At the risk of being "politically incorrect" I remember from reading
somewhere that "archaeology" is referred to as the "hand maiden" of history,
which of course is one of the weirdest approbations one could use for
archaeology. I once heard a cluster of terms for archaeology and history
that seemed more relevant to it (that is if and where archaeology is allowed
to exist, i.e., Adolph Hitler was none too happy with the "Beaker Culture"
that seemed to precede his grand vision of the past, and that archaeologist,
whose names escapes me, should have been given a Noble prize perhaps) to
"confirm or corroborate or negate" certain aspects of history, testable in a
scientific method.


----Original Message Follows----
From: Brian Siegel <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: archaeologists and history-Baby and  bathwater
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 13:27:19 -0500

While I too remember James Deetz arguing that American archaeology was
nothing if it wasn't anthropology, I also remember him saying that that
arrangement was historically arbitrary (a consequence of American
anthropology's historic, four-field focus upon  Native Americans), that
the French and British tend to regard archaeology as a subfield of
history, and that that arrangement seemed to work quite well (provided
that archaeologists could gain some autonomy and respect).  This same view
is implicit in the vision of historical archaeology which he articulated
in Flowerdew Hundred, that of an area of inquiry which transcended the
boundaries of history and of archaeology, and could tell us more about the
past that either discipline could separately.

Brian Siegel

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