Anthropology

Its amazing how anthropologists take a small idea which may relate to something, drill into it, produce a idea which ties that small idea to other ideas that cross cultures. Here is a small and simple one I did. I was driving to work the other day and noticed that it was a beautiful day here. People were out walking their dogs. Then I noticed that of the six couples walking that five of the dogs were be held on the leash by the woman. It dawned one me that when my wife and I walk, I rarely hold the leash. Is that just strange? My wife attributes it to some remaining “anthropological synapses” that just won’t go away. I think its not so much the thing itself; but its the idea of the thing. Its a relationship thing between acts, ideas, beliefs, and behaviors.

Truth be told, I like finding things which perhaps other scoff at, admit seems less than interesting; but when you see things in a different perspective, it becomes interesting. Light years ago, I studied prehistoric spatial relationships amongst western desert hunter-gatherers. I had noticed with the years spent recording prehistoric cultural resources, that the number and size of prehistoric cooking pits and hearths grew. The hearths simply got bigger in size. I wondered whether there was some kind of cultural continuity going. Was it merely because the rocks degenerated and were replaced? Were there different uses for the different sized hearths?

Suddenly, I remembered this class I took at graduate school. It was on non-verbal communication. We studied the idea of proxemics or spatial relations between people. It was as if a light bulb started appearing. What if people expect so much distance between themselves sitting around a fire? What if the firepits grew because populations using the sites were growing? I started compiling the location of the larger firepits with other indicators of population size.

Its sad to say at this point, the whole thing fell apart for a variety of reasons. My tenure at the place ended under cloudy conditions. I was accused of filing erroneous expense vouchers by someone simply wanting my job there. It was ugly and I wanted out. I left this thing behind which still jabs at me every so often. I was so close to I think finding something that tied material culture to people and their lives. And I had to leave it behind.

Others have told me since it was not a big deal. Everything just changes and I should adapt. But to me it was not hearths. It was the people around the hearths and how they arranged themselves proxemically. It was a shattering revelation. Then it ended.

So… Its not the dogs either and the people walking them. Its something else. Its the ability to see a thing and process it with that remaining pair of “anthropological synapses”. I hope I never lose those. I’d hate to only ramble through life and never see the ties that bind.

Sometimes when I’m commuting somewhere here; I look at the hills around Fremont and Newark here in the SF Bay area. The Hayward hills remind me of hills I used to clamber over back in the way gone days. When the sun rises over those hills, I sometimes remember being there. I remember when the destination was never as important as the travel and when the companions were cherished but yet we all wanted solitude. Anthropology while its the study of the vastness of human behavior; archeologists seem to need the solitary nature of person versus excavation unit.

I remember digging out on Edwards AFB in SOCAL and the wind was howling at 45mph and the dust swirled around the unit we were digging. Mark and I would stand up and periodically survey the unit and the wind and dust swirling never amounted to as much as us doing science. As one archeologist remarked at some time; “archeology is the mind wielding a trowel”.

In those other hills, I traveled over terrain I sometimes wondered if another had ever seen. The country was wild and open and I was never sure that another human being had walked the same trail. The other archeologist, sometimes my wife, was 30 meters to my right or left. There on the far side was RWR. He seemed introverted and focused inward. We never talked that much. Until…

Until we went to the Pizza joint or the hotel. One of the more humorous stories took place down in Mojave. We had been out all day long and were dirty and dingy. Tired and filthy. Dirt clinged to every place you wished it would not. We tramped into a hotel and the front desk clerk almost sniffed at us. He gave us the look that we were transients, homeless waifs and we could never spend the night at his place. RWR produced a Corporate AMEX card (no preset spending limit) and put rooms, food, massive orders of beer on the rooms. The clerk just watched us walk away. We were laughing and pointing at him. But we all went to separate rooms.

What was it about that career and life? What was so special that makes me wander the history of my own life gathering its artifacts? It was more than it was. It always was more and the archeologist were more. Simply put, archeologists are bigger than life. Bright minds, dirty trowels, clothes clinging with dirt. But the talk, friends.

The talk was like blogging all the time. Science came out as though we were constipated and we had to remove it using some philosophical diueretic. it was painful because it was so hard; but it felt so good. We gathered and talked. Once a year we produced scholarly papers.

All of this compressed in one drive after a summer’s over BBQ party for my son. I have so much compressed in archives, readers. This blog serves the same need I guess.

Perhaps the quality of this thing has gone down. I don’t blog so much about Linux; yet these days at work Linux is very much in my sights. I’ll blog more about that later. Things are still evolving there too.

Flesh is willing; but I notice a disturbing trend in blog posts these days. I am going through the week kinda busy and only doing my posts weekends. That’s not really good for me. Its funny tonite though. I’m sitting in a Vagabond Inn Hotel in Sacramento over by the California State Fair and have found a hotel at a level that I would never book. Light switches that don’t work. A desk with no power outlet. Uncomfortable beds and furniture that sags. Perhaps as my wife says I am spoiled by nicer class hotels like Marriott or Hyatt’s. I do like business class hotels with business comfort and roomy room service. I like international hotels in Singapore with almost instantaneous service. This place is creepy. We’re only here for a night though and on a mission of mercy.

Now I’m sitting at the bathroom door; laptop in lap. Beer iced and drinkable and thinking. I watched the sun do its retirement tonite and I remembered so many days in the field as an archeologist watching it. Days in the Mojave; afternoons in the Sequioa. Evenings in the Sierra. Wonderment in the Great Basin. What became of those years? Simply memories that I cull up when the mood strikes. I miss them though. I miss the best part of anthropology which was the cowboy science and the looking at incomplete things and forming pictures. Truly archeology is a record of trash and dumps and converting it all to behavior. I’ve always felt that those prehistoric cave painters were the ancestors of the blogger today. They reached to a pinnacle of expression and found a cave wall. It became their canvas and paradigm and speech network. They marked their world in uncertain hues.

I traveled that world, saw the record, and ate home-cooked rattlesnake chili many times. Drank way too much beer and considered the wonder of a sunset with a bunch of people that fell silent at the same time. Was there some bond or boundary that no one crossed those days? Yes. There was. I have never seen the same boundary and bond today. Computer technologists don’t possess the same joy, frustration, and love. Because archeology reaches to a depth of the spirit and rewards.

I’ll hoist my beer to all those I knew, that I dug with, that broke bread with me. I’m still here guys. I’m sitting in a bathroom blogging.

I’ve blogged a few times about my habilis habits. A habilis (like homo habilis) is a tool-user. The originals lived some million years ago give or take a flaked-stone tool and were the earliest known hominid to make tools. A tool is either a subtractive or additive process. If you are making a flaked-stone projectile point, perhaps you reduce raw material to a workable state. Tools can also be an additive process. May be that a projectile point is both actually since you add some kind of delivery agent to it. But that’s what we basically do I think to this day with the tools we choose to use or not. Some tools we adopt to make something easier and when we learn it perhaps we move on or keep it or adopt a new tool. I have a hypothesis that tools exhibit their maker’s beliefs in many distinct areas. If we can identify a certain structure to what is called flaked-stone morphology perhaps we could even identify a specific tool maker.

Now lets hop in my archeological and anthropological time machine and jog to the present. I’m at a customer site over in Plano, Texas which has given me a brand new appreication of “man the tool user”. The customer site is a larger entity which does some interesting things around tubes and transistors and even calculators. I’m in learning mode so I sit quietly and watch the master tool users exhibit. I ask a question or two about a specific tool and how to reduce it or add to it. These guys are interesting and encapsulate my judgements on computers as a whole. They use the right tool for the job. If the tool requires open source technologies, they roll out Linux solutions or place open source tools on Windows systems. This is completely possible and I do it myself. If they need Solaris they use it. Windows too. Many people maintain multiple desktops that they VNC or RDP to. Both of these tools are enablers. They enable you to reach out to other systems, make use of them. But lets not forget the ultimate enabler. Secure Shell has to be the grand daddy of enablers. With SSH you can rule. You can adopt, change, move, copy, delete, merge, split. Its cousins SCP and SFTP make it a three sided coin.

Now I have met the ultimate habilis enablers. They reach and encompass all the tools and they embody my beliefs that I’ve blogged a few times. Its all about the tools, Luke. You must use the tools. Computers and OS’es are no different. Linux, Sun, Windows, and their tools all make a composite whole. I told a Microsoft guy I am working with today that view and he vigorously agreed.

So in the end, I am sitting in the cave entrance painting my blog. Recording the rush of antelope and the sunrises and strange bursts of color. I am traversing a desert scape and knowing where the best plants lie. I am the enabler; the ultimate enabler and my canvas is the world. I can use tools that make me better and I can adopt and adapt. Is that not the mark of successful beings? Evolution has a way of separating wheat from chaff.

I get the feeling from these days in Texas that we must all become habilis and not ever have the view that just because its “this not that” its better or others that choose something else is worse. The paint I choose makes me more productive these days.

What do you choose to be more productive? As a side note, I would be seriously remiss if I did not mention that the fox came out with its latest yesterday or today. Way to go Mozilla team. You guys do good stuff and you have my thanks.

A few times in the past years I’ve dwelt on what it meant to be an archeologist to me. What anthropology has meant and means to me. I think there must be more than a few armchair anthropologists and I’ve wondered how many people have moved on from doing archeology to other things. Its interesting that I still use the term “doing”. Its an active thing when you practice anthropology. I think of technology as more passive. Sciences like anthropology require one to be active in their pursuit. You do them because you love them, want them, desire what they have to offer. Perhaps I’m remembering this because Indiana Jones and the 4th movie are coming and I remember this day years ago going to the theater in Lancaster, CA all charged up with Indy and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. We all laughed when he said that line “its why we’re doing archeology” or whatever it was.

Now I tend to remember those days with some degree of desire of almost a love lost. I get buried in memories of those days sometimes and wander around only engaging in theoretical field surveys, walking at 30m separate. Listening to the quiet. Archeologists can be very solitary beasts but not when the professional meetings come up. Then all that repressed social energy comes bounding out. Beers are drunk, people are drunk.

Someone told me the chief advantage of growing older is to remember all the things and dwell a bit on those that might have been. Memories of the times get more cherished and we fade in and out of reality. We gather those memories like solitary flames burning on candles that light our path. Slowly but surely each of the flames of those days are snuffed out and we find ourselves with new flames, new desires. Careers tend to move on but I will always be an anthropologist. I’ll always think and feel and do it. its a active not a passive. If you have never done it, you will never know and movies and docu-dramas cannot get you close. Its a unique thing to touch human past, try to interpret with an imperfect record what culture, life, society, religion may have been.

I would say if you ever get a chance to take a field class and you’re curious. Do it. You most likely will meet this interesting new breed unlike any other new breed. Technology and IT and Services and Linux and it all pales in comparison. Its archeology and I miss it.

I was lucky last week to go have lunch with my friend Jeremy from the Levanta days.  We went over to Left Bank Bistro in San Mateo for a well-deserved lunch, talk, and a really strange meetup.   What was so strange you may ask?  Well, we had been talking about a mutual friend that we worked with at Levanta.  I was lucky enough to have Miguel as a dotted line boss and he taught me more about international sales and channels than anyone I have worked with.  He also taught me another lesson about sales folk.  They can be honest and sincere and represent customer/client needs.  Previous experience denied that sales people were actually human beings. 

As it really happened… We were talking for a moment while waiting for our table at the crowded Bistro.  Talking about Miguel and our memories of him.  We moved toward the table and I looked at who was sitting next to us.  Damn!  It was Miguel.  We all just stared for a moment and Jeremy laughed first.  Miguel rushed up and shook hands and gave us that smile that we had so badly missed for almost a year.  We talked about Art for awhile too.

Then we all sat back down to our meals and conversations; but the entire lunch had taken a turn for even better. 

Webloggishness or the lack thereof

I’ve been giving some consideration lately to blogging as a passtime.  I’m always interested in the why of things.  Perhaps being an armchair anthropologist leaves me with a whole bunch of “W” questions on things.  I remember once having a discussion with another crazed archeologist on a phenomena that we had seen in the arid systems (deserts).  Prehistoric sites in marginal ecologies.  Why, I wondered.  He looked at me with that heat crazed grin stuck on his bushy face and said Well, Why not. Well this defeats the whole purpose of asking Why to things. The other person has to agree to be the recipient of the question and not just shout it back at ya.  I mumbled something about the answer being a question and wandered off.  Chris just stood there laughing and pointing at me.  I gotta say that these archeologists are some strange but wonderful people folks.  I’ve known my share of them and the always reach out to a point in me that still is deeply buried.

But as usual I seem to go at the subject I want to touch in widening circles.  I’ve been wondering the why of weblogging and whether there is a real reason I continue writing thoughts down in wierdly wonderful chrono-order?  What does it avail me?  Well, Why?
And then I answer…

Well why not?

So I move on to other things.  You know, I’ve done a few career changes and had a few force fed. I was pretty happy to leave a few of the places and the people there that thought they were extremely intelligent and articulate masters.  I’ve settled now at a place which is a place set apart for me. A job I like; people I respect.  Its a good time and I’ve been handed a rather large and significant project by our group Director.  So, why do I wonder if I should leave?  I have a potential offer; but the other place cannot really name the thing they want me to do.  They just want “it”.  No definition of it at all; no reason why.  No definition of success.  Seems strange to me.  I don’t think they are truly honest and I think they have never had to name the Why of things.  Well, why not?

Geez… That works well.

It works well for blogging too.  There is a reason why.  I know it you and you don’t.  So there.  See you in 4th grade tomorrow.

Powered by ScribeFire.

This is a new test with a new client… Lets see how it goes

I was talking with Setuid on IRC when a question he asked prompted me to start remembering things.  He had asked for a name for a Debian virtual system and wanted a famous anthropologist/archeologist’s name.  I skittered around for a second perhaps and came out with Boas.  I don’t know if you fine folks have ever had a completely separate thing suddenly cause a whole flotilla of thoughts and memories cascade around. Maybe its my slowly advancing age; but suddenly I wanted to read about one of Boas’ students; namely Kroeber.  Of course, the amazing wikipedia makes this so easy and the reading summarizes things for you, places emphasis around things, lets you get the fix.  So what is so amazing about Kroeber you may ask.  Well, Kroeber received the very first Phd in Anthropology from Boas out here in Berkeley. He had one of the most famous relationships with a California Native American named Ishi.  It was cataloged and recorded and you can still hear the music by visiting the Hearst museum at Berkeley. 

I remembered as an aspiring student of anthropology getting lectures on these amazing people in our history and what they did.  I grew up in the Mojave Desert in Southern California and learned to appreciate the landscape, the solitary nature of it and early on began reading Edward Abbey because he framed the experience for me, spoke of the desert and its disappearance in eloquent and wondrous terms.  The professor I had at the Junior College, RWR, became my mentor in many ways, friend, family member. He and I had years of friendship and then I went off to Graduate School in New Mexico intending on receiving a MA in Cultural Anthropology with a focus on new world prehistory and archeology.  I did that for the most part and returned.  I worked all over the state doing contract work and finally took a job at Edwards AFB down where the shuttle landed.  Perhaps its most famous landscape are the dry lakebeds. One of the most famous is Rogers Dry Lakebed.  That picture almost does it justice.  I drove over it, recorded parts of it, walked on it.  Wondered at it.  Truly majestic yet almost taken for granted in many ways.

That carried me back for some reason to a comment that Boas made about anthropological analysis that…

considers every phenomena as worthy of being studied for its own sake. Its mere existence entitles it to a full share of our attention; and the knowledge of its existence and evolution in space and time fully satisfies the student.

No matter what phenomena we are discussing, we should look at it because it has value at its level. 

At some point, I left archeology completely for a variety of reasons; trading in my field boots and pack and faithful trowel for a armchair and the life of a devout armchair anthropologist.  The map I once carried that charted my travels transformed somehow into this weblog.  But I am not really what is described as the classic armchair anthropologist.  But I like the definition of the four holistic fields of anthropology.  Anthropology is the chassis, the vehicle, the engine that carries me forward even doing technology these days. I still look at hillsides and forests and deserts as one.  Sometimes when walking with my wife, she sees me looking down at the ground as we walk and she asks me if I am looking for stone and bones still.  I smile gently and my mind twirls back to other days.

Imagine all this called up from a simple question by a friend on IRC.  Its an amazing facility we have to link and correlate and consider each phenomena as worthy…

Thanks Franz.

Powered by ScribeFire.

I was amazed this morning as I perused the Yahoo! News to see a few very interesting stories that brought about some recollectioin of earlier things I had done.  One was this story regarding the prehistoric Clovis Culture in the southern great plains.  Clovis, New Mexico is within “spitting distance” of where I went to graduate school and I spent a few months or more at the Blackwater Draw Museum situated between Clovis and Portales, NM.  I worked a summer if memory serves at the actual site on a Folsom-aged prehistoric killsite.

If you are unfamiliar with that part of the world, Clovis and Portales sit on this magnificent table of land called the Llano Estacado.  The area is rich with prehistoric and historic archeological resources and I worked as far as east as the Canadian River breaks in the panhandle of Texas around Amarillo and Canyon, Texas.

The prehistoric antiquity of the Clovis in the initial article brings a lot of questions but one of the best lines I thought was setting a basic time to when people arrived in the new world is rather limiting in nature.  I like the approach that people arrived in waves and perhaps as early as 20k years ago.  That means the sturdy Clovis Projectile Points we all found out in farms and ranches and on the Llano may not be indicative of the very first arrivals.  I like the idea that geography, ecology, and geology all conspired to open and periodically close lanes of movement for the new world and people moved about for thousands of years obeying the climate’s imperatives and limitations.  This does not lessen the rather amazing projectile points or the hunting of mammothus on the plains.  Instead it may point at a different type of habitation instead of one where we just pronounce “the earliest”.  In fact, it seems people like to know that there was an “earliest” because then the later things may make more sense. 

Out in the desert west, around the Antelope Valley is where I practiced the most archeology and anthropology.  One of the significant landforms there is the Rogers Dry Lakebed which now is surrounded by the Air Force Flight Test Center or Edwards, AFB.  The base is a wondrous place if you practice biology, geology, or archeology.  My friend Dave would include Botany since the many desert dunes and foothills were home to a wide splendor of poppy and other beautiful desert wild flowers.  Out there, I wandered those lanes of prehistory and the people were just as interesting and also had this intimate understanding of the desert and its bounty.  Traveling hunter-gatherer groups exploited the desert bottoms and oftne ended up in the Tehachapi Mountains to the north and a bit west or moving into the buttes which dot the valley to the east. 

The questions of antiquity, how Clovis cultures inhabited and where; how desert cultures adapted and adopted were always of interest to me.  But truthfully, I loved the entire measure and meter of their existance.  Their use of plants, animals and how they cooked same.  Given the chance of a “do over”, I would always choose for the years I spent doing archeology as a profession.  I miss many of the people, the places, and the things I saw greatly.  When stories arise on these things, I find the stirring and questions rising to the surface.  I may say I’m a technology professional; but there is this other thing which runs silent and runs deep.

I watch the history channel on Monday and Tuesday evenings when possible.  There are a number of shows then that I enjoy immensely.  The show Ancient Discoveries is pretty cool.  The other one I like is called Engineering an Empire ranks up there too.  I also like the Josh Bernstein show Digging for the Truth since he jetsets all over the place and asks questions about a variety of archeological and historic things.  You’ve probably astutely noticed that all of these shows have something to do with archeology and anthropology.  I also like to watch shows on geology and paleontology.  There is an interesting intersection for me when I watch these shows and often I walk away after an hour bathed in science, speculation, theory; kinda fired up.  It sometimes also takes me back to almost 15 years of doing archeology and I remember things which happened back then.

People still ask me if I enjoyed doing archeology.  Notice the way its said.  Doing.  Not studying or reading or thinking.  Its doing.  Its a active thing not a passive thing.  When one does archeology, it usually entails an active kind of thing.  One example is this little walk I took from Barstow to Las Vegas once.  If you know the geography, you know its desert all the way.

I also worked a couple of times out northeast of Barstow by this lava field which also had been a World War II base and we found all kinds of historic refuse and military occupation signs.  Prehistorically, the area was pretty interesting and we found all kinds of small sites where wandering and mobile hunter-gatherers stopped, ate, even defecated. 

We used to all joke when sh*t becomes something else.  Its when it becomes part of the archeological record.  Then you can do stuff with it like find out what people ate.

I’m bringing this all up because I wanted to blog about the shows I watch because I think they are very interesting and offer a degree of robust thinking.  Perhaps in this day of everything delivered on the web, robust thinking is not what it used to be.  We get gratuitous everything and we can Tivo it.  I remember when I was out walking in the Sierra Nevada’s at about 7500 feet up around the Eldorado National Forest.  If I had watched a video of it later, I would have been impressed; but only because I had been there first live.  Just watching a video and not being there would not have been so impressive.  Same with walking the distances from Barstow to Las Vegas.  Crossing those last hills (hell, mountains, okay…) were impressive too.  Seeing the crowned city of Sin with all the beer ports open was just too good to be true.  We ate and drank and then ate and drank more; but most of all I enjoyed a bed. 

Next time you get questions perhaps about a thing you once did, its fun to find the intersection points which make it relevant.  For me, its the History Television Channel.  It presents those intersection points for me.