Larry

We have exchanged much of this already but HISTARCH readers may not 
be aware of some of the details.  As indicated, what you are looking 
for has already been done and used with great frequency in western 
North America.  It was published as:  Roderick Sprague, 1981, A 
Functional Classification for Artifacts from 19th and 20th Century 
Historical Sites.  North American Archaeologist, 2(3):251-261.

Stan and I carried on good humored correspondence (before email) for 
many months on our different approaches to question of functional 
classifications.  Statements such as "laundry lists" vs. "where and 
what I did today" were part of that correspondence and should not be 
taken seriously or misinterpreted.   Why this work has been little 
used east of the Mississippi except by my former students has always 
been a mystery to me.

Changes suggested, such as those by Cathy Spude, are usually ones 
that are made to make specific adjustments for some special issue and 
are encouraged.  Unfortunately more often changes are made to make 
the decision process easier and generally violate the functional 
first level of decision.  For example cartridges are grouped as just 
that rather than within functional groups of hunting, self defense, 
recreation, national defense, etc.  This is also most often 
erroneously done with bottles and cans.

Rick

Roderick Sprague
625 N Garfield St
Moscow, ID  83843
208-882-0413

At 09:39 AM 1/22/2007, you wrote:
>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.
>
>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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