Puritans, Pilgrims, and the Taliban

Wow, it's been a while since I last wrote.  I am likely not going to be getting back to a regular schedule anytime soon, but I will be able to write occasionally.

I am a fan of Dan Carlin's podcasts, especially his show Hardcore History (a terrible name for a show, but an excellent podcast nonetheless).  The most recent episode, as of the time that I write this, is about the Anabaptist rebellion in/occupation of Munster, Germany in 1534-1535.

If you are interested in this historic episode, I strongly recommend that you listen to the episode (just click the link above).  But the thumbnail is this:  The Anabaptists were one of the early Protestant sects that arose after Martin Luther posted his list of theses.  They were far more radical than Luther himself was, and the Anabaptists gave rise to numerous sub-cultures, including several that were essentially communistic doomsday cults (yep, history is often weirder than fiction).  One such group became violent, and established a short-lived government in the German city of Munster, where they managed to hold off the local authorities for a time, while establishing a miniature totalitarian theocracy within the city itself.  They were eventually crushed by the city's Bishop (a secular as well as religious authority figure at this time in Munster), and the leaders of the rebellion put to death in a rather horrific manner (though one that won't surprise students of Medieval history).

This story has echoes throughout Europe.  In England, Protestant sects gained power under Oliver Cromwell, and established an authoritarian theocracy in England (though, to be fair, many would have considered the deposed-then-executed Charles I's monarchy to be authoritarian as well, and arguably also a theocracy as Charles I was also the head of the Church of England), and then near-genocidal campaigns against Catholics in Scotland and Ireland.  Under Oliver Cromwell (the Lord Protector, a role different than, though in ways comparable to, the king), England became hostile to things such as drama, dancing, etc.  In fact, the attitude of the government under Cromwell towards the arts and entertainments is rather reminiscent of Afghanistan under the Taliban**.

Comparable stories played out across Europe, with Protestant sects rising, and committing acts of violence, including ones that we would now consider terrorism in England, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and on and on and on.

These stories fascinated me, but they do not surprise me.  They might, however, surprise many contemporary people in the United States.

There is a commonly held belief here in the U.S. that Middle Eastern violence and world-wide terrorism is a product of beliefs and ideals unique to Islam.  Islam, this belief holds, is unusual among the Abrahamic religions* in its advocation of violence.  Therefore, it is the only of these three religions that produces violence on the strength of the religion itself.  Sure, there have been evil/violent people who claimed to be Christian or Jewish, but they just used religion as an excuse to do what they were going to do anyway.  Islam actually causes the violence!

People who hold this opinion are thoroughly ignorant of history.

In part, the ignorance is willful.  People rarely want to acknowledge that the club to which they claim membership can produce bad seeds.  As a result, Christians tend to deny the role of religion in the European wars of the 16th through 18th centuries, but they are hardly alone.  Members of most ideologies that have produced violence tend to deny that the ideology produced said violence.  

In part, it's the fault of those of us who deal with the past professionally.  We have a hard time grappling with ideology, and as a result, tend to look for other causes for violence, when ideology may be the cause.  As is summed up by historian R. J. Knecht in his book The French Wars of Religion, 1559-1598:

Many people nowadays attach little importance to religion.  Consequently, they find it difficult to believe that it played a major part in the civil wars that tore France apart in the late sixteenth century.  They look for other reasons: political, economic and social.  Religion, they argue, was merely a 'cloak' used by the great aristocratic families to give respectability to their ruthless pursuit of power.  But the sixteenth century was not the twentieth: religion did rule the lives of thinking people...  

...even today religion can move people to action, as is daily demonstrated in the Middle East and India...Material interests, including brutal power-hunger and greed, were certainly present in the French Wars of Religion, but religion was also crucially important.

Although Knecht focuses on religion, it is not unique.  Any sort of totalizing ideology - a belief system that claims to encompass either everything, or at least everything that matters for living in the world - is capable of producing the zealotry and hysteria necessary to create violence.  Religious violence is nothing new, likely having been with us from a very early in our time in our history as a species, but is has at times been joined by other ideologies as a source of violence - witness the anarchist bombings of the 19th and early 20th centuries, for example.

We know that Christianity is capable of the same types of violence as modern militant Islam not because Christianity shares many ideological underpinnings with Islam (though it does), but because Christianity has produced precisely the same sort of sectarian violence, political and social oppression, and acts of terrorism in the past.  Christianity still has the potential, and a theocratic undercurrent still breathes and seethes and seeks power (look up the Dominionist movements).  The story that we often hear is that Christianity gave rise to the Enlightenment (or, if the commentator dislikes the science and necessity of doubt that came with the Enlightenment, they will try to claim that Christianity is the source of the parts of the Enlightenment that the commentator likes).  The truth, though, is that Christianity was muzzled by commerce and politics, beginning in the Netherlands during the Renaissance, where city officials and business interests realized that persecution of religious minorities could be bad for profits.  The more peaceful Christianity that we know today is a product of historic de-fanging, a religion that has been molded by social currents and mores, as much as (if not more than) it has influenced the social currents and mores.

The rise of ideological authoritarian states has happened many times before...and it sure as hell will happen again.  While religion is typically the cause (being the most common potentially authoritarian ideology among humans), it can also occur with non-religious ideologies (noteworthy 20th Century examples include Nazi Germany, the rise of the U.S.S.R., and Cambodia under Pol Pot).  Similarly, the rise of ideological violence and terrorism is also nothing new.  Essentially, all that is required is for some group to conclude that they know they absolute truth, and believe that they, therefore, have the right to impose that truth on everyone else.

But we need to not be ignorant of history.  We need to acknowledge that while the technologies and means used by ideological zealots may change, their presence seems a constant.  We need to acknowledge that our own religions and political ideologies could, potentially, lead to chaos and violence - in part we need to acknowledge this to keep ourselves humble and not demonize our opponents, and in part we need to do so in order to prevent our own creeds from becoming the enemies that we loathe.




*Worth noting: many people who hold this belief would leave out the Abrahamic religion part, as many people who believe this are so thoroughly ignorant of Islam that they are unaware that it shares a good deal with Judaism and Christianity.

**Monty Python produced a funny and informative song about the English civil war:



...or, if you have a bit of a different set of tastes, I will happily recommend Mark Steele's version to you:




***Though I would note that their own actions were a result of the overall form of communism to which they adhered, where atheism was a part, but not in any way the whole.  In much the same way, while most people are loathe to admit it, Protestant Christianity (specifically Lutheranism) was a part of Nazism, but it was in no way the whole of Nazism.

Ahistoric Blame Game

It happens every now and again, admittedly less often now that I live in Fresno, that I will be speaking with someone from Europe, and they will say something ot the effect of "I don't think that you Americans should assume that you have any right to talk about racial relations, after slavery and what you did to the Native Americans!"

They never seem prepared for my response, which is "yeah, you're right, our nation did continue to implement and further develop the policies put into place by England, France, Spain, Germany, etc."  I usually follow this up with "so, let's talk about your country's history in Africa/India/Asia/etc."

It has been my experience that Europeans often accuse Americans of being the slavers and genocidal maniacs who went after Native Americans, despite the fact that anti-Native American policies originated with early European colonists from throughout Europe, and the racially-based African slave trade as we would come to know it originated in Portugal and spread throughout Europe, from where it eventually spread to the Americas along with European colonists.  And, indeed, one of the reasons why slavery continued as late as it did in the U.S. is because cotton markets, including those in Europe, were comfortable with purchasing the products manufactured through slave labor.

Within the United States, we tend to blame the south for slavery, despite the fact that many northerners were not opposed to (and some even supported) slavery, and even where slavery was outlawed it would still appear under the guise of indentured servitude, prison-based hard labor passed out out of proportion to the crimes of the accused, and debt labor.

And on it goes.

The problem with this blame-game is twofold:  1) it is ahistorical, it requires us to be willingly (and often intentionally) ignorant of history; 2) it allows us to view the "others" who engaged in these policies as separate from us, different from us, and therefore allows us to ignore the role that our nation, or even we ourselves, may play in this.

Obviously, as someone who professionally deals with history, I have a special concern about #1.  I strongly feel that we should know our past, as accurately as possible, warts and all, and ignoring the culpability of our own culture in the sins of the past counts as a failure.

But #2 concerns me as a human who has to live in this world, in the here and now.  When we portray ourselves as being more enlightened and fundamentally different as creatures from those who committed past atrocities, we not only ignore the capacity of our own culture to produce equivalent atrocities, but we also ignore that we are sometimes culpable in the atrocities.  It's why the people of Ohio can feel superior to the American South's history of slavery and Jim Crow laws while fostering conditions in cities that have continued racial conflict.  It's why European government officials can persuade themselves that they are better and more enlightened than the U.S. in terms of race relations, despite the fact that Europe has increasingly worse problems with immigration and assimilation than the U.S.

Ahistoric blaming isn't just lazy scholarship, it's also a problem for those who are concerned about what is going on in the here-and-now.  It's a shell game that people (en masse in the forms of both regional and national electorates) use to tell themselves that their decisions are alright, or even good, while equivalent past decisions of other nations were horrible and should be looked down upon.  It allows us to put a false distance between "us" and "them" and therefore falsely assert that our decisions are better, smarter, and more just, when they are, in fact, almost identical.

What's in a Name? Or, Why You Should be Cautious in Comparing Languages...

While driving out the the field the other day, one of the archaeologists with whom I am working asked what the linguistic connection was between Cachuma - a place name from Santa Barbara County - and Kuuchamaa - a similar-sounding place name from San Diego County.

I didn't know the origin of Kuuchamaa, but it is the native name for Tecate Peak, an important sacred mountain that is the spiritual center for the Kumeyaay peoples of southern California and northern Mexico.  Having read up on it, I still haven't a clue as to what the word means, but it is the name of both the place, and of a culture hero - a wise and powerful shaman - said to have once lived in that place*.  The translation of the word appears to be hard to come by, so I am at a bit of a loss.

Cachuma, however, is a bit easier.  Cachuma is the English bastardization of the Spanish bastardization of the Inezeno Chumash word Aqitsumu, meaning "constant signal", which was the name of a village located in the Santa Ynez Valley, near the current location of Lake Cachuma.

So, while Cachuma and Kuuchamaa seem similar at first glance, one appears to be the actual Kumeyaay word, while the other is a rather tortured telephone game version of an Inezeno word.  Now, there could still be some linguistic connection between them, but that seems somewhat unlikely, as Aqitsumu fits in perfectly well with the Chumash language family**, and Kuuchamaa, as far as I have been able to tell (though I am a bit shaky on this) seems to fit in well with the Kumeyaay language, a dialect of Diegeno, part of the Yuman language family.  So, there is no reason to assume a connection, despite superficial similarities.

The words, though similar, refer to different types of things (a sacred mountain/person's name and a village), and there is no reason to assume that they would have similar meanings.  What's more, the version of Aqitsumu that bears the most resemblance to the Kumeyaay word, Cachuma, is also the version that is most divorced from native pronunciation.  Further, the names come from two unconnected languages.

There is, in short, no reason to think that these words are in any way connected, and some reason to think that they are not.

What is interesting about this is that there is no reason to assume a linguistic connection between two groups of people who were separated by only a few hundred miles of space for centuries.   Pseudoscientific language comparisons are often employed by people who wish to show a connection between two completely unrelated groups of people.  It is a favorite approach of those who see the ancient Isrealites landing int he Americas, the Celts taking over parts of the midwest, Medieval Japanese explorers settling Mexico, or Egyptians colonizing South America (yes, there are people who believe every one of these things).

The method is as follows:

Step 1: Find a few words (or sometimes even one) from two languages that have even a superficial similarity

Step 2: Claim that the link between these two populations is proven

Step 3: Ignore everyone who actually knows what they are talking about when they point out that you are a fool.

But, as illustrated, even in a case where two words are both used as placenames, sound extremely similar, and are from groups separated by only a few hundred miles, there is still reason to doubt a connection.  Keep this in mind whenever your wacky neighbor claims that some vague language similarities prove that the native people of New Jersey were actually descended from a clan of Bavarian sausage-makers.




*Kuuchamaa appears to be a manifestation of a messianic religious concept that appeared throughout southern California either shortly before or around the time that the Spanish arrived.  Whether the Kuuchamaa version of the story is the origin for the others, represents a merger of the messianic story with another older religious tradition, or else a spontaneous manifestation of a similar story, I do not know...nor does anyone else as far as I have been able to tell.  It's neat that even after well over a century of research, we still have some mysteries like this to explore in California.

**Chumashan languages were, until recently, thought to be part of the Hokan language family, but that view has now been largely discredited.  As a result, Chumash is an oddity in that it has no known related languages (similar in this respect to the Basque language of Spain) and exists as a linguistic island alone on the California coast.  While this is speculative, some researchers have posited that Chumash may be the last version of the original Native Californian language family, as the other languages in California appear to have come in from elsewhere.  While intriguing, this idea remains speculation until such time as physical or paleolinguistic evidence can be found to back it up.

The Ghost Town of Calico

Just east of Barstow, in the Calico Hills, is a rebuilt old mining town, named Calico.  It is currently operated as a regional park by the County of San Bernardino, but was once a busy silver mining town.

Welcome...TO HISTORY!

The Silver Rush of the late 19th century is less well-known than the Gold Rush of the mid-19th century.  However, the Silver Rush was important in the histories of both Nevada and California (especially southern California).  The town of Calico was founded in 1881 by a group of miners who headed into the local mountains looking for silver.  Within two years, the town had grown to house around 1,200 residents, had 500 mines, and the usual accompaniments of a successful old west town (justice of the peace, post office, hotels, restaurants, numerous brothels, etc.).

Calico...never will you see a more wretched hive of scum and villainy

Before long, Colemanite borate (an ore of Boron that can be purified, and can itself be used for the manufacture of glasses, medicines, cosmetics, as well as for numerous industrial processes).  The town swelled to 3,500 people, with settlers from both Europe and Asia joining the American settlers.

The structures constructed during this time ranged from standard wooden construction, typical of 19th century houses and businesses, to stone structures that integrated the slopes and cliffs into their structure.

And, of course, there was no shortage of mining structures and equipment, including machinery such as a stamp mill.

Remember - it's not an exploitative Hell hole that OSHA would shut down anymore, it's historic!

However, as is so often the story with mining towns, the fall came almost as quickly as the rise.  The Silver Purchase Act of 1890 had the effect of reducing the price of silver.  As the decade wore on, Calico's silver mines became less economically viable, and the town began to depopulate.  By 1898, the post office shut down, followed by the school, and the town was pretty much abandoned by 1900.

In 1915, an attempt was made to recover unclaimed silver from the old mines, using cyanidation (a metallurgical process for the extraction ore using the chemical properties for cyanide).  While this did result in the brief resurgence of silver mining, it did not cause Calico to boom again.

In 1951, Walter Knott, of Knott's Berry Farm, bought Calico and began restoring many of the buildings.  While the purchase of historic buildings by the wealthy is hardly unusual, this was a unique turn in two ways: 1) Walter Knott had, as a young man, been a local homesteader and helped to build the cyanidation facilities, and 2) he turned it into a historic park with restored buildings, repaired or re-built based on old plans and photographs, and donated it to the County of San Bernardino in 1966.  

See, tacky Halloween decorations

While the buildings may have been restored to a close resemblance of their historic grandeur, the town is more tourist attraction than ghost town.  While it does serve to teach a visitor a bit about local history, it also has numerous souvenir shops and chachki stands that don't exactly stand up to historical scrutiny.  Oh, and if you happen to visit in October, as I did, you will witness numerous tacky "spooky" plastic skeletons and ghosts arranged about the place, further removing the historicity of the place.

Nonetheless, if you poke around outside of the central town portion and walk on some of the other paths, you will find the remains of buildings that have not been rebuilt, as well as some that have been rebuilt faithfully in ways that don't romanticize the old west.

The solution to California's high housing costs!

Oh, and if you visit, be sure to check out the cemetery.  It is fascinating both in terms of the tombstones, and of the construction of the graves themselves.  Observe:

Calico Hills, California

So, the new father routine has been keeping me busy and occupying much of the time that I used to use to keep this blog.  However, for now I am away from home and working on projects in the Mojave Desert, based out of Barstow rather than Lancaster, this time.

Contrary to popular opinion, Barstow isn't too bad a place - it's not high on my list of vacation spots, but it is a decent enough place out of which to be based.  It beats the hell out of Taft, at any rate.

We finish our work day a few hours before dark, and so I have been using my late afternoons/early evenings out exploring the area.  Yesterday, I headed out to the Calico Hills, an area of interest to me for a few reasons.

There are claims that the Calico Hills was host to a Ghost Dance movement.  The Ghost Dances were religious movements that had begun amongst the Paiute in Nevada and moved out among Native American groups during the 19th century (the best known being the one that sparked the massacre at Wounded Knee).  They varied considerably from place to place, and were often known by names other than Ghost Dance.  The ritual consisted of an extensive dance, coupled with lifestyle changes towards clean living, which would summon the ancestors (or, in some versions, the spirits worshiped by the ancestors) who would wipe the Europeans and their descendants from the Americas.

Needless to say, as often happens with apocalyptic religious  movements, the members of the Ghost Dance cults were tragically wrong.

I have been unable to confirm whether or not there was a Ghost Dance cult involved in the Calico Hills.  It may very well have, there were groups in the general vicinity who had been influenced by the Ghost Dance, but much of what is readily available about the Calico Hills cult comes from half-wit new age "spiritual investigators" and therefore isn't worth the air that the Wi-Fi on which I read about it penetrates.

The area was heavily mined for silver during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  The town (now ghost town and tourist attraction) of Calico Hills - about which more will be written in a following post - is partially in ruins and has been partially rebuilt.  However, the tunnels for the silver mines are still present, if falling apart, and make for some interesting viewing.

Another interesting aspect of the Calico Hills is the alleged "early man site" - a site that allegedly has artifacts that date to up to 200,000 years old depending on what dates you accept.  Now, I have not handled these alleged artifacts directly, but having seen photos, I am unconvinced.  They do look like they might be artifacts...or they might be geofacts (naturally occurring rocks broken in ways that make them look like artifacts).Given the dearth of any other evidence of humans or pre-human hominids in the Americas prior to 20,000 years ago (the most reliably dated old deposits date to around 12,000 years ago, though that may be beginning to change), and the ambiguous nature of the Calico Hills items, it seems safe to say that they are likely just geofacts.

Many of the supporters of the early man hypothesis like to point out that the legendary Louis Leakey believed these to be genuine artifacts and not geofacts.  However, becoming familiar with the actual work of Louis Leakey (as distinct from the work of his wife Mary or his son, Richard, both of whom have well-earned good reputations among archaeologists and paleoanthropologists) tends to lead one with becoming impressed with his business/fund-raising acumen, and somewhat less impressed with his skills in archaeology.  In fact, Mary Leakey cited his involvement with Calico Hills as being one of the primary causes of her losing respect for him as a researcher, and a contributing factor to the couple separating.

Regardless, the Calico hills have a weird, almost alien, beauty.  And they made for an excellent place to relax and watch the sunset over the playa below and behind the mountains across the valley.

Morro Rock

Morro Rock, at the mouth of Morro Bay, is a large chunk of volcanic rock, over 20 million years old, a result of long-extinct volcanoes along the California coast.  It is one of the Nine Sisters - a chain of similar large volcanic peaks located in San Luis Obispo County - and may represent locations where the continental plate moved over a volcanic hotspot over the eons. 

Of interest to me, Morro Rock is often held to be a sacred place to both Chumsh and Salinan peoples, and given its looming presence at the mouth of Morro Bay, it would be surprising if it weren't.  Unfortunately, like many elements of Native Californian Religion, the importance of Morro Rock is largely preserved through an oral history that has been damaged due to the impacts of Spanish colonization and the post-Gold Rush Americanization of the region. 

When I was in graduate school, I would pass by Morro Bay and see Morro Rock whenever I drove north to visit family in Modesto.  I always thought that I should stop off some day and have a look, but never did. 

Last Saturday, I had the day to myself, and decided to take a drive out to the area, stopping to spend a good part of the day in the town of Morro Bay itself.  The rock, which was once essentially an island off-shore, is now reachable via an artificial sandbar and walkway.  I drove out and parked next to it, and spent some time walking around the 1/3 or so of the rock that has walkways.  Climbing on the rock is prohibited, as it is a bird sanctuary, and given that large slabs of rock often fall off of it's nearly vertical surfaces, climbing on it is not particularly safe, anyway.

Given the history of the area, it was appropriate that, as I drove by the narrow estuary that is Morro Bay itself, I saw a strange canoe in the water.  My first thought was "hey, that looks like a Tomol" the unique Chumash plank canoe.  As I drove, I came to the boat launch, and saw a sign indicating that there was a meeting of Chumash elders that day, meaning that I had, in fact, seen a Tomol.

This was particularly exciting for me as the Tomol has long been prominent in my mind because there are strong arguments that the advent of the Tomol canoe allowed frequent trips across the Santa Barbara Channel, allowing some rather important trade routes to be more reliably opened, sparking the growth of Chumash culture after AD 1000.  I had seen the canoes hanging in museums and in illustrations, but never in use - but here were two of them being paddled around the bay by a group of Chumash elders.  And here I was, perfect timing, with a camera in my hand.

Anyway, I am very happy that I finally decided to visit Morro Bay.  What's more, I discovered that it is only a 2-hour drive from home (for some reason, I had always thought it was a longer drive), which means that getting out to the beach for a day trip is going to become more feasible for me.

How Not to Talk about India with an Indian

When I was in graduate school, the girlfriend of one of my fellow graduate students came to visit.  She was from India, and while she had lived in the United States for quite a while (her accent was so thoroughly western U.S. in its flavor that had she not told me that she had grown up in India, I'd not have guessed), she was, nonetheless from India. 

One evening, the lot of us went out to a bar near the university, where we spent several hours talking.  Another grad student was there, a guy who we will call Stan, was quite fond of accusing the white students of trying to push our "western narratives" onto other people (in case you're hoping for a heaping dose of irony on that point, he he was of mixed Mexican and Korean ancestry himself, and so was at least not one white student making the accusation to a bunch of other white students...he was, however, from Orange County, and so his frequent claims that we were all affluent and from conservative areas was deliciously ironic).  Indeed, most of us simply avoided any conversation that might turn to cultural differences and the assertion of cultural narratives (which was tough, as we were an anthropology department), and others (myself included) liked to play with him by throwing out bits of statements to see what we could get him to say or do.

Anyway, Stan began talking to our visitor, and in his usual way, he decided to buddy up with her by talking smack about "those evil colonialists."  He was shocked when she didn't agree with him.

In summary, her view was this:  The European colonial powers were basically a bunch of assholes who did some terrible things...but they left behind a physical and legal infrastructure that allowed India to begin excelling when left to its own devices, and the success of many Indian people, herself included, was a direct result of the colonial history.  So, she didn't see colonialism as being an entirely bad thing, in the long run.

Now, you can argue with her position.  I'm not sure that I entirely agree with it, myself.  But she articulated it well (what I wrote up there does no justice to what she actually said, it's a very crude summary), and she was willing to stick with and defend her position. 

Stan was perplexed, and then he was angry.

He would not accept that there might be any benefit from colonial activity.  He had so internalized the notion that colonialism was a purely evil thing, that he could not bring himself to accept that someone whose own personal history derives directly and (given both her and her parent's age) recently from European colonialism might not view it as a strict black-and-white issue.  She didn't say colonialsim was good, but she did say that it had beneficial long-term effects for many people in India.  Again, you can argue against this position, but you can not do so by simply nay-saying it without considering what was being said.

Then, of course, came the thing that made this evening so delightfully and memorably ironic: Stan accused her of attempting to impose her "western narrative" on the people of India.

That's right, the affluent boy from Orange County, who was able to attend a graduate school in a prestigious university system in California, accused someone who was actually from India of imposing a "western narrative" onto India.

The problem is that the strict black-and-white, good vs. evil view of Europe's colonial history and it's modern results is as much a product of western culture and beliefs as were the notions of European exceptionalism, of "white man's burden", of the particular form of greed and avarice that fueled it.  For all of his claims to being somehow non-western, Stan was as western as everyone else there, and he had bought into the late 20th/early 21st centuries western narrative of colonialism.  And just as those he criticized were unwilling to consider native views of history*, he was unwilling to do that very same thing.

The reason that I bring this up is that there is a tendency among many people, often (though not limited to) the political left, to attempt to correct past de-humanization of various groups of people by engaging in activities that are equally dehumanizing, just in a different way.  It is no less condescending to think of the people whose lands were colonized as hapless victims than it is to think that they should be grateful for having been made second-class citizens so that they might be "enlightened" by Europeans.  Similarly, if you object to histories being written by the descendants of the European colonials, you are not improving matters by creating an alternate history that tries to be sympathetic to the colonized while simultaneously ignoring what their descendants have to say on the matter. 

I have written in the past about the refusal of most modern people to really examine our histories as they concern colonialism and groups that we would not lump into the category of "minorities".  We want to create simple narratives with evil, maniacle bad guy colonists and shining, virtuous natives fighting a valiant, if losing, battle against encroaching modernity.  But the fact of the matter is that this is just false.  History is messy, and even horrible events can have good consequences down the road...and, of course, events that we consider good can have horrible long-term consequences.  But, ultimately, whether we are vilifying Europeans or Indians, we are applying a narrative to the situation...and Stan's narrative was just as much a product of his contemporary western political ideologies as the views of the colonial governments were products of theirs. 





A quick note - while I was writing this, I discovered that another blogger by the name of Natlie Reed wrote an excellent post on why the "progressive" notions of "non-western" cultures are just as dehumanizing and harmful as the attitudes that they claim to be trying to correct.  Read it here.





*For the record, most of us routinely worked with native consultants and informants and worked to make sure that we were accurately reflecting what they told us in our work.  Such a method is not without it's own flaws and pitfalls, to be certain, but it is more than Stan was doing in his work.  Again, the irony of it all was astounding.

Undergrad Solves an Astro-Historical Mystery?

This is cool.  I was clued in to it by my friend Matt DeHayes, who posted a link on Facebook.

Researchers in Japan have found evidence in a spike in the amount of atmospheric Carbon-14 in AD 774 or 775 reflected in tree rings.  Typically, this is the result of a supernova expelling materials into the galaxy, eventually reaching earth.  However, nobody knew of any supernovae the ejecta of which would have reached Earth during that time frame, either through historic reports or astronomical data consistent with supernovae.

Then, some smart-ass undergrad at UC Santa Cruz (go Slugs!) by the name of Jonathon Allen got curious, and decided to do a Google search, finding a link to on-line transcripts of the Anglo-Saxon chronicles.  In it, he found reference to the appearance of a new "red cruciform" star near the horizon.  The placement and color suggest both a dust cloud obscuring some of the light and radiation, and that the "new star" would have been hidden by the sun after its initial appearance, thus explaining why there is little evidence of a supernova, and why the debris hasn't been observed by modern archaeologists.

Now, as always, it should be said that the observations of an 8th century chronicler, while valuable, were never intended to be used as astronomical data.  The chronicler wrote about what he saw, but it would, of course, be filtered through the political, religious, and social attitudes and requirements of the time.  So, there is a danger in taken what was written at face value, much less in concluding that this was definitely any one particular astronomical event.

Nonetheless, if further evidence comes to light, Allen may have set us on the path to solving a real, if small, historical and chemical mystery.  Stuff like this makes me happy.

Allen - you're making this archaeologist happy, and this UC Santa Cruz alumni proud.  Keep on doin' what you're doin'.

Tesla, Edison, and Narrative Formation

So, a cartoon on the oatmeal regarding Nikola Tesla inspired a response from a columnist at Forbes, which in turn prompted a response from the cartoonist at the Oatmeal.  What is interesting about this particular case is that both authors are (correctly) pointing out that the other is engaged in cherry-picking, exaggeration, and occasional "creative interpretation" of the facts. 

Contrary to the Oatmeal author's assertions to the contrary, Tesla is increasingly not only not ignored, but there is something of a "cult of Tesla" amongst a large number of people ranging from out-there conspiracy theorists who see an over-simplified version of the Tesla-vs.Edison story as a microcosm of the "us vs. the powerful conspiracy vs. the sheeple" narrative that they have, to tech gurus who see Tesla as a genius misunderstood, rather like the prefer to think of themselves (and for many of these people, the claim that Tesla is completely ignored by everyone but them is part of how they identify with the story).  In defense of the Oatmeal*, the cult of Tesla is a relatively recent development, and exists largely as a pop culture phenomenon rather than a fixture of the educational system, like the cult of Edison.

Until fairly recently, Tesla has, of course, largely been ignored by most of the public.  While everyone knows of Thomas Edison, it is only in the last decade or so that Nikola Tesla has gained any sort of wide recognition from the public.  Tesla's genius did make him, in many ways, ahead of his time, while his deteriorating mental health made him increasingly an outsider prone to making wild claims**.  Edison, meanwhile, was probably not the kindest or most generous of men, but he did play a significant role in the development of the modern world, whether or not his own grandstanding and marketing was geared towards making his role seem even larger.

What both narrative have in common is that they seek to create a hero.  Either Edison was a flawed, but ultimately strong and significant, man who created the modern world, or Tesla was a lone genius capable of great things, done in by the evil dictator of engineering, Thomas Edison.  While the authors of both narratives make concessions to the presence of other narratives (such as occasionally admitting when Edison did something shitty, or when Tesla was talking out of his ass), they nonetheless tend to commit to their heroic narrative to the degree that they will ignore confounding information.  For example, the author of the Oatmeal notes that one of Edison's assistants died due to Edison's experimentation with X-Rays and notes that Edison jumped to human experimentation without working first with animals, but fails to note that this was not uncommon at the time (in other words, there was a cultural precedent) and that Edison experimented on himself as well as his assistant, that the assistant volunteered and was enthusiastic, and  that Edison was apparently haunted by the death of the man (not the trait of an evil mad scientist or soulless industrialist). 

By contrast, the author of the Forbes piece downplays Tesla's importance by pointing out that Tesla's work was often just one component of larger attempts to tackle engineering problems, while advocating in favor of Edison's genius while pointing out that, well, Edison's work was often just one component of larger attempts to tackle engineering problems.  The Forbes article comes of as, frankly, a bit more honest, while it should bee noted that the Oatmeal never claims to be either thorough or factually correct. 

Okay, Armstrong, so why the hell are you going on about this?

Simple, while neither the Oatmeal nor Forbes are history publications (the Oatmeal is humor, Forbes is about business), both nonetheless wade into the waters of historic narrative, and both engage in the sort of myth-making that is common when the lay public, and many professional historians, engage in this. It's worth noting this both because of it's  interesting in its own right, but also because similar processes are used to sway us when someone is constructing a politically, religiously, or socially motivated historic narrative, and looking at it happen can help to sort it out.

Look at the Oatmeal comic and the Forbes article side-by-side, and reflect that both are as accurate with their facts as the other (and neither is playing particularly fast-and-loose), and yet both reach very different conclusions about the virtues of Tesla and Edison respectively.  Consider that the exact same process is at work whenever you see an evaluation of a historic event or person (even recent history, say the first part of the Obama Administration or the entirety of the Bush Jr. administration) and reflect that by simply downplaying some facts, or paying greater attention to others, even someone who is not trying to deceive can reach a conclusion that is far more personal opinion than defensible conclusion. 

Now consider that most people outside of academic history and Journalism (and even a minority of people within those fields) will provide historical narratives only because they want to use it to push an agenda, and as such they are often more tied to the agenda than to the facts.  If you can be pushed to reach such different conclusions using legitimate information, consider just how far astray you may be led by someone who wants you to believe a falsehood.





*There's a phrase I never thought that I would write.

**Some of the more "out there" members of the cult of Tesla seem to either reject that Tesla's mental health was in poor shape, or simply ignore it, and take many of his more dubious claims about what he had figured out (such as wirelessly transmitting electricity) at face value.

New Age Energy vs. Anthropology and History

In a recent argument regarding Reiki, the person with whom I was arguing (who is fully convinced of the efficacy of Reiki*) made a number of supporting claims.  There were the usual citing of anecdotal claims and dubious readings of situations, and claims of big pharma cover-ups, of course, but in the middle of it there was the following claim (paraphrased by me, but close enough to the original that the claimant is unlikely to take any issue with it):

"All cultures have some form of energy healing, which makes the claims of Reiki practitioners credible!"

Really?  All cultures do, eh?

No.  Not really.

There are numerous problems with this claim - not the least of which is the notion that a commonly held belief is inherently true (AKA, the bandwagon fallacy).  Let's start with the first one - the imposition of the concept of energy onto the practices of cultures that would not have recognized the concept itself.  Most New Age beliefs tend to refer to mystical energies, but the problem here is that energy is well defined within physics (go here for a good explanation of what it is, or here for a good explanation coupled with how it is abused by New Agers), but not within the various New Age schools of thought.  In fact, my own experience has been that pursuing the New Age definitions of energy invariably results in either non-answer deflections ("well, you see, energy is vibrations!" "Huh?") or muddled nonsensical answers that collapse in upon their own weight. 

The problem, I suspect, is that because energy is not a physical object, but rather a potential for work/force, a property of physical objects (so, kinetic energy is the energy of an object in motion, electrical energy is the energy of electrons moving through an object, thermal energy is the heat generated by a chemical reaction within an object, etc.).  Because energy is physical in nature, but as a property does not manifest as an object itself, people tend to view it as a weird, ethereal thing, even though it is really a very simple concept that is quite clear once properly explained.  It is similar to quantum physics - a very real subject of scientific study the name of which is routinely employed by people who want to push their made-up crap.

So, the first problem with the claim that every culture has some form of energy healing is the fact that the term "energy healing" as used by New Agers reveals a deep ignorance of what the term energy means, and a replacement of its real definition with a hazy "mystical force" definition.

The next problem is that it's not at all clear that energy healing beliefs are all that common.  Many New Agers will refer to shamanic practices geared towards manipulating a person's energy to remove illness as a form of energy healing.  However, as described by ethnographers ranging from Claude Levi Strauss to Alfred Kroeber to J.P. Harrington and Franz Boas, these practices were geared towards removing illness-causing agents, not energies.  These agents might have been spirits, but they were at least as likely to be thought of as physical objects (for one example, Levi-Strauss documented cases where shamans claimed that bits of blood mixed with other objects were the causes of sickness).  Similarly, both anthropologists and journalists working in rural Asia have documented cases of local healers claiming to pull physical objects out of an individual in order to heal illness.  In other cases, shamans and healers fought to stave off illness caused by sorcery. 
So, many of the cases that get cited as "energy healing" are, in fact, viewed by the practitioners not as energy healing in the New Age sense, but as the removal of physical objects causing illness.  In those other cases, where spirits or sorcery are viewed as the cause, a reading of the actual anthropological literature demonstrates that the people who engage in these practices do not see spirits or magic as vague "bad vibes" in the way that so many New Age healers do, and that the claim of these being energy healing is a post-hoc rationalization and imposition to try to bring their beliefs into line with those of the New Age believers, and not an acceptance of the actual practice as viewed and experienced by the actual people doing it.

If we look into European history, we likewise see a mix of magic, spirit/demon beliefs, and physical causes for illness.  Folk beliefs often cited witchcraft as a cause of some illnesses, and depending on the tradition being examined, witchcraft might include anything from simple folk magic to attempted deals with spirits and demons, but, again, not some fuzzy, ill-defined "energy."  Early European medical doctors were often dependent on the concept of the "humors" - blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm.  While the concepts surrounding the humors often ranged into the mystical, they were, nonetheless, real physical things that could be manipulated by physical means (fr example, bleeding a patient), and not "energies." 

Even in east Asia, where so many New Agers get inspiration for claims about "healing energies", the notion that this was a common belief is a bit dubious.  Certainly, the notion of Chi (or ki, or qi) as currently used seems to meet it, but it is itself a term that has had many different definitions throughout history (read up on it here), and the notion that it was an "energy" as opposed to something else post-dates European contact, and historically it has even been thought of as a building-block of physical matter, rather like many similar concepts held by Greek philosophers.  Prana is a similar concept with a similar history.  So, even here, where we have the closest approximation to New Age energy, the history of the concept doesn't quite line up with what the Reiki practitioner with whom I was arguing claims. 

Are there cultures which do have beliefs that have rough similarities ot New Age "energy healing" practices?  Yes, there are.  But, again, they line up roughly, not precisely, and the New Age tendency is to tend to force the "energy healing" concept onto these beliefs and practices rather than take them as they are.  Moreover, while these types of concepts are not unheard of, they are FAR from universal, and someone who claims that every culture has them is someone who has demonstrated that they are disinterested in the practices of other cultures.  






*For the uninitiated, you lucky bastards, Reiki is the practice of waving one's hands over someone to manipulate their "energies" [in keeping with it's Asian origin, this is usually referred to as "ki", "qi", or "chi", and heal them*, with some people doing actual massage, which does have limited but real therapeutic value, and claiming to be doing Reiki simultaneously.  Though often claimed to be an "ancient healing art, Reiki is, in fact, quite modern, dating to the 1920s.  However, its adherents are usually very clear that it comes from Asia, which, as with so many culture-porn related things, seems to give it an aura of mysticism in their minds.

The Old News of Lost Tribes

Many years back, when I was in my early 20s, a friend of mine converted to Mormonism.  At the time, he was, like many new converts to a religion, very enthusiastic and wanted to share with everyone.  For the most part, this was fine - while I disagreed with most of his new-found views, they did appear to be doing him some good (though he would later outgrow them and leave the church), and I wanted to support him in doing something that seemed to be helping him (as you can probably guess, my views on religion in general have changed since then).  However, as I had received some training in archaeology, he often wanted to discuss the Mormon Church's views on North American archaeology with me.

As I have described before, the Mormon church teaches a version of North American prehistory that is completely out-of-touch with the archaeological record.  As a result, I think that conversations with me on the subject were rather frustrating to my friend.  But one thing that he said frequently during these conversations struck me as interesting.  He made the statement that Joseph Smith originated the notion that the Native Americans were descendants of the lost tribes of Israel.  When I spoke with friends of his from the church, I heard them confirm this particular claim.  Later, as I spoke with Mormons in Santa Cruz (where I was living at the time) and Santa Barbara (where I attended graduate school), I heard this claim expressed again. 

Now, I have been unable to confirm whether the Mormon Church claims as part of its official doctrine that Smith originated the idea that the peoples of the Americas are from the lost tribes or not (I have found that trying to pin down many specific claims gets pretty slippery pretty quickly), but it seems to be a not-uncommon claim amongst members. 

This is odd, as the claim had been around for centuries before Smith was born.

Spanish clergy and intellectuals, intrigued by the new people encountered by Spanish explorers, often floated hypotheses regarding where these people came from, and a popular notion since the 16th century was that these were the lost tribes.  These ideas were popular enough that by the time that the Spanish government asked for information regarding the Americans in 1813 (17 years before the Book of Mormon was published, and also before Smith claimed to have received visions as well as the alleged golden tablets) several of the priests who wrote the responses referred to the notion that the natives were descended from Israelites, and phrased their answers in such a way that it is clear that this was considered a relatively mainstream view.

In 1825, a few years before the Book of Mormon was published, The View of the Hebrews by Ethan Smith (no relation to Joseph) was published, which has many parallels to the Book of Mormon including an obsession with teaching the Americans about their alleged ancestry in Israel. 

Anyway, the point is that this idea that has often been described to me as "groundbreaking" or novel had, in fact, been in circulation for centuries before Joseph Smith began writing, and was in active circulation around the time that he produced the Book of Mormon.

Early Avocational Archaeologists

I am working on a project right now where I have to deal with an archaeological site that was first recorded by a man named Oscar Noren. 

Noren was a rancher and farmer who lived in the San Joaquin Valley during the early 20th century, and who became interested in the native peoples of the area.  He began to travel throughout the region, looking for archaeological sites, but also, importantly, getting to know the people of the area.  He collected a huge amount of anthropological and archaeological data, organized it in a usable fashion, and left behind some excellent notes that are still used by archaeologists in the region, all without the benefit of any formal training in anthropology or archaeology.  Noren's ties to the native community are solid, and he is still remembered fondly by the members of the community who interacted with him in their youths.

Most parts of California have someone like this - the avocational anthropologist who, out of sheer curiosity, was able to provide a base from which regional archaeologists, ethnographers, and ethnohistorians have since worked.  Their reputations have fared differently depending on their methods and their approaches - those who tended to go digging without consultation with the Native communities have generally been though poorly of by both the Native peoples of their regions as well as by modern anthropologists; those who simply collected folklore and language information uncritically have provided a useful record, but one that can be very difficult to use as it often contains contradictory and confusing information; many were engaged in other ideological work that colored their view of what they were doing - I have read a few entries by itinerant preachers who also did amateur archaeology in the late 19th and early 20th century, and while they can provide very useful information, their disdain of the people whose remains they examined often shines through in not only the tone of their writings but also the information that they deem worth recording.

But, faults, and all, this work oftne provides information about both archaeology and ethnography which is not at all available today due to the effects of erosion, as well as cultural change.  These accounts are greatly valuable.

Noren's work, which I have only recently become acquainted with, is particularly fascinating.  From what I have seen so far, he seems more interested in observation and interaction with people than in deep interpretation, which makes his work very usable for a modern anthropologist.  Moreover, because he made an effort to build and maintain ties with the Native San Joaquin community, I encounter people regularly who knew him and can fill in the occasional gaps in his information.  It's really a fascinating exercise.

The modern equivalent of these folks is found in local archaeological societies and archaeological clubs - groups of people actually interested in the real past, who have a desire to read, study, record, and discuss their work in a solid, defensible way.  While I know of nobody who currently has the ability to record the volume of information as these early avocationalists, mostly because of changes in land ownership to social norms, the spirit is still there, and it's something that I think needs to be nurtured. 

Flaked Glass and Date Designation

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.

Skull Art and Revulsion

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.