Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
I would like to thank Michel Christol, John Creighton, Louise Revell and Peter Wells for their stimulating comments on the two articles under discussion by Greg Woolf and myself. Since Christol and Wells mainly confine themselves to remarks on the cultural changes in Interior Gaul, my reply will focus on Revell and Creighton's critical comments on my paper. The most provoking of these, to me, was the term ‘story-telling’, as used by Revell. It is not, on first thoughts, a desirable designation for articles with a certain theoretical ambition. After all, the term evokes associations with the narrative traditions of the ‘pre-theoretical’ phase of Roman archaeology (Laurence 2001). This kind of story-telling does not belong in a theoretical journal such as Archaeological dialogues.