ABSTRACT
Despite apparent increases in the coverage of archaeological topics in newspapers, and in viewing figures for archaeological television programmes, the vast majority of the public has no interest or direct contact with what members of the archaeological profession consider to be their subject. The development of archaeology as an academic subject across the world in the last two hundred years has left most of humanity untouched and unworried. Nevertheless, many archaeologists have continued to express concern, particularly from the midtwentieth century, about the continued use of myth and wild and (in their eyes) unsustainable assertions about the past. This approach to archaeology is one for which I prefer to use the term ‘alternative archaeology’, rather than fringe or fantastic (see for example Williams 1991) or lunatic (e.g. Jordan 1981: 212) or cult or pseudo-scientific archaeology (e.g. Harrold and Eve 1987a) because all of these describe a series of alternatives to what might neutrally be described as mainstream archaeology.
