Archaeologists are often very disappointed when the past portrayed and evoked in our daily lives appears to derive from contemporary clichés and other imaginary preconceptions rather than accurate scholarship about past realities. This is understandable to the extent that the role of the archaeological scholar is defined as re-creating past life as accurately as possible from the traces that remain today. What is the purpose of their research, such archaeologists are asking themselves, when far too many contemporaries are satisfied by reconfirming those ever-same stereotypes about, for example, the primitive Stone Age and the pillaging Vikings?

In this chapter, however, I wish to argue that archaeology should not be concerned with assessing to what extent the past portrayed or evoked in our daily lives may or may not be historically accurate on scholarly grounds. Instead, archaeologists ought to be engaging with the overall role the past plays in present society. In that view, the role of the archaeological scholar is defined in relation to a past that derives from particular social practices in the present – of which academic archaeology itself is one. Therefore, archaeologists will need to give considerable attention to larger social, political, and indeed ethical issues. Ironically, in certain circumstances popular depictions of a past that never happened may have significant benefits for present society and would thus be preferable to those that, according to current scholarship, may historically be more accurate.