For those who posit that cities began in the nineteenth century, an appropriate methodology for studying them is to run insurance data through computers, generating statistics and calling the results history. But if our interest extends deep into the past, to Roman or Greek cities or to the first cities of the Yucatan, Mesopotamia, or China, then we are forced to find ways to deal with quite different sorts of evidence. In the Old World there are deciphered or decipherable written records in many cases; in the New World little written evidence. In both the Old and New Worlds, the chief evidence for ancient urbanism is the physical remains of the city, with the paraphernalia of daily life. Like other forms of human knowledge, archaeology over the past thirty years has become increasingly conscious of its methodology, goals, biases, and problems. The questions being asked and the solutions being sought today reflect some shifts in consciousness and in method. The identification of one's assumptions and biases is part of the new mode of research. Nowhere is this shift better revealed than at a site like Morgantina, Sicily, where excavation has extended over more than thirty years, as frequently reported in the American Journal of Archaeology since 1957. This site represents an opportunity for studying ordinary urban settlements of the Greek world, just as a modern sociologist might prefer to study Dayton, Ohio, rather than Los Angeles, as a typical American city. Morgantina is a fine test case for the use of archaeological data as the basis of urban history. Some general conclusions may be drawn from this evidence about the problems and opportunities of cross-disciplinary investigation. Since 1977, I have hunted through thirty years of excavation records from Morgantina, looking for the occasional fact about water system elements. Gradually I have come to realize that the data from Morgantina were gathered to verify certain written records from ancient times. The data collected would be very different if at the beginning the excavators had asked more anthropological or geographical questions, such as, “Since water is essential for human settlement, what features of this site provide for that need? And what human interventions were made; that is, what structures were built?”
Metaphor to Métier: Kerry Tribe’s “Aphasia Poetry Club” and the Discourse of Disability in Contemporary Art