Not really an eventful term, but my highlights were:
Classes -- Beyond Chiefdoms with Ben Nelson and Kate Spielmann. In this class, we reviewed the chiefdom literature and pretty much decided that the classically defined chiefdom only ever existed in Polynesia, but that there are societies that are neither states nor tribes that the chiefdom label could be applied to, for lack of a better term. Also, we decided that chiefdoms do not necessarily preceed states, and in fact, there are no historical or archaeological cases where a chiefdom turned into a state. I wrote a paper for this class in which I compared mortuary assemblages from the Southwest (including the Fremont, Hohokam, PIV, and Casas Grandes) to a Southeastern Chiefdom. Surprisingly, the Fremont assemblage was a lot like the chiefdom, and the pure Southwestern groups were very similar. Go figure!? I only used one metric to compare them though, the diversity index, which is a count of the number of artifact classes in a burial, which supposedly is related to the number of roles a person held in life.
Dissertation -- I continue to collect and analyze sherds from the Southern Sinagua area, putting together a temper typology for the region. As part of my analysis, I'm developing a new method to analyze ceramic thin sections by digitally photographing the slides and using computer software to quantify the amount of each temper particle present. The team includes people from Geology, Archaeology, Electrical Engineering, and Photography. If it works, and I'm pretty sure it will, we will reduce the cost of thin section analysis by 1/10th. Exciting times!
Work -- I'm currently finishing up a chapter describing Hohokam mortuary ritual on Canal System 7 based on a dataset of nearly 1,000 burials excavated over the last year or two. I've identified several roles, including household ritual specialists, group ritual specialists, hunt/war leaders, and ceramic entrepreneurs. We'll see if any of it holds up.
This summer -- I'll be working on my dissertation 2 days a week, and doing excavations here in the Phoenix Basin the rest of the week. Good times, my friends, good times.
1 comment:
Reduce the cost of thin section by 9/10ths! That sounds like interesting stuff. And you've been analyzing the burial assemblages of 1000 individuals?! Dude, that is a BIG assemblage. When you get those polished up let me know, I would love to give them a read.
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