Reminds me of a graduate class symposium or a paper I attended once in the fabled city of New Orleans. Seems it sounds familiar. If you have ever taken a cultural anthropology class, you know that anthropologists dwell on these intersection points. They like to see where society, technology, evolutioni all match up. I’ve worked with a few different cultural anthropologists in the past especially around the American Southwest and they have struck me as a focused sort which often get “lost” in the work. Archeologists are cowboy on the other hand. They like to play, work, and then play more. Of all the scientists I’ve worked with; the archeologists always seemed to travel the most ground in search of..
Well, in search of mystery or clues. I’ve searched for both. I always remember old stories these days but no one around here really asks. So I have this blog. This tail to record things on. Once awhile ago, I worked up in Redding, California on a massive human burial site. We were working at a fevered pitch to get things done in an area of richly colored soil or midden ahead of PGE engineers digging water pipeline right of ways. The soil got crusted in the nose, the pores, and mouth and it had a greasy oily taste. We wore bandanas over our faces most of the time. The summer was ending though and we had a geologist come onto the site to take a look around for us. I like geologists a lot and they have this rather interesting perspective on “Time”. Where archeologists deal with “time”; geologists deal with “Time”. Time with a big T means it stretches out for eons and years and more. For us, time is focused on a group of thousands of years.
Anyways, this particular structural geologist while walking an area to the north found more prehistoric remains just under the surface. We were all tired; but then we were excited. Our project lead just mumbled about the time and the lack of it. But PGE funded more work so off we went. What we found shocked even us. We found the place where the rich dudes were buried/interred. Man. There were literally thousands of beads with each flexed burial.
At the end we walked away and were in disbelief. The intersection of technology and culture had shown again. Human behavior being what it was; we had found the commoner grave and then the rich guys grave. The technology of separation and differentation was interesting and it fueled a few interesting papers from up there. That alone is an interesting phenomenan. We would work the summers and do papers on our summers for the professional symposia.
In our culture we know where our technology meets society and what happens or not. In the dim days of the prehistoric past it was different but the same. The complexity was vastly different; but they had belief systems, religiion, feelings, doubts, and they also peppered the earth with their trash. The difference being that their trash is called artifacts. Ours we enforce an anti-littering law on.
