Ethics

Before I was an East Asian Studies major on top of Archaeology, I was a Philosophy major. In an intro class I took, the main focus was ethics. We discussed ethics throughout the ages, and I was lucky that my professor had his Ph.D in comparative philosophy so we had the opportunity to discuss both Eastern and Western approaches to ethics.

Looking back at the philosophers we studied (the Greeks, Aquinas, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Hume), I find it ironic that the man whose philosophy I least agree(d) with (Kung Fu Tzu, or Confucius) in the ethical, social, and spiritual contexts, I can agree with most in the context of Archaeology. One of the basic teachings of Confucius is to respect your parents and honor your ancestors. While I may not practice what he preached, I can certainly see what value this outlook has for my field, and everyone’s enrichment.

Case and point: the Buddhas of Bamyan. In 2001, the Taliban, viewing the 80+ foot monolithic Buddhas carved into the cliff faces near the remote town of Bamyan, Afghanistan (along the Silk Road trade route) as remnants of Buddhist idolatry, chose to destroy these potential tourist attractions/revenue creators. Despite offers to buy the statues and the 0% population of Buddhists in Afghanistan, over the course of several weeks, anti-aircraft artillery and anti-tank mines were used to obliterate the UNESCO World Heritage site. These Buddhist statues weren’t so much idolatry (most Buddhists in this region did not worship Buddhas, much like Catholics do not worship a statue of Mary per se) as remnants of the rich Gandharan culture that reigned over the region until the 11th century AD. Gandhara was a wonderfully diverse culture, notable for its mixture of East and West in its artistic styles. Indeed, even in our small collection of Gandharan artifacts at USC, one can see the Buddha dressed in a toga with Caucasian features.

Desroyed Bamyan Buddha

Next semester, REL 465, the Archaeology capstone course, is being offered for once. This course covers archaeological ethics and its place in society. It’s interesting that we need to be taught an ethics course, much like a bio or engineer would.

On a side note, a few interesting developments were made after the destruction of these statues: 50 more caves were revealed behind the Buddhas. There are caves littering the cliffs, where hundreds of monk-hermits lived spiritually rich lives creating paintings, writings, and miniature statues. In these most recently found caves, the oldest known oil paintings have been discovered, possibly predating European oil paintings by 600 years.

 

Catching up on ARC doings

There comes a time in the life of every blog when neglected and/or abused by its distracted owner, it gets the obligatory “apology” post.  After tantrums, tears, and accusations of infidelity by both sides, the blog and blogger make up and reaffirm their friendship, and then the latter makes some outlandish promise like one post for every week!  This is not quite going to be one of those posts…the truth is, not too much has been going on this semester, what with everyone buried up to their necks in schoolwork and research.  Posts are snatched-up flotsam from one’s stream of consciousness, and the typical stream these days runs like ”read pp. 4-499, paper, library, pay bills, ugh, sick, cough, more reading, work, yawn, class, work, paper due, AHH!”  So you see that would not be very enlightening.  But I will do my best to catch us up.

(1) College Night at the Getty

Last Wednesday we all went to the Getty Villa in Malibu for College Night, which is this really cool (read: nerdy) thing where college students from SoCal can walk through all the exhibits and take behind-the-scenes tours and enjoy free food and music after the museum has officially closed.  I was already there for a class beforehand, but everyone else came in a big bus that USC near the last minute agreed to fund.  The archaeology kids joined a tour for the conservation lab, which was sort of a cross between a high-tech chemistry lab, replete with hoods and industrial sinks, and the kind of warehouse you imagine the Mafia would use to store their antiquities and tie up political rivals.  Really heavy metal chains wrapped around this VW-sized metal platform with a bronze statue on it, and the conservator gave us a very detailed talk about the process of finding out which pieces were orginial and where it came from, what he did to clean it, and a wealth of information about the kind of background that conservators have.  Not too much of his work was cleaning; more than half is restoring art pieces, and then there are museum-related labors like setting up new exhibits.  All in all, a very interesting perspective.

As you can see from the picture above, we also spent some time talking to centurions and women (tavern wenches?  I doubt a proper Roman lady would be walking around) from a historical reenactment society (www.legionsix.org).  They were very in character and pretended not to know what Diet Coke was or where we hailed from, until someone make the connection between “USC” and “Troy.”  Ah, so we were from Ilium!  That was within the borders of the known universe.  However, a question about dates left them confusedly counting years of consuls and reigns since Julius Caesar.

(2) WIDLS (What I Did Last Summer, although I always hear ”widdles” in my head) is past pre-production and on its way.  Mark your calendars for November 20, 2-3 p.m.  Sadly that’s the weekend a lot of people are going to be away for ASOR and some other conference, but there should be enough of us here to make a good showing for both New and Old World, at least 3 continents.

(3) Apparently a reporter from the L.A. Times came to the ARC lab today!  But I wasn’t there, so I will let someone else write about what went down.

 

Sunday afternoon… why am I not at the beach??

It’s another lovely, unnaturally hot Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles. I could be doing so many things right now–napping, going to the beach, driving, shopping, reading, enjoying my life…

Instead, I’m plowing through tons of articles, books, theses, dissertations, etc. etc. in the hopes of finding more sources for my article (soon to premiere at AIA… be excited!)  I now have about a million more sources, which is great. Unfortunately, this means I now have to produce more content for my article–you know, actually write. Which honestly isn’t the most fun thing to do on a lazy Sunday afternoon, especially when various distractions keep calling my name (hello, facebook). I also have a plethora (flock? pack? orgy?) of books that I’m in the middle of right now. I don’t know why I can’t just read them one at a time–instead, I’m currently involved in the Koran, the Black Book, the Masnavi of Rumi, the poems of William Blake, and No Rest for the Wicked (yes, you read that right). Unfortunately, with so many options to choose from on a whim, my ability to focus on schoolwork/research/boring things is being severely limited.

In other news, student organizations are confusing and terrifying things. For the weird analogy of the day, it’s rather like trying to create a tame hurricane–once enough critical momentum is gained to actually create/organize/carry out events, the resultant disaster if said organization fails can be catastrophic. Or feel catastrophic, rather. I’m not sure who besides the ARC lab inhabitants cares if our events fall through, but boy, do I care. It makes me want to rip my hair out.

Wow, this is an overwhelmingly positive post.

Hm.

On the bright side, I still wouldn’t have chosen any other major. And the STARC events (which ARE happening) are going to be awesome. And when this article is finished, I will be so proud and giddy that I’ll likely start skipping everywhere.

Perhaps my blogs from now on ought to have a purpose.

~Sarah Hawley

 

Career Choices

“I became an archaeologist because I wanted to drive around in a big Landrover, smoking, cursing, and finding treasure.” -Carmel Schrire

USC is a very driven school. It’s not any Dead Poet’s Society where students sit idly dreaming of Whitman, Thoreau & Co. Every week I am the recipient of the Intern Newsletter, a digest of available internships, paid and unpaid, for students all over the campus (but usually catering to business, comm, and cinema). At USC, it’s about the career, sometimes about the money, almost all the time about prestige. USC doesn’t hide this– their selling point is often the Trojan Family, an extensive network of diehard alumni who have been known to give a boost to young Trojans coming up. Funny, we basically threw that “money” thing out the window when we bcame archaeology majors.

Most of my friends (sans archaeology) expect to work at big companies upon graduation… or at least they did until the unemployment rate skyrocketed. The beauty of archaeology in these tough times is that we all expected to live in a cardboard box with our trowels and ground-penetrating radar anyway, so this economy stuff is just making funding that cardboard box just a bit harder. The competition for funding our dreams and research has become more competitive by a factor of however much NSF decides to cut. NSF is government-run, the same government who threw $80 million down a black hole to save some irresponsible banks. Now don’t get me wrong– There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of digs that are going on at any given time depending on the priority a government dishing out cash places on cultural heritage, and the money caps of private organizations… And the money is coming from somewhere.

Going off of our accepted fates to live in a cardboard box, we have also always been warned of our cultural irrelevance, how if every archaeologist on the planet died at once, the world wouldn’t change (other than an impact on the mortuary services industry– how ironic). The cool part about being an archaeology major (aside from everything) is that, despite our “irrelevance”, our major trumps all other majors by way of “interestingness”. If someone you don’t want to talk to asks you what your major is, you don’t say archaeology (that might start conversations alluding to leather stetson hats and guns… or worse, dinosaurs), you say accounting. No one wants to hear about accounting. But for some reason, everyone at some point has wanted to experience the life on a dig, to uncover Agamemnon’s tomb (or something). So, even though we are one of the least legit sciences in the category of “relevance”, we are also the most appealing. The History channel and National Geographic love us. And that’s why we get funding– because we’re cool. I would like to meet the person who didn’t think their 6th grade history report on Egyptian mummies and ritual wasn’t cool.

And so, did I become an archaeologist as a conversation piece? Did I do it for the opportunity to martyr myself for cultural heritage? Well, none of the above. However, unlike becoming a doctor to help people and play golf, of teach because of a love of children (ha!) and impacting someone’s life, there’s really no other explanation than love. I have always loved the past. Ever since a trip to Chichen Itza, a Mayan site on the Yucatan peninsula, when I was 6, I have loved it. And in the end, that should be enough. And so I, and my fellow archaeologists, break the USC norm of trying to get a good-paying career in something “relevant” with high-returns.

Howard Carter examines King Tut

~Sarah Butler

 

Dr. Jane in the Flesh

Guess who came to USC today?  Jane Goodall!  Yes, the one who sits in the wild and travels the world raising awareness for environmental issues.  She holds a professorship here, actually.  Bovard was filled to the brim this afternoon, not only with students and professors but also other educators and a good number of local kids.

She bore an uncanny resemblance to the huge wild-colored painting of her on one side of the stage.  While she was talking, there would be occasional creaks and program rustles from the audience but as soon as her story reached a point in dramatic tension, the auditorium would go dead quiet.  There were quite a few of those, from when she was a girl struggling to go to university (her family couldn’t afford college, but eventually she went straight to her Ph.D.) to the rehabilitation of black robins from 7 birds, 1 fertile female to over 300.  Her message was simple: don’t give up.  Even though she had to get a secretarial certificate and wait tables for tourists, she eventually made it to Cambridge and from there, revolutionized the way everyone thought about “man” and “tool.”  If we do not accept chimpanzees as human, we must simply redefine that term.  One of her biggest hurdles was the rigid academic language in which biology was couched; when her preliminary papers described the chimpanzees in terms of personalities and human emotions, they flat-out told her she had done everything wrong.  “Fortunately,” she said, “in my childhood I had a wonderful teacher who taught me that no matter what anybody said, animals do have emotions and they do love, they do care, they do get upset, just like humans.  That teacher was my dog.”

A practical tip from Dr. Jane: If a mother chimp is nursing a newborn and her other child interferes, throws a fit, and is acting in all respects like a jealous sibling but because of scientific rigor, you can’t say that, you get around it by saying, “The chimpanzee acted in such a way that had she been a human child, one would say she was jealous.”  Just passing on some advice!

It made me think, though, of how we say archaeology is the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences and yet, the way we write (in American schools) about the archaeological record is so carefully devoid of our emotional, human responses to the objects under study.  That is, it is supposed to be.  When a researcher starts waxing imaginative on the powers of a pipe instead of stating “this pipe had ceremonial signficance, evidenced by patterns of exchange and…etc.,” he or she lays himself or herself open to criticism of the most damning kind: an attack on research objectivity.  All scientists accept that subjectivity coloring observations and analysis is inevitable, but few condone its ready adoption.  When archaeologists go out into the field armed with total stations and magnetometers and floatation screens, it is with the hope of furthering our understanding of ancient peoples through ”hard” data for hard science.  Who is “us,” though, and who were the ancients?  We can never know who they were to themselves.  To us as people, they are as much a departure from our society, something to be viewed in reference and in opposition to the researcher’s universe, as a society unto itself.  Only the hardened factualist admits otherwise.  Is it really so bad to interject your own feelings and conjectures into a reconstruction of ancient lifeways?

Dr. Jane’s activism is informed by her perception of living creatures as emotional, social beings–the chimpanzees were given names and not just numbers as her superiors recommended, and she told a story about a zoo worker who slipped in the mud one day and was attacked by three threatened females until Old Man, a chimp he had groomed and been groomed by, headed them off as he dragged his bleeding self to safety.  He would later say there was no doubt that Old Man saved his life.  Stories like this, I feel, contribute just as much to our academic knowledge as MRI scans and DNA sequencing.

The talk ended with a question-answer session, with the kids asking the best questions as usual.  I mean, Jane Goodall’s views on vegetarianism and veganism (one young man actually had the audacity to ask if she had any positions for him) are very well and all for the factions, but it was refreshing to hear totally uncalculated questions like “Do gorillas have a favorite food?” and “The man in the beginning [Professor Craig Stanford] said you gave talks in 63 countries, so I was wondering how many languages you speak, and how did you learn them all?” (She speaks Swahili.)  She also put in some plugs for Roots and Shoots, her organization, and had a giant peace dove carried onstage and a teenage ambassador give a short speech.  The words “inspiration,” “empower,” and “thank you” were heard many times throughout the Q&A.

At the very end, there was a chance to stand in line and get her new book, Hope for Animals and Their World: How Endangered Species Are Being Rescued from the Brink, but the entire auditorium had emptied out early and now snaked around Tommy Trojan.  So I went to the ARC lab instead–it’s nice to think we have our own niche to make a difference.

~Tiffany Tsai

 

Haboob

In desert cultures across the Near East, they have a term for a dust storm so large and unpredictable it can stifle production for days called a “haboob” (هبوب).  And that’s how I feel about school– that it is my academic equivalent to a haboob.

Since the first week, school has pretty much beat me into submission, and a lot of time-consuming work (not necessarily difficult) is required. Some of the time it’s difficult to keep up. In my Geographic Information Systems (GIS) class, I often find myself struggling with the most rudimentary tasks because of a little glitch in my query entry. It’s very frustrating, and I am not a computer scientist.

Professor Dodd’s class this semester feels almost graduate-level, though the end product will be pretty satisfying. Currently (literally in another window), I’m working on assembling a bibliography for our term research project on a specific site of our choosing in the Near East. I chose Alalakh, or Tell Atchana as it’s known in modern terms, which is a palatial Turkish site located on the Amuq plain. Avid readers will recognize the name as the place where Ashley, Sarah, Lexy and Lee spent their summers excavating. I’ve spent the morning reading excavation reports and ILL-ing whatever has “Alalakh”, “Atchana” and “Middle Bronze Age Turkey” in its search terms. I must say, I initially had a mental block against Turkey (it’s a sibling thing– my sister Kristin (Archaeology ‘09) excavated in Turkey… And I have general passion more for Central/South/East Asian cultures), but I’ve actually grown quite fond of the site as I’ve dug around Sir Leonard Woolley’s and Aslihan Yener’s excavation reports. The site was originally excavated in the ’30s with U. Chicago’s School of Oriental Studies by Woolley, and lay dormant for almost half a century before Dr. Yener resuscitated the survey/excavations in 1995.

This project is multi-component. Professor Dodd is not satisfied with a ten-page paper analyzing the archaeological methods and considering unanswered questions about the site. No. Each of us must do a 3D mockup of the site inside Google SketchUp, a free (and easy) program used by engineers and architects for visualization of planning and development. By doing this, we import groundplans of the site, trace, and build. Some people chose sites that are not in the ground… Like Djoser’s pyramid…  But Alalakh is still being excavated (obviously). I have the benefit of getting to play a little bit with the aesthetics of the place based on further research on Middle Bronze Age sites in the area (keep in mind that the political map has changed dramatically since the 2nd millenium BCE– indeed, even since the WWs, when Alalakh was actually in Syria). In the end, with a source-laden bibliography, a term paper, and a mock up of a site all in hand, we will each plan a lesson plan to bring our presentations in to a local LAUSD school and teach 6th graders about the site that we did.  And then a final exam on paper. And that’s the semester.

I decided to take the project a step further. Since Professor Dodd works with Dr. Yener and Murat Akar, senior field supervisor, I took the opportunity to gather the raw data they have collected on the field and use it for my term project in my GIS class. There is so much data it’s overwhelming… I just hope I can handle it.

In other news, STARC had its first meeting at Jenny and Sarah’s house with our new mascot Weasley, a ginger no-tailed kitten.

Presenting Weasley! He has no tail.

Currently, STARC is planning on a camping trip to Joshua Tree National Park, a semester full of interesting speakers, our annual event What I Did Last Summer in which members share their field experiences, and College Night at the Getty Villa. Stay tuned.

~Sarah Butler

 

My first conference…

So yesterday I learned that my paper, “The Iconography of Empire: Figurines from Tell al-Judaidah,” has been accepted for presentation at the AIA annual meeting. I’m simultaneously excited and intimidated. I’ve never presented my research in an environment like that, and my project still needs a lot of work. But hopefully I will have a wonderfully polished research paper completed by the end of the semester, something I can present in front of archaeologists and academics with pride.

I’m also working on getting STARC (the Society of Trojan Archaeologists) up and running for this year. I’ve designed a basic website, which will be available soon, detailing who we are and what we do. For those reading this (is anyone?), we are always welcoming new members, and we would be so pleased if more students (both undergraduate and graduate) would join. Our first event this semester will be “What I Did Last Summer,” an afternoon of brief presentations about what USC archaeology students did over the summer. This is a great way to learn about the various travel and research opportunities available and how to get involved. More details to come!

A few pictures of STARC, so you can see how awesome we are:

This is going to be a fantastic year, full of presentations, guest lectures, social events, and even a camping trip. We’re going to have a lot of fun. So GET INVOLVED!!

And now, I have to bring this post to a close. The football game comes on very soon, and I plan to be glued to the television.

FIGHT ON!!!!!!!!!!

~Sarah Hawley

 

Pompeii at LACMA

Friday night at the museum?  An easy decision for an archaeodork!  I’m taking AHIS 420: Studies in Ancient Art this semester, a class on the art and archaeology of ancient Greece and Rome (a lot of our upper-division courses are superimposed with vaguely descriptive titles), and as perks we got free tickets to the Pompeii exhibit at the L.A. County Museum of Arts.  For two glorious hours we wandered around marble deities, frescoes, mosaics, bronze fountain animals and even a life-sized reconstructed triclinium as our professor kept up a running commentary.  Our class prior had focused on the excavations at Herculaneum; with the aerial shots and fortresslike hillsides still fresh in our minds, it felt like we’d fallen through several layers of zoom to be gazing up at a fresco whose songbirds were bigger than our heads.  Sometime in the past, the inhabitants of a wealthy villa in Oplontis had assumed the same stance of contemplation by this wall painting as they socialized in the garden.  Behind them, perhaps, was a statue of Aphrodite much like the one that now loomed on our backs…thinking about statuary tends to inspire poetic waxings.

Dr. Pollini talked pretty much nonstop for the whole two hours, attracting a lot of hangers-on who had heard punctuating words like “Sex slave!” and “Penis!” through their audio headsets.  It was usually when he was explaining how body types got increasingly feminized (a little boy bearing a lamp, for example) or de-sexualized (as in the Eros statuettes with noticeably undersized genitals), which has cross-currents with our class theme on Christian destruction of Greco-Roman artworks.  Sometimes, though, the subject matter was inherently sexual – in one sculpture, a woman’s prominent breasts rising above her lover bely the fact that she is a hermaphrodite, which becomes evident only as the viewer circles to the other side.

A definite highlight was the triclinium, or dining room, with the three representative couches re-invented as blocks around the inner walls, and almost complete frescoes making the whole 10 x 10 room glow red.  Just outside was another one of my favorite pieces, a black obsidian vessel from when Egyptomania hit Rome after Rome annexed Egypt.  There is really too much to talk about here, so if you want to go the artifacts are on show until October 3–it’s not free like the rest of the museum, but you get in this case what you pay for.

~Tiffany Tsai

 

Archaeo-Dork

Ok, so this is going to sound really dorky. But, I basically met an archaeology celebrity.

Senior year, a group of us took a year-long class where we studied cylinder seals and their relation to power in ancient society. We learned a lot of photography techniques with Professor Zuckerman and we wrote all of our personal-best term papers ever with Professor Dodd. Our textbook and about half of the articles we read were written by Dominique Collon…

Dr. Collon is essentially retired but still goes to a couple of sites each summer to analyze the seals they excavated that season. She came to Alalakh! We chatted a bunch and I got to show her how to do the portable PTM process on seal impressions. It sounds like someone had just shown her the dome about a month before, but she had never seen the portable version.

She even taught me that when there is dust on your seal impression, the best way to remove it without hurting the impression is to lick it off. She says that Edith Porada taught her that one…

ashley

 

Back in LA LA Land

Well, this summer’s wonderful archaeological experience is now officially over. I arrived back in the States on the 26th, and while it’s nice to have hot water and deliciously awful food again, I really miss Turkey.

This summer was long and full of hard work, but in the end we all learned so much about how to survey, excavate, and perform archaeological analysis. I ended up spending most of my time with the home team, drawing and inking pottery illustrations. I’m now quite proficient at inking despite a few days of horrific failure and periodic pen explosions. Some of my illustrations may be used in future publications, and I can’t wait to see them in print! I plan to return next year for the Alalakh study season to draw EVEN MORE pottery and help out Mara, the amazing local pottery specialist, with her work.

Now the fall season of fellowship applications, grad school apps, GRE preparation, and all the rest of senior year responsibilities has begun, and Turkey has changed from a fascinating and complicated reality to a wonderful memory. In fact, I am currently sitting in the ARC lab at 9:30 AM, thinking about the things I miss about Turkey and preparing to begin my draft for the Provost’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship (which all USC archaeology students should apply to!)

Soon it will be time for the first STARC meeting of the semester… get excited!!!

I’ll add some pictures later… right now it’s time to work.

-Sarah Hawley