In over 30 years of graduate and undergraduate teaching, I have taught everything from large introductory offerings with an audience of 300, to advanced undergraduate seminars, even a graduate course for two people on writing about archaeology. In all these years, I am struck by two constants: the general enthusiasm of my students for archaeology and their startling lack of ability to think for themselves and be intellectually self-reliant, something found in every academic discipline. These same 30 years have encompassed a period of remarkable change in archaeology-new theoretical paradigms, the increasing emphasis on stewardship and management, startling and sometimes dramatic discoveries, and a quantum jump in our ability to extract fine-grained information from the archaeological record. Yet, every winter, when I step into the classroom to address another audience of impressionable undergraduates, I find everything is the same. The expectations of my colleagues and students, the university regulations surrounding testing and scoring, the questions students ask, even the distinctive aroma in the classroom on a wet day.

The Medieval Hindu temples of Puri, Rhubaneswar and Konark are promoted as Orissa's version of northern India's ‘Golden Triangle’ of Agra, Fatehpur Sikri and Jaipur. One of the less affluent States in India, Orissa stands to benefit from tourism (FIGURE 1). The promotion seeks to appeal to all Indians and foreigners and also to prompt an image of Orissa as a distinct region. Such duality is typical among the diversity of community, ethnic, communal, federalist and national values at issue in India (Chatterjee 1993: 75).

Cultivation of the temples is nothing new. Whatever the original purposes of icons, significance is ascribed, not simply inherent. It depends on economic or political interest and context (Cohen 1985). Harrison (1999) has argued that images of ethnicity tend to be defended as if at risk of pollution or theft by outsiders. Under the influence of European ideology, the commonest symbol for ethnic or nationalist aspiration is language but religion and other markers of culture have been used too (Smith 1981). Other than religion, one of the criteria for invoking the temples is the discipline of archaeology. However, archaeology too is a Western conceptual idiom (Cohn 1983: 209). Although literacy — including in the ‘English medium’ — is spreading, archaeology is not appreciated by everyone in Orissa. Partly for that reason, there have been various views as to how the temples should be presented and to whom.

‘How is it that your countrymen steal our gods?’ asked a Brahmin of the Baptist missionary, John Chamberlain who noted the details of this conversation in his diary on 20 November 1817 (Davis 1997: 164):

Education, a primary mode for transmitting society's knowledge, values and beliefs, is a highly political endeavour. To understand fully the place of archaeology within the framework of public education in the United States, some background in the broader political landscape and sanctioned curricula in American schools is necessary. This article examines some key aspects of these issues, including governmental control of education, the ‘history of history’ in schools, and the appropriation of the past. It also looks at the status of archaeology education in the United States and considers an appropriate role for pre-college archaeology.

In Ireland I think it could be said that while archaeology plays an important role in national identity, this role is implicit and not very welldefined. Images of monuments in mist or glorious sunshine and artefacts displayed as treasure or jewellery are very widely deployed. This constructed past serves a variety of different purposes for a rapidly changing present, from utilization as a symbol of the long tradition of Ireland's high technological expertise — nowadays being best expressed in the computing industry, as a backdrop for the sustained (as opposed to sustainable) drive to increase tourism, to the context for a call of a revitalization of Celtic spirituality (see discussion in Gibbons 1996). More traditionally, of course, material remains played a very important role in the construction of national identities in Ireland (e.g. Crooke 1999). For these varied reasons archaeology is seen in a positive light, as a positive project, both by political decision-makers and the public. One illustration of this is the Discovery Programme, a government-funded research initiative set up in 1991 to enhance knowledge of Ireland’s past through integrated programmes of archaeological research (Waddell 1997; Eogan 1998).

After the destruction of Ayodhya's Babri mosque in 1992 by supporters of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), the statement above seems laden with premonition of the events to come (Rao 1994). More importantly, Carnegy’s comments highlight that the mosque’s destruction was not simply the result of 20th-century politics. The events surrounding and following the outbreak of violence in 1992 have resulted in more ‘spilt ink’ than Carnegy could ever have imagined. This literature can be divided into two main categories; firstly, the initial documentation submitted to the government by a group of VHP aligned historians, which presented the ‘archaeological proof’ that the Babri mosque had occupied the site of a Hindu temple dating to the 10th and 11th century AD (VHP1990; New Delhi Historical Forum 1992). This was believed to have marked the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama (hence the name Rama Janmabhumi — literally ‘birthplace of Rama’), and been demolished at the orders of the Mughal emperor Babur during the 16th century. As a response, a second group of ‘progressive’ Indian historians began a counter-argument, based on the same ‘archaeological proof’ that no such temple had ever existed (Gopal et al. 1992; Mandal 1993). The second category is a growing body of literature which has filled many pages of international publications (Rao 1994; Navlakha 1994). Especially following the World Archaeology Congress (WAC) in Delhi (1994), and subsequently in Brač, Croatia (1998), this has been preoccupied with finding an acceptable route through the battlefield which arises as a result of the problematic, but recurrent, marriage between archaeology, folklore and politics (Kitchen 1998; Hassan 1995).

For a developing nation, Bangladesh has a surprisingly large number of active archaeological excavations and museums. Resources have been invested not only in the capital city of Dhaka, but also in regional centres where there are archaeological museums and sites open for public visitation. These venues, identified by politicians and philosophers as the repositories for symbols of heritage and national identity, provide another significant benefit in the form of open public space for recreation and leisure. The use of these spaces by growing numbers of urban-dwelling Bangladeshis illustrates the often under-appreciated phenomenon of domestic tourism as a component of archaeological heritage management in developing nations.

As cultural resource management (CRM) in the United States struggles through another period of introspection, one need for improvement consistently identified is in the area of graduate training of future practitioners of CRM archaeology (Fagan 1996; Green & Doershuk 1998; Schuldenrein 1998; Messenger et al. 1999). To what extent training in the practicalities of the field needs to be embodied in curricular coursework, the relative role of research versus applied emphases in the graduate programme, the most appropriate terminal degree for CRM practice, and the very specifics of what constitutes adequate preparation for the diverse and dynamic challenges that constitute contemporary archaeology in the United States, all provide points for the emerging discussion between professionals operating in the field and those in academia who design programmes (e.g. Society for American Archaeology 1995).

There are competing, yet interlinked, identities in Sri Lanka through which people ‘establish, maintain, and protect a sense of self-meaning, predictability, and purpose’ (Northrup 1989: 55). These have become established over hundreds of years, and communities are attributed labels including Sinhala, Tamil, Vadda, Buddhist and Hindu (Coningham & Lewer 1999: 857). Sri Lanka is now experiencing what Azar (1990) has called a ‘protracted social conflict’, wherein a section of the Tamil communities led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are engaged in a struggle to establish a Tamil honieland or Eelam. International links, especially with south India, have had important implications on the formation of identities in Sri Lanka. Here we will focus on a key influence which has deep archaeological and political implications, whose interpretation has informed and distorted the present understanding of the concept and evolution of identities. This theme, the Vijayan colonization of the island, illustrates the formulation of identities, especially as derived from a historical chronicle, the Mahavamsa, which was ‘rediscovered’ by colonial officials in AD 1826 and has played a major role in determining the dynamics of this conflict.

Archaeology in Britain is going through one of its periodic ‘crises’, but for once it is not a crisis of funding, but one rather brought on by success, with more money, more posts and more archaeology. Much of the new money emanates from Developer Funding; PPG-16 (DoE 1990), brought out by the Department of the Environment in the wake of a European Directive on the need to conserve the historic environment, requires developers, where possible, to preserve archaeological sites, and where not, to preserve by record, i.e. to excavate. Roles were split with, on the one side, local government having ‘curatorial responsibility’ to maintain Sites and Monuments Records (SMRs) and to advise on planning and development; and on the other, independent ‘archaeological units’ to carry out the work.