i guess you could attribute it to 1960s processualism & idealism or
whatever, but i keep going back to 19th century positivism, and some very
big errors the early archaeologists made on the metamorphosis from
antiquarianism -
why can geologists and soil scientists and so many other disciplines have
common terminology for some of the very things we are trying to document,
whereas some archaeologists routinely insist soil descriptions are a waste
of time because they're all subjective anyway so why bother...?
we spend a lot of time discussing kinship/state structures in ancient time
periods, and artifact types & assemblages and how to define a culture, but
not so much about our field methods, or why they evolved the way they did,
or what we can do to make them less subjective if we really wanted...
there has been some interesting work lately on why stratigraphic excavation
is big in england but not in germany, for example, or why it started in
poland after the second world war but died out until the late 1980s, or why
it's rarely used in NAmerican contexts, even when there is visible
stratigraphy... you can't blame all of that on processualism, since that
particular theoretical debate seems to be primarily a british-american
thing, and even then the US aversion to stratigraphic methods seems to have
its roots in the the 1920s... even the british had to rediscover strat
after pitt-rivers and his school were replaced by a pile of classicists...
every site is different, every culture is different, every pathological
condition a forensic scientist investigates is different, every atom is
different... how far do we want to go with this? we group lots of stuff
together under classes like "state" or "tribe" without any big protest,
just because it conveniently fits our classification schema, but site
documentation can't be standardised...? finds typologies are clear-cut and
unambiguous...?
sorry ned, it's just an argument i don't buy into any more - something we
parrot more than we really think clearly about...
--On Sunday, October 19, 2003 7:33 AM -0400 Ned Heite <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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.
>
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