I find myself largely in sympathy with what Rodney Harrison is trying to do. In applying an archaeological sensibility to the contemporary world, it becomes increasingly clear that the habitual tropes of archaeological practice either do not work, or need to be rethought and reconfigured. Equally, I think that this reassessment of archaeological theory and methodology can have a wider epistemological value for the discipline in general. The tropes of ruin and excavation are particularly salient in this context, in that they do not entirely work in the understanding of the contemporary. However, there are points at which I diverge from Harrison, particularly with respect to what we mean by modernity, and especially in terms of the limitations of his concern with surfaces.

For my own part, having begun with an interest in modern material culture, I did not think in terms of excavating the present. Used to the kinds of artefact studies familiar to prehistorians, it did not occur to me to attack the modern world with a shovel! However, it has been all too easy for us to accept that a concern with modern ruins and the excavation of modern ‘sites’ were the obvious ways to do the archaeology of the contemporary. Indeed, one might argue that the site and the digging thereof are what we have needed, subconsciously, to legitimate our practice. In justification, we might point out that the various ‘posts’ that we inhabit – postmodern, postindustrial and postcolonial – tend to emphasize the sense in which we are living in the aftermath of history.

Conversely, particularly through cultural resource management, archaeologists have come to recognize that change is an inevitable part of the archaeological ‘record’, in terms of both the subtractive effects of decay and the additive production of a living society (cf. Bradley et al. 2004). Whilst the recent and the contemporary have often been viewed as a ‘pollutant’ of a static, traditional heritage, we are trying to come to terms with the fact that these pollutants are of interest in their own right. The problem is that whilst the past can generally be conceived of as static and thence amenable to study through excavation, the contemporary presents us with a moving target. You cannot really excavate something that is still happening.

Archaeology is itself the product of modernity (Thomas 2004), but I think there is some confusion in the elision of modernity and modernism. If, for the sake of argument, we take modernity as the product of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, of the emergence of the individual from the collectivity of medieval feudalism, then it is true that ‘moderns’ define themselves in terms of their difference from the past. Yet until the very end of the 19th century, if not to this day, Western societies have measured themselves against the past and its traditions; we need look no further than the innumerable neoclassical buildings that populate our cities. For the most part, archaeology has participated in this process of defining the present in relation to the past, albeit often in terms of contrast.

Modernism takes a quite different stance in its total rejection of the past. It is not concerned with realistic re-presentation, so much as with reality itself (Orvill 1989). Whilst this episteme was firmly established by architects, artists and writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it might equally be argued that its origins lie in the empiricism of Roger Bacon. Modernism makes its judgements not on what tradition tells us about things, but on what we can empirically find out about them, and herein lies its radical challenge to the authority of the past. Whilst archaeology has generally embraced this empiricist logic in its practices, dare I call it science (?), it has continued to do so in the context of a value system based on tradition. One might almost say that the methods of modernism have been used to legitimate the value of a traditional heritage. Marinetti's (2005, 8) contempt for ‘Homeric cheeses and legendary wool-winders’ might seem entirely antithetical to the programme of archaeology – he did, after all, want to burn down all the museums – but the study of the contemporary forces us to confront modernism, to embrace the aesthetic of manufactured and mass-produced objects as against the handmade products of craftsmen, and to recognize change and ephemerality as a normal part of lived experience. According to Marshall Berman (1982, 345–46),

I do not think it is too much of an exaggeration to suggest that archaeology is often adopted as a refuge from this maelstrom.

In a recent radio news broadcast, it was reported that excavations around Shakespeare's house in Stratford-upon-Avon were to go deeper, and that hence more was likely to come to light about the life of the Bard. Clearly there is no place for depth in a world of ‘perpetual disintegration and renewal’. The study of the contemporary is, quite often, about what is happening rather than what has been left behind and there is, as Harrison points out, a certain absurdity in the equation of depth with profundity. However, I am not, consequentially, content to remain on the surface. According to Heidegger (1977, 91),

Yet it seems to me that in the act of breaking the rock, we learn something about its inner nature. Ingold argues that the ‘surface of materiality, in short, is an illusion. We cannot touch it because it is not there. Like all other creatures, human beings do not exist on the “other side” of materiality but swim in an ocean of materials’ (2007b, 7).

I am not sure that we can maintain that surfaces are entirely illusory, but I agree with Ingold that we experientially inhabit the world, rather that objectively contemplating its surface. Indeed, this is particularly true of studying the contemporary, the ‘archaeology of us’ in which we inhabit the very society we are studying. Granted that we may want to say, metaphorically, that however far we imagine we are digging into the past, what remains is still on the surface of the present, there is a distinction to be made between depth as distance and that which is inside and hence not ostensibly perceptible.

In trying to make the ‘familiar unfamiliar’ I mean something quite opposite to the metaphor of depth and distance (Graves-Brown, forthcoming). It is rather a strategy aimed at a changed perspective in which, as Cornu (1990) suggests, we can, paradoxically, learn to see the invisible. In this sense the surface is familiarity – that which occludes a clear view precisely because it is so obvious. Here, however, there is a lesson for archaeologists in general and probably for many other disciplines as well: to follow Ingold's argument, in action we see through the surface of things, but the problem is that actions do not always translate readily into words (Gatewood 1985). One might almost argue that modernism's pursuit of ‘reality’ implies the acceptance of tacit knowledge (sensu Polanyi 2009), as against an Enlightenment modernity which has sought to formalize and codify ‘realism’.

Taking up the concept of the assemblage, I find myself back with what I learned as a prehistorian. In one sense a lithic assemblage is the kind of heterogeneous surface scatter that Harrison envisages. It often involves a complex set of non-hierarchical relationships. But as well as assembly/reassembly, which is what the archaeologist does, there has also been an original disassembly, a pursuit of what is inside, as described by Heidegger. A lithic core can be reassembled in order to understand the process of knapping, in effect a form of reverse engineering. In order to do this one needs a tacit knowledge of how to knap, an implicit know-how that derives from action. Whatever the assemblage concerned, we still ‘swim’ in the same ‘ocean of materials’ as the people who made it, and to that extent can share what they found in those materials. The advantage for contemporary archaeology is that the present has not yet been disassembled; it is not a ruin. In order to understand the AK-47, I could and did go and take one apart, learning what I could from my own tacit knowledge of machines and engineering (Graves-Brown 2007). Existing in the here and now, such objects/assemblages do not resemble the excavation, in that they are their own context. Exploring the inside of material culture is not about depth and distance, but rather about greater proximity, an experiential symmetry between the archaeologist and the authors of the artefacts she/he studies.

The job of archaeologists is to try to get inside past societies, but in a sense they are always frustrated by depth. As Ingold (2007b, 9–10; see also Ingold 2010) points out, studies of material culture usually begin with consumption, ‘Experienced as degradation, corrosion or wear and tear’, rather than with the materials themselves and their use in production. Seen purely as surfaces and assemblages, we have no insight into the inside of things, of what the experiential ‘qualities’ of materials meant to the people that used them to make things. For archaeologists concerned with the past, such questions must remain partially obscure, and they have no choice but to excavate static ruins. But for archaeologists of the contemporary we have the opportunity to study a world in production, to see material culture before it is degraded and corroded and turned into ruins. Here I can only agree with Rodney Harrison that what is needed (at least as far as I am concerned) is an ‘archaeology in and of the present’ (p. 141). My only proviso is that we should exploit the experiential opportunities of that present, rather than just contemplate its surfaces.