Should archaeology be useful?

Since the turn of the last century, archaeology has made several attempts to ‘be useful’ to contemporary society – from V. Gordon Childe's Marxism to the disastrous nationalism of Kossinna. In fact, it is the latter's haunting legacy to archaeology which makes this an existential question. Is there any safe way to apply archaeology to contemporary social or political conditions without the risk that it will be harnessed for ill? The 1990s burst of studies on nationalist archaeology (e.g. Diaz-Andreu and Champion 1996; Graves-Brown, Jones and Gamble 1996; Kohl 1998; Kohl and Fawcett 1995; Meskell 1998) continues to give us pause over this question. Once we open the door, accepting that archaeology should be useful, can we control the uses to which it is put, and by whom? This is the Pandora's box problem that causes many to retreat into a space of objectivism and detachment. Others try to walk an odd line of being politically engaged with the past, but disengaged from the present.

It hardly seems necessary to rehearse Gustaf Kossinna's contribution to archaeological nationalism and racism. Although archaeologists may still guardedly recognize his contribution to ‘settlement archaeology’, Kossinna blatantly used archaeological materials to promote ideologies taken up by the Nazis. Specifically, he argued that there was once a coherent Germanic ‘fatherland’ that extended over the borders of Germany into Poland, among other soon-to-be-invaded territories, and that the reunification of this prehistoric Germany was key to the restoration of 20th-century Germany. Further, it was the archaeologist Kossinna who introduced the idea of a superior Aryan race in European antiquity, holding it above even Rome and claiming it had been unjustly overlooked. These were ideas he published for a general public from the 1920s up until his death in 1931 (Arnold 2006; Arvidsson 2006). Under the Nazis, Kossinna's archaeological approach became the Party line, and archaeology benefited, institutionally at least, with an eightfold increase in academic chairships (Hodder 1991, 206). The Nazis were scornful of archaeological research that was not explicitly useful for their agenda and, at the same time as they expanded the field, purged it of any who disagreed with Kossinna's theses or who attempted to maintain a safe scholarly distance. It is no wonder, then, that in the long hangover from the Sceond World War, many European archaeologists remain not only allergic to archaeological questions of race or ethnicity, but also averse to agendas that aim to make archaeology useful.

Still, simultaneous with the rise of Nazi archaeology, the career of the grand figure of European archaeology, V. Gordon Childe, was starting to rise. Like Kossinna, Childe was interested in the Aryans and their archaeological culture, writing The Aryans. A study of Indo-European origins in 1926. However, he vehemently protested Nazi claims of Aryan superiority (not to mention purity of roots) during and after the war. Childe's Marxist leanings in both politics and intellectualism are well known (Trigger 1980). While he did not explicitly advocate that archaeology should be useful, it is worthwhile to note that Childe thought it important to communicate his ideas to a general audience through publications such as Man makes himself (1936). As Ruth Tringham says, ‘he was a highly political person; he was aware of the world about him, felt strongly about political issues and, throughout his career, incorporated these feelings into his choice of what he wrote and where he published it’ (Tringham 1983, 89). However, the Marxist components of his analysis were largely ignored in Western Europe and Great Britain, while his public outreach efforts were imitated by few until the late 20th century.

The legacy of his work in Eastern Europe was different. But there, another problem arose, in that as in the Nazi case, archaeology had to be useful and had to be Marxist in Soviet-style academia. Childe came by his convictions – both political and archaeological – on his own, whereas most Soviet archaeologists were given no choice. They were told by political authorities that archaeology should be useful. And generally they complied. Soviet-era archaeologies are replete with narratives of ethnos, evolutionary progress, and class analysis that helped to naturalize and give moral dignity to the socialist platform in each of its nationalist iterations (Slav, Czech, German and so on). This forced marriage between archaeology and politics has added to the European allergy towards what elsewhere gets called public archaeology.

In North American archaeology, there are at least two academic cultures at work, the prehistoric and the historic. Until recently, the first has rarely openly oriented itself towards being ‘useful’ or public. Several critics have noted how this very stance of detachment and a reluctance to connect living indigenous people to archaeological ancestors helped to rationalize the removal and expropriation of Native Americans from their lands (Trigger 1986; Fowler 1987). When not detaching living Native Americans from their ancestors, archaeology has been used to make them appear as living, savage fossils. As Alice Kehoe notes, in the early 1900s

In other words, prehistoric archaeology in North America has a history of being at least inadvertently useful, if not nefariously useful. It is only in the last two decades that archaeologists have been forced by Native American communities and legislation such as Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) to make connections to present-day society in ways that respect both the historical realities of colonial displacement and the contemporary realities of ancestral beliefs. Although at first there was a vociferous reluctance to accept such alternative uses of the archaeological past, there now appears to be a genuine shift taking place in attitudes with a new generation of archaeologists (and some reformed old guard) now answering the question differently (Watkins 2005) – that is, should archaeology be useful?

In contrast, historical archaeology, at least as practised in the US and Canada, has from the beginning been expected to be useful. The first controlled excavation on a historic-period site occurred in 1797 at the site of Champlain's fort on the St Croix River. The purpose of the excavation was to settle a boundary dispute between Britain (that is, Canada) and the new United States (Schuyler 1976, 27–28). Following this, the next widely recognized historic-period excavation occurred at Myles Standish's home in 1856, in order for Myles's descendant, James Hall, to flesh out the legacy of this Mayflower officer and augment his own social capital (Deetz 1977; Deagan 1996, 19–20). In fact, the entire period from 1856 to 1960 could be called the patriotic phase of historical archaeology. The 1935 US Historic Sites Act helped launch a growth industry in the excavation, restoration and interpretation of historic sites across the country. Most of these focused on sites important to national narratives, such as Jamestown, Plymouth Plantation (site of the Pilgrims’ landing and early settlement), and military forts tied to key victories over the British, Spanish, and Native Americans. The act stated that it was now national policy ‘to preserve for public use historic sites, buildings, and objects of national significance for the preservation and benefit of the people of the United States’ (US 292–74th Congress, emphasis added).

Despite this rather long and explicit history of archaeology in the service of the state, it is striking that American archaeology has been left almost entirely unscathed by critiques of nationalist archaeology. For some reason, it has not generally been viewed as nationalist (though for rare exceptions see Fowler 1987; Patterson 1999). It has been characterized as historically particular, reconstructionist, and ‘public’, but the connection to the political apparatus of the state goes underrecognized despite the fact that the Fed is by far the largest financial guarantor of this work up to today and that it is, through the National Park Service, a highly regulated endeavour.

In the 1960s, with the formalization of the subfield of historical archaeology through the first Conference on Historic Sites Archaeology (1960) and the establishment of the Society for Historical Archaeology, the scope of historic sites widened to plantations and Native American historic villages. This attention brought with it new public sectors, as did the development of cultural resource management (CRM). Historical archaeology became more self-conscious of its ‘usefulness’ to several constituencies, particularly in the 1980s.

Historical archaeology in the US, in fact, has been a crucible for debates and developments in public archaeology. While it is impossible to do this vast and still-growing field justice here (for reviews see Merriman 2004b; Shackel and Chambers 2004), it should be noted that the awkward umbrella ‘public archaeology’ is deployed to cover a diverse set of views and practices, including (1) ‘contract archaeology’, in which ‘public archaeology’ is used as a euphemism for CRM or archaeology performed by government entities (e.g. Jameson 2003; King 1983; Little 2002); (2) ‘didactic archaeology’, which aims to educate the public with/through archaeology, often as a form of social critique (or ‘critical archaeology’), bringing focus to the historical conditions of inequalities in the present (e.g. Copeland 2004; Potter 1994; McGuire 2008); and (3) ‘community archaeology’, in which local or descendant community members are invited to participate in the creation and execution of research projects in a more dialogic, collaborative mode (e.g. Mullins 2004; McDavid 2004c; Little and Shackel 2007). As suggested by this range of interests, the only agreement one could say characterizes these practices is that archaeology is and should be useful. Implicit disagreements hinge on different narratives about the past, or on which ‘heritage’ to develop through archaeology.

Public archaeology and heritage management can form an awkward, contradictory mix of intentions due to the multiple ‘uses’ to which it is simultaneously put. A colleague once shared with me that he was at a meeting for the Jamestown Rediscovery project of the National Park Service in Virginia when a participant offered, as a title for the planned museum exhibit of archaeological artefacts, ‘Birth of a nation’. My friend (the name of the innocent will be protected) was appalled by the participants’ seeming ignorance of G.W. Griffith's famous film of the same title that cast the Ku Klux Klan in a positive light. My friend was perhaps only bemused by a quite different concern voiced at the meeting that the exhibit failed in its civic engagement duties by neglecting to tell a story about Asian American contributions to the 17th-century English settlement. The irony of these errors underscores the missteps and dangers inherent in even the best-intentioned ‘heritage management’.

In Latin America the landscape of archaeological practice has been dominated by foreigners, primarily European and North American, since the mid-19th century. While archaeology developed after the Bolívar revolutions, it nonetheless was a field in which international interdependencies between poor and wealthy nations have played out as a form of quasi-colonialism (Joyce 2008). Up to the 1950s, colonizing archaeologists at major sites in Mayaland and the Andes swooped in, hired local labourers at cheap rates, and swept out again, having performed their resource extraction. Although in many areas we could say that this pattern prevails today, it has been mitigated by stronger local state controls on archaeological permitting and on the removal of archaeological materials. Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo (1994) makes the interesting distinction between state archaeology and nationalist archaeology, saying that most Latin American countries transitioned from colonialist archaeology (which he calls proto-state) to state archaeology between the 1950s and the 1970s with the establishment of institutions like the Museo Nacional de Antropología de Mexico or El Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú. The aim has been to stem the outflow of patrimonial treasures and to control by whom, when, and how archaeological excavations take place, with assurances that there will be local and regional financial benefits. Archaeology has been forced to be useful. Oyuela-Caycedo, though, says that only a few Latin American countries have moved clearly into a nationalist phase of archaeology, by which he means an archaeology explicitly oriented towards developing national patriotism and indigenous heritage. The difference can be seen, for example, between museum exhibits oriented towards a generic (and usually foreign) tourist and those oriented towards a national audience that narrate the contributions of the country's indigenous populations to a unique local culture (Leighton 2008). Moves towards nationalist archaeology can be seen most clearly in Mexico, Peru and Venezuela since the 1990s.

Karen Guthertz Lizárraga goes so far as to say (1999, 363) that in Peru, ‘the concept of National Archaeology, as developed in four national institutions, laid the ideological and political ground for the end of the terrorism in Peru’. In other words, archaeology there has made itself so useful that it helped bring an end to the Maoist Shining Path. Unlike in Europe, nationalism does not have a bad rap in Latin America. At least not yet. This is an essential difference in postcolonial contexts. Nationalist archaeologies in Africa and South Asia may be taking the same route. In postcolonies, archaeology serving a local political use is upheld as a corrective of the abuses of imperialist archaeology. As stated by O.F. Owen back in 1858, ‘The true patriot becomes of necessity the antiquarian’ (quoted in Trigger 1989, 148). I am not suggesting that this reverse swing of the pendulum should be stopped short in Latin America and other postcolonies, but I am saying we must recognize that such political uses of archaeology to create ethnic heritage narratives have a troubled past in the field and we should proceed with caution. Guthertz Lizárraga's allegation of ‘terrorism’ demonizes and oversimplifies the Andean peasants whose dislocation and poverty disposed them to consider Maoism in the first place.

It should be noted that the responses of mainstream academic archaeologists who focus on the prehistory of North America share much with those of foreign archaeologists working in newly nationalist Latin American settings. In both cases, they have been forced to adjust to the demand to be socially relevant or economically useful. Thus in many arenas the question ‘is archaeology useful?’ is a question archaeologists are increasingly forced to answer in order to be permitted to continue their work.

The other interesting parallel I see lies between North American historical archaeologists and European archaeologists working in former colonies. In both cases, an archaeology of apology has prevailed since the 1980s. In the US and Canada this takes the form of ‘community archaeology’ that seeks to involve the voices of the dispossessed and the underrepresented in the construction of archaeological narratives. European efforts have concentrated on developing more inclusive practices and dialogue through the World Archaeological Congress and its many publications. I want to stress that I have no ideological objection to inclusive and alternative archaeologies. However, in seeking to answer the question ‘should archaeology be useful?’, I think we have to take a hard look at our motivations and our success rate.

Barbara Little writes in her introduction to Public benefits of archaeology an answer to our ‘should’ question. She says that public archaeology should serve the ‘purposes of education, community cohesion, entertainment, and economic development’ (2002, 1). However, this is an agenda set not by community members but by archaeology. While archaeology can be made to serve all these needs, it is unlikely that a local community would turn to archaeology first for any of these except perhaps the last – economic development – when an archaeological site is visually spectacular enough that it can be developed for heritage tourism. If your children need better public schools, are you going to turn to archaeology as a solution? If your community is strained with racial tension, is archaeology the solution? For entertainment, would most people prefer to dig in a hole or go to the multiplex?

In Paul Shackel and Erve Chambers's (2004) edited volume Places in mind. Public archaeology as applied anthropology, the editors note the many ways in which archaeology, both prehistoric and historical, has been reoriented in recent years to include multiple publics and multiple narratives about archaeological remains. However, I will note that several of the contributors use language taken directly from marketing (e.g. ‘stakeholders’, ‘investment’, ‘target audience’). Considerations of indigenous communities are quite clearly oriented towards smoothing the way so archaeologists can placate a potentially troublesome public and still go about their business post-NAGPRA, or as a more heartfelt apology for the archaeological atrocities that NAGPRA was in part passed to address. A similar spirit of either reconciliation or apology infuses much of historical archaeology, stemming primarily from the challenges of doing the archaeology of slavery and not being misunderstood, as well as from sacrilegious blunders, such as the poor initial treatment of New York's African Burial Ground. The most vocal group of advocates for public archaeology is the large and now numerically dominant corps of cultural-resource managers. Their motivations for advocating public archaeology are also to smooth things over and forestall controversy over their projects, but primarily the aim is to bolster the public support of archaeology so that the laws stay on the books and the money keeps flowing. Academic archaeologists, depending on their national and institutional position, must also worry about money and making sure that there is a perceived public value to the work they do, often underwritten by taxes. So I am simply asking us to be honest. Most public archaeology should really be called public relations archaeology. Archaeology has been very useful lately, but primarily to itself.

Is archaeology threatened with its own end-time?

In fact, I know of no other social-scientific or humanities field quite so anxious about involving communities in its research or making the work relevant, except perhaps for public health – the same field that spawned the Tuskegee experiment and the corrective of the Institutional Review Board. Is all this concern about social utility more fundamentally about legal necessity? Can you imagine literary critics or political scientists going door to door to ask community members to be involved as collaborators in their research projects (rather than simply as subjects), or asking them to set the theoretical agenda? I suspect the legal fragility and fiscal insecurity of practising archaeology is as strong a motivation to ‘make archaeology useful’ as any moral imperative.

That said, I do not think there is any major harm yet being done by these self-serving means and, in fact, the political uses to which archaeology is now being put by indigenous groups thus far seem far less dangerous than those of nationalism. But as many might rightly caution, this can be a slippery slope. In a landscape with multiple victims, such as, for example, the former Yugoslavia, which indigenous politics should archaeology serve? What do we do with Semir Osmanagic, who claims to have found not only the oldest, but the largest, pyramid in the world in his native Bosnia, with cultural connections to the ancient Atlanteans (Rose 2006)?

Although Osmanagic has failed to find many professional collaborators, I worry about the ways in which some archaeologists plunge into ‘heritage management’. They contradictorily seem to hold the view that historical and archaeological narratives are politically powerful means of influencing the present – believing, as did George Orwell, that ‘those who control the past control the future’ – and, at the same time, seem cavalierly keen on creating a demand for heritage where none may yet exist (see Pacifico 2008; Matthews 2008 for situations in which local interest in ‘archaeological heritage’ is lacking or mismatched to the project). While some of these efforts are motivated by a sincere interest in sharing results or even the process of archaeological knowledge-building (McGimsey 1972; Marshall 2002b), these are usually difficult to disentangle from motivations to build political and economic support for archaeology. The projects often entail ‘managing’ the narratives that are produced in order to have a specific social effect. What powers and sentiments may be unleashed by inventing new traditions and expanding markets for the past seems to be overlooked. Even when community archaeology is geared towards widely shared and laudable emancipatory goals, such as creating recognition for the contributions of African Americans or encouraging a more democractic society, at the very least archaeologists should recognize the implications of their claims about the power of the past – and fill out a protocol for an Institutional Review Board. I wonder how many archaeologists have taken their own claims for social efficacy seriously enough to complete this responsible step?

The phrase ‘age of insecurity’ comes from the title of a prescient book on economics written by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson (1998), but it now gets used to describe a general nervous malaise, particularly acute since 9/11, in which our insecurities are expressed bodily, nationally and economically. The state of our global economic insecurity is almost certainly going to hit archaeology hard, as it has already begun to do in a major wave of layoffs and restructuring at Colonial Williamsburg and the University of Pennsylvania Museum. As governments and foundations pull back and prioritize, archaeology will certainly be called upon to answer the question ‘is archaeology useful?’ If it is not useful – if it is perceived to be just humanist fluff – or one of those dispensable categories of the ‘would be nice’, then research posts and projects will fall to the budget axe. Realistically, archaeologists may not have much of a chance to make their case. Whatever public perceptions exist about the utility of archaeology are likely already formed. Still, I expect the public relations machines of archaeology will be cranking full steam over the next few years to defend against the demise of archaeological institutions.

Although I suspect that the current climate of doom has spurred us to ask questions such as the one that launched this forum, one does not have to know much about the history of archaeology to realize that it has actually done remarkably well in times of crisis and recovery. In fact, the first major stage in the formalization of the field occurred precisely during the fin de siècle movement I mentioned above: Augustus Pitt-Rivers was appointed Britain's first inspector of ancient monuments in 1882; the American journal of archaeology was founded in 1885; and in 1894 the first archaeology Ph.D. was awarded in the US. In fact, it was during the fin de siècle decades of 1880 to 1900 that archaeology became professionalized (Kehoe 1999, 5; Patterson 1999). The Great Depression of the early 1930s led to a second wave of expansion of archaeological institutions under the Works Progress Administrative, as well as improvements in excavation methodology in North America, with effects that rippled through the world. The SAA was established during this period. The GI bill after the difficult times of the Second World War and the rebuilding efforts of shelled European cities likewise contributed to the growth and increasing sophistication of archaeology. While there are certainly contingent reasons why archaeology flourished at these times, one of the less obvious is that during periods of crisis, when the future itself seems insecure or the recent past a shambles, people can become more contemplative. Public mood shifts towards a consideration of the long view, which archaeology provides like few other disciplines.

Can archaeology save the world?

To come to the crux of my cranky challenge here, I want to ask whether the way in which we have been answering the questions ‘is archaeology useful?’ or ‘should archaeology be useful?’ in recent years is the most honest, most responsible or, in the long run, even the most productive tack. In these many heartfelt public gestures, archaeology still sets the agenda – the agenda of building heritage through artefacts. The apologetically inclusive archaeologies, the new indigenous national archaeologies, and the community-activist or critical archaeologies – no matter how framed, they are still variations of archaeology, an institution that must first serve itself, and save itself. No matter how framed, I cannot shake the sense that the fundamental motivation for these outreach efforts, whether academic or contract work, is to rescue archaeology from a world no longer structured along the colonial and imperial agendas that once needed it.

What if we pulled back from our own insecurities about preserving our careers and instead deployed archaeology to address specific social and environmental problems of the present day? This is not archaeology as heritage, or archaeology in the service of obvious political agendas (such as state socialism and indigenous nationalism). I am suggesting that it may be more ethical and more useful to set archaeology free from history and heritage – in other words, that we reorient archaeology away from reconstructions of the past and towards problems of the present. This is not the same sort of detachment that allowed archaeology to set an agenda entirely internal to itself prior to postcolonial critiques, focused on pedantic problems that only interest other archaeologists. Rather than detachment or genealogy, the relationship between the past and present could be one of reflective comparison.

I would like to hear a louder conversation about the ways in which archaeology can be socially useful beyond inventing traditions and building heritage. What are its more practical, immediate, and material benefits? In many parts of the world, archaeology's greatest real-life utility is economic, in the form of archaeological tourism. Many archaeologists remain squeamish about this marketing of their work, but they must also recognize that some of the most spectacular archaeological sites are surrounded by communities struggling with poverty and neoliberal dislocation. Archaeologists have usually left the economic development of tourism and monuments to others, but I suggest that, in order to make clearer how archaeology is useful, we should be involved in the decisions that are made, contributing our anthropological sensitivity in ways that help local communities have a voice in these developments and improve the conditions of their lives in ways that are important to them.

Another way to approach this suggestion is to convene meetings at the major archaeological conferences in which we set an agenda of the major social problems of the day that might be addressed with archaeological insight. A list might include climate change, urbanization, agricultural sustainability, disaster and recovery, how to survive the boom–bust cycles of capitalism, or perhaps even alternative forms of energy and resource management. None of these topics requires forging a genealogical link between the contemporary case and archaeological cases. In fact, it may be better to form a diptych between archaeological and contemporary situations in order to provoke creative problem solving. The longue durée approach that archaeology offers also has the benefit of the cool distance of time, which may help people receive the resulting recommendations with a more open mind.

I do not mean to suggest that there are not already many archaeologists doing this. Colleagues such as Alan Kolata, Clark Erickson and Anabel Ford have long worked on modelling sustainable agricultural practices from archaeological sites in Latin America and Asia (for examples see Kolata 2000; Erickson 1998; Ford and Montes 1999). Other research specifically addresses the issue of global warming (Bovy 2007; Jordan 2008; Lilley 2008). The growth of environmental archaeology is one of the most promising areas of potentially useful problem-oriented archaeology (see Evans 2003 for a review). Archaeologists working in Peru and Chile, for example, have been contributing to an interdisciplinary inquiry into the origins, patterns and effects of El Niño weather (e.g. Andrus, Sandweiss and Reitz 2008) and others have addressed worldwide desertification (e.g. Barker and Gilbertson 2000). On my own home turf, archaeologists have been useful to geologists trying to date the Mississippi river delta lobe formations in order to understand better the system's natural dynamics – information that is useful in designing a plan for coastal restoration (Törnqvist et al. 1996).

Other concrete ways in which archaeologists and physical anthropologists have been profoundly useful to contemporary society is by assisting in the excavation and/or recovery of mass graves and disaster sites, as seen in the archaeological response at Ground Zero in 9/11 (Gould 2007) or the archaeological forensic teams who have been assisting in Bosnia, Serbia, Ukraine, Iraq and Congo, among many other sites of recent war crimes and disappearances (Haglund, Connor and Scott 2001; Wright, Hanson and Sterenberg 2005; see also Steele 2008).

I realize my advocacy of environmental archaeology might sound like a retreat into the heyday of processualism, but I would insist that this is a very different day and a very different agenda. Human–environment interaction actually entails, whether acknowledged or not, the theoretically radical proposition of the agency of the material world in the mode of Bruno Latour (1993). Following Latour rather than Darwin, it allows for a dialectical and contingent co-constitution of society and nature. This is far from the timeless and monolithic natural world that once informed processual archaeology. Crucially, this new view recognizes the fragility of ecosystems rather than presuming their deterministic force.

To conclude, if the question ‘is archaeology useful?’ makes us at all nervous, then we should tackle it more honestly and follow the examples of our colleagues who are applying their work to pressing contemporary problems. While we need not totally disinvest from heritage-building projects, neither should we flatter ourselves about how truly helpful these are, nor delude ourselves into thinking they are unproblematically uplifting. Nor should we hide from the fact that a prime motivation for public archaeology is to build constituencies who will support funding, permitting and access.

The alternative I am suggesting for a socially useful archaeology might be called ‘futurist’, which I mean in the generic sense of a prospective orientation.Footnote ¹ This might not be so radical a proposition as one that rides a groundswell of temporal re-imagining already under way. At the same 2009 Society for American Archaeology conference at which this keynote was presented, Tamara Bray organized a session entitled ‘Crystal balls and possible pathways. Visions of (co-)futures in archaeology’. A recent surge in archaeological attention to temporality, including future times, folding and recycling, suggests that epistemically archaeology is beginning to explore alternatives to the linear, evolutionary timeline in which it has for so long been encased (e.g. Bradley 2002; Gosden 1994; Lucas 2005; Murray 1999; Olivier 2004). Walter Benjamin's quite archaeological approach to history, material culture and temporality is a sympathetic source of philosophical inspiration. Benjamin recognized the social understandings of the past and the present as engaged in an active dialectic. In fact, the recent rediscovery and embrace of Benjamin may be the beginning of the end for the fin de millénaire malaise: ‘Overcoming the concept of “progress” and overcoming the concept of “period of decline” are two sides of one and the same thing’ (Benjamin and Tiedemann 1999, 460). Thus the move towards a futurist archaeology I am advocating has simultaneously a pragmatic, ethical and intellectual appeal.

Stimulus towards a future-oriented archaeology, or at least an archaeology that intersects with contemporary social problems, is also coming from the general archaeological public. A survey of the last three years of Archaeology magazine yields a growing number of such titles as ‘Global warming threatens the ancient world’, ‘Drugs and looting. The crystal meth connection’, and ‘Rome's appetite for oil’ (these examples all from the April/May 2009 issue). Thus the current climate of crisis is already pushing archaeology to be relevant and useful to the present. Another title runs, ‘Iceland's unwritten saga. Did Viking settlers pillage their environment?’ (Zorich 2007). The last paragraph reads,

Walter Benjamin would agree.