Thursday 30 May 2013

"Oh! Scrapers and Choppers and Picks. Oh My!" Apologies to L. Frank Baum et al.*

A representation of the Movius Line. [Somehow Ubeidiye was translocated to the Indian Ocean, far from its true position near to Ain Hanech in the Levant. Thanks to Norton for the inadvertent loan of this graphic. 
First, R.I.P. [Hallam L.] Movius Line, that 60+ year old invisible boundary between, on the one hand the 'hand-axe' Acheulean of Africa, Europe and south Asia, and on the other hand what at one time was conceived of as a 'hand-ax'-less Lower Palaeolithic of east and southeast Asia. Those days are behind us. We know now that there are rock chunks similar enough to the 'hand axes' of the western side of Movius's line[It seems to me that the 'absence of hand axes' in the eastern parts of Asia probably had more to do with Mao's People's Republic's xenophobia and anti-intellectualism than with any empirical observation.]

Anyhoo, today's phys.org brings us word of recent discoveries in the PRC.
"A Preliminary Report on the Excavation of the Guochachang II Paleolithic Site in the Danjiangkou Reservoir Region, Hubei Province," by Hao Li, Chao-rong Li and Kathleen Kuman. Acta Anthropologica Sinica 32(2):144--155, 2013.
The open-air early Palaeolithic site of Guochachang yielded 132 stone artifacts from an excavation that covered approximately 500 m2. The swag comprises 9 hammerstones, 14 cores, 69 flakes, 18 chunks, and 22 "stone tools." Those "tools" are diagnosed as 13 'scrapers,' 5 'choppers,' 1 'pick,' and 3 'handaxes.'

A while back, here and here, I unsubtly tried to bang home the final nail in the coffin of the old typology that ascribes function by analogy to shapes that are broadly familiar to modern humans: the chopper, the axe, the pick, the discoid, and the cleaver. With nothing other than shape to use as a determinant of function, those old archaeologists [and the ones that continue to use such typologies in the present] are employing what's known as a 'formal analogy,' i.e. one based purely on shape. Such analogies are often a good place to start, but they are notoriously fickle when it comes down to interpreting the true function of a lump of stone. What's needed are solid 'relational' analogies that use more than resemblance in arguing for a 'real' similarity of form

Here's a quick example. Claiming that a lump of rock is a hand axe because its shape reminds one of an axe head is tantamount to claiming that the item below, on the left, is a cow femur, which is what the item on the right happens, in fact, to be.
By the way, the item on the left is a [nearly anatomically correct] doggy chew toy, if it wasn't already abundantly clear.

So, Li, Li, and Kuman begin with the unremarkable pieces in the assemblage. A hammerstone, a core, and some small and large flakes. So far, so good.

From "A Preliminary Report on the Excavation of the Guochachang II Paleolithic Site in the Danjiangkou Reservoir Region, Hubei Province," by Hao Li, Chao-rong Li and Kathleen Kuman. Acta Anthropologica Sinica 32(2):144--155, 2013.

The authors then show us 2 of the 13 'scrapers' [1 and 2 in the drawing below], the solitary 'pick' [item number 3], and 3 'choppers' [4, 5, and 6]. Compare the two views of item 2 in the drawing above with the two views of 'chopper' number 5 in the drawing below. Both have cortex dorsally and ventrally [whichever is which---take your pick. No, not number 3, the 'pick'!]. Both have had flakes removed dorsally and ventrally. Yet the one above is called a core [which is a safe inference] and the one below is deemed a 'chopper,' not such a secure inference. What, I ask you, is so different about these two rocks that they are classified differently---the one as a source of flakes, and the other as the desired end product? I think most of us would be hard pressed to mount a convincing argument either way. The authors have clearly imbibed the Kool-Aid of the French lithic 'school' and that of L. S. B. Leakey.

I don't read Mandarin Chinese. So, I'm just guessing. I think 1 and 2 are probably the "scrapers"; 4, 5, and 6 are likely the "choppers"; 3 is most likely the "pick." From "A Preliminary Report on the Excavation of the Guochachang II Paleolithic Site in the Danjiangkou Reservoir Region, Hubei Province," by Hao Li, Chao-rong Li and Kathleen Kuman. Acta Anthropologica Sinica 32(2):144--155, 2013.
Finally, Li, Li and Kuman trot out the 3 'hand axes.' I dunno. I think it's a bit of a stretch even to label these three rock lumps as 'hand axes,' with or without the implicit functional ascription. These are some pretty sad looking 'hand axes,' if you ask me. The shape of number 1, below, could NEVER have been intentional. Unless the 'knapper' could foresee where the natural fracture planes were, inside the rock, the shape of very few of the removals could have been predicted. Thus, the shape we see is just the product of happenstance.

Hand axe #1. 
Check out the impressive number of unintentionally shaped removals. Most simply follow the natrual fracture planes of the rock. Can you say that? "Fracture plane?"
The same is undoubtedly true of 'hand ax' #2, pictured below.
Hand axe #2
Once again, a good number of unintentionally shaped removals. 
Maybe I lack the imagination required to be an archaeologist of the palaeolithic. Clearly I don't see whatever it is that the Real Palaeolithic Archaeologists see in these lumps. Jeebuz Murphy!
Hand axe #3.
I have no idea why the authors didn't label this one a 'pick.' From "A Preliminary Report on the Excavation of the Guochachang II Paleolithic Site in the Danjiangkou Reservoir Region, Hubei Province," by Hao Li, Chao-rong Li and Kathleen Kuman. Acta Anthropologica Sinica 32(2):144--155, 2013.
I won't be beating this dead equine any further today. I'm sure that there'll be plenty more opportunities down the track.

One thing's for sure.The Finished Artifact Fallacy is alive and well and living in east Asia.

Take care. I'll see you again as soon as I can find some time to work up a critical lather.
* Members of the et al.

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SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

Wednesday 29 May 2013

Working at... "Oh, my! Scrapers and Choppers and Picks. Oh, my!"

I warned you that any subversions will take a back seat to moving World Headquarters 1500 km to the north at the end of June. Nevertheless, I can't resist banging, once again, on the persistence of using functional labels for stone artifacts in the Early [or Lower] Palaeolithic. I'm working on it.

From phys.org come claims of function ascribed to "early" palaeolithic stone artifacts from the site of Guochachang II in the Danjiangkou Reservoir area.

"A Preliminary Report on the Excavation of the Guochachang II Paleolithic Site in the Danjiangkou Reservoir Region, Hubei Province," by Hao Li, Chao-rong Li and Kathleen Kuman. Acta Anthropologica Sinica 32(2):144--155, 2013.



ANY TIME IS A GOOD TIME TO GET GOOD STUFF AT THE SUBVERSIVE ARCHAEOLOGIST'S OWN, EXCLUSIVE "A DRINK IS LIKE A HUG" ONLINE BOUTIQUE

SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

Sunday 26 May 2013

The Subversive Archaeologist Declares A Desultory Hiatus

Dear Friends, 

Consider this blog on a hiatus of sorts. My last blurt was Tuesday. Seems forever ago. Clearly I'm not keeping up my end of the bargain. Life intrudes. A brief justification follows.

In reality I'm not just moving somewhere new, I'm also completing the move that I made in September 2011---out of my family domicile to a new, solitary, existence. At that time I left most of half a household behind, including all of my papers, journals, old clothes, tools, half a garage full of stuff, and so on. That's why I've already starting "packing" so far in advance of June 30.

At one and the same time I'm having to cope with a) the procrastination associated with a vast packing project, b) looking for a new home 1500 km away, c) scraping together the means to make such a move, and d) disappointing all of the friends I've made while I was still blogging more or less regularly. I'm finding it hard to focus on any one thing, and in the chaos the Subversive Archaeologist is on an unintentional, but in truth a de facto hiatus.

So, the Subversive Archaeologist will pop up here now and again before the end of June. Sooner, I hope, than later.

Thanks for being such a great audience.

ANY TIME IS A GOOD TIME TO GET GOOD STUFF AT THE SUBVERSIVE ARCHAEOLOGIST'S OWN, EXCLUSIVE "A DRINK IS LIKE A HUG" ONLINE BOUTIQUE
SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.


Tuesday 21 May 2013

Technology And Knowledge: Joined At The Hip---Robin Ridington's Contribution To Archaeological Practise

This will be a bit like the old Touchstone Thursdays, in which yours truly draws your attention to a gem of a paper---one that really advances the discipline of archaeology. This time it's from an ethnologist, Robin Ridington (Professor Emeritus, University of British Columbia). Before you get all sweaty and turn away from someone who's studied living people, think back to your history of archaeological thought course. Saint Lewis R. Binford hath decreed that thou shalt fare better in pursuit of archaeological wisdom if thou makest thyself a comparative ethnographer. Here endeth the lesson.

In the course of getting ready to move, I've been downsizing by culling and recycling my accumulated reprints, which were stored in 11 full, letter-sized file cabinet drawers. [Who said that? There's nothing wrong with being anal retentive!] Making the tough decision about what to leave in and what to leave out of my collection was fairly straightforward---I'm keeping only the articles published in books or obscure periodicals. That's because, as a retiree of the University of California I will have library privileges until I croak [including remote access via the web]. So, it'll be easy to acquire electronic versions of [nearly] anything published in referred journals. 'Kay so, one that I came across and am keeping is Robin Ridington's 1982 Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology paper, "Technology, World View and Adaptive Strategy in a Northern Hunting Society." That article and several of Ridington's others point up a distinction not always uppermost in the mind of archaeologists. Where 'technology' is concerned, the 'nology' comes first.
 
Archaeologists are almost obsessive when it comes to what they universally identify as "technology," or [the almost anachronistic] "material culture." I don't know about you. But, when I'm thinking about where my next meal is coming from, I only have to decide between the technology of the stadium-sized supermarket and that of the local greengrocer. It's not hard to keep those choices in mind. First, I make a list, then I get in the car, and a-shopping I do go. The automobile technology makes the trip faster, which means that upon my return I'll have time left to cook dinner before it's time for bed. Cooking with gas technology removes the need to obtain fuel beforehand, saving more time and letting me watch an episode or two of Doctor Who before beddie-byes. And so on. 

Hand-held GPSs
You and I exist in what is unquestionably the most "technologically complex" culture in human history. Curiously, it's also the time in human history in which someone like me has never been so removed from the knowledge behind the "things" that I use every day---i.e. the technologies. I have learned to change a tire, but I couldn't, for the life of me, repair a car's power window or a GPS. No wonder us archaeologists fixate first on the physical manifestation of a given technology, and sometimes neglect to look beyond it to the person or culture that made it, and what they had to know to do so. If any of us actually spent any time at all trying to assimilate the knowledge behind every thing-a-majig we use, we'd barely get past the plastic pacifier. Forget, altogether, learning the technology involved in creating disposable diapers. Most of us spend our lives like some mammalian young, who spend a portion of their early life with their eyes closed, feeling around for the teat with the help of their little noses.  

With thanks to you-know-who,
the artist, who, unbeknownst to him
is supporting the SA's efforts,
despite intellectual property niceties.
For the sake of laying the blame,
here's the URL this cartoon came from.
So, Ridington reminds us that we are missing the point if we compare one culture to another on the basis of its "material complexity," and thereby assign privilege to the "things" that technology produces over the knowledge that preceded their manufacture. How many times have you heard an archaeologist talking about how much better it was to glue a sharp rock to a branch and use it to impale a wooly mammoth than it was before the "haft" was invented and Thog* had to sneak up on the animal, part the hair, and then plunge in the knife. Material culture becomes, implicitly, a measure that archaeologists use to compare one culture with another. Furthermore, how many times have you read about "social complexity" or "material culture complexity" or "intensification of resource procurement?" We've all read the literature. Admit it. Speaking just for myself as an archaeologist, I've always felt a bit dirty when comparing human groups according to what artifacts have been preserved---usually made of stone or ceramics. The way you hear people talk about the Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islanders of Australia is a perfect example, especially the desert-dwelling Aborigines, who're routinely used as an example of one of the least, if not the "least" materially complex culture in the ethnographic present. Comparisons like this are always followed by culturally sensitive qualifiers, like "they're nearly constantly on the move and can't, therefore, carry a lot of stuff around," or "It's not that they aren't capable of complexity, they just choose not to" et cetera, blah, blah, blah.


Perhaps it's only me who thinks this way. I'll let you be the judge. If you've ever been tempted to think of Ancient Rome on the one hand and ancient northern Russia on the other, with the idea in mind to figger out why one historical trajectory was so much unlike the other. Whether or not you succumb to the temptation now and then, or are perfectly reflexive and never mistake the "thing" for the mental faculties that brought it into being, you might still want to read on. 'Cause there's one beauty of a photo, and a pretty cool description of a road trip that you might find interesting or thought-provoking.

So, let's first contrast my heavily technology-dependent shopping trips with the likes of this
When the grass stalks die and turn a reddish colour as the dry season approaches, it’s time to look for prawns in creeks. When the grass seeds turn brown and start falling, the dry season has started and it’s time to fish for barramundi. When the grass has burnt, the turtles are fat and ideal to hunt. (Muller, Natalie. "Mapping Aboriginal knowledge of the bush," Australian Geographic, December 26, 2012.)
Molly Yawulminy hunts for long-necked turtle in the Daly River, NT.
(Credit: Australian Geographic's Marcus Finn)
Don't scoff. Of course I'm not trying to equate my shopping trip to Molly Yawulminy's. Hers would be way more fun and more ecologically friendly! You might be saying, "Come on, Rob. We're human. We make connections. We interpret patterns. Molly's just doing what any of us would do if we lived a long time in the same place. That may well be, my quick-witted friend. So, let's have a look at another technology---one that can't be employed simply by observing the passage of time and the seasons.

The Simpson Desert
Consider now the following snippet, which describes a trip in Australia's Simpson Desert, highlighted on the map of Australia, above, and illustrated in the photo that follows.
     The distance from our camp at Yunala was 43 km [about 30 miles], all cross-country; the mean direction was west-south-west, with a detour to dig for kante (stone knives). The courses and distances were as follows:
1. A little south of west 7 km to Namurunya soak—a tiny hollow that seemed, to my eyes, to have no identifying marks.
2. South-west 13 km to the kante site near a low and inconspicuous rise called Yirumora hill.
3. South-east 5 km, then back round the end of a tali (sandhill), to Rungkaratjunku sacred site.
4. Winding in and out between tali, generally west-south-west 16 km to Tjulyurnya rock hole by a low hill.
The sacred place was 2 km beyond.
     The Pintupi's route finding by the unremarkable topographical features that were landmarks for these several important places was uncannily accurate. They always knew just where they were, they knew the directions of ecologically and spiritually significant places over a wide area and were orientated in 'compass' terms. (Lewis, David, "Route Finding by Desert Aborigines in Australia," Journal of Navigation 29(01):21--38, 1976.)

Lewis is careful to point out that, no matter where they were, his guides were accurate to within about 10° when estimating the four cardinal directions and their subdivisions. More incredible, still was Lewis's description a round-trip of some 1600 km [that's about 1000 miles!] through the [to him and to most of us] "trackless" and "featureless" desert. The Simpson Desert [yes, yes, just a portion of it] is pictured below. Remember, too, that the trip was undertaken with only the "map" in the minds of the aboriginal people who guided him. And, by the way, that's navigation without using the stars! Many, many people of European descent are rightfully in awe of the knowledge required for such journeys. You can say all you want about dry grass and turtles, but you can't deny that the "technology" Lewis's guides were using was infinitely more accurate and precise than any hand-held GPS. How can I say that? Hmmm. Let's see... Oh, yeah. They've been doing it for around 40,000 years. No GPS. No lithium batteries. No compass. No surveying instruments. I think it's safe to say that all of the technology that goes into making a GPS couldn't hold a candle to the Aboriginal mind. More importantly, you'd have a far better chance of learning how to make and use a GPS than you would if you were trying to learn to navigate the Simpson Desert sans compass. Just sayin'.

The Simpson Desert. To whomever put this up, thanks for the loan of this photo. This is the caption, if anybody cares to translate! Этот неприветливый образец природы признан национальным парком и постоянно влечет туристов. Но пустыня Симпсон к неопытным путешественникам беспощадна: она изматывает жарой, выпаривает жидкость в моторах, не дает вернуться. Температура в пустыне летом может подниматься до 50 градусов. После нескольких трагических случаев правительство Австралии закрыло Симпсон для посетителей на летний, особенно жаркий, период. Here is the URL.
Now. Remind me. Who's technologically complex in this situation? You have just two choices: a) the guy of European descent driving the Land-Rover or b) the guys whose grandparents had never encountered a European? The only possible answer is a) those people whose archaeological record is looked on as being a little on the lean side. And thus it might be if all you're looking at is the imperishable remains of their lives. I think you'd probly agree---nothing could be further from empirical reality!

In remembering Ridington's work, I've used as an example one of the least materially complex cultures on Earth. Yet to me, navigating unerringly the breadth and depth of the Simpson Desert with nothing but one's eyes and memories makes Aboriginal knowledge the Eighth Wonder of the World---ancient and modern.

What I've written today is not intended to point fingers at archaeologists [even subversive ones]. It's merely a reminder that there's no more relevant a "technology" than the one betwixt our ears.

* Thog [legendary mammoth hunter], son of Thig, son of Thug, son of Thag [legendary stegosaurus hunter].

ANY TIME IS A GOOD TIME TO GET GOOD STUFF AT THE SUBVERSIVE ARCHAEOLOGIST'S OWN, EXCLUSIVE "A DRINK IS LIKE A HUG" ONLINE BOUTIQUE
SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

Sunday 19 May 2013

Are There Human Races? The Evolutionary Biology---Or Not---Of Race

Foreword: I ran a series on "race" and racism that began on October 7, 2011, which was the SA's third day in cyberspace. I'll be putting it up again in its several parts, beginning today [revised and expanded, as the publishers say]. If you've seen it before, please forgive my publishing "re-runs." Fighting bigotry should be our full-time job, and bigotry is nowhere as insidious as it is in the concept of "race." So, it won't hurt to air these thoughts again, in the hope of reaching a different audience this time around.

The Niña, the Pinta, and the Kalamazoo.
Christopher Columbus claims the island of
Hispaniola for his own Spain.
From the Age of Exploration--beginning at the end of the Middle Ages—Europeans and their descendants legitimated their imperialist expansion ideologically by seeing non-European people through the lens of a racial worldview. Wherever Europeans colonized, and for differing lengths of time, you saw the usurpation of power and territory at the expense of indigenous people who were inevitably deemed to be a different race. In many cases the oppressed were seen as not just non-European, but non-human. Today, wherever Europeans are still in power, indigenous people suffer existence at the margins of society, bereft of any real power, and often bereft of any connection with their past other than through the memories of degradation they experienced during and after the European invasion.

Africans captured other Africans and
sold them to European slavers who sold them to
colonial entrepreneurs. So. Who're the bad guys?
That's too heavy a question for me to answer
any other way than to say that it wasn't the
people whose lives were taken from them by
people who had no business doing so.
Where indigenous people have retaken control of former colonies, they live with the heritage of divisive and authoritarian colonialism: inefficient and inadequate infrastructure, and the legacy of old hatreds generated by colonial governments that pitted one group against another. In some cases those same Europeans enslaved the indigenous people, and the descendants of those slaves exist as a permanent underclass in the United States, Brazil, and elsewhere. And let's not forget that this might never have taken place without the complicity, and greed, of powerful, indigenous African groups


Race matters, today, because we all live with its twin—racism (itself the bastard offspring of a more broad-ranging bigotry). Anthropology (and through it, archaeology) has much to contribute to the race debate in the present, even if it has a somewhat uneven record, historically, on the matter of race. As much as anthropologists have made substantial additions to knowledge of the human species, they have also---implicitly and explicitly---added much fuel to the social conflagration that is racism. 

It's long since time to make amends.

Unfortunately, people calling themselves anthropologists have made major contributions to the construction of a racial worldview, which is the foundation of racism. As Carol Mukhopadhyay and Yolanda Moses pointed out a number of years ago in American Anthropologist, nineteenth century anthropology was geared toward classification and comparison of human groups, in keeping with the natural-history tradition out of which anthropology developed. This was welded to the already deeply entrenched racism of western cultures. With Darwin’s evocation of the principle of natural selection, which underpins evolutionary change, anthropologists began thinking of human groups as behaving according to Darwinian evolution. Social Darwinism and the Eugenics Movement weren't too far behind.  

Morgan
Tyler
Shown above are two very influential Dead White Males early anthropologists, Lewis Henry Morgan and E. B. Tylor. They strove to rank nineteenth-century and earlier historic and archaeological human groups along a continuum of 'progress' from what they called savagery, through barbarism to what they called civilization (a category to which, of course, they and no darker skinned people belonged). In today's vernacular these terms have been sanitized, but live on, in the use of such epithets as underdevelopeddeveloping, and developed.

Because Morgan and Tyler and their contemporaries thought of their culture as the pinnacle of evolutionary progress, their thinking automatically relegated less materially complex, less scientifically oriented cultures to an evolutionary backwater. Such thinking only added impetus and the aura of scientific validity to Colonial oppression of indigenous people. To the likes of Morgan and Tylor, mental capacity and its presumed correlative, moral capacity, were linked to a notion of evolutionary progress. Once Gregor Mendel supplied the notion of heredity through "genes," racial difference---and thus the notion of racial superiority---had a much stronger 'scientific' basis.


Thereafter, researchers went about looking for physical correlates of evolutionary rank, beginning with the seat of the intellect, the brain and its related bony structures. Anthropologists measured everything from how much the lower face projected (facial prognathism) to the length of the skull relative to its height (employing the so-called cephalic index). Facial projection was seen as a good place to look for racially based heritable differences in intellect, because, of course, non-human apes have projecting jaws. 

Indigenous races of the earth or, New chapters of ethnological
inquiryincluding monographs on special  departments...
contributed by Alfred Maury...Francis Pulszky... and 
J. Aitken Meigs... Presenting fresh investigations, 
documents, and materials.
By J. C. Nott...and Geo. R. Gliddon, 1857.
At left is an example of radical "scientific racism" and the ideological use to which 19th century "scientists" put such physical traits as facial gnathism. The illustration at left makes the specious argument that because the chap in the middle displays facial prognathism he is closer to, if not in fact the equal of, a chimpanzee. Not just a chimpanzee, but a "Young Chimpanzee," a lexical choice no doubt meant to further denigrate the middle guy in relation to the orthognathous Classical Greek sculpture.

BUT! Look at the way Nott and Gliddon "stack the deck" in favour of their visual "thesis." A line drawn along each individual's occlusal plane reveals that these racist F**ks have severely tilted backward our man in the middle and ever-so-slightly tipped forward Apollo's visage. This has the effect of reducing the degree of the Greek's facial prognathism and grossly exaggerating that of the disparaged middle man. You and I have to remember that it's not Science, but the scientist that perverts the empirical world in favour of one or another worldview.


Fig. 4.—a, Swaheli; b, Persian.
E. B. Tyler himself, whom you would have thought might have steered a little closer toward the role of a careful scientist, couldn't resist making a similar trumped up comparison in his treatise "The Races of Mankind "in Popular Science Monthly Volume 19 July 1881 (1881). As you can clearly see from the Frankfurt Planes that I've added to the illustration, the "Persian" face is tilted forward, which would have the effect of making the face look more orthognathous. But it gets worse! Lemme ask you something. How hard would it have been for Tyler to have found a Persian who WASN'T sporting a beard? If one is to make anything of Tyler's comparison it's made difficult to impossible by the facial hair. The guy could have no chin and we wouldn't be able to tell. We must assume that Tyler's intention was to confuse and obfuscate, and not to promote a coherent theory of human variation. Grrrrrr.

Okay. So, in those times no one seemed to notice that the so-called white race contained a large degree of variation, or that in fact, east Asian people have the least prognathic faces, something which, had it occurred to them, would have sent the measurers scrambling for a different parameter to put in their racial equation.
Craniometry is the systematic collection of head measurements, once used 
as a means of characterizing human ‘races’ (Gould, S. J. The Mismeasure of Man)
Anthropometry, the systematic documentation of the human form, was used as means of identifying so-called primitive and advanced traits. Long-headedness, to take another example, was a characteristic of the Scandinavians, who were of course highly intelligent and morally upstanding [to any self-respecting ethnocentric northern European]. Long-headedness therefore represented, for a time, a benchmark of evolutionary progress. That is, until someone discovered that some Africans were as long-headed as the Scandinavians.

Fig. 2.—Top View of Skulls. 
a, Negro, index 70, dolichocephalic: 
b, European, index 80, mesocephalic;
c, Samoyed, index 85, brachycephalic.
From "The Races of Mankind"
Popular Science Monthly
Volume 19 July 1881 (1881)  
By Edward Burnett Tylor

The well-known IQ test became the ultimate measurement tool in this effort, with various groups being branded intellectually inferior to the well-educated, well-nourished and fair-skinned, Christian Europeans (who, by the way, developed the tests from their own cultural perspective, oblivious to its inappropriateness for members of other cultures). And, unbelievable as it may seem, IQ is still being used to promulgate the notion that, at bottom, genes associated with certain races lead to certain races being less capable than certain other races. If you catch my drift.
     
I’ll come back to that in a future post.
     
Alas, physical anthropologists have been indispensable in promulgating and perpetuating a racial worldview. Physical anthropology (or biological anthropology as it more commonly called today) is that branch of anthropology that seeks to understand the nature and sources of human genetic variation. In the past, they have sought to understand the relationship between race and human variation (and some still do, to the detriment of the discipline).
     
Franz Boas
However, in the early 20th century some anthropologists were beginning to question the perception that physical form goes hand in hand with evolutionary rank. Franz Boas, for example, challenged the view that cranial form could tell us anything useful about one’s mental abilities, or in any way indicated evolutionary rank. By employing the same techniques of craniometry employed by other physical anthropologists, he demonstrated systematic changes in head shape between parents and offspring of recent European immigrants to America, thus refuting the notion that such anatomical characteristics need have very much to do with one’s racial background or intellectual abilities. Boas attributed the changes in head shape to environmental changes resulting from changed circumstances, such as nutrition, housing and clothing.
     
By the 1930s and 40s, medical science and genetics, too, were providing empirical evidence that the notion of a biological basis for racial classifications was on increasingly shaky ground. They were finding that the distribution of genetic traits appeared to straddle previously defined racial groups, leading to suspicion that racial categories were problematic. This didn’t stop those interested in mandating and maintaining genetic purity, the eugenicists, from co-opting the methodologies of population genetics, and searching for ways of identifying and manipulating so-called defective genes, for example, for masturbation (remember that there was a time when you couldn’t say that in public, much less do it in private, without people suspecting you of insanity?). 

[I wanted to link to a fair, well-documented treatment of eugenics, but even Wikipedia's article comes across (almost) as an apologia for a great idea that ended up in the hands of the wrong people. So, no links. Instead my web wanderings took me to many places that unsettled me, especially the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's "DNA Learning Center." In the more shadowy eugenics presences, it might well be written, "Here be monsters."]

Slowly, anthropologists were coming to an awareness that their categories were breaking down under the weight of empirical observation. Because of the depredations visited on Americans of African descent in North America and elsewhere, before and after the Civil War, and because of Adolf Hitler’s systematic efforts to extinguish Jews (and non-Aryan gentiles, Roma, homophiles and others deemed unfit) in Europe prior to and during the Second World War, the 1930s and 40s saw anthropologists more and more questioning the notion of human races. The Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. was in part enabled by reconstructed scientific rethinking of the race concept.
     
In addition, Social theorists were entertaining new ways of understanding human interaction. Some were inspired by Marx’s critique of Capitalism and his insights into the ideologies that permit some groups to have disproportionate access to wealth. At the same time, anthropologists came to agree that race was not so much a biological reality as it was an arbitrary social category, politically motivated, and having political, economic, and social consequences.
     
Since the tide of thinking about race began to change a half-century ago, perceived racial differences between human groups have continued to have catastrophic consequences for people in places as disparate, for example, as Bosnia-HerzegovinaRwanda, Los Angeles (the Rodney King riots), and the Indonesian anti-Sueharto riots, where ethnic Koreans and Chinese were targets of violence.
     
Happy in the knowledge that they had settled the question of race, anthropologists went about other work, while the rest of the population went about theirs, mostly ignorant of anthropological insights. Where once upon a time anthropologists had fed the thirst for evidence of racially based differences the discipline was feckless and largely unable to work against the status quo. At best they taught their insights to undergraduates. There appears to be no way to educate the broader public—no visible, public face for anthropology, to counter the much more widespread racial worldview.
     
Anthropologists have known for some decades about the racism inherent in racial categories. In spite of that, and in spite of clear evidence that the racial worldview was continuing to contribute to racism, it was only in 1998 that the American Anthropological Association (AAA), representing upwards of 10,000 sociocultural anthropologists, archaeologists, biological anthropologists and linguists, saw fit to make a submission to the United States government to rethink its standards, and to develop a more realistic way of categorizing Americans in its census and other official statistics.
     
The AAA was concerned to have the government adopt an informed position on race when collecting information for its census and for its programs to foster equality. Race, the AAA told Uncle Sam, is a ‘biological sounding term’ that adds nothing to the precision, rigor or actual basis of information being collected to characterize the identities of the American population. And more recently, the AAA has published its “Statement on Race”, which reflects the majority opinion of the discipline.
     
I think it’s well past time for some straight talk about race. I’ve now lived on two continents, in three nations run by descendants of European colonisers, where the descendants of the country’s original inhabitants daily endure the physical and mental by-products of racial thinking, and where their ancestors suffered unimaginably brutal treatment at the hands of the Europeans. Whether those indigenous populations were merely vilified, or were in fact the victims of cold-blooded murder, or stolen from their parents to live lives cut off from all that was meaningful to them, or worse, institutionalized for the crime of being angry at the treatment they received, in Canada, the US and Australia, people whose only crime was being different endured the depredations of racial classifications and of racism, and do so to this day. And every day, you can hear prominent (usually Corporatist) politicians employ racial categories and catch-phrases to communicate through inuendo to their constituents as they play their hateful power games.
     
To be continued... 
Next up: How do our genes contribute to the racial worldview?
Thank you for being here.

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Wednesday 15 May 2013

Noh Mul Update: Belize Government Launches Investigation Of Maya Pyramid's Destruction

This story is everywhere on the news this morning. The latest: from the Jamaica Observer comes this report that, at the order of the government, Belizean Police have launched an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the almost total destruction of the 60-m tall pyramid at Noh Mul in the north of that country.

Notes the Observer 
A government statement said that “this total disregard for Belize’s cultural heritage and national patrimony is callous, ignorant and unforgivable” adding that a “vigorous investigation has been launched to determine all the facts in this case”.
The Observer story continues
The government said that cultural landmarks, such as Noh Mul, should be protected at all cost and that “this expressed disdain for our laws and policies is incomprehensible”.
Jaime Awe, Belize's chief archaeologist, told reporters that the penalty for these actions is 10 years in prison, or a US$5,000 fine, or both. 

Let's wish them well in their hunt for clues. Let's also hope that there's no such thing as corruption in Belize's government, or police force, or construction business, or the big digger machine thing operators.

On second thought. Let's just show our support and hope for the best! What follows are my thoughts as to the punishment that these guys should really get. It's teachable moment time.


The Stocks
The Pillory

The Subversive Archaeologist says that the stocks are too good for these pot-hunting slime balls.  The pillory, too. I vote for a reinstatement of the Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición [i.e. the Spanish Inquisition]



Thanks for your support. TTFN

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SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

Monday 13 May 2013

Noh Mul Stands No More After Being Mined For Road-Building Gravel!!!!


Screen grab from the movie Star Wars, filmed on-location at Tikal, Péten Basin, Guatemala
I don't know what it says about me, but the first thought that came to my mind was something the character Obi-Wan Kenobi said when an entire planet had been destroyed by the Galactic Empire's Death Star.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
I don't mean it to sound glib or dismissive. I find it appropriate in a way. If only because Star Wars was in part filmed in the Maya lowlands, in Guatemala's Péten Basin, at Tikal. Remember?

Locations and physical relationship of Noh mul (Belize) and Tikal (Guatemala)

Well, something truly terrible HAS happened and it's unbe.EFFING.lievable! From 7NewsBelize.com comes the headline 
"No More Noh Mul? Contractor Bulldozes Mayan Temple." 
The 20-m tall main structure at the Maya center in northern Belize has been all but razed---for road-building gravel

The images above are appear in the 7NewBelize.com's story, and the Subversive Archaeologist is very grateful for the loan. 7News sums it up this way.
Noh Mul or “Big Hill” is scattered over a wide area about 12 square miles – and is estimated to have been home to 40,000 people between 500 and 250 BC. There are about 81 separate buildings – all on private property. But the one that has been destroyed is the namesake, the Big Hill - as it was the ceremonial center and main structure.
The Emeryville Shellmound ca. 1924.
Courtesy Phoebe Hurst Museum
University of California at Berkeley
URL
Such large-scale destruction of the world's archaeological heritage was once a commonplace occurrence in the U.S. and elsewhere. Think of the great shell middens that once ringed California's San Francisco Bay. They were levelled in the early 20th century for... you guessed it ... construction materials and topsoil. Many, many of the large earthen pyramids of the central United States met the same fate. The only difference in the present circumstance is that it has happened to a structure belonging to a culture that one would have thought was immune to unfettered abuse.
Huaqueros at work in an unnamed
location somewhere in South America.
Reproduced with thanks to
OCHOLEGUAS.com
for the loan
URL 


Of course, anyone who knows much about the New World's civilizations knows that small-scale depredations have a long tradition, and persist even today. For well over a century criminals known as huaqueros, or tomb-robbers, have been busily removing antiquities from the great ancient civilizations of Latin America. The story is much the same in the southwestern U.S., where the great and small buildings and middens have been ravaged with impunity by private property owners and criminals, alike.

This week's activities in Belize are just the latest in a long line of tomb robbing that has been around since the time of Egypt's pharaohs. You'll recall that virtually every royal tomb was constructed with elaborate and sometimes diabolical defenses against theft. Even the long-lived story of King Tut's Curse belongs to the the list of anti-theft devices. Unfortunately, as with so many such measures, only the honest ones heed such warnings.

From 7NewsBelize
URL
Unlike most other archaeological depredations Noh Mul's nemesis has a face. He's a political hopeful named Denny Grihalva, whose construction company, he maintains, carried out this activity without his knowledge. As if! The police and heritage authorities showed up just in time to write it off.

When the archaeological analogue of Black Bart deals a hand such as this, the only thing right-minded people can do is read 'em and weep.


For what's left of the world's cultural heritage, we can hope only that "collecting" objets d'art illegally taken, illegally transported, and illegally purchased will one day become so socially unacceptable as to be, once and for all, extinct. Yeah. Yeah, I know. I'm playing Pollyanna yet again! Yep. Best I can do is make a lot of noise here and hope for better days.

ANY TIME IS A GOOD TIME TO GET GOOD STUFF AT THE SUBVERSIVE ARCHAEOLOGIST'S OWN, EXCLUSIVE "A DRINK IS LIKE A HUG" ONLINE BOUTIQUE

SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.