Everybody starts out with a cursory introduction to the literature when
they work in a new area -- how many of us have remained in the same
narrow material culture confines our whole careers? Historical
archaeology, sorry guys, isn't that different from the other kinds --
only the material differs to any great extent. No need to be a snob
about these things, really. A good, responsible field archaeologist can
deal with any situation. What is important is digging, recording and
reporting responsibly. "meaning" is subjective and changes from
excavation to excavation, generation to generation., so not grasping all
the larger questions in one go is hardly devastating. And, my goodness,
what is half the traffic on this list but the online version of looking
things up in one or more guides . The problem really, which I've
experienced in American CRM, are "professional" archaeologists and
preservation architects doing shoddy, lazy fieldwork and covering it up
in the reports with a surfeit of jargon. Please don't blame people like
me (B.A. Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology, M.A. Field and
Analytical Archaeology, Ph.d. Prehistoric Archaeology) for the problems
pervading the process.
Maureen Basedow
David Rotenstein wrote:
>One of the greatest
>shortcomings of the cultural resource management industry is the idea that
>one size fits all, i.e., that any "professional" archaeologist is qualified
>to render judgments on the whole of the archaeological record. So, for
>example, if you are a newly minted MA archaeologist trained in pre-Columbian
>(or Old World) archaeology with only a cursory introduction to historical
>archaeology, you are going to look for meaning in what seemingly appears
>ubiquitous and mundane. You are going to search for hypotheses to test
>because you've read Stan South's books or you know that there's such thing
>as a Miller scale. You may not fully understand the things in these works,
>but you know they're there and you somehow must use them. These folks are
>easy to spot in the CRM industry: they are the ones who call themselves
>"historic archaeologists."
>
>I see the process above-described all the time in Section 106 architectural
>surveys done by archaeologists. It's apparent that the folks have no clue
>beyond a cursory introduction to the literature, yet they do the work
>anyway. When you read it, it is abundantly clear that someone has done
>fieldwork (taken photos, marked a few maps) and gone back to the office and
>spent an exorbitant amount of time worrying over photographs of buildings
>and poring through the Macalester and Macalester "Field Guide" to described
>the properties surveyed.
>
>-DSR.
>_________________________________________
>David S. Rotenstein, Ph.D.
>Consulting Historian
>Silver Spring, MD 20910
>Fax: (301) 588-9394
>Mobile: (240) 461-7835
>e-mail: [log in to unmask]
>Web: http://www.dsrotenstein.com
>_________________________________________
>
>
>
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