Name Change? : comments [elanya]

Well, I'm very busily ensuring that I do *not* wade in on your discussion over at FB, which has the worst sorts of archaeocentrism you could find. So I won't comment there.

I do think there is enormous value in having some specialized departments (like yours) that really sell their uniqueness. Especially at the graduate level, I think it's good to have focused (but not too narrowly) programs. Of course, the thing is that 'archaeology' isn't your focus, nautical archaeology is. And I don't think that trying to make the nautical archaeologists be more anthropological is necessarily likely to be productive.

Are all of your biological anthropologists bioarchaeologists? In a lot of departments, bio is closer to medical, to ecological, etc. than it is to archaeology. This is one of my pet peeves - the four subfields get grouped into two, uh, semi-fields of bio+arch and cult+ling. Which is dumb.

Is there, or has there ever been, a movement to turn nautical archaeology into its own department? And if so, how do the non-nautical archaeologists feel about that? I think it is possible that this is actually a way of appeasing the nautical archaeologists by keeping them in the fold rather than going their own way entirely.

So I do think this might be about nautical archaeologists (who, let's face it, aren't anthropological for the most part) clamoring for a little name recognition at the departmental level, and not much more than that. But I don't know enough about your departmental politics to say whether that's true.

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I think Nautical *used* to be its own department, but got sucked in to anth a while ago. I don't know the whole history though. However, I am not convinced that it is the Nautical people *alone* who are pushing for this - there are some serious rifts among the 'upstairs' people, at the subdisciplinary level. Because I have no idea who came up with this idea, I can't really comment further on that. The graph definitely came from one of the non-nautical archaeologists, though.

See, if they wanted to change it to Anthropology and Nautical Archaeology, I would actually have less problems with that. Naybe that was the initial proposal, and it has since taken on a new political life :p

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Heh - maybe, maybe, although it's obviously much too long. But in all seriousness, the real problem may lie with the cultural people in your department - do they take seriously the notion that archaeological theory is anthropological theory? In your 'core' anth theory courses, do they give as much time to Binford as to Sahlins, for instance? I definitely get why archaeologists would feel that they are distinct - everyone treats them that way. But I don't know - I thought your dept. had a lot of science-oriented cultural ecology types who would see things in a broader way? And don't you have some nautical archaeologists who are thoroughly humanistic? I dunno, it's a mess.

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Also (completely hypothetical): If there were a move to re-separate INA from the rest, this would give the non-nautical archaeologists a strong incentive to propose a name change - keeping the nautical arch. in the department gives them more clout, whereas if nautical went its own way, then they'd be a minority.

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