If you enjoy picking up junk from the curb, scraping your knuckles, burning yourself, and inhaling gasified metal, boy have I got a hobby for you!

Several people in my life tell me that I need to take more time off from work. They're probably right.  I had an opportunity to stay home for part of the day today after I dropped the kids off, so I took it. Other than grading papers and prepping (and administering and grading) a final exam, my academic semester is over. My computer models are now running around the clock, I don't need to pack up my office to move to our new space for a couple more weeks, most of the components of my research agenda are now more-or-less under control, and it hasn't yet broken 100 degrees here. So it was a good time to take a few hours of daylight to do something other than archaeology.

This is the rabbit sculpture I'm working on. It's made out of bits and pieces of junk that I've collected over the years. I'm a crappy, self-taught welder, but I don't care. My sculptures don't have to move or float or be transported by airplane, so as long as everything holds together the roughness and weight don't matter.

After the rabbit's done my next project is going to be to make a gate to replace the ugly chain link one that goes across the driveway. I plan to incorporate my iron Design Toscano sword into it. Yep: #Swordgate.

Update (5/8/2016): I think the rabbit is about done. I may tweak it a little bit here or there, but I've mentally moved on to the next project.  I'm thinking Tyrannosaurus rex.

Update (3/19/2017): The eyes and other parts of the head really started to bug me on this one. I like thinking of these sculptures at "time capsules," but I also don't see any reason why I need to live with something I genuinely don't like if I have the ability to change it. So I cut off the bulging eyes and some of the plates on the sides of the head, made some new eyes, added some circular pieces to the sides of the face, and modified the nose/mouth. Here is the result:

American Antiquity is the flagship journal of archaeology in the United States. While I haven't yet published a research paper in it, I'm happy to say that I've got a book review in the current issue. Building the Past: Prehistoric Wooden Post Architecture in the Ohio Valley-Great Lakes is a collection of papers edited by Brian G. Redmond (Cleveland Museum of Natural History) and Robert A. Genheimer (Cincinnati Museum Center). The book contains a lot of useful data and some really interesting insights, and I enjoyed reading it.  I'll be going through the chapters again in detail when I finally get back around to working on the database for the Eastern Woodlands Household Archaeology Data Project.

This is just a quick post to complain about Balaji Micro Technologies, a company that manufactures and sells cameras. For some reason, an important part of their marketing strategy seems to be making generic blog comments with a link to one of their various websites.  You can find some of their comments in this post about the "Roman sword" from Nova Scotia. They have made many similar comments (that I have deleted) on various other posts of mine.

I have no idea in what universe someone would be dumb enough to think this is a good business plan. I presume Balaji Micro Technologies pays someone to find blogs and copy and paste these comments. A Google search on "I like your blog. I enjoyed reading your blog. It was amazing. Thanks a lot" returns over 4000 instances of this phrase being posted in blog comments.  I wonder how many cameras they've sold doing that.

I've tweeted to the company and emailed to the company telling them to cut it out, and have not gotten a reply.

Dear Balaji Micro Technologies: stop being clowns and try spending your money on a business plan. Go away.

At the risk of alienating the few friends I have, I'm going to admit that I find working with large datasets to be a rewarding pastime. I'm not sure why, but I feel like that there is something really satisfying about compiling, cleaning, standardizing, and finding and filling gaps in data. So I've gone from the "why doesn't this exist" stage about a month ago to now having a dataset of over 8000 radiocarbon dates pegged to county-level provenience. Here's the current map:

You'll notice that several areas have been filled in since last week's map.  Matt Boulanger sent me a large spreadsheet of dates from New England and the Northeast, most of which I've now incorporated (I still need to track down counties for some of the dates). Victor Thompson and Matthew Colvin sent me a spreadsheet of the Florida radiocarbon database assembled by Steve Dasovich and Glen Doran, so those dates are in the database now also.  I've begun going through the chapters of the 2009 Archaic Societies volume (edited by Thomas Emerson, Dale McElrath, and Anderw Fortier), which contain significant listings of Archaic Period dates from the Midcontinent.  I know of compilations from North Carolina and Mississippi - those will be coming up.

I've got a few dates from Ontario and Quebec, but I confess to being a bit mystified as to how the various administrative regions, counties, and census divisions of those provinces correspond to the provenience information I have for the dates and the GIS data I'm seeing in front of me. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were easy, but I will need to figure out what's going on in the other eastern provinces of Canada before I can display the data.

Assembling and formatting a bibliography to go along with this dataset will be an unholy nightmare. I'm going to need to get that done before I release the data in a usable form. Working on pulling all the citations together in one place and correctly referencing them in the database may be a good summer job for my daughter. As far as I know, she doesn't read my blog. Maybe that's for the best.

Update (5/4/2016): 9,129 dates and counting . . .

I've been working on compiling a database of radiocarbon dates from the Eastern Woodlands. While my interest in doing this is mainly driven by my own research goals (the driving force right now is my desire to be able to discuss the possible abandonment of portions of the Southeast at the end of the Early Archaic period in a symposium I'm pulling together for the 2016 SEAC meetings this fall), I know these data will be useful to others as well.

Here is a GIS map showing the counts by county of the first 4,870 dates that I've gotten plugged in:

I started with a spreadsheet sent to me by Shane Miller and combined it with data available online from PIDBA (both of those sources were focused on dates from early sites across the east), the Louisiana Division of Archaeology, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, the Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia Radiocarbon Database (Cultural Resource Analysts, Inc.), a list of Tennessee radiocarbon dates (Tennessee Archaeology Network), and A Comprehensive Radiocarbon Date Database from Archaeological Contexts on the Coastal Plain of Georgia by John A. Turck, and Victor Thompson. After combining these datasets into a single database (which took some effort), I did a sweep to eliminate redundancies and flag obvious errors. I added a column for county and linked that to a separate table of county names attached to UTM coordinates of the approximate center of the county. That lets me query the database to spit out a table containing a listing of dates and associated UTMs.  I imported that into GIS and then did a "join" to count the number of points per county. Voila.

There are still numerous errors and omissions in the database as it currently stands, which is why I'm not prepared to supply the raw data at this point. I've got many dates that are missing key pieces of information (error, site number, county, etc.), and the columns for references are a total mess at this point.  As I work through the process of cleaning all that up and trying to fill in blanks, I'll be adding new data. I know of some print publications that will help me fill in some of the large blank areas, and I suspect there are other online or electronic sources of data out there.  I've got the UTM coordinates for the counties in most of the Midwest and Southeast (I still haven't done Mississippi and Florida), but I haven't yet started on the tier of states immediately west of the Mississippi River (Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota) or the Northeast and New England.

Many of you out there who believe in giants point to artwork from the past in support of the idea that gigantic humans and normal-size humans used to co-exist. People that appear gigantic must have really been gigantic, right? Here is one website claiming that artwork supports the notion of giant ancient Egyptians. Here is another. Here is one about Sumer. Here is another Sumer one.  I wrote here about how Ramses II was depicted as very large in comparison to other humans. Unfortunately for giant enthusiasts, Rameses II's mummy demonstrates that he was about 5'7". My solution to the contradiction presented by a normal-sized Rameses was that all those around him were actually very, very small.

But let's put aside the inconvenient facts for a moment and enjoy this depiction of giant Frenchmen building a fort in the mid-1500's:

The image is a colorized version of one of the engravings of Jacques Le Moyne, who accompanied Jean Ribaut's expedition to the New World. The Ribaut expedition established a settlement (Charlesfort) on Parris Island, South Carolina, in 1562. (The illustration above is typically described as showing Fort Caroline, another Ribaut expedition fort that would have been located to the south on the Georgia or Florida coast. For reasons I won't go into here, there is good reason to think the illustration above depicts the construction of Charlesfort rather than Fort Caroline.  You can read about the controversy over the location of Fort Caroline, which has never been found, here.)

Giant enthusiasts will immediately note the size of the men constructing the fort in Le Moyne's illustration.  The fourteen men (who apparently arrived on the island in the two open canoes) are as tall as the trees and tower over the walls of the fort they are building. They're so big, in fact, that it's unclear to me why they would even need a fort to protect themselves.  What are they afraid of?  The walls and moat are clearly not built to keep out other giants, as it's pretty obvious that our French giants could just hop right over them.  The best I can come up is that these French giants must have been building this fort to protect themselves from the normal-size native population. One problem with this idea, however, is that Spanish accounts from this same region describe the indigenous peoples themselves as being "giants."  So the giant French were trying to protect themselves from the less-giant-but-still-giant Native Americans.  Or the Native Americans were normal-sized and the Spaniards were super small.

Or maybe not everything in these depictions is accurately scaled and represented.

Shortly after I built the website for the Eastern Woodlands Household Archaeology Data Project (EWHADP) in the spring of 2014, I talked about the project to a workshop sponsored by the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA) (there's a link to that presentation here and some short blog posts about how my work fits into DINAA here and here). In that 2014 presentation, delivered while I was unemployed, I offered an incentive program that I hoped would spur interest in the EWHADP: beer to the first person who cited the database. With an uncertain future, I scaled my offer to whatever my employment situation happened to be at the time of citation:

At the SAA meetings last week, I met Jayur Mehta and bought him a beer.  Mehta cited the EWHADP database in a paper about the Carson site, a Mississippian site in Coahoma County, Mississippi. If I remember correctly, the paper is currently under review, so I won't say anything else about it at this point. I'm glad he was able to make use of the database, and I look forward to reading the paper.

The alert reader will notice that Dr. Mehta is holding but a single plastic cup of beer in his hand, while my incentive program clearly shows that six beers will be awarded if I am employed in a non-tenure-track position, which I am.  I will point out that the cost of the beer he is holding, purchased in a Disney facility, actually exceeded the cost of a six-pack of PBR purchased in a normal part of the world (here is a link to $4.99 six pack of PBR on sale at Binny's Beverage Depot, the first place that came up when I Googled "PBR six pack cost").  So I think I fulfilled my pledge.

Mehta was unaware of my offer when he cited the database in his paper, suggesting that my incentive program was not behind his decision to use the EWHADP dataset.  Rather, it appears, he recognized the usefulness of the data for the project he was working on.  I hope that more people use the data. It's possible that someone else already has but I'm not aware of the citation - I'm not sure how I would ever know unless I see it or someone tells me about it.

The EWHADP has been largely dormant for a while now. It's stalled midway through an effort to re-code several of the key variable related to structure size and shape. I'm hoping to get the update done at some point this summer and get a newer, larger version online. I plan to use it myself for some research that will build on the 2013 JAA paper that spawned the original dataset.

If you cite the database, please let me know. I'll create a page for those citations on the EWHADP site. I'm interested to see how people use the data, and tracking and understanding use will help me to enlarge and improve the database.

The annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) is going on right now in Orlando. I made the 6.5 hour drive down from Columbia, SC, on Thursday. It took me closer to 8.5 hours, though, because I called an audible and went to visit the birth town of Barnwell, SC, after hearing a story on NPR about James Brown as I was starting my trip. And then I stopped to look at a MiG-17 in the parking lot of the Mighty Eighth Air Force museum in Savannah, GA. It was the B-47 Stratojet visible from I-95 that caught my attention. I didn't actually go in the museum, but you understand why it sometimes takes me a while to get from Point A to Point B when I travel alone.

I'm guessing that most people that read my blog are not professional archaeologists and have never been the SAA's.  These are the annual meetings of the largest professional archaeological organization in the country.  I don't have any numbers on annual attendance, but for archaeologists these meetings are a chance to meet new people, learn new things, talk about ideas and data, and re-connect with others in our social networks.  The array of presentations and posters that one can go to over the course of several days is large (here's the program for this year's meeting). So you have to make choices about how you're going to spend your time.  I just wanted to pass on a few interesting things that I've seen, heard, or thought about over the last couple of days.

An Early Holocene Shaman Burial from Texas

Margaret (Pegi) Jodry gave a really interesting presentation on an 11,100-year-old (ca. 9,100 BC) double burial (a male and a female) from Horn Shelter No. 2 in Texas (you can find the 2014 paper that discusses the burial here). Human remains from the Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene are extremely rare in North America.  The male burial is particularly interesting because it appears, based mostly on the analysis of the contents of the grave, to be the internment of a shaman. The burial includes tools probably used for making pigment (antler pestles and turtle shell bowls), a tool for applying pigment to the skin, and a scarification tool. The burial also included animal remains that probably had symbolic significance: hawk claws and badger claws were found in the vicinity of the head and neck, presumably placed there as part of the burial ceremony. Jodry speculated that the hawk and badger may have symbolized travel to the "upper world" (sky) and "lower world" (underground), respectively.

I found Jodry's discussion of this burial to be really interesting after recently hearing my SCIAA colleague Adam King talk about Mississippian (ca. AD 1000) iconography and cosmology. I wondered how far back in time we might be able to trace the basic cosmological elements that we can discern (with the help of linguistic data) as important to the Mississippian world.  The Hon Shelter burial seems to provide a tantalizing glimpse of the symbolic representation of a tripartite "above" "earth" and "below" cosmos in the Early Holocene, associated with a a projectile point technology (San Patrice) that is related to the Dalton points that are the most common markers of the Late Paleoindian period in the Southeast. Very interesting.

If you remember last summer's flap over the supposed "mummy" discovered in Lake County, Indiana, (I wrote about it here) you will be interested to hear that I ran into the archaeologists who were working at the site when the human remains were found. ​As I suspected (which I can't remember if I ever wrote about), the site was one that I had actually worked on in the past: I participated in the Phase II testing of the and others back in the winter of 2004 (you can see a copy of the report by Sarah Surface-Evans and others here). Anyway, James Greene, an archaeologist with Cardno Envionmental Consultation Company, told me that what they encountered was a flexed human burial dating to the Woodland period. The remains were left in place and reburied in consultation with Native American groups. As reported in this story from July 2, the sheriff erroneously described the remains to the press as "mummified." They were not. There was no mummy, and there was no cover-up about a mummy.

I've seen a lot of papers over the last couple of days about climatic/environmental change in the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. The amount of information that we have now is amazing, and the datasets relevant to understanding recent environmental change continue to diversity and develop (pollen, beetles, ice cores . . .). At a paper by James Dunbar (unfortunately he wasn't there to actually give it, so I didn't get to talk to him about it), I learned about something called the "Georgetown Hole."  This is a spot along the submerged continental shelf off the coast of South Carolina that apparently preserves evidence of icebergs running aground (you can read about it on this page, which is also where I got the image and the quote below). The "scour" marks going from the Georgetown Hole toward the coast were reportedly created by the bottoms of icebergs scraping the continental shelf:

"The location and orientation of the keel marks suggests icebergs were entrained a southwestward flowing coastal current, most likely during the last glaciation. This may be the first evidence of iceberg transport to subtropical latitudes in the north Atlantic."

Apparently these marks were just discovered in 2006/2007.  If I understood Dunbar's paper correctly, there is still no firm answer on exactly when these marks were created. I think (and I'm really not sure, because I was still trying to wrap my head around the image of icebergs drifting by Charleston) Dunbar was suggested this may have been occurring rather late in the Pleistocene, perhaps even associated with the Younger Dryas (about 12,900 to 11,700 years ago) and the environmental changes associated with it. 

Disney World Not Such a Magical Place for a Conference

I'm not sure what the decision-making process was for choosing a Disney resort as a conference location.  Although I'm only offering my own opinion here, I can tell you that many people here agree with me. It's too expensive. I paid $16 for a pre-made chicken sandwich and a coke for lunch today. A pint of beer at the hotel bar is like $8 or so. The hotel rooms are over $200/night. It's impossible to go elsewhere to eat lunch, because we're on a Disney campus. Everything is Disney and everything is expensive unless you want to get in your car and drive somewhere for lunch, in which case you won't make it back in time to make the beginnings of paper sessions in the afternoon. You could argue that this is a "family friendly" location for a conference, but the SAA elected not to provide any childcare services this year. Maybe this is a great place to vacation, but my opinion is that it is a poor choice for a working conference where many of the attendees are here with limited funding and/or on their own dime.

To Be Continued . . .

I'm going to cut if off for now and get back to the business of the conference. I saw a good session this morning that was organized by Erick Robinson, Joe Gingerich, and Shane Miller ("Human Adaptations to Lateglacial and Early Holocene Climate and Environmental Changes"), but I'm hoping to talk to some of the participants more later.  It was good stuff.

Things are busy as usual around here, so I don't have time to write much myself today. I wanted to make available to you, however, a nice document produced by Ken Lentz.  Lentz took it upon himself to explore how to go from the 3D models that I'm producing for the Kirk Project to a set of linear measurements. As I wrote recently, getting those linear measurements is something I'm going to need to start doing again in short order. I used a freeware landmark-based program (tpsDIG, which I see is still available here) to derive linear measurements from images for my disseration. The program worked fine, but it was a bit labor intensive and I'm hoping to find an alternate path to getting the same measurements that takes advantage of the fact that I've got a detailed, scaled 3D model sitting right there in front of me. 

Lentz succeeded in getting linear measurements (including angles, which I would really like to be able to measure) from a CAD program, but he had to go through a lot of time-consuming steps to do it.  I'm grateful for his efforts, as I have had zero time myself to seriously explore the issues involved in going from 3D back to 2D. Thanks, Ken, for all your work on this (and taking the time to explain what you did).

For the backstory, go here. For the current context, go here.  For the artwork, stay right here.

And now you are up-to-date.