First of all, congratulations to Nick Overton and Yannis Hamilakis for an excellent and stimulating paper, made all the better for including two considered and rich case studies. Though in no way an animal-bone specialist, I find myself in general agreement with their approach, which attempts to persuade zooarchaeologists of the value of engaging further with particular trends within theory in archaeology (and other disciplines) from the last decade or so. It is with the implications of relational archaeologies that I particularly wish to engage: I concur with the authors that zooarchaeology (and other subfields), as well as archaeology more generally, could benefit from challenges to anthropocentrism, whether expressed in ontological or other forms, and ultimately produce more holistic as well as more diverse pasts. My comments are thus more an exploration of some of the issues raised in this paper than a commentary upon the contents per se.

In this fin de siècle moment – or is it closer to a mood of Depression? – the Keynesian idea of expanded government spending is much in vogue. We have been here before. As Shannon Lee Dawdy notes, part of Roosevelt's New Deal in the USA was the famous Civilian Conservation Corps, who performed much archaeology and related work (Maher 2008; Paige 1985). It seems particularly appropriate, then, to repeat a famous quote of Keynes: after all, archaeology comes surprisingly close to that much-derided Keynesian remedy. It was in his General theory of employment, interest and money that he wrote, ‘“To dig holes in the ground,” paid for out of savings, will increase, not only employment, but the real national dividend of useful goods and services’ (Keynes 1936, 220). What is less often quoted, though, is the subsequent comment: ‘It is not reasonable, however, that a sensible community should be content to remain dependent on such fortuitous and often wasteful mitigations’.

First of all let me wholeheartedly thank all those who have responded for their helpful comments and careful readings. In this reply I would like first to discuss points dealing with the history of concepts related to ‘hunter-gatherers’, before pursuing the implications for contemporary prehistories. One preliminary note: van de Velde and Bogucki both point to the many advantages of Enlightenment thought (or reason). There are many political and scientific reasons to concur. I certainly have no desire to throw out the baby with the bathwater and return to metaphysical speculation as a substitute for archaeological and historical practice. I would also like to respond directly to van de Velde's comments about Adam Kuper (1988). Kuper's book, though also a work of critical anthropological history, is concerned with the later nineteenth century onwards and the idea of ‘primitive society’ characterised by certain forms of social and religious organisation, rather than subsistence (Kuper 1988, 5–7). I have argued elsewhere (Pluciennik 2001, 744–746) that this is typical of certain nineteenth-century European anthropologists and highlights a moment of divergence between ethnologists and archaeologists. Van de Velde also queries the omission of the ‘noble savage’ strand of Enlightenment thought from the paper. Certainly the recognition that there could be markedly different societies was sometimes used to critique the perceived excesses and artifices of the writer's society or of ‘civilisation’ more generally (Berkhofer 1978, 72–80; Carey 1998). However I would argue generally that the ‘noble savage’ has tended to be a minority construct adopted for strategic rhetorical and literary purposes (even if there was a revival from the 1960s with the ecologically noble savage: Buege 1996). Indeed Ellingson (2001) has recently proposed that even the trope of the noble savage was largely a 19th century invention, a myth constructed by racists to provide a stick with which to beat ‘liberals’. I disagree, in that the image of ‘Others’ supposedly without the corruption and vices of modern civilisation has long been utilised to construct alternatives to contemporary conditions and to progressive social evolutionary scenarios, with foragers supplying ‘evidence’ of an Edenic place, a Golden Age past, or degenerative human histories.

Why do we still speak of foragers and farmers? The division of societies into categories including ‘savage’ hunter-gatherers and ‘civilised’ farmers has its roots in seventeenth-century northwestern Europe, but has implications for archaeologists and anthropologists today. Such concepts still provide the frameworks for much intellectual labour including university courses, academic conferences and publications, as well as providing the basis for moral and political evaluations of contemporary societies and practices for a wide range of people, from governments to development agencies, ‘alternative’ archaeologies and parts of the Green movement. This paper examines some of the currents which contributed towards their establishment, and argues that writing ‘across’ such deep-seated categories may be the only way to challenge their hegemony and develop new questions. As an example recent trends in data and interpretation of the ‘mesolithic-neolithic transition’ in western Europe are discussed.

There can be no doubt that Peter Bellwood's First Farmers is a major new statement which presents a robustly expressed solution to one of those classic problems which provides a benchmark for theorization and justifies archaeology as a field. But agreement stops there. Few academic books published recently have evoked such highly charged reactions. On the one hand, First Farmers has impressed many critics, reached audiences far afield from traditional archaeological readerships, and garnered major book awards from professional bodies such as the Society for American Archaeology. On the other hand, it has been subjected to a level of concerted criticism rare in the academic world. As the reviews below show, it has clearly hit a nerve; the gloves are off.

First Farmers polarizes scholars in complex ways. Much recent work on agricultural origins, particularly in Europe, has had a strongly indigenist and particularistic tone, averse to mass movements of peoples and ‘grand narratives’ in general. But even advocates of grand narrative in general may take exception to Bellwood's ‘language dispersals’ thesis. Similarly, the very attempt to bring together linguistic, genetic and archaeological data in an account of the past is controversial to some, but even those who aspire to this kind of interdisciplinary synthesis rarely agree on how it can be carried out.

Neither the book nor its critics here are likely to be the last word on the subject. But whether one agrees with it or not, First Farmers is a welcome addition to the agricultural origins scene, which, at least in Europe, has been evolving over the last two decades towards a sort of eclectic middle-ground consensus in which difference of opinion is accommodated by eschewing bold generalization.

New research fields and areas of scientific specialization often bring division and disciplinary divides. Here Brown & Pluciennik discuss the impact of genetic research on archaeology.

With changes in political structures, a pan-European dimension is increasing in importance for many archaeologists, because of cultural policy and funding from the Council of Europe and, especially, the European Union. Although nationalist frameworks are currently more important, archaeologists should keep a critical eye on European developments.

Molecular biology is prompting a renewed interest in genetic histories of ancient peoples. What are the old ‘ethnic units’ of these modern studies?