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)