Jamie Brothers wrote

>I have read more reports over the last few years that are full of major errors,
>because the authors did not have a clue how iron is made.  Instead of hiring an
>expert, or educating themselves, they went out and read a few handy secondary
>sources.  Not surprisingly, the same secondary sources are used over and over
>again.  And the same errors are repeated over and over again.  In terms of
>archaeological training I technically could run an excavation anywhere in the
>world.  But, I no more consider myself qualified to properly excavate a
>Mesopotamian site than to pilot the space shuttle.  I would miss too much.

This, indeed, was part of my initial point. Of course, it's all
anthropology if you have an "imperial" definition of anthropology, which is
not universally accepted, I might add. On a more practical plane, we are
dealing with the materials of material culture, which is far broader than
even the broadest definition of anthropology.

But most archaeological sites involve subject matter and research questions
that are not taught in anthropology classrooms. Please note, again, that I
said "not taught in anthropology classrooms," because I have never
intimated that the subjects in question are not anthropology.

Archaeology is a technique, normally, in America, taught in anthropology
classrooms, that can serve a variety of disciplines that are not taught in
American anthropology classrooms. As I have repeated several times in this
thread, everything one does is informed by anthropology, but that doesn't
make it all anthropology.

Sometimes archaeology is metallurgy.

Sometimes it is bridge engineering.

Sometimes archaeology makes a big impact on the study of the history of
some craft, like tinsmithing or cooking. That's why we published catsup
recipes in the report of a catsup factory dig; it shed entirely new light
on the physical evidence.

The role of the archaeologist in recording a smelter or a bridge is to
inform the historians of metallurgy, or engineering, or whatever. If he
wants to make side comments to anthropologists, that's fine.  Yet, as
several on this thread have noted, too many archaeologists concentrate on
the "anthropological" or "domestic" aspects of their sites and ignore the
aspects that are useful to non-anthropologists. This, to me, is both a
disservice and a violation of CRM laws.

It's a crying shame that archaeologists don't publish more frequently in
journals outside "anthropological" archaeology. Maybe more people would use
our material if we made it available to them on their own terms.

It's been almost thirty years since I presented my first paper making this
point, which was titled, "thinking the whole site." You'd think I would
stop harping on the subject after all these years. To reiterate the main
point of that paper, I said that an ironmaking site is a lot more than just
the furnace. Today, I might add that it is also more than just the worker
housing.

We are servants of whatever disciplines or areas of interest can be served
by what we do.

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