Includes bibliographical referencesI take my lead from a paper by Bruce Trigger (1984) in which he divides the disciplinary field into three modes or forms of archaeology: a colonialist archaeology, a nationalist archaeology and an imperialist archaeology. He goes on to suggest (1990) that South African archaeology is the most colonialist archaeology of all. Trigger was writing at a point before the current political transformation in South Africa had emerged over the horizon of visibility. Writing somewhat later, and from the point of view of a Third World archaeologist, I ask: What would a post-colonial archaeology look like? In particular, what would it look like from the point of view of South Africa in the late 1990s