Robert L Schuyler wrote:
 
> ...A Spanish site in California, for example, may well have
> more to do with a contemporary Spanish site in Peru, the Philippines or
> Spain that it does with an English farm site in New England, Ulster,
> or England...History Archaeology is a branch of general archaeology which
> studies the
> emergence, transformation and nature of the Modern World (AD 1400 to the
> present) and so, by definition, is global.
 
 I'd like to add a firm "Amen!" Or maybe "right on!"
 
I began my anthropological studies dealing with South and Southeast Asia where
ancient Roman trading ports contain the remains of Dutch East-India Company,
Portuguese and, later, English merchants' quarters or military cantonments. I
have tromped over maharaja's palace/fort grounds in southern India that are
paved with European, Persian, Arabic and Chinese ceramics purchased with money
made of Andean gold and silver acquired by trading Indonesian spices to European
merchants whose profits were invested in African slaves sold to West Indian
planters who produced sugar for sale by British merchants to the Russian Czar's
agent's in return for tar to seal the ships....etc. While I (like many
archaeologists) personally prefer to wallow in the human details of particular
sites and communities while working on them, what makes it all continually
interesting (and relevant, I dare say) is the fact that we are poking at parts
of that very large, very dynamic world-system. All this new-fangled
"globalization," about which the media and business interests speak so
incessantly, is at least 500 years old (and probably more like 5,000), and
historical archaeology has taken it on as a subject.
 
--
Dan Mouer
Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology
Virginia Commonwealth University
http://saturn.vcu.edu/~dmouer/homepage.htm