Iam afraid i deleted the previous contribution which sparked this:
I find the idea of a bias free archaeological record very difficult to take.
In what sense is it more accidental than the historical record- people
digging a rubbish pit may not think it will be excavated in 200 years but
then neither did the person writing the probate inventory in 1600 think that
it would survive in 100 years time never mind that someone would use it for
asking questions of consumption patterns in the 1990s. Someone writing a
biography cerianly thought of posterity but the same might be said for the
architect or town planner. I think the real problem over historical and
archaeological evidence is that the majority of people in both professions
have little understanding of each other's subject. Historians prefer not even
to think about archaeology and many archaeologists often tend to have an
mythologised impression of history so naive it was presumably created by the
picture books they read as kids. However, historian's tendency to be less
than explicit on methodology and theory (you are expected to understand these
as part of the masonry) may be partly to blame. Both historical and
archaeological evidence are riddled by biases at all levels from primary
creation of the evidence to interpretation - which is why there is so much
debate and periodical revisionism in both subjects. The idea of bias free
archaeology is presumably a product of New Archaeology's evironmental
determinism where individuals react rather than think or make choices and
where 1 x 1m excavation units will show little bias in the creation of the
archaeological record because they show little in the way of social
behaviour.
Paul Courtney, Leicester, UK