Dear all -
Congratulations to Sef for her role in this Historic England initiative, and to all those involved. Like Sarah and others I've found all of the questions raised and replies offered very valuable. Here are a few further thoughts, about ‘heritage baiting’ and the distinctions between ‘the historic’ and the archaeological.

Cornelius asked: "Is this initiative not merely taking current identity politics in heritage management to an even more socially divisive level, in promoting ‘LGBTQ heritage’?" Leaving aside the use of the term “promoting” (which in a UK context immediately evokes Clause 28), I could not disagree with this proposition more – not so much for political, as for archaeological reasons. 

Last autumn, when the email footers of my historic environment professional colleagues started to proclaim "English Heritage Is Changing" (this referred to the creation of two new bodies, English Heritage and Historic England), my first thoughts were: Great to have made a distinction from “Heritage”, but what if 'Historic England' had been called 'Archaeological England'? 

Maybe the idea of my imagined government quango 'Archaeological England' might help us to address Cornelius' provocation? Maybe it captures, far better than 'Historic England', the kind of understanding of the past that is the principal strength of what Sefryn nicely glosses as "the policy and data bit of what used to be English Heritage". And also, to my mind, the main strength of Contemporary Archaeology.

Of course most Historical Archaeologists gave up on calling their field "Historic Sites Archaeology" two generations ago. Part of the point of doing so was to emphasise archaeology’s role in engaging with untold stories - and crucial element of the practice of many on this list, including myself. But it retained its close bonds with History and Heritage/Historic Sites. The idea was most commonly to bring unwritten lives into new histories. To re-imagine famous historic places though other lenses (especially gender and 'race'), or to bring new places into the historic record. 

The political effectiveness of historical archaeology is a principal achievement of our field. But Contemporary Archaeology brings something that complements Historical Archaeology, and that is a wholly different enterprise from the Heritage and the Historic. It makes a different kind of political archaeology possible, in which the material is not reduced to the historical.

As long as the Heritage and the Historic remain our focus, then we risk falling back dangerously on the old, comfortable insouciance of the brand of cultural studies which Cornelius' question evokes. The late, great Raph Samuel, in castigated the 1980s rash of socio-cultural critiques of heritage practice (Robert Hewison, Tony Bennett, Neal Ascherton, etc), named it "Heritage Baiting". Samuel pointed out that "the denegration of heritage, though voiced in the name of radical politics, is actually quite conservative". 

But Heritage Baiting, Cornelius' question suggests, has not really abated. And today, with a more radical and inclusive agenda from the heritage practitioners, aloof critique really has run out of steam. Consider the question about LGBTQ "identity politics" and "social divisiveness" through the lens of Patrick Wright's thoughtful concerns about "Sneering at Theme Parks" (1989), in which he wrote:
“[It's just] another ‘them and us’ job.... We are back at sneering at the theme park, and at the dupes who are seduced by it"

But maybe Archaeological England isn't wholly imaginary. In contrast with these old debates, I'm pretty sure that some parts of Historic England are in practice operating as what I'm calling Archaeological England – and that the Inclusive agenda is a good example of this. 

What I mean is that Archaeologists (unlike Sociologists) understand that the Archaeology of the Recent Past is something more than (or, perhaps more accurately, something less than) the Heritage or the Historic. This is because Contemporary Archaeology operates at places and with communities that have witnessed conflict, loss, struggle and radical change – that is to say, at places where processes that render everyday things, places or buildings archaeological have taken place, often over quite short periods of time. A trans-disciplinary focus on on 'modern ruin' sometimes misses the point that such archaeological places are always resolutely, fragmentedly human. No wonder so much of our field engages with conflict of various kinds – from the Troubles to the legacies of slavery, through ordinary places as well as special sites.

All of which is to say: When contemporary archaeologists study the Troubles, or the legacies of slavery, or homelessness, or gender, they are not playing politics: they are working with those gaps, schisms and fractures through which our field is constituted.

The suggestion that Pride of Place is just another exercise in identity politics is incorrect: not just for the political reasons so eloquently set out in Sefryn’s reply, but also for distinctively archaeological reasons. Just as in the 20th century the radical changes wrought through military conflict or in the British class system has led to what Sef calls “the endless ‘promotion’ of war heritage, or aristocratic heritage”, so in the 21st century the human experiences of English LGBTQ history require us to acknowledge its contemporary archaeology: from the countless everyday places through which the Sexual Offences Act and Clause 28 were refracted, to the archaeology of events like the Festival of Light or the Admiral Duncan. 

In navigating between the Heritage, the Historic, and the Archaeological, and in blending the historical with the contemporary, we must be careful not to fall back into that breezy mode of cultural critique by which our field has been too often seduced, and through which the constitution of the archaeological has so often since the 80s been made invisible through the postdisciplinary fug of 'intangibility', 'heritage', 'museum studies', etc. Initiatives like UCL's important "Assembling Alternative Futures" project, in which several of those posting on this topic are involved, will undoubtedly help to clear the air.

........................................
Dan Hicks MCIfA, FSA
Associate Professor in Archaeology, University of Oxford
http://www.arch.ox.ac.uk/DH1.html
Twitter: https://twitter.com/profdanhicks

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