Grotesque Stone Idols

Puritan Dilemma: A 17th Century Salem settler and a 1991 murder

2012-01-10T17:25:00.002-05:00

"History is the story of events, with praise or blame." - Cotton Mather

I've never fully understood the general obsession we have with familial genealogy. Intellectually, I accept that it is part of identity-building. The desire to know "where I came from" is what feeds we heritage practitioners, for sure, but I suppose my own interest is more broad than my own mitochondrial DNA. Yet, like many Americans, I do have a strong sense of who and what my ancestors were. After watching a particular episode of The West Wing, I told my foreign fella that I bet I could get into the Daughters of the American Revolution with minimal effort. One weekend on the internet and a few months of waiting for approval, I was in (say what you will, it did get me a job). I wonder if this is just a part of our American society. I wonder if everyone has a strong sense of where we all fit in to the past nearly 400 years of Euro-American history.

As usual, this is a lead up. In 1991 a woman named Sarah Yarborough was killed in Washington State. There is a composite sketch of a possible suspect, there is DNA, and there is, as yet, no one behind bars. Last month the cold case was re-opened and the DNA evidence was sent to a lab to be compared against what I can only imagine is a massive DNA database. Interestingly enough, the DNA matched a particular family: the family of Robert Fuller who settled in Salem, MA in the 1630s.

Seriously, DNA evidence from a crime is most closely linked to an early American puritan.

So info on Fuller is a bit slim. Various news outlets place him as arriving in Salem in 1630. The internets, however, seem to think 1638 is a better year and that he may have arrived on the ship "The Bevis". That said, I looked at the Bevis passenger list and our Robert isn't on there. He may have paid his way by serving as a sailor but no matter, he was in Salem requesting land by 1639. He was a bricklayer, he eventually moved to Rehoboth. The man had six kids, although three of them and his first wife died during various Native American raids during King Phillip's War. He moved back to Salem, then back to Rehoboth and died around 1700.

Oh yes, and one of his descendants, presumably one descended from either his son Jonathan or his son Benjamin (unless John or Samuel had children BEFORE being killed), killed Sarah Yarborough. Isn't that strange?

The investigators are promoting this mostly because it is cool, but since this boils down to the Fuller Y chromosome, they are promoting the idea that the suspect might have the surname of Fuller. That is barring nearly 400 years of adoptions, illegitimacies, and legal name changes. But why not?

So my thoughts are drifting to three questions:

1. How likely is it that the killer knew that he is on a direct male line from one of our fine yankee puritans before this was all over the news?

2. How likely is it that any one American is on a direct line down from one of those folk, genetically speaking?

3. How long do you think it will take the genealogy nerds on ancestry.com to trace a descendant of Robert Fuller to the Washington state area circa 1991?

Here is hoping that the killer is found. It would be an added bonus if his surname is Fuller.

US/Bolivia MOU Extended!

2011-12-11T16:36:00.001-05:00

I'm as happy as this adorable Bolivian child!

The US/Bolivia MOU has been extended!

I and many other people have been on the edge of our seats over this one since June. This was the first time that I experienced a bilateral agreement hearing first hand and I wasn't sure what to expect.

Beyond being a success for cultural property preservation, this is a step towards normalizing relations with Bolivia. By keeping the ties that we have left, we leave the door open for sorting out past grievances. I'm proud to have been involved in this.

Five more years!

(cross posted)

A Sister Blog: Dividing and Conquering

2011-12-11T13:15:00.000-05:00

I have started a new blog!

Property of an Anonymous Swiss Collector:

Moderately learned commentary on looting, antiquities trafficking, and art crime

Grotesque Stone Idols is not going anywhere (and I promise I will update it more, seriously, I will), but I am splitting the commentary into two categories. G.S.I. will be focused on the nebulas issues of culture and heritage that float around all of our heads and P.O.A.A.S.C. will be focused on art crime, auctions, sales, antiquities trafficking, and the likes.

Image Organization: Getting Better

2011-11-30T16:24:00.001-05:00

For quite some time I have let the image situation on my computer get out of hand. Most of what I do is visual and I tend to have glorious and useful photos pile up all over the place. I think this is a symptom of not starting off with a filing system. However, organization is in the cards.

I don't pretend to know how best to organize the professional images that I have acquired. I find myself distrusting programs like iphoto...they feel too informal. Thus I find myself slowly curating my collection by hand, promising myself that I will do a better job of naming everything.

All and all, this is a mostly useless post, however, I am going to use it at a vehicle to share one of the great forgotten and re-found Tiwanaku-related images on my computer.

Click to Enlarge. An amazing set of panoramas with commentary from one of Posnansky's tomes. The first is the Tiwanaku village sometime before 1946, the second is the Kalasasaya well before the reconstruction of the 60s/70s. Special guest star: my finger.

Landscape archaeology? Landscape fantastical archaeology? And, really though, how crazy/great was Arthur Posnansky. I can't seem to get enough of the guy. With this organization system in place, I have plans to go back to unnamed university library and scan some more of his images for myself and for posterity. All the best to all of you!

Jonestown Vacation: Guyanese heritage?

2011-11-20T21:21:00.001-05:00

The fella and I were talking about what we don't know this morning. Specifically, which countries in the world that we knew the least about. I decided that I probably knew the least about Uzbekistan and Burundi: I can't muster up the name of a single city, a single historical fact, a single anything about either of those countries nor have I met anyone from there. Fella speculated that there were probably some South American countries he knew nothing about and I suggested the oft forgotten trio of French Guiana, Suriname, and Guyana. I told him that he had to rule Guyana out...Jonestown of course.

Interestingly enough the BBC has just run a small article on Jonestown, specifically in relation to heritage and tourism. The article describes it as a preservable site: tractors, file cabinets, big drums that once held cyanide and kool-aid all sit rusting away, covered in jungle creep. Quickly the focus shifts to attracting tourists to the country. To quote a Mr. Gouveia, who runs an airline and tour company in the country:

"What we need to do is attract people to come to Guyana, whether that attraction is Jonestown or Kaieteur Falls or birding or ecotourism or cricket, to see what a wonderful country Guyana has turned out to be". It compares the idea of Jonestown tourism to Auschwitz and Rwandan genocide locations as places for visitors.

Dachau: The take-home message

A lot has been made in recent years about the "heritage that hurts" phenomenon. People visiting places of pain, healing collectively and, presumably, spending their money. Yet I am not sure I see the idea of Jonestown tourism as being an equivalent of Auschwitz. There seems to be such a strong "never forget" sentiment to holocaust/genocide tourism. The driving force is to learn a lesson from a site of pain. Sure there might be some sort of, I don't know, rubber-necking a car wreck going on at these sites, but most people probably wouldn't admit it. You at least get the sense that the general mission statement of those sites is collective growth through the preservation of the experience of pain. "Never again".

Jonestown tourism, however, could really be summed up by Mr. Gouveia's quote above; to paraphrase, "We need to draw tourists to Guyana, it doesn't really matter why". A visit to Jonestown is for gawking not for "never forgetting" or "never againing". If developed for tourism, I see it as a stop on a jungle circuit: "Canoe down the river; birdwatching; visit Jonestown; local craft market; lunch." There really isn't a lesson to learn ("Don't join a cult then move to South America?"), there really isn't a collective memory to share, the tragedy that happened wasn't really something that anyone on the outside felt. It isn't a site of all of our collective pain.

I think personal tragedy is hard to sell in a heritage or museum setting. We all know how we are supposed to feel while standing in front of a hunk of the Berlin wall, or looking at a photograph of a starving Union soldier at Andersonville. Those locations represent massive scars. Interpreting smaller scale sites of pain is another story. And that is what I see Jonestown as: a site of smaller-scale pain and mostly just of international surprise. Terrible for the people there, terrible for the few survivors, terrible for everyone's family, terrible for Rep. Leo Ryan's family and the people in his district, but it wasn't the Rwanda genocide (side note, thinking of the Rwanda genocide pretty much automatically makes me start to tear up. I don't even need the place to feel it). In such cases, you are left with site staff who end up trying to teach visitors how to feel that pain.

"Rachel Weeping" by Peale (1772, 1776); Contemporary to my site of sadness.

Several days a week I work at a small house museum that many, many people visit. In one room visitors are confronted with several related facts: the person who owned that house was married twice; across the two marriages there were 16 babies born; the house owner married extremely quickly after the death of the first wife. I would say roughly 50% of people who come through guffaw at the number of children then say, exactly, "man he didn't wait long did he! *chuckle*". Yet I, the person who stands there and thinks about these things all day, can only see that information as sad, and the room as the site of pain. I see a woman who dies leaving 7 children. I see a man widowed with a slowly-dying newborn on his hands, with several full time jobs, and with a mess of kids who need food and clothing. The dying baby doesn't even make it the short time to the second marriage. Mother and baby probably died in that room. It was probably the saddest part of all of those people's lives.

But yes, it is something for people to giggle at because it isn't something they share. It isn't heritage that hurts because they were never hurt. There is nothing inside of them that is to be healed by the experience and I think Jonestown would end up the same. Something to laugh at; something to not think through.

Quest for progress? This sign is a whole 'nuther blog entry

But I have deviated quite a bit from my initial thought, which was the "get tourists here for whatever however" mentality. The tourism panacea specter. Tourism as development. It always plays as so desperate and always reads like it is never going to work. Is Jonestown REALLY a tourist draw in its own right?

I suppose the idea is that you work with what you have and, as I displayed this morning, Jonestown is the only thing that seems to occupy the Guyana place in my mind. Heck, if I was on some tourist circuit moving through there, I'd probably even stop in at Jonestown.

The Poe I didn't Know

2011-08-02T12:39:00.002-04:00

This week I read The House of the Seven Gables for the first time and have been googling daguerrotypes like mad. As the first truly popular form of photography, these dark, stiff, and oddly emotive pieces can easily suck hours out of your day. It is a dangerous road to go down folks, I really should be doing something else.

Poking around in daguerrotype land I came across the image to the right. You probably have never seen this image before but you know this man well. Heck, you probably think you know exactly what he looks like.

Taken around 1842, and believe it or not, this is a 33 year old Edgar Allen Poe. Although he was already a pretty heavy drinker at that point and his much-lauded wife Virginia wasn't dead. This Poe was a bit of an eff-up but was not haunted by any lost Lenores (the Raven wasn't until 1845, neither was his moustache for that matter).

Indeed, you know Edgar Allen Poe circa 1848 (left): a broken and increasingly erratic man who is half a step and just one night in the gutter away from rock bottom. This is the Poe who is laying down by the side of sepulcher of his bride and all that. We only visually know a Poe when he couldn't have been worse.

I am trying to think through the effect that photography has on our perceptions of public figures of the past. The limited number of images of some of these people have forever forced us to see them in the light of the one moment that the photograph was taken, no matter how bad or how non-representative that the photograph may be. Of all historic authors, I'd imagine that all of us thought we would recognize Edgar Allen Poe walking down the street. I am just not sure that is the case. The moment of Poe's life that we visually know now seems a bit unfair.

The question must be raised, of course, if that first photo is actually Poe. Turns out he is wearing the same great coat as in a daguerrotype taken in1848 (right). Of course this is a 1848 image so Poe looks like the suitable mess that we have come to expect from him.

Interestingly enough, Sarah Helen Whitman, who had just become engaged to Poe thus they had a betrothal photo done, stated that "this picture of mine has been hidden away all these years because I thought it did not represent him truly". This photo was taken within a fortnight of the other '48 one above after a good few days of emotional outbursts, drinking, and issues.

Moving on, the image to the left was taken about 3ish months before he died. It was given to a woman named Annie Richmond who seems to have had some sort of close relationship with Poe at the time. Her absolutely scathing comments about the image: "[It] does not do him justice — indeed, I have never seen a picture that did — his face was thin . . . [here] he looks very stout, & his features heavy, which makes it seem almost like a caricature — yet, he certainly sat for it, & the artist (if he deserves the title) is still living here, who had the privilege of taking it."

I find it interesting that the women close to him universally believe that every portrait of him taken during his downward spiral looked nothing like the man that they were involved with. Yet I find that my entire perception of Poe as a writer and as a man is wrapped up in these images of a disheveled, chunky faced man with bags under his eyes and an otherworldly expression on his face. Would my experience of Poe change if the only image I had of him was the '42 portrait where he is looking together.

To challenge the idea of a photograph as and 'authentic' artifact of the past is clearly a bit too complex for a slow Tuesday early afternoon. Maybe that is a task for another day, but I just wonder who certain people would be in my mind if I had never seen them.

Singing Inka Princesses of the 1950s

2011-05-19T12:54:00.002-04:00

Incidentally, there appears to be a whole mysterious world out there filled with dynamic Indigenous-chic Peruvian singers from the 1950s which I did not know about.

Part of the "exotica music" scene, Yma Sumac was born in Ichocán, Cajamarca and claimed to be an Inka princess who was directly descended from Atahualpa. In 1946, the government of Perú, apparently, formally supported this claim (at least according to her New York Times obituary).

For your viewing pleasure: a ghostly Yma Sumac performing vocal feats around stills of various South and Central American archaeology things:

That, my friends, is what it is all about. Hey there Gateway of the Sun!

The Glory of Bolivian Silent Film: Time Traveling Twice Over

2011-05-19T12:34:00.002-04:00

Today is another day for silent film lust and desperation.

Arthur Posnansky, everyone's favorite fantastic and fantastical Bolivian archaeologist, produced a silent film in 1926. Called La Gloria de la Raza, the pseudo-documentary was shot at Tiwanaku, starred Posnansky, and pushed his always-interesting views of the past. If you liked reading about how Posnansky believed the Tiwanaku the be the 12,000 year old nucleus of all American civilizations and culture, you'd LOVE to see it on the screen. Posnansky had cash and an eye for the mystical: I am sure La Gloria de la Raza was magical.

Yet, of course, it does not survive. I'm hot on the trail of either a script or a companion document to the film that Posnansky self published. It should show where he was going with the whole deal and, I hope, will note the locations of various scenes at the site. Film footage of the pre-restoration, 1920s Tiwanaku, however, would be both valuable and exciting. If only!

Existing still from La Gloria de la Raza: Pottery!

But, in the world of silent film, there are always discoveries to be made. It seems that what is lost can often magically found. I find that one of the most alluring aspects of silent film: the constant lost and found of it all. Rumors of Posnansky hauling a bag stuffed with his film reels to the US in the 1940s and returning to Bolivia without them are out there. Where did he go? A dark part of me thinks that perhaps I should take a look into it, that maybe it takes an archaeologist to find an archaeologist's film. Would he have passed it off as a teaching tool to, say, W.C. Bennett at Yale maybe? Were they still in a fight then? I'm walking a dangerous road. Better searchers than I have failed. Do I want to be sucked in?

As it turns out, and I didn't know this until today, the only surviving Bolivian silent film has just been restored. Set my heart ablaze: it is a full costume, Conquest era romance! Ladies and gentlemen, meet Wara Wara:

Now, obviously, there is much to be excited about there. Pre-conquest utopia! Coca leaf divination! Maybe even pushing of mestizoization!

And heck upon heck, Carlos Mesa, former president of Bolivia, has come out swinging!

In an interview about the release of Wara Wara, the former president states that in the 20s racism was unilateral and now it goes both ways; that he is proud the country has an Indigenous president, but Morales is the president of the Aymara not the president of all Bolivians; that the new constitution is racist. Getting back to Wara Wara, Mesa says the film idealizes hybridity, and:

"mestizaje in Bolivia is now a banned expression, a negative element, looked at with contempt by the plurinational State. For me, however, the base of mestizaje is precisely the diversity of languages and cultures. I do not think there are 36 nations in Bolivia. It is a fiction, a conceptual error that divides us rather than unites us"

...wow. Edgy.

As you can imagine, I want to see Wara Wara so bad that it hurts. As far as I can tell, there is no way for me to buy it online and the Cinemateca Boliviana site is down (and has been down for a while).

On an almost completely different note, while searching for the film Wara Wara, I found a Peruvian singer from the 1960s who went by the name Wara Wara. I must say that I delight in this track nearly as much as I delight in the the trailer for the silent film. Enjoy:

Changes in Altitude

2011-05-08T18:51:00.008-04:00

Lately I have been working several days a week at a small museum that was once the home of a well-known 18th century individual who need not be named. A component of this work involves interacting with the roughly quarter of a million visitors that rattle the post and beam structure every year. I'm loving it: most of my other days are spent inside alone, poring over my computer and my thoughts, spewing nonsense that I like to think is academic (read: PhD dissertation edits); at this museum I get to talk to people all day, answer their questions about the past, and see what they are interested in.

Surely I could write countless blog posts about this (and I will, no doubt) but today I want to linger on "people were shorter then," popular mythology and bursting bubbles.

Scenario 1:
Ponderer: Excuse me, how tall was X?
Ms Know It All: Well, based on the work of some people who seriously spent time on this, he was about 5'7" or 5'8" going by his arm to tool ratio in his youngest portrait: pretty average.
Ponderer: Oh, because I thought people were shorter then.
Ms Know It All: They weren't. Average American height has gone up, you know, because our population now includes the descendants of known towerers such as the Dutch or the Sudanese, but he and his lot are only slightly shorter than average for modern Europeans.
Ponderer:*Makes the I don't believe you because that is not what I wanted to hear face*
Ms Know It All: Umm...George Washington was our tallest president.

Scenario 2:
Observer 1: Oh wow! That bed is so SMALL!
Observer 2: People were shorter then.
Observer 1 (if American): Oh yeah! I mean look how small these doorways are.
Observer 1 (if British): Oh yeah! But look how high these doorways are.
Ms Know It All: *tongue is held*

For some reason people like to project a real and physical difference onto the past. If life was so vastly different, the people must have been different too. Often I think we archaeologists find that the past gets dehumanized: I know I have trouble thinking of individuals and interactions, emotions, sneezes, sleepless nights, itchy backs, and relief at taking your shoes off in the past. I wonder if the general public converts this dehumanization into the bolder folk idea of past (fake-feeling) people being shorter that modern (real-feeling) people. Maybe it continues the divide between then and now.

Then again, perhaps it is only a trick of observation. Low doorways (to conserve heat) and small-seeming beds (people slept propped up a bit more than they do today) are interpreted as evidence. But still, I think such things are interpreted in that way because it *feels* right somehow.

Interestingly, nearby Plimoth Plantation has a whole page on this topic, which goes into details of diet, how variable the term 'average' is and the curious problem of past people not really recording their heights. They note that people of European extraction are taller now, but not much taller, and present various possible reasons why (hybridization, antibiotics, better water at childhood). They don't actually talk much about anywhere else in the world (I am willing to bet money that the average height of people in highland Bolivia or jungle Guatemala lines up quite close to Inka or Ancient Maya height; please correct me if I am wrong). But the fact that the question is on the website means that they deal with this folk myth as well.

Now the two scenarios above. In the first I burst the bubble: if the visitor pressed the issue I would certainly yammer about such things as the 6'6" Roman skeleton I cleaned with a toothbrush, and probably freak them out, but the point is that they asked the question and thus opened themselves for something that, perhaps, they didn't want to hear. In scenario 2, however, two visitors were having a conversation, they didn't ask me, they asserted, and for me to cut in would be rude. Also, they probably don't care: to 'know' without asking just makes me feel like there is a certain lack of curiosity plus I am not getting paid to ruin peoples' vacations by being Ms Know it All.

I feel like I should start keeping a notebook for the more interesting ideas about the past that tumble from the lips of visitors. This is certainly a learning experience for me and I want to gain something from these visitors. Indeed, on my way in tomorrow I will acquire a notebook! Watch out!

Wild Wild Westism and War on Terror Rhetoric

2011-05-04T14:33:00.008-04:00

The moment that the news broke (quietly) that Osama Bin Laden had been codenamed "Geronimo" during the operation that shuffled him off this mortal coil, I said "you've got to be kidding me". I actually said that, out loud, to my long suffering significant other who is, no doubt, tired of such things.

But seriously folks, while I don't expect someone planning such an operation to spend much time on the irony of choosing the name of a 19th century Indigenous, anti-American warrior and spiritual leader, but you would think that someone would say "maybe it isn't a hot idea to use some actual dude's name as a code name: if it has to be a 'G' lets use 'Guanaco' or 'Gerontology'.

Before I dive in further, I want to say that ultimately I am upset with the use of that code name, not because the person whose name was appropriated was a Native American, but because the person whose name was appropriated was a person at all. Using "Judy Garland" or "Tito Puente" would be just as questionable.

Anyhow, sure enough it was only a matter of time for others to notice (and get offended by) the inherent irony in codename 'Geronimo'. As of yesterday, staffers of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee have given the name choice a thumbs down. Loretta Tuell says that this issue will be discussed in a previously scheduled committee meeting that will take place tomorrow. Others have gone so far as to say that this is an attempt to link Native Americans with terrorists, but I think that is about twenty-eight steps too far. Besides, we have all seen the t-shirts like the one pictured above: everyone on all sides has linked Geronimo to 'war on terror' terminology for a variety of purposes. Turning the tables is still playing along.

I think the powers that be probably imagined that they were using 'Geronimo' in the slangy, surprise attack sense: what we all probably yelled while jumping out of a tree onto an unsuspecting sibling. Sure the linking of Geronimo's name to surprise attacks (always from above?) can/should be examined; the persistence of the name as "war cry" is interesting in its own right. Yet, to say that the use of this code name was an overt (or even subconscious) linking of Native Americans with terrorists is shaky: the name was an attempt to link the swift surprise attack on Bin Laden with an American folk term that means 'surprise attack', however questionable that term might be.

What IS interesting is that Geronimo's descendants, as I have pointed out previously in this blog, can be quite litigious. Are they up for a defamation of character suit? Maybe! Yet, because of the folk definition of Geronimo, I'm thinking that such a case might not go very far.

It is worth noting that the BBC has a piece out about the code name. It talks about wild west imagery in the Bush administration etc. Frankly, I think it is a bit of a crap article. The quotes they use are either not attributed to anyone, especially the one that links Bin Laden to Geronimo (no date, no source?!), or they come from some random retired colonel or other who don't seem to be speaking for anyone. The one thing that the article DOES clear up is why I had this impression of 'Geronimo' being what is shouted when attacking from above:

The night before the jump, a small group of soldiers left the base to watch film at the local cinema - a western featuring the fearless Geronimo. As the men later revealed their apprehension about the next day's jump, Pt Aubrey Eberhardt announced that he was going to shout "Geronimo" as he leapt from the plane to demonstrate his courage...The motivational yell was adopted other servicemen and quickly became standard practice for US army paratroopers - and the favoured cry for little boys performing a daring leap.

Nice gendering, BBC. We little girls who grew up in the shadow of the US Military yelled it too. I can promise you that it was not linked in my mind to Geronimo the man at the time.

Yet, however much I feel like the slight was entirely unintentional, I honestly thought that by now the pentagon would have a binder filled with words that they were just not allowed to use for coded operations and some basic guidelines that can never be crossed. Having worked a little bit in NAGPRA compliance for the Army, you'd think that several decades of mandated attention to some level of Native American concern would have trickled down to culturally sensitive operations naming...that someone, anyone, in that room would say "this is a bad idea guys"...that as a last stop the president, who we like to think is race savvy, would say "NO, NEW CODE NAME".

One could argue that they had other things on their mind, but there was a clear concern from the top about how this operation would look to the public. There was so much media flack over the codename of Libya operations that you would think that at least one Pentagon person would be watching out for codename blunders.

UPDATE:
The chairman of the Fort Sill Apache tribe, Jeff Houser, has released this letter to President Obama. At least these are words from the current leader of Geronimo's tribe and not some randoms, thus they are worth mention:

We are grateful that the United States was successful in its mission against Bin Laden, but associating Geronimo's name with an international terrorist only perpetuates old stereotypes about Apaches.

In the 1800's Geronimo and the Chiricahua Apache people were portrayed as savages. This portrayal was used as justification for the forced removal from their homelands and their subsequent imprisonment. Linking Geronimo's name to an infamous terrorist only reinforces this false and defamatory stereotype.

Ode to Andean Leaders in Indigenous Garb

2011-04-25T16:13:00.001-04:00

Over the weekend I got myself characteristically worked up about Perú's impending run-off election between "Cancer and AIDS" to quote Mario Vargas Llosa. To prevent myself from launching into a blogged out-freak about the sense of confusion and disbelief inherent in knowing that the next president of Perú will either be a Fujimori or a Humala (...seriously), I will devote this entry to a much more amusing subject: Latin American politicians and leaders wearing Indigenous costumes. Sincere? Overtly Political? Both?

First we have the previously mentioned Ollanta Humala living his father's Movimiento Etnocacerista dream, dressed up as the Inka or perhaps as Ollantay/Ullanta, the semi-fictional Inka general after whom he is named. Like any good Andean power-seeker or power-holder, Ollanta as Ullanta holds a staff. Luckily red, the color of most mallku ponchos and general Indigenous important-ness in the Andes, is Humala's trademark color. Is that a coca leaf on the staff? Maybe!

Any hint to irony appears to be masked by Humalas perhaps sincere belief in his own inherited legitimacy. This is nearing the Tupac Amaru II school of Peruvian politics. Why shouldn't Ollanta dress as the Inka, he IS the Inka...right?

Next we have Ecuador's Rafael Correa, now serving his second term as president. After graduating from college Correa spent a year working at a rural kindergarten where he seems to have picked up some Quechua. A big deal was made out of this during his first campaign (yours truly thought that the fact that "knowing some Quechua" was newsworthy was a sad commentary on the historic place of Indigenousness in Ecuadorian high-level politics) and here we see Correa in a mallku poncho receiving a staff-like pututu from an Otavalleño dude. Don't let go!

Moving on, we see Rafael Correa enjoying some poncho time with Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales. Morales appears to have acquired a dove. What is notable about these costumes is that Chávez and Morales have eschewed the usual highland-style costumes favored by most South American leaders for Amazonian feathered headdresses. I'm not even going to pretend to know which group those come from but they are not unlike those of the Shuar, whose leader has been questionably arrested as of late. If I remember correctly, Correa had a staff in hand at some point during this particular ceremony. Staff is a must!

Back to highland styles, here we have Morales and Chávez again, this time in Bolivia. On the left both men are wearing Mallku ponchos (unkus), fair for President Morales who remains Apu Mallku, and matching ear flap hats. Morales sports a formidable coca-leaf lei and his hat is decorated with a wiphala. They have matching pouches!

We all know that President Chávez is no stranger to Bolivian Indigenous garb. On the right we see Morales and Chávez, this time at Tiwanaku, enjoying a different set of earflap hats. Note Chávez' hat includes a repeating gateway of the sun pattern and a controversial spelling of the site ending in "-nacu". You can't see it but he is wearing the same scarf as your author-ess is as she types!

Finally we have Evo Morales at his second Apu Mallku ceremony at Tiwanaku. His outfit from the first Apu Mallku ceremony was declared by Bolivian law to be the Cultural Patrimony of the Nation, so it stands to reason that he would need a slightly different outfit for the Jan. 2010 event. Morales, here, had graduated to the full two staff display of power, and walks through the Kalasasaya's eastern gateway, mimicking the Gateway of the Sun which is poorly positioned for a photo-op.

I honestly wonder how politically successful these displays are. I find myself sorting Evo Morales into a slightly different category than the other fellas: his Ingenuousness is a component of his political discourse. He trades on ancient legitimacy which, I would imagine, these ceremonies reinforce and he isn't dressed up as a particular ancient hero which just strikes me as weird (cough couch Humala cough). The others, however, just come off a bit dodgy. How does one avoid accusation of, at worst, cultural appropriation or at best, pandering? Can a costume really just be a costume in such tense political climates?

Pox, leave thy damnable faces, and begin! Come, the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge.

2011-04-21T20:31:00.002-04:00

This week a few media outlets reported on a story that I had never thought about. Long story short: there are two known remaining samples of the smallpox virus (in Russia and the US) and they have been condemned to destruction by the World Health Organization since the 1980s. What an amazing and chilling thought: the true and complete destruction of smallpox! Do we celebrate victory or mourn loss? As this blog is about preservation, I ask you all how far should preservation extend? Should something, a small bit, be saved?

Taking most of my information and quotes from an article in Live Science, a clear case is made for the destruction of the two samples. First, if the known samples are officially destroyed, the possessors of any other samples found to be in existence can be treated as criminals; smallpox can become something that it is universally illegal to posses. Second, the risk of accidental contamination is eliminated: although such a situation is extremely unlikely, just such an accident caused a death in the UK in the 1970s. Finally, the virus' genome has been sequenced so it exists forever in that format.

Yet, I find myself feeling that something is inherently wrong with total destruction. Don't get me wrong, I honestly feel that the triumph over smallpox is one of the greatest achievements of our little species. Once, at a museum exhibit about the eradication of the disease, I was so filled with emotion that I cried: VERY uncharacteristic of me. Yet I can't help thinking that, in destroying the remaining two known samples, humanity is making the wrong preservational choice.

Pragmatically, we have no idea what will be possible in the future. While we dream of science future, our policies have always reflected science present. Think of archaeologically excavated teeth bones from the later 1800s that were painted with chemicals to aid in preservation that are now useless for any sort of scientific dating or isotope analysis. Who knew? What if there is an entirely unknown next step for science that would require the actual smallpox virus for analysis? Practically, stealing the virus from the CDC is impossible and any number of nasty things housed there are a theoretical low risk.

Also, historic smallpox scabs have been hailed as interesting and valuable bits of preservable heritage before, it is not new to view disease in that way. Imagine how different everything might be without smallpox. What would the conquest of South America look like if Inka Huayna Capac hadn't caught smallpox and the Spanish had faced organized Inka resistance with a clear leader?

This virus is our past, it has affected the course of our world, is it not our heritage?

So, then, both the willful preservation and the informed destruction of smallpox at this juncture can be seen as highly symbolic acts. To preserve the virus for anything other than purely scientific reasons would be akin to saying that smallpox is the heritage of humanity: the vanquished foe consigned to a guarded vial in some deep dark vault, a memory of our past preserved forever. To destroy the beast after the battle is already won feels like the execution of Vercingetorix after his 5 years of captivity following the battle of Alesia: the final public blow to an enemy that is no longer a threat. Do we really want to be Caesar in this analogy?

The WHO is meeting to discuss this issue next month. I doubt 'cultural patrimony of humanity' will be a phrase that tumbles from any of the medicos there and perhaps it shouldn't be. I just cannot help but wonder if, for one reason or another, we humans will be sorry if smallpox is entirely destroyed.

Point of discussion or point of concern?

2011-03-29T10:57:00.001-04:00

Having just figured out how to access my visitor statistics, I found that the majority of visitors to this blog apparently come seeking photos of dead bodies on Mount Everest. Multiple thousands of visitors a month.

The lure of the grotesque, huh?

Libya: as the front advances

2011-03-28T12:08:00.007-04:00

Perhaps this is a symtom of my distorted mental map of the Greek world, but until earlier this week I did not know that Cyrene was in Libya. Indeed, as I comb my drowsy (but now coffee-fed) brain, I can come up with nothing that I know for sure about Cyrene except, oddly, how to pronounce its name correctly in Greek (Ky-ree-nee). Where on earth could that be coming from?

But this is not a post about what lurks in the dusty corners of my memory. This is a post about Libya.

Following the, frankly, surprising insta-looting in Egypt I expected to hear more about such things happening in Libya. Perhaps the dust is yet to settle and we will see instances of looting once the full situation in the country can be assessed, or perhaps the swift ascent of the eastern Interim Governing Council has prevented the sort of power vacuum that leads to looting. Totally possible. If that is the case, what about the west?

UNESCO has recently released a statement reminding everyone about about Article 4 of the Hague Convention. They request that everyone kindly refrain from bombing heritage sites in general, and World Heritage Sites in particular. Looking at the five Libyan World Heritage Sites, only Cyrene is off to the east near Benghazi. Two other sites seem to be away from the heat: the protected rock art is in the Acacus mountains to the Southwest which appears to be pretty much the middle of nowhere; Ghadames is near enough to the Tunisia and Algeria borders that I am guessing everyone will leave it alone. Plus neither of those are Classical sites meaning related artifacts aren't as quickly and obviously marketable. That just leaves Leptis Magna and Sabratha: two classical sites in the greater Tripoli area. Indeed, Leptis Magna and Sabratha are the other two "polis" of "Tripoli".

Thinking about the potential for damage due to actual conflict: bombing, military action, etc, Sabratha and Leptis are probably not in the best of locations. Sabratha is located in the Az-Zawiyah district, and the area surrounding it has seen fighting. To quote wikipedia "sword-wielding townspeople fighting against soldiers with guns". According to images released by the UK MoD's Major Jeneral John Lorimer, once Gaddafi's troops regained control of the area, the "Martyr's Square Mosque", at the very least, was "was razed to the ground".

Clearly the destruction of the mosque was payback for protesting, but should the area come under siege again, especially from allied bombing, who is to stop Gaddafi et al. from storing vehicles, ammunition and other targets at the site to prevent them from being destroyed from the air?

I can only hope that the site is inconveniently located. Google maps makes me think that Sabratha is quite a ways off from Az-Zawiyah proper.

The famous site of Leptis Magna seems to be very unfortunately located in Al-Khums, on the road between Tripoli and the Zlitan and Misratah area. By all accounts, the situation in Zlitan and Misratah is grave, but supposedly Al-Khums is under rebel control. Maybe. At the very least, a shipyard in Al-Khums has been hit by allied bombing. Google maps shows what appears to be a large shipyard quite far from Leptis Magna but also shows Leptis as being pretty much right on the main road coming into Al-Khums. Should the rebels advance past Sirte and then through Misratah and Zlitan, pushing Gaddafi forces backwards, the road on to Tripoli is through Leptis Magna. Little stops either side from using the site as a strategic area and especially for the pro-Gaddafi forces, a choke point on the road that the planes in the sky would not bomb.

Turning to the question of looting. What stops someone from sauntering down to Leptis Magna and pulling some bas reliefs off a monumental arch or two? What stops night digging around the site periphery? Maybe nothing. The most I can find is a random report from March 4th describing the security situation at Leptis as "good" as the last foreign archaeologist was evacuated from the country. At this point, I am willing to believe that a March 4th observation means nothing.

Of course, maybe no one in Libya has the urge to loot sites. Perhaps there is a sense of site loyalty and the people around Leptis all like having it there and in one piece. Maybe everyone is honestly too scared to leave their house and poke around the edges of the site, especially after allied bombing of the port area. Fair. Who knows. I want to say that it depends on who is in control of the area, Gaddafi or the rebels, but I don't even know if that is true

Yet, if fighting passes Leptis, I wouldn't put it past either side to engage in opportunistic looting. If the area IS in rebel control, I am willing to bet that at least the giant smug portrait of Gaddafi in the Leptis Magna museum is probably now a casualty of war.

Uncontacted Conquests

2011-03-25T15:46:00.007-04:00

As I have discussed before, I spend either a surprising or unsurprising amount of time thinking about uncontacted people. Any time new aerial photographs of a group are released by the Brazilian government or whatever applicable NGO, I consume them with a relish that is almost shameful: I look at them over and over for days, weeks, or months at a time. As this happens about once every year and a half, I cannot help but wonder at the source of both my curiosity and my shame. These photos tend to provide such a perfect mixture of sheer joy and pure guilt; through the delight and scandal I have trouble sorting my feelings out.

A few months back, Survival International released new photos of an uncontaminated group from the Perú border area. As usual, I sat with my mouth agape breathing in these stills of people just doing their thing against a bright, verdant backdrop. A man walks through a banana tree grove. Three fellas with hunting gear converse. Everyone looks wonderful and healthy. The kids are pudgy. The works. The kids look like they have some wonderful nightmare fuel from the plane and the older fellas seem to have taken a "oh that thing again" stance. Business as usual in the Amazon.

I suppose that would have been that: I would have leered, fetishized, exoticized, or claimed purely professional anthropological interest, whatever it is I am doing when photos like this come out. I would have sent them on to friends who wondered why I was freaking out (again) and then I would have sat around ashamed of myself without really understanding why. Fine, until then the news dropped that Survival International had a video. Billed as the first high quality film of an uncontacted group, they released it the next day:

Wow.

It makes me feel like a Conquistador. That is my feeling of intrigue and shame. This film may be the most spectacular bit of moving picture that I have ever experienced, and when I was first able to make out the fellow pointing at the camera from amongst the trees, I thought "this was what it was like." It is 1532 and these people are looking at me with curiosity, misunderstanding, and disbelief and I am returning the same.

The shame comes from feeling excited by this contact experience because I know it all goes wrong in the end. I know it is not possible to have the glorious two way flow of cultural knowledge that exists in my dream contact situations: where everyone says hello, swaps stories, then stays out of each others' lives. I feel guilty for pretending.

I take a similar guilty pleasure in reading both Conquest-era Spanish chronicles and truly terrible early Amazonian ethnographic works...and trust me I swallow those whole whenever I can find them, especially the Conquest-era accounts. I find myself ignoring atrocities so that I might enjoy the bits and pieces of Maya (or Inka or whoever) daily life and culture that I can squeeze out of them. Which is fine! It is the past and there is nothing to be done about it.

But these people are not in the past: they are out there doing their thing right now and I am peering through the trees at them. It makes me feel so strange, but I am convinced I am not dehumanizing them. Rather, I am superhumanising them and fantasizing about meeting them in some unlikely/impossible equal-footing scenario. I have gone ahead and set one of these images as my desktop background. Now I am not looking at them, they are looking at me.

Suffice to say the amount of time I spend on the concept of uncontacted people has trickled into other things I have been working on. For example in the ol' dissertation, in discussing the different Indigenous groups of Bolivia, I felt compelled to mention the 500 (give or take) uncontacted people in the Bolivian lowlands in the same sentence where I mention that something like 5+ million Bolivians identify as Aymara or Quechua.

Also...

2011-03-21T16:16:00.000-04:00

References as endnotes? No ma'am. I'm just not into that scene.

I seem to depend more on the information conveyed through parenthetical referencing than I thought.

'A crutch' you say? Two little curvy crutches.

Legends of Lost Cities: A Quest for Authenticity or Justification?

2011-03-21T15:49:00.005-04:00

Lately I have been thinking a lot about lost cities. To be more specific, the popular fantasy that an 'intact', 'authentic' functioning 'ancient' city could exist just beyond the scope of modern sight behind the impenetrable veil of the jungle. So much seems to be tangled up in this idea and I am not sure that I am able to untangle it all. Does the idea of an El Dorado (so to speak) appeal to us because we feel that, through modernity and conquest, something appealing has been lost? Is that appeal exoticism, primitivism, or a desire for some sort of static idea of cultural authenticity? Or is it the nature of the jungle itself: that anything can exist beyond the forrest barrier?

I recently revisited a paper that I presented at a conference at Cambridge a little while ago. I'm excited to say that it is going into a British Academy volume and thus it needed to be expanded upon a bit. The paper is about how super remote Maya sites were approached in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and I spent some time in the archives of Harvard's Peabody museum reading the field notebooks of Raymond E. Merwin, the archaeologist who excavated the remote Guatemalan site of Holmul around 1910.

Merwin certainly wasn't willing to indulge my desire for superfluous detail. His notebooks were purely professional and archaeological with no information as to how he felts about where he was and what he was doing. In a way, that is what I suspected. Indeed, it played right into the point I was making in the paper about archaeology at the time being approached as a serious science, but I wanted to see the Holmul that I remember from Merwin's eyes. I wanted to read about the 4am howler monkey party that seems to go on overhead every night. I wanted to read about the taste of jungle honey or see comment about the canned food that he brought with him. I excavated two of his tinned cans, could he not at least have given me a provision list? Yet come to think of it, I did get to enjoy his descriptions of a building that I worked in. I was there nearly 8 years ago but I can still feel how everything was oriented. I could read his words, see in my mind what Merwin meant, and then instantly understand where a later author misunderstood. That, in itself, is pretty exciting. I suppose that is also the point of my paper

Doing that research gave me a chance to very quickly indulge my interest in the lost city phenomenon. There seems to have been a significant groundswell of Lost City interest following the popular Stephens and Caitherwood books. To be fair, the illustrations in those books are luscious and overpowering. Anyhow, one example that I came across comes from none other than PT Barnum. He decided to cash in on lost cities, presenting two "Aztec Children" to the public that he said were captured from an intact, deep jungle city called "Iximaya". Aztec/Maya conflation aside, that Barnum would bring these children forward means that people were interested in lost cities and fully willing to believe in them.

I wonder if this welling up of Lost City-ism in the late 1800s and early 1900s is a byproduct of that era: the rise of anthropology, the deification of modernity, and the neo-whatever art/design/etc movements. Or is this an extension of the earlier mythos of El Dorado, of lost cities just beyond the reach of some 16th century Spanish Conquistadores. Indeed, I wonder if this exists today in alternative forms.

I suppose the next step is to dig through "professional" period commentary for discussion of this phenomenon. Alfred Maudslay mentions this interest, blaming unscrupulous newspaper publishers for pushing disinformation on the public. Yet, he seems sympathetic to the construction of lost cities; he can see how they are believable based on how strong a barrier the jungle is. He would know. Popular literature would be a fun line of inquiry into this.

Anyhow, this is merely a sketch; an idea fluttering around in my mind!

Color Shock: Reality and Black and White Photos

2010-11-21T00:35:00.024-05:00

As I fall into a swirl of sensory stimulation, I give more thanks to the Library of Congress for once again providing me imagination fuel.

There is an inherent distance in early photography. Not to downplay the crisp chemical beauty of a tintype or ambrotype, but I think the lack of color serves as a physical boundary between then and now, relegating the image to the distant past and, to an extent reducing the reality (so to speak) of the subject. Yes there are exceptions. Robert Cornelius' self-portrait (left), one of, if not THE, first photograph of a human ever, is so romantically perfect that it is haunting; I even think he is pretty hot. However, for the most part, I don't think that I fully appreciate the former tangibility of the people in non-color photographs. Every time extremely early color photographs are put on display, I am shocked.

I have been thinking about "color shock" for a while and, if you will excuse the pun, these photographs from the Library of Congress* bring this phenomenon into sharp focus. Taken in Russia between 1909 and 1915, these color people are much closer to me in felt time than they would have been in black and white. I always had the feeling that somehow people LOOKED fundamentally different in the past, but I think that is entirely to do with the medium of black and white. That difference is eliminated with the addition of color. These were people. They look totally normal.

A had the same experience when a series of French color photographs from World War I were released five or six years ago. My first and, frankly, my continued reaction is that they feel less old than other photos from the same time period. I can mentally animate the figures and experience them as humans. I have an incredibly difficult time placing them as far back in the past as I need to. Despite the clothing, I can't put them back farther than my mother's childhood in the 1950s. Yet, this is my great-grandfather's youth, but I have never seen him in color.

Then again, perhaps we enjoy this color boundary in some cases. I remember when color photographs of Adolph Hitler were released I felt very disturbed by them. I live in a world where Hitler has come to symbolize a sort of inhuman pure evil. This darkness was cleanly maintained by the starkness of every one of the thousands of black and white photos and films of him that I have seen. When Life shared color photos of him, my neat and tidy, black and white, good and evil world was rocked. Hitler the inhuman became Hitler the tired looking dude with an uneven hair cut at a car show in 1939 or Hitler that guy in the sharp suit having a chuckle with a pretty lady. He is just some boring guy. How can evil be so bland? Compare color Hitler to black and white Hitler…different emotions?

Perhaps this is obvious and surely this in natural: we humans react to other humans and color humans are more human than black and white ones. Knowing this doesn't change how I experience these Russian photographs. I wouldn't look twice (if I even looked once) at black and white photos from that period, however I find myself sitting here clicking through these over and over again. I have plowed through midnight and 1am and I am still looking.

Why am I always surprised that the past was reality?

*At the moment the Library of Congress site is down and I am using an alternate source. I will update when they update.

Marie Antoinette Markers and Costume Continuity

2010-10-25T13:38:00.018-04:00

I've always found 'dressing up' to be a remarkably complex activity. It is also weirdly divisive: love or hate, you are a dresser-upper or you are not. I don't really want to delve too far into the psychology of the masque, however, because I am afraid I will get lost, but I would like to muse a bit on the corpus of symbol triggers that signal a specific costume. How we know who/what costumed friends are without asking.

For the past two weeks my daily life has been centered around costumes. I am helping out at a costume shop just until the big H or until I drop from shock and exhaustion. Whichever comes first. One thing people have been asking me, to paraphrase, is "what is the salient aspect of x theme costume". In other words: what is the minimum collection of clear symbols that I need to buy to be a 1940's pin up girl (high heeled shoes, correct wig). There is always one step that can be taken to mitigate ambiguity; there is always a fake beard and a white Russian vs a towel that separates a bath-robed Dude from The Big Lebowski from Arthur Dent.

I am asked to reduce costumes to their least common denominator several times an hour and I am surprised that there is almost always a clear answer. This is particularly the case with the ever popular line of "sexy" costumes. All of these costumes are, essentially, a scrap of cheap fabric that barely covers anything at all with the previously mentioned salient symbols stuck to it. Sexy little red riding hood has a cape and basket; Sexy Sherlock Holmes has a magnifying glass, pipe and hat; Sexy Freddy Krueger has that glove and hat.

What actually surprises me most are the costumes that I wouldn't have thought crossed the threshold into clear and instant identification; the costumes that just don't seem to have all the symbols there. Case in point, the sexy Marie Antoinette line.

Sure, ol' Marie was a trend setter in her day but I, rather faithlessly, do not fully believe that the public at large really knows who she was. Case in point, over breakfast my brilliant fella indicated that he thought she was some sort of courtesan and not the wife of Louis XVI which prompted my to waggle my wikipedia enabled iphone in his face. In a way, because of that, I just don't think someone in a sexy version of late 18th century clothing is obviously supposed to be Marie Antoinette.

Full disclosure: it seems like none of our customers have this problem. They see these as obviously Marie Antoinette and MANY people ask for "Marie Antoinette" specifically and they see it in these costumes. Now what would push it over the edge for me, so to speak? What would make any of those costumes obviously Marie Antoinette? A red line around the neck and a little fake blood. The general weirdness of the sexy aspects of the costume aside, big white wig and decapitation = Marie Antoinette.

Because I am a horrible Classics nerd, this all reminds me of Greek pottery iconography. In black and red figure ceramics, it only takes the inclusion of one small scene element to make anonymous characters into household names. This pot is CLEARLY 'Oracle of Delphi' because the column means they are in a temple and the lady is looking into a dish. But "Woman and a Bull"…is it Europa or is it Pasiphaë? Well clearly Pasiphaë would be INSIDE a cow costume (hard to draw) but to be clear, best just depict Europa with the bull and Pasiphaë looking angry with her smug Minotaur baby.

Suffice to say a fun Saturday afternoon for me is walking through halls of greek pottery and playing "guess the story" from the symbols alone. Tags are for the weak. It is more fun to solve the iconographic mystery alone (then check yourself later). I can't help thinking about how long it takes me to add up the symbols on each pot and formulate my speculation. For anyone in the ancient greek world it would be instantly obvious that this or that pot either commemorated the Athenian games vs the Olympics and so on. Just as the differences between sexy Dorothy (checkered blue dress, ruby slippers) and sexy Alice in Wonderland (solid blue dress, playing card iconography) are obvious to us.

As a side note

2010-10-08T12:13:00.005-04:00

I have *just* submitted my PhD dissertation which means I am unemployed.

Inspired job ideas/opportunities are always welcome. Near or far from archaeology, heritage, anthropology, museums, publishing, education, researching, thinking etc. Get in touch.

"The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age"

2010-10-07T11:33:00.017-04:00

Way back in 2008 it was announced that squiggles (pictured left) from an obscure experimental transcription device from the mid 18th century were potentially playable. These preserved 'phonautograms', which were never intended to be heard per se, but once scanned into the wonders of technology world, out sprung the audio artifacts. Thus, a version of Au Clair de la Lune, probably sung by the phoneautograph's inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, became the oldest known recording of human voice in existence clocking in at 9 April 1860. To push this whole idea farther into the world of fantasy, there is even a totally unfounded rumor that Abraham Lincoln was 'recorded' with the phoneautograph.

Go here to hear Au Clair de la Lune and, as a special treat, here to hear his rendition of Voile Petite Aribelle from around September of 1860.

I think that we forget that the bulk of heritage loss happens within the first couple of decades and then evens out to a long decline. We get rid of things that we cannot ever imagine wanting and we save incompletely or wrongly. After we are really, really, REALLY sorry about it. There is absolutely no way to avoid this and I suppose there is no way to completely mitigate the muted sense of loss that underscores every discovery. I read and re-read Diego De Landa's Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, reveling in the only glimpse of the conquest-era Maya that I will ever get, run my hand over the 'alphabet' page and bless it for opening the door to the pre-conquest Maya. The famous "I do not want to" strikes me as so wonderfully and magically human...like a phonautograph from 1860. I am crushed when I get to the part where Maya books are burned. Why can't I just enjoy what I have, rather than lament what was lost?

I find the idea of lost and found media to be completely compelling. Silent film re-discovery, for example, makes me well up with 'heritage' joy, so to speak, then bubble over with a sense of loss. I saw the new new Metropolis recently, with the 30 extra minutes found in Argentina. The piece is almost complete now; reassembled. I enjoy it until I think of the glorious stills of Theda Bara who made 40 films, only 6 of which survive. Among the lost is a 1917 Cleopatra, "one of the most elaborate Hollywood films produced up to that time". Vampy Art Nouveu Egypt scenes? Every archaeologist's dream. Also you KNOW you want to see a 1926 version of The Great Gatsby. But you can't.

So 80% of films from the silent era are lost (at last according to Martin Scorsese's film preservation organization), and this is because they represented outdated technology. Talkies hit, times change, and no one is going to pay to see Theda Bara vamp it up in silence. Nitrate film was hard to store and, you know, tended to catch on fire so in several fell swoops in the 1930s, whole archives were trashed or incinerated. Really, the only reason any of these films survive at all is that they were widely distributed and sometimes the crazies and the hoarders at the ends of the earth could not let go. And, indeed, 30 minutes of Metropolis turns up in Argentina in 2009 and there could be more somewhere...like a Maya book sitting in a cave in Belize just waiting to be found. I think that we cushion that muted sense of loss with hope for the unlikely.

The reason I am posting on this topic is that the Library of congress released a report on the state of recorded sound preservation in the US (full report available here; executive summary available here). I've only had time to read the summary, but the writers open with the idea of the phonaudiograph stating:

The hunt for the Scott phonautograms is nothing less than a recorded sound equivalent of an archaeological dig to locate and secure the permissions to make them available for study

And that it is. Perhaps that is the appeal: I am sucked into such stories the same way I am sucked into other aspects of the past.

Hearing the recognizable sound that lay in the wavy lines on that smoked paper is a profound experience—an encounter with real time and space in the mid-nineteenth century.

Much like brushing the dirt off a recently uncovered bit of the past and knowing you are the first person to experience it for ages...yet someone experienced it before you.
The point of this study is that, despite what people might think about the nature of digital technology, we may be setting ourselves up for massive loss. I highly recommend taking a look at the "Scope of the Problem" section of the executive summary. It is interesting to note that they feel that digital recordings are "at particular risk". I wonder if that has to do with the lack of physicality: there is no actual object (a master tape, a phonautogram paper, a piece of nitrate film) that can be discovered a century later in a box somewhere. We are at the mercy of digital collectors and their ability to update their own technology it seems.

And, to come back to what I said before, we probably do not even know that we might want these seemingly random digital files. As the writers of this report say:

Significance is too often recognized and conferred only after the passage of years. We do not have the luxury of waiting until the significance of a sound recording is apparent before its preservation begins. By then, it may be too late.

Bones II

2010-01-19T10:24:00.004-05:00

So a few blogs back I wrote a bit about the whole Geronimo/Skull and Bones deal. Little has happened since in that particular case and, frankly, I am not sure if anything interesting will happen. However, the whole Christie's sale drama over an apparently *different* set of skull and bones from Skull and Bones is something that has, at the very least, sucked up a few moments of this lazy day.

Quick story: the skull and bones is human, was made into a ballot box (hinged skull cap people, hinged skull cap), and was being sold with a book of names from the mid 1800s...which of course is meant to make you feel like the skull is from that time period. True to deceptive form, the auction house said the lot was being sold by "a European art collector." Now the skull and bones has been pulled from the auction due to "a title claim." And there you go.

Now you and I both know that auction houses cannot be trusted. Sorry auction houses, you guys just lie. About a year ago I gave a paper at a conference that was written up in a pop science magazine. The paper concerned the research from my masters which primarily looked at the money made at Sotheby's on South American antiquities auctions. The magazine rightly allowed Sotheby's to comment and the auction house pretty much said that they dispute everything. I got those numbers out of your auction catalogs...and made them into charts! It was really, really straightforward and easy, how can they dispute what they published? Because they lie.

Coming back to the issue of the Skull and Bones skull and bones, I can't help speculating about what really happened. Frankly, it is Christie's own fault that I don't believe them. What the auction house means to imply by what they have said is that some anonymous European put the lot up for sale and then the real Skull and Bones have stepped forward, claiming the object as theirs...saying it was taken without their permission in the past. Christies, OF COURSE, is happy to hear claims on stolen materials and halted the sale. Plus we all know that members of Skull and Bones butter Christie's bread, right?

Maybe. But first you would think the bread butterees would have asked the bread butterers if the consignment was kosher before printing that expensive catalog. Second, barring the first, auction houses don't usually balk at obviously illegal sales. The FBI can be on the doorstep saying "don't sell this" and the house goes through with it anyway. Third, anything being sold by an anonymous European of any sort is suspect. Anonymous selling means something is being covered up...and more often than not the anonymous collector doesn't exist.

So what gives? Who is selling the thing? Why was it pulled? Curse you auction house, curse your deceptiveness!

Oddly enough this post was supposed to be a discussion on the sale of human bones. Perhaps we shall cover that in our next installment.

Everest: Good for the Sherpa? Good for my PhD?

2009-12-04T08:07:00.007-05:00

It seems I am party to swirling momentary obsessions that cripple any attempt to do anything else. The internet is my enabler: I sit all day following the tendrils of information, staying up to all hours and ignoring the very pressing other things that I should be doing. Who knows how they start but after the obsession has passed I have trouble even remembering it happened.

Yesterday's obsession seems to be spilling into today...the idea of climbing Mt. Everest. I've read account after account, watched a few documentaries, signed up for an Everest news feed which I will probably not be interested in later, and so on. Golly I even have learned mountaineering slang. All of this is useless. I'm not going up that mountain or any mountain for that matter...the act seems so silly to me. Silly acts are obsession fuel.

So the highest I have ever been is 3845m above sea level. You could tack on another couple of meters because at that altitude I both climbed a water tower and climbed a pyramid. That altitude hurt and I did very poorly in it, at least the first time around. I got a special kind of sick after a few months that warranted a trip to the hospital. This Everest obsession has taught me that I was only one cough symptom away from high altitude pulmonary edema...no wonder I got such quick hospital care. However the ol' lungs were clear (I still have the x-ray to prove it) and yours truly went back to work. For the record, Everest base camp is above 5000m and the summit is above 8000.

Twice in Bolivia I have had the option to go higher, both times for interestingly sacred cultural things that I would have liked to see and/or participate in under any other circumstance. You better believe that there was no way I went any higher than I had to, and that was in the face of actually going up to do something (collect herbs, rituals, etc). Everest just seems like an absurd notch in the belt. An insane risk for absolutely no tangible gain. I suppose it is this strange intangible significance we culturally assign the feat that causes people to keep putting their life at risk.

One theme that seems to keep rearing its ugly head in everything that I have been reading and viewing re: our western cultural obsession with Everest is the semi-animalization of the Sherpa people. Sherpas are constantly referred to as being possessed: "I sent my Sherpa ahead," "Our Sherpas went back up to help" and so on in contemporary Everest accounts. The Sherpas hired by the various groups seem to be the people who are forced into difficult situations, attempt daring and life threatening rescues of inexperienced climbers who shouldn't be on the mountain at all (and I would hold no one should) and many probably do so for not very much money. One fellow who died very controversially up there in '06 apparently paid less than $8000 for his entire Everest adventure. What do you think was the Sherpa dude's cut?

An editorial by Tashi Tenzig published in the New York times in 2003 estimates that a Sherpa can ear about $2000 during the two month climbing season. Good if you look at it from a poverty standpoint, terrible if you recall that something like 1 in 12 people who try to get up Everest dies. Tenzig goes on to say:

Sherpas join expeditions without life insurance, which is expensive and difficult to get, knowing that if they do not return there will be little for those left behind beyond the good will of their community... I asked my friend Ang Dorje how much longer he would climb on Everest with big expeditions... "Four more times," the amount it would require to build his home and educate his children.

Here is hoping that the Sherpa people make bank on food at the bottom. Somehow that a Sherpa can scale the peek multiple times seems normal. That some white dude from Cambridge can do it seems like a laudable feat. Again with the animal mentality: many of the writers seem to think that going up the mountain is what the Sherpa are FOR. Little is done to push back against this tendency. As Tenzig says "The foreign climbers go home with photographs of themselves on the summit, then leave their litter behind and forget the Sherpas who have contributed so much to their successes."

Finally, the last aspect of the Everest thing that has fueled my current obsession has been the idea of large amounts of human refuse scattered up the mountain. I read some heritage paper years back about this and mostly pictured tent bits an oxygen canisters. While this is not incorrect, the way is also apparently littered with 200+ human bodies. Well to be more accurate, there are 200+ bodies somewhere on the mountain but apparently any given adventurer gets to 'enjoy' several of these on the way up and for the most part everyone just keeps on movin'. I did a google image search and all I can say is "REALLY"? How do you not turn back the moment that you see something like that. Where is self preservation in all this?

What struck me most about the body thing is that several of the bodies up there have been given colloquial names by other climbers. Green Boots for example is actually a fella by the name of Tsewang Paljor who died in '96 and whose body is under an overhang near the top. People see him, they call him Green Boots. Very odd. There is apparently now another body in Paljor's overhang, the same '06 controversial death of a fella who went up the mountain on the cheap. George Mallory was located a few years back by a team looking for him. How far do you think we are from Everest frozen human body tourism? Is this heritage to preserve?

Yes. That is a photo of Green Boots. I promise the grotesque and I deliver.

Invention and Reinvention: Perceptions and Archaeological Practice

2009-11-15T19:17:00.004-05:00

Hot off the presses...several months ago, and otherwise respectable. This volume that I co-edited is a collection of papers focusing on personal perception and the practice of archaeology; how we archaeologist invent and reinvent aspects of our discipline. Cannibals, fake pyramids, Mel Gibson, and Peter Pan, we've got it all. In all honesty, it is a good read.

Yours here for only £9 (not including postage):
http://www.societies.cam.ac.uk/arc/home.html

For reference, a list of contributions:
Where is Reflexive Map-Making in Archaeological Research? Towards a Place-Based Approach
James Flexner
Evaluation of a Reflexive Attempt: The Citytunnel Project in Retrospect
Åsa Berggren
Beyond the Viewing Platform: Excavations and Audiences
Gabriel Moshenska
Contextualising Alternative Archaeology: Socio-Politics and Approaches
Tera C. Pruitt
Royal Jelling: Danish National Heritage Reinvented
Mette Bjerrum Jensen
Digital Simulation, Mediating Agents and the Implied Historical Object: Towards an Understanding of Mediaeval Jewellery Objects
David Humphrey
Sights of Invention: Deconstructing Depictions of the Earliest Colonisations of Australia and Oceania in the Academic Archaeological Literature
Sara Perry
Adding a Literary Bent to Historical Archaeology
Laurie A. Wilkie
Twenty-First-Century Reinventions of Alexander, Xerxes and Jaguar Paw: A Critique of Apocalypto and Popular Media Depictions of the Past
Traci Ardren
Science and the Epistemology of Culture: How We Know What We ‘Know’ About Human Burials in Chaco Canyon
Kerriann Marden
Text, Narrative, Evidence: Travel Writings and Archaeological Perspectives of Amazonia
Anna T. Browne Ribeiro
Reinventing an Old Discourse: Neolithic Cultural Similarity Across Eurasia
David Steel

The right to isolation (and other empty promises)

2009-05-07T04:39:00.004-04:00

Last night I was thinking about uncontacted peoples which, for some reason, I devote a surprising amount of time to...from time to time. Like many others I have a dark fascination with isolation. The idea of existing without the 'world' is intoxicating. Clearly that term 'uncontacted' is used liberally, such as with the Sentinelese. The Sentinelese have been contacted quite a bit, they just want everyone else to stay the hell away. They seem quite in charge of the situation, however their agression makes them more alluring. Why do they like red buckets but not green? Why? I both want to know and want them to be left to their island.

I will probably spend a portion of my day playing around with Survival International's Uncontacted Tribes site. I actually lived about 50 steps from Survival International for several years and never stepped inside to say hello. It is funny how that happens. I was thinking a lot about the series of photos they released a little while back of an uncontacted group in the Peru/Brazil border area, where everyone looks so healthy and strong and together. I doubt the airplane even phased them. Apparently there was an earlier flyover and in the time between they put on paint and got their weapons out. Basically they were able to culturally explain the plane, they did the thing they do for whatever the plane was, and it did not come back again. Problem solved. Pats on the back all around. Hurrah. Cough.

Actually I think what draws me in to the idea of uncontacted or isolated people is what goes on around them. What they are part of, even if they do not know it. This whole spiral downward was triggered by a portion of the new Bolivian constitution:

Article 31.II. The indigenous original nations and peoples, in isolation and not contacted, enjoy the right to maintain this condition, through the legal definition and consolidation of the territory that they occupy and inhabit.

So first, these uncontacted and isolated people are under the jurisdiction of the country of Bolivia, a spacey concept that they know little or nothing about, and second this Bolivia has the athority to mandate the continuation of their current status as uncontacted. They can set up 'reserves', make laws, and create whole government agencies that the people will never know about provided that everyone involved does their job well. This mode of thinking inevitably has me thinking of these isolated people as some sort of endangered jungle mammal and yet I want them to be left alone. I'm torn between thinking "how great" and "how horrible."

On further reflection, which is always dangerous, I started to think about "citizenship" and what it supposidly offers. Bolivians, so says the constitution, are promised and required to engage in free public education. Healthcare is also promised and while indigenous medicine is fully recognized, the constitution promises the regulation and safe administration of it. Among other things, Bolivians are required to be familiar with the constitution and to this goal, there was an audio version of it released, and so on.

So think about it: the constitution provides certain things for all Bolivians and absolutly promises and requires things like education, HOWEVER uncontacted and isolated groups "enjoy the right to maintain" this status and thus will not get the constitutionally mandated things. Neither will they be able to do the things required of all Bolivian citizens like be familiar with the constitution. Basically they are a class of Bolivians goverend by the law and outside of it.

And how about the phrasing "enjoy the right to maintain" isolation. Yes I truely believe that we should all leave them alone to do their thing, but the wording implies a decision, that constitutionally they can choose to "maintain this condition" over the other options. But there is no choice involved, despite promises of universal education and healthcare, the decision has been made by someone else that the isolated peoples' condition SHALL be maintained for them.

Please let me emphasize again that I think uncontacted peoples should be left alone and that all illegal loggers and everyone involved in rainforrest oil should be sentanced to 50 years aboard a slow moving Greek island ferry, with no ticketed seat, surrounded by mean old ladies in support stockings and spoiled crying children. I am just squirming at the creation of a state in which these people are official citizens with official rights and requirements that in reality they do not have or know about. A constitutional right to isolation for people without a constitution and without the means to actively exercise or revoke that right. Decisions made for people who do exist by people who might as well not exist (to the isolated people at least).

Living in the Iceage (twice removed)(poor Ian Curtis half-pun)

2009-03-15T05:47:00.004-04:00

It has been a bit since I posted something here. I am still feeling it out I suppose. I've been having amazing conversations with students but where is the line? What can appear here?

On my mind over the past few weeks as been the Anthropocene. I could devolve into any number of puns about being behind the times but I had never heard of this concept until C waved an article at me as I poked at digital Iranian pot sherds.

The idea that humans have had/are having a measurable impact on Earth's climate is pretty much a given these days but that we have caused a new geological epoch? I was so very secure in the Holocene up to moment. I was sure what Age I was in. Geological epochs bring up images of massive ice sheets cutting through some tundra terrain as tiny little fur clad humans throw spears at woolly rhinos or aurochs or something. They are the big to the humans' little. In a very structured view of things, the epoch governs or limits human activity: humans respond.

From Lenton (2008): In a feat unprecedented for a single animal species, humanity's total energy use has now exceeded that of the entire ancient biosphere before oxygenic photosynthesis, reaching about a tenth of the energy processed by today's biosphere.

Zowie. Ice Age by Joy Division has been replaced by Freur's Change the Weather...which is very unfortunate for me.

I'm now going through the extended process of logging into an academic article database from outside of the Cambridge network. I suppose I shouldn't complain, I have access. These should be public...

Anyhow, true to my vision of epoch power, the Anthropocene just is. I suppose we have come control over its' course, but it seems as if I may have never seen the Holocene which is a shame. The Holocene seems so nice, utopian...pastoral. I feel like I missed out.

I am heading to London for the big Darwin Exhibit hullabaloo on Tuesday, words to say perhaps!

What to do when the President's grandpa robbed your grandpa's grave and maybe made out with the skull...

2009-02-19T06:39:00.008-05:00

Oh interesting! It seems as though Goyaale/Geronimo's descendants are suing for the return of his bones which are supposedly held by the Skull and Bones secret society at Yale. Apparently a Bush was even one of the diggers up.

In reading this article (and not the lawsuit) I noticed two things. First Yale mentions that the Skull and Bones vault is not on their property. The obvious reason for this is that it indicates that they deny having any reason to be in this lawsuit. It also seems to be a NAGPRA inspired statement. If a Native American skull was being held on their property they would have been required to report it years ago under NAGPRA and possibly return it to the descendant community years ago as well. Yale receives some level of public funding thus they are not immune to NAGPRA thus this skull better not be at Yale proper or else they are in non compliance with a federal law.

It seems that the descendants of Goyaale/Geronimo are with it, however, and do not seem to be claiming him under NAGPRA. Rather they are the actual direct descendants: a family saying grandpa's grave was robbed and his body illegally taken with the Native American stuff mixed in just for flavor. If the bones are not Goyaale/Geronimo, but another Apache, the Geronimo family indicates that they want them returned as well but that would probably require a switch in legal tactic.

In a way it seems like they have left all doors open. I truely doubt they will ever get these bones back. I mean come on, the Skull and Bones people almost certainly have something Native American down there and they can just go hide it all before any search. These fellas are not the sympathetic sort (and I can pretty much assert that they all huge jerks and many other negative things). It is just an interesting way to go about it, to reach just a little beyond NAGPRA.

Spirit

2009-02-17T12:51:00.006-05:00

Today I heard a First Nations elder speak. This was particularly convenient as I spent most of yesterday discussing the concept of being indigenous with undergraduate students. The subject is so very complex that it was nice to invite them to come along to this and take in what he had to say.

This is where I might lose you, oh dear reader:

He spoke a lot about his own religion and his concept of Spirit, how Spirit comes from connection with the earth, etc. That this Spirit was quality of all human beings and that from it we know who we are, what we are, and where we should be. This and the rest of his talk brought my mind back to Bolivia in June 2005.

I suppose it is no surprise to say that my upbringing was decidedly western and passively non-religious which means that I am more than happy to accept any religion but claim none for myself. I feel powerful moments, just not spiritual moments. Except for once.

It was the solstice, the new year, and there were tens of thousands of people at the site. It was very cold, I hadn't slept. First we ended up in the room with all the mallkus, fellas holding various levels of power within the indigenous communities. We entered the site with them which involved a lot of shoving and pushing and Bolivians becoming angry at us getting special treatment for some weird reason. In the semi darkness I walked past where I was going to be digging the next week (and where I dug the year before) and there were people scattered about. The main temple complex was bursting at the seams.

This was before I lost my archaeological ID card in one blurry birthday night. I teamed up with my boss who is Aymara (plus his archaeology cred was way high) and we convinced the military police that we were important enough to be let into the off limits part of the site. Then we waited. Various computer programs told us that there would be an astronomical alignment with one temple during the solstice sunrise and that is what we were there to see. The 20,000 odd people behind us did not know about this alignment. We didn't know about it until just before. We waited.

Then the first sun of the new year peeked out over the distant ridge of the snowy topped Andes. The alignment was there. We were the first to experience it in that way in hundreds or a thousand years perhaps. Maybe more. I was struck by the idea that I was experiencing what this place was meant for. I was not just visiting, I was participating. We took off our gloves and, like the thousands of people behind us, warmed our hands with the new sun. My boss softly told what he believed this all meant to me and a young indigenous MP guy who had abandoned his post at the entrance to the alignment temple because we were clearly on to something interesting. We then climbed to the top of the pyramid (flashing our ID cards again) and looked out at the people filling the temple. It made so much sense.

Practically this had an effect on my archaeological work. It all made sense, everything I was finding, especially when illustrated with a modern photo of the packed temple spilling out onto my excavation area.

In a broader sense, and going back to this fellow's talk, I've found that I mentally cannot stay away from Bolivia...nor away from from that site (and I have tried to). All other projects seem to fail. I come back to it. He would say, perhaps, that I am connected to that land. I would say, maybe, that I just feel like I understand it a little bit. Who knows.

Perhaps Spirit is just some level of pan human understanding that can be transmitted through time by place. This part of our nature that suddenly allows us to understand what others of our species were going for when they produced something. If so, warming my hands to the new sun, standing exactly where I should be, was my contact with Spirit.

I wonder if others out there who are on intimate terms with the past have felt the same way.

"still laboring as their ancestors did, scraping salt off the ground"

2009-02-11T10:09:00.010-05:00

Very recently the New York Times published an article entitled "In Bolivia, Untapped Bounty Meets Nationalism." My heart beats for yet another marketable natural resource that Bolivia has the most in the world of, but like the rest of them I wonder where it is going. I know nothing about lithium extraction and less than nothing about any extraction infrastructure that may already exist. I fear it may not exist and thus would be difficult/impossible to get off the ground. Nationalizing an industry that doesn’t exist yet…the article makes it sound like they are going at it. Go! Go team!

What really gets my typing fingers in a jitter is the wording of the article. First, the word Indian is used throughout. Come on Simon Romero...no one who isn't from India is an Indian anymore, get with the program dude. You are publishing in the US where Indian is quaintly antiquated at best. You call someone an Indio in Bolivia they might knock your teeth out. What dude at the Latin America desk with the surname Romero doesn't know that? Ultimately in many circles, Indian/Indio is a racial slur. It is loaded down with 500 years of oppression and people don't like it. I'm not wiggling my finger at nothing.

I also wiggle at "this desolate corner of the Andes, where Quechua-speaking Indians subsist on the remains of an ancient inland sea by bartering the salt they carry out on llama caravans." I know he is trying to be dramatic here and maybe explain why someone would support indigenous resource control but, Jesus. Why not just write 'the savages scrape at the dirt.' Actually he kind of says that later on, see title. Sure this is less obvious than "Indian" but sensationalization is really dehumanizing. Othering. Those Quechua speakers just totally got Othered.

What do you say to that, random Indigenous dude that got interviewed? "We are poor, but we are not stupid peasants."

Speaking of Othering: "Mr. Castro said. “But in order to go down that road, we must raise the revolutionary consciousness of our people…" That is Mr. MARCELO Castro, not Fidel or Raul. He is the manager of the project and this was said "Over a meal of llama stew and a Pepsi." The llama eating was clearly a very important detail. Basically some dude said one thing that was sorta red, his name is Castro, and wham bam it is in the American paper because, you know, they seem a bit commie down there and we are not sure what to think about them. Par for any article on Bolivia.

"...should concern anyone interested in our nation's rich history and heritage"

2009-02-10T16:07:00.004-05:00

According to the Telegraph the general financial collapse will lead to around 1000 archaeology job losses in the UK alone this year. It is interesting to think of archaeology as artificially inflated, contract work having grown to accommodate the unsustainable building industry over the past years.

A friend of mine teaches primarily the children in families with less than favorable immigration status. Recently some of these families have been considering making a move back to Latin America. The demise of construction means that work is scare to the point that home (in this case Guatemala) seems the only option. Somehow this story has defined the extent of the financial crisis for me. The complete lack of work and the desire to get to the US/Spain etc was the general theme of most conversations I had with Guatemalans while working there in 2003.

Thus it seems that archaeology is in the same boat: with construction not likely to pick up for a while (and perhaps never reach the same levels again) are we destined to go back to a time when an undergraduate degree in archaeology led no specific practical carrier?

On this chilly night marking undergraduate essays, I wonder where each of them will end up. I wonder where I will end up for that matter.