Larry

With your site are you organising dating via artifacts? I am looking at 
streching the testing of a dating method I presented at SHA 2007 beyond 
Western Australian sites.

Do you have your database organised with start and end dates for the 
artifacts? Or have it organised with information so that I can identify and 
add the dating to the artifacts, and importantly work out minimum numbers 
for types?

I am looking for the artifact information from one excavation square that 
you are sure is not in a disturbed contest to test the dating method 
against.

Regards Gaye
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "McKee, Larry" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 2:39 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.





***********************************

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

 [log in to unmask]

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