Cornelius, Angela, and friends,

I think American historical archaeologists have always been most willing
to use oral history in conjunction with their archaeological work; Marley
Brown did so at the Mott Farm Site in Rhode Island back in the late 1960s
and published on this in the journal Ethnohistory (reprinted in Schuyler's
edited volume Historical Archaeology:  A Guide to Substantive and
Theoretical Contributions); Margaret Purser used oral histories
extensively to gain insight into the community of Paradise, Nevada, in her
case not just to probe for memories about the locations of features and
so on, but also memories about the landscape and community history
(she wrote about this in an article published in Text-Aided Archaeology,
edited by Barbara J. Little).  We interviewed elderly people who had once
lived in the Lowell boardinghouses as part of our effort to understand
what life was like there.  All these projects were highly focused on site
and/or community, all were grounded, as it were, in the desire to better
understand excavated material, survey data, etc.

I was in part trained by Peter Schmidt, whose work in East Africa involved
extensive use of oral remembrancing by informants who traversed the
local landscape with him.  In his book Historical Archaeology (subtitle
escapes me), Peter employed the concepts of landscape mnemonics
and social memory to explore how folklore and memory are intertwined
and provide insight both into the ways in which history is constructed
within a given culture (Faubion's historias) but also how this information
leads the archaeologists to sites and features and to richer
interpretations of these.

I think that what Cornelius is proposing does sound like an interesting
way of going about exploring how people construct knowledge about the
past in the contemporary world.  That is surely worthy of study.  I'm afraid
that most of us in the states tend to want remain engaged with excavated
material and to use oral history, oral tradition, and other forms of research
to help us arrive at interpretations of our sites and artifacts.  There are
several reasons for this, not the least of which is that we have a very
vibrant community of folklorists and public historians who occupy, but do
not own, the territory of oral history, just as we have a large and vibrant
community of architectural historians who occupy and for the most part
almost fully own the study of upstanding buildings, be they high style or
vernacular.  And then there are the material culture people.

Many of us work in an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary milieu, but my
feeling is that if, as an archaeologist, I can call upon my colleagues in
cognate fields and not have to reinvent their wheels, as it were, my
archaeological work is thereby enriched.

I hasten to add that while I might think that what I do is closer to historical
anthropology than to other sorts of studies, and that I am engaged in a
human science, I clearly do not speak for all American historical
archaeologists.  It seems clear (the recent SHA meetings in St. Louis
provide ample evidence) that most U.S. historical archaeologists abide in
the belief that archaeology is a social science with close affinities to the
natural sciences, and subscribe to a normal science model of
archaeological practice.  (This I find most depressing, though I have been
instructed by a person on the HISTARCH list that I am only allowed to be
depressed about earthquake victims in Iran and war casualties in Iraq
and Afghanistan, not about the state of historical archaeology.  I disagree;
I can be depressed about all of it and deeply distressed by the worst of it.)

I'm as willing as the next person to subscribe to a loose and unbounded
notion of what archaeology is or might be, but I have no secret hankering
to be a folklorist or an ethnographer or a public historian or anything else.
Perhaps this is too pragmatic an attitude for some, but it strikes me that
there is plenty of work to be done right at the heart of archaeology, whether
(with a nod to Gavin Lucas) one's definition of self includes field work in
the traditional sense of excavation, or not.

Mary B.


Mary C. Beaudry, PhD, RPA
Department of Archaeology
Boston University
675 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02215 USA
tel. 617-358-1650
email:  [log in to unmask]