George Stuart, distinguished Maya archaeologist, has passed away

National Geographic, where he worked for many years, has posted a gracious obituary. He was a truly nice and unpretentious gentleman. Condolences to his friends and family.

Nicaragua trip

Last week, I returned from my first trip this summer to Nicaragua. I was fortunate to be able to spend some time with colleagues, friends, and family.

First, we went to Cusirisna Cave in the Department of Boaco. Kendra Philmon wrote her thesis on the materials in the cave, which are curated at the Harvard Peabody. We are hoping to publish a revision of her thesis as a monograph. At the SAA meetings, she asked me if it were possible that some of the teeth remained on the floor of the cave. Most of the crania in the collection have lost their front teeth. So, I stopped by with my wife to take a look. I also wanted to take more photos because those from my first trip were not great. It was a terrible mistake. Getting to the cave requires a bit of a scramble. It's in a gorge with very steep walls that are paved with loose rock. Moreover, I'm in terrible condition. My wife is in better condition, but she took a serious fall while I got overheated. I managed to get some pictures and take a quick look in the cave.I didn't see any teeth, but I noticed that there is a layer of earth that might conceal additional remains and could be excavated.

Cusirisna Cave. Right hand chamber. Machete points approximately north

Cusirisna Cave. Left-hand chambers

Lahar deposit underlying Cusirisna Cave.

From Cusirisna, we went to the town of Boaco to visit our friend Edgar Espinoza, a semi-retired archaeologist. He has a lovely home there, and he kindly invited us to spend the night.

The next day he took us to see some petroglyphs in the surrounding hills.

Petroglyphs near the base of the hill, Boaco

Petroglyph of a fawn near Las Lagunas, Boaco

Anthropomorphic petroglyph (shaman?) near Las Lagunas, Boaco

A couple of days later, we had the opportunity to visit a couple of sites near Somotillo, in the Department of Chinandega, that had been previously found by Jorge Zambrana and reported by Rigoberto Navarro. We first went to see a couple of sites named Don Noe, after the landowner. We found a historic wall, but we're not sure if it is part of one of the previously reported sites. We chatted with Don Noe, but he did not know where the previously reported prehistoric mound site was located. After I came back and mapped our points, I saw that we were a couple of hundred meters too far north.

Historic wall remnant on the property of Don Noe, southwest of Somotillo, Chinandega

Then we drove back to Somotillo and looped around to cross the Rio Gallo and then came back southwest to its junction with the Rio Negro.  Heading south from El Tejar, we found the site of Los Andinos, which turned out to be impressive. According to the original report, it has over 30 mounds, densely packed. We saw lots of material on the surface, including chert (perhaps heat-treated--see photo below), obsidian, and fine-paste ceramics. The fields with the mounds are being plowed, but fortunately with oxen. Tractors will destroy the mounds in no time. This site has more architecture than any other we have seen to date in the Department of Chinandega.

Artifacts in the road at Los Andinos. Note the dark red chert that may have been heat-treated. The fine paste ceramics are typical of the region, including the red slip and the light grey cores. The compass/clinometer has a centimeter scale on the side.

The largest mound that we saw at Los Andinos, which apparently lies in the northern part of the site.

My wife threw me a surprise birthday party in Somotillo in the Restaurante Katin in Somotillo. I can't remember the last time I had a birthday party, but it must have been when I was a small child. It was also the first time I had a piñata. If you watch shows like America's Funniest Home Videos, you know that gringos are incompetent at whacking a piñata, which is, frankly, embarrassing. I didn't hit anyone or break anything, and I didn't have to dance!

Birthday party at Rancho Katin, Somotillo

Birthday party at Rancho Katin, Somotillo

Whacking the piñata

Adios for now.

The Society for American Archaeology annual meeting, and on being a discussant

This year's SAA conference was a lot of fun. My department at FAU boasted a large contingent of current and former graduate students, many of whom presented on their own research, including Kendra Philmon, Kelin Flanagan, Brittany Reneau, April Watson, and Laura Van Voorhies. Tim Guyah and Tom DiVito, recent graduates of our program, also attended the meetings. One of my departmental colleagues, Valentina Martinez, presented on her research in Ecuador.

I was involved in two symposia, one on recent research in Nicaragua and the other on multi-scalar approaches to archaeological interpretation. Both were very interesting. In the Nicaragua session, I presented a brief summary of work to date in the Department of Chinandega and Kendra Philmon outlined our work on the collection from Cursirisna Cave in Boaco. In the multi-scalar session, which included some research involving fractals, Kelin Flanagan presented her work on the fractality and lacunarity of archaeological site distributions. I served as a discussant at that symposium. 

It was my first experience as a discussant, and it was interesting for me. I read all the papers that had been submitted in advance, which seemed a lot like actual work. Then I thought about the remarks I had heard discussants offer in other sessions. They seemed to me to fall into two categories: those that critiqued the papers individually and those that offered thoughts on the theme of the symposium. While the former are probably more common, I though the latter were potentially more interesting. I still remember lucidly the comments that David Pendergast made at a symposium on Maya cave archaeology many years ago. They were of the second type, general observations on cave archaeology. I found his remarks more inspiring and affecting than any of the papers that had been given in the session. With that in mind, I tried to emulate that model of being a discussant. So the night before the session (which captured the enviable Sunday morning time slot), I created a brief presentation on the polyvalent meanings of scale in archaeology. I, at least, thought the comments were interesting, and it of course saved me from summarizing and reviewing everyone else's talks, with the concomitant potential for misinterpretation, omission, and offense.

I would be very interested in hearing about others' experiences as a discussant or your opinions about what kind of comments are most interesting and influential.

Thanks to those who organized our symposia and were kind enough to invite me and my students: Geoffrey McCafferty, Larry Steinbrenner, and James Stemp.

No dinosaurs!

I cannot tell you how many times someone has asked me what I do, and after I tell them I'm an archaeologist, he or she asks, "Found any dinosaurs lately?" What's shocking about this is how often the interlocutor is an educated person. I first remember this happening when I was an adolescent and my optometrist thought that archaeology was the study of dinosaurs. In the decades since then, I have learned that this experience was not an anomaly. Many people with graduate degrees do not understand that archaeology is about studying ancient cultures, and therefore is a social science, while paleontology is about studying extinct animals and plants, and is a branch of geology.  There's very little overlap between the two fields, although paleoanthropology (the study of our human ancestors, a sort of paleontology of the human lineage) and certain instances of zooarchaeology come to mind.

I don't know if paleontologists get asked, "Found any pyramids lately?" or, if they do, whether it annoys them.

Perhaps archaeologists are overly sensitive, but being taken for a paleontologist evidently annoys some of us. Here's the video that proves it:

Yes, there's a song about it on Youtube.

But what really takes the cake is that the American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of Science, doesn't seem to appreciate the difference. On their science news accumulator site, EurekAlert!, under the category "Archaeology" they brazenly include paleontology articles.

More great science journalism! For shame, AAAS.

Caving in Oaxaca, The Cheve system

An interesting article in the New Yorker on exploring one of the deepest caves on earth, in Oaxaca.

Tonight's Lunar Eclipse, a rare skywatching success

All of you--that is, both of you--who follow this blog should know that I haven't had a lot of success in observing celestial phenomena in the last couple of years. When I manage to wake up for the meteor shower (or whatever), it's usually too cloudy to see anything, or there is too much light pollution, or something. Well, the dry spell finally broke. I saw the lunar eclipse this morning.

Here is the edge of the moon reappearing. Poor photo, but I'm not set up for proper celestial photography.

When the eclipse began, I was tempted to start banging on pots or shooting at the sky to scare off the beast eating the moon, as they do in Yucatan. I didn't think my neighbors would appreciate it, though, so I restrained the impulse.

I still don't understand why I walked to the end of my driveway to see the eclipse better.

Beautiful, clear night, for once. The moon really did turn red, and you could tell because Mars was--brilliantly--right by her side for comparison.

A beautiful little essay by my friend Papatya Bucak

Here's s short piece entitled "An Address to My Fellow Faculty Who Have Asked Me to Speak About My Work."

It was published in Brevity (I said it was short!) in January of this year.

Enjoy!

Atlatl videos

I bought a fancy atlatl at the knap-in last weekend. I've made my own atlatls in the past. It's easy to carve a crude but functional one from a tree branch. In contrast, the one I bought, from Thunderbird Atlatls, is a minor work of art.

My new atlatl

If you're buying a making a spearthrower, the most important consideration is that it fits your hand easily so that your fingers can hold the dart shaft. If your hand is small or your fingers stubby, you should take extra care to ensure that you can use the instrument effectively. 

More importantly, I bought several darts, which are much harder to make than a spearthrower.

Atlatl darts

I took the spearthrower and the darts out for a test drive yesterday with one of my graduate students, Kelin Flanagan.

Here are four short videos of her shooting darts.

Kelin is a natural!

Unfortunately, the best video would not upload, perhaps because of the file size. [Update: I converted the largest file to mpg format, and it uploaded, but Blogger still messed up the resolution.] Also, note that the original videos are much higher resolution than these. I suspect the blogging website reduced the resolution to shrink the file size.

Knap-in

I took a couple of graduate students to a knap-in last weekend and my hands have almost recovered, but the shoulder I injured digging in Nicaragua last summer is still aching.

The Stone Age and Primitive Arts Festival was held in Ochlockonee River State Park, which is a pretty little park located in the Apalachicola River delta, southwest of Tallahassee in the eastern part of the Florida panhandle.

Ochlockonee State Park

It was a heck of a drive. Google Maps said it would be about 6 hours and 49 minutes driving time, but it took us much more--it seemed like 8 hours--even though there were no detours, construction zones, or traffic jams.

The nearest town, between our hotel and the park, was Sopchoppy. It's a small town that looks like it's down on its luck: a lot of stores are closed, some houses are abandoned, and some structures are collapsing. The town used to be a stop on a long-abandoned rail line that served the logging and turpentine industries. Since they dried up a century ago, Sopchoppy has been struggling. That why we were shocked but delighted to find that the only restaurant in town was superb. The Sopchoppy Pizza Company serves not only really excellent pizza but a variety of other tasty and creative dishes. It's housed in a nicely maintained historic building and the decor is fun and charming. It's immaculate and homey. Ironically, it is a far better restaurant than most of those in the affluent and sophisticated area where I live in Palm Beach County.

The two students I brought, Lana Ruck and Justin Colon, are both interested in lithic analysis. Lana's research focuses on determining handedness from debitage attributes. The evolution of handedness is important because it may be related to the evolution of language. Both are related to brain laterality and they are processed in similar and unusual ways in the brain. To test her hypotheses, which include attempts to replicate the results of previous studies that have claimed to identify handedness from debitage, she needs debitage from left-handed knappers. As it happens, left-handed knappers turn out to be as rare as Tea Party Communists. But there were several at the knap-in, and so Lana was able to collect some critical data.

Lana and Justin

Here's a sight you won't often see: two left-handed knappers.

Two left-handed knappers

Here's one of them actually knapping, with the copper billet in his left hand.

Left-handed knapping in progress

We spent most of our time just practicing. The many experienced knappers there were very generous in sharing their knowledge and experience with amateurs like us. I bought a couple of hundred pounds of nice chert from a vendor.  That was a significant motivation for attending, for me, because it's really hard to buy chert sight-unseen on the Internet and the shipping costs are prohibitive anyway. Because I drove up in a big SUV, I could carry back as much chert as I could afford to buy. I spent $500 on chert at $3/lb, which seemed to be the going rate. It's nice material: Georgetown flint from Texas, smooth as butter. I also picked up some useful knapping tools, such as pressure flakers. I have made these by hand in the past, but the ones on sale were nice.  It is difficult to assemble a good collection of tools, such as billets, flakers, and hammerstones, but the largest impediment to learning how to knap is obtaining a sufficient supply of good raw material to practice on. So, being able to buy a pile of chert was very important to me.

Here's our tarp with our knapping stuff on it, with and without grad students:

The tarp we bought for knapping

Justin and Lana preparing to knap

The weather was beautiful, cool, dry, and crisp. There were knapping contests (we only observed), demonstrations, and folk music. A fun time was had by all.

You're invited to my public lecture tomorrow night

I'll be reporting on the results of last year's fieldwork in Nicaragua

Date: February 13th, 7pm
Location: Palm Beach County Main Library
3650 Summit Blvd., West Palm Beach, 33406
"Under the Volcano II, Maribios and Chontales"
Presented by Clifford Brown, PhD

Dr. Clifford Brown will talk about the initial results his and his colleagues’ 2013 season of survey and excavations in northwest Nicaragua. The team located a number of new sites. They focused their excavations in the eastern and northern parts of the Department of Chinandega, at sites in the municipalities of Chichigalpa and Somotillo. Near Chichigalpa, they found a large site which has interesting stratigraphy as well as seemingly distinctive ceramics. The location and the ruins of a Colonial period church strongly imply that it is the lost Maribio town of Mazatega.

In the north, at the site of Dulce Nombre de Jesús, they found an extensive field of stone mounds as well as numerous prehistoric stone house foundations. Part of the site has a very unusual obsidian industry, while the remainder has a more conventional one. Finally, the site of La Trinidad produced patches of dense midden with cultural features. That site produced tantalizing evidence of ground stone tool production.