Mary Ellin D'Agostino wrote:
>I think we live in different universes or something. I cannot imagine how
>the questions of interest to the discipline of anthropology can be
>construed as "narrow." It may be true that I, as a non-specialist, may get
>bored by your detailed analysis of [whatever], but as long as you make some
>credible attempt to show how this detailed analysis is relevant to the
>wider world of human history and culture I *will* be interested.
The problem, as I see it, is a tendency for anthropologists to choose only
those subjects "relevant to the wider world." Anthropological literature
is loaded with a rhetoric of "breadth" that actually produces the
narrowness in archaeology to which I referred.
American historical archaeology has become concerned (even obsessed)
primarily with domestic sites, if the contents of journals and CRM reports
are any measure. We have derived most of our information about "the wider
world" from the narrow confines of wells, cellar holes, and privy pits,
especially privy pits.
It is my experience here in the Middle Atlantic that any site will be
interpreted first as a domestic site. The results will be reported in
archaeological journals, at archaeological conferences, and in
archaeological CRM reports, all of which demand anthropological
interpretation as Mary Ellin so quotably defined it.
As a result of this obsession with privies, wells, and cellars, the rest of
the site is likely to get the once over lightly.
A farm or an industrial village is more than a collection of domestic
features, but you'd never know it from reading so many of the reports. A
typical farmstead report will concentrate on the farmhouse and neglect the
barns, the equipment sheds, and the fields themselves. There is a lot you
can learn from the archaeology of a plowed field, including the field
margins and hedgerows, but I've seen maybe a half-dozen farmstead reports
that even acknowledge the existence of farm fields. An equipment shed site
can tell you a lot about the craft of farming as practiced on that site.
If you are fortunate enough to find where they dumped the old machinery,
you have an opportunity to interpret the farmer as tool user
(anthropologically if you prefer).
Mary Ellin may be bored (her term) by cataloguing old farm machinery and
machinery parts, but I submit that it is the farm, not the farmhouse, that
is the raison d'etre of the farmstead. Yet the evidence of farming is
almost uniformly shunned in the rush to sift the privies for
"anthropologically significant" materials.
The same goes for industrial villages. Last spring I sat through a really
pointless presentation that allegedly concerned an ironmaking village.
Ironmaking was completely neglected. The ironworks didn't even appear on
the site map slide. There is no way to construe such reports as good
anthropology, let alone good archaeology, but it was presented under the
auspices of an anthropology department's field school.
Which returns us to the original proposition of this thread. When we
approach a resource, especially one that is about to be destroyed, we
cannot ethically restrict ourselves to the narrow discipline of
anthropology. We also are servants of other disciplines that don't care
two hoots about the "wider world of human history and culture." These other
interests equally deserve our loyalty, even though whatever we do may be
informed by our own academic backgrounds.
There are organizations to study the history of virtually every area of
human endeavor, and we must consider all of them whenever we approach a
site. Moreover, we are (or should be) obliged to report to these audiences,
in their own terms, on whatever we find that concerns them.
The arrogance of Mary Ellin's boredom is a symptom of exactly the
narrowness I complained about at the beginning of this thread. I
emphatically deny the Prime Directive as it has been interpreted so
narrowly on the ground. There is more, much more, to archaeology than the
subjects that are taught in anthropology classrooms.
Instead, I contend that an archaeologist is a generalist or he is nothing.
Anthropologists do not own the past, and they have no right to appropriate
all the goodies from archaeology. I'm sorry that Mary Ellin is bored by all
the technical stuff, but that's just the way it is.
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Delaware | ___ Rover___ || If it doesn't start, he
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