This is an admirable, valuable piece of thinking and conceptualizing, but cramped – in my view – by the geographical boundaries which Kristiansen has set around his subject.
The thesis is built on a two-sphere model: ‘national’ archaeologies contained within, and contrasted to, a larger emergent entity which Kristiansen terms ‘European archaeology’. But a number of basic questions are raised by that model. The first is why the author makes the implicit suggestion that ‘Europe’ is the ultimate container. It may seem obvious to recall that Europe is only a self-regarding peninsula in a much wider world, and that when the congress of the International Union of Prehistorians and Protohistorians exploded at Southampton in 1986 there emerged the World Archaeological Congress, whose whole perspective on the past and its relevance derived from non-European and non-national sources. In any case, all schemata representing concentric circles are misleading (as in discussions of identity). Some ‘national’ archaeologies, the British for example, may connect more directly and strongly to ‘world’ concepts than to European interpretations – however they are identified.
Another immediate question is about the adjective ‘European’. Some people will remember the recurrent, acrimonious rows about the distinction between ‘Scottish archaeology’ and ‘archaeology in Scotland’. The subtext for these disputes was ultimately political, but the arguments themselves were ridiculous. Chilled by that memory, I would prefer to tackle ‘European’ in a less holistic manner. Is there a ‘European archaeology’ – a phrase which suggests certain consistent threads in material and social culture throughout the continent over millennia? Plainly not, although Kristiansen quite rightly lampoons the Council of Europe's enthusiasm for an (imaginary) Bronze Age united free-trade area from the Black Sea to the Atlantic. Nobody would talk about ‘a North American archaeology’, or an ‘African’ one, in the same sense.
Instead, there is ‘archaeology in Europe’ – a pretty safe way of putting it. But, much more usefully, we can define ‘European archaeology’ as ‘the way that Europeans do archaeology’. In that light, all kinds of issues suddenly appear. And it does seem to me that Kristiansen misses some of them. Europeans do archaeology differently in different places, and the most striking feature to me – as an outsider to the profession – is the survival of a huge ‘Kossinna Zone’ or culture-historical province, in central and eastern Europe. In Germany the battle by younger researchers to overcome the traditions inherited from the 1920s (never mind the 1930s!) is heroic but still far from won. In Poland, the tradition of patriotic archaeology means that only a brilliant but numerically small group of scholars have come to grips with new theory. All this contrasts sharply with the Atlantic end of Europe, Britain especially, where revolutionary theorizing and indeed revolutions in praxis reached their peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
In other words, archaeology in Europe is a diverse landscape in which very different traditions and structures compete. It is certainly not a Konzept, a recognizable or even convergent style of interpretation. If that is true, then it would seem to follow that the converse of ‘national’ archaeologies on the European continent is not the sum of all the incoherent herds of regional approaches, and certainly not myths about primordial common cultures, but world archaeology: the views of the past developed in postcolonial continents which propose that archaeology is a political activity about ‘now, not then’, and as much about the living as about the dead.
Where Kristiansen is admirable is in his perception of the nation state motivation behind the heritage boom. He is right to see that, just as conservation and to some extent research were growing more international and comparative, the nation states (which had created the profession of archaeology as a ‘nation-forging’ instrument) seized back control of the past in the name of national unity under the ‘heritage’ slogan. Kristiansen accurately points out that the ‘heritage’ definition, almost at once painted in the colours of a (hitherto unknown) human right, led in many countries to the commodification of the past as a sort of natural resource, to be marketed under state control to tourism or used as a fuel to heat the fires of patriotic solidarity.
He observes that the ‘heritage’ concept could not have been introduced in the 1950s or 1960s because in those times ‘archaeology demarcated a distance from everything “national” and everything linked to “origins”’ (p. NN). I am not sure about that. It could certainly be said that those were times in which archaeologists in western Europe thought that science and politics must never meet, and that the sharp minds of the 1960s would have seen through ‘heritage’ far more mercilessly than the more acquiescent intellects of the 1980s. But Kristiansen overdoes it when he says, ‘Heritage was . . . a politically tainted concept after the Second world war, as it was seen to be linked to the role of cultural and ethnic origins that prevailed during the first half of the 20th century in historical and archaeological interpretations’ (p. NN). That depends which language you speak. In Britain, the word ‘heritage’ in – say – 1948 was associated firstly with the transmission of ancient buildings and wealth by aristocratic families, and secondly, and more vaguely, with a leftish view of the physical rural landscape which suggested that ‘the people’ had a prescriptive right to walk all over it.
Kristiansen's model of theoretical cycles – the swings between rationalism and romanticism – is intriguing. But how sure is he that each spurt of scientific ‘innovation’ must lead to a new upswing of rationalism? It could be argued that the rapid onrush of research in genetics and DNA modelling is achieving precisely the opposite – a return of energy to postprocessual analysis in archaeology, just when that movement was beginning to lose momentum.
