With the Spring 2017 semester in the books, I have developed an allergy to firing up my laptop. I apologize if you wrote me an email and I didn't answer. 

Anyway, I've got all sorts of things worth writing about but very little desire to actually spend time writing about them.  So I'll just post some highlight blurbs and photos.

38FA608: What's in the Basement?

I spent last week with several student volunteers (I named them Deep Team 11) excavating a unit in the "downstairs" portion of 38FA608 (the site of the Broad River Archaeological Field School). The goal of the excavation was to learn something about what lies beneath the deposits exposed in the deep profile. If you followed along with my weekly blog posts during field school, you know that we made two attempts to excavate units (Units 7 and 10) below the wall. The area near the wall is artificially low and the matrix is soft sand: water that collected during two heavy rains significantly damaged both units and I gave up trying to excavate there on a one-day-per-week schedule. 

Our new unit (Unit 11) was a 2 x 1.5 m unit that articulated with the previously damaged unit. We had four straight days without rain and managed to get down about 80 cm below the existing surface. We hit an interesting sediment change beneath the lamellae, getting into a zone with more clay and very distinct grey/orange mottles that (I presume) were likely associated with seasonally-shifting wet/dry conditions. Right at that transition, we encountered a scatter of large rocks and several pieces of angular quartz in a relatively thin horizontal zone. On first look in the field, none of these items appeared to be unequivocally modified by humans, but I have yet to think of a better explanation for how they got there. We'll see once we get everything washed up. I'm considering pulling the trigger to date a piece of charcoal from the lowest sediment zone, which would at least help nail down the early end of the top 3 m of deposits in the levee. ​

R.I.P., Chris Cornell

I don't usually get too emotional about celebrities passing away, but this morning's announcement of the death of Chris Cornell was like getting punched in the gut. To me, he was a rare bird with an amazing combination of technical ability, vision, creativity, ferocity, and nuance. Badmotorfinger (1991) is on the short list of albums that really changed how I felt about music and art: it was on heavy rotation for many years of my life. My friend and former bandmate Nadine commented on Facebook this morning that Cornell was "one of my best teachers." I would echo that. He went for it, all the time. He pushed, he explored. Sometimes you "miss" when you're out on the edge, but that's what happens when you're out on the edge. And being out there is part of being an artist. He was only 52 and had tornadoes of good music left in him. I've been playing his music all morning with a lump in my throat.

My wife has been out of town this week, so I've been holding down the home front on my own. I've used almost every scrap of time in the 4-5 between when I get the kids to school in the morning and when I have to switch gears to pick them back up again to work in my garage.  I've been indulging myself, and I've been making a lot of stuff. I'd rather spend the time making things then writing about them, so here are a few pictures of what I've been working on.

I'll Drink to That

Like much of the free world, I breathed a sigh of relief at the news that Robert Mueller had been appointed Special Counsel to head the Russia/Trump investigation. My understanding is that things will probably go dark for a while as he takes over and does his job. I had a choice of two bottles of wine to open last night. Guess which one I picked.

Brood VI . . . Tip of the Spear

Yesterday as I was working outside I heard my first cicada of the season. This is supposed to be an emergence year for Brood VI of the 17-year cicada.  I don't really know what to expect other than it could be deafening. The  regular annual cicadas were louder than crap our last two summers here. I'll keep you posted.

Century Plant About to Bloom 

In other local wildlife news, there is a century plant a few blocks from my house that is about to bloom. The kids and I have been watching it for weeks as it sent its giant, asparagus-like shoot into the sky. I can report that there are lots of buds up there. I've never seen one of these things blooming in person before. I'll take a picture when the blessed event occurs. Hopefully no-one will run the thing over before then.

Following the spring break hiatus, the Broad River Field School will be back in session tomorrow. We'll be shifting gears a bit to carefully work our way into what appears to be a buried Late Archaic/Early Woodland component. I'm also anticipating continued work on the deeper deposits at the site. Hopefully it will be an eventful day. It's supposed to be sunny and in the mid 60's. I'll just leave it at that.

Here are a few quick updates on other things for those playing along at home: a new modeling paper about the minimum size of demographically viable hunter-gatherer populations, new Fake Hercules Swords en route, and an identification of last Friday's whatzit. 

Finally, following up on yesterday's post about Against Me!, I would like to encourage you to listen to the song "Rebecca" if you like the rock'n'roll music. It's on repeat in Andyland. 

Anthropology is the biggest, baddest science on the planet. Humans, human societies, and human cultures are far and away the most difficult things one can try to understand: they're complex, chaotic, layered, and historically and environmentally contingent. They're a pain in the ass to study. They're also a whole lot of fun.

I've been meaning to write a post about Against Me! since the summer of 2015. That July, I took my daughter to see them in Grand Rapids, Michigan (you can see a photo of me with Laura Jane Grace after the show here). I knew next to nothing about the band at the time, but was blown away by what I saw and heard. I became an instant fan. Two of their albums went into heavy rotation on my walk-to-work soundtrack. 

I never found the time to write the original post.  I wanted to write about the binary oppositions/tensions/categories (life/death, male/female, etc.) I heard embedded in the lyrics, the influences I detected in the music, and the extraordinary energy I felt in that room in Grand Rapids. In case you don't know, Laura Jane Grace was born Thomas James Gabel, coming out publicly as a transgender woman in 2012 (you can get an outline of the band's history here). Listen to 2014's Transgender Dysphoria Blues with that history and context in mind, comparing it what you hear on 2010's White Crosses. If you just want to dip your toe in the water, listen to "White Crosses" and "Bamboo Bones" from 2010 and then "Transgender Dysphoria Blues" and "Black Me Out" from 2014.  Compare "Because of the Shame" (2010) with "Dead Friend" (2014). 

There is something amazing, unmistakable, and unfakable about artistic honesty. I've been listening to music, playing music, and going to concerts for much of my life. Against Me! is the real deal. Period.

I took my daughter to see them again last weekend, this time at the tiny Throne Theater in Wilmington, North Carolina. Because of that, I now "get" the appeal of the communal energy in live punk music in a way that I never did before. Near the stage all night, I was simultaneously shoved and supported, lifted up and pushed down. There were strange hands holding on to my shoulders and resting constantly against my back. Everything was moving, all the time. In the interconnected crowd, you can physically feel the ripples of energy because you're a part of it, as is everyone else. And once I got used to the culture, once the touch of strangers was no longer strange, it was exhilarating. Someone always, literally, had my back.  I knew I wouldn't fall down because I could feel an anonymous hand there to hold me up. 

As a person who grew up on hard rock and heavy metal, this sense of community was new to me. The crowds at the big concerts I went to as a kid (AC/DC, Metallica, Guns & Roses, blah blah blah) skewed hostile. To me, it seemed like most of the people there were angry and hoping to take it out on each other. You passed time before the show watching people get hauled out by security. I tried not to look anyone in the eye. I'm pretty sure the guy behind me at an AC/DC concert flicked his cigarette ashes on my hair -- I wouldn't know, because I didn't turn around for fear of getting punched in the face.

Being in that crowd at the Throne also helped me understand why there's so much bad punk music: because it doesn't matter. As long as there's a beat, the crowd takes care of itself. It does its own thing, even if there's no melody, even if there's not a catchy hook, even if the lyrics are a bunch of shouted garbage. This has always been a mystery me. I've watched a lot of documentaries about punk music, and I never "got" the appeal until I was in a crowd myself. That's anthropology for you. (See that? Participant observation -- get in there and experience it to learn about it -- this post actually is about anthropology.)

If you liked rock music in the 90's but have checked out, I urge you to check back in for a few minutes and give this band a try.  Against Me! is bigger than the sum of its parts. The energy is there, but so is the music, so is the honesty, so is the bravery.  It's not a sob story or a pity party. It's a force for good.  It's gender, it's anger, it's tenderness, it's human, and it kicks ass. Rock and roll isn't dead.

Here are some videos I took of some of my favorite songs. The camera moves not because I'm unsteady, but because the whole crowd is in motion. Enjoy!

Last week, my answer to the question "how many blog posts discussing banjos will you write in August?" would have been "zero." Today marks number three. That shows you just how hard it is to predict the future.

This is going to be a short one. I wanted to follow up on the yesterday's discussion of who "invented" the banjo. The banjo display in the Museum of Appalachia states that "the Sweeney brothers of Appomattox, Virginia" made the first five-string banjo in this county -- in 1831." Joel Sweeney was a minstrel performer who popularized the banjo among white audiences.

I'm still trying to figure out exactly what Sweeney is being credited with "inventing," since African American banjos that pre-date Sweeney had the same basic design as the "modern" five-string banjo: a membrane stretched over a skin, a stiff neck, and several strings, one of which was a "drone" string. Was it that Sweeney used a wooden frame instead of a gourd? Or that he used a fretted neck? Or that he standardized the five-string arrangement (African American banjos had a varying number of strings)?

If we're going to give Sweeney credit for making the first banjo in the country because he used a wooden frame instead of a gourd, it seems like we should also give credit for creating a new instrument to whoever made the bedpan banjo, the toilet seat guitar, and the horse jaw fiddle that are also on display in the museum.

This painting titled "The Old Plantation" (attributed to John Rose, ca. 1785-1795) shows an African slave playing a four-string (fretless?) banjo on a South Carolina plantation.  The banjo appears to have a stretched membrane and a short drone string. As far as I can tell, it's the oldest depiction of a banjo in North America. 

Yesterday I wrote a brief post about my visit to the Museum of Appalachia in eastern Tennessee. My main point was that it's a fantastic museum, different from anything I've seen before (and I've seen a lot of museums). You can read that post for my somewhat soppy overview paragraph about what makes this museum so interesting (to me, anyway).

The first building that you visit at the museum is called the "Hall of Fame." The sign in the entryway explains pretty well what the goal is. This is one of the most interesting places in the museum, introducing you to the people and culture of the region though an incredibly varied display of personal artifacts, photographs, and anecdotes, with many of the placards written out by hand and signed by the museum's founder, John Rice Irwin. You can read about Viola Carter's cowbell, look at Felix "Casey" Jones' devil's head, and see a fiddle made from a horse mandible.

There's a lot in the "Hall of Fame," and the slower you move the more you will absorb. I was on medium speed, still having a lot of miles to cover that day to get back to Columbia. So I didn't read every word or every display. Some of the things I bring up here may well be in the museum, somewhere.

One of the things that makes this museum great, I think, is its affection for its subject: it's a museum about Appalachia and Appalachians, created by Appalachians. It is kind of an "inside" ethnography that embraces the distinctiveness of Appalachia, communicating and often celebrating characteristics that outsiders might see as strange, even embarrassing or depressing. The museum doesn't try to make an argument, or even to explain, it just gives you a chance to run your fingers over the fabric so you can maybe get some idea of its patterns, weaves, and textures.

Pride in the distinctiveness of Appalachian culture emerges loud and clear. Two items that jumped out at me from the "Hall of Fame" displays were the crossbow and the banjo. I didn't know much about the history of either of these items in American material culture. I left the museum with the impression that both were home-grown in Appalachia. A little online research, however, suggests the introduction of both to the region was via enslaved peoples from West Africa (the case for the African origin of the banjo is stronger than that of the crossbow). This is fascinating for several reasons, not least of which is that it's an interesting historical case of the transmission of technologies (one musical and one subsistence-related) between two very different groups. Appalachia remains one of the whitest regions of the county. 

The Crossbow

I'm neck-deep in end-of-semester grading, and probably won't have time today to finish the blog post I've been working on.  Without the benefit of the PlagiarismCat, I'm forced to go through the tedious process of researching and writing my own content, which just takes a while sometimes. It doesn't seem fair, but I guess that's life.

In lieu of a blog post today, I offer you the song "Antediluvian Man" by the Reno-based trio Red Mercury (here is a studio version).  Add this one to Rasputina's "Holocaust of Giants" and the musical starts to write itself.