Realia

For those of you dying to know how my feud with realia turned out, here's the response from Dr. Schuler to one of my many persistent questions:

"Archaeology is, in my view, an attempt to reconstruct past times andcircumstances based on material remains. There is some neutrality, because the reconstruction ought be driven by the data; but the datamust also be interpreted. What good is it to say, "a building 12 m by12 m"? Better, "a sixth-century byzantine church 12 m by 12 m." If one is to say that archaeology is fact, one must first define what afact is.I believe archaeology gives us an angle on realia, but so does theology,just in a different way. Davis would disagree."

And as for a bit of my own realia, holding my niece for the first time yesterday was reason enough to come home early.