not drinking the kool-aid

I never attended a liberal arts college. I received at BA, MA, PhD, and two post-docs from major state universities. Before I came here, I had no personal familiarity with SLACs.

I really like the teaching environment here, and I think we provide an exceptional education. I understand why the faculty are proud of what they have accomplished, and of their students. Still, I'm frequently annoyed by the attitude that many of my colleagues have, basically, that no other form of education is worth-while.

I think this school has many advantages - small class size, undergraduate-focused education, strong community spirit, focus on extracurricular and interdisciplinary education, etc., etc. If a student just wants a degree, any degree, in order to get a middle management job, or because having a BA is a prereq for being middle class these days, I think they can't do better than this college. There's no skating through with the minimum level of effort here; faculty hold students to a very high standard, and the classes are so small you can't just hide in the back row. Students are pushed into doing their best, and they are more engaged in the learning process than students at big state schools.

That said, this isn't the perfect education for everyone. It certainly wouldn't have been a very good environment for me. If a student is interested in pursuing a research career, this school doesn't have sufficient depth or breadth of opportunity, in or out of the classroom; you won't make the right kinds of connections, and you won't have the right kind of intellectual pedigree. Even for students whose interests are more professional than academic, there are limits to the programs were are able to offer. When a student tells me they're really interested in veterinary medicine, or forensics, or linguistics, or going to a seminary, I wonder why in God's name they came here, where we don't offer majors/courses to fully support those interests.

Do not try to tell most of the faculty here that a Liberal Arts education is not for everyone. Not unless you want to be crushed by the giant chips on their shoulders. In their view, state schools are full of professors who can't teach their way out of a paper bag, and automaton students with no real interest in education.

I was reminded of this today, when Crazy Colleague sent out an e-mail supporting a student's petition to transfer a Theory class from an R1 university to stand in for the course that CC herself teaches here. CC spent a full page assuring us that no lecture course could ever compare to "the Freirian pedagogy of horizontal communication among a community of learners sharing their ideas that undergirds [her] course". (I kid you not, that's a direct quote.) She complained that the professor did not require enough writing, discouraged open debate, and did not spend enough time on feminist theory. Still, she finally admitted that a well-established anthropologist at a major research institution might possibly be capable of teaching basic theory well enough that his course was acceptable for our students.

Is it fine to be pro-SLAC? Of course. Should we be blind to the fact that research universities do actually provide a good education for some students, depending on their interests and abilities? Of course not.

back in the saddle, and a video recommendation

Between preparing to go and actually attending the SAAs, I haven't had time to blog in a week. Well, I'm baaaack. The conference, as usual, was wonderful. I feel inspired, excited, and ready to dive into that research.

Not to mention the giant pile of exams I have to grade.

Well, damn.

So, while I'm working on the exam, I'm going to punt on blogging and just leave a quick video recommendation. I discovered Nova's Becoming Human series earlier this semester. I've been trying to find a good video for my Intro BioAnth class for years. This 3-part series aired this past November, and it is available on-line for free. Part I covers the earliest finds (Sahelanthropus, in particular) through Homo habilis. Since it's a Nova special, they rather over-state the differences in early Homo, for dramatic effect, but it's generally a good show.

Part II covers Homo erectus, and although they obviously don't go into as much detail as I can in class, the list of topics looks like it was taken straight from my lecture notes. Brownie points to the producers for the way my students cracked up to hear Richard Wrangham say, in his impeccable British accent, "As for how we got our pubic lice from gorillas, I wouldn't care to speculate."

Part III - OK, I have to admit, I haven't actually watched Part III yet. So far, I've loved the series, though. Highly recommended for intro classes. It covers a lot of the important "big-picture" issues, and I can bore them with the details of anatomy and taxonomy in class. My students liked it too. I showed Part I a week ago, and today when I showed Part II in class, some students had already seen it. They liked Part I so much, they found the rest of the series on Netflix!

UPDATE:
I decided to watch Part III (origins of the anatomically moderns), and I don't like it nearly as much as the rest of the series. They gave a hard-line replacement perspective, and didn't present any of the alternative evidence. For example, they implied that all genetic information supports total replacement, without mentioning any of the work by people like Hammer, which suggests some admixture. They skimmed over the controversies surrounding the "bottleneck" hypothesis, and implied that the entire continent of Africa was a desert, with only a few small places where humans could survive. (How chimpanzees and other apes would have escaped from a similar bottleneck, under those conditions, is not explained.) They played up the scanty evidence for symbolic behavior prior to 50kya, without mentioning Neandertal burial practices. They also implied that only modern humans were mentally capable of exploiting marine resources, when Stiner's work in Italy showed significant shellfish use, and Finlayson's work at the caves in Gibraltar suggest fishing, shellfishing, and hunting of sea mammals. I won't be showing this episode in my class, unless I stop the video every once in a while to discuss the various viewpoints on the topic.

environmental archaeology in st. louis

I've been looking at the program for the SAAs. I would like to call attention to a few symposia that may be of particular interest to environmental archaeologists.

Thursday:

"History and Trajectory of Irrigation and Water Management in the Southern Southwest"
Poster session about the agricultural landscape of the desert Southwest, including newly excavated irrigation features in southern Arizona.

"Beyond the Biological Need to Eat: Archaeologies of Food and Foodways"
Symposium approaches zooarchaeology and archaeobotany from a slightly po-mo perspective. Katheryn Twiss is discussant. She does wonderful work, just with a different approach than mine.

"Animals and Inequality in the Ancient World"
Nice to see more of a focus on the zooarchaeology of complex societies. This is quite common in Europe, but not nearly as much a focus of the Americanist schools.

"Alliance and Landscape on Perry Mesa, Central Arizona"
This group of researchers, led by David Abbott, has applied a landscape legacy model to understanding the archaeology of Perry Mesa.

Friday:

"Seeds of Change: Early Holocene Subsistence Diversification and Technological Change across the Desert West"
A really strong group of presenters, from an environmental archaeology perspective, including Phil Geib, Charlotte Beck, Joel Janetski, David Zeanah, Douglas Bird, and Rebecca Bliege-Bird. Discussants are Bettinger and Wills.

"Tropical Forest Low-Density Urbanism in the Southern Maya Lowlands and Southern Asia: Past and Present Sustainability"
Discussants are Michael Coe, Stephen Lansing, and Vernon Scarborough. Quite the diverse group, but it promises to have a great deal of interesting ecological material.

"Are We What We Eat? Continuity and Change in Food during Culture Contact in North America."
This actually sounds more interesting from a technological perspective than from an environmental one, but a variety of environmentally-savvy participants are on tap in this symposium, including the current editors of the Journal of Ethnobiology (Virginia Popper and Heather Trigg), Kristen Gremillion, William Hildebrandt, and the discussants, Katherine Spielmann and Christine Hastorf.

Saturday:

"Human Responses to Younger Dryas in the Northern Hemisphere: The Old World"
This needs no explanation, other than to note that the organizer is Lawrence Straus and the discussant Ofer Bar-Yosef.

"Current Research on Isotopic Analyses in Archaeology and Zooarchaeology"
The discussant is Stanley Ambrose, of course. The papers represent an impressive array of different regions and time periods.

"Large Game Procurement Strategies"
Heavy, although not exclusive, focus on the Western US

Sunday:

"Coastal Seasonality: Methodologies and Substantive Applications"
Alas, I'm going to miss this symposium, as my plane leaves too early for papers on Sunday morning. Organized by Elizabeth Reitz, Irvy Quitmyer, and David Hurst Thomas.


Also, note that there is an excursion to the Missouri Botanical Gardens scheduled for Saturday afternoon.

(not) taking one for the team

Our older child, Little Boo, was born while I was finishing a post-doc. I had time off at her birth, but I did not have formal maternity leave, for various reasons.

Our second child, Boo Two, was born this past November. I worked out a non-standard maternity "arrangement". The whole concept of maternity leave in academia would be grounds for another blog post, but I digress.

When I announced my pregnancy to Divine And Wonderful Department Chair, To Whom I Am Eternally Grateful (DAWDCTWIAEG, for short), DAWDCTWIAEG encouraged me to consider stopping my tenure clock. Here's the kicker: She doesn't think I need to stop my tenure clock because I will need an extra productive year in order to be tenurable. Actually, I was planning to go up for early tenure, and I already have a stronger publication record than is strictly necessary for tenure at this institution. No, the reason DAWDCTWIAEG wanted me to stop my tenure clock is because - get this - nobody has ever done it before!

Actually, that's not strictly true. Some faculty had stopped their clocks in the past for various reasons. No woman in our department, though, had ever stopped her tenure clock because she had a baby. DAWDCTWIAEG really hates the lack of precedent. She herself, when still untenured, had been told by senior colleagues not to stop her clock when her son was born because it would "send the wrong message" to the tenure committee. Now she fears that no woman wants to be the first, because blazing the trail could mean putting her own career at risk.

DAWDCTWIAEG feels I'm the ideal trailblazer for the tenure-clock policy. I have a strong enough record for early tenure, so surely there is no way my colleagues could refuse to give me tenure later, even if I took the "mommy track" and stopped my clock. Maybe I should jump on this opportunity to "take one for the team", and make the path a little easier for my junior colleagues.

I'm not going to, though. Yeah, I know, it would be a blow struck in defense of feminism, equal rights, and apply pie. It would also mean foregoing job security - not to mention a hefty pay raise - for one (possibly two) extra years. See, I'm still planning to go up for early tenure, if I can, and stopping my clock would make that much more difficult.

Sometimes, striking a blow for equal rights means asserting my right to put my own career goals first. I don't think many men would be criticized for doing so.

bad sign

A conversation heard outside my lab door, 10 minutes before the lab practicum was to begin:

Student A - So, what do we need to know for this exam?

Student B - The bones and features of the cranium.

{Pause}

Student A - So, what's a feature?

juvenile sense of humor

Maybe it's just me, but I found this paragraph hilarious. The student was supposed to be comparing and contrasting bonobo and common chimpanzee behavior. (I corrected some of the grammar/punctuation, so it makes sense and is easier to read. I did not, however, correct the "typo" that makes it so funny).

Sex also is a bounding activity. It brings female and male together, and female and female together. Other primates bound by other means, like grooming or helping with the young. There is a different and deeper connection formed when bounding through sex.

I have a mental picture of bonobo trampoline orgies.

The rest of the paragraph discusses the "off spring" produced by these orgies, which just extends the metaphor.

British courts on "Druid" repatration appeal

A British court has ruled against the Council of British Druid Orders, which had asked for the reburial of a Neolithic child from Avebury.

The druids say the remains of the child, known as Charlie, should be reinterred within Avebury's stone circle out of respect for the dead.

The Order says it has taken up the case because it feels it has a cultural link with pagan ancestors in the British Isles.

I've already mentioned my strong views on NAGPRA. Cases like Avebury make us really think about who owns the past, and who has an investment in how ancient people are treated. Here in the US, we have laws protecting Native American graves, but no specific laws protecting African-American graves, or Asian-American graves, etc. How would/should we, the archaeological community, react if there was a collaborative effort by, say, the NAACP to stop archaeologists from excavating human remains when they investigate plantation sites with slave quarters? Or the burial sites of a free black community in early 1800's Baltimore or New Orleans? Personally, I would defer to the descendants, if they could be identified, or to representatives of the local community. (And, yes, I understand that defining that community could be difficult. Such decisions would have to be made on a case-by-case basis.)

That said, I'm quite happy with the British court's decision in Avebury. It's not that the British "druids" can't support their claim of spiritual, cultural, or biological descent. That doesn't matter much to me. There are two major differences between British druids and Native American (or African-American, etc.) populations in the US: 1) in general, British druids can choose whether or not to be a member of the druid sub-culture, they are not born into a socially-defined ethnic group. In this case, they are trying to claim responsibility for the remains due to a cultural affinity with the child, when they themselves have created that cultural affinity by appropriating certain aspects of that child's belief system, long after that belief system had ceased to operate in Britain; 2) to my knowledge, there is no systemic bias against druids in British culture, so there is no power differential between archaeologists - as representatives of the mainstream and more powerful subculture - and druids. There is no post-colonial feeling that the archaeologists are attempting to defraud druids of their cultural patrimony (unless, of course, the druids are holding a grudge from the late Roman Empire). And of course, as stated above, being a druid is largely a personal choice. Under the circumstances, I don't think druids need the protection of the law for their spiritual or cultural ancestors.