>AFIELDS() returns the long table name in position 12--but why?? The table name is an attribute of the table, not the column so I don't understand why the table name is returned at all. Thanks for any help in understanding this...

It's the name of the table in DBC which could be different from the physical table name. You would need this name to get the rest of fields attributes from DBC.

SELECT mytable
= AFIELDS(laList)
? DBGETPROP(laList[1,12] + "." + laList[1,1],"FIELD","Caption")