Introduction: ‘European Archaeology’ in a Crisis-ridden 2016
John Robb and Staša Babić

What do ‘Europe’ and ‘European archaeology’ mean for archaeologists today? In 2008, Archaeological Dialogues ran a seminal discussion feature on the question of whether a truly European archaeology exists. This feature presented a range of reactions to Kristian Kristiansen's (Reference Kristiansen2008) argument that archaeology in Europe oscillates historically between nationalism and internationalism; the overwhelming tenor of the many insightful comments was that an internationalist European archaeology would be a good thing, reflecting both academic arguments for trans-national archaeologies and the academic community's generally positive attitude towards integration.

The present discussion takes place in a different historical moment, and has a somewhat different focus. A week is proverbially a long time in politics; a lot has happened since 2008. The global financial crisis of 2008 put the brakes on a decade of fast economic growth and had extensive repercussions, particularly in the poorer economies of southern Europe. Greece was on the brink of dropping out of the Euro, and while it has so far remained in, helping maintain the strength of the currency in the Euro heartland as well, the crisis has generated hard feelings between the economic core of Europe—particularly Germany—and its weaker economies, whose citizens sometimes see the European Union (EU) as a tool for capitalist exploitation of its poorer members. Equally marked has been the rush of Eastern European countries to join the EU, which has almost doubled its membership since 2004. This enlargement increased the economic and labour power of the EU, and heightened the amount of internal movement, particularly from the poorer former Eastern bloc to the prosperous West. A third trend is the crisis of refugees fleeing from civil war and poverty, not only from the disastrous civil war in Syria, but also from a belt of instability extending from Libya to Afghanistan. All these aspects create a context for heightened identity politics rooted in the past; tension over the large number of Eastern European immigrants in Britain was a major factor in the British referendum result of 23 June 2016 in favour of leaving the EU (the so-called ‘Brexit’ vote). Elsewhere in Europe, fear and anxiety revolve around migration into Europe, whether it is over recent refugees or over the integration of long-standing Muslim populations, for example in France and Belgium. At the heart of both national and continental tensions is migration from the global south across the borders of Europe. The tension is often expressed, overtly or in coded terms, in terms of race or religion: a struggle over whether Europe is fundamentally a white, Christian place.

This scepticism over an understanding of the past rooted in an emotive sense of identity lends itself well to a post-Brexit analysis. Effectively, the referendum debate, culminating in Britain's historic vote in June 2016 to leave the EU, was a debate over whether Britain's approach to Europe should be guided by sentiment or by economic and political need. The main persuasion of voters who wanted to leave the EU was an emotive pitch that ‘our’ identity and ‘our’ country were being threatened by immigration—a naïve longing for a simpler, pre-EU childhood normality (it is no surprise that pro-Brexit voters were generally older than pro-Remain voters). In contrast, the main argument in favour of remaining in Europe was based on a simple fact: economic integration, political coordination, and the movement of labour underpin today's normality in a thousand ways. This is becoming evident as politicians attempt to sort out what Brexit actually means in practice, and find that all those threatening migrants— builders, waiters, programmers, dentists, farm workers, even archaeologists—are in Britain because the British economy actually relies on them.

Brexit would be simply a local neurosis, except that it reflects tensions throughout Europe: in most parts of Europe, there is a tension between a present-day normality of integration and a sentimental order of identity politics rooted in the past. In the former, trans-national movement of people, economic integration, and political coordination underpin everything from the labour market, continental security, and peace to common standards of health, rights, and environmental care. They often do so invisibly, but the result is an increasingly integrated and homogeneous Europe. In the latter, people adhere tenaciously to identities established a hundred years ago or more, in quite different political landscapes. Such identities are inherently oppositional. This is so whether such identities are on a local level (being ‘English’ as opposed to ‘French’) or a continental, racial, or religious level (and a term such as ‘European’ often bundles all three together). Another way of expressing the contradiction is through a single vignette. When English, or Czech, or Greek football supporters pour off airplanes to cheer their team on in a European competition, they are intensely nationalistic; they feel anything but ‘European’. But—whether or not they are conscious of these factors and the underlying organizational relationships enabling them—the budget-airline flights they take work within an integrated European market, their passports will be recognized with no reservations, their health and security will be guaranteed by agreements across national health services, interlinked police forces, and shared legal codes, the airports, bars, bathrooms, hotels, trains, and roads will function much as they do at home, and they will be able to use their mobile phones and ATM cards seamlessly wherever they go. Europe is a mode of organization, not an identity.

This has one major implication for archaeological policy, which stands perhaps in clear contrast to how the situation may have been seen a decade ago. Whether or not we see ‘Europe’ as a historically integrated phenomenon, using archaeology to try to build an emotive commitment to European identity is a bad idea. At worst, it won't work, and would come across as pushing an ineffectual, somewhat forced political agenda; how many monuments really inspire visitors with a sense of ‘Europeanness’? And even if successful, it could result in a hegemonic identity which suppresses knowledge of variation, permeability, and difference in the past and lends itself to exclusionary political ideologies. The Roman Empire, for instance, unified much of Europe; yet we cannot regard it as ‘European’, encompassing as it did North Africa and western Asia too. Similarly, if any one factor united the chaos of strife that was medieval Europe, it was Christianity; yet medieval Europe contained significant numbers of non-Christians—Muslims, Jews, and believers in the indigenous religions of northern and eastern Europe—and there was often conflict, even slaughter, between Christians (Catholics, Orthodox, and ‘heretics’). Europe has always been both internally heterogeneous and open, integrated with Asia, North Africa, and the Near East. And this state of affairs continues today; a sense of ‘Europeanness’ based on historical domination of a factor such as Christianity is a charter for domination in the present. We would reject any essentialized or closed idea of ‘Europe’ as both misrepresenting the past and politically dangerous in the present.

Instead, much as in the football example above, ‘European archaeology’ should be fostered in the organizational normality of the present—the sense of Europeanness which derives from a mutual recognition of things like working practices. It should encompass things such as political coordination for goals including the protection of cultural heritage, making it an accessible part of local cultural life, and establishing widely shared standards for archaeological practice and integrative networks for sharing knowledge. These will create an organizational, not emotive, normality for ‘European archaeology’, which will foster a more open-ended understanding of the past and make it more productive in terms of social relations and political dialogue.

‘European Archaeology’: What's in the Name?
John Robb

Names are powerful: they create things as much as they describe them. What they create can be useful or harmful, a common resource or a sectarian banner; it is rarely simply a neutral statement of things. What is ‘European archaeology’? What does the phrase refer to, and what are the implications of setting it apart as a defined thing and calling it by that name rather than any other?

In this prelude to the discussion, I outline four major ways in which one can understand the phrase ‘European archaeology’. These differ considerably in what they encompass and in their political and practical implications. This introductory discussion lays out the key points of each strand, along with ways each has been used and some of its pros and cons.

European Archaeology as Reflexive Practice
Staša Babić and Monika Milosavljević

More often than not, archaeological knowledge is organized around geographical denominators, as presumed neutral technical terms. Maps, as two-dimensional graphic representations of these notions, serve as the consistent background against which material culture is plotted and inferences drawn on the grounds of observed regularities. However, these denominators and their visual representations reflect a number of pre-conceived ideas, necessary in this ‘process of reducing of infinitely complex to a finite, manageable frame of reference, requiring the imposition of artificial grids’ (Gaddis, Reference Gaddis2002: 32, 33). These preconceptions include not only conventionally agreed limits of individual natural phenomena, but also the ideas on the quality of human actions taking place among rivers, mountains, and seas. In this conflation of geographical, historical, cultural, and political descriptors, map-making may be described as ‘a light-handed exercise of power, which apparently leaves the world unchanged—only known’ (Humphreys, Reference Humphreys and Most2002: 209). The convention to mark the lands west of the Ural mountains and north of the Mediterranean sea as Europe is not an exception—it implies not only the geographical limits, but also the limits of human actions, however porous they may be conceived to be. The history of archaeology (and other humanities, for that matter) amply demonstrates that the discipline has not only observed this demarcation line, but has also contributed to solidify it (e.g. Humphreys, Reference Humphreys and Most2002; Díaz-Andreu, Reference Díaz-Andreu2007). Since the publication of the seminal volume Cultural Identity and Archaeology: The Construction of European Communities (Graves-Brown et al., Reference Graves-Brown, Jones and Gamble1996), a growing body of research demonstrates that the modern perceptions of the European continent's past have been very much shaped by the social and political circumstances of their formation and, in turn, that these ideas of origins have heavily influenced the decisions and choices of modern Europeans. Accordingly, the choices made by archaeologists concerning research priorities may transgress the boundaries of Europe set in seemingly purely geographical terms, including/excluding material traces of the past that may originate from the lands conventionally marked as European.

One possible example is the paradox offered by the Ottoman past: even though many monuments of the Ottoman Empire still exist in south-eastern Europe, from the viewpoint of common European archaeological narratives it is difficult to perceive that the Ottoman Empire ever existed on European soil. This peculiar absence does not stem from a lack of material remains, but corresponds to ideological blindness determining the adequate frame of reference for the European archaeological past (see Baram & Carroll, Reference Baram and Carroll2000, 3–32; Walker, Reference Walker and Smith2014). The stereotypes of the Ottoman Empire as a state overtly characterized by Islam, with anti-progressive social tendencies, have resulted in the image of a colonizer whose colonization is not perceived as ‘civilising’ and consequently excluded from the European heritage.

Though an illustrative example, the Ottoman past is not the only one marginalized, nor the only one perceived as pertaining to Otherness, indicating how European archaeology, through its practices, subtly discards chosen pasts and perspectives. In the process, purely geographical denominators may cease to hold true and other considerations are brought into play. A similar argument may be developed concerning the Byzantine Empire and its material remains on European soil. However, the reverse logic operates in the case of the Classical Greek culture: although geographically located in the southernmost part of the Balkan peninsula, the splendour of the Hellenes will rarely be listed as a part of Balkan archaeology. This south-eastern corner of Europe is often perceived as a liminal, ambiguous region bridging the opposites of East and West, and yet not fully belonging to either (Todorova, Reference Todorova1997; see also Babić, Reference Babić, Biehl, Gramsch and Marciniak2002). Locating ancient Greece—the eternal font of the European civilisation—in this ambiguous setting would go against the pan-Hellenic narrative, the thread linking the crucial traits of European identity to the Classical sources through a long string of emulations, imitations, and inspirations (Humphreys, Reference Humphreys and Most2002; Settis, Reference Settis2006). This essential role-model shaped after Greece has no doubt laid the foundations to many an achievement of the Europeans. Democracy and humanism come readily to mind. But, at the same time, in the words of Edward Said, to be a European means to belong ‘to a part of the earth with a definite history of the involvement in the Orient almost since the time of Homer’ (Said, Reference Said1978: 78). This persistent heritage of the Europeans, that of confronting it with the Oriental Other, needs to be assessed with the same rigour as the other, more desirable traits of the Classical ideal built into the European self-image.

The role played by archaeology in the process of fossilizing the East-West dichotomy is by no means negligible. It is therefore the responsibility of European archaeologists to deal with a series of questions: Is European archaeology reluctant to engage with the material traces in its soil which are, for one reason or another, not perceived as European heritage? Why are ‘other’ archaeologies disturbing? Is the triad of nation, race, and religion still the dominant framework in the construction of archaeological narratives within the European context? Finally, is this blueprint adjusted to a new meta-narrative, that of ‘Europeanism’ (sensu Gramsch, Reference Gramsch2000)? (According to Gramsch, ‘Europeanism’ refers to a conviction by interpreters of pre- and protohistoric material culture that it must be possible to find common European characteristics in their data that account for lasting European commonness. The EU conception of Europe defines it as unity in diversity, but it is ideologically founded in a similar way to national identity, instead of following from an academic conceptualization (Gramsch, Reference Gramsch2000).) Discussing some of these questions may bring us closer to understanding the processes of inclusion/exclusion behind the notion of European archaeology. This, in turn, may elucidate its interpretive potentials and limitations.

European archaeology needs to face not only the problem of a heterogeneous European past, but also the present fragmentation of its archaeological communities. In a simplified form, one might argue that north-western European archaeology is highly theorized, dominated by the postprocessual paradigm, yet open to new challenges. On the other hand, other archaeological professional communities are perceived as intrinsically conservative or, at best, lagging behind dominant trends. The ideal outcome is therefore for the latter to catch up with developments on a universally acknowledged ‘ladder of stages’ of archaeological theory and practice (Babić, Reference Babić, Stoddard and Popa2014, Reference Babić and Wright2015). However, the processes of knowledge transfer in academic communities are much more than a one-directional relationship between transmitter and receiver. In order to reach a more profound mutual understanding among various European archaeological communities, it may be useful to turn to the history of the discipline. For example, the German archaeological tradition (with its strong impact in central and south-eastern Europe) is usually described as a primarily atheoretical approach, in stark contrast to developments further west (Sklenár, Reference Sklenár1983; Babić, Reference Babić, Biehl, Gramsch and Marciniak2002; Raczkowski, Reference Raczkowski, Gramsch and Sommer2011; Novaković, Reference Novaković, Migotti, Mason, Nadbath and Mulh2012). More detailed research shows that these archaeological traditions are not in fact atheoretical, but reluctant to clearly articulate the theoretical standpoint, that of nineteenth-century positivism, implying a valid scientific procedure in which the truth is reached through empirical facts and their description. In this tradition, which goes well beyond the field of archaeology, cognitive activity is supposed to be neutral (Sklenár, Reference Sklenár1983; Raczkowski, Reference Raczkowski, Gramsch and Sommer2011: 197–214; Novaković, Reference Novaković, Migotti, Mason, Nadbath and Mulh2012: 51–71; Karl, Reference Karl2014: 1–4). This deeply ingrained intellectual tradition often leads to a reluctance of non-Western European archaeologists to engage in current theoretical debates.

Furthermore, the history of European archaeology includes in equal measure the British colonial experience, unilineal evolutionism, the ‘Kossinna syndrome’ (Veit, Reference Veit and Härke2002: 41–66; Brather, Reference Brather, Schlanger and Nordbladh2008: 327), and various later nationalistic claims (see Graves-Brown et al., Reference Graves-Brown, Jones and Gamble1996). Reassessing the past of archaeology as a discipline by locating these points of misuse—the deviating courses of archaeological theory and practice, occurring in some European countries under specific social and political conditions—could prepare us for the circumstances of a new paradigmatic change. The ‘factographical’ approach to the history of the discipline (Stoczkowski, Reference Stoczkowski, Murray and Evans2008: 346–59), limiting research to the adventurous tales of great explorers, will not serve that purpose. Rather, we should concentrate on the intertwining European intellectual traditions, which form an integral part of our own discipline. The world today poses possibly greater challenges than the ones endured by our predecessors in our field. It may therefore be argued that reflexivity in archaeology is and should be a vital component of the European archaeological tradition. In other words:

But reflexivity does not produce the kind of certainty that can be readily translated into narratives that are easily recognizable by the general public, decision-makers, and funding agencies alike. What is highly valued in this arena is measurable output, expressed through quantification of archaeological data and reports replete with analyses from the hard sciences. The majority of large-scale calls for project proposals by the European funding institutions almost completely neglect the need for critical reassessment of the implications of harnessing ‘big data’ in establishing ‘Europeanism’ (Gramsch, Reference Gramsch2000), spending ‘big funds’ to procure scientifically ‘hard’ evidence for the eternal unity and uniqueness of European culture. Designing projects and writing narratives about the past involves neglecting the critical orientation of the discipline and its adaptation to the political goals and profitability of the European Union (Niklasson, Reference Niklasson2014: 60–62). In order to survive in the European academic market, archaeologists may show themselves willing to reorient their focus of research and adapt to these demands (see Kristiansen, Reference Kristiansen2014: 12–19). However, science can indeed be blind to, or obscure, the fact that we may be trotting down a path that has already had dire consequences:

The situation gets even more intricate in the ways European strategies are implemented towards countries striving for membership of the EU. It can be easily imagined how the priorities of European archaeology expressed through big data, quantification, modelling, and aDNA are laid layer after layer onto the basis of, for example, the archaeological communities heavily imbued by the tradition of nineteenth-century positivism. The increasing use of bioarchaeological analyses thus buttresses identity models in which identity is but a matter of perception, relegated to the body, a territory on which we should tread lightly; from this perspective, genetics are the ‘true reality’ (Voss, Reference Voss2015: 661–64). Therefore, to avoid misuses bordering on pseudoscience or ethically dubious inferences, European archaeology at the time of a new paradigmatic change needs to pay attention to the ever-increasing possibilities of the natural sciences to contribute to our understanding of the past, but equally it must not lose sight of the reflexive nature of archaeological thinking. In other words, archaeology remains relevant only while it still fosters diverse academic traditions and numerous epistemological positions, approaching the past in its full complexity and bravely facing novel challenging questions.

Spannen wir den Karren vor das Pferd? (Are We Putting the Cart before the Horse?)
Raimund Karl

John Robb has remarked quite rightly in his introduction that any defined terminology necessarily requires an abstraction from reality. Any such abstraction is always necessarily a simplification, that is, a reduction of the complexity of the reality we have to engage with. Thus, as Robb also correctly notes, abstraction entails choice: choice about what aspects of reality are deemed irrelevant for the definition, and what aspects are considered relevant.

That choice frequently can be political in the narrow sense of the word, as the contribution by Babić and Milosavljević clearly demonstrates. Political aspirations of individuals, communities, and particularly states can and do influence these terminological choices, the latter in turn influencing political aspirations. While recognizing, as Paludan-Müller suggests here, that the interconnectedness of the world, can help overcome this problem on an intellectual level, the underlying issue remains: some things are included in any defined term, while others are excluded from it.

While it goes without saying that any term must mean something, Karl Popper famously remarked in his Open Society and its Enemies that, in the sciences, all truly important terms must be undefined terms (Popper, Reference Popper1980: 26). That does not mean that they remain meaningless: if it did, communication would be impossible. Rather, words gain their meaning from the context in which they are used: their actual meaning is rarely clearly defined. Indeed words occupy quite fuzzy semantic fields: what they actually mean in any particular instance is defined by the semantic context in which they are used. And that, in turn, depends entirely on what their user wants to express with them.

It is certainly interesting, particularly within a European Association of Archaeologists, to debate what the term ‘European’ in its name is actually supposed to mean, and how a ‘European’ archaeology might be defined. After all, the use of this, rather than any other term, is a choice, too. Yet, I would argue that the fact that the term ‘European’ remains as undefined as it is constitutes its greatest advantage: it gives its users the greatest possible freedom to apply it as they see fit, and shape its precise meaning in the way they wish, rather than being restricted by definitions that ultimately require us as a community to make the choices of what to include and what to exclude within its meaning.

The term ‘European’ in the EAA's name, and indeed in archaeology more generally, seems more like a mostly superfluous addition, a historical accident more than anything: the EAA was founded in the geographical area commonly called ‘Europe’ by archaeologists from that very same area. Hence calling it ‘European’ seemed sensible at the time to distinguish it from other archaeological associations. But it hardly seems to have been founded (or pursued any policy ever since) to restrict itself, its membership, or indeed most of its activities, to any particular definition of Europe. The only exception to this seems to be the location of the EAA annual conference, which—at least so far—has only been held in places within the geographical boundaries of Europe. And that, I would argue, is mostly due to the convenience of the majority of its members than some conscious political choice.

In general, I find the two other elements in the EAA's name much more important and interesting: what do we mean by ‘association’ and ‘archaeologists’? Who are the ‘archaeologists’ who are ‘associated’, and how are they associated with each other? And, perhaps even more importantly, what consequences (should) arise from archaeologists associating? Who do we include and who do we exclude? For what purposes are we associated? Do we want to restrict ourselves to just meeting at an annual conference and publishing a journal, a newsletter, and a monograph series, or should our association aim for more? And if so, what is this ‘more’ it should aim for, and how do we best achieve it as an association?

Perhaps, rather than discussing what the term ‘European’ means, should we not be discussing some of these questions instead?

European Archaeologies as a Node of Problems and an Arena for Experimentation
Koji Mizoguchi

The positionalities of European archaeologies

On those grounds, Europe matters significantly and inevitably to a large portion of us living outside this not-so-strictly-definable entity, and what is going on in archaeologies conducted on the inside (hereafter ‘European archaeologies’) matters a great deal to a large proportion of archaeologists living and conducting their daily archaeological practices outside it.

As I schematize elsewhere (Mizoguchi, Reference Mizoguchi2015), the current state of archaeology as a discipline, in terms of operational trends, can be grasped by heuristically categorizing the world's regions into a four-quadrant diagram, with the x axis indicating different degrees of ease/difficulty in accessing various resources, including economic and cultural/symbolic resources, and the y axis showing different degrees of ease/difficulty in acquiring self-identity (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Diagram mapping different modes of ‘living and doing archaeology’. X axis: access to capital and sources of wealth; + easy; – difficult; Y axis: self-identification, + easy; – difficult (after Mizoguchi, Reference Mizoguchi2015, with modifications).

Many ‘European’, mostly EU, countries, that once were colonizers and had experiences of attempting to ‘enlighten’ the colonized as well as their own citizens, are included in the first quadrant. In the process of the enlightenment as a modernizing project, and in the process of the establishment of modern nation states as ‘war machines’, each of which had to internally integrate agrarian communities into an artificial politico-economic entity and externally compete against one another over markets (see e.g. Mizoguchi, Reference Mizoguchi2006: Chapter 2), archaeology as a ‘scientific’ discipline was formed and mobilized, both consciously and unconsciously, for the achievement of those ‘Projects of Modernity’ (Mizoguchi, Reference Mizoguchi2006: 84).

The unique historical trajectory that many current European countries have been through, I would argue, is not only characteristic of the ways in which various archaeological practices have been and are conducted in these countries, but also defines the roles that ‘European archaeologies’ can play for the future(s) of world archaeologies in general.

The Elephant in the Room
Tim Murray

Some twenty years ago I took the opportunity of a need to mark the centenary of the death of Vere Gordon Childe to reflect on archaeology and European identity (Murray, Reference Murray1996). Even in 1996 it was no small irony that Childe celebrated the ideal of European civilisation as an Australian, Marxist, and secular humanist—a movement away from the ‘stultifying’ bonds of religion towards rationality and all the good things (such as science and democracy) that flowed from it. At that time, writing under the influence of a catastrophic war in the Balkans, separatist conflicts occurring everywhere from the Caucasus to the heart of Africa, and the return of radical right interpretations of ethnic essentialism, my major concern was to explore whether European archaeologists were better able to defend European society from the influence of ‘perilous ideas’ such as the supposed nexus between race, language, and culture, which had been fundamental to the rise of European nationalism.

In my reflection I stressed that Childe (unsuccessfully in my view) sought to defend the utility of concepts that lay right at the heart of culture-historical archaeology, through the application of the rationality of science for assessing the truth value of interpretations proposed by archaeologists and others. I found little reason for optimism, if only because the extent of epistemic polarization (or is it really atomization?) within the discipline of archaeology between science and non-science was so great as to make agreement about fundamental questions about the assessment of the value of interpretations pretty much impossible. Thus the absolutely critical task of finding ways in which quite clear abuses of such ‘perilous ideas’ could be unmasked and their use in contemporary politics constrained, had become more and not less difficult since Childe's passing.

Twenty years later it is clear that irony has been ‘upsized’. The same old epistemic and theoretical polarization exists within the discipline, notwithstanding the great impact that archaeological science has had on the ways in which the truth value of some theories can be assessed. Our incapacity to control ‘perilous ideas’ underwriting much culture-historical archaeology and social archaeology remains, as do abuses of archaeological interpretations by external groups advancing separatist (or even colonialist) agendas both within Europe and along its borders. But the world in which these continuing failures exist has changed more radically (and more quickly) than was generally thought possible.

Although the prospect of another round of navel-gazing about the nature and identity of European archaeology can be a bit daunting (so much self-obsession happening for so long and going where?), there can be little doubt that now, more than at any time in the past sixty or so years, archaeologists need to play their part in exploring and explaining Europe. We can all agree about so much: Europe can be geographically and politically defined (although they are not the same). European archaeology is done in Europe, by Europeans and others. European archaeology is also done outside Europe (the archaeology of the European diaspora, the archaeology of empires such as Rome, and the archaeology of the modern world system) by non-Europeans and Europeans. Europe is also a ‘region of the mind’, the source of firm cultural ties linking former colonial and imperial possessions across the globe. Thus the archaeology of capitalism, of the global trade in commodities, of mass migration and industrialization is also the archaeology of Europe. Perhaps even more so, the archaeology of ethnic conflict and dispossession (again within Europe as well as outside it) is also European archaeology. When we turn our attention to other aspects of Euro-culture, such as the Eurovision song contest, we find that the borders of Europe are very elastic indeed, now including Israel and (amazingly) Australia. So, what isn't European archaeology, does it really matter when compared to the current existential threat to Europe, and should that threat be of concern to non-Europeans?

Collapsing economies, rising unemployment and social dislocation, increasing military tensions, and the impact of mass migration, among other vectors of social and cultural stress, have created in Europe a highly combustible situation where the politics of ethnic essentialism are already beginning to play a part. In that sense, these politics have been bubbling away since the conflict in the Balkans and the collapse of the old Soviet empire in Eastern Europe some decades ago. Times of stress in Europe rekindle the attractiveness of nationalist and separatist politics (arguments for the separation of Scotland from the UK, or indeed of the UK from Europe, are just more recent examples), but the closing of borders, and conflicts within Europe over what to do with terrorism and the security of borders, pose an even greater threat to the idea of the open European society. It is up to all archaeologists (not just Europeans) to unmask dangerous misconceptions about the ethnic history of Europe which are being, and will continue to be, used as a basis for arguments supporting ethnic essentialism and the political and cultural separation that follows. This will be a difficult task primarily because those ideas are so deeply buried and so rarely exposed by archaeologists and others to rigorous analysis. But it is a task that we should undertake if we are to reform archaeological theory and protect society from archaeology. There is also a potentially high cost to pay in terms of exposing to public view the questionable assumptions that have supported the application of such ‘perilous ideas’ in archaeological interpretation. It is worth it. And could perhaps be the greatest gift of European archaeology to the project of world archaeology.

European Archaeology: Any Limits?
Carsten Paludan-Müller

There is nothing new in discussing the spatial extent of Europe. Nor is there anything new in the realization that working with the archaeology of European lands is meaningless without a perspective that includes the wider world. European lands are characterized by a spatial layout that has facilitated their connectedness both internally and with adjacent continental landmasses (Paludan-Müller, Reference Paludan-Müller2009). This has translated into tides that, from the earliest times, have shaped the dynamics of Europe's deep history. These tides can never be adequately understood from a perspective that segregates our past into ‘Classical archaeology’, ‘prehistoric archaeology’, ‘Islamic archaeology’, ‘medieval archaeology’, etc. While we need to dive deep into epochs and geographies, we need to do it with a strong awareness of their interconnectedness.

Today one of these historic tides is a condition of instability, poverty, and conflict that for many decades has affected the European Union's southern and eastern margin. Another, linked to that condition of poverty and conflict, is unfolding with accelerating pace in the form of a massive immigration that has affected and will affect the demographic and cultural fabric of Europe.

Cultural heritage itself is deeply affected by the conflicts raging on the periphery of Europe. The destruction of heritage in the adjacent conflict zones is also in painful ways affecting the many immigrants and refugees with whom we now cohabit.

If there are good scholarly reasons for questioning the relevance of a restricted geographical understanding of the concept of ‘European archaeology’, we could argue that, besides the scholarly arguments for a wider geographical perspective, we should see heritage (and by implication archaeology) as something that has to be defined with reference to people. The heritage of European citizens may no longer be perceived as restricted to the countries of our citizenship—but equally to the lands in which we have our roots.

In many parts of Europe, archaeology and cultural heritage are under pressure. Much of this has to do with the current economic crisis (Demoule, Reference Demoule, Schlanger and Aitchison2010; Schlanger, Reference Schlanger, Schlanger and Aitchison2010). But explaining this weakened standing solely with reference to the current crisis misses an important point: over the last five decades, the practice of archaeology has increasingly become dominated by developer-led investigations. Basically, archaeology has to a large degree become determined by the interaction of the legal framework with sources of funding rather than by the interaction of research questions with sources of funding. The result in the short run is not less money invested in archaeology but rather a poorer return of archaeological insights from these investments. With financial-legal logics in the driver's seat we have seen develop a fractured archaeology focused on single, site-specific issues more than on the big questions and long lines of enquiry that used to occupy the discipline.

The substitution of a strategic research funding rationale by a tactical-judicial funding rationale in the guiding of our practice has placed our discipline in a vulnerable position where it loses relevance in contemporary society in ways that threaten to delegitimize much of our practice.

Thus, too much of the archaeology that is being undertaken has been reduced to a bureaucratically legitimized exercise, where sites are excavated only because they are under threat from construction projects, and because excavations can then be prescribed by law and funded. Too often—though not everywhere and not always—the end product is a stock of artefacts, samples, documentation, and grey literature, left to oblivion in storage vaults and archives, because funding for the rest of the ‘food chain’, the production of new knowledge and giving it back to society, has been cut out (Kristiansen, Reference Kristiansen2009; Paludan-Müller, Reference Paludan-Müller and Lagerlöf2013b: 2). And, too often, cultural heritage management has failed to work in more inclusive ways with local communities, and with sufficient awareness of issues beyond those strictly pertaining to the sphere of cultural heritage.

In order to remain a viable historic discipline, archaeology needs to reconnect to what occupies people living in today's world. We as archaeologists must address big issues and identify long lines of enquiry when we shape the questions that guide our research strategies.

Archaeology has a privileged position from which it can illuminate us with insights into crucial issues such as the logics of urban development across time and space, cultural hybridity and connectedness, conflict and change, state and non-state interactions, climate and culture, and epochal transitions (Paludan-Müller, Reference Paludan-Müller2008, Reference Paludan-Müller, Bergerbrant and Sabatini2013a: 2). These are highly relevant issues in today's world.

Today, Europe is plagued by an inability to create the jobs necessary for the social inclusion of a growing fraction of its population. There is a concern among European politicians and in the European Commission that the European project is teetering on the edge of an ultimate failure to meet the basic expectations of its citizens. We need to think hard about how heritage can become a relevant part of a new equation, instead of a reminder of better days and the set pieces in ‘Heritage Theme Park Europe’. A new equation would have to address the need for inclusiveness in terms of citizenship and employment in a Europe that looks with confidence to the future and with openness to the wider world. We need to work with ‘big data’ (Gattiglia, Reference Gattiglia2014) in order to better see archaeology and heritage as sources of insights that help us understand and manoeuvre in long-term developments that are still unfolding and affecting our lives (Guldi & Armitage, Reference Guldi and Armitage2014: 88–116). And we need to see heritage less as a stock that needs conservation and more as an asset that inspires innovation. In previous periods of epochal transition, the European archaeology and heritage professions have been capable of connecting to big issues, and I believe we can do it again. But we must do it with awareness and integrity to avoid instrumentalizing history to divide and oppress.

An important discussion is now taking place within the discipline of history (Guldi & Armitage, Reference Guldi and Armitage2014) about how historians should shift their focus back to the longue durée by revitalizing a long time perspective for a better understanding of the major changes we are living through and which are so difficult to analyse and address with the short-term perspective currently guiding our political discourse and decision processes. Geopolitics, with its long-term and trans-national perspective, has re-emerged as an important discipline to support the understanding of international politics (Paludan-Müller, Reference Paludan-Müller, Bergerbrant and Sabatini2013a: 1). There is no reason why archaeology should not weigh in from its privileged position for analysing big data to understand long-term developments over vast spaces, be it in the growth of global power, economic structures, and empires, the shifting patterns of migration, or the response of human society to climate change.

Archaeology and history are parts of a long cultural tradition of self-reflection. When the Vienna conference of 1814–15 reordered Europe after the upheavals and wars following the French revolution, archaeology experienced a long, sustained period of growth and discoveries that revolutionized the understanding of the origins and development of humans and human culture. This took place within the framework of national institutions, but also within a pan-European community of scholars who shared insights and understandings, for instance of the origins and spread of agriculture, or of the Bronze Age across the European continent. At other times archaeology and heritage were instrumentalized in nationalistic political agendas to claim pre-eminence for some people over others and ‘historic’ rights to territories (Legendre et al., Reference Legendre, Olivier and Schnitzler2007). But at its best archaeology has provided encouraging perspectives, celebrating humankind's ability to reach beyond barriers and limitations, whether self-imposed or imposed by nature.

We need to re-engage with the big issues of our own time in order to let them be reflected in the deep mirror of the past, and we need to reconsider the ways in which we articulate and practise our profession in contemporary society. For instance, today we could use big data to focus on long-term and global patterns of cities and systems of cities, their growth, sustainability, occasional collapse, transformations, and mutations (Ortman et al., Reference Ortman, Cabaniss, Sturm and Bettencourt2014).

The Mirror of Perseus: Europe and the Destruction of Archaeological Heritage
Nathan Schlanger

One way to try and grasp this multifarious phenomenon that is ‘European archaeology’ is to assess it from the outside, as it were, as it reacts to some external stimuli. The deliberate destruction and looting of archaeological sites and finds carried out by the Daesh Islamic group since 2014 in Iraq and in Syria constitutes without doubt such a momentous event—especially since these cultural destructions are themselves set within a much broader religion-inspired humanitarian catastrophe. Condemnations have rightly poured out from international organizations, government agencies, professional associations, and civil society. Some of these reactions have been followed by unambiguous declarations and intentions to act, albeit at a distance, on a situation that remains geographically and ideologically out of reach. The nature and scale of the damage caused by Daesh need not be recapitulated here, nor do the various measures taken by the international ‘Western’ community. Rather, my suggestion is that these responses (concerning looting, legislation, museums, and technology) can actually reflect and shed light on some features and prospects of European archaeology—much like the mirror which, shielding Perseus from Medea's petrifying gaze, makes its demons all the more perceptible.

To begin with, European archaeology proves to be rather amnesic on matters of looting, erasures, and appropriations. Given the temporal and material depth it handles, archaeology has been good at documenting, as a research theme, the historical prevalence of destructions and damages deliberately inflicted on monuments—taken here in their etymological sense as commemorative constructions. From Classical temples to medieval monasteries, much devastation has been wrought on what opponents hold dear. In modern times, as archaeology became part of the nation-state apparatus, vandalism and iconoclasm have broadly evolved towards looting and spoliation. Some milestones here include the Napoleonic net cast over Europe, the heavy-handed colonial collecting drive, and the European-wide looting undertaken by Nazi experts. Strangely enough, these ideologically and geopolitically motivated accumulations, together with the institutions that embody them, are now poised to reap some collateral benefits from the latest outrage. When, for example, President François Hollande recently proclaimed that ‘The Musée du Louvre has been sheltering (‘abrite') since the nineteenth-century a collection of oriental antiquities which is now unique worldwide’, there is clearly an opportunistic attempt here to inject erstwhile accumulating practices with ethical ‘universal’ intents (Figure 2 makes a similar point for another museum, the Musée du Quai Branly).

Figure 2.

‘We are only coming to visit the museum of primitive arts’. Caricature by Willem on the inauguration of the Musée du Quai Branly, 21 June 2006 (reproduced with permission of Willem and Libération).

Retrospective as it undoubtedly is, the notion of ‘shelter’ at least reflects in this case the structural binding of recorded museum objects within the public domain. Less so apparently in Britain, the other former colonial power in the region, where the rhetoric of universalism is more willing to meet the laws of the market. Thus, the ‘shelter’ granted to the Old Kingdom statue of Sekhemka, brought in by Lord Northampton two centuries ago and since held for the public at the Northampton Museum, proved notoriously insufficient to prevent its £15 million sale by the strapped-for-cash Northampton Borough Council. By March 2016, the lifting of its temporary export ban allowed its anonymous new owner to walk away with it—and, for all we know, smash it to pieces with iconoclastic fervour. Alongside museums, traders and auction houses also clearly profit from this unexpected moral laundering. As I have heard it said at the Drouot auction house in Paris: never ever shall we knowingly trade in recent unprovenanced antiquities from Syria and Iraq (… so get off our back on all the rest!). In this respect, the crisis confirms how Europe has been dragging its feet on matters of illicit trade and cultural properties protection, be it with regard to armed conflict (e.g. the 1954 and 1999 Hague protocols) or the lingering tension between private ownership and the common good.

The channelling of illicit antiquities from Iraq and Syria towards the salons of Geneva and Brussels has been entwined, as we know, with highly-mediatized, live-broadcast, spectacular acts of destruction on the ground. As if to counter the communications strategies deployed there, the West has been keen to advance its own dazzling reconstruction techniques. Ventures such as the Iconem digital preservation projects (http://iconem.com/) or the Institute of Digital Archaeology (http://digitalarchaeology.org.uk/dubai/, in partnership with Dubai's Museum of the future) are no doubt doing innovative work with regard to photogrammetry and 3D reconstruction of sites and monuments. The fact remains that such technological prowess entails a disciplinary realignment that cannot go without a dose of sceptical scrutiny. Besides serving as a convenient photo-op for a political class that is increasingly hostile to cultural and archaeological heritage back home, the reduced-scale re-erection of one of Palmyra's arches in London's Trafalgar Square in April 2016 seems also to shift emphasis (decades back, one might argue) to those grandiose, imposing, ‘monumental’ dimensions of the past … rather than its broader documentary, historical, and cultural significance, as critically explored through hands-on analytical and transdisciplinary skills. What is more, if ‘3D-doability’ is set to become the new ‘in’ criterion, then what was all the fuss about that statue of Sekhemka, infinitely reproducible with down-to-the-millimetre accuracy? If we leave such arguments unchallenged (on grounds of expediency or humanitarian emergency), the heady mixture of enticing technology, cost-savings, and virtual undertakings emanating from the east will end up reorienting, indeed distorting, the prospects and priorities of European archaeology for many years to come.

European Archaeology, Colonialism, and the Wider World
Alessandro Vanzetti

I would assume that European archaeology can be effectively identified as a shared set of theories, methods, and practices, with reference to a covering historical model. But when one tries to delve deeper, it is easy to get lost in the differences of traditions and approaches in different parts of Europe (e.g. Britain vs France vs Mitteleuropa vs Eastern Europe), or between different historical archaeologies (e.g. prehistoric vs Classical archaeologies), or to find more important the connections with North American archaeology than within the continent of Europe. This situation forms part of the more general diversity of the European experience: as a matter of fact, we keep having to recognize, and not only in archaeology, that diversity is an essential European trait. It is determined by the intricate historical development of Europe, but, as far as archaeology is concerned, it has its roots in the fact that it was the nation states emerging in the nineteenth century that promoted archaeology as a part of their identity-strengthening process (Kohl & Fawcett, Reference Kohl and Fawcett1995), and it was in this social context that positivist archaeologists, dissolving Christian religious bans on the time-scale and the driving forces of change acting in the past, started to interact intensively on the European scale. European archaeology thus came to be defined, from a geographic, social, and academic point of view, as the policy corresponding to the existing political and cultural interaction of Europe as a continent (Babeș & Kaeser, Reference Babeş and Kaeser2009).

Concluding Remarks
Staša Babić and John Robb

These individual contributions are written by archaeologists from various parts of Europe, and indeed beyond—from Australia and Japan—and differing disciplinary practices—teaching academics, heritage, and museum specialists. The common trait is the inclination to reconsider our joint professional identity and the possibilities and limitations of the discipline. Our professional experiences of course do not cover the whole possible spectrum of European archaeology. The particular ways in which the contributors chose to answer the question: what is European archaeology?, and even more so: what should it be?, reflect a part of this spectrum highlighting a number of recurrent topics.

Almost all the contributions state that the term ‘Europe’ is the result of a convention linking the geographical and cultural phenomena of the area. On the other hand, throughout human history, both geographically and culturally, this part of the globe has been in various dynamic interactions with the lands beyond, sometimes even more so than inside the boundaries of Europe. Observing the limits of the continent thus inevitably leads to a series of reductions and exclusions, more often than not inbuilt into the history and tradition of archaeology (and other humanities as well). The modern history of Europe and the colonizing experience of its western part fortifies these exclusions through the grand narratives of the origins of European identity, stressing for example the Classical civilisations of Greece and Rome as unique and unsurpassable sources of a distinct set of values. Discussions on these topics inevitably set the practice of archaeology firmly into the present. Notorious examples of abuse in contemporary politics, pointing at the enormous importance of the past in the construction of modern identities, and at the same time the consequent responsibility of researchers, range from ideological claims, neglect of unfavoured archaeological material, to direct destruction of heritage motivated by ethnic or religious zeal. Even excepting these severe perils, archaeology has been intertwined with its contemporary surroundings in a number of fundamental ways, paramount among which is of course the question of funding the research. The tendency to steer the aims and topics of projects towards political agendas becomes stronger under economic pressure. In this respect, the fragmentation of the local archaeological communities emphasizes diverse local disciplinary traditions and their response to this pressure. Cutting across these local differences, an overarching divide inside the discipline becomes visible, i.e. the strong wave of scientifically oriented research. Growing numbers of professionals consider the union with the hard sciences to be of enormous benefit to archaeology and its interpretive potentials. On the other hand, concern is expressed that this reliance on sampling is not met with adequate epistemological reflection.

Finally, the terms Europe and archaeology are linked by the historical fact that the institutionalized research and academic practice we know today as the discipline of archaeology has been defined during the nineteenth century in the European countries, and this link persists in spite, or precisely because, of the many possible connotations of both words. It may safely be argued that this disciplinary institutionalization is the consequence of particular historical and cultural circumstances, part of which is the very process of the formation of the modern European identity. Asking ourselves, then, what European archaeology is may still be the most important question of our professional self-identification.