The issue is not ‘why excavate?’, nor is it whether or not to excavate sites. Nor is it the numerous ancillary considerations mentioned at the round table and in the papers – too many sites, too few resources, too large a backlog of unpublished sites, or saving sites for future techniques. All – excavators, archaeologists, curators and cultural heritage managers – would agree. If there is a unique world-class site that will be destroyed in a few weeks, it should be excavated. One needs to excavate to preserve the heritage, information, artefacts and context.

Among the most common questions asked by archaeologists who study past agrarian landscapes are the following:

1) How did farmers use land (in terms of the activities by which they made a living)?

2) On what basis did they claim the right to occupy and use land (in terms of territorial possession, ‘ownership’, common rights, etc)?

3) In what sequence was land occupied, and what general principles governed sequences of colonisation, ‘intensification’, and territorial sub-division?

4) To what extent were territorial patterns stable over long periods of time? How frequently did political and social action take place in the context of a relatively unchanging political geography?

5) Was there a hierarchy of places and communities, rooted in history, which influenced their relative social, political and economic power?

Reading the ‘Lampeter Manifesto’ did rather conjure up a picture of a small huddle of Post-Processualists (I don't know the collective term, but ‘in the trade’ adherents of the wider movement to which their approaches belong - Postmodernists - are known as ‘Pomos’), gathered in a seminar room in the remote fastness of Lampeter University, nervously eyeing the horizon for rabid positivists and other Neanderthals on the intellectual rampage, while engaged in a process of mutual encouragement (‘consciousness-raising’?) for their chosen position within Archaeological Theory.

The Chinese curse – ‘May you live in interesting times’ – has unquestionably fallen upon those involved in landscape studies, as many papers previously published in this journal attest. Derks' contribution adds an attractive case study, drawn from the Roman world rather than from the more frequently visited prehistoric periods, to this ferment. Derks reviews recent interpretive arguments, before turning to the landscapes of northern Gaul: landscapes in the plural, for in his study area Derks teases out the existence of two zones which develop in distinctly different ways. His major achievement is to divert explanations for this development from the more usual channels of thinking, such as pondering economic and ecological variables, or categorizing areas as ‘Romanized’ or ‘non-Romanized’. His addition of social values and cosmological principles as ‘filters’ helping to determine the trajectories followed by these two zones is bold and, whether or not one agrees with the details of his arguments, his basic contention – that such elements are just as vital as imperial policies and environmental conditions in determining the creation of provincial landscapes – cannot be challenged. I predict that within five years a wide variety of such locally sensitive, landscape-based case studies will be available from across the Roman world, leading to fresh analyses of provincial variability within the empire and to cross-regional comparisons no longer strictly determined by administrative boundaries.

I would like to thank Silvia Tomášková, Christoph Ulf and James Wright for their comments, which allow me to clarify and expand my argument. As I cannot address all the points they raise in this response, I have decided to concentrate on three themes: (i) the application of moral theory, (ii) Homeric questions and (iii) the focus on the shaft graves of Mycenae.

As the authors situate the discussion in their offices, let me also begin in mine. On my way home from the office there will be many things around me. They will mostly be familiar and go largely unnoticed. I will take my keys off the desk and lock the door behind me. I will walk along the corridor, through the swing doors, down the stairs, unlock my bike, and so on. Desk, keys, door, carpet, windows, stairs, lock, bike – these are all objects with which I interact. But do I necessarily notice them? As long as there is ‘smooth coping’, as long as these objects are ready to hand (Wheeler 2005, 129), then they remain in the background. These are not objects that hold me in their gaze; I do not ‘encounter’ them, in the sense of encountering, meeting or bumping into a person.

First, a qualifier: the ‘response-to-the-response’ section of Archaeological dialogues is often the most entertaining part of the issue, but frequently the least intellectually rewarding. One feels Schadenfreude, partisan cheering and jeering, and bafflement in equal measure as contributors lock horns over this or that finer point of who has misrepresented whom. I am anxious to avoid readers reacting to what follows in such a manner, and so will concentrate on a very selective range of raised points that, to put it crudely, got me thinking.

Oliver J.T. Harris and Tim Flohr Sørensen have written an interesting and urgent paper, raising crucial points touching upon a question at the very core of archaeology: what can we learn about the lives of prehistoric people, based solely on the material remains? Or, rephrased, how far can we reach on the Hawkesian ladder? To tackle this question, Harris and Sørensen accept the ten-year-old challenge raised by Sarah Tarlow, and suggest a vocabulary that will enable archaeologists to include emotional aspects in their interpretations. As they point out, several studies in archaeology have focused on emotion during the last decade, using burials as their main material. But as they acknowledge that emotions were a part of mundane social life, and not limited to ritualized events such as burials, they want to broaden the span of their inquiry and include materials from other contexts as well. As they do this, they make an interesting point and take a step forward in the development of archaeological interpretation. However, I would argue that they could have explored the issue even further. It would, for example, have been interesting to see them apply their ideas to some of the more mundane archaeological materials, from, for example, settlements that would be more explicitly connected to everyday life. Instead they use a quite spectacular site, where dramatic events have taken place. Is it perhaps easier to make assumptions about emotions when they are suspected to have been intense and exceptional in some way? The mundane emotions still escape us. Nevertheless, the case study chosen by Harris and Sørensen still illustrates their arguments and serves as an example for how the suggested vocabulary may be used.

The paper examines epistemological problems behind a recent study claiming to provide a synthesis of a vocal sound from the mummified remains of a man named Nesyamun and behind racial designations in Egyptian mummy studies more generally. So far, responses in the media and academia concentrated on the ethical problems of these studies, whereas their theoretical and methodological backgrounds have been rarely addressed or mentioned only in passing. It seems that the media reaction has targeted the synthesis of a sound rather than other, equally problematic, assumptions found in Egyptian mummy studies. By focusing on the epistemological problems, it will be demonstrated that the issues of greatest concern are endemic to a general state of a considerable part of the discipline of Egyptology and its unreflective engagement with the material remains of the past, especially human remains.

‘Theoretical archaeology’ as it exists today is – as we all know – primarily a product of anglophone archaeology. It developed as a challenge to traditional archaeological thinking in the 1960s under the label ‘New Archaeology’ and it flourished in the late 1970s and 1980s with the productive confrontation of ‘processual’ and ‘postprocessual’ approaches. In these ‘wonderful years’ theoretical archaeology gained reputation and influence far beyond its early centres. All over Europe and beyond mainly younger archaeologists found it useful and fascinating to join these debates (Hodder 1991).

The present article is a welcome contribution to the study of Mycenaean ceramics and to the study of East Mediterranean production, consumption and distribution systems. The general argument for an archaeology of value has wide-reaching relevance, while the specific case study usefully raises general issues of approach and methodology.

Asking different questions about and adopting an alternative perspective for understanding what happened in the past are rightly highlighted by François Richard as crucial to our understanding of colonial situations like that in 16th- to 18th-century West Africa. He frames his discussion with a speech given in Dakar by Nicolas Sarkozy, who in mid-2007 had just assumed the office of French president, and uses the strong reactions to those words very effectively to make it clear why thinking about the colonial past continues to matter, both in Africa and elsewhere.

In his review of recent trends in archaeology, Kristiansen argues that the changes in broad trends in cultural heritage management parallel profound changes in archaeological theory under the banner of postprocessualism. He also argues that one can conceptualize these changes through a pendulum model that swings between rationalism and romanticism, the former favouring generalized interpretations, the latter favouring local and national histories. For Kristiansen the problem lies in the emphasis on local and national frameworks for interpretation promoted by postmodernism and postprocessualism that prevents archaeologists from asking broader questions. Moreover, he claims, ‘the humanities, including archaeology, are today losing academic and political impact precisely because of this narrowing of their role’ (p. 24).

We cannot but agree with the basic contentions of Langbroek's paper that 1) the replacement of Neandertals by early modern humans in Europe is best understood from a perspective of historical contingency and 2) that it must have had a lot to do with the ‘very dynamic spatio-temporal redrawings of the population maps of Europe during the Weichsel glacial’ against the background of ‘the emergence of increasing climatological instability during the later part of OIS 3, with significant fluctuations at relatively short timescales’. This is the kind of approach we have been advocating to effectively supersede the reductionist ‘superiority’ paradigm that has dominated the literature on Neandertal extinction for the last twenty years.

This article recounts an untold chapter in the life of archaeologist Froelich Rainey, specifically his ambition to collaborate with Soviet scholars and deploy his personal networks to foster mutual understanding across the Iron Curtain during the height of the Cold War. The picaresque and implausible life of Rainey, who entered wartime Vienna in the turret of a B-52 bomber and was a State Department consultant with CIA connections, frantic anti-communist and advisor to Henry Kissinger, reveals just what was at stake for research in the frozen north. Here, I uncover Rainey’s work on ice—from his archaeological explorations in Alaska and his vision for a network of Arctic archaeologists to his internationalist aspirations for world peace. Without doubt, Rainey was a fascinating character, but he also occupied a position from which a wide range of values can be excavated—about politics, security, race and global order in mid-century transitions.

Unfortunately, I am unable in the limited available space to do justice to the perceptive and thoughtful critiques offered by the four commentators. There is too much ground to cover and there are too many venues to negotiate. While I wish to defend my position, I also wish to use this opportunity to keep this discussion going. It would be unfortunate if the exchange of views presented here led each position towards entrenchment and mutual exclusion. Thus, instead of providing a counterreaction to the objections raised, I will try to use these objections as leverage to pry deeper into the matters at stake. I do so with the hope that this will contribute to further discussion on matters that we all hold dear.

A lot of the comments deal with things I did not consider, as much as with those I did. As will become clear below, I am in agreement with many of the issues raised and think some of them provide significant avenues of enquiry. In general, this reply, perhaps more than it is a defence of what I did say, is an agreement that the various issues raised should inform future research on the Highlands in the recent past. I feel the discussion has been positive in this respect and thank the various contributors for that.

Roymans' paper is ambitious – and short. Perhaps a little too short: there were a good many junctures where I felt there was much more that could be said, and certainly the bibliography could be greatly extended. The excitement of the paper lies in the methodological cross-over between archaeological and folkloric materials, which I found both convincing and informative, and in the time-depth that Roymans permits himself. In a rather odd reversal, I felt that the paper was more interestingly complex than the Introduction suggested.

The study of architecture in relation to the social organization of space is a popular field of research within the discipline of anthropology and other social sciences. In archaeology, it has not played a significant role, although in recent years a number of publications have appeared and clearly the interest of archaeologists in this area of research is growing (Kent 1990; Samson 1990; Richards and Parker Pearson 1994).