“He thought we cared too much about the past, a kind of national nostalgia, and that it stopped us from coping with the problems of the present.” P. D. James, The Murder Room, 2003. T he 1960s and 1970s constituted a period of upheaval and transforma- tion in archaeology and one that lead to a reformulation of the archaeological agenda in the guise of the New Archae- ology. 1 In some respects, the discipline underwent more of a change during these two decades than it had during all of its earlier history. One of the key goals was to make archaeology more scientific, more objective than it had been prac- ticed earlier in the century. It was in this context that David Clarke emerged as one of the most influential voices of the day. Clarke is well known, both then and now, for Analytical Archaeology (1968), which was as much a manifesto for new directions in archaeology as Binford’s “Archaeol- ogy as Anthropology” (1962). But it is one of his “minor” works that serves as the focus of this essay. For archaeology to become more analytical, it needed to move further into the realm of the physi- cal sciences. In “Archaeology: The Loss of Innocence” (1973), Clarke examined the process and consequences of such a move, and recognized that meeting this obligation came with a price, a “critical self-consciousness.” This was “the loss of innocence” of the article’s subtitle, in reference to understanding the “true” nature of the archaeological record and to the archaeological process. To achieve the promise of an expanded, more ana- lytical discipline, there were new respon- sibilities to meet. There are two readings of this regarding the broad responsibilities of archaeology. The first is situated within the context of the New Archaeology, and the recognition of what an episte- mologically more robust and more scien- tific approach to archaeological record entails. For the New Archaeologists, this meant that access to past human behavior was now recognized as being thoroughly entangled with C- and N-transforms, behavioral correlates, analogical reason- ing, ethnoarchaeology, and taphonomic factors. Meeting the challenge became an important mandate of processual archaeology thereafter. In their history of the development of processual archaeology, Archaeology as Process: Processualism and its Progeny, O’Brien et al. (2005) refer to the loss of innocence that came with Clarke’s “critical self-consciousness.” They couple Kent Flannery’s reference to “when we knew less and enjoyed it more” with their own perceptive admission: Editor’s Notes: On archaeology and the “burden” of responsibility George P. Nicholas Canadian Journal of Archaeology/Journal Canadien d’Archéologie 31: iii–vi (2007)