I am sure I am missing his point, but what James Gibb seems to be
talking about with his "quirky" question formulation and "weaving the
most interesting, supportable stories" sounds to me like what myself and
some colleagues refer to as anecdotal archaeology. Sure, we are all
constructing narratives from archaeological material, and an
archaeologist without imagination is pretty useless, but this move
toward the most interesting and quirky - and I would argue one sees this
more and more in published interpretations -  leads to the less
"interesting" and quirky, though also supportable by the material,
alternate interpretations being ignored, given short shrift and so on.

As an example, outside of historical archaeology this time, we excavated
 a Hellenistic building in Turkey with several individual draught
animals (oxen and donkeys, mostly) deposited in the foundation trench.
Now, foundation deposits for ritual reasons are not uncommon, but the
donkey in particular as a sacrificial beast is very unusual, although
these animals had been eaten, which is typical for sacrifices.   The
anecdotal interpretation agreed upon by my colleagues, who could not
accept the donkey as ritual, was that these were the animals used in the
construction of the building. They either died natural deaths or were
killed being near death from overwork at the end of the building
project. Then they were given to the  manual laborers on the project to
eat, because poor people will eat anything, then the bones were tossed
into the handy foundation trench.

Quite a story isn't it? -- very vivid and European audiences in
particular loved hearing about this ancient example of animal cruelty.
 Visitors to the site could easily relate the anecdote to what they saw
around them in Turkish villages, where cruelty to donkeys in particular
is pronounced.  The subjectivity of the anecdotal interpretation was of
course affected by this environment as well.

In following seasons though we continued to find donkeys in foundation
trenches for all periods, not just Hellenistic, and two cases where they
had clearly been treated in a ritual manner.  So the donkey, either as
itself or as a substitute for the more expensive horse, was simply a
sacrificial animal in local custom dedicated to one or more gods.  How
mundane -- but wasn't this less interesting and quirky interpretation
more likely from the very first donkey find?  It just wasn't an
interesting enough explanation.

I have lots of examples of things like this -- those of us with good
imaginations are valuable to the field, but keeping in mind that the
dull, the usual, the everyday are as likely as anything when it comes to
interpretation.

Maureen Basedow, Ph.d