Abstract
The community study has been one of the most productive but least used approaches to the archaeological study of the past. This situation is especially ironic because community study offers a framework which overcomes many of the problems and fulfills most of the goals of contemporary historical archaeology. It is based in the relationship of people and locale, it is conducive to the synthesis of documentary and archaeological data, it can be used in conjunction with hypothesis testing, and it employs a comparative approach which deals with groups of sites and multiple classes of data. This article reviews the development of community study in sociology, anthropology, and historical archaeology; defines its methods as employed by major practitioners; and shows how the community study approach was applied to the study of ethnicity and class in late colonial St. Augustine.
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Cusick, J.G. The importance of the community study approach in historical archaeology, with an example from late colonial St. Augustine. Hist Arch 29, 59–83 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374217
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374217