Following its successful first international face-to-face debate at the 2006 meeting of the SAA in Puerto Rico, Archaeological dialogues has again organized a conference discussion. This time we chose the Old World to invite our readership and a wider audience, congregating at the 13th Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists in Zadar, Croatia. On 21 September 2007 we held a Round Table session, sponsored by Archaeological dialogues and Cambridge University Press, which asked, somewhat provocatively, ‘Does the “archaeology of Europe” exist?’ Kristian Kristiansen presented a position paper on the topic, followed by responses from Old World and New World commentators Predrag Novaković, Elisabeth Jerem and Phil Kohl. This issue now presents their thoughts on this question, together with a number of comments that arose from the very lively debate at the Round Table session.

Is there anything coherently ‘European’ about a European archaeology – or rather, about the ‘archaeology of Europe’ – or is it simply a modern political construct with no meaning in the ancient past? This paper analyses European archaeology through a historical perspective, tracing developments in the areas of archaeological conservation (heritage), thinking (theory/interpretations) and publication and teaching. It critically examines a perceived trend in archaeology from a national towards a European framework, and concludes instead that local and regional frameworks have become stronger in all three areas. To move forward, we should use our understanding of the relationship between ideology, politics and archaeology to promote a research agenda that actively contributes to the formation of critical knowledge about the conditions for heritage and research in contemporary society. There is scope for an archaeology that addresses fundamental historical problems and long-term histories of the various geographically and culturally interlinked regions of Europe.

This is an admirable, valuable piece of thinking and conceptualizing, but cramped – in my view – by the geographical boundaries which Kristiansen has set around his subject.

In his review of recent trends in archaeology, Kristiansen argues that the changes in broad trends in cultural heritage management parallel profound changes in archaeological theory under the banner of postprocessualism. He also argues that one can conceptualize these changes through a pendulum model that swings between rationalism and romanticism, the former favouring generalized interpretations, the latter favouring local and national histories. For Kristiansen the problem lies in the emphasis on local and national frameworks for interpretation promoted by postmodernism and postprocessualism that prevents archaeologists from asking broader questions. Moreover, he claims, ‘the humanities, including archaeology, are today losing academic and political impact precisely because of this narrowing of their role’ (p. 24).

Let me begin with an anecdote: in summer 1985 Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky and I participated in Bronze Age excavations at the site of Sarazm along the middle Zeravshan river in what was then Soviet Tajikistan. I remember one of the Russian artists on the dig complaining ruefully (and patronizingly) about her Tajik colleagues. ‘When will they [that is, her Tajik colleagues] ever become like us Russians and Americans, you know, Europeans?’ Karl, who is very proud of his mixed Czech, Slovak, and Austrian heritage, snorted disdainfully: ‘Since when have Americans and Russians ever been European?’

To start with, I would like to emphasize that I very much agree with most points of Kristian Kristiansen's analysis of the European state of archaeology. In my view he is totally right in observing a turn from the global perspective to a national and local focus, expressed not least by narrowing language capabilities and restricted citation networks, both convincingly described in his paper. Furthermore he is right, I think, that archaeology has lost importance in the academic field due to its general avoidance of the grand questions, while at the same time the reviving myths of origin and heritage have prompted an unseen public interest in archaeology on the local level.

The title of the Round Table at the 2007 EAA meetings in Zadar triggered a déjà vu, taking me back to 1984 when archaeologists in the then Yugoslavia, at the occasion of the 12th Congress of the Association of Yugoslav Archaeological Societies in Novi Sad, organized a discussion with a very similar topic centred around two principal questions – ‘does Yugoslav archaeology exist?’ and ‘what is Yugoslav archaeology?’. One may argue that the context, political and national, differs much from the context in which the EAA's Round Table was organized, but the core dilemma remains the same – can we speak of a united or integrated discipline of archaeology in a multinational and multiethnic political framework, and what are the perspectives of such a discipline under the actual social and historical conditions in Europe?

In the title of his paper Professor Kristiansen poses a question that turns out to be affirmatively rhetorical. One could surely be forgiven for reading the title and thinking that this eminent European and europeanist prehistorian had lobbed his own grenade of doubt into a discipline which, despite occasional protestations, has long assumed Europe to be a real place, a legitimate geographical context. In truth, it is not really a surprise that Professor Kristiansen asserts that we need to be more European, not less, in our thinking, but what is a surprise (to me, anyway) is the pathway he lays down towards that conclusion. His observations about the relationship between heritage/conservation issues on the one hand, and the shift from positivism to postprocessualism in archaeological theory on the other, are certainly thought-provoking, as are the results of his survey of linguistic and citation trends in recent archaeological literature, but have they a natural home in this particular argument? If yes, is his argument in favour of a greater ‘European-ness’ of enquiry the natural outcome of invoking them?

The retraction of the archaeological research perspective away from big questions and its fragmentation into national, local or even site-specific perspectives, as documented by Kristian Kristiansen, is by no means inexplicable. However, this closing of the archaeological mind can only be adequately understood and countered by viewing it in its wider historical context.

In this stimulating piece Kristiansen provides a trenchant critique of the provincialism of much European archaeology (though he tends to concentrate his argument on prehistory), but he does not really engage with the question of whether we need an archaeology of Europe until his closing paragraphs. Here his answer is that ‘Europe and its regions [are] a far better and less exclusive frame of reference than the dominant local and national framework’ (p. NN) – i.e. we need an archaeology of Europe not to exclude others but in order to transcend narrow provincialism. Like Kristiansen, I too would like to put off engaging with the question, and start by examining his argument.

At the Round Table discussion in Zadar different understandings of what the phrase ‘a European archaeology/an archaeology of Europe’ stands for were brought to the table, so to speak. Several nuances may be discerned, and within these there were differences that could lead to substantially different claims. The proposition may thus refer to the question of whether a European archaeology as a distinct practice of interpretation (and presentation) exists – in essence this is an epistemological question: do we think and argue in a distinctly European way? The phrase was simultaneously used to refer to whether there is an archaeology of Europe solely based on it being a geographical region; Philip Kohl's response to the precirculated paper by Kristian Kristiansen was largely concerned with the legitimacy of this claim. Finally, another important point of departure was whether the claim was seen to refer to coherence in terms of prehistoric cultures, i.e. is the ‘European’ in our work a direct response to characteristics and qualities of the past that we study? Surely these understandings overlap and fuse but it is nonetheless important to appreciate that the proposition under debate may be understood to refer to different matters.

While not a formal comment on Kristiansen's discussion paper, this brief note was written and submitted to Archaeological dialogues by a participant in the discussions between the Zadar Round Table speakers and the audience.

When I agreed to present the article as a vehicle for discussion at a session at the EAA's annual meeting in Zadar, Croatia, I decided to approach the question of a European archaeology from what I considered to be the three organizing pillars of archaeological practice: heritage, theory and publications. Heritage is the dominant organizational/legislative framework for archaeological practice, and it is where most of the money is spent. Theory, on the other hand, organizes most of our interpretations of the past, while publications are still the most common way of presenting the results of both heritage work (mostly excavations) and interpretations of that work. In this way I hoped to have encircled the dominant parameters for a diagnosis of the archaeological landscapes in Europe. I assumed that there might be some correlation between the three, and that such observed common trends within two or more variables would strengthen the argument, to paraphrase processual jargon.

The concept of value increasingly fills archaeological debates. An examination of how value works within the diverse practices of archaeology (reconstructions of the past, heritage management and self-reflexive critique) provides an integrating factor to these debates. Through a genealogy of value in the management of material heritage, I highlight how ‘significance’ has been institutionalized from contingent forms, and the ‘the past’ rendered an object. Moreover, I follow the translation of these management procedures from the national to the global stage to highlight the emergence of economic significance in international heritage management. Providing an alternative approach to significance, the anthropological work of Weiner and Graeber locates value within practices that manage material heritage. These theories provocatively suggest that archaeological practice and heritage management are one and the same, both capable of producing value. This requires archaeologists to reconsider their discipline, and the contemporary contexts and situated ethical conditions of their work.