ABSTRACT
Most academic disciplines are deeply divided fields of argument and uncertainty; this can make them quite stimulating, the big interesting questions seem to remain forever unanswered, and very much so in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Archaeologists vigorously debate theory and method, as well as accounts offered of the likes of the origins of agriculture, the origins of civilization and complex society, the role of traded goods in ancient empires, the reasons for collective burial in prehistoric monuments. These arguments are like storms in a tea cup compared with a broader sense of crisis facing the archaeological past in the present. There are today unprecedented threats to the material past, enormous challenges of managing the loss, of mitigating the impacts on archaeological sites coming from urban and rural development. The archaeological imagination is rooted in a sensibility, a pervasive set of attitudes towards traces and remains, towards memory, time and temporality, the fabric of history.
