New Student Journal: International Journal of Student Research in Archaeology

There is apparently a new archaeology journal in the works specifically for students. I came upon a flyer online.


As it says, this was a call for papers for the first issue, and the deadline has already passed. But, the idea of having a student journal is great, and I wish them the best of luck.

As you can see at the bottom of the flyer, they have a Facebook page and a Twitter feed. The also have a webpage, although I had to eat cookies before it would function.

I love their logo, which features a quill pen crossed over a trowel. If the message is that the pen is mightier than the trowel, I agree: Reporting is more important than digging.

I'm not sure where the funding comes from, but it's going to be open access without page charges.

Everything looks very professionally set up. I look forward to the first issue!

Photographs of the Department of Chinandega

I've been working on writing archaeological site descriptions in English. I have them already, of course, in Spanish, but my graduate students need them in English, and it's generally easier for me to re-write them in English than for them to translate the descriptions from the informe. Sometimes an additional detail will occur to me, and I've also discovered a a thing or two since I wrote the descriptions, such as the soil types from the soil atlas of Latin America.

In the course of writing the English descriptions, I've had to search through my files to find the maps and photos. In looking through the thousands of files, I've come upon some pretty photos that I thought I would share with you.

Click on the thumbnails for a bigger picture.

The Rio Tonala where it crossed the road from El Viejo to Tonala. A picturesque, babbling brook.

Young Nicaraguan teosinte within the biological reserve dedicated to its preservation. The Homo sapiens is Kelin, a former graduate student, in 2013. Note that the teosinte looks like a grass, as indeed it is.

Farmer planting corn using espeque near the Estero Real

Coffee plantation between the volcanoes Chonco and San Cristobal. Point of departure for climbing to the summit of both cones.

San Cristobal smoking among the clouds

Canyon Tanque on the Peninsula of Coseguina

Narrow road to the deep north

Sierra de la Botija in thebackground

House on a northern road

A bit of Shangrila

Northern farmhouse

Northern stream

Northern stream, which will become a river when it rains

River in the north

River

Northern hills

Sun striking hills

Bright hills

Sun through the clouds

Snug valley in the north

Valley

Cloudy sky over hills

Grant opportunity for Archaeology Students Studying Florida Archaeology: the Florida Anthropological Society Dorothy Moore Student Grant for 2016

E-mail recently received from Robert Austin, Ph.D., R.P.A.:

Attached is information on the Florida Anthropological Society Dorothy Moore Student Grant for 2016. FAS will offer $500 to assist students in conducting archaeological research in Florida. The attachment provides details on how to apply. The deadline for the 2015 grant is March 31, 2015. Please distribute and post the announcement and inform your students of the availability of this grant. Thank you.

Here is the text of the announcement:

Florida Anthropological Society

Florida’s Statewide Organization of Archaeology and Anthropology

ANNOUNCEMENT

THE FLORIDA ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY DOROTHY MOORE STUDENT GRANT

The Florida Anthropological Society (FAS) is making available $500.00 to be awarded annually to archaeology students (B.A., M.A., or Ph.D.) who are currently enrolled in a Florida university. The grant money will assist students conducting archaeological research in Florida. Grant funds can be used to cover the costs associated with archaeological fieldwork, special analyses (e.g., radiocarbon dates, faunal or botanical analyses, soils analysis, etc.), and, in some cases, travel expenses associated with presenting a paper based on the student's research at a professional meeting.

Students interested in applying for the grant should submit a letter not to exceed two pages that describes the project for which the funds are being requested; what research question(s) or problem(s) are being addressed; how the funds will be applied to these problems; what, if any, additional funds will be used to accomplish the research; and how the research will contribute to Florida archaeology. The applicant should include a budget indicating the amount requested and describing how the money will be spent along with a letter(s) of support from faculty.

Applications for the 2016 award are now being accepted and can be sent to: Dr. Robert Austin, FAS Student Grant, 7224 Alafia Ridge Loop, Riverview, FL 33569 or via email to roc_doc@verizon.net. Deadline for applications is March 31, 2016.

*     *     *

Note that undergraduate and Master's degree students are eligible. This is unusual.

Archaeologist Job Opening in South Florida

I'm pleased to post the following job advertisement. Please do apply.


Cliff

Florida Atlantic University (FAU) Department of Anthropology seeks an Outreach Coordinator (position number 979770) for its grant-funded Florida Public Archaeology Network (FPAN) office in downtown Ft. Myers, Florida. The Coordinator will report to our FPAN office in Ft. Lauderdale. The Coordinator must be knowledgeable about Florida archaeology and the overall mission of the Florida Public Archaeology Network (FPAN), assist the Regional Director with public outreach and other center efforts, and supervise staff and volunteers. A Master's degree in an anthropology or related field or a Bachelor's degree in anthropology or related field and two years of experience in anthropology, archaeology, or closely related field are required. Professional experience with public outreach, public interpretation, education, or heritage tourism required. Candidates must have excellent communication skills, be able to work independently, access a variety of buildings or field sites, and have a valid driver’s license. Applications and personal information (CV/Resume, names of references, other supporting materials) must be completed on-line through the Office of Human Resources website at https://jobs.fau.edu, position no. 979770.

FAU is an equal opportunity/affirmative action institution and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veterans status or any other characteristic protected by law. Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodation, please call 561-297-6057, TTY/TDD 1-800-955-8771. A background check will be required for the candidate selected for this position

Fruit bat fellatio? Really?

Yes.

Tan M, Jones G, Zhu G, Ye J, Hong T, Zhou S, et al. (2009) Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time. PLoS ONE 4(10): e7595. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007595

You must watch the video! (Yes, there's video.)  The choice of music (yes, there's music) struck me as very strange.

Sorry for the digression from the main theme of the blog, whatever exactly that is.

New Article: "Quantitative analysis of Munsell color data from archeological ceramics" Open Access!

My former student Lana Ruck and I have published an article on how to mathematically analyze Munsell color data. Although we use data from archaeological ceramics as our prime example, the method would work with any body of Munsell color data that was collected to address a hypothesis. The colors could be from soils, minerals, leaves, flowers, birds, and so forth, and the method would still work. We're so convinced that this article will be of wide interest that we paid for open access.

The idea is that you convert the Munsell readings to spatial coordinates in the Munsell color space and then perform spatial or statistical analyses on the coordinates, which are interval scale variables. For the kinds of hypotheses I wanted to test--whether the ceramic colors from one houselot or cluster of houselots were the same as those from another--I decided that logistic regression was probably the right technique because:

• the dependent variable (the provenience, i.e., the houselot of cluster of houselots) was a categorical variable; and
• the data were demonstrably non-normal, thus eliminating linear discriminant analysis.

I've been struggling with the issue of how to analyze this kind of data ever since I got back from Mayapan in 1992 or 1993 with thousands of Munsell observations and realized that I didn't know how to perform statistical tests on them. My best guess is that I finally figured out how to do it right, at least in theory, around 2006 or 2007, but it wasn't until a couple of years ago that Lana came along and mastered the logistic regression.

Apparently, the real lesson here is that if you think about something for 20 years, you just might figure out the answer, although I hasten to point out that during those 20 years I studied quantitative techniques pretty intensively.  I wasn't just sitting on the beach pondering the problem solely in thought; I was actually educating myself--howsoever unsystematically--about the general topic of mathematics in archaeology. Nevertheless, there is a push among university administrators to systematize and quantify scientists' goals and productivity. So, if I put down on my annual assignment that I'm going to study how to analyze Munsell colors, presumably I'm expected to produce the article in the year it's listed. If you take into account how long it took to devise the original research design, excavate the artifacts, and record the Munsell colors, this article has been in the works for 25 years! Should I submit a 25-year plan as part of my annual assignment? If I do, I can probably say anything I want because I'll almost certainly be dead in 25 years.

Here is the reference, linked to the article:

Ruck, Lana and Clifford T. Brown (2015). Quantitative analysis of Munsell color data from archeological ceramics. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 3:549-557. 

Just in case the link doesn't work for any reason, here is the URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X15300730#

Enjoy!

As always, comments welcome.

Soils of Latin American and the Caribbean

For those of you who, like me, sometimes work in areas of Latin America or the Caribbean where soil data are rare, difficult to obtain, unpublished, or simply unavailable, there is a very useful new work that I'm finding helpful: Atlas de suelos de América Latina y el Caribe.

It includes complete maps of the region, although they are published at a scale of 1:3,000,000 which can make identification of the location of individual sites difficult. Nonetheless, I have found it an extremely useful work. Not only are the maps helpful, but the soil taxonomy is explained with great simplicity and clarity, which is convenient for an archaeologist with no meaningful training in soil science.

Here is the citation suggested in the front matter of the document:

Gardi, C., Angelini, M., Barceló, S., Comerma, J., Cruz Gaistardo, C., Encina Rojas, A., Jones, A., Krasilnikov, P., Mendonça Santos Brefin, M.L., Montanarella, L., Muñiz Ugarte, O., Schad, P., Vara Rodríguez, M.I., Vargas, R. (eds), 2014. Atlas de suelos de América Latina y el Caribe, Comisión Europea - Oficina de Publicaciones de la Unión Europea, L-2995 Luxembourg.

Even better, it's available online at:  http://www.fao.org/agronoticias/agro-publicaciones/agro-publicacion-detalle/en/c/239323/

Cheers!