(This is the last of the GBAC2012 posts and the second part of day 2. Part 1 of Day 2 is here.)
Modern Costly Signaling. Although, this signaling is costly in more ways than one.
Costly signaling, artiodactyl DNA, and behavioral ecology, Oh my!
The day included a series of papers regarding ancient populations and “costly signaling”. Signaling, for those that are unaware, is essentially bragging. If you bring back a difficult to find resource it increases your image and status in the group. That “signal” was costly and your status is proportionally increased. It’s like when someone walks into the room with an Apple product. That’s right.
Fisher said that when hunting is used as a costly signal, “Good” hunters will have a higher reproductive success. That’s not always true, however. Fisher related a story from a Native American (the tribe name escapes me and I was too concerned with the image I was presenting with my iPad to write it down) where the individual had tried to increase his visibility to a certain girl using costly signaling. It didn’t work for him: “I thought that now the girls mother would send her to me at night. For many nights I waited and she did not come”. Nice. Fisher also suggested that non-local resources could have been used as costly signals due to the difficulty in acquiring them. In contrast to the other papers, Jones presented a paper that he started with, “The only costly signaling presented in our paper will be the presentation of the paper.” Nice.
Broughton is using ancient sources of DNA to determine the sizes of Artiodactyl populations. Those animals include pronghorn antelope, among others. He says that a decrease in population size over time should equal a decrease in genetic diversity. That has implications for human populations that use those resources.
George Jones discussed tools and life at Smith Creek Cave. Micro tools at the sit were expedient, simple, and used for game processing. There is evidence consistent with tool repair and caracas processing functions.
The last few papers of the day were about behavioral ecology and it’s applications to anthropology. Metcalfe mentioned that when archaeologists fail to get the results that were predicted then tend to see it as a failure in the theory, not a failure in the model. DH Thomas began is behavioral ecology paper by quoting Carl Sagan. He was talking about how scientists can hold a belief for many years then just change it or update with the discovery of new evidence. I don’t know if that’s entirely true for some scientists. Kuhn said that the only time a paradigm shift happens is when old scientists die and take their ideas with them.
That's it for GBAC2012 posts. I encourage everyone that attends a conference to blog about it and share the knowledge.
This one was just for fun.Thanks for reading and I'll see you in the field.
(In an effort to keep these posts from being filed in the tl:dr category I’ve split this one into two parts. Part 2 will be posted tomorrow.)
Friday at the GBAC has the most papers presented as compared to the first and third days. As a result I was incredibly busy and was bouncing around different rooms all day long.
(c) 2012 Chris Webster - From Grimes Point Petroglyphs, East of Fallon, NevadaI started the day with a paper about petroglyphs and their preservation on BLM lands. Earl, a BLM archaeologist posited the question of how to reposition recovered stolen rock art so it doesn’t happen again. They have some short term solutions for rock art preservation that basically includes getting as much of it recorded as they can. Good, thorough recording has a chance of lasting much longer than the actual rock art, unfortunately. Long term solutions include education (which likely won’t work) and basically turning the sites into parks. Add trails, signs, and educational material and people are less likely to damage it. Interesting. That idea goes along with Saltzgiver saying that the use of volunteers and interpretive signs can help engage the public on a dig in an urban setting.
A former employer of mine, Ed Stoner of WCRM, presented on the cornucopia of data that is the Fire Creek Archaeological District southeast of Battle Mountain, Nevada. I worked on this project two years ago in the field and in the lab. The focus of this paper (they’ve presented elsewhere on other topics related to the site) was on the presence of Western Stemmed points in buried soils. We typically don’t do any subsurface testing during the inventory phase of work out here in the Great Basin. Stoner is proving that in some depositional contexts, subsurface testing could yield valuable data. The points Stoner recovered from Fire Creek were on the edges of a paleo lake. Some of the points were recovered from 10-30 cm below the ground surface (that’s not from the paper but from my own memory of the excavation).
Fire Creek block excavation.Next, I shifted gears and attended a few papers on CRM archaeology and it’s future. Yoder presented a paper about the 50 year rule for recording historic sites. He suggested ditching the 50 year rule in favor of ARPA’s 100 year rule. He noted, however, that he’s just shifting the goal posts by adding 50 years and isn’t really solving the problem. Should we record, in detail, can scatters, regardless of how old they are? My idea is to record dubious historic artifact concentrations as isolates. That way you can know where they exist and what they are without spending hours recording the minute details. Knowing where they are on the landscape is beneficial for larger studies of land use. Rood wondered whether the end of CRM was near and what we can do to fix it. Recording can scatters has not taught us much and some of his clients have mentioned that they have lawyers trying to shut down NHPA so they don’t have to worry about little sites like this. Scary times, indeed.
After shifting gears again I heard more great papers about prehistoric patterns and lifeways. Beck said that we can expect to see more lithic reduction close to sources and less reduction further away. Seems intuitive but it’s nice to have evidence to back up that intuition. Betting presented on the Marginal Value Theorem say that if patch count goes up and patch residence time goes down it’s likely a result of population change. Conversely, if patch count goes up and residence time also goes up then it’s likely a result of environmental change.
I'll post the second half right after this so you can read it in discrete parcels.
I thought I'd do one last post before the generators die in the New York offices of Squarespace. This morning I received an email from them saying that they can't get to the generators in the basement of the building the servers are stored in because they are under water. Also, the water is causing the generators to fail. So, this blog and countless others will go dark until they can get power restored.
Of course, the priority is to get power restored to as many residential areas as possible, especially with cold weather already there and more on the way. I'd like to think this storm is one of those "once in a lifetime" events but something tells me there is more to come. A cursory glance at climate statistics tells even the lay person that there are big changes happening right now. Whether you believe we helped climate change happen faster than normal or not is beside the point. We all have to deal with storms like this now and there isn't a whole lot we can do about it when they happen.
So, I'll prepare some scintillating and droll blog posts so I can flood your RSS readers the minute the site goes back up. Of course, it might not go down, in which case I'll just put up the normal BS that I usually do.
Enjoy your week and stay safe if you're in the danger zone (I'm being serious but scenes from Top Gun still flash through my head when I say "danger zone". Shit. Did it again).
Paisley Caves(This is the second installment of the first day of the 33rd GBAC. Click back one post for Part 1 of Day 1.)
OK. Back to day 1.
Paisley Caves occupied my time for the next three papers. The first, by McDonough et al., discussed the lack of evidence that humans actually interacted with megafauna near the Paisley Caves. They examined the distribution of artifacts and mammal bones beneath the well-dated Mazama tephra. The analysis used Spearman Rank correlation to determine that the distribution of artifacts, bones, and coprolites was not random and was a result of cultural activity. This, the authors believe, is the first real evidence of interaction between humans and megafauna.
Jenkins himself discussed the next paper. He used temperature recording devices placed inside shotgun shells and distributed throughout one section of the Paisley Caves to better determine the temperatures experienced by that cave in order to refine the dating of obsidian using hydration. They did this for one source only since different geochemical obsidian types hydrate at different rates.
The paper by Davis on the three-dimensional digitization of Paisley Caves artifacts was inspiring. They are creating 3D point clouds of artifacts down to several microns and then doing a wide range of things to them. With the point clouds they are able to create hi-resolution digital representations of artifacts. Then, they can manipulate them and do creative analysis on them using tradition GIS techniques to identify flake scars. They've also purchased a MakerBot 3D printer so they can make normal and large-scale reproductions for analysis. Truly forward thinking ideas by this group.
Incised stone.A friend of mine, Randy Ottenhoff, presented a paper based on research he's doing for his dissertation at the University of Central Lancashire, England. The paper was titled, "Incised Stones of the Great Basin: Chronology and the Archaeology of Context". Randy is studying, not the patterns on the incised stones as has been done previously, but the association of the incised stones with other artifacts and their positions within cave settings. We had an interesting conversation regarding some of the things he’s studying regarding the positioning of the stones within cave settings. I won’t steal his dissertation thunder by discussing those things here.
The final paper of the morning included a re-hash of the Dietz Site artifacts in south-central Oregon. O’Grady, et al., reanalyzed the obsidian material at the site using geochemical sourcing. They determined, unlike previous studies, that much of the obsidian used for fluted and stemmed projectile points recovered from the site came from nearby sources rather than distant sources. The previous 25 years of research at the Dietz Site was based on the assumption that many of the obsidian tools originated from the nearby Buck Mountain source in California. This just proves that quality recording during the initial excavation and meticulous cataloging of artifacts after excavation is key in allowing future research to continue. You can never know what new analytical techniques will be invented 10, 20, or even 50 years in the future.
The morning paleo session ended with a synthesis from Great Basin Paleo royalty, Charlotte Beck and George T. Jones. It was great just to hear them speak and give their thoughts on the papers presented that morning.
The final session of the day was a series of papers on the comparisons between the Great Basin and Central-Western Argentina. As it turns out there are many similarities ranging from weather, fauna, flora, to archaeology. There are high elevation sites and valley sites in both locations and the cultural similarities, particularly between paleo- indian and early Archaic groups, are striking.
Overall it was a great first day. Check back later for recaps of the next two days of the Conference.
Ever heard of Storify? It's a great way to collect tweets, posts, and other social media blurbs and photos into a single story about an event.
So, of course, I Storified the Great Basin Conference this year. I only did this to highlight the fact that I was about the only one (with one notable exception) that was tweeting the conference. Why tweet you ask? Well, I had more than a few conversations on Twitter regarding some of the things I tweeted. It was a way to engage others that couldn't be there but had valuable input regardless. Check out Twitter if you haven't. It's a great academic tool is used properly. Just don't follow sports figures and celebrities. You'll regret it in the morning.
This week I'll be posting more about what I saw at the conference. Come back if you're interested.
Thanks for reading and I'll see you in the field, or on Twitter!
(In an effort to keep these posts from being filed in the tl:dr category I’ve split this one into two parts. Part 2 will be posted tomorrow.)
OK. Here is my detailed accounting of the papers I heard presented on day one of the Great Basin Anthropological Conference. First, I have a complaint. Big surprise, right? There were no less than five symposiums and two general sessions during the first half of the day. There was one plenary session in the afternoon. Now maybe the reason for that was to drive people to the plenary session, I don't know. What I do know is that I missed a lot of good papers Thursday morning because I couldn't be in more than one place at once. What am I, a Q-bit? Extra points if you know what that is. Since the inability to split ourselves into multiple components like an evil wizard afflicts us all I'd like to plead for more use of Twitter at events such as this one. Currently, there is one other person tweeting at this conference and we are attending many of the same papers. If there were more people tweeting then someone could follow other presentations while watching one or, while not even being at the conference at all. OK. That's my rant for now. I'm sure there will be more in the future.
The first symposium I attended was the Paleoindian Research one organized by G. Smith and T. Wriston. The papers presented focused on several questions including, "(1) when did humans colonize the northern Great Basin?; (2) what is the relationship between fluted and stemmed projectile points?; (3) how did Paleoindians use the landscape at both a local and regional scale?; and (4) how can new approaches be used to tackle old questions?" Pretty much all the big questions in Great Basin, and North American, archaeology. They did a descent job of it.
Obsidian overshot flake.The first paper was entitled, "Identifying Fluted Point Sites in the Desert West" by Mike Rondeau. His idea is that fluted point sites can still be identified even if all the fluted points have been removed by collectors. This is done, in part, by identifying overshot flakes that are a typical byproduct of the fluted point knapping process. In fact, overshot flakes themselves are sometimes worked into other point types through time. Rondeau says that there are thousands of fluted points in the hands of collectors in the Great Basin alone. What does knowledge of where these sites are located tell us about the Clovis First model? My own question is how many of these sites have already been identified by CRM archaeologists that didn't know how to identify them? Probably quite a few. I know I'll be taking a closer look at prehistoric lithic scatters from now on.
Obsidian HydrationNext, I heard a paper by Fagen, et al. on trace element analysis and obsidian hydration dating of obsidian from a massive site in southern Oregon. It was located as part of the Ruby Pipeline project for those of you familiar with that project. The site was a monstrous 1,200 acre lithic landscape with buried deposits. There was also a habitation area situated right on top of the source obsidian. Fortunately, most of the obsidian occurs in small nodules, otherwise, the medical bills from small cuts would have been enormous! Analysis of the obsidian showed that there was non-local toolstone there as well which illuminated the trade and exchange networks in the region.
The third paper in the Paleo session didn't discuss projectile points at all! Instead, the authors, Barker et al., discussed textiles and the radiocarbon dating of textiles found mostly in caves and rock shelters from around the Great Basin. Some of the 8-10 kyo sandals and baskets were made on loom-type frames, which I didn't know existed back that far. Of course, I know little to nothing of prehistoric textiles.
Historic tram. The one discussed in the paper had a wooden box.After the textile lesson I jumped over to a discussion of tram use on a historic mining site. The tram was several miles long and served a number of mines. It's amazing that such a thing existed in the 1870s. White mentioned that the ore box was a 2 ft by 2 ft by 10 in wooden box that carried ore over 11,000 ft with an elevation drop of over 2,000 ft. High grade ore was still moved by wagon since it was deemed to valuable to risk.
I'm actually writing this on the morning of Day 2 while waiting for the first papers to start at 0800. I'm not staying up here in Tahoe since I live in Reno and drive a Prius. It costs me about $9 round trip to drive here which is a heck of a lot cheaper than hotels up here. Also, I get to see my wife in the evenings. The downside is that I have to get up at 0500 in order to shower, stop at Starbucks, and make the hour drive out. I have a compulsion to be early for things which I got from my time in the Navy. A particular a Division Chief told me once that you should never be right on time for something. You should always be either fifteen minutes early or fifteen minutes late. Early shows that you were prepared for traffic or other contingencies and late allows you time to come up with a great excuse! I've lived by that for twenty years.
Anyway, yesterday was the first day of the conference. It's my first time attending the Great Basin Conference. I've always been in the field and couldn't leave when they've happened in the past. Since they only occur every two years you miss a lot when you don't go. Now I'm in a better professional position and can afford the time to go.
As with the SAAs, the biggest draw so far has been to the Paleoindian Symposium that started right at 0800. The symposium was a regular who's who of Great Basin Paleo work. Papers were given by Jenkins, Fagen, Fowler (Catherine), and Davis with a discussion from Beck and Jones.
After this is all over I'm going to have more detailed posts about the conference. For now, you can follow the two of us that are tweeting what we see by searching #gbac2012.
