Greetings -

I think Ned's response raises an important point that has recently been
overlooked on the listserv ...

>Who gave any of us a license to sacrifice all the evidence on a site for no
>objective except to answer "the question you are interested in finding the
>answer to"  ? I submit that any project should be designed (if that is
>possible) and executed in a manner that  will address all the audiences
>that site might ultimately speak to.

In our recent discussions of data and theory ... one conclusion was that
our data drive our theories. I think this is terribly wrong ... and Ned
brings this up quite well in his response. What we are interested in ... is
what we dig up. Although many archaeologists would like to think that they
do 'total data recovery' ... this is really just self-delusion of the
profession. We recover what we feel is interesting or useful ... which
definately is not total.

How many times have we not sampled the plowzone? How many times do we dig
in units larger than a meter by a meter? How many times have we not taken
float samples of all contexts?

Although I would not say that theory exists prior to data ... I think that
the relation of one to the other needs to be rethought a bit. What we
envision to be worthy of recovery is driven by the theoretical assumptions
with which we approach any given site. We should keep this in mind before
we start believing that archaeologists can work outside of theory ... and
just go out and collect the data.

Kevin.