Not good. South's categories won't work well with an industrialized material culture of the twentieth century. Too much glass, not as much ceramics, more nails and metals survive and an incredibly complex material culture reflecting an incredibly complex, hierachical industrialized society.
South's taxonomy was developed for a British Colonial, 18th century complex. Bit of a difference, there. It was not constructed to tackle the types of problems you want to handle in your analysis of early 20th century materials.
You can read about it my dissertation:
Blee, Catherine Holder
1991 Sorting Functionally Mixed Artifact Assemblages with Multiple Regression: A Comparative Study in Historical Archaeology. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado, Boulder. University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, MI.
I have a much more recent discussion and update of the problems associated with using South's taxonomy in Appendix D of my most recent publication,
Spude, Catherine Holder
2006 Appendix D: The Multiple Regression Analysis. In The Mascot Saloon: Archeological Investigations in Skagway, Alaska, Volume 10. National Park Service, Anchorage, AK.
This report is available free by writing to [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> and asking for a copy. You don't need to use the types of statistics I advocate to understand the need for a more sophisticated approach to classification than that advocated by South.
The bottom line is that I advocate a slight variation of Sprague's taxonomy, which makes more allowance for the huge variability that accompanied the industrial revolution, not only with its explosion in material culture, but also with its resulting specialization in economic function. I maintain that if you use Sprague's method of classifying artifacts, you will be able to adapt it to whatever analytical problems you eventually design, even if you haven't come up with those questions yet. South doesn't work for the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
If you are interested in following up, contact me off-line for a draft of an essay that will appear in an academic book within the next year, which explores the subject even further.
Cathy
Catherine H. Spude, PhD
Montana Dawn, Enterprises
7 Avenida Vista Grande #145
Santa Fe, NM 87508
505-466-1476 home
505-913-1326 cell
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"Life is not tried, it is merely survived if you're standing outside the fire." Jenny Yates and Garth Brooks.
----- Original Message -----
From: McKee, Larry<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, January 22, 2007 10:39 AM
Subject: Revisiting South's functional artifact categories
Our staff is working on the analysis of artifacts from a data recovery
project on a 1910s to 1940s lumber mill town, Ravensford, on the edge of
the Great Smoky Mountains in southwestern North Carolina. The
collection includes over 170,000 artifacts from 22 distinct house lots,
commercial lots, and several dumps.
We are trying to adapt South's functional category scheme to serve as an
intermediate step in the artifact analysis. We are tweaking it to
accommodate 20th century items as well as to try (as others have done)
to minimize the inherent problems in forcing certain multifunctional or
ambiguous items into fixed categories.
We are looking for references to discussions (in publications, gray
literature, dissertations, or meeting presentations) of similar attempts
at broader functional categorization of historic period artifact
collections, based on South or other approaches.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions from list members.
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Larry McKee, Ph.D.
Branch Manager/Senior Archaeologist
TRC Inc.
1865 Air Lane Dr, Suite 9
Nashville TN 37210-3814
Office: 615 884-4430 Fax: 615 884-4431
Mobile: 615 482-7378
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