3 Chapter 1 Archaeology at the Millennium Of Paradigms and Practice GARY M. FEINMAN AND T. DOUGLAS PRICE Gary M. Feinman • Department of Anthropology, The Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois 60605–2496. T. Douglas Price • Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706. Knowing the past is as astonishing a performance as knowing the stars. (Kubler, 1962:19) 1. INTRODUCTION In many senses, our reaching of a millennial year is an arbitrary milestone. To begin with, it is clear that there are quite a number of distinct calendars to mark time (Rathje, 2000). Furthermore, even for our own time-reckoning system, the issue of exactly when the calen- dar should have started is far from a finite and unequivocal matter. In fact, this question underlies the debate as to whether the third millennium began January 1, 2000, or on the same date in 2001 (Gould, 1997). The arbitrary and culturally constructed nature of this seemingly round number (A.D. 2000) invites us to address the intellectual rationale for why we have undertaken this syn- thetic volume at this particular time. The simple and direct answer is that it is generally intellectually fruitful and stimulating for scholars or institutions to take stock periodically of where they are and where they want to go. In addition, most practicing archaeologists have just passed a temporal threshold that has been used as a meaningful and reflectively provocative marker within the societies in which we reside. Furthermore, archaeology as an academic, scholarly, and scientific discipline in North America is more or less 100 years old (Trigger, 1989), thereby providing another potential impetus for introspection. While the year 2000 represents only the 65th anniversary of the Society for American Archaeol- ogy, the American Anthropological Association will reach the century mark in 2002. At the same time, the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution celebrated its 100th year in 1997, and The Field Museum reached its 100th birthday 3 years earlier in 1994. We believe that it is essential to take full advantage of such milestones to look forward and back in a synthetic manner. It is too easy to become enmeshed in nostalgia, or to lose sight of the long-term goals and accomplishments of the discipline when grappling with the immediate challenges and successes of the present day. As an analogy, if we think back