What conditions preserve archaeology, and what conditions accelerate decay? Here experts from York, using the wealth of experience and data gathered from that city, discuss the issues.

‘The separation of theory and practice is not one that will easily be overcome by academic and philosophical critique, however necessary and important these are.’ (Shanks & Tilley 1992: xxii). Here a team of archaeologists address this difficult theme, in the light of their experiences under the flightpath of Heathrow Airport.

A man and a woman were found in a double burial dating from the 1st century BC and located in a Xiongnu burial site in northern Mongolia. An offering box at the head of the man's coffin contained both remains of domestic animals and a human hyoid bone. The skeleton of the man was complete whereas the woman's hyoid bone was missing. The isolated hyoid bone could belong to the buried woman, which suggests the removal of her tongue and probably her sacrifice.

Analysis and dating of new Upper Palaeolithic sites suggest that microblades emerged in the Transbaikal after 18,000 years ago. These findings encourage review of earlier assertions that such technologies developed in northeast Asia prior to the last glacial maximum.

In 1995 Bruce Trigger dismissed the role of nationalism within the archaeology of south Asia (1995: 271), apparently ignoring even the archaeological nature of the crest of the new Indian republic — the Sarnath lion; and his comments have acted as a catalyst for this special number of papers, many of which explore the very real relationship between the south Asian nation-state and archaeology. We have expanded Trigger's tripartite division of nationalist, colonialist or imperialist archaeology (1984), to reflect the aspirations of additional units such as regions, religious groups and individual communities over the last 200 years. In so doing we have used the concept of identity, as offered by Northrup (1989: 63), to encompass these disparate groups:

This paper argues that Indian identity, as built within the colonial Indological framework of race, language and culture and its Aryan–non-Aryan dichotomy, is unacceptable to modern India and Indians. It is unacceptable because of its emphasis on the notion of Aryan invasion and the subjugation of, and interaction with, the native population. This notion, the key element of ancient Indian history, culture and archaeology, keeps a vast segment of Indian population away from a sense of positive participation in the country's past. Further, the key ingredient of this notion is the Indian Vedic literature, which thus makes it primarily a textual notion, and as long as it persists, the Indian upper castes, who ipso facto are given a place in the Aryan ruling order, have no particular reason to seek a primarily archaeologybased past for themselves. However, before we examine these twin formulations in some detail, it might be useful to look at how the question of identity is emerging as a major phenomenon in India in current years.

The idea of indigenous people in South Asia is more complex than elsewhere, in part because it involves longstanding and intimate contact between ‘tribal’ and non-tribal peoples (Béteille 1998; Gardner 1985; Lukacs in press). Additional complications arise from the hierarchal and endogamous structure of Hindu social and ritual organization, including the plight of people who occupy the lowest stratum of the hierarchy — ‘untouchables’ (Charsley 1996; Delikge 1992; 1993). Because the system of socioreligious stratification known as caste does not encourage social mobility, new ethnic identity is often sought by groups whose position in the hierarchy is low (Dumont 1980; Klass 1980; Kolinda 1978). Biological anthropologists are interested in the caste system for the opportunities it offers to understand the interaction of cultural behaviour with the biological patterning of human genetic and phenotypic diversity (Majumder 1998; Majumder et al. 1990; Malhotra 1974). Although most Westerners perceive caste as an immutable category, in which membership is ascribed, and hierarchal rank is forever fixed, many accounts of castes changing their occupational and ritual status have been documented (Silverberg 1968). Some castes seek to elevate their ritual or economic position by claiming higher status and adopting an appropriate new caste name, while others lay claim to indigenous origins seeking to benefit from rights and privileges that accompany autochthonous status. Such claims often involve adopting new or different patterns of behaviour commonly associated with the new social, religious, indigenous or occupational position claimed. This process is sufficiently common in India to be labelled ‘Sanskritization’ when a Hindu caste emulates higher castes (Srinivas 1968), ‘Hinduization’ when tribal or non-caste groups emulate Hindu castes, or more generally, ‘elite-emulation’ (Lynch 1969).