Summary
In the recent years there has been a clear attempt from most institutions across Europe to update the models of archaeological heritage management implemented following the Malta Convention. This is visible not only in the documents issued by advisory institutions (Council of Europe, EAC) but by the government institutions (European Comission and Parliament, Council of EU) which are reviewing its global policy on Cultural Heritage in several terms. All that can be related with the need of updating Malta Convention in order to make it more participatory, sustainable and integrated. But is it really so?To our view the model on which the Malta Convention is based 1) has accentuated the division between professional sectors, 2) has had a very uneven utility for market regulation (very different from country to country) and 3) has by and large forgotten society (following a technocratic paradigm).Despite the solutions that are being articulated from the institutions to supposedly change things, we argue that they do not imply a paradigm shift, but actually a deterioration of its contradictions: a real turn of screw. In most recent proposals for governance, sustainability and integration we can find, albeit embellished, the same problems that we have found in the ?golden years? of the model.The real question is not what model of archaeology, but what global context of the archaeology policies we need. The problem is that an integrated preventive archaeology, with the participation of different professionals, open to society as a whole, and sustainable (that is, a really public preventive archaeology) is not compatible with capitalism. We argue that any paradigm shift must be built as part of a transformative praxis, and that political action (both in archaeology and in its legal-administrative framework) should take most of our efforts in the future.