Hello folks, I have been quite engaged by the discussions that have come from the New Orleans privy issue concerning the construction of historical archaeological interpretation. Since the AAA's and Thanksgiving took me away I was allowed to ingest the last tens days of discourse in one sitting. I intend to save these thoughts for future reference and even to pass along to others struggling with interpretation (archaeological of other). But I would like to add my own 'two pesos.' I see a difference between extrapolation and interpretation which seems missing thus far. It is one thing to move from a site to theory and another to move from the theoreatical construction of culture to the site, but quite another to dialectically juxtapose 'theory' and 'history'. I prefer the latter but believe that much of historical archaeology shies from this practice. To move from the excavation of material to conclusions about culture is a weak use of theory since is makes theory (e.g. Irish immigrants abused alcohol) simply conclusion. Theory exists to aid in the formulation of conclusions. If we are really interested in the lives of people at the sites we study, we should approach sites with theory in hand and formulated as problems worth addressing. Lives do not have a face value, rather they are situated and lived in the midst of contextualizing forces which determine the activities undertaken, for example, at a site. What did it really mean to be an immigrant? It is likely that different people, though using the same terms (e.g. immigrant or Irish or laborer), understood and employed those terms differently. To figure out these potential meanings and their usefulness in the interpretation of archaeological sites, historical archaeologists should, as Nassaney (perhaps unwittingly) proposed, be better historians. What sort of issues were at play in the particular struggles of Irish immigrants in New Orleans? To answer, and thus to formulate the theories and question worth exploring archaeologically (both in terms of excavation AND research), one should interogate the specifics of the broader question. This means tying down the potential meanings of 'immigrant' and 'Irish' in the '19th-century New Orleans' context. To do otherwise is to essentialize the experience of real lives which were most likely lived outisde of, or in opposition to, the structures which we now take as essential. This process also allows us to avoid the trap that Mouer suggests lay in the path of critical theory, that of finidng in the data what we know already to be true. This is so because the point is not the construction of theoretical generalizations (e.g. Marxism), but, through the use of theory, the making of site-specific archaeological interpretatations, in other words, histories of the lives lived at the site(s) being studied. Chris Matthews