Musings

Today’s big excitement….

Every once in a while I come across a succinct comment that ties into something I’ve been thinking about, as happened this morning when I found a link to a transcript of a 2005 lecture by Patrick V. Kirch, and took a look at it. Writes Kirch:

Any compelling theory of change will need to attend to both ultimate and proximate causations, to long-term context and process, and to short-term dynamism and agency.*

Data and research questions are interlinked. Duh.

I’m interested in, most generally, the evolution of political economies or sociopolitical change and continuity. Kirch is right. To assess change, you have to look at data from a range of temporal scales, and thus causation over that same range. This means issues such as demography, subsistence including production and market/exchange, and ideology all are in play.

Over time, trends toward increasing population (even at the slow scale of multiple generations) mean that subsistence strategies (including the production of non-subsistence goods) must intensify. And that right there is what I keep coming back to. The evolution of political economy is tied to strategies for intensification, in the broadest sense. And intensification often involves centralization…and we’re off!

* From the published version of a 2005 lecture (pg. 37) at BYU by Patrick V. Kirch, an archaeologist at UC Berkeley who works in Hawai’i and across the Pacific.

Posted at 4:16 PM | Comments Off on Ultimate vs proximate causations

What a stately ballcourt!

In 2003 we made a grand tour of the Yucatan, and this was the day (yes, 27 July) we visited Ek’Balam (various spellings). Fantastic site! Signs said the architecture dates to the Late—and Terminal—Classic (with a few Postclassic embellishments), although my archaeological resources indicate occupation began in the Middle Formative. I loved exploring this ruined civic-ceremonial precinct!

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Archives…

This stuff covers our floor in strategic places.

We got a quick rain shower right after we ducked into the groc store, so we made a run for the car upon exiting. What fun!

I finished the first editing run-through of the China diss* (not mine). Finally!

Ergo, the liquor cabinet beckons! 😉

* Among other things, this means I have a slightly less hazy idea of the Yangshao and the Longshan periods of the Neolithic, detailed in this cool table. I also learned that the Chinese language doesn’t have plurals. If I have it right….

Posted at 4:59 PM | 2 Comments »

Archaeologists commonly monitor pollen types in sealed (buried) horizons—well, if the project has sufficient funding for it. From the pollen, you can discern things about the climate, the season the material was buried, etc. Only in unusual circumstances do we find seeds. Archaeologists found date palm seeds at Masada (yes, the fortress built by Herod around 35 BC and destroyed by the Romans in AD 73), and one is now three years old and more than three feet tall! (Science link, too.)

Posted at 11:52 AM | Comments Off on Dated date

Somewhere in Tennessee—or was it Kentucky—we stopped for gas the other day, and this closed-up stone house was across the road from the gas station.

I woke up early this morning, sometime around 4:40 am. Sigh. But there was no falling back asleep, so I got up to read the news on the internet.

Wrong.

JCB found out it’d been out since 1:00 am and it didn’t come back on until 7:30 am. I’m still discombobulated.

Posted at 3:54 PM | Comments Off on Whatta morning!

Is this what they mean by negative space?

We imported a friend to distract us this weekend, and distract us he has!

Late this morning, he and I went to the Southeast Region office of the National Archives and looked at some of the TVA records. When the government ousted all those folks so they could flood their land, they did social work/outreach as part of the resettlement. I looked at case records for some of the 800-odd families who had to move for one reservoir in Alabama, and geeze those folks were poor. For some perspective, a chicken was valued at 50¢ and I saw one mason’s helper made 25¢ per hour; this was in the 1930s.

The photos were all mixed up, and haven’t been indexed, so we couldn’t know where the Alabama ones were in the acid-free archive boxes. Out of the thousands of negatives, we pulled only a few, and as luck would have it, none were from Alabama.

This farm in this lovely valley is in Tennessee, however; the photo was from 1942. It is labeled as the Mack Swann Farm, Jefferson County. Here’s a wee bit about Mack Swann’s wife and her family….

And that excursion was over by 1:30 pm!

Posted at 6:43 PM | Comments Off on Past and present

Here’s a hand-dug well abandoned in the woods of the piedmont. It’s about three feet across and was used during the early-to-mid-20th century.

NB: it’s only a bit more visible if you’re standing there.

Posted at 10:22 PM | 1 Comment »

Do you think of ancient objects as artwork rather divorced from their cultural context, or as information-impregnated windows into the past? From which paradigm do they obtain their value?

Apparently, although he takes his salary from an art museum which espouses the first, James Cuno* actually believes the latter.

Fact

The earliest surviving printed document is known as the Diamond Sutra. It dates to AD 868 and is a Chinese translation of a Sanskrit Buddist text. It was printed using carved wood blocks, and the separate pages were then stitched together. Although it was found in northwest China, the British Library controls it.

Or owns it, depending on your perspective….

* Cuno’s new book is Who Owns Antiquity?

Posted at 6:06 PM | Comments Off on What are things?

Fire pink (Silene virginica), with its lovely forked petals. Peterson says these wildflowers begin blooming in April, and that’s true down here, but not in more northern climes, I’m sure.

I often think about production intensification when I contemplate issues surrounding sociopolitical evolution. More people only happens if there are more resources; of course, in the long run those additional people can garner most of what they need on their own, but in every cross-cultural case, it seems like there’s an additional amount of “stuff”/“product” needed in the long run, so it’s not a linear relationship.

In world news right now, we hear about food shortages, rising fuel costs, and now fertilizer deficits. Another way to put all this is that demand is outstripping supply, which is directly related to increased and increasing human populations.

Global climate changes are altering the production/risk profile, thus exacerbating shortages.

The short-cut way to decrease shortages is to intensify production (increase efficiency, some would say). So now, we’ve pretty much done all the practical intensification to the global political economy, and voila!, if any part of the system falters, oops, problems! People are hungry! They become restless! The status quo is threatened!

What next? This is the stuff of history….

Posted at 11:16 AM | Comments Off on Intensification of production

What we do for love: stay inside, in a windowless room, mostly with the lights off. On a nice day. On a nice Saturday!

Yes, but I found many, many people to talk to at the semi-annual SGA meeting, held this spring at Fernbank Museum of Natural History. One of Fernbank’s galleries is called “A Walk Through Time in Georgia.” For this particular visit, presentations focused on the Spanish period in Georgia, in the 1500s and 1600s, and mostly from the coast.

You may be surprised to learn that one of the hallmark artifacts from this period is the glass bead, used in rosaries and necklaces and the like. One site’s glass beads came from as far away as India and China, as well as, I think, Holland and Bavaria (might have those last two a bit wrong, but from what is now across Europe). Now that’s political economy!

Posted at 6:12 PM | 2 Comments »