Archaeology then is the relationship we maintain with the past: it consists of a work of mediation with the past. In a sense, archaeology archaeology is something that each of us routinely does. This we might call the archaeological imagination. Archaeological knowledge has to be produced and interpretation is always informed by present interests and values. It is contemporary interest which takes the archaeologist to the material past. Nor is there a single way to do archaeology: different things can be made from the same traces and fragments. People may work on the same material and produce different outcomes. The past 'as it was' or 'as it happened' is an illusionary category, neither stable nor homogeneous. For instance, the prehistoric monument we call Stonehenge has no single, essential meaning: it has been reworked, reconstructed, reinterpreted since building began (Chippindale 1994). The site continues to be used as it always has been: people experience material things, appropriate them and produce a meaning for themselves, be they archaeologists, new age travellers, foreign tourists or latter-day Druids (Chippindale et al. 1990). And thus it becomes a place of contention, of conflicting interpretation, of power relationships and contested ownership (Bender 1998).
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The active process of interpretation is to clarify or explain the meaning and significance of something, deciphering and translating the past in the present. In prophesy to interpret is to read significance and infer courses of action. Interpretation is also about the performance of a work - acting out something to give it an intelligible life. This is an active apprehension - making a past work a present presence. When you act out a dramatic work you choose to pick on some meanings and not others. You make an explicit or inexplicit critique of other interpretations. So such interpretation is simultaneously analytic and critical.
MS