Introduction: crisis, hyper-capitalism, and post-processual archaeologies

Crisis, what crisis?

It has been a while since the word ‘crisis’ began to be uttered in describing the state of Japanese archaeology. An interesting thing about this is that the nature of the crisis itself has never been specified in this ‘crisis discourse’; or rather, it seems that the fact that we do not know how to describe/characterise this crisis itself constitutes the core of the crisis. Japanese archaeology was felt to be in a different type of a crisis situation back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, Japanese archaeologists apparently felt they not only knew what constituted the crisis but also what was behind the crisis back then. The ever-accelerating pace of the destruction of archaeological sites was truly threatening during those periods (NKK 1971, 1980), and devising strategies to counter it was an urgent task. Meanwhile, archaeologists also knew, or were believed to know, how to grasp and talk about the crisis, and as a prerequisite for doing so they also felt they knew how the crisis situation had come about/was created. In other words, Japanese archaeologists by the late 1960s and early 1970s had a clearly articulated system of concepts and terms, i.e., a ‘theory’, a Marxist theory as illustrated in Chapter 4 and to be touched upon later again, to make sense of the situation and with which to decide how to make an intervention in it.