When I was asked to comment on Shannon Dawdy's position paper entitled ‘Millennial archaeology. Locating the discipline in the age of insecurity’ I must admit that I was, even with the give-away ‘millennium’ of the title, thinking of the current economic crisis, the ‘credit crunch’ as it is known in Britain. Shannon Dawdy seems to describe a much more specific American crisis – the realization that the United States are not somehow outside history, that they can be hit on their home ground and that their political and military hegemony is contested (and if you detect a certain European smugness there, you are probably right).