I have been waiting for Rich Sprague to reply to his thread. After several  
years of attending SHA conference symposia and hearing the problems many people 
 encountered with Stanley South's model, I elected to work with Sprague's  
functional model for analysis of collections recovered at the Ballast Point  
Whaling Station and Chinese fishing camp (CA-SDI-12953) at San Diego,  
California. I corresponded with Sprague and launched into the analysis, which is  nearly 
complete. I expect to produce a report on this work by the end of next  
summer. 
 
My problem with the South model is that it is so static. Other people  
applied their data to the model and it simply did not work. Sprague's model, on  the 
other hand, enables analysis of the behavioral variables within a site due  
to factors such as ethnicity, gender, and economic class. I am more interested  
in the variations than trying to force the data into some rigid model.
 
Ron May
Legacy 106, Inc.
 
In a message dated 1/24/2007 1:18:06 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,  
[log in to unmask] writes:

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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