Just wanted to send a Congrats and Well Done to Molly for her thesis proposal defense on Monday. She'll have to supply the details, but the worked bone gaming pieces of PVAP are looking like they'll tell us some interesting things when compared to the ethnographic evidence. Molly stood up to our favorite trio of committee members (the 3 J's) very confidently and made some interesting points about our favorite neighborhood Fremont.
Kudos!
6 comments:
Woah! Is this thing typed up? Very interested. I've spoken to Molly about this before, but I hope that the gaming pieces are examined both as a commodity and as a proxy for gambling.
If the latter is not in the plan Molly, I'd love to work with you on it as a side project Molly.
The commodity thing was just an easy way out of my GIS paper and doesn't actually have much to do with my thesis.
My original idea was to look at gaming pieces as evidence of gambling and aggregation. Dr. J. said that Clark would just ask "so what?" and then pushed me to take everythign to the next step and say the Fremont were organized as (a) tribe(s). I really wasn't fond of the whole thing, but Dr. J. had an answer for all of the problems I had and kept pushing, so I just went for it.
Thankfully, both Clarke and Allison had huge issues with it and the tribe stuff is gone. Basically, I will be examingin the gaming pieces as a data set. I'll be relying heavily on ethnographic examples to first establish that they bone puieces are indeed what Fremont archaeologists have been calling them for almost 100 years. Then, I will use the provenience info at a variety of scales (site, Valley, region) to look for places of aggregation.
Over all I think it went well and am excited to get started once I get back from field school.
As a side note, my favorite part of the defense was when Clark told me to not cater to a particular committee member's personal agenda while looking right at the committee member!
HAHA! Zing!!
This is going to be really cool Molly. If it were me, I would incorporate sites with central structures into your GIS analysis. I will almost guarantee that there is going to be a huge concentration of gaming bones within the central core area. This is the evidence of trade fairs that Joel's article lacked.
If it doesn't end up in your thesis, I'm going to try and convince you to write a paper about this with me.
Yeah, that's been brought up in discussion, especially looking at large sites as places of aggregation (and in comes J's trade fairs) and examining the presence of gaming pieces in those sites, but I still wonder how it will all end up.
You won't have to twist my arm too hard to write something in the diretion you are suggesting.
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