ABSTRACT
Archaeological data present the researcher with one of the strongest lines of evidence for reconstructing past human behavior. Archaeology is the principal source when it stands alone as it does for the totality of prehistory and for the numerous prehistoric interludes within the historic period. Historical writings may record human behavior in the form of observations of human actions or statistical data. Documents can be the basis for either an etic or emic analysis, although they have almost never been used for the latter by historical archaeologists. In an earlier presentation at the Conference on Historic Site Archaeology Dollar offered “Some Thoughts on Theory and Method in Historical Archaeology” and was severely criticised by several scholars for his misuse and misunderstanding of anthropological and archaeological concepts and terminology. Historical archaeology, with a few outstanding exceptions, has fallen short of its potential because of a set of more complex problems.
