Archaeolog

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.

Posted by Four Stone Hearth at 8:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A World Heritage site always attracts a lot of attention. Such archaeological sites are viewed to materially represent irreplaceable ‘heritage’ on a global scale and are defined and protected through the United Nations’ UNESCO declarations (eg. UNESCO 1988). Teotihuacan, Mexico is no exception.

Replete with two monumental pyramids (the Pyramid of the Sun being the 3rd largest Pyramidal structure in the world) set amidst the ruins of a once densely populated, urbanized city (the first of its kind in Mesoamerica), “Teotihuacan”, or the “city of the gods” as the Aztec later identified it in Nahuatl, has attracted, both historically and contemporaneously, a broad range of interests. As most of us may personally attest to in visiting these world monuments, such interests run the gamut from the archaeological
to new age spiritualism.

Working at Teotihuacan, I often heard the phrase ‘yahoos’ being used to refer to the unsanctioned, occult practitioners who regularly gather at the site for their rituals.

Enter , the billion dollar, international internet company based in the Silicon Valley of California. To celebrate the media giant’s 15th anniversary, Yahoo! announced that it would create a ‘time capsule’ to gather together a snap shot of contemporary human life. Beginning this past October 10th, the search firm began collecting text, audio-visual and video contributions from any and all interested parties worldwide – estimated in analog terms to represent about 5 million books worth of data (OCRegister 2006). These would be uploaded via the internet.

This media-bundling was then digitized and beamed into space via laser a few months ago on October 25th. Following in the original steps of the affable ‘yahoo’ Carl Sagan, this digital ‘time capsule’ was made in hopes of communicating to digitally attuned extraterrestrials the diversity of life and culture on Earth. As a spokesperson for Yahoo! stated: the purpose was to join the "past and present with the universe's potential future by sharing today's culture on Earth with other life that may exist light years away" (Subzeroblue 2006).

A ‘hard copy’ of the time capsule will be buried on the Sunnyvale grounds of the corporate offices. But, in keeping with the ethos of ‘digital democracy’ inherent in the conception and content of the Time Capsule Project, the company wanted to laser the digitized information in real-time at a prominent locale. You guessed it. This Yahoo! chose the top of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan.

Continue reading "Open source Archaeology? Taking 'Yahoo!s' seriously at Teotihuacan, Mexico" »

Posted by Timothy Webmoor at 8:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)