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Comments on Julian Thomas (2004): Archaeology and modernity. New York: Routledge.

In the spring of 2005 I had the opportunity to attend Julian Thomas’ excellent talk, ‘Archaeology and modernity: Depth and surface,’ at the Archaeology Research Facility at the University of California Berkeley. At the same time I had been reading bits and pieces of Thomas’ recent book Archaeology and Modernity (2004b), which the talk nicely summarised. In both performance and paperwork Thomas has raised a number of extremely important and fundamental questions about the nature of archaeology and how archaeology has ‘conceived’ its key ingredients – humanity, materiality, space and time – in the context of the discipline’s relationship to modernity. This work and its core argument deserve further consideration and discussion. In brief, archaeology, for Thomas, could not have existed prior to the modern era because modern thought created the very conditions for the existence of archaeology. Archaeology is distinctively modern. Well, at least this might be construed as how it has always characterised itself. After all, it is important to question, how else could it be? It is this matter of concern that Thomas and I share. In what follows here I will not engage so much with the idiosyncrasies of the book as much as this issue of archaeology and modernity in general. Let it suffice to say that the book is a rich and valuable contextualisation of the history of modernity and its relationship to archaeology (albeit from a modernist perspective) and for this it should be read. We should begin with the question of what modernity is. For Thomas: ‘modernity may represent a chronological division of human experience, but more importantly it is distinguished by the growth of a particular philosophical outlook, and by particular ways humans have operated socially’ (2004b:2). Modernity came about through a revolution in how humans thought of themselves in relation to the world. Modernity is characterised by epistemic breaks and philosophical ruptures against the Aristotelian teleology and dynastic rulership of medieval Europe and toward Renaissance humanism, Cartesian dualisms, rationalism, atomism and so on. With the social contract in place, the crossed-out God was replaced by Man. Constructed, planned, ordered, modern life, Thomas emphasises, is put into theory before it is put into practice. Without modernity there would be no archaeology. There would also be no sciences, no nation-states. Without modernity, according to Thomas, the world would be a very different place. So to underline the point, modernity is a constellation of ideological, material and social beliefs oriented around notions of progress and development, which presuppose a separation with the past (for further work in archaeology on the topic of modernity