Nicely said, Philip...and that is the crux of the matter. In the US, at any
rate, most archaeologists come from a different discipline than do historians.
We swim in the same sea, so to speak, but some of us are surfers, some swimmers,
some deep sivers...and it all looks very different from these different
perspectives. I have heard historians make comments as to how they see "no way
that archaeology has contributed anything to the major themes of
history."---that's a near quote many of my fellow Chesapeake scholars will
recognize. I doubt that is a true statement in any sense, but it also begs the
question as to whether archaeology ever intended to do that. Among
anthropologists, of course, the answer is "No."

Another, friendlier, exchange took place between an historian and an
archaeologist at a regional meeting many years ago. The archaeologist was me.

Historian: You archaeologists can never begin to understand the intimate
relationship we historians can have with the past as we spend countless hours
reading diaries, letters, and the personal records of an individual from the
past.

Archaeologist: Apart from the simple observation that fewer than 1/10 of 1
percent of all who have lived in, say, the past 5000 years have left any diaries
or letters behind, I beg to differ. Once you have stood for days on end up to
your waist excavating in someone's privy pit, or lain in the hot sun for hours
over a grave removing the gooey matrix from your subject's abdominal region and
placing it in plastic bags for further microscopic analysis...well I think that
is a form of "intimacy" with the past that doesn't translate to paper or
microfilm.

Different strokes, eh?

Dan

Philip Levy wrote:

>     I am one of those rare creatures that is both an historian and an
> archaeologist. I agree that this is an interesting topic that need some
> attention. But I also think that there are several flawed premises built
> into the whole issue. The most important centers on the word "use" in Geoff
> Carver's original posting (no fault there of course). "Use" implies that
> data sets are universal, transparent, and not subjected to little hidden
> manipulations. It furthermore implies that the findings, concerns, and
> methods of one discipline can be simply transferred to those of another. I
> have come to see history and archaeology as two distinct ways of viewing the
> past that often have little to say to each other.
>     Historiography--the debates--are the stock-and-trade of the historian.
> Very little archaeological literature has entered into the debates that are
> at the core of what historians do. For the most part archaeologists only
> enter into historians' debates at the tail end--often by picking up on an
> interpretive portion of the literature and then calling it historical
> context. Witness the authority that Edmund Morgan's accommodation thesis
> holds in the greater Chesapeake archaeography. But the thesis is an end
> product of debate and too often treated not as a conclusion open to debate
> but instead the solid background against which archaeological evidence is
> interpreted.
>      It makes more sense to me for archaeologists to use archaeological
> evidence to establish (in conjunction with primary and secondary literature)
> their own historical contexts and perhaps broadside historical debates with
> a volley of new conclusions which are not dependant on the tail end of
> historical debates.
>
> Philip Levy ABD
> College of William and Mary



--
Dan Mouer
Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology
Virginia Commonwealth University
http://saturn.vcu.edu/~dmouer/homepage.htm