ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the history of Anglophone archaeological discourse about material culture. The ‘governing’ role archaeological knowledge came to play in disputes about material culture will be analysed, with emphasis on how this was applied in America and Australia. It argues that American and Australian archaeology reached its fullest extent as a technology of government, via CRM, during the late 1960s and 1970s, and examines how this came about by identifying the preconditions and disciplinary attributes that made this possible. A detailed history of the discipline is not intended. Rather the aim is to develop an argument about archaeological governance, in the context of the discipline’s history, by locating the conditions of emergence of an ‘archaeological’ discourse on material culture which was able to make itself useful in a political sense by arbitrating aspects of conflicts over material culture.
