Two days ago, I turned in the term paper for Dr. Smith's grad course, Archaeology of Ancient Built Environments. I don't have an exact count, but I suspect I spent over 100 hours on the research and the writing. It's not as good as I would like it to be-- if I decide to clean it up and really finish it, I already know many of the changes I would make.

My paper, entitled "Neighborhoods in Non-urban Settlements: A Cross-cultural Comparison," used criteria originally developed to demonstrate sub-settlement groups in the Anatolian Neolithic (in Turkey) in an attempt to find neighborhoods in Native American pueblos right here in the Southwest. This will be the topic of a longer post as soon as I get the chance. I'm creating a Powerpoint slide show that may be worth posting, for those of you who are interested.

I still have another research project in the works with Dr. Martin, and I'll be finishing my data analysis very soon. More on this later.

I'm just glad I can finally get a few full nights of sleep.

Labels: archaeology, asu, goal

Read a great collection of blog posts from anthropologists around the web at the 38th edition of the Four Stone Hearth. This week's edition scan be found at A Very Remote Period Indeed, the blog of Julien Riel-Salvatore. Julien was a graduate student in paleoarchaeology at ASU (my current school), and is now a post-doctoral fellow at McGill University in Motreal.

Labels: fourstonehearth

Unfortunately, I may have found one.

It's funny how one can make cross-cultural connections sometimes. A friend of mine is from Ghana (in West Africa), where he spent a good deal of his childhood. We were talking about the problems Ghana was having with a special kind of litter: Clear plastic bags used primarily for drinking water, known as "pure water sachets."

Solving One Problem Creates Another

In Ghana (and many parts of Africa), the public water system provides water that is safe for washing clothes, etc., but is not so great for drinking. The solution? Make clean drinking water readily available in convenient plastic bags. So for years now, nearly everyone has been able to get clean, pure water to drink. I know you see the downside coming: The discarded plastic bags are everywhere. Pure water sachets fill the sidewalks, the gutters, the streets. They clog drains, canals, and lakes.

At the root: Common Behavior

The problem is exacerbated by a cultural norm in Ghana: People drop their trash wherever they are (this is very similar to the way my teenage children take off their shoes, jackets, and clothes... they drop wherever they happen to be, and quickly form a think layer covering their bedroom floors). It is commonplace to just drop the wrappers from food, paper, unfinished food itself, and of course plastic, right on the sidewalk or street.

Government efforts have been underway in western Africa for years now to deal with the problem, but have been mostly ineffectual. NGOs have gotten involved, and private groups are attempting to apply free market approaches (such as making tote bags out of collected sachets). recently, the Association of Table Water Producers in Nigeria staged a self-imposed, one-week stoppage in the production of pure water sachets, with limited results.


The Random Connection

I've been pretty obsessed with learning more about Cambodia lately, and I stumbled onto a delightful podcast by an American currently living in Siem Reap: Tasty Dog in the Kingdom (you'll need to listen to her podcast #1 to learn the meaning behind the name). during podcast #12, Delilah Marie (a pseudonym) described the trash system in Cambodia: People throw trash on the ground anywhere and everywhere, and it is almost never picked up. She also addresses the ubiquitous plastic bag, used to carry and drink fresh water (sound familiar?), coffee, and a variety of food items. These bags clog irrigation canals, and are piled along every road and path.

So it seems that the people of Siem Reap, 11,537 kilometers away from Ghana, have nearly identical behaviors when it comes to dealing with trash. Questionable water from the public system has also resulted in the distribution of drinking water in plastic sachets, just as in western Africa. I was even more surprised to dig a little on Google and discover that entrepreneurs in Cambodia are also converting the plastic bags into fashion as a way to deal with the problem.

Conclusion

Well, there is no conclusion, really. I have barely begun to scratch the surface on this issue, and it is clear that I (and many of us) have been ignorant of the scope of the trash control problems around the world. I found a website dedicated to abandoned and orphaned children which relates anecdotal examples of families and orphaned children living in garbage dumps around the world. I plan to post more on this topic soon.

Labels: culture

We've all seen photographs of Angkor Wat, the spectacular 12th century Khmer Temple in Cambodia. I was surprised to learn that Angkor Wat is just the tip of the iceberg-- that it was the center of an enormous, low-density urban complex whose size (1000 square km) rivaled large modern day cities.

Right before Spring Break, I attended a presentation by Roland Fletcher, an archaeologist from the University of Sydney who is leading up the Greater Angkor Project. This 10-year study is bringing new technologies to bear on the large questions surrounding the city of Angkor.

Using airborne side-looking radar (and other imaging from space), amazing features were revealed. From the presentation summary:

So far the project has mapped the extent of the water management system, has located key water management structures and has identified the dispersed pattern of occupation along canals and roads and on house-mounds. The demise of the urban complex now has to be reappraised because it was apparently functioning into the 16th century, later than the generally assumed sack in the early 15th century CE.

The scope of Angkor is startling. If you take a look at the feats of engineering the Khmer accomplished, one can't help but be amazed. The second photo in this post (click it for a larger view) is a satellite view of the temple of Angkor Wat, its grounds, and the large, square moat which surrounds it. You can see that the temple is dwarfed by the moat, and Dr. Fletcher tossed up a slide that showed the area inside the moat is larger than any Mayan city.

Not stopping there, you need to see the map of the entire Angkor complex (the 3rd image). The very center square on the map is Angkor Thom, the royal forest. Just below it, a tiny blue square represents the moat at Angkor Wat.

The long, rectangular blue features are man-made water reservoirs which supported the irrigation of the entire area. The West and East Baray (the two largest) are 8 kilometers in length. The NASA Earth Observatory has a large AIRSAR image of the Angkor region, plus an accompanying GIS map of all the archaeological features and sites.

What have they determined so far? It looks like the earlier theory (by Bernard-Philippe Groslier) that the large reservoirs were primarily for irrigation are correct. The radar imagery show the remnants of rice fields covering the entire region from the lake to the mountain foothills. A river was diverted to fill the reservoirs, and to irrigate the landscape. Excavations of old water channels has revealed evidence of heavy flooding (including substantial deposition of sand), which likely overwhelmed their system. It is possible that the deforestation of the area for conversion to agriculture, combined with the re-routed natural water channels, may have led to a large-scale ecological disaster.

One of the principal investigators (Damian Evans) was the lead author on a paper last year that reported on their comprehensive mapping (see below).


Additional resources:

1. Wikipedia has a nice overview of Angkor's history.

2. Evans, D., Pottier, C., Fletcher, R., Hensley, S., Tapley, I., Milne, A. and Barbetti, M. 2007. A comprehensive archaeological map of the world’s largest pre-industrial settlement complex at Angkor, Cambodia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Vol. 104 no. 36, pp. 14277-14282

3. The American Museum of Natural History has a nice animated overview of the current findings at Angkor.

Labels: archaeology

Here's what I have:

• forty-two credit hours in Anthropology coursework, GPA: 3.97
• A certificate that says I won the Undergraduate Research Assistantship award at ASU
• 4 weeks of archaeological field school experience
• 2 years of research work with a professor
• Glowing recommendations from two professors

Here's what I don't have:

• Acceptance in the graduate Anthropology program at Northern Arizona University.

I returned from a college-hunting trip (for my daughter) in Colorado to find two letters from NAU. The one from the Anthropology Department was somewhat friendly, stating that either my application was not competitive enough or that my research interests did not line up well with those of the professors in the department. The letter from the NAU Graduate College was much more blunt: "Your application was not competitive."

I've already asked the graduate coordinator to please explain to me the aspects of my application which failed to meet their standards, and hopefully this will be a productive thing. Right now, I'm still pretty depressed about the whole thing-- and I keep wondering which is true: 1. They just don't know me, or 2. I'm not good enough.

There are some good things I can take from this:

1. NAU's program really is pretty competitive! If I'd been accepted, I would not have know for sure.
2. You can always do a better job on your application. I've identified about twenty things I would do differently if I could (and I will do them for the next one).
3. I can finish my B.A. in Anthropology. Having the B.A. is a good thing-- it means I'll finish my foreign language work, and have a minimum credential for moving on to graduate studies. Who knows-- this may have worked against me at NAU.
4. I have plenty of time to finish my research with Dr. Martin. By May of next year, I'll have my B.A. and two publications.
5. I can still choose something other than Archaeology. I've been having doubts about choosing Archaeology as my subdiscipline, so now I have time to reconsider.
6. I have another year to pay off debt and save. If I'm planning to go part time at work, I better be as financially secure as I can be.

As depressing as this has been, I have to remember that I'm in the middle of a very demanding graduate seminar. Now I REALLY need to do well in this.

I couldn't help myself: I already registered for next semester at ASU. I'm taking the two remaining courses I need for my Anthro degree, except for the foreign language component. For Spanish, I'll take two summer sessions starting in June, and I'll have completed my four courses total by May of 2009. Yep, I should be able to graduate.

As for graduate school, I'll need to see what happens. I might still try the Online Masters in Applie dAnthropology at UNT, or I might commute to the U of A in Tucson. But for the next 15 months, I know I'll be right here at ASU.

Labels: goal, hints_and_tips, nau

This has been an exciting semester so far, and an immensely busy one. I'm taking ASB 591 Archaeology of Ancient Built Environments, I'm still working on a paper with Dr. Martin, I still have quite a bit of data entry to do for Dr. Smith, and I'm sitting in on Dr. Martin's graduate seminar entitled Biology and Society.

This seems like pretty good practice for graduate school-- since I'm doing all of the reading for two seminars and working on a major research project. If I am lucky enough to get accepted into the Master's program at NAU, it can't be much worse (except for the drive).

In Dr. Smith's Built Environment class, we're reading up on how the many ways that archaeologists propose for inferring culture from architecture. We've had some really stimulating conversations (there are five us us unrolled in the class), and kicked around many things I had never considered.

We've covered new broad topics each week:

• The Meaning of the Built Environment - reading mostly works by Amos Rapoport, who proposes that the environment can possess lower-level meaning (cues for what we are supposed to do), middle level meaning (e.g. identity, status, power), or high level meaning (e.g. world view, spiritual meaning). Intriguing urban design/social engineering controversy: Urban planner Robert Moses designed expressway systems in New York City, and supposedly designed the expressway bridges with such low clearance that public transportation (buses) could not go under them. This discriminated against the poor communities (few had automobiles) preventing them from visiting parks, baseball, etc. He is even credited by some with driving the Brooklyn Dodgers out of New York. read more at Wikipedia.
  

• Settings for Activities - Dana Anderson, Susan Kent, and more Rapoport. We covered the definition of "activity" and "activity areas", discussed the types of activities (daily, subsistence, ritualistic, production, consumption), the types of activity areas (shared or dedicated), and Rapoport's concept that activities cannot be viewed alone, but as part of a larger activity system. He believes that settings are also part of larger setting systems.

• Habitus and Home - Looking at domestic structures, Richard Blanton, Kent Lightfoot, and others looked at methods for identifying meaning. Most of these authors make it clear that to gain a full picture, one must combine data from archaeology, ethnohistory, and even oral histories.

• Housing and Communication - House construction and design is to a large extent a consumer decision... how much to spend, etc. Blanton looks at how the decoration and design of a house communicates on multiple levels: What group the owners are in, their status in the community, etc.

• Roland Fletcher - His model for settlement growth is pretty interesting (although I'm not sure what it can be used for if you are an archaeologist). It grows out of his belief that interpersonal interaction and limits on communication increase as settlements get larger, ultimately limiting the size of growth until the interactions are curbed or new facilitating communication technologies emerge. See The Limits of Settlement Growth.

We have 8 more weeks of topics, usually reading 6 papers per week. I need to read a related book and write a publishable review, and I also need to produce an original research paper, some kind of cross-cultural comparative study using existing data.

If I can survive this semester, I should be able to handle the real thing.

Labels: archaeology, asu, goal

Okay, I know it's been a long time since I posted. For the two of you who still check occasionally, I apologize.

I'm going to try to post more often, especially since things have been getting more interesting for me as a student.

Some highlights:

• Dr. Martin and I are close to submitting a paper on an important discovery we've made regarding the social effects on the sex ratio at birth in Africa. More details once it's on its way.

• I managed to get all of my application materials submitted on time for the Anthropology Masters at NAU. Now I just have to wait... I should hear in the next few weeks.
  

• I'm taking a graduate seminar from Dr. Michael Smith: Archaeology of Ancient Built Environments. Tons of reading, tons of excellent discussion, and tons of stress are making it a novel experience.

I'll be posting separately in more detail on each of these topics real soon now.

Labels: asu, goal