Hello folks,
 
I have been quite engaged by the discussions that have come from the New
Orleans privy issue concerning the construction of historical archaeological
interpretation.  Since the AAA's and Thanksgiving took me away I was allowed
to ingest the last tens days of discourse in one sitting.  I intend to save
these thoughts for future reference and even to pass along to others
struggling with interpretation (archaeological of other).  But I would like
to add my own 'two pesos.'
 
I see a difference between extrapolation and interpretation which seems
missing thus far.  It is one thing to move from a site to theory and another
to move from the theoreatical construction of culture to the site, but quite
another to dialectically juxtapose 'theory' and 'history'.  I prefer the
latter but believe that much of historical archaeology shies from this
practice.
 
To move from the excavation of material to conclusions about culture is a
weak use of theory since is makes theory (e.g. Irish immigrants abused
alcohol) simply conclusion.  Theory exists to aid in the formulation of
conclusions.  If we are really interested in the lives of people at the sites
we study, we should approach sites with theory in hand and formulated as
problems worth addressing.  Lives do not have a face value, rather they are
situated and lived in the midst of contextualizing forces which determine the
activities undertaken, for example, at a site.  What did it really mean to be
an immigrant?  It is likely that different people, though using the same
terms (e.g. immigrant or Irish or laborer), understood and employed those
terms differently.  To figure out these potential meanings and their
usefulness in the interpretation of archaeological sites, historical
archaeologists should, as Nassaney (perhaps unwittingly) proposed, be better
historians.
 
What sort of issues were at play in the particular struggles of Irish
immigrants in New Orleans?  To answer, and thus to formulate the theories and
question worth exploring archaeologically (both in terms of excavation AND
research), one should interogate the specifics of the broader question.  This
means tying down the potential meanings of 'immigrant' and 'Irish' in the
'19th-century New Orleans' context.  To do otherwise is to essentialize the
experience of real lives which were most likely lived outisde of, or in
opposition to, the structures which we now take as essential.
 
This process also allows us to avoid the trap that Mouer suggests lay in the
path of critical theory, that of finidng in the data what we know already to
be true.  This is so because the point is not the construction of theoretical
generalizations (e.g. Marxism), but, through the use of theory, the making of
site-specific archaeological interpretatations, in other words, histories of
the lives lived at the site(s) being studied.
 
 
 
Chris Matthews