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.

Finish the damn B.A.

I've been away for a while.

My career as a "non-traditional" student ground to a halt after the Fall 2009 semester, when I seemed to be out of viable options.  Back in September, I blogged at the OAC about abandoning my goal of a Ph.D. and instead finding other ways to work as an anthropologist/archaeologist (I included links to some excellent Applied Masters programs in the U.S.).

Even though I have not taken a course for some time, I have involved myself by attending a conference and a few lectures, continuing to read papers that interest me, and staying in touch with a couple of my professors.

I had the great fortune to observe my 50th birthday last month.  The approach and arrival of this dubious celebration triggered a "last chance" attitude for me with regard to my continued involvement in anthropology, and I decided that any action was better than no action.  Here are my current plans and options:

1. Finish the damn B.A.  No matter what I do, holding the degree is way better than trying to explain to a potential employer or graduate program that I have 30 or so credits hours in anthropology.  My academic advisor at ASU informed me that I could take SPA 201 and 202 at the community college and then simply apply for graduation.  I managed to find two four-week Spanish courses at Phoenix College that are completely online via Blackboard, and I'm already two weeks into the first one.  I should be able to graduate in August.

Hmm... so what is number 2?  Pursue a  Masters of some sort?  Get my hands dirty working for a local CRM firm part time, or volunteering with a group like SWAT?  Ok, it turns out I don't have a plan yet beyond #1.  No matter, finishing my first degree in Anthropology is a start.  I have a couple of ideas cooking that may be options, but I'll address those in a later post.

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 2: Mimbres Lives and Landscapes

Michele Hegmon of Arizona State University asked us to consider the Classic Mimbres society as "Another Way of Being," and to do so through the archaeological data.  She began by contrasting the layouts of Mibres pueblos vs. contemporary structures at Mesa Verde.

Mesa Verde unit pueblos are very uniform in their overall form, and in room size and shape:  Room block, kiva, midden.  This is suggestive of lower autonomy, greater hierarchy (because someone is dictating the apparent standards).

Classic Mimbres: Less planning to pueblo layout, variation in arrangement and room size, and each household seems to be self-sufficient (every household shows evidence of processing areas  and food preparation).  In this type of community, social stability and progress depends on peer pressure to conform (example Classic Mimbres villages: Avilas Canyon, Flying Fish).

Hegmon also addressed conformity vs. standing apart.  It has been fairly easy to establish a chronology of pottery styles for the Mimbres precisely because of a consistent conformity of style within each period, and then someone stretched the rules and moved to a new design.  Mimbres pottery designs are a visual component of a shared culture, where conformity is the norm and is maintained through peer pressure, not hierarchical rule.

Hegmon also notes that there is little or no evidence of hierarchy in Mimbres burials.

She closes by wondering: "Why should modern culture care about the Classic Mimbres?"  To understand that there are other ways of being... not better or worse ways,  just other ways.

Karen Gust Schollmeyer from Simon Frasier University and Arizona State University presented her findings regarding deer hunting by the Mimbres.

She developed an excellent model for the deer population in the Mimbres area.  She simulated hunting effects on the deer, and found that if hunting removed 18% or less of the deer each year, the deer population can remain steady.  Middle Mimbres populations reached a demand level (222g, or 2 "deer burgers" per week per person) that exceeded 18%.  If she runs the simulation with 26% hunting, the deer population crashes.  Even if the hunting drops to 13% after 5 years, the deer never fully recover, instead continuing on a slower decline.

Do archaeological data support this?  Dietary stress indicators are present in the record (in the form of evidence for breaking the deer bones to get marrow) that correlate with the same period when Mimbres populations were highest.

An interesting side note: isotope analysis of deer bones from that period show that some of the deer were eating higher amounts of C4 plants (maize is a C4 plant) than deer from earlier times.  Were they eating maize grown by the Mimbres?

For more information about her ongoing research, take a look at her current projects page.

Margaret Nelson from Arizona State University (hmm... there's a trend here) gave a talk she titled  Mibres Archaeology: Then and Now.  Diversity was the theme.

• Diversity of ceramics styles varies inversely with population size for Mimbres.

• When is diversity good or bad?

• She found in the southwest that with the exception of Zuni, ceramic style diversity varies inversely with relative population density.  (Paper out for publication on this)

• Also: Low ceramic style diversity is associated with (actually, is seen immediately prior to) major cultural transformations.

• What are the contexts that promote homogeneity, and what are the consequences?

In closing: The KIND of diversity we promote is as important as the simple valuing of diversity.

Nelson and Hegmon are editors of a new book from the SAR Press: Mimbres Lives and Landscapes.  You can read the opening chapter here.

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.