Prominent in the new literature of a ‘post-processual’, ‘critical’ or ‘radical’ archaeology are a pair of books, conveniently colour-coded as one black and one red, written by Michael Shanks 6. Christopher Tilley, and both published in 1987. The ‘black book’, from Cambridge University Press, has a stark cover mostly of solid black; the cover of the ‘red book’, from Polity Press, is a more cheerful crimson, though its picture, a 19th-century Comedy of death, is a despairing image of dismal decay.

Kristian Kristiansen, of the Center for Research in the Humanities, University of Copenhagen, reviews here the black and the red, and the post-modern vision of archaeology they amount to.