Time, Culture and Identity is a book which attempts to write about prehistory while at the same time meditating on what that writing involves. It is composed of two sections, one of which addresses a number of philosophical issues, while the other presents a series of case studies. This structure might easily give the impression that I first formulated a theoretical position and then proceeded to impose it onto particular sets of evidence. In practice, the book was written in a much less linear fashion, tacking back and forth between conceptual problems which were set up by the evidence and onslaughts upon the material which were suggested by the developing fabric of ideas. In a sense it represents a very personal (and perhaps rather indulgent) piece of work, since it is the outcome of my own process of working through a series of problems which appeared to me to be unresolved when I had finished my first book, Rethinking the Neolithic (Thomas 1991). Writing is thinking, and my hope is that others will find this record of my own learning process instructive.

In August 1992, the American multinational Coca Cola launched a n ew advertising campaign in Italy. The advertisement used, showed the Greek Parthenon. The commercial artist had replaced the temple's original fluted baseless columns with columns resembling the world's most famous bottle. Whereas it took the Greeks almost 180 years to launch a protest against the theft of the sculptures of the Parthenon by Lord Elgin, their reaction was now of another order. The tasteless representation infuriated the national archaeological authorities. As these were preparing to sue, Coca Cola offered its excuses to the Greek government.

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.

Odermatts's discussion of the changing responses of the Abbasantesi to the fate of the local nuragic monuments adds important new insights to the emergent literature on the politics of national and regional heritage. I intend my remarks as suggestions for expanding the argument – and perhaps the research – beyond the promising start made here. This timely topic and Odermatts's refreshingly critical perspective deserve no less.

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.

Thomas' paper and manuscript are ambitious. He aims at nothing less than opening up for discussion fundamental concepts which have informed archaeological writings to date. While in principal laudable and exciting, the chosen concepts – time, culture and identity – are broad, each one on its own of daunting complexity. The vastness of the project is handled by setting up an opposition at the outset between the Cartesian and modernist reading of these concepts adopted by archaeology and an anti-Cartesian and anti-modernist reading facilitated by Heidegger. At issue is less the validity of Heidegger's writings or their deployment in contemporary theory-making, a fact which the author is at pains to defend, though leaving the novice at pains guessing what his writings are actually about; at issue is whether the future of archaeology should rest on developing an anti-Cartesian theory in the first place. The mind/body dualism associated with Descartes has been the subject of much critical work, so much so that it seems at best unnecessary to have to revive Heidegger to give Cartesianism the final blow. One may further question the opposition itself; is it not Kant who is the foundation of post-Enlightenment thought, rather than Descartes, and would thus not his writings be the point of departure for any rethinking of theoretical assumptions that may have guided archaeological theory and practice? A third reservation may be voiced about the validity of the interpretative approach itself; it rests on the assumption, also known as the logocentric paradigm, which holds that a relation exists between an object or image and a narrative description of it which is ‘found’ outside the object and thus may vary according to the context in which the object is seen. The most serious criticism to this assumption is that it ignores the immediacy of understanding which allows images to play a fundamental role in social transmission. Thomas' use of Heidegger's notion of Being appears to strive towards precisely such an immediacy of understanding, yet fails to do so by leaving accounted for the materiality of images. In advocating the interpretative approach, Thomas sets out less a new direction for archaeological theory than captures post-modernist writing which dominated across disciplines for the past decade and left a whole generation of scholars trained during this period ill-equipped to deal with artefacts in more than an exemplary manner. In the late 90s, however, due to advances in cognitive psychology and our day to day experience with cyberspace, this neglect of the image, material and conceptual, and its role in transmission has become glaringly obvious and unacceptable. Critical in their inception, however, paper and manuscript are intently thought provoking, stimulating and timely in calling for a rethinking of archaeological theory to accommodate the contemporary perception of material things. In my discussion I aim to both paraphrase the main points of Thomas's paper and manuscript and to offer comments and questions.

In 1992 a public quarrel started at the opening of the new Stone Age Museum in Swedish Lapland. Were the early local inhabitants from 5000 years ago to be called Swedes or Sami (Lapps)? A couple of years later the newly excavated Viking trading post Birka was presented as an example of an early multi-ethnic Swedish community, with a message of peaceful coexistence among Swedes and immigrants. Modern concepts like ‘identity’ or ‘multi-ethnic society’ do not travel very well through history, but any historical reconstruction will be characterized by projecting contemporary ideas, hopes or anxieties back into the past.

Under the title Triumphal procession from the blind alley, the German magazine Der Spiegel in the autumn of 1995 published a series of articles on the latest developments in the archaeology of Homo sapiens and its ancestors. These articles focus on mankind's evolution, and its relationship to the capacities of mankind's mind and culture. The question is posed: Did the prevailing circumstances force mankind to develop its mental abilities, or did evolution plant the seeds of culture in the brain of Homo sapiens? As soon as we hear a question like this, we have the suspicion that its rests on a shaky metaphysical foundation: the distinction between natural evolution on the one hand, and mind, culture, art, myth, religion, and language on the other.

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.

Julian Thomas' published work since 1988 has been largely concerned with the integration of theory and practice. If there is now a general recognition that ‘practice without theory is blind’ (Shanks and Tilley 1987), Thomas counterbalances this with a welcome reminder that ‘theory without practice is sterile’. In his words, this is an attempt to ‘write about prehistory while at the same time meditating on what that writing involves’.

Let me begin my commentary on Julian Thomas' provocative and stimulating project by invoking, as anthropologists seem to do from time to time, the figure of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes, as we know, classified types of persons, livelihoods, mentalities and criminalities by, among other things, the varieties of dirt on their shoes, the characteristic calluses and grooves on their hands, the imprints they made upon different utensils, the kinds of tobacco, food scraps, and bits of clothing they left behind as traces of their presence. Holmes made a living out of deducing the motivational and moral contours of a human personality from such material indices. He knew the physical components of his environment – the different soils and plants of London, which stores purveyed which implements and goods characteristically utilised by criminals – and he catalogued the sartorial and other visible indices which marked inhabitants of different districts, and socioeconomic and ethnic categories. We also learned that he was not unfamiliar with the Who's Who of London society of his time, not to mention the London constabulary and the organisation of various other professions whose activities related to his interest in crime solving.

First, I would like to thank the commentators, Beatrice Annis, Peter Fowler, Michael Herzfeld and Ovar Löfgren for their inspiring comments, and the editors of Archaeological Dialogues for providing us with the opportunity to engage in a debate about the politics of heritage (re) presentation. Naturally I am unable to pay attention to all the significant and interesting, and at times highly provocative suggestions. My reaction primarily addresses issues that have been raised by at least two commentators. As the debate continues, many of those suggestions neglected here will be picked up, by me or by others, in different contexts. Personally, Fowler's remarks about an archaeology of tourism, intrigued me most. It is, however, a subject so complex, that it cannot be addressed in a few sentences. Suffice it to say, that in my opinion, Eric Leed's The Mind of the Traveler, provides an excellent starting point for such an enterprise.

The papers collected in this special section of Archaeological Dialogues were first presented at the fifth Symposium on Archaeology and Theory, held in Leiden on January 17th to 19th 1996 under the general heading of The history, theory and methodology of regional archaeological projects. The choice of regional research as the main theme provided the opportunity to discuss current theoretical perspectives on the basis of specific case studies, thus reflecting the concern of Archaeological Dialogues to balance theoretical and practical aspects of archaeology. Through the invitation of archaeologists from various backgrounds and countries across Europe, the diversity of research traditions was not only acknowledged but debate between them was also stimulated. Regional research projects had been chosen because they usually last for a considerable period of time, in the course of which theoretical insights, methodological premises and available techniques are likely to change. In this way, regional projects have repeatedly been suggested to represent a critical element in Dutch archaeology, setting off ‘the Dutch experience’ from developments in both Anglo-American and continental European archaeology (cf. Slofstra 1994; Hodder 1994). The past decades have moreover been especially prolific in generating new theoretical perspectives which may now often coexist with older ones. One of the key issues addressed at the symposium therefore concerned the interaction between changing theoretical and methodological perspectives and the practice of fieldwork. The effects of these relationships were critically assessed by several speakers in the context of a specific regional archaeological project, while others reviewed long-term developments of regional archaeological projects both North and South of the Alps.

It is a rare treat to have a distinguished group of colleagues give up their time to read and comment upon one's work. They deserve my thanks for their kindness, but also for their more trenchant criticisms. As Susanne Küchler notes, Time, culture and identity is a very personal project, and I view these commentaries as an unexpected addition to the learning process which the book represents. They have raised questions which will stimulate my work for a good while to come, but for reasons of space I must be brief here. I will reply to each in turn, although in no particular order.

In considering the history of regional archaeological projects, I propose to use a long-term perspective. Rather than surveying relatively recent examples and inductively working out the differences between them, I should like instead to venture some historical generalisations about the mental and practical traditions in which such projects are set. I want to suggest that two contrasting attitudes and approaches have presented themselves, largely as alternatives, throughout the history of archaeology; and that these choices are still offering themselves today. While this is perhaps a rather long perspective to take, the alternative is a very short one. If we take the description ‘regional projects’ to mean the integrated investigation of sites in landscapes, then the concept is effectively post-1945 and really post-1965. The reason is very simple: money. Archaeologists at earlier periods just did not have the size of budget which now seems essential for what we call ‘regional projects’. Of course there were earlier examples of landscape studies in Europe, and excavations of two or more complementary sites; but it would be hard before the 1960s to find the degree of integrated investigation which is today the defining characteristic of a regional project. (Perhaps archaeologists in the Near East, by using very cheap labour, had the equivalent of a modern regional budget; but they had whole abandoned cities to investigate, so the regional label scarcely applies.)

Explicitly regional projects have been a comparatively recent phenomenon in Mediterranean archaeology. Classical archaeology is by far the strongest discipline in the university, museum and antiquities services career structures within the Mediterranean countries. It has always been dominated by the ‘Great Tradition’ of classical art and architecture: even today, a university course on ‘ancient topography’ in many departments of classical archaeology will usually deal predominantly with the layout of the major imperial cities and the details of their monumental architecture. The strength of the tradition is scarcely surprising in the face of the overwhelming wealth of the standing remains of the Greek and Roman cities in every Mediterranean country. There has been very little integration with prehistory: early prehistory is still frequently taught within a geology degree, and later prehistory is still invariably dominated by the culture-history approach. Prehistory in many traditional textbooks in the north Mediterranean countries remains a succession of invasions and migrations, first of Palaeolithic peoples from North Africa and the Levant, then of neolithic farmers, then metal-using élites from the East Mediterranean, followed in an increasingly rapid succession by Urnfielders, Dorians and Celts from the North, to say nothing of Sea Peoples (from who knows where?!). For the post-Roman period, church archaeology has a long history, but medieval archaeology in the sense of dirt archaeology is a comparatively recent discipline: until the 1960s in Italy, for example, ‘medieval archaeology’ meant the study of the medieval buildings of the historic cities, a topic outside the responsibility of the State Archaeological Service (the Superintendency of Antiquities) and within that of the parallel ‘Superintendencies’ for monuments, libraries, archives and art galleries.