It is a great pity that archaeologists tend not to write like this. Over the last decade with the rise (and the eagerly awaited fall) of post modernist perspectives in the discipline we have become accustomed to archae­ologists proselytising about the aridity of much archaeological writing, supposedly brought about by a lack of critical self-reflection, or by an outmoded adherence to the subject-object distinction.

But answering the call for a more "humane" archaeology has instead simply led to the replacement of a "positivist" aridity with even more vapid, abstracted, and disconnected discourse about archaeology, with interpretation stalled in abstractions of poorly understood and even more poorly applied perspectives from the human sciences or from "cultural studies".

Instead of the passion and high principle which is evident in best of Gordon Childe's writing or even, surprisingly, the closing chapter of more conventional works such as Lubbock's Prehistoric Times, we have regular rehearsals of the elite sensibilities of archaeologists from centres of academic over-production in England and the United States.