ABSTRACT
As Champion points out in his succinct discussion of recent theoretical developments in British archaeology, there is some contradiction between the unusually animated debate which has taken place over the past two decades and the relatively minimal impact which it has had in some quarters. From at least the time of David Clarke onwards, theoretical works emerging from the United Kingdom have had an international currency (see Clarke 1972a). It could be argued that this influence has been all the more profound since 1982 and the emergence of a range of semiotic, anthropological and sociological approaches to material culture whose initial gestation took place in Cambridge (Tilley 1989a: 185). Yet, as Champion implies, the interest in these developments has been patchy in British universities and virtually nonexistent in public archaeology. In the context of the present volume, it is equally significant that the extent to which archaeologists in the United States have been exercised by the debate over ‘postprocessual archaeology’ (either positively or negatively) (Earle & Preucel 1987; Preucel 1991) has not been matched in other parts of the world (see Andah 1995; Funari 1995; Mackie 1995; Politis 1995; Paddayya 1995). Understanding the predicament of archaeological theory in the United Kingdom involves two distinct issues: the character of the questions being debated, and the nature of the institutional context within which archaeological knowledge is produced. However, as demonstrated below, these two sides of the problem are not unrelated.
