Monday, 26 March 2007
Lemme be explicit: M, this bud’s for you!.
These buds are in honor of Maureen, who passed her oral comps today (and her writtens last week)! Kudos, M!
I promised that I’d open a bottle of prosecco tonight since I can’t be in Lexington with you and the celebrants, and I want to report that I’m on my second glass! Cheers! Salud!
Friday, 9 March 2007
Even in Atlanta you can rent a castle! The Brits would probably laugh at us for calling this building a castle, but, here in the Sunny South, we boast about it!
Thursday, 1 March 2007
Got distracted thinking about the Olmec and the Mother/Sister Culture debate.
A few relevant references:
Blomster, Jeffrey P., Hector Neff, and Michael D. Glascock. 2005. Olmec Pottery Production and Export in Ancient Mexico Determined through Elemental Analysis. Science 307:1068–72.
Flannery, Kent V., and Joyce Marcus. 2000. Formative Mexican Chiefdoms and the Myth of the “Mother Culture”. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 19:1–37.
Flannery, Kent V., Andrew K. Balkansky, Gary M. Feinman, David C. Grove, Joyce Marcus, Elsa M. Redmond, Robert G. Reynolds, Robert J. Sharer, Charles S. Spencer, and Jason Yaeger. 2005. Implications of New Petrographic Analysis for the Olmec “Mother Culture” Model. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102:11219–23.
Grove, David C. 1997. Olmec Archaeology: A Half Century of Research and Its Accomplishments. Journal of World Prehistory 11:51–101.
Pool, Christopher A. 2006. Current Research on the Gulf Coast of Mexico. Journal of Archaeological Research 14:189–241.
Wilk, Richard R. 2004. Miss Universe, the Olmec and the Valley of Oaxaca. Journal of Social Archaeology 4:81–98.
Tuesday, 27 February 2007
The way cool thing about anthropological archaeology is that anything interesting can be considered within the field. Poetry? Yup. History? Yup. Climate change. Yup. Keeps me coming back!
This colorful image is from a report by Margo Schwadron, on the web from the venerable journal Antiquity, examining prehistoric settlement of the south Florida Everglades. Given the effects of small fluctuations in sea levels on this terrain, where people lived should directly reflect when that spot of ground was a) above water, and b) accessible.
Love those smeary-appearing “tree islands”. Just imagine how many bugs would attack you if you visited them.
Monday, 26 February 2007
Got distracted thinking about the Olmec and the Mother/Sister Culture debate.
A few relevant references….
Blomster, Jeffrey P., Hector Neff, and Michael D. Glascock. 2005. Olmec Pottery Production and Export in Ancient Mexico Determined through Elemental Analysis. Science 307:1068–72.
Flannery, Kent V., and Joyce Marcus. 2000. Formative Mexican Chiefdoms and the Myth of the “Mother Culture”. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 19:1–37.
Flannery, Kent V., Andrew K. Balkansky, Gary M. Feinman, David C. Grove, Joyce Marcus, Elsa M. Redmond, Robert G. Reynolds, Robert J. Sharer, Charles S. Spencer, and Jason Yaeger. 2005. Implications of New Petrographic Analysis for the Olmec “Mother Culture” Model. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102:11219–23.
Grove, David C. 1997. Olmec Archaeology: A Half Century of Research and Its Accomplishments. Journal of World Prehistory 11:51–101.
Pool, Christopher A. 2006. Current Research on the Gulf Coast of Mexico. Journal of Archaeological Research 14:189–241.
Wilk, Richard R. 2004. Miss Universe, the Olmec and the Valley of Oaxaca. Journal of Social Archaeology 4:81–98.
Tuesday, 20 February 2007
What you’re looking at here is a moderately high-resolution aerial photo (more or less) of an eroded hill-peak down in the Mixteca Alta (see this page), with some shapes drawn on it (thank you Illustrator). The shapes variously represent temple-mounds (the white squares), residential terraces (those long shapes rather like bacilli), and retaining walls (the long grey wide lines).
The whole mess is a map of a residential and civic-ceremonial architectural cluster slopped across a ridge, part of a now-abandoned community that extended across a spider-shaped set of ridge tops beyond the portion shown here, and had several thousand residents in its heyday. Occupation spanned the Classic and Postclassic (roughly), but now the hilltop is pretty eroded making discerning the architecture not only difficult while standing there, but hair-pullingly difficult if you’re trying to make this map—my task for today!
Monday, 19 February 2007
Few awnings like this survive in our neighborhood today. Even this one may be upgraded soon…. Nice pounding rain sound, as I recall, right up there with the echo in an attic under an uninsulated tin roof….
Love those stripes, too!
Sunday, 18 February 2007
The other day I mentioned kids and dogs as an obvious possibility for somewhat or actually unexplainable features around domestic archaeological sites. So, was this floral art kids or adults?
(Obviously, even the best of show types of the canine persuasion are out here….)
On another note, here’re suggestions for overcoming stage fright. In a nutshell: “Don’t think about yourself.”
Yeah. If you can….
Friday, 16 February 2007
Most Mesoamericanists recognize that households in more or less complex societies provision themselves through a variety of acquisitive acts, including trading and bartering, marketing, reciprocal gifting, redistributive exchanging, and various kinds of resource sharing, all at the same time…
Is your household more like this, or less?
Tuesday, 30 January 2007
Finally the Brits get their collective archaeological act together and investigate the greater Stonehenge area, and wah-lah (as they say down on the GA coast), there’s interesting evidence of feasting and domesticity—don’t skip the fun 32 second animation! For a time, many of my colleagues were smitten with the idea of empty (non-residential) civic-ceremonial centers, and it’s good to know how occupied the Stonehenge area was—and that partying was a big deal. Not a big surprise there, these were the ancestors of some hard-drinking modern types….
I’d have to see more data than the Smithsonian is reporting here (note that the investigations were funded from this side of the Atlantic!) to understand the whole river use angle, but ideology is where it’s at—and the most impossible piece of cultural reality from an archaeological period.