Clifford T. Brown's Archaeology Blog

Domestication of Dogs Over 30,000 years ago

2012-01-30T13:49:00.003-05:00

In the last couple of weeks, I have seen a stream of news reports gushing about new evidence for the domestication of dogs as long as 33,000 years ago. As far as I can tell, the research they are referring to is this article published in the prestigious open access journal PLoSOne. What seems strange to me is all the fuss about an article that, according to the journal, was published back in July 2011.

Having glanced at the article, I would say that the radiocarbon dating seems unassailable. The other important question is whether the remains are really of a dog or of some other animal. I cannot reliably judge their assertion that it is a dog because the argument is based on an analysis of the evolution of canine cranial physiology, about which I personally know nothing.

If there's another article out there that I missed, let me know. Or if you have any thoughts about how slow the press can be in picking up a story, which then spreads like an epidemic.

Guide for My Graduate Students

2012-01-23T10:27:00.002-05:00

Here you will find a helpful guide to my attitudes. I urge you to consult it carefully.

A New and Curious Application of Fractal Mathematics to the Social Sciences

2012-01-23T10:01:00.007-05:00

The number and variety of applications of fractals and power laws to the social sciences continues to increase.

Here's one on the power law behavior of the time intervals between murders committed by a Russian serial killer.

What's next? Your guess is as good as mine.

Public Lecture February 23rd at the Palm Beach County Archaeological Society

2012-01-19T11:07:00.009-05:00

I will be giving a lecture to the Palm Beach County Archaeological Society entitled “Why Most of What We Think We Know About Archaeology Is Wrong, and What We Should Be Doing Instead.”

I thought about calling it "What I Think about in the Shower" but that seemed open to misinterpretation.

Date: Thursday, February 23rd, 2012
Time: 7:00 pm
Place: West Palm Beach Public Library
Room: 3rd Floor conference room
Address: 411 Clematis Street, West Palm Beach, Fla. 33401

View Larger Map

I will discuss the application to archaeology of the statistical issues raised by John Ioannidis’s famous paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”. I will then discuss the unintended consequences of confirmatory hypothesis testing research designs in archaeology and explain why we should focus our efforts, instead, on hypothesis-generating research. I will conclude with an unusual example that I'm keeping to myself for the moment.

Academic Social Networking Sites

2012-01-17T16:33:00.002-05:00

I'm curious to find out what social networking sites other archaeologists are using. I've built a profile at Academia.edu, which seems to be well designed and quite active. There was an article in the New York Times today lauding the Researchgate.net site. I have an account there too, which I created in response to "friend" requests from colleagues. I find the Researchgate site awkward and cumbersome to use.

There are clearly too many social networking sites out there. I must have profiles on at least half a dozen, and I obviously don't keep up with any of them as a result. What site(s) do you use?

New Book Hot Off the Presses

2012-01-05T09:44:00.005-05:00

Walter Witschey and I have published a new Historical Dictionary of Mesoamerica in Rowman and Littlefield's historical dictionary series. Yesterday I discovered that it had come out in print when I got a box containing my complimentary copies. Yeah! It's dated 2012, although in fact it must have been physically printed last year. It's a good-looking volume, thanks in part to Walter's skill as a photographer. His photo of the Caracol on the cover came out very nicely. Thanks, Walter, for your collaboration. It was fun!

Here's the URL for the book on the publisher's web site: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780810871670, or you can click on the title above.

Here's the link to the book on Amazon.com.

Historic Map of the Laguna de Términos

2012-01-04T05:49:00.007-05:00

I post below a scan of a historic map of the Laguna de Términos. Some years ago, I lived in Springfield, Virginia, near the Washington, D.C. Beltway. Around Christmas time, a dealer in old maps, prints, and etchings would set up shop at the local mall. I found there an old map of the Laguna de Términos in Campeche. It may be a German copy of Jacques Nicolas Bellin’s map from the eighteenth century. I bought it because it shows the location of an Indian village, apparently named Usumacinta (see detail). I wonder if Dampier mentions it? He was living there not too long before the map would have been made, and of course the map may include details copied from earlier maps. Click on the images to enlarge them. I can provide a higher resolution scan if anyone needs it for research.

Quadrantid Meteor Shower

2012-01-04T05:23:00.003-05:00

Last night, I set my alarm clock for 2:15 am and laid out warm clothes for the morning. I was out looking for the Quadrantid meteors by 2:30 am this morning. After about 20 minutes, I hadn't seen a single one, and so I came into the office. Very disappointing! Probably too much light pollution where I live. I thought about driving out to the beach or out to the edge of the Everglades--either one would be much darker than my neighborhood--but I wasn't sure which would be better, and so I did neither.

The last time I saw a good meteor shower was around 1993, in the Yazoo Basin of Mississippi, with Lynn Berg.

Did anyone out there have better luck than I?

Strange first post for the new year. At least I didn't eat any strange brownies from friendly hippies, like the guys in the Big Bang Theory.

New Pictures

2011-11-28T19:27:00.037-05:00

I am (un)officially the best professor ever. On Saturday, I went to Chichén Itzá to take photos for my class today. How many professors fly to a foreign country over the weekend to take pictures for their Monday class? (In all honesty, the main reason I went to Chichén Itzá was to take my wife.) Here are some of the better photos. Feel free to use them with proper attribution for non-profit scientific or education purposes. Explicit written permission is required for publication or any profit-making use.

Monjas Annex , Puuc style

Monjas

Casa Colorada

Caracol

Iglesia

High Priest's Grave, Serpent Balustrade

High Priest's Grave

Cenote of Sacrifice

Chacmool

Relief Panel, Platform of the Jaguars and Eagles

Temple of Kukulcaan or Castillo, Serpent Balustrade

Relief Panel, Mercado

Wall (very high!) Mercado

Mercado, tall columns in courtyard

Mercado, Exterior Relief

Mercado, tall columns in courtyard

Castillo or Temple of Kukulcaan, Temple

Thousand Columns Courtyard with Temple of the Warriors behind

Relief Column, Temple of the Warriors

Detail, Warrior Column, Temple of the Warriors

Warrior Column, Temple of the Warriors

Lower drums, Warrior Column, Temple of the Warriors

Thousand Columns

Temple of the Warriors

Earlier substructure exposed in excavation in front of the Castillo

Temple of Kukulcaan, Temple Superstructure

Great Ball Court, Temple of the Jaguars

Temple of Kukulcaan

What I Did Last Summer

2011-11-02T09:11:00.014-04:00

In the midst of an unusually hot summer (What global warming?) in south Florida (a.k.a. North Cuba), I was fortunate to be able to go to England on a vacation with my wife. A queasy mixture of guilt (at not working) and interest impelled me to visit archaeological sites and museums, with the acquiescence of my patient companion.

For the other Mayanists out there, I thought I would post my photos of the Yaxchilan lintels in the British Museum. Feel free to use them for non-profit educational or scientific purposes. The new Mexican room at the museum is lovely.

Yaxchilan Lintel 24

Yaxchilan Lintel 15.

Yaxchilan Lintel 16.

Yaxchilan Lintel 16 again. A better picture.

Yaxchilan Lintel 17.

Yaxchilan Lintel 17 again. A slightly better picture.

Hope these are useful to someone out there in cyberspace.

Archaeoplanet: A Great New Blog

2011-09-08T10:41:00.001-04:00

Found this great new blog named Archaeoplanet. Created by Lawrence Desmond. Check it out.

Maya Ceramic Texts

2011-08-26T08:07:00.003-04:00

I wanted to post some more ceramic photographs to my Google webpage, but it just wouldn't work. Just an endless series of errors as the image files failed to upload. What a waste of time. I only managed to upload 5 of about 30 photos. "Google Sites" just isn't worth the time and effort, especially when the result is an ugly page. I'm going to try to post the same photos here on a static page. Wish me luck!

The Plain Language Act

2011-05-20T06:17:00.002-04:00

This is a little off-topic, but I was delighted to read in the news today that the Federal government has started implementation of the Plain Language Act, signed into law by President Obama last fall. According to the AP, the law "takes full effect in October, when federal agencies must start writing plainly in all new or substantially revised documents produced for the public. The government will still be allowed to write nonsensically to itself."

If you Google "Plain Language Act," the relevant government website pops up, http://www.plainlanguage.gov/. Follow the link to the Guidelines. They are 117 pages long. Good luck!

Language change, diffusion, and more early dates from South America

2011-05-06T07:21:00.007-04:00

I've read a melange of interesting articles in the last couple of days instead of reading the term papers I'm supposed to be grading. Actually, I've been doing both, in between meetings of various kinds.

This first article may seem a little off-topic, but I think it is directly relevant to prehistory.

Dunn, Michael, Simon J. Greenhill, Stephen C. Levinson, and Russell D. Gray (2011). Evolved Structure of Language Shows Lineage-specific Trends in Word-order Universals. Nature 473, 79-82.

Published yesterday, this article tests hypotheses, originally posed by Chomsky and Greenberg, about the innate structures of language by studying how languages have changed through descent within language families. The authors studied four of the larger language families, Austronesian, Indo-European, Bantu, and Uto-Aztecan, to see if certain kinds of changes co-occurred, which would imply that those characteristics were cognitively or neurologically linked. Interesting, the authors found little evidence for either Chomsky's or Greenberg's hypotheses, and conclude that "[l]inguistic diversity does not seem to be tightly constrained by universal cognitive factors specialized for language. Instead, it is the product of cultural evolution, canalized by the systems that have evolved during diversification, so that future states lie in an evolutionary landscape with channels and basins of attraction that are specific to linguistic lineages." (p. 82). This seems to me to be an eminently sensible conclusion that harmonizes with my own knowledge and experience of language and historical linguistics. In individual cases, it is easy to see how specific changes to languages are strongly constrained and conditioned by their linguistic and cultural contexts, so the results of the analysis are not surprising. As an aside, I think that Otomanguean would have been a better choice than Uto-Aztecan for this study because the former is larger (in terms of numbers of daughter languages) and its evolution is less confounded by the effects of later migrations.

Since we're talking about linguistics, I want to mention an article by the famous linguist William Labov (Labov, William 2003. Pursuing the cascade model. In D. Britain and J. Cheshire (eds). Social Dialectology: In Honor of Peter Trudgill. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp. 9-22). Very interesting! He assembles evidence that lexical diffusion tends to jump from larger cities to smaller ones in rank order, rather than diffusing outwards like waves from centers of innovation. This is modeled using the gravity model from geography, which has also been applied in archaeology. I had no idea that the gravity model had been applied in this manner. This also has implications for models of diffusion in archaeology.

Finally, a bit of pure archaeology:

Jolie, Edward A., Thomas F. Lynch, Phil R. Geib, J. M. Adovasio (2011). Cordage, Textiles, and the Late Pleistocene Peopling of the Andes. Current Anthropology, Vol. 52, No. 2, pp. 285-296.

They directly dated textiles and cordage from Guitarrero Cave in Peru to ~12,000 cal yr B.P. "Direct dating" in archaeology means they actually dated the artifact in question, rather than an associated object, such as a lump of charcoal in the same feature or stratum. Guitarrero Cave is a pretty well-known site that had previously produced some unusually early--pre-Clovis--radiocarbon dates. The site is located in an intermontane valley in the Andes and is known for its Archaic/Paleoindian (?) occupation. The new dates as well as corrections applied to older ones suggest the earliest occupation dates from 12,100-11-800 cal yr B.P. This is not as early as Monte Verde, Chile, but it is still pretty early.

New Hieroglyphic Stairway found at El Palmar, Campeche

2011-04-28T12:22:00.006-04:00

El Palmar is a large site in southern Campeche about 50 km east of Calakmul. Although the extent of the site is not fully known, it does have 2 pyramids about 40 m tall, which makes it quite a monster. It was investigated in the 1930s by none other than Sir Eric Thompson himself, but the results were never fully published. At the time, El Palmar had the largest number of stelae of any Maya site, although Calakmul now holds that honor. El Palmar was explored some years ago by Carlos Brokmann, but not very intensively. It is currently being explored by a graduate student from the University of Arizona, Kenichiro Tsukamoto. They have uncovered and conserved a new hieroglyphic stairway, as National Geographic reports. This nice article is written by a distinguished Salvadoran archaeologist. This news has gotten surprisingly little coverage, so I thought I should mention it.

Here's the URL if you prefer to cut and paste it: http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2011/04/25/the-meaning-of-words-new-evidence-of-ancient-maya-history/

Cacao in the Southwestern U.S.

2011-03-31T08:09:00.004-04:00

The Journal of Archaeological Science has published online an article reporting the discovery of cacao residues in a significant number of ceramic vessels from Ancestral Puebloan and Hohokam sites in the southwestern United States.

Washburn, D.K., Washburn, W.N., Shipkova, P.A. The prehistoric drug trade: widespread consumption of cacao in Ancestral Pueblo and Hohokam communities in the American Southwest, Journal of Archaeological Science (2011), doi: 10.1016/j.jas.2011.02.029.

The lead author, Dorothy Washburn, is best known for applying the techniques of symmetry analysis, from crystallography, to the formal analysis of designs on archaeological artifacts.

Many of the the vessels studied come from eleventh century deposits at Pueblo Bonito and Pueblo del Arroyo in Chaco Canyon, while the remainder come from the fourteenth century deposits at Los Muertos. Although this is not the first time that cacao residues, primary theobromine, have been identified in Ancestral Puebloan pots, the sample tested in this study was much larger (75 vessels) and from a wider variety of contexts (i.e., both elite and non-elite). The results were astonishing: 50 of the 75 vessels tested (67%) revealed evidence of cacao. Thus, it appears that trade in cacao, which must have come from Mesoamerica, was much more widespread than previously believed.

Great stuff!

Where else should we be looking for cacao?

Report on Pre-Clovis Occupation in Central Texas

2011-03-26T11:59:00.008-04:00

A rich cache of articles on archaeology appeared in this week's issue of Science. The most
important for us is a report from Texas A&M on the excavation and dating of a Pre-Clovis
complex in central Texas. Here's the citation:

Michael R. Waters, Steven L. Forman, Thomas A. Jennings, Lee C. Nordt, Steven G. Driese,
Joshua M. Feinberg, Joshua L. Keene, Jessi Halligan, Anna Lindquist, James Pierson, Charles T.
Hallmark, Michael B. Collins, James E. Wiederhold (2011). The Buttermilk Creek Complex and
the Origins of Clovis at the Debra L. Friedkin Site, Texas. Science 331:1599-1603.

The Friedkin site appears to be well-preserved and displays a high degree of stratigraphic integrity. Lead author Michael Waters is a distinguished geoarchaeologist and, surprise!, the description of the soils, stratigraphy, and geomorphology are outstanding. The site has a long occupational sequence, from Pre-Clovis through Clovis, Folsom, Late Paleoindian and Early Archaic cultures, representing a span of roughly 6,000 or 7,000 years, all sandwiched into about a meter of alluvial and colluvial sediment.

The key issue is the definition and dating of the Pre-Clovis Buttermilk Creek Complex. Because
the excavators could not recover any carbon from the site, making radiocarbon dating impossible, they relied upon optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating instead. This technique is somewhat less desirable than radiocarbon dating because OSL depends on local conditions, such as soil moisture content and ambient radiation rates, that can be difficult to estimate. Nevertheless, I'm inclined to believe the results in the case because the many dates form a clear, properly ordered, and internally consistent series that correlates appropriately with known information from other sites. So even if the adjustments for local conditions are not perfect, the essential fact would not change: there is a Pre-Clovis component that is many hundreds or even a couple of thousand years older than Clovis stratified below it. The OSL dates for the Buttermilk Creek Complex are reported by the authors to be 13.2-15.5 kya (kya=thousands of years ago).

Unfortunately, as at Monte Verde in Chile, the excavators did not find any really distinctive
diagnostic artifacts associated with the Pre-Clovis complex. So we still don't have any easy and
obvious means to identify other such occupations at other sites.

These finding contribute to the already significant evidence for Pre-Clovis occupation of the
Americas.

2012 News

2011-03-21T09:41:00.007-04:00

Something must be wrong when you find information related to your professorial duties posted on News of the Weird (Professional Edition, no less!). But that's where I found a reference to a guy who was in jail for making bombs because he believed the world was ending in 2012. The full story is at the Louisville Journal-Courier.

This should serve as a reminder that the apparently silly bunk about 2012 can be deeply pernicious. However ridiculous, inane, or childish they seems to us, these outrageous fabrications can trouble people and might even push troubled people over the edge.

This is not a unique incident. I seem to remember reading somewhere about a Mayanist who took a call from a credulous person who wanted to know if he or she should kill himself before the world ended.

I want to collect stories like these. Please send me any you find.

Thanks!

Mi ahijado Victor

2011-03-12T14:47:00.002-05:00

Acá pongo una foto de mi ahijado Victor.

Bruce Dahlin Photo

2011-03-04T15:05:00.003-05:00

Here's my favorite photo of Bruce and me: sitting on the stoop in Tecoh, Yucatan, after a hard day's work. It was taken by Marilyn Masson. Thanks to Marilyn for letting me post it.

My Professorial Trading Card

2011-02-23T04:57:00.004-05:00

Fun item on the Ph.D. Comics website: Professorial Trading Cards!

Here's mine. Students: Feel free to download it and add the stats. The link above provides additional (and humorous) information about the information to include. Have fun!

Seibal

2011-02-18T06:39:00.002-05:00

Nice post by Takeshi Inomata on the New York Times science blogs about his work at Seibal.

New Work at Tazumal, El Salvador

2011-02-09T05:15:00.002-05:00

According to a brief note in El Mundo, Shione Shibata is directing new excavations at the major site of Tazumal in El Salvador. They have evidently found a substructure, possibly Early Classic in date, within one of the Classic period pyramids. Congratulations, Shione!

Job posting

2011-02-08T11:51:00.003-05:00

My Department is advertising a tenure-track position for a biological anthropologist. Here is the text of the announcement:

Florida Atlantic University. The Department of Anthropology invites applications for a full-time, tenure-track position in biological anthropology at the Assistant Professor level starting August 2011. Research specialization is open. A Ph.D. in anthropology is required at time of appointment. The successful candidate must be committed to undergraduate and graduate teaching and mentoring as well as demonstrate research potential and a commitment to generating external funding. Five courses per year is the normal teaching load. Applications will be reviewed beginning March 15, 2011 and continue until the position is filled. Applications must be submitted online at jobs.fau.edu (posting no. 981848). Original documents such as application letter, vita, names/addresses of references, and supporting materials should be sent to: Search Committee, Dept. of Anthropology, Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, SO 171, Boca Raton, FL 33431. Florida Atlantic University serves a culturally and ethnically diverse student body and is an Equal Opportunity/Equal Access Institution.

Bruce Dahlin

2011-02-07T11:05:00.003-05:00

My friend Bruce Dahlin passed away a few days ago. Here's a link to an obituary.

He was a major figure in Maya archaeology, deeply engaged in the theoretical debates of the day. He worked throughout the Maya region, from El Salvador to Guatemala to Yucatan. He directed excavations at key sites, such as El Mirador in the Peten of Guatemala and Chunchucmil, Yucatan.

Bruce was an extraordinarily generous person and had a warm and loving soul. When I moved to Washington, D.C., he went to great lengths to include me in his personal and professional circle, attending lectures I gave and inviting my wife and me to his beautiful home for Thanksgiving dinner. He also included me in grant proposals and field projects, which had a positive effect on my career and professional advancement. He was a role model and mentor.

Mesoamerican droughts: New Dendrochronological study

2011-02-04T10:35:00.005-05:00

Sorry for the long absence. I've been unusually busy, even for me.

David Stahle has published (yet another) important article on dendrochronology and archaeology. This one describes a new dendrochronological sequence he and his colleagues have developed for central Mexico. It is derived from the Montezuma baldcypress, and it extends back 1,238 years, back to the Late Classic period. The paleoclimatic reconstruction created from the sequence indicates a series of major droughts corresponding to significant historical changes. The Terminal Classic Maya drought is evident and can now be dated between A.D. 897 and A.D. 922. (That's one major advantage of dendrochronology over other paleoclimate proxy methods: dendrochronology can provide dates precise to the year. Methods such as paleolimnology rarely, if ever, provide such precise dating.) Another major drought occurred between 1149 and 1167, close to the end of the Toltec reign (if that's what the Toltecs did). Another drought, from 1378 to 1404, was the most extreme in the dendrochronological sequence, but its historical correlates are not obvious. Finally, a major drought occurred around the time of the Spanish conquest, from 1514 to 1539. This may have found an echo in the 1535-1536 drought in Yucatan that drove the Xiu to try to cross the province of Sotuta, which led to their massacre by Nachi Cocom, which helped motivate the Xiu alliance with the Spanish.

All in all, an important article. Here's the reference:

Stahle, D. W., J. Villanueva-Diaz, D.J. Burnette, J. C. Paredes, R. R. Heim Jr., F. K. Fye, R. A. Soto, M. D. Therrell, M. K. Cleaveland, and D. K. Stahle (2011). Major Mesoamerican droughts of the past millennium. Geophys. Res. Lett., doi:10.1029/2010GL046472, in press.

Tim and Sheryl Beach's Maya wetland research

2010-11-08T07:21:00.003-05:00

Nice article in Nature (with links) on Timothy Beach and Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach's work on ancient Maya wetland agriculture.

I can't say enough about the quality of their research. They are dedicated, adept, thoughtful, and cautious scientists. The best of the best.

Interesting article on Lower Paleolithic Stone Toolmaking

2010-11-05T11:04:00.004-04:00

Faisal, Aldo, Dietrich Stout, Jan Apel, and Bruce Bradley (2010). The Manipulative Complexity of Lower Paleolithic Stone Toolmaking. PLoSOne 5(11): e13718. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013718.

Related news release with a nice video.

Teotihuacan at Dawn

2010-11-01T17:11:00.013-04:00

I was here a couple of weeks ago. It can easily cost US$100 to get a tour or taxi to Teotihuacan from downtown Mexico City. Taking local transport is very cheap. Take the Metro to the Autobuses del Norte station. The bus station of the same name is directly across the street from the subway exit. Veer left inside the bus station and the narrow ticket counter for the local bus that goes to the ruins is the second- or third-to-last ticket vendor from the left-hand end. The small sign is yellow, and the buses go to San Juan and San Martin. The one you want is the "Piramides" bus. Tickets go on sale a few minutes before 6:00 am. Since the Metro starts running at 5:00 am, you should have time to get to the bus station before the ticket window opens so you can catch the first bus to Teotihuacan if you want. Not knowing how long any of this would take, that's what I did: the first Metro train and the first local bus. I arrived before 7:00 am at the gates of Teotihuacan. There was a night watchman hanging out in the gatehouse, chatting with random employees or friends. A couple of employees went in and out. It was absolutely freezing in the pre-dawn air at about 2300 m (7500 feet) above sea level. I had on an extra shirt, but I was jumping around and shivering anyway. The locals were all wearing jackets. It didn't help that I needed to pee something fierce. I finally asked the guard if I could use the restroom, and he let me in.

Here's Teotihuacan at dawn with no one else around.

Pyramid of the Sun from the west, with the sun rising behind.

Pyramid of the Sun again.

Another image.

Pyramid of the Sun yet again.

More of the same.

And one final image:

Actually, there was a charming group of giggling high school students who had just emerged from the tunnel under the pyramid. They were hidden behind something, so I didn't see them until I got right up to the pyramid. They were having a great time and we had a fun chat.

Here's a nice one of the Pyramid of the Moon taken in the dawn light from atop the Pyramid of the Sun.

Feel free to use my photos for non-profit educational purposes provided you attribute them to me, the photographer.

The bus was a comfy modern contraption. The movie on the way back was great, although I didn't see the whole thing and didn't catch the title.

Fun trip!

More photos to come, if I remember.

Nice archaeology blog

2010-10-22T12:36:00.003-04:00

Stumbled upon and enjoyed this archaeology blog http://middlesavagery.wordpress.com/ by Colleen Morgan.

Her photostream on Flickr is impressive too: http://www.flickr.com/photos/colleenmorgan/

I particularly enjoyed this little video clip:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/colleenmorgan/2944551291/

What do you think?

Benoit Mandelbrot

2010-10-19T08:56:00.004-04:00

It has been reported in the press that Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractal mathematics, died on October 14th. This is a sad loss not only for math, but for all the sciences and even the arts and humanities. Mandelbrot was a visionary who made substantive contributions to the broadest conceivable array of fields. Even a short list would have to include art, astronomy, computing, cosmology, economics, education, geography, geology, geophysics, hydrology, linguistics, and materials science, as well as mathematics. I found in his work evidence of a courageous and novel mind that was inspiring to me as a novice. I was thrilled when he once called me to ask about my work. He will undoubtedly be missed by innumerable students, friends, and colleagues.

Congratulations to Linda Manzanilla

2010-09-25T11:39:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, Dr. Linda Manzanilla, the preeminent Mexican archaeologist, was invested with an honorary doctorate (honoris causa) from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She is probably best known for her work at Teotihuacan, but she has worked in the Maya area (at Coba and, I think, elsewhere) and also in South America.

She's a delightful colleague as well as an outstanding scholar, and so it is a particular pleasure to congratulate her.

Before writing this, I consulted her biography on that bastion of accuracy, the Wikipedia, and discovered two interesting facts, 1) she was born in New York, and 2) she is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. As both women and foreigners are rarely elected, her selection is a remarkable achievement. Being born in New York is much easier, provided your mother is there too.

Albert-Lazlo Barabasi's new book, "Bursts," and the problem with 'science writing'

2010-08-21T08:22:00.016-04:00

While I was riding long-distance buses around Central America, I read Albert-Lazlo Barabasi's new book, Bursts. My friend, Larry Liebovitch, had recommended that I read Barabasi's first book, Linked, but I hadn't gotten around to it. Now I regret my oversight.

It's easy to say that Barabasi writes well for a physicist, but that doesn't do him justice. In truth, he writes well for a novelist. More impressive, the book has a complex novelistic structure with multiple storylines interwoven in a way that successfully builds the tension to climax and denouement. He combines a fascinating historical narrative with excellent science journalism about the work he's been doing on the timing of human activity and patterns of human movement, especially Levy flights. And he doesn't just report on the social physics as a reviewer, he went and interviewed the other physicists and provides all manner of human interest stories about them. I was entranced by some of the background stories about people I know, like Gene Stanley.

This is some of the best science writing I've ever read. The only things that even come close are John McPhee's writings and the book 1491. And Barabasi has the advantage of actually being a distinguished physicist who was involved in the original research, so there's no question that he understands the technical details and the intellectual issues. To this we have to add the advantage that he is a Hungarian from Transylvania. Why would this matter? Well, he chose to interweave throughout the book a remarkable historical narrative about Hungary and Romania from the sixteenth century, and since he's from that region, he was able to use a wide variety of primary and secondary sources in the original languages. The historical episode he traces--a Crusade nominally against the Ottomans in eastern Europe--is fascinating, and I'm surprised I didn't know anything about it.

The other book I brought with me couldn't have offered a sharper contrast. The Best of the Best American Science Writing was a disappointment. The book is a compilation of the essays from previously published collections of essays from the annual series The Best American Science Writing 2006, 2007, etc. As I read this book, I couldn't help but think, "When did the term 'science writing' come to mean dumbed-down human-interest features journalism about science?" With the exception of a few essays, such as Ernst Mayr's, almost all the stories were mere pablum, and in my opinion some were not even well written while others were wrong or, sadly, even anti-scientific. The scientific content of most of the essays was almost nil, and I don't think I have a blinkered view of what constitutes science. Forgive me for being old fashioned or narrow-minded, but I still think of "science writing" as reports or commentaries by scientists about original research. The current belief that actual scientific discourse is unreadable and needs to translated into some other genre is both false and deleterious because it deprives society of direct access to critical information and ideas. It is false because many scientists can write well and exert great effort to communicate clearly and creatively. So there isn't any need for translators who dumb stuff down. The portrait of the scientist as illiterate is as false as any stereotype. The average scientist is probably an average writer, and since science is an international collaboration, many scientists who publish in English are writing in a second language, which doesn't make for great prose. In addition, good writing is not usually a key criterion for publication in science journals. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of original scientific articles are published each year, and in that thick forest there are many beautiful trees: well-written, interesting, and intellectually significant essays. Why no one publishes an anthology of those, I don't know. In support of my argument, I only need to point to Barabasi's book. He's a physicist, for heaven's sake, perhaps the most impenetrable of the sciences. English must not be his first language. It might be his third or fourth. His work is largely mathematical. How could he write a book of general interest about it? But he has. And the book makes intellectually important points that his peer-reviewed articles don't. Only in the book does he describe the broader significant of his research and reveal that it is an organized program of investigation. The individual articles only hint at these broader themes.

So, if any publisher out there wants to start a series of the best of real science writing, let me know. I'd be happy to edit the first volume or two. Click on the title of this post to go to the Amazon page for Barabasi's book.

PS. My admiraton for Barabasi's book has nothing to do with the fact that he cited my Levy flights article! I swear.

Trip Report

2010-08-15T23:25:00.018-04:00

I'm writing this from my hotel room in Managua. Tomorrow morning I fly home. I've only been here about three weeks, but it was a good trip. I accomplished everything I hoped to and more. I spent the first day or so in Managua at the National Museum, and then went to Chinandega to study our collection and learn the new types we had defined. Then we took the bus from Managua to Tegucigalpa--long ride. Tegucigalpa looks like a nice city, surprisingly prosperous, but incredibly dangerous. Gangs rule the streets and the citizens are prisoners in their homes. The folks at IHAH were extremely gracious and allowed us extraordinary access to their collections. The first day, we studied the whole vessels in Tegucigalpa. We stayed at the Hotel Linda Vista: huge rooms, good A/C, nice owner, good breakfast.

The next day we drove up to Comayagua to visit the museum there, where they also have type collections from Yarumela and from the El Cajon project. Both sets of collections were very helpful, providing excellent comparative material related to our stuff. Comayagua is a dream, a lovely Colonial town nestled in a deep mountain valley, surrounded by dramatic mountains. The museum is very nice. It's in a nice Colonial building near the plaza and it has historic and ethnographic exhibits as well as archaeological ones. Here we are in the plaza next to the museum.

We stayed at the Hotel Casagrande, just around the corner from the museum. Very pretty! Even huger rooms with great A/C. Here's the exterior:

And the interior:

We next went to Los Naranjos by Lago Yojoa. The museum there is small but pretty. The site is lovely, the mounds are big, and they probably merit more study. I believe this is Mound 4:

There's a remarkable Olmec statue at the site. It was dredged from the hydroelectric canal in the 1960s. I don't know whether anyone ever found the site from which the statue came.

We returned to Tegucigalpa and took the bus to San Salvador. We picked a hotel named the Villa Florencia right next to the National Museum in the zona rosa. Rooms were a little small, but everything else was very nice and the location was perfect, not just for the museum but for restaurants and shopping. San Salvador is supposed to be very dangerous, plagued with gangs, but we could have been in Peoria. The Museum is wonderful, and everyone, starting with the Director and his staff, were wonderfully helpful and welcoming. Again, we were able to study both whole vessels and archaeological collections of sherds.

We got back on Wednesday, and I spent a day and half at the museum. Yesterday, we went out to the Cave of Cusirisna. It was a heck of a walk. Then I drove from Boaco to Chinandega, which takes exactly four hours in case you were wondering.

That's all for now. Wish me luck getting my flotation samples through Customs!

European miscellany

2010-07-20T07:33:00.000-04:00

Just got back from a two week vacation in France and Spain. I don’t take vacations, so I’m not sure I did it right, but I had some archaeological and historical experiences that might interest the ghostly (i.e., nonexistent) readers of this blog.

1) The Museo de América in Madrid is lovely and interesting and worth a visit if you’re an Americanist archaeologist.

2) The Archive of the Indies in Seville is remarkably accessible, and the archivists seem very helpful, so don’t hesitate to plan research there. I’ve always wanted to study the documentary sources there, and I certainly have lots of important historical issues to work on (Mayapán, Otzmal, Chinandega, etc.).

3) We visited the Cueva de la Pileta near Ronda, Spain. It seems to be one of the few Paleolithic cave painting sites open to the public. Pretty interesting! Lovely cave, quite apart from the paintings. The guide said it had the full Upper Paleolithic sequence, from Aurignacian through Magdalenian. The Atapuerca team is supposed to be soliciting permission to excavate there in the future.

4) We also visited the Roman site Acinipo nearby. The road has washed out, and we had to park the car in the middle of nowhere and hike a distance to get in. Like the road, the ruins are not well-maintained. There’s virtually no explanatory signage, and the few monuments that have been consolidated or restored are starting to deteriorate.

5) The new anthropological museum in Paris, the Musée de Quai Branly, is fantastic! The design is incredibly innovative, the display and lighting remarkable. The Mesoamerican collection is surprisingly good, being particularly strong on the Huasteca.

Video of a lecture

2010-06-17T15:57:00.002-04:00

I just discovered a video showing excerpts of a public presentation I made for the Southeast Region of the Florida Public Archaeology Network. It's posted on the Regional Office's Video Channel on Youtube. Here's the URl for the Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/FPANSoutheast, but the direct link above is easier to use. Note that the excerpts from my presentation run from 3:11-5:57 in the video.

You may be an archaeologist if:

2010-06-15T06:38:00.001-04:00

You may be an archaeologist if:

1. You take filthy objects out of the dirt and tap them against your teeth to see what they are.

2. You find yourself wondering what the sherds would look like if you smashed a piece of your wedding china.

3. You can’t get through a conversation without drawing a map on a napkin.

4. While someone is talking to you, you are imagining what their skull looks like.

5. Your idea of weekend fun is crawling through a muddy cave.

6. Your machete is sharper than your kitchen knives.

7. You know how to avoid diseases your friends haven’t heard of.

8. You’ve ever felt someone’s head at a party to see if they have a sagittal keel.

9. You spend more time picking a backpack than a car.

10. You own a closet full of backpacks that you use judiciously to accessorize for trips.

11. You organize the buttons in your button box in accordance with a typology.

12. You buy the topo quad maps for your holiday destination.

13. You’ve ever knocked yourself unconscious by walking into a low-hanging branch while surface collecting.

14. You know how to make cocktails with Pepto Bismol.

15. The older your spouse gets, the more interested in him or her you are.

(With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy and Agatha Christie)

The Old Shoe again

2010-06-15T06:32:00.003-04:00

I'd like to call attention to Kate Ravilious's very interesting National Geographic article on the old leather shoe excavated in Armenia. She has some fantastic comments by various shoe makers and designers. Her article almost made me retract my dismissive comments about the importance of the shoe in my earlier post on the topic.

Polynesian Contact with South America

2010-06-11T08:57:00.003-04:00

In today's Science, Andrew Lawler published a news article on the recent evidence for trans-Pacific contacts between Polynesia and South America.

Lawler, Andrew. (2010). Beyond Kon-Tiki: Did Polynesians Sail to South America? Science vol. 328, pp. 1344-1347.

Nice article! I've read the articles on the Polynesian chicken bones found in Chile, and I found them pretty persuasive.

Sandals versus shoes

2010-06-11T08:41:00.004-04:00

There's a been a kerfuffle in the press recently about the excavation of a leather shoe in Armenia. Radiocarbon dated to around 5500 BP, it's supposed to tell us something important about Chalcolithic footwear.

Here's the reference to the actual article:

Ron Pinhasi, Boris Gasparian, Gregory Areshian, Diana Zardaryan, Alexia Smith, Guy Bar-Oz, and
Thomas Higham. (2010). First Direct Evidence of Chalcolithic Footwear from the
Near Eastern Highlands. PLoS ONE vol. 5, No. 6. e10984.

In the article they mention earlier footwear excavated in Missouri from Arnold Research cave dating to 7420 BP, but they fail to reference even earlier sandals from the western U.S. For example, Geib (2000) describes a number of much older sandals from the Colorado Plateau, including some apparently dating to 7000-8000 cal B.C. Not being a southwestern archaeologist myself, I don't know whether there's some controversy about those specimens or whether the authors overlooked them.

Overall, I guess I feel that finding a shoe, albeit a nice one, hardly merits publication in a journal like PLoS ONE.

Geib, Phil. R. (2000). Sandal Types and Archaic Prehistory on the Colorado Plateau. American Antiquity vol. 65, No. 3, pp. 509-524.

Geib,

Michael Smith's Blog

2010-06-07T07:57:00.007-04:00

Hi, folks! I just added a link to Michael Smith's blog in my blog roll. It looks like a notable blog. He's one of those indefatigable and extraordinarily prolific academics whose prodigious productivity is a mystery to me. I don't understand how can anyone get so much done, even working 16-hour days.

If I excavate, even just for a few weeks during the summer, then I can't write any articles because I spend all my "free" time during the next academic year writing the excavation report. Some people have lower teaching loads and better financing than I do, but still....

Moving on, I noted with interest Smith's April 18, 2010 post about bad presentations at the SAA. I had a very similar experience at the meetings, and in frustration I wrote a little essay about it on the flight home. I didn't post it at the time because it seemed too cranky, sort of the equivalent of the old man sitting on his porch yelling, "Hey you kids, get out of my yard!" But Mike's post has encouraged me to add mine. Here it is:

Don't Be Boring

The SAAs were fine this year, and I heard some good talks, but I found myself growing ever more impatient with the poor quality of many of the presentations. I'm not referring to the intellectual or scientific substance of the reports, but rather the clarity and dynamism of the speaking itself. More papers than ever are read verbatim from a prepared text. And people are reading them in a low, halting mumble.

What the heck are we doing? Papers should never be read. They have to be explained. If you can't stand up and explain your research, then you probably shouldn't be presenting a paper. On Friday morning, I fled from one talk so bad that it was "not even wrong," but when I went next door to another session I wanted to hear, a graduate student was reading in a low mumble something about percentages of broken rocks. I ditched that and crossed the hall to a session on eastern Europe, thinking "I'm part Hungarian. This will be interesting," only to stumble into a talk being read in a low mumble with a Slavic accent. Now exceedingly frustrated, I walked into the forum "Tips, Tactics, and Techniques: Facilitating Interactions between Archaeologists and the Media." Ironically, one of the themes of the discussion turned out to be how archaeologists can't communicate. I view this partly as an intellectual and substantive problem. I think we often hide behind jargon and passive constructions because we are insecure about our status as scientists; for the same reason, we often avoid the really interesting questions because we fear the inevitable controversy. How is it that so many of the most popular books about archaeology are written by non-archaeologists such as Jared Diamond and Charles Mann?

But here I don't want to focus on the substantive issue but rather the stylistic one: How can we present papers better? It's probably presumptuous of me to offer this advice because no one has ever given me reason to think I'm a great presenter myself, but most of the suggestions below seem pretty commonsensical to me. Moreover, you don't have to be Dave Letterman to recognize what's not funny. I should say in advance that I’ve violated all the suggestions I offer below, but I’ve also gotten better over the years. Practice certainly helps.

Suggestions

1) Speak audibly. If the audience can't hear you, what the heck are you doing there?

How: a) Project: many teachers have learned through practice to speak loudly without shouting. If you're not accustomed to doing this, you should...b) use the microphone. For the microphone to work, you have to speak directly into it. If you turn your head away to look at the slide precisely when you make your crucial point proving that Neanderthals subsisted on foie gras, no one will hear you. c) If you're not sure if people can hear you, by all means ask the audience if they can hear you in the back. If that seems awkward or unprofessional, believe me, it beats not being heard. The interaction with the audience also helps draw them in and makes them feel that you care.

2) Speak clearly. If people can hear you but still can't understand you, what have you accomplished?

How: a) Speak slowly, b) enunciate carefully, c) speak naturally, and d) don't read a formal text. Formal written language differs from natural spoken language in syntax and cadence. That's why it's almost impossible to read a paper so that it sounds natural and therefore is easy to understand. It's really rare to hear a paper read so that it's truly understandable.

3) Explain. Don't just say stuff. Explain it.

How: a) If you really want to communicate your ideas, you need to outline them in an orderly fashion so that the listener can understand the chain of logic and supporting evidence. I'm not saying you need to explain what debitage is. You are speaking to archaeologists after all. But you can easily lose the audience if they can't follow your train of thought. I'm sure you all know how to put thoughts in a logical order, but the decisions about what to explain can be tricky. I think that people often leave out vital explanations because they're rushing to fit too much into their talk, which brings me to my next point....

4) Focus. You only have 15 minutes, so how many points can you make clearly? Most papers try to pack in way too much information. Better to make one point clearly than 12 poorly because you tried to jam too much into the talk. When you try to fit too much in, chances are you will end up with a jumble of ideas that are poorly supported or inadequately developed.

How: a) Cut down your presentation ruthlessly to the bare essentials. Remove every idea and fact that is not essential. b) Simplify, simplify (Thoreau). c) Then ask yourself, "Does the audience absolutely need to know how much chromium is in my fine ware?" The answer may be "yes," but to be sure you must first ask yourself the question.

5) Eschew numbers. How many numbers can you hear before you lose track of them? You can only present a very few numbers and you must be very clear about what each one means or else you're just talking to yourself.

How: a) Say "We found a lot of this and a little of that, and the difference is statistically significant." Then point at the slide that shows the frequencies or proportions, the test statistic, and the p-value. b) Never read a formula. Show it on a slide and parse it or explain it verbally. Speaking of slides....

6) Use clear graphics. If the audience is trying to figure out an illegible map or confusing graph, they're not listening to you. Just clicking through slides pro forma without looking up is not good. If the pictures aren't important enough to require your attention, why should the audience pay attention to them?

How: a) Don't show slides with dense text. They're hard to read, and if the audience is reading, your voice will fade into the background. b) Explain what the pictures and graphs are. How many times have you seen a slide and asked yourself, "What the hell is that?" or "Wow! That's beautiful! What is it?" but the speaker doesn't explain. c) Take a look at a couple of the many books on this subject. I like Edward Tufte's famous books, such as The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information, but there other good books as well.

7) Humanize it. We all have a story to tell, and stories feature people, not cyborgs or processes.

How: a) Who are the people you're citing? Where are they from? Are they American, Mexican, or Chinese? Were they Nazis? Communists? Postmodernists? b) Show a picture with people in it, and then tell us who they are. c) Tell an anecdote even if it's not central to your narrative. The audience will pay more attention to the story than to your paper and will remember it longer.

8) Personalize it. The audience will be much more engaged if they feel that they know who you are. Show your face. Drop a veil. Expose yourself a little and take a chance.

How: a) Speak in the active voice, not the passive. b) Unless the research was done by someone else, or by robots, use the first person. If you did it, say so. "I measured these bones and, guess what, they were bigger than the other bones." c) Say what you think, and take credit for your thoughts. It's okay to say, "I think this is cool", or "beautiful," or "interesting." Enthusiasm is contagious and engaging. What's the chance the audience will find your research exciting if you act like it's boring?

9) Use humor. Try to be entertaining, but without pratfalls or scatological allusions. Humor is much more difficult than it seems or else we'd all write like Kent Flannery. Nevertheless, most of us have the capacity to be witty or charming but we suppress it out of awe for the solemnity of the occasion.

How: Try a) starting with a joke, or b) ending with a joke, or c) telling a joke somewhere between the beginning and the ending.

So, come to the next meeting and give a paper. Stand up. Speak your mind. Tell us what you think.

American Anthropological Association Joins Arizona Boycott

2010-05-25T06:09:00.003-04:00

The American Anthropological Association has passed a resolution condemning the Arizona anti-immigration law. Click on the title of this post to link to the press release, which states in part:

"The AAA has a long and rich history of supporting policies that prohibit discrimination based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion or sexual orientation," AAA Executive Board Member (and resolution author) Debra Martin said in a statement issued today. "Recent actions by the Arizona officials and law enforcement are not only discriminatory; they are also predatory and unconstitutional."

The AAA resolution also pledges that the association as a whole will refuse to hold a scholarly conference in Arizona until SB 1070 is either repealed or struck down as constitutionally invalid.

Here's the URL for the press release and the resolution:

http://www.aaanet.org/issues/press/Arizona-Immigration.cfm

Cactus Hill Site, Virginia

2010-04-20T09:13:00.004-04:00

The Cactus Hill site in southern Virginia is often mentioned as an important candidate for a pre-Clovis site. I visited the site in late 2001 when the Fairfax County (Virginia) archaeologist was excavating there. (I think his name was Michael Johnson. I lived in Fairfax County at the time, and he was very kind and professional.) I was accompanied by Timothy Beach, a geoarchaeologist from Georgetown; Sheryl Luzzadder Beach, a hydrologist and geographer from George Mason University; Kevin Pope, another geoarchaeologist; and Walter Witschey, then Director of the Science Museum of Virginia (now he's at Longwood University). Walter brought with him the director of a science museum in northern Europe (Finland? Norway?). We took the trip shortly after 9/11 and this European gentleman, who had been visiting Walter's museum, was trapped in the U.S. because air travel had been canceled after the terrorist attacks. With typical grace, Walter took the man home and settled him in the guest room.

Michael Johnson's excavations at Cactus Hill appeared to be very meticulous. You can see the individual artifacts marked with film canisters.

Unfortunately, you can see in the photos that the stratigraphy is poorly defined. The site is buried in an ancient sand dune. The sand is pretty heavily leached, obscuring the definition of the strata.

When I was there, someone--not Johnson--had excavated long trenches across the site with a backhoe, destroying parts of the site. This was sad because even if the site is not pre-Clovis, it defintiely has a major Clovis occupation, making it significant by any definition.

Correlated Walks down the Babylonian Markets

2010-04-14T15:19:00.005-04:00

Last week, we had a paper on econophysics accepted in European Physics Letters. The paper is entitled "Correlated Walks down the Babylonian Markets," and the authors (in order) are Natalia E. Romero, Qianli D. Y. Ma, Larry S. Liebovitch, Clifford T. Brown, and Plamen Ch. Ivanov. Look for it soon. The journal seems to publish their papers promptly.

New Book on Fractal Analysis for Social Scientists

2010-04-09T14:29:00.010-04:00

My friend Larry Liebovitch and I have written a small monograph entitled Fractal Analysis, and I'm pleased to announce that is coming out this week. Sage Press published the volume in their well known Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences series.

Here's what the back cover says:
A specialized presentation of fractal analysis oriented to the social sciences

This primer uses straightforward language to give the reader step-by-step instructions for identifying and analyzing fractal patterns and the social process that make them. By making fractals accessible to the social science students, this book has a significant impact on the understanding of human behavior and the patterns that people create.

Key Features

Detailed examples help readers learn and understand the analytical methods presented.
Matlab codes for programs allow the user to implement some of the techniques described in the text on their own.
Clear and logical explanations of fractals and their analysis enable the instructor to easily teach and student to learn about fractals.

This is the only book designed to introduce fractal analysis to a general social science audience.

I should add that we selected examples from many different fields of social science so that social researchers of all kinds could appreciate the relevance of fractal geometry to their work. We even managed to include a few examples from the obscure discipline of archaeology.

Click on the picture of the cover or the title of this post to go to the publisher's web site.

Books on the Olmec

2009-11-20T14:24:00.004-05:00

In the course of doing some research, lately I’ve found myself dipping into two relatively recent books on the Olmec. One is Richard Diehl’s The Olmecs: America’s First Civilization (2004, Thames and Hudson), the other, Christopher Pool’s Olmec Archaeology and Early Mesoamerica (2007, Cambridge). A few days ago, I realized that these are the only general books on the Olmec written in many years. Michael Coe’s America’s First Civilization came out around 1968, and Ignacio Bernal’s The Olmec World was published (in English translation) in 1969. But I can’t think of a general, introductory book on the Olmec written between 1969 and 2004. It’s true that Jacques Soustelle published the English translation of The Olmecs: The Oldest Civilization in Mexico in 1984, but I’ve never thought of that as an original (or interesting) contribution to the field. He’s not an archaeologist, and I find the book merely a rehashing of published data which by that time were well-known.

That’s not to say there were no books on the Olmec published for 25 years. Coe and Dielh’s two volume In the Land of the Olmec came out in 1980 and David Grove published two books on Chalcatzingo in the 1980s, but all were site-specific treatments rather than general books on Olmec archaeology or culture. Similarly, several edited volumes (e.g., The Olmec and their Neighbors, Regional Perspectives on the Olmec, etc.) have appeared, but neither are these balanced general treatments of the topic. The same holds for various attractive “coffee-table” books that have been issued.

So Diehl’s and Pool’s books are particularly welcome, not only for their intrinsic merits, but also because they fill an important gap in the literature. A great deal of original archaeological research on the Olmec has been conducted in recent decades, but syntheses have been lacking.

Richard Diehl’s book is one of the volumes in Thames & Hudson’s Ancient Peoples and Places series. The series is noted for publishing general books on archaeological sites and cultures that are simultaneously technically accurate while also being accessible to educated audiences. Diehl’s volume follows the established pattern. It is written in an engaging and pleasant style while being packed with plenty of archaeological detail. Like other volumes in the series, The Olmecs is a handsome book. It is liberally illustrated, and even includes several color photographs. It is also printed on heavy glossy paper and is well-bound, creating a palpably hefty object. Diehl’s erudition on Olmec archaeology must be nearly unmatched. When this book was published in 2004, Diehl was celebrating 40 years of active fieldwork in the Olmec area, and he is a consummate field archaeologist.

Although Chris Pool can only boast a mere quarter century of fieldwork in Olman, the Olmec heartland, he has nevertheless managed to cobble together a very recondite and worthy review of the subject. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Cambridge book has a more academic and scholarly tone than the Thames & Hudson volume. Pool’s book is also longer, more technical, and includes more theory. For working archaeologists, these are all good things, but students may prefer to start with Diehl’s book.

In short, both books provide very credible and interesting summaries and interpretations of Olmec archaeology. For archaeologists like me, who work in neighboring regions of Mesoamerica and find it difficult to keep up on the literature, it is particularly useful to have these detailed discussions of the topic by highly competent and respected colleagues.

1491

2009-09-14T17:38:00.002-04:00

So, Lester Embree lent me his copy of the book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. Lester urged me to read it, but I rarely read books that people recommend to me because I don't have the time. I'm so far behind on the reading I need to do for my own work that reading for pleasure is a rare treat. I don't know how many months Lester's book sat on my shelf before I dipped in, but once I did I was caught. The book starts with a description of a visit to the extraordinary mound sites in the Amazonian lowlands. This grabbed me not only because it's inherently interesting, but also because he was talking about people I know and about topics on which I do research, such as terra preta soils.

I was strongly tempted to read it straight through. It's a real page-turner. Instead, I chose to read it slowly to savor it.

I think this is the best book on archaeology that I've ever read, not only because it's beautifully written and entertaining, or because it masterfully summarizes a couple of decades of cutting edge research. It's not just a popularization of research. The book makes a fundamentally important intellectual point: that the American Indians were the moral, intellectual, and social equals of the Europeans. It makes this point more successfully than any other work I've ever read. It explains the European Conquest of the New World largely in terms of disease, not technological or military superiority

Why wasn't this book written by an archaeologist? I can think of a couple of reasons.
1) First there's the problem of "popular" writing by scholars. Many non-academics understand that popular writing by scholars is discouraged by the scorn of colleagues. Although not everyone cares what their colleagues think, there is nevertheless some truth underlying this belief. Certainly some scholars, particularly younger ones, will be discouraged by the disapprobation of their peers. But that's not the key issue. Scholars receive tenure, promotions, and professional advancement, including in many cases merit raises or plum job assignments, based on their scholarly productivity. A book like 1491, which was published by a trade book publisher and therefore was presumably not peer-reviewed, simply doesn't count toward professional advancement. Few of us have the leisure to work on major projects, like wide-ranging books, that don't contribute to advancing our careers.

2) Second, we're too specialized. Archaeologists specialize both topically and geographically. It would never have occurred to me to try to write a book on the archaeology of the whole western hemisphere. Archaeologists occasionally attempt a major comparative work on some wide ranging topic such as the rise of civilization, the origins of agriculture, or something similar, but these are rare, and they are rarely popular in tone. 1491 not only covers a vast geographic area but also discusses numerous disparate topics, from soils to demography to genetics. Certainly your average scholar would not believe him or herself competent with such a diversity of disciplines.

So, read 1491.

Back from Nicaragua

2009-08-22T13:53:00.003-04:00

The Director of the National Museum, Edgar Espinoza, had asked us to give a talk about the results of our project on August 14th, in celebration of the anniversary of the Museum. We were, of course, delighted to do it, but since I was leaving on the 16th, this meant that I would have to leave the rental house in Chinandega on the 13th, move into a hotel for the night, and then leave for Managua early on the morning of the 14th. It wouldn't make a lot of sense for me to go to Managua on the 14th, return to Chinandega, and then go back to Managua on the 15th for my flight the next day. So, I started packing up and making a variety of final arrangements on the 12th, at the same time as we were working on the presentation for the talk. On the 13th, I shipped most of my stuff to the storage place up in Somotillo, cleaned the house, and said goodbye. On the morning of Friday, August 14th, Ramiro García and I left for Managua before 6:00 a.m., to make sure we would arrive in time to attend the first presentation at 9:00 am. We arranged for the students who had been working with us from the Fundación Chinandega 2001 to attend the talk at the Museum.

The talk was successful and well received. Afterwards, we raced over to INETER to collect some computer files before they closed. Then we ran another couple of errands and finally met the students for lunch at Pizza Hut. I must be overly sentimental; it was difficult to say goodbye because they were so sweet. Late in the afternoon, I go to my hotel and spent most of the next day sleeping.

The flight back on Sunday was fine, but Customs detained my box of soil samples even though I had a permit. I had to retrieve it from the Agricultural Inspection people the next day, and, I must say, they were very helpful.

This week, my first back in the office, was a huge string of meetings, many of which I had postponed during my absence.

Progress in Chinandega

2009-08-07T22:29:00.004-04:00

Well, we´ve wrapped up most of our excavations now. We did some prospection out on the slopes of the Volcano Coseguina today, but didn´t find anything. It was fun, though, because we took along the archaeology students from the school we´ve been working with in town.

In the past couple of days, we discovered some interesting facts about the fantastically rich site we excavated near Villa Nueva. Dr. Timothy Beach who is helping us to understand our taphonomy and site formation processes discovered a buried soil at the base of the depositional sequence at the site. I never would have seen it because it didn´t look much like a buried A horizon. We also discovered in the lab that the ceramics in the lower levels are in fact earlier--there are in fact resist decorated ceramics related to Usulutan wares in the lower levels. In fact, I excavated one vessel that was associated with a comal, a very unusual vessel form in Nicaragua. As usual, the most interesting discoveries come in the lab, although I did enjoy excavating the comal nestled in the Usulutan vessel.

We´re also finding a nmber of new types that will require new type names and we´re considering creating some new phase names for the area. The project is really coming together nicely.

Here´s a random picture of a site we found in the Estero Real a few days ago. Look at the density of ceramics on the surface. The site is a little island in the swamp. It is basically composed of a pile of sherds.

Hasta luegito.

Cliff

Chinandega again

2009-07-26T18:21:00.006-04:00

Sorry for not posting more often. The fieldwork, as always, is frenetically paced.

Just for the record, I went to Honduras by accident twelve times yesterday with a random guy who was half in the bag and carrying a 9 mm semi-automatic which he used periodically to shoot at trees. It’s a long story, but it comes out well.

We visited the Pueblos del Norte. The road from Somotillo to Cinco Pinos is in the process of being paved with U.S. money. More than half is already finished and they’re working like the dickens on the rest. We saw scores of men, possibly hundreds, laboring on the project. Nevertheless, grinding through many construction zones was tense and tiring. Cinco Pinos was a pleasant reward. Cheerful adobe houses with red tile roofs. A pretty little church with a Black Christ somehow related to Esquipulas. We then went on to San Pedro del Norte where we met a good friend of María José. He told he knew of a pool in the river that had a drawing or carving on the rock. So we went, with me thinking of petroglyphs. After of a long struggle of a trip along the Río Guasuale, which involved repeated crossings of the river, we got to the site, but the carving, supposedly of an eagle, had been buried under river sediment and was invisible. We drove back as fast as possible. We got back about 6:30 pm, having left at 7:30 am, a long day filled with striking scenery.

Here´s a picture of the Rio Guasaule near the supposed petroglyph site.

Today we found a new site although we only recovered three artifacts from the surface. So we´re up to abolut 8 sites, which is not much, but we´re spending most of our time excavating and the excavations are producing interesting results. We´re in the process of excavating two sites and hope to dig at one more if we have the time and resources.

Ciao!

Cliff

Survey and Excavation in Chinandega, Nicaragua

2009-07-03T20:26:00.006-04:00

6/26/09

Well, we made it. I’M STILL A LITTLE SHELL-SHOCKED. I brought a ton of equipment and Flora packed everything but the rugs. So our bags were over-weight, and we had too many of them, but all that was ignored by the skycap who checked us in at the curb. Curbside check-in at Miami International is like a whirlwind in a mob. Our driver triple-parked, we hauled our 7 or 8 bags to the sidewalk, and we accidentally found ourselves in a line that looked like a circle. Apparently, MIA is in a parallel universe with non-Euclidean geometry. In fact, there were several lines that never ended, and never crossed, but weren’t parallel. I tried to ask a skycap a question, and he took our passports and disappeared into the crowd. I thought you couldn’t check in at the curb for international flights, but anything is possible in Miami if you speak Spanish. After a few minutes I started walking around on tiptoes, looking over the crowd with rising anxiety trying to see the skycap who disappeared with our travel documents. He finally reappeared with baggage tags, gave us our boarding passes, and wished us bon voyage. Miraculous!

We boarded on time, but of course as always a thunderstorm appeared and they couldn’t load the baggage because of the lightening. So, we were delayed, but only by about an hour. The flight was smooth, but we discovered on the plane that there were unusual sanitary procedures in place in Nicaragua. We had to fill out a health declaration asking whether we had flu symptoms and then when we landed they took our temperature with some kind of infrared camera. As soon as we passed customs, we met María José who I hope will work as my general factotum on the survey. We all went to the hotel in the shuttle, dropped off the bags, and zoomed off to look for a field vehicle. We drove all over Managua in taxis that looked like they could collapse into their constituent parts at any second. We almost crashed into an ambulance, which, if you’re going to have an accident, would be ideal. We picked up our cell phone, but haven’t figured out how to use it yet. Tomorrow morning, we’ll keep looking for some appropriate four-wheel drive truck.

6/27/09

We spent the morning looking for a field vehicle to rent but without any luck. Dashing about in taxi after taxi in the heat on a Saturday morning was exhausting and gave me a headache, undoubtedly as a result of dehydration and diesel fumes. An old friend, Don Filemón, came out to help us. He’s something of a mechanic and was willing to look at some of the diesel engines for us. He knew how to check for problems like piston slap and other things that did not occur to me. We finally gave up in frustration and rented a car from Dollar Rent-a-Car. Even getting one of those turned out to be a problem. We went to Hertz first and of course they were quite expensive. Then we went to Dollar but they had a limited selection. The problem yet again was the luggage. We had so much that an economy car was too small to carry them and the three of us, Flora, me, and María José. We ended up renting a Suzuki Gran Vitara with four wheel drive, which actually would be a good field vehicle. Since we will have to return to Managua to pick up Carmen on Monday, we only rented it for two days, but asked them to give us a quote for six weeks. Then we left our hotel and drove to Chinandega.

You can see the land grow ever more fertile as you advance toward Chinandega with the Maribios volcanoes flaring along your right flank. The trees loom taller and the vegetation grows ever greener. The plains of León and Chinandega both seem to have immensely deep soils, but the key difference is the rainfall, which increases significantly as you drive northwest to Chinandega. The data I have seen indicates that annual rainfall averages more than 1800 mm in Chinandega, considerably more than further south along the coast or inland in the central highlands. This combination of rainfall and deep, fertile volcanic soils is the reason why Chinandega is the breadbasket of Nicaragua, why the Spanish conquistadores called it a paradise, and why there should be extensive prehistoric settlement here.

We got to Chinandega and picked up the keys to the house we had rented sight unseen. Finding a house for rent for two months in Chinandega was quite difficult and occupied an inordinate amount of time and effort over the past couple of months. We almost had one house rented, and then it got sold. At any rate, we picked up the keys to our home away from home, base of operations, and temporary laboratory. Well, we got to the building and with some effort wrestling with keys managed to get through the steel front door and into the front patio with the car park. I noticed a weird sign made of twisted Manila rope over the door of the house proper and while the others went inside I found myself trying to puzzle out what the sign said. Eventually, I deciphered the words “Side Track”. How odd, I thought.

I walked inside and realized we had rented what had once been a bar. And it must have been named after the “Side Track Tap” in Lake Woebegone. Despite these exceedingly weird facts, it seems like it will serve well. It’s pretty big, has two bedrooms with air conditioning, and two bathrooms with toilets and showers. It’s not been well maintained and it’s rather dirty (despite having been cleaned at least twice), but it’s better than many places I’ve stayed in the field. In fact, this will be the first time I’ve ever had air conditioning in the field, although I should specify that the AC is very weak and needs to be supplemented with fans anyway.

Tomorrow morning we plan to go to Dulce Nombre de Jesús. María José tells us that the site is being looted. Local people are digging up whole vessels and selling them for 10 pesos each. It will be interesting to see what is showing up. When we first saw the site some years ago, the stone structures buried in the T1 terrace seemed so unusual, I thought they might be historic. The mortar was very hard and the walls were preserved to a considerable height. There is also some oral history in Somotillo saying that the town used to be located up in that area somewhere. All that made me think the site might be historic, even though we saw only what appeared to be aboriginal artifacts. There were various sherds eroding out of the same river bank, including at least one type that Healy dates to the earlier of the two phases (Las Lajas) in the Late Polychrome period (so, maybe A.D. 1200-1300). In fact, not far away was a small mound with some obsidian scattered around it. In sum, I have no idea whether the site is prehistoric or not, but we should be able to resolve that tomorrow.

Signing off from the Side Track Tap in Chinandega!

6/28/09

Dulce Nombre was a bit of a disappointment. The site is pretty overgrown, not surprisingly, and one th still-buried structure has partly collapsed down the bank. The excavated structure is still in pretty good condition, but the mortar seems to be softening. Unfortunately, the town drunk latched onto us and pestered us so aggressively we felt obliged to leave. We did however have a very leasant chat with the landowner, who told us that he has found artifacts in buried in many places on his land, including what might be an urn burial which he found while digging a well. He very kindly offered to let us excavate on his land. This still a weird ite

7/3/09

We´ve started doing some survey and have investigated a couple of sites in the vicinity of the city of Chinandega. They´re pretty large. The parts we´ve examined extend over hundreds of meters and we haven´t really found the edges of either of them. The materials look intersting, but we haven´t washed or analyzed any of them yet.

We did rent laboratory space and are getting ready to start processing the materials as we collect them. We´ve bought some tables to work on, towels for drying artifacts, lamps for illumination, and so forth. We should set up the lab on Monday.

Today we went to Managua to see the Director of the National Museum. He has helped a great deal in organizing the project and getting our permit. He was interested in our initial results and told us that he hoped to be able to visit the lab and look at the ceramics when we had more material washed and labeled. I certainly hope he can because he is a ceramicist who knows the material very well.

We had hoped to see the exhibits in the Museum, but unfortunately the mayor of Managua died a couple of days ago and the wake was being held in the Museum while we there, so the exhiubits were closed. Instead we visited the new park on the southern shore of Lake Managua. The park was lovely, but the wind off the lake was tremendous, making it hard to talk.

After lunch, we went to the Instituto Nicaraguense de Estudios Territoriales to buy maps. I already have copies of the topographic maps of Chinandega, but there are new editions of several of them, and I wanted the up-to-date map sheets. The old ones are from the 1960s. We got seven of the eight we wanted for only $5 each. I also foudn out that they have both jpeg and ArcGIS versions of all the topo sheets. The jpeg images are C$250 each and the shapefiles are C$400 each. I hope to get both, but I´ll have to be selective and only buy the ones I absolutely need.

Here´s a picture taken from one of the sites we visited.

The small volcano in front is Chonco, the tall one in the middle with the fumarole is San Cristóbal, and smaller one in the distance is Casitas. The plowed field in the foreground was ideal for surface collecting!

Ciao!

Manioc Field at la Joya de Ceren

2009-06-23T07:38:00.003-04:00

There are news reports that Payson Sheets has found and partially excavated a large manoic field at Ceren.

Fieldwork in Nicaragua

2009-06-21T08:07:00.003-04:00

On Friday morning, I'll be leaving for Nicaragua to conduct survey and excavation in the Department of Chinandega, in the northwestern corner of the country.

I will attempt to blog about our progress, but I can't promise because it may be difficult to find a seat in an Internet cafe. More important, the pressure to make the best use of one's valuable, limited time in the field is intense.

Ciao!

Etching of a Mammoth Found in Vero Beach, Florida

2009-06-21T07:51:00.002-04:00

I apologize to my many (ha! ha!) readers for neglecting this blog. I've been working on a NSF grant proposal, teaching, and preparing for an upcoming expedition. I leave next Friday morning for Nicaragua, so the pressure is on!

Nevertheless, I couldn't resist mentioning an archaeological find just up the road from me in Vero Beach, Florida. An avocational fossil collector found a bone with an beautiful etching of a mammoth inscribed on the surface. He passed it along to Dr. Barbara Purdy, professor emerita at the University of Florida, for study. She assembled a group of experts who looked at the specimen pretty closely using a range of instrumental methods and declared it authentic. It's quite a remarkable find. A local newspaper has published the most detailed description of the find. The description of the investigation convinces me that it is very likely to be authentic. Interestingly enough, the specimen seems to come from the area of an "early man" site that was investigated at the turn of the twentieth century, one of the many whose antiquity was later rejected when archaeologists became doubtful about the age of the human occupation of the New World. The site probably merits another look. It's always interested me.

Mammoth Barbecue

2009-06-04T07:26:00.002-04:00

There's a fine article in the most recent number of Antiquity describing the excavation of an Upper Paleolithic mammoth roasting site in the southern Czech Republic. At the center of the site was a 5 m wide roasting pit where the Gravettians were cooking up a female mammoth and her calf. What a great find! The archaeologists also recovered some bone tools and fragments of ceramic. It's all about 29,000 years old.

Reference:

Svoboda, Jiri, Miroslav Kralik, Vera Culikova, Sarka Hladilova, Martin Novak, Miriam Nyvltova Fisakova, Daniel Nyvlt, and Michaela Zelinkova (2009). Pavlov VI: An Upper Paleolithic Living Unit. Antiquity 83: 282-295.

[Apologies to the authors for not adding the MANY diacriticals in their names]

Moral-Reforma, Tabasco

2009-05-28T06:56:00.002-04:00

Interesting article on the Maya site of Moral-Reform, Tabasco, in Spanish. The site is near the junction of the Usumacinta and the San Pedro and, given its location, is interpreted as a center of trade. It's a major site where INAH has been working for many years.

The Art Daily has a very similar article in English.

New dating method in archaeology

2009-05-27T08:51:00.004-04:00

Wilson, Moira A., Margaret A. Carter, Christopher Hall, William D. Hoff, Ceren ince, Shaum D. Savage,Bernard Mckay, and Ian M. Betts (2009). Dating fired clay ceramics using long-term power law rehydroxylation kinetics. Proceedings of the Royal Society A Advance online publication. (doi: 10.1098/rspa.2009.0117)

Looks very interesting, but it does depend on knowing or estimating the mean lifetime temperature of the sample, which can be difficult or impossible to know with certainty.

Paper on Reductionism and Emergence

2009-05-21T08:54:00.004-04:00

There is an interesting commentary on reductionism versus emergence in today's issue of Nature:

Binder, P.-M. (2009). The Edge of Reductionism. Nature 459: 332-334.

It discusses the difference between irreducible and undecidable systems (in Wolfram's sense) and provides examples of cellular automata that illustrate undecidability despite knowledge of the simple local governing laws.

It's worth a glance.

New, very complete, skeleton of Eocene primate published

2009-05-20T07:48:00.003-04:00

The quite complete skeleton of a new species of Eocene primate has been published in PLoS ONE. It is so complete that it includes the outline of the soft tissue and the contents of the digestive tract.

Franzen JL, Gingerich PD, Habersetzer J, Hurum JH, von Koenigswald W, et al. 2009 Complete Primate Skeleton from the Middle Eocene of Messel in Germany: Morphology and Paleobiology. PLoS ONE 4(5): e5723. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005723

Some of the popular press have started raving about this as the "missing link" and claiming it's related to the human lineage, but that is all deceptive. This is a very early primate, about 47 million years old, and weighed less than 1 kilo, hardly what we think of as the missing link. Nevertheless, it is an important discovery.

Key Marco, Florida

2009-05-18T09:25:00.002-04:00

Key Marco is one of the most famous archaeological sites in Florida. A shell mound located on an island off the southwest corner of the peninsula, it was excavated in 1895 by Frank Hamilton Cushing of the Smithsonian Institution, who uncovered a trove of over one thousand wooden artifacts in a swampy area. The wooden artifacts included beautiful statues that revealed a previously unsuspected aesthetic. Most of the wooden objects were not properly preserved after excavation because knowledge of conservation was not sufficiently advanced at the time. As a result, they warped and disintegrated. The collection from the site remains immensely significant as nothing similar has ever been recovered since.

For my birthday, my dear wife took me to Marco Island for a night in a kindly but probably misguided attempt to get me to stop working and relax, if only for a few hours. We happened to stay at a hotel on top of the archaeological site. Marco Island is today almost completely urbanized and what was a large site is unfortunately buried or destroyed. About 6:30 in the morning, we went out to look for artifacts. We found many small sherds along a major road wherever the underlying shell midden was exposed to one side or the other of the sidewalk. A surprising percentage of them are red (Glades Red type?), but that could be because the red sherds are easier to see, and therefore they might be overrepresented in the collection rather than truly being more common. Most of the non-red sherds are black and so are camouflaged in the soil.

It seems appropriate for FAU to have a collection from Key Marco. All I need to do is to find someone to wash and label the sherds.

The Culture of Archaeology

2009-05-16T13:58:00.004-04:00

I recently read an article on the disciplinary culture of archaeology that I have to recommend:

Moser, Stephanie (2007). On Disciplinary Culture: Archaeology as Fieldwork and Its Gendered Associations. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 14:235-263.

The article appears in a special issue of journal devoted to feminist archaeology. As the editor of the issue, Alison Wylie, explains in her introduction, she assembled the contributions in the volume to counteract the deplorable (to her at least) lack of explicit feminist theory and activism in current feminist archaeology. Evidently, current feminist archaeology is no longer feminist enough for the true believers. This is an excellent example of recursive subdividing of schools of social theory so aptly described and analyzed by Andrew Abbott in Chaos of Disciplines.

But I digress. Moser's article is very interesting. She discusses the Romantic origins and associations of fieldwork, the role it plays in the profession, and it's overwhelmingly masculine culture. Although she investigated archaeological fieldwork in Australia, little that she says would not be true in the United States. The macho tendency in fieldwork is perhaps ineluctable, but I try to counteract it in my students by emphasizing professionalism, ethics, and safety. I go so far as to admonish them that the field is no place for macho games and that if they ever hear someone say "Watch this!" they should just run the other way.

Moser's article got me to thinking about the culture of fieldwork. One salient point I have not heard others remark about is the self-reliance that field archaeology instills in its practitioners. Need to make a north arrow for a photograph in the middle of Amazon Basin? Whip out your machete and start chopping. (I've actually done this in Yucatán.) The resourcefulness necessary to solve the most unpredictable problems is a quality essential for every field archaeologist to possess. One day you might need to drive an old truck with a standard transmission and no synchros; another day you might need to build platform so you can take vertical photographs of your excavation; and the next day you might have to locate, rent, and install a trash pump to pump out your excavation. It all requires ingenuity and determination, something akin to an entrepreneurial spirit.

I found myself talking to a well-known woman archaeologist about this the other day. She said that fieldwork built leadership skills. You can't do archaeology alone. The image of the lone archaeologist scratching around in the dirt by himself is of course fictional. Fieldwork is a group activity that requires extensive planning and organization. You have to work with people, organize them, motivate them, and keep them happy. The idea that archaeological fieldwork builds leadership and self-reliance is one that we should emphasize to students who may be trying to make career choices.

Hohle Fels Cave Venus Figurine

2009-05-15T07:41:00.003-04:00

I've now looked at the actual article in Nature that gave rise to yesterday's news reports. Here's the full reference:

Conard, Nicholas J. (2009). A Female Figurine from the Basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in Southwestern Germany. Nature Vol. 459, pp. 248-252. (doi:10.1038/nature07995).

It looks like a nice article. Some of the graphics showing the stratigraphy are very interesting. The figurine is carved of ivory and is about 6 cm long. Its very early date is significant: ca. 35,000 Cal bp. This is much earlier than the other Upper Paleolithic Venus figurines, which are generally Gravettian, about 5000 years later. Conard lists a large number of 14C dates from the Middle Paleolithic and Aurignacian levels of the cave, which, although not perfectly consistent, present a pretty clear picture of the antiquity of the find.

Oldest Venus Figurine Recently Found

2009-05-14T07:01:00.005-04:00

Several reports appeared in the press today announcing the discovery of a new "Venus" figurine from the European Upper Paleolithic that may be the oldest yet found. Found in Germany, it has been dated to about 35,000 years ago. It is a sculpture of a female, made in ivory, that evidently exhibits reproductive organs exaggerated to such a degree that some have called it "pornographic" and "sexually charged". A Spanish newspaper headline even wrote "Sin Tetas No Hay Paleolítico", an allusion to the popular telenovella entitled "Sin Tetas No Hay Paraíso". The scholarly article is to appear in tomorrow's number of the journal Nature.

I Haven’t Given Away my American Antiquity...Yet

2009-04-30T19:51:00.002-04:00

I read Mark Warner’s article “Why I Gave away my American Antiquity” in the last SAA Archaeological Record with interwoven recognition and sadness. Warner tells us that he gave away his accumulated run of American Antiquity because it had become irrelevant to his research, scholarship, and teaching…. “as a historical archaeologist, I don’t find American Antiquity all that relevant to me as a professional. Simply put, there are other journals that I use more frequently, that I find more interesting to read, and that are more useful for me to teach from” (2009:6). He also documents the decline of historical archaeology articles in the journal.

I’m not a historical archaeologist, but I nevertheless share his feelings with some dismay. I’m trained as a Mesoamericanist, but I have broad interests which include parts of North America. Unfortunately, I, too, find American Antiquity increasingly irrelevant to my research and teaching, and I’m glad that someone has spoken up about it. My disquiet began in the mid-1990s when Latin American Antiquity started up. At the time, I was sharing an office with a dyed-in-the-wool North Americanist at a CRM firm. We were talking about the new journal. I was delighted by it, and to my surprise so was he, but for a very different reason: “I’m thrilled,” he said, “because American Antiquity won’t be full of all that Latin American stuff.” I don’t think that the original intent of Latin American Antiquity was to make American Antiquity into a regional North American journal, but that seems to have been the result. Volume 73 Number 3 of American Antiquity, from July 2008, is a good example of this trend. Almost all the articles and reports in that issue were on North American topics that seem to me, subjectively, to be of limited broader interest. Unfortunately, as American Antiquity becomes more parochial, it becomes less interesting and less relevant. This is a loss for the archaeological community in general and for the SAA in particular.

I haven’t given away my American Antiquity yet, but mainly because I’m a pack rat. Packratism is, in my experience, a congenital disease among archaeologists. Throwing stuff away is contrary to our nature. Think about what we do for a living: we go to extraordinary lengths to dig up other peoples’ very old garbage, and then we keep it forever in museums and repositories. The very idea of throwing away something new is nary inconceivable. So, my run of AA is safe for the foreseeable future, but I remain concerned about the direction the journal is taking.

Reference cited

Warner, Mark (2009). Why I Gave away my American Antiquity. SAA Archaeological Record Vol. 9, No. 2 (March), pp. 6-7.

A Lesson for Students

2009-04-30T07:50:00.005-04:00

I would ask any students (of mine, at least) who read this blog to look at the articles I cited in the last couple of posts. What do they have in common? The research articles (as opposed to the commentaries) are all strongly interdisciplinary, drawing from a variety of sciences, such as physics (entropy) and genetics. Now, almost all archaeology is interdisciplinary. That's one reason why I find it fun. I get bored easily and the far-ranging scope of archaeology helps hold my interest. The lesson for students is this: build a strong general background in science and read eclectically. Many (most?) truly interesting discoveries come from the serendipitous intersection of apparently unconnected ideas. More specifically, note the rise to dominance of archaeological science. Dave Killick and Paul Goldberg (2009) wrote about this trend in a recent edition of the SAA Archaeological Record. If you're thinking about thesis or dissertation topics or trying to choose a graduate program, consider how you will develop expertise in some branch of archaeological science. When you read the job ads, see how many solicit researchers with expertise in some form of archaeological science, from GIS to paleoclimatic analysis, to archaeological chemistry to microscopy. Do you want to be the job applicant whose expertise is limited to digging square holes very slowly?

Reference cited

Killick, David and Paul Goldberg (2009). A Quiet Crisis in American Archaeology. The SAA Archaeological Record Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 11-13.

Even more in Science

2009-04-25T07:07:00.004-04:00

As if yesterday's bonanza of articles on archaeological topics were not enough, yet another article appeared in the online advance publication section. I do not have access to the full text of these articles, but it's about the linguistic character of the Indus script. The authors claim to have show that the entropy of the as-yet-undeciphered Indus script is similar to that of other human languages, refuting the hypothesis that it is not a script representing natural human language.

Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script by Rajesh P. N. Rao, Nisha Yadav, Mayank N. Vahia, Hrishikesh Joglekar, R. Adhikari, and Iravatham Mahadevan Science
Published online April 23 2009; 10.1126/science.1170391 (Science Express Brevia).

Lots o' Archaeological Stuff in Today's Issue of Science

2009-04-24T12:54:00.007-04:00

Before we get to today's issue of Science (Vol. 324, Issue 5926), I want to embed a cute little video from the "Science Friday" radio show web site about ancient domestic agave cactuses in the southwestern U.S.

Now, back to Science. There are articles about the domestication of cattle, horses, and sheep, all based on various kinds of genetic information:

Coat Color Variation at the Beginning of Horse Domestication by Arne Ludwig, Melanie Pruvost, Monika Reissmann, Norbert Benecke, Gudrun A. Brockmann, Pedro Castaños, Michael Cieslak, Sebastian Lippold, Laura Llorente, Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, Montgomery Slatkin, and Michael Hofreiter. Science 24 April 2009: 485.

Genome-Wide Survey of SNP Variation Uncovers the Genetic Structure of Cattle Breeds by The Bovine HapMap Consortium Science 24 April 2009: 528-532.

Revealing the History of Sheep Domestication Using Retrovirus Integrations by Bernardo Chessa, Filipe Pereira, Frederick Arnaud, Antonio Amorim, Félix Goyache, Ingrid Mainland, Rowland R. Kao, Josephine M. Pemberton, Dario Beraldi, Michael J. Stear, Alberto Alberti, Marco Pittau, Leopoldo Iannuzzi, Mohammad H. Banabazi, Rudovick R. Kazwala, Ya-ping Zhang, Juan J. Arranz, Bahy A. Ali, Zhiliang Wang, Metehan Uzun, Michel M. Dione, Ingrid Olsaker, Lars-Erik Holm, Urmas Saarma, Sohail Ahmad, Nurbiy Marzanov, Emma Eythorsdottir, Martin J. Holland, Paolo Ajmone-Marsan, Michael W. Bruford, Juha Kantanen, Thomas E. Spencer, and Massimo Palmarini Science 24 April 2009: 532-536.

In addition, there are two interesting commentaries on archaeological topics, including one on current research into the causes of the Maya Collapse:

A New Look at the Mayas' End by Heather Pringle Science 24 April 2009: 454-456.

"Climate researchers have fingered drought in the collapse of the great Maya civilization, but many archaeologists say it doesn't fit their data. Ultralocal paleoclimate indicators may spark a resolution."

The other one is about the lithic reduction sequences of Homo floresiensis:

Did Humans Learn From Hobbits? by Elizabeth Culotta Science 24 April 2009: 447.

"A detailed new analysis of stone tools unearthed from the cave of the roughly 1-meter-tall ancient human found in Indonesia sheds light on the "hobbit's" technological capabilities and raises a new mystery: Why did the modern humans who arrived later make tools the same way hobbits did?"

Pantasma "Crater"

2009-04-22T21:39:00.012-04:00

In studying the geology and archaeology of Nicaragua, I noticed a prominent landmark north of the city of Jinotega in the central highlands of northern Nicaragua. It is visible as a circular structure in the middle of the Google Earth image below.

In the image below, I have circled the crater in yellow.

If you study the topography, it is clear that this is a well defined circular depression. I found that it is named "Pantasma" after a village located within the crater. Googling it, I found that there are websites that suggest this may be an impact crater. The Wikipedia article on Pantasma describes this theory. I think impact craters are pretty interesting, particularly because I worked in and around the Chicxulub Crater in Yucatán.

Unfortunately, I feel impelled to point out that Weyl's authoritative tome Geology of Central America (1980: Figure 107) maps this as a caldera, one of several responsible for the Mio-Pliocene out-pouring of ignimbrite sheets that blanket the region. The statement that appears in the Wikipedia is not well-supported by the evidence and probably should be removed. The Pantasma area must have been a smoking hell when all these giant pyroclastic flows were emplaced. The Río Estelí runs through this region a bit further west. The name Estelí is said to derive from the Nahua word for obsidian, itzli. I wonder whether there actually is obsidian in the area or whether some of the glassy ignimbrite merely recalls obsidian.

Reference cited

Weyl, Richard (1980). Geology of Central America, Second edition. Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger.

Sri Lankan Shipwrecks

2009-04-20T09:08:00.005-04:00

This topic may seem a bit odd, but it's one to which I feel a special connection. As a kid, I was interested in marine archaeology and read everything I could find about it. At the time, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, underwater archaeology was a new field (SCUBA diving was invented during WWII and only became popular in the 1950s and '60s), and there were as yet few scholarly books on the subject. Most of what was written was by various kinds of avocational archaeologists or even treasure hunters. Among the ones I read were two autobiographical ones by Arthur C. Clarke, the very famous science fiction writer.

If I'm not mistaken, the books I read were Indian Ocean treasure by Arthur C. Clarke and Mike Wilson (Harper & Row [1964]) and The treasure of the Great Reef by Arthur C. Clarke (Ballantine Books [1974]), although it's possible that one was The coast of coral by Arthur C. Clarke (Harper, [1956]). These books recount how Clarke and his friends started diving on the Great Basses and Little Basses reefs off the southern coast of Sri Lanka, where Clarke lived, and found a number of shipwrecks including one with a cargo of silver coins. As Clarke was a world famous novelist, the books were unusually well-written.

Well, the Sri Lankan Navy has just posted a web site describing these wrecks, their history, and a protection plan for them. Not surprisingly, given their fame, the wrecks have been extensively and brazenly looted. I hope the Sri Lankan Navy can protect them. It does seem a little odd for the Sri Lankan military to be working on this problem during their bloody offensive against the Tamil Tigers

New Web Site

2009-04-19T11:06:00.009-04:00

I have set up a new web site on Google Sites to be able to post data and photographs in a static setting rather than in this blog. Among other things, I have posted photos of typical Mayapán ceramic types, copies of some of my papers, and a series of photos of archaeological sites in Nicaragua. I am particularly interested in posting photos of archaeological artifacts because there seem to be few photographs of archaeological ceramics available to students and researchers. The photographs in books are normally printed in black and white because the cost of publishing them in color is prohibitive. The few photographs one finds on the web are usually rare museum pieces that are not representative of what one typically excavates. As a result, one usually has to go to a ceramic repository or museum to see actual archaeological examples of these ceramic types. So, I think there is a real need to have photos like these posted on the web.

I expect to continue to add new material to the web site as I have time. I will soon run out of space, however, and I'm not sure what I'll do then, but undoubtedly there are many options.

Happy Birthday!

2009-04-16T15:54:00.001-04:00

Happy 50th, Strunk and White!

Cave Paintings in Cueva La Conga, Nicaragua

2009-04-14T10:01:00.005-04:00

Some months ago, reports appeared in the media announcing the discovery of cave paintings in the Department of Jinotega, Nicaragua, by Suzanne Baker, who has been working in the country for many years, mainly studying petroglyphs. The discovery of Cueva la Conga was interesting for several reasons. First, most of Nicaragua is volcanic, and so most of the caves are lava tubes, but Cueva la Conga is a limestone solution cavern, located in a small region of karst near the border with Honduras. Second, cave paintings, as opposed to petroglyphs, are rare in Nicaragua. Third, the central and eastern parts of Jinotega are remote, dangerous, and almost completely unexplored. So, any archaeological discovery in the region is interesting news. Here is a link to Suzanne Baker’s website describing the discovery.

I bring this up because of a new report on an effort to radiocarbon date the paintings by Dr. Ruth Ann Armitage at Eastern Michigan University. She is using new techniques that I haven’t heard of, so it will be interesting to find out how they work. Here’s the article.

I would love to visit Jinotega. It’s reputed to be a beautiful, coffee-growing region is the cool, misty highlands. Jinotega is supposed to mean “City of the Mists” (Ciudad de las Brumas). The closest I’ve been to Jinotega is the Finca Selva Negra, north of Matagalpa, which was indeed lovely.

Check out Jinotga on Google Earth. See how the eastern part is all green? This is a large patch of rainforest that has not been explored archaeologically. Much of it falls with the Boswas Biosphere Reserve, a protected conservation area. One reason Jinotega has not been surveyed is that it was heavily mined during the Contra War and it has not been completely demined. Demining efforts were significantly complicated by the effects of Hurricane Mitch, which caused extensive erosion and landslides that moved mines around. A couple of days ago, I watched Carla’s Song, a very powerful movie about the Contra War. It’s worth watching.

Rich Moche Burial Uncovered

2009-04-12T08:24:00.002-04:00

National Geographic has also posted photos of a very rich Moche burial recently excavated in from Huaca el Pueblo on the northern coast of Peru by Steve Bourget of the University of Texas. Again, very pretty pictures and also a news article.

Huge Bead Cache Found at Santa Catalina de Guale, Georgia

2009-04-12T08:12:00.005-04:00

According to a report on the National Geographic web site, a cache of 70,000 seventeenth century trade beads has been found by archaeologists excavating the Franciscan mission site of Santa Catalina de Guale, in Georgia. The excavation is sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History. Not surprisingly, National Geographic has beautiful photos.

When Conch Was Queen

2009-04-12T08:00:00.004-04:00

Here's an interesting popular article about conch in Caribbean archaeology: Talking Taino: When Conch Was Queen by William Keegan and Betsy Carlson. Dr. Keegan is a distinguished graduate of our M.A. program at Florida Atlantic University.

Early Ceramics in Northern Morocco

2009-04-11T18:02:00.004-04:00

An Argentine newspaper, the Diario de Mendoza, reported on April 10th the discovery of quite early ceramics from a site named Hasi Uenzga, located southwest of the town of Nador, in the Rif region. The ceramics may be as old as 9000 B.C., which certainly is early for this part of the world. The discovery was made by archaeologists of the Instituto Nacional Marroquí de Ciencias Arqueológicas y del Patrimonio (INSAP) and the Instituto Alemán de Arqueología.

Here is a link to the article: Hallan cerámica del año 9.000 antes de Cristo. The article is in Spanish.

The Collapse of the Earliest Civilization in the Western Hemisphere

2009-04-09T11:24:00.005-04:00

This interesting article was mentioned in Nature’s journal club column this week.

Sandweiss, Daniel H., Ruth Shady Solís, Michael E. Moseley, David K. Keefer, and Charles R. Ortloff (2009). Environmental Change and Economic Development in Coastal Peru between 5,800 and 3,600 Years Ago. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences vol. 106, no. 5, pp. 1359-1363.

The basic argument seems to be that a “severe cycle of natural disasters—earthquakes, El Niño flooding, beach ridge formation, and sand dune incursion—at ca. 3,800 B.P." led to the collapse of the earliest civilization in the New World, which developed along the north central coast of Peru between 5,000 and 6,000 B.P.

Maize domestication

2009-04-08T08:04:00.006-04:00

It’s taken me a couple of weeks to find and read the new articles about the domestication of maize in Mexico that came out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Here are the full references:

Dolores R. Piperno, Irene Holst, Ruth Dickau, and José Irarte (2009). The Cultural and Chronological Context of Early Holocene Maize and Squash Domestication in the Central Balsas River Valley, Mexico. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences vol. 106, No. 13, pp. 1514-1518.

Piperno, Dolores R., Anthony J. Ranere, Irene Holst, José Irarte, and Ruth Dickau (2009). Starch Grain and Phytolith Evidence for Early Ninth Millennium B.P. Maize from the Central Balsas River Valley, Mexico. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences vol. 106, No. 13, pp. 1519-1524.

There was also a commentary about this pair of articles published in the same issue:

Hastorf, Christine A. (2009). Rio Balsas Most Likely Region for Maize Domestication. . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences vol. 106, No. 13, pp. 4957-4958.

You can read the abstracts on the journal website here.

These are important articles. The Ranere team excavated a number of rock shelters in the region of Iguala, Guerrero, looking for deposits containing evidence of the beginning of plant domestication in the Archaic period. They chose this area because the genetic evidence—that is, analyses of the DNA of maize varieties and teosinte varieties—pointed to this region as the heartland of corn domestication. Interestingly, they are focusing on the moister piedmont between 700-900 m elevation, rather than the arid highlands.

The first article, in which Ranere is the first author, describes the archaeological sequence that they found, mainly at Xihuatoxtla rock shelter. They seem to make a fairly sound argument, based on the stratigraphy, carbon dating, and artifact sequence, that they found a series of Archaic deposits. The second article describes the microbotanical evidence—phytoliths and starch grains—for the presence of maize cultivation and processing.

Here is a Google Earth snapshot of the Xihuatoxtla area where the Rockshelter is located.

These are nice articles, and they report very significant results. We’ve all been waiting to hear these results for some years now. We’ve known that the current earliest dates for maize domestication were much too late, and that the answer probably lay in the Balsas River Valley. These articles provide strong support for domesticated maize exploitation in the early ninth millennium (2-sigma calibrated date: 8990-8610 B.P.).

Nevertheless, I was a little disappointed. Perhaps I’m an intellectual Neanderthal, but I would have liked to seen some macrobotanical evidence in addition to the microbotanicals. I was disappointed that they didn’t find a single cob or kernel. Give me a cupule! In North America, we find carbonized maize remains in hot and humid parts of the southeastern U.S., which is not that different environmentally from the tropics. I’ve excavated maize macroremains in the Yazoo Basin in Mississippi, and I’ve also worked in various parts of southern Mesoamerica, and frankly, the Mississippi Delta feels more tropical. I’ve worked at Copán, Honduras, which is at 600 m elevation, about the same as these sites in Guerrero, and it’s fairly cool and pleasant by comparison. I still find myself a teeny bit skeptical about phytolith and starch grain evidence, if only because they are young fields and so few people do them that I don’t get the sense that there’s a community of experts who have arrived at a consensus on various important issues. The authors of these articles are undoubtedly world experts on precisely these issues—the identification of maize starch and phytoliths—one couldn’t ask for a better group. And they deserve tremendous credit for having developed the approaches painstakingly over many years. But I would be happier if their results could be independently validated. Or, of course, they could keep digging till they find a hearth full of carbonized corn cobs.

I also would have been happier if the most significant of the deposits, at Xihuatoxtla rock shelter, had been deeper with better stratigraphic separation. The deposits there are barely 1 meter deep and the first 50 cm are post-Archaic. In fact, there are sherds down 60 cm in Layer C too. So, it’s really just Layers D and E, only 35 cm thick, that contain the whole Archaic part of the sequence, stretching back to almost 9000 B.P. Are we to believe that those two strata all date to 8990-8610 B.P., the age of the sole radiocarbon date from those strata? Shouldn’t the deposits have built up over time, like the ones above them apparently did? Actually, that carbon sample came from the middle of Stratum D, so some of this material may be even older than that date. But I think there’s no doubt that their conclusions would have been much stronger if they had found a deeper stratigraphic profile associated with more radiocarbon dates. Ideally, one would like deeper strata without any maize exploitation overlain by the earliest maize processing. I expect the Ranere team was disappointed in some respects too. In addition, I think some discussion, however brief (these are articles after all, not monographs), on the geomorphology and taphonomy of the deposits might have alleviated concerns about their shallowness. The map of the excavation in the Supplementary materials suggests that the ground drops away in front of the rock shelter, a common situation which leads to downslope movement of materials over time. So, evidence that the deposits are intact would have solidified their argument.

Overall, the articles report on an impressive achievement. Most of my doubts are based on what they found, which is not under their control. It’s no accident that no one has excavated Archaic sites in the valley of the Río Balsas till now. These guys have spent years doing survey to find sites, performing paleoenvironmental reconstruction, excavating sites and performing artifact analyses. And it’s probably not an easy area to work. I love Mexico. I’d rather be there right now. But Guerrero is not the safest place in the world.

The French are online

2009-03-29T07:52:00.004-04:00

I've noticed in the last couple of days that the French seem to have (finally?!) put a goodly bunch of journals online and made them freely accessible. (Perhaps it's my imagination, but in the early days of the Internet, it seemed that French websites would rarely connect or, when they did, they ran very slowly. I assumed that they had an antiquated phone system.)

Of interest to the readers of this blog will be Le Journal de la Société des Américanistes.

More generally, there is a broad and excellent collection of journals at a portal named Persée. Full text articles are available from the older numbers. The collection includes major French-language periodicals in history, social sciences (including anthropology), and archaeology. Interesting journals for archaeologists include:

and many others.

They also have a section with "Proceedings and Series" but I can seem to get the search engine to work there.

Otherwise, the site is attractive and functional.

Welcome! Come in and sit down. Cup of coffee?

2009-03-28T21:30:00.000-04:00

My name is Clifford Brown, and it's a pleasure to welcome you to my new blog. This blog will focus on archaeology, prehistory, and any other topics that interest me or on which I do research. I'm an archaeologist and anthropologist by training. I serve on the faculty of Florida Atlantic University, in the Department of Anthropology.