End of class reflections

   For my final blog post for this class (and maybe ever?...who knows maybe I'll become a crazy blogger!), I thought I would reflect on my experiences and things learnt from Anth 397. I found the course to be a totally different format than what I've been used to at Uvic. I think this may have been the only class I have ever taken that didn't have exams. When noticed this on the syllabus, I thought sweet, it's gonna be an easy class. :P Turns out that doing projects and weekly reflections is a lot more work than one might think. But because of this, I felt more immersed in the course work than in the majority of my other classes. It was a different experience to work on 2 major group projects in one class; the case study magazine in particular was an interesting project. I liked Erin's goal of having as research a topic and then bring break it down so it would be accessible to the layman/non-academic. All in all, a good experience. :)

Rubrics for an online magazine

    So, I decided to take up Erin's suggestion for the blog post, and am critiquing Love Archaeology magazine with my group's rubric. I picked love archaeology because we came across it while looking at archaeology magazines for idea, and Erin said she loved that magazine so I figured it would be a good choice for evaluation. The first thing I noticed when perusing a couple issues of the magazine (specifically issues 1 and 2), is that our rubric criteria is far too specific. We included number of sites, quality of sources and ideas/research questions as 3/5 of our rubric marking scheme. I didn't realize until after Erin handed back our rubric, that we hadn't included some pretty important categories. By browsing Love Archaeology, I noticed that we were missing some pretty important things in our rubric.   Had I graded Love Archaeology with our initial rubric, it would have scored pretty low because our criteria doesn't work with every academic magazine. The magazine definitely has originality, subject knowledge and an aesthetically pleasing overall format. Out of those three aforementioned qualities, our rubric only had the last one as part of it. Lesson learnt? Rubrics are more tricky to make than one would think. I now have more sympathy for professors deciding how to grade assignments.

Elephants and the concept of Death

    I took the title for my post right from the Chapter 7 title from our textbook, The Archaeology of Death and Burial. In the chapter, Pearson writes a blurb on whether animals understand the concept of death, in ways to similar to humans. He talks briefly about Goodall and her chimps and then gets right into discussing one of my favourite things in the world: elephants.

Elephants greeting. Source: Wikipedia

     I've been obsessed with elephants since as far as I can remember so I was pretty stoked to read about them in a school textbook. I have so many elephant related items, my apartment looks like a shrine to the great elephant species! Anyways, Pearson goes on to talk about how African elephants bury and grieve over their dead. As I carried on reading the article, I got recollections back to a documentary I watched I few years back. I wish I could remember the name of it so that I could re-watch it; it was pretty amazing. However, Pearson brought me right back. 

    Upon seeing the bones or carcass of another elephant, a family will stop and investigate them, even if the elephant was unrelated to the group. The ritual includes touching the bones gently with their trunks while remaining very quiet, covering the body with leaves and grass, and if the elephant belonged to their own, staying with the body for days or weeks at a time.

Just beautiful.

   I've even heard stories of elephants burying sleeping humans whom they thought had perished. I love reading tid bits such as those Pearson included in our readings because it's interesting to step outside the lens of human experience of death into the broader awareness of how other species understand death. 

On a mostly related note, while trying to find the name of that documentary I watched, I found this awesome Cracked article titled "5 Mind-Blowing Ways Animals Display Human Emotion". Check it out: http://www.cracked.com/article_20141_5-mind-blowing-ways-animals-display-human-emotions.html

Changing the landscape with burial monuments

     For our group case studies, my group is looking at Early Bronze Age Ireland. Specifically looking at difference amongst three different burial types: wedges, cists and tumuli (more commonly known as mounds). We want to see if there is any general geographical pattern occurring in the differing burial types, in addition to differences in cremation and inhumation. Pictured below are pictures of the three types we are looking into (as I'm sure most of you don't know the diff, I sure didn't until further research!).

Parknabinna Wedge Tomb in Clare County,  Ireland

Knowth burial mound, created around 2000BC

A cist tomb courtesy of Wikipedia 

    After Friday's class, in which Erin lectured about specific burials in the Valley of the Kings, I started thinking about why people bury their dead in specific ways. I remembered that the Egyptians changed the form of burial for Royalty from a highly visible venue (the Great Pyramids of Giza) to a far less obvious resting spot. They consciously made the choice to bury their royalty in what may seem a less grandeur way in an attempt to stop thieves from raiding the valuable grave goods. It's fascinating the variety of ways we, as humans, choose to bury our dead. It's easy to forget that the whole 6 feet under in a standardized plot isn't the way it has always been. Even in Early Bronze Age Ireland, in a relatively small span of time (approximately 500 years) and in a small geographical area, there was a variety of ways in which people changed the landscape in order to dispose of the dead. Learning about what some of the other groups are doing for their projects further enlightens this notion: humans are pretty creative in a plethora of ways!

Not a caveman, jury's out on sexual orientation

   Oh, where to start with this? He isn't even a caveman! 2500 BC is Mesolothic/borderline Bronze Age. That is some serious shoddy reporting. Know your facts people! However, I think the main problem is that the media isn't reflecting on how one can tell sexual orientation through the archaeological record. Where is the evidence that this man was attracted to other males?    In an article posted by the Huffington post, one of the archeologist who excavated the find is quoted as saying "[we] believe the man was probably homosexual or transsexual,". That is a bold statement to make. I think it is far more likely that this is a case of an alternative gender or misdiagnosis of sex. Perhaps, if the sex was diagnosed correctly, the man was taking on a female's role for some unknown reason. If we can hypothesize that in some cases where women are buried "as men" it is because of a role they took on in life (not a gender role, but rather a societal role), then we should be able to think of this as an option for the inverse. Either way, debating a skeleton's sexual orientation is pretty much pointless unless there is some serious supporting evidence in the form or texts or the like in direct association with the skeleton.

Reflections On Cemetery Data-Taking

  
   Last week we finished our monument analysis project...after two trips to the cemetery and thoughtful reflections on the meaning of the data we took down. For our assignment, my group chose the Chinese Cemetery at Harling Point. I thought it would be an interesting site to look at because we figured that most people were going to be doing Ross Bay. So we decided to spice things up. It turned out to be much more complicated than originally anticipated. For some reason, I hadn't anticipated the gravemarkers being entirely in Cantonese (ignorance is bliss until someone has to translate 13 monument inscriptions). Because of this we couldn't choose the monuments based on an existing set of criteria, and had to chose them basically at random. Which ended up working out pretty nicely in the end.
   Two summers ago,  I went on a field school in Greece on a very dusty archaeological dig. After that, I decided being in the field wasn't my thing. I hadn't realized that there was more to being in the field than being in a dirty (and at times muddy) trench. Apparently data taking isn't too glamourous either! Myself and another group member had to return to the Cemetery for a second visit because we forgot to  record where all of the monuments were relative to one another and the boundaries of the cemetery in general. The morning we went looked beautiful...until we stepped out of the car and got gushed with wind as soon as we took out a paper and a pen. As we walked through the gate, I noticed my shoes felt really squishy. Goose poo. All over. Ever second step. It took all of my concentration just to watch where I was walking and force the paper from blowing all over the place. Indiana Jones completely misinformed me of the reality of archaeology!

Shine bright like a diamond...or firework?

Cremation Diamond courtesy of  Lifegem.com

Annoying song lyric aside- I just found out recently that one can choose to have his cremated remains made into a diamond. My sister mentioned this idea in a conversation we had about my hypothetical burial. This is a real thing. Mind. Blown. It makes sense, because both are made of carbon.

After 5000 degrees Fahrenheit (and several weeks), the ashes turn into graphite. All that's needed next is a diamond press and voila-you have a diamond made from your loved one's ashes. Also a lot of cash. According to ehow.com, a company called Lifegem will do this process (depending on size) from $2700-20 000.

After some perusing of the interwebs, it appears to be most popular in the UK to turn ashes into jewelry. Other things the Brits seem into are the usage of remains in a portrait, pencils, or paperweights and the weirdest two of all: tattoo ink and fireworks. You can literally have your loved one run through your skin! Brits have been experimenting with cremated remains for a while now. They invented bone china after all. I would have liked to hear the rationale behind the fruition of that idea.

Check it out:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/hereford/worcs/8334313.stm
 
http://www.heavenlystarsfireworks.com/

Taking it to the grave

   This overdue blog post is taken from one of the prompts from last week (note to self-don't make this a habit!). In part, I delayed writing this because it took some reflection to understand the conversations I had with my sister, boyfriend and another friend about what they would choose to include in my burial. Their comments were oddly humorous for such a morbid topic. I guess I can attribute that to surrounding myself with playful, silly people. My boyfriend and I talked to my sister over skype and we had an interesting conversation. My sister got really fixated on the lining of my coffin, even when I insisted that the question was less about the encasement, and more about grave goods. For some reason, it is really important to her that it have a "plush, cream lining". And apparently I should also have "nice fake flowers" because real ones would die. My boyfriend thought I should be buried barefoot but wearing a really nice watch...which is weird because I have never wore a watch except maybe when I was a kid. He also said I should be buried with all the books I've bought and never read. So cheeky.

  My first thought was that two of the people closest to me didn't really know me too well if they couldn't give me serious answers. But then I thought that maybe it's just a difficult thing to contemplate-that it is a certainty that most of us would prefer not think too much about. When I started to think of what I would want included in my burial (hypothetically, because I think I would go the way of cremation), I realized the complexity of the question. What is succinct enough to tell the story of a person's life through material remains? The only thing I know for certain, is that I would want one to be wearing one of my elephant pendants. When I asked my best friend what she thought I ought to have, she responded saying that it wouldn't make sense to have something buried that was of great sentimental value to my loved ones because they could never see it again. So maybe the question of which goods ought to become grave goods lies between the boundary of cherished and irreplaceable, in the eyes of those left behind.

Analogy: Stonehenge and Madagascar Megaliths

   In class, Erin gave us a handout of a short interview with archaeologist Ramilisonina and a somewhat harsh blog reply by blogger Luciano Aimar. Aimar's issue with Ramilisonina seems to be his analogy of Madagascar's megaliths with Stonehenge and Bluehenge. I agree in part with Aimar, although I thought his response veered a little on the rude side (especially if you scroll down on the link Erin gave us and read the comments back and forth...he gets even meaner). I disagree with Ramilisonina and Pearson's stance that there is an affinity with Madagascar's megaliths. I think there is a similarity in material, certainly...but not much more than that. My biggest problem with the analogy is Ramilisonina stating that the two share a "similiar element of magic"; he says this with absolutely no followup about what he means. This statement is far too subjective for an archaeological comparison. I understand his sentiment about the "magic" as I've been to Stonehenge myself and it's pretty awesome, but archaeology is a scientific pursuit. Also, stating that Stonehenge was a place to commune with the gods is a pretty definitive statement for a site that (as far as I know) has no written records explaining its purpose, and no solid clues to its purpose at the site itself. Its totally ok to have a hypothesis, but when you state your hypothesis as a fact you cross over into pseudoscience. In sum, IMO the analogy only goes as far as likeness in material (and the positioning of the material).

about moi

Hi All,

   My name is Samantha and I'm a 3rd year Anthropology major from Victoria, originally Calgary. No minor, just a straight up major, although I've taken quite a few courses in psychology, linguistics and art history at Uvic. I just couldn't focus my interests enough to minor in anything. Anth is my definite fav. I've flitted in and out of postsecondary since high school, altogether taking off 3 years to work and travel before going back to school this summer to finish my degree. In the end I decided I wanted to be an Elementary school teacher and finishing this degree is the fastest, most economical way to get there. Also, doing one more year of Anthropology courses is pretty enjoyable, and even though I know I won’t be using it directly upon graduating, I love all the stuff I’m learning. I plan on doing my post-degree teaching program in the UK because although I love Victoria, I love Europe more. I am fortunate to have grandparents born in the UK, and therefore the ability to permanently live there (I love choices).

   Some other things I like: travelling (everywhere and anywhere-especially excited to go to Thailand in May), cooking, reading & movies, board games (getting really into Settlers of Catan), GoT (and other epic TV shows) and many more…As far as Anthropology goes, I really like Biological Anth and Archaeology…in particular evolutionary DNA and archaeology, and Paleolithic art and archeology. I took April Nowell’s Paleolithic Art class a while back and it was awesome, highly recommended. And ‘First Peopling’ last semester with Quentin Mackie was my favourite class of recent past.

  I’m really looking forward to this class because the subject matter is so intriguing. I’ve been interested in ancient burials since I was a kid. Looking at books about Pompeii fascinated me, with the bodies stuck in a moment of time. Also Egyptian mummification and bog bodies are mesmerizing (who isn’t captivated by mummification?!) I hope we touch on art in burials (like those amazing ivory beads at the Sunghir burial(s?))

  Well, that is all for my first post. That felt kind of long…but I’m babysitting and nothing good is on TV. :P