ABSTRACT
Modern humans are clearly different in form and behaviour from our other ancestors known only from archaeology – though recent studies are obscuring that clarity. The power of the colonising countries, and the fact that their archaeological work was initiated early, established the frameworks that have been a dominant influence on almost all that has been written about the process of human evolution since the nineteenth century. The point of the catalogue of uncertainties about the basic elements that contribute to the views archaeologists have about the past is that many of the theoretical assumptions that have made it possible to tell a story have been less carefully examined than some of the data. The essential starting point for decolonisation and a postcolonial critique must be a definition of colonialism – on the assumption that ‘decolonisation’ refers to a process of undoing colonialism, and postcolonialism is what comes next.
