This is a busy time of year. The field school excavations have entered crunch time (we had another good day on Friday -- watch for the video on Monday), the SAA meetings are fast approaching, I'm trying to lock down plans for my next field project (and the two after that), and I'm using much of the free time I have on evenings and weekends looking forward to the summer art season. By "looking forward" I mean both doing stuff and planning stuff. After a few hours of sleep last night, my brain was awake well before my body should have been. But we all got up, made coffee, and got to work.

​Here's what is going on in my art world.​

2018 Summer Selfie Contest

Last May, my Afterburner show at Tapp's more-or-less inaugurated my "career" as a professional artist. While I don't have anything like that show planned for this summer, I do have pieces scheduled to be shown in various locations and contexts. I thought it would be a fun experiment in brand-building and engagement to create a selfie contest. I finished up the rules this morning. I'll make a custom sculpture for the grand prize winner. I'll have pieces at ArtFields, Kinetic Derby Day, and Luna Lola in April and Tapp's in June and July. There may be additions to the schedule. By doing this I'm hoping to improve my connection with those who like my work as well as encourage people to go out and support other artists. The world is better with cool stuff in it.

Expanded Social Media

In the ramp up to ArtFields and to implement the selfie contest, I have tried to expand and update my social media footprint. Zero Point Mechanic is now on Instagram and Pinterest. If you like those platforms and want to use them to keep up-to-date on in-progress and completed work, please follow me there. I'll still be posting on the Zero Point Mechanic Facebook page and (sometimes) Twitter.

I designed some 5x7 cards to have as promotional materials at ArtFields and elsewhere. In my hurry to get them done so I get them printed and placed where they need to be, I made a really noticeable typo. I'll be stuck with 500 postcards that say "if you're looking for perfection, I'm not your guy." That's fine. I'll fix it next time around.

New Videos

I've managed to get a couple of art-related videos done in the last few weeks. One shows the moving of "Beauty and Grace" to ArtFields and the other chronicles the creation of "Harley." Enjoy!

I've started a GoFundMe campaign to support the planned 2019 season at 38FA608. If you've been following along with my blog posts, the students' blog posts, and the videos from this year, you have some sense of the value of sustaining the work at this site. We've shown that site 38FA608 preserves an extraordinarily fine-grained record of human behavior dating back at least 6,000 years.  The archaeological deposits protected within the levee provide a rare opportunity to understand the activities of individuals and small groups deep into South Carolina’s past and integrate those data into the larger narrative of Eastern Woodlands prehistory. They also provide a wonderful opportunity to educate students and the public in the use and importance of careful and systematic field methods to understand the human past. 

The site is the real deal.

I would like to keep the field school going as a yearly spring offering through the University of South Carolina.  To do that, two main things need to happen:

(1) student enrollment needs to be sufficient;

(2) I need to have funds to support the work.

After two seasons of work at the site, I have a pretty good idea of what it takes to be successful out there in terms of supplies, equipment, time, energy, and strategy. An important component of what I've been doing is hiring some experienced help to manage working in the two areas of the site (the block and the wall) at the same time. This year I hired one of the students from the 2017 season to act as a kind of "field sergeant," helping with direction, basic instruction, and quality control in one of the excavation areas. It helps with continuity, and also helps that student get some supervisory experience. I plan to continue that in the future (with different students).

I set up the GoFundMe with a goal of $4000.  That money will be used to : 

(1) pay a student field assistant ($1190); 

(2) pay student lab workers ($1280); 

(3) purchase expendable equipment and supplies to continue stabilizing the site ($557); and 

(4) rent a vehicle to transport students to/from the site ($973). 

Specific research goals for the 2019 season will be developed as materials and information from the 2018 season are processed, analyzed, and integrated with those from the 2017 season. My suspicion that there is a Late Archaic (ca. 2000 BC) house at the site grows stronger as the 2018 work continues (more on that later).

Sustained, publicly-accessible research on sites like 38FA608 has the potential to address numerous interesting questions as well as engage the community and help educate the next generation of southeastern archaeologists. Please consider contributing to these goals if you value our work and would like to see it continue.

Thank you!

Last Friday's fieldwork was eventful. With just a few days left in the field, we are down into the nitty-gritty of the feature excavations intended to recover detailed data about the Late Archaic (ca. 4000-1000 BC) occupations at the site. Last year's work in the block revealed the presence of a significant Mack component (dating to around 1000 BC) and hinted at the existence of an earlier Savannah River component (dating to around 2000 BC) in close vertical proximity. Although we won't know which features go with which component until we excavate and analyze them, Friday's work gave us some important clues. Enjoy the video!

You can find all the videos from the 2018 season on the Broad River Archaeological Field School website.

This is going to be a quick one. I've got multiple research endeavors I need to keep moving along, lab housekeeping to do, students coming in, and prep for field school tomorrow. It's a busy day. They all are. And that's why I feel compelled to wonder (somewhat rhetorically) how I should value my time and how much of an ear I should turn to those that want to "buy" it.

For professional archaeologists, participating in the peer review process comes with the territory. Peer review, however imperfect it may be, is a mechanism of quality control: if someone with legitimate expertise can raise serious/significant questions about aspects of your work, you should be able to address those questions one way or another before the work is published. 

We all get asked to anonymously read and comment on articles that fall within our particular wheelhouses. For various reasons (time, conflicts, lack of interest, etc.) I don't always say "yes." But most of the time I do. 

We do peer review for journals for no direct compensation. It can take a lot of time to carefully read and comment on a submission, especially if the paper is somewhere in the zone where it will be publishable after non-trivial adjustments (i.e., it's not good enough to give say "publish now" but not poor enough to say "toss it out"). I think most of us consider doing journal-based peer review to be part of our responsibilities as scholars.

I will admit I'm increasingly conflicted about doing review work for journals that limit public access  using paywalls. I would prefer that everyone -- especially those that support the research through tax dollars -- be able to read everything. Those concerns are increasingly factoring in to my decisions about what review requests to accept and where to submit my own work for publication.

But then there are cases where we are offered something to read, review, or comment on a piece of scholarly work. I've recently done two book reviews for American Antiquity (copies here) and I did an essay for Reviews in Anthropology that included review of three new books. In those cases, I got a publication out of the deal.

This week, I got an email asking me to review a textbook and provide "detailed feedback" within one month. For my troubles, the publisher -- a major book publisher -- offered me the princely sum of $150 or $300 worth of books.

How long would it take me to carefully review and provide detailed feedback on an entire textbook? If it took me 20 hours I'd barely be making minimum wage.  And I'd be putting all the other things I need to do on hold to accomplish that.  Do I have a "duty" to devote my time to reviewing a textbook that will be sold for profit? I'm just not feeling it.

A few months ago, I received an envelope that contained an advertising flyer for a book, a hand-written letter, and $5 in one dollar bills. The letter urged me to buy the book but did not mention what I was supposed to do with the $5. I guess it was supposed to be some kind of incentive to move the book up in the queue of "things I need to read."  Right?

I have remained strangely paralyzed about it: the bills are still in a pile on my table. Something about it feels oddly icky. Yet I continue to let them sit there.

I need some validation. Tell me it's okay to use the money to get a Dr. Pepper from the vending machine across the street. 

I can barely keep up with reading the abstracts of the "first tier" literature that is coming out in my areas of interest, let alone reading it all or devoting multiple work days to mark up someone else's textbook. I can't be the only one who feels somewhat besieged. ​

Last week was spring break at USC, so I put off producing the video from Day 8 of the field school until today. We had a small crew but beautiful weather, as usual (at some point I'm sure my luck will run out). Work focused on the excavation of Feature 3 (exposed in the machine cut wall), Feature 11 (encountered in the block), and Unit 12 (still piece-plotting down through the intact deposits to reach Feature 13.  Enjoy the video!

If you're an archaeologist, you need to read this article (and this) about accusations that the late James Mellaart faked portions of his research on the Neolithic/Chalcolithic settlement of Catalhoyuk.  While I'm not a specialist in the area or the time period, I've covered the site briefly in introductory classes. To hear that some of what we "know" about the site may be based on fabricated "evidence" is incredibly disappointing. 

I'm sure we'll learn more about this story as people who work in the region weigh in.

I grew up on a small farm, so I can verify through personal observation that a chicken really does run around like crazy after you cut its head off.

Things have been hectic both at home and at work over the last month. The coming week is USC's spring break, which will offer a little bit of breather as I won't be in the field this Friday and won't have regular office hours or meetings with students.

Here's some bullet points about what's been going on and what's coming up.

"Finding the Family" Fieldwork Started

As I think I mentioned in the Week 2 video from field school, I've got a complementary project lined up to do some subsurface reconnaissance (i.e., targeted backhoe excavations) of nearby landforms that are similar to the one we are working on for the field school. At least some of those landforms -- also alluvial -- probably contain archaeological deposits, perhaps of different age ranges than 38FA608.  Anyway, the first step is to establish some known points that we can use for mapping our excavations. I've spent a couple of days in the field doing that, one with Eddie Reeps who used his GPS rig to help determine the coordinates of a handful of far-flung points that I set (by sinking rebar). 

This work is being funded by an internal USC grant. I realized this seek that I never actually announced it or described it via my blog, so I'll do that sometime in the near future.

My First Holi: That Was Fun!

Last weekend, my family and I joined some of our Indian friends (and their Indian friends) to celebrate Holi. This is a holiday that I knew nothing about before the rise of social media. The bright colors make it naturally photogenic. 

This was a really interesting experience. Speaking as an "alien" with very little foreknowledge about what to expect,  I was struck by both the overall positivity of the atmosphere and the sense that it was a time/place where "normal" cultural rules were put on temporary suspension. There was color (and water) everywhere, much of it applied to your face and body by strangers. It's a strange kind of intimacy, not unlike what I experienced at the fringes of the mosh pit at Against Me! 

I wish we could have stayed for the food, but the little kids were on overload/meltdown and a retreat was the best option.

Friday Field School Video Will Be . . . Delayed

Our ongoing work at the field school site (38FA608) went well. We had another beautiful day with plenty of sun and high temperatures in the low 60's. The crew was smaller than normal.

I had hoped to get two of the Late Archaic features out of the ground, but it was not to be . . . they are going to take the time they're going to take, and that's all there is to it. While Feature 3 (exposed in the machine-cut wall) was completely removed, Feature 11 remains in progress. Both of these features are defined by dark fill contained some carbonized plant remains (including nutshell) and a low density of lithics. Feature 11 is deeper than I anticipated, and the fact that it intrudes into earlier deposits makes i's excavation complicated. I lined our ongoing excavation with landscape fabric and filled it with back dirt to protect it until we return.

I probably won't get the video from Friday done on Monday.  I'm not sure, but it may be next Monday before I upload the Week 8 video. We won't be in the field this week because of spring break. Watch for the premiere of "trowel cam."

"Harley" Ready to Move!

I finished my first officially-commissioned sculpture: a scrap metal javelina named "Harley." It's be a steady weekend project, occupying the large majority of time I've spent in my workshop since late January. I think it turned out great - perhaps one of the best pieces I've made. The "formal" pictures are here on my ZeroPointMechanic website. There will be a video when I get the time to put it together. 

"Beauty and Grace:" Final Prep Before ArtFields

Next week (I think on Tuesday the 20th), I'll finally have to face the challenge of moving "Beauty and Grace" to Lake City, SC, for ArtFields 2018. The piece will be displayed on lawn in front of The Citizens Bank (209 East Main Street). My friend and archaeology colleague Chris Gillam has agreed to help me get the ceratopsians moved and reassembled. I'm not sure what I promised in return, but I'm sure it was something. As it stands now, my plan is to get some segments of heavy-duty PVC to use as rollers when moving the components of the piece over the lawn. Some 2x4's and a crowbar will also come in handy. If it was good enough for ancient Egypt, it will be good enough for me.

I've started prepping both pieces to finally live outside. I cleared space in my workshop yesterday so that I could wheel "Beauty" inside and apply a coat of Penetrol, which will arrest the rusting, bring out colors, and provide a barrier to moisture. It also makes the entire piece shiny, which I'm not a huge fan of. But it's better than all the colors degrading to an even rusty orange. The coating is sticky as it dries for 48 hours, so I had to apply it in a space that I could enclose to prevent the omnipresent March aerosol of pine pollen from becoming a permanent part of the piece.  "Grace" will go next.

An Unknown Road Trip

I will be spending a few days this week on a road trip with my older daughter. We don't know where we're going. We may not know where we're going until after we've already been there. It's tradition.

A 250-mile radius from Columbia includes most of North Carolina and Georgia as well as eastern Tennessee. I had some thoughts about going to Florida to see Cape Canaveral and/or a restaurant with a mermaid show, but that might be too heavy on the driving, too pre-planned, and too expensive. Plus I'm not really impressed with Florida's government right now and not enthusiastic about spending my money there.

If you know of a "good," out-of-the-way destination in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, or Tennessee that I should be aware of, post away. I've driven by the UFO Welcome Center in Bowman, SC, but not yet stopped (it looks like it has been trashed). I went out of my way on my last swing through North Carolina to visit the Andre the Giant museum, only to find it closed. I'll probably try to avoid the Myrtle Beach area. 

I spent my morning putting together the video of last Friday's field work. The work continue to go well, even as things become more and more complicated. We've started dealing with the Late Archaic features, the excavation of which is my primary research goal this semester. I had to rush a bit on the editing of this one for personal reasons, but it's done and posted. Enjoy!

Regular readers of this blog know that I have a pretty high tolerance for nonsense. I don't mind having arguments, I don't pre-screen comments, and I've only ever "banned" a single person from commenting. I know that being a public academic invites attention of all kinds, and I'm fine with that.

For the past few months, I've been routinely deleting comments by E. P. Grondine on my posts about my actual archaeological work and legitimate academic topics (i.e., those that don't involve giants, Atlantis, and other fringe claims). Recently, his comments have transitioned from being simply condescending and ignorant and have become harassing and (in my opinion) borderline defamatory.

E.P., you are welcome to comment on my blog on this post and this post only. I will delete all future comments from you on other blog posts, just as I delete spam for online gambling except on this post. I will also delete all comments on this post that are defamatory.

I hope this satisfies your need to comment on my blog. 

I spent a little bit of time with Nic Jones of WLTX (our local CBS affiliate) yesterday morning talking about my art. This is the piece he put together, which ran on last night's news. Thanks Nic!