A fellow ARC lab alum…

I officially graduated from the ARC Lab two and a half years ago (oh my gosh–it doesnt feel like that long ago!) But, I have been lucky enough to remain involved in the research, events, and friendships that I started while I was technically still a good ole USC student.

One of the people I met while researching in the lab, and then got to know even better while in the field with Professor Dodd at Kenan Tepe in Turkey, is Jon Vidar. I feel like we all take our undergraduate archaeology training in different directions when we graduate. Jon has used his undergraduate experiences of meeting Kurdish populations in Turkey and joined that with his masters degree in communication and love of photography.

Jon is now a member of the Tiziano Project. In their own words, “The Tiziano Project creates self-sustaining, multimedia, online citizen journalism in conflict zones and areas of the world neglected by the established press with a vision and goal of job creation for those we serve. We achieve these aims through collaborative media creation by pairing working professionals with local citizen journalists.”

Well, you may have heard that Chase is doing a philanthropy competition on Facebook. The organizations with the most fan votes received funding. Tiziano could really use our votes! It only takes a minute, so if you have the chance, here are the step by step instructions:

1) Go to this page on facebook: http://apps.facebook.com/chasecommunitygiving/charities/1228604

2) “Become a Fan” of Chase Community Giving (You must be a fan for your vote to count!)

3) Select “Vote for Charity” and make sure that the vote count went up so that you know your vote counted!

4) Please, please pass this along to all of your friends on facebook! We need all the votes we can get! You must have a Facebook account to participate.

fight on,

ashley

 

What We Did Last Friday

Friday, November 20, as you can see in the second and fourth respective posts below, was a day for reliving the lost langour of summer.

Let us qualify that: on Friday we powerpointed through a summer’s worth of field school/internship/conference photos and for a brief, heady seven minutes were transported back to languors of a mosquito cloud embalming us alive and of dirty ash flying into our eyes while we kept them trained on the ground for eight hours of surveying sun-cracked ashy ground.

O, how beautiful summer is!

There were eight members of the Society of Trojan Archaeologists and one Environmental Studies professor talking about what they did last summer in our long-awaited event.  WIDLS went off with only two hitches: 1) the rather amusing incident of DPS showing up at the lab upstairs, a hand on her gun but afraid to take any serious action on our lightweight classmate (we’re mostly girls, you know) because she was “waiting for backup,” and 2) a un-reschedulable yearbook photo in the middle of our presentations which had us sprinting back from PED after two or three awkward teeth smiles.  Amazingly, our audience was still there!  We were so gratified and humbled by their attendance that we gave them a tour of the ARC lab afterwards.

The people who spoke were

1. Dr. Haw – ENST 499, Collapse of the Ancient Maya
2. Sarah Hawley – AVRP survey in Turkey w/ Prof. Dodd and pottery illustration
3. Sarah Butler – Getty Multicultural Undergraduate Internship, conserving things in Decorative Arts
4. Cara Polisini - Cultural heritage studies and excavations on the island of Menorca
5. Tiffany Tsai – excavation of Paleo-arctic kill site in Alaska
6. Aaron Muller – excavating Tel Dor, Tel Bet Yerah, a site that USC had previously been to in Israel
7. Miriam Mollerus - XRD of Ancient Egyptian artifacts at the Argonne National Laboratory
8. Jacob Bongers - GIS work in Peru
9. Ashley Sands - chairing a session at the World Archaeology Conference in Ramallah, Palestine

We hope that if you came you enjoyed it and if not, that you can join us next year!

 

Cultural Change

For thousands of years, the Venus of Willendorf was thought to have been worshiped as the pinnacle of beauty. The emphasis on breasts, hips and the in-your-face voluptuous gut are obvious symbols of fertility and the importance thereof. Many people disdain the current emphasis on thinness and ask where we went wrong, how our perception of beauty has been altered by the ~media~. I say this is quite simple from a values perspective– fat= food = survival + fertility. Being skin and bones was not a desirable thing for the better part of human history, mostly because it was a sign of malnutrition, an obvious lack of resources, and possibly bad genetics. If there is anything I have learned in my anthropology class, I have learned that propagation of species (“fitness”) works in mysterious ways. It’s deeply rooted in our subconscious sometimes, and sometimes criteria for sexual selection is even selected against… “Golddigger”, for example. If thought about objectively, is it really so awful to have a partner (male, as this term is generally ascribed to women) who is wealthy with resources?

But, then again, I ask you this: maybe this is simply a Paleolithic centerfold? An ancient Claudia Schiffer?

 

VERY EXCITING EVENT

It’s that time again! Time for WHAT I DID LAST SUMMER, a great event where USC students share information about summer archaeological opportunities.

***

What did YOU do this summer? Archaeology students drew pottery in Turkey, excavated Maya sites in Belize, knapped flint points in Alaska, surveyed the Lake Titicaca basin, and restored bronzes at the Getty, among other things. Come and hear about the various opportunities available to USC students who want to dip their feet in the past. From paleoclimate research to field school, a wide variety of regional and disciplinary topics will be explored by faculty and students as they talk about their summer experiences. What they did this summer just may be what you do next summer.

Free food, homemade by members of the Society of Trojan Archaeologists, will be available. Come one, come all.

Friday, November 20, 2009

2:00-3:00 PM

ACB 238

***

EVERYONE COME!!!!!!!!!

 

#MCN09

I am currently in Portland attending the Museum Computer Network conference. I am learning a lot about creating databases, websites, etc. in the museum world. It’s a great link between my archaeology background and my current Information Science studies.

 

Ashley Sands

 

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