At 10:16 AM 8/16/99, Diane Dismukes wrote:

>I am unable to accept that there is any professional archeology that
>"isn't anthropological at all". Oxymoronic in my book.

Depends on your definition of anthropology, again.

What I said was that the most important information from a site frequently
has nothing to do with anything taught in an anthropology classroom.

That doesn't mean that the archaeologist is not informed by his training in
anthropology. Quite the contrary. But from time to time, he may dig as the
servant of some othe discipline. On several occasions, I have conducted
excavations that were intended only to solve legal questions. The clients
wanted facts on the ground, and I found them.

Unless your anthropology curriculum includes metallurgy, my statement
stands.  If the purpose of an excavation is to answer metallurgical
questions, it follows that the focus of all the work will be metallurgical,
and it will be reported in the metallurgical journals for that audience.

If one is digging a blacksmith shop, he is responsible to the rather large
body of people who study blacksmithing. His observations on status, gender,
marxism, working conditions, and all the rest, are secondary to the
information he can provide to historians of blacksmithing.  And there are
several excellent blacksmith shop dig reports that do just that.

However, I have seen literally dozens of reports within the past few years
where the authors have glossed over the meat-and-potatoes subject-matter
findings in order to mount a "higher" theoretical plane, virtually ignoring
the stuff they found. In other words they choose to speak only to a small
and entirely secondary segment of their audience.

The reason I cited the journal Historical Metallurgy was exactly this. The
authors I mentioned are fully qualified in archaeology, schooled in the
social sciences.  But they were writing about metallurgy, or the history of
smelting, or some other subject of interest to historians of a particular
technology. It didn't make it less archaeological just because it covered
subjects that are not covered in anthropology classrooms, or because it
said nothing about class, gender, or the place of religion in ironworking.

Don't make the mistake of interpreting my statement as saying that it isn't
anthropology. What I said was that the subject matter is not taught in
anthropology classrooms.

There is no reason to discard most of the evidence from a site, or to
design an excavation to avoid  remains that will yield information outside
the narrow confines of the digger's perception of the subject.


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