Geoff and Ned:
You guys are getting overly concerned about the history part of
historical research for archaeology. Sure, any given document could
be questionable, or misunderstood, but it's the interpretation of all
the documents you've got on a particular topic that's important. You
hypothesize a sequence of events that seems to best fit the
information in the available documents, and call that your "history."
There's always a few things that won't fit.
But for hist.arch., historical research does, generall, three things
for us: 1) the overview, or historical background, the broad context
in which we think a site originated and was used; 2) site history, and
ethnographic and material culture info from the records -- how life
was lived at the site, and what was used there, or at one very like
it; and 3) structural history, using the documents to tell us what was
built at a site, and where, and when, and how it was changed.
That last one begins to cause confusion about "truth," and the lack of
it in any absolute sense, in documents. If you find a description of
a site, and use it to guide your excavations, and you find the
structural traces of the buildings and features in the historical
description (something I've done a number of times, and I'm sure most
of us have done), you have just gone from your everyday sort of
history to "applied" history. You've tested the document and found
that parts of it, at least, appear to be accurate descriptions of the
reality you find in the ground on the site. You're no longer in the
realm where a colleague in history can offer a new interpretation of
the document that puts the buildings somewhere else. That gets pretty
close to "fact," I'd say.
Jake.
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