With the growing impact of postprocessual orientations, archaeologists have become increasingly aware that the production of values resides in all aspects of archaeological research. This awareness has also paved the way for a more encompassing concept of archaeological heritage, which of course not only includes the management of material traces but also the transmission of values through archaeological practice, method and theory. Many archaeologists and heritage managers now propagate the belief that reflecting on value production will better equip archaeology for ethical concerns or that it will improve its engagement with society, and that adopting anthropological perspectives and key notions may help to achieve this goal. This contribution explores the opposite proposition: that an anthropologically informed reflexive attitude is important to understand present-day heritage practices, but in most cases it is desirable for archaeologists to tell stories about the past, not about themselves, in order to be really engaged with public and ethical issues. Arguments for this proposition can be derived from the discipline's specific articulation of discovery, difference and time depth (including the ‘long term’), which traditionally shape archaeological research and narrative to a high degree, not only within academic discourse but also in a wider social setting.

The issue of ‘knowability’ in relation to the origins and distribution of the language families of the world is addressed, and recent advances in historical linguistics and molecular genetics reviewed. While the much-debated problem of the validity of the concept of the language ‘macrofamily’ cannot yet be resolved, it is argued that a time depth for the origins of language families greater than the conventional received figure of c. 6000 years may in some cases be appropriate, allowing the possibility of a correlation between language dispersals and demographic processes following the end of the Pleistocene period. The effects of these processes may still be visible in the linguistic ‘spread zones’, here seen as often the result of farming dispersals, contrasting with the linguistic ‘mosaic zones’ whose early origins may sometimes go back to initial colonization episodes during the late Pleistocene period. If further work in historical linguistics as well as in archaeology and molecular genetics upholds these correlations a ‘new synthesis’, whose outlines may already be discerned, is likely to emerge. This would have important consequences for prehistoric archaeology, and would be of interest also to historical linguists and molecular geneticists. If, however, the proposed recognition of such patterning proves illusory the prospects for ‘knowability’ appear to be less favourable.