Collide-a-scape

An archaeologist is peeved about the “craze over the supposed Maya prophecy of the end of the world in 2012,” which he says “is based on bogus, commercialized, fake claims.” Well, blow me down, are there any rational-minded people who would seriously entertain such a prophesy even if it came straight from a Carlos Castaneda book? Wait a second, those were Yaqui Indians and Castaneda was a best-selling fake.

Never mind.

So all this attention lavished on the Maya is grating on archaeologist Michael Smith, in part because the Mesoamerican culture he’s studied gets no respect:

As an Aztec specialist, this whole Maya 2012 nonsense really bugs me. The Maya always get all the publicity, and the Aztecs get very little. The Maya are always on the History Channel or in National Geographic Magazine. Maya, Maya, Maya! We Aztec specialists often get an inferiority complex with respect to the Maya.

The Aztecs actually DID predict the end of the world, but who gets all the credit for ancient prophecies for doom and destruction: the Maya, who didn’t even make such prophecies.

I know! Not fair. The Maya get to be a poster child for eco-collapse and the stars of a brutish, bloodthirsty movie. What are the Aztecs known for? Montezuma’s revenge.

And they have a message:

Researchers say they have found new evidence of prolonged drought in parts of the West, suggesting megadroughts are not the rarity Westerners would like them to be.

Of course, there is already ample evidence for Westerners not to think this, but c’mon, who remembers what they had for dinner on Tuesday, much less how much it rained 800 years ago?

Then there’s all this climate changey stuff that people keep bringing into the picture, and it’s just…well…I bet some of my buddies out West can feel the hard reckoning in their desert-bleached bones.

There is an upside, though: Archaeologists in 3100 AD are gonna be feasting on the ruins out there. And a thousand years from today, I bet they’ll also be scratching their heads over the same thing we wonder now about the Anasazi and Hohokam: WTF were these people thinking?

I’m just catching up with this story from the Salt Lake Tribune:

During [Utah] Gov. Gary Herbert’s visit to Blanding, one of the poorest regions of the state, residents pleaded with him to keep open the Edge of the Cedars Museum State Park.

The ancestral Puebloan site and official archaeological repository houses one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Pueblo, Navajo and Ute artifacts. It also is one of five state parks recommended for closure by legislative auditors because of budget concerns.

This would be tragic for archaeology. I doubt Herbert sees it that way.

But because I’ve been to Blanding and this museum, I thought I’d share an anecdote. First, let me return to the Salt Lake Tribune article, specifically the lede:

Residents in the vast southeastern Utah outback that once teemed with pre-Columbian Americans worry the heritage and rich culture of their homeland will be stolen twice: once by black-market American Indian-relic peddlers, and then by the state of Utah.

Heh. My Utah readers have an inkling of what’s coming.

So I was still living in Colorado in the summer of 2009 when news broke of a splashy federal sting operation that collared 24 archaeology looters. Sixteen of them were Blanding residents.

I couldn’t get there fast enough. Here’s the story I ended up writing for Science and an interview I did with an archaeologist who lives in Blanding. You can catch up with those pieces later. Meanwhile, stay with me for a minute.

I got to Blanding a few weeks after the big bust, and just after the town doctor, one of the arrested suspects, killed himself. The mood was tense and angry. The first thing I did when I drove into town was stop off at the Visitor’s Center and Pioneer Museum.  An elderly white-haired man stepped out from behind a desk after I walked in. With a frozen smile and in a croaking voice he asked, “What’s your destination?” It was not an unusual question. Blanding is close to many of southern Utah’s red-rock scenic gems, like Arches National Park.

So I exchanged small talk with the friendly old man. His name was Harold Lyman. But he got tight-lipped when I started asking about the arrests. This seemed understandable, given the recent tragic turn of events.

Later on, I learned that lyman was a pillar in the community. For 50 years he’d been a tireless promoter of southern Utah’s unique tourist attractions. It was Lyman who recognized the economic value of Blanding’s proximity to the region’s recreational pursuits. He had helped re-brand Blanding as the “Base Camp to Adventure.” Lyman also had helped create Trail of the Ancients, a national scenic byway in southeastern Utah that rolls past ancient Pueblo Indian ruins. And he had a hand in establishing Edge of the Cedars Museum State Park.

On May 15, 2009, in recognition of these achievements, Lyman was inducted into the Utah Tourism Hall of Fame. Three weeks later, 150 FBI agents descended on Blanding. As national media stories all noted, the 78 year-old Lyman was among 16 Blanding residents arrested for looting archaeological treasures from American Indian burial sites.

When I visited Edge of the Cedars Museum during my trip, I learned that a good many artifacts housed there were once the ill-gotten booty of Blanding residents, which had been recovered during another notorious federal raid in 1986. In fact, the town’s grave digging history goes back many decades. As Craig Childs wrote in this High Country News article, “pothunting has been a pastime for generations” in Blanding. He described the tradition:

Sunday picnics included shovels. Kids rifled through spoil piles for beads or pretty potsherds, while the older ones dug craters into the red soil. For some it was a competition to see who could find the most beautiful or the most curious object. A painted 11th century olla in perfect condition was worth monumental bragging rights in town. Some sold the artifacts, and some kept them, treasuring them as mementos.

I hope the Edge of the Cedars Museum doesn’t close. As for the Blanding townfolk who are reportedly worried about losing this Native American heritage, well, they’ve always had a special connection to it.

What does the theory of punctuated equilibrium have to do with modern-day American politics? Dan Vergano of USA Today has an intriguing piece that makes the connection:

In the 1990′s, amid widespread complaints of “gridlock” in Washington, the notion of political punctuated equilibrium “was born from dissatisfaction with the idea of everything being fixed and unchanging in politics,” [University of Texas political scientist Bryan] Jones says. Political scientists who looked at our institutions broadly saw big changes coming relatively slowly from public pressure, which led to politicians finally voting for new laws.

But in reality at the time, big changes were arriving suddenly, without big changes in voter sentiment, after long periods of well, equilibrium. A good example is the welfare reform of the mid-90′s, says political scientist B. Guy Peters of the University of Pittsburgh. “The laws and ideas behind them were put in place decades earlier with only small changes and then suddenly you had a big one,” Peters says. “That’s a punctuation.”

A more recent example is the food safety reforms of last year, Jones says. Food safety laws had dated back to the 1930′s without big changes. The basic idea is that things often continue in government with only incremental changes until something — an idea catching fire or a scandal, the comet impact of politics — suddenly makes big things happen. In food safety, decades of recalls had only resulted in small fixes to rules. But the food safety reform bill giving more power to the Food and Drug Administrationpassed the Senate last year by a 73-25 vote, even though it hadn’t been an issue until a salmonella scare the previous year shook things up.

Similar examples can be found in seminal environmental legislation, such as 1964′s Wilderness Act, of which was the culmination of decades of groundwork by an influential group of advocates, writers, and interest groups (such as The Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society).

One piece of legislation that has transformed the science of archaeology, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), also seemed to come out of nowhere in 1990. But it sprang from a long-festering history and a series of smaller events in the early to mid-1970s.

With respect to climate change, the du jour environmental issue of the day, I suspect that something similarly momentous will happen in the near future, despite the increasingly polarized state of U.S. politics.

Five years ago this September I was fortunate to spend a week with a team of archaeologists who were surveying remote stretches of Utah’s Desolation Canyon. Half the crew set off on the Green River and the other half on horseback, working their way down the Tavaputs Plateau. (I’ll get back to those horse guys in another post–quite a story in of itself.) I was part of the river flotilla. Here’s me at the helm of one raft, pretending to be an experienced river runner. (The guy in the middle did much of the rowing.)

Kevin Jones, Utah’s state archaeologist until last week, was on this trip. On Friday, I wrote about how he got fired and probably why it happened. I had already gotten to know Jones briefly while writing this story for Smithsonian magazine.  Over the years, I’ve had many instructive discussions with him about evolutionary archaeology and the prehistoric cultures of Utah, among other things. That week in Desolation canyon, Jones, who is a skilled musician, played a terrific mandolin at night around the campfire.

Here he is investigating a cliff ledge granary (a food stuff, where seeds and corn would be stored). We spent a lot of time scrambling up steep cliff sides in search of ancient granaries.

Check out that Smithsonian story if you want to learn about the people who put these granaries in such precarious places. Then read this story I wrote in Archaeology magazine, to learn about what I was doing in Desolation canyon and about the archaeologist (and former journalist) who has spearheaded  some amazing work in this part of Utah. His name is Jerry Spangler. I also tagged along with him for this piece in Backpacker magazine.

All these stories have been written since the mid 2000s (here’s another one in Science magazine, which includes quotes from both Jones and Spangler), and are set in the same spectacular region of Utah.

I mention these articles because they show just a part of what Jones has been involved in as Utah’s state archaeologist. For another side of Jones, check out this 2009 story in the Salt Lake Tribune, which I wrote about here in a profile of him.

During that week I spent in Desolation Canyon five years ago, Jones said something to me that I’ll never forget, while we were sharing the same raft one day on the river, talking about the creep of recent oil and gas development at the top of the Tavaputs plateau:

I think your grandkids ought to be able to take this same trip and see this beautiful scenery and prehistoric rock art, because to visit here and see it in this context is very enriching. It gives us a sense of our place in history.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of people like Jones (and Spangler), many of Utah’s archaeological treasures will be safeguarded for future generations.

If only Utah pols felt the same way about their state’s rich heritage.

I have a story that just went up on the Science magazine website. I’ll have much more to say about it on my site over the weekend.

UPDATE: I didn’t see this editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune until after my story was published in Science. Here’s an excerpt:

Puzzling out the real reason why the state archaeologist and his two assistants were fired Tuesday, supposedly for budget reasons alone, is also a matter of setting the event in context. But it doesn’t take a lot of digging to see that the lamentable action had very little to do with payroll and everything to do with payback.

Officially, the axing of state archaeologist Kevin Jones and assistants Derinna Kopp and Ronald Rood was nothing personal, just business, forced upon the Utah Department of Community and Culture by legislative spending cuts.

But, set in its full context, the firings strongly suggest that the archaeologists had become very unpopular with the powers that be in the Legislature, governor’s office, Utah Transit Authority and others in Utah’s inordinately powerful real estate development business.

You know I do. I’m also a fan of this blog, whose author is a young archaeologist committed to engaging with the public. Check out her latest project:

The Maeander River, now known as the Büyük Menderes, flows through southwestern Turkey, connecting the ancient cultures of Anatolia with the Aegean, its twists and turns documented by Strabo and Ovid.

This summer, a team of archaeologists, bloggers and photographers will explore this relatively under-researched region, providing a real-time, multimedia experience to connect the public to this ancient landscape. The project will highlight archaeology as an art and a science, conducted by individuals who seek to understand the past and present of an idyllic landscape.

Now please go read this and give it some thought. I’m going to lend my support.

What are the chances that someone could make a compelling movie about 30,000-year old rock art?

Incredibly, Werner Herzog pulls it off with Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which I saw this weekend on the big screen.

The archaeologists in the movie are terrific, and Herzog does a nice job answering all the basic questions a general audience are likely to have about this extraordinary cave in the south of France.

Like some reviewers, I found the musical score distracting at times. Also, the ending (which has nothing to do with the cave) is bizzare and factually incorrect.

But these are two minor qualms that don’t detract from the movie’s excellence. Here’s an excerpt from a recent interview that Herzog did with Archaeology magazine:

ARCHAEOLOGY: You’ve talked about how culture conditions the way we interpret images. Have we lost something between the modern day and the time of Chauvet?

HERZOG: No, not lost. We simply have changed. We are fundamentally changed and yet there is something about humanness, there is something about the modern human soul, which awakened during the time of Chauvet, or maybe a little bit earlier, we don’t know.

ARCHAEOLOGY: What is your definition of humanness?

HERZOG: I think as Jean-Michel Geneste says, it is an adaptation to the world, language, symbolic representations, including rituals like burial, like probably cannibalism, initiation rites. There is a point where we shift away from a purely material culture.

ARCHAEOLOGY: Do you feel the story that science is telling of Chauvet Cave is inadequate in some way?

HERZOG: No, its not inadequate, and I’m glad that it does not proclaim to have a full explanation. There is a younger generation of archaeologists at work who are very much into declaring the findings as they are and not over-interpreting them. Everything in the previous generations was declared ritualistic and part of ceremonies and the young generation says “maybe, but we do not know.” I find it a healthy attitude. It will certainly be the school of archaeology that will prevail in the foreseeable future.

Being in the moment.

If you’re looking for Sunday brain food on a taboo subject (it may go down better after brunch), head over to Gambler’s House for some smart, straight talk on cannibalism.

I’ve been meaning to note Teofilo’s recent meditations on the topic, and now he’s helpfully collected them all in one post. I loved his headline so much, too, that I had to steal it.