Jeff, Bill and others,
 
The problems you are discussing vis-a-vis theory, critical methods of
documentary analysis, and the relationships between documents sand
artifacts arte problems that have been central to historical
archaeology for thirty years or more. Not that I want to suggest we
have all answered the questions or mastered the methods of combining
the tradfitional materials of history and archaeology (and in North
America, we flavor it all with anthropology), but we have sometimes
been successful, and we certainly have generated a huge literature on
the subject. I'm glad to see this discussion, just as I am glad to
see the beginnings of some communications between SHA and SPMA in the
up-coming conference, but I hope that our British and European
colleagues will not overlook this literature. Beyond theory and
methods, the excavations of many hundreds of sites--many of them with
short occupation spans and tight dates--have often provided us on
this side of the pond with closer, more reliable dates for British
ceramics than can be had in britain. This is particularly true with
17th-c materials.
 
Dan Mouer