Anthroslug the Much Put-Upon

Another Distraction

2012-01-31T11:48:00.000-08:00

So, one part of the reason that my posts have been a bit sporadic as of late is that I have been int he field alot, and there were the holidays. However, it looks like this sporadic posting may continue for a while because we have recently discovered that my partner, Kaylia, is pregnant (which we planned, so we're both pretty happy about this). So, my attention is likely to be on other things more often from here on out. I will continue to update, and I will try to get back to my old 3-times-a-week schedule, but we will see how it goes.

And, for anyone offended, the title of this post is intended as a joke.

On The Eventual Loss of Field Work

2012-01-30T10:00:00.000-08:00

I have come to realize recently that my days in the field are likely numbered.

This isn't a shock, or even a gloomy outlook. quite the contrary, in fact. The next step in my career will likely be one of project management, which means more time dealing with management-level stuff rather than the day-to-day issues of field work and logistics. Now, this step is likely years off, and it is one that I could probably stall even longer if I wished to, but that comes to the fact that my partner and I are talking about having children, and I wish to spend more times with my nephews and nieces while they are still young enough to appreciate their eccentric uncle, which means a more stable weekly schedule, which, in turn, means less field work. So, even though the next step may be a few years off, I have no desire to hold it off any longer than necessary, and may even be looking for ways to make it happen sooner.

So, the loss of fieldwork is still a ways off, and I am not gloomy over the eventual loss of field work as a regular part of my life. But, I will admit, I will be a little sad to see it go.

This was not always the case, however. Back in early 2007, I had worked for companies that had large local clients, and therefore field work consisted of going out for the day, and coming back home at night. I rarely had to stay overnight anywhere, and then never for more than a four-night stint. I then went to work for a company based in Santa Cruz (the town in which I had wished, and still do wish now that I have left it, to settle). This company had very little local work, and so we spent at least 30% of our time away from home (the rest of that time was spent writing reports, preparing for field work, doing lab work, and handling our few local projects). And so I was thrust into the much more common world of the field archaeologist - travel and hotels.

I didn't like it. I have long been a creature of habit, and I had developed a life for myself where I had my daily and weekly routines in which I reveled. I liked my weekly gaming group, my nightly walks, and the three to four nights a week that I walked down to the local coffee shop to either write or read (in fact, most of the blog entries on this site dating to before December 2008 were written in the Coffee Cat in Scotts Valley, CA). I did not like having my habits interrupted, and being sent out for field work felt like an interruption. I disliked being sent away, and the entire time I was out, I longed for my return home.

But then some things happened.

The first is that I began to realize that fieldwork, even at its most miserable, tended to provide fodder for great stories that I could tell later. When my friends in the tech industry would talk about difficult situations at work, I could always contribute a story about nearly being stampeded by cattle, or driving on a road that appeared to be in danger of collapsing into a canyon, or having to learn how to stop a pack of dogs using nothing but chutzpah. I found that I rather enjoyed being the "guy who has the best stories", never having to embellish the stories.

I also began to get a bit into the spirit of adventure that was inherent in the work. Archaeology is an infinitely more sedate field than movies would lead one to believe, but there is always the possibility that some strange thing will happen (as evidence by many of the stories on this blog), and even if it doesn't, you spend time going to enough different types of places that nobody else has quite the same breadth of experience as you do. There are stretches of boredom, and even longer stretches of basic routine work, but these are punctuated by weird occurrences, funny events, and exciting discoveries. I am not risking life and limb on a regular basis (provided that I follow my safety plan), but I still get to see and do some exciting things.

Later, my partner Kaylia and I moved in together. I very much liked this, but co-existing with someone else meant everything was shared (space, money, time, etc.), which was a bit difficult for me as I had lived as a single man into my 30s, never having cohabitated. In truth, Kaylia was encouraging of me maintaining my own hobbies, habits, etc., but it took me time to understand this, and so I found that fieldwork allowed me time and space of my own in which I could think, work out my own issues, and sometimes just engage in my own hobbies or habits without having to worry about upsetting someone else. I would look forward to returning home at the end of the job, but I nonetheless enjoyed my time away as well.

And so, while I preferred being at home to being on the road, I did develop a bit of a taste for traveling to fieldwork. In fact, when I hadn't gone out recently enough, I would sometimes begin to get a little stir crazy, waiting for the next expedition out of the office.
At the same time, when I was out of the office, I usually counted the days until I returned home, as I did prefer home to the field, even when fieldwork was at its best. What's more, even some of the events that provided me with great stories could become more grief than they were in any way worth - spending seven months of 2009 in Taft with a hostile and imbecilic client who expected me to work 16-hour days and who was sufficiently dim to not look up our contract to see what the actual amount allocated to our work actually was (hence she constantly claimed that I had gone "well over budget" when I wasn't even 25% of the way through our budget) was enough to make me seriously consider going back into the tech industry.

And so, I find myself pondering a future in which my fieldwork will eventually start to become more limited, eventually vanishing. It's not a bad future at all, the pay will eventually go up, my time at home will allow my relationship with Kaylia to improve (and it's already pretty good), if we have children, then I will no doubt want to spend more time with them.

At the same time, there is a bit of melancholy in knowing that my wild and wacky adventuring days will eventually be over. Still, it will be better if they are over when I still enjoy them than for them to continue into a future where I start to go a bit nuts, like some of the older field techs that I have worked with.

Tools of the Trade: The Crude Tools

2012-01-27T10:00:00.000-08:00

I have had a number of experiences lately in which the people with whom I'm speaking seem shocked at the tools that we use - the popular view of archaeology being that excavations are carried out with brushes, trowels, and dental picks. There is, of course, some truth to this. When you are excavating features (things such as hearths, old posts for holding up long-vanished buildings, etc.), then you want to use very fine tools to make sure that you don't lose something important. Likewise, there are places where the archaeological materials that you may encounter are fragile enough to make very fine-controlled tools necessary.

But, most of the time in North American archaeology, larger, more "crude" tools are actually perfectly appropriate for excavation. When you are digging into a midden or a flake scatter, the goal is to get the materials out of the ground and into a screen where you can separate them from the surrounding soil and natural rock. To do this, cruder tools than what is usually thought of work just fine.

So, to that end, here's the first part in a short series on the types of tools that we actually use, as opposed to those ones that people usually assume we use. This first part is the blunt instruments or crude tools that we use on a regular basis.

The Shovel

Okay, no surprise here. If you're digging holes, you need a shovel. However, we need a few types of shovels. First off, there are round-nose and square-nose shovels. The type you use depends on whether you are digging a square or a round hole, and on how hard is the soil through which you are digging - hard-packed dirt is easier to dig with a round shovel, and if it's a square hole then you use the square shovel to clean it up before finishing your unit level.

There are also different handle lengths. A long-handled shovel works great when you are at the surface, digging a shallow hole, or digging a deep hole that it too small for you to enter. However, when you are more than a meter down, maneuvering the long-handled shovel can become a bit of a pain, and the short-handled shovel is pretty useful. The shorter handle shovel is also easier to control if you are having to exercise more caution than normal.

The Breaker Bar

Okay, this one is probably the most shocking ot the non-archaeologist. Hell, it surprised me the first time that I was asked to use one. However, it is a very useful tool.

The breaker bar is a steel bar approximately six feet long (though some are shorter), with a chisel tip on one one, and (usually) a spike on the other end. This is used to break up hardened soil (and occasionally to dig through pavement...which I can assure you is not fun).

We don't like the breaker bar. It is the definition of a crude instrument, looking more like a medeival weapon than the tool of a scholar. You run the risk of breaking artifacts, and in some contexts creating false flakes that resemble the remains of making flaked stone tools. However, when you are stuck with dense, hardened clay to dig through, there is no other practical way to do it. You use the breaker bar, and be as careful as you can.

The Mattock, Pick, Chipping Hammer, etc.

So, these are similar to the breaker bar, but are not quite as crude. Nonetheless, they are basically spikes, axes, or other blades mounted on wooden or fiberglass sticks of varying lengths, and they function in much the same way as the breaker bar: cutting through hard-packed soils. The objection to using these is pretty much the same.

The Screen

The screen isn't really a crude instrument, but it is used in conjunction with the crude instruments. It's basically a wooden box lacking a top, and with a bottom made out of wire mesh, usually 1/8 or 1/4 inch. Basically, you put the dirt from your hole in here, shake it (and sometimes break up dirt clods), and then sort through the gravel and rocks left over to try to find artifacts.

Okay, so those are the most common crude tools. A later post will desscribe the fine tools.

Permission Marketing, Math, and Annoyed Executives

2012-01-24T10:00:00.000-08:00

Back in the late 90s, I worked for a large computer hardware manufacturer. I worked in one of the marketing departments. The management of the various marketing departments were obsessed with a "marketing guru*" named Seth Godin. Ol' Godin was, at that time, pushing an idea called "permission marketing" (often credited to him, but existing much earlier). The concept, in a nutshell, is that you identify people who might want your product or service, and you get them to agree to read or listen to messages that you send to them about your product or service. The basic idea being that they will be receptive and appreciative to hear what you have to say, and you aren't annoying other people by interrupting what they are doing (watching television, reading a website, listening to the radio, etc.) and thereby generating illwill from potential future customers. While the idea has its limits, it's basically a sound concept, and seems like something that should work. I have seen some anecdotal evidence to indicate that it does work some of the time, but I have no idea how it works overall in practical situations - and to be honest, I really don't care.

Now, the way that my employer decided to apply the permission marketing concept to our way of doing business was to identify the different marketing segments, and ask companies within those segments to sign up for various programs where they would get a few different goodies, and would also receive regular emails from us trying to provide information that might persuade them to purchase our products. This had been going one for a few months when I got brought on board, and the program to which I was assigned had approximately 12,000 members, which got whittled down to around 10,000 when you eliminated cases where two accounts existed for the same company (usually because two different people at that company had signed up). It was at this point that the upper management wanted to prove that their new program was working.

Note, I say that the upper management wanted to prove that it was working, not look at it and see whether or not it was working. This is an important distinction.

I was given access all of the data for the program - member data, email send dates, click-through data (we had a way of seeing if the emails were read - I can not remember at this point whether the email simply contained a link or if there was some way that we were able to track whether the email was opened, though the latter seems like it would be riddled with errors), and contents of all emails. I discovered that the average email generated a total of five click-throughs, or roughly 0.04% to 0.05% (depending on whether you count duplicate accounts or not). There were a few noteworthy exceptions - emails that demanded action be taken to maintain membership had click-throughs as high as 25%, and during periods when there was a very high number of new members, there would follow one to two emails with click-through rates as high as 15%, but the emails demanding action to maintain membership privileges were all clearly isolated incidents not to be included with the rest of the data. The higher rates during periods of program expansion were noteworthy, as they seemed to come from new members interested by the novelty of the new emails, but the rates always settled back down to 0.04% to 0.05%, sometimes ranging as low as 0.01%, which seemed an abysmal range of rates for a program that was costing no small amount of money to implement.

So, I put all of this together, wrote a report, and handed it to my supervisor, who handed it to her supervisor, etc. up the chain of command up to one of the Vice Presidents in charge of marketing (there were a few of these guys, I don't recall which one ultimately received the report).

I didn't hear any more about this for a few weeks. And then I received an email, from the VP in question, addressed to my boss, but with me as a CC and not amonggst the (several) primary recipients (the tone of the email left me feeling that this was used as a way of letting someone lower on the foodchain know that they were to be "instructed" without ever directly addressing them - I always found it insufferable and insulting). The email demanded, of my boss and not me, to know whether I had a degree in marketing, and then rather strongly implied that if I did not have a degree in marketing, everything that I might have to say on the subject was meaningless. Being the sort of person that I am, I responded, stating that, no, I did not have a degree in marketing, but that I could do basic math and it was clear that a 5/10,000 response rate was pretty sad and not the sign of a healthy marketing program. My boss was, again, informed that, as I did not have a degree in marketing and was therefore not ordained to the priesthood, and Mr. Godin had written this holy text that was to be followed, all analysis that I had done was to be disregarded**.

This has always struck me as an unaccountably odd position for a corporate executive to take. Admittedly, there was always the possibility that there was some other principle at work here that, had I gone through school to get a marketing degree, I might be aware of which would explain why such a low response rate was not necessarily a bad thing. I can not conclude absolutely that I was not missing some important concept or piece of information. However, the tone of the emails (and my later interactions with this VP) couple with the fact that he never bothered to point out any such concept or information suggested that this was not the case. Rather, there seemed to be two things at work: 1) there had been a good deal of time, effort, and money put into this particular marketing scheme, and in keeping with the sunk cost fallacy, comment that the program should be altered or dropped was not looked upon kindly; 2) within the business side of the tech industry at that time, whether or not this is still the case I cannot say, there was a definite pressure towards "group think" and those who were skeptical of the positions taken by the group (or, more often, paid lip service by the group by held by upper management) were often seen as not being team players.

Regardless of the precise reason, I never did receive any sort of explanation from anybody regarding the distaste that the VP had for my analysis, which I had been asked to give, but it was made clear that he saw it as somehow offensive. I was, however, assigned to other tasks and never asked to provide an analysis of anything again. The program continued for the next year that I continued working for that company. I haven't a clue as to whether it still exists.

One interesting side-note. Some of the methods that I used for slicing up the data in looking for the effectiveness of the program, and looking to see if there were sub-sets of the clients who were more interested in the program than others, I later adapted for looking at the frequency of different types of artifacts in archaeological sites, and I was able to use them successfully in writing my Masters Thesis. So, in the end, this assignment did work in my favor.

*"marketing gurus" came and went like sheets at a hotel. They usually had a kernel of a good idea that was then packed about with all manner of pseudo-profound nonsense in order to turn what could have been a one-page instruction sheet into a book with accompanying seminars and DVD sets. Occasionally, one would actually have a profusion of good ideas, but most were one-trick ponies who enjoyed their five minutes, and then were forgotten when, after a few months of trying to get the "new, game-changing idea" to work and discovering that it failed when tested against reality, it was abandoned by the marketing executives who had found a new guru to teach them what was sure to be the one true religion.

**Strangely, I was allowed to maintain access to the data sources until a year later, when I ran a series of statistical tests demonstrating that the individual sales people had little influence on product sold, but that changes in engineering and manufacturing had a huge impact, and therefore the engineering and produciton staff should be the ones getting the sale's team's rather large bonuses and other perks (such as, and I shit you not, safari trips to Africa, month-long tours of Italy, and so on). I was laid off a few month later, admittedly for reasons unrelated to my oddball exercises in applied mathematics, but I have always wondered if management wasn't at least a bit happy to get rid of an irritant.

Back to the Frozen Wastes

2012-01-18T06:53:00.000-08:00

So, I'm sitting in my office, waiting for my crew.

As the frequent readers know, I have been routinely getting sent up into the mountains to do boundary testing on sites near a linear project. This project should have been done no later than the fall, when there was no snow on the ground and the ground itself wasn't frozen. Now, it's difficult to get to the sites due to snow and ice covered roads, and the ground is frozen making digging difficult and screening soils very difficult - to the point of being occasionally impossible. As a result, each time we have gone up, there has been at least one site that we have been unable to reach, and we have one left. I had figured that it would wait until Spring, as there is no practical reason to go after it now - it will cost more than is necessary to get to it and to dig into it.

However, my client is a large corporation, and the archaeologist that works for my client is under pressure to get things done even when impractical. And so, on Monday, I received instructions to go back into the mountains to try to reach the last site, even though impractical. It is very cold up there right now, so I am decked out in my cold weather clothes, and there is a fair chance that we won't be able to get to the site at all, so this trip might be a waste anyway.

So, here I am, up earlier than normal, very tired, very grumpy, and possibly not even going to be able to get to the site to which we are headed.

Joy!

Flaked Glass and Date Designation

2012-01-16T10:00:00.000-08:00

A short while back, I wrote about the problems associated with assuming that sites containing historic-era artifacts are necessarily related to Non-Native American use of a location. While it is true that, as of the mid-19th up through the early 21st century, Native Americans were a distinct minority among the European, Asian, and African-descendant settlers who occupied California, they nonetheless remained a present and active community (or, rather, set of communities) within California (and the United States more broadly). And, contrary to what a surprisingly large number of people seem to think, Native American communities have historically been very open to adopting new technologies and practices from other cultures - this is, in fact, a common human trait - and as such, after urbanization began in the American west, it becomes much more difficult to differentiate a Native American home from a non-Native American Home.

In an area such as the southern Sierra Nevadas, where I currently do much of my work, it becomes a bit more difficult to differentiate Native and non-Native sites. Many of the towns in this area have large Native American populations, many descended directly from the people who occupied the same locations a century or more ago. And European settlement was slower in this area than in other parts of California, resulting in the Native peoples of the area being better able to adapt to a slow creep of Euro-American settlement rather than the sudden rush brought on by the Gold Rush and, earlier, by the establishment of a local Spanish mission. Moreover, the culture of the settlers had changed over the course of the 19th century, so while the Native peoples of this region still had numerous problems with the settlers - some of them quite horrific in their own right - they were not quite the same as the trauma experienced by those in the central Sierras and also along the coast.

As a result, it is not unheard of to find Native American village sites that were known to be occupied as late as 1914 and with histories stretching back centuries, in the hills and mountains of this region. What this means is that the people of the area were making use of tools and goods that are typically associated with non-Native settlements, creating sites that are a mix of artifacts typically thought of as historic, as well as those typically thought of as prehistoric. The problem is that for most archaeologists, and I have to confess that I have been one such myself, we tend to assume that the presence of metal, glass, concrete, etc. are indicators of "historic" (that is, non-Native) settlement and land use, while the presence of flaked stone, ground stone, and similar materials is evidence of "prehistoric" (that is, Native) land use and settlement. As a result, we tend to describe sites that have both "prehistoric" and "historic" traits as being "mixed component" - we assume that they were occupied at two different periods of time by two different sets of people - both Native and non-Native.

I had to reflect on this while I excavated a site this last week that had been recorded as a mixed-component site. It contained bedrock milling features and flaked basalt and obsidian, and it also had metal and glass artifacts in fairly large numbers. Although I am aware of the problems associated with assuming two different settlements of the area, I had nonetheless fallen back into the habit of thinking of these types of materials as representing just that...until one of the field techs walked up to me with a piece of amethyst glass (a distinct type of glass that usually dates to the late 19th and early 20th century) that had been bifacially flaked - that is, someone had taken the glass and very carefully knocked flakes of glass off of it in a distinct pattern to make the larger shard into a cutting and scraping tool. This is not a behavior one sees from non-Native Californians, but Native Californians were masters of producing flaked stone/glass tools, and I have seen many examples of them being produced from bottles, porcelain, and thick old window panes.

Suddenly, this site looked different. We now had pretty convincing evidence that Native Californians were living here and making tools during the late 19th and early 20th century, which was the same period during which the other historic artifacts had been deposited here.

Now, there is still some evidence from the distribution of artifacts to suggest that there was a dump of industrial materials here after the site was used by the Native Americans who made use of the milling stations and flaked the stone and the piece of amethyst glass. But it was nonetheless a valuable lesson to be reminded that the Native Californians never left, and that we should be cautious in assuming that a site, or site component, doesn't belong to them simply because it has glass, metal, and porcelain. In fact, when we make that assumption, we buy into and perpetuate the belief that Native Americans are of the past and not part of the modern world, though they very clearly are still here and still part of the world that you and I inhabit.

Phase 2

2012-01-09T10:00:00.000-08:00

Most of the fieldwork that I have been doing for the past two years falls within the category of Phase 1 projects. Today, however, I am going out for a Phase 2 project.

A Phase 1 project, at least in California CRM parlance, is a project geared towards identifying cultural resources (including archaeological sites, historic structures, traditional cultural properties, etc.) that may be impacted by a project. Usually this means doing a records search at the appropriate repository/archive for archaeological and historic information, followed by a pedestrian survey of the area in order to see if there are any resources present. Sometimes, as has been my lot lately, you go to what is sometimes called an "extended" Phase 1 or boundary testing - you dig a few holes in order to see if the archaeological site in question has a sub-surface component of which you would otherwise be unaware, and to see whether that subsurface component (if it exists) extends into the area likely to be disturbed by a project.

Phase I projects are, by far, the most common type of project. Often, once resources are identified, they can be avoided, and the project moves forward.

When a resource can't be avoided, or the project proponent would prefer not to work around it, then it usually has to be evaluated for it's eligibility to the state or federal register of historic resources. In the case of archaeological sites, this usually involves excavations that are more extensive than what is done for the extended Phase 2.

The Phase 2 can be enjoyable because, while the excavation performed is limited, the goal is to determine what types of materials are present, and to get a rough idea of the quantities and variety of archaeological materials. In other words, while the Phase 1 does generate data, and that data does have definite value outside of CRM and into research, the Phase 2 begins to more closely resemble research archaeology, and there is even the possibility of addressing some more advanced research questions with the data generated than is possible with the Phase 1.

Of course, the main goal of this part of the project is still essentially regulatory in nature - we have to determine whether the site is eligible for the appropriate register. However, most archaeological sites are determined eligible for the federal register under Criterion D (and in California, they are usually eligible for the state register under Criterion 4, which is almost identical to federal Criterion D) which states that a site is eligible if it has the potential to yield data important to the study of history or prehistory - in other words, that the site has research value.

So, this is a bit more of the type of archaeology that most people think of when they hear what I do for a living. And while I enjoy pedestrian survey - getting paid to take a walk is excellent - I am looking forward to changing pace today.

If the resource is eligible for placement on the appropriate register, then further work may be required, but that is a story for another time...

Skull Art and Revulsion

2012-01-04T10:00:00.000-08:00

This, a pinhole camera manufactured from the 150-year old skull of a 13-year old girl, got me thinking about human remains, or, rather, the treatment of human remains. As I have been known to deal with human remains through my work, this type of musing has professional implications for me that it doesn't have for most people.

I do not subscribe to any supernatural views - I believe neither in souls nor gods nor spirits, and I do not buy the notion that the way in which one's remains are treated in any way impact the person to whom the body belonged*. So, understand that I am aware that my thoughts here, steeped as they are in a sort of weird notion of what death and remains mean, are not particularly rational...and yet I suspect that they will be perfectly understandable to most people reading this.

But before we get into my own flavor of irrational, let's set the groundwork by stating what I think are perfectly reasonable views regarding the treatment of human remains.

By and large, I feel that rules and regulations regarding the treatment of human remains should be designed to A) protect public health, and B) avoid reasonable and unnecessary upset to people still alive** - in that order. So, if a coroner has to perform an autopsy against the wishes of a family in order to assess the likelihood of communicable disease, for example, then the prevention of disease should trump the family's wishes. However, if a family member would like to prevent a body from being used for medical instruction or research, I think that they should have their wishes met.

Going with these two principles (along with the ** below), you can take care of business. People who wish to have their bodies donated for research or instruction can do so, but the families of those who don't wish that can be assured that unnecessary disturbance of their deceased will not occur. And this is, more-or-less, what we usually have in our current society, and it seems to work pretty well.

But then you have cases such as this pinhole camera. I have an automatic revulsion to this, and while I can explain why, I'm not entirely comfortable with my reasons.

On the one hand, if I were to learn that some hipster twit was going to turn my cranium into an "art object" after my death I would be annoyed...on the other hand, by the time it happened, I would be too busy being dead to care. I have disintered bones, taken them from the ground, catalogued them, and placed them within a box for transport and/or storage. This doesn't bother me. I have had human bones in boxes near my desk for months at a time, waiting for the MLD*** to take them for permanent curation or internment. This doesn't bother me. In short, I am not creeped out by being near and even handling human remains. It's something that absolutely does not bother me.

But this pinhole camera skull creeps me out, and really bothers me.

I think that part of it is that I am making some assumptions about the creator. I have met many an "extreme artist" in the past, and found that while some are trying to do legitimate work, many often go for shock value, capitalizing on prurient impulses in order to get publicity, while claiming that they are challenging taboos when, in fact, they are simply getting a kick out of trying to upset people. I have no idea if that is what this guy is doing or not, but I have to admit that, lacking any evidence one way or another, that is my working assumption...and it is an assumption. I have no good reason for thinking that this is the case.

Another reason this bothers me, I think, is that I know a bit about how skulls were often obtained during the 19th century. Exhibitions such as Body Worlds use the bodies of volunteers, people who willingly donate their bodies to be made into art objects. It seems remarkably unlikely that a 13-year old girl would have agreed to such a thing back in the mid-19th century. So, I have to wonder where and how the skull was obtained, not only by the artist, but by those from whom the artist obtained it, on down the line until it was on the shoulders of a living teenage girl. During the 19th century, and even up into the second half of the 20th century, there was a trade in the bodies of people who had the misfortune to die in the wrong place or under the wrong circumstances. Many of these bodies were from criminals, but many others were from those who were poor, or kidnapping victims. The bodies were usually sold to educational institutions for anatomy courses, though some were sold to individual scientists, and a few likely even ended up in the hands of colectors (the number of disturbing things that the allegedly upright Victorians collected is truly mind-blowing). And that doesn't get into skulls taken by soldiers sent to the colonies, settlers who stole the body parts of Native Americans killed during the conflicts that accompanied the western expansion of the U.S., as well as the less common ways in which someone might illegally gain body parts. So, there is a fair chance that the skull became available for a 21st-century collector because the girl to whom it belonged died in a manner that while undramatic likely caused grief to her family, or was killed violently, and the removal of the remains would have compounded her family's grief.

Again, though, I don't know any of this. It simply seems likely given what I do know about the history of the body trade.

And, of course, another thing that is making my skin crawl here is the fact that this is a deep-seated taboo, a fact that the creator of the camera is probably counting on. It's the "ick" factor. Admittedly, this is culturally constructed to a degree, but taboos against poor treatment of corpses (at least those from the in-group) are universal, and destruction, damage, or mutilation of bodies is universally a sign of both disrespect and anger/hatred towards the one to whom it is being done. This is, admittedly, not rational - again, what happens after death doesn't impact the person when they're alive and able to notice - but it is something that is wired into human societies across the board (though, admittedly, what is construed as respectful or disrespectful treatment of the dead varies greatly across cultures...but I'm pretty sure that making a pinhole camera out of the skull isn't considered normal anywhere).

But this brings me back to what I do for a living. There are those who would consider my work to be disrespectful towards the dead, and therefore "icky" or disturbing. Although I do not remove human remains unless they are in danger of being destroyed otherwise, and I work as much as possible with the descendants of the deceased to ensure that everything is on the up-and-up, that doesn't change the fact that what I do with the remains, and the sort of research that I have supported in the past and will likely continue to support, is often not viewed with pleasure by a significant portion of the Native American community. Even when I am clearly working to save an endangered skeleton, there are those who would rather that it be left alone by me, even if that means it getting smashed by a bulldozer.

I will make this argument: the work I do is done to prevent harm to remains, and I do work to have them taken care of in such a way as the living descendents are not unnecessarily bothered. I don't view the remains as mine to do with as I please, but rather as remains that belong rightfully to the people who descended from the person being exhumed. The information that I gather is not sold, when possible I see it published, when not possible it at least gets into the "gray literature." This, I believe, puts me into another camp entirely from an artist who decides to turn a child's skull into a camera.

But, I have to admit that I have my days when I wonder if I am as different as I would like to think that I am.

* Interesting to note that our cultural views regarding these things are so steeped in supernaturalism that even in describing this, while I know that the body WAS the person (after all, our minds are a function of our brains which are a part of our bodies), I still use the langaueg of mind/body dualism and talk about the body "belonging" to someone.

** I would make one exception to B - when remains are likely to be destroyed, I think that it is acceptable to remove them from their current location in order to prevent their destruction. However, in such cases, the work should be done discreetly and professionaly so as to prevent grief to the living.

***Most likely descendant, the person designated by the coroner to take care of the human remains based on a relationship to the deceased. The politics of how this often works out within a Native American context is complex and worthy of an entire book.

Field Work Hotel Wackiness Photos

2012-01-02T10:00:00.000-08:00

Last week I wrote about the hotel in which I was staying for my recent fieldwork. On the one hand, it was only the latest in a long line of very odd hotels that I have stayed in. On the other hand, unlike some of those hotels, it was actually a pleasant place to stay, if odd. So, here's a few photos of the place, to give you a taste of the sometimes pleasant oddities that can come with field work.

The place is called the Snowline Lodge, and is...well, "quirky" isn't quite the right word, but it's the closest that I can find. We checked in here on Tuesday, not knowing anything about it other than that it was within the price range allowed for lodging by our client. When we arrived, we saw the front, and noticed that the porch had all manner of odd objects on it, including a piano that did not appear to be in working order.

And then we noticed the hallway with graffiti in it from various visitors, further making us wary.

It wasn't until later that we realized that all of the graffiti were positive and from people who seemed to like the place.

A sheep (which I was unable to get a photo of) was running about the place, acting very much as if it were a playful domestic dog. Indeed, had I not heard it "baaaa"-ing when I first saw it, I might have initially mistaken it for a weird looking dog until I got close.

A fellow missing all but one of his top teeth checked us in, and proceeded to, for reasons that weren't entirely clear to me, try to convince my crew and I to take a room with multiple beds rather than taking the three separate rooms that we had actually reserved. He also tended to talk far more than necessary, and his wife yelled at home from another room most of the time that we were talking with him. He informed us that he and his wife lived in one of the many trailers that were parked around the hotel, though from what we could gather they had spent most of their time in various rooms of the hotel itself.

Suffice to say, we were nervous as the the quality of this establishment. But, we need not have worried as it turned out to be nice, if odd.

The place was originally built as a bar, and later had rooms added on so that it might be used as a hunting lodge. The bar area now functions as a lobby and common room - yes, a common room in very much the "Medieval inn" sense: it was a room that remained open 24-hours a day, which had tables, couches, and stools on which the patrons might relax. There are drinks available, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic, though this isn't really a bar or restaurant of any sort. There is a piano, and atop the piano is a mannequin, as you can see:

Then, there's the nude photo of Marylin Monroe on one wall, accompanied by a portrait of John and Jackie Kennedy, a line of baskets allegedly from Africa, and a Bible where one would expect the sheet music to be on the piano (and I checked, this isn't a Bible with a hymnal appendix, so it's presence in the sheet music location is decidedly odd).

And then there was the back room, a secondary common room, with couches, a fireplace, a television (one of only two in the hotel), and a seriously mishmashed collection of old books available for anyone to read. Oh, and for no apparent reason, there are children's bunk beds in this room.

The hallways that led to our upstairs rooms rather reminded me of the Shining, but the rooms themselves were pleasant.

All in all, the Snowline Lodge was a good place. The only downside was that there was no food on-site, and no fridges or microwaves in the room, so that we had to drive a good 15 miles in either direction to eat. But we slept well, the staff turned out to be both efficient and friendly, and I would be happy to stay there again, which is not something that can be said for most of the hotels in which I have stayed for work.

The Rush Continues...and There's a Sheep

2011-12-29T10:00:00.000-08:00

Back in September, I wrote about the tendency for projects to get rushed through in the fall, before either winter snow blocks off access to project areas, or winter rain makes it impractical to slog through the mud to get to locations or dig in them.

Then, last month, I wrote about how one of these fall rush projects had become a "freezing-your-ass-off-during-the-winter project" in which we broke shovels while trying to dig through frozen ground in an attempt to ward off frostbite. At that time, I had believed that once we had completed what work we could, we would be done until spring thawed the ground and melted the ice off of the roads, and then we would return along with the warmer weather to finish the job.

Oh, was I naive.

See, our client really needs this project done ASAP, though I am at this point not exactly clear on why anymore. So, Tuesday afternoon - what was supposed to be a day off - I was contacted by the client and my boss and asked to put together a crew to head out Wednesday morning. I busted ass, calling everyone I could think of, finally managing to pull a crew together, arrange for a vehicle, and get lodging for the crew by Tuesday night.

So, on Wednesday morning, we all met at the office, headed to the storage unit to get our field equipment, and headed out. We arrived in the field late morning, and were a bit surprised. We had, based on both weather reports and on previous experience in this location, expected to be very cold, and expected to encounter frozen soil that we would have to chunk out with breaker bars and chisels. Much to our surprise and delight, we found that the weather was actually warm. We quickly discarded our heavy coats and wool hats, and within 45 minutes were down to our t-shirts. Moreover, the ground had thawed a bit, and digging and screening were both absurdly easy. We completed a site in a few hours, giving us time to scout some of the roads that had been blocked by ice and snow a few weeks earlier. We found that all but one of these roads, while still frozen over in parts, were passable.

So, I am looking forward to getting this project our of the way. We have two more sites that we can get to. Both of them are in areas which are likely to still be frozen, so I don't think that the next couple of days will be as easy as today...but they will be easier than they were.

And then, we finished up our project, and came to our hotel. None of us had stayed in this hotel before. It appears to have been an old hunting lodge converted to a hotel. There are motor homes parked all about it, every one of them apparently having been here for quite some time. The lower room of the hotel, a true common room, is open 24 hours for whoever wishes to use it. It has a piano, numerous couches, several shelves of ratty paperbacks, a moose head mounted to the wall, a nude photo of Marylin Monroe on another wall, and a mannequin dressed in a short sundress sitting atop the piano. Wandering about the hotel grounds is the pet sheep - yes, you read that correctly - which, despite being a sheep, behaves as if it were a dog (replacing the barking with "baa"-ing).

The hotel rooms, however, are rather nice, and this is a pleasant enough hotel...if a bit odd.

Anyway, the rush to get this done this week has again disrupted my attempt to write entries on a regular schedule. However, I will try to load some photos of this place by early next week...it really does need ot be seen to be believed.

War on Christmas Annual Report

2011-12-23T10:00:00.000-08:00

Last year, I had thought that the annual "War on Christmas" idiocy was rather muted, and figured that the popularity of this particular form of stupid alarmism was finally fading. And then, this year, it picks up again, with the U.S. Congress even getting in on the act (funny, I thought that maybe they'd have other things to do). And while last year I had encounters with twits, this year I see signs like this one broadcasting twitdom along a major highway:

Sign on Highway 180 in eastern Fresno County.

Now, had I seen this sign 20 years ago, it would have been in a social context where it was very clear that it was an admonishment towards Christians to not lose the religious value of the holiday to commercialism. Even as an atheist, I can see merit in this view. But in the days of the non-existent "War on Christmas", these signs now tend to be aimed at non-Christians and are intended to give them what-for and let them know that they are not welcome. In other words, twenty years ago, someone who was sincere and in at least some way honorable would have such a sign up as a way of trying to elevate fellow believers, an honorable thing to do. Now it's just bigoted assholes who do so in an attempt to hurl abuse at those who are outside of their club.

Hell, even the sorts of people who used to express concern over the commercialization of Christmas now demand the commercialization of it, provided that the money-changers in the temple pay lip service to Christianity to the exclusion of every other group on the planet. Don't believe me? Let me show you the mis-named American Family Association's "Naughty or Nice" list. Yeah, they honestly are not only okay with the commercialization of Christmas these days, they are actively campaigning for it as a way of making non-Christians feel unwanted.

Head hurting...world spinning...too much stupidity...

To make things even more bizarre, the usual Religious-Right bullshit about how "Christians are persecuted in America" has been getting amped up, with everything from the tendency of rational people to roll their eyes at Tim Tebow to the refusal of public schools to force non-Christians into Christian prayers seen as a sign of the persecution. As in previous years, this reached it's usual December peak o' stupid this year when I began to hear, both around town and in the media, about how wishing someone "Happy Holidays" is a form of anti-Christian persecution.

The dictionary on my desk defines "Persecute" as "To Harass with Cruelty and Oppression." So, members of the LGBT community, who often face direct violence as well as legislation aimed at stripping them of rights can fairly argue to be the most persecuted minority in the U.S. In many locales, while legal persecution of ethnic minorities may be prohibited, it is still nonetheless a common practice (such as this church that banned an inter-racial couple*). Religious minorities, while they usually face much milder harassment (although in some areas even this gets increased), also could argue to some minor persecution (people losing jobs, being harassed or even physically attacked, being barred from public speaking and advertising - which is, notably, in every case open to Christians).

But Christians?

Christians make up something in the neighborhood of 70%-80% of the U.S. population (depending on how you crunch the numbers). A politician can not become elected without pandering to Christians in some way - even non-Christian politicians have to engage in some degree of pandering. Christianity is the only religion that has one of it's holidays observed as a Federal and State holiday within the U.S. While acts of vandalism occur against Christian churches and property, they are far, far, FAR less common than acts of vandalism against the places of worship of religious non-Christians, and the property of the same non-Christians plus atheist organizations.

What's more, the attempts at bigoted legislation, hogging the public square, and acts of vandalism and aggression against non-Christians are pretty routinely helmed by, you guessed it, Christians.

Now, it should be said, most Christians don't do this sort of thing, most are actually good citizens, and decent people...but, and there is a but of course, they tend not to speak up when other, more radical, members of the Christian community are doing these things. While the majority of Christians are not engaged in this sort of nonsense, by remaining quiet when the obnoxious minority are engaged in it, they give them cover, and the willingness of many otherwise decent Christians to reflexively strike out - whether through the media or the ballot box - at anyone who questions the obnoxious minority, they make themselves complicit. At most, they will attempt to claim that the offender is "not a real Christian" as a way of denying that their own religion can give rise to the sorts of assholes that they will readily spot in other religious groups. In short, Christians are not persecuted in the U.S. If anything, Christians are either persecutors or are complicit through silence in the persecution of others.

Christians who complain of persecution in the U.S. are fools or liars or both. And regardless of which of these options best describes the one that you most recently encountered, they slander their fellow Christians in other nations who really are facing persecution. In Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other nations, it takes great courage and conviction to declare one's self a Christian. I may not agree with their views, but I can see something admirable in their fortitude. In the U.S., declaring one's self a Christian is not an act of bravery, as it is the declaration that one stands with the majority. At best, it's a statement of fact, which is honorable but not remarkable. At worst, it's a disingenuous attempt to claim to be part of a privileged minority.

And it's privilege that this is all about. Nobody is persecuting Christians in the U.S. Nobody. Nobody has the power to do it, even if they wanted to. What is happening is that Christians are being told that there are other people living here, and that they have as much a right to speak and be heard as anyone else. And, it should be said, most Christians accept this with grace and with ease. However, a very vocal group can not see the difference between not being allowed to persecute and being persecuted themselves. They can not see that they have the same rights as everyone else, and are not entitled to special rights that the non-Christians don't have. And, unfortunately, the Christians who get it, who are generally decent and honest and aware, seem to be unwilling to call them on their bullshit.

And the yearly "war on Christmas" bullshit is symptomatic of this. There are many holidays during this time of year. There are people who celebrate no holidays this time of year. The fact that the Federal and State governments essentially shut down on December 25 means that even those who don't celebrate Christmas are forced to observe it in some way - even if the observance is trying to figure out how to get work done without the necessary agencies involved. So, if you support Christmas being a Federal and State holiday, but are upset that non-Christians are doing something to make it their own - the sentiment expressed in the phrase "Happy Holidays" - then you are an empty-headed hypocrite. I have no respect for you, nor will any person with more than two brain cells to rub together.

You are not being persecuted, maltreated, or harmed in any way. Grow up, and get over it.

*The church later rescinded the ban, but the fact that it occurred in the first place shows the depth of racism and willingness to engage in real persecution that exists in that particular church community.

The Not-So-Disturbing Origins of Maligned Common Sayings

2011-12-21T10:00:00.000-08:00

When I was in graduate school, I worked as a teaching assistant, and UCSB offered many one and two day courses aimed at helping the teaching assistants learn to teach and communicate with students. One of these courses was named "Feminist Pedagogy" and was required by one of the departments for which I worked.

By and large the course was a fairly useful run-through of the sorts of things that instructors often do that may upset or turn-off female students, and I had no problem with this.

However, there was a fair amount of time spent on the origins of common phrases, and how their origins might be offensive to female students. The problem, however, is that the origins discussed by the instructor were wrong. Dead wrong. Completely wrong.

The two examples given were "more bang for the buck" and "rule of thumb."

The phrase "more bang for the buck" comes out of military and political circles, where it meant more firepower for the amount of money spent. There is one other possible origin, however, that it comes from the explosives and mining industry, where it referred to the amount of explosive power per unit of explosive purchased.

The instructor, however, was convinced that it came out of prostitution, and referred to the tendency for men who solicit prostitutes to hire those who would work for longer, or be more exciting, I suppose. Really, I'm entirely unclear as to how, even assuming that the term "bang" to refer to sexual intercourse is old enough to pre-date this saying (it may be, I don't know), one would get "more" bang for one's buck with a prostitute...but, then, I have never solicited a prostitute, so what the hell do I know.

It is ironic that the misogynist false origin is the one that stuck with a group of self-described liberal people, while the possible actual origin involving warfare didn't. Both appeal to their sensibilities, but one actually makes some degree of sense (clue: it's not the false one).

Then, there's the phrase "Rule of Thumb" which, thanks to a particularly stupid list of false origins for common sayings that made email inbox rounds circa 1998, people think comes from a law that described the width of a rod with which a man could beat his wife. This is, however, not the origin of the saying at all. The origin is somewhat murky, but appears to come from the world of measurement and not domestic violence. In fact, there's evidence that it is a very old saying and well-predates both modern English and the legal codes that people often claim it is derived from. Given the way that the phrase is used - meaning a quick-and-easy way to reach a conclusion or course of action - having an origin in measurements makes significantly more sense than it having an origin as a way to determine the size of the cudgel that one might use against one's spouse.

But since then I have been thinking about this. While the erroneous belief about the origins of the saying "more bang for the buck" aren't particularly widespread, there are probably as many people who falsely believe that they know the origins of the saying "rule of thumb" as people who don't. Many, though not all, of these people refrain from using the phrase because of its allegedly sordid past. The problem is, since it doesn't actually have a sordid past, we are creating one, and therefore feeding some dubious notions about our ancestors. Moreover, we are casting the women of the past into the role of helpless victims rather than dealing with messier and more realistic views of women in the past.

In short, by buying into these false origins for these phrases, by trying to cast them in the role of remnants of a misogynistic past, the instructor for the Feminist Pedagogy course ironically bought into a misogynistic "men are the victors, women the victims" view of history and of our language, reinforcing the very "men vs. women" binary that most feminists admirably fight against - indeed most of this instructors statements and attitudes indicated that she did. So it was rather odd that she should so easily fall into this trap with this portion of her lecture.

The simple fact of the matter is that history is messy. Our ancestors did things of which we have every right to be proud, but they also did things of which all who are decent among us will be ashamed. I am not sure whether the ease with which we buy into the notion that our ancestors were so despicable comes from our desire to see ourselves as enlightened and better than them, or whether it comes out of a certain type of cultural self-loathing that many of us seem to have developed to a high degree.

Regardless of the source, it's pretty damn annoying, and likely counter-productive.

For other common sayings and practices that most people know false origins for, go here.

Virus, Looters, and Antiques, Oh My!

2011-12-19T10:00:00.000-08:00

So, I had all of the fieldwork in the last month and a half or so, but figured that, now that it was done, I'd be able to get back to a normal blogging schedule.

And then my computer got hit with a particularly nasty rootkit virus, which after a week-long battle and the failure of multiple anti-malware programs I finally took to someone who actually knows what they are doing, and will therefore be without my computer for most of the next few days. So, I may not be blogging as per normal. I'm sure everyone is so sorely disappointed.

Fnord.

Quick story, though - yesterday, Kaylia and I went to take care of the last of the Christmas shopping*. We ended up in old town Clovis, which, as far as I can tell, as a five-block area consisting entirely of antique shops and Italian restaurants. Anyway, in one of the antique shops, we found a large collection of flaked stone tools and groundstone tools (including an unusual quartz mano) in a glass display case. Not telling the owner who I was or what I do, I asked him about the tools, and he replied that he used to be a rancher and that all of these tools came from his ranch. He then went on to tell me about digging them out of sites that he was sure would yield stuff. After a few minutes, I mentioned that I was an archaeologist, and he continued to go on about the virtues of digging into sites and just looking for "the good stuff."

As we left, Kaylia asked me why I was looking annoyed and perturbed. I told her about my conversation with the shop owner, and expressed that after a bit, I had really wished he'd stopped talking. He appeared to not know that he was actually destroying sites more than recovering artifacts, and that his lack of documentation made the artifacts less interesting to me, as I had no idea where they came from or what they meant. He just kept going on, with me getting more annoyed and disheartened as he continued.

Oh well.

On the up-side, I then got to go home and deal with a rootkit virus.

*If you were at all annoyed at an atheist celebrating Christmas, then work to get it removed as a federal holiday. As long as our institutions are shut down and we are therefore forced to observe it, we're going to have fun with it, and there ain't nothin' you can do about it.

Mountains, Cold, Regulations, and Fieldwork

2011-12-16T10:00:00.000-08:00

So, in the last week, I have been out in the field, in an isolated location, twice,been to a mini-con in Oakland, and just generally been everywhere except next to a computer. Hence my lack of posts.

Still, I am back now, at least for a little while, and the last week's work has got me thinking about some of the strange timelines that being a consultant rather than an academic forces on one.

See, we are contracted to do the archaeological work for a large utility company. They have facilities, including some underground utilities, in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, at altitudes between 7,000 and 8,000 feet. Changes to these utilities may damage near-by archaeological sites, so we have been tasked with determining the boundaries of the sites in order to figure out whether or not the work on the utilities will impact the sites. Normally, this would be a pleasant, even fun, task.

However, it is December. While much of the world thinks of California as a giant beach that is warm year-round, this is only slightly true of small parts of Southern California (and even there, it gets cool enough in December and January that you're more likely to wear a sweater than a bikini). In the Sierra Nevada, it's fucking cold. Okay, not Wisconsin-level cold, but we haven't even gotten hit by the full force of winter yet and tempuratures are dropping to 25 degrees below freezing at night. The Sierra Nevada has glaciers for fuck's sake! There are 497 glaciers in the Sierra Nevada. Yeah, next time you think of California as nothing more than a giant beach filled with silicon-injected bimbos and meatheads lifting weights on the sand, look up how many glaciers your state has, and if it's less than 400 I don't want to hear you even try to describe my state.

This is a road in California. Note the lack of beach.

But I digress.

The point I was getting at is that it is cold in the Sierra Nevadas in December. Cold enough that the ground is frozen. Cold enough that we broke shovels attempting to excavate sites. Cold enough that we routinely mistook chunks of ice in the screen for pieces of quartz (a common stone used to make tools in the area). Could enough that we would scoop the dirt that we had just broken up and taken out of a unit into a bucket, only to have it freeze to the bucket minutes later, requiring us to use the shovel to get it out of the bucket and into the screen.

Years back, a friend of mine told me that his grandmother had died in Maine in January, but that they waited until March to bury her. I didn't comprehend why one would do such a thing at the time. I get it now.

So, yes, if you're willing to be frustrated and actually have tools break under stress, you can excavate in the Sierra Nevadas in the winter. It would, however, be better to wait until Spring, when the soils can be easily dug and screened, and when you don't have to bundle up like Ralphie's little brother in A Christmas Story in order to work.

Field tech Dave doing his Vasily Zaytsev impression.

But this isn't possible.

See, our client needs to actually begin working on the utilities in the Spring. Because of the delays and details involved in getting a cultural resources report written and accepted, that means we have to do the work now. We would have been able to start the work earlier, when the ground was not yet frozen, but the Forest Service, who is responsible for the land in question, has it's own consultation duties that must be carried out before they can issue us the permits to do the work. The timing is bad, but it's really nobody's fault, it's just the way these things go.

So, there we are, bundled up and looking more like a cross between the Michelin Man and WWII-era Russian sniper than archaeologists, digging in the frozen earth, trying very hard to maintain feeling in our extremities.

But we got the job done, on-time and on-budget, dammit!

Quick note: all of the photos in this post were taken by me in the general vicinity of our project area, but none of them are of sites or client facilities in the project area.

The Value of a Good Crew

2011-12-12T10:00:00.000-08:00

I am doing a whirlwind tour of California - Sequoia National Forest yesterday, Oakland today, back to Fresno tomorrow, and then back out to Sequoia on Monday.

So, as described in my previous entry I described that we were anticipating freezing our posteriors off while doing fieldwork in the mountains. The mornings were cold, though the afternoons weren't bad. Some of the roads are covered in snow and/or ice, and we are staying in lodgings that one would compliment by comparing them to the Bates Motel.

And yet, it has been fun.

I have written before about the trouble of finding good crew, and it can be difficult. But when you have a good crew, it makes life good. Currently, I have a young archaeologist, someone who is just getting his feet wet, but is a fast learner, has an excellent attitude, and is excited enough about the work that he infectiously gets our spirits up. I have an army veteran who finds that archaeological field work is somewhat therapeutic, is a hard worker, and is full of amazing stories. And I have the son of one of my bosses who has never used the "my dad's the boss" excuse, is a hard worker, extremely smart, and is willing and quite capable of being the right-hand-man of the supervisor.

My boss's son, in fact, is heading to graduate school soon to earn the credentials to become a supervisor himself. He will be excellent, of that I have no doubt.

All of these guys know their job, all can provide good suggestions that can change our strategy, but all understand the basic chain-of-command so that I don't find myself having to argue with them to get things done. It is a pleasure to have these guys in the field.

Anyway, a potentially miserable situation has become an enjoyable one. I am very grateful for this crew.

On Freezing One's Ass Off

2011-12-07T10:00:00.000-08:00

So, the end-of-year fieldwork rush is finally concluding with a literal last-minute trip into the Sierra Nevadas. I was notified this morning that I will be heading up tomorrow morning to lead a crew doing boundary testing at several sites in the Sequoia National Forest. I may only be gone two days, or I may be going back up again on Monday, depending on weather.

This is not the best time of year to be doing Sierra Nevada fieldwork. There is the ever-present chance of snow, closed roads, and associated logistics problems. There is the fact that many facilities available during the warmer months are closed in December. And then there's the cold.

The damn cold.

The weather report states that we will have high temperatures below freezing while we are out there. Below fucking freezing. Yeah, some smart-ass archaeologist from Wisconsin is reading this and laughing at my wimpiness, but they can go screw themselves. It's cold in the Sierra Nevada, in December, at 8,000 feet. Not good fieldwork conditions.

The last time that I worked int he Sierras in the Fall, and this was mid-October, not nearly as cold as it's going to be, it looked like this:

However, our client, for various reasons, needs this project taken care of ASAP, and as cold as it will be, we're not looking at snow in the next couple of days, so the roads should stay open. We would have done it sooner, but the federal agency with which we are working is constrained by consultation requirements with Native American groups, who are in turn constrained by political realities within those groups, all of which led to us being delayed by a couple of months. So, it's off to the frozen highlands with us. Yipee!

I'm not sure how much writing I am going to be able to get done over the next week, so it may be fallow here for a bit.

Point!

2011-12-05T10:00:00.000-08:00

Every now and again, I'll work on a site where I find something that really doesn't seem to belong there, until the context of the item is worked out. This is one such situation, involving a projectile point that seems out of place, but likely seems out of place simply because we don't know as much about the site from which it has come as we would like.

So, I was recently excavating at a site in the central Sierra Nevadas, in an area where the earliest agreed-upon sustained occupation began around 2,500 years ago. We were at a known site, performing boundary testing - where we excavate small holes to see if the buried archaeological materials extend beyond what is visible on the surface, and if so, how far they extend. We were not collecting any artifacts, just noting them, photographing them, and re-burying them in the holes from whence they came*.

During this process, we found a projectile point, probably a point from an atl-atl dart, made out of chert (while most of the waste flakes we found were obsidian). It was of a type not commonly found in the area**, but appeared to be fairly unremarkable otherwise. It looked like a type known as a Borax Lake Wide Stem, but those are very, very old, and I figured it was more likely that I was getting the type wrong than that a site that held features and artifacts that we can confidently date to the last 2,000 years held a point that was significantly older. My boss was out on that day to see how we were doing, and neither he nor I immediately thought anything more of the point than that it should be photographed and we should try to type it when we got back to the office.

On returning to the office, I pulled out my books and articles to try to more accurately type the point. And I kept coming back to the Borax Lake Wide Stem. This was odd, as these points date from 7,000 to 11,000 years ago. So, again, I assumed that I was wrong, and we forwarded the photos to an expert on projectile points.

When the expert responded, he told us that the point is, in fact, of the Borax Lake Wide Stem variety, and that it likely dates to between 7,000 and 11,000 years before present.

Now, keep in mind that other materials on the site date it pretty clearly to the last 2,000 years. So, this point is a bit of an oddity. However, similar points are found in the Great Basin, to the east of the Sierras, and throughout California to the west. So, it is not at all unbelievable that this point would be there, but its presence brings up an interesting question: is it simply an isolate (a single artifact that was dropped and/or may have been picked up and moved by later people, such as those inhabiting the site during the last 2,000 years), or does it represent an earlier component to the site (that is, was there an early site here that the newer site was simply placed on top of)? One confounding element is that the site is located in a somewhat out of the way place, somewhere where later peoples were clearly living, but where traders passing through would be less likely to go. Another definite possibility is that points of this type, being relatively simple to manufacture as compared to some other points, might actually have a much longer period of use than is normally thought (and possibly, the longer period of use is based on the location). Yet another possibility is that a later occupant of the site found this point while they were traveling elsewhere, and brought it back to the site (while this possibility tends to get downplayed in many reports, there is ethnographic evidence of this sort of thing happening from time to time).

Anyway, the presence of this point at this site does not necessarily mean that the site itself was occupied all those many years ago. It's an oddity the meaning of which is unclear. There's no way to know without a more extensive excavation, and we have no idea whether or not we'll get to do it. Still, it's pretty cool to find something unlikely, regardless of the final conclusion.

*This is a pretty common approach. Partially this is an effort to reduce the amount of stuff that ends up being stored in curation facilities and not studied. Partially it is done out of deference for Native Americans who are concerned that materials stay where they are. And, partially, it is a desire to reduce the impacts that archaeologists have on the sites that we study. We may destroyt the stratigraphic context of an artifact, but it's horizontal context remains intact - it may not be much, but it's better than nothing.

Of course, that being said, we still do collect artifacts on many projects.

**The shape and size of a projectile point can be used to figure out who was in an area and when. Projectile points changed over time and not every group used the same sorts, so looking at the points

Ahhh, Libel Claims...

2011-11-29T10:00:00.000-08:00

So, a high school student by the name of Rhys Morgan has written some blog posts about a Doctor named Stanislaw Burzynski who offers cancer treatments that appear to be poorly researched, and therefore of dubious value. Mr. Morgan has since been contacted by a man named Marc Stevens who represents the doctor (though Burzynski's own website indicates that Stephens is a PR guy and does not work for the doctor as an attorney), and his description of the matter can be found here.

The issue in short: Morgan wrote a blog entry in which he was extremely critical of Dr. Burzynski's methods, citing articles written by cancer researchers (such as this one) and court documents (such as this one) which argue that Burzynski's methods are not simply unproven, but disproven, and therefore questioning the ethics of a practitioner who continues to use them. A man by the name of Marc Stephens contacted Morgan demanding that the blog entry be pulled down and threatening legal action against the libel that this blog entry allegedly represented.

Now, I am not an expert in the law, obviously, but it seems like a bit of a stretch to think that a high school kid writing a blog entry that cites published research to criticize the work of a controversial doctor meets the legal criteria for Libel, especially as the kid, while certainly making his feelings known, didn't really make any material claims that were not present in the journal article or legal decision.

And it turns out that Morgan isn't the only one getting this. Andy Lewis of the Quackometer blog has also received threats of legal action from Mr. Stephens. And Stephens has, in his emails, demanded not only that these two bloggers remove their content regarding Burzynski, but that they also "pass the word" on to the other "skeptics" who would dare question the alleged brilliance of Dr. Burzynski. So, it sounds like this is more of an attempt to scare people into not stating their opinions of Burzynski and his treatments than anything else. Unfortunately, to many people the law is this strange, arcane thing, and they see a mass o' legal sounding jargon such as Stephens sends out and feel like he can do bad things to them if they don't comply.

Also, while I really don't know if Stephens is licensed to practice law, this seems like a bit of an odd qualification for a PR guy, so I suspect he does not*.

So, Marc Stephens, if you happen to be reading this** be advised that I have both attorneys and a judge in my family and my circle of friends. Should you decide to send me threatening emails, I will seek their counsel, and if I am advised to do so by them, will hire an attorney and respond with legal action against you and your employer. I grew up around lawyers, I am well aware of what they can and they cannot do, and mere mention of a lawsuit isn't going to intimidate me and send me cowering to the corner.

Oh, and stop picking on high school kids. Don't you have an actual job to do? You know, like PR work?

*On the off-chance that he sees this, the way I constructed that sentence doesn't constitute libel. You see, I made it clear what part was my opinion and what part was based on actual information. But it will probably piss him off anyway.

**Normally I wouldn't have the ego to assume that any particular person is reading anything I write. However, as this guy seems to be going to blogs with the intention of sending emails to their writers, it is possible that I will hear from this guy.

Mormons and the Term "Cult"

2011-11-28T12:00:00.000-08:00

So, we're gearing up for the 2012 election season by watching the Republican front-runner change every couple of weeks. Because Mitt Romney is in the running, this means that, every now and again, we get to hear some new claim or fact about his religion. He is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, better known as the Mormons. While much is said about the Mormon church in general and Mitt Romney's involvement (or, more often, his supposed and/or feared type of involvement) in particular, one common claim that is made, over and over again, is that the Mormon church is a cult.

A cult.

Interesting word, "cult."

Interesting, largely meaningless as used in general conversation word. A term of abuse with no real meaning other than "they believe stuff that I don't" or "I don't know what they believe, but they give me the willies."

The problem is that there is no real generally agreed-upon definition for the word outside of research circles. Within the research community, the word "cult" lacks pejorative meaning and refers instead to any particular form of supernatural belief and/or the rituals engaged in by people who follow a belief system. Using this definition, all forms of Christianity are cults, as are all forms of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and many forms of nationalism, where one venerates a symbol of the nation rather than a supernatural being, but does so with the types of rituals and beliefs with which one venerates supernatural beings. Broadly speaking, the term "cult" and the term "religion" are almost interchangeable within the social sciences*. So, in this sense, Mormonism is a cult, but your local Baptist, Methodist, and Episcopalian churches also represent cults.

In broader colloquial English, the term "cult" generally means a shady, destructive group that hides its members away from the rest of society, holds strange beliefs, and has predatory recruitment patterns.

Does this describe Mormonism? Well, if we get away from the absolutely arbitrary ideas that most religious people have regarding what is destructive to one's soul (and, really, considering that no two denominations of even the same religion will agree on this, it seems an absurd thing to focus on) and look solely at verifiable harm and destruction that a group can do, it's hard to think that Mormonism is a cult. Certainly, there is no shortage of stories of members who are secretly homosexual or who have some doubt about the teachings of the church being done harm by the indoctrination, but that's true of the vast majority of religious traditions and is not in any way unique to Mormonism. So, if Mormonism is destructive in any meaningful way, it is no more so than any other religion, so if you are reluctant to call the local Southern Baptist denomination a cult on these grounds, you probably shouldn't call Mormonism a cult, either. In fact, given the general focus on self-improvement and social responsibility within the church, the Mormon Church may be healthier on average than many other denominations.

As for hiding members away from society, Mormonism is pretty damn innocent there. Unlike groups such as the Jehovah's Witnesses and many Protestant denominations, Mormons are generally encouraged to be members of the broader community through social functions, charity work, and political activity. While I take serious issue with some of the ways in which this occurs (such as a general - though by no means universal - support of Proposition 8 ihere in California), it nonetheless demonstrates that members are not being held away from society at large. While the Church has been known to discourage the reading of certain books and viewing of certain films, television shows, etc., it doesn't seek to prohibit this in the same way that many Protestant churches and the Catholic church have historically (and currently) sought. What's more, the Mormon Church encourages education and general social engagement, which is more than can be said for many "main line" denominations**. So, again, while I often have problems with the Church's official and unofficial stances on issues related to this point, there is not the prohibition of interaction with the outside world that I have seen in many a "main line" Protestant church. So, once again, not really cult-like.

How about holding strange beliefs? Well, I've described some of the Mormon Church's teachings before, and they are pretty weird. You know what else is pretty weird? The idea that the world was created in six days by a strange all-powerful being that seemingly was just always there, a belief held by many a "main line" church in the U.S. The idea that a man in Italy who wears a funny hat communicates with this creator and is infallible in his decisions is also pretty damn weird, but that's Catholicism for ya'. While we're at it, the entire idea of the Holy Trinity really only makes sense if you think of it as mythology and not reality. The idea that a religious group that has been abused throughout the course of western civilization is the special chosen people of an all-powerful deity is pretty odd, come to think about it. And don't even get me started on talking snakes. And yet, these really bizarre beliefs are considered mainstream and respectable by people who think that Romney is a member of a cult.

Some people will respond that the Mormon Church hides many of their beliefs from the public, holding secret closed ceremonies in the Temples. This is true, and I can easily understand where this would unnerve many people. Hell, I find it a bit creepy, myself. However, I also know enough about human religion to know that this is pretty damn common amongst religions. I don't like it, but it's an aberration within Christianity, not within religion in general. So, unless you want to dismiss the majority of religious systems the world over as "cults", you'd be hard pressed to explain why this makes Mormonism a cult.

How about predatory recruitment? Well, first off, it's really hard to think of anything less threatening than the tie-wearing bicycle-riding missionaries. Have they been known to take advantage of people's moments of weakness to get them to join the church? Yep. Does this separate them from the "main line" denominations? Nope. In fact, the use of missionaries, who are very clear about their purpose, means that the Mormon church is arguably less predatory than many, perhaps most, other expansionist religious movements. My own personal experience is that, as a child, many different churches made an effort to persuade myself and my school-mates to join their ranks, whether our parents approved or not. This included the usual Protestant sects (Baptist, Methodist, Calvinist, etc.) and even a couple of Catholic churches. However, the local Mormon Church never invited the children to any religious functions - it would often invite the adults and suggest that they bring their children with them, but it was always an invitation at the adults first. While I haven't done any serious research into the matter, my own experience and that of others with whom I have spoken has been that this is the common way that the church works. So, whereas on everything else, the Mormon Church is no more cult-like than most churches, on this point it actually is much less cult-like than most other churches.

Now, I do take issue with the Mormon Church on many points - note, though, that I don't take issue with specific Mormons except where they require me to do so. Like any church, the Mormons are not a monolithic whole, but rather there is a range of ideas, beliefs, and attitudes on many issues, and it is wise to keep this in mind, because you will find yourself dealing with individuals (many of them both bright and articulate) and not mindless automatons. Moreover, what issues I have with the Mormon Church, I also have with many, probably most, other religious groups. But as to the question of whether or not the Mormons constitute a cult, well, that idea is absurd and reveals a large degree of bigotry on the part of the populace of the United States.

*The terms do have different meanings, but are intertwined enough that for our purposes here, they can be thought of as essentially the same thing.

**Many people will say that the Mormon church encourages this for it's own reasons. This is probably true. It is also true of pretty much every large national and international church organization, so, again, if you're not going to consider the local Baptists a cult on these grounds, it's pretty damn hypocritical to consider the Mormons a cult.

Gender, Sex, and Where They Don't Meet

2011-11-23T10:00:00.000-08:00

My partner, Kaylia, has many friends who are part of thetransgender community. These are peoplewho don’t fit the traditional gender roles in that they are living as membersof the opposite sex, are undergoing medical procedures to change sex, don’tfind themselves fitting into either male or female sex roles, or arebiologically not clearly male or female to begin with. The tendency in society in general (and herein Fresno in particular) is to treat these people with confusion, fear, and/orskepticism as to their gender or lack thereof. Natalie of the Skepchick blog argues, with a good deal of success,that this is due to a discomfort that people have with having their notions ofgender challenged. While I agree, Ithink that it also comes from a basic miscomprehension of what, exactly, genderis to begin with. Gender and sex are notthe same thing, and this seems to be at the root of much of the problem.

I was first introduced to the concept of gender as somethingother than a synonym for biological sex during my freshman year of college. This was a difficult concept to wrap my headaround, having grown up in a time and culture in which we are in many waysobsessed with observing, reinforcing, challenging, and critiquing a binary male/female ideaof gender. The notion that there mightbe more than two genders simply did not compute because we only formallyrecognize two genders that roughly correspond to one’s genitals*. While even my own culture’s notions of genderdon’t quite line up with biological sex, the insistence otherwise tends toblind one to this and make it difficult to conceive of the idea that there maybe more than two genders.

And yet there are, in fact, multiple genders observed acrosstime and across cultures.

First, a little clarity and definition…

Gender is not the same thing as sex. Sex is biological, based on whether or not aperson possesses a Y chromosome. This,obviously, determines your genitalia, but also impacts things such as youroverall physical build and, to an extent, the way in which hormones influenceaspects of your behavior and socialization. Gender isthe social role that is ascribed to you based primarily on your sex. However, gender takes things into account thatare based on socialization and not just biology – the tendency to socialize boysinto an interest in sports and girls into an interest in shopping, for example –but because gender and sex are interrelated, we tend to conflate them. And so we have a number of, frankly bizarre,research papers on the evolutionary roots of why women like shopping andwearing pretty clothes or why men like football and watching wrestling, papers that rarely really deal with the fact that they are conflating gender roles with biological sex. There may well be biological influences on theseinterests, but they are largely cultural rather than biological. Gender takes the biology into account, butcovers it in a heavy dollop of social norms, cultural context, and the flotsamand jetsam of history.

We tend to think of gender as being divided into two for avery simple reason: humans are generally divided biologically into male andfemale. The different physical capabilities- due largely to the necessities of child-baring and rearing and to a lesserextent to general physical builds – results in different social roles beingascribed to men and women within any given society. And so, on the surface, it seems that weshould expect there to be two genders in every society corresponding to biologicalsex. That is, we should expect a set ofsocially/culturally-constructed roles and expectations that correspond withbiological sex to break into two – male and female – if this is what biologyactually demands.

But scratch the surface and think about it for a few minutesand it becomes clear that this isn’t, in fact, what biology actually demands. First off, it should be said that biologicalsex is not really the simple binary that we tend to conceive of it asbeing. Humans generally divide into maleand female, but don’t absolutely. Thereare a number of physical traits (from hermaphroditism to a range of genetic conditionsand even a few anomalies) that can and do result in individuals who do notclearly fall into either the male or female gender. Then, of course, there’s the issue of sexualorientation – itself a rather complex and often murky subject that is typicallyso mired in social context that it is difficult (though not necessarily impossible) toclearly tease out the underlying biology – which can lead to a person notcomfortably fitting into the procreation duties imparted to the gender rolethat corresponds with their biological sex. And, of course, there is the fact that there appear to have always beenindividuals who find that they fit better into a gender role other than the onethat corresponds with their biological sex – while it is tempting to think of transgenderedpeople as being a product of modern society and medical technology, the fact isthat the ethnographic literature is filled with information about thisphenomenon across time and culture, implying that it is something inherent tohumanity and not a product of current western culture.

So, what we are left with is the realization that twogenders doesn’t actually quite work. Even with loose gender roles, it doesn’t cover all of the bases. Now, of course, the majority of people withinany society appear to fit the male or female role…but there are enough that don’tthat it is unlikely that you will find a culture that actually strictlyobserves the notion of two genders.

Third, fourth, fifth, etc. genders are well-documented. Off of the top of my head, there are the Hijrasof the Indian Sub-Continent, Sworn Virgins of the Balkans, ‘Aqi of the Chumash,Winkte of the Lakota**, ZapotecMuxe of Mexico, and the list could go on forpages (and actually does so here ). In these cases, the majority of people fitwithin the male/female genders, but a sufficient number of people do not thatadditional gender roles evolved. Inaddition, things such as a shortage of men or women may produce additional genderroles that allow the surplus of whichever sex is overabundant to take on theroles of the other. Many of these genderroles have ritual/religious functions, as is the case with the Hijra, as wellas the vestal virgins of antiquity, but membership in the gender is not limitedto participation in the ritual functions and is all-encompassing of theindividual’s role in society, and as such should not be confused with a solelyritual position.

To many, perhaps most, of my readers, these groups willsound strange or exotic – genders beyond male and female will likely seem to bederivatives of the religious beliefs and practices of other cultures, andsomething that has nothing to do with good ol’ rational Western culture (manypeople would also add either "post-Enlightenment" or "Christian" in there).

These people would be wrong.

Though they are not often discussed in textbooks, if onebegins looking at the primary historic sources, evidence of people who don’tfit into either the male or female roles are pretty clear within westernhistory. The most lurid (and thereforemost often discussed) examples are male prostitutes (both ritual/temple basedand otherwise) who took on roles similar to, but separate from, women. However, there are many other examples ofindividuals and even small communities rejecting gender roles altogether, orelse of people living as members of other genders (sometimes for limitedpurpose – such as women acting as men to join armies or take on positions ofpower – but often because the individual simply seemed to be comfortable as amember of the opposite gender, or even outside of gender normsaltogether). This has beencommon throughout western history, even if little acknowledged.

Then, of course, there are the examples of additionalgenders existing, but only being semi-acknowledged. For example, if one reads many of the primarysources from the 16^th century, people will be very clear that womenare to have specific, prescribed roles within society…except for QueenElizabeth. She may be a woman, but she’sa queen, so the rules don’t apply to her, you see. In other words, the Queen does not fit thegender of “woman”, she is instead a “queen” and therefore has her own set ofrules and expectations, some of which are derived from her sex (such as bearing an heir - which Elizabeth did not manage to do), and some of which are derived fromt he social or political demands of the day.

Likewise, Catholic priests and nuns, while linguisticallydescribed using the standard binary gender pronouns and associated language,don’t really fit their gender roles either. The terms used for them – Father for priests and Sister for nuns – arethe terms for family and not prospective mates, linguistically put themoff-limits sexually, rendering them functionally neuter***. Further, they are expected to be detachedfrom the family and work roles reserved for both men and women within societyat large. While they are not generallyacknowledged as such, this arguably makes them a third and fourth gender withinwestern society.

Given this context, the rise of a transgender community andmovement is not some strange anomaly or a product solely of modern westernculture. Rather, it is the contemporarywestern manifestation of a tendency common in human populations for as long aswe have records of human populations. Certainly, modern medical technology allows for new manifestations, suchas having one’s appearance and even sex (or aspects of sex) physically changed, but the underlying reasons appear tohave existed throughout history.

P.S. Some time back,I read a magazine article, I believe it was in Time, though I cannot recallwith certainty, in which the journalist stated that despite claims to thecontrary, anthropologists have never found a culture with a “third gender”. To this day, I am uncertain as to whetherthis journalist was conflating gender and biological sex, was ignorant of whatanthropologists have actually found (which leads one to wonder why they wouldwrite such a blatantly un-researched statement), or was ignoring anthropologicaldata for some personal or political reason.

*Minds out of the gutter, people.

**It is common for people to refer to third-gender ortransgender people of the Native American groups as “berdaches”, but this islikely a term that was largely applied by European explorers and colonists anda term of abuse, rather than the term actually used within that culture. Plus, it attempts to apply a broad term to aphenomenon that is expressed and handled different from culture-to-culture, andas such is probably not a particularly useful term.

***Which didn’t stop many from acting on their sexualimpulses, certainly. But the fact thatthey did so was considered a violation of their role, while it would not be aviolation if they were normal men and women.

Peruvian Alien Mummy!

2011-11-21T10:00:00.000-08:00

In a great example of how a bit of knowledge on a subject can change how you react to a news story, we have this one from Peru about an alleged alien mummy found in a Peruvian archaeological site.

The following quote is attributed to Renato Davila Riquelme, who the story states works for the Privado Ritos Andinos museum in Cusco:

"It has a non-human appearance because the head is triangular and big, almost the same size as the body. At first we believed it to be a child's body until Spanish and Russian doctors came and confirmed that, yes, it's an extraterrestrial being."

Here, have some photos (from io9):

Okay, so two things right off: 1) I am not an osteologist, human skeletal anatomy is not my specialty. Like most archaeologists, though, I do have some training in osteology and have handled a wide rnage of human skeletons both with and without pathologies, so I have a good baseline idea of what I am talking about, though it should be kept in mind that I am not an expert. 2) All I have to go on is these photographs, and not the original bone.

So, that being said, when I first saw these photos, the first thought that went through my head was not "GAH! What the HELL is THAT! ALIEN!" It was, in fact "oh look, human bones exhibiting signs of pathology and possibly some intentional cranial deformation." In other words, something unusual, but definitely well within the range of known and well-understood human variation.

The assurance of how it was determined that these are alien bones is pretty damn comical. Leave aside the fact that it's a group of Spanish and Russian physicians who are never named who say that it's an alien (really, this is the sort of thing that would end up in a journal, with the names of the researchers highlighted in order to ensure their impending flood of grant money), it's that they "confirmed" that it's an extra-terrestrial. As the website io9 puts it:

"BOOM. There ya go. Four out of five faceless scientists agree that what you're looking at are mummified alien remains. Case closed."

Now, let's assume, for a moment, that it was definitiely shown to not be exaclty what it looks like (a human skeleton exhibiting bone pathology), how would you go about confirming that it was an alien?

I have done faunal analysis, and when I have a bone that I can confirm does not belong to any of the animals with which I am familiar, I don't confirm that it is, therefore, from another planet. I conclude that it belongs to an animal for which I don't have a sample for comparison. So, let's say that these bones were shown clearly to not be human. That would imply that they were from another animal, true, but why assume that this animal is from another planet? Why not an undiscovered primate from Earth? If you don't have an extra-terrestrial body to which to compare it (and this article says nothing about the bones being taken to Nevada for comparison with the Roswell...oh, I've said too much!), then you have no reason to think that it's an alien.

I suppose that if the bone contained some element or compound not found on Earth, you could conclude that it came from elsewhere, but then why would a group of doctors and not a group of chemists and physicists be making that announcement (again, with their names in bold to help catch the flood of grant money coming their way)?

Anyway, I suspect this is a hoax. If it's not a flat-out hoax, then it's a case of someone being very, very stupid.

Regulated Madness

2011-11-17T10:00:00.000-08:00

As anyone who regularly reads this blog knows (and contrary to what I suspected before I placed traffic trackers, there's actually quite a few of you), I spend alot of time looking into regulations and case law to try to figure out how to apply historic preservation laws to specific projects. Right now I am particularly confounded, though.

See, I have a project in the southern San Joaquin Valley. This project involves historic-era archaeological sites that are related to the early use of the oil fields. Now, back in the late 90s, the Department of Energy sold Naval Petroleum Reserve 1 (which is about two miles north of my project area) to a private company, and in the process had to go through the environmental revue process. During this process, rumor holds that they developed a good set of criteria for determining whether or not a historic-era oil field site was eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, and therefore would gain some (admittedly minor) level of protection, and that the State Office of Historic Preservation agreed to these criteria in a programmatic agreement.

Now, the project that I have is not on the old Naval Petroleum Reserve grounds, and therefore these criteria would not be directly applicable to my project, but they can provide guidance on how to apply the regulations in similar environments within the vicinity of the Petroleum Reserve grounds. It is, essentially, a matter of hunting down precedent.

Which makes my current task as necessary as it is frustrating.

You see, the studies and documents that I need to find were produced in the late 90s, as federal agencies were beginning to gain a strong online presence, but before the early 2000s shuffling of various federal responsibilities under Bush. In other words, it came into being during that magical internet time when all web sites had blue balls to illustrate bullet points (mind out of the gutter!), Geocities and Angelfire were where it was at, and federal agencies were sure that they needed to do something with this internet thingy, even though they weren't sure what, exactly. So, I can find the Record of Decision in the Federal Register that describes the project and the documents, I can find the public comments to the documents, and I can find agency comments for the documents from the Bureau of Land Management and the Department of Energy...but I can not find the document itself. I can't even find PDF copies of one of the several documents to which the document I need would have been an appendix or attachment!

Now, this wouldn't be bad if I could get a hard copy of the document. But here's the problem - if I make a formal request to OHP or DOE, my project will be due before I actually hear about the possibility of receiving the document. I could conceivably call one of my contacts at an agency that works with the documents, but I have already found that most of them are out of the office for extended periods of time on their own projects. And the people I know at private companies who could get me a copy are currently so buried under their own work that they rarely respond to emails or phone calls anyway.

So, I continue trying to find it by some other sneaky way. Oh joy!

Don't Need That After High School?

2011-11-15T10:00:00.000-08:00

About once a week I come across it. Someone may be referring to a historical fact, or to a mathematical concept, or to famous scientific experiment, or to a...well, you get the point. Someone will be referring to something that they had been required to learn in school, laugh derisively, and say "well, I don't need that now that I am out of high school!" with the sub-text pretty much always being that learning the information, process, or concept in question was a waste of time and not applicable to "the real world."

Bullshit.

The "I don't need that now that I'm out of high school" line is nothing more than a proud proclamation of intentional ignorance. If you want to know why out country is in a shambles, stop looking for conservative or liberal boogeymen, stop looking at religious or sexual minorities. Start looking at the fact that we are a nation full of people proud of the fact that we don't retain basic information once we have a diploma in hand.

Once I have heard someone say that they don't need some skill or information or ability post-school, I have a very hard time taking anything else they say about any subject seriously.

Leaving aside the very real fact that, now that we don't live in a society where young men automatically go to work at dad's factory and young women are usually married and pregnant at 19, learning all of these "useless" facts and skills opens up the possibility that a young person can actually find a career path; leaving aside the fact that there is a pleasure in learning this information for those who go with it rather than resist it because to do so is somehow perversely considered cool; leaving aside the fact that simply having been exposed to this sort of information can provide one with an appreciation for the work lives of others who are not in one's own occupation, and therefore make it easier ot live with other people; leaving all of those very valid reasons why it is a good thing to have learned and been exposed to a wide range of academic disciplines, the claim that what one learned in high school (or junior high, or college) was a waste of time best left to nerds and egg-heads and not applicable to the so-called "real world" remains complete and utter bullshit.

Let's take a common high school math class: algebra.

Algebra, on it's surface, seems to have very limited application to the non-academic world. If you are a construction contractor or involved in some types of business, you may have some use for very basic algebra in order to solve day-to-day problems. But, all of those quadratic equations and discussions of arithmetic properties, what good is that? Well, it is true that you can get by, day-to-day in most jobs without having to make use of those skills and knowledge sets. In that sense, you don't need it. But that doesn't mean that it isn't useful. Go here to see some places where quadratic equations come up in your everyday life, even if you don't do the math, knowing that it's there can help you make sense out of what's going on. Even if you don't need ot solve for them, you can find uses that will allow you to improve your life, and likely improve your workplace, by retaining this knowledge. You may not need it, in the same way that you don't need a cell phone - it's still useful to have one, and the more you use it, the more likely you will be to find further uses.

How about another math class: statistics.

This one tends to be even more poorly understood, and in my experience even more likely to be scoffed at by the proud ignorance brigade. You can probably go on with life quite well without being able to perform a chi-square test, or calculate standard deviation on the fly. However, if you have learned to do these things at some point, and retained a decent part of the conceptual knowledge, you are far, far, far less likely to be conned or scammed than everyone else around you. Simply remembering that there are ways to determine whether or not a correlation is due to random chance or due to causal factors allows you to ask some important questions when a politician pushes a policy, or when a scam treatment is presented to you, or when someone wants you to buy something to increase your fuel mileage, or when a self-help guru is trying to peddle idiocy packaged as wisdom (I'm going to go out an a limb here and guess that The Secret didn't sell well amongst mathematicians). In other words, having just a basic-level knowledge of statistics, the sort that someone could acquire from high school and retain through adult life, will make you a smarter consumer, voter, and citizen. Again, can you get by in life without this? Yes, you can live day-to-day without basic mathematical knowledge, but much of the poor policy passed by politicians and the idiocy marketed to consumers relies on the fact that most people will relegate statistics to the dust pile of their personal histories and not use it to defend themselves as adults.

Let's look at something that is not as clearly related to day-to-day life and yet very important: history and civics classes.

I live in California, and like many states in the U.S., we have a referendum system that allows voters to put legislation onto the ballots and vote for it, bypassing the state legislature. On the surface this sounds great - direct power from the people, for the people, right? In practice, it means that many pieces of legislation get passed because they sound good to the public but make very little sense, are unenforceable or would require a wide range of inoffensive activities to become crimes, laws get passed that drain the public treasury for very little gain, or laws get passed that are struck down immediately (often in costly legal battles) because they clearly violate the federal or state constitution and therefore should never have been passed (and initiatives favored by both the political right and left do these things with what appears to be equal resolve and gusto, so don't go blaming the other side, your side is also at fault). Likewise, everytime I see someone who is swayed by cries of "activist judges" I know that I am looking at someone who doesn't remember high school history/civics and who therefore is being taken advantage of by political opportunists.

Here's the thing - if voters were generally more aware of what the constitution actually says (and right now I know that both Occupy people and Tea Party people are nodding their heads while dellusionaly believing that their take on the constitution is the only valid one...and both are wrong), then laws violating it (and wasting resources as a result) wouldn't get passed. If voters had a better idea of history, then they would know where to look in trying to figure out whether a proposed piece of legislation was likely to do what it said (after all, most of these measures have been, in some form or another, tried somewhere before). In short, knowing some basic civics lessons and retaining at least a broad outline of history (allowing for a small bit of research when necessary) would make us better voters.

The same sorts of things can be drawn from high-school level biology, physics, chemistry, even classes such as literature, art, and music. There is information and skills that can be gleaned from these classes which will help you to avoid getting ripped off, which will help you to avoid making stupid choices in the voting booth, which will help you to deal with many day-to-day matters. But, here's the catch, you have to come to the realization that "I don't need that after high school" is the battle cry of the imbecile. It's justification for laziness, not a show of wisdom or worldliness.

Postcards From the Dungeon

2011-11-13T17:18:00.001-08:00

So, in keeping with my on-going goal of talking about archaeology with anyone willing to let me (AKA, talking about archaeology with different audiences), I was interviewed by the Role-Playing Game podcast Postcards From the Dungeon (it's a reference to Dungeons and Dragons, not BDSM!).

It was alot of fun, more like a conversation than an interview. I'll post a link when the podcast drops.

Pollution and Prejudice

2011-11-11T10:00:00.000-08:00

As frustrated as I get with the, frankly, anti-reality stance that many a person has when it comes to opposing the rights of certain groups, I am simultaneously fascinated with it. The reason for my fascination is that there is this weird, abstract way in which all of these matters carry striking similarities with often-observed religious and ritual views on purity, and how these views are often tied in with primitive views on infection.

Confused? Yeah, so was I when I first started noticing this.

Look at how we react to marginalized groups within our society. Let's take homosexuals, because they are currently one of the more marginalized groups in the U.S. If one looks at the rhetoric from those opposed to gay rights, we see that notions of pollution, disease, and uncleanliness are common. Consider:

-There is a pervasive notion that gays will recruit others to their ranks, despite the fact that all of the actual accrued scientific evidence shows that an individual has little-to-no control over their sexual orientation. The descriptions of "gay recruitment" bear a strong resemblance to the spread of a disease, with those who are weak falling prey while an epidemic rages (seriously, go to Google and type in "Epidemic Homosexuality", it's surreal). The notion of pollution is pretty strong, though nonsensical given the real nature of sexual orientation.

-There is an obsession with trying to keep physical and social control over where they go. This applies not only to a wish to not allow them to have jobs such as teachers or from serving in positions such as Scout Master (an opposition that, within the rather weird world of those opposed to gay rights at least is consistent with the widely-held beliefs about "sexual deviants", even if it is inconsistent with reality), but also to pushing for legislation that allows an employer to fire someone based on sexual orientation (or opposing legislation that makes sexual orientation a protected status), which really makes very little sense except as a way of controlling where a person goes.

-There is a "one-drop rule" of sexuality very much in effect (at least for men). If a man has sex with another man, then he is likely to be considered gay or bisexual from that point on, even if he does not consider himself so. However, if you flip it around, a gay man who has sex with a woman just once is not necessarily considered straight or bisexual for that. This is similar to the "one drop" rules of race that were common up through the mid-20th century (one ancestor of a non-white race means that you are of that race), and is also consistent with fears of contamination - fears one drop of sewage might ruin a reservoir of water, or that brief exposure to a sick person might destroy one's health.

-The language used by those opposed to gay rights often speaks of visceral disgust, including gagging, wanting to vomit, etc., all of which is also tied in, again, to our bodies reactions to disease and contamination.

-Even the often-shouted cry of "hate the sin, love the sinner" is couched in a Christian sub-culture in which homosexuality is seen as something to be purged from the individual - whether through ineffectual (and often harmful) psychological treatments or through trying to keep them from being symptomatic, that is by not acting on their sexual impulses. Again, this is in keeping with the treatment of diseased people - treat them, or try to control their symptoms so that they can otherwise get on with life.

Now, in case you think that I am making a case specifically for gay rights issues, I want you to look into the rhetoric surrounding the opposition to the civil rights movement of the first half of the 20th century - while it was clearly the case that African-Americans couldn't stop being their ethnicity, there was a very definite fear of the white population being contaminated by everything from culture (both jazz and rock music provoked outrage when they became popular because of their ties to African-American popular music) to physical contact (there's a reason why "white's only" restrooms, drinking fountains, etc. seemed reasonable to people back then, and it was not unusual to hear about "negro diseases" that might be passed on to unwary whites) to sexual contamination (while it was most common to hear about fears of black men with white women, it was also not uncommon for worries about white men with black women to be brought up). Similar issues have faced other ethnic and social minorities throughout U.S. history, as well as Europe.

I first started to think about this when I was an undergraduate taking a course on the ethnography of India. The caste system of Indian was an important subject, obviously, and as such the role of untouchables within Indian society was heavily discussed. Within the caste system, the untouchables are physically and socially controlled to the extent that they are only allowed certain jobs (those considered polluting, sometimes for obvious reasons - such as dealing with sewage - sometimes for more esoteric reasons - such as working as barbers), are constrained as far as who they can socialize with and under what conditions, and being physically touched by one requires purification, often through ritual bathing*. In other words, the untouchables were treated quite literally as diseased, though carrying a "spiritual" disease rather than a physical one. Even the language used to describe them came directly from dealing with disease, as did the notions of pollution and cleansing.

And understand, this isn't a case of some white kid in California misunderstanding the intricacies of India's religions**. The disease/religious purity interpretation is something that most of the participants in the system themselves were aware of and commented on. Indeed, it was often used as a defense of what was, in truth, a system of religiously ordained bigotry.

Over the years after I took the course, I began to think about my own culture's prejudices in a different way. Not every type of prejudice is based on notions of illness or pollution - anti-Mexican bigotries are generally based on over-simplifications of immigration and population dynamics, for example (though some of these same notions do get pulled in at times). But, very often, the issue of fear of pollution tended to fuel bigotries.

In fact, in the last two decades psychologists have begun to analyse prejudices with an eye towards the tendency for people to express their bigotries by describing the targets in what amount to disease terms. So, it's not just me that has noticed this.

This is both dispiriting, and paradoxically somewhat hopeful. On the downside, the fact that this gets applied across cultures and across time indicates that it is something hard-wired into us, and therefore would be difficult to rid ourselves of. On the other hand, there is clearly no actual connection between the groups of people who are targeted by bigotry and disease-causing agents. So, if you can show this to people and get them to understand what they are doing, it might (and note that I say might...I'm not optimistic enough to say "will") help to dismantle some of those prejudices.

*It should be noted that, since the 1940s, India has been changing radically, and many of the rules regarding caste are not as strongly enforced or held as they once were.

**Unlike the douche bags from affluent areas who go to India "because it's so spiritual, man!"

On Buying a Digital Scale

2011-11-09T10:00:00.000-08:00

I volunteered to do the faunal analysis for a research project in the southern San Joaquin Valley. The principle investigator* is a friend of mine who teaches at a university in England**, and while he has grant money for many things, he doesn't have enough to cover all tasks necessary to complete the project. As such, he relies in part on the work of fools...err, I mean volunteers such as myself who are willing to use our skills to assist his project without charging him anything.

Now, the faunal analysis is pretty much what it sounds like: I get the bone and shell that has come out of the site, and try to figure out what animals it came from, whether or not there are signs of it having been modified (whether by people cutting meat off of the bones, burning it during cooking, or trying to make tools out of it). It essentially consists of slowly sorting through all of the fragments of bone, assigning everything to as specific a category as you can (often just placing it in broad "large, animal, medium animal" categories, but occasionally being able to figure out the genus or even species), and noting relevant features (cut marks on the bone, burning, etc.).

The bone that I am looking at is badly fragmented, which means that, often, a simple count of bone fragments will tell you more about the factors damaging the bone than about the animals - interesting in its own right and valuable, but I still have to make sense of the faunal remains. So, in addition to counting up the bone fragments, we also weigh them, which in circumstances such as this can often tell you more about what the site residents were prioritizing in their hunting and eating habits.

So, with that in mind, I set out to buy a digital scale that could measure with 0.01 gram precision.

Now, in every city in which I have lived, this would have been an easy task. I know of places in Modesto, Santa Cruz, and Santa Barbara in which I could find such things. So, Fresno being the largest city in which I have lived, I figured that finding an appropriate scale here would be a piece of cake. I was very wrong.

The first problem I ran into is that, despite it's size, Fresno has a relative dearth of stores catering to scientific labs. That's not to say that they aren't here, but there are fewer than one would think. The second problem is that, rather contrary to what one might expect, these places do not sell scales with the level of precision that I required. In fact, there was a surprising number of scales that measured in pounds and ounces and not in the metric scale, as one would expect for lab equipment.

So, on the advice of the the folks at one such store, I went to several office supply stores, which I was told would have digital metric scales. They did, but their level of precision was 0.1 grams, and not the required 0.01 grams. Moreover, most of them were in the $100 range - which, considering that I am doing this work as a volunteer and that for most of the last year I have been the only income in my household (making money tight) I wasn't really willing to pay.

It dawned on me that I should try a hardware store - certainly a place that sells every form of tool you could want would also sell a scale. I mean, I might not find a metric one, but it was worth a try, right? Well, wrong. I discovered that the hardware stores in Fresno (including the national chains) do not, in fact, carry scales of any kind (aside from the odd bathroom scale, not the precision or accuracy that I need). What's more, asking for help led to the sales staff eyeing me, assuming that I am a drug manufacturer and/or dealer - one salesman even went so far as to inform me that that's what he figured I or anyone would be buying the scale for. Trying to explain that I am a scientist looking for a piece of lab equipment didn't seem to assuage his worries, as he seemed to think that this was a cover story.

I wonder what kind of watch list Home Depot has had me placed on.

Well, the hardware stores were a bust. So, I decided to head out to the local cooking supplies store - it was a longshot, but they would have scales and they might have them in the units and level of precision that I needed. Again, I found scales, but they would do, at best, 0.1 grams, and most didn't deal in metric at all***. And, again, it was made clear that, despite my protestations about scientific work, it was suspected that I was a drug manufacturer/dealer.

I wonder what kind of watch list Williams Sonoma has had me placed on.

Finally, one of the cooking store salesmen decided that he wasn't part of the war on drugs, and told me that I could find a high-precision scale at one of the local sporting good stores. It would measure amounts in the range that I needed, and apparently is used by hunters who pack their own shotgun shells. The problem, however, is that it doesn't measure in metric, or even pounds and ounces, but instead in the far more esoteric measurement unit known as grains. A grain correlates to approximately 64.8 milligrams (or 0.648 grams) making the conversion problem even more obnoxious than simply measuring in ounces.

In the end, I bought one on line. I found a jeweler's scale that measures to 0.01 grams, comes with a calibrating weight, and is in my price range. It's unlikely to be a great scale, but it will have to do.

Really, though, who would have thought that finding a scale in a city of half a million people would be such a pain in the ass?

*Translates to English as "Head Honcho" or "Big Cheese." The archaeologist who is ultimately responsible for all work performed.

**The irony of him leaving for England to perform excavation near Bakersfield is not lost on me

***If at this point you wonder why I didn't buy one that measures in ounces and just convert the sum, the reasons are twofold: 1) they still wouldn't measure at the level of precision that I needed, and 2) I have something in the neighborhood of 2,000 bags of bone to weigh and process by January. The slow-down required to convert all of them would simply not be worth it.

Fall Rush

2011-11-07T10:00:00.000-08:00

The last month has been chaotic. I have not known from one week to the next where I would be, and I have been doing alot of very hard work. I've been slogging through fields covered in deep silty dust, I've been digging holes in Granitic sands in Yosemite, and I've been trying to find the boundaries of a huge-ass archaeological site in a vineyard in the southern San Joaquin Valley.

It's the fall rush.

Every company that I have worked for has had this mad dash that begins around September and ends in late October. There's usually field projects that, for various reasons, didn't get started when they should have - paperwork didn't get filed, permits weren't issued, clients delayed on giving the go-ahead, etc. etc. And now, here we are, heavy rains will start within the next couple of months in the valleys and on the coast and snow will begin to make work in the mountains, and the client and/or agencies with which we are dealing realize that if the work isn't done now, and I mean now, then it won't get done until the spring.

And so it is that every fall, I find myself running around like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off, heading off on one project after another with usually very little time between in order to recover from one project or to prepare for the next.

In some ways it's exhilarating. In the last few weeks, I have been in vineyards, mountains, forests, and near-desert environments. I have surveyed, excavated, and recorded sites. I have worked with historic-era sites, late Holocene prehistoric sites, and found artifacts that, based on their state of degradation, are likely thousands of years old.

I have seen some fantastically cool things, but I have also had to put other things on hold (reports to be written, personal tasks to accomplish, doctors appoints rescheduled) to accommodate it. It's stimulating, but I don't want it to stretch on until it becomes aggravating.

Halloween

2011-10-31T10:43:00.000-07:00

Today is Halloween, one of the few holidays that is, at this point in time, simply about fun. Yes, there is an old tradition of harvest/coming winter festivals celebrated by cultures throughout the world (the Celtic festival that most people cite as being the origin of Halloween is, in reality, only one of many similar festivals celebrated by peoples the world over throughout history), but only a small number of people within the modern U.S. or western Europe observe or even acknowledge the historical and social roots of Halloween anymore. It is now simply a day in which people get to play dress-up, children get to seek candy, and adults get to make fools of themselves.

It's a toned-down carnivale.

I have always liked Halloween. The symbols and imagery that would be considered morbid or dour at any other time of the year are rendered goofy by their over-abundance. There is something joyful about watching children try to figure out how to get the biggest candy haul, while watching adults try to re-capture some element of their childhood (even I did so this year, dressing as the 4th Doctor and attending a party).

Hell, even the usual over-bearing and obnoxious tendency for some of the more loopy churches to claim that everything outside of their absurdist walls is somehow evil is rendered almost charming as their yearly declarations that they would not allow their children to observe "Satan's holiday" becomes just so much noise in the otherwise celebratory background. Indeed, their insistence on this nonsense probably does much to push away the saner people who see this nuttiness for the hysteria that it is.

About the only de-facto tradition of this time of the year that really annoys me is the yearly moral panic. The reality is that there has never been a case of an adult poisoning candy handed out to trick-or-treaters, but this lack of it ever happening hasn't stopped parents and even law enforcement officials (who should know better than to A) believe this nonsense, or B) waste resources and money encouraging this false belief in the "name of safety") from doing the usual thing and ignoring reality in the face of scary-sounding but absurd rumor. Really, the fact that this story continues to be told year-after-year despite the evidence shows more than anything that we as a population are really, horribly, tragically bad at calculating risk. And while this inability to calculate risk can have more serious consequences (war in Iraq and a return of nearly-eradicated contagious disease, anyone?) it is brought in a small but direct way into everyone's homes every year on October 31st.

Okay, rant done. If you have kids, take them trick-or-treating, it's perfectly safe, no matter what anyone tells you. If you're an adult, have some candy by the door, and put on a scary movie (or, if you can't stomach horror movies, watch Ghostbusters). And, everyone, have a good time tonight. It's going to get darker before it gets lighter again, so take the coming winter with some joy rather than dread.

Happy Halloween!

Dodgin' Codgers

2011-10-26T08:57:00.000-07:00

Several years back, when I was an intern in an Air Force base's environmental office, one of my tasks was to travel around the base to check up on various sites that were threatened by erosion and document their condition. These sites were usually in spots that were far from buildings and structures, but in areas that the folks who would come onto the base to go fishing would frequent*. So, it was no surprise when, one spring day, I encountered an elderly fisherman standing next to one of the sites.

He saw me coming, and decided that he wanted to see who I was and what I was doing there - amusing in that I was there performing a base-required work task and he was there because the base allowed him to be there - and I explained that I was one of the archaeologists on base, checking up on various locations. He looked at me with what I assume was supposed to be contempt, but instead came across as cartoonish grumpiness, and said "well, you people shouldn't be bothering over here! I've seen stuff that came out of Honda Canyon** and you have plenty to study from there and you don't need to be looking anywhere else!"

I went on to try to explain that we don't just study large quantities of artifacts, but that the locations of sites was also of importance, and under federal law we were required to at least make a good-faith effort to know what was going on with sites on base, regardless of whether or not we did anything to or with said sites.

He simply nodded his head and said "I don't know who you think you're talking to, but I'm a veteran, and I was an electrical engineer! Don't think that you can pull one over on me!"

This seemed astoundingly strange. That he was in the military and an electrical engineer had, of course, no bearing whatsoever on archaeology. I responded, int he calmest voice I could muster, "I don't doubt that, but I'm an archaeologist, and I understand my field, and what I have told you is accurate."

"No it isn't! If you believe that then you don't know what you're talking about."

The hell? Now, I am accustomed to people with no experience thinking that they know more about archaeology than I do, it's a common enough delusion, but they didn't usually throw out irrelevancies about their past career as would-be evidence of their allegedly superior knowledge. This guy, though, just seemed to want to be right, and int he face of someone who was clearly more knowledgeable on a particular subject, he decided simply to push his weird-ass notions anyway.

"You're as bad as the wildlife biologist" he then said to me.

"Heh?" I wittily responded.

"Yeah, that wildlife bioldogist, Nancy whatshername, the one who says that the snowy plovers are endangered even though they aren't!"

Ahh, the snowy plovers. These are a type of beach bird the status of which is a bit controversial. The Fish and Wildlife service holds that they are endangered and that the base's beaches were among the few pristine habitats left. The local public, and a few biologists not involved with the base, claimed that they were not endangered. The base biologists were caught in the middle, required to enforce the Fish and Wildlife Service's ruling, even though they were not sure if they agreed with it.

So, I explained to the fellow that the biologist didn't make that ruling, and that it had come from the outside.

"No, it didn't!" He insisted, "she's the one who claims that they're endangered!"

I explained again that the biologist didn't make that ruling, I didn't even know if she agreed with that ruling, and that I had a bit more knowledge of the matter than he did because I worked with her and he, by his own admission, had never met her nor read anything that she had put out on the subject.

"Well, I know the Colonel," the Colonel being the man in charge of the base, "and he says that she made the decision, so I know that you are lying to me!"

One of the issues that we encounter in environmental work is that very often the people with whom we work think that we are the ones who are dictating what they can or can not do, when, in fact, we are usually just the messengers for messages from outside authorities. So, it is possible that this Colonel, no long since retired, honestly believed that the biologist was the one making these decisions, and not the FWS. However, as the facility head, he had the responsibility for knowing, at least at a basic level, how the various laws impacting the base functioned. I had been present when this particular issue had been explained to him, and I was told that it had been explained to him on a regular basis, and he simply chose not to listen. So, it wasn't me that was lying to the fisherman, but his buddy the Colonel who was little enough concerned with reality that he was willing to badmouth his subordinates to score points with his buddies***. I am, however, pleased to say that, from what I have seen and heard, this was unusual among commanding officers, and when this colonel left, his replacement was much more on-the-ball.

Anyway, I looked at the man and said, sternly but calmly, "I am not lying to you. DO NOT accuse me of lying to you. I know this subject, I know what's going on, I work with it every day, and I am telling you the truth."

"No you're not. Damn liberal." And with that he walked away.

In retrospect, I realize what sort of personality I was dealing with. I have a very disagreeable elderly relative who was similar to this man in that he "knows what's going on" when his alleged knowledge is nothing more than delusion based on a need not only to be right, but for everyone else to be wrong. This relative is okay with those who generally agree with him being right, but as soon as someone disagrees, no matter how much more demonstrably knowledgeable they may be on the subject on which they disagree, they are not only wrong, but somehow immoral and corrupt.

And that seemed to be what I was seeing here. What I told the man disagreed with his "me vs. the evil liberal environmentalists" notions, and so I was clearly not only wrong, but somehow corrupt. I don't have a problem necessarily with people disliking what I do on philisophical or even pragmatic grounds, but if you're going to dislike it, at least dislike it for reasons based in reality, not delusional supposition. No doubt he left there thinking he'd given me what for, when he had, in fact, only exposed his tremendous ignorance of the subjects discussed. So it goes.

*One of the reasons why prehistoric peoples had lived in these locations is because they relied on the fish, so it's no surprise that we would frequently find fishermen still frequenting these locations.

**One of the many canyons on the base, has nothing to do with cars.

***What an asshole.

So Long, Maricopa...Good to See You in my Rear-View Mirror

2011-10-24T10:00:00.001-07:00

One of the members of my current crew often likes to talk about "archaeology as adventure". I usually roll my eyes when he begins going off on the subject, but as he's probably the happiest person on the crew, maybe I should take his attitude more seriously. However, Maricopa is making that difficult.

Maricopa is the town in which we are currently staying. It is south of Taft, and is, in fact, Taft's evil, twisted little brother. The one who was locked in the attic, who subsists on whatever vermin it can catch with it's teeth and mis-shapen bare hands, and of whom the family doesn't like to speak. Taft was filled with meth-heads. Maricopa, on the other hand, is a town full of people who would only become meth-heads if they suddenly developed a sense of decency.

Think I'm exaggerating, do you? Okay, quick, go to Maricopa's Wikipedia page. Seriously, go there, here's a link. Go down to the bottom of the page, to the portion mistakenly labelled "Public Safety." Down there, you will see a description of the police department's problems with racism and good ol' corruption, which includes the following delightful quote:

In mid-2011, American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Jennie Pasquarella is quoted as saying, "Maricopa has been a shining example of impoundments gone wrong," and "They're essentially creating a racket to steal people's cars."

Yeah, that's Maricopa for ya'.

To protest the police corruption, a trailer with signs painted on it is frequently placed at the town's gas station parking lot. The trailer has signs on both the right and left signs requesting that the people of Maricopa start taking their police department to task for its misbehavior. On the front and back, the signs plead for all reading them to "pray for our troops" as they "defend the right to freedom of speech" which means that the sign is simultaneously co-opting the language of both right and left wing politics, which is kind of interesting.

The people are even more colorful. On a daily basis I see men around town wearing t-shirts that should, in a sane world, prevent them from ever having the opportunity to talk to a woman. There's the fellow who walks about town with his shirt featuring the phrase "don't stop till the panties drop" alongside an image of an anorexic-looking nude woman, and the Hustler logo below it. He walked into the local sandwich place with someone who was either his wife or girlfriend, and who appeared to be so worn down by life that she didn't find it embarrassing to be seen holding this man's hand. Or the fellow who walked into the hotel, wearing a "I love dirty whores" t-shirt, who then succeeded in chatting up one of the women who works here. That these imbeciles would have any success with women would seem odd, until you see the local women. I have noticed a large number of local women have tattoos on their upper chests/lower necks which are occasionally abstract designs, but usually are words to the effect of "Property of Steve" or "Woman Belongs to Glenn" or some other such up-lifting message. Then there's the woman who apparently declared her independence by getting a message that did not brand her as the property of a man, but rather as a "White Trash Bitch" - yes, this woman wanders about with these words tattooed to her lower neck. And she's probably not on her meds.

The people of this town could make Cormac McCarthy decide that his opinion of humanity is too sunny and optimistic.

The sandwich shop that I saw Mr. Hustler in? It's in the local gas station. I have gone in there a couple of times for sandwiches, as it is one of only two places in town where food can be procured at hours known to the public, and the staff always seems annoyed that you are trying to give them money. Now, I should note that the staff of the Sandwich shop, a Subways franchise, is separate from the staff of the gas station, who are always bizarrely chirpy and happy. I am guessing that the two crews have different qualude/barbituate preferences.

Anyway, I'll be leaving tomorrow. But this is just yet another one of those places that I have ended up thanks to archaeology. On the off-chance that you ever find yourself thinking that my job is full of adventure, think of Maricopa.

Tedium, Sweat, Research, Pseudo-Science, and Frustration

2011-10-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

As I write this, it is 10:00 PM. I have to go to sleep soon so that I can get up early tomorrow morning and return to t he survey that I have been performing here in Kern County. I have been walking back-and-forth, at 15-to-20 meter intervals over fields of loose, silty sand, sustaining foot injuries and horribly sore legs, all of it looking for evidence of prehistoric human occupation of the area. I do not think that we will find anything, but this can not be confirmed if we don't bother to check. The work is physically tough, tedious, and often frustrating. This is my job, I do get paid for it, but compared to the level of physical and mental labor involved, and the level of training and education required, people in my line of work do not get paid very much*.

When I return from the field, I will go to my hotel room, where I will set up my mobile lab once again and begin working at sorting through slivers of bone, most less than an inch long and less than 1/16 of an inch wide, classifying them as well as possible, and (where feasible) identifying the species from which the bone comes. The work is mentally taxing, hard on the eyes, tedious, and often frustrating. I am doing this as a volunteer to help out an under-funded researcher, so I do not get paid, nor can I claim that it is a labor of love, but it is simply a task that needs to be done.

As I work, the television plays in the background. It's the History Channel, which would probably be better called "the Hysteria Channel" these days, given it's reliance of crackpot conspiracy beliefs and pseudo-scholarship concerning Mayan calendars and Nostradamus. And, as always, they have an "archaeology" show on that's got nothing to do with real archaeology and everything to do with imbecilic fantasy. Claims of space alien influence on human prehistory** are given preference over actual research, and real archaeologists are nowhere to be seen. Instead we get a bunch of people who's "research" consists of deluded and confused numerology, bizarre (and often made-up) claims about the material record, and bridging arguments that sound good so long as you don't actually bother to check the facts.

And this is the perfect contrast. Here I am, doing the very real, very tough work, as necessary to produce actual archaeological evidence. It is time consuming, difficult, often boring, but necessary if one is to find relevant evidence of the human past. It is not an easy job, and it is not a well-paying job. Meanwhile, the television channel that is supposedly dedicated to educating people about the human past is helping to further line the pockets of authors who do little other than sit in arm chairs and ponder what sort of crap they can make up after taking their most recent expensive exotic vacation.

This is, I think, what gets under my skin about pseudo-archaeology. It's not the wacky claims, it's not even the racism inherent in much of it (see ** below), hell, it's not even the fact that so many of these people try to claim that they are "independent researchers***" rather than the more honest "people who pull claims out of their asses." It's that there are real people doing real research, and that it is extremely difficult, time consuming, and often tedious work, and yet it's these dickweeds who make sexy-sounding-yet-stupid claims that are being promoted on what is allegedly an educational network.

It's enough to make you want to take a tazer to the soles of a cable network executive's feet. Unfortunately, I don't know any cable network executives, so instead I write grumbly and poorly written blog entries.

*Sometimes I think that my grandfather was right and I should have gotten an MBA. Other times I remember just how mind-numbingly bored I was when I was in business and decide that I made the right choice.

**usually, it is worth noting, the history and prehistory of non-white people, the implication being that the "savages" weren't capable of feats that Europeans were. That most of these people don't see the racism often inherent in their claims is truly amazing.

***This is pretty common. Pseudo-scholars of all sorts will tell you that they are "independent researchers" who are somehow revealing the "truth that the establishment doesn't want you to know!" I have dealt with the claims about "the establishment" before. I want really briefly to deal with the term "independent researcher." there are real independent researchers - both avocational archaeologists who may lack ties to universities or museums but who have a passion and willingness to learn about the field an behave responsibly, and people who have formal training but are not tied to research institutions and who perform original research as time and money allows. Many of these folks do really excellent work. They are not the same as the self-proclaimed "independent researchers" who use bizarre methods to "prove" their pet hypotheses, disconfirming evidence be damned. So, when someone calls themself an "independent researcher", take the time to figure out if they are actually doing research, or if they are simply playing stupid games and making shit up.

Meth Shacks and Other Aspects of Fieldwork

2011-10-17T10:00:00.000-07:00

So, as noted, I have been working on archaeological surveys in Kern County, southwest of Bakersfield*. The land parcels we are surveying range between 200 and 600 acres in size, and are in relatively isolated locations in this rural area. This area is notorious for, amongst other things, a large degree of methamphetamine manufacture and use. So, it is no surprise that, hidden adjacent to one of our parcels, there is a set of shacks and old trailers that appear to still be used as shelters, have a worn chain-link fence surrounding them, and numerous large dogs - mostly dobermens and German shepperds - as well as what appeared to be a well beaten and chewed dummy on a rope.

We don't know what it is, but very likely it is a meth manufacturing facility. Which, frankly, means that it is also likely to be a place populated by paranoid people with firearms.

Yay?

This is not the first time that I have encountered a meth lab in the field. And I will deal with this the same way that I have dealt with other meth labs: never go to the location alone, be near the vehicle at all times, make sure that everyone has cell phone, and make sure that our employer knows exactly where we are and what our concerns are.

Still, it's a bit unnerving.

Nor are meth labs the only trouble spots that we sometimes encounter. My colleagues who work in and around Humboldt County, as well as a few other choice locations around the state, often encounter marijuana farms - which doesn't sound too bad until you realize that they are often run by embittered ex-hippies and/or paranoid "bussinessmen" who like to booby-trap their crops in order to inure any who might come upon them - with the booby traps including everything from explosives to fish-hooks hung at eye-level.

Next time you toke on a doobie, consider that the plant you are about to take in might have been watered with the blood of an unaware environmentalist.

Likewise, there are many landowners who dislike environmental workers, who will allow you on their land with the intention of spraying you with a crop duster, or firing a shotgun at you.

Then, there's always the more subtle threats of the white supremacist who will let you on their land to work while simultaneously trying to figure out if you are fit for membership in their "gun club"; the people who are watching for a chance to get you to join their religious cult; or the ever-present evil of zombie macrobiotic dieters.

Most of the time, my job is much less exciting and adventurous than most people seem to want to make it out to be. Most of the time it's a bit of a grind. However, on occasion, it can get exciting. And by "exciting", I mean "unnerving and frightening."

Still, I have no doubt that we'll be fine. But just in case, would anybody mind calling my cell phone every 15 minutes or so.

*Hence the fact that I am, once again, not posting much right now.

Back in Taft

2011-10-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

So, those three of you who have read my blog for more than a week may recall that a couple of years ago I spent seven months working through the summer in Taft. I had thought I would never have to return once I finally escaped. Well, not "thought" so much as "hoped"...and yet here I am.

The up side is that I am only here for three weeks, and not seven months as before. I am also working with a very good client and not with someone who is actively trying to sabotage the environmental team. I also have a small crew of good workers instead of a large crew that is a mixed bag. So, on the whole, things are greatly improved. Also, the temperatures will be in the 80s all week, and not 110+ as was the case the last time I was out here.

One of the more interesting aspects of this particular project is that we are working in the bed of a now-empty oscillating lake - that is, the lake would grow or shrink depending largely on rainfall in a given year. As a result, the majority of the area is unlikely to hold archaeological sites, which is a bit disappointing, as it somewhat negates the reason for us being here. However, int he unlikely event that we encounter a site, there is a fair chance of the site being something particularly important as this would have been a semi-stable body of water in a generally arid area - meaning that both water and animals and plants that use the water were present, providing resources for the people of the region to use.

At any rate, we have no real expectations of finding anything in particular, but if the weather continues like this, at least it will be an easy project. And if it ceases to be easy, it is likely to become interesting, so that's all ot the good.

Getting Crew

2011-10-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

I am currently in the process of trying to assemble a crew. This is not always an easy task. Good field technicians are a precious commodity, and tend to be snatched up by companies as soon as they are available, which means that you have to either have eerily good timing to have a crew of entirely good technicians, or else you have to keep tabs on the good technicians that you know so that you know as soon as they are available and can get them in your snares.

One of the problems with getting good field technicians is that many really good field technicians are older, more experienced, and preparing to go over the edge. Most of these folks don't have steady jobs, but travel from project-to-project. They may have a permanent address, but they rarely see their homes, have tenuous family connections and friendships, and, while in the field, drugs and especially alcohol take up a large part of their non-work hours. As a result, while they are often very good at their jobs, they are also prone to sliding into severe alcoholism* and depression, and this can lead to obvious problems in the field. I have watched many a middle-aged field technician go, in the space of a year, from being a fantastic worker with an excellent skill set to becoming a depressed, permanently drunk or hung-over, unreliable liability. It is extremely sad to watch, and it is rare that they get themselves back upright after slipping over. It should be said that there are some older technicians who manage to remain solid professional workers, and they are usually a pleasure to work with (I learn a good deal just from listening to them talk), but as time goes on, I know fewer and fewer of these folks.

Younger technicians tend to be less likely to slip into depression, and they are better able to physically take the late-nights drinking and still be able to work in the morning. Moreover, they haven't grown frustrated or disillusioned and tend to view the work as an adventure, improving morale. However, they also lack the experience and knowledge of their older counterparts, and often have not had to do some of the more onerous tasks of field archaeology (digging in a poison oak thicket, walking through tick-infested grasses, wading through stagnant water and hoping that you don't get leaches on you), and are often less ready to do the work that needs to be done.

So, the trick is to find someone who is young, but smart enough to learn and willing to do what it takes to get the job done, or else an older technician who has managed to keep their sanity and is not so far in the bottle that they have become unreliable. It's a tough trick, though my current employer has many people fitting both descriptions in its orbit. The problem (and I suppose that this falls into the category of "the types of problems you'd like to have") is that we are really damn busy, and as such having the field technicians available is a bit of a problem - the good ones have largely been assigned, and now I am trying to find other good ones who, by some miracle, haven't been picked up by another company yet.

Still, I have some good leads, and things look promising.

*Drinking is a very large part of the culture of field archaeology. For most field archaeologists, opening a six-pack or heading to the bar as soon as you get back from the day's work is a huge part of the field experience. Supervisors, such as myself, may drink, but we usually have more work to do when returning from the field, and as such either forgo drinking or get a later start and stop earlier than the field technicians. We also tend to have stable jobs and (relatively) stable home lives, which require both our money and our energy, and as a result tend to have less impetus to drink heavily. Not to say that it doesn't happen, but seeing a hung-over supervisor int he morning is unusual, while seeing hung-over field technicians is not uncommon.

Fun with Fossils

2011-10-04T10:00:00.000-07:00

A few months back, I wrote a post regarding my training as a paleontological monitor at the Fairmead Fossil Museum. Well, a couple of weeks back, Kaylia and I arranged a trip for Fresno SWAC*, though only a few of the members ultimately ended up attending. Still, it was fun, and I am once again monitoring (now for 10 hours a day, in a landfill, surrounded by loud heavy equipment, and in a landfill! Hooray!**) so I don't have a whole lot of time to write (though I will be trying to get a regular wordy post out later this week)...so, here's what amount to weekend trip photos to bore you all!

The museum houses both actual fossils and a large number of replicas of fossils that have been unearthed at the Fairmead Landfill site (located, surprisingly enough, at the Fairmead Landfill in Madera County). Hey, I've got photos! You want to see a picture of a landfill taken from the street? Of course you do!

The Fairmead Landfill, in all of it's glory.

The majority of the fossils recovered from the landfill are in storage until such time as the paleontologists at the museum are able to finish unpacking the plaster jackets in which they sit. Some of the others are kept at UC Berkeley despite attempts by Madera County to get them back (I think that UC Berkeley is full of bastards, but then I would***). However, a few samples are present at the museum for public viewing, the coolest of which was a mammoth skull and tusks suspended from the ceiling at the height that this animal's head would actually have been in life:

The hovering mammoth skull, coming soon

to a theater near you, in horrifying 3-D!

Articulated replicas of many of the skeletons found at the museum were also an display (though most of these replicas were of the other samples from the species, and not necessarily the precise fossils found at the Fairmead site):

The cast, in order of appearance: Short-faced bear, bear and friends,

smilodon and giant ground sloth, dire wolf, Kaylia (not a fossil) and the

ground sloth, camel (yep, camels once lived in California, during

the Pleistocene)

What was fascinating about the fossils found at the museum is what the reveal about what California's San Joaquin Valley was like during the middle Pleistocene. The valley is now known primarily for 1) being one of the world's agricultural powerhouses; 2) being the place that most Californians either want to leave or are happy that they don't call home; 2) being the place where heat is manufactured for export to other places. Where it's not covered in farms, it's covered in invasive grasses and oak woodland with a few creeks and numerous seasonal waterways running through it. During the middle Pleistocene, however, the mix of plant and animal remains found in the region indicate that it was closer to the African savanna, and teemed with wildlife that most of us would consider rather exotic now, such as camels and large cats (saber toothed tigers, but also other types of large feline predators), species of elephant (the Colombian Mammoth - a larger, and non-woolly version of the mammoth), and giant ground sloths (huge versions of the sloth that you can now find living in Central and South America).

The landfill also has yielded several fossils of ancient horses - an animal native to the Americas but that migrated to Asia during the Pleistocene and eventually died off in the Americas.

Yipee! Horse skulls!

While small, the museum is a good place to kill a couple of hours. The displays explain the science clearly, and the laboratory where the paleontologists work, while enclosed, is visible to the public (and some of the paleontologists like talking with the public).

Thrill to the office space of the paleontologist!

In the end, it was a groovy trip, and if you are in Madera County or the surrounding area, it's worth checking out.

Kaylia runs in terror from the re-animated

skeleton of a short-faced bear!

The members of SWAC who attended the trip - Jerred, Eric, Robin, and Kaylia,

photo by me.

*SWAC = Skeptics Without a Cause, a group that originally formed in Santa Cruz after my better half witnessed an atheist group imploding. Some of the members of that group, my dear partner included, formed the original Santa Cruz SWAC as a place for those who value science, critical thinking, and just generally not accepting made-up-crap at face value to meet and socialize without having any particular political or activist agenda. When Kay and I moved to Fresno, we started a local branch.

**Curious note, one of the workers at the landfill where I am working had previously worked at the Fairmead Landfill and decided to make it clear to me what he thought of paleontologists, which wasn't anything good. I pointed out that I am an archaeologist and not a paleontologist, but he didn't seem to want to believe me.

***I attended UC Santa Cruz, which I like to say has a long un-acknowledged rivalry with UC Berkeley. We at and from Santa Cruz feel that we, as the other University of California campus in the Bay Area, that we could hold our own academically with UC Berkeley. The students at UC Berkeley, however, were surprised to hear that there was a UC campus other than Berkeley.

Seriously, they call their own campus "Cal" to shorten it for "University of California" because they are blissfully unaware that there are, in fact, nine other UC campuses. Oh, and all of them are considered quite good. In your face, UCB!

Cinema of Pain

2011-09-29T10:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, a detour from the usual talk. This one is just for fun...

Every now and again, I meet someone who informs me that they have seen the worst film ever made. They will then go on at great length about how some big-budget, low-concept film is well and truly terrible, and it wouldn't be possible to make a movie that's worse than it. Or, perhaps it's one of those people who has heard that Plan 9 From Outer Space is the worst film ever made, and is actually gullible enough to believe this.

Whenever this happens, I chuckle, look at the person who announced that they have found the worst movie ever, and announce "my DVD collection can hurt you."

I have stated before that I enjoy B-movies, so it will probably come as no surprise to anyone who is a regular reader that I have racked up a fair number of bad movie notches on my television side over the years. Whenever the person who announced that Wild Wild West was just too terrible for words insists on their point, I try to show them one of the films below. If you enjoy crappy movies, then you probably already know about these. If not, then proceed with caution.

I've included the trailers for all of these movies, but be warned - if you watch the trailer and think "that doesn't look so bad", it is because trailers are mareting tools, and one is can be designed to make a movie look significantly better than it really is.

Manos the Hands of Fate

Probably best known as an episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, this is allegedly a horror movie. It was made by a fertilizer salesman, Harold Warren, who thought that audiences were stupid enough that any crap he put on screen would satisfy them. He was proven very, very wrong.

On the one hand, many of the people involved as actors and crew apparently were proud of their work and really tried, and so it's a bit of a backhand to laugh at them. On the other hand, the overall artisitic vision was provided by someone who was apparently something of a dick who thought that he was the smartest man in the country and the only one who would know that this film was dreck, so laughing at the film feels kind of good in that way.

This movie centers on a family (father, mother, and daughter) who are trying to find their way to a hotel, and eventually end up at a place called the Valley Lodge. The caretaker of the Valley Lodge, Torgo (a fawn, but limited makeup results in him simply looking like Arlo Guthrie with huge knees), tells the family that they can not stay there, but the man (who is played by the fertilizer salesman - so he cast himself as the star of his movie as well...tells you a bit, don't it) insists that they stay despite the caretaker's wishes and unloads their luggage.

Over the course of the evening, Torgo falls for the wife, the Master (Torgo's boss, a demon or sorceror who looks like Frank Zappa) awakens and decides that the wife and daughter (who was around 5 years old) would make fine additions to his harem, and the man who got his family into this mess is pursued by allegedly demonic dobermens before being turned into the new caretaker. Oh, and for no apparent reason the viewer is treated to routine check-ins on a couple who are making out in a sports car and have nothing to do with the plot.

The script is bad, the production values nonexistent, the implications of demon-induced sexual slavery and pedophilia icky and disturbing, and the film was done without audio, so all of the voices are dubbed in by two or three people after the fact. This one is bad. Bad, bad bad. Not the worst movie I have ever seen, but still pretty terrible.

The trailer:

The Galaxy Invader

Contrary to the title, no galaxies were at any point invaded during this movie.

This is a micro-budget movie produced by Don Dohler, a Maryland-based film maker who made many low-budget grindhouse-level movies (back when Grindhouse referred to low-budget quickie/cheap films and not hipster film makers trying to "get back to their roots"). One the one hand, make no mistake, this is a bad movie from almost every standpoint - the acting is amatuerish (probably because it is filled with amateur actors), the budget is nonexistent, and the dialogue is often laughable, and even the film stock is poor...but Dohler didn't seem to be under any illusions as to the type of film that he was making, and while the movie is bad, it's also fun, and fun in a way that I suspect Dohler would have approved of.

The basic premise of the movie is that an alien spaceship has crash-landed on earth, and the alien has lost his gun and power source in the crash. A college student and professor witness the crash, as do a set of good ol' boys (led by a guy who comes across as a drunken, over-sexed redneck Jimmy Stewart wearing a permanently torn white t-shirt) who find the gun and power source, all the while the alien (while searching for the lost items) goes on a killing spree. Although the film seems to want to make this into a treasure hunt/game of cat-and-mouse between the science crew and team redneck, that never quite gels, and instead it seems like two completely different movies that are spliced together without rhyme or reason. Meanwhile, we are supposed to feel some sympathy for the alien, but as it seems more interested in killing innocent people than in getting its stuff back, that's difficult. Weirdly, the most satisfying part of the movie is the family drama amongst the would-be-Jimmy Stewart's relations, which resolves in a way that is both hilariously poorly done and nonetheless actually rather satisfying.

The film is probably best known for providing the clips that were (for no apparent reason) used in the opening and closing credits of another low-budget movie, The Pod People (which featured no pods, and arguably no real people, despite its title), which ended up on Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

Incidentally, the only person who has managed to site through the full film with me is my good friend Liberty. Libby is also a professor of literature, meaning that she may be teaching your children the finer points of the greatest writing in the English language, but she's warped enough to enjoy something like this. I have the coolest friends.

The trailer:

Highlander II - The Quickening

This is one of the few blockbuster, major-release, studio films that really is just as bad as it's made out to be. Most of them are bad, but bad in a "come 10 years, people will forget that this movie was ever made" bad...Highlander II, however, is both hilarious (at least initially, see below) and legendary in its badness. There are worse films, to be certain, but they weren't made by major studios working with an existing franchise with some well-known actors. And so, as a friend of mine likes to say, Highlander II has probably the highest money-to-suck ratio of any film ever made.

Now, some people will insist that, yes this movie doesn't really work with the story established in the original Highlander, but it's pretty good if taken as its own piece of work. These people are wrong.

Some people will insist that the theatrical release or the television edit or the original video release were bad, but if you see the director's cut (AKA the Renegade Version because the director thought that using the term "renegade" made his movie sound badass rather than just plain bad) or the producer's cut. These people are deeply deluded and in need of immediate psychiatric help.

It's worth noting that one of the later (and also terrible) Highlander films actually explained this one away as a fever dream had by the film's "hero" Connor MacLeod. Yeah, a crappy movie in an increasingly crappy franchise even tries to disown this one.

At its core, Highlander II's problem is that its basic premise, that an alien (or time-displaced, depending on which version you're seeing) warlord comes to Earth (or the future, again depending on which version you are seeing) to prevent his arch-nemesis from returning to the Planet Zeist (or the distant past), makes no sense as the hero (such as he is) of the film has made it clear that he has no method of transportation or intention of going to Planet Zeist (or the distant past) to challenge the warlord (I like parentheticals). Even the warlord's lackeys point this out! Out of this nonsensical plot, add in an evil corporation that has no clear way of making profits off of it's only product, the fact that the "love interest" falls for a guy apparently because she saw him regain youth through decapitating someone (which you would think would be her cue to avoid him), and Sean Connery of all people using his "life force" energy to zap evil ceiling fans...and, well, there's just no way that this movie could be anything but bad.

I love watching bad movies, but Highlander II begins to have a numbing effect after a while. It is so bad that, at about the halfway mark, it ceases to be fun and starts to get boring. If you watch it in bite-sized chunks, it remains fresh and entertaining in its own bizarre way, but trying to watch it straight through actually sucks the fun out of the bad movie experience.

There are many big-budget major releases that get labelled as the "worst movie ever" (Ishtar, North, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Gigli, etc.), but Highlander II has all of these beat. Anybody who is so sheltered as to think that Gigli is as bad as a movie-going experience can get is likely to be killed by exposure to Highlander II.

For the hardened lover of the cinema du crap, however, Highlander II can provide some great post-movie jokes to crack with your friends. Indeed, 2-hours of crappy movie lead to a 10+ hour session of making jokes about the movie with one of my college room mates.

A detailed, and wonderfully funny, scene-by-scene review of Highlander II can be found at Jabootu's Bad Movie Dimension.

The trailer:

Flowers in the Attic

Like Highlander II, Flowers in the Attic is one of the few major release films (and an adaptation of a popular novel) that is pretty much just as bad as it's reputation holds. The premise: a woman who married her uncle has been widowed and is financially ruined, and is coming home to her parent's house in order to make ammends and get back in her sick father's will. As he considered her marriage sinful (for obvious reasons), she must prevent him from knowing about the children she had with her uncle/husband. So, the children are locked away, and slowly poisoned, until the oldest twins (who it is implied have begun their own incestuous relationship) break free and kill the mother.

If you think that sounds over the top, I have been told by those who have read them that the novels on which the movie is based have exactly the same plot, but that the incest is much more blatant and graphic, and includes elements of sibling-on-sibling rape (which is is later stated that the victim enjoyed). Oh, and these books were popular in the 80s with teenagers who are now taking on leadership roles in our society. Let that sink in a bit, and then shudder and weep for humanity's future.

What saves us from the ick factor in this movie is the sheer ineptitude. The dialogue is both ham fisted and hilarious, and the delivery is truly awful. Kristy Swanson, the star, speaks like a robot version of Keanu Reeve. Oh, and the make-up effects for the "sick children make them look like Oompa-Loompa mimes. It's really something to behold.

A personal note: When I was a kid, my sisters loved this movie, which they were introduced to by a friend of our mothers (some friend). They would rent it on a routine basis and would get upset to the point of physical violence if you pointed out that it was a bad movie. They even were convinced that Kristy Swanson's performance was a thing of beauty. Now none of them admit to having liked it, and all of them insist that it was one of the others who wanted to rent it all of the time...but the truth is, it was all three of them.

Once again, Jabootu provides a hilarious scene-by-scene review.

And, the trailer for this schlock:

Nukie

This Swedish/North American/African co-production is so terrible that I wasn't allowed to view it until I had completed my hazmat training.

The basic premise, clearly inspired by E.T. (which was actually, you know, good): a pair of energy-based life forms are flying through the cosmos and come too close to Earth. One of them, Nukie, decides to buzz the planet out of a sheer desire to joyride. This results in the other alien crashing, and being captured by the U.S. military. Nukie lands in Africa, and begins a trek to recover his brother before he dies at the hands of evil scientists.

Now, with this premise, you would have a difficult time making a great movie (though this could be done), but you could easily make a decent movie, one that was fun, enjoyable, and provided you with a passable way to spend 90 minutes. Instead we end up with a movie that is truly awful. The writing alternates between hackneyed and hysterically bad. The special effects are "special" in the same way that the surface of the sun is cold and wet. And the acting...oh, the acting. In a turdball film like this, it is usually difficult to figure out what the worst aspect is, but in Nukie, it's the acting. Now, mind you, this movie could have been cast entirely with the greatest actors ever to have lived, and it would still have been awful, but with these actors, it crosses over into a very strange type of bad that I had not previously thought possible.

To accurately describe the acting in this film, I have to provide you with the following: Imagine that you have a set of sub-par animatronic puppets that are constructed for Disneyland's cheap Bakersfield knock-off Darbyland. Now imagine that the local community theater group were to take acting lessons that consisted entirely of watching these knock-off animatronic puppets. You now have a very rough idea of just how bad the acting in Nukie really is.

The trailer:

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Ok&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

Wedding Rocks

2011-09-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, a friend of Kaylia's got married (or, actually, had a wedding ceremony - she actually got married at a courthouse ceremony several months ago). After I dropped Kaylia off at the Bride's hotel, I had a bit of time to myself before heading over to the beach at which the ceremony was to be held.

When I finally headed over to the wedding spot, it was cool (many of the attendees do not share my affinity for cooler weather and would have termed it "cold"), overcast, and misty. Not precisely brilliant weather for a wedding - though Kaylia had warned the couple that this was likely to be the case when, over a year earlier, they first stated that they wanted to have a wedding on the beach in Monterey County in September*. I brought my folding chairs onto the beach and placed them where they were supposed to go (yep, everyone had to bring their own chairs ot the wedding). And then I sat and played chess on my cell phone while I waited for the ceremony to start. While I sat, a woman (who I later saw was offciating at the ceremony) walked up with a back of rocks, and asked me to take one, which I did. I was a bit confused - during past ceremonies, I have been provided with bags of rice to throw at the couple after the ceremony, but this seemed a bit odd. I looked up at the woman who handed it to me and asked "so, we're supposed to throw rocks at the couple after the ceremony?"

She chuckled nervously, and said "uhh...no, no, we're not asking you to stone them."

"You sure? Because, I have to tell you, I have lousy aim, so I'll need to get REEEEEAAAALLLLL close..."

"No. You are not to throw rocks at the couple!"

Anyway, the wedding occurred, and the entire time I was sitting with this rock in my hand, wondering just what the Hell, exactly, I was supposed to do with it if not use it as an offensive weapon. Towards the end of the ceremony, all of the guests and hostages were asked to rise, walk through the arch, and place the rocks into a container filled half-way with sand, as the rocks were now "infused with our love and good wishes." So, basically, we made a rather heavy good luck charm (which, admittedly, it would be fun to watch one member of the couple attempt to carry around on their key chain).

When I was in graduate school, one of the professors had a habit of describing a situation that he had witnessed or that he had read about in an ethnographic or historical text, and then asking us to describe what the materials remains of such an event would look like should we find them in an archaeological site. And so, I found myself considering this good-luck-charm-of-DOOM (GLCD) and wondering what I would make of it if I had found it in a site.

The GLCD was comprised of a round glass container about 6 inches wide and a foot tall, rather like a huge drinking glass, that had been filled up halfway with sand. The guests then piled rocks on top of the sand, filling the container much of the rest of the way. Now assuming that I found it in a context where it was clear what this had been (either the glass container survived intact or the pieces of glass were arranged around the sand and rocks in such a way that it was clear that a glass container had once held them), I'm not sure what I would make of it. The sand was from a beach in the Monterey Bay area, and of a sort that is a bit unusual for sand in that region, so I'd probably be able to work out where the sand had come from. The rocks, though, came out of a bag of rocks purchased from a store (who knew such things were sold..why they are sold is still a bit baffling to me, are there places that are throwing-size rock deficient?) and were not of local materials.

Now, if I were to find such an item without any knowledge of other similar items, I might think it was simply decorative (not really correct), religious (quasi-correct), or I might think that it represented something having to do with travel or settlement (focusing on the potential symbolism of local sand covered by imported rocks...very much not correct). I probably wouldn't be able ot figure out that it was a charm created as part of a wedding ceremony because, hey, I would have no information even pointing in that direction.

If, by contrast, it were a common item, and I found it only in the homes of couples and families, I would likely think that it was an item either granted to a couple or made by the couple as part of a "life crisis"** ritual for their marriage (which would be true), but I would likely still get caught up on the symbolism of the sand and the rocks, trying to figure out why there were local sands and foreign rocks, and probably concluding that this was a show that people from different areas were marrying and that the item symbolized their union (incorrect).

In other words, I would be stumped, which was often the point that my old professor was trying to make - always show some humility, because the materials record is usually incomplete and there's always a strong likelihood that you got it wrong and are barking up the wrong tree.

*Really, when you know a local who is willing to tell you about the area, it is best to accept that their assessment of the local weather conditions is likely ot be more accurate than your fantasy. Just syain'...

**The term "life crisis" is used by social scientists to refer to events that alter one's status within the community and/or one's personal/home life - this includes coming-of-age ceremonies, marriage, childbirth, and death (which, really, isn't a life crisis so much as, you know, death). In most societies, many, if not all, of these events are marked with rituals.

Cern, Neutrinos, and Good Science

2011-09-25T16:35:00.001-07:00

So, you may have heard that scientists at CERN found Nuetrinos moving faster than the speed of light, something that should be impossible according to Einstein's Theory of Relativity. The thing is, it's not certain that they actually observed that, and for all the time that the media spends talking up the discovery, the researchers have been much less certain. They have stated that their work appears to show that the neutrinos can move faster than the speed of light, but they have released their data and have requested that other scientists confirm their results and try to replicate their experiments to make sure. While they did annoucne this to the press, it was after careful internal review of their data, and the simultaneously provided their data to the research community at large rather than claiming to have made a massive discovery and hiding or falsifying the data.

This is how good science works. Contrast this with the way that various other groups do it: creationists (both of the young-Earth and the Intelligent Design camps), global warming deniers, vaccine deniers, cold fusion enthusiasts, etc. etc. They find a study that seems to vindicate their position, don't look too closely at the study itself or the reasons why it was put together (media attention? money to be made?), declare that it is the "final word" on the subject (even when it clearly is not - Andrew Wakefield supporters anyone?), and then refuse to engage with critics in any meaningful way. How many times has someone announced that their idea will replace dominant scientific thought and overthrow "the dominant paradigm"...only to fade into the background.

By contrast, these scientists (whose work actually could overthrow - or at least greatly change - the dominant models) are requesting that others check their work and make sure that it is correct. They are well aware that they may have made a mistake, and they want someone to find it as they have failed to do so. They are, in short, well aware of their responsibilities, and are looking to make sure that they are not fooling themselves.

That is good science.

Racial Realism?

2011-09-23T10:00:00.000-07:00

I was recently introduced to a new, and rather disturbing, term - "Race Realists"The concept of human race was once considered something of a fixed and real biological thing - with three major divisions (representing peoples from Europe, Asia, and Africa), and then many sub-divisions among these.

Now, most scientists hold that it is more of a cultural construction - that is, the way that people are grouped into races (based on skin color, hair type, facial morphology, etc.) is due to flukes of history rather than significant or meaningful biological differences, and the way in which we divide people up into racial groups is based more on cultural norms and ideals than on any actual biological information or model. The traits used to divide people into racial categories are often essentially arbitrary and based on what were the common traits in a given region as of a few centuries ago. Those who argue that there is a real biological phenomenon at work still tend to point out that the variation between races tends to be A) a result of historic geography (and therefore fluid and changing) and B) have as an end-result a tendency to create what could be called statistical "clumps" of traits - traits are more common in some groups than in others, but can be expressed in groups not generally associated with those traits.

The "Race Realists" (I refuse to use that term without scare quotes, as there is nothing realistic about these people), by contrast, believe that race is both a real biological phenomenon (that is, they tend to deny that there is social construction at work here) and that it is a reliable predictor of various traits (though they tend to focus on intelligence). The information that the "Race Realists" tend to cite is a handful of studies that show IQ differences between different ethnic groups, and a mish-mash of biological and anthropological studies on racial differences as well as polls showing the attitudes of anthropologists and biologists regarding the concept of race as a biological reality. Oh, and it's not uncommon for them to simply lie and claim that the studies and polls reach conclusions that they don't actually reach (for a good description of the problems with one particular "Race Realists" views, go here...and as the keeper of that blog, a fellow anthropologist, points out, the technical term for what the "Race Realists" are doing is biological reductionism).

There are a number of problems with the concept of race as a biological fact, and most of these are addressed at the blog linked to above, but I want to talk about a few specific problems here, as well as the apparent reason why people adopt the "racial realist" stance.The basic problem with the "Race Realist" stance is that ethnicity is, by its very nature, fluid. To explain why, though, requires a bit of basic biological background.

When a group of people splinters off from a larger population and leaves to occupy a new area, they carry with them a sub-set of the genes of the larger population, and (assuming that they are relatively isolated from the larger population) their descendants will resemble the members of the splinter population more than the larger population that spawned the splinter group. This is the Founder's Effect. So, if a group of colonists from the Red-Headed League leaves Ghoofiland, then the descendants of these colonists will have a larger number of redheads amongst them than the population of Ghoofiland did - the descendants of the original colonists will not be entirely redheads, as they will have carried the genes for other hair colors as well, but there sure will be a butt-load more redheads among the colonists' descendants than among the people of Ghoofiland.

Another matter that comes into play is genetic drift. This is the tendency for certain traits to become more or less common within a population due to random sampling. So, let's say that brown eyes start to become more common among the colonists, after a few generations there is a colony that has a larger number of brown-eyed redheads than one would expect in Ghoofiland.

Then, of course, there's selection. Perhaps the colonists have occupied a location that is rife with insects that carry a particular disease, let's call it Rubenitis, and say that it results in a chronic condition that involves lethargy and speech impairments. Some of the colonists carry a gene that gives them some resistance to Rubenitis, allowing them to go about their daily business while some of their fellows are having to routinely lay in bed while having a hard time conveying information to those around them. The ones who don't have the chronic condition will have more time and luck finding mates, and therefore their genes will be spread at a faster rate than those without the resistance. So, even elements that aren't directly linked to disease resistance (say, skin tone - many of those with the resistance have a slightly bluish tinge to their skin) will increase in frequency.

After several generations, the colonists begin to look a bit different from the people of Ghoofiland. Given a long enough amount of time, they will look and behave (remember, culture is also changing in both populations) differently enough that they will be considered (and likely come to consider themselves) a completely different ethnicity, or "race" to use the term in the way that the "Race Realists" tend to. Are there biological differences between the groups? Yes, there are cosmetic differences such as frequencies in hair color, eye color, and skin tone, as well as functional differences such as frequencies in resistance to disease...but these are differences in the frequency of genes and in phenotypes (the observable expressions of those genes - two organisms with the same set of genes may have different behaviors or traits if the environment forces different gene expression), each population still has most of the same genetic material (allowing that some new genes may have occurred due to mutations in either population), just in different frequencies, and each lives in different environments resulting in the shared genes potentially being expressed in different ways.

So, we now have two different races of people. What happens when they meet, say because technological change allows rapid transportation between their different homelands? Well, if history is any guide, they may or may not come into conflict, but they will definitely interbreed. In interbreeding, they will change the gene frequencies (and hence appearance) of both populations. The interbreeding may be slow, but over time it will change both populations significantly. If there are social taboos against interbreeding, this will slow it further, but if history is any guide, it will not stop it.

When we look at the modern world, we see several populations that sprang from the same stock population in Africa, and eventually went on to populate the rest of the continents (okay, Antarctica excepted). Some of these populations are more closely related to each other than others, but we ultimately have the same basic process as described above, just played out ona grand scale of both geography and time. However, all human populations are still so similar to each other that we can, and do, have viable children with each other, and we are, slowly but surely, changing the gene frequencies in every part of the world. Racial categories that once made perfect sense due to the relative isolation of populations are now thought of as nationalities, because the populations are no longer isolated and are intermixed. While there are still likely to be definite phenological differences between someone plucked out of the middle of Europe and someone plucked out of the middle of Africa, the populations are converging at a slow but definite rate. That's not to say that there will, someday, be only one ethnicity, likely something will occur that will restore isolation (wars, societal collapse, etc.), but the populations that are isolated this time will be different than those from the last time, with different biological and cultural traits. In other words, even if they call themselves the same things, there will be different races from the standpoint of genetic and phenotypic variation.

And this is nothing new, one need only read some of the old Roman or Greek histories to see that there were once distinct populations throughout the Mediterannean that have since merged with other populations, creating new ethnicities. Race/ethnicity have always been fluid.Okay, so, even if there are biological races (which is debatable, as there is no clear way that one would decide when a person was a member of one race and not another, as we are talking about gene frequencies not markers of certainty - the very concept of "biological race" is murky at best), that doesn't mean that these represent any sort of distribution of traits such as intelligence.

That being said, is it possible that variations in genetic and phenotypic frequencies may also result in variations in intelligence? Maybe, but there are problems with that assertion. The definition of intelligence is a slippery term. We typically use it to mean the ability to aggregate data and engage in abstract thought in order to plan, process, and interact with the world. Seems straightforward, right? Humans are clearly more intelligent than hamsters. Humans are clearly more intelligent than dogs. But when we start comparing humans to each other, it gets muddy. Is a master chess player - clearly someone possessing a skill set requiring great intelligence as applied to mastering a rule-set and thinking ahead - more intelligent than a well-connected socialite - someone who has had to master a skill set requiring planning and thinking ahead in interacting with other people? To answer that question, we would have to decide that one set of skills requires a greater degree or type of intelligence than the other, which may not be the case. The chess player is likely better at dealing with systems and rules, but the socialite has to be able to engage in situations which are much less predictable and prone to sudden change. Both are displaying a high degree of intelligence, but applied in different ways, and possibly even different types of intelligence. So, is one more intelligent than the other? Hard to say, and the question might actually be completely meaningless when applied in this way. What's more, there is evidence that intelligence, in this sense, is somewhat malleable, and that someone can actually improve it by their actions and education. Also, there is strong evidence that intelligence is tied to issues such as nutrition, conditions during pregnancy, and early childhood, all of which are highly dependent on things not tied in to genes but to physical and social environment. So, your ethnicity may have much less to do with your intellectual capacities than do your parents level of affluence or poverty.

Most of the "Race Realists" like to cite studies showing IQ differences amongst ethnic groups. On the surface, the use of IQ seems ideal, as it measures a few specific skills and provides an overall quotient for the person taking the test. There are a few very serious problems, however. The first is that the simple act of taking a test - while most of us who attended schools in the U.S. and Europe don't think of it as such, test taking itself is a skill, and people can be trained to perform better on tests without actually knowing more about the subject of the test. So, if you compare a group of people who have attended affluent suburban schools with regular testing to people who have attended poorer inner-city schools with less regular or rigorous testing, you should expect the people from the suburbs to perform better not because they are necessarily more intelligent, but because they are more accustomed to (and trained for) taking tests.

Another problem is that the tasks and the questions within an IQ test are not devoid of their own cultural context - they reflect, from the actual tasks or questions chosen to the way that they are worded, the background of the people making the test (despite the best efforts of these individuals to eliminate this), and that means that the closer you are in social class and culture to the makers of the test, the less time and energy you are likely to spend trying to decipher what a question means are how a task should be performed. And when you start looking into studies of IQ across ethnicities, these types of issues tend to show up time and again, meaning that the results of the studies, while interesting and potentially of value, should not necessarily be taken to reflect a biological rather than social reality.

So, the case for biological race is a shaky one, and the claims that there are distinct intelligence difference between races even more so. So, why are the "Race Realists" even making these claims?

Well, many (probably most) of them are, of course, just good old-fashioned racists. They have heard that there is a new set of arguments that they can use to try to justify their existing bigotries, so they are jumping on them. But it's just a post-hoc rationalization for their old prejudices.

Others, though, are a bit more complicated. For basic historical reasons, there are a disproportionate number of people of African and Native American descent within the U.S. and Europe who are impoverished. There are many, admittedly often expensive, social programs aimed at trying to change this. If an argument can be made that the poor can not be helped, then that undercuts the programs and provides a rationalization for removing them altogether. Now, it should be said that the majority of people who oppose social programs do not engage in this sort of racist thinking - their oppositions are on philosophical or political grounds, and the ethnic make-up of the people affected by these programs doesn't enter into the matter for them (or if it does, it does so in a much more complex way than is often portrayed). However, there is a sub-set of people who are opposed to social programs who see using a notion of biological racial differences as a way of arguing against the usefulness of social programs, and therefore for eliminating the program - whether or not the impulse for grasping the argument is racist, the outcome most certainly is.

Now, many "Race Realists" would respond to what is written here by saying that, because of historical rather than scientific reasons, legitimate research into racial differences tends to be stifled and little reported. They might have a point, but their response is to exaggerate, misrepresent, and often lie about both the outcomes and the quality of the research that is available. You don't fill a gap in knowledge with ignorance and expect it to be respected.

Monitoring

2011-09-21T10:00:00.000-07:00

Monitoring is, easily, one of the least appealing tasks in standard field archaeology. A monitor watches construction or other ground disturbing activity in order to ensure that no archaeological materials are disturbed. At best, the job is mind-numbing boredom while you watch construction workers and equipment move about the project area, and find nothing. At worst, it's an exercise in frustration and resisting intimidation as you stop construction work because something has been found, and the foreman fails to understand that you are just the messenger and that if he wishes to negotiate with someone about continuing work it will be someone higher up the food chain than you. Depending on what kind of work you are doing, you may also have to dodge heavy equipment that moves at relatively high speeds while putting up with veiled (and sometimes not-at-all veiled) threats from construction workers who have got it in their heads that you want to stop them working.

Five years ago (it was five years ago this week that I complete my Masters degree!), I had thought that having an MA meant that I never had to do this particularly form of drudgery again. In fact, the first project I was on after finishing my degree involved me supervising (that is, sending out and receiving reports from) monitors without me ever having to do it myself.

However, I was soon disabused of the notion that I was free.

Most of the time, I am sent out because we have a people shortage - the field technicians are all away on other projects and we need someone to monitor right now. Other times, however, I am sent because an agency has decided that all monitors will be required to have an MA - which is unnecessary and tends to result in qualified people without degrees losing out on work.

The last two times I have monitored, it has been on ground that not only has no known archaeological sites, but (for various reasons) can be confidently said to not have any sites. In one of these cases, I had to monitor construction on fill soils imported from elsewhere - in other words, no intact archaeological deposits were even possible. In this latter case, most of the people with whom I came into contact A) knew that it was fill soil, and B) therefore assumed that I had somehow managed to force my client to hire me (how I would do this was never explained) and did not believe that my presence was an agency requirement that I would have been happy to not have fulfilled, and as such I had to put up with the daily asshattery as people made comments insinuating that I was just some gold digger along for the ride.

And all of this is a long winded way of saying that I am currently monitoring yet again, and that is why I am not writing as often as I would like. I will hopefully be writing on a regular basis again soon, but it looks as if the flood gates have been opened, and I will be quite busy, so please understand if I am not as prolific as normal.

Myth, Meaning, and Popular History

2011-09-15T10:00:00.000-07:00

From time to time, I find myself discussing Californian history with folks, and when the topic gets to the Spanish missions, it invariably results in me having to explain that the currently popular narrative (known in the field as the Black Legend) is an over-simplification, and should be assessed critically rather than taken at face value.

This typically results with the person with whom I am speaking assuming that I am an apologist for Spanish colonial activities, and that I think that the Spanish practices were good for the native peoples of California, which is odd as I am not an apologist and am better aware than most people about the impacts that the Spanish colonies had on native populations.

I also am familiar enough with the history, archaeology, and ethnography of my state to know that our view of what happened during the late 18th century and early 19th century in California is based more on legend and politics than on actual events. I have provided and overview of the effects of Spanish colonization before, so I'm not going to get into it in detail here. Suffice to say that while it did, without question, result in the decimation of the native populations, there were many factions amongst the Spanish, all behaving in different ways, and malice, good intentions, and obliviousness were all present in various measures amongst the European colonists. In other words, trying to simply paint the Spanish as a monolithic evil empire misses the very real, complex, and messy nature of the actual history.

However, it is rare that I can persuade someone to see it this way. Even when someone will agree that I am far more familiar than they with the documentation of the time period, and far more familiar with the ways that colonies have typically impacted native peoples the world over, they still refuse to accept that perhaps the mission system was a far more grey and complex institution than they usually want to believe. And very often, I will find a complex, well-thought out explanation of what was going on greeted with a strong sounding, but ultimately meaningless, response such as "well, there's alot of Indian graves in the missions!" - a fact that I had never denied, and for which I was trying to provide historical context.

I think that the reason for people's refusal to accept the complex realities of Spanish colonial activity are twofold:

1) Most people use history more as a mythology than as a description of the past. This is the reason why Religious Right groups want to claim that the founders were all Evangelical Christians, or many people want to believe that the term "rule of thumb" refers to a law allowing wife beating (when it does not), or many anti-immigration folks claim that Rome fell simply because it let too many foreigners in (it actually fell for a wide range of reasons, no single one doing the job on its own). History, when turned into mythology, allows us to orient ourselves, to justify our own position either by showing ourselves as being in line with great historical figures or else by contrasting ourselves with a brutal and evil past, often doing both with reference to different points in history. Regardless, in this way, history is less about factual accuracy and more about setting up good guys vs. bad guys, which leads to some very sloppy and muddled thinking about what actually occurred in our collective past.

2) Related to point #1, history is also viewed more as a story than as what actually occurred by much of the general public. This is why we tend to focus on the big moments or the major figures, and not on the trends and small details that often make all of the difference. For this reason, we want to see the single factor that caused Rome to fall; we want to believe that WWI was the only thing that killed the great empires (WWI did many of them in for good, but the reality is that the emerging nationalist movements and economic issues in the colonies had an effect even before the war); we want to believe that Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great fought and won wars, when the truth is that they led many individual soldiers who were, ultimately, the ones who fought and won (a general with no army is not a general, after all).

In this case, we can see the extraordinarily bad effects that colonization had on Native Californians, and we want to be caught up in the drama and see the native peoples purely as victims of a cruel and uncaring colonial power.

But reality never was black and white, and when we engage in this sort of thinking, we lose track of reality. Cackling, mustache-twirling villains are rare, but everyday people doing evil without being aware of it are common. When we forget this, we lose track of the fact that we, as a species, haven't changed. We are as capable of cruelty as the worst of the Spanish colonials, but we need to be aware of the real complexities of history to be able to keep that in mind and not do harm.

Impotent Shakespeare Rage

2011-09-12T17:18:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't written in a while...field work, as usual. Anyway, back to the usual nonsense...

When I was in college, I worked in a clothing store with a fellow named Steve. Steve was very much into the local community theater, and one day began talking about the plays attributed to William Shakespeare*. Knowing only a small amount about the plays, I tried to make conversation by bringing up the one thing that I actually was aware of. I asked him what he thought of the claims that the plays were not written by Shaksepare, but by someone else entirely.

His response: "Oh, I know that they were really written by him."

I asked how he knew, expecting that he would provide an argument in favor of the position. His response to this was simply to say "I'm a theater person. Ask any theater person, we just know that he wrote them."

I pressed him on the point, figuring that he was claiming that being involved in theater meant that he had developed a special technical knowledge and that some aspect of the plays from a technical standpoint was consistent with one writer. When I asked this, he simply repeated "I'm a theater person. Ask any theater person, we just know that he wrote them."

That was it. He was saying that because he was involved in community theater in California during the late 20th century, this somehow influenced whether or not some guy in 16th century England wrote a set of plays. The notion that one's current interests somehow influence historical happenings is, of course, absurd. Regardless of whether or not the claims of false authorship has any merit, one's current after-work activities are completely irrelevant to the question, unless you happen to be a time-traveling theater critic (in which case, why was he selling cut-rate suits at a mall in Modesto?).

Since then, I have often used the "I'm in theater, therefore I know" conversation as an example of how one can reach a perfectly reasonable conclusion ("Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him") via stupid and sloppy reasoning ("I know because I have magical theater powers!"). But it was not the last time I would have essentially the same conversation. It wasn't always about the authorship of the plays, often it has been about the merits of Shakespeare as a writer. Since I worked with Steve, I have both read many of Shakespeare's plays and seen many, many productions. And while I can kinda' get why many people enjoy them, they aren't precisely my cup of tea. It seems to shock some people to learn that I have no problem at all understanding the language**, and yet I have never been particularly impressed with most of the plays - I have enjoyed some of them, and many of them are intellectually interesting even if I don't particularly enjoy them, but I am not particularly taken with the plays in general and have always been a bit lost on what all of the fuss is about.

Kaylia agrees with me, though as someone who is far more interested in the process of writing than I am, her indifference towards Shakespeare seems to have turned to a bit of antipathy due to years of having people insist that she must bow before the altar of the man from Stratford-on-Avon. I think it's rather like my antipathy towards Heinrich Schliemann.

So, I was prepared for a bit of a blow-down fight when someone this weekend announced that Shakespeare was the greatest writer ever. I was proud to see, though, that Kaylia, while standing her ground and sticking to her guns, remained consistently reasonable, maintained a consistent set of critiques (which she backed up with evidence), and admitted that the reaction that one has to any piece of art being subjective, she was stating in part critiques based on evidence and, in part, a distaste based on her subjective experience.

The person favoring Shakespeare was not satisfied though, and kept pushing the notion that Shakespeare's plays weren't simply something important to her, but were objectively better plays than anything ever written by anyone else. She started by making a reasonable argument for Shakespeare as a craftsman, but when Kaylia and myself argued against that (successfully), she took the route of essentially just asserting that Shakespeare was the greatest without trying to support the claim. She even went so far as to claim that one's reaction to a piece of art was not subjective, but objective, and therefore her reaction to Shakespeare's plays was the same as everyone's reaction...which is just kind of absurd and easily disproven by the fact that I, for one, didn't have the same response as her (though she tried to claim that I did...which was, well, weird).

After everyone mellowed out, she admitted that she attaches a good deal of personal importance to Shakspeare's plays, and therefore hearing someone dismiss her idol got her hackles up. Fair enough, I think we've all done that at some time. It's what the folks on a podcast I like to listen to refer to as "impotent nerd rage" - the tendency to become upset when you feel that something that you care about, but which is ultimately inconsequential, is not being taken seriously (named "nerd rage" due to the fact that it is endemic in science fiction and fantasy fandom).

But it got me thinking, why Shakespeare? Not just in her case, not just in Steven's case, but why does Shakespeare get people so riled up?

Of course, the woman with whom I was arguing would claim that is is yet more proof of Shakespeare's brilliance...except that the people who are inflamed with passion are often just as likely to be Shakespeare detractors as fans.

I think that part of it may be the way that Shakespeare's plays and poems are introduced to us as children. We are told, time and again, that he was the greatest writer, and therefore those who find a connection and appreciation for his work tend to feel smarter, more sophisticated, and often are praised by teachers. Those of us who don't find ourselves appreciating them are informed time and again by smug people that we will grow to appreciate it when we become more sophisticated...with those smug bastards never actually bothering to make a measure of our actual level of sophistication, and simply assuming that we lack such qualities because we don't enjoy their favorite writer. So, right of the bat, there's a wedge driven in between those who appreciate his works, and are provided with the illusion that they are objectively right to enjoy it, and those of us who have a different reaction and find ourselves having to deal with the fans...of course, most people simply forget about it and go on oblivious (and I think that they might have the right idea in this case). Incidentally, the lisy of those who are detractors of Shakespeare is really quite distinguished.

I think, also, that there is another level at work here. There have been many, many great writers in the English language, some of them are even alive today, and these writers have left us with a vast and rich literature to enjoy. I, myself, find a good deal to admire and to think about and feel in the writings of Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald...but I react this way because I am me, and it would be absurd for me to expect others to react similarly. My friend Liberty - who is a professor of Renaissance Literature (and therefore about as sophisticated on the matter as one can be expected to be) enjoys Christopher Marlowe (who the woman with whom Kaylia and I were arguing dismissed as "objectively boring" - strangely rejecting the notion that boredom is a subjective reaction to a piece of art), though Libby also is also aware that this is in large part due to her own personal tastes and background. Kaylia, a published author and someone who holds a degree in literature (and therefore is, again, pretty damn sophisticated on the subject) finds much of value in contemporary fiction, and sometimes delves into 19th century fiction. But between the three of us, we just scratch the top of the iceburg of what is available to English-speaking readers.

Amongst these great authors, there are many different works which will convey meaning, enjoyment, and feeling to many different readers. Some are more influential than others (it's hard to imagine modern English literature without Charles Dickens, for example), and there are some who are under-rated (I think that there is a good deal of merit to Raymond Chandler's stories of corruption in early-mid 20th century Los Angeles, both for their literary value and for their importance as documents of how a period in history was viewed by those who lived through it). But the notion that there is any one, or even a group of, writers who will absolutely, without question, appeal to and be important to all readers is absurd. And yet, this is, to a large degree, what our modern education system pushes - the idea that Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald were objectively good and that if you do not appreciate them, you are somehow unworthy. This is further backed by the notion that a work somehow gains greater merit with age (and, arguably, with association with Europe), which is also rather a strange idea when you actually stop and really consider it. To call the notion silly would be to give it too much credit...and yet, it is an idea that pervades how literature is taught throughout both elementary and high school education.

I think there is one further part to the puzzle, though (though bear in mind that I am out of specialization here, and therefore my opinions should be taken just as that). It's what I (of course) call the archaeological problem. In archaeology, as you probably know, we deal with the material that survives depositional processes and is preserved...and most of what was used day-to-day didn't survive, so we are left fitting together bits and pieces to make sense of the past. Literature is in a similar state. The printing press wasn't invented until the 15th century, and so important works were copied by hand, resulting in few books being produced. Even after the printing press came into use, the costs of printing remained high for some time, further impacting what was printed. We tend to assume that what was printed was inherently important, and there is some truth to this, but the reasons why it was considered important often had alot to do with the quirks of society (and of individual printers...and those who would pay printers), and as such might not always make sense to a modern person. Add to this that even with the printing press, print runs were small by modern standards, and you have a condition in which is is pretty much guaranteed that a large chunk of what was printed is now lost to us.

So, we are left with an incomplete record of our literature. Were there writers whose work would have left modern readers astounded at their beauty and value? Maybe. We have no way of knowing. What little was written down by hand, or printed on early presses, suggests that there likely were such artists...but we really don't know. We also have a notion that certain authors (Shakespeare is a big one, though this is true of others as well) invented modern literature (including prose, poetry, and drama) out of whole cloth, when they were not writing in a vacuum and were, no doubt, influenced by others just as they would in turn influence others. It makes for a situation where it looks like there was a sudden creation of modern English literature, when what we are probably seeing is a snapshot in time where we simply don't have the advantage of the previous photos in the sequence***. Yes, we have bits and pieces from prior to the 15th century, but it is limited in such a way as to make the issue rather confused. It's as if someone were not allowed to read or see plays, but only watch films. Such a person would be convinced that Orson Welles created drama...which he, of course, did not do****.

Regardless, I have to admit that I have long since gotten rather tired of the cult of Shakespeare. I can appreciate his work intellectually, and I even enjoy some of the comedies, but the notion that he was the greatest writer (or, even more narrowly, playwright) ever to have lived is, frankly, a claim based more on wishful thinking and fandom than on any actual evidence.

*I say attributed for a few reasons. The first is that there is a long-running dispute about whether or not he actually wrote them, though I have no idea what the strength of the evidence regarding that claim actually is, and I care even less (despite what is written int he following sentence). The second is that there is also apparently some discussion in scholarly circles regarding the degree to which various plays were tampered with post-writing. the third is that there is fairly strong evidence that portions of at least one play, and possibly others for all I know, were plagiarized from other sources and therefore weren't the works of William Shakespeare to begin with. On all of these points, I remain agnostic because I don't know enough about them to know how much, if any, merit the various claims have, and frankly, I care too little to go researching.

**One of the most irritating things that people say to me when I state that I am not so wild about Shakespeare's plays is "well, once you get used to the language, you'll understand it and then you'll see the appeal!" I never had a problem with the language, as dialects of English go I've always found Elizabethan stage-talk pretty damn easy to comprehend. Likewise, I have seen many productions by different groups with different cast and crew of the plays that I haven't much cared for, so don't claim that it's that I haven't seen the right production...if the only thing in common between the productions that I have seen is the script, then it's a fair bet that it's the script with which I have a problem.

***Think of it another way - on the show Seinfeld, the character of George is quite a loser...but after meeting a new woman he discovered that if he claims to have done in a week what had actually taken him ten years (get a job, get an apartment, make friends, etc.), he looked impressive. I think there's a similar thing at work here, where we suddenly see more of what is going on and assume therefore that more is being invented when it is, more likely, simply being recorded for the first time.

****Though he might have claimed otherwise.

Monitoring and Pondering

2011-09-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

I apologize for not posting so far this week. I have been monitoring construction in Fresno County, and working 10-12 hour days, so I have not had much time to write.

However, this monitoring project has got me thinking about the way that we mitigate impacts to cultural resources, including archaeological sites, and wondering about what is and what is not necessary. In this case, this is a location that had been surveyed for archaeological sites prior to the beginning of construction, and nothing was found. After the initial surveys, a few additional surveys were performed to spot check a few areas about which the regulatory agency issuing the permits for this project was concerned. Again, nothing was found. The area is located on the floor of the San Joaquin Valley, away from water sources and not in or near any known travel corridor that the people of the area would have used. In other words, the location was unlikely to hold any archaeological sites (in the professional jargon, we call this a low sensitivity area). Nonetheless, the permit-issuing agency either advocated or agreed to archaeological monitoring as condition of the construction permit. And I am left wondering why.

The project proponent has a good track record for protecting archaeological sites and environmental resources, so this is likely not a case of the agency not trusting them to do what they are supposed to do (report any sites that they encounter during construction). The area is, as noted, of low sensitivity, so it's probably not a case of the agency being concerned that archaeological sites are likely to be hit. So, I am left wondering, why is there a monitoring requirement?

This is one of those odd cases where I can think of many reasons why this requirement exists, both bad and good reasons, and yet there is nothing in the documentation that explains the decision. It makes it especially awkward as, being the monitor on-site, many of the construction personnel seem to think that I should explain and/or justify my presence, and yet I would not have put a monitoring requirement in place were it my decision - again, no known resources coupled with a low sensitivity, I have a hard time justifying monitoring - so I simply tell the people who ask that it is a permit requirement and refuse to elaborate further. But, again, if the justification were written into the documents, then I would be able to make a better explanation.

Cultural Lenses and Subjectivity

2011-08-25T10:00:00.000-07:00

One of the things that fascinates me is the tendency that all of us have to project the present of our culture onto other cultures and other points in time. This is, perhaps, most obvious when we see a politician claiming that the people of another nation want the very same political structure as the politician's nation, or that some aspect of modern culture (be it gender roles, the modern mode and trappings of marriage, the nature of our current economic system, etc.) is an eternal and fixed part of humanity and not the fluid and transient thing that it actually is. Similarly, many of the counter-narratives that are developed do a similar thing, projecting the struggles and points of contention of the modern U.S. and Europe onto the rest of the world and the past (viewing all past human societies through the lens of Marx's writings, or through modern political feminism, or through the lens of 21st-century fundamentalist Christianity).

It is often less obvious when historians and anthropologists do so, not because we don't engage in many of the same behaviors, but because we are very good at talking as if we are not. We layer our readings of the past with views gained from our own experience in the present, and then fold these within theoretical models (themselves derived at least in part from our experience of the present) and present them as if they were objective readings of another time and place. A common post-modern critique of mid-20th century archaeological models of hunter gatherer behavior is that these models often required the behavior of hunter-gatherers to conform to post-Adam Smith models of capitalism-steeped economics. And the argument was, to a degree valid, though those making it almost immediately began trying to build new models based on other 19th through 20th century social and political ideas thus proving that they really weren't as different from "the positivists" (as they often labelled the more traditional scholars) as they would have liked to believe.

This tendency is understandable. Human behavior is complex, often downright bizarre, and if we are going to make sense of other cultures we have to find some way in which we can enter the mindset of the people of that culture. As a result, we are forced to try to find something that we either have in common with them or else find some way to boil down some aspect of their culture into an understandable model or formula. Beyond that, we are human just as they are/were, and therefore have the same physical and cognitive capabilities, and therefore there should be similarities that we can understand. The problem lies not in finding similarities that allow us to understand others, but in making sure that these similarities are real and not the product of our failure to understand important and fundamental differences between cultures.

There are many ways to separate illusory similarities or explanation from real ones. One of my personal favorites, due of course to my training, is that of hypothesis testing. You suggest a possible similarity or formulaic way to expressing or explaining people's behaviors or culture, and you then begin to determine what testable conditions will result if what you are looking at is actually true. For example, there is a popular body of scholarship in archaeology referred to as Optimal Foraging Theory, and typically applied to hunter-gatherer cultures. It's fairly complex, but boiled down to it's essence, it holds that people will balance the amount of work required to obtain food vs. the amount of nutrition available from those foods, trying to maximize the nutrition (measured in any number of ways: calories, grams of protein, difficult to get vitamins, etc.) while minimizing the amount of work necessary*. By looking at the food remains found in archaeological sites or documenting the foods brought in by groups studied ethnographically, we can evaluate the success of a particular optimal foraging model for predicting and rendering comprehensible an aspect of human behavior.

Optimal foraging models are successful, but only to a point. There are many foods that people pursue that are of little nutritious quality, or may be highly nutritious but are so labor intensive to get that the gain is nullified, and yet people seek to obtain them. So, using what is essentially an economic model to make another culture comprehensible only works to a certain degree. You then have to look into the specifics of that culture top see why the model doesn't work all the way. And when you start looking for this, you will quickly find that you are alternately stuck between trying to find analogies to your own time and/or culture to make sense of behaviors, or else simply confused by what you are seeing and thinking that the people who you are studying are flat-out nuts.

Ultimately, we have to realize two things: 1) we will never understand others as they understand themselves (and vice-versa) and there will therefore always be room to modify and challenge our conclusions about other peoples and other times; 2) all of our understandings of other people will be, to some degree, dependent on our own position as viewers/interpreters. As a result, we should be wary of holding our views of other times and cultures as being anything but tentative and subject to change. But that doesn't mean that these other people are completely alien or incomprehensible to us. Again, we share our biology with them, and much of human behavior and human nature derives from our biology, however much we might like ot cling to romantic notions otherwise. Moreover, when we realize that we have projected ourselves into others, we have been given a reality check and shown a place where we erred, which means that anything and everything doesn't go. If we are open to having our beliefs about others challenged by our observations of them, if we don't simply succumb to the confirmation bias and ignore disconfirming information, we can move closer to the truth of reality, even if we never quite reach it.

A vocal minority of post-modern scholars and their acolytes outside of the academy claim that the fact that we can never have full and true objectivity means that we must reject the notion of objectivity altogether, even as an idealized goal. Robert Solow (as quoted by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz) has said that "that is like saying that as a perfectly aseptic environment is impossible, one might as well conduct surgery in a sewer." It's a good point - just because you can't remove all of your stumbling blocks and biases doesn't mean that you shouldn't get rid of as many as you can, while committing yourself to the process of removing others as you find them.

*This, incidentally, is one of the models often criticized for being based on modern capitalism. Note the similarities between the basic concept underlying the model, and the notion of a market supporting prices based on supply of a commodity.

The VA, Funerals, and Religion

2011-08-24T16:00:00.000-07:00

So, a group of legislators and clergy are trying to force the families of all people who die in military service to observe Christian funeral rites, whether the dead or their families are Christians or not.

Read more here.

Of course, they are framing this as them "standing up an protecting the rights of Christian soldiers against the godless commie liberals!" But the fact of the matter is that Christian families/servicemen are free to have Christian funerals on federal land. They always have been. They have to request them, though, just as Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, and members of every other religion have to request funerals that conform to their religions so that they don't have the views of another religion pushed onto them during the funeral. It is perfectly legal, and nobody is trying to stop it.

Contrary to what these people claim, religion isn't banned during military funerals. However, the families of the deceased are not forced to have the rites or rhetoric of another person's religion thrust upon the funeral of their family member.

If you look at what's going on, these legislators are actually pushing for rules that will make a religious ceremony the default for all military ceremonies, and allow VA staff and volunteers to push religion during funerals even if it is against the wishes of the deceased or their family.

This isn't an attempt to protect Christians, it's an attempt to force everyone else to accept a specific form of religion. It'll fail when it comes to court (if the legislation even passes), and the Veteran's Administration is doing the right thing in resisting it. But, as is so often the case, despite all of the rhetoric, this isn't about standing up for religion in general or Christianity in particular, it's about domination and beating down the people who are not members of the dominant religion. It's bullying, and nothing more, and if the legislators and clergy had any sort of a sense of shame or decency, they would provide and apology and back away. But, of course, that isn't going to happen.

This is dispicable, callous bullying.

Of course, it is also unlikely that any rule requiring religious funerals against the wishes of the deceased and their family will actually stand up in court, so this is also a case where those backing it who aren't purely delusional are clearly taking up time (and the tax-payers money) to grandstand and engage in divisive politics, which is, frankly, evil and destructive.

Edit: As I searched for more information on this, I kept coming across hysterical claims that the VA was banning mention of religion at military funerals. This is not true. Religious services are allowed for families who wish to have them. The VA does not allow VA staff or volunteers to push religion into funeral services where the family of the deceased does not want them. Again, the existing rules are about people having the funeral that is appropriate to their family, and NOT having a government agency push or prohibit religious rites on those who don't want them. The people wanting a change are not trying to allow religious funerals, they are already allowed, they are trying to force them on people who don't want them.

A Short Science Fiction Story

2011-08-23T12:30:00.000-07:00

In the last moments of my life, I recalled my conversation with Dr. Johnson regarding the time machine. He had explained that the machine could travel through time, but not space. So I could go forward or backward in time, but would remain in the same location. Johnson had indicated the platform on which the machine stood, and said "this is the very height, down to the millimeter, of the land at this location prior to the construction of this facility."

He was proud of the machine, of the scientific work behind it, and, strangely, of having built the simple wooden platform. The USAF had sent me to be his test pilot, and I was getting ready to see this little corner of Nevada as it was in 1850, though I doubt it would be too terribly different from what it was now, other than the lack of pre-fab standardized government-issue buildings.

I thought of this after the laboratory had vanished, and was replaced with a starscape and a darkness more complete than anything I had ever seen on earth. I thought of this as the capsule exploded around me, it's internal air supply forcing it's relatively weak seems to break against the vacuum. And I completed my thoughts of this conversation as space sucked the air from my lungs and I could feel my eyes turning to ice.

Note: I have always been puzzled by science fiction stories that portray traveling forward or backward in time while remaining in the same spot on Earth as travel through space but not time. The planet, Solar System, and even galaxy are always moving. So, if you were to travel through space but not time, you wouldn't end up in the same point on earth but in a different year. Statistically speaking, you would most likely end up in the vacuum of space.

At Long Last, Publication!

2011-08-23T10:00:00.000-07:00

So, finally, the paper that I had been writing and revising and re-writing for the last two years has seen the light of day.

Check it out!

My paper has the scintillating title of Exchange Links between the Coastal and Inland Chumash, and if you are interested in southern and central Californian archaeology, I hope you'll find it interesting...if you're not, it's guaranteed to be better than Sominex and have fewer side effects.

I was also informed by my boss that a paper she is writing for presentation at a conference will have me listed as a co-author as it will be based on a document that I originally wrote. So, on the whole, I'm doing okay on the "sharing information with my peers" front.

It's an important thing to me to do this. So much of the information that CRM archaeologists produce never gets any real circulation, languishing in government offices or regional information centers but unknown except to those who find it during a record search (and, in my experience, rarely read these documents) that one can reasonably wonder why we are bothering. Publishing papers synthesizing our results and speaking at public and professional conferences is probably the best way out of this particular pickle.

Anyway, I'm finally published, will soon have another paper at a conference, and am already working on another (hopefully to be published) paper.

Archaeological Cultures

2011-08-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

A while back, a friend of mine was reading about the Clovis Culture and asked a pretty good question: why do we call it a "culture" when what we are really looking at is the tools, and the small sub-set of stone tools which preserve, and not other things that we would generally consider to be important to culture: religion, language, family organization, etc.

It's an excellent point, and one that begs the question of just what, precisely, culture is, at least archaeologically speaking.

Archaeologically, we use the term "culture" to describe related artifacts and groups of artifacts the consistently appear in a given place and date to within a given range of dates (so, the Clovis Culture appears in North America and dates to about 13,000 years ago and consists of sets of artifacts that include the distinctive Clovis Points. Based on the similarities of tools and other artifacts, it is generally assumed that the different sites at which these artifacts are found are related to the same or similar lifeways (the same tools=similar tasks, the thinking goes), and as such it makes sense to groups these sites and their assemblages together.

The archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, who is often considered one of the popularizers of the use of the term "culture" in this way, wrote:

We find certain types of remains - pots, implements, ornaments, burial rites and house forms - constantly recurring together. Such a complex of associated traits we shall call a "cultural group" or just a "culture". We assume that such a complex is the material expression of what today we would call "a people".

One problem is that these perceived cultures may be partially a product of the archaeological record rather than simply direct evidence of actual cultural groupings or peoples. For example, the Clovis Point seems to represent the remains of a highly mobile nomadic culture that engaged in, and likely was reliant on, big game hunting. And likely this was the case for most of the early American peoples. But there are numerous artifacts used by people that simply don't preserve, or at least rarely preserve, in the archaeological record, and so we are not seeing many of the tools, art, social signifiers, and other objects that would have been vital to the day-to-day lives of the Clovis peoples, and that's not even getting into the intangibles such as language, religious beliefs, social organization, etc. Some of this information can be teased out of the remains to varying degrees, but not all of it, and never with 100% confidence. We're putting together a jigsaw puzzle with several of the pieces missing. For this reason, many archaeologists refuse to use the term "culture" to describe the artifact groupings, opting instead for more accurately descriptive terms such as "technology-complexes."

Of course, the degree to which archaeology can describe an actual culture varies greatly. With the Clovis complex, we know little other than that they all used similar spear points and appeared to make extensive use of large animals for food and tool material. We can actually derive quite a bit of information from that, and speculate on quite a bit more, but there is so much that we can't know that it is fair to say that we may just as well be looking at many different cultures spread throughout North America who all used similar projectile points as to say that they were all related to a "stock" culture and shared a good deal more than hunting practices and nomadic land use patterns. Some may have been more reliant on hunting than others, there were probably multiple dialects, maybe even many different languages, and if it turns out that Clovis tool-making methods spread to many different groups of people already in North America (much as we know that later tool-manufacturing methods spread in the Americas), then it is entirely possible that there were multiple languages, religions, and regionally highly-adapted lifeways. In other words, Clovis may represent a solution to a common problem rather than a common culture.

By contrast, the Maya had such distinctive tools, architecture, and writing that we can say with confidence that there was a shared culture, likely a shared ethnicity, amongst the people living in Mayan sites. Even there, there is likely variations (some of them possibly quite important) that we are simply unaware of, but it is more reasonable to talk about "Mayan Culture" than "Clovis Culture." And these are two extreme ends of a spectrum.

Another problem is that artifacts that are perceived as being separate are sometimes actually closely related, and those perceived as being closely related might, on further analysis, prove to be separate. For example, in reading archaeology journals published in the 1920s through the 1950s, it's common to see certain types of artifacts grouped together as being part of the same "culture", distinct from other groupings of artifacts. After the 1950s, as radiocarbon dating became common, it was not unheard of for some of these "cultures" to turn out to be from the same time, not just the same place, and likely represent the remains not of separate cultures, but of separate work places or task sites belonging to the same group of people. While this wasn't too common, it did occur, and is a lesson to be kept in mind.

In the end, talking about archaeological "cultures" can often be nothing more than what my professors referred to as "confusing people with pots" - assuming that the recovered artifacts are more strongly indicative of the people who used them than they really are. If you are reading about archaeology, or watching a documentary, be aware of how the term "culture" is used - is it used to describe a group of people who are known to have shared a common identity - such as the Maya - or is it used to describe a set of artifacts without regard to how closely the people using them were related. It gets used frequently in both ways, but the two uses are not interchangeable.

Comparing the Primitives?

2011-08-17T10:00:00.000-07:00

Several years back, I was at a panel discussion on Native American involvement in cultural resources management at the Society for California Archaeology's annual meeting. During the meeting, a woman on the panel, who was herself a member of a Native Californian group, said that she was offended at the tendency that anthropologists had to compare hunter-gatherer and early farmer groups. As she put it "I see what you guys are saying - you're saying 'let's compare the primitive people!'"

Did she have a point?

Well, yes and no.

During the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, there was a tendency for many anthropologists to view all human society as being on a linear path from the most "primitive" (mobile foragers) to the most "advanced" (usually considered to be the society of one of the European nations, sometimes conceived of European culture as a whole). In this sort of framework, comparison of two groups of people who made and used stone tools, who engaged in hunting and gathering as a resource base, and who spoke a non-written language would have been viewed as a comparison of two primitive cultures. And, it must be said, some of the writing produced during this era reflects the chauvinistic attitudes of the European and European-descended anthropologists.

However, even during this time, groups were not compared to each other because they were viewed as primitive, per se. They were compared based on similarities of resource base, tool production technology, and social organization. So, groups were not being compared because anthropologists wanted to "compare the primitives*, however arrogant the anthropologist might be. They were being compared because it was (and still is) thought that comparison of groups of people who live in similar ways might yield information about humanity in general.

If there are four different groups of people who all live in temperate zones, are mobile foragers, use similar tools, but some are matrilocal (men go to live with their wive's families/bands) while some are patrilocal (women go to live with their husband's families/bands), then this differences stands out in stark relief when compared to the similarities. Once you find this difference, you can begin looking for the source of the difference: is it essentially random chance? Is there some social or ecological factor at work favoring one pattern over another? Is there evidence for any of the groups as to the age of the practice?

Once one finds some answers (or, more likely, possible answers) as to why there are differences in patrilocality vs. matrilocality, it is then reasonable to look to other cultures which also share many of the similarities, and examine the reasons (or, again, possible reasons) for their practices regarding how couples and families organize. This may then provide information regarding basic human organization which can be applied more broadly.

So, in this sense, no, she was wrong, it wasn't just a case of "let's compare the primitives." Most of us who do this sort of comparative work don't even think of these people as "primitive", we usually think of groups of people as being adapted to different environments, and issues such as the alleged sophistication of a group of people don't even come into play. There are utilitarian reasons for comparing groups of people that have nothing to do with passing judgement on them.

At the same time, there is a reluctance to compare peoples who are quite different from each other, even though this might yield interesting results. Comparing the role of a chief within a community of eastern Native Californian farmers with the role of a senator in ancient Rome, for example, yields some interesting similarities: in both cases, there is someone who yields influence more often than outright power; both are reliant on the support of the people over whom they have power or influence in the way that a king, for example, is not; both need to exercise eloquence and patience in using their power in a way that a dictator does not; and both are likely to come from a lineage that produces people of their rank and often have been groomed for their position since childhood. Yet it is rare - not unheard of, but rare - to see someone who is researching complex chiefdoms in the American West look to Republican Rome for examples of the development and maintenance of power and authority. There are many reasons for this, but the fact remains that comparing two such vastly different cultures and finding the similarities can often reveal important information about common aspects of human behavior and culture that seem to be true across time and cultures, and might be hard-wired into us as a species.

In this sense, she sort-of has a point. The lack of comparisons across such vastly different cultures is due, in part, to the fact that anthropological archaeologists and ethnographers often have only the most limited understanding of the peoples who are usually treated by the field of history rather than anthropology. But another reason is that we are often so attached to our own narrow focus that we fail to see that there are lessons to be drawn from outside of our own sphere. In this sense, while we don't tend to think that we are "comparing the primitives" that is the effect of so much of what we do.

It should be noted, though, that this is not an absolute. Jean Arnold of UCLA has studied modern North American households with the intention of trying to apply information from them to prehistoric peoples the world over. Stuart Smith has drawn from the interaction of the Native Americans and the Russian outposts in North America in developing his ideas for how Egypt interacted with their neighbor Kush (I take issue with how Smith makes his comparisons, and with the material that he often cites from the Americas, but at least he's trying to do something interesting and worthwhile). As early as the 1960s, James Dietz argued for the study of historic Europeans and their descendants in the Americas as a way of generating theoretical models that could be applied to prehistoric archaeology.

Nonetheless, whatever the intention, I can understand why she would feel that there was an attitude that her ancestors were "primitive". I think that the situation is more complicated than that, but I can understand the feeling.

*Well, most anthropologists weren't doing it for this reason. There were, of course, some who were acting out of a desire to promote their own culture or nation by belittling others.

Another Hotel

2011-08-15T19:54:00.000-07:00

So, I'm in the field again. This time we're working in the Sierra Nevadas, performing surveys and site record updates for a transmission line that stretches through a rather remote area of a national park. Thankfully, we're not camping - after a day spent working, a shower and hot meal for which you didn't have to build a fire are nice - but we are staying in a rather remarkably unremarkable hotel. It is, as far as I can tell, clean enough, and the location is convenient for our work. However, it is a the lone building for several miles in any direction, and is extremely isolated, meaning that we have little in the way of cell phone coverage (which doesn't seem like too big a deal until you consider that I have to be able to receive and send phone calls both with family members and with co-workers - being in the field on this doesn't mean that I am not still responsible for other projects), and the internet service, while obviously existing, is poor. It took me nearly an hour to upload this entry, which is a process that can normally be completed in under a minute.

So, the point of this is that while I had hoped that the relative isolation of our lodgings would allow me to actually write entries and post them, I will be able to write them but may not be able to post them. I will, however try to update as I can.

In the meantime, consider that I am a room barely large enough for the bed, in which it is impossible to use the shower without ramming one's knees into the toilet, and where there are a few odd stains in places where, frankly, I don't think there should be any. It's yet another hotel adventure for you to consider should you ever start thinking of archaeology as a glamorous career.

Beads, Morals, and History

2011-08-12T10:00:00.000-07:00

One of the things that both fascinates and frustrates me about how people within the United States view the history of European interactions with Native Americans is how the stories invariably end up being streamlined, simplified, and mythologized either in order to assign blame or to teach a moral lesson or to tell a story of racial superiority (and this goes both ways). The reality of culture contact situations goes out the window to be replaced with a storybook description that replaces the messy realities with a black-and-white tale of right vs. wrong.

If you grew up in the U.S., you have most likely heard that Manhattan Island was bought from the local Native American inhabitants for $24 worth of beads (usually described dismissively as "trinkets") (though the Straight Dope makes a compelling argument that in modern terms, a price between $70 and $80 would be more accurate). The tale of this 1626 purchase is usually told as part of a story about how the Native Americans were taken advantage of by the European settlers. It is, in many ways, the emblematic story of the ways in which crafty European settlers callously took advantage of naive native peoples who weren't sophisticated enough to understand the "wily white man's ways". The story is basically bullshit. Oh, the narrative is true, as far as it goes, a European settler did provide beads and other materials worth a relatively small sum of money in European terms to a group of local people in return for possession of the island. However, the notion that the Native Americans were unsophisticated bumpkins who were easily hoodwinked when a white guy shoved some shiny stuff at them is nonsense - the basic facts of the story may be accurate, but the moral of the story is essentially ignorant and racist nonsense based on the notion that non-Europeans are a bunch of simpletons. While the tellers of this story may be sympathetic to the plight of the Native Americans, they nonetheless are also astoundingly condescending.

First, it should be considered that much is made of the apparently small monetary value of what was traded, and the fact that it is usually described, dismissively, as "trinkets." The implication being that the people of Manhattan Island were so foolish that they would take a bunch of gaudy junk to be something of real value, and in so doing allow themselves to be taken advantage of. However, in cultures where money has not yet been developed, it is very common for exotic trade goods to mark the possessor as someone with authority and social cache, and the distribution of these trade goods can bring tremendous influence and wealth to the people who trade them away or hand them out. What might have been the equivalent of a cheap Kmart bracelet to the European economy may have been the equivalent of designer platinum jewelry when placed within the Manhattan economy. The economies of the European settlers (based on money and goods generated as per the structures of that society) was so radically different than the economy of the Native Americans that they encountered (where social prestige and ownership were often formulated in radically different ways) that to compare the two isn't a matter of comparing apples to oranges, but is more akin to comparing apples to monitor lizards.

Just as the European settlers were doing what made sense within their culture, it is likely that the native Manhattanites were doing what made sense within their culture. Whatever the motives, interests, or attitudes of the Europeans, the people of Manhattan were not simpletons, and the story of how Manhattan was sold for a handful of useless shinies leaves out 50% of the story. It's rather like claiming that the 1850s placer miners who moved into California were "travelling great distances just to get a few handfuls of sand*" - well, the sand contained gold which, within the miner's society, was of tremendous value and therefore their actions made sense.

There is another variant on the tale which holds that Peter Minuit, the man who made the transaction, was himself fooled by a group of Canarsie who were trading on the island but did not reside there and therefore did the 17th century equivalent of selling Minuit the Brooklyn Bridge. This variant re-casts the story not as "the mean old white man exploits the natives" but re-creates it as a trickster tale in which the "clever natives exploit the mean but foolish white man." Again, there may be some truth to this story - it was not unheard of for Native American groups to sell land multiple times to multiple Europeans - but even this one takes the basic facts (and potential facts, as it is unclear whether or not the people who sold Manhattan actually had a right to do so under their own system of property) and attempts to turn it into a story that is, quite simply, probably not an accurate reflection of what, precisely, was happening.

This version of the story is charming, but while it might be historically accurate (there is alot of uncertainty about the native people's side of things in most of these colonial histories, especially those from before the 19th century) it tends to be told in a way that recasts the story not as a historic narrative but, again, as a morality tale in which the villain is gotten the better of. The problem is that this reading requires that the complexities of culture contact situations again be jettisoned in favor of a simple and appealing narrative, so that even if the narrative is more-or-less accurate, the reader is likely to misunderstand important aspects of the situation, making evaluation of events surrounding the event difficult if not impossible. It precludes the ability to ask why Minuit dealt with this particular group and not another (basic racism - they all look alike? Disiniterest in local social practices? Misunderstanding of settlement patterns?) and it fails to account for the cultural context in which the native people were participating (were they trying to rip Minuit off? Were they engaging in an acceptable practice that had different meanings for them than for the settlers?).

A version of the story that may be more accurate, or at least seems to make a bit more sense to someone who knows about the economies of hunter-gatherers and non-state farmers, is described here. This variant holds that the Native people of the area didn't recognize land ownership, in that it was a foreign concept to how they structured their economies, and that they thought that what Minuit was doing was giving gifts with the intention of securing the right to share the resources and land on the island with the people who lived there. This is somewhat consistent with the way in which many societies view land - the resources on the land may be controlled or owned but the land itself is something there independent of the people who use or occupy it.

However, even this is an over-simplification. It assumes, first and foremost, that the people of Manhattan Island didn't comprehend that the Europeans did have a concept of land ownership - and they may very well not have understood this, but it's difficult to say based on the nature of the ethnohistoric record. Indeed, if Minuit "did business" with the wrong people as described in the previous version of the story, this implies that the local peoples did understand European land ownership to some extent and may have taken advantage of that. Additionally, while many groups do not have a concept of land ownership, they often do have a concept of territorial control - you may not own the land, but you'll damn well keep people who don't belong there from using the resources on it. This is different from owning the land in some rather significant ways, but for the purposes of making sense of this chapter in history it is similar enough to make the question of whether or not the land was sold rather murky. Again, while it is possible that the people of Manhattan may not have comprehended the European concept of land ownership, to simply assume that they did not because it was not a part of their own tradition is to assume, again, that they are simpletons incapable of understanding the ways of another culture. Tellings of this version of the story rarely, if ever, seem to discuss why the people of Manhattan might not have understood this aspect of European culture, they simply take it as given that these people were somehow incapable of comprehending it. Again, this is astoundingly condescending.

What is clear is that, over the next two centuries, the people who had once lived on Manhattan were driven out, and that a city scape that it is now impossible to even imagine as a wooded island gradually appeared. Injustices committed by European settlers - both against native peoples and against each other - are well documented, and I am not trying to create an European apologetic or a politically motivated history. What I am trying to do is point out that the stories that we learn about the interactions between European settlers and local native peoples are often modified or embellished by a desire to turn the dirty business of culture contact (and often cross-cultural aggression) into a morality tale that doesn't quite match reality, and that our readings of the past are typically informed more by our assumptions than by the facts of what happened.

*I know that some pseudo-intellectual, on reading that, will sniff and say "well, they were just looking for sand, because gold doesn't actually mean anything!" This person is just as guilty of ignoring the cultural context of the miners as someone who dismisses the "trinkets" given to the people of Manhattan island is of ignoring their cultural context. In other words, if you're the person who is saying "well, they were just after sand", stop being so fucking pretentious!

Waiting for Notice

2011-08-10T10:00:00.000-07:00

It's been an odd few weeks. I spent most of last week writing reports, the week before that writing bids and proposals for potential jobs, and this most recent Friday we got approval to start work on several field projects.

Sort of.

See, you can get your contracts approved, but some clients want you to clear with them before you hit the field. They do so for various reasons, some of them good and sensible, some of them betraying control freak behavior. Regardless of whether they have a good reason or not, it means that you have to wait to hear from your client sometimes before you hit the field. When your client is able to respond quickly to requests, this is not a problem. When your client is him/herself buried under other work, this can result in you waiting. And so I was sitting about twiddling my thumbs waiting to find out if I could start doing field logistics until today, when I was finally given notice to proceed on the preliminary part of a project. Hopefully, come tomorrow, I will have a notice to proceed on the field portion and will be able to start next week.

On the up side, one of the higher-ups at my company pulled me aside today and informed me that I should let them know when I needed to be home to take care of personal matters, and then explained everything that they have set up to help me out should that be necessary. This was...unexpected. My current employer has a reputation for fair treatment of employees, but this was beyond that. One of the reasons that I left my last job was because the travel demands of work interfered with my family life, with medical treatment that I needed, and with me just keeping any sort of normal sane personal schedule. To be essentially ordered to maintain a good personal life was a delightful shock. It makes me feel that, troubles with Fresno aside, I made a good choice in coming to this employer.

Osteology Software Buying Blues

2011-08-03T10:00:00.000-07:00

When I was an undergraduate, I took a class on human skeletal biology. The class was difficult*, and I was always on the lookout for anything that might help me out. To that end, one day, I headed to the local Software Etc. store**, thinking that, seeing as they were in a college town and did stock some educational software, they might have something that would be helpful.

I walked in, approached the counter, and explained to the guy standing there (the employee, not some random customer trying to buy his software) that I was an anthropology student, and was looking for educational software that covered human anatomy in general, and bone in particular.

the guy behind the counter - I am tempted to say "kid behind the counter" but he wouldn't have been much younger than me back then - snorted, and said "they weren't human."

A bit confused by his answer, I said something extraordinarily witty, like "huh?"

In about as condescending a tone as the little twit could muster he said "You said your an anthropology student. You don't study humans. You study those monkey things. Even if we have the software, it wouldn't help you."

I attempted to explain that anthropology was the study of humans - modern and otherwise - in general, and yes, I was looking for software on the anatomy of modern humans. His response? "No, you're looking at like Lucy and stuff.

I was flummoxed. On the one hand, I was trying to spend money in this guy's store, and his attitude was making it difficult for me to justify doing so, much less actually do it. On the other hand, I was an anthropology student, he had clearly never taken an anthropology class and didn't know anything about it, and I was clear in what I was looking for and that it would cover modern humans, and he was still insisting that somehow I was the one that didn't know what I was talking about.

I finally said "Look, I know what I am looking for, you obviously don't. I am studying the bones of modern humans, and I am looking for software that can help me study."

He snorted again, gave me a disdainful look, and said "Lucy wasn't a human."

I stared at him with irritation and said "depends on what you mean by human, but that's beside the point, because I am studying the bones of people walking around in the world today."

He rolled his eyes, gestured towards a rack of programs and said "there might be something over there."

I looked over, and then turned and walked out.

To this day, some sixteen years later, I still find myself wondering about why this guy had such an attitude. Was he simply one of those arrogantly ignorant fucks who is sure that he is the master of all sorts of specialized knowledge when he actually knows very little about, well, anything? Was he a creationist who was upset with the findings of paleoanthropologists and therefore wanted to show up one of them only showing his own ignorance in the process? Was he just a disagreeable ass who was unwilling to admit that his initial assumptions were wrong even as it became increasingly obvious that they were?

I don't know. What I do know is that that was the last time I ever walked into a Software Etc.

*Though in the end, I received either an A or B, I forget which.

**This was back when Software Etc., which has since merged with another store and become Gamestop, stocked a wide range of software, not just games. As odd as looking for something this specialized there might sound, they did sometimes have such specialized programs.

Low Ball

2011-08-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

I am headed out into the field today (I should be in the field by the time this post drops) to record a site. The site is known, and a site record had been previously produced. However, the older record was of very low quality, providing little actual information aside from "there's a site in this general area...oh, and we think it's a prehistoric site."

This sort of thing is pretty common. There are many companies that produce solid work - good reports, good site records, and field and lab work that you can be pretty sure will be accepted by the agencies to which you have to submit the work in order to get your permits or money. My current and immediately previous employers were known for being these sorts of companies.

Then you get the low-ballers. The companies that will cut corners, produce a shoddy report and site records, and have dubious methodology. These ones get by by producing the "work" that they produce for a very, very low price. The work of these companies is usually a product of greed and laziness, but not outright corruption - though there are a few that veer into the latter category. If you happen to be submitting it to an agency that doesn't look to closely (or doesn't care) and if you are doing so in an environment where there is little reason to think that any public groups or private individuals will be scrutinizing it, then you can get away with this - and that's how these companies stay in business.

However, if you have a project that is likely to be scrutinized or where the agency reviewers aren't asleep at the wheel, there's a good chance that these low bid companies won't fly. Case in point - I am leaving today to go out int he field and re-do some work done by someone else. They issued a report that lacked the necessary background information, only vaguely described the study methods, and the site record that they produced along with the report gives no real information. The company that initially hired them paid about 2/3 what my company charges for the same services, which is why we didn't get the original contract. However, the report was rejected by the agency because it didn't provide any of the important information that the agency needs to comply with the relevant regulations. So, after some bickering with the first company, the client dropped them and hired us. Now, rather than pay our original cost, they have paid 1 and 2/3 of our original cost, and look bad to the agency from which they need to get permits.

So, the lesson is, if you are ever in a position where you have to hire an archaeologist, biologist, geologist, clean air/water person, etc. etc., don't just look at the price tag, look at their qualifications. It may save you some money in the end to not go with the cheapest one up front.

Places that Should be Haunted, But Aren't

2011-07-29T10:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, after the heaviness of the last two posts, here's something a bit lighter, though not at all archaeology related.

As some readers know, I am a ghost story enthusiast. No, I don't believe in ghosts, but I nonetheless love a good ghost story. I even keep a second blog where I keep track of ghost stories. When you find a story of a haunting, you also usually find some sort of explanation. These explanations range from an allegedly haunted site being the location of a tragic or horrific event to the place being the repository of human remains (often unburied or disinterred, though proper cemeteries are frequently reputed to be haunted as well), to the ever-popular "this place was built on an Indian burial ground!"

Most of the time, following through on the stories explaining the hauntings reveals them to be fabrications. The number of times that I have looked up a place that is "built on an Indian burial ground" only to find that there are no burials of any kind anywhere near it is quite large. Likewise with most other stories - tracking down the actual deaths of people said to have been killed in a house often reveals that they died elsewhere of different causes (occasionally they are even still alive) or that the person in question never even existed to begin with. Likewise, looking for evidence of the traumatic events said to have left some sort of psychic residue often reveals that these events never actually happened or that they weren't nearly as traumatic as often made out.

Still, these are the common stories given to explain hauntings, and if they were true, there are a number of places that I personally know of that one would expect to be haunted, but which, mysteriously (or not mysteriously), are not. For example:

Two of my former workplaces

During my first job as a supervisor, my office was in a building that was built right on top of a Chumash village site. Now, Chumash villages in the particular area where this one was typically contained burials. So, this office was literally built on a Native American burial ground. I knew about it, as did the other archaeologists working in the building, but for various reasons (mostly related to not wanting people to loot what was left of the site), we didn't advertise the fact. In addition to being built on an area that likely contained burials, we frequently had human remains in our office, mostly bone dug from archaeological sites. So, we had a burial ground and disinterred bodies. However, other than the soul-sucking boredom of Monday morning staff meetings, we never experienced anything supernatural, nor did anyone ever report such a thing.

A subsequent workplace was not built on an archaeological site of any sort. However, it also often served as a temporary repository of human remains - mostly the remains of Native Americans which were removed from sites that were about to be destroyed by bulldozers. However, we also, for a time, had the remains of two Navy Airmen who died in a Plane Crash during a WWII-era training mission. We had excavated their remains, and before the county coroner collected them, we processed and stored them at our facilities. So, Native American burials AND the remains of people who died in a traumatic way? Double check. Ghosts on the premise? Negative.

Pajaro River Floodplain

The above-mentioned plane crash, the remains of which we dug up, was located on the Pajaro River flood plain, in Monterey County. Not only did two men die a traumatic death in a plane crash, but the event became part of local folklore (including variations on the story in which two planes hit each other mid-air and crashed...not true, by the way). So, again, the sort of place that one would anticipate would have a ghost story...but it doesn't.

Abney Park Cemetery

Before the band Abney Park existed, there was a cemetery by that name. While the cemetery doesn't have any more int he way of tragic history than any other cemetery that I know of, it is nonetheless exactly the sort of place for which the term "creepy-ass" was invented. It looks like the set of a horror movie, with neglected and crumbling tombstones, a dilapidated chapel that looks like something out of a Dracula movie, and a generally weird atmosphere. Here's some photos that I took while visiting:

I have searched long and hard for ghost stories for this place, convinced that it must have some, but keep coming up goose-eggs. If a creepy-ass cemetery doesn't have a ghost story, then what is the world coming to, I ask?

The Duplex on Mason Road

One day, in the late 80s, as I was walking home from school, I noticed that Mason Road - which forms the eastern terminus of Driftwood Drive, the road in Salida on which I grew up - was cordoned off, and there was a butt-load of news vans parked around the entrance to the road. I didn't know what it was all about until I saw the news that evening.

Earlier that day eight people were murdered, bludgeoned to death, in one of the duplexes (dupli? duplo? duplae?) as a result of what appeared to be the result of drug deals gone bad. As the media hype began to increase, I found my neighborhood labelled "Drug Alley" by the Sacramento news stations, despite the fact that nobody ever actually called it that except reporters from Sacramento.

Eventually, the interior of the duplex was cleaned up and rented out again. Despite the grisly history, I never heard of anyone having any sort of strange experience there, and asking around never brought anything up. So, a sad history, but not one that has been made light of by people using it as fodder for campfire stories.

Crown, Merrill, Cowell, and Stevenson Colleges, UCSC

Every college of university seems to have a ghost stories, but UC Santa Cruz's are relegated to Porter College. UCSC is divided into multiple colleges, which serve as the residential and educational bases of each student (though every student will take classes at other colleges as well). Porter College is the art college, and many of the residents are, in my experience, given to self-induced drama, which probably explains why it has the monopoly on ghost stories. However, Merrill College, Crown College (which was my college), Cowell College and Stevenson College all butt up against Pogonip Park - an allegedly cursed forest - are within walking distance of a cemetery with decaying graves dating to the civil war, and the forest adjacent to these colleges is described by the forensic anthropology professor from whom I took classes as a "dumping ground for bodies." Despite this, the place doesn't have much int he way of ghost stories. Sure, the forest itself does (complete with the ghost of Sarah Cowell, of the family for whom the college was named), but this portion of the campus does not. Fnord!

So, that's what I've got. So, readers, what are places that you know of which should have ghostly reputations, but don't seem to have the ectoplasmic taint?

Thinking About Politics and Cultural Identity

2011-07-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

In reading more about what occurred in Norway last week, it becomes clear that, whatever else was going on in Anders Behring Breivik's mind, he seemed focused on a notion of cultural/ethnic purity, obsessed with being a cultural Christian (meaning that he didn't necessarily believe in the supernatural claims of the religion, but did feel a connection to the church and the ethical code claimed by the church) and was obsessed with Europe expelling the Muslims - referring in his writings to the previous expulsions in the 11th and 15th centuries*. It would probably be best to describe his views as politically right-wing with religious overtones, and not "religious fundamentalist" as is often described.

Common in many right-wing political ideologies - especially in Europe but present in a slightly muted form in the U.S. - is an idea of an allegedly threatened ethnic white/European/Christian (which of the three is used depends on the individual) identity. The reality is, of course, that ethnicity and religion are fluid and are changing. Rather than give support to the belief that this means that they are somehow "under attack" as so many of these people claim, it is simply a statement of the realities of human history.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, before we heard of a Muslim threat to some sort of pan-European identity, we heard about German threats to French identity, Russian threats to German identity, etc. etc. Ethnicity was conceived of more narrowly, and an Italian was generally believed to be fundamentally different than a Briton. Over time, and especially after WWII (when this nationality=ethnicity view was most strongly espoused by the Nazi regime), this mellowed so that there is no a recognition of nationality and cultural differences between, say, Italy and Sweden, but it is not necessarily viewed as an ethnic difference. So, in the sense that all are considered to be of a "white European" ethnicity, or even more narrowly as regional ethnicities, the definition of European ethnicity has still changed dramatically from what it was as late as the 1940s.

Even if you are going to go the route of trying to define ethnicities as the regionally-centered complex of genetic frequencies (that is a group of people from a given area who have a higher statistical likelihood of having particular genetic traits - such as skin tone, hair color, etc.), you are still stuck trying to attach a concrete label to something that is fluid and constantly changing. If one reads the Greek or Roman accounts of western Asia, you see descriptions of people who sound as if they would be more at home in other parts of the world - tribes of red-headed middle-Easterners, blond Asian Tribesmen, etc. The reality is that many of these people belonged to groups that migrated into Europe or North Africa, or (less often) were so thoroughly crushed by the Greeks or Romans or Persians that there were few left to carry on their lineage. We are left with this notion that the genetic groupings we now see in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East or not the same as the ones that were present 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000 years ago. They have shifted, changed, re-arranged.

Basically, no matter how you try to define ethnicity, an honest person is forced to admit that it is fluid.

What, then, of cultural identity? Many of the right-wing folks, especially here in the United States, don't talk in terms of ethnicity, but rather of cultural identity - it's okay for people to come from the outside so long as they adopt our ways, language, mode of dress, etc. etc. Isn't cultural identity under attack by allowing people to become part of our society without becoming acculturated**? There is alot to be said for the necessity of integration - where a person new to a society learns how to negotiate and contribute to that society (this requires that the receiving society allow them to integrate and that the emigrant be willing to integrate, so it's a two-way street) - but acculturation is the abandonment of one's cultural heritage in order to adopt the cultural identity of the new place wholesale...which even people who are actively trying to do it never actually seem to manage. The reality is that people move - they migrate between nations and regions within nations - and they bring their own cultural traits and ideas with them when they do. This does change the cultural identity of a region, make no doubt. But, contrary to what many people claim, this is not an assault on the existing cultural identity, which itself is nothing other than an accumulation of other such changes and additions over time. This is one of the major processes by which cultures work and change, and it has been since our early ancestors began to develop what we would understand as culture.

I don't want to get all kum-ba-yah on you. This process is not always easy, and historically has often been violent, though it is also often peaceful. But the notion that we will preserve some ethnic or cultural identity in perpetuity is absurd in the extreme. Humans never have, and even the attempt to do so itself causes changes in ethnic and cultural identity. We will change, no matter how we try to fight it. The question is, can we decide to do so in ways that benefit us?

*It should be noted that while these are often referred to as the Muslim expulsions, other groups, including the Jews, were also pushed out of various European countries during these episodes.

**Many people will use the term "integration" when they should be saying acculturation. Integration implies that the individual becomes a part of the broader society without fully shedding their previous identity - so, they learn the local language, customs, laws, etc., but they don't need to dress differently or stop speaking their native language altogether. Much of what you hear from people such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc. is that they want people to "integrate" by completely abandoning their previous cultural identity rather than modifying for their present circumstances, which isn't actually integration.

Insanity or Belief?

2011-07-25T10:00:00.000-07:00

In a departure from the usual archaeology nonsense, I just wanted to write briefly about last week's events in Norway. When news of the bombing and shootings initially broke out, many people believed that it was Muslim terrorists - unfortunately there is precedence for this assumption not only from 2001, but from both before and after that. However, it soon turned out that the bomber/shooter was neither Muslim nor Arab, but is a Norwegian who identifies himself as a Christian. And the attacks were prompted by his belief that Muslims were taking over his country - a commonly held belief amongst right-wing political circles in Europe, and increasingly in the U.S. as well.

Much of the talk went from discussing how the attacks were clearly the work of "Islamic extremists" to discussing how the actual terrorist "is simply a madman." But the fact of the matter is that nobody who I have heard dismiss him as a "madman" has actually bothered to see if there's been a psychiatric assessment done of the man. People who were perfectly comfortable blaming the attacks not on insanity but on Islam are now loathe to admit that the attacks could have been the work of anything other than a sick mind. As afar as I can tell, the reason for wanting to consider him a madman has less to do with any actual assessment of his mental health than with the fact that the political/religious views on which he acted are shared by many people in both Europe and the United States, and nobody who holds similar views or beliefs wants to admit that they might lead to violence (in this sense, they are no different than the Muslims I have met who want to insist that Al Queada is not an Islamic organization - just because it's not the religion as you practice it doesn't mean that it isn't the religion).

The man may, in fact, be insane. I don't know, and neither do any of the people who I have spoken with. He may also, however, simply be acting on political and religious views* that are held by many, but not held quite dearly enough for them to carry them through to their logical conclusion. Whether we like it or not, this is not necessarily insanity, it may simply be the well-known power of beliefs to shut off our ability to empathize with other people, and to see them as less than human. We saw it in the creation of Japanese internment camps during WWII, in less violent ways with the passage of Proposition 8 here in California, and with the bloodshed that accompanied the Soviet Revolution in Russia. While each of these was very different in a number of ways, in each case, political or religious beliefs served to make some group of people less human, less worthy of rights or respect, and deserving of mistreatment - whether simply the denial of legal rights and creation of slanderous claims all the way up to violent acts perpetrated against them.

Every belief system has the ability to do this. Whether or not this man was insane, his actions did not require insanity, just fervent belief.

*One interesting thing about his religious views, as shown in his own writing, is that they don't seem to be straight-forward Christian so much as a weird mix of Christianity, latter-day Nordic paganism, and supernatural justification for political views. So, there is another narrative also forming that this man is a right-wing Christian terrorist...the "right wing" part is probably correct, but the "Christian" part is much more complicated.

Prehistoric, Historic, and Arbitrary Distinctions

2011-07-21T10:00:00.000-07:00

If you look at a California Department of Parks and Recreation Form 523 Primary (see it here), the one required for recording archaeological sites in California, you are giving three options for the site's age: Prehistoric, Historic, and Both. This seems straightforward - if the site pre-dates the introduction of written records (literally predates recorded history) then it is prehistoric, so everything prior to Europeans showing up; if the site post-dates the introduction of written records, then it is historic; if the site has elements from both before and after the introduction of written records, it is both.

Simple, right?

Of course not.

I'm not going to wade into the debate about whether or not oral traditions should be considered history. It's a valid line of debate to a point, but not what I'm interested in here. What I am interested in is what we use to make the distinction between prehistoric and historic sites, why the three check boxes aren't maybe the best way to reflect the archaeological record, and what's they ultimately mean.

For starters, when we record a site, the way that we identify which of the three boxes to check is be evaluating what materials are present within the site. If it is filled with flaked stone tools, ground stone tools, and no evidence of metal, glass, or European-style tools or structures, it gets labelled "prehistoric"; if it contains things such as milled wood, metal, glass, paper, etc, then we label it "historic" (and, obviously, if it contains elements from both categories, then we label it "both").

Here's the problem: The prehistoric/historic dividing line in California (and much of the world, in fact) is murky at best, and nonexistent at worse. The introduction of written records to California came with the Europeans. The problem, of course, is determining when you should place this. Should it be with the early voyages in the 1540s? Should it be with the founding of the missions in the 1760s through the 1820s? Should it be with the establishment of Euro-American settlements in even the more remote parts of the state in the 1890s and 1910s?

The practice that we have been in is to ignore all of these potential dates and look insteadm as described above, just at what's present in the site. The problem here is that this results in sites that were occupied by people well-documented in the historical record being labelled "prehistoric", which is just plain factually incorrect. There are other, more correct, labels available: ethnohistoric, protohistoric, etc. All of which are in active use in research archaeology, but not available as a check box on the documents that we are required to use.

What's more, there's a tendency to associate "prehistoric" sites with Native Americans, and "historic" sites with everyone else (Euro-Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, etc.). But this really isn't correct, either, as Native Americans did adopt many of the materials from the newly-arrived groups, and so it is not uncommon to find a Native American site from the late 19th or early 20th century that is comprised of a wood-frame house and glass and metal detritus, similar to the non-Native homes of the day. There would be differences in the material patterning of the site, just as there are differences between the sites of Italian immigrants vs. German immigrants, but it would still end up being given the "Historic" label (maybe a "both" label if things such as ground stone were found on-site, but the ground stone would often be assumed to have pre-dated the rest of the material, even thought it didn't necessarily), and unless there was a clear record that the home belonged to a Native American, there would typically be little effort made to determine to whom it belonged.

Up to this point, this has probably all seemed like pointless ranting about something that is unimportant. So, I'll try to explain why this actually does matter.

Under current practice and regulations, Native Americans have a more significant role when a "prehistoric" site is found than when a "historic" site is found. The reasoning seems pretty clear - the prehistoric site belongs to their cultural lineage, whereas the historic site is seen as belonging to the post-European cultural lineage. But the problem is that, as describe dabove, many historic sites are Native American sites, and so it seems rather bizarrely inconsistent to only consult with them on prehistoric sites when they may have relevant information on historic sites as well.

Now, many of my colleagues will point out that sufficient background research will identify historic-era sites that are the homes of Native American individuals and families. This is generally true, but because of the nature of late 19th/early 20th century racial politics, it's not uncommon for ownership information or ethnicity identification to not be readily apparent in this historic record.

The reality is that the division of prehistoric and historic, while it annoys my inner fact-checker, does work the majority of the time. But that doesn't stop me from wondering how often we get it wrong, or when it is going to bite some (or maybe all) of us in the ass.

Workin' the Bone

2011-07-18T10:00:00.000-07:00

I have been spending my free time working with bone.

I volunteered to help out a friend of mine with a research project. My friend is a professor at a university in England, and has, over the last several years, put together a team of other archaeologists who spend time working on aspects of his principle research project - the excavation and analysis of a series of sites in the south of California's San Joaquin Valley* - and I am his faunal guy. The upshot of which is that I have a box filled with bone, most of it in small slivers due to taphonomic** processes, and I am sorting and doing a basic analysis of it.

It's an odd experience. On the one hand, it is tedious work, sorting through several pounds of bone slivers, most of them less than an inch long, and figuring out what category they belong in (large mammal, small mammal, medium-sized mammal, sea mammal, fish, reptile, etc.), and with large enough pieces, trying to figure out exactly which type of animal it belonged to (deer, skunk, coyotes, and so on). On the other hand, it's also a skill - being able to look at a sliver of bone and see the features that clearly identify it as being from one creature and not another, or knowing how thick a large mammal's cortical bone is vs. a small mammal's, etc., and I have amazingly not lost my skill over the years in which I have primarily written reports and done surveys - in fact, I seem to be getting sharper.

It's also a bit odd for me because this is pure research - there's no resource management angle and no regulatory reason for the work. My friend is an academic, so all of this is done for the sake of generating data, hopefully learning a thing or two about Californian archaeology, and publishing it. So, on the one hand, this means that I do the work on my own time without being able to use company time or resources on it. On the other hand, this means that I am largely free to do what I think is appropriate with the materials, provided that my work meets the needs of the rest of the team working on the research project.

One of the things that this is reminding me of, though, is just how much pains-taking, often monotonous work one must engage in when doing research. It is possible that the analysis of the animal bone will reveal something important about the site...but it is equally possible, perhaps even more likely, that it won't. Still, we have to do it so that we can be certain that we haven't unnecessarily left an obvious route of investigation out***. One of the things that I often hear or read when I see pseudo-archaeologists respond to criticism that they haven't bothered to do basic due-diligence in working out their conclusions is something along the lines of "what, do you honestly expect us to sift through every rock, piece of bone, and scour each part of the ground?" To which I can only respond "why not, we have to."

*The irony of these people leaving a country where the normal summer temperatures are relatively conducive to fieldwork to travel to a hot, arid location where heat stroke is common does not escape me.

**Taphonomy is the study of post-depositional processes - that is, the study of what happens between the time that archaeological materials are discarded and the time that an archaeologist comes along and digs them up. Taphonomic processes include items being moved due to soil movement, broken due to animal and plant activity, eaten away due to soil acidity, etc.

***That being said, there will always be something that you couldn't research, look into, or evaluate, either because you didn't think of it, because doing so would have prevented you from investigating something that seemed more important, or because you simply didn't have the time and/or resources. It's unfortunate, but a fact of life.

The Register and Controversial Sites

2011-07-14T10:00:00.000-07:00

Doing some research a little while back, I began looking up locations that met the criteria for listing on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP), but where I suspected that controversy surrounding the meaning/role of the places might block them from having actually been listed. Somewhat to my surprise, I found that most of those I thought of were either listed, or at least had been recommended as eligible for listing*.

Probably emblematic of this is the Stonewall Inn, a prominent 60s-era gay bar in New York which was routinely raided by the police. One night, in 1969, a raid did not go as planned, and riots began. The riots were, in many ways, the ignition of the modern gay-rights movement. Whether one is in favor of or against gay rights, it is hard to argue that the movement hasn't had a strong impact on U.S. politics and society since 1969, and therefore has affected "the broad patterns of history", which is the criteria for listing a place on the National Register for it's role in/contribution to historic events.

I have discovered that telling people that the Stonewall Inn is on the NRHP usually gets one of two reactions: 1) for people who are in favor of gay people having the same rights as everyone else**, it seems appropriate that the location so closely linked with the start if the gay rights movement should be listed; 2) for people who are opposed to gay people having the same rights as everyone else***, finding that the Stonewall Inn is listed leads to reactions ranging from irritation to outrage. There is this notion that NRHP listing somehow puts a mark of approval or acceptance on a location.

But this isn't the case.

Listing on the NRHP is rather like Time Magazine's "Man of the Year" - it isn't an endorsement or an accolade, but a recognition of the impact that a place or events associated with it has had on history****. This impact can be good, it can also be bad, or it can even be neutral but pervasive. This seems appropriate - what seems bad or controversial now may seem like the obviously right thing to do down the line (remember, ending slavery was controversial enough that it contributed to the breakout of the Civil War), and remember things that are either controversial or even negative but influential is necessary to maintaining an accurate view of our past and not creating false legends.

It's important to remember that we are shaped just as much by our desire to maintain the status quo, often (perhaps typically) unthinkingly, as we are by a desire to improve things. Aspects of our past which we would like to not think about, regardless of the reason, are nonetheless important. What's more, one group's abomination may be another group's shrine. I like the fact that the NRHP is not a monument to our greatness as a nation, but instead is a reminder of the various types of things that have shaped us. While I think that the Stonewall Inn stands for the start of something good, even if I didn't, it would still belong on the register because it is difficult to imagine current politics and religion without the outcome of the riots. Likewise, places associated with people who I do not hold in esteem, but who nonetheless altered the United States in significant ways, also belong on it.

*This is a bit of an arcane regulatory thing. Actually having a property listed on the NRHP can often be something of a drawn-out process. As it is federal agencies that usually do the work, and the process can take a fair amount of time and money, the regulations that protect cultural resources protect both those that are listed and those that have been found eligible for listing, even if they are not actually listed. This can save time and money on the part of federal agencies, and it also provides some (admittedly limited, as the historic preservation laws have no real teeth) protection to resources that haven't been listed but are known to be important.

**In other words, people who don't think that someone should be penalized for no reason other than old superstitious dogma.

***In other words, people who believe old superstitious dogma, regardless of how they try to rationalize it.

****True story - Time magazine has listed some truly vile individuals as the "Man of the Year" not because the magazine endorsed them - often the accompanying articles have been extremely critical - but because they made a huge impact. It is worth noting, though, that both Time and the NRHP can sometimes bend to political pressure and not list something important but unpopular.

Historic Junk not in the Trunk

2011-07-08T10:00:00.000-07:00

I am currently working on a report for an archaeological survey that occurred in Madera County. During the course of the survey, several archaeological sites were found, as well as one location that is difficult.

Under the National Historic Preservation Act and the California Environmental Quality act, a number of criteria must be met in determining whether or not something is eligible for the National Register of Historic Places or the California Register of Historic Resources, and only if it is eligible will it be provided any legal protection*. Although not one of the formal four criteria, the age of a site does come into play. Remember that an archaeological site is just the past remains of human activity that is not solely a standing structure or object, regardless of age. The relevant regulations have placed the age of 50 years as the point in which we start seriously considering a site (some agencies use 45 years as there is often a several-year difference between the time the environmental studies get started and the time that work actually begins)**. So, as of the day that I write this, if a fallen building, a trash dump, or the remains of a camp site dates to 1961 or earlier, there is a (vanishingly small) chance that it might be eligible for the National Register. Of course, the older it gets, the more likely we are to consider it eligible, in large part because written records are less likely to provide information. So, a camp site from 1961 would have to be recorded, but a camp site from 1861 is much more likely to be subject to further study.

The difficulty is that so much of modern disposable consumer culture really got kicked up in the 1950s that it is often difficult to determine the age of sites that are post-WWII but still over 50 years old. Part of this is due to the narrow time frame (approximately 16 years), part of it is due to the fact that the labels on items tend to fade in the sun, often resulting in little more than blank bottles and cans (which, changes in manufacturing methods being what they are, we can often tell the age of by measuring them, but not always), and part of it is the fact that a sufficiently large number of people horde stuff in their garages, closets, etc, and then decide to dump it decades later, so a trash scatter or dump consisting primarily of materials from the 1940s might actually have been dumped some time in the 1970s, and you have to watch for clues that this might have been the case. Another part of the problem is that most trash deposits from the 1940s onward consist in large part of the remnants of consumer goods from brands that are still around today, leading the field worker to try to figure out whether a particular brand logo dates to 1946 or 1963 when trying to decide whether or not something needs to be recorded.

There are, of course, historic archaeologists who are experts in this. They are very good at the identification, and also can take basic information on brand distribution and show you fascinating things about how this reflects economic changes, the spread of different populations (sometimes the consumption of one brand of goods over another tells alot about who was doing the consuming), and the ways in which the creation of consumer goods in the modern sense led to an evolution of work and home life. If you have one of these people on hand, as I am sometimes lucky enough to, it can be a boon both to your efficiency (less time recording what you shouldn't, less time going back out to the field because you missed something) and your morale (when someone else is excited about a can scatter, it's harder to feel grumpy about having to record it).

But most of us in CRM are prehistoric archaeologists - we are into stone tools, bedrock milling features, and hunter-gatherer settlement patterns. We know enough about historic sites to be able to sufficiently record most pre-1940 sites that we encounter, and when we embark on a new project we do enough background research to identify unusual sites that we might otherwise miss. We also carry cheat sheets with corporate logos by year, maker's marks for items, and tables of can measurements so that we can judge how old things are. But we always find ourselves finding objects for which we don't have the knowledge or an information sheet ready at hand.

To get back to the case mentioned in the second sentence of this post, we recorded a site that appeared to be a dump of 1950s era household and industrial refuse. Once I returned to the office and began comparing photos and drawings from the field to information in our reference books and at some on-line resources that I use, it became clear that the materials were either from items that would have been in use any time between 1947 and 1976, or were produced in the 1970s but intentionally designed to look like they came from the 1940s and 1950s. A historics specialist wouldn't likely have made the error, but a crew of prehistoric archaeologists did.

It's one of the weird elements of CRM archaeology. Most of us attended undergraduate and graduate programs geared towards making us experts in a relatively narrow range of archaeological skills and knowledge, and then we end up in this profession where we have to work at broadening our knowledge to encompass a very wide range of site types. It also speaks to the value of double-checking your historic artifacts against your reference material before you go to the trouble of producing in-depth site records.

*I often hear people claim that the discovery of any archaeological site or historic structure will result in impacts to construction projects. This is not true. First off, the protections for archaeological sites are not particularly strong. In most cases you can, in fact, destroy them, you just may be required to pay to have them excavated first. Secondly, the only ones that even get this small measure of protection are those that are eligible for the relevant historic registers, and the vast majority do not meet eligibility criteria.

**This age criteria can be ignored if a site is considered to be sufficiently important to history, and this is clear before the 50 years is up. So, for example, the Cape Canaveral launch location, if evaluated before it was 50 years old (which it may have been, I haven't looked it up), was probably eligible for the register because of the huge, history-changing events that took place there.

The 4th and Mythology of the Past

2011-07-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

Monday was Independence Day in the U.S., the day when we blow crap up to celebrate the fact that 235 years ago, a group of men sent what amounted to a "Dear John" letter to England and declared that the United States was a sovereign nation of its own.

What fascinates me is the way in which this event, and the period in time surrounding it, has become mythologized within the U.S. that a mythology has built up around it is not surprising, this happens in most, if not all, countries. What fascinates me is the way in which the mythologies often radically depart from reality, and the degree to which people cling to their views when even the most cursory research would prove them wrong. And I'm not even talking about the "Paul Revere rode to warn the British*" nonsense.

There are a few different types of mythologization. One of the most common is the heroification of the Founders. By this, I mean the assertion that they did more than they really did, such as can be found in the "Price They Paid" account. There is also a particular strain of heroification in American Christianity that holds that the Founders were supernaturally inspired and "the wisest men ever to have lived." In these cases, the Founders are blown up beyond who they really were, usually for social or political purposes that serve the person creating the myth.

And people buy into it because they want the myth to be true, they want these guys to be larger than life. Which is weird, because these are people who rejected the existing order, created a new system of government based on trying to fix some of the problems that led to the fall of the Roman Republic, fought a war over this, and then relinquished power when their terms in elected office were up, despite what one might expect. If that, the reality, isn't cool enough for you, then I really have to wonder what would be. They don't need to be supernaturally inspired or have models of virtue in order to be pretty damn outstanding. Yes, these were humans, and they had their faults - slave ownership, an ability to fall into petty partisanship, and the prejudices of their day. But the reality, good and bad, warts and all, is amazing enough. These were remarkable men living in remarkable times, and it doesn't need to be made into something it wasn't.

But the myth gets warped in all sorts of ways to suit various purposes, all of them requiring that facts about the events be ignored and, often, that new facts be invented. One of the arenas where I have taken a particular interest is that of how the religion of the Founders is viewed. It is increasingly common for people to assume that they were all Christians of some sort, with many Fundamentalist Christian sects claiming that they were all specifically Born-Again Protestant Evangelical Christians of a sort that many a mega-church pastor would recognize as one of his own. This is, of course, not true. It's difficult to get a handle on how many Founders there were, because the term can be defined in many ways (just the signers of the Declaration of Independence? All of the representatives at the Constitutional Convention? The prominent writers who pushed the agenda of the rebel colonists?), but any reasonable count would include people of a wide range of religious positions, which includes numerous Christians, it must be said. However, the particular brand of Born-Again Protestant Evangelical Christianity that is prominent in modern politics today is a relatively recent creation, growing out of 19th and 20th century religious movements, and none of the Christians who were present for any of the events that might qualify them as among the Founders would recognize it as the Christianity with which they were familiar. Moreover, even amongst the Christian Founders, the role of Christianity in their lives was highly variable - George Washington, for example, is known to have stopped bothering with church and didn't attend.

And, of course, many of the Founders were clearly not Christian. Thomas Jefferson re-wrote the New Testament to remove supernatural elements. Thomas Paine was openly atheist, and often wrote disparagingly of religion in general and Christianity in particular. Deism and even atheism were not uncommon amongst educated men of the time, and that category includes the Founders.

Which brings us to another myth. While many Christians falsely claim that the Founders were all Christians, or even more falsely claim that the Constitution sets the U.S. up as a "Christian Nation"**, it is common amongst my fellow atheists to hear that the Founders were all deists - sort of a "weak proto-atheism"*** that was popular in the 18th century. This is also not true. As described above, there were many religious views amongst the Founders, and the claim that they were all deists is just as false and absurd as the claim that they were all Born-Again Protestant Evangelical Christians.

It fascinates me that we tend to project our present politics onto the past without regard to what was actually going on in the past. This is, to a degree, understandable, but it is mistaken. While there is much int he past that can provide information and guidance for the present, the past is, nonetheless, a different place with different social orders and different rules, and it leads to nothing more than dubious mythologies when we try to read the past by the issues of the present.

*No he didn't, you illiterate twit. Actually what surprises me about this is that the original statement seemed like a basic slip of the tongue - the sort of mistake that all of us can make even when we know better, she likely wanted to ay that he was coming to warn the colonists about the British and stumbled over her words a bit. No big deal, we've all done that sort of thing. What surprises me is the fact that Palin stuck to the erroneous claim after she made it, and really she has to know that she was wrong, simply so that she wouldn't have to admit that she made a mistake. What surprises me even more is that many of her supporters seemed to take this as a sign of her conviction rather than a sign of her unfitness for any responsibility beyond running the Slurpee machine at the 7-11. Really, being firm in your conviction of a completely false premise - and one that you probably know is completely false - is not a strength, it's a severe liability.

Then again, from what I have seen, most of her supporters are also young-Earth creationists and believe that WMDs were found in Iraq, so whatcha' gonna' do...

**Fun fact: Religion is mentioned only twice in the Constitution: 1) when religious tests to hold public office are prohibited (in other words, a member of any religion or no religion can legally hold public office, and it's nobody's business but their own what their religious beliefs are); 2) in the Bill of Rights when prohibitions against the government establishing or interfering in religion are stated. In other words, the Constitution is pretty clearly not a Christian document. Anyone who claims otherwise is either lying or wholly ignorant.

***The basic idea of deism is that, as there is no evidence for miracles or any sort of supernatural interference in people's day-to-day lives, this is consistent with the creator of the universe, usually conceptualized as a god of some sort, having put the universe into motion, and then stepped back and not interfering any further. Once cosmology and biology began to discover natural processes which explained the orign of complex systems better than a creator deity, deism began to decline. This is the reason why flat-out atheists were unusual in the 19th century, though some did exist, while deists are relatively rare in the 21st century.

Archaeologists Don't Dig Up Dinosaurs...Except When We Do

2011-06-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

Normally, when somebody asks me if I dig up dinosaurs, I become annoyed. I have to explain that archaeologists study the remains of past human activity, and that prehistoric animals (unless hunted and butchered by humans) aren't really my bailywick.

Then this week happened.

One of my company's owners realized that if he has us out there looking at the ground anyway, and we're already trained to identify bone and teeth, we might as well also be looking for fossils as well. This provides better protection for paleontological resources (archaeologists get around far more than paleontologists, as the laws requiring our presence tend to be a mite bit more strict and expansive). However, while there is a bit of overlap in the sorts of things that we look for (some of the early human sites in the Americas contain Pleistocene animal bones that paleontologists are interested in), there is also quite a bit of difference. So, having archaeologists qualified to identify and handle paleontological resources requires that the archaeologists actually, you know, get qualified to do so. To that end, my coworkers and I spent the last few days at a small paleontological museum being trained to identify and recover fossils.

Now, we were not being trained to be actual paleontologists. We are archaeologists who now have enough knowledge of paleontology to know how to protect fossils that we find and when we need to contact the real paleontologists to deal with things. Oh, and we will only do this work under the supervision of a real paleontologist, so it'll be difficult for us to fuck shit up too badly.

I don't know if it's just a reaction to HAZWOPER training, or if it was the content of these classes in and of itself, but the paleontology class has been a hell of alot of fun. We went from covering the laws and implementing regulations that provide what protection there is for fossils, to covering the basic geology that we need in order to make an assessment of the paleontological sensitivity of an area, to discussions of the types of fossils that we are likely to encounter in different parts of California. The next day we gained some hands-on experience preparing a fossil for collection*, and then preparing them for identification in the lab**.

So, basically, I got paid to hang out with coworkers, learn some stuff, and handle fossils. It was fun.

But I guess this means I can't be as pissy next time someone asks me if I dig up dinosaur bones. Harumph.

* When identified, if the fossil is both small and in good shape, it can simply be picked up. If it is large and/or in poor shape, then you engage in a process called "jacketing." In this process, you dig around the fossil in a process known as pedasteling (we use the same approach with certain types of artifacts in archaeology). Once the fossil is appropriately pedestaled, you place wet tissue (what you and I know as toilet paper) over the fossil, and then cover this with plaster-soaked burlap in order to provide a protective plaster-and-tissue cover. You then use your trowel to cut the pedestal off, taking as much dirt as is practical with you to further protect the fossil, and cover the underside in tissue and plaster. This produces a large plaster package that you can then take to the lab and be secure in your knowledge that the fossil is in good shape. Of course, before you even begin this process, you will take GPS coordinates and take notes on the nature of the fossil, location, orientation (on it's side, standing up, pointing north, etc.), and also note the local geology.

** This is where you use a dental pick and paintbrush to carefully remove the dirt surrounding the fossil without damaging it. It was fun to do, but I imagine would get tedious if it was what I normally did for a living.

Apparently Yes, I can HAZWOPER

2011-06-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

So, as noted in the previous entry, I have had to attend a class to get a certification that allows me to work with hazardous waste.

I passed.

Yes, that's right, I am now authorized to work with hazardous waste. Do not be alarmed. Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

Unlike the previous week, most of what we went over this last, and thankfully final, weekend was at least somewhat applicable to my job, and therefore much more worthwhile. Which isn't to say that it was any fun, because it wasn't. Still, it's over, and a few amusing things did happen over the course of the weekend.

The safety personnel from Hazard Safety Services Incorporated continued to show that they considered this class to be a joke, disrupting with smart-ass comments and continuously providing stupid answers to the instructor's questions, which means that I will walk off of any site that these guys are responsible for - if your safety people don't take their training seriously, then the shit will hit the fan on one of their sites eventually, and it is best not to be present for that. On the up-side, the instructor did make one of their number, the guy who I had taken to referring to as "Princess Diana", do laps around the classroom while wearing a full class-A hazmat suit, and pressing down on the twit's shoulders. He later threatened to duct-tape and taze the kid.

Class A Hazmat Suit

Unfortunately, when Princess Diana quieted down, one of his buddies picked up and began rambling about zombies and 2012 end-of-the-world nonsense. So, the irritation continued to flow.

On Saturday, I walked through a group of fellow students who were having an in-depth conversation about their time in prison. One of these guys later interrupted the class to inform everyone that the reason why Harold Camping's Rapture prediction was wrong was because "if Camping was telling the truth, it would make Jesus a liar, and that can't be man, because..." and then he began trying to preach at us until the instructor, who you may remember looks like a hybrid of a professional wrestler/Hell's Angel/hipster/driver's ed. instructor gave him a glare that made the guy shut up. Later that same day, the same guy also, appropo of nothing, decided to shout out that non-dairy creamer is flammable. He later tried to disrupt the class again to talk about contracting Valley Fever while in Prison.

I wonder what it's like to be in prison and have Tourette's.

All the while, there was an umkempt, greasy fellow who looked for all the world like Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons. On the first day, the previous week, he had tried to impress me with his interest in "morally ambiguous" characters in literature, but quickly showed that he was far more interested in the cartoonish violence doled out by such characters when they appear in Conan-derived fantasy novels. This week he decided that we were buddies, and spent the weekend trying to regale me with stories to show how cool he was, but all of which were plainly bullshit - my favorite was a story about a buddy of his who "is in the Marines, a special anti-terrorist taskforce, who had a gun pulled on Osama Bin Laden, was only ten feet away, but his commanding officer ordered him to let Bin Laden go!"* He then spent some time pestering me to try to get me to hire him as an "archaeologist's assistant." This was when he wasn't rambling on about movies, comic books, or other entertainment that I didn't care about, and about which he would continue to ramble at me even after I had informed him in no uncertain terms that I didn't care. He also took to cracking fart jokes at every opportunity. I began to spend my breaks pretending to answer email on my phone or else hidden away just to avoid this guy.

Through all of this, the instructor continued to be an imposing and amusing figure. In addition to his tormenting the HSSI morons, he also informed us of how to dispose of a body if working in the oil fields, discussed the bomb shelter that he owns in Montana, and just generally made himself a weird, amusing character who I would swear was made up by a hack writer if I hadn't seen him. He also had a dimple on the back of his head, which might be where his keepers plug him in at night.

Oh, and in case you feel safer knowing that people working with hazardous waste have this training - they spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out the boiling point of a flammable solid. Oh, and one of them, I believe it was the would-be preacher, began to tell the instructor about how, if a federal official "disrespected" him, he'd attack the federal official, and seemed genuinely surprised when he was told that this would get him arrested.

Yeah, real brain trusts here.

Oh, and I was put in charge of a field exercise because I was the only person in the class who both had supervisory experience and did not have anger control problems.

Sleep tight America, your hazardous materials are in safe hands.

And it wasn't just the class that was strange. While walking out onto the lawn during a break, a fellow in an orange safety shirt ran by, ran out onto the lawn, dropped onto all fours, and then began moving in a manner that can only be described as dry-humping the air. At my hotel, some random guy walked up to me and wanted to ask my opinion of St. Louis, Missouri politics and the current weather problems there, which would have made sense if A) I had ever met this guy, and B) I knew anything about the subject or said/did something to imply that I did...as neither of these is the case, it was just odd.

At any rate, I am now certified, and don't have to go back for a couple years. If I keep my certification up, then I only have to go back for 8 hours.

*Now, don't get me wrong. As weird as the notion of Bin Laden being let go sounds, historically, equally strange things have happened. So, if 20 years down the road evidence comes out that this sort of thing occurred, I'd be surprised, but not overly shocked. I just really doubt that this guy's ever-so-bestest friend from high school was the one who had him.