Mr. babson is quite correct in several of his assessments of
archeological
language and the reason behind it. In answer to his question of whether or
not we (or anyone in the discipline) can write a readable treatise on
archeology one only has to reach as far as Leland Ferguson's Uncommon
Ground. This book outlines the author's thought processes in very eloquent
and readable language. From there Ferguson tells the story of his research
in South Carolina and compares his work to comparable work in Virginia. In
the end he tells a sort of narrative, one he created, yet is plausible.

He also makes a case for better writing in archeology in the introduction
on page xliv. he says "To start we need to connect artifacts to people-not
as simple a task as it sounds. Locating yards and houses by the dark
stains of rotted posts and the scatter of lost and forgotten things
requires careful exploration and research. Furthermore, we not only want
to identify places, we also want to find out what people were doing on
particular sites. This requires slow, painstaking excavations, days of
sifting through soil, collecting and counting artifacts, filling
notebooks, making maps and drawings, taking photographs, then analyzing
the data with the same careful attention to quantification and
description. No wonder archeologists write highly technical and detailed
reports, filled with broken artifacts and devoid of human beings. The
result is that archeologists communicate more easily with one another than
with people outside the profession and miss the vitalizing effects of
wider scholarly and public involvement. We not only need methods to link
artifacts to specific activities, we also need methods to help archeology
find people-in both the present and the past."

Rather succinctly put I should say.
BTW on the same page Ferguson quotes Ian Hodder whom I mentioned in a post
on this topic last week. Obviously these two great minds think alike.

Now I will  have to take issue with Mr. Babson's analysis of historians
and their literature. Whereas I agree that there is a very long tradition
of good literary narrative in history, some historians, especially those
writing on historiography are simply boring. Have you ever tried Anthony
Grafton's The Footnote: A Curious History, or Carl Schorske's Thinking
With History - deadly.

Michael Strutt
Center For Historic Preservation
Middle Tennessee State University


On Sun, 2 May 1999, David Babson wrote:

> I have followed the two recent debates on the list with interest.  First,
> we went over the relation of archaeology to history as disciplines or
> varieties of inquiry into the past.  Second, we are again going over the
> problem of writing, and how we are to produce for the public (who pay our
> salaries, and support or research) an understanding of the results of our
> projects.
>
> I formerly thought that the answer to this (second) problem was simple.
> Historians, in general, exceed us greatly in writing, and, especially, in
> creating books, essays or articles that an educated, but not expert, member
> of the public can understand with ease, and read for pleasure as well as
> for information.  This may come from the literary traditions of history,
> and the acceptance of narrative as a legitimate form of expression in that
> discipline; going back to Gibbon, or Herodotus, the best historians have
> succeeded in telling a good story.
>
> A part of our problem is our heritage as a science, and our tradition of
> presenting arguments and conclusions from an evidentiary, not a narrative,
> base.  Historians can write histories that advocate certain ideas, and at
> least in part their success depends upon their use of rhetoric as well as
> factual evidence.  Archaeologists, as scientists, must subordinate
> narrative and rhetoric to the evidence, the facts, the data, on which we
> base our conclusions.  We get no points for a good argument, if we cannot
> back it from facts.  So, we proceed to write at great length about how we
> got those facts--research designs, methodology, formal presentations of
> analysis, in service of the scientific responsibility of presenting our
> data to colleagues who will test it, argue it, and reconfirm (or deny) it.
> This is all the more necessary due to that old truism about archaeology;
> our experiments in excavation are not exactly repeatable by others, in that
> we destroy our primary information in the process of excavation.
> Historians do not present this type of information in detail.  For the most
> part, beyond listing the archives they consulted and the sources they used
> (often in acknowledgments or footnotes), they do not describe their process
> of research ("I drove to the library.  I parked in the back.  I went into
> the building, and stored my briefcase in the locker.  I requested Col.
> Blovington's letters of 1710-1718 from the archivist, and I booted up Word
> on my laptop while I awaited their delivery...").  Yet, we have to describe
> how we chose where to dig, laid out test units, recovered artifacts,
> identified and analyzed them, and worked so slowly, painfully, yet surely
> toward our conclusions.  The conclusions, of course, are what interest the
> non-specialist audience.  Can anyone, even the most talented writer, make
> such description interesting?
>
> It would be entirely too simple to say that we should just emulate our
> "more skilled" colleagues in history, and write narratives.  Yet, can we do
> that, when the very nature of our science, and of the information that we
> recover, rests on this very different means of inquiry?  I also must admit
> that I have lost some of my enthusiasm for narrative uber alles, having run
> across the occasional "historian" (Dinesh DiSouza, for one) who abuses
> basic methods of research and historical argument.  Such tricks can make a
> better argument, and they hardly impede the readability of a narrative, but
> they do damage (all the more, for being skilled) to the basic purpose of
> inquiry into the past.  In such a case, it might be better to be boring.
>
> I think we're left with a basic question--can we preserve and present our
> tradition of careful inquiry, and fact-based research, yet present it in a
> manner that would be interesting to a public who do not want to read 2-3
> chapters/100=200 pages describing the process of research?  If we can't,
> simply, replicate the narratives of historians, what can we do?  Or, can we
> replicate these narratives?  Can we tell a good story, from "just the
> facts?"
>