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.
Of a field archaeologist in Qatar:
In the desert, sitting against a ruined wall, wind ripping through my context sheets, salty sand on my lips, skinned knuckles and bruised knees, I feel like myself again…I’m sure the sand and wind and sun will wear me down soon enough, but for now I’m relishing being back in the field, scratching away at the dirt and rocks to find meaning in the past.
Here’s some sobering context from an archaeologist:
If you look broadly at human history, failure is the norm. What’s amazing is when things last.
That observation was made in reference to the Cahokia, a little known and little appreciated pre-Columbian empire that gets the full National Geographic treatment in its current issue.
Yesterday, Justin Gillis published an excellent front page NYT article on climate change and sea level rise. Of course, the tone wasn’t catastrophic enough for this guy, but he’s never happy unless the story pummels the reader into “hell and high water” submission.
Today, Gillis blogs on an interesting side note to his main piece:
Archaeological discoveries that shed light on ancient sea level are prized finds for the experts in this field. One of the most compelling studies of recent years was carried out by an Australian scientist named Kurt Lambeck, who worked with colleagues in Italy. They focused on ancient fish tanks built at the edge of the Mediterranean by the Romans over the 300 years when their civilization was at its height, ending in the second century A.D.
These tanks were sometimes decorative, but mostly they were used as storage pens to keep fish fresh for the lavish banquets that wealthy Romans held in their seaside villas. The tanks, described in some detail by Roman historians, have long fired the imaginations of classicists, since they represent Roman civilization at its decadent height. The tanks made an appearance in the popular Robert Harris novel “Pompeii,” for instance.
The tanks were usually carved into rock at the edge of the shore and constructed in such a way that some of their features bore precise relationships to sea level at the time. For instance, walls and sluice gates had to be built to let water into the tanks while keeping fish from escaping at high tide. A few years ago, Dr. Lambeck, of the Australian National University, and his team realized that these features could be used to arrive at an estimate of sea level in the time of the Romans.
Both pieces by Gillis are well worth reading.
Given that there are no indigenous peoples in the UK, (the kind that exist in Australia and the U.S.), this is a bit strange:
Severe restrictions on scientists’ freedom to study bones and skulls from ancient graves are putting archaeological research in Britain at risk, according to experts.
The growing dispute relates to controversial legislation introduced by the Ministry of Justice in 2008, which decreed that all human remains found during digs in Britain must be reburied within two years.
As this special section of stories in the current issue of Science shows, disputes over ancient graves has riven American archaeology over the past two decades. But at least we know these disputes stem from legitimate grievances. In the British case, it appears that nobody is contesting archaeological excavations of ancient remains. Rather, it’s an antiquated 19th century law that is messing with modern-day archaeology in Britain.
UPDATE: Charlie Petit at Science Journalism Tracker has a very complimentary overview of the special package discussed below.
Twenty years ago, landmark legislation passed by the U.S. Congress revolutionized the field of archaeology in America. That much everyone can agree on.
But some anthropologists insist that the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) has allowed religion to trump science. Other anthropologists argue just as strongly that
Today, Science magazine publishes a special section that examines NAGPRA’s impact to archaeology. The effects are considerable–for better and worse.
I’m one of the three contributors to the special section. As I was reporting the various stories, I felt as if I was navigating an intellectual and ethical minefield. The issues raised in the stories are as complex as they get when a branch of science must be reconciled with an ugly historical legacy. Things get even more complicated when you consider that some of the profession’s practices–both in the lab and the field–are still considered to be offensive to an entire culture.
I’m going to talk more about this in a follow-up post over the weekend. Meanwhile, go and have a look at Science’s website. The stories are available free of charge (which is unusual for Science. You just have to register). We’re hoping to get a discussion going at the site, so feel free to drop a comment over there.
I’ll provide one excerpt from an interview I did with Steve Lekson, a leading southwestern archaeologist. Lekson, who is the anthropology curator at the University of Colorado’s Museum of Natural History, in Boulder, has spent the last six years repatriating hundreds of human remains and sacred objects. In a recent essay, Lekson talks candidly about how the experience triggered a sort of professional existential crisis. When we met a few months ago in Boulder, I asked him to elaborate:
The worst part, personally, was participating in reburials. The tribes asked us to do that. There was one particularly large reburial, where we arranged to get the money and facilitate what was going to happen. The tribes are legally in the driver’s seat at that point, but we agreed to help out. There were many sets of human remains, many pots. So we needed a backhoe, … chemical toilets, travel arrangements, this was a major logistical operation. The Indians [representing a Pueblo tribe] didn’t want to handle the remains, so the white guys did that. So I’m putting all these dead people down in the ground. And at the end of it, there’s a huge hole 60 to 70 feet long and 8 feet deep, and 10 feet wide, with its floor completely covered with human remains—skeletons. It looked like something out of World War I. Lines and lines of skeletons. And I’m standing next to the Pueblo representatives. I don’t know whether I should apologize or what. Apologizing wouldn’t even begin to cover it. It’s one thing when they’re in a box on shelves. It’s another when they’re looking up at you.
There’s been a fair amount of fretting over science journalism lately. It’s taken the form of earnest criticism and parody. (For an arch rejoinder to the latter, see this post by one of the science reporters at The Economist.) Even Jay Rosen, whose meta mind scans of mainstream media tend to focus on political journalism, weighs in.
There’s not much I can add to the critiques, except to note that they seem to treat science journalism as a monolith. When in fact, there’s the spot newspaper or web story; there’s the deeply reported and nuanced pieces you see in Science and Nature; the explanatory, (sometimes narrative-driven) features in the likes of Discover, Scientific American, New Scientist, Wired, etc.
From my view, it appears that newspaper reporters receive most of the barbs. Yet critics don’t really make the distinction when raking science journalism over the coals. It’s as if a particular NYT or Guardian piece singled out for some egregious failing represents all science journalism: Did you see that terrible false-balance story today? Yet another reminder that science journalists suck.
Science journalists have been tied en masse to the whipping post before. In fact, I’ve been a little surprised that Dorothy Nelkin and her seminal book Selling Science: How the Press Covers Science and Technology, have not been mentioned in any of these current discussions. Here’s a 1988 review of the book that distills Nelkin’s take on science journalism:
A central theme of Dorothy Nelkin’s Selling Science: How the Press Covers Science and Technology is that science journalists all too frequently perpetuate “this idealization of science as an ultimate authority.”
In general, she argues that too many stories contain too much hype and not enough of the context in which the scientfic advances take place. Rarely do science journalists look behind the immediate story, she says, and they often blindly accept theories and findings that are controversial or open to alternative explanations. As a result, science and scientists have largely escaped the critical reporting that has been directed at virtually every other profession.
The reviewer, who is now the news editor at Science magazine, later notes that Nelkin is unfairly indicting all of science journalism based on a narrow selection of stories, which is the same problem I have with the current crop of critics.
At any rate, I wonder what people make of Nelkin’s critique today. (It predates the uprising against the he-said, she-said type of story that is a whole other ball of wax.) I wonder what folks make of how scientists are treated by the press today, and whether other parts of Nelkin’s critique holds up in 2010.
On a related note, I really wanted to blog in full on this excellent post by Heather Pringle at Archaeology magazine. But I’m running out of time today. Here’s an abbreviated take: I read the paper she refers to and last week, an archaeologist friend alerted me to this story about it.
There is much to say about both the journal paper and this particular news story, but for now, I’d encourage those interested in the debate over science journalism to read Heather’s post and think about 1) how the groupthink in southwestern archaeology was wrong for a long time about an emotionally charged issue (and some of that groupthink still persists), and 2) how some archaeologists tend to interpret their findings through a prism of the age they live in.
So, in an attempt to come full circle, let me ask: in the story I refer to just above, who is responsible for the sensationalist angle and tone: the scientist or the journalist?
I’m in an archaeological state of mind.
This week I will be traveling and working on some new assignments. So blogging will be light–and probably archaeologically related. On that note, I recently came across this neat story that talks about the use of computer modeling in archaeology, and the similar aims and challenges it shares with climate modeling:
Archaeologists can treat the past as a proving ground for calibrating their models. This allows them to refine a model and improve its accuracy before it is applied to contemporary situations by soil and agricultural scientists. “If we can predict the past really well, then that gives us a good chance of predicting the future,” said Barton.
This is similar to the way climate modelers calibrate their models with ancient climate data gathered from sources like tree rings, pollen and ice cores. Reenacting the past and comparing the outcome to what actually happened is one effective way to test a model. Large differences between what the model says and what past evidence says can expose weaknesses in the model.
Some of the most fascinating (and on-going) archaeological modeling is part of the Village Ecodynamics Project, which attempts to sort out the social and ecological factors that led to the depopulation across a huge swath of the American Southwest in the 12th century. The Anasazi cultural collapse is of enduring fascination to scientists and the general public. But I’ve come to suspect that there are connecting dots to a larger story that doesn’t get nearly as much attention, perhaps because the ruins aren’t as visually spectacular or well-preserved.
The issue of human-manufactured biodiversity is controversial. After all, if humans are overrunning nature and degrading the vital ecosystem services that we depend on, isn’t it rather beside the point if we also inadvertently boost biodiversity on some landscapes?
I don’t think so. More environmentalists need to realize that the boundaries between pristine nature and civilization grow fuzzier by the day. The latest example is a new, intriguing study on pre-Columbian agriculture in the Amazon, published last week in PNAS.
This is the kind of stuff that makes my geeky heart flutter: interdisciplinary research on how ancient farmers engineered their environment in a part of the world that most people today consider primordial nature. Additionally, these findings hold important contemporary ecological lessons, as the study’s abstract explains:
The profound alteration of ecosystem functioning in these landscapes coconstructed by humans and nature has important implications for understanding Amazonian history and biodiversity. Furthermore, these landscapes show how sustainability of food-production systems can be enhanced by engineering into them fallows that maintain ecosystem services and biodiversity. Like anthropogenic dark earths in forested Amazonia, these self-organizing ecosystems illustrate the ecological complexity of the legacy of pre-Columbian land use.
In a nice write-up of the study, New Scientist interviews Doyle McKey, the lead researcher, who says:
Human actions cannot always be characterised as bad for biodiversity. Some might be good.
That’s one of those inconvenient truths that purists who subscribe to the human/nature dualism don’t like to hear. But science has come a long way since the publication of George Perkin Marsh’s seminal text. The increasing collaboration between archaeologists and ecologists is revealing an ancient world that discomfits doctrinaire environmentalists. (In the American Southwest, I’ve written about one such collaboration here.)
Moreover, as the New Scientist article puts it:
The new study is bound to further fuel the debate over whether most of the Amazon rainforest and the associated savannahs are pristine ecosystem. “To my mind, the debate has been too black-and-white,” says McKey. “Nature and culture are interacting to produce interesting things, and maybe that is the way this debate should go.”
Seems like good advice to me.
