ABSTRACT
Atie between past and present raises the need to understand where to dig and thus to say something relevant as a first objective. How are we to choose where to excavate? This can be called the problem of site significance. The term comes from cultural resource management, and it asks, in the United States, why a site should be placed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Register serves to illustrate the point that there are legal criteria that appear objective and that can be used to determine whether or not a site—house, building, archaeological locale, landscape, or neighborhood—can be designated as more worthy historically than others like it. There is supposed to be truth in this technique, residing in the things themselves, not in the reasons the criteria were assembled in the first place.
