between prehistorians and art historical archaeologists increased. The former considered themselves to be the “real” scientific archaeologists while the art historical archaeologists regarded the prehistorians as newcomers who threatened funds and opportunities. The foundation of ARCHON, a government subsidizing agency (one of the suboffices of the Netherlands Organization for the Advancement of Pure Scientific Research), in 1981 was a major step toward easing these tensions. Classical, prehistoric, and other archaeologists met on commissions where research proposals were judged, and this work fostered a mutual understanding. The economic slump of 1980s set ceilings on university budgets, and this fact also resulted in closer cooperation as the various groups shared the burdens of student training.

A History of Dutch Archaeological Discussion

Most archaeologists are rather provincial in outlook, with little knowledge of problems elsewhere, and it is possible that nowhere has the universal ideology of positivism been achieved. Dutch archaeology is no exception, and historic-humanitarian (“culture historical”) rather than scientific leanings have been dominant. In the Netherlands, the study of the relation of material culture to society has involved a study of the relation of the Dutch archaeological record with previous Dutch cultures, and those Dutch archaeologists who worked elsewhere (Middle or Far East, Mediterranean) have related to their particular problems elsewhere in the same way. This situation held true until at least the 1970s.

In addition to the general provincialism of Dutch archaeology, there is the scientific influence of politically dominant neighbors. Thus, when France was dominant during much of the nineteenth century, references to French archaeology were frequent, and texts were written in French. With Germany in the political ascendancy, references (if any to non-Dutch texts) were to German writings, German congresses and training programs were attended, German ideas were copied, dedications were to German scholars, and texts were sometimes published in the German language. After World War II, when England and then the United States dominated the political scene, former German references were gradually replaced by English ones, and the general orientation, especially in prehistoric texts, became Anglo-Saxon and there was an almost complete ignorance of other—for example, French, Italian, or Russian—developments.

In Dutch classical archaeology, with its art history orientation, the same trend is present although slightly attenuated. The number of English references surpassed that of German texts only in 1980, and in prehistoric archaeology that index changed around 1970. Perhaps the languages in which the Dutch research is reported is even more eloquent. Before World War II, more than 90 percent of articles were in Dutch; during the war, only Dutch texts were offered; after the war, the percentage dropped from 60 percent in the 1950s to 15 percent in the 1990s, and in the same years, German texts decreased from 25 percent to 5 percent, and English texts rose from 10 percent to over 60 percent.

Whenever ideas of non-Anglo-Saxon scholars are discussed in the Netherlands, they have been introduced through English translations, even though the study of at least two foreign languages is compulsory in the universities. Thus, Italian archaeologist Bianchi-Bandinelli’s ideas are understood by only a handful of classical archaeologists, and French archaeologist andré leroi-gourhan and philosophers Foucault, Derrida, and Bourdieu only became known to prehistoric archaeologists when they were translated into English. The Russian archaeologist Leo Klejn is referenced only for his Current Anthropology contributions. Postmodernism is understood in its U.S./U.K. variant, with Ian Hodder and Michael Shanks as major leaders; Marxist (and other nondominant) archaeology are referenced rarely, if at all.

In Dutch mainstream prehistoric archaeology after the 1960s, the old (Childean) normative paradigm of archaeological culture as a recurrent set of archaeological traits was gradually replaced by a more anthropologically informed model of a systematically networked set of organizing subsystems of archaeological attributes (Bloemers and Van Dorp 1991; Slofstra 1994). A