Today it is the rage to use this to make a graphic version of the links on your web page. Mine’s above and here’s ababsurdo’s.

I wonder if the recipes are the little grey bunch at the bottom…?

And don’t ask me what tag clouds are….

One thing I’m grappling with these days is how to graphically portray scale and time. It’s a gnarly problem. Here, Alain Pavé shows overlapping scales of interactions for entities ranging from teeny things smaller than genomes to ecosystems and biospheres, all wrapped up in a single package, that at least on first blush, looks accurate. (Just how small are the smallest organisms anyway?)

Obviously, using two axes is an obvious solution (time on y and scale on x). I’m pondering adding a z axis, with a third variable (e.g., another kind of scale, for example size in extent—hectares—vs population). Hurts my head to try and actually generate that figure, however.

Fortunately, my bright, wise hubby, the Genius Wizard, has just purchased the latest Edward Tufte, so a guide is at hand….

* Pavé, Alain. 2006. “Biological and Ecological Systems Hierarchical Organization,” in Hierarchy in Natural and Social Sciences. Edited by Denise Pumain, pp. 39–70. Dordrecht: Springer. Figure 2, page 48.

Some climatology types have examined the effect on agriculture in the US—specifically premium wine grape areas—by a continued trajectory of increasing temperatures over the next century. The figure they used is 2–6°C. This is Figure 2-f, showing where the prime areas will shift to—that is, those areas lacking extremes of heat and cold. They make the point that wine is economically significant with 3.5 million tons of winegrapes out of approximately 6 million tons of grapes harvested each year. By converting them into wine, their value increases greatly, with concomitant deleterious effects if their production drops this much.

This is your world, and the projection is not pretty. Note how few premium grapes will come from California. In short:

… areas marginally suitable for winegrape production in the current climate were nearly eliminated and the area capable of consistently producing grapes required for the highest-quality and highest-priced wines declined by >50%.

Don’t trust my word; download the original here.

And, no, I haven’t seen Al Gore’s movie yet. Have you? What’d you think?

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.

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.

For no logical reason, I present this early digital photo of mine, as a result of which I decided I no longer needed to use the camera’s B&W setting.

Anne was complementary of my vocabulary the other day, but no one would ever do the same of my knowledge of history. Here’re two bits from Patrick Leigh Fermor’s second volume, Between the Woods and the Water, subtitled On Foot to Constantinople from The Hook of Holland: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates, on his walking trek across Europe that began in 1934. In the first selection, he writes about visiting Vár, the citadel of Buda, above the Danube in present-day Hungary.

Tim [a huge black Alsatian] bounded about among the sarcophagi and broken walls and the ruined amphitheatre and dug for bones in the Temple of the Unconquered Sun; and in the museum we gazed at one of those disturbing bas-reliefs of Mithras in a Phrygian cap, plunging a dagger into the bull’s throat. (The god always wears an expression of unbearable anguish as thought the throat were his own; a hound leaps up to drink the blood and, down below, a furtive scorpion wages scrotal war.) (p.38)

…and…

On the fringe of allegory, dimly perceived through mist and the dust of chronicles, these strangers have an outsize quality about them: something of giants and something of ogres, Goyaesque being towering like Panic amid the swarms that follow one after the other across this wilderness and vanish. No historical details can breathe much life into the Gepids, kinsmen of the Goths who had left the Baltic and settled the region in Roman times; and the Lombards only began to seem real when they move into Italy. (p.52)

I only know one person who I suspect would get all the references in these two excerpts (that would be Pooh, though I may be doing a disservice to Rebecca); I certainly am out of my league!

Fermor writes these bits seemingly without effort, and I realize, reading them, how much knowledge of this and that relating to the modern world has filled to overflowing the places in my brain that, in another day, like early twentieth-century, might have been allocated instead to Classical history.

From elsewhere in Fermor, where is the Istrian peninsula?; what do “cascading pengös�? sound like (Anne?)?; what do crockets on a medieval church’s pinnacles look like?; what kind of garments are “Tintin plus-fours�??; and what’s a “bombinated�? nation-state like?

I must add one last quote, Fermor’s amplification of his assertion that Magyar (Hungarian) is most closely related to the Finnish language.

It was no help, at first, to learn that Magyar, whose resonance is fast, incisive and distinct, is an agglutinative language—the word merely conjures up the sound of mumbling through a mouth full of toffee. It means that the words are never inflected as they are in Europe, and that changes of sense are conveyed by a concatenation of syllables stuck on behind the first; all the vowel sounds imitate their leader, and the invariable ictus on the leading syllable sets up a kind of dactylic or anapaestic canter which, to a new ear, gives Magyar a wild and most unfamiliar ring. (p. 33)

Ictus? Dactylic? Anapaestic? Geeze!

I bet this is right up Leslie’s alley!

I often forget just how large New York is—the state!—and how varied its terrain is. We zoomed through the state and city just after Thanksgiving, as you can see from this trip down memory lane. Here’s the view from a peak whose name I’ve forgotten that K and I hiked up to.

Regarding Sunday’s entry, I’ve also added a (crude) map showing where Eagle’s Nest is. That long skinny lake to the northwest is Long Lake, but the one just east of it (and NNE of Eagle’s Nest) has the best name: Fur Farm Lake. Yes, because back in the Old Days a harvesting concern was quartered there. Google’s gotten some bad data, however, because the big lake to the north of these two (no!, not Superior!) is labeled “Camp Seven Alke”. And that last word is a typo for LAKE.

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.

The Prime Meridian, the one through Greenwich, England, doesn’t line up in Google Earth. As you can see, the meridian in this projection is east of the observatory, by about 100 meters. The reason:

This is not a mistake on Google’s part. The developers of Google Earth (originally known as Keyhole) chose to support the same coordinate system as that used by GPS technology known as WGS-84 World Geodetic System.

Click here for a technical explanation of all this. Basically, the earth isn’t a smooth, regular sphere, and GPS is so accurate, something had to give. So they shifted the Prime Meridian. And there’s also the contribution of continental drift….

Google Earth (it’s FREE), if you haven’t yet explored it, is fascinating—searchable satellite photos of THE WORLD! Add places to your personal list, or send them out to the Google community.

Trivia: the GPS system uses 25 satellites, each with two atomic clocks. Bob Burns turns 80 today (Happy Birthday, Bob!). Jack Finlayson has come through his surgeries okay.

The term “abandonment” is often inaccurate and imprecise in archaeological discourse because it veils a range of behaviors in the past and assumes descendent communities have relinquished their present interests and claims in ancient places.

This bit of wisdom—and they’re so right!—is by Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh and T.J. Ferguson (“Rethinking Abandoment in Archaeological Contexts” in The SAA Archaeological Record, Jan 2006, pp. 37–41).

Substitute “collapse” for “abandonment” and it’s still accurate.

Now you have some idea why Jared Diamond’s books annoy me so much. His perspective is reductionist and ignores the range of comparative data available, indeed he ignores much of the data assembled by ARCHAEOLOGISTS, and the analysis we have done on the issues he’s commented on, especially in Guns, Germs, and Steel and his new Collapse book.

(I’ll quit now before this becomes a full-blown rant!)

The map above is of the civic-ceremonial core and the surrounding residential compounds at the huge city of Teotihuacán, Mexico. It was drafted during the 1960s as part of the the Teotihuacán Mapping Project, headed by Rene F. Millon. (The squares are 1 km on a side, so this city is BIG!)

Many, including probably JD, say Teotihuacán was abandoned at the end of the Classic period. Well, the civic-ceremonial architecture (temple mounds and the like) were burned and not rebuilt, but the residential areas remained mostly inhabited for at least several hundred years after the conflagration. Yeah, I know this sounds like an incomplete story, and it is. Many Mexican archaeologists, and a few foreigners too, are still excavating and working to help us understand what happened at Teotihuacán.