Musings

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 | Comments Off on Athens memories

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 | 1 Comment »

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 | Comments Off on MFD

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 | Comments Off on Chickpea history

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 | Comments Off on El colibrí

…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 | Comments Off on Story telling modes

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 | 2 Comments »

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!

Posted at 8:53 PM | 4 Comments »

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!

Posted at 6:52 PM | Comments Off on Castle 4 rent

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.

Posted at 10:27 PM | Comments Off on Olmec debate