Anthropology Times

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF SYMBOLS
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 27: 329-346 (Volume publication date October 1998)
John E. Robb
The publishers share an abstract here.

My dearest Simone,

In a previous post, I implied that study for a job or as part of a dispassionate continuation of a previous path of study might be wrong reasons to study. At the moment, these are not the main reasons that drive me, but I don’t think that they are wrong reasons.

I had hoped reading this article that I might find a point of view on the archaeology of symbols with which I identified. I did not. I felt an upsurge of some of my general uncomfortableness with anthropology/archaeology. There often seems to be a disingenuous relationship between theory and data; there’s this sense that if a certain theoretical perspective only has round holes, then only round pegs matter and all other shapes of pegs are ignored. The starting/middle point doesn’t seem to be which theory can explain the most data, but rather which theory and data go together to make the tidiest package. Let the cherry picking begin. These issues exists in every discipline, but my impression is that they are a more pernicious problem in anthropology.

Robb presents three approaches to symbols in archaeology. They are symbols as tokens, symbols as girders, and symbols as tesserae. Looking at the first and taking note that the author says it remained unquestioned and unamended for a long time I see an example of my thinking that anthropologists often blur the line between “this is what we can say” and “this is all there is to say.” On symbols as totems, Robb writes, “According to many archaeologists symbols serve primarily as instruments of communication … As one recent discussion puts it, ‘Symbols including icons, rituals, monuments, and written test all convey and transmit information and meaning to their viewers…’ Thus a sumptuous headdress signals a special status, an exotic artifact boasts about long-range connections, a monument represents a capacity to command labor.” I find it easy to believe when Robb writes that “this approach has long since proved its value in archaeology.” I can almost hear the meeting discussing the fact that those who fund research like clear ideologies that render easily quantifiable findings. Though I found this view of symbols shallow and expedient, I don’t necessarily agree whole-heartedly with the reaction from “Marxists and interpretive archaeologists, who argued that symbols do not merely represent and disguise power relations but actually constitute them…”

About symbols as girders, Robb writes, “In contrast to the information transmission view, many archaeologists have explored how symbols constituted and structured the mental and social world of ancient people … humans orient themselves in the world, think and act through learned culturally specific structures that recur wherever they organize themselves and their material productions.” I do find this a better starting point than the former view of symbols as totems. It reads like a more genuine attempt at saying something more real though less tangible. Of course, I’ve always had rationalist leanings. Robb mentions that “without strong Durkheimian assumptions about elementary social structures, Levi-Straussian assumptions about elementary mental structures, or Marxist assumptions about hegemony, identifying cultural structures alone usually does not satisfy social-minded archaeologists.” He goes on to write that many have combined structuralists approaches with other approaches to form a more workable model.

On symbols as tesserae, Rob writes, “Meaning does not reside in artifacts or in people but in the moment of interaction between the two… symbols’ meanings do not exist outside of the moment in which people apprehend them and assemble them into meaningful formations … Because symbols’ meaning is not fixed but contestable, social life involves continual struggle over alternative interpretations of important symbols.” This view seems overly narrow to me in part the way Robb cites in that “all of symbolic life becomes superficial, without historical or psychological roots – a transitory juxtaposition of images on a screen.” Thoughts come to mind of how many advertising strategies rely on the fact that symbols’ meaning do exist outside of the moment in which people apprehend them.

Reading this article I feel that my need to read a book that has a comprehensive overview of anthropological theories and the views of the major players becomes more pressing. Here’s one person’s anthropological timeline that includes links to Wikipedia articles on people who shaped the development of anthropological thought: History of Anthropology Timeline.

Yours truly,
S

The Demise of Antiquity: Europe and the Mediterranean in the First Millennium AD
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 18: 227-244 (Volume publication date October 1989)
Klavs Randsborg
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

This is another article that leaves me wondering what the editing process may have been like.  For instance the final section is labeled “Conclusions,” but it introduces a complex subject, symbolic representations, that hadn’t been covered earlier in the article and didn’t seem to sum up or touch on the overall themes of the article in a conclusory way.

Of more note, is the lack of clarity as to which parts of the author’s discussion were based on archaeological evidence.  In the introduction Radsborg writes that “new archaeological data … is drastically changing our picture of the period and of the world …”  I didn’t come away with any clear ideas of how this was so from the body of the review.  For example, Radsborg notes that archaeology has greatly increased the understanding of rural settlements during the first millennium, but the discussion that follows doesn’t clearly delineate which bits of information, such as the fact that the farms were quite large and as many as 20 of them could make up a single settlement, came specifically from archaeological data, were bolstered by archaeological data, or came mostly from historical sources.  A previous article I read on Norse archaeology that covered some of the same time period, made mention of specific dig sites in the body of the review.  It was nice to be able to google the names of these sites for further information on what was found there and how it added to or challenged the existing history.  Names of dig sites would have been helpful for this review.  I imagine that looking at the references would answer my questions, but it’s nice to have a bit firmer toe-holds in the body of the review.  The author does such a great job of providing toe-holds for exploring the causes of the fall of the Roman empire and factors that were important in the rise of modern Europe that I wondered whether useful toe-holds were removed during editing.

The review on Norse archaeology and this current review both emphasized the value of the knowledge gained from medieval archaeology. The Norse review noted that medieval archaeology was often thought of “as an expensive way to find out what we already know.”  Reading both reviews, I was generally left with a positive view of the types of people who do medieval archeology in that they seem to be the sorts who question whether we really know what we think we know or  whether we are missing important bits of information that we hadn’t even considered that we were missing; they also seemed to heavily promote interdisciplinary efforts that highlight differing angles. Radsborg writes that he enjoys discussions of the fall of Rome that include both internal and external causes for the fall.  He says it doesn’t matter so much whether the theories are right or wrong seeing that the discussion that comes from including multiple angles is so much richer.

It’s possible what I saw as a lack of toe-holds in parts of the review was a strategy seeing that Radsborg has written a book covering the same material … show ‘em that you got skills, but leave them wanting more …  The First Millennium AD in Europe and the Mediterranean: An Archaeological Essay.

Ever yours,
S.

The Archeology of the Norse North Atlantic
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 19: 331-351 (Volume publication date October 1990)
Thomas H. McGovern
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

Reading this review I thought it would be great to pal around the net looking for the latest info on the research discussed.  l wanted to read more on what McGovern referred to as the controversial claims regarding settlement of the Faroe Islands: “Pioneering palynological work by Johannes Johansen claimed to have identified evidence of early cereal cultivation by pre-Norse Celtic monks ca. AD 600.” So far, I’ve come across several non-academic sites that mention the possibility of Celtic monks in AD 600, so it would seem the notion is a popular one; but not much on the more official word. I imagine that no new evidence has been found and the claim remains controversial. Maybe one day the story of new evidence will break and it will be all excitement. McGovern also mentions the controversial claims of Margret Hermanns-Audardottir that there was a pre-Viking Scandinavian colony in Iceland. A stub Wikipedia page basically repeats this information with nothing new added.

I wonder what criteria go into determining whether controversial claims are worthy of mention in a scholarly work. How big a role does merit play as opposed to the reputation of the researcher or the sponsors of the research.

I’m certain I’ve watched a couple films on Viking archaeology and at least one on Vinland and the dig site at L’Anse aux Meadows. Reading McGovern left me wanting to re-watch films on this site. The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has a series of pages with information on Vinland archaeology with video clips, including one that takes you inside a Viking long house, and audio clips including an excerpt from the stories of Leif Eriksson. The “next” link in the bottom right corner is a bit discreet, but click it to page through the information at the site.

It’s super late, so I will leave you with that and my warmest regards,

S.

Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 14: 77-102 (Volume publication date October 1985)
Carol Kramer
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

Reading this article I began to think of how pottery is used, reused and discarded in my household. I’ve used pottery sherds to level surfaces, as incense burners, as components of artwork, as keepsakes from unfortunately broken prized pieces… roughed up kitchen pottery as planters, pencil holders, and paperweights. Kramer gives a tidy discussion of how studying living cultures can provide clues as to how to interpret pottery as found in the archaeological record. Kramer explains that ethnographic accounts of pottery-producing groups may aid archaeologists by providing information about “… learning routines, aspects of division of labor and social organization of production, scalar and spatial aspects of production and/or distribution (e.g. numbers of vessels manufactured, distances to resources and markets, workshop locations, sizes, and layouts), scheduling problems, secondary uses of pottery, potters’ expenditures and income, vessel prices, and the like.”

Kramer recounted a possible psychological profile of a potter … “psychologically and technologically conservative, unwilling to take risks and engage in innovative experiments, with conforming personalities and a low sense of self-esteem.” This isn’t the picture of the artist that I imagine when looking at beautiful pieces of pottery. Of course, when I look at my numerous stacks of hand-painted 1950s California dishware, I tend to romanticize the manner and method by which that was produced, too. I’ve often looked at colorfully planted flowers and vines and wondered about the lives of the (usually) ladies making those brush strokes day-in and day-out. Kramer notes that looking at brush strokes might be key to identifying the work of a particular ceramic artists because the decoration of a piece of pottery might involve the handiwork of many artisans.

Lately I’ve fallen into a pattern of ignoring the colors and strokes on my hand-painted dishware. This is a pattern I would like to break. I want to renew the sense of connection to the women who created the artwork and to the people who owned and used and admired the dishware before it came to me.

Here’s a short bio and list of papers by Carol Kramer. She worked to improve the working lives and academic opportunities for women in anthropology and archaeology.

My warmest regards,

S.

Concepts of Time in Quaternary Prehistory
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 12: 165-192 (Volume publication date October 1983)
Geoff N. Bailey
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

Reading this article I was most drawn to wanting to read more on the thinking concerning the relationship between study of the past and the study of present. Bailey writes that “on the one hand is the view that the past should be explained in terms of the present … and made relevant to present-day social concerns. On the other hand is the view that the present should be explained in terms of the past, that the study of the past should be in terms of large-scale historical processes not obviously visible to the individual observer in a contemporary setting, processes which to some extent determine the present situation.” The history professor who most influenced my thinking was partial to the latter view. I feel partial to Bailey’s statement that the two views do not have to be seen as mutually exclusive, but rather they can be seen as based on interrelated concepts of time.

In a most casual search on the subject matter of this article, I quickly came upon at least three other articles I would like to read. They seemed like that would further enhance my understanding of the discussion of time as it relates to archaeology and give additional guidance as to further reading:

“Time Perspectivism, Temporal Dynamics, and Battlefield Archaeology: A Case Study from the Santiago Campaign of 1898” by William E. Altizer

“Temporal Insanity: Woodland Archaeology and the Construction of Valid Chronologies” by Erin C. Dempsey

“Rethinking the great divide: long-term structural history and the temporality of event” by Jan Harding (opens a download window)

So far I’ve only given a cursory glance at them and I partly want to link to them here so that I will remember to go back to them.

Today I’ve been thinking again about how confronting death affects thinking about time.  Do Americans become more deterministic in their thinking about time when confronted with death … do we lean toward a thinking that there are processes at work that explain why a death occurred at a particular time?   A police officer acquaintance and former classmate of mine was shot and killed on the job over the weekend.  In more recent times I had reconnected with him on Facebook and we had chatted a couple times.   Chatting with him was such a special comfort to me in that his style of speaking and use of language brought a welcomed familiarity.  I was reminded that flowery romanticism in everyday conversation was just more commonplace in the Mississippi Delta (and the South in general) than other parts of the U.S.  Upon hearing of his death, I still had browser windows opened for articles he had linked to on Facebook and thoughts of speaking with him again were heavy in my mind.  When someone posted a picture of him on Facebook yesterday, I thought it was to show his recent fitness results.  But today there were messages of condolence from mutual friends.  I still don’t feel comfortable leaving Facebook condolences, but I’ve wondered how Facebook may be influencing the way we grieve and communicate with each other about death.

Many warm thoughts of you,

S.

The Neandertals and Modern Human Origins
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 15: 193-218 (Volume publication date October 1986)
Eric Trinkaus
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

I read this article based on the title after having come across a rather fluffy piece in the Guardian titled “Should We Clone Neanderthals?”An article of the same title, but with a more serious discussion can be found at Archaeology (“Should We Clone Neanderthals?”).

The New York Times has an article discussing the analysis of the Neanderthal gene sequence and the extent to which Neanderthals may have interbred with humans, Signs of Neanderthals Mating With Humans, with some scientists saying that interbreding was relatively insignificant and others saying that it may have had noticeable impact on the evolution of modern non-African humans. Writing in 1986, Trinkaus mentions this same discussion. From reading the NYT article, it seems the introduction of genetic evidence has heightened this discussion, but hasn’t interjected the clarity one might expect.

I was most interested in Trinkaus’ discussion of some of the details of the origins of modern humans such as possible connections between changes in upper limb morphology and advantageous changes in tool use and tool development. Further reading of this type would probably make my B-List of things to read.

Eric Trinkaus’ has a wikipedia page. When googling Trinkaus, his page on Rate My Professor came up in the results. It seems that the vast majority of the review articles are written by people who teach somewhere. Before now, I had never thought of looking them up at Rate My Professor.

That’s it for now.

Kind thoughts,

S.

Analysis of Style in Artifacts
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 12: 125-142 (Volume publication date October 1983)
Stephen Plog
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

I never got around to looking at the content of this review and the last side-by-side (making a note to go back and do that.) Still …

The question of what can be said about the depth and type of interaction between groups that share similar styles seemed to taunt the imagination. Plog and Hegmon mention studies involving analysis of how styles are produced and distributed in living cultures and what could be gleaned from those studies to help the understanding of style variation and distribution in prehistoric cultures. They both also discussed what could be said about the level of exchange between groups based on the level of style they shared, whether whole patterns or parts of patterns or similarities in the thickness of lines for example. I started to wonder whether analyses of the relationship between shared language traits and level of interaction between cultures might be instructive with respect to variation and exchange in artifacts. It’s one of those weeks where I haven’t poked around on the net as much. Next week will likely be the same.

In reading these reviews on style, I kept thinking about the styles of being human. What are my human styles? What style of human am I? Particularly I thought of one of the habits of my recently deceased friend. He was quite good about going toward people in distress. He didn’t avert his eyes or avoid contact. He offered to listen, to interact, to hug, to share information. He was so beautiful in this way.

Several times this week I saw this mother who appeared to be in general distress. I wanted to talk to her, but I was so worried about being a bother or having nothing useful to say or share that I felt paralyzed in her presence. (What a thing it is to feel at once disconnected from my own existence while being so obsessed with the particular and small details of it.) Her children were lovely and sweet to each other. Her daughter looked eight or nine, but being the oldest of four she was quite focused on being a big girl and a strong girl for her mother and her siblings. In the time it took me to set aside my own angst, they were gone.

Kind thoughts,

S.

Archaeological Research on Style
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 21: 517-536 (Volume publication date October 1992)
Michelle Hegmon
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

This review caught my eye because it was written by a woman in archaeology. It seems I’ve been bumping into the work of Mary Leakey all over the place, so I had female archaeologists on the brain. Michelle Hegmon teaches at Arizona State University. A high school classmate of mine completed her doctoral work in archaeology at ASU. I’ve been wanting to ask my former classmate about her current work. This whole little bit of kizmet may just prompt me to call her up.

Hegmon says that there is enough agreement among archaeologists as to what style is to be able to have meaningful discussions across various theoretical perspectives. She writes that there is basic agreement that “first, style is a way of doing something and second, style involves a choice among various alternatives.” Disagreement comes with discussion of the finer details, but Hegmon’s discussion left me with the impression that disagreements about style are still in some kind of kinder, gentler phase of academic dispute. Though one camp may mostly reject the perspective of another, they each are able to see value and sometimes even analytical usefulness in the rejected view. Or it could just be that Hegmon’s diplomacy is showing.

Hegmon mentions another Annual Review article on style written in 1983 by Stephen Plog titled “Analysis of Style in Artifacts.” I didn’t get a chance to read that one this week. I will read it next week and see what I come away with having read both. I do like the general movement away from considering style simply in relation to patterns of formal variation and toward considering that style also may include cultural and functional components. I look forward to reading what Plog has to add to the discussion of the problems in considering the cultural/functional components when looking at the archaeological record. It’s so easy for bias and wild storytelling to creep in. Hegmon writes of the “long, and sometimes notorious” practice among archaeologists of “correlating styles of material culture and social groups, such as the European Neolithic Beaker Folk and Hohokam Red-on-Buff Culture.” Naming and framing can go a long way toward creating a less than accurate view of the archaeological record. Hegmon writes that “no longer is the association between material culture and living cultures taken for granted. Instead, the archaeological interpretation of cultural identity is an active topic of research.”

Until next week?

Ever yours,

S.

What’s New in African Paleoanthropology?
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 17: 391-426 (Volume publication date October 1988)
Russell H Tuttle
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

Mr. Tuttle made for a spirited read. I don’t think I’ve read as many pop culture references in any other review. In speaking about how some “attempts to erect novel genera” often failed and resulted in the groups being lumped together, he wrote that the new genera (Bodvapithecus, Graecopithecus …) were lost “faster than Zsa Zsa changes mates.” He goes on to refer to the trend of splitting/creating new genera as “splitomania.” In closing out a discussion of hotly contested issues he writes, “For now, recalling our radio days, only ‘The Shadow knows.’” When writing on whether the individuals unearthed at Hadar represented more than one species, Tuttle makes use of a Biblical reference: “ Truly, that a flash flood sealed two species of hominids (and few other vertebrates) together in Hadar sediments is scarcely more likely than our finding righteous Israelites among Pharaoh’s finest under the Red Sea (Exodus 14).” Perhaps adding to this vibe was the fact that Tuttle refers to himself in the first person. The writer of the previous review, also published in 1988, did the same. Was all this a trend in the 1980s?

The section that discusses the Laetoli footprints is titled, “The Laetoli Trails: Facts, Fabrications, Phantoms and Folderol.”

folderol: (from Wiktionary)
1. (uncountable) Nonsense or foolishness.
2. (countable) A decorative object of little value; a trifle or gewgaw.

Tuttle writes about an academic dispute in this section. He had been invited by Mary Leakey to study the Laetoli prints. He writes that(Tim) White and (Gen) Suwa “bumptiously” accused him of academic shenanigans regarding his conclusions about the footprints.

bumptious: Obtrusively pushy; self-assertive to a pretentious extreme. (From Wiktionary)

Others join in with “invidious” public statements and “umbrageous” sources. Tuttle’s language and style in this section left me LOL. It seemed such a good example of the academic dispute language and style that I noted when reading Dean Falk’s review (“Hominid Paleoneurology” and the Dispute That’s All Inside the Taung Baby’s Head).

invidious: Prompted by or expressing or adapted to excite envious dislike or ill will; offensively or unfairly discriminating. (From Wiktionary)
umbrageous: Having shade; shady. (From Wiktionary)

I read in a short bio that Tuttle’s interest include social prejudice in physical anthropology. That interest seemed apparent in this review in several instances including a short remark regarding “man the hunter.” He writes that “observations of hunting, meat-eating, tool-making, and tool-assisted foraging by chimpanzees … and documentation that females are more adept and persistent tool-users, slew the ‘man the hunter’ hypothesis, which, in retrospect, appears to be little more than a corporate male fantasy.”

So, it’s late and I don’t really have a pithy way to wrap this up, so I’ll leave it. Perhaps I will try again next week to write a little earlier.

Ever yours,

S.

Homo Erectus and Later Middle Pleistocene Humans
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 17: 239-259 (Volume publication date October 1988)
G P Rightmire
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Letters to My Tutor…

My dearest Simone,

Many of the site names in this review were immediately familiar to me, Olduvai Gorge, Zhoukoudian, the Koobi Fora Formation.  Still, my mind glazed over just a little reading some of the finer details of identifying Homo erectus — I found myself longing for illustrations. With a quick consult of a more recently written textbook, I learned that the discussion of whether sets of individuals found in Africa and Asia that are both commonly referred to as Homo erectus should be grouped together in that fashion or labeled separate species continues.

Reading of Olduvai Gorge, I was put in mind of how the Leakeys were probably the archaeologists/anthropologists who made the biggest impression of me when I was younger.  Mary Leakey stood out to me because she was a woman doing exciting work in exotic locales.  I probably first heard her name in association with the Lucy and with the Laetoli footprints and most likely on some PBS broadcast.  She was just the kind of woman I was encouraged to like — talented, strong, spirited, freedom-loving, adventurous (As a little girl, I watched reruns of “The Big Valley” with my Granny, and I listened to her sing the praises of Victoria Barkley.).  Of the male Leakeys, I remember Richard the most from childhood, again, probably from some PBS special.

I will put a biography of Mary Leakey on my reading list for this year.  I would not of have thought to do so had I not read this article.  Now, I’m looking forward to it.

Yours truly,
S.