Often Fun, Usually Messy: Fieldwork, Recording and Higher Orders of Things

This paper has had a long gestation which began in 1997 as an article Chris Cumberpatch and I (Cumberpatch and Thorpe 1997) began to put together where we questioned the focus of the debate, played out in the pages of Antiquity, between Fekri Hassan and Ian Hodder (Hassan 1997; Hodder 1997, 1998). Later, in 2004, I was fortunate enough to be asked to contribute an overview paper to the proceedings of the Stratigraphy Conference held at York in 2001. Unfortunately the first paper was never completely finished and the publication of the Stratigraphy Conference proceedings has been cancelled. This chapter then draws together aspects of both papers, as the debate is still one with relevance today and includes an expansion of my thinking (up to June 2010) on other areas addressed by my original paper given in the Reconsidering the on-site relationship between subject, object, theory and practice session of the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference in at York in 2007.

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