ABSTRACT
Archaeology suffers from a particular version of this dilemma. One of its claims is that social and personal identity depends on a secure sense of past which archaeologists produce through objective knowledge and the acceptance of its findings in the established structures of academic bureaucracy. For cultural heritage to be significant it must therefore be unifying and transcendent and be constitutive of a sense of personal and group identity. The models and theories of identity developed in archaeology share elements of both these paradigms. Nations without pasts are a contradiction in terms and archaeology has been one of the principal suppliers of the raw material for constructing pasts in modern struggles for nationhood. Archaeologists, of whatever political persuasion, are involved inevitably as producers of expert knowledges. The social construction of archaeological pasts is more than personal values getting involved in the academic enterprise. The chapter suggests has been the key value motivating archaeological work is the notion of identity employed.
