worldwide. It emphasizes academic issues and questions that benefit from a widely oriented and comparative approach. It aims to bridge the disciplinary divisions of the past into chronological periods and to avoid exclusive and particularistic regional concerns. It is explicit in recognizing the historical and social roles and political context of archaeological inquiry and interpretation and acknowledges the need to make archaeological studies relevant to the wider community. Thus, it differs in concept and, as a result, in structure and organization from the UNESCO-linked international union of prehistoric and protohistoric sciences (IUPPS), from which it emerged.

Peter Ucko (1987a) has reviewed the precipitating circumstances that arose in the context of the organization of the Eleventh Congress of IUPPS scheduled for September 1986 in Great Britain. The British Executive Committee, of which Ucko was national secretary, planned the meeting with a breadth of international participation, disciplinary discussion, and involvement of interest groups quite unprecedented for IUPPS. When the parent body disowned the congress following the decision of its executive committee to disallow South African (and Namibian) participation in the context of growing anti-apartheid activism during 1985, the intended Eleventh Congress of IUPPS in Southampton and London became the first World Archaeological Congress in Southampton. A plenary session set up a widely representative steering committee of twelve, with a year’s brief, to open discussions with IUPPS on a range of issues extending beyond the matter of South Africa to questions of a revised role for the official body of world archaeology (Ucko 1987a, 209, 226–235, 1987b).

All approaches to IUPPS proving unsuccessful, the committee proceeded in September 1987 to the formal establishment of a WAC in fulfillment of its mandate. Its recommendations (Day 1988, 6–11) were the subject of wide discussion within the organization (Day 1989; Draft Statutes 1989) before the adoption of a constitution at the Second World Archaeological Congress in Venezuela in 1990 (WAC 1991).

WAC has a membership, individual and institutional, that is open to anyone with a genuine concern for the study of the past. Positions within the organization are elective. The council, the policymaking body that meets on the occasion of the congresses, which are held every four years, consists of the officers, members of the executive, and one national representative per country selected by the individual members from that country present at a congress.

There are three officers—president, secretary, and treasurer—elected by the council at each congress. The executive, the governing body between meetings of the council, consists of the officers and two representatives from each of (currently) fourteen regional electoral colleges, a senior member (must have more than five years permanent employment in archaeology or a related discipline) and a junior member, elected for eight years by secret ballot of the individual members of each college under procedures designed to favor gender balance. In addition, there are eight representatives of the indigenous (Fourth World) peoples appointed by appropriate organizations for a limited period. Executive members accept the responsibility of promoting WAC in their constituencies.

The organization’s major occasions are its four-yearly congresses, of which Southampton in 1986 was the first; the second was held in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, in September 1990; the third met in New Delhi in December 1994; and the fourth in Capetown, South Africa, in 1998. The main, though not exclusive, focus is on themes of universal significance in archaeological practice and research, to which experience in different parts of the world and different disciplines can contribute. True to WAC’s wide view of archaeology’s role and responsibilities, each congress makes specific provision for basic issues relevant to the archaeological exercise: the interests and concerns of indigenous communities when outsiders study their past; the dissemination of archaeological knowledge through schools, museums, and the electronic media; and archaeology and information technology, in which WAC’s attention extends to the provision of the requisite facilities and training at disadvantaged institutions. The languages