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Inspired by a recent exchange brought up by all things a Dry Bones cartoon over in the ol' PoliToons thread, I figured it was time to have a topic just for political issues in archaeology. I have an interest in the topic because it directly affects my field of study, and my career. I have worked in the past, and currently am trying to find another job after graduating, in the discipline, with an emphasis in the Southwestern United States. In the course of study and while working on a couple archival projects I came to appreciate just how political the field is, both for good and ill. A Bit of History Since the beginning of the discipline it has been politically charged. One major examples include early scientific racism based on comparisons of early pre-Sapiens Homo remains from different parts of the world, leading to theories of superior European Neandertals leading to H. sapiens in Europe and less evolved H. erectus leading to another, inferior branch of H. sapiens in Africa and Asia, that later also gave rise to Native American groups, an extreme racist take on the Multiregional origin of modern humans model. But that wasn't all. Early pioneers of the field in the United States tried to claim that Moundbuilder and major Southwestern sites were in-fact tied to either ancient Celts, lost tribes of Israel or Romans, thus legitimizing Anglo-American theft of native land. Of course this wasn't just tied to the US, there were the empty land theories based on faulty evidence that took hold in South Africa, and the assignment by archaeologists in then-Rhodesia of the remains of Great Zimbabwe to lost crusader armies or otherwise European migrants to justify colonial oppression. Even such scientific greats as Flinders Petrie, the inventor of ceramic seriation, our greatest relative dating tool, held some colonial views designed to rip native people of their history. Flinders Petrie held that Dynastic Egypt was founded by a "Caucasoid" race who invaded and conquered the inferior Pre-Dynastic native Africans. Other cases in the 19th-20th centuries included what was viewed as theft of a shared heritage, and a slight hint of xenophobia, but coming from the colonists and not the colonized. For example when Gustaf Nordenskiold tried to ship artifacts excavated from Mesa Verde back to Finland, outraged local pioneer colonists had him arrested, holding that foreigners should not be removing local artifacts. Of note is that the people most enraged were not descendants of the Ancestral Puebloans, but colonists who nonetheless claimed ownership of the history of the region they called home. Which brings up an enduring theme throughout archaeology's history: who owns the past? Descendant populations? Land owners? The government? Humanity? There is no easy answer, and as the Elgin Marbles show, the fight is global. The State of Politics in the US Now As anyone who has seen some of Marty Two Bulls' comics knows, the issue is still contentious here in the United States, but far better than what it was in the past. The passage of NAGPRA allowed affiliated tribes to reclaim ancestral human remains and objects of cultural patrimony, such as ritual objects, for reburial. Changes under Obama have allowed for non-affiliated tribes to also request repatriation, even if they cannot provide evidence of descent. This is a bit of a controversial law in the discipline, though in my corner of it most of us have accepted it, and work with the regional tribes in documenting and returning human remains and objects of cultural patrimony. The controversy of the moment is not having to prove descent, which in theory would open up the repatriation of sensitive objects to groups that are not actually related in genetic or cultural evolutionary terms, though I am unaware of any case where this occurred. From the native point of view, the law can be cumbersome and repatriation is often a costly and lengthy affair. There are also those cases such as Kennewick Man, where the remains are so old that honestly you cannot truly say who are the "rightful" descendants. Other laws have helped protect non-NAGPRA native and non-native sites. The main one is ARPA (The Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979) which prohibits all unlicensed excavation and artifact removal on Federal and Tribal lands, with fairly stiff penalties. The other is the National Historic Preservation Act, which puts sites on a list for protection, and also resulted in the establishment of the State Historic Preservation Offices, run by state governments. This is also the law that requires studies of impact on cultural remains of any federal government funded or approved construction. It was a big step forward in protection, and also created the private industry of cultural resource management, where most of us in the field are employed. An issue in the past was using archaeology to discredit native claims. I am happy to say in my experience and study, that has changed a lot. We work a lot with Tribal members now, and we seriously consider their traditions and stories, and in several cases have found good evidence for their historicity in the record. Listening to descendant populations has also opened up entire new avenues of study and understanding in prehistory, and is a powerful aid to traditional forms of study. A Bit About Archaeology in Global Politics As was gone over in the PoliToons thread, there is a great deal of controversy in Israeli archaeology. I'll republish the main posts here. Pththya-lyi posted:An example of Israeli archaeological policy: if archaeologists discover human remains at an archaeological site in Israel, they have to rebury them ASAP just in case the remains belonged to Jews. It's worth pointing out that human habitation in Israel goes back 1.5 million years and spans many different religions and cultures. KiteAuraan posted:The best example is the politicization of Masada. While the work there is fine, it is the tying of the events there to Jewish nationalism and a heroic struggle, building this myth of the necessity for the needless rebellion against the rather unintrusive Roman presence in Judea at the time, in order to preserve Jewish sovereignty and ideology, when in-fact it did the opposite. That sort of political grandstanding and politicized statements in an archaeological report is the exact opposite of where the discipline was heading during the 1960s in the United States and Western Europe. There was also a major conflict of interest, as the dig was funded and staffed by the Israeli army. The excavator, Yigael Yadin, went on to use his fame for excavating the site to become an Israeli politician, so the whole thing was tainted. Nachman Ben-Yehuda wrote a whole book on the topic of Masada as a national myth, based on biased archaeology and the lone account of Josephus in The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel. And while this article is in favor of using archaeology to build an Israeli identity for the region, it does shine through how archaeology has been used to construct stories, and how it was very much tied to state ideologies in the mid-20th century, when the most famous excavations were ongoing.. This is another example, where Roger Hertog, a private citizen who is a US Zionist, funded an excavation of a large structure in Jerusalem, which, despite no evidence from the data itself, the excavator claimed was certainly King David's Palace. In addition, many nations have passed laws protecting antiquities from looting, to varying affects and to varying levels of popular political support. A Jumping Off Point So while the discipline of archaeology would love to be apolitical, simply engaged in a search for truth, like all fields of study it is enmeshed in a web of political and social issues. The field has as much potential to aid marginalized people as it does to harm them, as history has shown. This thread is to discuss all aspects of politics in archaeology. From the laws protecting the past, to issues involving ownership, patrimony and cultural theft, as well as the (mis?)use of the past for modern political ends. I also would love to hear more from people with experience in different regions and with different laws, especially foreign laws, as I only know the major US federal and local state regulations. A Few Books Here are a few books I have read that touch on the history of archaeology and it's politics, or on working in archaeology in changing times. African Civilizations: An Archaeological Perspective by Graham Connah. This is an excellent introduction to evidence-based African archaeology, that goes deep into the colonial history of archaeology in Africa and it's unfortunate racism, and then delivers evidence based synthesis of the African past that puts the achievements of Africans back in African hands. This is entirely restricted to Sub-Saharan Africa, so no Egypt, though it does include Nubia. Ancient Burial Practices in the American Southwest edited by Douglas R. Mitchell and Judy L. Brunson-Hadley. This is mostly technical papers on mortuary practices in the US Southwest. However there is an excellent chapter on Hopi perspectives on archaeological studies that gives a native view that is so often ignored. A History of the Ancient Southwest by Stephen H. Lekson. While Lekson can be a bit of a pariah in Southwestern studies due to some of his grand claims of Chaco kingdoms and meridians, he writes a very readable account of the history of archaeological study in the US Southwest, warts and all, which helps understand a bit of the historical background to modern political issues. A View from Black Mesa: The Changing Face of Archaeology by George J. Gumerman. This is an account of the Black Mesa Project for Peabody Coal, and gives a good idea of how a modern archaeological project works within the laws and guidelines set out. War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage by Lawrence Keeley. Recommended by Captain_Maclaine, this is more or less the beginning of prehistoric conflict studies in modern archaeology and takes an abundance of evidence to show that organized conflict predates state and chiefdom-level organization. Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest by Steven LeBlanc. Similar to Keeley's work, this is a study of warfare in pre-state societies in the American Southwest, considering all time periods and supporting the thesis of low intensity, semi-regular warfare and raiding being present in various regions of the US Southwest from Basketmaker II to immediate pre-Contact times. LeBlanc supports his thesis with a great abundance of evidence and this is worth reading as a regional survey of conflict in human society. KiteAuraan fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Jul 15, 2016 |
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Jul 14, 2016 00:49
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KiteAuraan posted:
I'm interested in this part. Why would a company hire someone who might stand a chance of screwing their development plans? You have millions of dollars on the line and a choice of private companies that can clear your bureaucratic hurdle. What, if any, protection do those archaeologists have to be honest in their assessment? If you were called out to survey an area and found something, who in their right mind would ever hire you again?
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Jul 14, 2016 09:17
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Stinky Wizzleteats posted:I'm interested in this part. Basically it's because the government is watching and they will make sure any private company they are paying to work on their project will comply with their rules. Unfortunately the law only applies to federal government construction projects, though some states also apply it to their jurisdiction. For example in Arizona any project on state land is required by law to perform survey and salvage work and further protections are extended to any burial, marked or not, exceeding 50 years of age. Even if the burial is on private land, land owners are required by state law to contact the Arizona State Museum for guidance and written permission to do anything, in addition failure to report accidental disturbance of remains is also a violation of state law and commits a class I misdemeanor, which include up to six months in prison and a $2500 fine. This of course varies state to state. As for protection of sites without burials on private land, well, no real protection exists.
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Jul 14, 2016 10:15
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Oh wonderful, an effort thread I can actually contribute to! I'm actually employed in the field of archaeology. This summer I'm doing work at Jamestown, which you may recognize as the first successful English colony in the New World and the birthplace of English America! It's probably one of the coolest archaeological sites in North America just from the sheer profusion of artifacts alone. It's also a major contact period site, so native artifacts are very common. The archaeologists here have spent years building a good working relationship with the remaining Virginia Indian tribes, particularly the Pamunkey, the closest geographically and the only native tribe with federal recognition in Virginia. (They're probably the tribe Pocahontas was living with when John Smith and co rolled up in Virginia.) It's tough, given what Jamestown represents to them, but it's really important to us because the Virginia Indians were and are just as important to the study of the contact period as the English settlers, even though it's a lot easier to study the English settlers much of the time. It's all part of the field-wide effort to de-White Dudeify archaeology, to the degree possible when you're talking about the study of a colony that in its beginning consisted literally solely of white dudes. Similarly, we'd love to do work on the first Africans at Jamestown, and it's definitely in the cards, but there's a couple thorny jurisdictional questions involved. Namely, Jamestown Island is actually owned by two different groups. The Jamestown Rediscovery project, which is run by Preservation Virginia, a private nonprofit group founded by meddling old preservationist ladies back in the 1890s, owns the western tip of the island, including the 1607 fort site itself. The rest is owned by the National Park Service, as part of the Colonial National Historical Park. The two groups haven't always had a great relationship, though it's definitely much improved. Partially as a result of this division, the project has focused almost entirely on the fort period, approximately 1607-1620ish, after which the fort came down and Jamestown sprawled out all along the shoreline in a chaotic mess of a town. This "New Town" period is when most of the first Africans, including eventually the first slaves, arrive in Virginia, so the project can't really do much work on them as yet. Like I said, though, stuff is definitely in the works, though I don't know much of the specifics there except that the NPS would love to work more closely with the people with actual archaeological chops at Jamestown rather than bringing people in from elsewhere, the way it has done piecemeal for the last sixty years or so. It's definitely a fascinating field, and the effort to de-White Dudeify it is ongoing and probably never-ending. But the way it can corroborate, expand, and in some cases even overturn documentary evidence is absolutely fascinating. And nothing beats the feeling of pulling something out of the ground and realizing it hasn't been touched in 400 years, or watching a posthole pop out under your trowel. Also recently discovered in the area of Jamestown is Werowocomoco, the seat of Powhatan from which he ruled his confederacy, which was among the largest and most politically complex nations in North America in the 17th century. I don't really know how much has been done there, since it wasn't discovered until very recently, but they're confident in their identification of the site, I think they've found some longhouses, and I know they've found a bunch of complex ceremonial burials. The local tribes have asked them to stay away from the burials for now, until they've got the resources to deal with them properly-- after all, these are probably some of their ancestors, and certainly their ancestors' spiritual leaders. So those are on the "maybe one day" list. The whole site just got acquired by the NPS as part of the John Smith Historic Trail, and may end up its own National Park depending on what's found and how it goes. So that's definitely something cool to keep an eye on! Quorum fucked around with this message at 12:30 on Jul 14, 2016 |
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Jul 14, 2016 12:27
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What are repatriation and excavation laws like for Anglo-American and especially colonial slave burials? I've never really researched the topic heavily. Is there often any way to link to living descendants or are they just given a respectful reburial? Also, what are the legal limitations on bioarchaeological research?
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Jul 14, 2016 20:41
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Quorum posted:This summer I'm doing work at Jamestown, which you may recognize as the first successful English colony in the New World and the birthplace of English America! It's probably one of the coolest archaeological sites in North America just from the sheer profusion of artifacts alone. It feels so weird to see someone talk about artifacts at an archaeological site and it's referring to a place in the United States founded by the English. Something about archaeology always, to me, made it feel so distant, something that only happened to an ancient "them" and Jamestown is "us" instead. I mean, the people were there as part of a company's money-making scheme and wrote in English about eating boots! Archaeology is something we do for ancient peoples thousands of years ago, not about something that's chapter 3 of a U.S. history book! I guess I can pivot this into a useful question: do preconceptions about archaeology like mine limit the availability of sites? Do some people expect you to always dig for clay pots from millennia ago, so to speak, and believe things mere hundreds of years ago are too new to be in your field?
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Jul 14, 2016 21:38
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Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:It feels so weird to see someone talk about artifacts at an archaeological site and it's referring to a place in the United States founded by the English. I visited a dig site at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria once, it was really interesting. Turns out that even in a field as heavily researched as the Third Reich there's still a lot of information that only archaeology can give us.
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Jul 14, 2016 21:41
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Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:I guess I can pivot this into a useful question: do preconceptions about archaeology like mine limit the availability of sites? Do some people expect you to always dig for clay pots from millennia ago, so to speak, and believe things mere hundreds of years ago are too new to be in your field? Not really, most archaeology in the United States is salvage work now, so it legally has to be done if the site meets criteria. Basically, 50-55 years is old enough to be considered. It's why the Mayhew Lodge in Oak Creek Canyon in Arizona can be considered in archaeological site, despite being visited by Walt Disney and only closing in the 1960s, and why a 1930s ranching annex in Maricopa County is an archaeological site just as much as a Hohokam village. Also, there are very real reasons to dig recent sites, and the best reason goes back to the revision of history away from Big Man history. Archaeology allows you to see what wasn't written down in historical records. Day to day life, the lives of those who had no voice. It's a good political use of archaeology, as it can give a voice back to voiceless. The concentration camp example is a good one, as is the archaeology of historic reservations and slave archaeology, and even colonial household archaeology. It helps us better understand the lives and contributions of the marginalized to our collective history.
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Jul 14, 2016 22:20
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Can anyone comment on the politics surrounding archaeology done in the Americas? According to people like Charles C. Mann archaeologists have found more and more pre-contact sites in the last 20 years that, for example, has effectively thrown out the idea of the Bering Land Bridge being the way human beings came to inhabit the Americas -- which is still news to a lot of people. It seems like there has been a revolution in our understanding of pre-contact America, with archaeology being on the forefront. That also, presumably, thrusts the discipline into the limelight when it comes to dealing with debates about pre-contact demographics, population, technology etc. that are touchy subjects for a lot of people.
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Jul 14, 2016 22:43
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Dreylad posted:Can anyone comment on the politics surrounding archaeology done in the Americas? According to people like Charles C. Mann archaeologists have found more and more pre-contact sites in the last 20 years that, for example, has effectively thrown out the idea of the Bering Land Bridge being the way human beings came to inhabit the Americas -- which is still news to a lot of people. It seems like there has been a revolution in our understanding of pre-contact America, with archaeology being on the forefront. That also, presumably, thrusts the discipline into the limelight when it comes to dealing with debates about pre-contact demographics, population, technology etc. that are touchy subjects for a lot of people. The Bering Land Bridge hasn't really been discredited, as there is pretty much no evidence for a Pacific crossing that early. What has been more or less discredited is the Ice Free Corridor as the way people moved from East Beringia (Modern West Alaska) into the areas south of the Cordellian and Laurentide ice sheets. This is based primarily on Monte Verde, which is a site in southern Chile that dates fairly confidentially to 16 KYA, which puts it a good 4 KYA before the earliest Clovis stuff, and also at a time where there is no gap in the ice sheets that humans could exploit. So what this more or less means is that people living in West Beringia likely moved down the coast of the ice sheets, which would involve some preparation, though no where near as much as a Pacific crossing, and basically went down the west coast of North America, reached south of the ice sheets and dispersed from there. The other sites that are dated to older than 16 KYA are very, very, very unlikely. There are large problems with their dating, particularly carbon contamination that makes any radiocarbon dates highly problematic along with some cherry picking of data. So it's very unlikely that sites like Cactus Hill and Meadowcroft are really as old as some claim. However, Monte Verde is essentially a closed case, and given it's extreme southern position it is not unlikely at all that there are more Pre-Clovis sites further north. Also, dates from sites in Western Alaska put human entry from Siberia at roughly 25-30 KYA, which is well old enough. Genetic evidence also supports this. So the general outline supported by the evidence is of a series of population movements across the Bering Land Bridge some 30-20 KYA, followed by a fairly rapid expansion down the coast which then pushed inland and eventually developed in the Clovis Culture in North America, and other localized traditions elsewhere. When it comes to population demographics, that also varies quite a bit. But estimates are decently high, though it varies by area. I am most familiar with Southwest demographics, and the most relevant ones would be at around AD 1450-1519 or so, as that would be just before any chance for epidemic disease. At that time you're looking at the collapse of Hohokam society in the Phoenix area, which seems to have involved some catastrophic population decline, based on excavation at sites like Pueblo Grande. I am talking over 200 years going from 1,000 people a generation at the village to 180 people, which seems to be a combination of food stress leading to some truly massive death rates, and also out migration. So for the area as a whole, it seems like it goes from maybe 20,000 people at a high to 1,000 at most by AD 1450, and by the contact the Akimel O'otham (the direct descendants of Phoenix area Hohokam) number a few thousand and are living in much smaller settlements. But in other areas, population booms. Hopi in northern Arizona probably has around 10,000 people from AD 1450-Contact, roughly the same for Zuni, and around 40,000 or so people for entire Rio Grande Pueblo region, which goes from Taos to the Salinas Pueblos. You also have some settlements in the Rio Grande reaching 5,000 people a "village" which at that point are basically towns. For the entire region, the population is likely in the low hundred thousands prior to Spanish invasion. Keep in mind that the Southwest is less dense than other regions, and populations in the Pacific Northwest, Mississippian Southeast and North East Woodlands are likely very, very high. For just the US and Canada as defined now, you're looking at probably 50 million people at a minimum. It's even higher for the cities of Mexico and South America. So yeah, the level of cultural achievement and population levels reached by pre-contact civilizations suggested by archaeology is really troublesome if you want to see the land as a vast expanse, devoid of people, those who do exist not working the land, with a primitive technological base and a lack of any real history. In other words the classic American historical view.
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Jul 15, 2016 00:21
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KiteAuraan posted:What are repatriation and excavation laws like for Anglo-American and especially colonial slave burials? I've never really researched the topic heavily. Is there often any way to link to living descendants or are they just given a respectful reburial? Also, what are the legal limitations on bioarchaeological research? Pretty much just respectful reburial in most cases. Honestly opening up burials is a huge loving hassle so we never do it if we can avoid it-- you have to go to the state for a permit, demonstrating a pressing need to excavate, proving you can care for the remains in the interim, providing a reburial plan, excluding the public from the excavation, and all that stuff. You can do stuff other than rebury, but then you have to get it cleared by the descendants, if you can find them, or by a relevant cultural authority or whatever. Native burials obviously you have to bring in the tribes and have a chat with them about it, but I don't think we've ever found any. As for forensic anthropology and the like, you can pretty much do whatever you like as long as you're cleared to unearth the bones; Jamestown has done a shitload of testing with the Smithsonian on various remains we've found. You may remember a hubbub some while back about cannibalism at Jamestown; a skull with processing marks was found in a Starving Time-era cellar, and when it was all forensically analyzed it proved to be the skull of an approximately fourteen year old girl, born in England, probably a maidservant given that her high nitrogen levels indicated a wealthy, high-meat diet, but her low lead levels indicated she was eating from peasant wooden vessels rather than expensive lead-glazed or pewter ones. Honestly, the most restrictions we've run into doing bioarchaeology was when we tried to conclusively link one of our sets of remains, believed to be Bartholomew Gosnold, to a set of remains belonging to Gosnold's cousin or sister or something. Unfortunately, she was buried under a Church of England priory, so we had to get clearance from the CoE, which is notoriously tight-fisted about letting people dig up random noble skeletons, given how many people would love to do all kinds of DNA testing to "prove" their relationship with nobility. In the US, though, it's more a matter of professional ethics than legality. Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:It feels so weird to see someone talk about artifacts at an archaeological site and it's referring to a place in the United States founded by the English. Honestly, that's my favorite thing about working at sites like this: they feel immediate and relevant, in a way that, say, Roman sites in Bulgaria might not. (Though those are cool for other reasons.) As for the misconceptions, yeah that's a big one, though the major one I get is people expecting us to be digging for dinosaur bones.  But we do pull out lots of ceramics, which helps people grok that this is indeed archaeology, even if it's not Ancient History per se. This is just me guessing here, but a lot of people visit us after going to Colonial Williamsburg, the largest living history museum in the US (and the second largest in the world after the Imperial Palace Museum in Beijing, apparently?) so they're already sort of in the colonial history mindset.Dreylad posted:Can anyone comment on the politics surrounding archaeology done in the Americas? According to people like Charles C. Mann archaeologists have found more and more pre-contact sites in the last 20 years that, for example, has effectively thrown out the idea of the Bering Land Bridge being the way human beings came to inhabit the Americas -- which is still news to a lot of people. It seems like there has been a revolution in our understanding of pre-contact America, with archaeology being on the forefront. That also, presumably, thrusts the discipline into the limelight when it comes to dealing with debates about pre-contact demographics, population, technology etc. that are touchy subjects for a lot of people. The biggest thing I've seen archaeology change about perceptions of pre-Contact history is the stereotypical and dumb idea they were living in sparse villages with no concept of basic technology, scattered throughout a vast wilderness. Like KiteAuraan says, many parts of the Americas were really quite densely settled. Hell, the territory occupied by the Powhatan confederacy*-- eastern Virginia from the fall line to the sea, basically-- was known as Tsenacommacah, roughly translated as "densely settled land," in contrast with the western highlands, which were less densely settled (partially thanks to the lack of easy transport afforded by tidewater rivers) and occupied by the scary Monocans, whom everyone was afraid of. *actually the scholarly term is "Powhatan complex chiefdom," for some reason, presumably to differentiate the Powhatans, who were almost feudal in their hierarchical relationships, from the Iroquois Confederacy, which had a council of clans with votes and stuff.
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Jul 15, 2016 01:41
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Quorum posted:*actually the scholarly term is "Powhatan complex chiefdom," for some reason, presumably to differentiate the Powhatans, who were almost feudal in their hierarchical relationships, from the Iroquois Confederacy, which had a council of clans with votes and stuff.
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Jul 15, 2016 01:52
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KiteAuraan posted:If I remember the tiny little bit of study I did on that region, they're almost like a kingdom aren't they? With a very rigid hierarchy and clear top leader? Which is also politically loaded, because if they were organized in a feudal or near kingdom level, why don't they get called a kingdom or feudal state? Sorta. The way it worked (as far as I understand it, I love pre-Contact political history but I haven't done as much research into it as I would like!) was, the chief of a given tribe would pay tribute (of food, principally) to a paramount chief (the Powhatan, though there was also a council of advisors and also a secondary chief who governed matters of war), who in turn granted protection, particularly from the Monocans to the west, food from the central storehouses in times of famine (basically a social safety net!), and sacred materials such as copper from the central storehouses. The distribution of these sacred materials was a key part of the Powhatan political hierarchy. But you're right, it very strongly resembles a feudal society, especially an early one! The main difference is that the chiefs didn't hold their authority thanks to an appointment or delegation by the paramount chief, but rather by their own independent right. There's definitely some politically-loaded language at play here though, wherein the Powhatan get called a "tribe" or a "chiefdom" rather than a "kingdom" or what have you.
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Jul 15, 2016 03:05
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Isn't "feudal" a loaded word in its own right (though for very different reasons)? Some historians of medieval Europe would claim that "feudalism never existed."
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Jul 15, 2016 03:40
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How much do we know about relative population in America say 8000 YA? It just seems so weird to me that a supercontinent got populated by some guys who got super lost while mammoth hunting in Siberia, where I assume there arent a lot of people to start with.
Baron Porkface fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Jul 15, 2016 |
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Jul 15, 2016 04:13
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Baron Porkface posted:How mch do we know about relative population in America say 8000 YA? It just seems so weird to me that a supercontinent got populated by some guys who got super lost while mammoth hunting in Siberia, where I assume there arent a lot of people to start with. The short answer is climate change. The population rose because of that. It was a very few people, low thousands at absolute most, but when the climate warmed, diets shifted. Lots more plant foods that were easily obtained got added to the diet, and within 2000 years of the date you give, you have domestication in highland Mexico and parts of Peru. Then it spreads and allows for further population growth, which in turn leads to populations moving where they can get arable land and cases of hunter-gatherers on the margins of sedentary societies adopting agriculture. Once that takes off, and you get more domestication events, like the Eastern Agricultural Complex, it further encourages intensive agriculture and population growth. In areas where wild resources are so abundant that you don't even need agriculture, you also see large population growth, supported by the oceans and coastal plant foods, which happens with the Chumash and along the Pacific Northwest Coast. It's basically the same thing that led to the increases in group size in the rest of the world, because really, in the Pleistocene, and even into the early Holocene, human populations worldwide were very small. Also, Paleo-Indian groups were also able to spread rapidly because their subsistence base wasn't just mammoth. It's a preservation issue, but there are now plenty of known sites of Clovis date that are filled with small game and plant remains, so that also aided the earliest growth of the initial colonists.
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Jul 15, 2016 04:23
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I don't know if you've read or have an opinion about it, but you might include Lawrence Keeley's War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage to your book list in the OP. I mention it as Keely's thesis is that 20th century Archeologist and Anthropologists "pacified the past" by ignoring, denying, and downplaying evidence of organized violence among pre-civilized peoples, for various political reasons (usually with a strong Neo-Rousseauan bent). Background: I am a historian who has assigned this in my War and Society courses. Silver2195 posted:Isn't "feudal" a loaded word in its own right (though for very different reasons)? Some historians of medieval Europe would claim that "feudalism never existed." It can be a bit loaded, if you leave out qualifiers and claim it just applied to all Europe during the Middle Ages, and some do take it further and claim it was at most a phenomenon you see in Central France and no where else (note: I am not one of those guys). If you want to be safe, you can just call it "manoralism." Captain_Maclaine fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Jul 15, 2016 |
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Jul 15, 2016 13:51
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Captain_Maclaine posted:I don't know if you've read or have an opinion about it, but you might include Lawrence Keeley's War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage to your book list in the OP. I mention it as Keely's thesis is that 20th century Archeologist and Anthropologists "pacified the past" by ignoring, denying, and downplaying evidence of organized violence among pre-civilized peoples, for various political reasons (usually with a strong Neo-Rousseauan bent).
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Jul 15, 2016 23:43
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KiteAuraan posted:I haven't read it myself, though I've read about about Keeley's thesis and data, and I am inclined to agree with his conclusions. I'll add it to the OP. I'm a big fan of it, in case that wasn't obvious. His original motivation, if I remember the intro right, was finding out how quickly his grant applications got shot down whenever he proposed to study sites of what he believed were, and in retrospect proved to be, evidence of prehistoric organized violence.
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Jul 16, 2016 04:27
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Captain_Maclaine posted:I'm a big fan of it, in case that wasn't obvious. His original motivation, if I remember the intro right, was finding out how quickly his grant applications got shot down whenever he proposed to study sites of what he believed were, and in retrospect proved to be, evidence of prehistoric organized violence. There is still a movement to deny evidence of prehistoric violence even after it's publication as well. In the Southwest it takes the form of either downplaying evidence for warfare (which it is important to note is nowhere near the level it reached in the Pacific Northwest or Eastern Woodlands, those places were bloodbaths) or outright denial. It's funny because work like Coltrain et al's (2012) work on Wetherill's Cave 7, which concludes that it doesn't represent a massacre site, as previously thought, but rather a cemetery, still finds evidence for violent death and a lot of perimortem trauma in the male burial population in the cave. So even though I've seen the study used to argue against massacres and warfare, it actually supports a view of Basketmaker II society in the region as having a fairly high level of conflict between adult males. Coltrain, Joan Brenner, Joel C. Janetski and Michael D. Lewis 2012 A re-assessment of Basketmaker II cave 7: massacre site or cemetery context. Journal of Archaeological Science 39:2220-2230. Citation if you're interested in reading the Coltrain et al. study. There was also a paper I found rather disturbing which basically argued anyone studying violence in the American Southwest is a man or comes from a man's world and that it was all peace with minor conflict, and that conflict studies basically resulted from men sitting around campfires. I really wish I could remember the author because quite frankly I found the article used critical studies to attempt to shut down an avenue of study the author was uncomfortable with, but would like to read it again to make certain.
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Jul 16, 2016 06:21
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What are the major reasons for denying the warfare, both for past historians and present? KiteAuraan posted:The short answer is climate change. The population rose because of that. It was a very few people, low thousands at absolute most, but when the climate warmed, diets shifted. Lots more plant foods that were easily obtained got added to the diet, and within 2000 years of the date you give, you have domestication in highland Mexico and parts of Peru. Then it spreads and allows for further population growth, which in turn leads to populations moving where they can get arable land and cases of hunter-gatherers on the margins of sedentary societies adopting agriculture. Once that takes off, and you get more domestication events, like the Eastern Agricultural Complex, it further encourages intensive agriculture and population growth. In areas where wild resources are so abundant that you don't even need agriculture, you also see large population growth, supported by the oceans and coastal plant foods, which happens with the Chumash and along the Pacific Northwest Coast. It's basically the same thing that led to the increases in group size in the rest of the world, because really, in the Pleistocene, and even into the early Holocene, human populations worldwide were very small. Going off of this, were the major reasons for conflict-- it would seem most resources were fairly abundant at least in certain areas during certain times. Captain_Maclaine posted:I'm a big fan of it, in case that wasn't obvious. His original motivation, if I remember the intro right, was finding out how quickly his grant applications got shot down whenever he proposed to study sites of what he believed were, and in retrospect proved to be, evidence of prehistoric organized violence. What do archaeologists look for when they are looking for evidence of organized violence? I imagine a bunch of arrowheads or whatever but I'm guessing there's more to it. How did he figure out where he should even start looking?
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Jul 17, 2016 16:03
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tsa posted:What are the major reasons for denying the warfare, both for past historians and present? Keeley claims that through the 20th century, Archeologists and Anthropologists displayed a persistent bias against recognizing evidence of organized violence (and indeed violence generally) in pre-modern peoples. He argues this comes in large part from a Neo-Rousseauan bent present within both fields, which prefers to see mankind as peaceful in its "natural" state, and which is itself largely a result of post World Wars collective unease with what industrial society has wrought on the world. Seeing that society as being the main cause of the bloodbaths of the 20th century, he argues that those experts collective, and mostly subconsciously, project imagined lost virtues like peaceful coexistence back onto societies in previous, less developed forms of social organization. In short: they wanted to see the atrocities of the 20th century as aberrations, rather than as just the logical conclusion of ordinary human violence married to new technologies, and so imagined up a peaceful past existence that humans had departed from. quote:What do archaeologists look for when they are looking for evidence of organized violence? I imagine a bunch of arrowheads or whatever but I'm guessing there's more to it. How did he figure out where he should even start looking? Keeley relies on a combination of archeological evidence (mass graves, bodies with arrowheads lodged in their skulls, village fortifications, etc), and uses ethnographic studies to depart from the older, flawed Archeological/Anthropological narrative of "peaceful savage."
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Jul 17, 2016 16:28
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Thanks! It would be interesting if you or KiteAuraan could expand on present day denial- are these like the anti CC climate scientists of archaeology or are they a larger more influential group?
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Jul 17, 2016 16:38
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tsa posted:Thanks! It would be interesting if you or KiteAuraan could expand on present day denial- are these like the anti CC climate scientists of archaeology or are they a larger more influential group? I'd have to leave that for KiteAuraan, as this isn't actually my field. I'm an early modern historian, and I don't know the current archeological/anthropological environment well at all (I just know Keeley as his work dovetails well with my own War and Society research).
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Jul 17, 2016 17:30
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Similarly, I work in a period where there is ample documentary evidence for organized violence, both amongst native groups and between natives and Europeans, so I really can't imagine how denialism would even work! Pre-Contact period archaeology is a different beast entirely.
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Jul 17, 2016 17:52
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Keeley claims that through the 20th century, Archeologists and Anthropologists displayed a persistent bias against recognizing evidence of organized violence (and indeed violence generally) in pre-modern peoples. He argues this comes in large part from a Neo-Rousseauan bent present within both fields, which prefers to see mankind as peaceful in its "natural" state, and which is itself largely a result of post World Wars collective unease with what industrial society has wrought on the world. Seeing that society as being the main cause of the bloodbaths of the 20th century, he argues that those experts collective, and mostly subconsciously, project imagined lost virtues like peaceful coexistence back onto societies in previous, less developed forms of social organization. Anecdotally I've heard that there's been a similar resistance among many scholars to acknowledge the link between the spread of humans and the extinction of North American megafauna, with a lot of resistance to the idea that pre-historical humans could have caused triggered widespread extinctions. I don't have the relevant knowledge to evaluate those claims myself but the person relating the anecdote claimed that much of the resistance to the over-hunting hypothesis was motivated by a psychological resistance to seeing modern environmental devastation by humans as a natural outgrowth of our technology and growth, rather than the corrupting influences of modern society.
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Jul 17, 2016 21:09
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Why is it that American political and technological development was "behind the curve" of the rest of the world? It's so astonishing to think that the mesoamerican and Incan civilizations rose and fell in the AD.
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Jul 18, 2016 01:11
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Curious about the 16KYA site in Chile, would sea levels have been lower then? Could evidence of these people's travel from the north be under water? Does that 16KYA culture leave artifacts that would still be identifiable after thousands of years of surf and sea life?
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Jul 18, 2016 01:35
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unwantedplatypus posted:Why is it that American political and technological development was "behind the curve" of the rest of the world? It's so astonishing to think that the mesoamerican and Incan civilizations rose and fell in the AD. Guns, Germs & Steel (which I know is more pop science) theorizes that a lack of beasts of burden drastically shifted focus on what technologies were developed. Horses didn't (in the modern era) exist in the New World until the Spanish arrived, and the closest thing they had to Cattle and the like were the llamas and Alpacas in the south.
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Jul 18, 2016 01:45
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tsa posted:Thanks! It would be interesting if you or KiteAuraan could expand on present day denial- are these like the anti CC climate scientists of archaeology or are they a larger more influential group? In my experience it's a smaller group of mostly older researchers, or people who were trained in the older models. It mostly takes the form of arguing about intensities of violent conflict, rather than presence or absence and saying that since warfare or organized violence aren't as high as they are in other areas that it wasn't an important part of prehistoric lives for the people you're studying. A good example in the Southwest is the La Plata region. There is fairly decent evidence for massacres, with whole families showing evidence of cannibalism dismembered and thrown into kivas (ceremonial structures) that were then burnt and a general increase in violence in the La Plata area. The argument I've heard against warfare is that the kiva incidents represent witch executions, as performed ethnographically, though the accounts I've read of such executions are limited to one or two accused individuals. However, there is other evidence that the La Plata people were regularly engaged in raiding against their neighbors. There was a bioarchaeological study of remains from the region from AD 1000-1300 in Ancient Burial Practices in the American Southwest that found that a statistically significant amount of female burials from the region showed evidence of healed fractures and other trauma, and that they had multiple episodes of it through their life. Also, the female burial population, based on skeletal markers of genetic affinity, appeared to be drawn from multiple regions of the Four Corners area, not just the La Plata. Men in contrast had fewer episodes of violent trauma and where more homogeneous genetically. The inference being that the La Plata people were raiding adjacent populations and taking women as slave-wives. Taken with the other evidence for violence in the area, the La Plata people seem uniquely warlike for the region. However it's also not just scientists who have opposed conflict studies. There is a push back to evidence of violence and warfare by the native community, which I understand completely. It's based in a fear that their ancestors will be characterized as savages and war-like cannibals, a return to old racist ideas and giving the current crop of anti-native racists new ammo. There's no real remedy for that, though I'd say publishing and publicizing evidence of warfare and cannibalism from non-Native peoples and contexts, which I take to mean Anglo-American and Spanish, and Western European, could sort of allay some fears. Basically showing that everyone's ancestors had some ugly episodes in their past.
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Jul 18, 2016 03:32
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Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:It feels so weird to see someone talk about artifacts at an archaeological site and it's referring to a place in the United States founded by the English. One of my old lecturers digs at Peleliu, which is in the now Republic of Palau, as part of the War in the Pacific. Unfortunately whilst there's a few US Marines who're willing to talk about it there is only one confirmed living Japanese survivor, and whilst he's down for meeting former enemies and all that he's apparently not too keen to talk about the actual war itself. Fun elements of the excavation include the fact that one fifth of US grenades didn't detonate on being thrown, so the jungle is full of steadily decaying (read: ever more unstable) explosive compounds that can be triggered by touch! e: also I dug in Palestine and can confirm that be well uh pretty political. We had to hide the documentation of our site (specifically, its precise location) because it was an Orthodox church within walking range of local settler compounds: politically motivated vandalism of archaeological sites pre-dates ISIS. Obliterati fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Jul 18, 2016 |
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Jul 18, 2016 22:29
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On the topic of erasing the past or claiming sites for a group that obviously didn't construct them, there is a new incident from South Africa. Michael Tellinger, known crank, has teamed up with a South African Afrikaaner, Johan Heine, to claim that sites in northern South Africa are 200 KYA and are the remnants of the Annunaki, supposed ancestors of all humans and noted not-Sub-Saharan Africans. Now, to anyone even slightly versed in the archaeology of Southern Africa, these are clearly kraals and compounds of the Great Zimbabwe culture and the Kingdom of Zimbabwe, which dates from the 13th through 15th centuries AD, or perhaps of the earlier and ancestral Kingdom of Mapungubwe, which lasted from the 11th through 13th centuries. But to those who even unwittingly want to erase pre-Dutch Bantu settlement of the region, the ruins cannot possibly be anything but far older ruins of a far whiter race. While this stuff is fringe now, relegated to the realm of pseudoscience, it is important to confront, lest it gain traction in the general public.
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Jul 19, 2016 06:53
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KiteAuraan posted:While this stuff is fringe now, relegated to the realm of pseudoscience, it is important to confront, lest it gain traction in the general public. quote:The Anunnkai Timeline – Coming to Earth: (According to Sitchin)
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Jul 19, 2016 21:49
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Are they actually trying to suggest that Sumerians were aliens?
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Jul 19, 2016 22:35
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OwlFancier posted:Are they actually trying to suggest that Sumerians were aliens? Are you trying to suggest they weren't?! 
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Jul 19, 2016 22:58
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Stinky Wizzleteats posted:I'm interested in this part. I cant speak to what happens in America but in the UK there is usually a local government archaeologist who must be notified of work being undertaken in their region and they will make an effort to carry out some kind of inspection of the work being carried out. There is also a requirement to submit a report (a Data Structure Report) to various government and national agencies at the conclusion of any project. Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:It feels so weird to see someone talk about artifacts at an archaeological site and it's referring to a place in the United States founded by the English. Archaeology at heart is the study of the remains of human material culture, it doesnt really matter when those remains were deposited. For example the Tucson Garbage Project is a study of landfill sites around Tucson beginning in the 70s thats highlighted some interesting discrepancies in how people say they behave and what the material remains actually say about their behaviour.
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Jul 19, 2016 23:19
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It's a little odd to me from living in the UK that people have such a discrete view of history as being old and removed. So much of the world I live in every day is hundreds if not thousands of years old, and even the "new" things can easily be a century or so old, from a very different time as surely as the thousand year old ones are.
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Jul 20, 2016 01:13
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Strudel Man posted:Somehow I don't think we need to worry about this gaining traction in the general public. You would be surprised how often I see people bring up this stuff as a Makes You Think, sort of thing. The same thing with that Ancient Aliens show. Even if they don't buy into every aspect of it I've had people talk to me about how maybe there is something to some of it. Edit: OwlFancier posted:It's a little odd to me from living in the UK that people have such a discrete view of history as being old and removed. It's not really that different in parts of the United States. For example where I live, Phoenix, there is an unbroken series of occupation going back about 4000 years, starting with seasonal hunter-gatherer camps and their stone caches. Downtown is built entirely on a Hohokam village that was occupied from AD 400-1450, the airport is on a village that was occupied from AD 200-1450, Luke Air Force Base has 3000 year old hunter-gatherer caches in it, the airport has a pit house that dates from AD 1400-1750 or so, and there is the old town Anglo-American stuff beginning in the 1870s. It's just that outside the latest Anglo-American stuff it's seen as "Not our History" in terms of not being viewed as the history of the majority of the populace, and therefore something old, removed, and too often viewed as vanished. KiteAuraan fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Jul 20, 2016 |
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Jul 20, 2016 04:41
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tbf I think there's a reasonable psychological distinction between things which are very old but just part of everyday life and things which are very old and interesting but not in use anymore like you wander into a random village in the English* countryside and most of the houses will be about 400 years old and the church can easily be twice that and they'll all have been used by a continuous group of people pretty much every day for that entire period, which is a different kind of history altogether from eg Stonehenge or Skara brae but then there are lots of old buildings with similar continuous use in the americas, particularly in Latin America, not sure about indigenous structures though eg when the cliff palaces in the south west were abandoned or whatever, I imagine all the genocide would have been pretty disruptive *and in the rest of Europe obv but I don't have as much experience wandering into random villages there
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Jul 20, 2016 18:13
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Random Integer posted:Archaeology at heart is the study of the remains of human material culture, it doesnt really matter when those remains were deposited. For example the Tucson Garbage Project is a study of landfill sites around Tucson beginning in the 70s thats highlighted some interesting discrepancies in how people say they behave and what the material remains actually say about their behaviour. The university I did my undergrad archeaology degree at ran a project from 2006 to 'excavate' a 1991 Ford Transit van: http://www.archaeologyuk.org/ba/ba92/feat2.shtml You can apply archaeological methods and analysis to almost anything - by pulling apart that Transit they were able to piece together its history, what accidents it had been in, how many times it had been repainted, how well (or badly) it had been repaired, what it had carried, who had used it, what types of service station pasties they had been eating in it etc. etc. And just like the Tuscon project there were some interesting variences between the history of the van as recorded by its paperwork, as remembered by its previous owners and what was suggested by the archaeology. It didn't tell us anything we didn't already know (because it was virtually 'contemporary archaeology') but it proved how much you can discern by 'excavating' a site and how much mundane information that no one would ever think to put into a historical record can be learnt by archaeology, which is one of its greatest assets.
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Jul 20, 2016 18:46
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