My experience of reading archaeology reports (at least 2,000 over 24-years)
was that when people devised entirely "new" typological nomenclature for
analyzing each artifact collection, they reduced the comparative value to
meaningless gibberish. This held true for artifact identifications too (which usually
diminish to repetitive dissertations on bottle and ceramic manufacturing). Then
other archaeologists had to reexamine the older collections to come up with
meaningful comparisons. Collection discard policies rendered such comparisons
impossible, which drives the sacrifice of more archaeology sites (mitigation by
"data recovery"). What kind of data does our science benefit from if half of
it is discarded and the other half is identified and classified in an entirely
new scheme for each project?

Of course we want to consider contexts each time we analyze a collection, but
real humans created each historic context in which those artifacts were
deposited. Those real humans came from somewhere, were descended from somewhere
else, and brought with them habitual and favored behaviors that we as
anthropologists should be interested in studying. It seems to me that creation of
completely new typologies each time an archaeologist approaches a site (or feature
within a site) risks making the data uncomparable or useless to other
archaeologists. Why would we do that?

I have had some offline discussions with critics of functional typology and
found we do not really disagree on most things. I am just afraid that without
testing some sort of typologies against ancestral ethnicity, gender, ecomonic
class, and labor within the greater historical movements identified by the
National Park Service (et al) that we will not learn anything of interest to
anyone but ourselves. In a time when powerful federal U.S. Senators want to
terminate Section 106 archaeology studies on non-National Register sites, we should
be doing everything we can to make our collections useful to the rest of the
world.


Ron May
Legacy 106, Inc.