Digging up old stuff has perhaps not enjoyed such popularity since the heady days of Schliemann at Troy. Amateur enthusiasts with metal detectors search fields for Roman treasure, Time Team’s three-day digs command audiences in the millions, and documentaries detail the recovery and identification of bodies from the trenches of the First World War. Numerous websites list opportunities for volunteer archaeologists, offering backbreaking manual labour in the heat and dust, wages and accommodation not included. Archaeologists even hit the news, embedded with military units, trying to save Sumerian treasures from destruction in the Iraq war. Just what lies underneath all this?

As an academic discipline, rather than in popular culture, archaeology finds it rather more difficult to justify itself in these days of university impact statements and funding cuts. One of the first victims of the new government’s spending retrenchment was the proposed £25m Stonehenge visitor centre. Although Augustus Pitt Rivers long ago established a clear divide between archaeology and antiquarianism, by including mundane objects in the record as well as things of beauty or value, archaeology can still be uncomfortable with itself as a discipline. Within archaeology debates rage between those unhappy with the rigid but human-centred scientific approach of the ‘New Archaeology’ of the 1960s (‘archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing’) and postmodernists who stress the role of interpretation over process, culturally-sensitive self-reflexivity over impartiality.

In a wider context, some object to the damage digs may do to the environment, or have ethical concerns about the destruction of sites of importance to descendant peoples. Still others hold up the presence of archaeological sites as reasons to block developments such as dams, often despite the fact that these sites will go unexcavated because of the prohibitive cost or the aforementioned ethical concerns. To cap it all, there are problems of looting, and the fact that objects that have already entered the archaeological record are now increasingly subject to repatriation claims.

Perhaps it is partly in response to these dilemmas that archaeologists have sought to reach out and popularise their work. But does this run the risk of reducing the study of prehistory to the modern equivalent of charting your family tree? An entertaining diversion for the amateur history nut? With no great damage done but not much uncovered either? While we do not need to shed any tears at the demise of the Indiana Jones model of white man brings beauty back from savagery, do we not need to articulate better just what archaeology is good for? After all, without it we have no way of finding out more about the historical development of pre-literate human societies: the early development of technology, agriculture and religion, or supplementing what meagre written records we may have from ancient cultures. Should we be more serious about digging up the past?

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