ABSTRACT
From World Heritage Sites to World Systems, global perspectives have come to play a dominant role in archaeology. The proliferation of variously ‘World’- entitled journals and the publication of the many volumes that are the proceedings of the 1986 World Archaeological Congress (One World Archaeology) attest to the prominence of the idea of a world archaeology/prehistory. There is a tendency to place the birth of this highly influential concept some time in the 1960s, the decade of emotive satellite imagery of the planet and McLuhan’s ‘global village’. Capturing the public spirit, ‘World’ projects featured in United Nations/Unesco and environmental initiatives of the 1980s. Interrelating the global and local, the very big and small, by transcending or bringing pressure to bear upon the ‘middle’—the nation-‘One World’ is a compelling and apt contemporary ideology. It has come to supercede ‘united nations’, whatever the basis of their unity, inasmuch as it suggests the possibility of a world without borders.
