Heritage management as postprocessual archaeology?

Smith, Laurajane

The postmodern, or 'postprocessual', tendency in contemporary archaeology pays much attention in its rhetoric to that wider public, that wider constituency whose views of the past may not match much or at all with the academics. What happens when the realities of archaeology in the real world meet with those of postmodern theory?

This paper examines the relationship, or lack of one, between the body of theory labelled 'postprocessual archaeology' and the practice of heritage management. Postprocessual archaeological theory explicitly claims to have politicized archaeology; conversely, heritage management remains largely untheorized, yet is the form of archaeological practice which most directly engages with politics.

Many of the theoretical discussions developed within postprocessual writings have been played out within the arena of heritage management. Encounters by archaeologists working as heritage managers with indigenous peoples, land developers, local communities and other interest groups with views of the past different to that of archaeologists, have left many managers with a real, if not a theoretically informed, understanding of the political nature of archaeology. Further, the dynamics of cultural, social and historical identity confronts any manager of material culture daily, although considerations of the politics of identity have only recently been examined by postprocessual writers (e.g. Shennan 1989; Hodder 1992; Leone & Preucel 1992; Shanks 1992).

Does postprocessual theory successfully break with the arid scientism of processual archaeology, and provide an adequate account of the social, cultural and political context of archaeology? Is it up to explaining the politics of heritage? Or to explaining what it is archaeology does? One of the main things that archaeology does is heritage management. The academy educates heritage managers, heritage management is a main employment area for archaeologists, and archaeological research changes the values attributed to heritage sites. Yet archaeological theory falls short in addressing heritage management and how archaeological knowledge is used within the management process.

The discussion will concentrate on three issues:

* the political and cultural role played by archaeologists as intellectuals;

* the degree to which archaeological knowledge and ideology has been both institutionalized and constrained within state institutions and discourses; and

* the role heritage plays in the politically fraught process of the construction of cultural identity.

The definition of heritage management used in this paper challenges common assumptions that heritage management is simply an exercise of technical judgements and strategies of preservation. For a wider discussion of this definition see Smith (in press a).

Postprocessual theoreticians, when discussing heritage issues and politics, tend to find themselves, along with heritage managers, trapped within a discursive introspective loop. Within this loop heritage issues about the legitimacy of indigenous and other claims made on material culture are channelled into a discussion of archaeological rights of access to the data or 'resource'. Ironically, this situation rehearses many of the old claims of scientistic privileged access to material culture pursued by processual archaeologists.

In concrete terms, little progress has been made towards entering into a so-called 'politically democratic discourse' with non-archaeological interests. These interests are seldom identified in postprocessual writings, and the hard questions about what might constitute a progressive political practice for archaeologists are not addressed. Indeed, postprocessual theory tends to be written about archaeologists writing about archaeologists writing about archaeologists . . . with little engagement with concrete, practical problems posed within heritage management, and problematized by the political complexity of the role heritage plays in the formation of cultural identity. The latest books by Tilley (1991) and Shanks (1992) seem to indicate that they have taken themselves into a theoretical cul-de-sac, where abstruse and self-indulgent post-modernist rhetoric thrashes about in search of a referent.

Postprocessual archaeology

Almost all self-identified postprocessual writings put forward an oppositional position that takes as their starting point a critique of processualism in a self-conscious attempt to import post-modern theories and debates into archaeology.

Three main strands in the post-modern, postprocessual theory, at least in Anglo-American debates (Patterson 1990; Champion 1991; Hodder 1991a; 1992; Preucel 1991; Trigger 1991), are radical post-structuralist works of Shanks & Tilley (Miller & Tilley 1984; Shanks & Tilley 1987a; 1987b; 1989; Tilley 1991; Shanks 1992), the work in the USA by Leone, Potter and others which draws upon critical theory and Habermas' theory of communicative action (Leone 1986; Leone et al. 1987; Leone & Potter 1992; Leone & Preucel 1992), and Hodder's emphasis on the social context of theory and the post-modern metaphor of text (Hodder 1986; 1988; 1989a; 1989b; 1991c; 1992; Johnsen & Olsen 1992).

Underlying the three major strands is a concern with examining the subjective development of discourse and knowledge within archaeology. Recent work by Hodder (1992) and Leone & Preucel (1992) has acknowledged those wider social and political influences on archaeological theory, for archaeology operates within, and is at times privileged by, the authority given to intellectual activity in western society. Yet no examination has been made of the nature and source of this authority, and what it actually is that archaeology does. Emphasis is placed on archaeological theory, academic practice, and epistemology, and not on the uses made of archaeology outside of the academy.

All three strands of postprocessual theory ask archaeology to build a reflexive process into its practice and into the structures that formulate its interpretations. One of the major contributions to debate has been recognition that archaeological observations and interpretations are laden with theory and embedded in society. This is why a politicized archaeology should recognize the diversity of interests in the past outside archaeology.

Postprocessual writing calls for democratic debate and discourse between archaeology and others with a stake in the past, in transmitting information at heritage sites (Leone 1981; Leone et al. 1987) and in determining the significance of sites in the management process (Leone & Potter 1992; Leone & Preucel 1992). In the UK Tilley (1989) and Merriman (1991) have called on archaeologists to challenge normative assumptions and to use the 'positive values of stewardship and scholarship' (Merriman 1991: 18) to guide the public in challenging perceptions of the past.

In calling for democratic discourse, post-processual theorists ask archaeologists to act in reshaping ideology by challenging normative views of the past. Bauman (1987) defines two types of roles fulfilled by intellectuals, the role of legislator and of interpreter. Legislators speak as authoritative experts from powerful institutions, and interpreters seek to translate discourses constructed in one knowledge system into other knowledge systems. It is the role of 'interpreter' that postprocessualists appear to be theorizing for archaeology.

Important to all postprocessual theory is the emphasis placed on language, as discourse, text or Habermas' 'ideal speech situation'. Analysis of political and cultural conflict in terms of language and discursivity tends to reduce concrete and dynamic political issues to abstract matters of language. This confines and inhibits the development of concrete political action and reinforces the introspective stance of postprocessualism.

These points have much in common with criticisms of self-consciously 'post-modern' writers (Woodiwiss 1990; 1993) who claim that nothing can exist outside of discourse (e.g. Laclau & Mouffe 1985). This is an extreme claim, which draws on the post-modern rejection of modernist rationalist ways of knowing the world. However, many critics believe claims about the break between modernity and post-modernity are overstated, and$engage in 'excessive rhetoric, hyperbole, and lack of sustained empirical analysis . . . [which] greatly exaggerate the alleged break or rupture in history' (Best & Kellner 1991: 277). Indeed, many post-modern writers that stress discourse and language tend to ignore Foucault's admittedly under-theorized distinction between the discursive and extra-discursive (i.e. material) elements of discursive fields (Best & Kellner 1991; Jessop 1990; Woodiwiss 1990).

The work of Roy Bhaskar (1978; 1989a; 1989b) has been taken up in the social sciences as a sophisticated non-reductionist way to avoid idealism and relativism (see Keat & Urry 1982; Outhwaite 1987; Jessop 1990; Sayer 1992; and Gibbon 1989 for archaeology). Bhaskar argues for a 'critical realism' which readily allows for the importance of language and discursivity, but stresses the concrete social relations and generative and causal structures that underlie discourse. The postprocessual turn in archaeology, in seeing language and discourse as the most relevant forms of power in the 'post-modern' world, has chosen to stress subjectivity, yet says little about actual social relations and the structures and institutions that typify them. Adopting this theoretical position has political consequences.

Heritage management

Heritage management involves managing and mitigating conflict over archaeological sites and places. Heritage management was developed in Australia in the 1970s, and expanded rapidly in Britain, the USA and other countries in the 1960s and 1970s, following the development and refinement of government legislation and conservation and environmental management policies. Heritage management or, conversely, cultural resource management, represents the process of managing, either in the form of conservation or salvage, archaeological sites and places that are held to have particular values. It is the process which records and protects the data base of archaeology, within a procedural and conceptual framework often adopted from the physical sciences (Allen 1989; Smith in press b).

Heritage management is as much about protecting and 'managing' values as about the physical past represented by heritage artefacts, sites and places. Heritage items have competing values to diverse groups in any particular community, and it is often the role of the heritage manager to consider and, if you like, to 'manage' these values as part of the conservation process.

Competing heritage values often come into conflict, as a glance at heritage management in post-colonial societies will show. Interest groups and their values interact in a hierarchy established under heritage legislation, through the state apparatuses which govern heritage management and through the influences of social and political values and assumptions. The interaction is highly political; it is a struggle that uses cultural sites and places as symbols in the politics of community, cultural, social and historical identity.

This power struggle is framed by the government or state institutions which control heritage management. Science-based archaeology, with its intellectual and ideological assumptions about rationality, has been taken up into state discourses of heritage and institutionalized within heritage bureaucracies. This has occurred for two reasons. The first was that archaeologists in many countries in the 1960s and 1970s lobbied to ensure archaeological values were given primacy in new heritage policy and legislation (Edwards 1975; D.D. Fowler 1982; McGimsey & Davis 1984; Mulvaney 1990). Secondly, the rationalist intellectual framework of research archaeology at that time was easily incorporated into state bureaucratic structures and frameworks (Smith in press b), and added authority to pronouncements made by archaeologists, within the institutions which control and regulate the management of heritage.

The academic and popular archaeological literature presses the need to prevent the looting and destruction of sites by non-archaeologists and developers. A concern often expressed is of archaeological science as 'universal knowledge' with the rights of unrestricted access to the 'archaeological resource'. In a debate framed with references to rationality and an objectified past, archaeologists were presented as 'stewards' for, and 'protectors' of, an absolute past (e.g. McGimsey 1972; P. Fowler 1981; 1987; Mulvaney 1990; Merriman 1991). Such ideologically loaded assumptions are illustrated by one response to the handing back of skeletal material in Australia. When skeletal remains handed back to the Tasmanian Aboriginal community were cremated, a senior pre-historian thought that this 'could be likened to the burning of books that took place in Germany in the 1930s' (Mulvaney cited by Duncan 1984: 28).

The developing place of archaeology in heritage management came at a time when archaeologists were building their scientific credibility. Archaeologists were concerned to differentiate themselves from the label of treasure-hunter and grave-robber, criticism which was being used by both indigenous people and those with economic interests in the past. In the face of such pressures, and within increasing public interest in environmental and cultural issues, the development of a processual archaeology which transformed the practice and image of archaeology was important in helping to ensure archaeological access to the archaeological 'resource'. This was done with claims to the rationality of archaeology as objective science by the astutely labelled 'New Archaeology'. Heritage management provided a vehicle in which to publicly reinforce such claims, and presented archaeology with a means not only to protect their data base, but institutionally to distance themselves from the perception of treasure hunters. Fifty years before, Grahame Clark had noted that archaeology should only be incorporated into the state apparatus at a time when archaeology had 'reached a degree of accuracy' (Clark 1934: 414) and, presumably, maturity.

Now that a processual archaeological science has been integrated and institutionalized into state discourses about heritage, its authority frames archaeological interpretations, practice and theory within heritage management. This of course does not mean that archaeology is all-powerful, and is itself constrained by bureaucratic expediency, or economic or natural resource concerns. Heritage management is a form of cultural politics and is a part of struggles and debates over cultural and historical identity. The interest of archaeology can be seen as only one of many interests represented in such a process, but it is often a privileged interest -- and archaeology is not an innocent bystander.

What does postprocessual theory say about heritage management?

The explicit political stance of postprocessual theory and the idea of a democratized debate between archaeology and other interest groups appears to have important implications for heritage management; particularly as managers must make sense of the politics of indigenous land claims and cultural sovereignty, ensure that informed consultation is undertaken and repatriate artefacts and remains.

Postprocessual writers have found that debates over the use of heritage sites reveal the political nature of archaeology (Shanks & Tilley 1987a; 1987b: 1989: also Hodder 1991a; 1991c). Viewing 'heritage' as a commodification of the past tied to a Thatcherite policy, they lament the use of archaeological interpretations within conservative or reactionary frameworks. Indeed, there is a sense in such writing that the growth of a conservative 'heritage industry' has extracted aspects of archaeological theory and interpretations of the past from archaeological control. Having thus defined heritage as an 'other', most postprocessual writers have used heritage as a pristine example of the conservative use of archaeological theory. Archaeology is presented as the innocent bystander within heritage management.

In reality heritage management interrelates with archaeology, rather than being separate, as is so often thought, and of a standard below that of academic archaeology (see Dunnell 1979; 1984; Renfrew 1983; Carman 1991; Smith 1992).

Postprocessual theory, as well as forming this traditional view of heritage management as separate from archaeology, addresses the politics of archaeology in so highly abstract a way that it provides no reference point for those archaeologists who must deal with immediate political issues. The notions of discourse and interpretation, useful in identifying different concerns and interests, are made into overly theorized analyses that obscure the real political issues that may underlie conflicts between archaeologists, indigenous communities, land developers and other groups.

Postprocessual theory, which often only conceives of competing interests as discursively or linguistically constructed, fails to provide any real explanatory power in understanding the political basis of cultural, social or economic conflict over heritage sites. Nor is insight offered with regard to how such conflict is conceptually or politically structured. In privileging discourse postprocessual theory gets caught up in epistemological debates and fails to engage with extradiscursive influences on archaeological debates. Discourse is reduced to a notion of 'interest', and the powerful notions of ideological dominance are either ignored or abstracted (Eagleton 1991). Postprocessual theory, and Leone's use of 'communicative action' in particular, provides no insight into the generative structures and institutions through which particular discourses are privileged over others. By allowing 'other voices', without considering how archaeological discourse is used outside the academy, postprocessualism marginalizes other interests.

The postprocessual position that views heritage management as separate from archaeology, and which privileges discursivity, obscures the reality that heritage management:

* as a protector of archaeological data has a very real mutually constitutive relationship with the development of archaeological theory -- regardless of your theoretical persuasion;

* provides institutional authority for archaeology outside academia;

* provides archaeology with an intellectual identity that has been taken up within state discourses;

* provides archaeology with an intellectual role in the politics of cultural identity.

Not only is access to archaeological sites ensured and regulated through heritage management, but the sites, and how we manage them, are tied to our disciplinary identity and our claim to authority.

Archaeologists as intellectuals in heritage management

In Bauman's (1987; 1992) distinction between 'legislators' and 'interpreters', 'legislator' relates to the traditional Enlightenment view of intellectuals and knowledge. The legislator makes authoritative statements which may arbitrate, due to the legislator's superior knowledge, over procedural rules which ensure the attainment of 'truth'. The 'interpreter' represents intellectual practice in a post-modern sense, translating statements made in one communally based tradition across to a system of knowledge based on another tradition. The interpreter aims to facilitate communication between autonomous (sovereign) participants in the social order, rather than choosing 'rational' paths towards an 'improved' social order.

In opposition to 'post-modern' grandiose claims Bauman makes two important points. Firstly, that the two forms of intellectual practice may, and do, co-exist. Further, the interpreter role is not necessarily socially or politically progressive, nor an 'improvement' on the legislator role. The interpreter does not abandon the claims of intellectuals to meta-professional authority, the privileged position of the intellectual in making binding statements on procedural rules.

By Bauman's definitions, archaeologists within heritage management act as both legislators and interpreters. They are legislators in that their knowledge arbitrates on conflicts over heritage sites, and interpreters because archaeological knowledge is used as an interpretative bridge, particularly in post-colonial societies, between different knowledge bases. It is the role of interpreter that postprocessualists have attempted to theorize, and that heritage managers have, in recent years, attempted to politicize. However, in doing so neither the postprocessualists nor the heritage managers have abandoned the role of legislator, and often use the role of legislator to legitimize their role as interpreter.

Heritage management, the state and the politics of cultural identity

Through these two intellectual roles, archaeology occupies an active position in the state's arbitration of cultural, social and historical identity.

The use of heritage items as a focus for a sense of place, identity and/or community is well documented in the heritage literature (e.g. Lowenthal 1990; P.J. Fowler 1992). Indigenous people are increasingly using material culture to focus political movements for self-identification and sovereignty (Langford 1983; McGuire 1992). Archaeological discourses are often taken up within debates over indigenous identity and cultural politics, as well as conflicts over historical and social identities and the use of heritage by tourism enterprises. Groups and individuals actively use material culture to construct ways of knowing the past and present which differ from the archaeological and/or bureaucratic versions of the past. Often, these cultural and historical identities are contested and disputed, especially those of indigenous people reasserting a contemporary sense of cultural identity. This is also the case for constructing historical and social identity by various communities in Western and non-Western countries. Hewison (1987), noting that these contested identities can take on a reactionary and nostalgic aspect, misses the point that communities or social groups can legitimately use material culture to deepen old or construct new identities from which they may challenge received ideas of history.

The important point is that archaeological discourse may be taken up by the state, or other participants in debates over identity, with or without the consent of the archaeological community. Yet archaeology obtains a degree of authority through the legislative use of archaeological discourse in such debates and conflicts.

In Australia, archaeological knowledge and pronouncements have been taken up to regulate normative perceptions of Aboriginal people. Archaeological knowledge becomes legislative, and archaeological knowledge may be used to support cultural and ideologically loaded assumptions about Aborigines not intended by the archaeological community. Pronouncements by archaeologists on the effects to Tawmanian culture of isolation from the mainland have been used to support racist doctrines, and have influenced the debate on Tasmania Aboriginal identity (see Bickford 1979; Sykes 1979; Langford 1983). However, for archaeologists to proclaim that the use of their theories is something that they do not and cannot control misses the point of what is done with archaeology. The perceptions by post-processualists, like Shanks and Tilley, that heritage is an 'other', that the use of archaeological knowledge within the heritage industry is something external to archaeology, again obscures the dependent relationship of intellectuals with the state.

To illustrate further the point that archaeologists can become unwilling arbiters in the politics of identity, even when they are attempting to support indigenous claims, I want to examine legislative developments in the USA and Australia. Archaeologists point to the US Native American Graves and Repatriation Act, 1990 and the Australian Northern Territory Land Rights Act, 1976 as examples where archaeologists have worked in and with the state to frame and administer legislation that recognizes indigenous claims (Ucko 1983; Goldstein & Kintigh 1990; Leone & Preucel 1992). Ucko (1983; 1986) argues that the Northern Territory Land Rights legislation has politically legitimized archaeology in Australia, as archaeology was perceived to have helped Aborigines in claiming back their land. In both the USA and Australia, legislation is implemented by archaeologists working within state discourses and institutions which administer and interpret these laws (see Edwards 1975; Leone & Preucel 1992: 130). Archaeological and anthropological knowledge is used to arbitrate on claims to land or to cultural property. Indigenous people are placed in situations where archaeological information used in ways imposed and structured by the state, works to undermine the legitimacy of indigenous knowledge of their own pasts. Archaeologists acting as 'intellectual interpreters' under these acts are also legislators in Bauman's terminology. In Australia, at least, intellectual and political legitimacy for archaeology in a post-colonial state is obtained through this process, within a hierarchy of power relations that places indigenous knowledge below that of archaeology. Without recognizing these unequal power relations, archaeology cannot achieve democratic discourse with indigenous groups.

Heritage management ties archaeology directly to the politics of cultural identity. What is problematic for heritage managers, and other archaeologists concerned with debates about cultural identity, is that the intellectual identity and authority of the archaeological community is also inextricably tied up in the outcome of such debates. This observation has relevance to the United Kingdom as well as post-colonial societies. Archaeology is used by, and within, state discourses about the British past and the pasts of non-indigenous peoples in post-colonial societies (Gidiri 1974; D.D. Fowler 1987), and to legitimize the commodification of the past by the heritage industry. It is also the case that archaeology is used to mediate on contested histories about class, gender and ethnicity. Although archaeologists may oppose such uses of archaeology, archaeology obtains legitimacy this way.

Postprocessual theory has not engaged fully with the institutionalization of power relations within and between the academy and bureaucracy even though postprocessualists gesture at their importance. By privileging subjectivity and discursivity in a way that de-emphasizes power, structure and institutions, and by ignoring the institutionalization of the authority and identity of archaeology, postprocessualists have entrapped themselves within an intellectual framework that focuses debate back onto matters concerning archaeological authority over that of other interest groups. This is done in such a manner that the archaeological status quo is never really challenged.

Heritage management and postprocessual theory: the self-referential bind

By ignoring the institutionalization of archaeology, postprocessual debates about heritage management ignore the very institutions that frame and control heritage discourses. The way these debates over heritage are framed closely parallels, ironically, the way similar debates were framed in the 1970s by processual archaeologists.

Tilley -- arguing that archaeology through salvage excavation '... rather than conform to the heritage industry, ought to be challenging it' (1989: 279, original emphasis) -- simply rehearses processual debates. His arguments for scientific rigour and for regional archaeology are those of the 1970s US processualists who argued that heritage management must engage with the New Archaeology and adopt scientific methodology and regional studies if salvage work was to be relevant (Smith in press b). Debates then and now are framed by the legislative role that archaeology plays within the state.

Hodder (1989c) calls for more self-reflection in heritage management, arguing that heritage reports should adopt a narrative style and abandon dry scientism. By adopting an engaging first-person style, he hopes to 'plage the archaeological past more completely in the public hands' (1989c: 272). Without engaging with the authority archaeology gains through heritage management, all that this can achieve is the personalization of archaeological authority. Again, debates about heritage management are structured around issues of archaeological control or archaeological 'stewardship' of the past.

Shanks, debating issues raised by the use of archaeological sites in the construction of cultural identity, states: '... this is crucial, responsibility is owed to the past. To ignore what the past is and use it to justify any desired invention is an injustice against the past and an offence against reason.' (1992: 117). The sense that archaeologists deal with an absolute past, and are responsible for the 'truth' of this past, appears to underlie Hodder's (1992) recent criticism of his earlier work, and his argument that postprocessual theory must incorporate processual tenets. Such concerns, and Shanks' appeal to the authority of rationality, closely parallel the concerns of processual archaeologists in the 1970s. Once we question the role of indigenous peoples in archaeology, we find we can only 'empower' indigenous concerns (to use a term often employed in these debates) by undermining the institutional authority of archaeology.

To admit the legitimacy of indigenous people's interpretations of their own pasts makes archaeology relinquish established claims to authority based on the absolute rationality of archaeological science. In siding with indigenous claims archaeology marginalizes itself within the heritage process and state apparatus. In Australian archaeological managers, often seen to support 'black issues', are viewed as less 'objective' and 'rational' than natural resource managers (Sullivan 1992).

Postprocessualists have reached an impasse. To advocate the legitimacy of indigenous and other groups' perceptions of the past they must employ notions of an absolute past and the rhetoric of 'rationality' or risk losing intellectual authority. They must incorporate both the role of interpreter and legislator. This impasse is the same one faced by heritage managers, who deal with indigenous claims and sympathize with the need for indigenous peoples to control the construction, through heritage, of their cultural identities. Australian and US heritage managers, who have adopted codes of ethics and procedures for repatriation and consultation with indigenous peoples (Goldstein & Kintigh 1990; Davidson 1991; Williams & Johnston 1991), will achieve little in the long term without also challenging and altering the institutional basis of archaeological authority. When debates sparked by indigenous and other marginalized groups lead back to concerns about archaeological control of the past the original concerns are only belittled. If the desire to ensure that archaeology undertakes political action is framed by the language and concepts employed in debates that helped lead to the dominance of archaeology in the first place, nothing changes, and archaeological authority over other legitimate claims remains.

Conclusion

Despite the theoretical rhetoric concerning 'other voices', postprocessual debates have only turned inward within archaeology. Postprocessual theory has given us some insight into what we do and why we think we do it, but we still do not know what it is that archaeology does. We have yet to understand clearly the effects of archaeology within the state and how the state in turn influences archaeology. The way archaeology has been institutionalized within the state influences not only archaeological practice, but also the development and expression of theory. By ignoring what archaeology does, postprocessual theory has not overcome the conceptual barriers that have prevented the expansion of discussions concerning the plurality of voices in archaeology, beyond issues tied to concerns over the rights of access of archaeology to the past. The failure to break out of this discursive loop has meant that postprocessualism has become archaeologists writing to archaeologists about writing about archaeology (see Tilley 1991; Shanks 1992).

I do not suggest that I have found answers to these problems. But archaeology cannot just express concern over Thatcherite use of the past, the commodification of tourism and the need to enter into discourse with indigenous people and other groups, and then turn inward upon itself. The solutions lie in archaeology engaging with far broader concerns than the post-modern turn has provided. We need to examine the role of archaeology in the state, the institutionalization and structures of power and authority, and the interrelation between the history of archaeological theory and state and bureaucratic apparatus.

Many of the issues raised by postprocessual archaeology are played out daily in heritage management. With its engagement with politics heritage management may indeed be seen as a 'postprocessual archaeology'. And like postprocessualists, heritage managers are caught within the bind presented by the desire to align with indigenous and other marginalized groups, while insuring that we do not marginalize both ourselves and those we have aligned with in the process of politicization. Unlike postprocessual archaeology, however, it is heritage management and its position within the state that is actively impacting upon and defining the political uses of archaeology.

Acknowledgements. This paper was written during my stay as a Visiting Scholar with the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, Cambridge University. It was originally given as a seminar in the Department of Archaeology & Anthropology, Cambridge University -- my thanks to the audience for their useful comments and discussion. My research at Cambridge was funded by Charles Sturt University and the Department of Prehistorical & Historical Archaeology, University of Sydney. The paper benefited from discussions with Robert Preucel Ezra Zubrow and Trevor Purvis (Department of Sociology, Lancaster University). Thank you to my fellow Visiting Scholars for their support at Cambridge. I am much indebted to Gary Campbell (La Trobe University) for reading, re-reading, and commenting upon the various drafts of this paper, for introducing me to the work of Bauman and the sociological literature, and for contributing the humorous bit.

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