Standards are a slippery slope. Of course we need to be mutually
intelligible, but some of our state standards go beyond that
requirement and become micro-management and just plain silly. So who
really cares if a shovel test pit is round or square?

The existence of 50+ state standards is by definition mocking the
standardization effort itself.  Here in the east, where we have
little states all jammed up together, it is not unusual for a
particular lab to be working to four different state standards, as we
do. In some vital areas, such as collection culling, the state
standards differ radically.

The romantic idealism of the "new archaeology" created a mind-set
that dictates "scientific" appearance and uniform reporting methods.
Unfortunately, the world is not put together that way. Every site is
different. Every artifact is unique. Every archaeologist has a
different brain and a different background. We cannot, and should
not, think and work in lock step.

Proponents of "scientific" archaeology have made a forceful argument
for rigor in statistical, analytical, and procedural areas.
Generally speaking, most of these reforms have been beneficial.

It was a romantic notion, thirty or forty years ago, that we should
all take graduate degrees in a single subject, think the same way,
keep our records the same way, and create some huge database in the
sky, the seven levels of which would be accessed, in succession, as
the revealed truth in the core of our immortal souls.

Unfortunately, archaeology is too messy, too universal, too chaotic,
to render the neat pseudo-scientific tables that might make us look
like hard scientists, which we are not and never will be.

Laissez les bontemps roulez!


At 6:10 PM -0400 10/18/03, Elizabeth Cohan wrote:
>For Maryland, try:
><http://www.marylandhistorictrust.net/>http://www.marylandhistorictrust.net/
>.  Also, since I believe we share interests in excavation methods,
>etc., I would appreciate getting copies of any other URLs you
>receive.  Should I come upon others, I shall e-mail them to you.
>Cheers, Professor (ret.) Leonard Cohan.
>


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