I'm not sure if there was a "festschrift" for Marvin K. Opler, Ph.D., as
there was for Marion White, the archaeologist who helped found our field in
Buffalo, NY, as I perceive it in New York, but I remember him for the study
of epidemiology, and the discussions that involved the psychology of the 20th
century. At the risk of really being out of my depth let me relate:

The NIMH realized that the Minnesota Multiple Personality Tests were not
based any more on a statistically viable sample of the population, having
been based on the study of "neuroses" if you will, in a primarily rural US
population that had become more urbanized since the original tests. This led
to a $10 million project called the "Mid-Manhattan Project" and a battery of
psychological tests were given to a square block in the middle of Manhattan
and the data was being synthesized in the middle of the 1970s and might still
be being analyzed. The importance of this was in the screening of enlistees
and draftees into the US Armed Services. Dr. Opler preliminarily concluded
that either the rural population supports more diversity in mental makeup, or
the incidence of neuroses in the US population is statistically higher than
previously quantified and used in the MMP tests.

What this has to do with historical archaeology? I think that when we think
of the changing definitions of culture, personality and "deviant" behavior,
that the interpretation of behavior from the archaeological record needs
quite a bit of relativism. The "psychology" of the burials at City Hall Park
are out of my experience of human behavior, because of the lack of order and
sense to them, somewhere between hastily made "field burials" and some other
very loosely organized method with no function, having only the
archaeological experience of unmarked religiously organized graves, of which
I have had to photograph after disturbance. Unexpected in a strictly
organized sense, though Family plots are not in the record until the New
Haven, Connecticut cemetery outside Yale University, the "New Haven Burial
Ground" in 1796, unless someone else on the list knows of another earlier.