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Date: | Sun, 12 Feb 1995 21:31:59 EST |
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I agree with Tom Wheaton.
I agree with George Miller
I agree with Cara Blume
I agree with Bill Adams
Have I lef anyone out?
It seems to me that there is nothing whatever
(emic, etic, or whatever) to make the "traditional"
approach to ceramics incompatible with what George
Miller is doing. We are talking here about two or more
different aspects of the ceramics.
From a purely technological point of view, it makes eminently
elegant good sense to follow the broad taxonomic approach
when you are writing a catalogue and describing the finds from
a site. Like it or not, our most useful report element is still the
description of the finds. When it comes to interpreting the stuff in
terms of their role on the site, you should look at a whole
galaxy of techniques, not just George's. At the SHA, I was exploring
with several other colleagues the idea of merging George's
economic scaling ideas with ideas about gentrification based on
Dick Bushman's concepts of that subject. I happen to believe that we
need to look at the social scaling independent of economic scaling,
so there you have another. Then you can classify ceramics in terms of
distance between source and user, and you can classify that distance
as either social or commercial.
One could go on. There are gazillions of ways to classify
any raw evidence.
That is not, however, the issue.
The issue is that dull old stuff at the back of the book,
where we list the busted dishes in a fashion that is intelligable
to the poor schnook who needs to use our finds.
Once we have tended to the needs of the poor schnook in
question (who might be ourselves someday), let fancy fly!
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