Getting on with Things

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Abstract In the final chapter of this book we explore this issue and suggest care as a mode of getting on with things. Being a sensitive, responsive, and nondiscriminatory way of attending to things, care involves far-ranging consequences for how we conceive of Stonehenge, an exploded bunker, rusted barbed wire, or a Greek perfume jar in terms of heritage and meaning. Moreover, at excavation sites and in museums and laboratories all over the world, this mode has been essential to our disciplinary practices. It is more appropriate than ever to urge disciplinary confidence. Thus, what is needed today, we conclude, is an archaeology that looks back at its own past with wonderment, approaches it without embarrassment and contempt, seeks to revitalize its important legacy, and folds this into a future vision for the care of things.