more politics of the past

Saw this very interesting article about the politicization of archaeology in Sri Lanka. Basically, it boils down to who has the greater "right" to the island - the Tamils or the Sinhalese - by virtue of long-term residence. Since the colonial period, the official teaching has been that the Tamils were recent immigrants to Sri Lanka, a claim that appears not to be true. Now some Tamil archaeologists are accusing the army (largely made up of Buddhist Sinhalese) of creating a new Buddhist shrine in the former Tamil capital and claiming it's an ancient monument, bolstering the Sinhalese claim to the area.

outside influences

Last week, several influential political bloggers were blogging about the 10 books that influenced them the most. The best summary is here, on The American Conservative.

Obviously, any list of my most influential books would focus on the venerable classics of environmental archaeology. But I started thinking about less obvious influences - those from outside archaeology altogether.

I teach certain courses (ecological anthropology in particular) that include all four subfields of anthropology. Personally, I see the four-field approach as largely a historical accident. After all, archaeology really doesn't have to be anthropology to be worthwhile, as is eminently clear if you look at the programs in Europe. (A friend of mine posted on facebook once that archaeology is misanthropy or it is nothing, which is a line I've added to my personal motto: "If I liked living people better than dead ones, I'd have been a cultural anthropologist.") Archaeologists share a history and body of theory with anthropology, but the same is true of geography. We take methods and theories from biology, geology, chemistry, etc., and nobody claims we should be a subfield of those disciplines.

Archaeology has to be one of the fields that borrows most heavily from outside its own discipline. So, in this post I want to share some of the non-archaeological books that have had the strongest impact on me and my research.

William L. Ballee, Ed.
1998 Advances in Historical Ecology. Columbia, New York.
I love Ballee's work. I can't pinpoint just one influence that this book has had on my research, since my research focus is on humanly-modified landscapes, which pretty much sums up the whole point of Historical Ecology. I was trained in Human Behavioral Ecology, and while I still use many of the techniques of HBE, I fell in love with Historical Ecology the first time I read this book. It has a depth and soul that is lacking in HBE (IMHO). This is an edited volume, with chapters that cover a wide variety of topics. I suppose it is cheating to list this book as one of my biggest non-archaeological influences, since some of those chapters are written by archaeologists (Bettinger and Roosevelt wrote incredibly interesting chapters on the Great Basin and Amazonia, respectively). Plus, Historical Ecology is an inherently archaeology-friendly field, given that historical data is frequently obtained through archaeology. Carole Crumley's work is indicative of the power of Historical Ecology in archaeology. I'm still claiming the Ballee book for this post, though, since Ballee himself is a cultural anthropologist.

Rea, Amadeo M.
1983 Once a River: Bird Life and Habitat Changes on the Middle Gila. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
1997 At the Desert's Green Edge: An Ethnobotany of the Gila River Pima. University of Arizona Press, Tucson
1998 Folk Mammalogy of the Northern Pimans. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Rea's an ethnobiologist and ornithologist whose work explores the dialectic between plants/animals and traditional agricultural societies in the desert Southwest. (Note that I hardly ever used words like "dialectic" in a non-sarcastic manner, but in this case the term is justified.) The most important influence Rea's work had on me was driving home the understanding of how deeply embedded all societies are in their environments, and how we interact with other organisms in a myriad of contexts. Since this is the case, it follows that remains of wild plants and animals can tell us something about all aspects of human society, from the economic to the social to the religious. These books are also beautifully written, a classic example of academic work that can find a wider audience.

Mintz, Sidney W.
1986 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Penguin, New York.

I love this book. While Rea's books show that communities are embedded in particular landscapes, and that the taxa of those landscapes permeate throughout the culture, Mintz's book looks at one species and shows how it is embedded in a vast social and political network, across space and time. He shows how something as fundamental and "natural" as food becomes enmeshed in the story of economics, power, colonialism, and religion over the last 400 years. Fascinating and, again, inspiring to think how much more than just nutrition information can be gained from a deeper understanding of the role of plants and animals in human societies.


Those are the books that come to mind off the top of my head. I'm sure there are a lot more. Anyone else want to chime in with their list?

sometimes you feel like a nut...

I've already mentioned that my department suffers from craziest person in the room syndrome. Well, today was a double-nut day. First, a meeting of Excruciating Faculty Committee, with Humanities Nut, who was particularly crazed today because she's convinced her department is on the chopping block (which just goes to show that you can be crazy, paranoid, and right). Second, I was blindsided during an advising session when my student informed me that Senior Colleague has decided not to teach our required senior capstone course next year - the one my student needed to graduate. SC had sent out an e-mail to all of the students telling them to find an "alternative", but hadn't bothered to inform the rest of us. The decision not to teach the class is partly a rational decision on her part to try to reduce a very heavy teaching load next year. I'm sure she also sees it as a bit of revenge for being forced to teach another class usually taught be a colleague who is escaping leaving.

No real point to this post - I just wanted to vent.

using my religion

Easter Sunday is an appropriate day to make this particular confession: I take full advantage of my religion in the classroom. I was raised in a fairly religious household (even though my parents were not of the same religion), and although I left the Church for most of my time as an undergraduate, I eventually found my way back. It's not that I'm brainwashed, stupid, ignorant, or unaware of the socio-political functions of religion, it's just that I was raised in faith and, no matter how much I told myself that those beliefs were not "rational", I found that I fundamentally still believed.

My personal faith journey isn't particularly relevant here. I only mention it because I have found my religion to be helpful, especially when I'm teaching BioAnth. Even though my BioAnth class isn't required, I still have a handful of students each year who take it despite the fact that they don't believe in evolution. There are also a fair number of students who dismiss much of what I say about human diversity as just the PC propaganda of yet another left-wing ivory tower academic. Both groups of students are somewhat disarmed by my declaration of faith. They find me harder to dismiss, and I've had several productive conversations with students who are honestly interested in how I blend religion and science.

Of course, the answer to that question is rather complex (complex enough for a whole 'nuther post, and, frankly, sometimes I think my solution comes down to Fitzgerald's quote about "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time.") I know it's not possible for all students to find a resolution to their religious conflicts. I'm Catholic, and my personal experience has been that Catholics tend to have fewer problems with a perceived religion/science conflict than Mormons or members of certain Protestant sects, particularly the more conservative ones. Among the students that I have personally known, at least, that has been the case. I certainly wouldn't claim it is universal! Those students who have been taught young-earth history, and literal Biblical interpretation, are unlikely to be moved by the fact that I'm Catholic (particularly if they were taught that Catholicism is an evil cult). For other students, though, I know I make them stop and think.

politicizing the past

I saw this movie on Matthew Yglesias' blog:



Basically, they're arguing that the Smithsonian Institute's new Hall of Human Origins, which is funded by a major conservative and fossil-fuel millionaire named David Koch, is "right-wing propaganda" aimed at confusing visitors about the science of recent climate change.

I have some serious problems with the allegations in this video. Nothing shown in the video seems to me to be particularly "right-wing". The exhibit makes the claim that our genus evolved during a period of rapid climate change, and that our flexible behavior, cultural abilities, and intelligence are responses to rapid environmental shifts. Well...yeah. That seems pretty non-controversial to me. It's a stretch to argue that the underlying message is that we'll be able to evolve to meet any challenges posed by future climate changes, so we don't need to worry about capping emissions.

The video's makers are also upset about an interactive exhibit at the end of the Hall that I'm guessing is aimed at teaching children the concept of adaptation. For example, by suggesting that communication through texting over many generations could lead to longer fingers. Again, it seems a stretch to suggest that the message really is that we can burn all the fossil fuels we want, because no matter how badly we pollute the Earth, we can always evolve to the new ecosystem we've created.

The narrator of the video mentions that the exhibit downplays how stable the environment has been for the last 10kya, since the oxygen isotope curves they are showing suggest that we're still in a period of rapid climate change. Well, when you show a curve that covers the last 10 million years, then the Pleistocene is going to look dramatically different, and the Holocene will barely be a blip at that scale. Again, a bit of a stretch to suggest it's all a nefarious plot.

That said, I'm sure that Koch's foundation would have vetoed any addition to the exhibit that talked about the rapidity of modern climate change vs. Pleistocene climate change, or that mentioned that the rapid adaptation of 7 billion people to a radically new environment would occur through the deaths of many millions (or billions) of people. But, listen folks, it's not an exhibit about modern climate change! Got it?

The deeper problem here, of course, is that studies of human evolution are prone to politicization. It's inevitable that a subject so close to the bone (if you'll forgive the pun) will be loaded down with all kinds of cultural and political baggage. I spend several days in my BioAnth class talking about how our assumptions about basic human nature, gender, race, and age color our interpretations of our hominin ancestors. We can't help but politicize the past, but in this case, I honestly believe the problem is in the video maker's interpretation, not in the original exhibit.

school vs. education

I found this post over at DSP: Daily Science Professor to be interesting. DSP recounts how his plans to graduate in three years were changed by conversations with faculty members who recommend taking his time and getting the most out of his undergraduate education. I can't help but contrast the advise he got with the advise we're expected to give at this liberal arts college.

As a school, we pride ourselves on our 4-year graduate rates; it's one of the guarantees we give all in-coming students: they can definitely graduate in 4 years. At the same time, we encourage double-, triple, and even quadruple-majors. Of course, as a liberal arts college, we have wide-ranging GenEd requirements, and a fairly low cap on the number of credits that apply to a major. There is also a culture here of encouraging students to be involved in a large number of extra-curricular activities, from theater, to student government, to sports, to student clubs and organizations. (To give you an idea of the scale of student involvement, when I gave my last exam, I had to give a quarter of the students an alternate exam because they had university excuses to miss class on that day for extracurricular activities.)

I think the intention is to produce well-rounded Renaissance men and women. Personally, I think the result is all too often to produce dilettantes, who know a little bit about lots of things, but have never really applied themselves to one field in-depth. That would be fine, except we're also supposed to encourage these students to go to graduate school.

Now, I already have issues with sending any student to graduate school (as I've said before), no matter how well prepared, but the truth is our students just aren't prepared. I've had students who want to go to graduate school in archaeology or physical anthropology who have only had one class in that subject! When I suggest they take some extra classes, or do an independent study, they tell me that they "don't kneed any more credits in anthropology" because they've already fulfilled their major requirements. When I've brought up this problem to my colleagues, or to administrators, the answer I get is "Well, we can't expect students to stay for an extra semester to take more classes. Do you know how much money that costs?" Sure, I grant that's a problem, and if these students were taking their BAs and moving on to some random middle-management job, I wouldn't care. But if we're actively encouraging our students to pursue PhD's (as my colleagues are), then we owe it to them to see they are truly educated, not just that they've fulfilled school requirements.

nagpra changes

I've seen several blog posts on this particular story. The Obama administration has changed some of the NAGPRA regulations and will allow tribes to claim remains that were found near their current or historical homelands, even if they cannot prove affiliation.

I'm going to go out on an archaeological limb here and say three little words: I don't care.

No, honestly. I predict a lot of attempts to portray this issue as an "us vs. them" fight between scientists and Native Americans, but personally I have no problem with tribes claiming remains that they cannot prove were their ancestors. Among other reasons, I'm not convinced most of these remains have as much scientific potential as some archaeologists claim. Admittedly, my research focus is not bioarchaeology, but I work in a related field. I recognize that there are new analytical techniques that have not been applied to all of the skeletons in repositories today - DNA analysis, for example - but many of these skeletons have been sitting in these museums for decades or even centuries; we've had long enough, how much more time do we need?

Furthermore, we - or our academic ancestors - have made our bed, and now we have to sleep in it. Look, none of us (hopefully) have dug up graves in a disrespectful manner, without permission of the descendants. None of us have ever owned slaves, either. But it remains the fact that we live within a system that privileges certain groups over others, and the vast collections of skeletons found in museums are the result of that bias, just as surely as the continuing differences in average wealth between communities of different ethnic backgrounds. We can say that we shouldn't be punished for the misdeeds of people in the past - today we're so much more enlightened after all - but we continue to benefit from the systematic privileging of mostly Euro-American scientists over Native Americans. It's not enough to change the rules of the game to give each player an equal chance to win, if past rounds have already given the vast majority of the cards to one person.

I spent a year doing NAGPRA compliance checks at various universities, and I have to admit that I was rather appalled by the excavations that took place as recently as the 1960's. I remember one dam project that flooded a valley with a cemetery dating to the early 1900's. The graves of Euro-Americans were moved to a hillside overlooking the valley. The graves of Native Americans were excavated by the archaeologists and the bones stored in boxes in some university's basement. Honestly, these were graves of people who had died only 30-60 years earlier. There were headstones saying that this was somebody's Uncle Fred, for Christ's sake! The mentality is mind boggling that gives a whole community the status of "research subjects", while treating their contemporaries of a different ethnicity as real people, worthy of respect after death. The people in those boxes weren't my ancestors, but the whole experience disgusted me so much that I'd be happy to return all of the skeletal remains in the country to any tribe that wanted them, no strings attached.

I will now get off my soap box.