The Hidden Archaeology

For 2011, we will be excavating a cluster of Roman tombs belonging to a cemetery located on the outskirts of the Roman city of Sanisera that was occupied from 123 B.C. to A.D. 550. The excavation is directed by Fernando Contreras, director of the Ecomuseum of the Cape of Cavalleria, and Thaïs Fadrique with the collaboration of specialists in physical anthropology and conservation.

The course runs seven hours a day which is divided between excavation of the tombs and laboratory work, studying the human remains and other materials recovered during the excavation (The amount of time dedicated to lab work may vary each session depending on the state of the tombs excavated, i.e. how many individuals per tomb, etc.). Students will also participate in lectures, classes, exercises and excursion.

Participants will learn and apply excavation techniques used in physical anthropology when excavating tombs. In the laboratory, participants will follow guidelines set by an anthropologist and other specialist for the classification, study, and conservation of human remains and other related material found. Participants will also be given lectures on methodology, roman archaeology, physical anthropology, and conservation of archaeological materials. Participants will visit other archaeological sites on the island through organized excursions. Courses are given in both English and Spanish.

Location: Es Mercadal, Menorca, Balearic Islands, Spain

Season Dates: March 29, 2011 – October 31, 2011
Session Dates: 1) March 29 – April 17; 2) April 20 – May 9; 3) May 12-3;, 4) June 3-22; 5) June 25 – July 14; 6) July 17 – August 5; 7) August 8-27; August 30 – September 18; 9) September 20 – October 9; and 10) October 12-31, 2011
Application Deadline: October 1, 2011

Website: http://www.ecomuseodecavalleria.com

Program Type
Field school

Affiliation: Ecomuseum of the Cape of Cavalleria and the Sa Nitja Association

Project Director: Fernando Contreras

Period(s) of Occupation: Roman

Project Size: 1-24 participants

Minimum Length of Stay for Volunteers: 20 days

Minimum Age: 18 (contact with questions about age)

Experience Required: no

Room and Board Arrangements

Participants will stay in one of the Ecomuseum’s three student residences. All of our residences have heating/air-conditioning, laundry service and wifi. Transportation to and from the excavation site and planned excursions are included. Cost includes full room and board, transportation, accidental medical insurance, planned excursions, application fee and administrative cost. Airfare not included.

Cost includes full room and board, transportation, accidental medical insurance, planned excursions, application fee and administrative cost. Airfare not included.

Cost: Between $1,500 and $2,500 per session

Academic Credit
Number of credits offered: none

Contact Information
Lana Johnson
APDO 68
Es Mercadal, Menorca 07740
Spain
sanisera@arrakis.es
Phone: (34)699695580

The Cape of Cavalleria Ecomuseum in Menorca, Spain, has scheduled for 2011 the excavation of funerary deposits made by the first inhabitants of Menorca. The excavation is directed by Fernando Contreras, director of the Cape of Cavalleria Ecomuseum in collaboration with other specialists in physical anthropology and conservation. The course runs 7 hours a day which is divided between excavation of the cave and laboratory work; study and conservation of the human remains and other materials recovered from the burial site. The fieldwork focuses on the spatial distribution of the individuals and the objects related to their rituals and grave goods. Students will also participate in lectures, classes, exercises and excursions related to the course material. For every seven course days there are two days off. Participants will learn and apply excavation techniques used in physical anthropology when excavating the cave tombs. In the laboratory, participants will follow guidelines set by an anthropologist and other specialists for the classification, study, and conservation of human remains and other related material found. Participants will also be given lectures on methodology, roman archaeology, physical anthropology and classification of archaeological materials. Participants will visit other archaeological sites on the island through organized excursions. Courses are given in both English and Spanish.

Location: Es Mercadal, Menorca, Balearic Islands, Spain

Season Dates: March 29, 2011 – October 31, 2011
Session Dates: 1) March 29 – April 17; 2) April 20 – May 9; 3) May 12-3;, 4) June 3-22; 5) June 25 – July 14; 6) July 17 – August 5; 7) August 8-27; August 30 – September 18; 9) September 20 – October 9; and 10) October 12-31, 2011
Application Deadline: October 1, 2011

Website: http://www.ecomuseodecavalleria.com

Program Type
Field school

Affiliation: The Sa Nitja Association and Ecomuseum of the Cape of Cavalleria

Project Director: Fernando Contreras

Period(s) of Occupation: Bronze Age

Project Size: 1-24 participants

Minimum Length of Stay for Volunteers: 20 days

Minimum Age: 18 (contact with questions about age)

Experience Required: no

Room and Board Arrangements

Participants will stay in one of the Ecomuseum’s three student residences. All of our residences have heating/air-conditioning, laundry service and wifi. Transportation to and from the excavation site and planned excursions are included. Cost includes full room and board, transportation, accidental medical insurance, planned excursions, application fee and administrative cost. Airfare not included.

Cost: Between $1,500 and $2,500 per session

Academic Credit
Number of credits offered: none

Contact Information
Lana Johnson
APDO 68
Es Mercadal, Menorca 07740
Spain
sanisera@arrakis.es
Phone: (34) 699 69 55 80

Not interested in digging right now, but you enjoy things archaeological? Here are some sources for great archaeological travel tours:

1. Archaeological Institute of America Tours
2. Archaeological Tours
3. Explorations
4. Mayatour
5. Far Horizons
6. iExplore
7. Chevvy Tours LLC
8. Gecko’s Grassroots Adventures
9.Geographic Expeditions
10.Peter Sommer Travels
11.Beyond Touring
12.Tutku Tours
13.Voyages to Antiquity
14.The Archaeological Conservancy

Special Featured Tours:

Peter Sommer Travels: Exploring Ancient Turkey by Land and Sea
Beyond Touring: Touring with a Purpose in Belize

International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences / editors-in-chief Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes. New York: Elsevier, 2001.  26 v. (lxxxvi, 16,695, 588, 898 p.) : ill., maps ; 26 cm.

If you aren’t already familiar with this massive reference work, maybe you should be. It is massive (almost 17,000 pages), and it is online (if your library has a subscription). The coverage of archaeology is very good; archaeology is listed as a discipline of  its own and not a subdiscipline of anthropology. I count 44 archaeology articles, most by recognized experts. These are categorized as follows:

• 8 regional syntheses
• 24 entries on “conceptual approaches”
• 12 entries on “methods and practice”

But for archaeologists, its value lies more in the exploration of other areas of social science. The entries are authoritative and compact, with good bibliographies. I use it like a scholarly Wikipedia – a first place to look when I’m looking into a new topic in the social sciences.

Puzzled about the relationship of poststructuralism and postmodernism (from some discussion on Savage Minds), I turned to the encyclopedia today while watching Florida beat Penn State. This entry turned out to be extremely useful for a social-theory-challenged guy like me:

• Mjøset, Lars  (2001)  Theory: Conceptions in the Social Sciences.

He divides social science theoretical approaches into four broad categories:

• law-oriented (covering-law approaches, promoted unsuccessfully by the new archaeologists);
• idealizing (economics, game theory, rational choice theory)
• constructivist (Geertzian anthropology, poststructuralism, postprocessual archaeology)
• critical theory (Frankfurt school).

Most important for me personally, however, is Mjøset’s explanation of why constructivists fail to acknowledge that theory exists on multiple levels. I puzzled over this in my recent paper on urban theory. Ian Hodder and Matthew Johnson are dead-set against the notion of multiple levels of theory, which seems like such an obvious and important principle to me. I mention the issue in a footnote, but didn’t really understand the issue until I read Mjøset’s discussion of constructivist theory.

Murphey’s Law strikes again! Don’t you hate it when you find an important and very relevant work just after your article is published? (I really wish I head read Mjøset before I completed my paper.) I almost added, “or after your term paper is submitted.” But in the latter case, it is a blessing for students, since it gives you a head start when you return to your term paper to revise it for publication. Oh, you don’t publish your term papers? Well why don’t you get off your butt, stop reading blogs, and do something useful. Here is my logic: If a student has the ability, intelligence, drive, etc. to succeed as a scholar, then the chances are pretty good that such a person’s term papers (with some additional work) are worthy of publication. If that is the case, then by NOT publishing them one is not only reducing one’s academic chances, but also depriving the discipline of good research.

Here are a few other entries from the encyclopedia I have found useful:

• Bruegmann, Robert  (2001)  Urban Sprawl.
• Evans, Gary W.  (2001)  Crowding and Other Environmental Stressors.
• Jackman, R. W.  (2001)  Social Capital.
• Ostrom, Elinor  (2001)  Environment and Common Property Institutions.
• Wacquant, Loïc  (2004)  Ghetto. (This seems to be a kind of updated to the Encyclopedia)
• Wong, S.  (2001)  Cities, Internal Organization of.

Oh yes, I also found this gem today. In his entry “Postmodernism in Geography,” postmodernist geographer Edward Soja says that poststructualism is just a “safer sounding label” for postmodernism.

Adrian Myers, a grad student in archaeology at Stanford, has been in the news lately for his work on satellite imagery of Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay. It’s (almost) always good when archaeological research is featured in places like Science Magazine and Wired.

The basic scholarly article is:
Myers, Adrian 2010    Camp Delta, Google Earth and the Ethics of Remote Sensing in Archaeology. World Archaeoelogy 42(3):455-467.

Here is the abstract:  With easy access to satellite imagery through free applications such as Google Earth, it is now financially feasible for archaeologists to undertake remote survey in areas that are difficult or impossible to access in person. But there are ethical concerns inherent in the use of remotely sensed images, as Google Earth might be seen as a panoptic viewing technology that leaves no voice to those being viewed. Through a virtual investigation of the Camp Delta prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, I discuss methodological and theoretical aspects of the use of Google Earth in archaeology.

See also:

Publication in a peer-reviewed journal with a good reputation (World Archaeology) gives the work credibility, which is probably one reason it was picked up by Science. There are a couple of things that I really like about Adrian’s research.

• His inclusion of methods, substantive findings, and ethical considerations in his two published articles.
• The application of archaeological methods and approaches to contemporary issues.

Also:

• These same features also characterize his dissertation research, a historical archaeological study of a German prisoner-of-war camp in Canada. I find that work interesting for its relevance to my comparative research on urban neighborhoods and spatial organization.
• Last but not least, Adrian posts his papers (and related items) on his page on Academia.edu.

I am way behind in several big writing projects, including two books under contract, a book that I should be writing, a book that I really want to write but don’t even dream of finding the time for, and a couple of other book-like projects. So why can’t I find someone to write these books in my place? Even one ghost-written manuscript could ease my work load enormously.

Evidently pharmaceutical companies hire writing companies to write medical textbooks published under the names of real scientists and physicians (see the blog Mind Hacks, or the original article in the NY Times, or a recent article in the Stanford Daily). And some Harvard professors have managed to find students to write their books (see the blog, Harvard Plagiarism Archive). So why am I stuck here all alone with my computer?

Maybe there are advantages to working in a relatively obscure academic discipline with few commercial opportunities. That is, unless one wanted to cozy up to commercial art dealers, in which case maybe a wealthy patron could be found to finance the ghost-writing of one’s books. Oh well.

PS— did you hear the one about the postmodern ethnographer?

• What did the post-modern anthropologist say to their informant? “But enough about you, let’s talk about me.” (thanks to comments on Savage Minds for that one).

I am finishing up a short paper, and I can’t figure out what journal to send it to. This is a new experience for me – its has always been pretty clear where to send my papers. One or two journals have seemed obvious for each paper, with perhaps one or two others as backups. But for this particular paper, nothing comes to mind. This is a short paper on a very limited subject (comparative data to support the interpretation that Classic Maya house clusters functioned as urban neighborhoods). The target audience is Mayanists and other Mesoamericanists.

Normally the first choices would be Ancient Mesoamerica and Latin American Antiquity, the top two English-language journals for Mesoamerica. But these journals take forever to review and publish articles. I don’t have firm data, but based on my own experiences and anecdotal data, these journals take a year or more to review manuscripts, and then a year or more until they appear in print. But now I’ve been spoiled by the quick turn-around times (and insightful reviews) of my 3 most recent papers: 3 weeks (Urban Studies), 5 weeks (Jr. Anthropological Archaeology), and a couple of months (Jr. Archaeological Method and Theory). And the archaeology journals got the papers online very quickly. After these experiences, the idea of waiting around a couple of years to get a short paper into print seems unacceptable.

I thought of Mexicon, a less prestigious journal that seems to be quicker than AM and LAA, but my paper exceeds its rather short length requirement. There are some good relevant journals in Mexico and Spain (and France), but I’m not anxious to have to translate this paper, and I think these journals also have long lead times. There are the general anthropology journals (American Anthropologist, Current Anthropology) that sometimes take specialized papers, but I would predict that reviewers for these journals would want a full analysis of the larger topic, rather than the very limited and specific point of the paper.

So do I go with an online journal with rapid turn-around but less visibility for my target audience? Or do I just accept the long delays of the top Mesoamerican journals? Or try a general anthropology journal and hope for the best (in terms of both reviews and turn-around time)? Or cut the thing down for Mexicon (its really pretty lean right now)?

I’ve been thinking about rationality lately. What is rationality? Why do people behave rationally in some circumstances but not others? When is it rational to cooperate? When and why do people cooperate with one another? These, of course, are questions at the center of a very active and prolific research effort today that cuts across economics, evolution, anthropology, psychology, and even archaeology. But that’s not directly what I want to talk about; I am puzzled by the citation differences between two authors who published useful frameworks for thinking about some of these things.

In 1980 economic historian Peter Temin published a paper called “Modes of Behavior” (Temin 1980). He identified three of these modes: instrumental behavior; customary behavior; and command behavior. He then defined three institutional structures: hierarchy; market; and community. Temin presented a 3 x 3 matrix to show that some combinations are stable (e.g., customary behavior in community settings; or instrumental behavior in markets), and other combinations produce pressures for institutional change (e.g., command behavior in markets favors institutional change from markets to hierarchy). I have found this a useful way to think about markets, rationality (“instrumental” behavior), community, and the like.

Ten years later, anthropologist Alan Fiske published a book and an article on “elementary forms of sociality” (Fiske 1991, 1992). He now calls this realm “relational models theory” (see his website, http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/fiske/). Fiske identifies four types of sociality: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing. He argues that all human social interactions can be analyzed in terms of these four elementary models. This is also a useful way to think about human behavior, rationality, etc.

To me, these two schemes are quite similar. Fiske’s is more nuanced in terms of cross-cultural variation in behavior, while Temin’s has a stronger economic and institutional emphasis, but both serve to put rational behavior in its place. That is, some behavior is based on rational calculation but other behavior is not; and some settings encourage or require rational behavior, while other settings do not. The next time you hear a simplistic economic argument about analyzing all behavior as rationally motivated, or a simplistic culturalist argument about the worthlessness of rational choice models, take a look at Temin and/or Fiske.

Now for the strange citation patterns. According to Google Scholar, Fiske’s book has been cited 581 times and his article 726 times. But Temin’s paper has been cited only 7 times (twice by Temin himself in his papers on the Roman economy). What’s going on here? The two schemes are parallel, and one would think that scholars citing one would cite the other. But it seems that disciplinary citation patterns have prevented this. Most economists, particularly in 1980, probably did not want to hear Temin’s argument. They were wedded to the narrow rationality model, and he just complicated things with non-rational behavior and institutions. Fiske’s work, on the other hand, was picked up by cognitive psychology and psychological anthropology, and there is now a substantial body of work that has grown out of his original insight (see his website). Writers on rationality and cooperation today typically cite Fiske but not Temin (Bowles 1998; Henrich and al. 2005).

So what are the lessons here? For one thing, it matters where you publish a paper. Also, disciplines differ in their citation patterns. With Google scholar today, though, it is harder to justify limiting one’s citations to a narrow realm. So, WHY AREN’T ARCHAEOLOGISTS CITING THESE PAPERS? Have we managed to figure out ancient rationality, cooperation and such on our own, so that we don’t need to cite works like this? (sarcastic remark deleted here). I don’t think so.

Fiske, Alan P.
1991    Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations: Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, Market Pricing. The Free Press, New York.

1992    The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality: Framework for a Unified Theory of Social Relations. Psychological Review 99:689-723.

Temin, Peter
1980    Modes of Behavior. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 1:175-195.

Bowles, Samuel
1998    Endogenous Preferences: The Cultural Consequences of Markets and Other Economic Institutions. Journal of Economic Literature 36:75-111.

Henrich, Joseph and et al.
2005    “Economic Man” in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28:795-855.

Yesterday I shipped off the manuscript for an edited volume, The Comparative Archaeology of Complex Societies, to Cambridge University Press. This is from a conference I hosted a couple of years ago at the Amerind Foundation and ASU that explored methods and results of comparative analysis of ancient states and chiefdoms. The volume as a whole emphasizes a scientific approach to the past, and an explicit and rigorous approach to comparison. Actually, I should say “approachES to comparison,” since one of our points is that there are a variety of valid comparative methods and approaches to archaeological data, from large-N statistical studies to small-N heavily contextualized comparisons. One method that we do NOT consider a rigorous comparative method is taking a bunch of case studies, by different authors, and throwing them into an edited volume. In this book, there are two types of chapters: most are comparative studies; some are general papers about comparison.

The conference participants came up with a “manifesto” on comparative archaeology, and this is included as chapter 1 of the book. I talked about this in a previous post;  you can see the document here.

I think this may be the only edited volume I have edited (I’ve done three or four), where I have NOT said to my wife, “Remind me never to do this again!” This was an easier task than most, perhaps because there are fewer authors, and authors who are responsive and responsible. I take a dim view of most edited volumes in archaeology these days, but this CAN be a very good form of publication.

Here is the contents of the new book:

The Comparative Archaeology of Complex Societies
edited by Michael E. Smith
Cambridge University Press (in press).