Hiatus noun \hī-ˈā-təs\

A total cessation of effort for an indefinite period of time.

Although, in the present circumstances, that time is limited.

A good guess would be Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, 2014.

That'll need to be revised. Project Cluster *uck just won't go away!

I'm hoping it'll be over by week's end. That'd be the 8th or so.

It'll be good to get back into the Subversive Archaeologist's saddle.

Be back soon!

Who Knew? International Archaeology Day, And I Wasn't Invited!

When one is 'out of the loop,' as they say, one should, nevertheless, avoid appearing to be 'out of it' altogether.

So, since I more or less qualify for both labels, but wish to 'appear' otherwise, it's appropriate that I should say

"Happy International Archaeology Day" to you and yours. And may the spirt and the rewards of our mutual passion be with you all the days of the year! 

Words Escape Me.

The Road Taken—Four Years of The Subversive Archaeologist: To Celebrate—Cormac McCarthy's Apocalyptic Vision and Paleolithic Archaeology

[Listening to Echosmith's "Cool Kids," and knowing what it's like.]

Well, well, well! Milestones will be passed. You and I have been together here now for just over 4 years. Hell! That's longer than my entire academic career!* And there are so many of you. Unimaginably big numbers of you, which is what I'd have said if you'd told me on October 5, 2011 that today, this address on the web would've been accessed more than 480,000 times. You've been wonderful. And, despite my spotty presence in the past who-knows-how-long? it's been incredibly rewarding.

Thank. You!

Enough shilly-shallying! Down to business.

Perhaps you read The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. I did. Or, maybe you saw the film with Viggo Mortensen. I saw it too. Both left me filling bilious. Like most, you may have seen the narrative as a treatment of the human condition through a father and son story, played out in circumstances where even Hope seemed a cruel joke, and in which they have little to live with, or for, but their own [broken] bodies and [overburdened or innocent] minds. The end was more a welcome relief than anything close to uplifting. But we beat on . . .

And why should this concern an archaeologist? Funny you should ask!

This archaeologist can't help being human. Can't forbear emotion. Can't escape the search for meaning in his own and in humanity's existence. [Even if the answer is, as I know it to be, "There is none!"]. And most of all, I have a burning need to understand phenomena that pique my interest. For me, it's rocks and bones that reached their sell-by date hundreds of thousands of years ago. I think that's why The Road fascinated me, even as it frustrated and bemused me.

Why? Because all of the metaphors that the story evoked were, for me, trite—even hackneyed. Kinda like all of the ways that Paleolithic archaeologists have found to see human [read: yours and mine] cognition in Lower—or if you prefer the less denigrating—Early and Middle Paleolithic stone artifacts [and the bitumen, putative birch tar, putative purposeful burial, putative mammoth-bone structures, putative cooked pumpkin, putative this, putative that—the list grows by the hour].

I really don't give a poop about what Cormac McCarthy intended. I'm really only interested in what he wrote, and how, evidently, it revealed more about his cosmology and those of his reviewers than any of them could have imagined. Sorta like the rock and bone specialists whose 'scholarship' I've had the privilege to pillory these past four years.

Something really bad happened in The Road. The world as we know it ended. And suddenly it was cold and lawless. Raw. Primal. [Hey! I could write those 15 second teasers for gook like this!] We aren't told what, exactly, happened. But, presumably it was nuclear Armageddon. Evidently there wasn't anything left alive. Leastwise, not worth eating. And, for some reason, two remnants of humanity—father and son [mum checked out, leaving her only begotten son, because she was too weak of spirit—try that on, if you have a feminist bone in your body]—are on a road trip [sorry, that's too deprecatory] a Quest for something better, or the meaning of life, or . . . you're the consumer/critic . . . you decide. Are we told what the two are questing for? Barely. Warmer climes. Seems pretty small potatoes to me. I can see the paraphrase quoted in frosted letters on Borders Books store windows in some future time: "'Tis better to die on a ghastly warm, tropical beach than to live in this ghastly, cold place!" Theirs is a road to nowhere—or to Hope, which is in my parlance, pretty much the same thing. But what does McCarthy think the road is. Why call your opus magnum The Road, if you didn't mean it to be a truly epochal place to spend time?

There's this road. [And this is where I get all archaeological on you.] There are bad people about. People who're too lazy to take to The Road to find happiness [or, more probably, oblivion] in warmer climes. People who'd just as soon eat you as look at you! Cannibals. Ruthless. People. [All the good people are dead or took the early train to tropical oblivion.]

So what does Dad figure is the best way to get where he's taking his son? Yep. The Road. Dad makes the two of them into walking road-kill. The Road! Can you say, exposed? Hell! They spend more time getting off the road, looking for leftovers in abandoned bomb shelters [that's what it was, folks, a 50s bomb shelter replete with Spam and Tang!, or high-tailing it trying to get away from the cannibals! But that road is a constant. I guess that's supposed to be a good thing. We'll see.

And here's where I and Cormac McCarthy's conscious, or un-, come face to face. For me, one of the crucial moments in the book is when Father and Son come upon some of their fellow travellers—well, dead people—“half mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling”—frozen in time in what was, at some time in the recent past, molten asphalt. Skeletons. Um. Is it just me? This is the road that's supposed to be our salvation?

Is it just a coincidence, or perhaps it's his unconscious talking, that the author decides shortly thereafter to end the journey for Dad and begin it for Son? McCarthy has told us [I can see him standing there, with his arms akimbo, laughing at us schmucks who've endured his crushing narrative to this point] that this road is and always was a road to oblivion. Could he have given us this image without intending us to see this? I doubt it. On the other hand, schlock fiction hasn't always scintillated for its ability to maintain verisimilitude longer than a nanosecond. God. Damn. It! McCarthy wasn't showing us a Father with a primordial urge to make his life better for his Son: he gave us a vision of what it's like when those in control cleave mindlessly to a way of life that is a) pointless, and b) dangerous to life on earth. That way of life, of course, is symbolized by the road—a perilous petrochemical pathway to prosperity until the global grab for fossil fuels led us down a swirling toilet bowl of increasingly violent and destructive wars until finally the world's people propelled themselves into a world-ending cataclysm.

And the Road is supposed to have been a good idea? A symbol of the search for identity or humanity or salvation? Give me a break! Critics and pundits, heal thineselves!

So. Paleolithic archaeologists, hold on to your brown fedoras, because this soulless critic of bad literary criticism and even worse archaeological narrative is on your case. I'm gonna dissect your arguments and their silly premises until there's nothing left but a graveyard of broken hypotheses, preserved, not in amber, but asphalt . . . or birch tar . . . or limestone breccia.

I'd be hittin' the road, if I were you.

________________
* A bit of an exaggeration, for effect. I guess it depends on how you define an academic career. For the purposes of this conversation, I'm calling it the time I was employed, full time, in an academic position for which the original intention was that it would be permanent. That was the three years I spent as a Lecturer at the University of New England, in Armidale, New South Wales [which is in Australia for the geographically challenged among my readers—'tain't no disgrace, I can't add 2 and 2 and get the same answer three times in a row!]

Fiat Lux* Polly Wiessner Tries Unsuccessfully to Shine a Light on Cognitive Evolution.

Polly Wiessner gave archaeologists something fresh to think about in 1983 with the publication of "Style and Social Information in Kalahari San Projectile Points" (American Antiquity 48:253-276.) It. Kicked. Butt. It was a rigorous investigation of stylistic variability in one economic artifact—the projectile point—among and between several linguistically related southern African hunter-gatherers. At one and the same time it opened the door to a deeper understanding of stylistic differences in subsistence foragers, and exposed the porous theories then extant for explaining both what and why style exists, and how and why is varies. I think it's still an open question if there aren't as many ways of using style as a means of symbolic communication as there are coherent groups in the human species. But that's an empirical question, something toward which Wiessner *cough* pointed us in that paper.

From Wiessner 1983.

Today, however, I become a turn-coat. Professor Wiessner has produced another brilliant work of anthropology, again based on long experience of life among the same southern African people. But, this time, the good doctor has gone too far—it seems to me—in extending her insights of life in the Kalahari Desert into what she uncritically accepts is the deep past of humanity's controlled use of fire.

There is great value in her discussion of fire's light in modern human societies, even those whose material complexity has turned firelight into a self-conscious diversion and a form of entertainment.

As Weissner puts it

Control of fire and the capacity for cooking led to major anatomical and residential changes for early humans, starting more than a million years ago. However, little is known about what transpired when the day was extended by firelight. Data from the Ju/’hoan hunter-gatherers of southern Africa show major differences between day and night talk. Day talk centered on practicalities and sanctioning gossip; firelit activities centered on conversations that evoked the imagination, helped people remember and understand others in their external networks, healed rifts of the day, and conveyed information about cultural institutions that generate regularity of behavior and corresponding trust. Appetites for firelit settings for intimate conversations and for evening stories remain with us today.

And she provides plenty of evidence for the divide between what goes on under the sun, and under the moon and the start. And her narrative is interesting, inventive, and diverting.

But just as naive children ask questions like "Where did God come from?" Weissner has to ask the question of what her insights might tell us about the role of fire in our cognitive evolution. She may not put it quite that way, but that's where her question leads. And, rather than simply muse as to when that might have had its beginnings, she demonstrates a similarly childlike naivete in her regurgitation of some of the extreme claims for the antiquity of controlled use of fire on which the Subversive Archaeologist has thrown a good measure of cold water.

Here is the stage, as Weissner sets it.

Current archaeological evidence indicates that our ancestors had sporadic control of fire by 1 million y ago or longer . . . and regular use after approximately 400,000 ka . . . . With or following the control of fire, many developments were unfolding that rendered modern humans “unique” . . . : extended co- operative breeding . . . , higher orders of theory of mind . . . , religion . . . , language . . . , social learning and cultural transmission . . . , cultural institutions and their regulation . . . , and intergroup cooperation and exchange . . . . Although much work been has done on the effects of cooking on diet and anatomy, little is known about how important the extended day was for igniting the embers of culture and society.

And there you have it. And there you don't.

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Dear Reader, I know you're not one of the credulous. So, you already know that there are very good reasons to doubt the claims for controlled use of fire at Wonderwerk Cave. Just ask me! Beginning with the aptly titled "I must be bat-guano crazy!" yours truly, the Subversive Archaeologist has laid out the myriad reasons for doubting the truly crazy gesticulating and arm-waving that emanated from that big southern African cave, mined for bat guano in the 20th century, and excavated by flaming archaeological imagineers. Then here, the so-called scientific support for controlled use of fire—using Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometry [Sounds great, doesn't it? Unfortunately, a scientific knowledge claim is an inferential argument, from evidence, and this argument falls flat on its face, 'cause it doesn't have any evidence.]

If they can't rule out spontaneous combustion of bat shit, and at the same time want to pretend that the cave was never much of a bat cave [*clears throat* tell me again, what were they mining?], these alleged scientists have no authority, as far as I'm concerned. And, if they can't demonstrate that the fire was controlled, and they can't rule out natural processes for the observations they acquired at Wonderwerk, Polly Wiessner has no basis on which to muse about the inner workings of the cognitive processes of a bipedal ape about which we know less than nothing.

So, think what you want. But at a certain restaurant at the end of the universe, when the data are all, finally, in, there I'll be, swimming in the biggest Pan-galactic gargle blaster that ever existed, paid for by the oops!es and the whoops!es of the ones who got it wrong, and the legions of their credulous megaphones.

* I'm a graduate of the Universitas Californiensis, the Latin motto of which is a quote from the Latin Vulgate Bible: Fiat Lux, the first words written down relating the will of the Abrahamic deity, whose name I shall not write here, out of respect for hundreds of millions of Jews. In the English vernacular of the Authorized Version of the Holy Bible—the King James Version—it means "Let there be light."
I'm not a Holy Man. I'm not a devout man. I'm devoted to just one belief when it comes the world's cosmologies—I believe there are no gods.
I am, nevertheless, an anthropologist, and I like a good story as much as the next reflexive post-modern student of humanity. Apparently I'm not alone. Although, to me, a good story doesn't necessarily mean good science. But I digress.

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