Musings
Yeah, I know; this is not a horse. But it’s the closest I had….
While browsing tables of contents for issues of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology, I ran into this term: horselads.
The term harks back to the days of horse-farming in rural Britain, and to the social hierarchy on rural farms (those Brits!). Horselads were at the bottom, while still valued for their knowledge of work horses, although they were assigned other menial field labor. The horselads received room and board as part of their compensation, in part because the farms were relatively isolated, or at least by keeping horselads resident on the farms their labor was assured.
Horselads could be recognized by their by their distinctive dress at the hiring fairs where they looked for their next position—they moved each year—while striving to move up the hierarchy.
Because of their low status, annually fluid employment situation, and the way written history (even modern history) is generated, little directly from horselads has made it into records. Giles and Giles opted to examine the graffiti in barns where horselads lived and worked to obtain insights into their lives.
Conclusions: horselads wrote about sex and the ladies, they glamorized themselves, they recorded song lyrics, they wrote about hardships (extreme weather, boredom), and they drew pictures (mostly line drawings) on the same subjects (especially the first).
I wondered if the horselads are in the direct social ancestry of North America’s western cowboys, but these British researchers do not address this point.
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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Today we hosted a day-long biz meeting here at the house, where we talked about sims and 3-D of archaeological sites and topics. Exciting!
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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Today’s NYT science section takes evo-devo as its topic. I had to look up the term, and only felt mild relief to find it’d been around less than ten years. (I think.) Still…. Evo-devo evolutionary development biologists look at how molecular and genetic changes put in motion a whole set of possibilities and take away another whole set.
So, here’s my contribution. Two thoughts….
Here’s an article on the bushy tree of life, and its many branches, a more technical explanation than what the venerable NYT offers. I provide it, not merely for the content, but also for the final subhead. My response: let me count the ways….
Second is the photo above, of a mature tree next to Lake Clara Meer. Its neighbor, disfigured by a streak of rot and a blob of uncontrolled growth (virus?), I noticed, has an orange dot at eye level. I’m guessing it’s slated for removal. So this oak will survive a little longer, offering its leaves to the sun-gods and its shade to the squirrels…and me. Another tree of life….
Posted at 12:57 PM |
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A long time ago in another life, I worked for a contract archaeology firm in Athens, GA [no link]. Last week the NYTimes included a quote from one of my then-bosses, Tom Gresham.
Another friend, who works for the state DNR, wrote a book on Georgia cemeteries, in part because of this very problem: people, especially developers, buying land that has a special surprise, a cemetery. Several years back the state legislature ramped up laws regulating disturbance of human remains, which was aimed at preserving Indian sites. Since, lots of folks have found they’ve had to change their plans for lands that include historic cemeteries and burials, too.
And the picture, that was me jumping for an undergraduate acquaintance back when I was living in Athens (and Atlanta, at the same time: whew!) who had a journalism photography class and was assigned to take some action pictures of people jumping, to learn to click the shutter at just the right moment. How different that experience might be today using a digital camera!
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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Okay, this rose is from the files. Our small digital still camera is in the shop, and I haven’t been lugging the big SLR-like one around, so no new pictures. This is the tenth digital still picture I took with my first camera, a Sony that’s long since been passed along down the inevitable food chain for electronics.
The Guru gave me the camera one afternoon, right after I defended (successfully) my dissertation. The rose was part of a lovely bouquet some of my buds sent me, delivered by the secretary after the stress was over.
I just realized that the fine woman who spearheaded the arrival of that bouquet, the lovely MM, is the one who received the hand-me-down camera.
Ah, the inverted twists and turns of life….
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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Need I say more than that today was Mandatory Fun Day? Well, I could say that I avoided the margaritas, although they looked frosty and tasty.
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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Yeah, I know these are wasabi peas not chickpeas….
Most people theorizing on the origins of plant domestication—agriculture—get around to improved dietary energy sources and risk reduction sooner or later. In other words, they find 1) the calories with respect to the energy involved in production, especially of grain species were improved with domestication and formalized planting/growing, and 2) the assumed storage potential for grains and seeds means the food source is available for a longer period.
In a recent article, researchers propose that the chickpea has a somewhat different story behind it. Both its wild progenitor and domesticated versions have elevated levels of tryptophan, which increase serotonin in the brain. Increased serotonin means increased satiety, and, possibly, increases in cognitive performance, thus lowering aggression and improving social integration (yeah, I’m collapsing the argument substantially here). The enriched tryptophan diet also increases ovulation rates, and increases demographic potential. The chickpea was, as I understand it, the largest pulse in use at that time (over 10K yrs ago), so had, you might say, the most bang for the buck along these lines.
I take it as a given that long before the Neolithic revolution, our ancestors were very aware of biochemical inputs from dietary sources, so I don’t find this farfetched. Nutritional subtleties had to have been factors in domestication and the adoption of agricultural practices. That and the great fun attached to consuming fermented starchy foods…but that’s another topic….
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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Played hooky today and headed for northeast piedmont GA, where the rains came last night (is that why the hummers were so busy?), but had gone by the time we arrived. ATL got nary a drop.
Today’s vocabulary:
levigate
to reduce something to a fine powder or paste
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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…historians consistently differ from ecologists, who more often than not treat people as exogenous variables that fit awkwardly if at all into the theoretical models of the discipline. The historian’s tendency is quite opposite. The chief protagonists and antagonists of our stories are almost always human, for reasons that go to the very heart of our narrative impulse.*
We archaeologists often try hard to get people, emotional people, into our publications, but it’s difficult to do while appeasing the gods of science by describing what is nearly unarguably true—systematically observed truths, anyway (and replicable, if at all possible—that’s why there’s so much data published in addition to discussions and analysis).
Charles Hudson’s recent fiction, Conversations with the High Priest of Coosa, is an example of a premier ethnohistorian abandoning the limitations of academic publishing in a search for (adventure in?) truths not readily accepted there.
BTW, a triumphant (not triumphal) 4.6 miles today at 3.6 mph. Whew! T-shirt weather already, even before 8 am.
* William Cronon. 1992. A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative, Journal of American History 78:1347–1376.
Posted at 11:18 AM |
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Today I’ve been thinking volcanoes, which sent me to the dictionary to check out a few technical terms:
tephra
air-fall material (pyroclastics) ejected from a volcano during eruption
ash
fine tephra particles <2mm in diameter
lapilli
tephra particles 2–64mm in diameter; multiple forms
volcanic bombs or blocks
tephra objects >64mm in diameter
fugacity
a thermodynamic property of a real gas that, if substituted for the pressure or partial pressure in the equations for an ideal gas, gives equations applicable to the real gas (this one has my head spinning)
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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