Let me begin with an anecdote: in summer 1985 Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky and I participated in Bronze Age excavations at the site of Sarazm along the middle Zeravshan river in what was then Soviet Tajikistan. I remember one of the Russian artists on the dig complaining ruefully (and patronizingly) about her Tajik colleagues. ‘When will they [that is, her Tajik colleagues] ever become like us Russians and Americans, you know, Europeans?’ Karl, who is very proud of his mixed Czech, Slovak, and Austrian heritage, snorted disdainfully: ‘Since when have Americans and Russians ever been European?’
This anecdote, I believe, points to a central problem with Kristian Kristiansen's prescription for a broader ‘archaeology of Europe’ to counter what he richly documents as the disturbing dominance of the local and national archaeologies within Europe today; it is a problem that he himself recognizes when he asks rhetorically, ‘is there anything coherently “European” about a European archaeology – or rather, about the “archaeology of Europe” – or is it simply a modern political construct with no meaning in the ancient past?’ (p. 6). Or, perhaps more tellingly, in another passage he raises the problem of what would happen ‘if the attempt to be inclusive within Europe actually becomes exclusive by focusing on a bounded Europe’ (p. 7). There are, at least, two problems here: first is the fact that the concept of Europe is both a historical and a cultural construct originally conceived (forgetting for the moment the rape of Europa by Zeus) as a geographical Christian counterweight to the North African and Middle Eastern world of Islam; Europe in that sense and as a ‘modern political construct’ greatly postdates anything to do with prehistory and that means that the creation of a prehistoric ‘archaeology of Europe’ is necessarily an artificial and anachronistic exercise.
Second, what does it mean to be European? If something is defined as European, something else is defined as non-European; it is both an inclusive and an exclusive concept, and what gets included or excluded at one point in time may be excluded or included at another. M. Gimbutas referred to the spectacular Chalcolithic cultures of the Balkans stretching east to central Ukraine as ‘Old Europe’. Today this region would be perceived – at best from a biased Western Eurocentric perspective – as forming Europe's south-eastern underdeveloped periphery. And what does one call those hundreds of kilometres stretching east of the Dnieper river all the way to that low and quite passable mountain range known as the Urals: eastern eastern Europe? Or, perhaps even better, does one include or exclude the peninsula that in classical times was known as Asia Minor? Should the archaeology of modern Turkey be part of the archaeology of Europe? That is ultimately a political question, not a scientific one to be decided by the archaeological record. Of course, one can trace prehistoric linkages, extending back to Palaeolithic times, between the larger peninsula of Europe and the smaller one now defining the Republic of Turkey, but do such connections validate the concept of an even more inclusive ‘archaeology of Europe’? Where does ‘Europe’ cease to exist? Modern political issues should not be conflated with always somewhat tentative reconstructions of the remote, archaeologically ascertained, past. Turkey's entrance into the European Union should not depend on (or have anything to do with) the spread of food-producing economies from Anatolia to ‘Europe’ during the Neolithic period.
Fortunately, archaeology's influence here is quite limited, and I believe Kristiansen exaggerates archaeology's importance when he suggests that the contemporary trend of the narrowing scope of archaeological research, which he nicely and convincingly documents, has made archaeology less relevant than other social-science disciplines. Rather, except for some politically unstable and volatile areas, like the northern Caucasus, where land claims are mistakenly based on presumed ancestral ownership in the remote past, archaeology's relevance for modern political questions is inherently limited relative to other social sciences that deal more directly with the contemporary world. We should not delude ourselves to the contrary. In short, I believe Kristiansen correctly decries the three current trends that he shows have characterized archaeology over the last 25 years: 1) the dominance of a local perspective/site perspective in interpretation, 2) the decline in readings outside one's own language and national borders, and 3) the expansion of archaeological heritage management and of nationalism. Such trends are indeed worrisome. He also makes an important point when he emphasizes that ‘national borders were rarely the cultural borders of prehistoric societies, and by accepting a national framework for teaching, research and publications we have accepted a distorted perspective on the past’ (p. 21), and asks whether it is ‘really necessary to feed young students with a basic knowledge that is historically distorted by a modern national framework?’ (p. 21). Mutatis mutandis, similar distortion also occurs – albeit on a different scale – when one argues for an ‘archaeology of Europe’, as opposed to, say, a world archaeology.
While I share many of his views, Kristiansen's review of the recent history of archaeology strikes me as unabashedly partisan, resulting in a caricature of theoretical developments in Anglo-American archaeology during the last quarter-century. According to Kristiansen, processual archaeologists, working within a period or under a paradigm of rationalism, were interested in macro-questions demanding ‘grand historical narratives’ such as examining ‘the relationship between climate, culture and environment’ (p. 16). Postprocessualists have laboured within a period of romanticism that has favoured the particular in local and national histories, developed narrow interpretative strategies, and proceeded with less methodological rigour than their processual forebears. (Just in passing it must be noted that such a summary of recent developments in archaeology only concerns certain national traditions of archaeological research, above all those working and publishing in English, and largely is irrelevant to many other major traditions of archaeological research, both European and non-European.) Kristiansen's reasoning here is quite deterministic. The metaphor is of an ever-oscillating pendulum swinging back and forth between theoretical cycles of rationalism and romanticism. To quote him directly: ‘the conditions of theoretical dialogue and interpretation are determined by one's own historical position in the cycle. No dialogue is possible between researchers situated at two opposing poles of the cycle’ (p. 13). Surely this is overstated and his figure 2, which supposedly illustrates these ever-recurring cycles, is far too regular and schematic to describe real historical processes; there is no change or cumulative development over time, just a return to one or the other theoretical cycle.
As appropriately critical as one may be of certain features of contemporary Anglo-American theoretical archaeology, one still should acknowledge its numerous positive features and contributions. Most postprocessual archaeologists, I believe, would accept a social-constructivist, as opposed to a primordialist, conception of ethnicity and nationality, and such a theoretical perspective lends itself more to a critique of local and, above all, national histories than to their endorsement. Real progress occurs at both theoretical and empirical levels. We are not forever enmeshed in and endlessly swinging between periods of rationality and romanticism.
As a Bronze Age prehistorian working either beyond or on the south-easternmost edge of Europe in Daghestan, Russia (depending upon one's definition of Europe), I confess to being unaware of the three trends that Kristiansen has identified as characterizing archaeology in Europe during the last 25 years, and, as an American, I was particularly astonished to learn of the trend towards monolingualism in large European countries, such as Germany, France and England. Such a development is, of course, troubling, but surely muted relative to the almost exclusive monolingualism characteristic of American archaeology, which arguably still is dominated mostly by archaeologists working under the supposedly rational processual paradigm. In other words, monolingualism is not a disease specific to the period of romanticism or of rationality; it is something to be resisted or combated wherever it appears.
Kristiansen is surely correct in singling out deficiencies in textbooks, reading lists, syllabi and the basic way in which archaeology is taught at the university level. These serious problems in instruction and the ‘dangerous decline of learning’ (p. 22) that they represent strike me as more worrisome than the publication structure of research that consists overwhelmingly (80%) of archaeological journals that are ‘national and regional in scope’ (p. 21). The latter may not be totally desirable, but at least to some extent (though maybe not, admittedly, at the 80% level) is simply inherent in the nature of archaeological research and publication. Local scholars working within their own regional or national frameworks will conduct most of the research and write most of the articles on the archaeology of Daghestan or on that of any Scandinavian country. One should not be surprised that the ‘national idiom still prevails’ (p. 23) in archaeological practice, even though political borders change over time; such an idiom will continue to prevail as long as we continue to live in a world of bounded nation states.
Kristiansen deplores what he sees as a decline in ‘basic academic skills’ (p. 22), and he believes that such a decline ‘cannot be compensated for by greater theoretical sophistication’. I totally agree. His paper convincingly documents numerous serious problems currently affecting the practice of archaeology in many European countries. His diagnosis is accurate, but his prescription is unnecessarily limited. There may be a ‘need’ for a European archaeology that is ‘linked to wider regions in the Near East, North Africa and western Asia . . . The prehistory and early history of Europe are thus of interconnected worlds from local to regional and global’ (p. 24).
If I understand his conclusion correctly, Kristiansen ultimately favours ‘an archaeology without borders that is based upon a study of the forces of history as they unfolded locally, regionally and as world history’ (p. 24). In order to attain this goal, however, Kristiansen believes that first ‘we need a European archaeology to replace the prevailing national archaeologies of Europe’ (p. 24). It is a two-step process, and in this, as a strategy, he may be correct. He certainly is aware of the value and importance of new European-wide agencies, such as the European Research Council, in promoting ‘projects that are truly supra-national in scope’ (p. 24).
This sympathetic non-European observer, however, worries about the possible temptation of stopping at the first stage of this redirection: reifying the concept of Europe and extending it anachronistically into the remote prehistoric past. Kristiansen's desire to overcome and reverse the disturbing dominance of locally and nationally focused archaeological research is admirable and worthy of support. The additional questions, however, still must be raised: why advocate only a European archaeology and why not an archaeological perspective that transcends all politically constructed limits; that is, an anthropological world archaeology that recognizes and emphasizes the interconnections that have consistently characterized our shared developments as a single species from the Palaeolithic past to the global present? Before Zeus abducted her, Europa resided in the Levant.
