Stick to your guns, David. "Self-policing" is the ONLY policing professional
archaeology can have that will matter, and, as the AMA and various Bar
Associations know, professional "quality control" always brings cries of
outrage. After twenty years of doing so, neither I nor anyone else at my
university does CRM. Requests to rephrase recommendations too quickly turned
into demands to substantively alter findings. Too many archaeologists now owe
their livings to agencies whose missions have nothing to do with archaeology,
and for whom archaeology and other aspets of CRM are, at best, a pain, or for
companies to whom it is profit, or it is nothing. Even those who work for
governmental agencies charged with managing cultural resources are likely to
find themselves at times having to bend this way and that in the winds of local,
state, or federal politics. That's not always bad, of course, but archaeologists
should always be, first and foremost, advocates for and interpreters of the
archaeological record. CRM entails inevitable conflicts of interest.
 
It is sometimes a very subtle step between trying to meet competing needs,
limited budgets and pressing schedules on the one hand, and selling out any hope
of creating real research, real knowledge and real education in return for the
taxpayer's dollars one needs to keep the office running and mortgage paid. I
have become fairly cynical. I absolutely recognize the hard, dedicated, and very
talented work that the majority of professionals produce, but I worked at it
long enough to know it's a real snake pit out there.
 
Archaeology at it's heart is a discipline, not a profession. Since leaving grad
school in 1977, I have focused on the the late stone age and iron age in South
India, the Late Archaic through Middle Woodland in the Middle Atlantic,
plantation cultures and slavery in the 17th and early 18th century Chesapeake,
early American urbanism, and, most recently, the plantation and slave cultures
in the British West Indies (especially Barbados). Each of these areas required
my devoting large blocks of time over several years of study before I began to
feel competent to publish in them...I'm not yet there for the Caribbean stuff.
Each topic required reading dozens, if not hundreds of books and major articles,
as well as attending conferences, participating in workshops, etc. Yet, as a CRM
archaeologist I was expected to be at home with an 18th-century tar kiln one
day, and with a Civil war redoubt the next. Nowadays CRM professionals may
expect to be competent in Great Basin cave archaeology this week, and Puerto
Rican shell middens next week. I don't believe such archaeology is worth much to
anybody.
 
Well I've stepped in it now. Fire away folks.
 
 
David S. Rotenstein wrote:
 
> Right about now, as Jim Gibb deftly demonstrated on ARCH-L, there are some
> offended archaeologists out there. Jim wrote that the survey I distributed
> yesterday implied "wrong doing on the part of lots of hard working,
> committed, and woefully underpaid professionals." In a way, he's right:
> There is "wrong doing" in the CRM industry and not everyone is responsible...
 
--
Dan Mouer
Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology
Virginia Commonwealth University
http://saturn.vcu.edu/~dmouer/homepage.htm