Archaeolog

A recent Archaeolog posting drew attention to the Graffiti Archaeology Project of Cassidy Curtis and his team, documenting accretional changes to graffiti walls in a number of urban locations in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. Such a project has become possible only by the development of software for the manipulation of digital imagery and of new photo-sharing websites such as Flickr. The interest it has attracted is palpable – as indexed not only by the thousands of members of Curtis’s on-line group for “graffiti archaeology” and a good deal of buzz in the blogosphere, but by stories appearing in the mainstream media and, most recently, a full-length article by Samir Patel in Archaeology magazine (readership: roughly half a million). Patel’s subtitle says it all: “The Graffiti Archaeology Project challenges the definition of archaeology.” In what sense can the documentation of graffiti, whose physical persistence is in most cases ephemeral and extremely short-lived, have relevance to archaeology (whose very etymology invokes a discourse on things ancient and primitive)?

In fact, archaeology as a discipline has been pushing against this boundary for some time. The initial impetus, perhaps, could be seen in the intense interest in ethnoarchaeology as a subfield that developed within the New Archaeology of the 1960s and 70s, leading on inexorably to manifestos on “the archaeology of us” (Gould and Schiffer 1981) and “archaeologies of the contemporary past” (Buchli and Lucas 2001), alongside other detailed archaeological studies of modern material culture, such as Bill Rathje’s Garbage Project (Rathje and Murphy 1992) or Michael Schiffer’s (1991) study of portable radios. Work in this vein presupposes a view of archaeology defined not simply as a field uniquely positioned to inform us about the material remains of the deep past, but also (in Christopher Witmore’s words, quoted in Patel’s article) in terms of “a wider sensibility about how humans live with their material environments.” In this reading, archaeology is all around us, ever in a state of becoming: the objects, structures, landscapes, images created by human action provide the stage for change, negotiation, resistance, destruction. The material world pushes back, and objects in that sense have agency too. The material present becomes the material past as soon as it comes into being. And one of archaeology’s distinctive roles is to try to understand humans’ complex relationships with things -- whether past or present. Graffiti art (“graf art”) is no different from material culture in general, except that is has an unusually short shelf-life, whether because of “tagging” by other graffiti writers, “buffing” (painting over) by anti-vandalism municipal authorities, or natural processes of decay. Curtis’s project is in this way, to some extent, salvage archaeology: an attempt to capture something of the culture and dynamics of a material world changing at lightning speed.

The final throws of a new Ph.D.'s job search?

No, this week Archaeolog hosts Four Stone Hearth and the next series of their blog carnival. The Fourth Stone Hearth is a "blog carnival that specializes in anthropology in the widest (American) sense of that word". This carnival spans this four-field model, including submissions ranging from salvage archaeology using historical sources to ideas of human evolution. Questions relevant to archaeology are raised concerning the deep time of what it is to be human, and some frank assessments of where we think we come from. Archaeologists have a credible tradition of ethno-archaeology, or modeling ancient human behaviour from observations of the contemporary. Analogical reasoning at its best. Science Studies students of Shirley Strum and Latour's work will recognize an 'ethnography' of the social relations of bonobos. And a final piece gets reflexive about how we think about evolution and the evolution of these ideas.

Harbour of the Sheaf Kings - Martin Rundkvis starts us off with some salvage archaeology on the island of Djurhamn, part of the Stockholm archipelago. Using historical sources describing Gustaf Eriksson and the importance of a once flourishing harbour town, Dr. Rundkvis surveys ahead of a tourist development project.

In a series of three pieces, Eric Michael Johnson raises questions about the evolution of love and hate:
The Sacrifice of Admetus - How the evolution of altruism reveals our noblest qualities.

Why Chimpanzees Make Bad Suicide Bombers - The evolution of spite is the evil twin of altruism.

Brooding Angelmakers - Offspring abandonment in the ancient and natural world.

Bonobos and the Politics of Human Nature - With a title evoking a Strum-Latour collaboration, Frans de Waal responds in the ongoing debate over human destiny - and if humans are genetically destined to love and hate.

The Evolution of What We Think About Who We Are - In a final piece, Brian Switek looks at the ebb and flow of scholarship, and reviews of how our view of human evolution has evolved.

Look for Four Stone Hearth's next carnival at Hominin Dental Anthropology.

In an ethnographic interview conducted in June 2007, leaders of the autonomous community of Oventic in highland Chiapas, Mexico discussed with me and a colleague the meaning of the caracol (snail) as a Zapatista symbol. They explained that the ancient Maya ancestors used a conch shell as a horn to summon people to gather in one place as a community. Their ancestors lived during less technologically advanced times, they noted, when the world moved at a much slower pace than today, much like the slow-moving caracol. Today the symbol of the caracol expresses the ideals of small community government in the face of globalization. The caracol represents the ideals of an autonomous Zapatista government with direct reference to a distant Maya past on two levels, and connects the Zapatista present with a conception of the Maya past as a direct and logical historical trajectory. Other icons frequently employed by the Zapatistas, such as pyramids and glyphs, reference more blatantly the ancient Maya past. The symbolism of the caracol is more subtle, yet more powerful in the meaning it relays.

Mayan Identity and the Zapatista Movement

The Zapatista movement began officially in eastern Chiapas, Mexico in 1983. The movement derived its name from Emiliano Zapata, a hero of the Mexican Revolution. The Zapatistas are often characterized as the first post-modern revolution, perhaps unjustifiably so, and have abstained from violence since a cease fire was brokered in 1994 (Johnston 2000). The movement is most often associated with anti-globalization, anti-neo liberalism, and indigenous rights. Zapatistas gained much attention by vociferously opposing the NAFTA free trade agreement in the early 1994 (Rich 1997). The outside world recognizes Zaptista rebels by their black ski masks (pasamontanas) and red bandanas (pallacates).