Thanks to the various authors who provided substantive comment to my initial
query.  Based on those comments, several points seem pertinent:
 
(1)  Despite several comments to the contrary, I would suggest that my
original comments concerning the low likelihood of recovering an identifiable
African-American component at UGRR sites remains a defensible one.  Although
the presence of a recognizable or diagnostic artifact "pattern" of such
behavior remains a possibility, it clearly must be viewed as a remote
possibility.
 
(2)  More significantly, comments such as those by Sigrid Arnott and Tim
Scarlett concerning the application of historical (anthropological)
archaeology to questions of social class, etc., in reference to those who
organized and hosted the UGRR, proves (to me at least) that there are good,
research driven reasons to excavate such sites.
 
(3)  The other set of responses to this query fall into a different category,
i.e., the use of archaeological techniques to foster and promote the public
interpretation of history.  As Dan Mouer, Vergil, and Karolyn Smardz pointed
out, projects such as Karolyn's freed slave work in Toronto and Verg's work on
UGRR sites have tremendous potential for public interpretation and eduation,
particularly with respect to bringing in otherwise disenfranchised groups into
mainstream historical process.  No argument from me...  Good, valid points.
And frankly, if prehistorians had incorporated even a little of that ethic
into their Native American work, we probably wouldn't be facing the problems
that we are in that field today...
 
Clearly, there is room in archaeology for both emphases...  but in comparing
the two response classes presented in (2) and (3), it seems to me that there
is a continuing, and dare I say, increasing schism between (2) historical
archaeology and (3) historic sites archaeology.  I am particularly concerned
with recent published literature which has focused largely on archivally
driven historical research, with the archaeological component providing only
particularistic and often completely superfluous "supporting" data.  In
several of these cases, including recent major monographs, there really wasn't
much reason to have done the archaeology, let alone publish it in Historical
Archaeology.  In increasing numbers of cases, I would argue that we really are
seeing archaeology returning to its original role as the "handmaiden of
history," i.e., historic sites archaeology.
 
Well, maybe that's all historical archaeology can become, but I prefer to hope
that that's not the case.  Digging up site's for public interpretation, ethnic
empowerment, or whatever, is a perfectly reasonable and respectable reason to
do archaeology.  However, if archaeology is going to be anything other than
the "handmaiden of history", we better be able to justify what we're doing as
a discipline.  Maybe its about time that we returned to Schuyler's collected
works on the roots of historical archaeology ...  After 30+ years, it seems
that some of the same problems are reasserting themselves.  And I suppose it
was that concern which prompted my original broadside.
 
Respectfully,
 
Mark C. Branstner
Great Lakes Research Associates, Inc.