Anthropologies

I was honored to be invited to contribute to Anthropologies, which focused on archaeology as a part of anthropology.  My short essay More than Strata and Sherds appears in the May issue.

Mimbres Lives and Landscapes

While attending the 2010 Mogollon Conference last October, Margaret Nelson and Michelle Hegmon presented some of their recent work in the Mimbres area (see my summaries here).

These two professors from Arizona State University had recently edited a book dedicated to the Mimbres culture, but the hardcover version was a little too pricey for me.  Mimbres Lives and Landscapes is a SAR Press publication, and they have chapter one available for download as a PDF.

Not sure how I missed it, but the paperback version has been available for a few months now.  I ordered my copy tonight, so I'll try to write up a book review as soon as I can.

Mogollon Conference: Day 1 - Ritual Spaces

After leaving Phoenix at 6:00 am and discovering somewhere along the way that New Mexico is currently in a different (i.e. later) time zone, I somehow still made it to the conference in Las Cruces just in time for the first presentation following the lunch break.

Chuck Adams from the UofA kicked off a series of presentations on the use of space for rituals in the pueblos.  Adams is the director of the Homol'ovi project in northern Arizona, and addressed the evolving use of communal space at Homol'ovi over time.

He points out that these "emergent" communities (as labeled by Kate Spielmann) in the Southwest in the 13th century were using Great Kivas and Plazas for the same reason: To integrate the community.  Smaller settlements could use a Great Kiva to bring together the entire population at once, while larger communities needed to employ plazas for public sacred activities.

Just a side note: I was unaware that two of the Homol'ovi communities (Homol'ovi I and II) had more than 1100 rooms each.

Darrell Creel from UT-Austin looked further at the relationship between Great Kivas and Plazas, and concludes the plazas were more than shared domestic spaces.  At the Swarts ruin, the Great Kiva open onto the plaza.  Not such a big deal, but here was the kicker:  Of over a thousand total burials at Swarts, the vast majority were inhumations, with only a few cremations... and the cremations were exclusively buried in the plaza, while nearly all inhumations were in or around room blocks. 

I am attending the 2010 Mogollon Archaeology Conference at New Mexico State University this weekend, starting with the Friday afternoon sessions.

16th Biennial Mogollon Archaeology Conference

I'm planning to blog here and at the OAC about the sessions, and you might even see a few tweets.

Four Stone Hearth - 69th Edition

Welcome to another edition of the Anthropology Blog Carnival known as the Four Stone Hearth. Named for the four fields of Anthropology, I plan to offer this edition's blog posts by those categories, which a bonus fifth category at the end.


Sociocultural Anthropology

We're pretty light on posts involving the observation of extant cultures, but Paddy K has done some informal ethnography at his work place: He wonders if the shared behavior he observed is universal in The Milk Leavers.

Here's another look at ordinary people: The Ordinary People Project at Ethnography.com (found via Savage Minds). Mark Dawson says he is "taking a few months off to drive to Alaska and have conversations with the random people that I meet along the way." He has already posted videos of his first three interviews.



Archaeology

I recently took a seminar on the ancient built environment, so I was immediately intrigued by Theoretical Structural Archaeology. The sad part for me is that I didn't have time to even read post #30 before I pulled all of this together, let alone posts one through twenty-nine (which are all intended to be read in order). This is no fluffy blog with a few tidbits from Geoff Carter's work-- it IS his work. He is using his blog as the primary vehicle to further his research and share it with us.

Tim Jones at Remote Central takes us beneath the waters of Lake Huron where evidence of Paleoindian hunters has been found. Tim not only summarizes the recent discoveries, he places them in the context of the very different environment that existed 10,000 years ago in the area of the Great Lakes (among other things, many parts were clearly above water!).

Under another lake in Sweden (Vänern, the country's largest), a 20-meter-long wreck was discovered and almost immediately touted as the remains of a Viking ship. Martin Rundqvist (the coordinator of this fine blog carnival) was lucky enough to receive photos and x-rays of the Viking weapons recovered from the ship, and rains on the parade when he points out they are neither "Viking," nor "weapons." Read the whole story (and hear Martin's radio appearance on the subject) ar Aardvarchaeology.

Greg Laden sets the record straight on a recent paper proposing a new contributor to changes in the Earth's magnetic field (archaeometric dating is the loose tie-in for our purposes, and it's a good read).

It's Summer time, and that means Field Work. Some arhcaeologists are using their blogs to chronicle their excavations (I'll bet you know of a lot more-- maybe we should compile a more complete list for next time).

• Mark Henshaw, the Archaeology Dude, will be reporting on his season at the Father Angel Site in Pennsylvania. He's posting videos, too.
• Brian, at Old Dirt - New Thoughts, reports on his already-completed field season in the Aleutian Islands.
• Checkout RECAP, sponsored by the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) in the UK, which will be publishing digital materials from completed projects over the last decade.
  

Biological Anthropology / Human Evolution

More secrets revealed from the waters: Tim Jones also has an excellent writeup on a Neanderthal fossil dredged from the North Sea over at Anthropology.net. This is the first time a find like this has been made.

The news of Darwinius masilae set the press and the internet all atwitter (did I say that?), and Carl Zimmer reports that the online journal PLoS One will be publishing a corrected version of the article which formally announced the find. His post at The Loom is titled Darwinius: Science, Showbiz, and Conflicts of Interest

Daniel Lende points us to a list of posts created by his students in his course "Alcohol and Drugs: The Anthropology of Substance Use and Abuse" at Neuroanthropology. They were assigned to look into human compulsion, and wrote some compelling stuff, including this one on Compulsive Internet Use. Daniel also provides some details on how he structured the course and the assignments.

Another post at Neuroanthropology provides links to Trances Captured on Video, providing "film footage of trance states of various kinds–rituals, dance, shamanic, etc."



Linguistics

Wanna be a Linguist? The Linguistic Aanthropology blog has a post listing Universities Offering Graduate Programs in Linguisitics.



Anthropology on the Internet (Bonus Topic)

The internet is changing everything. Information comes to us in many new forms and avenues now that we have the internet, shunting aside not only printed news but even Television sources (for example, people have turned to Twitter to follow current events in Iran, and bashed CNN while they were at it). These posts address the way the internet is changing the way we do anthropology.

John Hawks (what 4SH is complete without a post from him?) discusses a recent controversy about bloggers at scientific conferences, although it doesn't seem to have hit the Anthropology field... yet.

The proliferation of open access journals published online is considered a boon to the open sharing of research, but it looks like "Buyer Beware" still applies. Mike Smith (an Aztec archaeologist) alerts us to the story about a supposedly peer-reviewed Bentham OA Journal which accepted a hoax paper for publication. The submitted paper was created by a very clever article-generating program which puts together very professional-looking articles with figures and tables, and every sentence is technical nonsense.

It's amazing to believe that the Open Anthropology Cooperative already boasts over 900 members, and is about three weeks old. If you haven't heard about it, please visit anthropologie.info for a great introduction. It is a marvelous use of the internet to provide greater access and interaction for anthropologists around the world.

Lastly, Neuroanthropology has an annotated list of various internet tools and resources to help you integrate social networking into your anthropological practice. Anthropologists out there on the interwebs are using Twitter, Ning networks, Wikis, blogs, Livejournal, and more to keep in touch. To be honest, bythe time this blog carnival comes out every two weeks, the people who are really plugged in via these tools have probably already seen it all... are 4SH's days numbered?


Okay, that's it for this time. Be sure to keep your eyes open for the 70th Edition of the Four Stone Hearth in two weeks, hosted at the new home of Afarensis.

Four Stone Hearth #68

Jump on over to Remote Central to read the latest edition of the Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Blog Carnival. This is a big one-- it took me several minutes just to scan it without clicking through!

Oh, and if you like reading the Four Stone Hearth every two weeks, imagine how cool it must be to join the Open Anthropology Cooperative!

Cheap Anthropology Books

as a part of my research project, I needed a chapter from the book Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns. The copies at both ASU and U of A were checked out, so I headed to Amazon.com.

Delightfully, there were seven or eight used copies available, ranging in price from $10 to $54. I snapped up the $10 copy, and it arrived just four days later. I wouldn't do this for every source I might need, but this looks like a book I would own, so I went for it.

In Amazon's Marketplace (books sold by Amazon customers), one can find numerous out-of-print archaeology and anthropology books and reports, often for very reasonable prices. There are a surprising number of excavation reports available (e.g. Archaeological investigations at the Arroyo Hondo site: Third field report, 1972).

You can even browse Anthropology or Archaeology books by subtopic. Take a look at these starting points, and use the subtopics in the left-hand nav:

Archaeology Books at Amazon

Anthropology Books at Amazon

You can sort the results by price, customer rating, etc. I've also found several of my textbooks over the last few years on Amazon, usually paying significantly less than the used prices at the university bookstore.

Not too early to think about Field School

Most summer field schools begin accepting applications after the first of the year, and that is right around the corner. I'm starting my search now.

Another student in the seminar I'm taking at the University of Arizona worked at Baking Pot last year, a large Classic capital in Belize. The Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance (BVAR) project is entering its 20th year, and there is still a lot of work to do there. I'm putting this one at the top of my list for several reasons:

1. It's in Belize, where the official language is English;
2. Instead of living in tents, you get to stay in a modest hotel;
3. The amount of time you stay is flexible (minumum of 2 weeks).

I also see that academic credit may be obtained for the course through Galen University/University of Indianapolis (But the additional costs for the classes are significant).

If you are interested in attending a field school in the Maya area, this might be a good choice. As I continue my search, I'll compile a list of field schools and create a permanent link to a post which can just keep growing.

My First Publication

It's not in a journal, and it is not a paper, but it is cite-able. The Anthropology Review Database, hosted at the University of Buffalo, has published my book review of A Space Syntax Analysis of Arroyo Hondo Pueblo, New Mexico: Community Formation in the Northern Rio Grande.

I read this book as part of my research into neighborhood formation in pre-state settlements last semester. Another grad student in the seminar I was taking brought the ARD to our attention as a great source of Anthropological book reviews, and I discovered that they were looking for a review of this book (they have a large list of books and films for which they desire a review).

Here's the abstract of my review to give you an idea of what the book is about:

Using the large body of research collected from Arroyo Hondo pueblo during the 1970s, Jason Shapiro employs space syntax analysis, a method initially developed with modern architecture in mind, to analyze the settlement and subsequent resettlement of this 14th century community in the Rio Grande valley.

Take a look, it's short (but good).



REFERENCES:

Shapiro, Jason S.
2005 A Space Syntax Analysis of Arroyo Hondo Pueblo, New Mexico: Community Formation in the Northern Rio Grande. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press.

Wren, Paul
2008 Review of A Space Syntax Analysis of Arroyo Hondo Pueblo, New Mexico: Community Formation in the Northern Rio Grande. Anthropology Review Database. September 01. Electronic document, http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=3256, accessed October 5, 2008.

Photos of Chacchoben are up!

19 Temple 2
Originally uploaded by kactuswren

I have finally uploaded photographs of my visit to Chacchoben to my Flickr account.

Chacchoben is a Mayan ceremonial center in the Yucatan about which very little is known. Only one scholarly work has been published, and it is written in Spanish (I've requested it through inter-library loan, and I'm gonna try to decipher it!).

Visitors are allowed to see the large Temple (Temple 24), and two others nearby which are on top of a large platform (you can see the large stairway that leads to the top of the platform in my set). There is another unexcavated group of temples a short distance away that is part of the same complex.

I'm working on a personal project to pull materials together and get a better overall picture of Chacchoben, and I'll be post it it here when I do.

That was one busy semester

Two days ago, I turned in the term paper for Dr. Smith's grad course, Archaeology of Ancient Built Environments. I don't have an exact count, but I suspect I spent over 100 hours on the research and the writing. It's not as good as I would like it to be-- if I decide to clean it up and really finish it, I already know many of the changes I would make.

My paper, entitled "Neighborhoods in Non-urban Settlements: A Cross-cultural Comparison," used criteria originally developed to demonstrate sub-settlement groups in the Anatolian Neolithic (in Turkey) in an attempt to find neighborhoods in Native American pueblos right here in the Southwest. This will be the topic of a longer post as soon as I get the chance. I'm creating a Powerpoint slide show that may be worth posting, for those of you who are interested.

I still have another research project in the works with Dr. Martin, and I'll be finishing my data analysis very soon. More on this later.

I'm just glad I can finally get a few full nights of sleep.

Impressive Angkor

We've all seen photographs of Angkor Wat, the spectacular 12th century Khmer Temple in Cambodia. I was surprised to learn that Angkor Wat is just the tip of the iceberg-- that it was the center of an enormous, low-density urban complex whose size (1000 square km) rivaled large modern day cities.

Right before Spring Break, I attended a presentation by Roland Fletcher, an archaeologist from the University of Sydney who is leading up the Greater Angkor Project. This 10-year study is bringing new technologies to bear on the large questions surrounding the city of Angkor.

Using airborne side-looking radar (and other imaging from space), amazing features were revealed. From the presentation summary:

So far the project has mapped the extent of the water management system, has located key water management structures and has identified the dispersed pattern of occupation along canals and roads and on house-mounds. The demise of the urban complex now has to be reappraised because it was apparently functioning into the 16th century, later than the generally assumed sack in the early 15th century CE.

The scope of Angkor is startling. If you take a look at the feats of engineering the Khmer accomplished, one can't help but be amazed. The second photo in this post (click it for a larger view) is a satellite view of the temple of Angkor Wat, its grounds, and the large, square moat which surrounds it. You can see that the temple is dwarfed by the moat, and Dr. Fletcher tossed up a slide that showed the area inside the moat is larger than any Mayan city.

Not stopping there, you need to see the map of the entire Angkor complex (the 3rd image). The very center square on the map is Angkor Thom, the royal forest. Just below it, a tiny blue square represents the moat at Angkor Wat.

The long, rectangular blue features are man-made water reservoirs which supported the irrigation of the entire area. The West and East Baray (the two largest) are 8 kilometers in length. The NASA Earth Observatory has a large AIRSAR image of the Angkor region, plus an accompanying GIS map of all the archaeological features and sites.

What have they determined so far? It looks like the earlier theory (by Bernard-Philippe Groslier) that the large reservoirs were primarily for irrigation are correct. The radar imagery show the remnants of rice fields covering the entire region from the lake to the mountain foothills. A river was diverted to fill the reservoirs, and to irrigate the landscape. Excavations of old water channels has revealed evidence of heavy flooding (including substantial deposition of sand), which likely overwhelmed their system. It is possible that the deforestation of the area for conversion to agriculture, combined with the re-routed natural water channels, may have led to a large-scale ecological disaster.

One of the principal investigators (Damian Evans) was the lead author on a paper last year that reported on their comprehensive mapping (see below).


Additional resources:

1. Wikipedia has a nice overview of Angkor's history.

2. Evans, D., Pottier, C., Fletcher, R., Hensley, S., Tapley, I., Milne, A. and Barbetti, M. 2007. A comprehensive archaeological map of the world’s largest pre-industrial settlement complex at Angkor, Cambodia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Vol. 104 no. 36, pp. 14277-14282

3. The American Museum of Natural History has a nice animated overview of the current findings at Angkor.

Good Practice for Grad School

This has been an exciting semester so far, and an immensely busy one. I'm taking ASB 591 Archaeology of Ancient Built Environments, I'm still working on a paper with Dr. Martin, I still have quite a bit of data entry to do for Dr. Smith, and I'm sitting in on Dr. Martin's graduate seminar entitled Biology and Society.

This seems like pretty good practice for graduate school-- since I'm doing all of the reading for two seminars and working on a major research project. If I am lucky enough to get accepted into the Master's program at NAU, it can't be much worse (except for the drive).

In Dr. Smith's Built Environment class, we're reading up on how the many ways that archaeologists propose for inferring culture from architecture. We've had some really stimulating conversations (there are five us us unrolled in the class), and kicked around many things I had never considered.

We've covered new broad topics each week:

• The Meaning of the Built Environment - reading mostly works by Amos Rapoport, who proposes that the environment can possess lower-level meaning (cues for what we are supposed to do), middle level meaning (e.g. identity, status, power), or high level meaning (e.g. world view, spiritual meaning). Intriguing urban design/social engineering controversy: Urban planner Robert Moses designed expressway systems in New York City, and supposedly designed the expressway bridges with such low clearance that public transportation (buses) could not go under them. This discriminated against the poor communities (few had automobiles) preventing them from visiting parks, baseball, etc. He is even credited by some with driving the Brooklyn Dodgers out of New York. read more at Wikipedia.
  

• Settings for Activities - Dana Anderson, Susan Kent, and more Rapoport. We covered the definition of "activity" and "activity areas", discussed the types of activities (daily, subsistence, ritualistic, production, consumption), the types of activity areas (shared or dedicated), and Rapoport's concept that activities cannot be viewed alone, but as part of a larger activity system. He believes that settings are also part of larger setting systems.

• Habitus and Home - Looking at domestic structures, Richard Blanton, Kent Lightfoot, and others looked at methods for identifying meaning. Most of these authors make it clear that to gain a full picture, one must combine data from archaeology, ethnohistory, and even oral histories.

• Housing and Communication - House construction and design is to a large extent a consumer decision... how much to spend, etc. Blanton looks at how the decoration and design of a house communicates on multiple levels: What group the owners are in, their status in the community, etc.

• Roland Fletcher - His model for settlement growth is pretty interesting (although I'm not sure what it can be used for if you are an archaeologist). It grows out of his belief that interpersonal interaction and limits on communication increase as settlements get larger, ultimately limiting the size of growth until the interactions are curbed or new facilitating communication technologies emerge. See The Limits of Settlement Growth.

We have 8 more weeks of topics, usually reading 6 papers per week. I need to read a related book and write a publishable review, and I also need to produce an original research paper, some kind of cross-cultural comparative study using existing data.

If I can survive this semester, I should be able to handle the real thing.

Dig Vicariously in Mesoamerica

If you want to look over the shoulders of a team of archaeologists excavating in Mesoamerica, then you should hop over to the Blog for the 2007 field season at Calixtlahuaca.

Dr. Michael Smith from Arizona State University is leading the multi-year project, and is one of the primary contributors to the blog.

A Postclassic urban center, the site is of particular interest because it includes well-preserved public architecture and residential zones.

I particularly enjoyed reading about the likely ancient name for the city, which Smith says was populated by non-Nahuatl speakers (the language of the Aztecs).

One last note: the site of Calixtlahuaca is the source of one of the only suspected European artifacts discovered in a precolumbian New World context: the Roman Figurine. Most agree that it is not a Roman artifact, but Romeo Hristov at the University of New Mexico hasn't given up hope.

[I've also posted this item at Anthropology.net.]