The past is everywhere. All around us lie features which, like ourselves and our thoughts, have more or less recognizable antecedents. Relics, histories, memories suffuse human experience. . . . Whether it is celebrated or rejected, attended to or ignored, the past is omnipresent. (Lowenthal 1985:xv) In a scene that may resonate with contemporary archaeologists as uncannily familiar, a sixth century bc cuneiform tablet from Larsa, in modern Iraq, testifies to the incipient archaeological investigations of Nabonidus, king of Babylon (Schnapp 1997:13-20). The tablet describes how Nabonidus mobilized workers with picks, shovels, and baskets to excavate in sites already millennia old, seeking to recover and restore past traces of a mighty predecessor. Yet the deeds of Nabonidus offer more than an exceptionally early example of archaeological practice -the king was actively engaged in the construction of social memory.Today, it is the accepted business of the discipline of archaeology to interpret human pasts, and in the process, to contribute to the construction of memory for contemporary societies. Although we style ourselves as participants in a fairly young academic discipline, the "fascination with the past" or "backward-looking curiosity" that gave rise to the formal practice of archaeology is not a phenomenon specific to the post-Enlightenment era. Like the Babylonian ruler Nabonidus, past peoples knowingly inhabited landscapes that were palimpsests of previous occupations. Sites were built on sites; landscapes were occupied and reoccupied time and again. Rarely was this a meaningless or innocent reuse. Like us, past peoples observed and interpreted traces of more distant pasts to serve the needs and interests of their present lives.This collection of essays is intended to explore these uses "of the past in the past" from a wide range of archaeological perspectives. The papers that follow are drawn from a spectrum of cultures and chronological periods: from prehistoric to early modern times, from the American Southwest to southern India. The peoples involved in each case study accessed the past through different means, employing varying combinations of texts, oral traditions, iconographic representations, heirlooms, and visible remains on the landscape.

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