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.