The retraction of the archaeological research perspective away from big questions and its fragmentation into national, local or even site-specific perspectives, as documented by Kristian Kristiansen, is by no means inexplicable. However, this closing of the archaeological mind can only be adequately understood and countered by viewing it in its wider historical context.
Archaeology is by origin a product of European culture. Its scientific breakthrough occurred in the dual context of modernity and the construction of the nation state. This adherence can be illustrated by reference to J.J.A. Worsaae. He was one of the mid-19th century's international pioneers of an interdisciplinary archaeology with big questions on the agenda. However, he also concluded his popular history of Danish antiquity with a strong manifesto about the role of archaeology in the construction and bolstering of a Danish national identity (Worsaae 1843, 116).
During recent years the validity, as adequate frames of reference, of both of archaeology's spiritual parents – modernity and the nation state – has been seriously challenged.
The nation state took over as the general geopolitical organizing principle during the 19th and 20th centuries. From its western European basis of origin, it gradually expanded first into central and eastern Europe and Latin America, and then, especially after the Second World War, to the former colonies of western Europe in Asia and Africa.
As part of the change of relations between western Europe and its former colonies there followed substantial immigrations of non-Europeans to the former colonial powers and their neighbours in Western Europe. The result is that the populations of these countries now have much more composite identities than that of the classic European nation state between 1850 and 1950. This shift presents a considerable challenge to the self-understanding of the nation states and their citizens.
With the collapse of the Soviet empire, and hence of the bipolar geopolitical system, there followed in the eastern half of Europe the revival of questions and conflicts from a distant past. Many of the ethnic and national conflicts that had been operating since the beginning of the 19th century and that had culminated in the context of the First World War re-emerged after 1989 as unfinished business, especially at the fringes of the Soviet field of gravitation, i.e. in the west Balkans and in the Caucasus region. The attempts once more to create meaningful national states out of ethnic palimpsests have proven disastrous. Outside of Europe, a growing number of postcolonial nation states are now by European and North American observers labelled ‘failed states’, due to their serious dysfunction or even disintegration. This has all served to illustrate the limited validity of the nation state as the universal organizing principle. Why, then, has this exposure not translated into a post-national archaeology?
The answer is that an organization experiencing dwindling legitimacy and poise often responds by reasserting its founding myths. Examples of this can be found throughout history, from Diocletian's revival of the traditional imperial cult around the beginning of the 3rd century A.D. to the contemporary fundamentalist response of many of today's Muslim countries to the deep crisis.
European archaeologists, whether they are working in newly established nation states in the former East or within old nation states in the former West, operate in a setting where the national perspective, exactly because of its crisis, is actualized in the surrounding society. New or redefined nation states in the former East need archaeology to create a myth of origin. Old nation states in the former West seek to reassert an anachronistic identity, out of contact with the bewildering heterogeneity experienced in a modern society which houses citizens with multiple identities.
The break up of the monocultural eurocentric perspective, following exposure to other cultures through immigrations and accelerating media access, has, together with the political collapse of communism, translated into a general loss of faith in the big explanations and metanarratives of modernity. Postmodernism in general and postprocessual archaeology in particular are manifestations of this retraction into the particular that has followed from the loss of consolidated theoretical frameworks for dealing with big questions that cross-cut time and space. This change of scale is by no means unique to archaeology. During the 1980s ‘micro-storia’, or micro-history, spread from its origin among Italian historians to other parts of Europe and to the United States. In France it was welcomed as a counterproposition to the longue durée focus of the Annales school (Revel 1999). Just as in archaeology, this narrowing of the focus in time and space can also be seen as a response to a public demand for a less abstract insight into specific conditions of human life. This is almost by definition left out by most large-scale studies of big questions.
Big questions, however, are still there, and are no less important in times where radical climate change, the depletion of resources and the collapse of ecosystems are on the global agenda, together with preoccupations with mass migration, accelerating urbanization, global networks, the clash or coexistence of civilisations, conflicts spinning out of control and rise and fall of superpowers.
Archaeology must be able also to deal with such questions, if it wants to be relevant. And, in order to do so, it must transcend the national perspective. A European perspective for various reasons would be a logical step in the right direction, first because Europe ‘in itself’ offers a sufficiently large and open frame for the study of phenomena pertaining to the big questions, second because there is a genuine political and cultural need for a deep-time perspective on Europe as an open-ended process of both unity and diversity and as a product of interactions with the wider world, and third because this need on a European scale translates into political initiatives (the Council of Europe's Faro Declaration) and schemes for research funding (the EU's 7th Framework Programme, Social Science and Humanities).
Closer attention paid by archaeologist to the potentials of European institutions might help transcend the limits imposed by the institutional and mental obstacles imposed by the national organization of archaeology exposed by Kristian Kristiansen.
We have lost modernity's metanarratives as frameworks for analyses of the big questions. What we have won is the challenge to contribute as archaeologists to the development of a new body of theories that can provide an adequate framework for a contemporary understanding of the big questions in their proper context of long processes with implications also for the scale of individual human lives. After all, even today's number-one big question, ‘climate change’, can only be adequately analysed in its full significance by relating climate to the human sphere. That is, the impact of climatic changes on human societies in the past should be studied in order to extract precious insights and templates for understanding the challenge posed by climate change to contemporary societies on a local and a global scale.
Finally, one big question, too often avoided by archaeologists and historians alike, is the collapse of societies. We prefer to occupy ourselves with their origins, or in the worst case their transitions, as Bryan Ward-Perkins has lucidly pointed out (2005). However, exactly as in the hard sciences, which we tend to envy for their public status, we as archaeologists should be able to say something about the limits of the systems we are studying. What happens inside and outside a society when it collapses? What types of interaction between big processes and hazard can we observe? What are their implications for the conditions of individual human lives? What might determine whether a system collapses or just declines? These are questions of high relevance in a time of extreme geopolitical volatility – and Europe has a long record of experience to analyse.
Europe is trying to define itself and its role in the world. It is currently torn between the fortress and the crossroad, as the appropriate template for its future. Surely archaeology should add the qualities of deep-time perspectives to this quest.
