George Cowgill: How I got here...
George Cowgill is a Mesomericanist archaeologist, probably best known for his work at Teotihuacan. In an essay titled "How I got to where I am now: One thing after another, a (mostly) linear narrative" and published in Ancient Mesoamerica late last year, Cowgill talked about how he got into archaeology, and it is an essay anybody contemplating an entry into the field ought to read.
In "How I got to where I am", Cowgill first describes a childhood in Depression-era Idaho with his twin brother Warren. As a high school student, Cowgill toyed with being a journalist and an anthropologist, but started out his academic career in physics, graduating with a BS at Stanford and beginning a graduate degree at Iowa State. Somewhere along the line, he fell in with bad company, and in 1952 found himself at an archaeological site in Jamestown, North Dakota working with Richard Wheeler and Hester Davis, and while in Iowa visited the Effigy Mounds and met Will Logan and Reynold Ruppe. By 1954 he chucked physics and started graduate school in archaeology at the University of Chicago.
The rest of the essay discusses Cowgill's life as an archaeologist, how he got to Harvard and eventually Arizona State, how he ended up at Teotihuacan with Rene Millon, and what he thinks of the changes in the profession over his fifty plus years in the field. The essay is an interesting glimpse into how one man became an archaeologist, and what being an archaeologist meant in the 1960s and what it means today.
Cowgill, George L. 2008 How I got to where I am now: One thing after another, a (mostly) linear narrative. Ancient Mesoamerica 19:165–173. You can buy a copy of the article for £10 or US$15 through this link.
Teotihuacan from the Pyramid of the Moon to the Pyramid of the Sun. Photo by Owen Prior
Time Team America
Premiering Wednesday, July 8, 2009, is Time Team America, a new PBS television series that is the first U.S. program dedicated to showing the nuts and bolts of archaeology in action.
Produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting and based on the madly popular British series Time Team, each program in Time Team America brings a Mission Impossible team of professional archaeologists to a different archaeological site in the United States. Sites featured in this premiere season include the lost colony of Roanoke, North Carolina; the extensive Clovis and controversial preclovis Topper Site in South Carolina; New Philadelphia, an Illinois town established by former slaves; Range Creek, a rocky valley with Fremont culture occupations in Utah; and the wild west frontier town of Fort James, South Dakota.
The professionals on the team include historical and urban archaeologist Julie Schablitsky currently at the Maryland State Highway Administration; Plains prehistorian Adrien Hannus at Augustana College in South Dakota; Joe Watkins, Director of the Native American Studies Program at the University of Oklahoma; historical archaeologist Eric Deetz of the James River Institute for Archaeology; geophysicist Meg Watters; and head excavator Chelsea Rose, a graduate student at Sonoma State University.
Led by the charming host, artist Colin Campbell, Time Team America spends three days at each site, bringing along a raft of cutting edge remote sensing and geophysical survey techniques, such as ground penetrating radar,fluxgate gradiometer, resistivity, Lidar, and differential GPS. Meg Watters, geophysical expert for Time Team America, recently expressed the thrill of using Terravision GPR and Foerster gradiometer to discover buried remnants of the western frontier town of Fort James: "These two geophysical survey methods are just beginning to be used in archaeological surveys (in Europe) and our survey at Fort James was the first of its kind."
All of this equipment is fairly expensive and all too often outside the budgets of many archaeological projects. I'm sure their use was warmly welcomed by the local archaeologists: but the real benefit the Time Team America brings is the diverse experience and backgrounds of the visiting archaeologists. I mean no disrespect to any of the archaeologists leading the excavations on the sites: speaking as an archaeologist I would have killed for a visit from such a team.
Each of the archaeologists brings his or her own set of expertise to each site: Schablitsky her background in historical and DNA research; Hannus his prehistoric Plains background; Watkins his extensive research in Native American history and experimental archaeology; and Deetz his three decades of historical work including Jamestown. This diversity helps even when the archaeologist is out of his or her area of expertise, leading a generalist curve to the excavations at play.
If Time Team America is a success this year, PBS may ask for another season, and tentative plans may involve sites outside the lower 48 states. My plans for this season are to post a review of each of the programs on the Monday before the program airs on Wednesday. In each program review, I'll include a bibliography and links to further information and photos of each site.
I'm excited! Are you? As Time Team America member Julie Schlabitsky puts it, "If the viewing public can learn that we don't dig dinosaurs, use the word 'geofizz' in a sentence, and appreciate the volumes of information archaeologists add to our history, I will be a believer in educational television for the rest of my life."
Time Team America's Schedule All programs air Wednesdays, 8 pm eastern/7 pm central
Time Team Info You can preview the episode about Roanoke Island on the PBS website. As is usual for PBS, each program will be available to watch on the site the day after it premieres.
If you are outside the US and having trouble viewing the PBS videos, I am reliably told that you can use a free American proxy from Xroxy to get in. 
Time Team America. Photo by Meg Gaillard
Archaeology Quiz of the Week: Middle Paleolithic
Today's Archaeology Quiz of the Week is on Middle Paleolithic, that most exciting period in human history.
Trivia Quiz: Middle Paleolithic Trivia Quiz
Cheat Sheet: Study Guide to the Middle Paleolithic
Shell Beads and Behavioral Modernity, a photo essay
Twitter and Archaeology
Now I know Twitter is not everybody's cup of tea, but I was poking around today and discovered some very interesting projects in Twitter. If you've been interested in seeing what different archaeological groups are up to on Twitter, or contemplating running a Twitter feed for your own group, this blog is for you.
It took me several hours, but I found a lot of professional archaeologists and students who were tweeting about archaeology; and I also found a lot of creative use of Twitter by organizations, archaeological sites, museum, magazines—even a handful of CRM firms to get news out about their organizations. Each of the following links should take you to a Twitter page, where you can cruise at your own pace and see what others are doing.
If I missed your organization's Twitter feed (and I very well might have, searching Twitter has a needle-in-haystack quality), add it in a comment and I'll add it to the list.
Specific Archaeology Projects
- Campus Archaeology Program, Twitter project from Michigan State
- Dead City Stories, Paris, France
- Flemish Heritage Institute, in Dutch
- Florida Public Archaeology
- Gabii Project, archaeology project in Italy
- Grand Pre Archaeology, Nova Scotia
- History Faculty, free podcasts by historians
- Indiana Jones
- Iowa Archaeology
- NE Asia Archaeology
- PalaeoGeek.net, Chicago notebook about UP art
- Standing with Stones, film and book project
Archaeology News Servers
- ArchaeoBox
- Archaeological Box, weekly pod cast
- Archaeology News
- Archaeology Daily
- Archaeorama
- Bennu, Ancient Egypt news
- BAJR jobs
- Bread and Circuses
- Culture 24, news from museums, galleries, heritage sites
- Culture Watch Pacific Northwest
- Digipast
- Grassroots News, public anthro project in Washington DC
- Heritage Twit
- Jorgen Holm, paleolithic news
- Preservation Today, Natchitoches, LA
- Research News in Late Antique Studies, Paris
- Rogue Classicist
- Southeast Asian Archaeology news
- Vin Brown, news from Adelaide
- Watching Archaeology
- Wiki Arc
CRM Firms
- L-P Archaeology, CRM firm, UK
- Moore Group, CRM firm in Galway, Ireland
- Wessex Archaeology, CRM firm, UK
Magazines/Television
- Archaeology magazine
- Biblical Archaeology Society
- Discovery Channel
- History Channel
- National Geographic
- New Scientist
- Sierra Magazine
- Smithsonian Institution
Archaeology Organizations
- ADMAT, UK, Dominican Republic
- AIRC Rome, nonprofit for preservation of Rome archaeology and architecture
- CHARM, Macedonia
- Crow Canyon Archaeological Center
- English Heritage
- Flemish Heritage Institute, in Dutch
- Heritage Action, UK
- Museum of Ontario Archaeology
- National Center for Preservation Technology and Training
- National Trust for Historic Preservation
- PAST Foundation
- Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
- Portable Antiquities Scheme at British Museum
Museums
- Arizona Museum of Natural History
- Arizona State University's Anthropology Museum
- Brooklyn Museum
- Backus-Page House
- De Young Museum, San Francisco
- Fernbank Museum, Atlanta GA
- Museum of Natural History and Archaeology, Norway
- San Diego Archaeological Center
Oh, of course. My own twitter feed is at Archaeology, and I should also mention my colleague N.S. Gill's Ancient History feed too!
Behavioral Modernity in South Africa
I just discovered a great article in the American Scientist this month (July/August 2009) on behavioral modernity as exemplified in the South African industries of Howiesons Poort and Still Bay, written by archaeologists Zenobia Jacobs and Richard G. Roberts. Fortunately, the whole article is available for free and online, with photographs, so if this subject fascinates you as much as it does me, you should read about it from two of the main researchers on the subject.
Jacobs, Zenobia and Richard G. Roberts. 2009. Human history written in stone and blood. American Scientist 97(4):302-309. Free to read online.
- What is Behavioral Modernity?
- Shell Beads and Behavioral Modernity, a photo essay
Ancient Flutes from Hohle Fels
The oldest musical instruments found to date are from the Upper Paleolithic period, and include bullroarers, rasps and even a marimba-like instrument. But the oldest of all these are ancient flutes, carved from the wing bones of birds or from ancient elephant ivory.
A news story breaking today describes new flutes from Hohle Fels, Vogelherd and Geissenklösterle, three Aurignacian sites in the Swabian Jura. You may remember Hohle Fels as the site where just a few weeks ago was reported evidence for ivory figurines recovered from the same levels.
Paleolithic Flute from Geissenklösterle (Replica). Photo by José-Manuel Benito
Sequoyah's Written Language
- Sequoyah was Here, Archaeology magazine
- Carvings From Cherokee Script’s Dawn , New York Times
National Archives on YouTube
Now this is really neat. The US National Archives has just posted 17 videos from its vast storage of historic audiovisual records to YouTube.
Among the tasty things of interest to archaeologists and historians is an 1933 video called "Rebuilding Indian Country", a 1935 short on California redwoods, and a biographical sketch about Dr. Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocketry. My favorite has got to be the half-hour video called "Stories from the Great Depression".
Field Work in Focus: Marsiliana d'Albegna Project
The 7th Research Campaign at the Marsiliana d'Albegna Project will be held 31 August 2009 - 30 October 2009 and is currently seeking students and volunteers. Carmine Sanchirico sent along this description of the project.
The archeological research activities in the Etruscan site at Marsiliana d'Albegna (Italy) will start again under the direction of the Department of Archaeology of the University of Siena (Laboratory of Etruscology and Italic Antiquities directed by Prof. Andrea Zifferero) and with Etruria Nova, a not-for-profit association. Started in 2002, the Marsiliana Project has contributed to the rediscovery of this important Proto-historic and Etruscan site, already known for its rich and large necropolis brought to light by Prince Tommaso Corsini at the beginning of the 1900's.
Activities Conditions of Participation The activities in the field and in the laboratory imply a commitment of 40 hours weekly, certified with a certificate valid for the issue of formative credits. There will also be afternoon workshops on the study of epigraphy and Etruscan ware, informatics elaboration of data and methodology of excavation; on the weekends, excursions to the major sites and museums of Southern Etruria are planned. Participants require the certification of tetanus injection, and the annual membership fee, insurance included.
The fee is 80 euro for one week, 150 for two weeks, 200 for three weeks. Price includes full board and lodging, transfer by car, workshop and excursions. Participants are housed in the holiday farm house "La Speranza", in flats with 4 or 5 beds, with independent kitchen and bath and heating, soccer field and swimming pool available. The participation in the research is open to students of archaeology and volunteers, provided that they are of legal age.
Contact Information Prof. Andrea Zifferero
Grave circle Brizzi 2, discovered during the course of excavation at Piani di Perazzeta. Photo by Marsiliana d'Albegna Project (c) 2009
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Photo Credit: Marsiliana d'Albegna Project (c) 2009
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Photo Credit: Marsiliana d'Albegna Project (c) 2009
0039 577 233659
marsiliana@unisi.it
Solstice at Stonehenge 2009
On June 21, 2009, at 4:58 in the morning, Stonehenge looked like this:
Environmental conditions weren't great this year—the sun didn't shine—but fortunately, you can revisit some great older photos in the photo essay called Solstice at Stonehenge. 
Summer 2009 Solstice at Stonehenge. Photo by Matt Cardy / Getty Images