Bill Lipe,
I've been listening in on the SOPA/ROPA discussion and have been very
impressed by your well stated position.  You've just about won me over, but
first I'd like to hear you address the issue Mary Ellin D'Agostino brought
up in her August 13 entry about the narrow scope of the definition of
archaeologists as a 'dirt' archaeologist. She referred to the:
>>the long standing bias in archaeology that the dirt archaeologists are
the only 'real' archaeologists while collections and document oriented work
is devalued.  This is a particular problem for historical archaeologists
who, presumably, focus a significant portion of their work on non-excavated
materials.  Nor does it sit well with the recent discussion of the ethics 
of digging and destroying the non-renewable resource of the archaeological
record as opposed to working on all those (already excavated) collections 
moldering in museum basements.<<        If I already missed a reply to
this, I apologize for bringing it back up.
        Increasingly, I am bothered by CRM archaeologists that work outside
their area of expertise. Profits over ethics.   So, I would be interested 
in an organization that could stem this growing trend.  I'm particularly
concerned over the number of archaeologists that work on historic sites but
have little or no expertise in working with archival materials - or even  a
clue that looking at historic records might not only be a good idea but, in
many cases, it is the cost effective thing to do.  In reading the ROPA
materials, I see a couple of small statements that might address this
issue.  From your insider's viewpoint, do you think this issue of working 
outside your expertise will actually be addressed by ROPA?  And during the
21 years of SOPA, has anyone ever been "called' on working on a historic
site without the appropriate expertise?  I am sincerely concerned about
this issue and would appreciate hearing your thoughts.
        On the other hand, I often think we all spend too much time focused
on compiling lists of people.  We spend alot of time trying to figure out 
who should or should not be on some list of professional archaeologists.    
Sometimes I think the same amount of time would be better spent compiling a
list of meaningful research topics that should be addressed by salvage
archaeology (and conversely a list of boring, overdone research questions 
that none of us want addressed in these CRM reports ever, ever,  again).  
How about that for a new approach?  Yeah, that's the ticket, we could call
it ROBA, register of Boring archaeology.  Hey, i kinda like it.   
Linda Derry
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