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Sites are the staple of archaeological investigation, forming the basis of many an excavation or survey project, often within a wider landscape study where it is the relationships between sites that can matter more. Think of any archaeological project or great excavation of the nineteenth or twentieth century, and you have your archaeological site, defined by convention as incorporating either settlement or industrial, religious, or military remains. These sites are often the subject of either a lengthy process of investigation and then post-excavation analysis leading to publication of results, or sometimes a short Weld evaluation prior to their destruction through development or preservation in situ. Their initial discovery may be newsworthy, and perhaps the result of some significant new development, a new landmark in the making. As we have seen, by convention archaeologists and curators generally treat those places and objects from the past as precious, valued resources for their very historicity and their cultural value, and often (correctly) seek their protection from destructive forces of the present and future. But our view is slightly different. We do not recognize the distinction between that which is old/ancient and matters, and that which is new and does not. Rather we recognize all material culture, the artefacts and sites and the wider landscape, as being suitable for archaeological inquiry and potentially holding value for this reason: not just the objects of the deeper past threatened with destruction, but also the contemporary office building that now occupies the site. Archaeology of the contemporary past even gives recognition to the ‘site to be’, the places planned for the future, a site that exists only on a planning board or an architect’s computer, or as a model, or even in the mind. With the archaeology of the contemporary past, the past, present, and future are woven together in a way that gives the subject complexity, introduces new and unforeseen challenges and difficulties, and equally gives it a heightened sense of social relevance and meaning. That said, for archaeology of the contemporary past, many of the same rules apply as for earlier periods, although, as we have seen, the sheer numbers of modern sites, and the spatial continuity of human activity and our perception and experience of it, do complicate things somewhat.

In the previous chapter, we considered those methodologies that might be seen to characterize the archaeology of the contemporary past. One of the issues raised there was the extent to which an archaeology of the contemporary past is defined by, and is even reliant upon, working with and across a series of different academic disciplines and areas of subject specialisms. In this chapter, we will look in more detail at the relationship between the archaeology of the contemporary past and the various academic disciplines on which it draws and with which it overlaps. Rather than a field defined by a series of other academic disciplines, we argue that the archaeology of the contemporary past emerges from this review as a discipline characterized by a particular vision and approach to the material culture of the contemporary world. These issues are explored in relation to various examples which illustrate both the similarities and differences between an archaeology of the contemporary past, and those various specialisms with which it has close relations. This chapter will also explore the relationship between the archaeology of the contemporary past and contemporary art, both in terms of artistic engagements with the archaeology of the contemporary past and the idea of archaeology as a form of contemporary artistic practice. A number of authors have written in detail about the historical relationship between archaeology and anthropology (e.g. Gosden 1999), and we do not have space to cover the topic in the detail it deserves here. The relationship between archaeology and anthropology is, however, particularly relevant when we are considering the archaeology of the contemporary past, as in almost all instances we are considering the material remains of societies contemporary with us. Archaeology and anthropology, although closely related, have developed along divergent lines in the different countries of the world in which they are practised, so for this reason we will focus our discussion on the historical relationship between archaeology and anthropology in North America and Britain, and the role of an ‘anthropological archaeology’ in approaches to the archaeology of the contemporary past.