What My Daughter and I Did On Spring Break [hint: we visited Quest University, the University of British Columbia, and Simon Fraser University]

     My daughter is just 16. And, although her dad is still reeling from the metamorphosis, it's time for her to consider the options for further education once she graduates from high school in May of 2013. Although she was born in the U.S. and has lived there for the past twelve years, she's entitled to Canadian citizenship. As such, she's eligible to attend university there as if she'd lived there all her life. Her choices are legion, and she's faced with (from my point of view) the daunting task of deciding where in the worlds she should go. 
     When I was her age there was never a question where I would go (if I could gain admission)--the University of British Columbia. 


There was never any question where I'd go because it just wasn't part of the culture in those dim days of the 1960s. UBC was a good school, and in the late 60s Simon Fraser University was a fledgling that had been rocked by the excesses of democracy taking root at places like Berkeley. As such, my establishment upbringing meant that SFU was, well, too radical to consider. As for the rest of Canada, which was a skating rink most of the year, it never occurred to me that there might be alternatives in the east.
     So, even though there are several thousand universities and colleges in the U.S. from which to choose, I mentioned to my daughter that she could also consider Canada. We formed a plan to spend a couple of days on her spring break to have a look at some of her options in my home and native land, and in the area I grew up [truly the best place on Earth--B.C.'s Lower Mainland]. I later discovered that my prima alma mater, UBC (B.A. English, 1976), is ranked 22nd in the world! Moreover, Simon Fraser (Honours B.A. Archaeology, 1987) was recently ranked first in Canada among 'comprehensive' universities. She could do a lot worse, I thought.

But my daughter had her eye on smaller game. Through a friend at high school she'd learned about Quest University--the very new kid on the block in B.C. At the time it was just four years old, and had just graduated their first students. We flew to Seattle and drove across the border to Squamish. Next day we went on the tour. There were altogether three prospective students on the tour. All were, coincidentally, from the US. 
     There is nothing usual about Quest. By almost any criteria it's unique. For starters, it's a private, non-profit school--the first of its kind in Canada. Its physical location is likewise off the beaten track. Ever heard of Squamish? You can be forgiven if you haven't. It's a small town about half way between Vancouver and Whistler--Blackcomb (where the 2010 Olympic Winter Games outdoor events were held). Quest received a private grant of land on the outskirts of Squamish to build their completely residential university. 
     'Scuze me while I effuse a bit. The Quest Campus is compact, and comprises just a handful of buildings. The picture to the right shows the Library/Administration structure. It surrounds a three-story high atrium that's a gathering place for the community. The student population presently stands at 350, and will never grow beyond 600. Everyone knows everyone else, and everyone watches out for everyone else.
     The instructors are Ph.D.s with a passion for teaching undergraduates. There's no tenure--just rolling five-year assessments. They're not required to do research. 

[Judging by the gasps I'm hearing that's a deal-breaker for many of you. But look at it the way one of its progenitors puts it: most institutions pay lip service to teaching. The typical academic discourse cinches it: teaching responsibilities are referred to as 'load,' and when not teaching, academics are always looking for research 'opportunities.' I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with research institutions like UBC or UC--but as so many of them are learning the hard way, their students are telling them, in droves, that while they're getting their degrees, they seem to be missing a great education in the process.] 

Quest's student feedback is off the charts. Have a look.


The National Survey of Student Engagement polls frosh and fourth-years at 751 Canadian and US universities and colleges. Quest topped the list of Canadian institutions in every category If student engagement represents learning opportunities, I think you know where I'd like my daughter to go. [Father's only half-facetious worry showing--you don't think they're putting something in the water at Quest?] I've taken screen captures of the published tables and I've truncated the lists below the 67th percentile--averages shown include the US institutions. 

Average was 61.6/58.1

Look at the drop-off! NSSE overall average was 32.2/40.5

NSSE overall average was 53.2/57.1

Look at the drop-off! NSSE overall average shown on bottom line

Look at the drop-off! NSSE overall average was 41.8/50.4

Sure. Sure. It's easy to 'engage' when no class is larger than 20 students and the student to Tutor ratio is 12:1! Well, yes. That's so. But Quest is doing it and many, many aren't. 

At left is one of the founders of Quest (and its current president), Columbia University astronomer David Helfand, 'engaging' with students in one of the first-year classes he teaches. Earlier in his career he fought to have tenure abolished at Columbia. He won, but only for himself--he still undergoes the five-yearly reassessment that is now institutionalized at Quest. 
     Oh, and did I mention Quest's unique program? Students take one class at a time--about a month long. There are no academic departments. All classes are interdisciplinary and aimed at integrating knowledge with a global perspective. After two years students are expected to develop their own interdisciplinary 'major' by choosing a 'question' that they'll investigate from every possible angle for the final two years, culminating with some form of 'capstone' project. Tutors are fully involved from start to finish. Students emerge with, by all accounts, a unique perspective. Funny, that.
     Well, I think I've probably bent your ear long enough for a Sunday night.
     I'll prolly get back to you tomorrow with an update on my foreshortened look at the Younger Dryas Boundary impact hypothesis, etc. 

The Younger Dryas Boundary Impact Hypothesis is Going Into the Too-Hard Basket

Wow. I give up!
     When my [soon to be ex-] pal Iain Davidson suggested I get in touch with my inner PalaeoIndian and investigate the Younger Dryas (YD) Boundary (YDB) Impact Hypothesis (YDBIH), I stupidly assumed that it would be a question of sedimentary context, or of association and datable material, or something equally mundane. Was I wrong? IMHO, you might say so.
     As it turns out, my spider senses are telling me that this one isn't going away for a while. Not because there's inherent merit in the near-earth-object collision idea. Rather, it appears as if there'll be claims and counterclaims 'til Hell won't even have 'em. One side says 'I see nanodiamonds!' The other side says, 'I see dumb people who wouldn't know a nanodiamond if it fell out of the sky and landed smack on their iris.' One side says, 'Nyah!' Then the other side says 'Nyah, nyah, nyah.' I'll admit, this might be an overly simplistic portrait of the circumstances.
     Take nanodiamonds. The proponents of the impact hypothesis claim that they find significant numbers of them wherever they look at the Younger Dryas lower boundary. Great. What's a nanodiamond? How do you know when you've got 'em? Are they truly of extra-terrestrial origin and do they never form on Terra? Good questions all.
     Apparently they're ubiquitous in space, the result of fullerene (a form of carbon) 'onions' that form naturally and that when deformed by collision reform in such a way that nanometer-scale diamonds are created--by the trillions per cc of interstellar dust. [I've seen so many abstracts and summaries in the past few days I won't even try to ferret out the source(s) of this facet *cough* of the YDB question. But the statements I'm making are based on published research from so many journals with arcane titles like Glacial Geology that my poor little brain is spinning faster than a quasar.] Nanodiamonds can be synthesized in the laboratory, and they've been found in meteorites. The jury's still out as to whether nanodiamonds of extra-terrestrial origin could collect in a particular stratum of a column of unconsolidated sediments in the western United States.  
     Someone claims to have found a ton of nanodiamonds at the YDB in the Antarctic ice cap. Someone else says that those 'yahoos' sampled a thin profile at the edge of the ice sheet [not unequivocally in primary context, in other words] and don't even have a well-supported date for the material! Whom to believe? Nanodiamonds may not have spelled doom for the sabertoothed cats. But they've sure killed any idea that I might be able to mount a critical examination of the impact hypothesis without about three more graduate degrees.
     The same is true of the claims for peaks of carbon microspherules at the YDB. Carbon microspherules? Yep. Some say they have 'em at the YDB. Others say those people are seeing fungal spores and misidentifying them. someone else says they found one on their residential mailbox. Sheesh! All I know for sure is the objects that are being reported are DEFINITELY spherical!
     'He said; she said' would be preferable to this supposedly empirically based back and forth. How's a girl to cope? Any judge would throw this out of court before the first recess.
     No big impact crater? No problem. The inferred object hit the Laurentide ice sheet, creating a continent-sized splash and a freshwater flash flood of Armageddon-like proportions (which also helped to reverse the global warming that was occurring at the time in the Northern Hemisphere). Imagine the swimming-pool sized globules of water that would have been emitted from the point of impact (sort of like the peaks of the milk 'crown' that you see in those instantaneous photographs of drop-sized splashes). These are what some argue created the elliptical, lake-sized, Carolina Bays (which visible in numbers across the eastern continental plain most densely in the Carolinas, but which are also seen in the southeast and even in Nebraska. Their long axis orientations unambiguously point back to an area just north of the ice margin near the present-day Great Lakes). These, some claim, are the shallow 'splash' scars left by the house-sized globules of water thrown up by the ice-centred impact.
     No impact at all? No problem. Simple. It was a north-south vectored near miss that created a continent-sized 'airburst' that vaporized everything in its vortex down to the surface (like the Siberian devastation in the early 20th century that resulted from a NEO NOT impacting the surface--a cometary fragment, it's assumed). Charcoal from the presumed resultant wildfires that would have been produced in vast quantities across the west of North America south of the ice sheets, and putatively ended up in the so-called black mats found at dozens and dozens of archaeological sites at 12.9 ka. Moreover, the cloud of vapour and dust that would have resulted would have lingered, it's supposed, long enough to have created a short-lived 'nuclear winter' called the Younger Dryas.
     Then somebody else says that in fact the YD is effectively invisible in the Antarctic ice sheet, suggesting that this was a Northern Hemisphere phenomenon resulting from the disproportionately large volumes of fresh water emanating from the North's vast ices sheets, which took some time to equalize and which stalled or reversed the effects of terminal Pleistocene warming for the duration of the YD.
     To my way of thinking, despite all of the back and forth, all of the bluster, and all of the details associated with the various lines of evidence, and regardless of the constituents of those black mats, their undeniable presence at the YDB in site after site across the western US and directly to the south in Mexico is a phenomenon that begs explanation. As I've indicated in the preceding paragraphs, it's still an open question what they contain, and if, at the end of the day, those constituents are found to be the unique result of an encounter with a NEO. But the answers must be found, and the mystery put to rest.
     And I'm sad to ask: 'Who am I to adjudicate the contrary claims? Especially since my pocket SEM crapped out the other day and I can't afford a new one! Oh, and, by the way, I'm not a nanogeologist [not many are, I'm guessing]. On the basis of my 'investigation' of this matter, I'm calling for an international consortium of scientists possessing the requisite expertise who have NO vested interest to undertake a large-scale investigation of this phenomenon--from, as it were, the ground up.
     

It Seems I've Opened a Can of Younger Dryas-Aged Mega-Annelida

     Who knew? Who knew that a seemingly innocent attempt to make sense of some anomalous observations would have led to such a palaeo-can of worms? Most of you, probably! Dwight Simons is expecting me, at the end of the day, to cast *cough* doubt on one species of these explanatory worms--the near-earth object impact or near miss hypothesis. One of you, who shall remain nameless [Iain!], wants me to treat all of the competing hypotheses and counterhypotheses with a certain equanimity of which I fear I'm only barely capable. Still others want me to just shut up and get back to the Middle Palaeolithic and the issues that got me into so much hot water in the first place.
     Well I'm not gonna play that game! Er. I'm not going there! Umm, I won't fall for that old trick. Oh, all right. But you must understand...this has turned out to be a far more complex, long-standing, and multi-disciplinary investigation than I ever thought it would. It encompasses material going back into the early 90s, and of necessity will require a familiarity with more recent geological observations and interpretations with which I have been only tangentially familiar up 'til now--e.g. Antarctic ice cores; Greenland ice cores; eastern Pacific Ocean foraminifera (for staters, with the rest of the globe close behind); some very arcane geophysics and sedimentary geology (nanodiamonds, microspherules, magnetic so-and-sos, and micromorphological smizmies); and more.
     So, as I've said before, bear with me, please, whilst I commiserate with the swamis of about 10 non-archaeological disciplines to come up with a reasoned assessment of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. Wish me luck!

A Clairvoyant's Touchstone Thursday: Nanodiamonds are a Sabertoothed Cat's Worst Enemy

Because I've been absent from pixel-land for almost a week, I've decided to combine what I was working on before I travelled to Vancouver with Touchstone Thursday. This will entail bringing to your attention not works that have stood the test of time, but rather some recent and fairly recent publications that may very well turn out to be classics in their own right, for any number of reasons. It began with a challenge--to bend my brain in the direction of an issue that's currently being debated and for which there's some very up-to-the-minute work that may well be a game breaker in a long-elusive geological and archaeological question. 
     You'll never guess what the issue is. Go on. Give it a try. Hint: it's not, strictly speaking, an archaeological issue.

[Final Jeopardy music tinkles in the background]

Alex Trebek [from the podium, as serious and sincere as ever, considering that there are thousands of dollars at stake and millions watching and waiting for the day's champion to make it a clean sweep]: 

"10 seconds left. tic. tic. tic. tic. tic. tic. tic. tic. tic. ... Bob Muckle, what's the answer to today's Final Jeopardy question: Black mats that resulted from a close encounter with a near-Earth object are indicative of what?" 

Bob [smiling sheepishly, knowing that he's nailed it, 'cause he told them on his application that he was a writer of children's books instead of text books.*]: 

"Uh. What are megafaunal extinctions in North America, Alex?"

[Sound of jackpots being hit, just like in Vegas]

Yup. That's it. Megafaunal extinctions. Thanks, Dave-oh! Couldn't have given me low hanging fruit for a change? Could you? Hey, Sysiphus! Wanna gimme a hand? 
     Here's the crux. It's my belief that there are only two issues in archaeology and palaeoanthropology that are more hotly debated than megafaunal extinctions: 1) 'Whose hominid is going to end up being the last common ancestor?' and 2) 'Are Neanderthals like us?' [and all that entails]. Even the question of who came first to North America--the Clovis people or the Clovis people who weren't yet Clovis people--pales by comparison to the three questions above.
     So, what could I possibly [and I mean it] contribute to the decades-long 'conversation' about North America's geologically recent mass die-off? What, indeed? Perhaps we'll see. To begin with, I'll have to set the scene in a way that's not normally done, by modeling the broad environmental conditions south of the Pleistocene glaciers and what implications they would have had for the earliest human occupations.
     Okay... Well... Here goes... First slide, please. Oops. Sorry! I have the remote! Heh, heh, heh. 
     Some of this will be review for the older students, so bear with your younger colleagues and meet me down around RanchoLaBrean or thereabouts.

www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/image/laurentide.gif

All righty. The map above shows the more-or-less official maximum extent of the North American ice sheet at about the time the last deglaciation commenced. This vast accumulation of snow and ice was in fact the coalescence of two great ice sheets: the Laurentide (centred on what's now Hudson Bay) and the Cordilleran (aligned with and mantling everything to the left and right of the Rocky Mountains down to about the elevation of the Canadian prairies). To the northwest of the ice sheet lay Beringia--that continental-scale landmass between Asia and North America that comprised a biome that's been called the Mammoth Steppe [it's always been termed the 'Bering Land Bridge,' but that really obfuscates the reality--it was about 1000 km from north to south. Thus, hardly a 'bridge']. Beringia hosted lots of big hairy elephants and other big, most likely hairy, quadrupeds. Directly south of the ice sheet, the Prairies. To the southwest, the Rockies, the Inter-montane Plateau and the Coast Ranges. To the southeast, Appalachia, the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain. For some distance to the south of this ice mass, from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast, periglacial (permafrost) conditions would have been the norm. 

     And what would this mean old periglacial environment look like? Millions of square miles of this when it's cold out. 

notendur.hi.is/oi/patterned%20ground%20Thule%201986.jpg

And a lot of this when the 'summer' arrives. 

farm3.static.flickr.com/2670/3718209681_e4643ee024.jpg

Or this

www.alaskaphotoworld.com/alaska365/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Glacial-River.jpg

This was not a hospitable landscape. 
     And, when you consider that the combined seasonal meltwaters along the middle third of the ice sheet drained into what's today the gigantic narrowing geographic funnel that is the Mississippi/Missouri River catchment, which narrows southward and becomes the Mississippi River Valley, you can probably imagine the 'downstream' extent of the landscape you see in the above illustrations. If you also include the summer runoff from the Rockies via the Arkansas River, you have an enormous affected area. Think of it, the Mississippi River is in reality a misfit (or underfit) stream. 
     This periglacial environment I'm talking about would have involved much or all of the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee,West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware. 

You can see the affected area better in the map above. I've drawn in the red arrows to show the approximate route of the seasonal glacial meltwaters. Remember those desolate outwash plain pictures up above? That's right. All but the uplands in the middle third of the lower 48 would have looked like the wetter of the two much of the time. 
     So, what can I possibly contribute to the question of when and where the Clovis people became the Clovis people? I think it's clear that it wasn't within several hundred kilometres of the ice sheet's southern margin at 15,000 BP, and not so much in what I'd call 'The Great Outwash Plain of the Americas' as long as that area functioned as such, which would have been the case in the first several hundred to a couple of thousand years after the last glacial maximum.
     'But what about the megafauna?' ask the smaller children at the front. 'You promised you were gonna talk about the big, scary animals!'
     Okay, okay. Listen up, kids. Here's a picture of one of the Pleistocene faunal communities south of the ice sheets, near Rancho LaBrea, in the western United States. And, yes, those are horses. There were camels, too. Both extirpated during this extinction 'event.' The big question has always been 'Why?'

http://baynature.org/articles/jan-mar-2004/where-the-elk-and-the-antelope-played/captionimage_mainarticle

The explanation has boiled down to two mostly mutually exclusive schools of thought--either it was the climate changes that accompanied the end of the Pleistocene, or the gluttony of the newly arrived people that occupied this vast new territory at the end of the Pleistocene. 'Debate' has raged for decades. But lately there's been a third candidate to explain the die-off: a so-called near-earth object (NEO) that scorched the western U.S. as it ignited the atmosphere and either broke up or ended up in the ocean.
     [If this feels like déjà vu to many of you...yes, a similar set of positions characterized the debate about the dinosaur die-off at the end of the Cretaceous. Odder, still, it played out mostly in the pages of PNAS, too. Hmmm...]
      So, let's meet the players. In this corner, a heavyweight in the area of megafaunal extinctions: C. Vance Haynes, Jr. and a moderate-sized group of naysayers. In the other corner, a growing number of scientists of various stripes, all of whom are claiming to have found 'smoking gun' evidence of a near collision between a NEO and our Earth that scarred the contiguous United States, southern Canada, and central Mexico, around 12,900 years ago. 

Haynes 2008 get url/ref

This controversy seemed to have grown legs just about the time Haynes--one of the most peripatetic and prolific geoarchaeologists on the planet--correlated the so-called 'black mats' that occur in numerous geological and archaeological localities with which he was familiar from his extensive fieldwork in North America. The 'black mat' sites are shown as filled black circles on the map above, taken from Haynes (2008). Notice the paucity of circles of any kind in the Great Outwash Plain of the Americas? Coincidence? Don't think so.
     Back to the black mats. It turns out that these charcoal-rich layers are all about 12,900 years old (Haynes 2008), and found across western North America and putatively in the extremely interesting geological features on the eastern coastal plain--the so-called Carolina Bays [which resemble nothing so much as titanic-sized rain-drop scars from a hard, slanting downpour]. The black mats, therefore, are a continent-wide coincidence that begs for an explanation. Not the first to consider the possibility of an extra-terrestrial object, nevertheless Haynes concludes that, while there might well be a connection to cosmic collision, more work needs to be done. He said a mouthful there.
     In the next part of my challenge, I'll examine: 


1. Firestone RB, et al. (2007) Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104:16016 –16021.

2. Kennett DJ, et al. (2008) Wildfire and abrupt ecosystem disruption on California’s Northern Channel Islands at Allerød-Younger Dryas (13.0–12.9 ka). Quat Sci Rev 27:2530 –2545.3. Kennett DJ, et al. (2009) Nanodiamonds in the Younger Dryas boundary sediment layer. Science 323:94.

4. Kennett DJ, et al. (2009) Shock-synthesized hexagonal diamonds in Younger Dyras boundary sediments. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 106:12623–12628.

5. Haynes CV (2008) Younger Dryas ‘‘black mats’’ and the Rancholabrean termination in North America. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 105:6520 – 6525.


6. Israde-Alcántara, I., et al.  (2012) Evidence from central Mexico supporting the Younger Dryas extraterrestrial impact hypothesis. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1110614109


7. Surovell TA, et al. (2009) An independent evaluation of the Younger Dryas extraterrestrial impact hypothesis. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 106:18155–18158.




* He was later heard to say: 'Hell! They looked like kids to me!'

I'm busy!

Update--2012 04 01 00:11Z 
Been bizzy (busy + dizzy). Too bizzy to do the full subversive treatment on the challenge I've been given. And, now I'll be out of town until Wednesday, without a moment to devote to my favorite people on the planet--you(s)! 


You should know that I'm looking into a possible 'game-changer' of the environmental/climatic sort [Think 'Nature Bats Last' and don't get at me for using a sports analogy]. Best of all, for my pals who're staunchly North American archaeologists, it doesn't have anything to do with the 'Old World' Palaeolithic! See, there is a reason to stay tuned.


Hold, please.     

Touchstone Thursday: Philip Rahtz's 'How Likely Is Likely?'

By all accounts Philip Rahtz (1921-2011) was venerated as a human being and as a first-rate excavator. Based on this tongue-in-cheek probe of circumlocution in the literature [what have elsewhere been called 'bullshit qualifiers'], I have to infer that he was also a straight shooter when it came time to present his own inferences from the materials he recovered.

     So, he begins this note in Antiquity by recognizing the word-smithery that is characteristic of so many archaeology publications, and proposes a quantifiable scale by means of which an author can signal to the reader just how secure an inference is.   

Antiquity 49:59-61, 1975

However, Rahtz despairs that this would find widespread acceptance, given that the very people who are likely to use waffle words to present their inferences are unlikely to report the certitude of their interpretations honestly, even if given the opportunity to quantify them.
     So, he offers an glossary-style approach, and bequeathed to all who came after these hilarious paraphrases of commonly used expressions.

Antiquity 49:59-61, 1975

But wait! There's more! Even better. He can't forbear a similar glossary for the following eclectic aggregation of equally oft-heard phrases. I still can't read these without laughing out loud [er...LOLing].

Antiquity 49:59-61, 1975

I don't care what time or place you specialize in. You'll be able to appreciate Rahtz's brief candle raised in a heroic but inevitably futile effort to buck the trending wind of archaeological discourse [i.e hot air].

I'm Gonna Rot in Hell For This...

   I'm sorry. No. I'm not. This is scholarship? Craig A. Evans is the Payzant Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada [my home and native land]. This just in....dit de dit de dit di doo doo...[that was supposed to be Morse code, harking back to the days of the Pony Express and canal boats, which is where this ridiculous article belongs]. The headline reads

The Archaeological Evidence For Jesus (PHOTOS)

...claims that there never was a historical Jesus fly in the face of common sense and more than sufficient evidence.

As I approached the text of this article, I was guessing that there'll be some less than sufficient evidence referred to in this sensational piece of proselytizing. And, guess what. Nada. And it's a durned shame, too. I was looking forward to those photos!
     Obviously Dr. Evans is no archaeologist. He's also no rocket scientist, either. Apparently, finding evidence of the sorts of things and people referred to in the New Testament is sufficient to prove the existence of god--or, at least, of god's presumed chimeric son.
     The good Dr. Evans begins by laying out the epistemological underpinnings of his claims. 'I begin by explaining what archaeology is...' he says, 'the excavation and study of the remains of material culture.' Well. Whaddayaknow? Kinda convinces me of what we've always suspected, but were afraid to speak of. Biblical archaeologists aren't archaeologists at all--they're puffed up antiquarians and art historians with an axe to grind. They wouldn't know an archaeological inference if it flew right up to them in a blinding light and proclaimed the second coming of Lew Binford. 
     It's really hard to keep a straight face. Listen to this:

[archaeology] means correlating what we discover with relevant written records (such as the writings of the New Testament and the writings of Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian). It often means applying space-age technologies. It is hard work and it is very rewarding.

This sounds more to me like George W. Bush on the vicissitudes of being POTUS than an archaeologist opining on the empirical basis for the knowledge created from archaeological traces. To paraphrase: we find stuff, and it's just like the stuff they wrote about in the New Testament. That proves it's true!
     You really have to read this to believe it. Er. To find out how a real biblical scholar thinks. Land o' Goshen! They had buildings and tombs back then! Jesus is real. They had religious leaders! Jesus is real. Give me a break.
     What's that rumbling?

Bonus! Anthropology Makes Normal Human Interaction Virtually Impossible

I know I'm walking a thin line when I decide to comment on someone else's commentary on some issue or other. It reminds me of the old saying, 'Those who can, do. Those who can't, write about it. Those who can't write about it, teach.' However, after reading yesterday's 'Why the Cultural Conversation Should Never Stop,' cultural anthropologist Melissa Rinehart has me musing on the impact of anthropology in my own life. 
     Dr. Rinehart writes of the emotional investment that we all make, as anthropologists and as members of the human community. She's not the first, nor I the second, to reflect on the relationship between us and our subject. For Rinehart the subject is a living, breathing people who daily endure a legacy of pain and crushing despair visited on them by the waves of Europeans that invaded the 'New World' after 1492. Hers is, at best, the tenuous relationship between oppressor and oppressed. Her realization of that dichotomy, she believes, makes her a better person.
     By contrast, my subject resides in the deep past--beyond memory. My nominal subjects lived just before and immediately after our species became human in the way that you and I are, and which I believe is exemplified in this activity. As I write and as you read we are making sense of pixels that form 'letters,' which we interpret as streams of sounds that themselves bear no significance to the matter at hand other than that of the meaning assigned them by common consent over the long history of the language we speak. 
     Unlike the author, there is no social negotiation between me and my subject. Nevertheless, my research can enrich the lives of living people, no more or less than that of Melissa Rinehart. My life is, I believe, manifestly more human because of my understanding of culture, garnered from a decades long relationship with anthropology.
     Both Dr. Rinehart and I are motivated by our emotional attachment to our 'subjects.' As she puts it, her emotional involvement with the victims of Haiti's earthquake made her realize that

My professional contributions, whether publishing or teaching are more reflexive as I've come to recognize purist objectivity is unobtainable. I am more morally grounded and have come to recognize the inherent value of respectful relationship-making whether with students, consultants, friends, or colleagues. Only by engaging in more emotionally intelligent discussions is where I find true learning takes place and this recognition has opened many new doors in my life that I would have never imagined before.

Her awareness of the variety and resiliency of culture she thinks has made her a better human being. Some might see this as self serving. 'Gosh! If I didn't know all this anthropology stuff I wouldn't be able to see the layered and intersecting present and historical forces that abide in even a simple conversation. And if I wasn't so enlightened and emancipated I'd never be able to communicate my impressions to the non-anthropological community, which is where my insights could do the most good' [reminds me somewhat of the wizard Harry's 'participant observer' relation to muggles in the Harry Potter series]. I don't see this as self-serving. I think Dr. Rinehart is on to something. And I'm not even certain I could have put it into words before I read her blog, but I know I can now.
     Anthropology, and through it archaeology, has fostered in Dr. Rinehart, in me, and in my anthropologist readers a deep and abiding sense of the connectedness of all human beings. It sounds fluffy. I know. [Why don't you go hug a tree, Rob, and leave us to the real business of anthropology!] I truly believe that an anthropological perspective is something that chemists, biologists, engineers and business majors don't get, that psychologists and other social scientists and humanities majors may not even get. It's the profound understanding that, even though we can see differences between us and 'others,' even though we are entangled in our separate tapestries of meaning and understanding of the world around us (i.e. our cultures), even with all the linguistic and other impediments to mutual understanding, twenty-first century anthropologists have the opportunity to inform others of our collective humanity. 
     As a result I believe as Dr. Rinehart does, that anthropology gives us the opportunity to be a different kind of human--one that has the ability to change the circumstances of others of our kind. Whether those changes occur in whom we teach, whom we love, whom we work with, or whom we choose to understand better by walking in their shoes, those incremental changes improve the odds that, to paraphrase William Faulkner upon receiving the Noble Prize for Literature, humanity will not merely endure, it will prevail.
     Anthropologists can help humanity prevail over its dreadful history, its inglorious present, and its uncertain future, but only if we involve the rest of humanity in our work. Like Melissa Rinehart, I believe that it begins with talking, one to one, just as you and I are doing right now. This medium--call it what you will--is making global understanding more possible than it's ever been before. Let's not squander the opportunities that we, as anthropologists, have been given.

Lots On My Mind; Not Much Emanating...

 I realize that I've been mute more than I've been cute these past few days. Making my fieldwork travel arrangements has eaten up most of my time. However, today I'll be enduring the climax of the two-day ordeal that is the truly dreadful experience known as the 'screening' colonoscopy. [Larry, my dear old friend, will no doubt be 'liking' this blurt, since he's only recently been given an all clear after undergoing the successful treatment for the disease the fear of which has convinced me that I must now do this thing.]

As much as I appreciate the 'need to know' if my body is planning on accelerating my inevitable demise, the medical community couldn't have devised a less appealing regimen if what they wanted to do was encourage men to undergo the procedure. I know. I know. Whiner.

Finally seeing the good sense of doing this, I've decided, is part of a syndrome--my having a colonoscopy, I mean. It goes along with the rapidly approaching 60th anniversary of my birth, which, believe it or not, has me thinking more and more about the hereafter. For reals? Yep. It's been happening for years, and I haven't wanted to let anyone know, 'cause after all I'm an atheist, and I've always been proud of my intellectual side. And seeing the latter being pushed aside by the emotions associated with advancing age is not easy to bear. But, I have to tell you what it's really like. As I said, I've been wondering for some time about what 'life' would be like on the other side of 60 and beyond. And nowadays I'll find myself entering a comfortable and familiar space like my bedroom or my equally familiar but often happily avoided workplace and asking myself 'What the Hell did I come in here after?'

I'll see you on the other side...of the operating theatre I mean! I'll save that other 'transition' until much later, thank you very much!

The Subversive Archaeologist: On the Road in July?

I've put up a page with news on my effort to raise the funds to get me to the Czech Republic for part of the 2012 season at Pod hradem cave.


I'd be honoured if you'd check it out. Click here.  
Then click below if you want to support the Subversive Archaeologist, your all-time favorite blog! 

Merci! Gracias! Thank you!

Triggering A Revolution: Archaeology and the Image of the American Indian

Profuse apologies for the tardiness of the blurt you're about to read. Certain...practical considerations have forced me to bend my will to other matters, all the while worrying that my subversive pals would feel like they'd been left out in the cold. More on those pre-emptive activities in due course. On to the Trigger.

American Antiquity 45:662-676 (1980)

All I can remember of the first time I read Trigger's 'Archaeology and the Image of the American Indian' is a blur. Partly it was because we were assigned so much reading at the time, and partly it was because American Antiquity insisted on using a type size and a line length that prohibited fluid eye movement from one line to the next, as you'll discover if you find the article and choose to read it. The kind of presentation that American Antiquity employed waaaaay back then was the sort that increases the reader's cognitive loading manifold, and thereby comprehension suffered. Needless to say, the experience for me was probably one you've experienced many times yourself--you read something and you realize you didn't follow what was said. And so you read it again to get more of its sense. 
     My hope is that despite these practical shortcomings you'll persevere. And if you do, and if this is the first time you've seen this work, you'll understand just why it's being presented as this week's touchstone. It's a story that can't be told often enough, to enough people, to have it sink in, and yet it's vital to the ethical and humanistic practice of archaeology in many parts of the world.
     Not only is Trigger's article a concise history of North American archaeology's contribution to the image of the Native American (or First Nations, if you're Canadian), it's also a creditable accounting of the intellectual trajectory of archaeology in North America from the 18th century onward. In both strands the author reminds us that the 'subjects' are worthy of our interest and consideration in and of themselves, and not, as has so long been the case, as an abstraction against which to compare other people and other times, or as laboratory specimens used in discovering cultural regularities that can be applied to the experience of the archaeologist--both of which denigrate the living descendants of North America's first and longest inhabitants. 
     Although this example of Trigger's primacy in this corner of archaeological scholarship is aimed at the view of North America's aboriginal people, having lived there and worked with many Australian archaeologists, it's the story of that country's stance with respect to its aboriginal inhabitants, as well. Likewise, I believe, in any case of colonial archaeology, irrespective of time and place.
     There aren't any tables or nifty illustrations in this paper. I have the vague sense that Trigger might have eschewed such forms of presentation if only because seriation diagrams and typologies, flow charts and migration routes, and so on, were in part responsible for reinforcing the view of Native North Americans as incapable of changing, culturally, without prodding from outside influences--either by diffusion or migration. 
     Although I'm certain it could easily have been written as one, Trigger's paper is not an admonishment. It's, as it were, a chronicle--nothing more. Of course its intent is to educate, but it never seems (to me, at least) as if he's lecturing the reader. I think his readers are very much left on their own to construct the take-home message, since Trigger's message very much demands that for each consultation or interaction between archaeologists and their contemporaries in the Native American communities a unique approach is needed--one that takes account of the particular, historic circumstances of the group whose archaeology is being engaged.
     There's no humour in this paper as there might be in something written by Flannery. And you won't find a Binford using the opportunity as a 'bully pulpit.' All you'll get from Trigger is a sense of his profound humanity and his deep regard for the people whose history he constructs out of their ancestors' archaeological traces.
    

Pulling the Trigger

I promise. I'll have new news and old news some time on this, the twenty-third day of March, two thousand twelve (which of course ended yesterday in the Antipodes, and will soon be over in Europe and South Africa. So, I'm technically in breach of contract already. So, sue me!
TTFN

How'd It Get To Be Thursday?

Profuse apologies. It's Thursday and I'm haggard at the heart, care-coiled, care-killed, fashed, cogged, and cumbered. There'll be no touchstone today. Night all.   

Mad (as in 'as a hatter') Monday: Blurting Out the Reality Checks, one at a time

If you post something on Twitter, it's called a tweet. If you post something using email it's called... wait for it.... an email. If you post something by snail mail it's called a letter. What, then, do you call something you post on a blog? Simple. A blurt! Or a bleat. Except that 'bleat' makes it sound like you're a sheep, and 'blurt' makes it sound like you're shy. In my case they're prolly both appropriate. So, I flipped a coin, and from now on I'm calling each article that I publish on the Subversive Archaeologist a 'blurt.'


My last blurt, as it happens, unleashed a torrent of comment. One, to be exact. And it appears as if Unknown completely misinterpreted my point(s) with respect to Einstein's thought experiment, at the same time as reminding me that the GPS system and other observations made over the years since 1905 are clear evidence that time dilation exists as a result of Special Relativity (well, not the theory, the physical process that the theory describes [or imputes]). All I can say for certain after my foray into the cosmological realm is that it's a good thing I'm not trying to establish and maintain credentials as a physicist or, for that matter *cough* a mathematician or philosopher of science.


My second-to-last blurt was not so much a criticism of the archaeologist who lately exhumed some of Mesopotamia's history, but of the means by which she and her colleagues 'gained access,' as it were. I thought it was very telling *cough* that they could only venture out in sight of one of the new mondo military bases that've been established not to house the soldiers who aren't still there, 'cause the U.S. apparently pulled out a month or so ago. What's that? They only pulled out the last of the combat troops? My bad. But, that's a good thing, isn't it? I mean, if the people in the bases aren't combat troops then the U.S. is no longer at war with Iraq. Right? OK. So, the U.S. has troops on the ground to protect the personnel and equipment at their shiny new mega-bases (and the Green Zone). Ipso facto they're not there to wage war against the Iraqi people or their neighbours [this sentence contains the elements of a teachable grammar moment, if you have any small children nearby]. So (he asked rather coyly) why are the bases and the equipment and the soldiers and the support staff still in Mesopotamia in great numbers? Occupied? Of course the bases are occupied! If they weren't occupied they wouldn't need the soldiers to protect the people and equipment they surround. Would they? What's that? Not the bases? The country. The country is occupied? Obvies! If it hadn't been occupied there'd never have been a war in the first place, stoopid! Sorry? Oh. Doh! Duh me! Iraq is occupied by the U.S. military because the U.S. has vital national interests there. I see. Kinda like Japan after WWII? No, huh? Unlike Japan, Iraq was a poor country ruled by a vicious tin-pot dictator. So, why occupy Iraq? [Can I please stop the dumb show, now, and get back to the point I'm trying to make as pointedly and as protractedly as possible?]


Professor Stone's intentions may have been, and no doubt were, as innocent as can be. And her hopes for a renaissance of home-grown Iraqi archaeology may also be heartfelt. But, her actions suggest that she and her colleagues are, at best, a little 'tone deaf' and don't realize the signal that they're sending, loud and clear.


Maybe I can draw you a word picture to better illustrate. It's an analogous situation, played out in a university setting, which many of you can appreciate. You could also change the titles and imagine a business context. 


I'm Professor John at WhoAre University. I have a graduate student whom I'm supervising. I've heard that she has a fabulous collection of old vinyl 78s from the early jazz era in America with one-of-a-kind recordings. I love that stuff, and it's really valuable. And because of that, no one I know has anything of the kind. One day I waltz on over to Ms. Q.T. and declare my interest in the music in her collection. And I suggest that she invite me over some time to listen. And just between you and me she kinda doesn't want to, but says OK, anyway. By about the fifth or sixth of my requests to come over and listen, she's desperate to say 'No,' and I'm not about to put her out of her misery. Because she can't say 'No.' 


Why? Why can't Ms. Q.T. just say 'No?' Probly for the same reason that she would have trouble refusing Prof. John's sexual advances. See the relationship between the two isn't equal. It's what the enlightened members of the academic and private-sector establishment have termed a 'power imbalance.' One side, Prof. John, is all powerful--wielding life and death in his palm. Ms. Q.T. is, well, powerless. Almost. She can always take the issue to the university brass and have Prof. John put in his place. The Iraqis? Where are they gonna go? 


Your guess is as good as mine. And, frankly, it doesn't matter if it's oil, or sand, or Ur's gold, or the Great Woolly's petrified faeces. Just being there is bad PR.
   

Sideways Sunday: Einstein Errs?

Even I go off the track at times. But this is ridiculous. I've never gotten the whole time dilation 'thing.' As far as I'm concerned, anthropologically speaking [of course], time is something we humans have constructed to talk about processes: things that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. As an archaeologist who deals with immense time depth I can't imagine that the universe gives a flying hooh-hah about its passage. And so the square peg of 'time-space' never made it through the more-or-less circular hole in my head where knowledge usually manages to insert itself. The worst of it is that I'm not a mathematician. 

Arithmetic? Fine. Algebra? Barely. Calculus? Forget it. Einstein's math? Only in my wildest dreams. So, it's kind of funny, don't you think, that I should be worried about Special Relativity? [I think it's funny! And perverse, given my thoroughly innumerate self.] And so, what do I do about it? I end up rooting around in the most basic explanation for time dilation due to Special Relativity. And what do I find? Implications that I couldn't, in a million years, make sense of in a way that Einstein's theoretical progeny would understand. It's for that reason that I'm going to impose it on my subversive pals. See what you think. 

[Those of you with more than a sprinkling of physics might wish to disabuse me of any misconceptions in what follows. But please do it gently. My ego is, after all, fragile.]

Patent Office Clerk A. Einstein (ca. 1905)

Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity* is often illustrated using an archetypal cartoon—a clock, attached to a train, traveling at or near the speed of light. This is a kind of ‘thought experiment’, a heuristic device with a long and venerable history in physical investigation. However, as an example of temporal relativity, the ‘moving train’ model can be seen to fall short of the claims that have been made on its merits, and the mathematical constructs that would seem to support it. As I hope to demonstrate in this post, it's because the observations necessary to support the claim would be unobtainable in the physical world (the same world, one presumes, that Einstein was trying to describe and explain with his theory of special relativity). In what follows I examine the assumptions implicit in this classic thought experiment, suggest what an objective observer would really perceive as the train sped past, and with elementary school arithmetic, demonstrate that this attempt to model Special Relativity fails to represent empirical reality. 

Imagine that a mag-lev train is traveling from left to right, in a vacuum, in total darkness, on a horizontal, linear path very near the speed of light. The only force acting on the train is that which propels it. The train carries a very precise clock that can emit a continuous stream of photons that exits the train horizontally at 90° to the direction of travel. In Einstein’s thought experiment there is a stationary observer; in my scenario the observer is a closed-coupled device (CCD) that is sensitive enough to discern the first photon emitted and each one thereafter. 

The train is traveling exactly 1.0 m/s below the speed of light, or 299,792,457 m/s. Thus, during one microsecond-long interval the train travels 299.792457 m (or about the length of three Canadian football fields**). In the standard story, a stationary observer sees the light traveling further in a given unit of time than would an observer on the train. By the time Einstein was mulling this over, most of the math to support the concept was already in place, in the form of the so-called Lorentz Transformation.*** Einstein’s contribution was to propose that the speed of light is a constant. With that in mind, he inferred that time must therefore be slowed down relative to the stationary observer, even as time passes normally for a passenger aboard the train.

Credit to
Suppose that at the very moment the train passes at 90° to our CCD, the photon stream begins. Because the speed of light is invariable, by definition that photon would take 1.0 µs to cover the 299.792458 m to our CCD. And here is where the experiment suffers its first set-back. By definition we would be unable to begin timing the train’s progress because, simple mechanics tells us, the photon that marked the precise moment the train passed would never impinge on the CCD. Rather, after 1.0 µs the first photon emitted would arrive at a point 299.792457 m to the right and 0.000001 m to the rear of the observation point. Thus, the CCD would not have detected the first photon. Even at this early stage of the experiment one already has difficulty reconciling objective reality with Einstein’s theory, because the experiment’s success depends on an observer seeing the photon stream at the moment the train reaches a point at 90° to the observation point. For any theory to be so at odds with empirical reality, and yet be so universally accepted, strikes me as odd. For, if you can't observe a phenomenon, how on Earth can you claim to understand its behavior?

Even if one were to shorten the distance of the observation point the reality would be the same. A photon emitted as the train passed a CCD only a millionth of a meter less than a light nanosecond away from the train (i.e. 0.299792458 m) would still miss the mark and would therefore be imperceptible. In this case, after a nanosecond, the photon would end up nearer to the CCD than in the previous example, only 0.299792457 m to the right of the observation point (or about the length of a northern European adult male’s foot).

In reality, for the CCD ever to ‘perceive’ a photon emitted at the moment the train passes, the CCD would need to be so close to the source (i.e. one photon’s diameter away) as to render the experiment, to all intents and purposes, meaningless. And, because any photon emitted in the manner described above would continue moving away from the observation point in two directions at or very near the speed of light, our CCD would be in the dark for ever thereafter.

At this point the reader might be tempted to say, “Well, this is just a thought experiment, after all. What matters is the concept.” In response, I would suggest that if the ‘concept’ cannot be replicated in the physical world, even in theory, what possible value could there be in the model as a representation of the claim that time is relative? 

Summarizing to this point. The photon emitted exactly at the time that the train passes the observer, and every photon emitted thereafter would be, in theory and in practice, imperceptible to any stationary observer, even a CCD capable of sensing individual photons. For a photon emitted from the train ever to reach the CCD, it would either have to be in two places at once, or be able to exceed the speed of light, perhaps by quite a bit. Thus, Einstein’s illustration fails to provide a compelling case for special relativity in a real world, and the mathematics that describe it must also fail to reproduce reality.

In every practical sense, to be able to track photons emitted from the moving train, our observer would have to be moving with the train, or be in two places at once. Clearly a moving observation point would violate the assumptions of the experiment, and an ability to be in two places at once would violate the laws of nature (Quantum Theory notwithstanding). How much faith or credence can we confidently place in Einstein’s experimental evidence of time dilation if it demands that light, itself, or matter, for that matter, behave contrary to physical limits?

Credit

Another manifestation of Einstein’s thought experiment involves a train traveling at speeds much more amenable to human perception, such as the TGV or the Bullet Train. In this alternative experiment, on board the train a beam of light is emitted from the ceiling, and aimed at the floor, such that it spans a distance of approximately 2.5 m. The observer on the train sees a constant beam of light. On the ground, the theoretical observer would see a blurred line of light that began at a point on the ceiling of the train and ended at the floor some distance to the right of its starting point. As the theory goes, the “distance” covered during the process would then be the square root of the sum of the squares of the horizontal and vertical components of the light’s travel, which is a number greater than the distance from the ceiling to the floor. As the theory of Special Relativity depicts it, the stationary observer sees that light has traveled further than it did aboard the train, because on the train it was vertical. Since the speed of light is a physical constant, and the distance traveled on the train is less than the apparent distance traveled in relation to a stationary observer, on Einstein’s account time aboard the train must have slowed down.
Yet, as I've implied above--in theory based on physical reality--for an observer to 'see' either the photon stream emitted by the passing train, or the photon streamed aimed vertically at the floor of the train from the ceiling, it would need to be on a conveyance of its own, have left a predetermined point to the left at a predetermined time, traveled the same distance at the same speed as the train, and converged at the same end point. In realistic terms, the moving observer would see the first photon emitted by the clock about half way from the photon stream's commencement to the end point of the journey, and the same observer would record the final photon emitted in the moment it converges with the theoretical light source. Notwithstanding the cataclysm that would result in reality when the two trains collided, I think I've made the point well enough. [And, lest you think that such experiments would be unlikely to occur in the real world, think of crash-test dummies and their circumstances, then multiply by infinity (or some factor just this side of it).]If, therefore, one “unpacks” the assumptions associated with Einstein’s thought experiment, it becomes clear that, regardless of the inertial frame of the observer, the “light” could not, and did not travel further in relation to a stationary frame of reference. 

There is nothing inherently wrong with performing thought experiments, or with ‘discovering’ properties of nature in one’s dreams, for that matter. It has been known to happen. However it is crucially important that the imagined scenario can be replicated (at least theoretically) in the real world. When Einstein’s mental formulation of relativity is compared with empirical constraints on observation, there is clearly no accord: infeasible observation, coupled with intractable issues of timing and the physical nature of light make this demonstration of Special Relativity appear fanciful, at best, fantastic, at worst. Granted, the existence of a train traveling at the speed of light would also be highly unlikely. However it is, at least, theoretically possible. A light generator on board is also a real possibility. Equally likely is a timepiece that could control photon emission. However, that is where Einstein’s concept and reality finally part company. After comparing the imaginary to the real it is hard to escape the conclusion that Einstein’s model of special relativity presupposes sensory abilities and light behaviors that are physically impossible. I have no idea what implications this has for the theory itself.

However, someone said to me once that he could derive relativity mathematically, and that he didn’t require the cartoon or the thought experiment to help him. To him I would say simply that, while it may be possible to derive relativity mathematically, everyone knows that mathematics is a human invention, and must at times give way before ruthless empirical reality. Indeed, it seems as if one of the only ways to ‘see’ relativity is in the mind’s eye of mathematics. Ask any logical empiricist: the mind’s eye is not an objective source of empirical data.

This is the sort of 'deer caught in the headlights look that I usually get when confronted with a similar array of mathematical notation

All of this might make us a wee bit skeptical of Einstein’s conclusion that time is relative. [It does me, as you can imagine.] And, after a century in Einstein’s sway, it might convince us, once again, to entertain the intuitively satisfying notion that time can neither be speeded up, nor slowed down. This view of time accords much better with the anthropological insight that the consciousness of time is peculiar to humans, and that it is a cultural construct. So much for space-time. Perhaps Time exists, not as Einstein so famously said, so that everything in the universe doesn’t happen at once, but because we humans need to communicate our perception of sequential events in nature that span intervals which are meaningful only to us.

* A. Einstein, Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper. Annalen der Physik 17, 891–921 (1905).

** The length of a “football” field (or pitch) is relative to the side of the Atlantic on which the English-speaking reader resides, and varies according to the rules set by the respective governing bodies of the “football” played there. On the east (or right) side of the Atlantic, the distance is 90–120 m (FIFA). On the west (or left) side of the Atlantic, the distance further depends upon which side of the Canada–U.S. border one lives. South of that line the distance is 91.44 m (NFL). North of the line, the distance is set at 100.584 m (CFL). 

*** Which, curiously enough, was an attempt to understand the universe in terms of the aether through which, up until Einstein's time, was theorized to have been the 'medium' through which electromagnetic energy moved (much like sound waves through air and water waves through, well, water).