In the last chapter of What Happened in History, Childe touched on the problematic of Late Antiquity. His pessimistic view of that period was a variation on the theme of decadence. This theme had existed in the Roman Republic and under the Empire, long before there was any Late Antiquity to be decadent. It then persisted throughout the Middle Ages and found monumental expression in Gibbon's Decline and Fall. Childe, however, took it to excessive lengths in his denunciation of the politics, economy, and culture of the Late Roman Empire. Childe based his arguments largely on the work of Rostovtzeff and Heichelheim. Both these eminent historians were exiles: Rostovtzeff from the Russia of the October Revolution and Heichelheim from National Socialist Germany. It is no belittlement to say that their work was influenced by the insights of their political experiences. Childe, however, did not appreciate this and adopted their thinking somewhat uncritically. He further added parallels between the Roman Period and his own time, which resulted in an unduly dark vision of the last phase of the Roman Empire.

Anders Högberg is a Swedish archaeologist whose research offers an original perspective on prehistoric flint technology but he has also been directing some innovative projects in archaeological teaching and learning. In this interview I am exploring some of the ideas that have been guiding his work in both realms. Although part of the interview is about work conducted in the past, equal weight is given to new opportunities and developments that affect the future of archaeology. Anders Högberg's ideas cannot be said to be typical or representative for any larger community, but he is operating in very specific historic circumstances that are shared to a greater or lesser extent by many other archaeologists living and working today. This interview documents the particular views on material culture, public archaeology, and the field of archaeology more generally that were held by one European archaeologist in 2008.

This paper looks at representations of antiquity in cyberspace and discusses their meaning and position in global discourses on nationalism and identities. After a critical review of some recent discussions of globalization and the informational society, it adopts the concepts of ethnoscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes in examining the deployments of representations from antiquity in the web pages constructed by the Greek state, private organizations, and mostly Greek diasporic communities and individuals. It is suggested that organizations and individual social actors construct in cyberspace the national topos of Hellenism. In this process, representations from antiquity play a central and crucial role. Many social actors, mostly away from the ‘homeland’, form modern Hellenic ethnoscapes by projecting the national narrative and constructing an imaginative heterotopia where the personal becomes national and vice versa. These representations act as the currency of the symbolic capital of antiquity, a crucial resource in the foundation of the imagined community of the Hellenic nation. At the same time, they become an effective weapon in the ritual battles and contestations around the polarity between Greece and the West. Finally, representations from antiquity become a device which contributes to the ‘domestication’ of the cyberspace, its transformation from space to place, and its ‘materialization’ through the materiality that the representations of antiquity allude to.

The article deals with the practice of phenomenological archaeological fieldwork, which is concerned with sensory experience of landscapes and locales. Phenomenological approaches in archaeology have cast light on aspects of past human experience not addressed by traditional archaeological methods. So far, however, they have neither developed explicit methodologies nor a discussion of methodological practice and have laid themselves open to accusations of being ‘subjective’ and ‘unscientific’. This article describes and explores three experiments in phenomenological archaeology developed in the context of the Tavoliere–Gargano Prehistory Project and carried out on Neolithic settlement sites of the type known as villaggi trincerati. Our aims are both to develop explicit methods for this type of fieldwork and to combine phenomenology with other more traditional approaches, such as those concerned with technological, economic and environmental aspects of landscapes and sites. Our work also differs from other phenomenological archaeology in its concern with familiar, everyday experience and domestic contexts, rather than exceptional, special experience in ritual contexts. We consider how our particular approach might be used to further understandings of past lives.

Archives form a valuable but under-researched resource for mapping the development of prehistoric archaeology as a discipline in post-war Europe. New work on the previously un-catalogued archives of Professor Paul Jacobsthal at the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford, exemplify the opportunities offered by archival research. Here, we focus on the correspondence between Professor Jacobsthal of Marburg University, who sought refuge in Oxford before the war, and his colleague, Professor Merhart, who remained in Germany. The surviving personal correspondence between Germany and Oxford from 1936 to 1957 illustrates the complexities, uncertainties, and challenges to personal and academic identities in the aftermath of the war, and show how the individual responses of archaeologists to their personal experiences impacted on the directions taken by archaeological scholarship in Europe and beyond after the war.

This article seeks to clarify the reason for the flourishing of daggers during the first millennia of metal use in Europe. Flint daggers, usually characterized as direct copies of contemporary metal blades, circulated widely from around 4000 cal BC to 1500 cal BC in different parts of Europe. Among the best studied and most well-known flint dagger varieties are the early second millennium cal BC fishtail-handled varieties made in southern Scandinavia which are universally described as skeuomorphs of Central European metal-hilted daggers. In this paper, their putative skeuomorphism is re-evaluated through a close technological and contextual analysis, and a new way of conceiving of the relationship between fishtail flint daggers and metal-hilted daggers is proposed. Like most of the other widely circulating flint dagger types in Neolithic Europe, fishtail and metal-hilted daggers are produced through the application of specialized/standardized production processes and demonstrate a desire to cultivate special and perhaps circumscribed technologies on the part of the people who made and used them. This shared technological background is identified as the root of the ‘dagger idea’ which emerges in Europe at this period. Daggers, in any material, are identified as ‘boundary objects’ – things which bridge social boundaries, allowing people with different backgrounds to recognize similar values and ways of life in each other's cultures and which, consequently, facilitate communication and exchange, in this case of metal and of the technological concepts which were part of its adoption.