Saturday, 31 August 2013
Friday, 30 August 2013
I'm Not Begging; I'm Merely Asking Earnestly...
FREE OFFER!
FIRST-RATE EDITING FOR NOTHING!
FREE! GRATIS! PRO BONO!
I will edit your work for free.
I need testimonials to back up my claim to editing abilities well above the norm.
I am primarily aiming for work that requires a copy editor. I'm very good at editing for spelling, grammar, punctuation, the mechanics of style, consistency—of mechanics and facts within a ms, placement of headings, clarity, word usage, basic fact checking, cross-references, that sort of thing. If this is what you need, I'm your boy!
Just give me a poke, either here or on the Subversive Archaeologist's Facebook page, and we can talk.
200,000 Hits Within Sight. Thanks, One and All!
[Update]
In another month and a bit The Subversive Archaeologist will be two years old. Yep. For reals. Two fingers. For me, two years is astonishing. More incredible is the other statistic with a 2 in it. Some time in the next 24 hours the "page-view" counter near the bottom of the sidebar will read 200,000! That deserves a big, fat exclamation mark. In the last 10 months alone, there have been more than 38,000 unique visitors.
[As always I must confess that an unknown number are one-offs generated by a curious web wanderer who clicks to see just how random search-engine results can be. Still, SA must be weird enough or attractive enough to warrant that click.]
All things considered, all things being equal, and all qualifiers of that ilk, I'm gonna ignore the issue of unknown clickers and give you, Dear Reader, a pat on the back. You're the most amazing 'statistic' of all. I hope my saying so doesn't get old. Thanks for hanging in there.
ANY TIME IS A GOOD TIME TO GET GOOD STUFF AT THE SUBVERSIVE ARCHAEOLOGIST'S OWN, EXCLUSIVE "A DRINK IS LIKE A HUG" ONLINE BOUTIQUE
Wednesday, 28 August 2013
Lest We Forget
Thursday, 22 August 2013
Taxonomists Take Note: If the Geneticists Are Correct, You'll Have to Choose Between Rassenkreis and Parapatry, and Whether Or Not We Get to Keep Calling Ourselves Homo sapiens. Good Luck With That!
 |
| The one on the left is probably the most convincing effigy ever created of what some think Neanderthal males looked like. (Source © Neanderthal Museum (Mettmann, Germany) |
As you know I've been critical of claims that we and the Neanderthals interbred. By "we" I mean people with the cognitive capacity that you and I possess. Even if it could be unequivocally demonstrated that the Neanderthals bred with another kind of bipedal ape, it wouldn't have been us. It would have been with the contemporaneous anatomically modern Homo sapiens [AmHs] that left a remarkably similar archaeological record. Ipso facto, not like you and me.
 |
| A member of the AmHs kind of bipedal ape: Homo sapiens idaltu. (Apologies to copywriter holder. I ripped this from Google images and there was no source ascription.) |
Here's why.
First, the role of genomics. A human palaeontologist's job it is to find and describe fossils and erect taxonomies. Until recently all they had to go on were a) the fossils themselves, b) a rough estimate of the time they lived, and c) the geological context. On those bases, there was much back and forth over the taxonomic status of the Neanderthals. However, by the time it became possible to sequence the Neanderthal genome, human palaeontologists had pretty much agreed that Neanderthals were a separate species. Big whoops, by the look of it.
 |
Geographic distribution of Pleistocene bipedal apes.
Source. (After J.R. Stewart and C.B. Stringer,
"Human Evolution Out of Africa: The Role of Refugia and Climate Change." Science 335(6074):1317-1321, 2012. DOI: 10.1126/science.1215627.) |
If the recent claims of the genome scientists hold up, the most likely scenario would be that the two populations interbred during the time they were contemporaneous and geographically adjacent. And there's the rub. If the two bipedal ape kinds were able to produce viable offspring it would put serious pressure on the biological definition of species. H. n. and H. s. would be seen either as a mini-rassenkreis or as parapatric species. And, if the claims of people like me hold up, and AmHs was the cognitive equivalent of a Neanderthal—neither of which could match wits with you and me—there would be an even bigger problem of what to call the newly distinguished types of AmHs—them and us.
In the world of taxonomy there are strict rules about who gets to name stuff and who gets to decide who names stuff, and in the event of a tie the race goes to the temporally precedent nomen. In the hypothetical case I've just sketched for you of Homo sapiens (Linnaeus 1758), the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature [founded in 1895] would likely end up having to rule, and would [as near as I can figure it] do so by retaining the nomen Homo sapiens for AmHs. What then?
What to call us if AmHs gets to go on being H. sapiens? Well, according to the rules of zoological nomenclature one is not permitted to name a taxon before its discovery. I suppose we could play around with some possibilities, but nothing written here could ever have valence with the gods of taxonomic nomenclature. It's possible that we got to keep the H. s. tag. After all, we would end up being the sapient ones [whatever sapient means].
I'd like to think that we'd be given a new genus name, so fundamentally different are we from all that came before. Can you imagine? I'd push for Humanum sp. That's the un-gendered form of the Latin for human, in the sense of being humane [or kind]. We'd still have a long way to go before the whole world lived up to the name, given the state we're in. But at least we'd no longer have to put up with the tittering of homophobia-inspired, grade-school, potty humour involving our current genus name! [Did I just say "tittering?" English is full of pitfalls like that. Isn't it? *sigh*]
How about Humanum naturalis? [translation: human from nature; naturally human]. Wouldn't that just stick in the craw of the Christian Supremacists?
Final word. If, as I believe, Neanderthals and AmHs interbred, leaving remnants of Neanderthal DNA in the lineage of AmHs, and if, as I also believe AmHs was fundamentally different from you and me, and cognitively identical with the Neanderthals, archaeology would undoubtedly be the means by which the distinction is made between the two anatomically modern species. I like that idea. Some minds will need to be changed before such an event occurs, but that's why I'm here!
"Race" in the U.S.A.: Marble Has Lost Whatever Marbles She Was Born With
Un.b.effing.lievable.
How does the United States of America a) produce people with brains the size of a Diplodocus, and b) see fit to elect them to govern?
This comes to us today from ThinkProgress.org,
On Wednesday Colorado's Republican State Senator Vicki Marble's limbic system authored this utterly bigoted filth at a meeting of that state's Economic Opportunity Poverty Reduction Task Force:
ANY TIME IS A GOOD TIME TO GET GOOD STUFF AT THE SUBVERSIVE ARCHAEOLOGIST'S OWN, EXCLUSIVE "A DRINK IS LIKE A HUG" ONLINE BOUTIQUE
SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.
How does the United States of America a) produce people with brains the size of a Diplodocus, and b) see fit to elect them to govern?
This comes to us today from ThinkProgress.org,
Colorado Legislator: Poverty Higher Among ‘Black Race’ Because They Eat Too Much Chicken
BY JOSH ISRAEL ON AUGUST 22, 2013 AT 9:04 AM
 |
| Colorado's Republican [go figure] State Senator Vicki Marble |
When you look at life expectancy, there are problems in the black race: sickle-cell anemia is something that comes up, diabetes is something that’s prevalent in the genetic makeup and you just can’t help it… Although I’ve got to say, I’ve never had better barbecue and better chicken and ate better in my life than when you go down south and you — I mean love it and everybody loves it. The Mexican diet in Mexico with all of the fresh vegetables. And you go down there and they’re much thinner than when they come up here… they change their diet.
Smarter people across this country have been heard to say that it's time there was a conversation about "race" in America. I'm not so sure that'd be a good idea. With so many brain stems contributing to such a 'conversation' that effort might just be still-born.
The immortal words of James Tiberius Kirk spring to mind: "Beam me up, Scotty."
Sunday, 18 August 2013
It's Like Déjà Vu All Over Again! The Oxford Handbook Of The Archaeology Of Death And Burial
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
—Albert Einstein
I must be crazy. Why else would I keep addressing what amounts to the same claims over and over again, only to find that my efforts do little more than amuse the Very Serious Archaeologists. The obvious reason is that I enjoy entertaining you, Dear Reader. Nevertheless, the callous on my forehead just keeps getting thicker and thicker as the knowledge claims get weirder and weirder. Take, for instance, the feathered Middle Palaeolithic (MP) couture from Gibraltar, shown at right being modelled by archaeologist Clive Finlayson. It's an airy garment made of the wing feathers of one of the local carrion eaters.
You'll have to forgive me. As ludicrous as the archaeologist looks to you and me, the inferential route that he took to get there is even more preposterous. Yet, it's always me that gets the side-long glances and the whispered asides at meetings, merely for being sensible. But, hey. Clive published it, the media went with it, and there was a conference about it, and everything. So. I guess that's really the way it was in Neanderthal Land.
OK. What new flights of fancy have raised me out of my job-house-life-hunting hiatus to climb back into the saddle just now? You won't be surprised. It's MP burial, again!*
But, what the Hell! Here I go again.
Academia.edu recently introduced a new kind of notification. When one whom one is "following" uploads a new work of scholarship, the one doing the "following" is emailed with the news. And so it was this morning when I plopped myself down in front of the middle-aged iMac here at World Headquarters. The email read:
Hi Robert H.,
[That is Academia.edu's attempt at informality!]
Erella Hovers (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Archaeology) just uploaded a paper on Academia.edu:
[Erella and I go back a long way, but we have always existed at opposite poles on the matter of Middle Palaeolithic (MP) burial.]
Hovers, E. and Belfer-Cohen, A. Insights into early mortuary practices of Homo. In: S. Tarlow and L. Nilsson-Stutz (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial (Oxford University Press, Oxford), 631--642, 2013.
[Anna and I also go back a long way.]
This isn't the first time we've heard about this volume, published just last month. Back in February I caught wind of it because of a paper that Julien Riel-Salvatore uploaded to Academia.edu, "Upper Palaeolithic Mortuary Practices in Eurasia: A Critical Look at the Burial Record," co-authored with Claudine Gravel-Miguel, pp. 303--346. At the time I was bemused by some of their explanations for the geographical distribution of interred human remains. [But that's history now. It's in the pasture. Onward to the now!] Today's revelation has to do with earlier times—right up my alley.
The editors of this new Handbook wanted to cover a lot of ground. Yet, their explicit statement about what they wanted to achieve has a fairly narrow scope.
But, Hovers and Belfer-Cohen don't give us a litany of claimed burials the evidence for which falls well short of unequivocal. Instead, they hustle through the "Yeah, they buried their dead" part and get to work interpreting what the [still putative from my perspective] claims imply about MP cultural and individual values, based on the ethnographic record. In so doing, they appear to have imbibed Paul Pettitt's Kool-Aid—at one point they talk about caves being places where the dead are "cached," one of Pettitt's hypotheses for the very early bipedal apes, and a hypothesized precursor behaviour to that of Neanderthals and modern humans. ["Cached" is a poor word for what they claim occurs in caves. In my lexicon to "cache" something means to store your stuff somewhere that you can readily put it to work when you need it. Something useful. Something handy. So, food is cached. Tools are cached. What utility, one wonders, do they think might inhere in a carcass? They simply don't address the matter.]
All right. So. Unless this is your first trip to the Subversive Archaeologist (SA), you'll no doubt have heard about my work on the taphonomy of MP bipedal ape remains—those of the Neanderthals and their [mostly] anatomically modern contemporaries from Skhul and Qafzeh. Erella herself took part in the most recent excavations at Amud Cave, in Israel, during which an infant's skeleton was unearthed. Along with several other examples from the last half of the twentieth century, the Amud infant's discovery was one I dealt with in "Middle Palaeolithic burial is not a dead issue: the view from Qafzeh, Saint-Césaire, Kebara, Amud, and Dederiyeh" (MPBINADI). I'm happy to say that the authors cite this and the earlier long paper of mine on the subject, "Grave Shortcomings: The Evidence for Neanderthal Burial."
O' course they don't do much more than cite my work. As far as they're concerned there's no weight in my arguments. So, if there ever was a debate about the many inferences of MP burial, these authors nod their heads in its direction and steam right on through. I can forgive them for presuming that any more 'debate' would be moot. After all, they're almost single-handedly [in fact, double-handedly, 'cause there're two of 'em] published "In the Eye of the Beholder: Mousterian and Natufian Burials in the Levant," Current Anthropology, 33:463-471, 1992, in which they tore apart "Grave Shortcomings" in the most rigourous of fashions. It didn't take them long, either. In fact, all it took was two statements to thoroughly discredit my arguments. Voilà!
Hang on a minit!
I never said anything to the effect that small numbers WERE sufficient to disqualify MP burials. I don't know where they came up with that. And ... come to think of it, where are the references to those rejections so wide and so several? They're not here. Hmmmm.
Ya see, up to that point in 1992 the only published 'rejections' were those that accompanied "Grave Shortcomings" in Current Anthropology. I'll admit they weren't friendly rejoinders ['cept for Clive Gamble's and that of Clark and Lindly]. But I addressed each and every one's complaints in my two published replies—the first was right there after the 'rejections' that followed "Grave Shortcomings;" the second an issue or two later, Current Anthropology 30:326-329, 1989.
I find it strange and instructive that no one ever, EVER, refers to the content of those two replies. Perhaps they never read them [possible], or maybe they don't want to call attention to them because they answered all of the cheap shots, unsupported claims, and specious arguments laid out in the CA comments [more likely]. Either way, some of my pithiest arguments are to be found in them. Yet, they get nary a mention, and Anna and Erella thus feel emboldened to skirt every last issue I confronted in them, and thereby proclaim "Grave Shortcomings" *cough* D.O.A.
But, you ask, "Rob, beyond giving you a[nother!] opportunity to whine about their treatment of your work, what, if anything, does "In the Eye of the Beholder" have to do with their chapter in the just-now-published Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial?
I'm getting to that. Patience, Grasshopper. Such matters cannot be covered by 'sound bites' or sweeping statements—even the argument against the comments on the original argument need to be as thorough as the original arguments. Otherwise, I set myself up for even worse criticism, or the worst possible fate—being ignored [still]. Neanderthal Land, you see, is a bonny place, where speculation is fact and inferences are written in stone, neither of which processes can be found in any textbook on epistemology, so far as I know.
Kayso, we're talking about the reason(s) that Erella Hovers and Anna Belfer-Cohen think they have the credibility to reject my arguments—Erella, especially. Well, first of all, since 1992 and before, she and Anna thought they had the God-given right to consider my theses to be rubbish. Secondly, and more importantly, Erella thinks that she, personally, recovered the 'stone' in which was written 'the truth' about MP burial. That's because she was THERE, at Amud, for the excavation [not exhumation] of the infant, Amud 7. Moreover, she, Bill Kimbel, and Yoel Rak [two more with whom I go back] published a response to the treatment of Amud 7 in MPBINADI: Hovers, E., W.H. Kimbell, and Y. Rak. "The Amud 7 skeleton—still a burial. Response to Gargett." Journal of Human Evolution 39:253–260, 2000. Since she doesn't mention my reply to those criticisms, Erella clearly must have thought that she'd answered any questions my paper had raised. Thus, as far as Erella and Anna, and Erella, Bill and Yoel were concerned, my arguments had ceased to have any valence, whatsoever, by 2000. Again, their 'position' was advanced with NO reference to my [by now] three replies to criticism—two for "Grave Shortcomings" and one [quite sufficient to counter every jab] with reference to MPBINADI.
I've now given you what I think are the reasons that a) Erella and Anna were asked to deal with MP burial in the Handbook, and b) for their confident, but as of August 28, 2013, unsubstantiated assertion that I'm full of shit. ...
Here it comes! What you've been waiting for.
Finally, I turn to the reason I've brought you here today—what Erella and Anna in fact said of my work in the [destined to be a modern classic] Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial. What they have to say won't take long, I can assure you. See? You're almost home, Grasshopper. Here is how Erella and Anna dispense with my work in the latest word on MP burial.
Do you have a clue what they're saying here? Me neither. Even so, was there ever as much shilly-shallying in any critical statement you have ever seen? I find it very difficult to parse their meaning in this passage, other than that it says I'm full of shit.
The following is my informed guess as to the gist of their position. Feel free to disagree if you can find any reason to. [No, really. I mean it! Maybe it'll help me to 'move past this' as the New Agers would have said.]
As for the rest of Hovers and Belfer-Cohen 2013, go ahead and read what they have to say about the many and various MP cultural constructions of death and burial. I'm not gonna bother, as you probly already guessed.
For the record, if you're very brave you can revisit the entire published conversation—every disputed fact and fancy—laid out below [no doubt in contravention of every convention of copyright, Geneva or other].
When you're done, see if you can figger out how Erella and Anna and all the rest think I'm full of it. Perhaps then you'll understand why it is that I'm so pissed off that these remarks of mine are never mentioned!
The original treatment of the Amud 7 discovery begins in the lower right of this first page.
ANY TIME IS A GOOD TIME TO GET GOOD STUFF AT THE SUBVERSIVE ARCHAEOLOGIST'S OWN, EXCLUSIVE "A DRINK IS LIKE A HUG" ONLINE BOUTIQUE
SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.
—Albert Einstein
You'll have to forgive me. As ludicrous as the archaeologist looks to you and me, the inferential route that he took to get there is even more preposterous. Yet, it's always me that gets the side-long glances and the whispered asides at meetings, merely for being sensible. But, hey. Clive published it, the media went with it, and there was a conference about it, and everything. So. I guess that's really the way it was in Neanderthal Land.
OK. What new flights of fancy have raised me out of my job-house-life-hunting hiatus to climb back into the saddle just now? You won't be surprised. It's MP burial, again!*
But, what the Hell! Here I go again.
Academia.edu recently introduced a new kind of notification. When one whom one is "following" uploads a new work of scholarship, the one doing the "following" is emailed with the news. And so it was this morning when I plopped myself down in front of the middle-aged iMac here at World Headquarters. The email read:
[That is Academia.edu's attempt at informality!]
Erella Hovers (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Archaeology) just uploaded a paper on Academia.edu:
[Erella and I go back a long way, but we have always existed at opposite poles on the matter of Middle Palaeolithic (MP) burial.]
Hovers, E. and Belfer-Cohen, A. Insights into early mortuary practices of Homo. In: S. Tarlow and L. Nilsson-Stutz (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial (Oxford University Press, Oxford), 631--642, 2013.
[Anna and I also go back a long way.]
This isn't the first time we've heard about this volume, published just last month. Back in February I caught wind of it because of a paper that Julien Riel-Salvatore uploaded to Academia.edu, "Upper Palaeolithic Mortuary Practices in Eurasia: A Critical Look at the Burial Record," co-authored with Claudine Gravel-Miguel, pp. 303--346. At the time I was bemused by some of their explanations for the geographical distribution of interred human remains. [But that's history now. It's in the pasture. Onward to the now!] Today's revelation has to do with earlier times—right up my alley.
The editors of this new Handbook wanted to cover a lot of ground. Yet, their explicit statement about what they wanted to achieve has a fairly narrow scope.
... the strategy of this volume [sic]** to identify themes, traditions of study, theoretical approaches, and areas of current concern, and to invite contributors to address them where relevant through case studies which are grounded in the material they know best.My favourite bit in the above quotation is "areas of current concern..." The phrase is clearly shorthand for some aspect or other of archaeological death and burial. But it's a bit nebulous to my pea brain. However, I must assume that "current concern" doesn't imply "debate," because something that calls itself a handbook is supposed to be a comprehensive treatment of the subject and not a place to hang out a discipline's dirty laundry. So, we should expect to hear an accounting of MP burial that merely rehearses received wisdom.
 |
| Middle Pleistocene carcass "cacheing." |
All right. So. Unless this is your first trip to the Subversive Archaeologist (SA), you'll no doubt have heard about my work on the taphonomy of MP bipedal ape remains—those of the Neanderthals and their [mostly] anatomically modern contemporaries from Skhul and Qafzeh. Erella herself took part in the most recent excavations at Amud Cave, in Israel, during which an infant's skeleton was unearthed. Along with several other examples from the last half of the twentieth century, the Amud infant's discovery was one I dealt with in "Middle Palaeolithic burial is not a dead issue: the view from Qafzeh, Saint-Césaire, Kebara, Amud, and Dederiyeh" (MPBINADI). I'm happy to say that the authors cite this and the earlier long paper of mine on the subject, "Grave Shortcomings: The Evidence for Neanderthal Burial."
O' course they don't do much more than cite my work. As far as they're concerned there's no weight in my arguments. So, if there ever was a debate about the many inferences of MP burial, these authors nod their heads in its direction and steam right on through. I can forgive them for presuming that any more 'debate' would be moot. After all, they're almost single-handedly [in fact, double-handedly, 'cause there're two of 'em] published "In the Eye of the Beholder: Mousterian and Natufian Burials in the Levant," Current Anthropology, 33:463-471, 1992, in which they tore apart "Grave Shortcomings" in the most rigourous of fashions. It didn't take them long, either. In fact, all it took was two statements to thoroughly discredit my arguments. Voilà!
Gargett (1989) suggests that the pits in which remains of Middle Palaeolithic European Neanderthals have been found should be interpreted as resulting from natural phenomena. … this view has been widely rejected on several grounds… [p. 464]and then their heartless coup de grâce,
The fact that Middle Palaeolithic "burials" appear in small numbers is insufficient to disqualify them as intentional burials (contra Gargett 1989). [p. 468]That's it. I was done-for. My reputation was in shambles, so widely were my views rejected, and on so many—well, several, at any rate—grounds.
Hang on a minit!
I never said anything to the effect that small numbers WERE sufficient to disqualify MP burials. I don't know where they came up with that. And ... come to think of it, where are the references to those rejections so wide and so several? They're not here. Hmmmm.
Ya see, up to that point in 1992 the only published 'rejections' were those that accompanied "Grave Shortcomings" in Current Anthropology. I'll admit they weren't friendly rejoinders ['cept for Clive Gamble's and that of Clark and Lindly]. But I addressed each and every one's complaints in my two published replies—the first was right there after the 'rejections' that followed "Grave Shortcomings;" the second an issue or two later, Current Anthropology 30:326-329, 1989.
I find it strange and instructive that no one ever, EVER, refers to the content of those two replies. Perhaps they never read them [possible], or maybe they don't want to call attention to them because they answered all of the cheap shots, unsupported claims, and specious arguments laid out in the CA comments [more likely]. Either way, some of my pithiest arguments are to be found in them. Yet, they get nary a mention, and Anna and Erella thus feel emboldened to skirt every last issue I confronted in them, and thereby proclaim "Grave Shortcomings" *cough* D.O.A.
But, you ask, "Rob, beyond giving you a[nother!] opportunity to whine about their treatment of your work, what, if anything, does "In the Eye of the Beholder" have to do with their chapter in the just-now-published Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial?
I'm getting to that. Patience, Grasshopper. Such matters cannot be covered by 'sound bites' or sweeping statements—even the argument against the comments on the original argument need to be as thorough as the original arguments. Otherwise, I set myself up for even worse criticism, or the worst possible fate—being ignored [still]. Neanderthal Land, you see, is a bonny place, where speculation is fact and inferences are written in stone, neither of which processes can be found in any textbook on epistemology, so far as I know.
Kayso, we're talking about the reason(s) that Erella Hovers and Anna Belfer-Cohen think they have the credibility to reject my arguments—Erella, especially. Well, first of all, since 1992 and before, she and Anna thought they had the God-given right to consider my theses to be rubbish. Secondly, and more importantly, Erella thinks that she, personally, recovered the 'stone' in which was written 'the truth' about MP burial. That's because she was THERE, at Amud, for the excavation [not exhumation] of the infant, Amud 7. Moreover, she, Bill Kimbel, and Yoel Rak [two more with whom I go back] published a response to the treatment of Amud 7 in MPBINADI: Hovers, E., W.H. Kimbell, and Y. Rak. "The Amud 7 skeleton—still a burial. Response to Gargett." Journal of Human Evolution 39:253–260, 2000. Since she doesn't mention my reply to those criticisms, Erella clearly must have thought that she'd answered any questions my paper had raised. Thus, as far as Erella and Anna, and Erella, Bill and Yoel were concerned, my arguments had ceased to have any valence, whatsoever, by 2000. Again, their 'position' was advanced with NO reference to my [by now] three replies to criticism—two for "Grave Shortcomings" and one [quite sufficient to counter every jab] with reference to MPBINADI.
 |
| The proverbial shallow [non]grave. From "A Neandertal infant from Amud Cave, Israel," Rak, Y., W.H. Kimbel, and E. Hovers, Journal of Human Evolution 26:313-324, 1994. |
Here it comes! What you've been waiting for.
Finally, I turn to the reason I've brought you here today—what Erella and Anna in fact said of my work in the [destined to be a modern classic] Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial. What they have to say won't take long, I can assure you. See? You're almost home, Grasshopper. Here is how Erella and Anna dispense with my work in the latest word on MP burial.
... Gargett (1989, and especially 1999) diligently elaborated on the taphonomy of hominin burials, focusing on natural processes that might have played a role in incidental preservation of MP skeletal remains at the sites of Dederiyeh, Kebara, Qafzeh, Amud, and St Césaire ... . When the test implications of the hypothesized processes were examined minutely with regard to the burial of the Amud 7 Neanderthal infant, it became clear that hominin burials did not come in standard taphonomic packages. Variables such as skeletal completeness, anatomical position of all bones, or clearly visible burial pits, were highly dependent on particular sedimentological and depositional circumstances, and could not be relied upon unconditionally as differential criteria. Arguments for intentional burial should be tested inductively, on a contextual basis, rather than through a deductive, theory-driven process. With these specifics taken into account in the case of Amud 7, hypotheses of natural agency were examined and refuted (Hovers et al. 2000; see also Pettitt 2002). We conclude that intentional burial can be recognized based on situationally nuanced archaeological criteria.
The following is my informed guess as to the gist of their position. Feel free to disagree if you can find any reason to. [No, really. I mean it! Maybe it'll help me to 'move past this' as the New Agers would have said.]
"Gargett was right all along, but we prefer to make stuff up." ~ Hovers and Belfer-Cohen 2013.If that sounds a bit harsh, tough.***
As for the rest of Hovers and Belfer-Cohen 2013, go ahead and read what they have to say about the many and various MP cultural constructions of death and burial. I'm not gonna bother, as you probly already guessed.
For the record, if you're very brave you can revisit the entire published conversation—every disputed fact and fancy—laid out below [no doubt in contravention of every convention of copyright, Geneva or other].
When you're done, see if you can figger out how Erella and Anna and all the rest think I'm full of it. Perhaps then you'll understand why it is that I'm so pissed off that these remarks of mine are never mentioned!
The original treatment of the Amud 7 discovery begins in the lower right of this first page.
* At least you can't brand me a quitter! But, if Mr. Einstein's statement is true, my persistence may not be such a good sign.
** The word 'is' is left out in the Google Book preview, which I presume is a typo that is reproduced in the print version. MORE evidence that publishers and writers everywhere need the Subversive Archaeologist's acclaimed editing ability to rid their publications of pesky typographical errors.
*** In my bank of draft SA blurts there's one that discusses an archaeological issue using the word 'shit' in every one of its denotative and connotative senses. I think it's funny, but hardly suitable for the web.
Sunday, 11 August 2013
Message In A Bottle: Itinerant Editor For Hire
Wednesday, 7 August 2013
An Anthropology Of One's Self. Difficulty Focussing On More Than One Task At A Time
For quite a while now, every time I address the desktop computer on which I'm typing this sentence I am torn from three directions. Before I left Surf City the three comprised 1) you, the reader, 2) readying myself for the move north, and 3) trying to find a satisfying, well-paying job. Now that I'm finally back in the Pacific Northwest, where I belong, the three poles have changed. I think of you first, as always. Then comes looking for that job. Lastly, unpacking and making this a home.
I often feel like Jerry Lewis's hapless bellhop...
The sad truth is that I end up paralyzed. Or, more to the point: I'm unable to focus on any of the three activities. Worse, when I do manage to focus on one of the tasks I'm thinking about not doing the other two. That, of course, lessens the likelihood that I'll do anything like the best job I can on whichever of the three I'm working on.
As an anthropologist and archaeologist who knows all the ins and outs of optimal foraging, embedded activities in a seasonal round, rational decision-making, and so on. Despite that, the explanation for my inability to conform to such theoretical frameworks is a profoundly black, black box. I seem to be cognitively or behaviourally inept at apportioning my time. And, when I do manage to apportion my time to one of the three, I spend most of it worrying about giving short shrift to the other two. I think to myself, "Is multi-tasking a myth? Or am I just a misfit?" I have no answers. No compelling ones, at any rate. According to every cultural materialist tenet, as a human being I should have no difficulty doing what's needed, and in the right order of priority, exactly like a wolf would, or any modern humans worth their salt. Am I a freak of nature?
Hardly. [Used here in the sense of definition #5.]
The answer lies, I think, in the particular way in which my personality developed—through my acculturation in a milieu that was rife with contradictory [and mainly negative] responses to whatever it was I chose to do at any one time. I'll admit, that's more a psychological hypothesis than a purely anthropological one. Except, perhaps, that my early learning took place in a subset of western Canadian culture in the 1950s and early 60s. I can still hear my dead Dad reminding me that "A job worth doing is worth doing well." And, if the job I decided on was akin to colouring outside the lines he'd grumpily state that "If you give [him or 'em, I'm not sure which] and inch, he'll take a mile." Take-home lesson: be careful what you choose to do, lest you be punished for it.
I could come up with a thousand more vignettes to explain what goes on in my psyche, but it wouldn't change the reality. If I have to divide my attention, the result is a diminished finished product. [Aaaaaaaaaand we're back to "A job worth doing is worth doing well." It's vicious (sense 2), I tell you!]
So. Where does that leave you and me? Unfortunately you take a back seat to the other two. I have been working on a blurt about Jim Enloe's spatial analysis of La Grotte du Bison, at Arcy-sur-Cure in France. Bison is the little-known sibling cave phenomenon adjacent the more famous La Grotte du Renne—the La Grotte du Renne from which one of the few claimed "Châtelperronian" assemblages was recovered. While less well known, Jim Enloe's recent work on the taphonomy of Level I at the Cave of the Bison is consequential. So, while I'm dithering, why not give it a read? It's behind a paywall, of course. But I'm certain that you can find a way to procure a copy if you're exceptionally good at the Google.
Enloe, J. G. 2012 Middle Palaeolithic Cave Taphonomy: Discerning Humans from Hyenas at Arcy-sur-Cure, France. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 22: 591–602.
For the moment, then, it's back to the job of getting a job—perhaps the most work for least reward of almost any activity of which I'm aware. *sigh*
Sunday, 4 August 2013
And There He Was. Gone!
I'm not happy about the amount of time I'm not getting to be subversive.
But, at a minimum, I must get the kitchen up and running. For therein lies comfort and satiety.
I hope that my Northern Hemisphere friends are enjoying our unusually warm summer, and that my antipodean companions are managing to bear up under the strain of the Southern Hemisphere winter.
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