OPA, FOF, GB all stars? On a stamp?

Not to detract from Jenny's recent post about lithic scatters (I will comment soon), but I found a really cool website that allows you to make USPS approved stamps using your own photos.

I think this would be a great way to get some fun images circulating through the nation. Imagine- a "tribute to trowels". Imagine--a FoF stamp or an "OPA-Nouveau" stamp designed Mr. Ure! Finally, imagine a "Great Basin All Stars" series. Once every few months we could get a new one.

The possibilities are endless. A little more expensive, but endless.

Here is the link:

Photostamps.com

On the Ground

I’ve got a question for the general audience relating somewhat to fire issues, more to obsidian dating:

I work a lot out in southern Tooele County on the Vernon parcel of the Forest (ok, as if most of you haven’t heard me compulsively raving about the joys of Vernon…). Long story short, we see tons of little non-descript lithic scatters, mostly Fremont in my book, but quite a few have Archaic points. Most sites have at least a few little bits of obsidian, though I’d say the points are more often chert. There are typically no associated features and very few ceramics, but a lot of these suckers are huge (most of the sites are strung out along the creek beds and can be as long as a mile or more).

Now here’s the issue. For years, my boss has put off making an eligibility statement on any of them because she and Dykmann have gone back and forth about the whole potential to contribute scientific information. There is a distant possibility that they may have buried deposits, but not even enough evidence to justify a test pit (though we’ve put a few in over the years and generally don’t see anything besides lithics in the first 10 cm—to complicate it more, most of the area has been cultivated or chained, or both!). Dykmann’s primary argument, though, is that we can’t call them Unknown Aboriginal and Not Eligible simply because, in his book, we could technically do obsidian hydration on every site. I guess he wants them all Eligible. Problem is, we’ve got documentation of burns over almost the entire Vernon unit, and no doubt, of course, that there have been fires prehistorically as well.

So what do you think? I’m not hugely familiar with obsidian dating, but I know fire can reset the clock. If we don’t have buried deposits (particularly because things have been so disturbed historically) deep enough that the obsidian has been protected, could we ever really trust hydration dates? And is it even remotely worth dating little scatters that don’t even have diagnostic points? Obviously, part of the issue has been solved with Dykmann’s retirement, although maybe Seddon will have a problem, too, but I’m looking to finish up these forms and write an article or two on the prehistory of Rush Valley one of these days and it’d help to have a solid grounding on eligibility. It’s a neat little microcosmic world out there, with some cool patterns, so the report really deserves to be published.

Any thoughts are appreciated. Apologies to any anti-CRM among us who take horror at the thought of being reduced to discussing National Register status. =)

Wow, more secret messages

For those of you who did not notice, the word "hell" in Holly's post "An Open Letter" is a link. Scroll down and check it out. What were you trying to say, Holly?

Haikus for the Forgotten

For Mike and Scott:

Anthro research lab
"You can't use that in the film!"
Re-do, re-do, damn.

For Cady:

Parowan turquoise
Sourcing? Isn't that Joel's thing?
Academic thief

Mr. Yoder's Thesis: On-Line!

I forgot to previously mention that my thesis is now on-line at BYU. It feels good to have it done. Here's the link:
http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd1052.pdf

Now what you do is go to this link and then scroll down to page number 9. Increase magnification to about 300% and look on the left hand side of the image. The excavators of North Creek, forever immortalized.

An Open Letter

Dear Everyone,

I've made haikus for all!

A Haiku for Chris:

Ho-ho-ho- wha? who?
Ho-ho-what the h? who cares?
More like, ho-ho-krap

A Haiku for Jenny:

Are you kidding me?
Rusty nails and can scatters
You get paid for this?

Oh, another haiku for Jenny!

Hole-in-top, matchstick?
Insignificant cowboys
Boring, boring, dumb

A Haiku for Aaron and the Fremont:

Fremont foragers
Don't loose your rabbit stick now!
Smelly pithouses

A Haiku for the Nabataeans:

Written language, kings,
Monumental structures....hmm..
Sounds like it's a state!

A Haiku for State-level societies:

Important cultures
Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians
No snail suckers here!

A Haiku for North American Archaeologists:

Burial digging
Don't let NAGPRA keep you down!
Night excavations

Now you can all pack your bags and go to Hell-

Love,
Holly

A request for Resurrection:

So, I was sitting around trying to avoid writing my Western Shoshone paper for Great Basin and, as has become a somewhat ritualistic habit in the past month, wandered over to FOF for a bit of light reading. I couldn’t get past the Dashboard all day, however, with two results: 1) You were all spared a number of lame and/or dry comments on such things as I generally know nothing about…you may now stop celebrating, thank you, and read 2) I did a search for FOF to try a back way in and ended up accessing the first three or so lines of the last 82 some odd posts on a Blogger search page that was actually working.

I’ll grant that it was a stunted view of what’s gone on over the life of the blog, but I’m slightly disturbed at the loss of a lovely tradition that seemed to be burgeoning.

Where is the haiku?
I think it was a nice touch.
And Holly was alive.
Sniff.

Knorosov: The Decipherment of the Mayan Script

This week at BYU International Cinema, they had a film on Yuri Knorosov, the Soviet linguist who made significant contribuitons to deciphering Mayan glyphs. It was very interesting, including interviews with Michael Coe, excerpts from Diego de Landa's writings, and several great photographs of Mayan ruins.

Towards the end of the film, Knorosov started talking about the origins of the Maya. he suggested that they migrated from the north down into Mesoamerica. Knorosov theorized that the Mayan homeland was somewhere in the American SW.

Knorosov suggested that Mesa Verde may have been of particular importance in the Mayan cave emergence. In other words, K. believed that Mesa Verde may have been the site of the seven caves/seven rivers where the Maya believed they emerged. Knorosov provided no real evidence, he just quoted from the Popul Vul and other Mayan writings.

A lack of evidence aside, this is an interesting idea. Especially since the idea of a southwestern Aztlan has been mentioned by Mike.

So I guess the question is this: Is the Southwest the epicenter of Great Basin and Mesoamerican cultures?

AJ Sighting

I have it on a high authority (Lane Richens), that our beloved AJ has been found doing contract work for John Baxter's CRM firm, Bighorn Archaeology. It is also on the records that he is still living in Moronihah and is still working for the Forest Service. Long live the Filfoul! We need to find a way to get him on FOF with us!

Another new feature?

Over the years we've talked a little about doing some kind of "Great Basin Archaeological All-Stars" trading cards. Maybe we could do a trial run here on FOF. We could come up with legitimate profiles for all of our favorite friends, with a brief biography, research interests, and selected bibliography. That way, if we ever talk about "Joel", we could link his name to his profile. This would be particularly helpful for the uninitiated.

On a sidenote, I'm thinking about organizing a lunchtime forum here at ASU to talk about blogging and its potential uses. That might mean a bunch of people looking at this site. We'll see if I decide to do it.

Thanks and Request

Thanks Yoder for your input. That clarified a lot. I have a request for another clarification:

Chris, what I know of the Sinagua tradition is that they are some kind of melding pot of the Snazi, Mogollon and Hohokam, is this true?

Teach us.

Basketmakers = Early Fremont?

(Had to make my own post so I could use the colors as emphasis!)

What essentially defines the Basketmakers is time, space, and some material culture. The material culture part generally includes pithouses (though some above ground structures were also used), atlatl use, use and probably reliance on corn, storage features (including rock shelters, dry caves, slablined cists, and bellshaped pits) no ceramics, and all this taking place around a couple hundred years BC to 400 or 500 AD. Does that sound familiar to anyone? What keeps the early Fremont from being Basketmaker? Location. Early Fremont really look a lot like Basketmaker groups. Rich thinks that early Fremonters ARE Basketmakers who in micro migrations expanded up into the Northern Colorado Plateau and Great Basin where they passed on some traits to the indigenious rabbit chasers before being culturally swallowed up. The Steinaker Gap report lays out Rich’s basic argument:

“There is another option seldom considered: small-scale migration of farmers. In this scenario, Basketmaker II nuclear or extended family groups, experienced in maize agriculture, would have spread northward from the more populous regions of northern Arizona, seeking the best arable land (Talbot 1995b). Such groups would have been minority populations in a sea of hunter-gatherers. Enculturation in these settings very likely was reciprocal, with the immigrant farmers sharing knowledge of agriculture and associated technologies, knowledge that ultimately led to widespread adaptive shifts, but with the people themselves inevitable being swallowed up in the local, larger gene pool.”

He goes on to discuss this more, but that’s the main idea. Although I’ve never talked to Janetski about this specifically, generally I don’t think he buys it. He feels that Basketmaker traits diffused slowly into the Fremont region, not through migration, whether large or micro. Although he does think that early Fremont are very similar to Basketmakers. He says:

“these data suggest that indigenous peoples in the central Utah region adopted and adapted new ideas from surrounding areas, both north and south, and gradually, rather than dramatically, shifted to a Formative strategy.”

And….

“These data also suggest that a Basketmaker II-like strategy was present well to the north of the traditional Anasazi area and preceded the better known Formative (Fremont) adaptation in this region”

Good reading on this includes
Talbot, Richard K., and Lane D. Richens
1996 Steinaker Gap: An Early Fremont Farmstead. Museum of Peoples and Cultures Occasional Papers No. 2. Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

2004 Fremont Farming and Mobility on the Northern Colorado Plateau: The Steinaker Lake Project. Museum of Peoples and Cultures Occasional Papers No. 10. Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

Janetski, Joel C.
1993 The Archaic to Formative Transition North of the Anasazi: A Basketmaker Perspective. In ????(not sure, I’ll find out tonight)

So what’s it all mean? I think that obviously PreFremont or Early Fremont (200 B.C.- 500 A.D.) folks were heavily influenced by Southwesterners. I don’t think that early Fremont and Basketmaker were the same people in the sense of a distinct cultural group, like Americans or Frenchies. Instead they were small groups who shared similar cultural traits, just like Americans and Frenchies live in above ground houses, have a industrialized society, ect. Basketmakers and Early Fremont shared much in subsistence, architecture, and other things, but I don't think archaeologically they should be counted as the same group. In part because early Fremont seems to have been a little later and because they obviously followed different paths in the end. But right now the number of early Fremont sites is very low, so as the database increases this may clear things up considerably. That’s my general view of it all. I think they were very similar, but should be seen and discussed as different groups. Read Rich’s and Janetski’s reports and articles, cause they make their arguments much more clear than I do.

Theories!...Theories everywhere!...

Just so all y'all outside the bubble know, Clark is looking to put together a theory/history of archaeology book for 501/510. He's looking for contributors to write the chapters, so here's your free chance to publish, folks!

If it actually happens, it'll be a good opportunity to really attack a theory or two in-depth and to leave a tidge of a legacy for future generations--spare them reading Hawaiki, I hope. I imagine he'll be up for a goodly number of us putting in on this, so I guess stay-tuned, but be thinking about what theories you specifically want to see in it. He's also planning on a section for statehood, origins of agriculture, etc. Basically it'll be a big study guide for the competency.

Northern Periphery on the Mind

I was reading through Carol Riley's "Becoming Aztlan" (2005) and found an interesting tidbit on the inclusion of the Fremont into the Anasazi Basketmaker tradition. It goes like this...

"The Basketmaker phase of Anasazi extended over much of the San Juan Basin, westward to the lower Virgin River of Southern Nevada, although there is not much evidence for Basketmaker occupation in some areas, for example the north rim of the Grand Canyon. If the enigmatic pithouse-dwelling Fremont tradition can be included, much of Utah and parts of Colorado belonged in the Basketmaker-Pueblo world."

If one of the main characteristics of the Basketmakers is pithouse use (and non-ceramic, of course) then couldn't the earlier Fremont be considered part of this group? What draws the line for exclusion? Is it the fact that they didn't evolve into what is considered a Pueblo tradition but continued using pithouse stuctures? Or is their material culture actually totally distinct/different? Can't we all just get along?

Click here!

Hello all: I just finished our anthro. graduate student association website. It's no OPA site, but I was pretty happy with how it turned out, considering I had no idea how to construct a website beforehand. Tell me what you think.

www.ou.edu/agsa

Michael Coe Shallit Lecture

The lecture this year, "Dawn of the Maya Civilization", in my opinion, was one of the better Shallit lectures so far. Dr. Coe really made the lecture understandable for everyone in the audience (and for hacks like me it helps to keep it simple and interesting). He used some really cool 3D models of Mayan temples as well as some great satellite imagery. I guess thats the benefit of working at Yale and being one of the premiere Mayan scholars. One point that he made at the beginning of his lecture concerning theory was very interesting to me. He basically said that he doesnt subscribe to all of the theories that are floating around out there and that they all come and go. He said that he considers himself a cultural historian instead. I found this quite refreshing since I have a hard time with all the theories involved with archaeology in the first place. I am the first to admint my limited knowledge here, but in my mind, let the culture speak for itself. What is the point of having theories that you cannot test and prove right or wrong? I understand that we all have our theories, and on a small scale it makes sense, but these large overriding ideas that are imposed in a one-size fits all doesnt make sense to me. Anyway, I thought Dr. Coe's statement about being a Cultural Historian was interesting and a quiet slap in the face to some of the theorists. I will get off my soap box now...

Sinagua Dissertation

When I began working as an RA for Dave Abbott this semester, I little dreamed that the job might turn into such a cool dissertation. Dave has written me into his latest NSF grant where we will be analyzing and redressing the Sinagua ceramic typology and the Sinagua phenomenon in general. If it goes through, I'll be essentially redefining the Sinagua phenomenon for my dissertation.

In the meantime, I'm working on Patayan - Hohokam interactions. Pretty soon, we'll have every boundary covered.

Again with the Symposium

I figure I better hurry and post just in case Holly decides to do something brash and actually post--wouldn't want to be branded as she has been.

That said, all I'm gonna say about you sceptics and your anti-historic attitude is...well...ok, I got nothin', but it's still cool. Pass your rust to me, I'll gladly take it. But don't get me wrong, I'll take a pretty lithic scatter over a pile of cans any day of the week.

Now, to the Symposium...

First of all, even now, days later, I can feel my tailbone. The drive was LONG. I tried keeping the 'hey, we're bonding' perspective and that made it slightly more tolerable. 1776 was really enjoyable even though it came in such large blocks.

The first session was definitely the highlight for me, despite its comparative lack of historic discussion, but when it came down to it, I enjoyed the Pueblo talk a lot more than I did any of the Euro-American junk. Traitor to my own cause.

Christine Ward's discussion of lithic procurement. Definitely interesting stuff--a great way to start the conference. Aaron has already discussed it, so I won't.

Donna Glowacki's was a little soft around the edges, but I enjoyed the basic concepts. She discussed The Social Landscape of Depopulation in the northern San Juan. I resonate with the idea of going beyond what's strictly represented on the ground and really trying to bring in our inherent understanding of humans, but getting too post-processualist can rub me the wrong way. In this case, some good points were made and I'll ignore the rest. Notably she suggested that movements in the region, particularly between the east and west, were caused by social differentiation in addition to drought. The east became more ritualistic than the west and that affected the equilibrium. Lot's of food for thought building from this.

Does anyone know of any positive demonstration of the southwest "ball courts"? I mean, yes, they're big flat community areas with seating around, and yes, they're very similar to what we see in Mesoamerica, but do we have associated gaming artifacts? Just curious. I wonder if we tend to just follow along with traditional terminology and let previous biases (such as the standard south to north movement) cloud our ability to read the ground. Ball courts were mentioned, mostly in passing, in a couple of the presentations.

Wendy Ashmore was the discussant, as Aaron mentioned. Her broad discussion of landscape theory was certainly more useful than anything any of the other discussants shared. Her nine factors to be considered were: (1) use of ethnography, (2) consideration of the spatial scale, (3) physical visibility, (4) time, (5) decision making and strategy use, (6) social relations and interaction, (7) movement/pilgrimages, (8) power, and (9) citation circles/networks. I appreciated her inclusion of no. 9—that we need to acknowledge the work being done on the other side of the Atlantic and the Euros need to do the same.

Well, I’m long-winded. The point is that the conference had a lot of good points. I got to see a few token rusty things, particularly in Carol Griffith’s trash talk. Interesting history bites about waste disposal. Did you know there’s a landfill in Fresno that’s eligible for the Register under A, B, C, & D?! The fire talks were interesting, but I think more could have been done. My particular interest in the fire venue is maybe better saved for a separate post…I’ll probably do that one of these days.

In the meantime, it’s oddly nice to be back to the bubble. *sick*

Mike's SW Symposium Likes-Dislikes

Likes:
1. There were tons of opportunities to network with potential employers. I think I have a job in Chihuahua, Mexico for the summer and was offered work at two other locations.
2. Stephen Lekson's "History of Archaeological History in the Southwest." He made a comment that some Mexicans are claiming they should have automatic residency in the US because their ancestors were originally from the American Southwest. This is the concept of "Aztlan" as the motherland. The Aztecs claimed that their ancestors originally lived in Aztlan, a land to the north of Central Mexico. I liked his twist on this concept and he gave props out to Riley who recently wrote a good book called "Becoming Aztlan", if anyone is interested.
3. There were a number of papers that talked about prehistoric and historic trails. This was facinating to me just because these are still around. I guess nothing really grows in the desert to disturb them. The "Camino Real" paper was particularly interseting. The guy talked about a road that stretched from Tenochtitlan all the way to Santa Fe, NM. Parts of this road still exist.
4. Carnitas - these were mentioned in Aaron's comment. They are God's gift to mankind. Small cuts of tender, delicious pork - nuf said.

Dislikes:
1. Although I tend to lean towards post-processual theory and ideas, the subject matter on landscapes was a little too ephemeral. There were a lot of comments based on bad interpretations of data. I'm getting more and more skeptical of archaeologist's interpretations, especially those who resort to narratives. Give me a break people.
2. It was refreshing to see a film at the symposium. It was on structural burning (already mentioned by Aaron). Unfortunately it was shown at lunch time and nobody came. I was dissappointed that the presenters the next day did not use the film in their presentations. I know they are only alloted 15 minutes, but 2 minutes of film would have made a big difference. Also, the presenter from U. of AZ who did the experiment built (in my opinion) a poor representation of a room block house. Not only did she not include plaster on the walls, but the roof, which is where people would typically enter, could not even be walked on. During one of her burnings, the roof collapsed when she didn't expect it to. Well, all I could think was "if you are going to build a shotty roof that can't even be walked on, then what did you expect?" Experimental archaeology can tell us a lot when it somewhat accurately represents prehistoric conditions.
3. Historic archaeology still makes me sleep. Just ask some of my fellow students here at OU. They were about to buy me a neck brace because my head was bobbing pretty violently during some of the historic paper presentations.

Overall, it was a good experience. Good to see the BYUers. Take care all.

Quotable Quotes from Gardner Dalley

Just thought I’d pop on and share some of Mr. Dalley’s site descriptions. We obviously have a lot to learn about writing from these old-timers:

Site 118: Quite level and very few “veggies”
Site 55: This is just a really cute, compact little site…roomblocks…may have a couple of little PI hookie-dos on it.
Site 56: There is just a dandy artifact scatter to the east…aspect is pick your own.
Site 57: Site is on a major order architecturally, although it’s a pure bear to sort out exactly…some fool punched right into the guts of the thing with a backhoe…screwed the alignments.
Site 58: Site type = “donut pueblo”
Site 22: …also the sucker is a good PI and they lay in a strange matter oft-times.
Site 66: “feels” substantial and is probably [structural]…have to be fairly husky to support the big midden.
Site 77: Don’t have a clue what it is.
Site 88: Maybe 20 m diam…ugly as sin.
Site 96: One spiral and a couple of other jobbers.
Site 4: It’s a hard sucker to get a good photo of and it defeats my limited sketching abilities…looks like some SOB tried to get his share for the mantle.
Site 9: There appears to be a minor ledge under the figurines, but it does not appear to be my kind of place.
Site 3: I can’t see everything that’s on the face and I have no interest whatsoever in trying to get closer.


I remember reading a few more, but couldn't find them today when I went through the forms again. Good times. Different times. Poor little undergrads'll love standing around the valley with us come field school trying to locate these things--you should see the site sketches!

Review of the Southwest Symposium

The Southwest Symposium was a great experience and it was refreshing to hear about something besides the gastric. Granted, the main theme of the symposium was on perceptions of landscape, but there were many well done papers.

The 13 hour drive from Provo to Las Cruces was fairly uneventful but filled with decent conversation and pretty good tunes. Jim has some good music in his collection, from world music to Barenaked Ladies. We also learned all about the American Revolution from the book 1776. Jim has it on CD.

For me, the conference began when I met up with our very own Mike Searcy and his OU group. Mike graciously introduced me to Pat Gillman and Paul Minnis. They were both really nice people and were supportive of my research interests. It was strange to be treated as if I actually had something significant to say (even though I'm only 25). A new sensation.

The first paper I listened to was by Christine Ward from Geomarine, Inc. Her paper was on the idea that the location of toolstone sources are just as important as the toolstone itself. Also, she suggested that the act of procurement was as important as actual procurement. In otherwords, the actual location of toolstone sources and the act of procurement are both charged with important memory and tradition. Ward also claimed that convienience (proximity to source), redistribution(of materials), and social ties had little to do with the presence of lithic materials at great houses in Chaco.

She noted a lack of patterning between the presence of certain toolstones and the distance of sources. She observed that exotic toolstones were used and discarded in the same way as local toolstones.

The balance of papers on Friday were devoted to landscape archaeology. Specifically rooted in how a landscape approach to Chaco Canyon could provide new and interesting research questions. Many of the papers were too "touchy-feely" for my liking, but the main theme seemed to be an attempt to understand the purpose/origins of Chaco.

At the end of the Friday morning session, the discussant, Wendy Ashmore mentioned eight different factors that should be considered in all elements of archaeology. I only got five, so maybe Mike or Holly got the rest.

Here they are: Use of ethnography
Consideration of time
Consideration of movement/migration
Scale
Power(social relations)

Friday afternoon had two good papers. One was about the sun daggers at Chaco Canyon. Due to vandalism and shifting sands, the sun daggers do not appear in the same place during the solstices. Some people from Ohio State scanned all of the area with laser scanners, entered the scanned data into a computer and created similations based on photographs from the 60s and 70s. They were able to figure out where the stones need to be in order for them to generate the original solstice daggers. Pretty amazing that they scanned the whole cliff face and surrounding terrain to get an accurate reading.

The second paper was by Bill Walker (NMSU) who suggested in the past that the mutiliated skeletons found among anasazi pueblos can be attributed to witch killing. Apparently when he made those claims, he caught a lot of flak from the Man Corn camp. His paper at the SWS was in part a reaction to criticism and in part an explanation why so many dog skeletons are found with mutilated remains. Walker suggested that the dogs were included with the witch bodies to keep the witches from re-emerging from their graves.

Saturday was filled with all sorts of talk about experimental archaeology, specifically testing hypotheses of why many anasazi structures are burnt. A bunch of people from U of AZ built a roomblock and set it on fire in a few different ways to see if they could note burn patterns, roof-fall, and other things.

I enjoyed their presentation/film but i still have some critiques. Some of their methods were questionable and it seemed that they were trying to hide their lack of data behind a cool idea. Their testing methods were sketchy and left a lot of room for error. Bottom line, a great idea that needs some more work. Or, if anything, the students needed to present their data in a clearer manner. One student suggested that the fires were a way to curb insect infestation, but it was a rather weak argument. Without the data/conclusions they are just setting fires.

Finally, I should note that we ate at a great little Mexican place where the carnitas, soup, tacos, and such, were excellent. It was way better than Los Hermanos...and that's saying a lot. Because LH is one of the best in the nation! Just kidding.

Anyway, that's my review of the SWS. I've left some things out so that Mike can throw in his two cents. Maybe Holly will too...

We need a good archaeological TV program

Chris has thrown this idea around with Cady and I for some time. It is true that there are really no good TV programs about archaeology except for the occasional National Geographic, NOVA, or other documentary. Recently, the History Channel has begun a series about archaeology. I was turned off to the show just after I saw the advertsing...

Digging for the Truth

Although I see this as an attempt to put our field in mainstream media, using Hollywood gimmics (Indiana Jones-esque font and style) is so overused and steriotypical.

I propose we look to doing a show that exposes Joe Schmoe to archaeology as it is - scientific, historical, and expanding. In addition, each episode would not only expose the viewer to a new part of the world, but would involve an experiment, so-to-speak, each episode. For example, recently, an archaeologist produced his own yucca rope to see if it was strong enough to rapel down a cliff face into a grannery. This would take the science from the lab to be tested in the field. We could use experimental archaeology as the eye-catching, never before been done, aspect of the show. I know it may seem as though this brings a "reality TV" edge to the idea, but that is what people are used to watching and have grown to like.

Tell me what you think. Ideas, ideas, ideas.

FoF, a serious institution?

Recently, it has been suggested that FoF is not a serious scholarly forum, and that serious research oriented topics have only started appearing in the past 2 or 3 months.

I exhort all FoF's to read the list below, and note that as early as May 2005 (one month after the birth of the blog), scholarly discussions were commonplace. I turn your attention to the following posts/subjects:

May 2005:
Thesis Outline (Chris)
Coprography
The Northern Periphery

June 2005:
Definitions of the Fremont

July 2005:
Homosexual Marriage

August 2005:
Various academic conferences
Yoder's Thesis
The Hohokam
Paul Minnis and the Fremont

September 2005:
Fremont Subsistence
The RMAC

October 2005:
The importance of Technoarchaeology
What makes a Fremont?
Fremont Mortuary Practices
Aaron's Tech Blog(sorry, I'm biased)
Historic maps of Hohokam sites
Pre-Clovis stuff with Adovasio
The importance of blogs in academia
The Three Corners

November 2005:
Fremont Production
Optimal Foraging
The Semester in Review feature (still waiting to see a few...)
The SW symposium
Projectile points in the GB
Presence of the GB in American Antiquity

December 2005:
Fremont site occupation/mounds
Various SIRs

January 2006
Paleoclimates in the EGB
Moqui Marbles and Hopi ideology
Multi-disciplinary approaches
The SW symposium

Since May, we have had at least one serious or thought-provoking post per month. That's pretty good if you ask me. Of course there are jokes, there are fun posts, and there are non-research oriented discussions, but for the most part we have done some pretty good stuff so far.

I think the above list tesitfies to the legitimacy of this blog. It has spawned at least two splinter blogs (Chris' Thesis blog, and my tech blog), and provided an excellent forum to bounce ideas around. Just making a point.

Cherry Poppin' Daddy

Well, you knew it would happen eventually. I'm directing my first excavation tomorrow. It's a small one, 2 days and 360' of trench, but I'll be directing it nonetheless.

This has been a really cool job for me, and I guess this project sort of represents the culmination of the last 6 months of work here. I did everything except sign the contract. I did the lit search, wrote the test plan, will direct the test Thursday and Friday, and will do the analysis and write up the report next week.

Who would have thought that we'd be entrusted with our own backhoes and crews. Eat that BYU Anthro Department, eat that...

Southwest Symposium

It looks like a few of the Friends of the Fremont will be attended the 10 Biennial Southwest Symposium this weekend. I'm particularly looking forward to the experimental work done on the burning of structures in the Southwest. Maybe we can have an update for the blog when we get back. Take care all.

Historic Arch Sucks but Multidisciplinary stuff is SEXY!

I just got back from being in the field for a week doing a survey in which we found nothing but historic junk (blahhh). There's this ranch out in the middle of the Nevada desert that the BLM just bought but are going to let UNLV manage because there's a bunch of historic buildings out there. So some PI's from UNLV (Biology, Archaeology, Geology, and Landscape Architecture) are planning on turning it into a multidisciplinary field camp/station/research facility. So I had to take a couple of undergrads out and survey the place. The survey was boring (cans, glass, wood, etc) but the multidisciplinary part was pretty cool. All the other ology's had one or two folks out there doing baseline surveys for their disciplines and at nights we were supposed to be figuring out how we could integrate all the disciplines. Talking and interacting with these other guys was really productive and I think if this thing is able to get the grant money it needs there could be some really cool research coming out of here. We discussed and learned a lot of things but just one wierd example is.....did you guys know that hematite comes in a lot of forms? One night one of the geologists comes back in and plops down a bunch of rock samples and is looking over them and I was asking him what he had. So he starts naming them and tells me one of them is hematite. This rock was black, sparkly, and solid. Nothing about it said hematite. So I was like, ummm, that's not what we call hematite. So he goes on to explain that hematite comes in different forms depending on how it was created. Then he picks up a nail and scratches the rock and I'll be damned if the scratches didn't turn bright red! Anyway, the whole week we were mixing data and info and it was pretty cool. And as always, multidisciplinary is SEXY! I'm thinking some cool stuff may come out of this venture if it gets the funding.

Eastern Great Basin Paleoclimate

I've just started "Collapse", Jared Diamond's latest ingenious synthesis of archaeological data that sort of disses archaeology. In it, Diamond identifies 5 factors contributing to cultural collapses: environmental change, anthropogenic damage to the environment, a decline in support from friendly neighbors, hostile neighbors, and cultural responses to the above (link).

As I was reading, it occurred to me that with the Fremont, we are clearly dealing with a collapse. It further occurred to me that I know almost nothing about the Eastern Great Basin paleo-environment. Is this because there actually is nothing known, or if I'm just ignorant of it. I know that Madsen has done a bunch of pollen work, but I guess I always figured that it was early and not late. Anybody know about this?

If there has been little work done on this, maybe we should start thinking about it. Can we assume things about the Fremont area pale-climate from the extensive work on the Colorado Plateau? How does the collapse of the Fremont relate to other Southwestern collapses? Can we catch up the tree-ring record in the Eastern GB to address some of these issues? Is Range Creek the Answer?

This is just a research direction I hadn't really considered before. In examining intra- and extra-Fremont relations, I have been inadvertently examining a large part of the Fremont collapse, but the environmental factors should also be considered.

Moqui Marbles

My mom works at the Provo School district and a lot of discounted books are sent directly to the district by publishers with the hopes that Provo will buy their books for school libraries. Most of these books are rejected and then sold to Provo School District employees for 1 to 10 dollars.

The other day, my Mom brought home a book called "Fossil Legends of the First Americans" by Adrienne Mayor. Mayor is a folklorist who deals mainly with Native American stories and how they deal with fossils. Kind of a limited niche. You may recognize Mayor's name-she was quoted in the December issue of National Geographic.

I was reading her book two nights ago and found the following passage. Those of you who did your field school in Escalante will appreciate this, especially those who were there for Carl Shurtz and his paint bucket full of Moqui Marbles.

"...moqui marbles are unique rock spheres found at the base of Navajo Sandstone Formations in Arizona and Utah, encasing pink sand from the Creataceous inland sea. These were long thought by scientists to be mere iron concretions, but recent studeies have revealed their true origin: mollusks trapped in a great flood of sand about 130 million years agao. As the mollusks decomposed, their internal juices were drawn out, leaving hollow centers, and as water filtered through the outer shell over the ages, fine sand filled the centers and iron deposits formed around the outer shell, along with phosphorus and lime from the mollusks' shells.

The Hopi word moqui means "dearly departed ones," and according to legend, Hopi ancesotors descend from heaven in the evening, brining the marbles to play games. At dawn, the ancestors retrn to heaven, leaving the marbles behind to reassure their relatives that they are happy. Hopi people gather the moqui marbles and keep them in their homes to welcome the spirits of the departed relatives" (Mayor 2005:156-157).

Interesting eh? Mayor does not cite any paleontologists (or any other source for that matter) so the veracity of her explantation of moqui "mollusks" is debatable. Regardless, the explanation of the Hopi curation of moqui marbles is intriguing.

New baby!

Hello all FoFs
We have a new member of the Friends of the Fremont. Max Mabry Searcy. That's right, Amie and I had a healthy baby boy on Dec. 29th. He's doing great and you can read about all the details at www.searcypages.com . There are pictures as well (you may have to scroll down a bit to find the post about Max's birth). Well, may your year's begin well and may heaven's windows open up wide at the beginnning of this new semester. I know I could use all the help I can get. Take care.

Scott's SIR:

Finished the Capitol Reef Occasional Paper

Finished the OPA Website

Aaron's SIR...finally

Getting this up took longer than I thought it would. I took three classes and taught one, worked at OPA, and tried to keep my Bishop's interview lists full. It was a busy semester.

Keep in mind that the majority of you have had the exact same (or similar) semester during your first year of graduate school, so some of it may be boring. I've liked the outline form that everyone has used so I will continue with that.

501

Honestly, one of the most difficult classes I've ever had. Clark expects a lot and doesn't mess around. Witnessed in this class, were two particularly nasty attacks on one of the newbies. This kid has no background in archaeology and apparently, no real background in research methods. Clark ended our last class period accusing him of having "done diddily". Hope the kid survives.

Anyway, 501 was structured differently than previous years. Our studies were not centered solely on the comp. exam test questions. Rather, we focused on larger issues that could be applied to the test questions. We read two Hodder books, Archaeological Theory Today and Reading the Past. We also read a few more.

Here they are in no real order. We read a monograph by Patrick Kirch on state development in Hawaii. It wasn't the best. Kirch focused mainly on lexical data and did not provide much hard data (artifacts, etc). His main focus was trying to pinpoint the location of a general ancestral polynesian homeland. In my opinion, he relied too heavily on glottochronology. Not my favorite.

We also read a book on biblical archaeology. It was essentially a critique on post-modern approaches. Again, not my favorite. The author, William Dever, spends more time attacking opponents than actually discussing critiques on PoMos. Unfortunately, I'm not really sure why we read the book, it seemed more like an excercise in how to rip your opponents apart. After finishing the Dever book, we watched an anti-mormon film deconstructing the BoM. We got into a lot of discussion on the marginalization of christian/mormon archaeologists, and how our perspective in just one more to add to the many voices of post-processualism.

We read another book on the state development on in China...meh.

My favorite book was Myths of the Archaic State by Norman Yoffee (2005). Yoffee criticizes the neo-evolutionary model of band, tribe, cheifdom, and state. He argues that each culture developed individually and that they should be approached individually as well. Yoffee also criticizes perceptions of traditional leadership roles, suggesting that early states were not as stratified previously assumed. Yoffee feels confident that the agency of various individuals (from all classes) influenced the formation of early states. Therefore, concerns with everyday life served as the catalysts from early state development. Yoffee struggles with the problem of lanugage. He criticizes neo-evolutionary models but still uses their language. It is difficult to understand when he is talking about his version of the state and chiefdoms and when he is talking about the neo-evolutionary version.

Ultimately, I think Myths serves as a great introduction to some new ideas concerning the development of early states. To be honest, I was not aware that there were other perspecitves beyond the neo-evolutionary model. It was beaten into my head in 215 by Joel, and has remained until I read this book.

502

Bottom line, it was statistics.

I think I learned the material better with Jim than I did with Ian. Jim left a lot more to the imagination, and we found ourselves struggling to figure out exactly what he expected of us. Towards the end of the class, he gave us Cowgill's list of 8 things you should remember about statistics.
I chose some of my favorites:

1. Statistical analysis is not a way to arrive at certainty; it is a powerful aid in discerning what your data suggest, and how strongly they suggest it. This is often done better by an estimation approach than by hypothesis testing.

2. Look at your data dirst, through simple tables and pictures. Often this tells you everything important. If not, it will tell you what is sensible or not sensible to do next. Do not rush to apply advanced techniquest while overlooking the messages of simple methods.

4. It's not the sampling fraction that matters; it's the size of the sampel. For example, a well-chosen sample size of 100 that is one percent of a large population can tell you a lot, but a sample of 10 that is 20 percnt of a small population tells you less.

6. Proportions, percents, and ratios represent something relative to something else. Proportions are fractions, with a numerator and a denominator. When you read, always ask yourself whether you understand what denominator is implied. Often you will find that the denominator is unclear or inappropriate.

8. If you are worried about data quality, reducing data to "present/absent" only makes the problem worse unless you are sure that absence in the sample unambiguously implies abscence in the relevant population. But a category that is scarce but present in the population will be totally absent in many random samples from that population, and the chance that it is absent in any one sample is strongly dependent on the size of that sample. Together with sampling vagaries, this makes "presence/abscence" a very unstable statistic. if you want to be conservative, us something like "way below average," "about verage," and "way above average."

For the rest of the 8, see page 35 of

Kintigh, Keith

2005 Writing Archaeology: Analyses and Archaeological Argumentation. The SAA Archaeological Record.

I don't have the volume number (it's upstairs), but it is from September 2005 (SAA members- you should have it)

512

Laws...ARPA, NAGPRA...Agencies...BLM, EPA....Ethics...zzzzzz

Anthropology 207

This is the class I taught. It was a rewarding experience, and I've learned a lot about how a class should and should not be taught.

We began with cordage, processing dogbane, yucca, raffia, and whatever else students brought in. The cordage unit was alright, but I was dissapointed in some of the students inability to go and forage for their own materials. I told them were plants were, and would have been happy to take them to the sources. Instead, I had students ask their mothers to send them yucca from New Mexico, and come to my house and raid my personal yucca plant. There are five good yucca plants in the parking lot across from the Tanner building!

Ceramics were next. I really learned a lot from a book called Ceramic Technology by Owen S. Rye. There were class periods when I was only hours ahead of the students. I was at a loss as to what we were going to make for this unit, but with the help of Jim Allison, we processed some of his clay samples from the Animas La Plata region into tiles. We then fired the tiles to see if the clays turned similar colors.

Lithics proved to be the most challenging to teach. This is mainly due to the fact that teaching one or two people to flintknap is much easier than teaching seven at a time. Dr. Clark and I split the class of 14 into two groups of seven with mixed results.

I saw a lot of great projects. Here are some of them:

Lengths of cordage made of many different plant types

a pump drill

a small basket made in the style of California indians. Acorns were leeched and processed into flour mush which was eaten from this basket.

a small limestone stela carved with mayan glyphs

an atlatl and dart

a processed elk-hide pouch

a set of Oldowan tools

a pair of woven yucca sandals

Those are some of the projects I was most impressed with. I was happy with the quality and effort expended.

That's about it for the SIR. If you have any questions, let me know. I'm sure I left things out, and it may not be exactly what you all had in mind, but here it is.

Quote of the Day

I qoute Beck and Jones 1997

"Since their first discovery there has been much speculation concerning the function of these items. Wardle (1913), in the first published reference to crescents, suggested that they may have been used as surgical instruments. Clewlow (1968) notes that "unless we imagine a vast pre-Columbian medical center on the shores of the Black Rock Desert post-Lahonton lakes, it is difficult to accept crescents as surgical instruments."

You guys might not appreciate it, but it made me laugh out loud. Maybe its the sleep deprivation. Merry Christmas.

Craig's Semester in Review

Craig forgot how to get onto FoF, so he sent me his Semester in Review via email.

Hey guys,

My semester pretty much consisted of 4 key activities.

1. Watching wrestling. It's been kind of a bummer since Batista got the belt, but what are you gonna do?

2. X-Box. My roomate and I finally went in on an X-Box together, I'll kick your trash at Halo anywhere, anytime, anyplace.

3. MXC. Can't get enough Spike TV.

4. Making concrete. Enough said.

Smell you later,

Craig

SIR delayed

You may have noticed that my SIR is incomplete and listed as a draft. I will finish it tomorrow. When I was writing it, I had to respond to a call from a girl in my ward who had "tried" to commit suicide by cutting her wrists. Her home teachers weren't around, neither was the bishop. So the 1st counselor and I went over to see what the deal was. It was an interesting night. I'll finish it up soon.

Joel's review of my term paper

"Thanks for sending me the paper. I found it very well written with only a few typos, etc. It is nice that you found support for our interpretations of the site occupation. A concern I have is how you are treating functionally different structures. What I recall (without checking) is that the storage structures had very different fill content than the pit houses. It almost seemed that people avoided dumping in the granaries. There could be several reasons for that but I wondered how storage vs pit houses plotted."

It is nice? WTH? I realize that the chronometric data from FFR did indicate that most of the site was probably occupied at the same time, but, by Joel's own admission, these data were pretty problematic for a number of reasons. I have generated an independent corroboration of his results, and he tells me that "it is nice"?

I realize that the paper isn't some sort of mind blowing research, but to me, the mound phenomenon is the most important research topic in Fremont archaeology. These aggregates represent a total change in trajectory for the Fremont. If not everyone is convinced that the occupations were large (and according to Jim Allison, they aren't), then we have a real problem.

This is my biggest critique of BYU's graduate program. The grad students are treated as idiots who aren't capable of contributing. As long as they're treated as such, they really won't contribute anything other than maybe a crappy thesis. Some (looking at Yoder here) are able to rise above the oppression, but I thought my ideas weren't good for a long time. Turns out they were good, and I was just being dismissed because of my position.

For those of you still suffering, let me tell you that there's a whole other world out there. There's a place where prominent researchers treat you like a junior peer, and not like some member of their scout troop. There's a place where you are encouraged to publish your work, a place where you can learn and be respected.

Don't let the man get you down.

El Che Vive!

Anyway, I'd like to get some feedback on the paper sometime. Maybe Joel is right, but I don't think he is...

Mike's Semester in OU Review

Hello all: It seems we have all survived our most recent semester. I never thought people here at OU were serious when they said 6 credit hours was a full load, but I'm a believer now. 35 hours of work a week also adds to the load, but I digress.

I took Cultural Theory (which is a required course for all graduate students - classic 4 field approach) and Political Dynamics of Small-Scale Societies. The first was taught by a recent Berkley graduate (just hired on here at OU). Let me tell you, she fit the mold, but was very conducive to other modes of thought. The Political Dynamics class was a great immersion into theory behind the development of complex societies and a good spring-board into my dissertation. My final paper will eventually turn into my dissertation proposal which deals with Mesoamerican symbolism on pottery produced in the Southwest and how it served as tool for rising elites ("aggrandizers," if you will) to create political legitimacy. The theory behind foreign symbolism for legitimacy is a little weak and undeveloped, but hopefully I will be able to address this issue.

Cultural Theory:
This is a classic anthropological theory graduate class, like the two required at BYU, but combined. It was extremely informative. Just to give props out to faculty at BYU, we're on par when it comes to other institutions. And don’t worry, archaeology students here hate cultural theory just as much as any other archaeologist (except for my twisted self). We basically covered the development of anthropological theory from the late 1800s until about the end of the 1970s. It was a good overview, although it was a bit weak on the post-modernist side. We delved into a couple of ethnographies and trudged through British social anthropological history as well. Glad it's over. Below is the reference to my favorite reading for the semester. In this lecture, Weber really hits the nail on the head when it comes to being a good professor of anthropology (or science).

Weber, Max
1946 Science as a Vocation. In Max Weber: Essays in sociology, translated and edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Mills Wright. Oxford University Press.

Political Dynamics in Small-Scale Societies:
This was an awesome class taught by a visiting professor who just graduated from UCLA. His dissertation was on the obsidian (or “obsdidian”) workshops adjacent to the Temple of the Moon at Teotihuacan. He reminded me of Ian Robertson. He even knew Ian! Good guy who could relate to what we are doing as grad students. Anyway, this guy really knows his political development theory. We read a couple of Clark articles (appropriately) and a few others that were really great (which I've listed below).

DeMarrais, Elizabeth, Luis Jaime Castillo, and Timothy Earle
1996 Ideology, Materialization, and Power Strategies. Current Anthropology 37:1:15-31.

Bayman, James M.
2002 Hohokam Craft Economies and the Materialization of Power. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 9:1:69-95.

Wilk, Richard
2004 Miss Universe, the Olmec and the Valley of Oaxaca. Journal of Social Archaeology 4:1:81-98.
(This article is a great effort by a soco to explore the transmission of information and style across cultural boundaries. He used modern-day fashion and beauty pageants as an analogy for Olmec style appearing in the Valley of Oaxaca. Extremely entertaining.)

Other activities:
I've just been working on keeping food on my family's table by working part-time for the department as a GA at the Museum of Natural History. I also have a part-time job leasing apartments (great way to get paid to study). In addition, I have a few publications in the works. One is the New World Archaeological Foundation publication of my thesis, and another is one I'm trying to get out into a peer-reviewed journal (a condensed version of thesis research). Also, I’ve submitted a paper for the SAAs, co-written with one of Chris’s classmates at ASU, but it is still pending acceptance. I also have a film in the works, just trying to find funding to do it. Looking to do a Kekchi-English dictionary with a friend at SUNY Albany and the list goes on. If we all only had double the time and double the funding.

Am I a whore?

I guess it's time for me to come clean. I've been secretly working on a Book of Mormon archaeology project. That's right, me, the biggest critic of non-John Clark apologists, is working on a BOM archaeology project.

Essentially, what I've done is read through the BOM and flag any and all references to cultural things. I have every mention of political structure, material culture, subsistence, etc marked in a copy of the Book of Mormon. I'd like to publish a concordance with some limited ethnographic commentary. I am currently looking for a publisher, and if anyone bites, I'll turn my list into a book.

As Juan has constantly pointed out, people don't actually know what the BOM says about this stuff. This would let the BOM stand on its own with both critics and apologists, and I think it would be an invaluable reference tool.

I would appreciate some feedback when you're through being stunned. Juan doesn't know about this, and I'd appreciate it if neither he nor Joel find out about it yet. Thanks.

Watkins Semester in Review - Fall 2005

Finals sucked, and on to the good stuff...

I took three classes this semester, Academic Inquiry (essentially method and theory), Intrasite Research Strategies, and Hohokam Archaeology. Ill also report on my work in Hohokam contract archaeology.

Academic Inquiry
This course was a real disappointment. It was co-taught by Michelle Hegmon and a SoCo guy. Michelle lived up to her work and all my expectations, but the course itself really blew. The newly formed "School of Human Evolution and Social Change" (formerly the Department of Anthropology) is attempting to be more integrative, and the class had first year archaeology, SoCo, physical anthropology, and museum anthropology students in it. What's that? There are people out there with MA's in Museum Anthropology? That's right, you poor suckers might as well use those Museum certificates from Marti to wipe your butts with, casue it isn't going to amount to jack squat.

I really have nothing to recommend from this course. We read some Trigger ("Sociocultural Evolution"), not his best stuff, rehashed Giddens (got it better from Juan Clark), and read a few interesting things on primate social behavior, if you're into that sort of thing. Turns out some animals differentially pass on behavior non-biologically. On some level, I realize that this is probably important, but I just can't bring myself to care.

Whiten, A., V. Horner, and S. Marshall-Pescini
2003 Cultural Panthropology. Evolutionary Anthropology 12(2):92-105.

Whiten, A., J. Goodall, W.C. McGrew, T. Nishida, V. Reynolds, Y. Sugiyama, C.E.G. Tutin, R.W. Wrangham, and C. Boesch
1999 Cultures in Chimpanzees. Nature 399:682-685.

Ultimately, I walked away from this class with the realization that Anthropology is extremely diverse, and that we have much less in common with each other than everybody thinks. Most physical anthropologists don't even understand culture, let alone investigate it. SoCo's never shut up about being ethnocentric (one girl almost broke down into tears in disbelief when we talked about functionalism in archaeology). And museum people are just a bunch of artifact babysitters. Depressing really. Really, really, depressing.

Intrasite Research Strategies
What can I say about this course? It was easily the most difficult, most rewarding, all-around best class that I have ever been a part of. Keith Kintigh is a statistical genius, far surpassing his reputation. In this course, we studied a variety of quantitative spatial techniques aimed at the analysis of a single site. The critical article, which I recommend to everyone, is a summary piece by Keith.

Kintigh, Keith
1990 Intrasite Spatial Analysis: A Commentary on Major Methods. In Mathematics and Information Science in Archaeology: A Flexible Framework, edited by Albertus Voorrips. Studies in Modern Archaeology 3: 165-200. HOLOS-Verlag, Bonn.

It's pretty hard to get, but I have pdf copies I can email to the interested. Even if you're not quantitative, Keith makes this stuff understandable. I wrote a term paper trying to figure out whether there was a large simultaneous, or small repeated occupation of FFR by examining trash deposits instead of chronometric data. Looks like was a large occupation of FFR (suck it Sammons-Lohse!). Some of you have the paper, if others are interested I can email it along.

Hohokam Archaeology
The Hohokam are way cooler than I ever thought. There were several readings of interest but I'm not sure what to recommend. I have them all as pdfs if people would like them. So many really important research questions remain unanswered. Did people live on the platform mounds? If so, were they managerial elites or lineage heads? What drove the Pre-Classic - Classic transition? Burial changes from Cremation to Inhumation, public architecture from Ball Courts to Platform Mounds, and many others. How were the irrigation systems managed? How were households organized? Hohokam archaeology is surprisingly wide open, not as open as the Fremont granted, but there's a lot of work to do. Pueblo Shemblo!

Work
I've been working at the ASU equivalent of OPA, except here I'm either the project director or assistant project director depending on the size of the project. I've never seen so many whole pots in all my life! Phoenix is developing at an amazing rate, and state and federal law require every burial be dug by an archaeologist. Considering the Salt River Basin Hohokam lived in permanent Villages with defined cemeteries, there is a bottomless pit of archaeology waiting to be done.

Pretty much a good year overall. I'm looking forward to hearing from everyone else and buying Holly some Hashemite for Christmas. She could spread it on her bathtub hoagie this Christmas...

A Tribute...

What's for lunch raghead?

Revel in this "oil-free" spread!

Sand in my sandwich...

Mr. Yoder's Semester in Review

Ok, all papers and projects are out of the way and only one final left. Time for......drumrole.........THE SEMESTER IN REVIEW!

I took three classes this semester. Environmental Archaeology, Historic Preservation, and Ethnoarchaeology.

Environmental Arch: Sadly this was a class which included senior undergraduates so it was taught at a pretty basic level. Much of the reading came from two books that I don’t particularly recommend. Although I did read an article that I really liked which I’ve already posted about, but in case you missed it:
Reinhard, Karl J.1992 Parasitology as an Interpretive Tool in Archaeology American Antiquity 57(2):231-245.
(This is a really informative article that also is a well spring of ideas. Plus it’s easy to read. Bonus!)

Historic Preservation: Basically a CRM class. We read all the laws, regulations, etc. Essentially Jim’s A's class at BYU. Didn’t gain any fascinating new insights. Besides the fact that there is a big curation problem and we need the YAR (Yoder Archaeological Repository) now more than ever. This has prompted me to begin an article. Basically I want to know how many theses and dissertations are written using brand new material and how many are being written using collections. I think I’ll send out a questionair to a bunch of universities and ask about how many of their students in the last five years completed a thesis or dissertation using new research and how many using archaeological collections already dug up. I think universities should encourage grad students to focus more on the collections so that we can get this huge backlog of stuff reported on. Yeah for Cady doing PVAP!

Ethnoarchaeology: This was a good class in that it opened my eyes to the potential of ethnoarchaeology for really getting at issues that can be difficult to see in the archaeological record. Unfortunatley, ethnoarch is mostly useful if you are working with recent cultures. Although by using the general comparative approach it can be used in deep time as well. A couple of good articles about ethnoarch in general are:

Gould, Richard A., and Patty J. Watson
1982 A Dialogue on the Meaning and Use of Analogy in Ethnoarchaeological Reasoning. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 1:355-381.

Wobst, H. Martin
1978 The Archaeo-Ethnology of Hunter-Gatherers, or the Tyranny of the Ethnographic Record in Archaeology. American Antiquity 43:303-309.
(Wobst takes his argument to far in my view, but it is a good warning)

Wylie, Alison.
1985 The Reaction Against Analogy. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 8:63-111.
(Although this Wylie article SUCKS to read, it is the seminal paper on the use of analogy. Be warned…very boring, long, and theory laden. But she makes good points, if you can find them)

As to ethnoarchaeology in actual use, these are some well done articles:

Frink, Lisa
1996 Social Identity and the Yup’ik Eskimo Village Tunnel System in Precolonial and Colonial Western Coastal Alaska. In Integrating the Diversity of 21st Century Anthropology: The Life and Intellectual Legacies of Susan Kent. Edited by W. Ashmore, M. Dobres, S. Nelson, and A. Rosen. Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, University of California Press, Berkely.

Weedman, Kathryn
2005 Gender and Stone-Tools: An Ethnographic Study of the Konso and Gamo Hideworkers of Southern Ethiopia. In Gender and Hide Production, Lisa Frink and Kathryn Weedman eds., pp.175-196. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek.

Frink, Lisa, Brian W. Hoffman, and Robert D. Shaw
2003 A Comparative Ethnoarchaeological Study of Ulu Knife use in Western Alaska. Current Anthropology 44(1):116-121.

The instructor for this class, Lisa Frink, kind of ambushed me in that although this was an ethnoarchaeology class, it was equally about gender. Almost all of our readings had something to do with gender. Which although it bugged me at first, did raise some good questions in my mind. One of which is…Are there any articles focusing on gender, or discussing gender for that matter, for the Fremont? I couldn’t think of any. Yet in other areas people are looking for and finding gender with as much information as we have. I may one day look for gender among the Fremont, but right now I’ve got to finish some other projects I have going.
In this class I wrote a paper on the Mojave Sink area of the Mojave Desert in California. I’ve sent it off to the two Big Boys in the field to see if they think its article worthy. It’s content in sum: Trying to determine cultural affiliation of sites in some areas can be very difficult if not impossible because of similarities of material culture, fluid cultural boundaries, and limited ethnographic information. This is true in the late prehistory of the Mojave Sink and is even more so for the Paleo and Archaic time periods. I say we need to look for more cultural diversity in the early time periods and outline a couple of ways we could do so.

So there you have it, the Semester in review for Mr. Yoder. It was busy, but good. For any interested my thesis will hopefully be up on the BYU website soon, as I’ve turned it in and should graduate this semester….at last. My rabbitskin article is also out and in print in the wonderful publication the Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology. I have yet to see it, but I’ve been told by those who have it looks good. Yeah. And Jason Bright says that my CRM article is supposed to be out in the next issue of Utah Archaeology, but who knows when that will be. So if you are desperate to know how much money you are likely to make in the world of CRM, or are interested in a number of other CRM related issues, just let me know and I’ll email you a copy.

Keep’en it real in Lost Wages (which by the way gets old REAL fast so don’t say this to people who live in Las Vegas, because I’ve only been here for 6 months and am already sick of people saying, “So, you live in Lost Wages...hahaha”, or “I went on vacation to Lost Wages last year…hahahaha” Yes, you are so funny.

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas and the whatnot (Seewhat I did with the colors there...ahhhh...very creative)

Checking in

Things have been a little quiet here at FoF the last week or so. I figure that this is due to finals, which is why I haven't been posting.

I guess I just wanted to say good luck on finals, and I'm looking forward to everyones semester in review, and that Veronica Mars is probably the best show on TV right now, and that the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan can suck it.

Fremont Ceramic Production areas

What about this...

Say I plotted all of the known Fremont residential sites by UTMs, and classified them by the dominant ceramic series (i.e., Paragonah=Snake Valley, Five Finger Ridge=Sevier, etc). Then, I would do a k-means cluster analysis of the sites.

I would then overlay the two maps, one with the clusters and one with the dominant ceramic type.

What exactly would it mean if the sites clustered by ceramic type? I think that this would be meaningful, but I'm not exactly sure how. Your input would be appreciated...

Yoffee against optimal foraging.

This post is partly in response to the "semester review" knowledge exchange.

In 501, we've been reading Myths of the Archaic State, by Norman Yoffee.

Yoffee talks about a lot of interesting things, and I will post a better summary once the semester is over. While reading last night, I saw a tidbit about optimal foraging. I'm preaching to the choir, but here it is:

"Rhys Jones (1978) studied a situation in which prehistoric Tasmaninas stopped eating fish after many hundreds of years in which fish were an important part of their diet. Whereas this decision makes no sense to some archaeologists, it shows for others that choices made by hunter-gatherers cannot be reduced to optimal strategies for exploiting the environment" (Yoffee 2005:162).

Sounds pretty good to me.

Techno-ethnography?

http://www.technologyreview.com//wtr_15900,1,p1.html?trk=nl

A New Feature -- The Semester in Review

I'd like to see a new feature here at FOF, the "semster in review".

Basically, those of us still taking or teaching classes would post a brief synopsis of each class, and then review it. Was it useful? Did you learn anything cool? Here is some stuff the rest of us should check out? Etc.

Good idea? If you're not in class you can put up some projects or research you've been working on too.

Southwest Symposium

Do all of you vets of the SW seminar remember Jim talking about the Southwest Symposium?

Apparently Jim is going, and openly invited any interested parties. Since presenting at this symposium is by invitaion only, we would be going as spectators, but it still sounds like it could be fun. There are some interesting topics for discussion.

Take a look:

http://www.antrocom.it/file/Southwest0106.pdf

On a side note, he threw a jab in the direction of the GBAC and other conferences, mentioning that the Southwest Symposium is much more polished and professional due to the "invitation only" nature of the forum.

OPA Website

I wanted to let everyone know that the new and improved OPA website is now available for your viewing enjoyment. Just point your browser to http://opa.byu.edu and feast on the eye candy that abounds. Some of the site is still under construction but the majority of the site is functioning.

Great Basin points can't win

I glanced at Hockett's AA article last night and noticed that the proj points had been mislabeled again. If the Smithsonian can't get it right we shouldn't expect AA to I guess...

Bombs in Jordan

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9979747/

Looks like you won't be getting back to dig for a while Holly...

Palm Trees and Island Shores

Well I'm afraid I'll be incommunicato for the next week and a half. Why you ask? Because my friends, I'll be laying on the beachs of Hawaii from Nov 10th through the 18th. Yes...as you all know I am independently wealth, money by the bucket loads. So I thought I would just hop over to the islands for a little break. Ok, the independently wealth part is untrue but the rest is. Sally's family has always gone to Hawaii for Christmas instead of giving presents, but since the kids are all grown up and have families, they don't take everyone anymore. Instead they try to take one of the families each year. So this year its our turn. All we have to pay for is food. I inform you all of this because I will be away from the internet during this time and will not be able to respond to the intellectually stimulating conversations going on. But didn't want you to think it was because I was a slacker like Holly. Aloha.

$400

I feel a little guilty, but I scored $400 bucks from graduate studies to attend the RMAC in Park City. In my application, I implied that my research would help shape economies in developing nations.

Anyone else score? And yes, I am going to hell...

Great Basin Foraging in American Antiquity

After school today, I came home to find everyone's favorite academic journal in my mailbox.

I've yet to read them, but there are TWO articles on Great Basin subsistence strategies in the Archaic and Holocene. One by some people from Far Western Anthropological Research Group, CA and one by Bryan Hocket from the Elko BLM. They look interesting.

When/if we have time to read them, they should provide good discussion fodder.

Unless of course, we aren't finished with the Green Hoagie motif....

Haiku Holly

Deutscher femme fatale…
Green hoagies in her bathtub?
Only time will tell…

Welcome Molly

FOF is proud to welcome Molly Hall as our newest member. Long may you post, and long may the Stars and Stripes wave, o'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave...

Technoarchaeology in Action

Having seen that my posts have been far and few between (few being the key word) I thought I'd give a summary of some "Technoarchaeology" in action and add another post to my name. The field is alive and well as coined by Mike and Scott so long ago. My work the past few months has actually been consumed by it. These are a few of the innovating avenues my company is taking in an effort to get archaeology up to speed with the rest of the technological savvy world.

All data collected from surveys, monitoring, etc. related to the Las Vegas office are captured and stored electronically. Each crew member on survey is given a pocket pc. For those unaware, I don't think there are any, but Pocket PC’s are palm pilot size but windows based. All IMACS, field notes, maps and etc. are recorded on these. The process for digitizing everything begins with us (meaning me, in this case) in the office. First, I create an Access database based on State site form requirements, research design, etc. and next I design Visual Basic programs for pocket pc’s.

The Access database is the key to whole process. The database not only stores and organizes all information collected in the field, but feeds data into any query or report imaginable. Our database prints out IMACS forms, as well as feeds into SPSS (our stats program).

The Visual Basic programs capture data that we would normally record on an IMACS form while in the field. Data such as flake size, vegetation, landforms, etc. These VB (Visual Basic) programs ensure accuracy and consistency. They are “dummy” friendly and require little, if any, actual user input. The program consists of a handful of forms. These forms contain combo and list boxes that are populated by items that we would expect the user to record. For example, the drop down box for a combo box labeled “Site Type” lets a user select “Lithic Scatter, Quarry, Habitation, Camp, Rock Shelter, Agave Pits, Rock Art.” Thus, all the field crew must do is point and click! Sites are recorded in minutes. The VB program saves the information that a user selects into comma-delimitated text file. The files are automatically saved with a date stamp, ensuring that all data is organized by day and section surveyed. At the end of each field day the files are attached to an email and sent to me in the office. All I have to do is back the files up on the serve and import them into the Access database. Quick and painless; we waste no time transferring data from paper to electronic form.

This is still in the works but we are writing a program that allows site sketches and artifact sketches to be recorded on the handhelds and saved in a format able to be imported into Pathfinder office and/or Arc View as a shape file to be added to concurrently collected GPS coverage.

This same process can be replicated by anyone having knowledge of Access and a little code writing experience. Code is difficult to learn at first but after a few months of editing code on previous programs I’ve actually been able to write my own without too much difficulty. Starting next Monday we begin a project in Arizona. My boss let me go on this one and gave me the responsibility of designing and writing the VB programs solo. I have a little left to finish before Friday but when the guys show up to leave for survey, all we have to give them is a laptop, a few pocket pc’s, a GPS receiver, and they’re ready to go!!

Its refreshing to know that some companies like this are pursuing more efficient and consistent means of recording sites. As we all venture off to various places, it’ll be exciting to hear how other companies/institutions are embracing the new field of Technoarchaeology!

What makes a Fremont - a thesis excerpt

In a sense, seeking a definition of the Fremont is a moot point. The dominant theoretical perspective claims it is impossible, and the dissident minority insists that doing so isn’t useful. What the two factions do seem to agree on is the need for a rough definition of the Fremont as an archaeological culture, a “constantly recurring assemblage of artefacts which are assumed to be representative of a particular set of activities carried out at a particular time and place” (Darvill 2002:109). Madsen (1989:67) proposes that the term “Fremont” should be applied as an “umbrella” to include a diversity of human behavior. Four relatively distinct artifact classes are identified as the material manifestations of this behavior: one-rod-and-bundle basketry, the “Fremont” hock-style moccasin, distinctive trapezoidal anthropomorphic figures in rock art and clay figurines, and distinctive grayware pottery. The umbrella concept is declared “useful” by Janetski and Talbot (2000a:7), particularly in its rejection of bounded models of regional variation. To Madsen’s list of common physical objects they add architecture and socio-economic emphases.

With a macroscalar approach, general material patterns among the Formative people north of the Colorado River can be delineated. The Fremont were fairly sedentary pithouse dwellers (Talbot 2000a, 2000b) for whom maize was a major food source, though an assortment of wild food resources were also exploited (for a summary of Fremont subsistence see Janetski and Newman 2000). A distinctive style of basketry, moccasin, pottery, and art distinguish the Fremont from their neighbors (Adavasio 1986; and Madsen 1989). These fairly egalitarian people, with four known exceptions, also buried their dead without preserved objects (Madsen and Lindsay 1977; Roberts 1991; Janetski and Talbot 2000a).

The people that shared these archaeologically observable characteristics may have recognized a variety of group affiliations among themselves. They may have shared a common language, but they just as likely could have spoken a variety of distinct languages or dialects. Some may have not even recognized an affiliation between their own kin group and other prehistoric farmers with the characteristics listed above. Regardless of how Fremont groups organized themselves socially and politically, the material culture traits shared across the Fremont area are meaningful, indicating some sort of commonality. The nature and meaning of this commonality are beyond the scope of this research, and I recognize that this is a difficult subject to address with archaeological evidence. I argue, however, that the subject is an important one that demands further investigation. Rather than seeing the Fremont material culture complex as some sort of indicator of a pan-Fremont identity, I interpret these shared characteristics as the material manifestation of participation in an agricultural-based regional system north of the Colorado River (Janetski and Talbot 2000a) that archaeologists have identified as “Fremont.”

Fremont mortuary practices - where the H are they?

Cady and I were talking today about Fremont mortuary practices. After digging for 4 years in Escalante, we didn't find one Fremont burial. Does that strike anyone else as strange? Similarly, in the 10 years of digging that UCLA did in the Parowan Valley, they found maybe 10-15 burials, of which only a few were "formal" internments. We really don't find too many burials at all do we? Were there even any found in all of Clear Creek?

What if the Fremont were burying most of their people outside of the residential sites, you know, maybe just out in the woods or something. Here's how it could be tested.

1. Compile a database of known Fremont burials, Yoder style. I bet there are less than 200 known, it wouldn't be that hard to do. The most important field would be "burial context" (i.e., house floor, midden, etc).

2. Calculate a per capita ratio of people buried in village contexts / number of residential structures.

3. Do the same calculation for some contemporary PII sites. Include some big pueblos as well as some unit pueblos.

4. Compare the two figures.

Essentially, we'd have a rough idea of how many Fremont and Anasazi folks were buried within their settlement per household. The Anasazi numbers are going to be through the roof when compared to the Fremont. We think that per household, there were far fewer individuals buried within the village, and that they had to be buried somewhere else. Ideas??

Do YOU want to become a Friend of the Fremont?

If you've been lurking, waiting, yearning to join us in our friendship with and investigation of the Fremont, here is your opportunity to join. Post a comment on this thread about why you'd like to join us, and we'll consider adding you to the team. We'll need your email address, which you could forward to an existing member (if you don't want it on the internet) or just leave it in your comment. Please keep in mind that if you're deemed a non-participant, you'll be booted! We welcome contributors, and kick out the loads! Holly is pretty much almost kicked out, so let her be a lesson to the rest of you.

Aaron's Blog

Hey, this is actually a quick note for Aaron. I tried to post a comment on your blog, but am not a "team member", so I wasn't allowed to post. Maybe you could take that filter off. I promise I won't SPAM you. For those who have not visited, it is quite a thrill. Aaron has posted some sharp ideas that may cut you to the core. No puns intended...just really bad humor.

http://www.toolreplication.blogspot.com/

Peace in the Middle West

My First Hohokam Paper

Here in the Phoenix Basin, there exists a "sacred" map of the prehistoric Hohokam settlements made by Omar Turney in the 1920s. This map is almost always taken at face value, even though some of Turney's informants were known to be full of it.

I have decided to evaluate the plots of these sites by plotting the map over ALL of the CRM projects undertaken in the Valley. I will code each site for the presence/absence of buried features and tag all of the confirmed canal locations to see which plots are correct and which ones may be dubious. Most of this information is contained in the City of Phoenix archaeological database. I have a meeting with the City of Phoenix archaeologist next week to discuss the research.

KIVA here I come!

James Adovasio and pre Clovis

Last night James Adovasio came and gave a guest lecture on the current changing views of Clovis and info on pre-Clovis groups. It was pretty darn good. He talked about some of the reasons that Clovis has always been seen as a big game hunting culture and how excavations in the past 20 years have really been changing this view. It's looking, he says, more and more like Clovis subsistence and settelment was much more like the Archaic than anyone wanted to recognize. Then he went on and talked about his Meadowcroft Rockshelter excavations and the old dates he got out of there (in addition to Clovis dates he had some as early as 14,000). Finally he wrapped up discussing some current sites with dates ranging from 20,000BP on up into the Archaic. He says the the archaeologists working on these sites have been really careful and he believes the dates. It was really interesting. I'm pretty sure North Creek Shelter is going back at least into the 20,000's! Adovasio got his degree from the good ole University of Utah. We went out to dinner with him before the lecture and he talked a little about Jennings. And let me say this, although he was the man, the more I hear about him the more I'm glad I wasn't around the same time he was. Sounds like a tough dude. Anyway, so there's your dose of daily Paleo info. (Paleo info, cool...say it again Paallleeeoooo iinnnnffffoooo)

Praise for blogs and praise to the man..(Chris)

Joseph still deserves praise, but Chris deserves a little for being so ahead of the game...

This afternoon I was sitting in the department waiting for some copies to finish and picked up "The Chronicle of Higher Education"(one of those throw-away rags that sits on the table so that people can read through it).

Interestingly enough, I found an article inside called "The Blogoshpere as a Carnival of Ideas".
In which the author, Henry Farrell (a professor of political science) discusses the validity of blogs in the academic world.

I include some excerpts, but if you want the whole article, let me know. I'll be happy to copy it and send it off to anyone interested.

This is a summary of some of the things he said:

Farrell begins by mentioning the general fear that many academics (especially those in the job market or non-tenured ones) have of blogging due to their fear of discipline for expressing controversial or original views.

Farrel argues that blogs serve several purposes, he says:

"Academic bloggers differ in their goals. Some are blogging to get personal or professional grievances off their chests or, to propose non-academic interests. Others, perhaps the majority, see blogging as an extension of their academic personas. Their Blogs allow them not only to express personal views but also to debate ideas, swap views about their disciplines, and connect to a wider public. For these academics, blogging isn't a hobby; it's an integral part of their scholarly identity. They may very well be the wave of the future."

Farrell provides some statistics for poly-sci and law majors at George Washington University. He said that 130 law professors have active blogs and that those who don't read blogs or maintain blogs of their own are cutting themselves out of important discussions.

He suggests that blogs have been slow to enter areas like the social sciences but believes that they will enter and expand soon.

Farrell believes that blogs can be exciting and free forums of discussion and idea sharing without the nasty grant proposals, project approvals, and publishing reviews which often slow the flow of ideas. Blogs provide a nice area of conversation around and between articles and monographs.

Blogging also provides a flexibility and freedom that publishing does not allow. Farrell considers the vast amount of time it takes to publish in a peer-reviewed journal, stating that years can pass by between a first draft and a publication....(cough...Spotten Cave..cough). He also considers the fact that years may go by while other academics are publishing reactions to a publication. In the blogosphere, these publications and reactions can take minutes.

In addition to rapid results, blogs provide new academics or blossoming students a chance to make their voices and opinions heard. Blogging provides students, academics and amateurs semi-equal footing to enter into a forum to discuss ideas. Farrell says, "This openness may be discomfiting to those who are attached to established rankings and rituals-but it also means that blogosphereic conversations, when they're good, have a vigor and a liveliness that most academic discussion lacks."

Farrell concludes that blogs allow academics to reconnect with the public. Blogging makes intelectualism more democratic, and an academic (with some good ideas and some self-promotion) can enter into public debate quickly. He also notes that while blogging will not replace publishing anytime soon, it provides an excellent environment for the exchange of ideas.


Sorry this is so long, but the article was very well written and seems to be in keeping with the main intent of this blog. I think Chris has done an excellent thing here by creating such a forum, the type that is garnering praise from a nationwide academic newspaper (throw-away or not).
I think that FoF, provides us all with an excellent opportunity to not only keep in touch with one another, but to also kick around ideas about our archaeological pursuits.

So, well done Chris.

If any of you would like a copy, send me an e-mail, and I'll send one off.

Three Corners Conference

So Saturday was the first ever “Three Corners Archaeological Conference” (look, I'm using colored text like Cady) held here at UNLV. A great number of papers were presented, by a good mix of academia and contract archaeologists. Since Karen Harry kind of arranged the thing, and I’m her GA, I was roped into providing a little technical assistance during the session she presented in. BYU was well represented by Jim Allison, who presented some C14 data he’s currently working on. Rich Talbot and the Sand Hollow Project was mentioned by at least one of the CRM folks. In fact, a large project that they did was heavily based off of the Sand Hollow work. They gave high praise to BYU and the thoroughness of the work done. I wanted to say, “Damn straight. That’s Rich K. Talbot your talking about” but refrained. A special treat for all was the comments of two discussants at the end of the conference: Margaret Lyneis and Claude Warren, both big wigs in their own right. After the conference I got to hang out and talk with both of them and Allison, as Lyneis and Warren had some questions about Allison’s work. Throughout the conference I was trying to think of ways I could somehow get a Fremont paper in the next one of these they hold. I remember reading somewhere that some Fremont looking petroglphys have been found as far south as the Las Vegas Valley…......Let the Northern Periphery Rise Throughout The Land!

Classroom in the Desert is gone...

Those of us who frequently check byu.edu noticed that for weeks, a Mark Philbrick (sp?) photo graced the homepage. There was also a link to the "mentoring story" with the photo of Dr.J teaching a Maren(last name?) how to dig, etc.

The photo was a nice one. It showed Mr. Craig Freeman and Mrs. Erika Holje measuring a rock art panel.

Sadly, the photo has now been changed to pimp the library. It was a good few weeks for archaeological awareness though...I think.

Cannon revised?

I stayed up late into the night reading the Capitol Reef Report, and it prompted me to propose a revision to the Friends of the Fremont cannon.

Fremont Farmers : The Pearl of Great Price (It's short, but full of important, foundational doctrine)

Clear Creek Canyon: The New Testament (Like the Bible, deals with the Fremont of the east. Excavated in recent times)

Capitol Reef: The Book of Mormon (Recounts the western Fremont)

Forthcoming PVAP monographs: The Old Testament (Excavated in antiquity. Stuff is important but often unclear. Also eastern Fremont)

The Doctrine and Covenants: Everything else.

The Legend of Ian Robertson

The following is an excerpt from an email I just sent to Ian.

I'm taking Keith's Intrasite Research Strategies class this semester, and because I was new and hadn't taken the pre-requisite class several of my fellow students were curious as to where I had learned my statistics. I explained that I had taken a class from you while you were visiting at BYU.

A reverent hush fell over the assembled students as they stared at me with mouths gaping. After an extended silence, one brave soul finally ventured to speak.

"Did he he ever talk about it?"

I'm afraid I wasn't quite sure what "it" was.

"You know, the Bayesian?"

Were they talking about your work at Teotihuacan?

"Of course that Bayesian!" was their disgusted reply.

Apparently, Ian is a legend in his own time, at least among the current crop of ASU grad students.

Cheers, sweet cheers...

The Dave Madsen Commemorative Pin

So I'm listening to X96 this morning and they are promoting a new commemorative pin from Hard Rock Cafe, SLC. Every Friday, X96 invites this guy named Dave to help them with their show. Dave is a little slow and has a speech impediment (it's great for radio). They found out about him becuae he sells flowers and other things to make money, and he has hit up x96 DJs to by his flowers.

Hard Rock Cafe, SLC found out about Dave and have decided to make a commemorative pin in his honor. All proceeds go towards helping him out.

As I mentioned in the subject heading, this guy's last name is Madsen. This is not a pitch to buy a pin for some guy none of us know, this is a chance to own something with the name of everyone's favorite Great Basin Archaeologist on it. Imagine--showing up to the GBAC or some other conference with a stack of these pins...The University of Utards would snatch them up and I bet we could put Simms down for 5 or 6...

Spammers posting nasty comments...

Hey Guys,
It seems that some spammers have been posting comments to messages that have contained some pretty bad content. We can't specifically block them from posting comments, but as administrators, Chris and I can make it to where only members of this blog can post comments. If everybody agrees, we can set it up that way. Let us know what you think and we'll keep deleting the junk people post until then.

A little Thal on the way...

Recently, I talked to Sean Thal and he mentioned that he and Erika are going to have a baby. I told him that this is information he should post on this site. His exact words to me were "You guys still do that? I haven't been on that site for months"

Yes, Sean we still post on this site.

Anyway, I told him to post the good news on this site. That was two weeks ago. So, I'm doing it for him.

I've walked the narrow strip of land...

Thought all you Book of Mormon Tour enthusiasts may want to know about this conference. Notice the last line in the story...

http://newsnet.byu.edu/story.cfm/56774

You think John Clark is going to miss this one?

Peace in the Midwest.