Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies

Announcing the formation of the new Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies.  From the website:

The Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies (CIAMS) is the coordinating forum for archaeology activities at Cornell.  Through a consortium of graduate students and faculty housed across five academic departments and two colleges at Cornell, CIAMS encourages research, interaction, and innovation in all areas of archaeology and material studies.  It promotes and supports advanced training and research opportunities for graduate students in archaeology, integrating the different graduate fields at Cornell that offer degrees in archaeology and material studies.

We are excited to welcome the inaugural class of CIAMS MA students in Fall 2013.  For information on the MA program in Archaeology, go here.  For information on how to apply, go here.

Return of the Ukok Princess

The 1993 discovery of a tattooed “princess” in a burial on the high Ukok Plateau in the Altai region of southern Siberia drew much deserved archaeological attention back to the region that also yielded the famous Pazyryk tombs.  But it also had a rather remarkable impact on the complex intersection of archaeology, memory, and genealogy.  A recent article Siberian Times on the find and its ensuing controversy can be found here:

Siberian princess reveals her 2,500 year old tattoos.

The final section of the article raises the most interesting–and for archaeologist, worrisome–issue.  Following a series of happenings–both human and environmental–that attended the removal of the body from the Altai region, a repatriation movement arose demanding the return of the “princess”.  Following extended negotiations, the body was moved from its original home in Novosibirsk and this month appears on display in a new home at the Altai Museum in Gorno-Altaisk.  But the impact of rediscovery continues to shape regional research:

The Altai authorities have now declared the remote mountain area from where the princess and her kinsmen were buried as a ‘zone of peace’ where no more excavations will take place, despite the near-certain treasures lying in the permafrost. 

What is worrisome here is the equation of the absence of archaeology as a state of “peace”.  Archaeological research then is equated with an act of violence.  While archaeology can play a role in strategies of domination and can be used as a tool of appropriation, it need not be and the discipline is in considerable jeopardy if we let it become that.  This means working collaboratively with local stakeholders such that a “zone of peace” is a place where archaeology takes place, not an area from which it is absent.

 

Indo-European Origins, Recomputed

A NYTimes article on Friday considers a recent computer model of language divergence that places proto-Indo-European (PIE) speakers in Anatolia 8,000-9,500 years ago in small agricultural villages.  The model thus stands in opposition to the argument for PIE arising on the Pontic Steppe sometime after 3500 BC advanced most systematically by David Anthony.

Indo-European Languages Originated in Anatolia, Biologists Say – NYTimes.com.

I leave the linguistic assumptions built into the model for others to critique.  But there is an archaeological question which the model will find hard to address: what social dynamic does the early Anatolian model provide for the expansion of Indo-European?  Small agricultural villages do not have built into their social dynamics an obvious mechanism for wide-scale expansion.  One clear advantage of the steppe origins model is the clear socio-technical apparatus for rapid expansion provided by horse riding and chariots/wagons.  The Neolithic Anatolian village provides no such mechanism.

This is not to argue that extension would be impossible–obviously farming and its technologies diffused widely.  But the hoe and the horse are not equivalent technologies of dissemination.  The hoe is a scale-narrowing object–one that yokes the land to human production by tying farmers to very local places (as opposed, for example, to the wider ranges of foragers).  The horse, in contrast, is a scale expanding technology, one that encourages a wide-ranging sense of place.  Missing from the Neolithic Anatolian model then is a sense of how language dispersal could have been so dramatically scaled up even as the lives of its putative speakers was scaling down.

New Maya Temple of the Sun God

A fascinating discovery of a temple of the sun god at El Zotz in Guatemala dramatizes the articulation of rulership with the cosmos.  Two things of particular interest strike me most immediately.  The first is the dynamic nature of the architecture, designed to in a sense draw the viewer around the building in rhythm with the arc of the sun.  In this sense, it might well seem that the building itself is not still but rather orbits around an axis.

The second point of interest is the iconoclasm that resulted in the destruction of nose and mouth.  Houston argues that this reflects an understanding of the building of the temple as itself alive, suggesting that we need to revisit episodes of temple destruction as not only opportunities for looting but more significantly as efforts to extirpate the gods themselves.  To leave a community without their gods is presumably to leave them truly bereft, a mortal blow to the very possibility of life and sovereignty.

See video and text here: “Dramatic” New Maya Temple Found, Covered With Giant Faces.

Conflict of Interest

Andrew Ross’s new book, Bird on Fire, a profile of the urban absurdity that is Phoenix AZ, opens chapter 1 with an observation I remember discussing countless times with friends while doing CRM work in New England in the 1980s.  He writes:

Of all the livelihoods made possible by land development, Cory Breternitz’s job was one of the more peculiar.  He was paid to do archaeological excavations by people who hoped he would find nothing of interest.

 

Timeo Danaos et Dona Ferentes

Greeks apologize to the EU with a gift of a huge horse

THE nation of Greece said sorry to the European Union with a present of an enormous wooden horse.

Left outside the European Central Bank in the dead of night, the horse has now been moved into the ECB’s central lobby where it is proudly on display.

A gift tag attached to the horse, which is surprisingly light for its size and has small holes along the length of its body, suggested that it should be placed in the bank’s vaults overnight to avoid it being targeted by thieves….

via Greeks apologise with huge horse.

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