Formerly the Anthropology Student's Association of McGill University. Now it's just Becky but I'm still super modern and know how to use the internet. I solemnly swear to bring you cool anthropology junk. Ya dig?
Aw yiss! I got my Bones patch in the mail!
Now all I need is a blue lab coat and my next cosplay is complete :D
So, for one of my anth classes I wrote a paper analyzing Tumblr giveaways through Marcel Mauss’ gift exchange theory. Ended up receiving a 100 percent which is pretty dang awesome. Still waiting to see the grade for my ‘little red riding hood as a commentary of rape victim blame/rape culture’ paper from my folklore class.
I fucking love anthropology.
Fieldwork is like sex: It is often messy. It can be awkward, especially at first. It requires some flexibility. It is at best spontaneous and, no matter what one’s proposal may say, simply cannot be planned. Like sex, even bad sex, fieldwork is always productive: it produces sensations, emotions, intimate knowledge of oneself and others.
Patty Kelly, “Awkward Intimacies: Prostitution, Politics and Fieldwork in Urban Mexico”
(Looking forward to that dissertation…)
(Source: theagonistes)
Who invented clothes? A Palaeolithic archaeologist answers
Hadley Freeman’s answer to the question was chiffon-flimsy, so here’s the lab-coat response
- by Rebecca Wragg-Sykes
““Who invented clothes?” It’s one of those brilliant questions that children ask, before they learn that the big things we wonder about rarely have simple answers. It’s the kind of thing that archaeologists like me get put on the spot about when chatting to kids, and we love to have a crack at answering.
Saturday’s “Ask a grown up” section featured just that question, from eight-year old Harriet, with an answer by Hadley Freeman, fashionexpert and fantastic writer. Hadley’s response was, as usual, entertainingly breezy, with some refreshing encouragement to Harriet to experiment in developing her own style; but, like a fine chiffon, it was a little flimsy in substance.
I’m proud to be involved with ScienceGrrl, which aims to show girls that science is for everyone by providing diverse role models, andTrowelBlazers, a new project that is all about bringing to the fore the achievements of pioneering women archaeologists, geologists and palaeontologists. So I was kind of disappointed that a girl asking a genuine question about archaeology ended up with the barest of facts, as well as being told, even if it was meant lightheartedly, that the grown-up answering her question would rather she pay attention to what she looks like.
Hadley knows today’s fashion world inside out and might not care much about pre-silk times, but I’ll bet that Harriet wanted to find out more than what the Flintstones wear.
It’s this kind of response that can, in aggregate, have a negative impact on children: being mentally curious ends up as something deeply uncool and not relevant to modern life. I’m not advocating force-feeding facts Vulcan-style when talking to young people – far from it. They like to be challenged and humour is a great way to do this. But I do think we should take every chance we get to pass on the incredible stuff that we’ve found out about our world thanks to science – including archaeology – and keep on showing girls that using their brains by asking big questions is, actually, absolutely fabulous.
So for Harriet, if you’re reading: there’s a whole lot we know about the invention of clothing. Many TV reconstructions and book illustrations of stone age (Palaeolithic) people really don’t do them justice. People were already making finely worked bone needles 20,000 years ago, probably for embroidery as much as sewing animal skins, like the thousands of ivory beads and fox teeth that covered the bodies of a girl and a boy buried at Sunghir, Russia, around 28,000 years ago. This was some serious bling, representing years of accumulated work.
And – caveman stereotypes aside – stone age clothes weren’t just animal skins. We’ve known since the 1990s that people were weaving fabric back then, revealed by impressions in baked clay from the sites of Pavlov and Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic. We don’t actually know for sure that these were used for clothes, but the materials weren’t heavy duty, and the variety in weaving styles suggests a long tradition. And at Dzudzuana Cave in Georgia, 30,000 year old spun plant fibres were found which had been dyed: pink, black and turquoise blue!
But what about the really old stuff (because 30,000 years ago isn’t really old in human evolution)? As Harriet asks, who were the first fashionistas? People are still debating what, if anything, our close relatives the Neanderthals were wearing” (read more).
- Becky Wragg Sykes (@LeMoustier) is a postdoctoral researcher working on Neanderthal archaeology. She blogs atwww.therocksremain.org and is part of the TrowelBlazers team (@trowelblazers)
This is AWESOME. And Becky Wragg Sykes is awesome.
I began with physical anthropology. I was taught how to measure the size of the brain of a human being who had been dead a long time, who was all dried out. I bored a hole in his skull, and I filled it with grains of polish rice. Then I emptied the rice into a graduated cylinder. I found this tedious.
I switched to archaeology, and I learned something I already knew; that man had been a maker and smasher of crockery since the dawn of time. And I went to my faculty adviser, and I confessed that science did not charm me, that I longed for poetry instead. I was depressed. I knew my wife and my father would want to kill me, if I went into poetry.
My adviser smiled. ‘How would you like to study poetry which pretends to be scientific?’ he asked me.
‘Is such a thing possible?’ I said.
He shook my hand. ‘Welcome to the field of social or cultural anthropology,’ he said. He told me that Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead were already in it-and some sensitive gentlemen as well.
In a world where Kevin Garnett, Harold Ford, and Halle Berry all check “black” on the census, even the argument that racial labels refer to natural differences in physical traits doesn’t hold up.
zomganthro note: an accessible, though not all encompassing read.
You better Anthropologize
Hey guys, I know it’s been a while (probably almost a month) since I last posted. I’ve been involved in a pretty big move and work picked up so I’m been way too busy to post. I plan on starting up regularly again now. I will be posting less frequently than you are probably used to because of how busy I am with work. That being said, everyone else in the amazing tumblr anthro community will be more than an adequate distraction from my sparse postings!
I missed you guys!!!
Ancient Egyptian Lionness Headed Usekh, So Called “Aegis”.
Dates to between 1290 and 664 BC (late New Kingdom-Third Intermediate), and made of silver. Silver was not easily obtainable in Egypt and was probably more costly for ancient Egyptians to acquire than gold.
Courtesy & currently located at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, USA
Hey you guys I’m struggling with something regarding my dissertation and it’s a big something, so I figured, why not ask the archaeology experts?
One of the locations a collection I examined came from is listed as Hafrsfjarthar ey (Iceland) in the museum, however any search for this name/location (and any variant of it) has turned up nothing.
So basically I’m asking if anyone has heard of this location or knows where I can find a map showing it?
I can’t be any help, but maybe one of my followers could?
getting really angry about the confusion about coprolites and paleofeces…
dudes, they’re different…! one literally means “stone dung” and one is dried up, not fossilized, feces! GEEZ, get it together, internet. one site claimed a paleontologist took his coprolite back to his paleo cave lab and turned it back into it’s “natural” stinky state. wat! didn’t know you could do that with what is basically a rock. :|
To be honest, I’ve never even thought about paleofeces. You’ve just opened my mind.
Cave painting!
step 1: spend 2.5 hours grinding down red ochre for a total of only 1/4 cup pigment
step 2: cry over your broken bloody hands
This seems like a super cool class
Anazarbos II - At work!
After receiving our licence, we could start working. This included geodetic surveying, object drawing and photography of the three necropolis as well as the decription of the single sarcophagi.
Also, we ranged the plain to get a general view of the pottery; most we found Terra sigillata, a fine red roman ceramic.
