To most of the world, the image of an archaeological dig comes from the movies. You remember: in the first Indiana Jones movie, there's an iconic moment when Indy is standing at the archaeological site in Tanis, peering through a theodolite, with hundreds of Nazi-paid workmen around him. He is alone, above the crowd—the only crew member he talks to in the whole movie is Sallah, his faithful foreman. The perfect, tanned, obsessed, isolated scholar.
Toutswemogala Hill, Botswana. Photo by James R. Denbow (c) 2007
The reality of modern archaeology is far more interesting, not to mention more complicated and dangerous. The modern archaeologist is engaged with the local community. She or he works hard to bring in the participation of locals, descendant communities and other stakeholders in the process.
But you don't often see that process described; and further, there are few records that describe how that sea-change from a profession practiced in isolation on the unprotesting dead to one conducted in and among living people occurred. For one thing, it's not easy, in any sense of the word, and the archaeologist doesn't always come out looking particularly heroic or even completely professional.
African Iron Age Site of Bosutswe, Botswana
Photo Credit: James R. Denbow (c) 2007
But, in "Finding Bosutswe", a brave, fascinating article recently published in the journal History in Africa, archaeologist James Denbow, his field assistant and PhD student Morongwa Mosothwane, and Nonofho Ndobochani, a Senior Curator at the National Museum of Botswana, reflect on Denbow's struggles with his own post-colonial fieldwork in the 1980s and 1990s, and how they all worked together on the African Iron Age sites of Bosutswe and Toutswemogala. The article is a collaboration among the three, with the voices of Batswanas Mosothwane and Ndobochani clear and distinct from Denbow's recollections of how he worked as part of the local community.
I was lucky enough to see an early draft of this article, and am truly pleased to see it published. More than anything else I've read, "Finding Bosutswe" really expresses the difficulties and joys of modern fieldwork, and how dangerous, hilarious and exciting working within a community, as opposed to above and apart from it, can be.
Eat your heart out, Indiana Jones.
Denbow, James, Morongwa Mosothwane, and Nonofho M. Ndobochani 2008 Finding Bosutswe: Archeological Encounters with the Past. History in Africa 35:145-190.
Note: If you don't have access to a university library, you might be able to buy a copy of this article through the African Studies Association, who publishes History in Africa.
Belgian anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss died on October 31, 2009, at the ripe old age of 100. His impact on anthropology (and archaeology as a subset of anthropology) was so earth-shattering that it's hard to remember what anthropology was like before him.
Lévi-Strauss was perhaps one of the earliest post-colonial researchers: to put it bluntly, he humanized people who were less "civilized" than the first world. It's hard to believe now, but before Lévi-Strauss, the standard explanation of the existence of modern hunter-gatherers was to consider them less than human, less intelligent, less "gifted" than those of us who turned our hands to agriculture and the lesser arts.
Lévi-Strauss' research could be said to have laid the groundwork for our modern understanding of the world, our (still fledgling) ability to look at alternative living methods as not a reflection of lesser intelligence, but of a pragmatic reaction to environmental conditions. Lévi-Strauss' structuralism pointed out that there are hard-wired components of our natures that are reflected in all of us, no matter where we were born, how much education we have or how we make our living. Although modern people are still chauvinistic as all get-out, we are less so for Lévi-Strauss' research and writings.
You can't say that Lévi-Strauss won't be missed—but his impact will continue to resonate for a long time in anthropology and the related sciences.
Here are some other attempts at explaining the importance of this truly astoundingly influential scholar:
Selected Books of Levi-Strauss
And you'll notice that, every one of them is in print
Now, don't get me wrong. Archaeologists do have a reputation for drinking an ocean of beer at the end of their working day, but that is besides the point. I recently heard about an inventive public archaeology venue, being carried out in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—surely one of the beer-making capitals of the world.
Making Beer the Medieval Way at Archeon. Photo by Hans Splinter
This year marks the second annual set of courses taught in Milwaukee called Ale through the Ages: The Anthropology and Archaeology of Brewing, a series of short courses on ancient beer brewing, bottling and tasting.
Ale through the Ages is taught by staff from Discovery Worlds museum located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. October's class brewed Rhineland Roggenbier, a tasty ale that predates the German purity law of 1516; November will see the brewing of Mayan chicha beer, an ancient recipe made with corn and cocoa; and December promises a taste of the sweet honeyed medieval Mead of Meath ale.
Yum! You can sign up for each class, and the November classes start on the 3rd, so belly on up to the bar!
According to a little press release I received late last week, David Beresford-Jones from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge has been leading a team investigating the environmental impacts of agriculture on the Nasca civilization in Peru.
Ancient huarango in Usaca, the last old-growth forest fragment on the south coast of Peru. Researchers have found evidence that the Nasca cleared areas such as this to devastating effect. Photo by McDonald Institute
The Nasca, who are best known for the Nasca Lines, those mysterious gigantic geoglyphs of spiders and birds and geometric lines created in the Peruvian deserts, lived between about 1-750 AD, when their society collapsed into chaos. The recent study is said to show that the Nasca cleared the Ica Valley forest of huarango trees to make way for crops, including cotton and maize. Beresford-Jones' team reports that cutting down the huarango tree had an unintended effect on the arid landscape: that the deforestation damaged soil fertility and made the Nasca vulnerable to El Nino-style storms, and ultimately put an end to the Nasca society.
The report has been published in Latin American Antiquity, and I haven't seen it yet, so I'll just stop there and pass along some late-breaking news stories on the topic.
News Stories
