In their jointly authored paper ‘Relativism, objectivity and the politics of the past’ which was published in Archaeological Dialogues 4.2 (1997, 164–184), the ‘Lampeter Archaeology Workshop’ argued that there has been an increasing tendency for authors to characterise ‘post-processualists’ as proponents of relativism, understood as the inability to evaluate different versions of the past or present. This naive view of relativism as ‘anything goes’ (known philosophically as judgemental relativism) was rejected in favour of a more nuanced understanding of different forms of relativism and the criteria which archaeologists can and do use to evaluate versions of the past. They also discussed the relationships between epistemologies, ethics and politics in this context, and suggested that there are implications for the ways we might engage in archaeological debates. This paper was commented on by the philosopher Diederick Raven and the archaeologists Ulrich Veit and Ian Hodder in Archaeological Dialogues 4.2 (1997, 185–194). Below, more comments are provided by the archaeologists Philip Kohl, Reinhard Bernbeck, Susan Pollock and John Bintliff. Finally, the Lampeter Ar

In an earlier contribution to Archaeological Dialogues (4.2), Raemaekers discussed the relationships between the Swifterbant and Ertebølle cultures of respectively the mesolithic Low Countries and southern Scandinavia, calling for a more regional approach to the study of mesolithic western Europe. In this comment, recent ceramic studies from southern Sweden are used to draw attention to regional variability in the Scandinavian Mesolithic.

I wish to thank Barbara Bender, Aron Gurevich and Ton Lemaire for reviewing my contribution and for making critical comments on the ideas put forward in it. I should like to take this opportunity to comment briefly on the main points in their reviews.

I welcome Axel Christophersen's effort to offer a new approach to the study of Scandinavian medieval urban communities, and his outline of an ‘urban archaeology of social practice’. His presentation of a theoretical framework and language offers many insights as to how archaeologists can analyse the way people constructed their social lives through practice. It is exciting to see studies that grapple with the complexities of everyday life in urban settings. This article makes a significant contribution in its explicit approach to a theory of practice that archaeologists can use to explore and describe social change. Christophersen draws heavily on the work of Shove, Pantzar and Watson as detailed in their 2012 book The dynamics of social practice. Everyday life and how it changes; I was unfamiliar with this work until reading this essay and I am impressed with the way this framework offers a language and a concrete approach to understanding how practices emerge, evolve and disappear. My goal here is not to revisit the details of this argument, but rather to push on some select issues raised in the paper. I first discuss the way that Christophersen frames his arguments against a processual archaeological approach, suggesting that his effort to provide an alternative might be unintentionally minimizing a more critical approach to everyday life. Next, I discuss the role and place of unintended consequences in Christophersen's argument. And finally I examine the way that Christophersen's approach might be more fully operationalized with data, providing some examples from my own work in eastern Africa.

On the occasion of a short research trip to Japan, I had the opportunity to sit down with Professor Koji Mizoguchi in Kyushu University, Fukuoka, to discuss several topics, which you will find transcribed below. I was curious as to his thoughts that he – as the President of the World Archaeological Congress, a non-governmental and non-profit organization that promotes the exchange of archaeological results, training at a global scale and the empowerment of Indigenous and minority groups, a Professor of Social Archaeology, and one of the few archaeologists writing archaeological theory in the far East – had on the state of the art of archaeology today. Furthermore, since I grew up in Europe but nevertheless feel a deep connection with my own Asian ancestry, I was very interested in Mizoguchi’s own experience and contributions to archaeology in Japan and the world.

The subject of Gerritsen's paper and the way in which it is presented invite comment on three main aspects: firstly, his theoretical stance, secondly the methodology he uses and thirdly, his conclusions regarding the farmsteads which he seeks to understand. Since my own specialism lies well outside the area and period with which his paper deals, I shall focus my discussion on the first two aspects.

Archaeology, anthropology, human geography: three disciplines born out of a nineteenth-century imperative among Europeans to apply a coherent model of understanding (Wissen-schaft) to varied forms of social life within a differentiated physical world; three disciplines stretched between the epistemology and methods of the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) which promised certainty, and the hermeneutic reflexivity and critical doubt of the Humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) which promised self-knowledge. Each of these disciplines is today in crisis, and for the same reason. Europe as the place of authoritative knowledge, of civilization, has been decentred upon a post-colonial globe; the white, bourgeois European male has been dethroned as the sovereign subject of a universal and progressive history. Thus, the enlightened intellectual project represented by archaeology, anthropology and human geography, whose findings were unconsciously designed to secure the essentially ideological claims of liberal Europeans, are obliged to renegotiate their most fundamental assumptions and concepts (Gregory, 1993). The linguistic turn in the social sciences and humanities which has so ruthlessly exposed the context-bound nature of their scientific claims — what Ton Lemaire refers to as a critical awareness of their inescapable cultural and historical mediation — forces a recognition that their central conceptual terms, such as ‘culture’, ‘nature’, ‘society’, and ‘landscape’, are far from being neutral scientific objects, open to disinterested examination through the objective and authoritative eye of scholarship. They are intellectual constructions which need to be understood in their emergence and evolution across quite specific histories. Ton Lemaire seeks to sketch something of the history of landscape as such a socially and historically mediated idea: as a mode of representing relations between land and human life, which has played a decisive role in the development of archaeology as a formal discipline. On the foundation of this history he develops a critique of the social and environmental characteristics and consequences of modernity, and seeks to relocate archaeological study within a reformed project of sensitive contemporary ‘dwelling’ on earth.

I am in general agreement with Professor Johnson's main points. To his and the editor's question, ‘is there archaeological theory?’, His answer is ‘yes and no’. This ambiguous but accurate answer can be divided variously. The first category would be archaeological theory per se, which would encompass the work and thought from that of Nicholas Steno in the 17th century to that of Michael Schiffer (2002) today. It would be about the natural transformations of ‘deposits’. Next there would be theories about the transformation of natural materials into the more or less durable remains that comprise archaeological ‘data’ – the stuff of everyday lives. Again, work of Michael Schiffer (2001) and Daniel Miller (1998) comes to mind. They and a long list of contemporary archaeologists deploy theory on behalf of the understanding of the creation of things that build the human habitat. Broader use of theory comes with the deployment of frameworks from demography to demonology and ecology to ethics that are used to structure historical and anthropological questions that might be answered with archaeological remains. Each selection of a theoretical position entails one or another metaphysical commitment about what comprises ‘data’ and ‘evidence’ and what constitutes a proper explanation. In this regard Professor Johnson asks, does archaeology indiscriminately adopt and apply various philosophical positions without proper regard for their extent, implications and conditions for application? His answer is yes, certainly, and to our disadvantage. As Christopher Chippindale and I have noted on several occasions, archaeology treats philosophical traditions a bit like a Chinese menu or perhaps the contents of a supermarket: the archaeologist takes one from column A and another from column B, and a whole bunch of stuff from the dairy aisle and more from the fruits and vegetables section. Not only is this not kosher – one does not mix dairy and Derrida – but the selections are radically contradictory and sometimes even incoherent.

In his paper on structured deposition the author exclusively focuses on the Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age archaeology of Britain. He shows the wide range of discussions from the the key paper by Richards and Thomas in 1984 to the most recent papers of the ‘hyperinterpretive turn’.

The grand houses and gardens of William of Orange (1650–1702) and his courtiers in Britain and the Netherlands are strongly influenced by the French style, itself associated with Louis XIV, who was actually William’s arch-rival. This paper explores that paradox by probing ideas of power and friendship in 17th-century court culture.

There is nothing inherently new, of course, about the study of men in archaeology. For example, in his important history of the creation of modern European masculinity George Mosse (The Image of Man, Oxford, 1996) describes one objective of eighteenth-century archaeologists as entailing the rediscovery of ancient Greek sculpture. Among other things Mosse demonstrates how an ‘ideal of masculine beauty took its inspiration from Greece’ and from the Greek statues in which the male body is deified, to such an extent that ‘the noble soul of each youth manifests itself through the harmonious position of his naked body during gymnastic exercises, foreshadowing the important role that gymnastics will play in shaping modern manhood’.

Firstly, we would like to extend our thanks to the editors of Archaeological Dialogues and those authors who took the trouble to consider our article and write their responses to it. This discussion is a welcome extension to the workshop we had in Lampeter, and represents the open debate and pluralism which we believe is vital for an active and self-critical discipline. In this reply we would like to concentrate mainly on substantive issues raised by the respondents, rather than engage in point-scoring against individual participants. Nonetheless, there are a number of what we feel are mis-readings or mis-representations of our original article, which in themselves may be symptomatic of the type of ‘debate’ which has unfortunately characterised much of the discussion of recent theoretical and political issues, particularly within Anglo-American archaeology. In particular, it is regrettable that several commentators discussed our paper very much in the context of the old dichotomy of processual and postprocessual archaeologies. While Veit (p. 192), Bintliff, Kohl and, to some extent, Raven considered the paper as an attempt to moderate a single, established postprocessual position which may go some way towards a ‘convergence’ of both camps, Veit also viewed it in terms of a ‘counter-attack against processual archaeology’ (p. 189). We would like to emphasise that our multivocal discussion should not be seen as being written by, or on behalf of a certain ‘camp’ within current debates in our discipline, but by a diverse mix of theoretically interested archaeologists with a wide range of opinions, some of which conflict with one another. Other issues of polemic, rhetoric and form are dealt with at the end of this reply. At this point, however, it may be helpful to reiterate the origins and aims of our article.

Roymans' article is an original and valuable contribution to an interpretation of the ‘cultural biography’ of the landscape of a specific area by combining archaeological and folkloric evidence. His study concentrates on the sacred places of this landscape, especially the urnfields and barrows, because ‘these are focal points from which local communities order and interpret the surrounding landscape’. The author rightly stresses that funerary monuments not only had a certain significance in the societies that constructed and used them, but that they also had a prominent place in the landscape of later societies up until pre-modern times. He suggests that, in the Meuse-Demer-Scheldt region, there has been ‘a long-term incorporation of prehistorical burial monuments in the mythical landscape of later inhabitants’. Archaeology itself, for that matter, should be understood in the perspective of the (dis)continuing biography of the landscape because it presupposes the destruction of the ancient mythical geography, including the Christian one. Archaeology is the product of the ‘modernisation’ of space: it is presupposing and reflecting (upon) the coming of the modem world with its rationalisation and Entzauberung (disenchantment) of the landscape. In a similar way the study of folklore (Volkskunde in both Dutch and German) has been made possible and interesting by the waning of rural popular culture as a consequence of both the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Thus, it is no accident that modernity produced the conditions of becoming aware of the mythical meaning of the landscape exactly at the time that its traces are disappearing in the physical landscape as well as in the memory of the rural population.

I respond to Odermatts's request for an open dialogue with a personal contribution. Heritage as theory can be abstruse as well as too abstract so I am fired on my first-person trajectory by the interest he generates in writing, albeit impersonally and in proper academic mode, about something which has been experienced as well as studied. In any case, if anything at all has come out of some 10–15 years of seriously-labelled heritage studies, it is surely that views on the topic are bound to be subjective. Odermatt uses, for example, the word ‘theft’ in his first paragraph whereas Lord Elgin actually bought the Parthenon sculptures. It becomes almost improper, then, not to use the personal pronoun in a field characterized by its many different shades of grey.

In his book Time, Culture and Identity Thomas proposes the adoption of a Heideggerian archaeology. This is consonant with the adoption of Heidegger's thought in a number of neighbouring disciplines, including anthropology (Jackson 1989). For many Heidegger heralds the end of modernity and an attempt to overcome habits of thought that have become engrained over the last few hundred years. This is also Thomas' starting point. Thomas begins with a critique of habits of thought and particularly Cartesian dualisms such as mind::body and culture::nature. He then emphasises the nature of lived experience as a seamless whole, which breaks down these distinctions putting people within the flow of life, rather than seeing them as subjects confronted by a series of external objects. One result of the erosion of the object-subject dualism is that there are no such things as social relations: all relations between people involve relationships to things and all connections to things are structured through the networks of bonds to other people.

In his paper Peter Odermatt takes the local inhabitants and their right to (re)presentation and appropriation of the monumental heritage under protection against the hegemonistic pretension of the Authority – scientific, institutional, economical – that they are solely entitled to this right. The author rightly argues that, in the appropriation of cultural heritage, the Authority does not hold any greater rights than those who live in the vicinity of monuments or those who come from abroad to visit them. The examples he outlines are derived from a Sardinian context and illustrate how the ‘colonial’ pretensions of the heritage industry alienate the local residents from their monumental past and, as a consequence, how indifference led into oblivion.

We welcome the Lampeter Archaeology Workshop's (LAW) attempt to clarify the ways in which they understand relativism in post-processual archaeology and especially their distinctions among several kinds of relativism. We would like to comment on links between epistemological relativism and a particular view of history (or, more generally, the past) that the LAW's discussion raises. In particular, we draw attention to several implications of their positions, including the relative emphasis placed on the past and/or the present in archaeological interpretations, different ways of linking past and present, and the political implications of such links

En route to becoming one of archaeology's best-known writers on prehistoric landscapes and monuments, Richard Bradley had a brief brush with the law and almost became a Romanist! Here he reflects on his early archaeological forays as a boy, his perspectives on different field methodologies, and how his ways of writing have changed over the years.