Musings

Sorry I didn’t note the name of the photog who made this wonderful shot of crewing at the Olympics—reminds me of a water strider!

Today’s NY Times reports great news for fans of the nearly absent American chestnut tree—a stand near Albany (say Al-benny, like two guys names), in South Georgia, that appears to be resistant to the blight that’s killed off most of their relatives. Our Southern oak forests used to have a huge component of chestnuts, most of which were killed off in the early 20th c. Some chestnuts do sprout, but are usually dead before they are 20 yrs old, still from the blight. Up in the mountains, loggers as late as the 1960s were removing fallen chestnut logs, because the demand for the wood was so high.

Apologies for repeating myself about the chestnut blight, but I had to pass along this good news….

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Chestnut victory?

Last glaciation in North America borrowed from this site. Isn’t it gorgeous?

Plotting continental divides on a map can produce some interesting patterns. Here’s a web page John pointed me to that considers the Gulf/Atlantic divide and the drainage divides across Georgia. Note the many parallel linear drainages across the piedmont and coastal plain, I’m guessing because of the longevity of this pattern.

If you’re in the mood to wander the web, you might also be interested in this blog that looks at GIS, geospatial technology, and, okay, I admit it, their intersection with archaeology. The blogger, Matt, posted a link to this nifty site with images constructed of the last 550 million years of North America’s surface geography, like the one above. This is roughly the period when humans arrived in North America, and we’re hip deep in arguments about whether they took sea routes or arrived via a proposed ice-free corridor along the Rockies. Of course, some recent publications have argued for a Pacific Coastal route that was less blocked by ice than shown here and there was no ice-free corridor. Stay tuned to the relevant journals, as this discussion will likely continue over innumerable beers. However, if another golden oldies bunch is right, a wave of hardy vagrants, whose descendents may or may not survived to meet later waves of immigrants, arrived 50,000 to 70,000 years ago, and that would have been earlier than this image.

Posted at 4:35 PM | Comments Off on Web maps

Superintendent’s house, Fayette, Michigan, a ghost town.

Looking back at my overall impressions of fiction published in English over the last hundred years or so, I keep thinking most stories are best in the first third, and weakest in the last third. Few, however, achieve the elegance Jim Harrison invests in the opening lines of The Beast that God Forgot to Invent:

The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense. The discounted sociologist Jared Schmitz, who was packed off from Harvard to a minor religious college in Missouri befoe earning tenure when a portion of his doctoral dissertation was proven fraudulent, stated that in a culture in the seventh stage of rabid consumerism the peripheral alwyas subsumes the core, and the core disappears to the point that very few of the citizenry can recall its precise nature. Schmitz had stupidly confided to his lover, a graduate student, that he had in fact invented certain French and German data, and when he abandoned her for a Boston toe dancer this graduate student ratted on him. This is neither specifically here nor there to our story other than to present an amusing anecdote on the true nature of academic life. Also, of course, the poignant message of a culture spending its time as it spends its money; springing well beyond the elements of food, clothes, and shelter into the suffocating welter of the unnecessary that has become necessary.

Not only is this fine fiction, but it is provocative. After all, is rabid consumerism really a foregone conclusion in civilizations? Do you in fact spend your time as you do your money, or are you more parsimonious in one than the other?

What among the unnecessary has become necessary for you? Beyond the internet, I mean….

Read a longer excerpt of Harrison’s story here. Or make the tale “necessary” and dig it up at your local library or bookstore….

Posted at 4:50 PM | Comments Off on Lace curtains

Yellow stargrass (Hypoxis hirsuta) at trailside, yesterday.

Random bits from the web:

Whoever desires to have their hair grow a lot and to make the head smell very good, should get used to combing the hair, with vulture grease, in the sun. (Find more hygenic comments here.)

Here’s an innovative and well-crafted website about an important 8000-10,000 year-old archaeological site in south-central Turkey named Çatalhöyük. The buildings on this site are similar to the Puebloan housing blocks in southwestern North America.

Archaeologists consider it unethical and unprofessional to buy and sell artifacts, much as physicians would not buy and sell livers or kidneys. But what is subsistence looting? In poorer regions where finding an ancient pot or statue would mean immediate government control, the peasant farmer who unearths such an artifact might instead quickly sell it to a dealer to bring money so an impoverished family will to be able to eat. (Read more here.)

It is clear that 90% of humanity have subsisted on a 90% vegetarian diet. Modern carnivorous men and women are the exception not the rule. (Read more here.)

Archaeology is largely a field subject and, as part of your course, you can expect to be working out of doors for weeks on end, often away from proper housing and facilities. (Read on here.)

Posted at 3:47 PM | Comments Off on Vulture grease?

We’ve arrived at That Season, when the streets are alight with the glow cast by layer after layer of branches laden with these blooms. We are in the midst of Cornus florida days….

BTW, the Linnean system designates this plant (according to The Web): Plantae>Magnoliophyta>Magnoliopsida>Cornales>Cornaceae>Cornus florida L.

PS Here’s an idea that didn’t work….

Posted at 9:02 AM | 2 Comments »

Adjacent lots entirely ravaged by new construction in Atlanta’s Virginia-Highland neighborhood.

You can find lots of neon in the downtown Seattle area, and the NY Times reports that the future of a Wonder Bread sign is up in the air, since the building under it is facing demolition and replacement, in a transition from factory to housing and commercial space.

At the core of this is the age-old problem of what to preserve and what to tear down and replace. Sometimes, we chose to walk away from the old and build anew elsewhere—witness, the abandonment of center-city areas in many US metropolitan areas in the late 20th century. Sometimes, we chose to rebuild in the same locations—hence the buildup of tells across the Middle East.

Right now, there’s a furor in Atlanta over McMansions, new homes replacing early 20th century bungalows and other modest, often one-story residences, bringing looming third stories, shadows, and increased taxes to the neighborhood. The mayor even tried a moratorium on permits to halt this trend, but it was only a blip on the city’s history, as the moratorium was quickly overturned in the face of considerable pressure from builders and many others.

Of course, archaeologists are happy with any choice—replacement, maintenance, or abandonment—which gives us evidence of political, economic, and demographic disruption or continuity.

Posted at 9:08 PM | Comments Off on Neon harbinger

Here’s yesterday’s graphic tweaked, with better logic/data/math behind it; I know it looks like more of the same, but now I feel I can better defend the trends it shows.

Okay, here’s the freaky thing. The triangles, squares, and diamonds are averages of some of the same data in orange and red and yellow at the top, along with means and standard deviations (the gray graduated bars). Hey, it hurts my head to think about it, so I know your eyeballs are crossed!

Interpretation: the short version is that, over time, the populations of all these places tended to become more centralized (but the variations to this trend are exceedingly interesting and informative); the long version is the book this is destined for!

P.S. Did I mention that I was bouncing between FileMaker and Excel a while back? Now, it’s Canvas, Excel, and Illustrator! Oh, my!

Posted at 6:37 PM | Comments Off on Time lines 2

I’m guessing this doesn’t make much sense, but it’s what I’ve been working on for the last few days, and need to tweak a bit more.

The short version is that time goes from left to right (right is most recent), and white means I have no (comparable) data. I’m trying to generate an index of demographic centralization using regional survey data, and this is how far I’ve gotten. The darkest colors had the most centralized populations (more people lived in large communities). Stand by for adjustments.

Posted at 9:43 PM | 3 Comments »

The fruits, or hips, of the Cherokee rose are huge!—an inch or so long! I found this one on the bower in the rose garden at the State Botanical Garden in Athens. (Thanks, Bill!) The rose garden is surrounded by a big fence, detracting somewhat from its beauty….

Sources on the web indicate that this rose is really native to China and southeastern Asia, and now is naturalized in southeastern North America. Unlike most roses, it’s fairly easy to grow.

Georgia’s state flower is the Cherokee rose, and the plant is linked to the Cherokee Trail of Tears, when Euroamericans drove the Cherokee west to resettle those who survived in Oklahoma. The petals symbolize tears of grief for the four to five thousand Cherokees who died en route.

Posted at 4:24 PM | Comments Off on Rosa laevigata

Tamales and atole for breakfast.

Nixtamalization is a process discovered by the Aztec and Maya civilizations of Mesoamerica….*

False.

So superior is nixtamalized maize to the unprocessed kind that it is tempting to see the rise of Mesoamerican civilization as a consequence of this invention, without which the peoples of Mexico and their southern neighbours would have remained forever on the village level.*

Please!

Archaeological data suggests the lime-treated ground maize dough was being made and eaten when the largest Mesoamerican settlements were villages.

Overall, however, I do find useful information in this volume, and am glad to have it. Still, foodies must be careful that their received knowledge has a basis in science—and the rest of the real world!

* From entry “Nixtamalization” in Alan Davidson’s The Oxford Companion to Food (1999, Oxford University Press), page 534.

Posted at 6:20 PM | 1 Comment »