Dale Floyd asks: "Now does that mean that we historians, because we
have associated with and talked with archaeologists, can go out and
start digging?  I think not and without a great deal more formal
training, experience and publishing, you are not a professional
historian."
 
***
 
Let's stop playing disciplinary turf wars here. Archaeology is not
history. For one thing most of us archaeologists are trained in
anthropology, so we have different disciplinary traditions, etc.
 
On the other hand, anthropology and history have always been closely
linked (ask Boas or Kroeber), and never more so than at present
(thanks, partly, to the spread of historical archaeology, historical
ethnography, ethnohistory, culture history, etc.). While there are
undoubtedly more than a few historical archaeologists who are lousy
historians, there are equally many mediocre anthropologists in the
history profession (eg., Rhys Isaac, David Hackett Fischer, etc.).
 
Anyone who claims to be an historical archaeologist and who does not
take the responsibility to become more than passably conversant with
the methods, goals, traditions, findings and literature of history
is a poor historical archaeologist. Likewise, any historian who pays
small heed to the perspectives, interpretations, and "data" of
historical archaeologists working in a common period/region/topic is
equally foolish.
 
Let's stop drawing lines in the sand and start spending more time
reading each other's works. We cannot (as some have suggested in
this debate) simply "collaborate," with archaeologists doing task X
and historians task Y, we need fully to communicate in research
which sometimes has shared goals, and sometimes does not.
 
Dan Mouer