It would be churlish (as well as difficult), when my own work is treated so generously in this article, to object to its thrust too strongly. But agreement does not make for much of a dialogue! Let me state my agreements briefly, then.1.Versluys has nailed the terminological impasse: ‘Romanization’ is far worse than Romanization, because it has all the sins of the former without its conviction. But I have less sympathy for those TRAC speakers ‘ordered’ not to use the concept by their supervisors. If they can answer the many criticisms made of the concept, and make it work for them on their material, let them demonstrate this. If not, they need to find something better.2.Versluys also seems to me quite correct that some postcolonial approaches have often ended up in an unsatisfactory anti-colonialism. Yvon Thébert (1978) made a similar objection when he asked whether Bénabou (1976) had decolonized the history of Africa in the Roman period or simply turned it on its head. Denouncing ancient imperialism, colonialism and racial and sexual abuse might make us feel more comfortable, but it does not improve our analysis. I would add that it has also allowed British Romanists to return to a very traditional preoccupation: rewriting the Roman chapters of ‘our island's story’ in dialogue with contemporary imperial preoccupations.3.Versluys argues that we should ‘focus on “cultural transformation taking place in the context of empire” rather than on “imperialism and colonialism”’ (p. 8). This too makes very good sense. But I wonder what the word ‘cultural’ adds to this programme? Does it operate to exclude the study of other kinds of change (economic? technological? agricultural?). I doubt that this is what Versluys advocates and cannot see the advantage of arbitrarily demarcating one sphere of life as ‘cultural’ and excluding discussion of other changes. And I doubt that it would be possible to do this in any case. How would we talk about bathing without aqueducts, engineering and hydrology, as well as euergetism, notions of the body and foodways? Or about wine without thinking about techniques of agriculture, exchange systems and so on. If the abundant recent literature on entanglement – along with Hodder (2012) I am thinking particularly of Thomas (1991), Dietler (2010) and Garrow and Gosden (2012) – has taught us nothing else, it is that we cannot easily separate ‘the cultural’ from the rest of life. Or does ‘cultural’ give holistic accounts of change a particular flavour? Or does it designate some particularSchwerpunktefor study? I have more sympathy with this position, but I suspect that it now obstructs more than it illuminates our projects. Now that ‘culture’ is no longer the final chapter of a book which has already dealt with conquest, administration, politics, the army, agriculture, manufacture and trade, town and country, and late antique decline (the traditional format of volumes in the genre ‘provincial history’), perhaps we no longer need to signal so strongly that culture is all-encompassing and can simply study together the whole set of changes with which we are concerned?All the same, I am wary of signing up at once to Romanization 2.0. My commentary is an attempt to articulate my reasons for this reluctance.

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Abstract The question ‘Can an archaeologist be a public intellectual?’ appears to express both an unfulfilled desire and a secret hope of an entire professional corps to count among them at least a few public intellectuals. I suggest that the state of the discipline of archaeology makes it harder, compared with other disciplines, for its professional representatives to address present-day issues and relate to public debates. I also suggest that maybe the most significant effect of the fact that society's public intellectuals generally do not have degrees in archaeology is that participants in public debates and policy makers are unaware of how various applications of archaeology and cultural heritage can benefit contemporary society. This potential will therefore have to be realized in different ways.

Duncan Garrow's article is a thought-provoking review of the concept of structured deposition and I agree with several of the points he makes. Thinking along the same lines, I would like to make a few additional remarks on structured deposition.

I congratulate Duncan Garrow on his very engaging history of the concept of structured deposition, although I find it slightly terrifying that this history now extends over nearly 30 years. I find much to agree with in his account, notably the distressing point that what was originally intended as a heuristic has sometimes become an end in itself: the identification of a class of deposits that are ‘structured’. Thus, for instance, Bishop, Church and Rowley-Conwy argue (2009, 82) that pits in Neolithic Scotland may have represented ‘places of structured deposition rather than domestic settlements’, and that therefore the plant remains contained within them should be regarded as unrepresentative. Here, structured deposits take on the abject character that used to be afforded to ‘ritual’ phenomena in archaeology: having been identified as irrational and abnormal, their interpretation is considered beyond archaeological competence, and they are not subjected to further analysis.

Abstract An interview with Evžen Neustupný opens up a range of issues regarding the theory and history of archaeology and its development in Central Europe. His view of the discipline differs in many ways from that of current global trends. His ‘artefact archaeology’ inverts the concept of adaptation and highlights the role of artefacts in the creation of the human world. The interview also shows that post-war archaeology even to the east of the Iron Curtain followed the trajectory from culture-history paradigm to processualism and onwards. It also testifies to the situation in the social sciences under the Communist regime and the ambiguous role of Marxist philosophy.

Abstract This paper explores a central paradox in the aims of the archaeology of the contemporary past as they have been articulated by its practitioners. On the one hand, its aim has been expressed as one of making the familiar ‘unfamiliar’, of distancing the observer from their own material world; a work of alienation. On the other hand, it has also aimed to make the past more accessible and egalitarian; to recover lost, subaltern voices and in this way to close the distance between past and present. I suggest that this paradox has stymied its development and promoted a culture of self-justification for a subfield which has already become well established within archaeology over the course of three decades. I argue that this paradox arises from archaeology's relationship with modernity and the past itself, as a result of its investment in the modernist trope of archaeology-as-excavation and the idea of a past which is buried and hidden. One way of overcoming this paradox would be to emphasize an alternative trope of archaeology-as-surface-survey and a process of assembling/reassembling, and indeed to shift away from the idea of an ‘archaeology of the contemporary past’ to speak instead of an archaeology ‘in and of the present’. This would reorient archaeology so that it is seen primarily as a creative engagement with the present and only subsequently as a consideration of the intervention of traces of the past within it. It is only by doing this that archaeology will develop into a discipline which can successfully address itself to the present and future concerns of contemporary societies. Such a move not only has implications for archaeologies of the present and recent past, but concerns the very nature and practice of archaeology as a discipline in its broadest sense in the 21st century.

I am totally for the archaeology in and of the present that Rodney Harrison defends in his powerful text. In fact, I have defended a similar idea elsewhere, although in a rather less eloquent and straightforward way. I have suggested that we could transform ethnoarchaeology, an archaeological subdiscipline that already deals with the present, into a true ‘archaeology of the present . . . that . . . deals with people that are alive and things that are in full use, and which accepts that all presents are entangled with a diversity of pasts in a percolating time’ (González-Ruibal 2006a, 112). With the author, I think that archaeological engagements should not be reduced to the past – understood as something remote and finished: archaeology can be a very creative way of dealing with the present, and even of transforming it. I also coincide with Harrison in considering that the archaeology of the contemporary past is less harassed than we tend to think and that we should be less anxious in defending ourselves against possible attackers and focusing more on creating exciting work.

Abstract This paper sets out to re-member coins into archaeological discourse. It is argued that coins, as part of material culture, need to be examined within the theoretical framework of historical archaeology and material-culture studies. Through several case studies we demonstrate how coins, through their integration of text, image and existence as material objects, offer profound insights not only into matters of economy and the ‘big history’ of issuers and state organization but also into ‘small histories’, cultural values and the agency of humans and objects. In the formative period of archaeology in the 19th century the study of coins played an important role in the development of new methods and concepts. Today, numismatics is viewed as a field apart. The mutual benefits of our approach to the fields of archaeology and numismatics highlight the need for a new and constructive dialogue between the disciplines.

In western Europe, cultural resource management agencies have enforced, through treaties and legislation, the principle that archaeological sites endangered by development are protected. Excavation has played – and still plays – a major role in this: thousands of archaeological sites that are threatened by destruction have been ‘rescued’ through excavations. While treaties (e.g. Malta 1992, 4.2) and legislations (e.g. Planning Policy Statement 5, A.13;Wet op de archeologische monumentenzorg, 2007) stipulate that rescue excavation stands equal to protection, they also acknowledge that there are better ways – likein situpreservation – to protect our heritage.