Sadly, senior practitioners in our field today could not have been
hired today as junior grunt-herders, let alone Principal
Investigators.  Some of the best senior folks in our field do not
have the standard ladder of degrees in anthropology or a "closely
related field," whatever that is.

Historical archaeology, as a field, has pasted itself together from a
vibrant mix of disciplines. To standardize this wonderfully crazy
mixture would be a disaster.  True, there is a "common body of
knowledge" that can be taught in perhaps six or twelve credit hours
plus a field school. But then there are regional studies, varying
technologies, and heaven knows how many arcane specialties. There are
dozens of different skills that could be swept into professional
credentials, to enrich our mixture.

If we continue this self-destructive plunge into standardized
training for the next generation, there is little hope for the kind
of innovative research that has made this field so interesting and
useful in the first place.

While it's true that only a minority of sites need an
archaeometallurgist or a molinologist, or a genealogist, we all need
to be aware and receptive to the contributions these disciplines
might be able to offer.

Perhaps a core course in the standard curriculum should be a survey
of the various contributing disciplines. On second thought, do we
need any more core courses?


--
Ned @ Heite.org

You know you're in trouble
when your idea of excitement
is the way the receipt pops
jauntily, even with gay abandon,
from the slot in the ATM machine.