After a beer or two I have found myself arguing that Theory serves no
     purpose in archaeology except to make us look like a science in the
     textbooks.  Really, what good is it if it will be tossed on the
     trashheap within ten years, replaced by some new fad idea stolen from
     some other discipline, and you know you'll be plagued for years by new
     grads using the jargon as though it meant something.

     If Theorization was a cumulative, self-improving process, it would be
     more tolerable, but so far it's "damn the heretics of the previous
     Theory generation to hell, this is the true belief!"

     I say "Theory" as opposed to "theory," the group of operating ideas we
     take to the field: such as the one that stratigraphic structure has an
     inherant meaning, or that artifact distribution is usable data, and
     each of us interprets those observations through our "theories."

     Most of us, I suspect, never accept more than a small part of each new
     Theory as it comes along, because it is contrary to what we feel is
     reality, as we see it in the dirt or in the data.  After some thought,
     I've come to the conclusion that the problem is with the method of
     Theory production.  Theory should be produced as the best explanation
     we can think of for the sum of our observations -- that is, it's
     driven by all the individual excavations all of us make.  It has
     seemed to me that most recent archaeological Theories do not derive
     from fieldwork, but are just nice ideas someone tried to make fit to
     archaeology.

     Which raises the question, what is Theory supposed to do?  What should
     it accomplish?  Since that brings us back to the question of whether
     archaeology must be anthropological, it's not a place I want to go.

     Jake.