Comments on “historical archaeology in the next millennium: A forum”

Dr. Hardesty's article addresses two big issues that have been the center of much discussion at recent conferences and in print (Lees et al. 1995; Lees and Purser 1994; Orser 1996). The first concerns whether there is, or really whether there should be, a fundamental research agenda for historical archaeology. The second issue is by far the most important, and concerns how we "practitioners of the discipline pass on the culture of historical archaeology to others." This second issue is the more important because it has so much to say about how we conduct research and whether anything approaching a fundamental re search agenda is even possible. When I sit down to develop a research design or to craft an analysis, and when I discuss the sis and dissertation proposals with students, I pull off my shelf a 1978 issue of American Antiquity and open an article by David Hurst Thomas. In his article on "The Awful Truth About Statistics in Archaeology" there is one passage that I find most instructive. Here, Thomas (1978:236) writes "... every study in archaeology can be analyzed by one simple criterion: what does this research tell us that we did not already know?" To this I would add the qualifier ". . . and that we or someone else wanted to know." From my perspective, this should be our fundamental re search design as there are too many projects that fail a test based on this simple criterion. What Hardesty and others writing on this sub ject are reacting to is, I believe, a two-fold prob lem. First is the plethora of reports (coming from all sectors of the field) that conclude with trivial or uninformed results. These fall into the category of the "so what" report where you read of precise field techniques (it is hoped) and won derful features but at the end realize the project's principals have learned nothing except how to excavate properly and what the site looked like under the ground. Second is the much acclaimed lack of evidence that we as a field are going in the same direction, or any direction for that mat ter, in terms of using theory or addressing big questions of anthropological interest (Cleland and Fitting 1968; Ferguson 1977; Honerkamp 1988; Orser 1996). The "so what" reports are unfortunate because they could be better, but they do have a de facto role in sallying forth data for others to use. Historical archaeology is, and must remain, a comparative endeavor built on well-excavated, catalogued, conserved, and reported data. I per sonally do not believe that we require a funda mental research design more explicit than that I attribute to David Hurst Thomas. We have been arguing about this for many years and I believe that we will not and probably should not agree on any one research design. Historical archaeol ogy touches on and is touched by so many dis ciplines, we almost by definition will have mul tiple schools of thought that will result in mul tiple approaches to research. This is not a problem. What is important is that there is direction to our research that goes beyond an individual site and that ties into re search questions of broader importance: ques tions that require a comparative approach to re solve. Our research must be based on careful survey and excavation, and must be followed by an analysis that provides the building blocks for comparative research. In the process we must answer questions of culture-historical interest about a particular site so that we may then ad dress questions of broader anthropological inter est using a larger comparative format. It is not important that we all address the same question but rather that we direct our research to answer