ABSTRACT
The analysis of planned, formal landscapes was important to me because it tied these wonderful gardens not just to the Renaissance and Baroque eras with which I already had some familiarity, but also to Jim Deetz’s In Small Things Forgotten (1977), which was the most important book I had read in historical archaeology. Deetz’s book allowed me to lay the basis for comparing colonial New England to Annapolis by using recognized ideas. Because I had been trained in comparative method in anthropology and was happily situated within the new archaeology, the move of bringing an idea from one area to another for scientific purposes seemed right and comfortable to me. But, while productive for me in the short and long runs, it never caught on in historical archaeology. That is frustrating, and such frustration is a source of motivation for how I continue to think and organize.
