Colonisation involves the expansion of one state or polity into the territory of another and the establishment of settlements subject to that parent state. Expansion may be accomplished by conquest or by trade, and includes political, economic, social, cultural and psychological dimensions. Colonialism is the process by which new societies emerge in both the new territories and the core because of colonisation, and the new systems of relationships that result. Colonial sites might be defined culturally as those occupied during the first generation or two of colonisation, or politically as any from the period that precedes independence from the homeland. Colonialism appears as a complex, layered process, whose implications extend to the writing and practice of history and archaeology, and our understanding of the past. As the South African anti-apartheid activist and writer Steve Biko commented: 'the colonists were not satisfied merely with holding a people in their grip and emptying the Native's brain of all form and content, they turned to the past of the oppressed people and distorted, disfigured and destroyed it' (Biko and Stubbs 1978: 29). The notion of postcolonialism is a contested term, which describes a surprisingly wide range of subject positions, professional fields and critical enterprises (Slemon 1995). In one usage it refers simply to the period since independence. A potentially more productive usage is to understand it as being primarily an oppositional term, used to describe a set of anti-colonial projects and ideas. In some cases these may be coeval with colonialism itself. Neocolonialism refers to economic and other ties that outlive formal political independence, and serve to perpetuate colonial forms and relations (Hewitt 2002).

Colonialism and postcolonialism are characteristics of the modern world, but the process has deep historical roots and has been of interest to archaeologists for some time. The major state-based societies in the ancient world, such as the Romans, Greeks, and Mayas, incorporated colonialism of some form (Gosden 2004; Lyons and Papadopoulos 2002).