Didn't Walter Taylor first say "Archaeology is Anthropology, or
nothing," or words to that effect, in his "A Study of Archaeology,"
1948?
D. Babson.
-----Original Message-----
From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of E.
B. Jelks
Sent: Sunday, March 21, 2004 11:34 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Being a pedant (anthropology or nuttin')
As I recall, the 1958 Willey and Phillips statement was: "Archaeology as
taught in American universities is anthropology or it is nothing." (I
donated my library, including W&P, to my university upon retiring many
years ago, and I am not going to the library to look up the exact
quotation.) W&P, I believe, cited someone named Maitland as the
originator of this notion. Who Maitland is or was I have no idea.
Maybe someone with a copy of W&P will look up the actual wording and
will track down the Maitland paper and thus document the origin of this
dictum which, with the phrase about universities omitted, became the
mantra of the "New Archaeology" movement.
Jim Deetz, incidentally, gave a keynote address at an annual meeting of
the SAA about 20 years ago in which he made the point that the
nuts-and-bolts phase of archaeological research--i.e., exposing and
observing physical elements of the archaeological record in the field,
and drawing direct inferences about the human activities that created
those elements--was sufficiently different from the ultimate objective
of formulating explanatory models of cultural processes to warrant being
assigned a different name from the latter. He suggested calling the
nuts-and-bolts phase "archaeography" and the model-building phase
"archaeology". This, of course, would be comparable to "ethnography"
and "ethnology" in cultural anthropology. If any American
archaeologists have adopted these terms I am not aware of it. Lewis
Binford has been working for years, with indifferent success, on
developing a "middle-range" theory to bridge the gap between
"archaeography" and "archaeology".
ebj
-----Original Message-----
From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of K.
Kris Hirst
Sent: Saturday, March 20, 2004 5:10 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Being a pedant (anthropology or nuttin')
Brian Siegel <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>While I too remember James Deetz arguing that American archaeology
was nothing if >>>it wasn't anthropology, <<<
Actually, if you don't mind my butting in pedantically, it was Philip
Phillips who said "new world archaeology is anthropology or it is
nothing" in 1958, in the first version of what was to become the classic
Willey and Phillips text "Method and theory in American Archaeology" :
http://archaeology.about.com/blquote51.htm
(and the only reason I know that is somebody kindly corrected me several
years ago, and showed me where to find it)
Kris
K. Kris Hirst
The Wasteflake Project
http://www.wasteflake.com and
Guide for Archaeology @ About.com
http://archaeology.about.com
Tolerence for ambiguity is as essential as the Marshalltown trowel. --
Alice Beck Kehoe
More Quotes: http://archaeology.about.com/blquoteold.htm
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