Although passenger pigeons, now extinct, were abundant in eighteenth-and nineteenth-
century America, archaeological studies at twelfth-century Cahokian sites in the present-
day United States examined household food trash and found that traces of passenger
pigeon were quite rare. Given that the sites were close to huge passenger pigeon roost
documented by John James Audubon in the nineteenth century and that Cahokians
consumed almost every other animal protein source available, the archaeologist
conducting the studies concluded the passenger pigeon population had once been very
limited before increasing dramatically in post-Columbian America. Other archaeologists
have criticized those conclusions on the grounds that passenger pigeon bones would not
be likely to be preserved. But all the archaeological projects found plenty of bird bones-
and even some tiny bones from fish.
The relevance of the literary personality-a writer's distinctive attitudes, concerns, and
artistic choices-to the analysis of a literary work is being scrutinized by various schools of
contemporary criticism. Deconstructionists view the literary personality, like the writer's
biographical personality, as irrelevant. The proper focus of literary analysis, they argue, is a
work's intertextuality(interrelationship with other texts), subtexts(unspoken, concealed, or
repressed discourses), and metatexts 9 self-referential aspects), not a perception of a
writer's verbal and aesthetic "fingerprints." New historicists also devalue the literary
personality, since, in their emphasis on a work's historical contexts, they credit a writer with
only those insights and ideas that were generally available when the writer lived. However,
to readers interested in literary detective work-say scholars of classical(Greek and Roman)
literature who wish to reconstruct damaged texts or deduce a work's authorship-the
literary personality sometimes provides vital clues.