Rodney Harrison's recasting of contemporary archaeology as an archaeology in and of the present serves as a very welcome and overdue corrective to a subdiscipline which has been disparagingly described as ‘well-meaning and superfluous’ (Hummler 2010, 922) and, rather more crudely, as in danger of ‘disappearing up its own arsehole’ (Devlin 2006). I should confess at the outset that over the last decade I have gone from being excited and enthused about the florescence of interest in the contemporary and recent past to often feeling cynical and uninspired. I have sat through too many earnest conference papers that in effect do no more than demonstrate that yes, indeed, it is possible for archaeologists to analyse the contents of their own closets/offices/attics. As an anthropologically trained archaeologist, it never occurred to me that we were not supposed to study the present, so I do not need to be told that it is possible – for me, that is self-evident. Instead, I want to be challenged by the insights derived from archaeological studies of the present. I want there to be a point.

Thankfully, Rodney Harrison delivers a number of points in this discussion article, arguing for a promising new orientation for contemporary archaeology, one that moves beyond self-justification and contributes to a broader re-envisioning of archaeological practice. While there are some contradictory statements, there are also key critical observations, the most basic of which is the recognition that an ‘archaeology of us’ is hardly as new, innovative and radical as many of its proponents would appear to think. I very much hope that Harrison's clear presentation of the general support for and interest in contemporary archaeology over the past 30 years pushes the discipline beyond an obsession with justifying the value of looking at the present and towards exploring what we can actually learn and what we can actually influence. At the very least, it ensures that no one has an excuse to pretend that another study of contemporary graffiti or a temporary campsite is particularly novel or radical because of its subject matter rather than its insights.

Perhaps what contemporary archaeology needs most is a reminder not to dismiss our own disciplinary past. I fear this situation may exist because those of us who are educators do not do as good a job as we should of ensuring that students gain a solid grounding in the historiography of archaeology. In our haste to self-present as up-to-date by referencing the latest texts, it is too easy to forget how nourishing more vintage works can still be. There is much still of value in formative publications. To expand on Harrison's examples, as early as 1974 a case was made by Reid, Rathje and Schiffer (1974, 125) that ‘archaeologists can apply their method and theory to the study of material culture in modern industrial societies for the purpose of deriving explanatory statements of modern human behaviour’. The fact that we no longer seek universal explanatory statements is no excuse for ignoring these early discussions. I am reminded of W.W. Taylor's acerbic take on the New Archaeology – ‘Old Wine in New Skins’ – where he found nothing new in the New Archaeology he himself helped to create (Taylor 1972; see also Taylor 1969, 383). Similarly, I would suggest that in addition to having a better grounding in the origins of contemporary archaeology, practitioners might benefit from more thorough immersion in material culture study earlier than the 1990s. By way of example, nearly 30 years ago the art historian Jules Prown (1982) set out a framework for material culture studies that paid overt attention to emotion and embodiment – foci that most archaeologists attribute to the postprocessual critique (Harris and Sørensen 2010).

Before getting to the core of the discussion article – a new focus on assemblage and surface to produce a more meaningful archaeology – I would like to divert briefly towards a consideration of the interface between contemporary archaeology and the disciplines of British post-medieval archaeology and anthropologically based historical archaeology. I cannot help but think that the insecurity of British contemporary archaeology is in part related to lingering perceptions of post-medieval archaeology as a poor stepchild of prehistory, related to what Harrison sees as the ‘modernist trope of archaeology-as-excavation’ (p. 143). Post-medieval archaeology in the UK has traditionally focused upon finds research, standing-buildings analysis and mortuary studies rather than on extensive excavation. As such, the surface focus of contemporary archaeology represents a logical continuation in practice, but brings the burden of inherited insecurities. By contrast, I do not get the same sense of a constant need for self-justification coming from North American and Australasian historical archaeologists, perhaps because of their greater reliance on excavation but also, critically, because of the anthropological roots of historical archaeology. Mark Horton (2011) recently expressed his worry that the ‘distinction between being an anthropologist and a contemporary archaeologist is somewhat fuzzy’, but I do not see that as a problem. For me, anthropology is the key ingredient here – to again cite Reid, Rathje and Schiffer (1974, 125–26), ‘the archaeologist as anthropologist possesses a developed body of concepts and techniques suited to the investigation of material culture and human behavior, regardless of traditionally conceived temporal and spatial boundaries’.

Turning from the perils of disciplinary ignorance and the oft-debated relationship between archaeology and anthropology, I am intrigued if not wholly convinced by the suggestion that we need to focus on the ‘surface’ as part of a ‘sustained attack on modernity’ (p. 150). It is impossible to disagree with the observation that archaeology is a product of modernity through the ‘production of a past which is distant, alien and “other” to ourselves’ (p. 150). This notion of ‘perspective distance’ (Rowe 1965, to cite another vintage work) lies at the core of all archaeological and anthropological inquiry. Few archaeologists would now subscribe wholeheartedly to a belief in scientific objectivity, instead acknowledging our own positionality and immersion in modernity and modern life as we endeavour to understand the reflexive relationship between material forms and lived experiences. The ‘sustained attack on modernity’ celebrated by the author is itself wholly dependent on another form of ‘perspective distance’: that somehow we as scholars are capable of standing back and recognizing the ‘fragile underpinnings’ (pp. 150, 153) of the very worlds we inhabit, akin to Neo swallowing the red pill in The Matrix. Far from modernity being ‘past and in ruin’ (p. 152), then, the notion that contemporary archaeologists can simultaneously understand, deconstruct and realign the future of the modern world suggests to me that reports of the death of progressive modernity, as it underpins our own ‘fragile’ discipline, are very much premature. Following on from that, I query the description of modernity as an ‘unfinished project’ (pp. 150, 153) not because I think the author is incorrect in the observation that modernity is not ‘past’, but because the very terminology implies directionality to some sort of plan yet to be completed.

Challenging linear temporalities and acknowledging the physical entanglements of human histories in our present, on the other hand, is a different issue. Here the metaphor of an assemblage employed by Harrison represents a particularly helpful way to destratify our understandings of being in time with past, present and future. The pasts that we construct as archaeologists always exist in the present, as do the many and varied pasts and memories constructed by others as we all negotiate the extant, physical traces of lives past in our todays. Such traces are by their very existence neither ‘out of time’ nor ‘out of context’, even if the convoluted character of their temporo-spatial relationships cannot be easily reduced to expression on a Harris matrix diagram.

So, then, ‘why’ should we do contemporary archaeology? On the one hand, Rodney Harrison argues that we need to ‘move away from the question of “why” we should study the present, to focus on the question of “how”’ (p. 144). Yet he contradicts this recommendation in his conclusion, making a strong argument not about the ‘how’, but about the ‘why’: to ‘engage not only with issues of present social concern, but also with all of the pasts which are implicated in that present’ (p. 158). Such a reorientation would force contemporary archaeologists to consider the utility of our studies. This is a far cry from contemporary projects such as the oft-cited Van project (Myers 2011), with its easily attained goal of sparking debate over the meticulous application of archaeological techniques to a contemporary object, or, as recently considered on the CHAT email discussion list (30 April–2 May 2011), an archaeology of the Royal Wedding that would seem to serve only to supply a thin veneer of academic legitimacy to those ‘participant observers’ who hung out the bunting or ‘ironically’ purchased a commemorative mug.

Here Harrison aligns himself with other scholars (citing Dawdy 2009; and Zimmerman, Singleton and Welch 2010; see also Voss 2010, 187) who have argued for a ‘useful’ archaeology, whatever the ‘use’ might be. While usable pasts are by their very nature unstable and dangerous pasts, it is here I find myself most sympathetic to this new formulation. My own research (Horning 2011) is bound up in the inextricable linkages of colonial pasts and presents, particularly as they express themselves in Northern Ireland. I have no choice but to engage with ‘all of the pasts which are implicated in the present.’ They are many, they are contradictory, and they are often ugly. Mere engagement becomes political. But any meaningful archaeology in and of the present will inherently and inevitably be political (Hall 2010, 7). To reimagine contemporary archaeology as a discipline that addresses the present and future by interrogating the presence of the past assigns a welcome seriousness of purpose through forcing its proponents to take a stand and to make a point – and, of course, to face up to the consequences.