Turn and Burn the Defender and Hit a Solid Cross Out to the Far Stick

Science is melting my brain this afternoon, as it often does when I'm on the cusp of finally figuring out a long-term problem. So yay for that, but a body needs occasional breaks to churn out words that are not related to the adoption of projectile point design canons over large geographic spaces 2500 years ago.

My favorite uncle has gone on some super-cleansy diet ordered by his endocrinologist, or something, and for four more weeks must eschew caffeine, alcohol, pork (a Muslin endocrinologist? I do not know), grains, salt, black pepper (whuh??), sugar, nuts, and anything refined or otherwise flavorful. I would have to be thisclose to death for that to sound like a good option. What's that you say? I need to eat unseasoned steamed kale and chicken for the next month? And drink herbal tea? Do you have any unprocessed, gluten-free bullets I might be able to eat? Because that sounds seriously fucking intolerable. He's lost 16 pounds in two weeks, which wouldn't hurt me one bit, except that the daily rage index would probably push my blood pressure into such dangerously high elevations as to outweigh the health benefits of swearing off chocolate chips, coffee, and hoppy hoppy IPAs.

Here's something happier than that:



And with the Megan Rapinoe Song playing in my head nonstop, it's back to the science.

Uh, No

Anthropologists have been thrown into turmoil about the nature and future of their profession after a decision by the American Anthropological Association at its recent annual meeting to strip the word “science” from a statement of its long-range plan.

Well, I'm a fuckin' scientist. With stats and graphs and everything. Screw the Triple Ehs. The end.

Unrepentant Geekery, Part Deux *UPDATED*

Now with more explanation, below.

SOFA, bitchez.




















p = .738

My heart flutters.

Statistics have been the bane of my existence since junior year in college and the stats course that was required for my anthropology major. The class was taught by a wee, marginally insane Scotsman who claimed to be able to identify the county in which any given scotch was distilled, simply by sniffing it.

Suffice it to say that I would have done better if the class had focused on the whisky and not so much on the numbers. It got so bad that I resorted to carrying the floppy disk with my homework projects on it (this was in the long long ago time far far away, when data were stored on bendy rectangular media the size of a cd sleeve) through the library security zone and actually rubbing it on the sensor so I could say whoops, disk must've gotten bunged and take the blind F rather than letting the TA see incontrovertible evidence of my incompetence.

The prof ended up giving everyone a C instead of the Fs we deserved since failing an entire class presumably would not have reflected well on his teaching skills. The TA went on to pursue a career as a car show model. I kept my textbook and made occasional and inevitably tear-inducing attempts at using it as a reference over the years.

And now I found SOFA, and my life has changed. It is an open-source online stats package that evaluates your data and walks you through the process of selecting tests. It cranks out graphics. It produces results I can use. I understand, finally, and now I still weep, but this time in joy and relief.

Oh, science. We're on again.

Public Service Announcement

If, like me, you regularly need terrain, elevation, and distance data at work and, like me, tend to have requests for map-based data answered with the question but what are the UTMs?, only for that answer to be, invariably, fuck if I know, a miracle has arrived. A gift from the mapping gods, who, previously unbeknownst to me, are named Zonum Solutions. They have a free online toolset that ties in with Google Maps and lets you get spot elevations, or set points to measure linear distance, or define a polygon to measure area and perimeter of spatial features. And--and, miracle of miracles--a window in the sidebar shows the UTMs for wherever you have the cursor positioned in the map.

Then, the FireShot add-on allows you to download the onscreen map (plus any lines or points you've drawn on it) into Photoshop to further muck around and save. I'm not sure about permissions for using the images you generate this way in publications, but at the least, you can generate nifty draft copies to hand to the AutoCAD guys down the hall, and make all the maps you want to hang on your wall.

Happy archaeologist.

Just another way the MaddowBlog serves the world.

Archaeology Interlude

Sometimes there are no more compelling explanations for chronological trends.

Click to embiggen.

The Boltgirl Typing Primer

I did not take typing in high school. I'm not even sure if they offered typing at my high school. So I hunted and pecked well into grad school, and even though I (mostly) type now without having to peek at the keyboard, certain words just refuse to come out right every goddamn time. Especially archaeology words, which is troublesome given that archaeology is necessarily the number one subject in my work writing.

Here is a handy translation guide, should you ever find yourself editing one of my chapters.

1. steon. This actually is supposed to be "stone," and since my specialty is stone tools, it's a problem.

2. Cieneha. Looks plausibly Southwestern, but should be Cienega. It is the name of one of the more significant time periods I study--lots of fascinating steon tools going on, of course--so, again, needs some help.

3. poitn. Uh, "point." As in projectile points, which, alas, were typically made of steon, and there were shit-tons of them in the Cieneha phase.

4. preshitoric. Need I say more?

So apparently the left hemisphere of my brain is rebelling against my career choice. I'm amazed sometimes to get to the office and find that they haven't changed the locks overnight.

Caution: Archaeologist at Work

I knew all this blogging would come in handy for work someday. I am writing a journal article about some extensive collections a guy made west of Phoenix in the 1940s when he noticed that several large Hohokam sites were going to be damaged by irrigation and hydroelectric (I think) work along the Gila River. Almost all of the stuff--buckets and bucket and buckets of stuff, mind-boggling in both sheer numbers and the superhuman quality of workmanship--is from mortuary contexts, cremations to be exact, and while a few people have dipped into the collection over the years to write dissertations and master's theses, it's never been comprehensively presented to the public.

So that's my job, at least for the arrowheads, and until this afternoon I had no real idea what to say beyond holy shit will you look at all these amazing things. A lot of the arrow points that were included as offerings in various cremations are stunningly well made, on the order of 10 cm long and yet no more than 2 or 3 millimeters thick, but there's an equal number of offertory points that were clearly intended to be of the same design as the big showpieces, but whose workmanship falls far short. Even accounting for the warping and twisting incurred in the intense heat of the crematory fire, they are asymmetrical, unevenly serrated, thick in the middle. Why? What social mechanism was at work here?

I don't know for sure. Nobody does. But! This afternoon, as I was thinking about mortuary rituals and grave furnishings, I remembered the field trip I took last summer to a tiny cemetery in the limestone country of southwestern Indiana, which I wrote about here. These completely unrelated cultural settings provide my favorite kinds of analogies, the sorts of parallels I best like to draw between in attempting to understand the human forces behind the extinct technology I study for a living because the initial apparent absurdity strips somehow strips away the superfluous and lays intrinsic processes bare (ask me sometime about 17th-century European gunflint industries and arrowhead manufacture in the US Southwest circa A.D. 900). Cultural parallels between central Arizona in the year 1000 and southwestern Indiana in the year 1880 are pretty much nonexistent, but in both places and times people had to deal with the deaths of friends and family, and had to send them off with the requisite ritual and grave furnishings.

The dead needed certain things, and then as now the survivors were constrained somewhat by their ability to pay for the really good stuff, the highly visible status items. In Gila Bend, they wanted chalcedony arrowpoints with long, serrated blades, side notches, square shoulders, and deep basal concavities. In Needmore, they wanted a limestone grave marker inscribed with a name and dates, ideally with a bit of scripture and a decorative motif. Those who had the resources to acquire these things from a master craftsman got the long thin arrowheads, the headstones inscribed with a lengthy bible verse and topped with intricate scrolls, ferns, and flowers. Those who didn't were left to make their own uneven points with mismatched serrations and awkward humps, left to scratch names into unadorned slabs with an unsteady hand, letters backwards and dates squeezed together, scrollwork passed over in favor of a stick-figure sun.

Or maybe not. It makes a good story, though, the thread of common humanity weaving possibilities across hundreds of miles and years.

In Which Our Productivity Falters

The breaking news e-mail from CNN rolls in, dutifully announcing Sotomayor's confirmation. My officemate wonders if John McCain indeed voted no, and I spend about a minute Googling to no avail, hampered somewhat by a slow connection and more by the assumption that this is something we probably don't need the internet to confirm. It takes a while and I get no answers. Oh, I just wondered if you'd seen the roll call yet, she apologizes, I didn't mean to interrupt your work.

My work.

Heh.

I have been paralyzed for a long time now, days, at least, managing to drag a sentence here, a paragraph there out of my brain, distracted by something I can't quite catch a glimpse of except from the corner of my eye. It's an elusive ennui, sometimes taking the guise of anxiety over my son's looming adulthood and moving away, sometimes masquerading as an utter lack of confidence in my professional abilities, from time to time an aching shoulder, a sore knee, a dumpy visage in the mirror. It's all of these things and none of them. I am running uphill in sand, tethered by an elastic band that allows just enough progress to pique some hopeful interest before snapping the whole situation down to the bottom again.

I am supposed to be an expert of arcana. Vacation was supposed to rejevante me. I was supposed to be better than this. I hope my boss doesn't notice.

Huh.

While I was busy with other stuff, somebody else built the career I thought I might have. This distresses me. I landed a book contract with the University of Utah Press, and midway through the rough draft the other guy published essentially the same book. I couldn't bring myself to read it, but I hear it's good. He's since cranked out another book or two and papers in journals that cheerfully reject my submissions. I don't read those either. The other half of my department is braver and tells me that we are essentially clones, soulmates, sharing a single stone tool-based brain and writing the same stuff in the same style.

I guess I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks about our subject matter the way I do, and that the ideas are getting out there to a wide audience. I'm just bothered that it's under his name rather than mine.

It's my fault, not his, of course. I never wanted to go back and polish up the hoop-jumping and ass-kissing skills that are necessary tools for navigating a PhD, nor did I want to sit through another introductory physical anthro class with a bunch of 20-ish baby grad students, nor have I ever had any interest in an academic career that would require teaching. So I toil in obscurity and wonder if I really have any idea what I'm doing after all after the drawing's done.
















My only reliable skill set. Shh, don't tell the boss.

Trumpets and Angel Choirs

They're blaring in my head, anyway, because I finally finished the freelance illustrating job that has been plaguing me for weeks. I am very grateful for the opportunity to earn some sorely needed cash, but all that crouching over the light table has left me with a sore back and bleary eyes.



It's a lovely flake of breccia.




A fragmentary stemmed projectile point.






















Oh what a beautiful hammerstone.

So yeah, that's been my life. I am looking forward to spending some quality time tonight with the Chicago Red Stars (thank you, DVR gods) and Martha Stewart.

Tantrum Tuesday

This does not happen often--although I suppose the degree of frequency is entirely dependent on your perspective, vis-a-vis whether you're inside my head or a hapless bystander on the outside--but when it does it sucks. It's eerily reminiscent of the early '80s, specifically, nights on which I would get totally fucking stuck on my math homework, stuck to the point of swearing I could feel a physical barrier inside my brain that kept all the knowledge and capability that just had to be in there from spilling forward into an area where I could access it.

Today it is the same nice Hohokam site as yesterday, still sitting scattered in the database, resolutely flipping me off on every attempt I make to pull up a chair and be friendly, rebuffing my offers to buy it lunch or maybe just a drink, before it goes back to the Times crossword and its cup of decaf. I don't want a commitment or even a second date here. I just want to talk.

Specifically, I would like to know what people living there were doing round about the year 1000, why they made the tools they did, what all they had to give up to the people at West Branch in order to acquire some lousy brown and slightly radioactive chert the West Branchers were sitting on, and if there was any real reason behind the changes they made in their technological behaviors from generation to generation, or if they were just bored or all like fuck that shit, no way I'm doing this the way my old man did, and by the way, did you notice we have to make everything using these goddamn rocks? And you want how much, again, for that lousy-ass chert that makes me glow green at night? Because I can get it way cheaper in Nogales, you scamming bastard, and la migra can't do a goddamn thing about it because they don't fucking exist yet.

Uh, because I kinda need to know these things, and kinda need to write a report about them by... 5:00 today? In! Trouble!

Argh

I like my job. really. But! I do not like needing to revise a five-year-old chapter that suddenly has a hard deadline of the end of this week and discovering that (1) it sucks, largely because (2) I did all the analysis and draft-writing while recovering from a grade 2 concussion suffered at the outset of the Iraq war, which means (4) the artifact sampling is inexplicably fucked up and (5) the syntax is even more tortured than usual but (5) whatever, I don't remember doing a shred of any of it anyway.

It is amazingly difficult to plausibly explain prehistory when you, uh, don't have any data.

Professionalism: I haz it.

Shit.

Homer Says

This is one of Homer's best posts ever. Go read.

Science Monday

Back in the saddle, three spreadsheets open and bucking and snorting as I shovel data into them, utterly disregarding the inelegant clanging of mixed metaphors, hot on the trail of the secret lives of a few people who hung out on top of a hill outside Payson, Arizona about 1700 years ago and made a mess of things. These people were inveterate recyclers, resharpening just about everything they had down to a nub. This is highly unusual behavior for the geographic setting and time period, so I need to figure out what all was all up in they grillz to make them do that. That's my job. That, and replenishing the coffee pot.














Puzzling evidence.

In completely unrelated news, the Emmys managed to top the previous edition of Completely Pointless and Stupid Format Tweaking we last saw when an awards show made a big hoo-hah of being In The Round, as it was uttered breathlessly and repeatedly, although "in the round" in that context simply meant "maintaining the same two-camera format despite half the audience being seated behind your mark." Cutting edge, that. Anyway. To top that, last night's Emmys featured the Worst! Idea! Ever! by being hosted by five reality show hosts, simultaneously and painfully unscripted. When both Ryan Seacrest and Tom Bergeron fidget and look distinctly uncomfortable, you know you have a serious dog. And I thought Howie Mandel creeped me out before. Holy shit. Uh, yeah, so I guess some people won awards and stuff. I didn't pay a lot of attention since more and more of the nominees are for things I can't see since I don't have HBO. I did see the bit at the beginning with Ricky Gervais and Steve Carell, which was howlingly funny and should have earned both of them another Emmy on the spot.

Who Benefits?

I was wrapping up my last trip up to Mesa to visit the grandparents before they chug back to Colorado for the summer, the mental Offensive Comment Bingo card refreshingly under-blotted, when my grandmother said, "You know, I really don't have any idea what you do in your job." That's fine, not many people do. So I launched into my well-practiced spiel about the cultural resource management field, touching on Arizona's historic preservation laws, the rich history and prehistory of life in the Tucson Basin over the past four thousand years, outlining the process we go through in order to get artifacts out of the ground and onto my desk, describing briefly how I look at them and the kinds of behavioral inferences I can squeeze out of them, tooting ever so softly the little horn that plays the song about me managing to have achieved a decent reputation in the field and respect as an expert. It took a few minutes. She absorbed it and paused for all of two seconds before asking the ultimate question.

"But who does it benefit?"

That one stumped me. It's been stumping me for years, as I watch my relatives build meaningful careers in education and health care, as I have watched those same grandparents kick back and enjoy the very comfortable retirement my grandfather accrued through a lifetime of working his ass off. "Uh... I guess it mostly benefits people who are curious about how people lived in the past," I finally managed to sputter out. "So, nosy people, then." Yeah, something like that.

Does that do anything to better the world? I kinda have my doubts. My officemates agree that archaeology mainly functions to keep marginally socially incompetent riffraff like us off the streets. If we occasionally satisfy someone's curiosity about what might have been going on in their back yard in 1800 B.C., I suppose that's nice. But earth-shaking revelations about human behavior that actually benefit modern people are pretty few and far between. Ancient people used tools and generated mounds and mounds of trash. They remodeled their houses and ate dinner. They wore jewelry. They cared enough to bury their dead relatives and even, sometimes, their dogs too. They did things one way until someone came up with a better idea, and then they did them the new way until the next innovation came along.

In short, ain't a whole lot changed in four millennia. Does knowing that benefit your life? I hope so. Otherwise I'm squandering a lot more here than just time.

Archaeology is Fun

This is the kind of archaeology I used to do, in exotic places fraught with danger, with occasional sprints away from armed grave robbers during weekend hikes, driving hands-up through military checkpoints, searching native markets for cold beer, eating guinea pigs. My old undergrad adviser and buddy Mark has always done excellent work in Peru and, more recently, Tibet, and now he's hit the big time since the wire services noticed he found a nifty necklace high in the Andes:


Awesomeness from Lake Titicaca.

Granted, we never found any gold back in the day when I was working for him in Peru, but we did find one of the earliest mano-and-metate sets known in the Andes and some very interesting early ceremonial features. He taught me how to wield a trowel and draw trench profiles, and taught us all to work as hard as we played.

Good show, Mark. You're buying the beers next time.

Unapologetic Geekdom

68 days, 13 hours, 21 minutes.

Brief Respite from the Trenches

The past several weeks have been one long cage match with the database. The administrator did install the equivalent of a nifty warp drive button for me yesterday, which will alleviate a lot of the problems, but I'm still left with several complex summary tables to correct, which entails running the same query with minor tweaks over and over and over again. I swear by the end of the day I can feel my cerebral cortex folding in on itself in surrender. And after all that, how many people actually give a rat's ass about how folks organized themselves to manufacture arrowheads on the Mogollon Rim a thousand years ago? Do you? Didn't think so.

That and reading far too many comments on the Daily Star's continuing coverage of the upcoming Arizona Constitutional amendment kerfuffle (election coming up? must launch anti-gay marriage bill!) has left me too mentally numbed to post much other than pretty pictures from hiking trips. You know, straight people who insist that hiring a lawyer to draw up a will and a few Power of Attorney documents not only provides the exact same legal protections as civil marriage but is actually superior to civil marriage should be required to forfeit their own $50 trips to the courthouse and re-do it all via the lawyer route. Seriously. They'll need to go shopping for a sturdy messenger bag first, though, which they'll need to cart around their documents wherever they go--not that even a boxful of medical and financial powers of attorney will fly very far in one of the states whose constitutions were recently amended to not only ban same-sex marriage forever and ever world without end amen, but to also explicitly refuse to recognize any relationship designed to approximate marriage or the legal incidents thereof. Get that last little bit there? Your very expensive contracts and PoAs mean exactly jack shit in states like Michigan or Wisconsin, because they attempt to secure for you just a few of the legal incidents extended to straight couples facing emergencies without hesitation or the demand for supporting documentation.

So I'm a tad more surly than usual, and my Thin Mints have still not yet arrived. WTF, Girl Scouts? Step it up!

One-stop Shopping

This was posted very briefly last week and then taken down so as to not conflict with something similar going on at work. That being finished, I can now happily unveil yet another goddamn CafePress shop offering the finest nonsectarian archaeologywear on the planet for your Christmachanukawanzaakuh shopping pleasure. Browse the full selection to find something you can't live without; proceeds will be donated to Pretty Bird Woman House.


Favored by surly archaeologists throughout Tucson... and the world!

Don't forget the lovely holiday ornaments while you're there, cuz nuthin' sez XMAS like an oversized Basketmaker point on an oval plaque dangling from a fir tree. Ah, just do me a favor if you happen to work at my company, and if you're not sure if you do, please ask--be a love and and wear the stuff someplace other than the office (at least not to staff meetings) for the next couple of months, m'kay?

Hunting the Wild Chert in Central Arizona

I spent this past Thursday and Friday tramping along creeks and down the sides of highway road cuts outside Payson, in search of the sources of the many lovely varieties of chert people at one specific site used to make bucketloads of arrowheads way back in the 11th century. It was a mostly successful venture.
















The Home Depot of A.D. 1000 Payson, located roughly between the two large alligator junipers (red arrows) near the top of the right side of this ridge. Click to supersize.

Four or five different cherts outcrop here and roll down the hill in the form of fist-sized nodules. Some of the people living in the small settlement below scooped them up, knocked thin flakes from them with round stone hammers, and turned those flakes into arrowheads by pressure-flaking tiny chips from their edges. The analytical problem I'm exploring is how the staggering number of artifacts--mostly waste flakes that are the byproduct of the manufacturing technique and broken arrowheads that got thrown away--can be used to infer the scale and organization of the little industry centered here at the base of an otherwise unremarkable hill, one among dozens in the immediate area, but one that just happened to be loaded with the kind of stone favored for arrowheads back in the day.

One of the larger nodules on the hill (above handle), with prehistoric flakes (below handle). Click to supersize!

I came home with a backpack full of samples and a roll of maps I have yet to mark up. The scenery was lovely, even if fall has been a bit late in coming this year.

Oak leaves against a brilliant blue sky.



















Butterfly on thistle, with inquisitive bee making an appearance at lower left.

I leave you with this image from Star Valley. I do not know why the adult cabaret chose a giant steer as its mascot, except that there are a lot of ranches in the area. We tried not to think about that one too hard when we drove by.