This paper explores a central paradox in the aims of the archaeology of the contemporary past as they have been articulated by its practitioners. On the one hand, its aim has been expressed as one of making the familiar ‘unfamiliar’, of distancing the observer from their own material world; a work of alienation. On the other hand, it has also aimed to make the past more accessible and egalitarian; to recover lost, subaltern voices and in this way to close the distance between past and present. I suggest that this paradox has stymied its development and promoted a culture of self-justification for a subfield which has already become well established within archaeology over the course of three decades. I argue that this paradox arises from archaeology's relationship with modernity and the past itself, as a result of its investment in the modernist trope of archaeology-as-excavation and the idea of a past which is buried and hidden. One way of overcoming this paradox would be to emphasize an alternative trope of archaeology-as-surface-survey and a process of assembling/reassembling, and indeed to shift away from the idea of an ‘archaeology of the contemporary past’ to speak instead of an archaeology ‘in and of the present’. This would reorient archaeology so that it is seen primarily as a creative engagement with the present and only subsequently as a consideration of the intervention of traces of the past within it. It is only by doing this that archaeology will develop into a discipline which can successfully address itself to the present and future concerns of contemporary societies. Such a move not only has implications for archaeologies of the present and recent past, but concerns the very nature and practice of archaeology as a discipline in its broadest sense in the 21st century.

Rodney Harrison's recasting of contemporary archaeology as an archaeology in and of the present serves as a very welcome and overdue corrective to a subdiscipline which has been disparagingly described as ‘well-meaning and superfluous’ (Hummler 2010, 922) and, rather more crudely, as in danger of ‘disappearing up its own arsehole’ (Devlin 2006). I should confess at the outset that over the last decade I have gone from being excited and enthused about the florescence of interest in the contemporary and recent past to often feeling cynical and uninspired. I have sat through too many earnest conference papers that in effect do no more than demonstrate that yes, indeed, it is possible for archaeologists to analyse the contents of their own closets/offices/attics. As an anthropologically trained archaeologist, it never occurred to me that we were not supposed to study the present, so I do not need to be told that it is possible – for me, that is self-evident. Instead, I want to be challenged by the insights derived from archaeological studies of the present. I want there to be a point.

I am totally for the archaeology in and of the present that Rodney Harrison defends in his powerful text. In fact, I have defended a similar idea elsewhere, although in a rather less eloquent and straightforward way. I have suggested that we could transform ethnoarchaeology, an archaeological subdiscipline that already deals with the present, into a true ‘archaeology of the present . . . that . . . deals with people that are alive and things that are in full use, and which accepts that all presents are entangled with a diversity of pasts in a percolating time’ (González-Ruibal 2006a, 112). With the author, I think that archaeological engagements should not be reduced to the past – understood as something remote and finished: archaeology can be a very creative way of dealing with the present, and even of transforming it. I also coincide with Harrison in considering that the archaeology of the contemporary past is less harassed than we tend to think and that we should be less anxious in defending ourselves against possible attackers and focusing more on creating exciting work.

I find myself largely in sympathy with what Rodney Harrison is trying to do. In applying an archaeological sensibility to the contemporary world, it becomes increasingly clear that the habitual tropes of archaeological practice either do not work, or need to be rethought and reconfigured. Equally, I think that this reassessment of archaeological theory and methodology can have a wider epistemological value for the discipline in general. The tropes of ruin and excavation are particularly salient in this context, in that they do not entirely work in the understanding of the contemporary. However, there are points at which I diverge from Harrison, particularly with respect to what we mean by modernity, and especially in terms of the limitations of his concern with surfaces.

Following the recent discussion of excavation in Archaeological dialogues (18(1)), Rodney Harrison's questioning of the viability of excavation and depth as viable tropes for conceptualizing and communicating archaeology's epistemological processes is both timely and pertinent. Beginning where Harrison finished, his use of Anselm Kiefer's artistic work as a ‘framing’ device, brings me to some intriguing critical trajectories for understanding archaeology's modern condition and the possibilities for it at this moment through deeper engagements with contemporary art, and visual and material gesture and culture.

I was trained as a processual archaeologist in the 1960s, and as a result my interests and research, along with the vocabulary I have used to express these, have followed a different trajectory from those paths that have emerged out of what we once called postprocessual archaeology. This is not to say that we do not have common beacons. I believe we certainly do. To this end, I am writing this dialogue with Harrison's piece to rename the ‘archaeology of the contemporary past’ as ‘archaeology in and of the present’ and ‘for the future’. I like the new name for contemporary past archaeology, but archaeologists in and of the present should not forget about their own past.

I thank the commentators for their thoughtful and articulate responses, in which they have quite rightly exposed several inconsistencies and queried or expanded on a number of points that I did not have the time or space to develop in the original piece. In doing so, they raise the important issue of regional variations in the ways in which archaeology is conceived, practised and perceived by its practitioners and publics, which also significantly extends and complicates the original discussion. Rather than comment on specific points, almost all of which are relevant and well made, I want to focus on four linked themes which I think are reflected in different ways across all five comments. These are the relationship of archaeology to modernism and modernity, the value of the archaeological production of a sense of the ‘uncanny’ as an active intervention in the quotidian present, the surface/depth dichotomy, and the question of archaeological methodology in relation to an archaeology in and of the present. In doing so, I hope to provide some important clarification regarding what I mean when I use the terms ‘archaeology in and of the present’, ‘surfaces’ and ‘assemblages’, as well as to take up Ian Russell's challenge to approach more critically the use of artistic metaphors to emphasize the affective qualities and creative possibilities of archaeological practice. Before I move on to do this, I think it is helpful to discuss briefly the circumstances under which this paper was written and its place within a broader emergent programme of research and writing to give some context to what follows.

In this paper I argue that we should attend to why and how forgetting happens in concert with the construction of social memory, history, identity and heritage. Through a focus on processes of forgetting, this discussion offers a new set of interpretations of early colonial Sylvester Manor, a 17th-century plantation site in coastal New York. More specifically, the construction of racial categories over several centuries implicates social memory and forgetting, and introduces issues to the manner in which we remember the site where people of European, African and Native American ancestry met. This analysis views memory and forgetting not only as historical vectors in racialization, but also as factors in current identity politics.

In traditional models, nomadic empires are often depicted as ‘parasitic’ on the neighbouring sedentary polities. Inspired by the development of anthropologies and archaeologies of colonialism, this paper adopts the political-landscape approach to address the emerging steppe urbanism of the nomadic Liao Empire. Perceptions of Liao urban landscapes are discussed from six viewpoints – settlement location, city walls, architectural orientation, camping sites, spatial segregation and sacred places – in order to understand the political practices of city making. I argue that the nomadic Khitan did not simply emulate spatial strategies of settled agricultural polities in the heartland of China, but rather produced a radically new form of urbanism that was brought forth as one of the creative instruments constitutive of authority, formed and transformed in the process of nomadic empire building in which traditions of nomadic pastoralism with ties to eastern Eurasia were manipulated and remade along with Chinese urban planning.