This paper investigates the rationale for excavation against the background of a new trend in archaeology: the renewed interest in the values of experience and empiricism in both archaeological practice and interpretation. It is argued that we should seriously reconsider the principles of archaeological heritage management as it has developed from the 1970s onwards. Reasons for excavating are discussed by referring to three examples: (1) the reconstruction of cultural evolution in the time period roughly between 40,000 and 30,000 B.P., when anatomically modern humans entered Europe but Neanderthals were still there; (2) recent excavations in 20th-century terrorscapes; and (3) public activities, like geocaching, that evoke a kind of ‘archaeological experience’. It is concluded that the time is ripe for a broad empirical and experiential attitude, based on new intellectual orientations like the new empiricism, to return to the archaeological agenda. Excavation may fulfil a vital role in this project.

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 is a characteristically trenchant and persuasive critique from Jane Webster, who has done more than most to persuade Roman archaeologists to engage with comparative and postcolonial perspectives (Webster 1997; 2001; 2003; 2005 are required readings). Yet, as she argues, despite some notable theoretical advances in the last decade or so the study of the Roman past still remains hidebound within classificatory and descriptive categories. The result of this is that we remain far better at delineating our subject than at interpreting it – especially where we enter territory that is not well served by supplementary sources (such as texts or epigraphy). However, the problems that she has identified with regard to the archaeology of slavery apply with equal force in many other areas where the material culture is ambiguous or discrepant. Thus, while I find myself in strong agreement with much of what she says, I would like to pose a series of points for further reflection.

Although it is easy to agree with Toby Pillatt that the role of weather in the archaeological record has been understated, it is more difficult to provide a clear method for incorporating the weather into archaeological interpretation. His concerns about the dominance of climate in interpretations are also acknowledged. Whereas climate and weather are indeed important to the interpretation of past ways of life, when we do try to recognize a direct correlation between, for example, a climate proxy record and any specific human behaviour, it is common to discover that any neighbouring proxy record will show a different set of relationships. Although there is a long history critiquing this approach, there is still a tendency for the uncritical to draw simplistic conclusions.

Whereas German-speaking archaeology (GSA) has long been understood as generally uninterested in theoretical debates, the situation has taken a most interesting development since the year 2000. Archaeologists tried to escape the general decline of the small university disciplines by getting more and more involved in the overarching research questions of cultural studies and in large-scale collaborative projects. The necessity of integrating a clear theoretical and methodological approach for a successful proposal and the subsequent research changed the significance of theoretical discussions. As a consequence, theme-oriented research has developed which aims at addressing overarching themes in the cultural and social sciences. We have chosen five of the most prominent themes in German-speaking archaeology – self-reflexivity, identities, space, cultural encounter and knowledge transfer – as well as material culture, and shed light on their theoretical conceptualization and methodological implementation in recent publications. Despite the lack of dominant schools of thinking, its strong rootedness in the evaluation of empirical sources, and its close link to the discipline of history, current GSA can contribute to the overall theoretical discourse of the discipline.

Allison's paper shows how the complex world of real-life social relations, dependencies and needs may be extracted from the small finds and the mundane domestic aspects of life associated with a site – even when that site is a Roman fort. In her approach Allison does not presume that society in its totality is mirrored in these finds; rather her apparently modest, but in fact potentially significant, point is that concrete aspects of how people organised their relationships, and especially the spatial aspects of these relationships, are revealed by such finds. In this emphasis Allison makes important contributions to two core areas of concern: one is the character of domestic life within Roman forts during the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D., and the other, more theoretical concern, is how we make interpretative links between objects and social roles and identities. These two areas of concern are not, however, given equal standing in her arguments. The reflection upon the interpretative project of engendering is largely nested within the discussion of how one may find evidence of women and children within the Roman fort. There appears to be little acknowledgement of how some aspects of this concern need to be discussed at a general level separate from the specific questions about gender as part of social relations within this particular type of settlement. This omission is probably due to the limited space, but it brings up important points about how we reach interpretation.

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.

The proliferation of European Union law and policies and their impact on Member States appear to be issues very much connected with the future of the political union of Europe. Heritage management practice in Member States is also being affected by legal developments promoted by E.U. institutions. This article attempts to assess the E.U.'s growth of interest in cultural heritage matters as part of a broader political context, which involves issues ranging from economic development to ‘European’ identity. The successful cultural integration of Member States is being pursued by the E.U. on the basis of a common cultural heritage. Does the perceived legal necessity for uniformity in Member State's heritage management pose a danger to the differences and particularities that stem from the diverse pasts in the E.U.?

Rather than being bashed around in view of its contents, the nation state – or at least the ‘state’ part of this compound term – needs to be cherished for the context it provides. Without the state, instilling regulations, procedures and common purpose, archaeology will not really thrive. This is confirmed through an exemplary case study, namely the seemingly measured and consensual retrenchment of the state occurring in England over the past 25 years. A brief presentation of the structure of English archaeology serves to highlight the situation of each of its main sectors, commercial contractors, curators at local levels and national bodies. Recent changes at the last level, involving English Heritage Trust and Historic England, highlight the risks posed by state disengagement, by funding withdrawal and by the enforced commercialization of public services.

Few archaeologists can claim to have written more than 300 articles in three different languages, let alone on topics as diverse as the philosophy of archaeology, the Ukrainian Eneolithic and the anatomy of the Iliad. Still fewer to have convinced Stalin, to have been convicted for homosexuality, and to have written a half-million copy bestseller about his years in prison. Only one archaeologist has. Despite all this, he is still poorly understood. At 76, Leo Klejn is still active. And still eager to have his voice heard.

Contemporary archaeology seems to be marked by a questioning of the limits of interpretation, pushing for a radical change in the way we conceptualize our engagement with the past, the material and the world we live in: from archaeologies of affect, to new materialist approaches or calls to political engagement, practitioners seem to experiment with new questions and theoretical tools. As Artur Ribeiro points out in his contribution to the following collection of papers, ‘“new” has become the new normal’. But the question is, what are we trying to do with these experiments and what do we expect from archaeology in a world that is undergoing major changes and challenges?

All living creatures exist with others in relationships – networks of ecological, biological, psychological and social interactions – that are ongoing and meaningful, and at some level affect their animate neighbours. This point seems so self-evident that it should not need stating. Yet in many instances both archaeologists and scholars within other disciplines remain mired within an anthropocentric metanarrative which serves the purpose of limiting the study of these relationships either to the human use, or to the (human) cultural construction, of non-human animals. That is changing. In arguing that a ‘shift . . . of emphasis to the live animal as an autonomous being with its own agency and even its known perspective on other species is long overdue’ (p. 116), Nick Overton and Yannis Hamiliakis offer a valuable contribution toward refining the ongoing archaeological re-examination of the potential gestalt of the human–animal social interface.

Each of the four discussants of my paper has offered constructive comment on specific points of detail in the piece. I am grateful for their insights, and for their consensus that the time has come to break down the disciplinary restraints that inhibit interdisciplinary cooperation in the study of slavery (and much else). In terms of my central focus on the potentials and pitfalls of a comparative archaeology of Roman slavery, however, I gained most from placing these commentaries side by side and reflecting on them as a group. That is also what I plan to do here.

First I will offer a view of public archaeology which differs from Dawdy's perspective. Then I will respond briefly to one of her specific questions. Finally, I will comment on her suggestion for a futurist archaeology.

Michael Pollan recently published an essay in the New Yorker (December 2013) introducing the notion of ‘plant intelligence’ and how plants have evolved by virtue of their lack of mobility to cultivate and attract the resources they require. Although not using the humanistic language identified with ‘agency’, a widely used term most frequently associated with human motivation, action and accomplishment, Pollan lends his implicit support for the communicative ‘behaviours’ of plants and their own brand of agency in effecting change in the world. Veronica Strang champions this view for the role of the non-human organic world, but moves a step or two further in suggesting that the inorganic has its own sense of agency. And though she and those phenomenologists whom she cites attribute agency to all things, it is difficult for some of us to entirely accept such a premise.

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.

Rodney Harrison's recasting of contemporary archaeology as an archaeology in and of the present serves as a very welcome and overdue corrective to a subdiscipline which has been disparagingly described as ‘well-meaning and superfluous’ (Hummler 2010, 922) and, rather more crudely, as in danger of ‘disappearing up its own arsehole’ (Devlin 2006). I should confess at the outset that over the last decade I have gone from being excited and enthused about the florescence of interest in the contemporary and recent past to often feeling cynical and uninspired. I have sat through too many earnest conference papers that in effect do no more than demonstrate that yes, indeed, it is possible for archaeologists to analyse the contents of their own closets/offices/attics. As an anthropologically trained archaeologist, it never occurred to me that we were not supposed to study the present, so I do not need to be told that it is possible – for me, that is self-evident. Instead, I want to be challenged by the insights derived from archaeological studies of the present. I want there to be a point.

No matter what kind of archaeologist you think you are, Ingold's text evokes emotional and intellectual reactions concerning a core of archaeology: how to deal scientifically with the material world. It pinpoints some serious problems within today's archaeology, not least field archaeology. Given this, I will try to comment on Ingold's text from a practical archaeological point of view. Before I turn to the tangible fields of sand, clay, stone fragments and almost vanished materials, I will take the opportunity to associate Ingold's point of view with a well-known geographical tradition, since some concepts appear to be quite similar.

The St Anthony's Day procession was caught in a bitter, driving rainstorm, accompanied by thunder and lightning. We elected to carry on to the church, despite the weather and the sense of threat. By the time we reached our destination we were soaked through. Locals were happy for the rain and all it implied, students and faculty to have shared the powerful experience which appeared to close an affective gap with our hosts.