" American fascist Imperialists", Paul? I don't think I ever accused them of being _fascists_.
More seriously, (and I realise we're beginning to move away from the original poster's query about academic organisation at a specific North American institution) these differences in archaeological academic organisation between nations/continents, as already noted by Paul and Geoff, have been of some concern to me for a few years now, as anyone who remembers a related heated discussion on this very list some 7-8 years ago will already be aware.
I've now worked professionally in the US, UK, and Australia (and will be returning to the UK in the near future), and each country has its own rich archaeological / historical archaeological tradition. As we've extensively noted, archaeology typically comes under the purview of anthropology in North America and New Zealand, and is typically a separate field broadly under the humanities in the UK, much of continental Europe and Australia (at my current Australian institution, archaeology - from early hominids through to historical archaeology - is in the School of Historical and European Studies).
As far as I'm concerned, this is fine. I've moved between each region's tradition as needed, and - as Janice noted - often the ability to undertake professional quality archaeology supersedes these broad differences in disciplinary conception.
What causes me concern at times is that there appears to be a minority in North America who, instead of accepting these rich divergent disciplinary traditions and histories strongly argue that archaeology - including historical archaeology - can only be anthropology, and that those of us working in countries and regions that don't have an anthropological tradition are essentially engaging in theoretically poor archaeology. I think this is ridiculous. Those of us outside North America are engaging in theoretically different historical archaeology with its own disciplinary traditions, not theoretically backwards archaeology, as has sometimes been argued.
What particularly baffles me is that I would have thought that scholars with an anthropological training would have been open to the idea that archaeologists practicing in other countries would have their own historical archaeology culture that can differ from the archaeological culture of North America, but is no less rich or somehow inherently inferior for those differences.
Which ultimately is a plea on my part for trans-continental understanding across archaeological traditions rather than a criticism of any one region's approach.
> I have trained in both archaeology and history with a bit of
> environmental sciences, historical anthroplogy and geography thrown in.
> I am still amazed at the miscomprehension of every discipline for every
> other one but I am worried by people who think there own is not full of
> its own biases. Some disciplinary differences are based in practice
> such as archaeologists (excavators) unlike historians have a tendency of
> destroying their primary evidence. Some of the differences are to do
> with professionalisation ie boundary and career maintenance. Academics
> are amazingly bad at applying the same critical eye at themselves as
> they do to their subject areas.
> US archaeology is anthropology based but Europeans (as geoff points out)
> mostly come from different traditions and tend to think 'American
> fascist Imperialists and that's just the printable words' if told they
> should be otherwise by Americans.
paul
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