Archaeology has to re-think the terms of its practice, because current debate tends to intervene at the level of theory, which leaves the discipline ungrounded in a theory of practice or a conception of the historical coming into being of archaeology as a discipline. From a South African perspective, its grand narrative is primarily concerned with the development of social theory in the West but it does not provide - it cannot provide – an account of the formation of the discipline as a social and signifying practice situated in a broader social and political context. Central to this re-thinking, I argue, are questions of social value, and the role played by archaeology in projects of restitution, social justice, memory and identity.

Among the influences that have altered the nature of archaeology over the past two decades, two major trends are singled out for discussion here. The first is the emerging interest in understanding the subjective experiences and perceptions of life in the past. The second trend is the growing concern with making archaeology more meaningful and accessible to a wider public. Some of the characteristics of these two trends will be considered in turn. It is then argued that, although these two movements are generally considered as quite separate issues, they stem from shared social and historic roots. The recognition of the inseparability of these two areas of concern has far-reaching implications for the nature and role of future archaeological practice.

Archaeology is not just about writing reports and interpreting ancient societies and their social structures, but it is also a process which should aim at the creation of a clear communicative message to the general public. Thus, archaeologists should be aware of every possible medium of communication – verbal, written, visual, sound – to express re-constructions of ancient pasts. In this essay I express some ideas about how archaeologists could collaborate with experts, for example theatre directors, in defining artistic way of communicating the past. Finally, I focus on the relationship between academia and fringe archaeology and I look into the political role of archaeologists in modern society.

Why do we still speak of foragers and farmers? The division of societies into categories including ‘savage’ hunter-gatherers and ‘civilised’ farmers has its roots in seventeenth-century northwestern Europe, but has implications for archaeologists and anthropologists today. Such concepts still provide the frameworks for much intellectual labour including university courses, academic conferences and publications, as well as providing the basis for moral and political evaluations of contemporary societies and practices for a wide range of people, from governments to development agencies, ‘alternative’ archaeologies and parts of the Green movement. This paper examines some of the currents which contributed towards their establishment, and argues that writing ‘across’ such deep-seated categories may be the only way to challenge their hegemony and develop new questions. As an example recent trends in data and interpretation of the ‘mesolithic-neolithic transition’ in western Europe are discussed.

Mark Pluciennik's paper offers an insightful review of those seventeenth-century philosophical issues that influence archaeological theory, even today. I am in broad agreement on the significance of the seventeenth century, though I prefer to see that century as a prelude to the eighteenth. To my mind, it is only in the eighteenth century that hunter-gatherers become ‘invented’ in a form that is fully recognisable in modern archaeological terms (Barnard 2002a). In this commentary I shall concentrate on that issue with reference to Pluciennik's ‘six inter-related factors’, commenting but briefly where appropriate on his attempt to ‘write across’ boundaries through his example of the interpretation of the mesolithic-neolithic transition.

Mark Pluciennik has presented us with an excellent and original piece of research. His conclusion that the current categorisation of pre-industrial societies into hunter-gatherers and farmers is, effectively, a modern invention represents a continuation of his earlier investigations into this subject (1998; 2001). He supports this conclusion with very convincing arguments, and offers a historically contingent explanation in terms of the coalescence of several ideological and economic ‘currents’ which, in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, led to the establishment of a categorical distinction between ‘savage hunter-gatherers’ and ‘civilised farmers’. In my comment, I would like to focus on two issues, broadly following the structure of his paper: (1) in general terms, are we really dealing with yet another ‘invented tradition’, spawned by the need for an ideological justification for the supremacy of western capitalist ideology and economic order? (2) How do we categorise early farming, fishing, hunting and gathering communities in the past, if at all?

Although the title of Pluciennik's essay refers to hunter-gatherers, his description of the genealogy of that concept hardly mentions them in these terms; rather, seventeenth and eighteenth century European perceptions of non-peasant pursuits and primitive societies are discussed. Certainly, the labels themselves are unimportant, it is their meaning that matters, in this case the Image of the Other. Pluciennik avoids the noble savage strand of European thinking, and instead emphasises the primitive, un-civilized counterstrand. He must have had a great time in the amassing of seventeenth century quotes on the forests and wildernesses and their most profitable use in the eyes of European merchants and their grooms. Yet most of this ground has been covered previously with a balanced account of especially the noble and the primitive aspects in Adam Kuper's 1988 essay subtitled The transformation of an illusion with a title almost identical to that of the present paper: The invention of primitive society.

Mark Pluciennik has correctly pointed out that many of our current views of social and economic development in prehistory have their roots in the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His critique focuses on the assignment of primacy to subsistence change as a way of dividing pre-state societies into meaningful categories. Although he and I probably approach archaeology from very different theoretical positions, I must confess that I have also marveled (privately) from time to time at the amount of attention that archaeologists pay to food-getting and consumption. This may be a bit surprising to the reader, since my research has been focused on early farming societies and my analytical specialty is the study of animal bones. Thus, it would be fair to conclude that I must have some intellectual stake in maintaining the conceptual distinction between foragers and farmers.

The interesting point in Pluciennik's paper, other than the well documented and useful part on the philosophical origins of the deep-seated categories of foragers and farmers and hunting and farming practices, is the focus placed on the opposition of the two terms and its ideological bases. He reviews the shift from foragers to farmers (from social evolution, progress systematised as universal schemes of human development defined by subsistence categories) following six inter-related factors relevant to him: the rise of individualism, the growth of modern economic theory and materialism, the birth of Reason and Science, the concepts and practices of improvement, the decline of Biblical authority, and tropes from classical authors.

First of all let me wholeheartedly thank all those who have responded for their helpful comments and careful readings. In this reply I would like first to discuss points dealing with the history of concepts related to ‘hunter-gatherers’, before pursuing the implications for contemporary prehistories. One preliminary note: van de Velde and Bogucki both point to the many advantages of Enlightenment thought (or reason). There are many political and scientific reasons to concur. I certainly have no desire to throw out the baby with the bathwater and return to metaphysical speculation as a substitute for archaeological and historical practice. I would also like to respond directly to van de Velde's comments about Adam Kuper (1988). Kuper's book, though also a work of critical anthropological history, is concerned with the later nineteenth century onwards and the idea of ‘primitive society’ characterised by certain forms of social and religious organisation, rather than subsistence (Kuper 1988, 5–7). I have argued elsewhere (Pluciennik 2001, 744–746) that this is typical of certain nineteenth-century European anthropologists and highlights a moment of divergence between ethnologists and archaeologists. Van de Velde also queries the omission of the ‘noble savage’ strand of Enlightenment thought from the paper. Certainly the recognition that there could be markedly different societies was sometimes used to critique the perceived excesses and artifices of the writer's society or of ‘civilisation’ more generally (Berkhofer 1978, 72–80; Carey 1998). However I would argue generally that the ‘noble savage’ has tended to be a minority construct adopted for strategic rhetorical and literary purposes (even if there was a revival from the 1960s with the ecologically noble savage: Buege 1996). Indeed Ellingson (2001) has recently proposed that even the trope of the noble savage was largely a 19th century invention, a myth constructed by racists to provide a stick with which to beat ‘liberals’. I disagree, in that the image of ‘Others’ supposedly without the corruption and vices of modern civilisation has long been utilised to construct alternatives to contemporary conditions and to progressive social evolutionary scenarios, with foragers supplying ‘evidence’ of an Edenic place, a Golden Age past, or degenerative human histories.