Behavioral Modernity

Just a couple of things I'd like to emphasize from last couple of days' discussion. The term behavioral modernity is important because it transparently states that the peoples alive during the times were behaving in ways very similar to how contemporary humans do.  While most humans alive today aren't making their livings through hunting and gathering, humans today do get a lot of resources out of their environment, live in spatially structured settlements, and use symbols to communicate about lots of things, including social information.  This includes communicating senses of identity--who am I, who do I identify with and who do I consider different from me. The specific answers to those questions will differ greatly between you and an Upper Paleolithic person, but you're asking the same questions.

Another quick point. Most of my illustrations come from the European Upper Paleolithic, but most of the developments associated with Behavioral Modernity appeared in Africa first, sometimes tens of thousands of years earlier.  As we'll get into on Monday, I think it's because the demographic context of humans first shifted in Africa, requiring some of the changes we've been talking about.

Anthropology and Kinship

As discussed briefly today, anthropology has long focused on kinship as it's been a central organizing principle for most societies.  Even our own, with its many, overlapping institutions and identities, kinship ties remain some of the strongest, most meaningful and longest lasting (I still talk to my parents, but most friends from high school I now only interact with through Facebook).

On Friday, we'll continue with the description of diagramming relationships, particularly with what criteria we use to organize and classify kin. Then, with a broad brush, we'll look at the kinds of social groups and networks that conceptions of kinship create.  Kinship has been and remains one of the most important ways that humans activate and actualize social cooperation.

For all of you kinship nerds out there (and I know there were some), I just stumbled across this site, which seems to provide a freeware program to depict and model kinship groups.

Archaeological Inference Papers

All in all, I was pleased with the quality of the papers the class submitted yesterday.  While your well-done papers shows that many of you already "get" this, I just want to reiterate how central inference is to the archaeological process. As noted in the Torso and Oblong blog

For archaeological theory, one of the most important processes is the transformation of a living society into the remains that archaeologists encounter. Archaeologists must theoretically account for this in any inference that reconstructs some ancient behavior based on the static material remains of the present. Like other social scientists, archaeologists are interested in describing, understanding and sometimes explaining what human beings do. Like other social scientists, they seek to document the dynamic interplay of groups and individuals within their societal context.

Unluckily for archaeologists, they cannot actually observe people do what they do; even if that is what they want to study. By the very nature of the discipline, archaeologists are often left without living informants to tell them anything about how their particular society worked. Luckily for archaeologists, people have almost always lived in a sea of material culture. Projectile points, pots, wheels, masks, houses, temples, malls and iPads are just some of the almost infinite variety of material culture that makes human life as we know it possible. So, it is material culture that provides us our window onto the past dynamics of an ancient society--much of it remains after its makers and users are dead.

The papers you just handed in were your first forays into that intellectual process. Overall, nice job.

Archaeology vs. "American Digger"

This topic would have been more appropriate a few weeks ago when we were discussing archaeological method and theory, but beggars can't be choosers.  In a few weeks, the paragon of educational and intellectual television, Spike TV, will be broadcasting their new show, American Digger.   In this show, a former professional wrestler will

scour target-rich areas, such as battlefields and historic sites, in hopes of striking it rich by unearthing and selling rare pieces of American history. In the US, there are millions of historical relics buried in backyards just waiting to be discovered and turned into profit [Spike TV press release]

I hope all of the students in the Archaeology and Prehistory class can already see what's wrong with  this show just in that short description.  Such a show runs counter to most of the deeply held ethical principles of archaeology.  As discussed in class, at its core, archaeology is about learning more about the pasts of specific peoples as well as our collective humanity.  The archaeological record is an irreplaceable resource to do that. And, the archaeological record is more than just a collection of artifacts. It's a record of spatial relationships among features and artifacts that give us insight into the social organization of past peoples.

Looting artifacts to make a quick buck robs descendant communities and all of us of our past.

Human Ancestries: The Place of Neandertals and Denisovans

Today's lecture covered an important and newly developing picture of human history. As noted, humans seem to have always interbred with neighboring groups and there never seem to have been distinct biological "races" as they have been understood in the last couple centuries of American history. For any of those interested, here's a couple of blog posts that influenced my coverage in class today (Living Anthropologically's Admixture All the Way Down and Torso and Oblong's Talking About Ancient and Modern Peoples).

On a related note, since we're talking about breeding between different populations, I wanted to remind you what anthropologists believe that Neandertals looked like.  Not like an ape or other kind of bestial monstrosity, but a lot like you and me. 

Overlapping Economies

Just a quick note that I wanted to add to class lecture.  Today, I tried to dissect the concept of an economic system by explicitly teasing apart allocation, production, distribution (and consumption..though I didn't mention it).  Dissecting even further, I separated types of distribution--specifically looking at varieties of reciprocity.

In an actual society, most or all of these aspects of economies overlap.  For instance, while the US economy is dominated by market exchange and a capitalist mode of production, we all also participate in household (sort of like kin-ordered) modes of production and in a variety of reciprocal exchanges.

Societies like the Ju/'hoansi simply are much more dominated by communal modes of production and reciprocal economies.

Rethinking the Tiv

I keep coming back to thinking about Ant 101's discussion of "Learning from the Tiv." Here's some random thoughts that have popped into my head over the weekend.

I think another way to think of Hornborg's argument is to conceive of local subsistence resources as a kind of social actor in a local community.  We interact with other social beings in variable, non-universal ways.  In other words, we don't treat all other humans in our lives in the same ways. When humans enter into social relationships with other humans, a myriad of specific rights, obligations and expectations emerge.  You have to act toward your siblings differently than toward your parents or friends or coworkers.

Hornborg's suggestion for special-purpose, local money would force communities to have a specific social relationship with essential community resources and treat them accordingly.  Groups would engage in different social relationships with the land than they would with commodities produced for distribution on the global economy.  Ipads would have to be distributed and importantly, consumed, differently than subsistence resources from folks' own backyards.
I don't know if this helps any of your thinking, but it does for me.

"Learning from the Tiv" and the "Myth of Barter"

In anthropology 101 today we discussed Alf Hornborg's "Learning from the Tiv." A big part of that paper is a critique of the idea of general purpose money. General purpose money allows anything to be convertible to anything else, which according to Hornborg conceals unequal exchanges.

During discussion, the idea of money being an efficient solution to the inefficiencies of barter came up. This is often described as the problem of the "double coincidence of wants"--if I've got extra onions and want tomatoes, you've got to want onions and have tomatoes.

I've got fish, you got grain?

While we will return to this idea on Monday, I wanted to point interested readers to a post about one part of David Graeber's book Debt: The First 5,000 years. In it, he describes the "Myth of Barter." Here's a link to a brief blog post about the idea,which includes link to a longer post where the ideas are explored further.

Beginnings

This blog will serve as a platform for discussing anthropology related happenings at SUNY-Orange County Community College.  During 2012, it will likely focus on the upcoming summer archaeological field project in the Warwick area.