The structure of the argument

When I agreed to present the article as a vehicle for discussion at a session at the EAA's annual meeting in Zadar, Croatia, I decided to approach the question of a European archaeology from what I considered to be the three organizing pillars of archaeological practice: heritage, theory and publications. Heritage is the dominant organizational/legislative framework for archaeological practice, and it is where most of the money is spent. Theory, on the other hand, organizes most of our interpretations of the past, while publications are still the most common way of presenting the results of both heritage work (mostly excavations) and interpretations of that work. In this way I hoped to have encircled the dominant parameters for a diagnosis of the archaeological landscapes in Europe. I assumed that there might be some correlation between the three, and that such observed common trends within two or more variables would strengthen the argument, to paraphrase processual jargon.

Due to the structure of my argument some important themes were not considered, as rightly pointed out by Neil Ascherson and Predrag Novaković. Thus I left out the European ‘colonial’ history of archaeological institutes in the Mediterranean countries and the Near East. They are part of a European ‘classical’ heritage, which at times competed with a more ‘Eurasian’ prehistoric heritage, and whose historical role and possible future deserve a separate discussion article. And although the two merge in some areas and periods I decided to leave out classical archaeology, which I should have been more clear about. Finally, I left out the political history of Europe and its role in the development of archaeology, although its ideological impact is seen in the discursive changes over time in both heritage and theory. However, Margarita Diaz-Andreu has recently presented an impressive political history of archaeology, nationalism and colonialism during the 19th century (Diaz-Andreu Reference Diaz-Andreu2007).

Space obviously demanded selection and simplification, just as the debate forum invited some polemic. I therefore readily admit that some of my interpretations are open to discussion, and some of them did indeed provoke critique, as I would have expected. However, I also attempted to provide some empirical evidence to support my scenario of a predominantly local and national perspective in archaeological theory and interpretation. Some of that evidence was surprising even to me, but it is sustained by similar analyses in other regions than those I present. And I do hope that colleagues in other countries may feel inspired to carry out such critical documentation of the national research and publication structure. In answering the comments I begin with a theme I spend less time debating than most commentators: the concept of Europe.

Where is Europe? The concept of Europe

Phil Kohl is concerned about the political definition of Europe, which implies that it had different meanings at different times and to different people. I agree, but I never employed a political definition. I simply take Europe to represent a large and loosely defined geographical space that is able to open up a wider research perspective. It may include northern Africa, the Levant, Anatolia and Asia when so needed in order to account for the historical forces at work. As David Breeze rightly points out, the Roman Empire and its frontiers embraced most of these regions, and it left the historical and ideological legacy of a unified Europe. Moving back into prehistory, Phil Kohl's own recent book The making of Bronze Age Eurasia (Kohl Reference Kohl2007) is an exemplary interpretation of the prehistory of a large interconnected geographical region that is both Europe and Asia. To me, then, Europe is simply a metaphor for a region large enough to account for the historical forces at work at local, regional and interregional levels (or global, as some prefer). I employ the term ‘regional’ for a larger, natural region such as the Baltic, central Europe or the circum-Pontic area. The counterargument, that any geographical choice is political and therefore Europe is the European Union, and that those who advocate a European prehistory are automatically criticized for supporting a political project, is just a convenient excuse for supporting the national paradigm. I do not deny the role of politics but they are not important for my critique: that the national organization of archaeology imposes severe interpretative constraints on our understanding of the past. And, in opposition to Phil Kohl, I do think that archaeology and the archaeological heritage matter in politics; after all, museums and historical monuments were among the first targets of destruction in the war in the former Yugoslavia.

Here Predrag Novaković presents an arresting account of the modern failure of nation-building in the former Jugoslavia, and its consequent political impact on archaeology, which remained local or ‘national’ in a restricted ideological sense (Kaiser Reference Kaiser, Kohl and Fawcett1995). It conforms well with Carsten Paludan Müller's observation that nation states have either failed (Africa, Near East) or ceased (Europe) to be the dominant political–economic structure, while at the same time cultural and ethic nationalism flourishes, which includes cultural and archaeological heritage. They seem to be mutually dependent, to which the many ‘national museums’ bear witness, just as do the recently employed terms ‘English Heritage’ and ‘Historic Scotland’, both within the United Kingdom. The new heritage organizations are the ideological successors to the national museums. As convincingly argued by Predrag, the national/ethnic framework represented an authentic, ‘familiar’ context and this understanding of nationalism as an imagined ‘family’ or ‘kin’ is reinforced in periods of external threat, whether that be globalism or migrant labour. It corresponds to Benedict Anderson's (Reference Anderson1983) understanding of nationalism, which may be more helpful than Ernest Gellner's (1983) ideological construct. However, there are always countertendencies.

Where is home? The dialectic between the local and the global

Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, in her thoughtful comment, points out that current realities are already undermining the national paradigm, as researchers are forced to seek collaborators in other EU countries as a precondition for getting funded. I could not agree more. However, this is a rather new situation, and the postprocessual inclination towards local contexts of lived experiences is not ready to give way to a new Europeanism, if we are to believe Tadhg O'Keeffe. The rationale for this priority of local lived experience is that most of our evidence refers to local conditions, and although he recognizes the importance of a common European culture and has written a book entitled Archaeology and the Pan-European Romanesque (O'Keeffe Reference O'Keeffe2007), this is not considered relevant to his teaching of Irish students. And it is not considered relevant to prehistoric local people, since we ‘cannot know about the prehistoric conception of places larger in dimension than those within which individuals lived their lives’, to quote O'Keeffe (p. NN). This kind of theoretical determinism – or rather fundamentalism – is of the same order as earlier processualist claims to cultural laws. To O'Keefe home is Ireland, and prehistory should be no different. It may be new to O'Keeffe, but in later prehistory some people would travel long distances and return home with new knowledge that might challenge local knowledge and lead to changes.

It is this dialectic between the local and the global, to use a metaphor for what is beyond the local, that shaped prehistory and in the process changed local knowledge. Travels are well documented in later prehistory (Price et al. 2005; Kristiansen and Larsson Reference Kristiansen and Larsson2005), and to exclude the experience of foreign knowledge, and the possibility of cultural change that resided in other types of lived experiences than local experience, is to deprive prehistory of its social and cultural dynamic, while reducing it to a place that feeds our romantic dreams of the local and national present. Or, as stated by Bruce Trigger,

Ayfer Bartu-Candan provides a different take on local and national heritage. His discussion of the future role and use of the important Neolithic site Çatalhöyük in Turkey, and its presentation in a museum, entails all the ‘classical’ ingredients of conflicts of interest between local and national authorities. During the rise of local museums throughout Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries similar struggles were fought over who should be allowed to retain archaeological objects and carry out archaeological excavations. The national museums ‘colonized’ the local regions and in the process they brought all archaeological finds to the metropolises of Europe. When later local museums were created they wanted to stop this process of ‘colonization’ and over time they succeeded, and an integrated national archaeology was created, in some countries only to be formalized after 1945. However, such struggles can easily resurface, as in the case of important new sites, such as Çatalhöyük, and today economic interests linked to the global expansion of cultural tourism have become the driving force, rather than the need for local history. However, I contend that my cyclical model reflects real historical changes in the relationship between central and local forces of identity formation in European history as they were played out also in the role of museums. Periods of strong state control over archaeological excavations and exhibitions (rationalistic periods) alternated with periods of more decentralized, local engagement (romantic periods), and attempts to harmonize such ideological and political power struggles rather ‘romanticize’ history, which of course accords well with the present cycle. This leads on to a discussion of the role of my theoretical cycles.

The theoretical cycle

I readily admit that my theoretical cycle is a simplification of the dominant trends. And I stress ‘dominant’. But as all generalizations it has the capacity to put things into perspective and raise discussion. As pointed out by Thomas Meier, most of central Europe remained within a traditional positivist paradigm after the 1960s. He takes this as evidence that my cycle does not account for the history of archaeological theory in Europe after this period. However, I would rather put it the other way round and raise the question forwarded by Neal Ascherson: why is it that a large region of Europe remained outside the dominant cycle of theoretical thinking? Is it because it was economically or politically backward, or perhaps because archaeology occupied a different position in society during this period? To answer such questions would need another article, but we cannot delude ourselves that archaeology in central Europe, from the 1950s to the 1990s, played a major role in the international or even European development of the discipline. This is not to deny that it contributed with important knowledge, and that some outstanding individuals became part of the theoretical renewal. However, theoretical development corresponds to economic and political development in that it allows archaeology to expand into a modern project of heritage and history production with enough critical mass to allow for both more fieldwork and more intellectual reflection and inspiration from other humanistic disciplines and social sciences.

Thus it is no mere coincidence that one find similar discussions of rationalistic and romantic philosophies in social anthropology and sociology, as rightly pointed out by Meier. In his last book, Envisioning power, the anthropologist Eric Wolf (Reference Wolf1999) presents us with an intellectual tour de force of the history of thinking in Europe and beyond. According to Wolf, ‘Tracing out a history of our concepts can also make us aware of the extend to which they incorporate intellectual and political efforts that still reverberate in the present’ (ibid., 22). He sees the original debate between Enlightenment and its enemies to have formed all subsequent debates. Or, in his own words,

This brief reference to the 19th-century debate entails all the major ingredients of later debates, including processual and postprocessual archaeology, and it demonstrates that the historical discourse of archaeology is shared with other philosophical and historical disciplines, which lends some support to it. More recently John Bintliff has argued along similar lines, although he would trace the origin of these two competing perceptions of the world – the ‘modern’ (rationalism), and the ‘postmodern’ (romanticism) – in antiquity (Bintliff Reference Bintliff, Bentley and Maschner2008, figure 10.1).

Therefore I can hardly agree when Mark Pearce suggests that the swing of the pendulum towards local and national culture history and later postprocessual archaeology was conditioned by the ever-increasing volume of publications and new finds. It is just another of those convenient excuses for intellectual laziness. The human brain has unlimited capacity, and whether you choose to employ it for penetrating local history or European history is simply a matter of intellectual priority, nothing else. We only have ourselves to blame, and perhaps the discourse, which produces the priorities. However, I do not expect every archaeologists to take responsibility for European archaeology, but if 5% of all archaeologists would do it rather than the 0.5% or less of today, it would imply a big theoretical and interpretative development. And it would produce alternative historical narratives that might lead to new forms of historical understanding and collaboration between archaeology, history and the social sciences. Documenting and explaining the complex human responses to climatic change, diseases and migrations in a long-term historical perspective demand this kind of collaboration, and collaboration of course also with the natural sciences. Such collaborative projects that are defined by central problems of both present and past need funding at a European level. One good example of such a collaborative effort was the European Science Foundation's thematic Origin of Man, Language and Languages (OMLL; www.esf.org) research project.

Ayfer BartuCandan contends that postmodern anthropology has moved beyond the dichotomies of local versus global, and rather seeks to incorporate global problems in local studies. That may be so. However, I contend that local anthropological projects that claim wider global relevance often lack, by their very nature, the empirical and historical framework needed to support this ambition. They remain exemplifications from which contextualized insights are extracted that can be employed to redirect research on a larger global scale. That is of course valuable. However, anthropologists of the last generation gave up the ambition to carry out comparative and historical anthropological research. Therefore they correspond to my characterization of the postmodern, postprocessual cycle. In cases of prolonged and extensive fieldwork in a region such frameworks for historical analysis can be obtained, and a few good examples spring to mind, such as those of Polly Wiessner and Robert Layton (Wiessner and Tumu Reference Wiessner and Tumu1998; Layton Reference Layton2000). Also, when archaeologists and anthropologists join forces it may produce stunning results, as referred to above (also Kirch and Green Reference Kirch and Green2001). However, they remain exceptions.

Finally, several commentators suggest that I hold postprocessual theory ‘responsible’ for the national paradigm in archaeology (Meier) or that I consider it ‘bad’ (Pearce). Let me be clear on this matter: postprocessual theory is not responsible for anything inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’; it is simply part of the ideological forces of postmodernity (or modernity, as some would have it), and as such there is not much to do about it. Romantic and rationalistic periods of thinking produced innovations and important new interpretations, and they are conditioned by each other by providing a point of departure for critique. However, having observed their historical regularity, it is inevitable that one should speculate about the future of the cycle, which I will do in conclusion.

Publications: the burden of tradition and the prospects of the Web

Let us for a moment imagine that all archaeological journals were terminated, and we had to start from scratch, tabula rasa. Would we re-create all the journals we once had, or would we rather define new thematic and regional journals, aimed for a wider or different readership? One might also envisage a completely new concept of local history for a broader readership, which has already happened (Holtorf 2007). The fact that most new journals are doing precisely that – aiming at a new, larger readership (Public archaeology, the European journal of archaeology, the Journal of Mediterranean archaeology and so on) – or are creating new thematic blogs for interactive discussions, suggests to me that the present structures of archaeological journals are more of a burden than a joy to reproduce. They belong in the past. They are mostly produced out of tradition, and because archaeological societies pay for them.

Archaeology is privileged that new material is constantly produced, and needs to be published, and many journals fulfil this function. But are there other ways to serve the need for documentation? Some journals, like Antiquity (Carver Reference Carver and Rundkvist2007), are increasingly employing Web-based publication of new important excavations; perhaps it is possible to envisage a different structure of archaeological publication in the future, where archaeological databases, excavation reports, museum catalogues and research-based catalogues of finds are made systematically accessible on the Web, whereas interpretative articles appear in thematic journals (whether on the Web or in paper form)? I see a future where I do not need to maintain a huge library, which exceeds my housing capacity every ten years, but where I will be able to link up to any article or book on the Intenet via a slim lightweight portable computer that I carry with me in the same way as today I carry my calendar and address lists in my mobile phone or palm organizers. The prospects of this amount to a democratic revolution in academic and historical knowledge, and its mobilizing effects are probably beyond our present imagination. Here, finally, I see hope for a radically different and more open access to knowledge, which, however, will demand a highly theoretical and source-critical academic education. And in the end nothing competes with the experience of fieldwork and hands-on work, whether in excavation or among the dusty shelves of museums.

In conclusion: how long will it take?

Reading Predrag Novaković's last page, where he summarizes the accumulated contribution of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) during the last 13 years to integrate European archaeologists and archaeology, gave me new grounds for optimism (thank you Predrag, for reminding me), despite the prospects I have outlined. And so did Mark Pearce's recollection of the inaugural meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists in Ljubljana in 1994. But as a prehistorian I know that things change gradually; it is only during social transformations, as we have witnessed during the last two hundred years, that change suddenly speeds up. And even here institutional traditions remain stable, implying that new institutions are constructed around the old ones, as happened when the rescue and heritage boom completely changed the archaeological landscape within 20 or 25 years.

Carsten Paludan-Müller, in noticing the decline of the nation state as the dominant organizing political principle in Europe, wonders why this has not translated into a post-national archaeology. One answer might be that the political decline of the nation state at the expense of the European Union is compensated for by cultural means during a period of transformation. Thus it is simply too early to expect such a change of perspective. It may happen when the present ‘romantic’ cycle comes to an end. Or rather, when it happens the present ‘romantic’ cycle automatically comes to an end, perhaps in 15 to 20 years or so. I believe, though, that some time in the more distant future, 50 to 100 years from now, Europe and its regions, rather than its nations, will be considered ‘home’, and historical and archaeological research will in similar ways have changed their interpretative perspective, as the practice of archaeology will no longer be privileged by birth and national citizenship. And the European Association of Archaeologists will by then be the major archaeological society in Europe, with several thousand members.

In conclusion, I wish to thank all contributors for their insightful and stimulating comments, which forced me to rethink some of my arguments, while others were sustained. It is indeed a privilege to write something that is read and commented upon, and such debates are at their very best if critical and honest, the fuel of intellectual progress.