This volume is as much about applied social theory as about archaeology, because its ultimate objective is to consider the nature and character of the particular field of social practice/communication that is called archaeology by investigating how it has been and is situated in society as a whole.

To be more concrete, the volume attempts to critically portray the constitutive elements and characteristics of contemporary archaeological practice and the problems which they generate. The contention to be put forward is that they derive from a specific form of generating and maintaining sociality and social institutions, called modernity, which is fundamentally different from its predecessors, i.e., pre-modern social formations. The difference between modernity and pre-modern social formations is multi-faceted, and hence demands a multi-faceted approach. However, according to the late German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, it can be tackled most effectively by investigating the intrinsic nature of human communication and the difference between the way in which human communication is made possible in modernity compared with pre-modern social formations. The way in which human communication is made possible has evolved through the history of the human being as the size of the basic unit of social integration and its complexity has increased, but it was not until the coming of modernity that the human being entered the stage in which every communication was bound to be critically and reflexively commented upon by other communications and effectively relativised; before that moment, communications could be determined/fixed in their values/meanings by referring to something outside the realm of human communication, such as the divine and god-given order (of social hierarchy, for instance).