ABSTRACT

Definitional problems are already implied by the emergence of a strong field of modern material culture studies. Here the bridge between archaeology and other disciplines is created by the focus on material culture. But since material culture has long been of interest, however marginally, in anthropology and cultural studies, and since its study can be accomplished using ethnographic and social science techniques, this particular bridging or displacement only minimally challenges the separate identity of archaeology as the study of the material remains of the past. But when archaeology is used to excavate the present we see that the discipline

need not be confined to a preoccupation with the past but that it can be defined as a particular mode of inquiry into the present.