I often get asked what if any connection there is between my art and my archaeology. It's a good question, the answer to which I both think I know and have a difficult time clearly articulating. I've found myself thinking about it more since I was invited to participate in the Theoretical Archaeology Group's 2018 meeting at the University of Florida. The theme is "Matter Matters." Since the invitation, I've been taking mental notes while I work in my garage, especially about how and why materials "jump dimensions" and are transformed from simple utilitarian objects into symbolic ones. That's probably what I'll talk about.

This morning I had the opportunity to pick through an old garage that was about to be demolished. I don't know the full history of the property, but it was clear that the immediately former owner had used the building to "collect" all sorts of things. Material was piled head high in some places, a massive jumble of plastic, metal, wood, glass bottles, paper, styrofoam, etc. It had clearly been a habitat for rats for a long time.

I had to work fast because the goal was to get the building down today or tomorrow. When I'm looking for sculpture materials, I'm usually looking for ferrous metal in interesting shapes and colors. I'm also on the lookout for "unknowns" that might spark an idea or solve a problem now or in the future.  

The archaeologist in me found it really difficult to keep up the pace. As I started to remove and toss aside things I wasn't interested in, it became clear this wasn't just a random jumble of junk. There was information in both the kinds of things that were present (e.g., many old ax handles, lots of wire flower racks from funeral displays) and in their order. It was stratified both horizontally and vertically, which is easy to understand if you think about the process of gradually accumulating material in the room. There were postmarked envelopes here and there. If I had had a month to excavate carefully, I would  have been able to tell a really interesting story.

Embedded within the stratified deposits, I found three toolboxes. The metal one was in the debris above the floor. The long wooden one was sitting on the original floor (with nothing underneath it). And the short wooden one was tucked back in the far corner, leaning against the wall as if it is had fallen behind something.  

The top reads

• "Ken Schlimgen"
• "564th"
• "19112259" (I think -- I'll double check when I get home again)

On the front of the box it says "Slim."

My first guess is that this used to be the toolbox of someone in the 564th squadron (or some other organizational unit) of the U.S. military. The box has some odds and ends that appear at first glance to be mostly related to auto repair. I think the box saw secondary re-use after it's original military service: those probably aren't Slim's tools in Slim's old box.

Here's the challenge to the internet. Figure out who this guy is. Figure out if he's still alive. Figure out if he has family that are still alive. I'd like to give this box back to him or them if they want it. You know why? Because if it used to mine, or my dad's, or my grandpa's . . . I'd want it back.

I know this because every time I'm in my garage making something new out of something old, I think about how much matter actually can matter. One of the sculptures I'm working on now is called "My Father's Hammer." It's a crow made from my father's old hammer. It matters to me even if it matters to no-one else.

I'd like to give Slim's toolbox to someone that will treasure it. ​I'll send the person who finds him a signed print and some stickers for his or her trouble.

Just because I haven't been writing much about my art doesn't mean I haven't been busy. With the academic semester is in full swing, it's an evening and weekend pursuit. I've been working on a few different things but most of my energy has been going toward finishing up the piece I plan to enter in ArtFields (entries are due in early November).  Here are some highlights of what I've got coming up.

"Old Ben," Going Once . . .

As I mentioned earlier, I contributed a sculpture for the Columbia zoo's annual "ZooFari" fundraiser.  I don't really know how this sort of combination live/online auctions work, but there has already been at least one bid even through the live auction isn't until tomorrow evening.

You can bid on "Old Ben" here and I encourage you to do so. If the bid stays below $100, I'm going to buy it myself and he's going right back on my mantle.

Rosewood Art Festival Mystery Sculpture

My entry into the juried show at the Rosewood Art & Music Festival was accepted. The show itself is a one-day event on September 30th, so I'll drop the sculpture off in the morning, it will get judged, and then I'll pick it back up at 5:00. If it sells, I'll pick up a check that will go into the Zero Point Mechanic World Domination Fund.

For some reason I can't claim to understand, participants are not supposed to identify their entries online. So I'm not telling you what I entered. I'll just say I like it, but I'm putting a price tag on it.

If you're in the Columbia area, come and see some art and listen to some music on Rosewood.

Stickers: An Indoor Activity

I can't always work in my garage when I want to, so I stay busy indoors sometimes. I'm not doing much at these days that doesn't produce heat, sparks, and fumes, but I have taken to playing with sticker designs. You can see/purchase what I've come up with so far at my Etsy shop.

The tri-lobed rooster design is one I've been working on for a long time.

The yin-yang "dark-bright" Triceratops heads are something I worked on while we were cooped up inside getting lashed by the outer bands of Hurricane Irma. I couldn't decide on which color combinations and configurations I like the most, so I had a batch of 1" ones printed as a experiment.

South Carolina State Fair: A Pair of Birds

Next week I'll drop off my two entries for the South Carolina State Fair. I decided to go with two pieces from this year that I love and don't ever plan on selling. I'm not sure they're my best work, but they're a good pair. 

After everyone submits what they're going to submit, there is a process where they "jury out" things that aren't judged to be suitable for whatever reason. Everything that's left is judged, prizes are awarded, etc. Awards are announced in early October.

Last year, my crow sculpture won "Best of Show" in the amateur division. That was a real confidence booster, and it was a rare treat to get to take my kids to see my work literally in the spotlight with a big ass ribbon on it. I don't expect I'll be able to pull that off again, but I still love fairs and I'm looking forward to seeing all of this year's entries and seeing how mine do.
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ArtFields: Go Big or Go Home

ArtFields is a big deal: it's billed as one of the largest professional art shows in the Southeast. You can only enter one thing, and it's reportedly very difficult to get in. I missed the deadline last year but have been planning for this year ever since.

Originally I was planning on entering "Grace," but as the fall started I began thinking/imagining that I'd have enough time to also finish "Beauty" and produce the "Beauty and Grace" pairing I've been envisioning since I started on "Grace" last spring. 

The deadline is November 9, so I've got a month and half left. Wish me luck: it's going to be a push to get it done.

I'm happy to announce the publication of a new paper of mine in The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS). JASSS is an open access journal focusing on the use of computer simulations as a tool for understanding social systems. I love publishing papers that anyone can get to at any time, without requiring logins, subscriptions, or fees. I wish every paper could be open access, and I wish I had the funds at my disposal to throw money at journals like JASSS to support such efforts. If I ever do have the money, that's the direction I'm going to throw it.

My paper, titled "A Model-Based Analysis of the Minimum Size of Demographically-Viable Hunter-Gatherer Populations" will appear in Volume 20, Issue 4 (due to be released on October 31). You can read the paper online here. It should be available in pdf form soon.

If you really want to get into the nitty gritty, the raw model code and an explanation are available here.
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The focus of the paper using an agent-based model to revisit the question of how large human groups have to be to be demographically viable (i.e., able to survive over the course of many generations). This is a key question for understanding the size and structure of ethnographically- and archaeologically-known hunter-gatherer social systems as well as fleshing out scenarios of hunter-gatherer groups colonizing empty landscapes. Here is the abstract:

"A non-spatial agent-based model is used to explore how marriage behaviors and fertility affect the minimum population size required for hunter-gatherer systems to be demographically viable. The model incorporates representations of person- and household-level constraints and behaviors affecting marriage, reproduction, and mortality. Results suggest that, under a variety of circumstances, a stable population size of about 150 persons is demographically viable in the sense that it is largely immune from extinction through normal stochastic perturbations in mortality, fertility, and sex ratio. Less restrictive marriage rules enhance the viability of small populations by making it possible to capitalize on a greater proportion of the finite female reproductive span and compensate for random fluctuations in the balance of males and females."

My main finding is that, under the varying conditions I investigate with my model, I find no support for the often-repeated idea that a society of about 500 persons is required to ensure demographic viability.  Students of American anthropological archaeology -- especially, I suspect, those of us that went to the University of Michigan or were taught by U of M alums -- will immediately recognize the "magic number 500" as a concept that emerged from the research of Joseph Birdsell and (later) H. Martin Wobst. As I discuss in the paper, I think neither Birdsell nor Wobst intended the number 500 to take on the meaning that it did -- it became a kind of shorthand gloss for setting a general lower boundary on the size of hunter-gatherer social systems.

My modeling results suggest that the number of people required for demographic viability can be safely pushed down south of 200.  In over 67,000 model runs (under varying conditions of mortality, fertility, and marriage rules) where the mean population exceeded 150 people, the population went extinct only nine times.  I'd take those odds.

All the modeling was done under conditions with no logistical constraints to identifying and obtaining marriage partners:  no spatial component to interaction, no impediments to the flow of information. Logically, putting the model systems in space and dispersing the populations across a social/physical landscape would have the ultimate effect of raising the population size required for demographic viability. Would it double or triple it, though? I highly doubt it.  But the great thing about modeling is that we don't have to be satisfied to simply suppose things -- we can model the problem.  Understanding that less than 200 people are required for demographic viability assuming no interaction issues, we can then unpack the issue to ask why hunter-gatherer societies are often much larger. What role does the structure of mobility play? What about the need to maintain a geographically-extensive social fabric to buffer large-scale environmental variability? Here are a couple of paragraphs from my conclusion:
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The blog has been on the back burner while I deal with the beginning-of-the-semester crunch. I've got a lot going on this year, so I'll probably have less time to write than I did in years past. Keeping all the parts of my three-headed monster of a research agenda moving is more than a full time job.

I wanted to write a quick post about the presentations I've committed to for the fall (SEAC) and spring (SAA) conferences, as they give you a pretty good idea on what's going on with some of my "big picture" work.  I gave a presentation about my work on understanding the Kirk Horizon to the Augusta Archaeological Society at the end of August, and I'll be giving an informal presentation to SCIAA next week synthesizing what we know so far about the natural/cultural deposits at 38FA608 (site of last spring's Broad River Archaeological Field School). Here's what I'll be doing at the regional and national conferences:

SEAC (November 2017, Tulsa, OK)

David Anderson and I are teaming up to give a paper titled "Structure, Density, and Movement: Large-Scale Datasets and Basic Questions about Early Foraging Societies in the Eastern Woodlands." The paper will part of a symposium organized by Shane Miller, Ashley Smallwood, and Jesse Tune titled The Paleoindian and Early Archaic Southeast: The Last 20 Years, 1996-2016. Here is the abstract of our paper:

"Distributions of diagnostic projectile points show that the Paleoindian and Early Archaic societies of the Eastern Woodlands were spatially-extensive, occupying vast and varied landscapes stretching from the Great Lakes to the Florida Peninsula. The scales of these societies present analytical challenges to understanding both (1) their organization and (2) how and why the densities and distributions of population changed during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. We integrate several large datasets – point distributions, site locations, and radiocarbon dates – to address basic questions about the structure and demography of the Paleoindian and Early Archaic societies of the Eastern Woodlands."  

We'll be integrating data from PIDBA, DINAA, and my ongoing radiocarbon compilation. There will be some significant work involved in meshing all this stuff together in a GIS framework that we can use analytically, so that will be one of the main things on fire for me in the coming month.

SAA Meeting (April 2018, Washington, D.C.)

​At this year's SAA meetings, I'll be contributing to Scott Jones' symposium titled Forager Lifeways at the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition. My paper is titled "Patterns of Artifact Variability and Changes in the Social Networks of Paleoindian and Early Archaic Hunter-Gatherers in the Eastern Woodlands: A Critical Appraisal and Call for a Reboot." Here is the abstract:

"Inferences about the social networks of Paleoindian and Early Archaic hunter-gatherer societies in the Eastern Woodlands are generally underlain by the assumption that there are simple, logical relationships between (1) patterns of social interaction within and between those societies and (2) patterns of variability in their material culture. Formalized bifacial projectile points are certainly the residues of systems of social interaction, and therefore have the potential to tell us something about social networks. The idea that relationships between artifact variability and social networks are simple, however, can be challenged on both theoretical and empirical grounds: complex systems science and ethnographic data strongly suggest that patterns of person-level interaction do not directly correspond to patterns of material culture visible at archaeological scales. A model-based approach can be used to better understand how changes in human-level behaviors “map up” to changes in both the system-level characteristics of social networks and the patterns of artifact variable that we can describe using archaeological data. Such an approach will allow us to more confidently interpret changes in patterns of artifact variability in terms of changes in the characteristics and spatial continuity/discontinuity of social networks during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in the Eastern Woodlands."  

This is a basket of questions that was the main focus of my dissertation work. My goal is to lay out the case for why we really need to be doing things differently than we are in order to get at questions about social networks and social interaction. With the SAA meetings still months away, I plan to do new modeling work to support my argument. If I'm to do that, I'll have to ramp up my modeling efforts and deal with some issues around adding space back into the main models I've been working with. It needs to be done, so committing to a paper is a way to make sure I prioritize it.

I'll also be participating in a "Lightning Round" about engaging pseudoarchaeology. In this session (organized by Khori Newlander), the participants will each get just three minutes. No abstract is required for this one. As of now, I plan to use my time for "Swordgate: How to Win Friends and Influence People."