Geoff,

One thought about "getting through to the great unwashed"  -- try the media!
Go for the TV stations, the newspapers, etc.  A good press release is worth
a thousand words, as they say.  There are publicity hounds lurking even in
academia, trust me.


-----Original Message-----
From: geoff carver <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thursday, April 15, 1999 1:47 PM
Subject: Re: Historians and hisorical archaeology


The "true" historian seldom gets involved (in USA).
> To be fair, I should mention that this article gave several good reasons
why
> historians are unintersted in the historic preservation movement.

something like it would put them out of a job (if the thing's there, what do
you
need a historian crawling around in the archives for?

>
   While they rant on, my mind always wanders to the bedtime story
> about the animals that would not help do the work to store food away for
the
> winter, but then wanted to reap the profits of the hard work.
>
would that be the ant and the grasshopper? or the arndt and the gracehoper
(j
joyce, finnegans wake)? or the one where the little mouse busily remembers
the
flowers, sunsets, etc., so he can entertain all the other (hardworking
foragers)
mice down in their gloomy hole all winter?

> So, as I read Mary Ellins plea for more involvement, my immediate reaction
> was that, by comparison, we archaeologists have always been more engaged
> with the public  - simply because we share a common interest in the
historic
> "stuff" around us.  And in this post-processual world, knowing and serving
> our audience is a good thing.  So how about a big listserve group hug!
eh?

since i'm the cynical bastard who started it, i'll poo-poo all this
sickeningly
sweet self-congratulatory feel-good stuff (nothing personal, and please try
to
imagine the big smile on my face as i type this; i too need a big hug every
now
and then)
        the problem was we had a lecture by a prominent historian the other
week, discussing the founding of the city of dresden, something we have been
dealing with in several excavations over the past 100 or so years - and he's
still relying wholly and solely on the written sources, which we've
disproven in
our publications, and... it still goes on, and the investors are trying to
get
out of having to pay for any excavation whatsoever, and someone else the
other
day was explaining about how he really found erich von daniken's books
really
fascinating...
        we are engaged in the real world, at least in relation to the
stereotypical dusty old ivory tower historians with dust in their lapels,
but...
somehow we're still not getting the message across; we're still basically
just
preaching to the converted - if we can't break out into wider academic
circles
(i.e. historia), how can we convince the great unwashed?


geoff carver
http://home.t-online.de/home/gcarver/
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