Anthropology

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.

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.

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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.

Its come to me more than a few times writing this weblog that all we can do is present.  Present ideas, theories, plans, and do a part of communication.  One of my anthropologist friends reminded me often to do both parts of communication; namely listening and talking.  Communication is not a one-way media and if you’ve ever done ethnography or dabbled reading about what cultural anthropologists actually do in the field; you’ll note that they really get into the whole observation thing.  A noted anthropologist once coined the term Participant Observation and that person is considered to be one of the movers and shakers in modern anthropology even now.  Franz had it right and we all knew it because there is really no way to gain an understanding by simply reading some other study.  You have to go there and participate.  You also have to observe.  I like to think its active observation in which you… participate.  Got it?  Good!  Its communication and interaction and learning.  Anthropology touches so much and so many and I’m always amazed even after years of not doing it actively that things are blended through my anthropological filter even still.  As my lovely wife is fond of saying,

You can take the person out of archeology and anthropology; but you cannot take the anthropology out of the person

And its true; so true.  I still feel like some kind of fieldworker engaged in my own observations and participations.  Work comes and goes, people do too. I see things roaring past me at their speed and I remember the level at which archeologist friends of mine became detached and remoted themselves from the haste and hurry.  We all wanted a slower drain.  Culture moved way too fast for us and we felt more able to deal with the prehistoric garbage collections of which we were specialists at retieval, analysis, and cataloging.   We all go in directions and tangents and change our focus points.  I submit that culture for archeologists moves to fast and it becomes too much to deal with to track it.  So archeologists beg out.

Its an interesting paradigm shift that once or twice a year that they clamor for contact and head off to professional and scientific gatherings (beer busts).  There they get all the social “rubbing of the elbow” they miss on a regular basis.  But soon, its over and they head out.

When I left all that behind, I traveled to of all things technology.  Seems amazing in retrospect I ended up there.  Someone asked why I did not just go into paleontology.  Because I was digging critter bones before so why not just do it a different way.  I always laugh under my breath when some well-meaning friend or almost friend seems to know what we did and then pronounces he or she knows it so well, that he will prompt good advice to me to move into paleontology.  No.  Its not the same.  Go read about each one.  See and grok the differences.

Now I find myself hunting the job yet again and I feel its okay.  The scattered clouds are gathering and I can feel those frustrating and stubborn transient realities clamoring about me.  But I have good Participant Observation skills thanks to Franz and Malinowski.  I learned how to deal.  I’ll just head off for awhile into my own fieldwork which is job hunting and I’ll carefully and artfully hide my steps.

Perhaps we all think of retrospective things at the end of each year.  This has been a difficult year with friends dying, others moving on to other beats, and me leaving one thing which now I wonder why I went to at all.  As I mentioned to the CFO at Levanta, “you were able to sever me twice in the same month and with 5 years inbetween.  Must be empowering (insert smiley icon here)”. Smiley icons all around.  ASCII rules.

Blog tags are always interesting.  I have a number of so called categories or tags or whatever that I can choose.  Sometimes I pick one when the post I am writing seems appropos to some special area or place.  Other times, I feel like playing a bit and not even selecting one.  But the special one for has always been Anthropology.  It takes me be back, makes me smile, even brings a tear and a wish to my somewhat aged mind and heart.  We all know that things come and things go.  Jobs arrive and they depart.  I just did the same with my job at Levanta.  Officially, my days are up on 15 December; but for all intent purposes, I’m done.  I’m unemployed (again) in this silly place.  Back in the day, the prehistoric hunter-gatherers would travel some distance to find rocks and food, sex, perhaps climate change, perhaps small scale environmental differences.  I know this because I rode in the desert on a horse with no name. 

Seriously, I traversed the western rim of the Mojave Desert in this rather wondrous place called the Antelope Valley.  I don’t remember seeing Antelope there ever; but I believe there were some.  What I think is known best about the Valley is the rather unusual ecology, the dry lake beds, the pinch of environment between foothills, mesas, and mountains.  Up the foothills, we enter a zone where the vegetation is changing.  Suddenly greener trees come at you.  There are big granite boulders scattered all around mighty Oak trees that were once acorns only.  In some dim past, the acorn landed, grew, became the mighty Oak.  Perhap sone of the granite boulders has a acorn processing station on it used by those temporary inhabitants.  I found a lot of them; but my main interest was not this kind of food processing.  Oh no.  I wanted to find back then flaked stone technological sites.  Places where the cunning hunters sharpened, found, made flaked-stone tools.  Along the way, I found beautiful and isolated rock art caves, places in the desert where I would swear no living human foot had ever touched, and an indelible mark on the side of my brain that forever is an archeologist.  There is the right side and left side and then there is the side which wants to travel the road less traveled.  For me, that was this path where the prehistoric peoples traveled from place to place, hunting and gathering, socializing, perhaps story telling.  And blogging.  Oh yes, dear reader.  These guys blogged.  Their wordpress or movabletype was different though and the medium was darker and perhaps in a cave or rock outcrop.  But they told a story, made a rhyme, recorded an event.  I saw many rock art sites out there in the Mojave and they all struck me as mysterious and incomplete.  Kinda like the blog entries I write

So anthropology came along and was a haughty mistress, well sexed, and wonderful.  She was demanding and required me to pay a penalty of dedication to the cause.  But I willingly paid it because I could travel that road less traveled and see those sites (archeological and otherwise??). 

Now I look back and see myself stepping on those small stones, changing the pattern of the stones in my stream.  Enter current day.  I am unemployed basically and its Christmas time.  I have a wonderful family and friends.  A few friends.  I’m gonna go looking for work and I plan on finding work.  Will it be another startup?  Who da f**k knows.  My friend DaveR and I both agreed that doing the startup thing was much like spinning a wheel of chance.  Each time you could believe that the one you were going to was the best.  Perhaps it was. 

But the small stones urge me forth.  Perhaps I’ll just stand here for awhile and remember that anthropology that brought me here.  Of all the so-called sciences, anthropology understands it the best.  It gets it.  It grabs me still. 

Alright… Who picked up all the small stones I already stepped on?