Process? What Process?

A little tired and down in the mouth as the week nevertheless toils on.

As usual in these energetic lulls I'm feeling a little frustrated about how to think of my work. I'm a first year grad student in archaeology. And because I've found myself more and more attracted to theoretical questions, I sometimes wonder if I should be doing history of historiography instead. Or epistemology.
It's a mess.
As a novice, should I be concentrating on practical questions, getting my feet wet in the "stuff" of archaeology, keeping my head down and leaving the abstract thinking for 20 years later?
Or should I get a firm grip on theoretical matters, enabling me to approach concrete problems with greater breadth?
How can I do "practical" archaeology if I don't have firm conceptual footing? How can I have firm perceptual footing if I'm unfamiliar with the raw materials of my discipline?

Chickens and eggs.
(I have a friend who claims to have solved that problem, on the ground that there were eggs in the evolutionary tree long before chickens. I laughed.)
For lack of a better alternative, I'm going to play it back and forth between the two. Like a ninja running up a chimney. To glory.