In the 1970s I spent a couple of years in the Anthropology Masters program at American University.  As an aside, it was a great opportunity.  We spent a lot of time discussing how to discover, interpret, understand, and predict the rules that a society has for personal interactions. For ancient societies we have artifacts, for historical societies the artifacts are augumented often by documentation. Current societies can be observed.  In historic preservation we use some of these techniques to return a structure or other artifact to its original condition.  How was it made? How was it used? Who used it?  The work of preservationists is the subject of other parts of this web site but here the focus is not the artifact but, instead, the culture of the community of historic preservation itself.  Understanding "(t)he set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group" is essential in working with, in, or for it.  This standard definition of culture tells us that to be successful in designing, funding, implementing, and having our work accepted by preservationists that we need to know how the members of that community interact; to understand their culture