Busy day (with ritual)
Saturday, 16 May 2009
We capped a long day of substantive presentations with The Unveiling Ceremony! The ArchaeoBus apparently has good vibes, since the rain held off until after the festivities….
Musings
Is there GoogleIdea?
Tuesday, 28 April 2009
One thing about the SAAs, most people throw up a Keynote (or that other MS format), and since archaeology has a lot of spatial variables, there’re often maps. Well, they used to be maps, hand-drawn back in the old days; now a GoogleMap or two creeps in….
Note that the cleared area on this image had just civic-ceremonial architecture—no normal residential area. Some of that was on the terraces that sprawl down the slopes, mostly toward the top and right of the frame (no, north is not “up”). When this was a vibrant community a millennia ago, it extended outside this image. It was BIG. Uh, scale? Those rectangular things are tour buses on one of the whitish patches toward the lower right….
I had a good idea today—at least I’m pretty sure, even now, that it’s a good idea. That makes today a superb day!
You’ve heard of New Coke?
Friday, 24 April 2009
I just discovered New Coke Bottles….
Ah, material culture change…. I guess I don’t get out much. Or when I do, I’m not in the soda aisle at the groc store….
Conference news: I missed seeing the lovely Oralia because she’s suffering tooth problems. I’m sad. But I did see her hubby and get caught up a bit.
Conference news: Overwhelmingly, across the Maya lowlands, the “collapse” (whatever that is) preceeded the Maya drought you hear about. It’s hard to evoke cause-and-effect, therefore. And, prime-movers are out. At least with this example of sociocultural change.
As I write this, it is raining…*
Thursday, 23 April 2009
This gully is in the Mixteca Alta, which I’ve written a bit about here.
So, while much of the world was going about its business, I was cooped up inside an architecturally insipid hotel downtown listening to interesting and not so interesting papers on archaeology. Last night’s crop was really good, today’s more mundane….
The picture is of a “slide” someone put up (in these days of Keynote and it’s awful MS imitator, they’re no longer slides, but what to call them?), showing a huge erosional gully. The ladder is 4 m tall—that’s 13 feet. And the soil at the height of the guy standing on the ladder was deposited maybe AD 1400, so all that soil above his head was deposited in the last 500 years, then the whole mess suffered the erosion that made the eroded face we’re looking at. If that makes sense. (The soil at the bottom dates to about 7500 BC or so. That’s one heck of a lot of soil when you consider there’s a whole modest valley with this kind of deposition!)
Lesson: if you’re going to take away the vegetation in a mountainous region with friable soils, either maintain the ground surface or watch it wash away. There’s no middle ground.
*…and somewhere nearby I’m sure there’s plenty of red soil eroding (whosh!), too….
Geospatial thinking…
Thursday, 9 April 2009
I’ve been working on a White Paper. Just to be well, that way, I boxed some text and made the background not-white.
I got the info summarized in the box from:
Golledge, Reginald G., Meredith Marsh, and Sarah Battersby. 2008. A Conceptual Framework for Facilitating Geospatial Thinking. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 98:285–308.
I did mention this is a drafty draft so far, didn’t I?
Fake mom
Saturday, 28 March 2009
Visited a working sheep farm today, and saw the new crop of lambs and some of the milking process. My conclusion about the shift to pastoralism (from gathering and hunting): you get to deal with a lot of crap.
Grab your phone!
Tuesday, 24 March 2009
“Beware bears” doesn’t really cover it.*
We’ve been hearing about legislative budget dickering at the Federal level. It’s also happening at the state level here in Georgia.
The legislators seem to employ this logic: cut the heck out of everything, and then wait for the constituent backlash, and use that to decide what “has” to be put back in.
Late afternoon’s breaking news was that the Georgia House has cut the archaeology program to the tune of $279K-plus, including the Federally-mandated State Archaeologist position.
So, the backlash begins. The SGA story is here, and there’s more on the GCPA page here.
Fellow Georgians, please start dialing for dollars….
* Bears are harassing hikers and breaking into their gear along the stretch of the AT we hiked last Friday…. Our companion F added the drawing….
Dissected creeks
Wednesday, 18 March 2009
This creek drains the Little Park*, and it’s already delivered most of the rainfall from earlier this week downstream. The streambed is dissected, or deep below the adjacent ground surface. This is the result of sediment deposition in the valley, as well as downcutting by the drainage after the forests were removed in the catchment area. So, the pattern you see here is very historic, and relatively recent. The piedmont sure looks a lot different now than it did 500 years ago.
* my term
Check the detail
Thursday, 5 March 2009
Our neighborhood has some lovely old apartment buildings, although some have been condo-ized. These Ionic columns add a delightful detail to the façade of this pair of buildings, which face each other across a lovely garden, a haven in the midst of the city.
Atlanta’s many names
Friday, 20 February 2009
First, it was wild land.
Then, the Euroamerican landgrabbers founded Terminus, to be the end of the railroad coming south from Chattanooga. By 1842, it had 30 residents.
Then, Wilson Lumpkin asked that the town be named after his daughter, Martha, rather than himself. Terminus became Marthasville.
And, not long after, the community was incorporated in 1847 as Atlanta.
Then came the War of Northern Aggression, when Union soldiers torched fair Atlanta.
Rising from the flames, residents chose the phoenix as the symbol of the city.
And the reason for this historic recitation*? Over 7–22 March, the Atlanta Preservation Center presents a “Citywide Celebration of Living Landmarks” (buildings, not people). The connection: this is called Phoenix Flies.
I must confess I hear that name and I think of a summer street in postbellum Atlanta strewn with road apples and their attendent clouds of busy insects.