ABSTRACT
Uh-oh, Peregrine’s gone crazy. What in the world is this story about? Well, it’s intended to illustrate one of the truly odd facts about archaeological research. Here the librarian is unconcerned about the archaeologist’s seemingly bizarre and destructive behavior because he
is aware of that particular odd fact. What is it? That archaeologists destroy their data as they collect it. When we excavate, we destroy the very site we are studying. We destroy the very context of the artifacts, ecofacts, and features we want to examine. When we excavate, we act precisely as the scholar in the story: we read the record of the past and then destroy it. All that we have in the end are our notes. And that makes excavation a dangerous activity and a necessarily cautious, time-consuming, and precise one that no archaeologist wants to undertake without good reason.
