How can we use the past to make sense of the issues and problems that concern us in the present? In this collection of his most important writing, Mark Leone, a leading theorist of postprocessual or postmodern archaeology, offers a model for Critical Historical Archaeology that sets the field on the new trajectory. A forceful advocate for historical archaeology as an activist pursuit, he argues that the way to live in the postmodern period is not simply to chronicle it, but to use the process of interpreting of heritage to develop new understandings the cultural and political issues of our time.