Matt makes some very important points.  The sad fact is that archaeology
is evolving into something that we were evolving away from.
 
All of the wonderfully compelling ideas that were generated in the post
WW II period by the people who made archaeology into a modern discipline
are beginning to disappear.  The demands of contract archaeology
(reports, compliance, eligibility etc) are not the demands of academic
archaeology yet we still operate under a model of academic archaeology
(research designs, hypotheses etc) when this model often does not fit
what is being done.  Why construct a scientific program when in reality
all that is being done on Phase I surveys is site finding?  We are really
perverting the discipline when we do this.
 
What to do?  The reality is that CRM funds almost all of the work that we
do.  The reality is that a lot of CRM project (all those Phase I surveys
that find nothing) would never be conducted in a "pure archaeology"
environment.  The reality is that most of the CRM work is done by
consulting firms that crank out projects (not a bad thing to do) and have
no time and sometimes no authorization to publish the results.  The
reality is that more and more of our basic data is in the gray area.
Reports that receive little distribution cannot be relied on for
comparative purposes simply because they frequently cannot be found or
even are not known about by many people.  Sometimes it takes  long time
from the point when a report is submitted to an agency and it "appears"
in official files (one of mine took over three years to make it through
the process!).
 
The reality is that a discipline that matured in the academic world has
generally grown away from it.  The model of what archaeology is and
should be may no longer fit the reality.  Perhaps we have become a two
headed monster -- one driven by consulting funds that produces reports
and is fed by CRM money and the other that is very theoretical, produces
wonderful papers and books and is fed by grant funds.  Two different
worlds with some people fitting into both and most of us into only one.
The lucky people are the ones who manage to get significant CRM funds to
conduct "pure archaeology" projects.  These are rare people.
 
I've watched archaeology grow into a wonderfully complex discipline and
watched contract archaeology grow as well.  Unfortunately they do not always
seem to be the same thing.  This argument is getting to be similar to the
one about Historic Archaeology and Prehistoric Archaeology with many of
the same possible consequences -- a fragmentation of the discipline.
 
Karl Steinen
 
 
On Tue, 25 Apr 1995, Matthew S. Tomaso wrote:
 
> Rovner asks:
>
> >Is this problem real or my imagination?  If real - and I read the
> >traffic on this net as artifactual confirmation of the reality - is
> >anybody working toward a solution to this problem?
>
> Well, yes, the problem is real.  As a grad student, CRM practitioner and an
> aspiring academic, I have tried to confront the problem by doing both
> contracts and academic work as best I can, rather than constructing some
> false prioritization of them.  However, as with the general and practical
> distinction between historic and prehistoric archaeology (text), their are
> experiential differences between academic and contract work.  In contract
> reports, it is often very difficult to produce a meaningful and well
> articulated argument about a specific project or issue because you are
> forced to parse-out  your data and ideas into arbitrary traditional
> categories of information such as 'culture history' and 'environmental
> background' which more often than not have little or nothing to do with the
> specific project and its results.  I understand why this is necessary (as a
> minimum requirement standard), so I don't seriously challenge the practice.
> One way around this is to publish papers as spin-offs from contract reports
> which deal exclusively with relevent data, but you don't get any rewards for
> this besides pats on the back .
> However, there  are still other fundamental and difficult problems - like
> having to design your research around impact assessment within an impact
> zone, rather than employing a meaningful and statistically valid sampling
> design  -  or situations where a site which is not terribly significant
> whatsoever gets mandated for further work because it is more obviously
> threatened.  While these kinds of work are obviously necessary and
> important, they do little to allow contract archaeology to develop in an
> academically useful way.  Finally, speaking of text, contract archaeology is
> further bedeviled by the 'gray literature problem'.   Although many
> 'academic archaeologists' don't get around to widely distributing their
> ideas and  data  through publication, contractors rarely have the time and
> resources (and sometimes don't have the legal right) to construct broadly
> disseminated publications.  We are often too busy putting together reports
> to be read almost exclusively by other contract archaeologists and regulators.
>
> whiningly yours,
> Matt
> __________________________________________________________
> Matt Tomaso,  marginally human.
> [log in to unmask]
> Anthropology.   University of Texas at Austin.
> __________________________________________________________
>