The Golden Marshalltown: A Parable for the Archeology of the 1980s

Abstract

THIS IS A STORY about archeological goals and rewards, and no one should look for anything too profound in it. It’s really just the story of a ride I took on an airplane from San Diego to Detroit. That may not sound very exciting to those of you who fly a lot, but this particular trip was memorable for me. For one thing, it was my first time on a 747. For another, I met someone on that plane who became one of the most unforgettable characters I’ve ever run across. The flight was taking me home to Ann Arbor after the Society for American Archaeology meetings in May of 1981. I was leaving San Diego a day early because I had endured all the physical stress I could stand. I didn’t particularly feel like watching the movie, so as soon as the plane was airborne and the seat belt sign had been turned off, I went forward to the lounge area of the plane. There were only two people there, both archeologists, and both recognized me from the meetings. So I had no choice but to sit down and have a beer with them. I want to begin by telling you a little about my two companions, but you have to understand, I’m not going to give their actual names. Besides, their real identities aren’t important, because each considers himself the spokesman for a large group of people. The first guy, I suppose, came out of graduate school in the late 1960s, and he teaches now at a major department in the western United States. He began as a traditional archeologist, interested in Pueblo ruins and Southwestern prehistory, and he went on digs and surveys like the rest of us. Unlike the rest of us, he saw those digs and surveys not as an end in themselves, but as a means to an end, and a means that proved to be too slow. After a few years of dusty holes in hot, dreary valleys he was no closer to the top than when he had started, and in fact, he was showing signs of lamentable fallibility. In 50 tries at laying out a 5-ft square, he had never come closer than 4 ft 10 in by 5 ft 3 in, and he’d missed more floors than the elevator in the World Trade Center. And then, just when all seemed darkest, he discovered Philosophy of Science, and was born again. Suddenly he found the world would beat a path to his door if he criticized everyone else’s epistemology. Suddenly he discovered that so long as his research design was superb, he never had to do the research: just publish the design, and it would be held up as a model, a brass ring hanging unattainable beyond the clumsy fingers of those who ac-