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Date: | Thu, 20 Nov 1997 00:15:18 -0500 |
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Holy Moly, Bill, are we going to start discussing methods and theory on
HISTARCH? Far Out!
Don't know that I'd go so far as to honor it with a name, but the "fallacy
of extrapolation" has been something worth railing against for years...so
has the practice of digging a few itsy-bitsy holes in great big sites.
If we could ever get beyond trying to think of sites as *representative*
of anything, insteading of being just what they are...those "snapshots"
you mentioned...maybe archaeologists would finally stop trying to explain
the history of the Western World based on a handful (or a bucketful or a
boxcar full) of potsherds or fish bones, and would get down to telling the
stories they are learning from, and about, the site and it's occupants.
However, it is a fine old anthropological practice, this fallacy of
extrapolation. An ethnographer spends 1 year living in one village,
associating with a limited number of people and then goes out and writes
all about what the kinship system, ritual system, warfare practices and
fishing technology of the yumbo-bumbo are, and we read that ethnography 50
or 80 years later and say, "well, this is how the yumbo-bumbo do it..."
Yep, a fine old practice.
Your community approach may be one solution. Giving up trying to
understand Grand Patterns and Laws of Average Eternal Humanity through
archaeology is another. That's my choice.
Dan Mouer
http://saturn.vcu.edu/~homepage.htm
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