Robert Schuyler wrote:

  >        The parallel I would draw is with Maya Archaeology when those
  >scholars focused only on temples and palaces and only later started to
  >look at the total settlement pattern (especially housemounds). The
  >earlier approach created a very incomplete and distorted view of Maya
  >Civilization.

Schuyler is absolutely correct about the Maya archaeologists. 28 years ago,
I made the same argument for ironworks (industrial) sites.

If we must dig into our old papers, kindly refer to "Thinking the Whole
Site," Conference on Historic Site Archeology Papers, 1971, pages 45-50.
Some folks on this list weren't born when I delivered that paper. In that
particular diatribe, I urged ironworks archaeologists and interpreters to
pay attention to residential and craft sites that are components of the
"whole site."

I wrote:

       "But an ironworks is not just a furnace and a few
      houses. Nor is a plantation merely
      a manor house and its dependencies.
      Nor is a fort merely an earthwork and a few
      bomproof shelters. A site is the sum of the human
      activity represented by the material remains."

I believe this reflects Schuyler's position. It's a good point, too. Made
it myself,

But the archaeology of industrial processes is also important, and should
be a legitimate pursuit in itself. An industrial site can tell us a lot
about the evolution of machinery, of changed working conditions, of safety,
of workplace health hazards, and other purely industrial subjects too
numerous to mention.

A study of industrial process requires expertise in the process being
studied, and the results need to be disseminated among other researchers in
the same area. That's why we must have separate journals for industrial
archaeology that give space to the archaeology of industrial processes.

Industrial archaeology, as defined an practiced today, allows investigators
to devote special concentration to the industrial processes that were,
after all, the engine that drove the "industrial revolution." Any study of
industrial process requires orientation, background, training and
experience that are absent from most historical archaeology teams and
training programs. Patrick Martin and his colleagues in Michigan are
working to change that, I'm sure. But the fact remains that most principal
investigators in historical archaeology today neither know nor care about
the nitty-gritty of industrial processes after the "wooden age" was over.

Don't try to sell a study of worker housing as industrial archaeology. It's
not good archaeology because it doesn't cover all aspects of the site. By
the same token, I continue (after 28 years) to insist that an industrial
site should include both the workplace and the domestic components.

      _____
 ____(_____)__          Spam is a perfectly good ham product.
  |Baby the\            We need a better name for unwanted
  |1969 Land\_|===|_    electronic mail. Why not call it
  |  ___Rover   ___ |o  "Budweiser," or "sliced bread," or
  |_/ . \______/ . ||   something else disgusting?
  ___\_/________\_/____________________________________________
  Ned Heite, Camden, DE  http://home.dmv.com/~eheite/index.html