The discipline of archaeology has, like any other discipline, undergone transformation of various kinds over years. Such transformation is encouraged by various factors, which may range from the need to improve research techniques and theoretical frameworks to extract better results from the material culture to racial transforming within the discipline. The latter is true in the case of South Africa. An effort to bring about racial transformation within South African archaeology was initiated in 2007 by three African archaeologists who had the desire to see meaningful changes happening in the discipline following the democratic transition in 1994. A transformation charter was approved by the professional structure of archaeology in Southern Africa a year later. In it, we not only strive to achieve racial balance within the archaeological discipline, but explore how archaeology is practised in the context of archaeological heritage management. What does this transformation agenda mean for the management of archaeological resources? How can South African archaeological heritage management, through the transformation charter, bring about a truly post-colonial and Africanist archaeology? A review of post-colonial and Africanist ideology in the context of heritage management will be presented. In the case of South Africa, current archaeological heritage management principles are one-dimensional and Eurocentric in that the physical approach to heritage management is emphasized. This approach is at loggerheads with an approach based on African understanding of archaeological heritage management. To highlight this phenomenon, I shall briefl y discuss the current heritage legislation. I conclude the paper by arguing that a post-colonial and Africanist archaeology cannot be meaningfully achieved by a mere change of theoretical principles, but by the full incorporation of professionals from across the racial divide. In the context of the paper, archaeological heritage management should not be about managing African heritage for the Africans in their absence.

Heritage management and cultural legislation have always existed in the African continent, even before the days of written laws. However, it is often perceived that it was with the 'taking over' of the continent that civilization and heritage legislation were fi rst implemented. The 'new' legislation did not recognize the indigenous means of management and ignored the fact that heritage sites have existed long prior to the scramble for the continent. The fi rst enacted legislation in South Africa was distinctively biased towards the Bushmen heritage. I argue that this was probably because it was not politically problematic as Bushmen were considered to be a dying nation with a culture going 'extinct'. Having legislation that promoted the heritage of the people you were colonizing might not have been strategically correct. Legislation over the years moved away from the 'Bushmen culture' to protecting colonial heritage sites. Whilst the post-colonial heritage legislation has improved on the previous legislation -as can be shown by its success in courts -there are still areas of concern. I fi nd the whole heritage framework represented by the legislation to still be clearly non-African, with a top-down approach that has not much respect for African culture, especially the values that clash with Eurocentric ones. I conclude that indeed there has been signifi cant progress made with legislation over the years, from 1911 to 1999 when the current legislation was promulgated. However, a lack of proactive measures from within heritage management, as well as external factors, are still a stumbling block to a successful implementation of heritage legislation and as a result heritage is still threatened.

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We have no choice: we must excavate, first because whole continents are still barely known from an archaeological point of view, and second because thousands of archaeological sites disappear every day as a result of economic development. Rescue or preventive archaeology is thus an ethical duty. Nevertheless, there is a serious risk of a split between academic archaeology, with its wealth of thinking but poverty of funding, and commercial archaeology, where the situation is the opposite and the goal is, above all, financial profit. So the question is not just to know why one excavates, but also how.Tothe general public, archaeology is equated with excavations and discoveries of objects, even treasures. Incidentally, the archaeologist Indiana Jones is only interested in objects and seemingly he does not publish very much, even if he provides academic lectures to his students from time to time. However, for most contemporary archaeologists, excavation is only one step within a global and continuous process traditionally involving six stages: AbstractThe impulse to keep excavating, set against widespread failures to publish in a timely manner, has created a crisis of confidence for archaeology. This is especially so in Europe and North America, where contract archaeology has witnessed dramatic growth in recent decades, but it is not universally the case. Far from being the defining practice of the discipline, excavation is not the only technique for generating

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