Annual UPAC Presentations

Today was the annual UPAC meeting up at State History. Presentations all morning and then they did the business stuff after we all cut out to head back down to Provo. All told there were four presentations from BYU, including Jim Allison, Rachel Pollock and Mark Bodily, Brad, and I. Topics varied, I'd say Brad's North Creek junk is top list, but I'm still having nightmares from J-in-the-cliff...shudder...

Anyway, one presentation, which I unfortunately didn't really take notes on, was done by a UofU Doctoral student. I'd say it was the most interesting to me, so I wanted to throw out a bit of what I remember for you all.

It dealt with a mass burial in Moab. Six individuals, all male and all between 13-25 years old. Dentition and bone condition suggest that they were all in good health when they died. Three showed similar healed cranial injuries including a segment of bone/incised trauma above the right eye and several blunt trauma episodes to parietal and occipital lobes. Etc, etc, interesting stuff about the bones, but the really intriguing bit is the way the bodies were laid out in the mass grave. Unfortunately I have sucky MS Paint and that's it for graphic edits so I can't crop and rotate this correctly, but it gives you the basic idea:




Each burial was placed face down, with layered bodies having heads placed over the thoracic trunk and down. So they're actually at an angle, which I can't do in Paint, such that the six piled up a bit and then sloped back off.

Has anyone seen anything like this? It's really a bizarre bit of activity.

She didn't say anything about grave goods. She did note that the two common skull shapes for Utah burials (one more spherical/robust typically associated with Fremont/Anasazi culture and one more elongated not consistently identified to any specific culture) were represented in the grave, a good indication that cranial morphology shouldn't be standing alone in our cultural affiliation calls.

Anyway, interesting bit. Wish I had her graphic or better technology on my lappy...but anybody got any thoughts?

Image J - Free visual analysis software

Some of us have been messing around with Image J, a piece of freeware that will analyze digital photographs. Cady, Scott, and myself are trying to get a paper together where we will try to see if we can tell if Boulder Jasper has been heat treated by analyzing the level of light refraction and color of samples before and after heat treating.

There are many, many plug-ins and many, many possible applications of this technology. Everybody check it out. Best of all, it's free...

Hutchings Museum and Renee Barlow

Last night, several of us (Molly, Holly, Cady, Jenny, and I) went to the USAS meeting at the Hutchings museum in Lehi, Utah.

Renee Barlow was the guest and talked about....you'll never guess....Range Creek. During her lecture she said several things that seemed like "red flags". One of the red flags was her use of the term "Pithouse Village". After being asked what her definition of a pithouse village was, she suggested that a pithouse village in Range Creek could have as few as 3 pithouses and as many as 15.

Has she read Five Finger, or Clear Creek? Is she aware of Parowan Valley?

To her credit, Barlow did say somethings that sounded like a small shift in research bias, but I'll let Cady talk about those.

Also, The Hutchings museum has an amazing collection of chipped stone artifacts, perishables, and all sorts of eccentrics (figurines, incised stones, and other oddities) that we rarely get to see.

The collection was so amazing that our very own Old-Worlder,Holly A. Raymond, expressed her admiration for the material culture of the Fremont. Holly, I'll let you elaborate.

Something about doing a thesis on the Fremont instead....

I'm sure I left a few things out, everyone else who was there should throw in your summaries or impressions.

AP2 in trouble?

AP2, our archaeological chariot, is currently in the shop for an assessment to determine if she can continue for ten thousand more miles.

Thoughts and prayers are welcome.

If she does not survive, might I suggest a memorial order. Perhaps, "The Order of the Yukon".

This order would honor those who have shown excellence in the field, research, off-driving skills or whatever else.

Just a way to remember the vehicle most of us has eaten in, slept in, and traveled in for the majority of our burgeoning careers.

A Moving Chronological Southwestern Map

I've been thinking lately about the different fluctuations in the population of Southwestern traditions. Lekson has his opinions on major migrations of people through time (See Chaco Meridian). Most agree that at one point or another there were also migrations from the Western Anasazi area to the East (Rio Grande Valley). I feel that mobility was very common, but studies on interaction between groups are limited to discussions about trade or design similarities. There must have been more people moving around that area than we think. These people had to have been used to tramping around for weeks, covering many miles of terrain. It also seems logical that there may have been a ton of interaction between different contemporaneous groups.

For me, it is hard to visualize what groups (or areas of the SW) were in "full-swing" at particular times. It seems that the groups who were contemporaneous, especially while sustaining large populations, most likely had contact with groups in similar situations. For example, there was an increase in population at Chaco Canyon during its Pueblo II phase and peaking out with the completed construction of Pueblo Bonito during the Classic Bonito phase. Hohokam Snaketown, during its Sedentary period/phase also reached its greatest size around the same time. These plateaus in population size (if you attribute largest population size to maximum number of structures or largest building phases of structures) both occurred roughly between 920-1150. If we succumb to the discussions of population stress and the like, it would seem likely that groups would be venturing out to find more arable land to farm and less stressed food sources (game, wild plants, etc.). In the process, there would be interaction between and among groups.

So, here is my idea. Like I said earlier, I have a hard time visualizing which groups were at their population peak at which times. I've been thinking of building a moving map of the Southwest in Adobe AfterEffects or Flash that shows how these major centers of activity grew and shrank over time. By doing so, we get a better idea of how and when these groups might have interacted or when divisions and migrations may have occurred due to ecological stress. It seems ominous to collect all of the information on this, but would prove useful, maybe only on a teaching level, showing how these groups emerged, blossomed, and later abandoned their homes. Let me know what you guys think.

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.