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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]