Musings

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.

Posted at 5:34 PM | 2 Comments »

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 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Olmec debate

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!

Posted at 6:38 PM | 2 Comments »

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!

Posted at 6:39 PM | 3 Comments »

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….

Posted at 11:05 AM | 1 Comment »

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?

From pg. 268: Wells, E. Christian, 2006, Recent Trends in Theorizing Prehispanic Mesoamerican Economies. Journal of Archaeological Research 14:265–312.

Posted at 6:55 PM | 5 Comments »

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.

Posted at 6:24 PM | 2 Comments »

Today is the first anniversary of this blahg. As I strolled to the library this afternoon, I attempted to compose a commemorative essay, but every angle I thought up was so boring that I drifted back to contemplating…

…well, when human beings adopted behaviors that led them away from the nomadic hunter-gatherer life that the species had managed to make work so very well in environments ranging from the Arctic north to the Namibian desert, from tropical maritime shores to high-elevation mountain life in multiple continents.

For the most part, purist archaeologists shy away from thinking about the psychological component of the human past—for one big obvious reason: the evidence is scanty and indirect at best (a criticism common to both the processualist and post-processualist paradigms). However, I cannot think about groups of people changing their subsistence patterns (including eating different food and in different ways), changing their priorities, and changing so much else about their lives and what they do on a daily basis, without wondering about the mental component.

Mentioning this in some circles is tantamount to dropping a proverbial bombshell—one that isn’t Marilyn Monroe!

So, since I’m willing to tread these waters, lemme finish the thought. What was the motivation for the change? In a nutshell, I keep coming back to lust. In myriad forms. Just think of the so-called seven deadly sins: lust (originally extravagance), pride, coveting or wrath, envy, gluttony, anger, and sloth—right?). The first four unequivocally correlate to the tendency I’m thinking of, and the others can dovetail with it.

A psychological bent in this direction means increased interest in obtaining things one didn’t previously have, doing things that impress others, etc., leading to increased sociopolitical interactions, a transformed political economy, significant changes to ideology, and, poof, you can see changes that would underlie the shift to life in settled villages. At least I do….

Posted at 4:53 PM | Comments Off on One year

Worth visiting next time you’re in the area….

Posted at 6:12 PM | Comments Off on Silver City

Today’s hike (about 11.5 miles) was a loop that took us through canyons, Little Bear and Middle Fork of the Gila, near the Gila Cliff Dwellings Visitor Center, with only a single ridge to traverse. The main valley near the VC is open, framed on the sides by low rock faces (low if you don’t have to climb them, that is). Some of the flats have various grasses, all a lovely golden, which hides the fact that they’re treacherous this time of the year, inserting their aggressive ,wee, pointy seeds into any passing sock. Coming down the Middle Fork we figure we crossed the river at least thirty times, so I wore my Keen sandals, sockless, thereby thwarting nature’s seed distribution system.

Posted at 9:56 PM | 5 Comments »