Diane Dismukes wrote:
>The units you open and the statistics you use are governed by the question =
>you are interested in finding the answer to. I personally think you should =
>know what that question is before you go into the field and I think you =
>call that your research design. Your research design will dictate your =
>scope of work. So in the end it all comes full circle, the theoretical =
>perspective from which you work dictates the questions you ask up front =
>and has a big effect on the information you end up with at the conclusion =
>- and that works for both archeology and history.
Diane has pinpointed the problem. All of us choose, in advance, what we
want to observe. Maybe we have a formal theoretical point of view, a
written research design, a Prime Directive. Call it what you will.
Whatever one calls one's guiding principle, in archaeology it determines
what will be retrieved and what will be lost forever. It is very easy to
dig only one class of feature, or only one kind of activity area. It's
easy to dismiss as "uninteresting" that which interests someone else.
But, I submit, it is unprofessional and dishonest to do so.
Who gave any of us a license to sacrifice all the evidence on a site for no
objective except to answer "the question you are interested in finding the
answer to" ? I submit that any project should be designed (if that is
possible) and executed in a manner that will address all the audiences
that site might ultimately speak to.
Within my own area of operations, I can cite dozens of "data recovery"
projects where the excavator concentrated on one narrow aspect of the site,
and ignored another aspect that would have been interesting to someone
else.
Typically, we see examples of archaeologists whose idea of digging an
industrial site is to excavate the workers' privies to the exclusion of the
industrial workplaces, waste dumps, and raw materials.
We seem to accept that it is perfectly ethical to concentrate on whatever
interests us, and trash the rest of the site. Today, as we speak,
prehistorians are ignoring historic levels and treating them as
"overburden," while historical archaeologists stop digging when they reach
"natural" alluvial or aeolian deposits that probably contain pre-contact
components. Very recent landscape features typically are dismissed in the
"existing conditions" and bulldozed away.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if all the sites were totally predictable?
Wouldn't it be wonderful if every project team included someone with
expertise on everything we find, even if we didn't expect to find it?
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we never found features or objects that sent
our research off in a new direction?
Wouldn't it be wonderful if all the major site components were within the
PI's area of interest?
Yes, it would be wonderful, but that isn't the way the real world works.
The minute we relax and turn our profession into routine paradigm-checking
is the day we cease to be archaeologists.
We will never achieve ego-free research design, but we need to realize that
we are not digging for our own edification alone. We have many audiences,
and they all pay taxes.
Ned Heite _(____)_ The old one still works
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