This paper discusses the project of an archaeology of capitalism through a case study situated in the southern Scottish Highlands. It is argued that archaeology as a discipline has a significant contribution to make to discussions of the emergence and development of the social relations of capitalism. This is because archaeology has as one of its main concerns mundane social practice or routine. Changes in everyday routine and the associated material environment made the ideological aspects of capitalism, focusing on the individual and private property, conceivable for some. These changes to the everyday environment were instigated by the landlords, inspired by enlightenment thought, in order to secure their ownership of certain estates as private property, which had been in dispute under the clan system. Response of the rural population to Improvement was varied and their continuing relationship with their landlord evolved with reference to certain key structuring dispositions. The essential issue for the farming population was land rights. The major conclusion of this paper as concerns archaeologies of capitalism is that we must distinguish between capitalism (an ideology of the individual made knowable in routine practice) and capitalist societies (those societies where capitalism is widespread but not necessarily universal). This allows consideration of varied experience of and interaction with capitalism in the past.

The narrative structure of Roman archaeology places a particular emphasis on the acculturation of the newly conquered provinces. This ‘process’ known as Romanisation has been found wanting by many commentators on Roman archaeology. Although rejected, it can still reappear and influence the narrative structure of many studies. Reference is deliberately made to the publications of the ‘Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference’ to highlight the revision of the usage of ‘Romanisation’ by British scholars during the 1990s. The paper identifies the cultural assumptions underpinning the revisionist views of Romanisation and the key problem of a narrative based explicitly or otherwise on textual evidence. Here, an attempt is made to account for the uniqueness of Roman archaeology as practiced in Britain – in comparison to that of prehistory or medieval archaeology. The paper suggests that there is a need to move on from Romanisation to alternative narrative forms drawing on recent revisionist agendas within the social sciences.

Greek and Roman archaeology as a whole are often accused of being ‘text-based’ or ‘text-driven’. At a superficial level, this is palpably false: most Classical archaeologists do most of their research without consulting an ancient text for days and sometimes weeks on end, and this is especially true of Romano-British archaeologists. Everyone, except perhaps for a few militant prehistorians, knows this perfectly well. Ray Laurence does not fall into this trap. Instead, he rightly directs us to the deeper level of discourse, narratives and arguments; and hints more briefly at a deeper one still, that of ‘interests and preoccupations’.

Dalglish is correct, historical archaeology is the archaeology of capitalism. Now the association seems obvious, capitalism is too important in the temporal responsibility of historical archaeology for it to be ignored or marginalised. Archaeologists, as Paynter (1988) pointed out, have always excavated, recorded, analysed, and interpreted evidence of capitalism. They were just rarely explicit about it. As historical archaeology becomes clearer regarding its subject matter, there needs to be more precise understandings of the complexity of capitalism, its uneven developments, and the variation in its expansion around the world.

Ray Laurence's contribution on the state and future of Roman archaeology as practised in Britain can be summarised as follows: he thinks the discipline to be dominated by a narrative of invasion that is based on literary texts and which has made the concepts of Romanisation and resistance key points in the theoretical discussion. Laurence values this situation as negative. He looks at the discussion on the (im)possibility of representing the Holocaust and at the work of the contemporary architect Rem Koolhaas in trying to formulate alternatives, ending with a manifesto for a twenty-first century Roman archaeology firmly based on recent developments within the social sciences.

Dalglish's paper raises several interesting issues, both methodological and theoretical. At the heart of this paper is the proposition that archaeology can contribute to our understanding of capitalism, because local landscape studies (by archaeologists) provide us with a more informed view of the common people and the disenfranchised, and their ‘mundane daily existence’ (as a rationale for historical archaeology in general see Falk 1991). Dalglish argues the need to analytically separate capitalism (an ideology of the individual knowable from routine) from capitalist societies, where capitalist values are not uniformly embedded. Variability in local responses to capitalism is important to understanding regional processes of change over the last few hundred years. Few historical archaeologists would quibble with this.

We cannot but agree with the basic contentions of Langbroek's paper that 1) the replacement of Neandertals by early modern humans in Europe is best understood from a perspective of historical contingency and 2) that it must have had a lot to do with the ‘very dynamic spatio-temporal redrawings of the population maps of Europe during the Weichsel glacial’ against the background of ‘the emergence of increasing climatological instability during the later part of OIS 3, with significant fluctuations at relatively short timescales’. This is the kind of approach we have been advocating to effectively supersede the reductionist ‘superiority’ paradigm that has dominated the literature on Neandertal extinction for the last twenty years.

This paper makes an important, interdisciplinary contribution, to the ongoing debate on the transition from clanship to capitalism. Integral to this contribution is the important distinction between capitalism as an individualist ideology and capitalist societies where individualism is a widespread but not necessarily a universal ideology. His concern is not with the bipolar opposition of landlord and people which tends to dominate debates on the land issue in the Highlands. Instead, he focuses on material culture change in relation to landscape organisation, settlement patterns and morphology in order to examine how social relationships were structured during the critical period of estate re-orientation often depicted progressively as Improvement but regressively as clearance through the removal and relocation of population. His case study on Kintyre is particularly valuable. By scrutinising spatial as well as social relationships Dalglish demonstrates that clanship was based as much on daily practices of living as on an patrimonial ideology of kinship, practices which led the House of Argyll to attempt the reinvention of concepts of occupancy in order to emphasise the importance of the individual over the family through partitioned space.

The apparent aim of this paper is to reveal the contribution of archaeology to understanding the social relations of capitalism. The burden of this particular study of rural settlement in the Scottish Highlands is to show that archaeology helps to achieve a deeper understanding of the transition from clan ownership to individual ownership during the period of Improvement that heralded the dawn of the new commercial age in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

We cannot but agree with the basic contentions of Langbroek's paper that 1) the replacement of Neandertals by early modern humans in Europe is best understood from a perspective of historical contingency and 2) that it must have had a lot to do with the ‘very dynamic spatio-temporal redrawings of the population maps of Europe during the Weichsel glacial’ against the background of ‘the emergence of increasing climatological instability during the later part of OIS 3, with significant fluctuations at relatively short timescales’. This is the kind of approach we have been advocating to effectively supersede the reductionist ‘superiority’ paradigm that has dominated the literature on Neandertal extinction for the last twenty years.

A lot of the comments deal with things I did not consider, as much as with those I did. As will become clear below, I am in agreement with many of the issues raised and think some of them provide significant avenues of enquiry. In general, this reply, perhaps more than it is a defence of what I did say, is an agreement that the various issues raised should inform future research on the Highlands in the recent past. I feel the discussion has been positive in this respect and thank the various contributors for that.

The emergence of modern humans during the Late Pleistocene and the phylogenetic fate of the northwestern Eurasian Neandertals have been closely linked to our perceptions of the behavior and abilities of those late archaic humans, the Neandertals. In the past several years, several lines of evidence, including radiometric dating of archeological assemblages, taphonomic analyses of faunal remains, stable isotope analysis of Neandertal remains, the dating of late Neandertal remains, considerations of initial Upper Paleolithic associations and chronologies, and reassessments of Neandertal to early modern human phylogenetic relationships have tended to minimise the perceived behavioral differences between the Neandertals and early modern humans across Europe. Into this context, the discovery of an earlier Upper Paleolithic (Gravettian) early modern human child's skeleton at the Abrigo do Lagar Velho, Lapedo Valley, Portugal with distinctive Neandertal features provides further support for the de-dehumanising of the Neandertals. Its anatomical evidence for population blending when early modern humans spread into southern Iberia after 30,000 B.P. indicates that the behavioral differences between the local Neandertals and in-dispersing early modern humans were subtle and did not preclude them from regarding each other as human.

There are several reasons for not interviewing Lewis Binford. So much has already been written on the most famous archaeologist since Childe that one may well wonder why another text or an interview should be added to the corpus. This holds especially true now that Paula Sabloff has published a series of conversations with the man himself (Sabloff 1998). On top of that, his own literary output has proportions that can easily discourage even interviewers of the most intrepid kind. With fourteen monographs, two edited volumes, 59 articles in journals, 34 chapters in edited books, and several dozen reviews, comments and other genres of academic publishing—and this is only the harvest of the previous millennium, the counter is still ticking—Binford is not only one of the most influential archaeologists of the twentieth century, but also one of the most prolific ones. Another good excuse for leaving your tape recorder home is that if his work has made such an important impact, it must by definition be already extremely well known among archaeologists. Why bothering about talking to a man if everyone already knows the content of his thought? Binford has become textbook knowledge, many of his articles have become classics and figure on undergraduate reading lists, his writings belong to the canon of twentieth-century archaeological thought. So, why bother? Finally, everyone who considers, or even just starts thinking about interviewing Lewis Binford will be warned by well-intending colleagues who tell you that the man has a notoriously volatile temper and that you are putting yourself at risk.