The authors kindly agreed to respond to these comments.

Kristian Kristiansen takes issue with Cornelius Holtorf's vision of a people-driven archaeology; and the popular context replies in kind.

In two recent books, From Stonehenge to Las Vegas – Archaeology as popular culture (AltaMira 2005) and Archaeology is a brand! The meaning of archaeology in popular culture (Archaeopress 2007), Cornelius Holtorf wants us to readdress the focus of archaeology from being predominantly a study of the past to becoming a study of its use in popular culture in the present. While I am in general sympathy with the attempt to analyse the role of archaeology in modern popular culture – and his 2007 book especially provides some good examples of that – I am deeply sceptical of Holtorf's theoretical and political programme for archaeology. It represents a dangerous attempt to deconstruct archaeology as a historical discipline in order to allow modern market forces to take over the archaeological heritage and the consumption of the past as popular culture.

The exhibition, Rome and the Barbarians: the Birth of a New World, in Venice, meditates on Europe's cultural genealogy. Europe, it argues, is a concoction of disparate traditions conceived and developed by the will of admiring immigrants to the Roman world from the east and north. It raises a range of issues left latent in the gallery. How can we create an appropriate narrative for the first millennium AD, particularly with archaeological finds? How, for that matter, can Europe's tradition be defined; and what prompts the issue?