I was going to stay out of this discussion until I was misquoted by Mr.
Rotenstein as urging him to leave folklore and the "study of fairy tales and
trolls." I neve made such a statement, although it is a good line and I
will use it in the future. Indeed, I have a friend who is likely a troll.

At the time he is referring to (1980s) the Program in Historical Archaeology
at Penn was housed in the Graduate Group in American Civilization, a unit
that quite successfully combined anthropology (with elements from Folklore) and
American culture history; indeed, the Penn Department of American
Civilization was an anthropological version of American Studies. Our
specialization in historical archaeology (which will have two new PhD
students entering next year) is now housed in the Graduate Group in
Anthropology. Our students always did, and still do, take such courses
as vernacular architecture, the Built World, historic ethnography and have
worked closely with historians such as Drew Faust on the American South.

N.B. Both the Department of American Civilization AND the Department of
Folklore-Folklife have now been abolished at Penn. Also as a footnote
the second department was always Folklore-Folklife (never purely Folklore)
and had a strong emphasis on material culture.

The discussion raised by my Australian colleague is not new (the reason I
was going to avoid it!) and it comes down to both a practical (political)
and an intellectual side.

Historical Archaeology is a subfield of anthropology, not history, and it
will never find any substantial academic base outside of anthropology in
North America (nor from my own observations elsewhere). This housing is
not only the only game in town but is superior to a housing in history
departments in that it gives us a broader perspective (but one that does
NOT exclude anything done by historians) and closely ties us into general
anthropological archaeology.

Should historical archaeologists also know history - of course, and most
of them do. Our original program here at Penn had some mechanical advantages
but they survive under the new anthropological housing.

Knowing history, however, involves two things. We need to know historical
research methods (and the best way is by doing research with primary
documents) but we also need to know the substantive, secondary work of
historians. Most of the books in my own library were written by historians.
I have never ceased to be taken aback when I realize that many historical
archaeologists who, for example, study the American West, do not belong,
(and this is only an example) to the Western History Association. This is
the real problem (see my 1988 article in HA).

Historical Archaeology is not in practice or ideal form an equal mix of
anthopology and history. Historical archaeolgoists are, in North America,
anthropologists who need to control research methods from several fields
(this, however, does not make them primarily historians or folklorists)
and ALSO control the secondary, scholarly literature put our by these
fields.

                                Bob Schuyler