Greetings to everyone!
I have been doing my best to lurk quietly while I work on my
dissertation, but I can not bite my tongue any longer on these
threads.  First, I'll say that I'm enjoying this discussion, and the
thread on industrial sites.  Second, I offer KUDOS to Deborah Rotman
for providing actual REFERENCES with her postings and "raising the
bar" for the rest of us in our discussions!

On the subject of rituals and religion, I am in agreement with Drs.
Beaudry, Schuyler and others.  Dr. Schuyler's comments particularly
stuck me.  If we are going to improve the visibility of historical
archaeology within academics discourses and popular culture, we will
have to get over our maniacal desire to circumscribe our discipline
through a definition or boundary.  In stead of arguing about whether
our proper area of study is within anthropology, history, ethnography,
technology, or whatever, we should promote (even celebrate) historical
archaeology's intersection with those disciplines.  Historical
archaeology has come a very long way since the 1940s or even the
1970s, but we are deluding ourselves if we think that our field is
"mainstream" in the academy OR EVEN IN resource management (where our
field is represented best).

Examine any journal of history, anthropology, sociology, literary
criticism, biology, or general journals like Nature, Science, or even
National Geographic.  Each person should ask themselves if they are
content with the representation of HA in other fields.  I am
frustrated that HA is still rarely cited in history or anthropology.
I also believe that our field could fade away as historic and cultural
preservation laws are relaxed over the next decade, UNLESS we make a
conscious decision NOW to promote ourselves and our discipline.  Just
yesterday I was in the library here in Missouri, working on some
articles, and I was thrilled by the number of sophisticated and well
written new books in HA that should have broad cross-academic appeal.
(On my desk now are Corbin's Material Culture of Steamboat Passengers,
Mullin's Race and Affluence, Orser's HA of the Modern World, Gibb's
Archaeology of Wealth, and Leone and Potter's HA of Capitalism.  We
are flourishing now, but we have been waiting for 20 years or so for
the historians and anthropologists and others to DISCOVER how great
our work really is and to begin to read, consume, and cite our work.
This is not going to happen, unless we move to promote ourselves to
these other scholars.  We can't promote ourselves by telling each
other that THIS topic is not pure historical archaeology and THAT
topic is, in part because outsiders will read these statements as
reinforcement of the idea that our work is "cute" but not really
serious for a "real" historian, cultural anthropologist, or
archaeologist.  We need to intentionally target defined audiences and
forcibly get their attention, by giving papers at other meetings,
writing articles for other journals, AND perhaps most importantly
through PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE with scholars from other longhouses in
the academic village.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
Cheers,
Tim
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Timothy Scarlett
University of Nevada, Reno

601 F University Village Apartments
601 South Providence Road
Columbia, Mo 65201
[log in to unmask], [log in to unmask]
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 To my old brown earth
 To my old brown earth
 And to my old blue sky
 I'll now give these last few molecules
 Of "I"
 And you, who sing
 And you, who stand nearby
 I do charge you not to cry
 Guard well our human chain
 Watch well you keep it strong
 As long as sun will shine
 And this our home
 Keep pure and sweet and green
 For now I'm yours
 And you are also
 Mine

-- Pete Seeger for John McManus, 1958.

For James, Malcolm and the others.
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