In that I only tap into this once a week (I've reverted to being a
technician, or shovel bum, to pay the rent, and am up at Ft. Drum all but
the weekends), it's interesting to see how this debate is going.  A couple
of thoughts:

Any research design that is used as an excuse to destroy "other"
archaeological information that a site contains, or may contain, is
misused.  We all have our horror stories (mine, of late, involve
farmsteads--of which we're supposed to have thousands, etc.).  But, arguing
against bad, incompetent, ignorant research designs is not an argument
against research designs, any more than we can extend the same argument to
all of archaeology just because the profession includes a few incapable
practitioners.  Jimmy Swaggart can't invalidate all of Christianity; Rush
Limbaugh doesn't mean you should shoot your radio, etc.  I also do not see
how "anthropology," included as part of a research design, will necessarily
lead to "putting on blinders," thus to site destruction, lost data, and so
forth.  Are we advancing an argument that would call a research design bad,
because it is anthropological?  Do anthropological designs usually, often,
or ever lead to loss of data?  Is the data lost because the design was
anthropological?  What statistics back up this assertion, and make for
"anthropological blinders?"

My sneaking suspicion, alluded to elsewhere in these postings, is that the
horror stories may come out of the general practice of CRM.  The one posted
by Ned Heite is a case in point--prehistorians had no business dealing with
that important railroad site; they possessed neither the expertise, or,
perhaps more importantly, the interest, to deal with it as anything other
than a disturbance to the information toward which their interests had
biased them.  Yet, it's a human situation--you're the archaeologist for a
CRM firm.  You have areas of knowledge and ignorance, undoubtedly following
your professional interests quite closely.  You have to become an "instant
expert" (excavations start next week, and you have to hire a crew and
arrange for field logistics) on a site/part of a site/a survey tract where
your company has landed a contract.  And, there's not enough money to hire
consultants, or that money comes right out of the budget that pays your
salary, funds your crews, contributes to company overhead (profits) from
your division.

I would hope that closer enforcement of the Section 106 laws would help in
these cases.  Yet, if anything, the SHPOs are worse off than the
contractors--small staffs, first on the block for state budget cuts, floods
of contractor reports coming in, etc.  They also have little enforcement
authority--what is the result of rejection of a report?  Damn little, in
all too many cases.

It may not be anthropology, or research design, that gives us blinders.  It
may be more how we practice archaeology, especially in the economics and
structure of CRM.  Yet, in order not to bash CRM (where I have worked since
1977) too thoroughly, it has produced reams of data that we are hardly
beginning to synthesize for the purposes of public interpretation, and more
informed research design.  Are we satisfied with this situation?  How are
we going to change it?




At 05:35 AM 8/21/99 -0500, you wrote:
>The bottom line, then, is that research designs can be hazardous to your
>site, if they are used as blinders.
>