This article argues that the notion of cultural biography presents a key to understanding the social and cultural practices that created archaeological records of domestic architecture, as it brings the close and dynamic relationships between a house and its inhabitants to the fore. To do so it presents a case study of the construction, habitation and abandonment cycles of late prehistoric farmsteads in the southern Netherlands. After discussing typical biographies of farmhouses and the way these are affected by a transformation from a ‘wandering’ to a stable settlement pattern, the perspective is broadened through a comparison with burial practices. These witness a roughly contemporaneous shift from monumental and communal to short-lived and dispersed cemeteries. Finally, it is suggested that we view these contrasting patterns in terms of a transformation of the perception of farmsteads as places in the landscape and land tenure practices.

Value is one of the concepts which are of importance in the way people structure their material surroundings. According to the philosophy of Georg Simmel, value finds its origins in the tension between the desire for objects and access to them. The dimensions of desirability and accessibility may be investigated archaeologically, in order to approach the concept of value. Such a perspective is taken in this article with reference to three different classes of imported Mycenaean pottery, which have been found in the Late Bronze Age levels of the site of Ugarit at the Mediterranean coast of Syria. It is concluded that various vessel types were appreciated differently at the city. The meanings imposed on these imported objects derived from the roles they played in the local cultural context.

In a well-known paper on ‘the cultural biography of things’, Kopytoff (1986) shows that the application of meaning to ‘things’ is of a processual rather than a fixed nature. Mainly focusing his attention on commodities, Kopytoff demonstrates that, like people, ‘objects’ such as slaves, cars, huts and paintings have a social life of their own. The biographies that may be drawn up of the lives of these objects may provide insight into the complex whole of political, economic, moral and aesthetic practices, values and relationships prevalent in the societies in which they are produced, used and discarded.

Van Wijngaarden offers an important and instructive attempt to re-situate the study of Bronze Age ‘imports’ away from the dominance of prestige commodity studies, using the particularly thorny example of Mycenaean ceramics. Traditional approaches, as van Wijngaarden points out, have tended to assign a uniformity of value and unchallenged prestige status to all Mycenaean imports. The reason for this reflexive recourse to prestige in the presence of Mycenaean pottery has more perhaps to do with the evolution of the discipline of archaeology in the East Mediterranean and a desire to find a precursor to the highly evolved city states of the Classical world than to any objective assessment of the objects themselves. Analytical frameworks which contextualize imports and exotica into the greater scheme of a robust and diverse material culture are critical steps in the development of the theoretical evolution of the study of the Late Bonze Age. However, van Wijngaarden's efforts also illustrate the methodological challenges encountered when isolating a single subcategory of artefact for examination. The blame lies not so much with van Wijngaarden's analysis as with the problem of what can be said to constitute value in a prehistoric context and how value, once defined, can be kept separate from other interrelated concepts.

I should start by saying how refreshing it is to see Mycenaean pottery, a body of material discussed usually in terms of ever more refined and accurately dated typological sequences, being examined in its context and in the light of a sophisticated theoretical approach.

The subject of Gerritsen's paper and the way in which it is presented invite comment on three main aspects: firstly, his theoretical stance, secondly the methodology he uses and thirdly, his conclusions regarding the farmsteads which he seeks to understand. Since my own specialism lies well outside the area and period with which his paper deals, I shall focus my discussion on the first two aspects.

This is an interesting and important paper that argues in a reasoned and convincing manner for a new approach to an archaeology of houses. It uses as an archaeological case study the evidence from the southern Netherlands but the approach presented here has a much wider application and the results are directly relevant to a very large area of northern Europe. I originally heard this paper delivered as a lecture at a conference on settlement studies where it came amid a succession of papers debating detailed structural typologies of Iron Age long houses and others providing increasingly detailed scientific analysis of cattle byres. I had already made one abortive attempt to suggest there was a more interesting way of thinking about houses but this was most clearly demonstrated by the paper presented here.

The present article is a welcome contribution to the study of Mycenaean ceramics and to the study of East Mediterranean production, consumption and distribution systems. The general argument for an archaeology of value has wide-reaching relevance, while the specific case study usefully raises general issues of approach and methodology.

Nevett, Sharples and Vellinga have commented on my paper in a heartening and inspiring way, and I would like to thank them for their comments of agreement as well as for the points of criticism that they raise. In my reply I will attempt to engage in discussion by addressing a few of their issues. Two points of my paper that appear to have created some confusion, notably in Vellinga's comment, may be dealt with first of all. With regard to the timing of the construction of a house, I did not intend to suggest – as hopefully the diagram of figure 2 makes clear – that new houses were always built subsequent to the abandonment of an old one. In fact, in the case of wandering farmsteads I would envisage this as the exception rather than the rule. This may seem a minor point, but it has some relevance to the topic of variability that I will address below. The other point of confusion concerns the ulterior aims of the paper and the biographical approach, which Vellinga takes as explaining the long-term transformation of the settlement patterns. I would not want to claim that the notion of a cultural biography in itself has enough explanatory force in this respect, and in the introduction I described it as a way of taking a first step along the road towards a more balanced understanding. The aims of the paper were precisely that, but Vellinga certainly makes a valid point in raising the issue of explaining long-term changes, and it deserves further consideration.

Frank De Mita, Sophia Voutsaki and Todd Whitelaw, obviously, took the article for what it was meant to be: not a final assessment of the use of the concept of value in archaeology, nor a definitive analysis of the Mycenaean pottery at Ugarit, but an attempt to explore these issues as a basis for further discussion. Consequently, it is difficult for me to react to their comments. I can only nod in agreement to many of the points they raise and I feel that I just ought to thank them and go back to work with their valuable insights in mind. Instead of taking such an easy way out, however, I will react to some of the general issues raised by the three critics. Before doing so, I will briefly elaborate on the reasons why I chose Ugarit as the site to conduct my analyses. I feel this is necessary, because some of the criticisms derive from the difficulties inherent to the material of this site and below I will, unfortunately, repeatedly be forced to point to the limitations.

In an earlier contribution to Archaeological Dialogues (4.2), Raemaekers discussed the relationships between the Swifterbant and Ertebølle cultures of respectively the mesolithic Low Countries and southern Scandinavia, calling for a more regional approach to the study of mesolithic western Europe. In this comment, recent ceramic studies from southern Sweden are used to draw attention to regional variability in the Scandinavian Mesolithic.

The paper discusses the religious undertones classical Greek heritage is vested with in Greece. Drawing on the argument that nationalism and religion need to be seen as similar cultural systems, we show that classical antiquities have become powerful emotive icons for performances of national memory in the process ot imagining the topos of the Hellenic nation. This process is open to all social actors and not simply to State bureaucrats and intellectuals. We offer an explanation of this phenomenon by examining the position of antiquity in the construction of the imagined community of the Hellenic nation, as well as the ways by which Orthodoxy and classical antiquity became enmeshed in the formation of Hellenic national identity.We finally explore some of the implications that this phenomenon has for archaeology as a discipline and as social practice.

The increasingly voluminous literature on nationalism and archaeology published in recent years is providing archaeologists with a firm basis to self-analyse the connection of their endeavours to the socio-political context of which they are imbued. Yet, the work undertaken is not beyond criticism, as the authors make clear in their introduction. Most studies, including this one, approach the topic adopting a historiographical perspective. Yet, trying to summarise two hundred years of politics and archaeology in a few thousand words is not an easy task. It makes it necessary to simplify usually very complex processes into seemingly neat sequences of events. In addition, writing for an archaeological audience does not make things easier. Most archaeologists have an understandable lack of knowledge on the complexities of the political aspect of the argument, a problem aggravated in the case of discussions of countries other than the one most of the readers are more familiar with. A detailed analysis of the intricate political context is simply unattainable and although references to other analytical works are often provided, it is difficult for authors to avoid giving the impression of adopting an objectifying position and a positivistic approach. Despite Hamilakis and Yalouri's awareness of this problem (p.115), on occasion their account falls precisely into the latter category (especially in the section ‘Imagining the nation in modern Greece’). As someone who has often been faced with this problem in my various publications on the relationship between archaeology and nationalism in Spain, I am still convinced of the validity of offering general overviews, despite the risks entailed. It is only after producing an intelligible outline, as they in fact have done, that it is possible to undertake a deeper and more sophisticated analysis of more concrete issues related to the connection between archaeology and nationalism.

In an earlier contribution to Archaeological Dialogues (4.2), Raemaekers discussed the relationships between the Swifterbant and Ertebølle cultures of respectively the mesolithic Low Countries and southern Scandinavia, calling for a more regional approach to the study of mesolithic western Europe. In this comment, recent ceramic studies from southern Sweden are used to draw attention to regional variability in the Scandinavian Mesolithic.

In this elegant and wide-ranging essay, Hamilakis and Yalouri have offered us a sophisticated analysis of the utilisation of the ancient past in modern Greece. They have traced the powerful political connection between images of the past and contemporary political structures. They have described how different modalities of veneration have been conscripted for this task. Yet I want to offer a few conceptual clarifications and highlight some possible alternative social contexts that may – I hope – strengthen the central points that they make. These concern a tendency to reify ‘religion’ (specifically in this case specifically Greek Orthodoxy as a unitary phenomenon) and to privilege nationalism as the only socio-political behaviour that actively utilises the cultural capital of archaeology. The two points are closely related. For while the nationalistic use of archaeology may mimic the external forms and even literary topoi of religious veneration, State and Church are potentially competing power structures within a particular society. In many places, the cultural tensions between State and Church (or between rival States and Churches) are becoming increasingly intense. The recognition of those tensions may help us more effectively to problematise—to use Hamilakis and Yalouri's phrase—the socio-politics of archaeology.

Stilborg's comment on my 1997 article singles out two related subjects. The first is of a methodological nature. He states that a comparison of two ‘objects’ requires a third ‘object’ as a point of reference. In the case of my comparison of the Swifterbant and Ertebølle cultures, this point of reference is provided by the neolithic cultures to the South. His second argument is that the Ertebølle culture is not an homogenous entity, but rather comprises a series of regional groups with distinct aspects, especially in material culture. In the following response, I will discuss these two subjects.

The last decade has witnessed a significant increase in the number of comprehensive syntheses on Irish prehistory, both in terms of academic textbooks and popular accounts. The present review essay finds that these syntheses are highly convergent in terms of theme, scope, and theoretical underpinnings. Although large-scale migrations are rejected as explanations for culture change, Ireland is still perceived as the receptacle for foreign ideas and overseas inventions, whereby imports are not just introduced but also perfected in Ireland. We argue that a similar attitude can be noted in the perception of the history of Irish prehistory. This convergence and absence of overt polemics are explained by referring to the small size of the Irish archaeological community. The increase in syntheses is accounted for by a number of empirical preconditions, the theoretical climate of opinion, the institutional expansion of the discipline, the public impact of a rapidly changing natural and political landscape and the notion of an Irish identity.

Hamilakis and Yalouri make an important contribution to the recent growth in studies of Greek nationalism, which is part of a more general trend in history, anthropology and related disciplines to analyse nationalism as a cultural phenomenon, and the politics of ‘invented traditions’. By focusing on the sacralisation of archaeological remains, they add an important piece to the general picture of the uses of the past in modern Greece. While doing this they make their argument relevant to those authors looking at the power of objects and material remains to serve as sites for memory and historical consciousness, objects and/or rituals whose function is to ‘recall the past without enumerating it’ (Rappaport 1994: 76). In particular, archaeological remains resemble those ‘inalienable possessions’ which because of their power to symbolise continuity with ancestors, are withdrawn from the circuits of gift and commodity exchange (Weiner 1992). Objects from the past, much as we may attempt to preserve them behind glass cases in museums, have a ‘social life’ and are deployed in struggles for power and ideological legitimacy in the present. Given the sacred or ‘religious’ character that archaeological remains play in the Greek national narrative, Hamilakis and Yalouri sensibly argue that archaeologists, like historians and other scholars, must see their work as necessarily political. We cannot escape into objectivity; studies of the past are always in some way also reflections of the values of the present and the future. The authors rightly point to the hegemonic status of the ancient past in contemporary Greece. As I discovered during my research into historical consciousness on the island of Kalymnos, Kalymnians of radically different religious and political persuasions were united in the view that History should be read for what it revealed about the continuity in character of peoples and nations. Like archaeology, the narrative of Greek nationalism dominated written history on Kalymnos. Popular memories which conflicted with this narrative — for example, of women-led collective action — could still be found, but had none of the social capital to compete with ‘official history’, as written by an educated elite (see Doumanis 1997; Sutton 1998; 1999).

‘Sacralising the past: cults of archaeology in modern Greece’ appears within the framework of recent discussions on archaeology and nationalism and attempts to produce a reflexive and sophisticated analysis of the construction of nationalist discourses, both at the level of state and on an individual basis. Along these lines, Hamilakis and Yalouri argue that attitudes toward classical antiquity in modern Greece constitute what they term a form of ‘secular religion’ which presents distinct affinities with Orthodoxy. In constructing their argument the authors combine a number of analytical domains and touch upon a multitude of issues, all of which merit extensive discussion. However, the main point of their thesis concerns the relationship between the classical past and Greek Orthodox religion, a link forged during the creation of the modern Greek state. According to the authors, apart from being at the roots of nationalist state discourse, this link has also been a persistent, even dominant, feature in the popular perception of classical heritage.