Rational Thought vs. The Media

Because I prefer National Geographic News to listening to various idiots argue about the economy, here are two short and interesting articles about the archaeology of Pre-Columbian Peru:

The first one (here) is actually a week old now, but as we've learned already, I run behind the times. Anyhow, it seems last week was the 100-year anniversary of the first excavations at Machu Picchu after its "discovery" by American historian/archaeologist Hiram Bingham (a senator AND possible inspiration for Indiana Jones, if you weren't aware). Bingham's work at the site is credited with bringing it into public focus and causing it to become the famous tourist destination it is today, and has also resulted in repatriation issues between the Peruvian government and Yale University, where most of the artifacts and remains from those early excavations wound up. Interesting stuff. The NatGeo piece linked above presents a sort of mini history on the theories about Machu Picchu's purpose, the most credible at the moment being that it functioned as a retreat for Inca royalty, a highly symbolic religious site, or some combination of the two.

This is where the whole "tolerance for ambiguity" comes in—most likely, no one is ever actually going to know why Machu Picchu exists or who lived there. There's always going to be more than one possible explanation, and which if any of them is correct is anybody's guess. Interpreting archaeological evidence is often like putting together one of those puzzles with the flat-edged pieces, where you can match up groups of pieces in an assortment of ways, but there's only one way to fit all of them together at once. In archaeology, you're missing a few pieces, so you can put together all the ones that are left, but usually in more than one way, and you can't ever be sure whether you've got it right or not.

Speaking of which...

The second article at hand went up on Thursday and is about a recent discovery of a pre-Inca tomb.

Basically, the grave of an important person was uncovered at a site that has previously yielded evidence of human sacrifice. Cool. Said important person was buried with grave goods that included big copper knives. Also cool. Big knives are apparently common in noble graves from this culture—they're a status symbol.

And yet the article's headline, the topic sentence, the photo caption, and various phrasing used throughout the article consistently claims that this person was an "executioner" or a "sacrificer". Sometimes there's a subtle qualifier like "so-and-so suggests", but other times the article here straight-up states that the grave belongs to someone who ritually killed people, as if it's a known fact.

Kids... this is what we call CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE.

He's buried with knives at a place where women were sacrificed. Nothing about this proves that he was the sacrificer. The knives alone aren't even very good evidence to support that theory given that they're not an uncommon type of grave good for the time and place. It's an intriguing interpretation, and certainly not impossible, but it's not the only interpretation and probably not even the most likely one. National Geographic latched onto it because it will get people's attention and cause them to click on links. Maybe that's not inherently bad or wrong, but there's a way of presenting something like this that's balanced and not misleading, and then there's... well, the way they did it. If you want to inform the public, by all means do so, but draw a clear line between fact and speculation. Your interpretation of the evidence is merely that, and it really bothers me when a generally respected source like National Geographic fails to make that clear and instead gives into sensationalism.

The great poet W. H. Auden sums it up nicely (from "Archaeology"): "Knowledge may have its purposes,/ but guessing is always/ more fun than knowing."

Out Of That Random Rubble

I have been doing a really poor job of updating this thing. It's a little surprising given the time I have spent on things like, say, playing Sporcle, but it's also not at all surprising considering my history of following through on things. I'm working on some stuff, but I'm afraid nothing is complete enough to be upload-worthy at the present moment. Plus my computer's throwing a fit about something and it's taken two hours and a forced restart for me to be able to post this.

At any rate, I wanted to share this wonderful poem by Katha Pollitt: “Archaeology”:

You knew the odds on failure from the start
that morning you first saw or thought you saw,
beneath the heatstruck plains of a second-rate country
the outline of buried cities. A thousand to one
you'd turn up nothing more than the rubbish heap
of a poor Near Eastern backwater:
a few chipped beads,
splinters of glass and pottery, broken tablets
whose secret lore, laboriously deciphered,
would prove to be only a collection of ancient grocery lists.
Still, the train moved away from the station without you.

How many lives ago
was that? How many choices?
Now that you've got your bushelful of shards
do you say, give me back my years
or wrap yourself in the distant
glitter of desert stars,
telling yourself it was foolish after all
to have dreamed of uncovering
some fluent vessel, the bronze head of a god?
Pack up your fragments. Let the simoom
flatten the digging site. Now come
the passionate midnights in the museum basement
when out of that random rubble you'll invent
the dusty market smelling of sheep and spices,
streets, palmy gardens, courtyards set with wells
to which, in the blue of evening, one by one
come strong veiled women, bearing their perfect jars.

To me, that's what archaeology is all about. I guess deep down we all dream of temples and tombs and... whatever the equivalent would be in American historical archaeology. But the more ubiquitous debris of everyday life is just as, if not more, enticing. I see the tourists come through CW and get excited about seeing a glass bottle or a couple of cow bones. Those things are exciting to archaeologists, too (They are to me, at least; I suppose I'm too young to speak for those a bit more jaded), but not just on the surface. They're also exciting to archaeologists because sometimes when we look at them, we see so much more. That's why I wanted to become an archaeologist instead of a historian—because I want to understand the everyday, the things too mundane and too obvious in their day to make it into the history books. We are not permitted to time travel, so we dig. And then we imagine.

On a personal note, I am still in Williamsburg, but I've switched over to doing lab work now, helping sort and process the artifacts that have been brought in. It's fine, but I won't lie: As nice as it is to sleep in another half hour and work at a table in an air-conditioned building, it's a bit of a letdown after five weeks in the field. As Kent Flannery famously wrote, “archaeology is... the most fun you can have with your pants on.”

It's good to see the whole process, though. I think all aspiring archaeologists should have to experience all aspects of archaeology at some point, and although I occasionally allude to my field school's many flaws, I will say that that's one thing it did very well, making sure all its students got to work on everything at least once. Lab work can be boring and lonely compared to excavation, and it's not for everyone, but I appreciate it. Not just because it's a break from manual labor, but because it's refreshing to see some of the results of all the sweat and bruises and shower drains clogged with dirt. I love the moment of discovery when someone pulls something awesome—an intact bottle, the bowl of a pipe, a gleaming jawbone—out of a hole in the ground, and I love being able to see the soil features coming to light underneath my trowel, to see how things are laid out and how they fit together in person instead of trying to make sense of the photos and maps later on. But it's in the lab where you can really see the scope of the artifacts recovered—bags and drawers and piles full of them!—and where you can finally examine them without the dirt and sift through the soil samples for tiny treasures like beads and pins and fish scales, things you'd never spot in the field no matter how careful you were or how sharp your eyes. Finding a padlock in the flotation machine (which I haven't, but which happened to someone here a few weeks ago) may not be quite as dramatic as picking it up from the place it hit the ground two hundred years ago, but I don't think it's inherently any less exciting.

Okay, maybe I'm trying to convince myself a little bit here.

A lot of field techs are field techs because they vastly prefer the sweat and the dirt to the repetitive tedium of the lab. I don't think I had ever been more aware that I'm one of them until I'd spent several days in the lab here picking through thousands of miniscule fragments of brick and bone and shell and glass and wanting to scream. I still don't believe I hate lab work unilaterally, because I've definitely had enjoyable experiences, too, but I had a very hard time with this particular transition. It's been good in some ways, though—I've enjoyed learning how to do flotation, and everyone seems to be in awe of my ability to spot teeny tiny beads among all the bits and pieces (to which I say, “Er... my mom makes costume jewelry. I've been looking at little glass beads my whole life.”). The other day I found four or five of them still strung on a bit of corroded copper wire, which really was very exciting.

I am trying very hard to remember that poem and that usually it is after the digging is done that we can begin to put all the pieces together and make sense of what we've found.