The Role of the Archaeologist in Present-Day Society

Abstract

AbstractThe present paper is aimed to reveal the useful role that the archaeologist, evading from the ivory tower of his erudition of the societies of the past, may play for the change of the societies in the future. From two examples chosen in the XIX° century, we are focalizing on the very deep impact the archaeology may have in the society at a regional scale (the museum of Lubny in Ukraine) and at a worldwide scale (the Universal Exhibitions in Paris) for the evolution of the societies. Resulting from crisis due to internal mechanisms specific to our operation, the contemporary societies may collapse like the societies of the past. Such mechanisms have a systemic and non historical nature, which are involving us to discover the main processes, responsible of collapses. Then, the archaeologist, like the climatologist, may operate the knowledge of the past to forecast the happy or unhappy evolutions of the future. The archaeologist, servicing the contemporaneous society, may be useful, not only in discovering the remains of the past but also in making the inventory of the contemporary cultures as in forecasting the evolutions of the societies.