ABSTRACT
Responsibility to the public, perhaps especially for what many of its members will see as a recondite and expensive activity, demands three elements: scientific integrity, financial accountability, and a popularly-visible product. Environmental archaeology should be one of the most interesting, even most exciting, stories to emerge from research endeavour. A problem seems to be to make the intellectual leap, both conceptually and in presentation, from the mini-contextual to the palaco-global, to contemporary relevance and to useful prediction. The environmental archaeology must be expanded to embrace contemporary cultural structures, such as the political rather than merely the meteorological climate, and the change seen as an opportunity rather than a setback. Nevertheless the significant development for environmental archaeology could be the scientific indicators of medium-term environmental change, nor is it at all irrelevant for us as environmental archaeologists to note the public concern being fuelled by the indicators.
