As a participant in the session, I really appreciate all the nice comments that have appeared here, as well as on back-channel e-mail, or in the halls of the meeting hotel. I will even use this transient euphoria to shamelessly plug my forthcoming book, called Digging Sites and Telling Stories: Essays in Interpretive Historical Archaeology, to be published in Orser's new series for Plenum later this year. I hope you all take the time to contact Mary and let her know how much you like the session (if she's not listening in on Histarch). There are a couple points I'd like to make about story-telling, though. 1. We are all always telling stories. We can dress our work up in caveats and methods, and the jargonized language of scholarship, but we are, nonetheless, telling stories. Might as well make them interesting. I remember one time at the jamaica meetin, Robin Ryder was reading a book called "How to write science fiction" or something like that. Margie Purser saw her and asked if she was writing science fiction. Without missing a beat, Robin looked up and said, "Sure! I'm an archaeologist. We all write science fiction." 2. The above notwithstanding, one of the things that contributed to the success of this session, I believe, is that all participants were highly seasoned folks with established reputations, etc. That made it easier for us to take chances, and it made it easier for the audience to trust our interpretations. We also all chose subjects from sites projects we have lived with for many years. We "know" these people and their contexts well. I encourage anyone attracted to this approach--or any more interpretive approach--to go for it. But you should consider that a session by, say, some grad students dealing with projects they began just last year would probably not have been as well met. It may have been equal or much better in quality, but, as Geertz, Clifford and others have demonstrated, interpretive success often depends on narratological clues and auhtority that "convince" the readership or audience. If you remember Mary's/Adrian's intro: they pointed out the dirt under each participants nails. That rhetorical device alone let many listeners suspend disbelief and to trust us to tell defensible and meaningful stories. But then, ya gotta start somewhere... Peace, Dan Mouer