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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This paper on perceptions of the Pontine Region in Central Italy starts out with a discussion of a map by the Renaissance artist and engineer Leonardo da Vinci which he made of the Pontine marshes in the early 16th century A.D. Since this map is the earliest rendering known of this former wetland, it is an important document for the reconstruction of the wet areas of the Pontine Region, a landscape unit that falls within the wider survey area of the Pontine Region Project.1 The example shows how deconstruction of historical documents, whether texts or maps, is a prerequisite for an understanding of how landscapes were differently perceived over time. After all we perceive what we want to see. A valid interpretation of Da Vincis's map for archaeological purposes requires, however, insight into both the context of the map and the way in which Leonardo da Vinci handled landscapes in his work. I discuss the map to demonstrate how archaeologists using historical and ethnographical documents run the risk of dealing with ‘outsider’ information whilst thinking they are dealing with sources that take them right inside the landscape, i.e. into the landscape of its past inhabitants. To avoid the pitfall of perceiving what one wants to see, the archaeologist is recommended to obtain insight into the various historical perceptions of his study area. I cite some instances from my work that show how it is possible to extract inside information from ‘outsider’ maps and texts concerning the Pontine Region. It is argued that such inside information is needed to complement Mediterranean survey methodology if the discipline is to develop landscape perception models of Mediterranean regions in antiquity that are not based on a priori notions. The delineation of preference surfaces in the landscape such as forwarded by the archaeological record, is proposed as a starting point for reconstructions of past collective perceptions.

The existence of regional traditions, in terms of methods and practices, has been an accepted fact in social sciences with a longer history than archaeology. In disciplines like anthropology and archaeology, with their strong emphasis on the description of phenomena that are peculiar to a given regional context, the development of a set of methodologies common to scholars dealing with the same region (a methodological ‘local knowledge’) has long been regarded as a natural tendency. It was only as a result of the main thrust connected with the appearance of processual archaeology that the idea (or should we say the myth?) of a universal methodology, i. e. one applicable to all contexts and periods, was developed. Thus, between the 1960s and the early 1980s, in parallel with a very positive standardization and intensification of archaeological techniques, a great effort went into the quest for an ultimate and universal field methodology (Binford 1964). As a result, a very wide agreement was reached fairly soon in some areas; for instance, as far as excavation is concerned, a kind of common practice was established, thanks to figures like Ph. Barker (1977) and E. C. Harris (1979). For some reason field survey has experienced a far less unilinear evolution, with sharp debates arising ever since the earliest attempts at a definition of a modern methodology (see for example the entertaining Hope-Simpson versus Cherry controversy, or the even more amusing debate imagined in Flannery 1976, 131–136).

This article discusses the development of the research strategy of the South Netherlands project conducted by the Instituut voor Pre- en Protohistorische Archeologie (IPP) of the University of Amsterdam. Its general objective is the study of long-term transformations in landscape and culture between ca 1000 B.C. and 1200 A.D. in the flat sandy region of the southern Netherlands and the adjacent part of northern Belgium. This area of ca 100 by 140 km is roughly bordered by the rivers Meuse, Demer and Scheldt (= MDS-region; see figure 1). The project has a history which started in the early 1970s. It evolved out of the ‘Kempenproject’ of the IPP and the Archeologisch Instituut van de Vrije Universiteit (AIVU) at Amsterdam. At present it is a major research programme of the IPP, with each year several large excavations dispersed over the region, but with a concentration in the south-eastern half of the province of North-Brabant (figure 1).

The development of regional projects over the last generation has been heavily influenced by changing theoretical agendas. Landscape archaeology had been a growing force since the 1920s, but after the highpoint of the ‘palaeoeconomy movement’ in the 1970s its ecological wing has been unjustly neglected over this period. The New Archaeology of the 60s and 70s injected a fascination with geographical, statistical and sampling approaches that is unlikely to disappear as an essential aspect for the analysis of settlement history. Post-processualism in the 80s and 90s has encouraged renewed interest in what has been termed the ‘culturalist’ perspective – the ways in which people's perceptions of landscape influence their behaviour across it. But it always needs repeating that this derivative movement of post-modernism is only one of several sets of approaches that has emerged since New Archaeology, so I prefer the term post-structuralist for all these ideas of the 80s and 90s: other packages that I have found exciting to read about and try to apply in archaeology include world systems/core periphery theory, the approaches of the French Annales school, and the rapidly-expanding chaos and complexity theory. My current reading of the theoretical scene sees a strong movement away from the rather tedious battle of the ‘isms’ and towards a new eclecticism – this is very much in tune with the current general intellectual trend in the West towards neo-pragmatism. Not to be forgotten finally is the greater involvement of academic regional projects with public archaeology and heritage management, areas of professional archaeology that have probably become the dominant ones over this same time-period. Indeed some regional projects, including my own in Boeotia, Central Greece, see the creation of a regional heritage centre as the logical outcome of what began as an academic research project.