In the journals...

I've been trying to catch up on my reading from the end of the year; here's a handful of recent articles that are worth mentioning.

Faulkner, Neil 2007 Childe fifty years on. Current Archaeology 212:35-41.

Neil Faulkner has an excellent essay on the influence of VG Childe on today's archaeology and concludes "Child was a top social theorist whose ideas about how history actually works--and how archaeology can access it--remain as relevant today as when first coined."

Alter, Joseph S. 2007 The once and future "Apeman": Chimeras, human evolution, and disciplinary coherence. Current Anthropology 48 (5):637-652.

The surprising thing about this recent Current Anthropology article, which discusses why the four fields of anthropology are still important despite scientific advances which continue to blur the line between humans and animals, is how little commentary there was.

Says Alter, "[There are] critical points of topical overlap and analytical intersection between the various subfields as cultural anthropologists study the consequences of innovations in biology and physical anthropologists engage in new ways with questions about the evolution of culture, nonhuman primate cultural dynamics, and what it means to be both a sentient person and an animal.... Nevertheless, humans are very ambivalent about their status as apes..."

LaDousa, Chaise 2007 "Witty house name": Visual expression, interpretive practice, and uneven agency in a midwestern college town. Journal of American Folklore 120(478):445-481.

College kids on an Ohio campus have given their residences 'house names', some silly, some suggestive, some obscure. LaDousa's paper looks at the layered meanings of the house names to the residents and to others in the community. I found this interesting from the standpoint of thinking about multiple viewpoints, not necessarily directly applicable to archaeology field research.

Janik, Liliana, Corinne Roughley, and Katarzyna Szczesna 2007 Skiing on the Rocks: the Experiential Art of Fisher-gatherer-hunters in Prehistoric Northern Russia. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 17:297-310.

This article looks at petroglyphs within the River Vyg valley in Russia dated about 5000 years ago. Specifically, the authors examine the rock artist's use of the medium in expressing the motion of skiing. An interesting blend of modern art theory and rock art I've not seen before.