ABSTRACT
If the ideas and practices of archaeology are so thoroughly knitted in to the fabric of modernity, the various critical evaluations of the modern condition that have been generated over the centuries will be of material significance to the future development of the discipline. Critiques of modernity may effectively amount to critiques of archaeology, and may point to ways in which the subject might be reformed. To begin with, one of the most evident pathologies of modern existence has been the way in which, since the Enlightenment, reason and science have been identified as the means of achieving a perfect society. The consequence of this has often been that human beings have been subjected to traumatic conditions which were the product of abstract planning: five-year plans, economic stimulus packages, regional development programmes (Falzon 1998: 66). In this way, the human sciences themselves have often been complicit in a calculative reason that seeks to overcome problems by reducing humans to numbers (Horkheimer and Adorno 1973: 7). Similarly, by applying the same logic to ‘natural resources’ one may achieve efficiency and economic success, but at the cost of alienating oneself from the phenomenal world. Related to this broadly Marxist argument is Nietzsche’s view that human beings have come to dominate nature through a rapacious will to truth, which lays everything bare and yet provides no spiritual enrichment. Modern rationality has denied people the consolation of religious belief, but has not been able to replace it with any other kind of ideal which might invest their lives with meaning (Love 1986: 4). Precisely because the Cartesian universe is one from which meaning has been evicted the modern experience is one of a listless nihilism in which we can produce colossal quantities of information but nothing of any real worth. Undoubtedly, there must be times when we will feel that this is true of archaeology: that we are able to extract great amounts of data from excavations without being convinced that we have got any closer to the lives of those who inhabited the place in the past.
