Musings

Charleston Lighthouse, Morris Island, SC, ca. 1863, by J.R. Foster (Accession #1994.91.52)

Our Smithsonian has a slew of historic photos online for perusal and inspiration. This photo isn’t a bad place to start, or you could begin with all the flashy intro stuff here. Beware the visitors’ keywords, although the Smithsonian’s own keywords are inconsistent, too.

Here’s the Washington Post’s take on the photo web site, courtesy of a $500,000 gift (half a million smackers; I’m in the wrong biz!), and more info….

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Old photos

Sign from Oaxaca, years ago.

Below is table of some numbers I’ve been contemplating late this afternoon, estimated populations for some cities, with populations above 10,000 people, across Mesoamerica at the time the Spanish arrived in their grand quest for wealth and souls.

The obvious conclusion is that they encompass a wide variety of population densities—probably because the community is spread across rugged ground or substantial areas between the houses are allocated to gardens, although there may be other reasons. But what else?

*Where the center of Mexico City is now (the Zócalo).

Posted at 6:00 PM | Comments Off on Data stream

In principle, I’m a fan of historical fiction—just so it’s labeled as fiction. My current favorite is Farley Mowat’s The Farfarers. Mowat didn’t write pure historical fiction though, as the book alternates between archaeological and archival data chapters and his imagined version of the peoples who headed west from northwest Europe to Iceland, Greenland, and the New World (before they had those names, of course). It’s a masterful weaving, and makes the past come alive. He avoids expending much energy generating internal dialogue, instead concentrating on obvious material issues—watching weather, missing family, dietary concerns.

I had hoped Laura Esquivel’s Malinche would be a similar tour-de-force. The topic is right: contact-period central Mexico, and the turbulent times initiated by the arrival of Spanish plunderers and murderers and their not-so-noble men of the cloth. Esquivel completely captured my attention with her lyrical Like Water for Chocolate, and I hoped that her imagined version of the Spanish meany Córtes’s female translator’s experience as Córtes’s slave and servant would be similarly admirable. Early in their relationship, as Esquivel describes it, Córtes rapes Malinalli (aka Malinche, and considered a traitor by most Mexicans) and she is both dreamy and unconcerned. I tried to read more, but was too disgusted to continue. I expected far more from Esquivel. Don’t waste either your time or your money on this book.

The Farfarers, on the other hand, is worth every penny.

Posted at 5:39 PM | 5 Comments »

All by itself, the word diacritical commands your attention. Then, when the scorn-bearing word marks is added, its impact intensifies. Thankfully, for those of us who forget our diacritical marks, Wikipedia has a detailed entry to jog our memories, along with separate entries on each of them. Remember caron? Cedilla? Ever learn ogonek? I missed that one. Now I know what those dots above mean, too!

Off to make goat cheese and lamb and spinach packets in filo aka phyllo dough….

BONUS: For a while I thought I might blahg on this comment by Niles Eldridge:

Some of my more naive colleagues insist that the “hypothetico-deductive method” is what sets science apart from all other domains of human experience. One frames a hypothesis—they never bother to explore where those come from, even though that’s the most interesting bit—and devises a test. If the test fails, the hypothesis is falsified; if the test “passes,” we can only say that the hypothesis is corroborated—or at least not falsified. The logic involved is exactly the same as anyone with any savvy at all brings to buying a used car.

Instead, I’ll just give you the link, if you’re interested. I agree with him, by the way: how did you get that idea after all? How much alcohol was involved? Did the germ of the idea arrive in a dream? “Interesting�? has quite a range, here….

Posted at 5:16 PM | Comments Off on Say die-ah-critical

Reservoirs are a great example of our colonialism of the environment. Here’s a hardy cedar that’s coping pretty well with having it’s forest neighbors on the downhill side totally obliterated. Reservoirs also eliminate human inhabitation, as happened with the town of Rowena, Kentucky, now moved to dry land. Our planners here in the US are pretty arrogant. Long ago, I worked on the archaeology of a lovely pre-horse Pawnee hunting camp (bison butchering site) that was going under the Calamus Reservoir, in central Nebraska. At the time, the Calamus River was the most constant-flowing river in North America. Now it’s dammed up, and the wild, sandhills flavor of this part of Loup County is muted.

Don’t even get me started on the impact of the Three Gorges Dam.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Reservoir colonialism

Good friends are the best! We enjoyed a great evening with M The Archaeo and Banjo B, and their lovely daughter! Among the best was M’s peaches and cream pie (sorry, no recipe), mmmm. M says the summer she found the recipe, she made it every week and had to quit when she gained ten pounds!

They’ve just moved into a new place, and somehow have found the time to begin transforming the back yard into a place of beauty. They transplanted all their favorite plants and veggie garden, and we found both tomatoes and peppers among the flowers, including dahlias, and several familiar ones I don’t know the names of.

The apparent downside of our lovely stroll: I seem to have acquired at least two chigger bites!

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Peaches & cream

Here’s a map of distribution of fluted points (loosely “arrowheads,�? but they were really spear points or knives) by county across the US (mostly), current as of 1998, with the density reflected in the darkness of the blobs. The fluted points were made by the peoples who successfully colonized the New World, although there may have been earlier arrivals who did not leave genetic or linguistic evidence of their presence. These data suggest the fluted-point people did not arrive along an ice-free corridor through the Rockies, but instead worked their way considerably southward along the Pacific coast, then crossed eastward from what’s now southern California. Although there’s discussion of earlier and later arrivals from Europe/Greenland, this bunch came from Asia. These fluted points date to the 1500 years prior to 11,200 years ago.

John and I heard the latest on this from Dave Anderson, at a lecture at Fernbank (site loads slowly) recently.

Map from: Anderson, David G., and Michael K. Faught. 1998. The Distribution of Fluted Paleoindian Projectile Points: Update 1998. Archaeology of Eastern North America 26:163–87.

Posted at 5:41 PM | Comments Off on Fluted points

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Wall-sign frequently seen across Mexico, but it’s not a national mantra. Avoid excess! Yeah, right.

Today, after I got in a modest increase to the word count by 8:30 am, we played hooky and scooted up to Neel’s Gap to head east/right/toward Maine on the AT, not walking it ’cause it was the AT, but ’cause it was easy access and a good, shady route for a hot day.

No doubt about it, the highlight of the trip was Sr. No-Shoulders, stretched across the path, on the move. Never saw his head, but saw the rest of him from not far below. Down at the end of his tail? About eight buttons. I give him about three feet, at least 32-33 inches. Coloration? Dark, almost black towards the tail, but diamondy closer to the head. Overall, darker rather than sandier. His Linnean name? I’m not sure. Crotalus spp. for sure, but Crotalus horridus (Timber or Canebrake) or C. adamanteus (Eastern Diamondback)? I’ll have to ask F&D….

BTW, No-Shoulders is the generic name for snakes I learned from country people living inland on the South Carolina coastal plain, way back in the 80s when I was working near St. Stephens. I always thought the term extremely evocative. I learned it when well-meaning heavily-accented fisherman kept screaming at me as I was sitting in the water at the edge of a reservoir (water-screening soil samples, of course), and a sinuous beastie, a cottonmouth as I recall, was swimming toward me and my tripod, curious I’m sure, rather than hungry.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on No-Shoulders

Peer-reviews and book publication paradigms are shifting. Nature has announced an online peer-review process, which itself is under discussion online! They ask:

What is the best method of peer review? Is it truly a value-adding process? What are the ethical concerns? And how can new technology be used to improve traditional models?

Yale University Press is even letting the author of one of its titles post a PDF of the book on his own web page for download. The professor: Yochai Benkler, Yale University Law School. The title: The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.

Without a doubt, the internet and associated technologies like standard file types facilitate exchanges at scales never before possible. I’m loving seeing traditional institutions incorporating new capabilities into their workflows and distribution networks. If I had another beer, I’d probably argue that such shifts are the root of changes we most love to talk about in anthropology!

And the illustration?—statues and roads of Rapa Nui (known back in the old days as Easter Island), showing routes emanating from a quarry in the eastern part of the island published by Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt. Yellow-dot statues (those huge ones) are scattered around the island.

Posted at 5:17 PM | Comments Off on Institutional evolution

John’s been periodically scanning old slides and dumping the images into iPhoto, for my delectation and for archiving, and I today I poked around and found this picture of the long-time Archaeology Lab from the second floor of Baldwin Hall (yes, at UGA). The lab was eradicated when the cultural hegemony decided that an ecological focus to the Anthro Department was new, hip, and the way to go. Their supreme ignorance was that the archaeologists had been doing this since, oh, at least the 1950s, and way before if you count Kroeber, never mind that the department was established by archaeologists!

This is also by way of mentioning a new blahg by Mouse, who’s in the midst of Freshman finals (I think), supervised by Emily the goose. She (they?) has had several recent interesting anthropological observations, and I missed commenting on one of the best recently when I was in impoverished wifi conditions while in temporary residence in rural Ingham County.

Sorry I can’t get the caption to work for the modified Google Earth image I found on the web: thought it’s pretty darned neat! Here’s where it came from….

Posted at 5:39 PM | 1 Comment »