Compelling futures and ever-present pasts. Realigning the archaeology of us

Abstract

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.