In the title of his paper Professor Kristiansen poses a question that turns out to be affirmatively rhetorical. One could surely be forgiven for reading the title and thinking that this eminent European and europeanist prehistorian had lobbed his own grenade of doubt into a discipline which, despite occasional protestations, has long assumed Europe to be a real place, a legitimate geographical context. In truth, it is not really a surprise that Professor Kristiansen asserts that we need to be more European, not less, in our thinking, but what is a surprise (to me, anyway) is the pathway he lays down towards that conclusion. His observations about the relationship between heritage/conservation issues on the one hand, and the shift from positivism to postprocessualism in archaeological theory on the other, are certainly thought-provoking, as are the results of his survey of linguistic and citation trends in recent archaeological literature, but have they a natural home in this particular argument? If yes, is his argument in favour of a greater ‘European-ness’ of enquiry the natural outcome of invoking them?

Thinking eurosceptically

I accept that the issues raised by Professor Kristiansen are important in a discussion of the concept of an ‘archaeology of Europe’, but – and I say this at the risk of misrepresenting nuances in his statement – I am sure that the discomfort felt by postprocessualists about such large geographical spaces as ‘Europe’ does not need curing for the greater good of archaeology, or for the greater good of the modern European community and its heritages. Almost by definition, European postprocessualists – most of whom seem to live and work in Britain and Ireland and in Scandinavia, not further south in Europe – are eurosceptics. As one of that group, I contend that our euroscepticism has philosophical and intellectual subtlety, and is not at all rooted in ideology, nationalist or otherwise. We recognize that longues durées of pan-European scope have an intrinsic abstract interest, and that this gives their mapping an intellectual worth. To that extent, Europe is a conceptual place with which we engage. But we believe, more critically, that man's experiental world is tightly wrapped around him rather than spread across a continental landmass, that his temporal sensibilities are limited by memory and lifespan, and that the most significant domains of meaning in his material world are produced and sustained locally.

How does this euroscepticism trickle down into archaeological research and teaching? It is doubtless different for everybody, but let me answer from my own perspective, and with respect to the period with which I have most familiarity: the Middle Ages. I will return to consider prehistory presently.

The two obvious core concerns in any interrogation of the value of an ‘archaeology of Europe’ are, first, the scale of cultural experience and, second, the impact of an actual concept of Europe, or at least of a concept of a geographical space of its approximate scale and extent, whatever its name, on the cultural practices that produce the archaeological record. Put simply, there may, on the one hand, have been things which were common to populations scattered across the continental vastness, thus justifying empirically oriented pan-European research projects. On the other hand, there may have been things that people did at local or regional levels within that vastness which were driven or conditioned by their knowledge of that space, and by some value which they placed in that space.

Given this scope, an archaeology of Europe (as distinct from an archaeology that is practised in the space which is described as Europe) seems unproblematic for certain periods. Few readers of this debate would have difficulty believing that an ‘archaeology of Europe’, defined in the terms I have outlined and referring more or less to the Continent as we understand it today, is especially unproblematic for the Middle Ages, particularly the high Middle Ages. It is widely accepted, for example, that the big architectural projects of the era – castles, churches, towns – are marked by a conscious, and conciously pan-European, homogeneity of style and concept, while heterogeneity in other cultural activities (farming, industry) is less problematic because it can be contextualized within the common, homogeneous, construct of feudalism. Indeed, the recent publication of the first of two multi-authored volumes entitled The archaeology of medieval Europe (Graham-Campbell and Valor 2007), published under the auspices of the European Symposium of Teachers of Medieval Archaeology (ESTMA), reflects a consensus among European medieval archaeologists that Europe was a real place in the lives of people who lived within it, and that cross-European comparative analysis is both valid and necessary. (Incidentally, if there is general agreement on the Middle Ages, there would be much less consensus on the possibilities of an ‘archaeology of Europe’ in the period after 1500: with the discovery of the New World reshaping Europe's geographies and ending any claim the Mediterranean had to being the centre of European gravity, it is striking that the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century discovery and exploration of this contradistinctive overseas ‘other’ – the Americas – did not make ‘Europe’ a single place, or reinforce any notion that it was a coherent place, but fractured it even more.)

So, is an ‘archaeology of Europe’ in the Middle Ages really unproblematic? ESTMA thinks so, and as a one-time participiant in the editorial process for the The archaeology of medieval Europe project I am wary of admitting to ever having had doubts. But problematic it is (see O'Keeffe 2007 for this point made with respect to so-called Romanesque architecture).

Wearing my postprocessual medievalist hat, I am happy to know something about, for example, medieval rural house types in every corner of Europe. There are fora (the Permanent European Conference for the Study of the Rural Landscape – Ruralia) which allow me keep up to speed on research across the Continent. Recognizing Professor Kristiansen's interest in the geographical scope of undergraduate archaeology courses, I could, with a little effort, tell my students all about medieval rural house plans across Europe, and they would probably find it interesting. That interest alone might justify the effort, but that knowledge of houses in, say, Moravia is not especially useful to me in any interpretative sense, as an Irish archaeologist working primarily on Irish material, nor would it be to the students. Yes, I could compare and contrast medieval houses in Moravia and Ireland, but for what purpose exactly? If I maintain that the careful study of contemporary domestic architectures in different places has no potential to yield some fundamental truth about humankind, because there is no such truth to begin with, then comparisons between the archaeologies of widely dispersed places can only have analytical value if I can demonstrate connectivity between those places. Their presence in the same laboratory – Europe – does not constitute a de facto connectivity.

I can certainly understand why Professor Kristiansen laments ‘teaching programmes at undergraduate level [which] are . . . predominantly national in scope’ (p. NN), but I offer the view that the reasons are sometimes practical and intellectual rather than ideological. As he says himself, ‘the teaching programmes . . . reflect the research horizon of the lecturers’ (p. NN) and many lecturers have presumably critiqued the value for their own work of a research-level knowledge of material from elsewhere in Europe.

Salvaging prehistoric ‘Europe’

A critique of a pan-European medieval archaeology should have significance for pan-European archaeologies of other periods. If it is found to be problematic, what hope other such archaeologies, especially of earlier periods? I am not a prehistorian so I will confine myself to a brief comment.

We cannot know about the prehistoric conception of places larger in dimension than those within which individuals lived their lives, nor can we judge the extent to which peoples' material culture (in the broadest sense) was shaped by a geographical consciousness which they, as individual beings, could never have experienced in any corporeal sense. But some prehistoric objects and object-types demonstrably travelled great distances from their places of production, and this is the key. If we conceptualize these objects as ‘actants’ in the Bruno Latourian sense (see Latour 1999, for example), we can conceptualize ‘Europe’ as the geographical field created of networks of inanimate objects. It is an entirely abstract conceptualization of Europe, built out of the scientism of the underused (by archaeologists) actor-network theory. There is no pretence that prehistoric Europe was a real, experiential and experienced, place. The ‘unreality’ of this Europe is entirely appropriate to the fictive nature of narratives about prehistory. On reflection, Gordon Childe's The dawn of European civilization (1925b) was precisely the sort of pan-European prehistoric archaeology I am talking about, although Childe himself would never have seen his magnum opus as one of the great works of twentieth-century fiction.

The invidious culture of citation and the trouble with positivists

There are two other issues in Professor Kristiansen's paper that I want to discuss before closing. First, his observations on non-native-language citations are fascinating, and while they are probably as we would expect, the quantification is most welcome. However, whether citations can or should be used as evidence of a narrowing of perspective to the local at the expense of the regional/continental is debatable. Were I an Iron Age expert I could write a paper on some Irish hillfort and mention in passing that Iron Age hillforts are also found elsewhere in Europe, citing journal articles from all corners of the Continent. What would it prove? How many cited works are genuinely read and absorbed by authors? How often do authors see a reference to something in a language foreign to them and then transfer the citation to their own work without having seen the original? Citations have become invidious capital in academic culture. It is no longer enough to publish research. You have to hope that colleagues will cite your work (or that when they randomly choose things for their bibliographies they will select and pretend to have read and absorbed your paper and not somebody else's). We should encourage shorter and, dare I say, more honest bibliographies.

Second, Professor Kristiansen asserts that archaeology has lost ‘scientific credibility’ because it ‘and the humanities in general have abstained from the big questions that concern most people, such as the relationship between climate, culture and environment, which demand grand historical narratives’ (p. NN). The problem I have here is less his explanation for why archaeology has lost ‘scientific credibility’ and more his insinuation that such credibility actually matters in the first place. Most of us on the culturalist side of contemporary archaeology instinctively believe that scientific truth does not transcend cultural truth – science is cultural, in other words – and therefore we do not allow science to arbitrate in cultural debates. Professor Kristiansen may be correct in predicting that ‘regional, supra-national studies in tandem with larger historical narratives will become more popular in the future, supported by a more systematic use of analytical and quantitative methods’ (p. NN; emphasis added), but I predict that, if it does happen, those ‘big questions that concern most people, such as the relationship between climate, culture and environment, which demand grand historical narratives’, will remain unanswered.