Writing about archaeology is the archaeologist's most lasting contribution to society. In less than two hundred years, archaeology has fundamentally changed most people's understanding of the human past and the way in which many of us view ourselves. It has made vital contributions to our consciousness of who we are and where we are. In the long term, however, this has been accomplished not merely by the excavations, field surveys and variety of analyses that are usually thought of as the core of archaeological endeavour but by the presentation of such work and its results in one or another published form. As Joyce et al. (2002: 6–7), citing Walter Taylor (1948: 34–35) and James Deetz (1988: 15–20), have pointed out, the very word ‘archaeology’ covers two different activities, in which ‘the writing of archaeology [is] as integral to the production of archaeological knowledge as encounters in the field’. Indeed, the discipline of archaeology consists of the body of published material that has been built up by many thousands of writers, many of whom are now dead, creating a massive data base from which we can retrieve information and which we constantly augment, correct and revise. This data base constitutes the archaeological ‘canon’, meaning neither a misspelled antiquated weapon nor a member of the Christian clergy but a generally recognized body of publications that are central to research and teaching in our discipline and that form a material expression of its scholarship.