Adrian wrote:
>
>So EVERY site is important, eh? No wonder you have so much trouble
>with the government's reviews.

No, you missed a nuance there. I didn't mean to say that every site is
important.

Every site is informative. There is a difference.

An "important" site may be potentially signficiant, and therefore
potentially eligible under Criterion D for the National Register. The
meanings of the two words are uncomfortably close.

Among us, every site has something to say. Mere existence of the site is
potentially informative. Criterion D arguably could be stretched to include
virtually everything, but I wasn't suggesting that.

I'm not suggesting that we should snooker the Powers That Be.

I am, however, suggesting that you can't write off a site from the comfort
of an office, without sticking a trowel into it, or conducting background
research, or (preferably) both.

Vergil's example cuts very close to home. When we discovered the
well-preserved tinplate waste from a nineteenth-century canning factory,
the SHPO was ready to write it off as insignificant, just because there was
no archaeological literature and no facile research question relating to
the canning industry. I'm glad we prevailed and dug the site, because it
was a gold mine of information about an industry that literally changed the
world. Now there is a literature of cannery archaeology.

If we just keep digging sites in categories that already have been done,
what will happen to the unexplored areas and subjects? We can't arbitrarily
dismiss any category, not even late-nineteenth-century farmsteads.

I don't give a hoot about prehistoric mounds, either. That's why I dig
canneries and ironworks, which to me are much more interesting. But by the
same token, no prehistorian is qualified to tell me that we don't need to
dig another cannery.  We need to dig a bunch more canneries, and not just
tomato and salmon canneries, either.

I've never seen a site that didn't say something to the right person, but I
have seen informative sites that did not qualify under Criterion D.
Unfortunately, I have also seen entirely too many boring archaeologists who
could write off King Tut's tomb without a second look, just because he was
a relatively minor figure in Egyptian history.



     _____
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  |Baby the\            Ah to live in a world where the
  |1969 Land\_|===|_    two ends of horses were
  |  ___Rover   ___ |o  equally distributed!
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  Ned Heite, Camden, DE  http://home.dmv.com/~eheite/index.html