One of the major archaeological museums, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, serves as an example to discuss present problems of museology. I argue that the development of museums has to be analysed from a combination of perspectives, including an historical one, that of visitors and of museum staff. In a first section, the paper outlines the history of the Pergamon Museum, including an institutional history and the larger socio–political framework. To highlight the range of possibilities of understanding, I give two readings of the museum from the viewpoints of differently oriented visitors, one colonialist, the other postmodern. I then consider current debates among curators and distinguish between two main exhibition strategies, one pragmatist, the other purist. Finally, I discuss the larger framework in which museums exist, which shows their problematic status. Using critical theory's distinction between culture industry and affirmative (elite) culture, I show that the Pergamon and other museums survive today only through an uneasy compromise between these two extreme poles of culture.

In an extremely rich and informed essay, Bernbeck offers sophisticated insights into the problems confronting museology today. Using the Pergamon Museum as a case study, he draws out specific issues facing the museum into broader theoretical questions, and thus reaches conclusions of much wider relevance. Finally, he brings these wider theoretical views back to the particular situation in order to comment on future plans for the Pergamon Museum. As if offering a virtual tour, Bernbeck takes the reader through the museum offering a variety of perspectives – historical outline, colonialist and post-modern visitor's viewpoints, current debates and conflicting theories in museology, critical theory of museum culture consumption, planning for changes in the Pergamon Museum. But he is also well aware of the politics of such a ‘reading tour’, and his essay, quite self-consciously, offers a series of possibilities for engaging in discussion and further dialogue.

The museum is a construct; the collections and the physical building are enclosed by a structure, invisible to the eye, which is created by the context in which the museum is being viewed. The nature of that structure will depend on the viewer; he or she will make his or her own meanings. Reinhard Bernbeck, in his paper The exhibition of architecture and the architecture of an exhibition, has investigated how the Pergamon Museum can simultaneously mean different things to different people, according to their cultural perspective. What is at the core of this is the political and social nature of museums, and one of the most dominant aspects of this is the demonstration of power. This determines how the museum collects, interprets and displays both the objects and itself, and is related to both Bernbeck's colonial and postmodern readings of the museum, as well has his discussion of ‘pragmatist’ and ‘purist’ approaches to museums in general. Though his paper is based on a case study of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, the issues he raised are applicable to museums elsewhere. In this response to his paper, I am going to look at what this demonstration of power reflects about what museums mean and how they function and relate Bernbeck's evaluation to museum development I am most familiar with, that in Ireland.

I thank the commentators for their thoughtful and constructive critiques of my paper. They have led me to reconsider some substantial issues. In my reply, I will address five major themes around which the comments are centred: the question of historical detail; the development of German philhellenism; national identity and politics of culture; commodification and museological work; and finally the idea of museums as institutions ‘for the people’.

This paper writes a history of the forensic excavations in Argentina of the remains of ‘the disappeared’; people who were abducted and murdered under the military governments of the 1970s and early 1980s. The physical remains of these people were, and still are, located at a nexus of desires and attempts to reconstruct both individual and national collective memory, through creating and sustaining the individual and collective identities of the disappeared. As such the human remains have become a vigorously contested site for different and irreconcilable constructions. This paper considers the ambiguity of human remains; the tensions between humans as bodies and as people, the difficult issue of human embodiment after death, and the incompatible narratives that arise from these ambiguities. A textual analysis of the narratives created around the excavations of the disappeared in the Argentinian and English speaking media is used to illustrate the ways in which archaeological narratives about the dead are used in the creation of conflicting societal and personal constructions of the human body in Argentina, and the effect that this has had on the ways the disappeared are remembered.

‘All quiet on the western front’ (Härke 1991) for years on end, and now, suddenly two theoretical works out of Germany, one of them even of handbook-character – what's happening? Is the enmity towards theoretical discourse of mainstream German archaeology (Eggert and Veit 1998, 11) finally abating?

How did people feed themselves in the past? Archaeologists have been asking this question since the early years of the discipline and it remains an important topic to the present day. Perhaps not surprisingly, eating and drinking are among the most essential activities for human survival. Moreover, even though we do not frequently excavate food in a strict sense of the term, a great deal of the artefacts that we find are directly or indirectly related to food, its procurement and production, preparation and consumption and its waste products. In recent years, archaeologists increasingly recognise the cultural and social significance of food (and the animals and plant from which it stems). In this introduction to a special section on the archaeology of food and foodways I would like to reflect briefly on the potential of food archaeologies for studying diverse aspects of life as well as social processes in past societies.

This paper reflects on the recent flourishing of the interdisciplinary study of food. Central is the notion that food forms a meeting-place for nature and culture, thereby overcoming this cartesian dichotomy. The paper starts from a discussion of the work of the French anthropologist P. Descola.

The iron age settlement at Sollas, North Uist, Scotland, provides an unusually varied set of data relating to food and the role of animals in society. By comparing the evidence of food residues on pottery with animal remains from middens, foundation burials and cremations, structural patterns emerge which throw light on the relative status of domestic species. Sheep and cows are treated differently, with sheep being mainly buried, and cattle cremated. This patterning enables a speculative world view of the inhabitants to be constructed, and further analysis shows that mature cattle were classified differently from younger animals. It is suggested that these normally hidden structuring principles cause difficulties for the conventional interpretation of animal remains on other iron age sites.

On the basis of the Post-Roman surface finds from the Boeotia Survey in central Greece, the use and social meaning of glazed vessels as table utensils from Byzantine to Ottoman times (ca. 10th–19th centuries A.D.) will be discussed, as well as the cultural changes in dining manners in that period. It is the intention of this paper to approach this evolution of “wining and dining” habits in an interdisciplinary perspective, in which archaeological data, textual sources and iconographical information will be combined.

This paper develops a case study of animal exploitation in Androy, in southern Madagascar, to demonstrate the exchange and depositional processes by which animal bones can eventually end up in the ground. It examines the central role of cattle as symbol, currency and foodstuff in Tandroy life and explores some of the contexts and complexities of livestock exchange and slaughter. The results of this case study are used to suggest that standard archaeological calculations of minimum numbers (MNI) from individual sites may not always provide reliable information about livestock numbers in subsistence economies, and that the nutritional value of certain species might be the least important of their attributes. The complex exchange patterns of animals at Tandroy funerals, and the ways that their gifting and sacrifice define and reinforce social roles, identity and position, are key aspects of the social changes by which the powerful can become poor and the enslaved wealthy.

One of the more admirable things about this collection of papers is how the authors resist the almost overwhelming temptation to employ food-related, lip-smacking puns. I noted, for example, only one coy ‘food for thought’. This resistance neatly symbolizes, to my mind, a growing sophistication in the archaeology of food, a development seen everywhere in this particular smorgasbord of essays.