Ian,
So you belong to the camp who believe nothing can be standardized because the
typology would be too big to publish? The issue is not defining the precise
function of an object, but how that object contributes to understanding
behaviors in the context in which it was found. The historic contexts always change
with the particular research questions at hand.
Personally, I feel that if archaeologists persist in re-naming (and
reinterpretting) the same artifact for each site, within each region, and for each
research design, then they reduce science to gibberish.
Ron May
Legacy 106, Inc.