We are grateful to the commentators for their valuable and insightful contributions, and thank them for their thought-provoking comments. We find joy in the descriptions of archaeology as a discipline with cross-over potential, inherently collaborative, interdisciplinary and "messy", and cannot but agree with Andrew Jones that archaeology is fun! But what follows from these characteristics is also what makes archaeology so challenging, and sometimes even difficult. Several of the commentators

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... ve identified one of the roots of this difficulty: the education system. There are obviously considerable differences between countries, especially in the higher education system. As for archaeology programmes, most UK universities seem to offer courses in archaeological science, whereas this is not the case in Nor-way and Sweden. This could be easily solved by integrating a mandatory element of archaeological science into the curricula of archaeology courses at all levels. What is obvious when reading through the comments is that we all take our own realities as starting points-that was certainly our starting point. This is particularly evident when it comes to what we refer to as the filter. Although not all of the commentators admit to having personally encountered or practised the filter, it does seem to exist in various countries. And it could be expressed differently within different fields of archaeology.