The narrative structure of Roman archaeology places a particular emphasis on the acculturation of the newly conquered provinces. This ‘process’ known as Romanisation has been found wanting by many commentators on Roman archaeology. Although rejected, it can still reappear and influence the narrative structure of many studies. Reference is deliberately made to the publications of the ‘Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference’ to highlight the revision of the usage of ‘Romanisation’ by British scholars during the 1990s. The paper identifies the cultural assumptions underpinning the revisionist views of Romanisation and the key problem of a narrative based explicitly or otherwise on textual evidence. Here, an attempt is made to account for the uniqueness of Roman archaeology as practiced in Britain – in comparison to that of prehistory or medieval archaeology. The paper suggests that there is a need to move on from Romanisation to alternative narrative forms drawing on recent revisionist agendas within the social sciences.

Greek and Roman archaeology as a whole are often accused of being ‘text-based’ or ‘text-driven’. At a superficial level, this is palpably false: most Classical archaeologists do most of their research without consulting an ancient text for days and sometimes weeks on end, and this is especially true of Romano-British archaeologists. Everyone, except perhaps for a few militant prehistorians, knows this perfectly well. Ray Laurence does not fall into this trap. Instead, he rightly directs us to the deeper level of discourse, narratives and arguments; and hints more briefly at a deeper one still, that of ‘interests and preoccupations’.

Ray Laurence's contribution on the state and future of Roman archaeology as practised in Britain can be summarised as follows: he thinks the discipline to be dominated by a narrative of invasion that is based on literary texts and which has made the concepts of Romanisation and resistance key points in the theoretical discussion. Laurence values this situation as negative. He looks at the discussion on the (im)possibility of representing the Holocaust and at the work of the contemporary architect Rem Koolhaas in trying to formulate alternatives, ending with a manifesto for a twenty-first century Roman archaeology firmly based on recent developments within the social sciences.

We cannot but agree with the basic contentions of Langbroek's paper that 1) the replacement of Neandertals by early modern humans in Europe is best understood from a perspective of historical contingency and 2) that it must have had a lot to do with the ‘very dynamic spatio-temporal redrawings of the population maps of Europe during the Weichsel glacial’ against the background of ‘the emergence of increasing climatological instability during the later part of OIS 3, with significant fluctuations at relatively short timescales’. This is the kind of approach we have been advocating to effectively supersede the reductionist ‘superiority’ paradigm that has dominated the literature on Neandertal extinction for the last twenty years.

We cannot but agree with the basic contentions of Langbroek's paper that 1) the replacement of Neandertals by early modern humans in Europe is best understood from a perspective of historical contingency and 2) that it must have had a lot to do with the ‘very dynamic spatio-temporal redrawings of the population maps of Europe during the Weichsel glacial’ against the background of ‘the emergence of increasing climatological instability during the later part of OIS 3, with significant fluctuations at relatively short timescales’. This is the kind of approach we have been advocating to effectively supersede the reductionist ‘superiority’ paradigm that has dominated the literature on Neandertal extinction for the last twenty years.