Megalith Videos (Part 1)

The first two videos from our show last Saturday (March 7th, 2009, at the McGill Anthrograd Conference) are up so as I promised, here they are! The first video is us covering Whipping Post by the Allman Brothers, and the second video is us doing an acoustic cover of Simple Man by Lynyrd Skynyrd. I'll post more Megalith videos when they are ready.





Also, the sound quality isn't the greatest, though it is MUCH better than the videos we had last year, so if your going to watch the videos use some good speakers or some headphones for the best sound!

Archaeodigms Part 1: Reiterating the Point

This past weekend (March 6th and 7th, 2009) was the first (and hopefully annual) McGill Anthrograd conference. At this conference many Graduate, PhD, and even some Undergrad students presented papers on their research in several sessions, which were chaired by McGill University Anthropology Faculty members. Overall I think the conference went extremely well, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I commend the Graduate students who put so much work into organizing it. Now before I get into what the conference got me thinking about and where I'm going with this whole 'Archaeodigms' thing, I want to also tell you that the McGill Archaeology lab band - Megalith - in which I play the bass (plus some vocals and guitar on select songs), played their second ever show to close the conference. We got the whole show on a video camera and will be posting a few of the songs on youtube, so when they are ready I will definitely post them here.

Ok, so back to the conference. One theme I noticed was a general disconnect between Anthropologists and Archaeologists. I don't want to get too much into this but I just want to say that this is kind of problematic. Archaeology is considered to be a branch of Anthropology here in North America, but too often us Archaeologists seem to to get relegated to a 'little naive brother' status within North American Anthropology on the whole, and our work seems to get generally ignored by most Anthropologists. Ok, sure, maybe they don't find it interesting, but it's our approach that they should be taking into account, such as something as simple as time depth, which I find is sometimes lacking in Anthropological studies, and can add whole new perspectives. To be a little bit 'Hodder-ish', and also a little over-simplistic, I feel like the relationship between Anthropology and Archaeology should be this:

Anthropology <----> Archaeology

instead of what it seems to be currently:

Anthropology ------> Archaeology

Anyway, let me know what you think of this, I'm not sure how clear I've made it, but maybe that's because it's still kind of fuzzy in my head.

Now this got me thinking about theory in general, and particularly where we stand theoretically as Archaeologists today. Does the one-way relationship between Anthropology and Archaeology exist because we are not theoretically sound enough yet to truly contribute and are still actually the little brother? Are we still playing 'theoretical catch-up'? Have we truly reached a theoretical middle ground between processualism and post-processualism? or are we still in a polemic debate between the two? To paraphrase one of my Professors here at McGill, maybe this theoretical diversity is what we need, because that way our odds of actually being right may be higher, but the answers to these questions are not clear to me yet. I want to try and hopefully answer some of these questions (clearly with your help) in something I'm going to call the 'Archaeodigms' series. This has also been inspired by my reading the Golden Marshalltown article by Flannery a little while ago and the fact that I'm taking a course entitled "The History of Archaeological Thought" right now, which is awesome by the way. We've gotten to post-processualism and I'm asking myself "Has there been a Marshalltown-esque article discussing the pitfalls and/or discontent with post-processualism by an actual post-processualist?"...maybe we will find out.

So hopefully through this five part series we will try to find out what constitutes a theoretical middle ground (and, feel free to challenge me, but I feel that a middle ground is the best place to be), and if this middle-ground is being applied today. In each part of this series I want to discuss the pros and cons of the three major theoretical and methodological paradigms in Archaeology (Culture History, Processualism, and Post-processualism). I also want your contribution to these pros/cons lists, so please comment after the posts! I hope that this way we can try to integrate the positives of all the paradigms and see what we get, and see if recent work has gotten to our formulated middle-ground theory, which will be what the fifth and final post will hopefully do!

Now I don't want this just to be me going through what I think of the paradigms, I want your contributions too, so I will reiterate what I said in the previous paragraph, post your comments/questions/problems/contributions after each post of the series! I want it to be almost like a forum for Archaeological theory....well that's the idea anyway.

I guess that's all for for now, stay tuned for 'Archaeodigms Part 2: Culture History' as well as Megalith videos!

References in this Post:

Ian Hodder. 1991 (1986). Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology 2nd Ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. (Ch 1, pp.1-18).

Kent V. Flannery. 1982. The Golden Marshalltown: A Parable for the Archeology of the 1980s. American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 84, No. 2, pp. 265-278.

Chimp Filler

Just a quick filler post to 'fill' the 'void' (and I'm sure 'void' is more than a significant overstatement) between real posts. I've got a new one in the works, but because of time constraints (ie. I have a midterm tomorrow that I really should studying for...right now) it probably won't be up until Wednesday.
I would like to direct you all to yet another interesting BBC article, this one on a particularly ornery chimp (and rightfully so, if I were a chimp, living in the Stockholm zoo would not be my ideal living situation) appears to be planning attacks on zoo visitors by hoarding piles of stones early in the morning before the zoo opening, and then throwing said stones at the visitors once they arrive. Anyway, the idea of planning for future emotional states in chimps is pretty interesting, but I don't really have the time now to get into it, so I guess that will have to be left to another post at a later date. That's all for now, enjoy!

The Golden Marshalltown, Thesis news, and more Grad School updates

I'm going to start today's post by directing you to an article that I have recently read in my History of Archaeological Thought class, which I can simply describe as awesome. It's an older article (published in 1982) but I feel like the message definitely still rings true today and we need to continually keep what is brought up in this article in mind when pursuing our respective Archaeological careers. The message (I think, anyway) that we can take away from it today is that we need to remember that we are both Archaeologists and Anthropologists (in the sense that our goal is to interpret the behaviour of past humans), and that even though we all have our specialties within the field, the only way we can come up with any sort of reasonable interpretation or anything remotely close to a "complete picture"(in quotations because I know we will never have a complete picture of prehistory) is by integrating and taking into consideration data and theory from all of the different sub-disciplines and theoretical approaches. Anyway, read the article, it's a nice and easy one that is very well written. The article is "The Golden Marshalltown: A Parable for the Archeology of the 1980s" by Kent Flannery....who is awesome....by the way.

I've got two other tidbits of cool information for this post. The first is that I've pretty much completed my simulation from my undergraduate Honours Thesis (minus a few small kinks to work out, but I'm nearly there!). And it's pretty sweet, if I do say so myself. I'm modelling the coastal route migration hypothesis for the peopling of the Americas (in NetLogo) to look at what kind of archaeological record is left under different circumstances. Essentially there are 4 scenarios I've created where the environment is either uniform or modeled (with an extremely rich coastal strip and the rest being a randomized environment) and agents who either move randomly or by a randomized form of patch choice modeling (whereby agents stay on their patch until its nearly depleted before moving to a "better" patch). The goal of this model is to look at which circumstances affect the distribution of theoretical archaeological sites in an above sea level to below sea level comparison (as much of the theorized coastal route is now under water as the sea level has risen since the proposed "migration"). Anyway I don't want to get too much more into it in this post because I don't want to bore you all, but if you've got any questions or comments just comment on this post or shoot me an email. Also, I believe the idea is to possibly turn my simulation into a web applet that will be posted on the McGill Computational Archaeology lab website for people to play with at their own free will. So I'll post the link to the website and the web applet if and when this happens!

The second bit of info is that I found out monday that I've been accepted to the Anthropology PhD (Archaeology) program at the University of New Mexico to do my Masters and PhD work. This is pretty damn cool. Another big thank you to my reference letter writers. It's looks like I'm going to have a big decision to make, all the programs look fantastic!

References in this Post:

Kent V. Flannery. 1982. The Golden Marshalltown: A Parable for the Archeology of the 1980s. American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 84, No. 2, pp. 265-278.

To all you foot lovers out there....

So today I'm just going to give you the link to yet another BBC news article. And don't just brush it off after reading the title of this post, it's not about foot fetishes or anything....but it is about feet...Homo Erectus feet!!! It discusses some recently excavated Homo Erectus footprints from northern Kenya, dated to about 1.5 mya. It appears that after analysis of these footprints they've determined that Homo Erectus had the same walking pattern as modern Humans today (ie. land heavy on the heel, roll through to the toe, repeat). Pretty cool. Anyway, read the article for a more detailed explanation.

Grad School Update

Sorry for the total lack of true posts lately, a new full fledged one will come in the near future, I promise. This post is really just to update you all on new grad school news. This new news being that I've been admitted to the PhD Anthropology (focus on Archaeology) program at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Damn. That's some good news I definitely wasn't expecting! Those of you who wrote me reference letters, they must have been pretty awesome, so thanks again!

FOXP2!!!

No time for a real post, I have a midterm on the Socioeconomic applications of GIS in one hour. Basically I just want you all to read this article from the BBC discussing the preliminary results of the newly sequenced Neanderthal genome, and please focus on what the anthropologists are saying, not so much the reporter. The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology is......awesome.

I also like the fact that Prof. Paabo from the Max Planck Institute has put the the kibosh on cloning a Neanderthal from this sequence, for the time being anyway. Argue with me if you will, but cloning a Neanderthal would be...a bad idea to say the least...not to mention ethically problematic.