Monday, August 08, 2005

Sort of non-archaeology post

We'll actually have a couple of distinctly non-archy things to post this week as another rather auspicious occasion presents itself tomorrow, August 9. Stay tuned. . . .

But first, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame, has this post up as he looks back on four years of blogging:

TOMORROW will be InstaPundit's fourth bloggiversary. (Click here to see what I was writing about back when it started).

How has the blog changed? You may have a clearer sense of that than I do. I think it's become a bit less opinionated -- the older entries were mostly opinion; now I'm more likely to link to somone's actual reporting, or to an item of news without commenting on it much. I tend to express my longer opinion-oriented takes elsewhere, at TechCentralStation or GlennReynolds.com, rather than here at the blog.

I think that the tone has gotten milder. This was never a rantblog, but I decided over a year ago, during the election runup, to try to be extra-conscious about word choice, and to avoid name-calling as much as possible. Over-the-top hysterics on other blogs turn me off even when they're from someone I agree with, and I suspect many people feel that way. You can have strong opinions without strong language, and they're usually more persuasive that way, or so it seems to me.

I've learned -- well, come to appreciate, anyway -- that there are huge numbers of very smart people out there, in all sorts of settings that aren't usually thought of as smart-people settings. Every academic should have that experience.

The blogosphere has certainly gotten bigger, which I see as pretty much an unalloyed good.


ArchaeoBlog is pretty much in Glenn's mold, although we link much less often to other bloggers than to news stories and web sites. For one reason, there just don't seem to be too many archaeologists out there blogging. Andie at Egyptology News blog is one, and John Hawks in paleoanth is another (John also has some other links to paleoanth and general anthro blogs as well). Hawks' is more of the opinion-oriented, while Andie's is more link-oriented.

Why not more? Probably because most anthropologists and archaeologists are busy with listservs and such to bother with this medium, which is more self-publishing than anything. That and to get any sort of audience in the blogosphere, one needs to be much less pedantic and technical than one ordinarily would when discussing issues with colleagues. Who is your audience anyway? We've tailored ArchaeoBlog more for the masses and those archaeologists who want to see what's going on outside of their speciality without having to troll around news sites forever. And we find the odd cool thing every now and then. It's a developing medium and people will surely push the envelope in unexpected directions. Perhaps blogs will eventually function as something like the old research notebooks did in the past, where one can jot down any thoughts relating to what you're doing at the moment for review later, with the added benefit of outside commentary. Sort of a constantly-on seminar with feedback from colleagues around the clock. Or instant peer-review. This seems like a very powerful aspect of the give-and-take nature (via Comment and email responses), but of course holds the danger of people stealing your ideas before they've been published.

But, you know, your colleagues might just read what you write on these things and, being more of an opinion-oriented thing, you can say stuff that might tick people off. After all, calling someone a complete knee-biter at a cocktail party is one thing, but sticking it on a blog is another. It also gives prospective employers a record of what you really think, as opposed to your published record which is necessarily drier and more respectful (usually). Hawks had a post on this a while back, but we can't find it right off the bat. Instapundit linked to a post/article on the uses of blogs by professors as well, but we can't find that either. (We are apparently severely search-challenged this morning) It's doubtful (and Lordy, we hope so) that anthroblogs will ever become as free-for-all and hyperventilating as general, especially political, blogs. ("Oh, and I'm sure you think Kent-McSystemsTheory-Flannery was a total god or something!" "Pointy-headed mentalist scum!")

Site blogging would definitely be cool though. That would capture a lot of people's attention. Actual on-site blogging, that is, not just putting "This season's results" up on a web site. The daily thrill of discovery, the interpretations of different features. . .the gossip about who's sneaking of to who's tent in the middle of the night. . . .errrm, well, maybe the anthroblogosphere will be as tittilating as other blogs.


TV corner The History Channel's Ape to Man premiered last night. We didn't watch it. Main reason being all of the previews showed little except dramatizations of historical anthropological figures doing their thing and the usual people dressed up as various incarnations of Homo and/or Australopithecus doing their thing. Let's face it: guys dressed up as early hominids fondling a black monolith and getting knowledge zapped into their brains worked; guys dressed up as early hominids demonstrating possible scavenging behavior doesn't. Hawks simulblogged it and this comment seems to sum up the enterprise:

9:02 Ape-woman sniffing at rubber carcass is not engaging me.


Think we'll pass on the later showings. . . .

Update: More items

Novel technique offers new look at ancient diet dogma

A Penn State researcher is part of the team that developed techniques that have generated insights into dietary divergences between some of our human ancestors, allowing scientists to better understand the evolutionary path that led to the modern-day diets that humans consume. "Our new techniques are allowing us to get beyond simple dichotomies and helping us understand the processes by which dietary evolution is working," said Peter Ungar, professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas.

. . .

Traditional examinations of these ancient teeth – counting pits and lines on a black and white electron micrograph image – suggested that A. africanus ate tough foods and P. robustus dined on hard, brittle fare. However, the researchers used a new technique developed by Ungar and his colleagues that combines engineering software, scale-sensitive fractal analysis and a scanning confocal microscope to create a reproducible texture analysis for teeth – and the analysis tells a more complete story.


More on extinctions Study shows big game hunters, not climate change, killed off sloths

Prehistoric big game hunters and not the last ice age are the likely culprits in the extinction of giant ground sloths and other North American great mammals such as mammoths, mastodons and saber-toothed tigers, says a University of Florida researcher.

Determining whether the first arrival of humans or the warm-up of the American continent at the end of the last Ice Age was responsible for the demise of prehistoric sloths has puzzled scientists because both events occurred at the same time, about 11,000 years ago. But by using radiocarbon to date fossils from Cuba and Hispaniola, where humans appeared later than on the North American continent, long after the last Ice Age occurred, UF ornithologist David Steadman was able to separate the two events.

He and his colleagues found the last record of West Indian ground sloths coincided with the arrival of humans 4,400 years ago. The results are published in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper this week.


Original paper is here for those with subscriptions/university access.

Critics will point to a lack of actual evidence that humans were hunting these things, which would leave habitat destruction as the remaining factor, which the authors cite in the paper.

Polynesian sailors update Scholars swim in choppy waters

In academia no less than Oceania, voyagers are sometimes called upon to sail against the prevailing winds. Polynesian seafarers, equipped with sophisticated boats and navigational skills, may have braved the trade winds in their quest to colonize the Pacific during the first millennium. Now a pair of scholars are making waves by flouting what they call "the prevailing theoretical orthodoxy of North American archaeology."

Kathryn Klar, a lecturer in Berkeley's Celtic studies program, and Terry Jones, an associate professor of anthropology at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, teamed up five years ago for what would prove a risky voyage of intellectual discovery. In a recently published article, they claim to have found new linguistic and archaeological evidence that Polynesians landed in Southern California between 400 and 800 A.D. and shared their advanced boat-building techniques with the region's Chumash and Gabrielino Indians.


This was reported on earlier and not a whole lot new is in it, but we get a little more backstory on the timeline of the researchers involved.

The oldest profession update Ancients Rarely Punished Prostitutes

Prostitution in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and Israel was glorified or mildly tolerated, according to a new analysis of "the world's oldest profession."

The findings reveal that attitudes about sex, fidelity and women varied in early times. [Eds. Gee, what a surprise. . . .]

Several scholars contributed to the analysis, which is published in the current Zmanim Hebrew historical quarterly. The Israeli news service Haaretz reviewed the journal in English.


Oldest dated evidence of cattle in southern Africa found

A team of researchers working with colleagues from the Botswana National Museum shed new light on the questions of when cattle were brought to southern Africa and from where. A domestic cow bone, dated to about 2000 years ago was excavated from a site at Toteng, located in the Kalahari Desert of northern Botswana. This bone, dated by the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon technique, provides the oldest directly dated evidence of cattle in southern Africa.

Domestic sheep were also present at Toteng at about the same time. Historical and linguistic information suggest northern Botswana figured prominently in the arrival and dispersal of livestock in southern Africa. The new dates support this view and confirm a long-term association between people and livestock in this part of the Kalahari. The discovery of the 2000 year old cow and sheep bones are important because of the long held view that the Kalahari was a comparatively isolated area that was primarily occupied by foraging peoples until recently.