YouTube

Lately, I've been spending more and more time watching YouTube. Not the part of YouTube where cats jump into boxes, but the part I wish I had in high school and struggling through biology, world history, or physics. Short, fast-paced educational videos like these are all over YouTube and yet, I can't seem to find any for anthropology. Why not? We see the media always blowing up new archaeological finds, especially if it involves a "huge shake-up" of our current models of human evolution.

From Time. October 9, 2006 cover.

These sort of stories pique the interest of people like my older brother, who took an introductory anthropology course at his university because he was interested in finding out where humans came from. I remember him complaining that he had to go through so much material that didn't interest him before they even started talking about human origins--he could have saved the money spent on that class if there were an easier way for him to access the knowledge he wanted.

I don't think the physical classroom can be replaced by a video. But I think having an accessible, entertaining, and accurate introduction to a subject is necessary to capture the interest of future anthropologists. It's great to see these channels popping up to explain the stereotypically difficult courses, but I also think it's time that the social sciences get a YouTube presence.

Edit: I forgot this video existed, but my point that there should be more of these still stands:

"Something tells me that playing Mario party with a Neanderthal would be, like, a dozen different kinds of awesome, but, I guess I'll never know." Hank pretty much sums up my feelings on the subject.

Plagues and Media

One of the earliest concepts I remember learning, when I started anthropology courses at UVic, is the difference between archaeology in North America and archaeology in Europe. That difference is obvious in this BBC article on possible Black Death victims found during the construction of a high-speed railway through the City of London (which, confusingly enough, is not London). Here, the archaeologists are studying their own history, with the possibility that these remains are their distant ancestors.

From BBC. The archaeological pit found in the City of London.

The discovery in the City of London contrasts with discoveries of First Nations remains here in BC even in the news coverage it gets. In a class I took last semester, Dr. Thom would send us articles having to do with First Nations (sometimes 14 articles a day!) and he would discuss them in class, pointing out the bias that Canadian media has relating to First Nations. One huge controversy we looked at was skeletons unearthed near the Great Fraser Midden in Vancouver that halted the development of a condominium complex, thoroughly annoying the Vancouver Island couple that were financially backing the development. The comments on those articles were disgusting; suggesting that the people buried in that midden were trash because they were found amongst "trash," a poor interpretation of the meaning of midden. In this BBC article, more people are worried that the skeletal remains still contain the plague--they aren't insulting the memory of those ancestors because they stand in the way of development.

From Warrior Publications. Musqueam band members protest the desecration of  c̓əsnaʔəm.

Maybe the solution to this discrepancy is to encourage greater First Nations involvement in their own history. Would our news sound more like the BBC's article if the archaeologists working on a site weren't settlers whose familial presence on this continent only goes back 200 years? When Dr. Thom would bring in elders from the First People's House to speak to our class, they would emphasize the cultural knowledge that we, as future archaeologists, need to keep in mind when digging up a site; for example, the responsibility of a certain family to maintain burial grounds. I wish the First Nations sites around here got as much positive attention as these Black Death victims. We should start that change by working with local First Nations as much as possible, to synthesize their cultural and environmental knowledge passed down over thousands of years with our own archaeological skills.

This way to the ministry of magic ↓

I was going to write about this new History Channel show called Vikings,* but while browsing through my reading list I found MacKenzie's post about Egyptian graffiti. Having just watched a documentary on Netflix this week on the process involved in deciphering hieroglyphics, the concept of a totally unknown script creating such a mystery was fresh in my mind.

Which then reminded me of a guest speaker in Erin's ANTH100 class three years ago. Genevieve von Petzinger summarized her research on geometric symbols for our class, which analyzed the relationship between supposedly non-symbolic shapes found all over the world; preserved in caves from as far back as 68-80 kya BP! Thankfully, I still had my notes from that class kicking around, and was able to find this webpage that goes into further detail from that presentation. I looked through it and remembered how fascinating I thought those symbols were, and the influence it had on my eventual decision to major in anthropology.

So, going back to the topic of drunkard Egyptian graffiti, I can't help but relate this European cave mystery with the only recently deciphered Egyptian script. If the symbols researched by von Petzinger do have the property of conventionality--that is, if they hold shared meanings among those who used them--then what if some of these inscriptions are in fact ancient graffiti? Perhaps the bored scribbles of a thirteen-year-old stuck in the cave, taking shelter from a storm?

MacKenzie points out that it's easy to separate ourselves from the humans whose cultural remnants we stumble upon. We hold every piece of the puzzle in equal level of significance, whether pyramid or drunken graffiti, and naturally inflate their importance in the story we then tell of our own beginning. It's important to remember that perhaps not all that is preserved is solely indicative of a culture, a species, or an idea. As with everything, sample size matters.

*You'll have to find a way around the outside-of-USA block the History Channel has in order to watch this show, which isn't entirely impossible.

This post's title was inspired by a post from this blog.

Troublesome Corpses

Over this last week we've been researching the treatment of "revenant" corpses over the last millenium or so. It's amazing to see the kinds of superstitions that arose over the treatment of corpses. In the Ukraine, it was believed that wind passing over an unburied body was enough to reanimate it; the Gypsies believed that any living being crossing over a corpse awaiting burial would be enough to create a revenant. So it makes sense that a similarly varied tradition appeared after the Dark Ages to respond to this "Vampire problem."

There were numerous peoples who believed that vampires exhibited what we might now call OCD behaviours--that they could not cross scattered millet or a dog's body because they could not count every grain or hair by sunrise. Certain woods were believed to have exceptional vampire-taming properties, and strong-smelling herbs such as juniper were utilized by the Gypsies to repel the troublesome revenants. The use of garlic, which we typically think of today as the vampire repellant, was employed by the Romanians.

Tragically, it seems this could have been avoided had our modern science been around to explain the decaying corpse. The apparent growth of hair and nails post-mortem, and the process of decomposition were confused to be the product of an evil force, and as a result numerous bodies were mutilated in response to a perceived supernatural presence. So it seems even more necessary that we remember that our case studies deal with real people, likely with still-living descendants.

Quotes and Cats

Part of the research question our group decided on when looking at the St. Luke's Church cemetery looked at the expression of identity on the monuments. The most interesting thing I found is the detail given about an individual's life drops off during the twentieth century.

One of the older monuments at St. Luke's.

The burials from the late 1800s all give familial relationships, birthplace, and a quote (biblical or otherwise). Yet after 1950, there's only two markers (out of about 7 we looked at from that time period) give anything beyond the years of life and the name. Why was the identity of the individual devalued to two numbers and a name? In the family burial plots where we noticed this, the family name was more decorated than other plots--one had one of the only symbol inscriptions in our sample. Was the family becoming more important as space decreased? Or was it due to something that happened during the early 1900s that changed the style?

A non-traditional monument we found in the cremations section.

Cremations were introduced to save space in the small cemetery. One of the cremation markers we looked at had a cat on it; not something you'd expect to see in an Anglican cemetery, is it? But besides the cat, there was no information past the minimum inscribed. It seems like with the adoption of a new practice, nontraditional symbols are also being accepted as a way to describe the personality or identity of someone without words. 

"Make her be served a good meal."

A necropolis of the ancient kingdom of Kush, neighbour to the Egyptian kingdom, appears to have a hybrid of two styles: the local tradition of circular tumulus construction and Egyptian pyramids. These densely packed gravesites vary in size, and one even has a tablet wishing grandma good meals in the afterlife. The combination of cultures here is interesting.

From Live Science. The Kushite necropolis.

The inner circles of these pyramids offer no structural support, leading the authors to suggest they come from a local style. They say that only one pyramid outside of the Sedeinga site follows this style. Having just completed the monument analysis project and thinking about our modern grave-markers and their susceptibility to style, I can't help but see this necropolis in the same terms. I can imagine wealthy Kushites influenced by the Egyptians, perhaps wanting those powerful pyramids to reflect their own wealth. Eventually, the style becomes so popular that even a child is buried next to a 30-inch wide pyramid and Sedeinga is suddenly a dense graveyard of tumulus-pyramid hybrid monuments.

The few artifacts described in the article make this seem more like an ancient graveyard than an ominous-sounding necropolis. Offerings for grandma, prayers to Isis, Osiris, and Anubis on behalf of loved ones; they don't sound much different than Ronald Kendrick's gravestone at St. Luke's cemetery. I hope we find more sites like Sedeinga.

Individuality Among the Dead

One of the earliest things I remember about my mom is her fascination with graveyards. I used to think it was creepy, and would never want to accompany her on those visits to local graveyards during vacations. But with this monument analysis project, I'm finding myself almost as fascinated by those tombstones as she is.

At the small church cemetery my group and I visited this week to record information, I was surprised by the amount of multiple interments (all cremations? or did they stand people up when burying them?) and the stories I could infer from the little information provided. I saw a family's grave occupied by brothers and sisters, children and grandchildren. The couples temporarily separated by death (but seemingly prepared for it in the ominous birthdate-only engraving for the surviving partner) and those reunited after decades apart.

But my favourite was a Scottish couple, who easily had the coolest grave; none of us saw it until we were about to leave, but once found it stuck out from the rest of the toned-down grave markers (before this, the most unique grave was marked by a stone scroll). I think this is the kind of monument I would want over my grave: almost fitting in, but individualized enough that it can be picked out amongst all others.

Karksi Castle and the Vicious Circle of Conquest

Science published this article by Andrew Curry in November on new techniques being used to study the impact of colonization in Europe during the Northern Crusades, around 1200-1400 CE. Essentially, he's reinforced the idea that history repeats itself. This article tells a story about a prehistoric (i.e. without written records) peoples whose cultural traditions and way of life were replaced by colonizers, who at the same time decimated the landscape. As Alex Brown, a University of Reading paleobotanist in the UK says: 

“In the Iron Age, you have woodland. When you get to the 14th or 15th centuries, a century after the arrival of the Teutonic Knights, you're dealing with significant cleared landscape,” Brown says. “You can see the impact of the appearance of the Order and the scale of resources required to construct castles and maintain them.”

From cut marks on animal bones, we find evidence of new technologies. From the garbage pits of Karksi Castle, we find a transplanted culture. Can we transplant our recent experiences as humans onto these transplants? Possibly. It's not hard to assume that a sudden change in the way of life of Estonia's indigenous inhabitants isn't really a coincidence with new arrivals; especially when the cultural descendants of those invaders later colonized a large part of the world under the banner of the White Man's Burden.

Curry alludes to this repetitive nature of our history by concluding, "It might even be possible to turn the clock 1000 years further back, to look at how the Northern Crusades compare to the expansion of the Roman Empire." This pattern begs the question of what archaeologists a thousand years in the future might discover about our turn-of-the-millenium lifestyle. How will our eventual replacement by a "more advanced empire" be measured?

More exciting is the idea that we're only measuring changes that occurred within the last thousand years. The Catholic Church that ruled during those Crusades is still around today--but it took 600+ years to even begin to understand the impact that such a sudden upheaval can have. But since we started studying our own history, the technology we use has advanced exponentially. Perhaps next time we won't repeat our old mistakes.

The Meaning of Stone

Ramilisonina, a native Madagascar archaeologist, compared the sacred "ancestor stones" of Madagascar to the megaliths of Stonehenge, Bluestonehenge, and Woodhenge erected in Neolithic England. He and Mike Parker Pearson have come together to propose a theory analogous of the more recent Malagasy ancestor worship to explain these mystery stones erected 9,200 km apart. Blogger Brian John questioned that comparison, skeptical of transposing one modern-day belief system to an ancient one.

A dramatic moment at Stonehenge (source)

MPP and Ramilisonina are not wrong to propose this theory for the purpose of the henges. MPP has found cremated remains at the site that could possibly be from a single dynasty. So, logically, it could very well have been a sacred place for the dead. Ramilisonina seems confident that similar forms indicate a similar function—this is where I split from MPP/R and agree with Brian John. That analogy is probably too far.

But while John is right in describing the comparison between belief systems a "grave mistake" (pun intended?), his criticism of MPP for imposing a sacred meaning on the stones is too far. It seems that the majority of belief systems we've encountered as anthropologists do indeed include an afterlife, so the discovery of massive man-made structures and human remains together naturally elicit a sacred connotation. If there are some massive structures containing human remains that are not "the domain of the dead," I'd love to research them. But for now, I'd place my bets on MPP.

The Malagasy "ancestor stones" (source)

Without written records or a time machine, it's impossible to know for sure what the function of England's monoliths were. Ramilisonina may be a little ambitious in claiming a universality of ancestor worship at monoliths, considering the ancestors of the Malagasy and the henge erectors probably shared their last common ancestor tens of thousands of years ago. But I don't think he and MPP are too far off the dot.

Introductions...

So this is my introductory entry.

First things first: I grew up in Seattle, and I was obsessed with anthropology for years without actually knowing what it was. It started with the Discovery and History Channels, and more recently BBC Documentaries. My high school Japanese teacher also worked on a few archaeological digs in Japan, and would tell us stories about all the cool artifacts he found.

Speaking of Japanese, the character for "death" in Japanese is 死, read as shi (pronounced "she"), and is made up of two radicals (parts of a character that contains meaning about the word). The first radical is death, 歹, and the next is ... spoon, 匕. I'm not sure where the connection between death and spoons comes from, but it would be fascinating to find out. Before I actually looked into this, I thought it was a combination of three radicals, the first being that straight line at the top that would logically signify something buried underground (there are other characters with that sort of meaning). But it's not. Interesting.

Besides anthropology, I also have a passion for linguistics and languages (which are not really the same thing). I'm sort of pursuing a minor in linguistics, though it may just end up as more of a lots-and-lots-of-electives-in-linguistics thing. I'm semi-fluent in Japanese, and have also dabbled in French and Lushootseed, the Coast Salish language of the Puget Sound area Native Americans (First Nations is a Canadian term). If anthropology doesn't pan out, I'd really want to do work with language revitalization. There's a ton of environmental and cultural knowledge embedded in the languages of aboriginal peoples, and losing that insight would be tragic.

In short, there are a lot of areas in all disciplines that interest me, and I'm excited to be taking Archaeology of Death at UVic. I think it'll broaden my understanding of cross-cultural funerary rituals, and I'm especially interested in learning about how the artifacts found in these burials translate into knowledge about the people who buried them and how they thought about death. Most people say the universe makes them feel small and insignificant, and that's basically how I feel about anthropology. The more I learn, the more I realize that the time I spend here and alive is small and insignificant in comparison to the 200,000 year lifespan of Homo sapiens.