A British academic abroad may find it hard to explain why his country – with a lower proportion of school-leavers going to university than in almost any other western state – sees no good cause to improve matters. For archaeology, the recent past, as is set out here, has been a story of disordered attrition; the future seems a choice between planned contraction or unplanned decay. Behind this British-parochial dilemma is a wider issue: should archaeology be a vocational training or part of broad liberal-science education? And the concern as to the minimum size of a viable archaeology department has implications everywhere, especially where archaeology is taught as one element in a broader historical or anthropological field.