Southwestern Archaeology, Inc. (SWA) " Got CALICHE ? " Newsletter Archaeology, Anthropology, and History of the Greater Southwest! Monday October 27, 2003 ***************************************** TEXAS http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/2178318 Established as Rancho Carnestolendas in 1753, Rio Grande City survived fierce Indian raids and endured military campaigns during three different wars and the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Today, city leaders are staking their economic future on this very rich and still very visible heritage. http://news.mysanantonio.com/story.cfm?xla=saen&xlb=180&xlc=1075010 The Lajitas trading post in Big Bend, a blocky old adobe building on the banks of the Rio Grande always has been an important social center and supply stop. The trading post was a symbol of the two cultures joining: it was a social gathering place, where you could see your friends, but the border closing ended all that. The instant gentrification of the trading post is just the latest step in the rapid conversion of Lajitas from a dusty border stop into a manicured destination resort for the well heeled. "Basically they are sweeping away the last historical vestige of Lajitas," Davidson said. "This is America. If you've got the money, you can do what the heck you want..." COLORADO http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_2376126,00.html Thousands of century-old inscriptions from Colorado graveyards haunt the Internet, accessible by people who may never visit them. Some entries include epitaphs, some just a single photo, but the names are always there. Each day, more tombstones are uploaded onto Web pages such as savinggraves.com and cemeteryjunction.com, sent by preservationists such as Kilgore, who scour graveyards around the world, transcribing the stones of strangers. ARIZONA http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjournal/living/7072767.htm There's more than one version of how Hollywood "discovered" Monument Valley. Ford and Goulding conveniently remembered themselves as the sole discoverers and developers of the Valley for cinematic purposes. http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/index.php?page=local&story_id=102503b2_ahs_extension The Arizona Historical Society won a 10-year extension of its state funding. The extension, the longest granted by the Legislature, was passed unanimously, without discussion, after presentations by several supporters. NEVADA http://www.bayarea.com/mld/cctimes/news/7107785.htm An environmental team is combing a 50,000-acre area that BLM has targeted for the auction block. Significant paleontological or archaeological finds could launch a consultation process with Nevada's congressional delegation, and eventual public meetings, about how to protect the sites or preserve what is found. The environmental survey is expected to last through December, and an environmental study is due in August. EDITOR'S NOTE Two disparate views. Any Comments? An archaeologist says ... "Finding and raising artifacts is the easiest and least expensive part of our work. But, the most exciting discoveries have all come in the library. Finding artifacts is not archaeology." http://www.archaeology.org/magazine.php?page=0307/etc/conversations Another archaeologist comments [in separate letter written to swanet.org] ... "Archaeology, while great fun when you're digging in the dirt or walking along on survey, had become just too much of a drag: too much paperwork and too much hassle just to perpetuate a largely pointless bureaucracy. CRM has degraded into just another "business model" with too many CRM mercenaries in recent years. I'm questioning the self-perpetuation behind much of the grossly overblown bureaucratic process. What ever happened to informing the public about our findings? What about sharing information with our scientific colleagues? Most companies are only concerned with getting reports passed through regulatory agencies, collecting their fee, and moving on to the next project. So few companies even think of doing any public outreach, or spending more than a few moments thinking about educating and engaging the public." REPLIES TO EDITOR'S NOTE From: Mark Hackbarth CRM firms are businesses, first and foremost. Their goal is to provide a service that involves "getting reports passed through regulatory agencies, collecting their fee, and moving on to the next project." There is nothing wrong with that business model and it does pay the bills. But face it, businesses are made up of people and people have the option to use their spare time for other purposes. If the employees of CRM firms are unhappy with not doing public outreach, education, or engaging the public then they should do volunteer work. How about giving back to the public that supports the legislation that gives you a job? How many tasks did you do on a voluntary basis when in graduate school? Why is it that once you get a job you expect all things related to archaeology should provide you with an income? If you loved archaeology enough to struggle through school, why not continue to do voluntary work? There are all kinds of places and ways to become involved with education and the public. Just look around and get started. Try speaking to AAHS, AAS, or local historical societies. Want to educate the power brokers? AAC needs someone to guide a legislative committee - or talk to city councils, county supervisors, house and senate members, or join a CLG board in your community. What about the Site Steward program? Do you have time to help locate site on your own time and become the next generation's version of Frank Midvale? But you say you don't like going out of town? Then offer to tutor students at ASU, UA, NAU, or offer to teach classes at community colleges (you'll even get paid for it), or work weekends with the nonprofits arms of some contract firms. How about writing a KIVA paper about that last project you finished? Or start learning a skill that will enhance your value at the office. Stop complaining about what is and work for what should be. From: Lou Sloat I could write reams on communications or the lack of it. No matter what the subject or the problem, communications of some kind always plays a part. Over the years I have written and have published thousands of news releases, newletter articles, photo releases and other articles to keep the public AND our own profession informed of what we were doing, why we were doing and how we were doing it. Public communication is the key to any successful project, keeping funding coming, getting the public and your peers to accept techniques, discoveries, applications, etc. The thing that has always astounded me is the lack of the professional field, ie. archeologists, natural resources managers, foresters, wildlife biololgists, etc. that have any education in how to keep the public and their peers informed. How many of us took a Journalism or public information course in college or learned the ins and outs of public information, public relations, or media relations? Why don't the college and universities see the value of this or better why doesn't the professionals see the value of this. I totally agree, we need to keep everyone informed, but the professional in many times has to be the one to do it and KNOW HOW TO DO IT. Communications is the key to our successes and our failures. From: Rick Pettigrew I don't think these views are really disparate, but just two different perspectives on the same animal. The second really strikes a chord with me, however, because it expresses one of my pet peeves about the current status of archaeology in this country. CRM has indeed become a habitual process (known as the Section 106 process) that feeds a cadre of archaeologists for hire and an entrenched bureaucracy. Although Section 106 regulations give lip service to the need for public participation and public education, no provision was included for follow-up review and potential sanctions to ensure that the value protected and recovered through the process is shared with the public. Thus, the public derives remarkably little benefit from the millions of dollars it spends annually, ostensibly on its own behalf. I think the time has come for reform of the Section 106 process to rectify this situation, which is a scandal that at some point could threaten public and legislative support of a system that otherwise has been very effective in protecting cultural resources and generating masses of data that otherwise would never have been obtained. For my own part, I have worked for the past four years through nonprofit Archaeological Legacy Institute to help address this situation through http://www.archaeologychannel.org, our streaming-media Website designed as a tool to deliver the important messages of archaeology and indigenous peoples to people all over the world. The remarkable difficulty we have faced in obtaining support for this effort is a measure of the low esteem held by many of our colleagues for initiatives that attempt to reach beyond the spheres of archaeological research and archaeological business to share with the rest of humanity the valuable perspectives we are gaining through our research. I sense, however, that change may be in the wind. Perhaps there is hope that our profession as a whole soon can put our actions where our words are with regard to communicating the value of learning about the human past. From: Mark Sechrist The article on George Bass oversimplifies the concept, understandably in the context of comparing archaeology to looting, but the point is correct. Amassing material without some means of relating it to issues in life is fairly pointless. I think Bass is saying that archaeology is all about interpreting the material, that the material realm is only the tip of the archaeological iceberg. The bulk of its value is in what the materials indicate about more general life, how the facts of the material articulate with the concepts of culture. These relationships only become clear through knowledge recorded elsewhere (as in the libraries). The second statement is understandable from the perspective it seems to be addressing, that corporate-run archaeology outfits out there stress profit over product and stress social-Darwinist sink-or-swim management structures that are ultimately (and usually irreparably) dysfunctional, over front-end investment in training for long-term returns on competence with little further maintenance. The former represent old-school management models that really don’t work but continue, I guess, partly from inertia, partly from like-mindedness of their clientele, and partly from university programs not recognizing the need for management training for archaeologists. Profit motive and low-bid priorities create an atmosphere where competition becomes a "race to the bottom" (a phrase from independent-trucking-industry economics) necessitating abuse of labor laws, regulations, and ethics. Fraud and cheating are clearly no longer the concern, only getting caught is. The other aspect is on the governmental side, which suffers from similar forces of budgetary limitation, managerial ineptness, and clientele pressure. Third party to all of this is the profession as a whole. From my limited point of view I can see little that the SAA’s RPA program has done to improve things. They seem to simply assume that requiring a graduate degree and signing an oath will lead to better archaeology and do not recognize that most university programs do not articulate well with the profession, and oaths without real enforcements are naive. Government regulation requiring graduate degrees for positions of authority has often led to contractors putting inexperienced and ill-trained personnel in charge of projects they are unqualified to deal with and alienating very accomplished and experienced archaeologists who stopped their education at the undergraduate level (usually because they recognized what little graduate education had to offer). In some sense this represents the same old straw man of the academic vs. contract archaeology "rift". CRM has constraints that, for some reason, seem more obvious and deleterious to the goals of the profession. Yet it’s easy to see that academic archaeology suffers similar constraints. Time and money limitations are real for all of us. That simply necessitates rational decision making between doing what we would like to do and doing what we can, period. We should be thankful for the structure they enforce upon us. As far as archaeology as business being "second rate" and accusations of "prostitution", we should ask ourselves how many university field school classes would make if the project was to focus on low-density lithic scatters and burned rock features in a desert basin instead of a PIII pueblo in a scenic, sandstone-mesa woodland? Does archaeology as a whole (i.e. as an anthropological pursuit) really benefit more from an intense focus on the few hundred years of prehistory that created "spectacular" material remains or from studying the thousands of years of hunter-gatherer cultures that represent the other 90+% of cultural evolution? How many university archaeology professors have old field school project materials languishing or abandoned in basements because they did not allow time for adequate processing and reporting, or simply left for a new job without finishing? I know there are at least some field schools out there that, having been required to return artifacts to private landowners, helped enable the cash business of trade in antiquities. We all have our ethical challenges and the solutions are clear but not easy. Archaeology is a pretty straightforward process that is often made difficult by inept management at all levels. The obvious cause for this is simply a lack of training. Yet, university programs still barely stress CRM processes, even though the vast majority of their graduates will find employment in CRM, and most teach nothing about basic business or personnel management. Professional organizations also need to recognize and realistically address these issues or rampantly dysfunctional organizations will continue to mangle archaeology. And, if we don’t think the consequences will be noticed, we’re deluded. Our proven inabilities to manage collections and disseminate information to the public (the majority of whom still think that archaeology involves dinosaurs or Indiana Jones—that’s our fault) indicate that some archaeologists don’t take their obligations any more seriously than looters do. If the end results are the same—the artifacts are lost or destroyed, and the knowledge remains an elitist property—what difference is there? TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGY http://www.wasteflake.com/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=2 Imagine this. You are the mayor of a small city. You and your tax-paying constituents paid $300,000 for an archaeological study. The only thing is, nowhere does in this document does it explain in plain language what the archaeologists learned. Why not? Why don’t we as scientists do this? Why don’t we tell the story? Don’t we owe it to the public to explain ourselves? People with agendas of their own will talk about the site excavation as a great loss to humankind or a not very interesting waste of the taxpayers’ money or an invasion of privacy of the ancestors. We shrug our shoulders and try not to think about it, but that’s what happens. Mostly, to be honest, we hope nobody notices. Editor's Note: The Wasteflake Project is a starting point for conversations on the cross-discipline investigations of the intersection between culture and science. wasteflake.com http://www.dmregister.com/news/stories/c4788998/22553889.html Archaeometry is not a household word, and likely not an occupation that will be found featured at a high school career day. It's the natural science approach to archeological questions, according to Jim Huber, one of the rare consultants in archaeometry. Huber, 48, spends a good deal of each day conducting a sort of scientific detective work. He searches for microscopic bits of history from pollen left by plants thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years ago. He uses pollen in samples, taken from ancient sediments to create a depiction of what the environment was like at a given place at some point in time. His studies are particularly applicable to paleontologists, researchers and even crime investigators. http://www.trivalleyherald.com/Stories/0,1413,86~10669~1724773,00.html Cell phones enable the chronically tardy. Ultimately, researchers say, being late is a way of exercising power. "In reality you're saying, 'I'm more important than you -- my time is more important than yours is,'" said Robbie Blinkoff, the principal anthropologist at the research group. "There's this sense that if you're late, you must be really busy, and if you're really busy, you must be a really important person." ***************************************** Contact the Newsletter Editor: archaeologist@rocketmail.com dogyears@dogyears.com www.swanet.org (url) 602.697.5754 (cellular) 602.372.8539 (digital fax) 603.457.7957 (digital fax) Post letter mail and other media to: Southwestern Archaeology, Inc. P.O. Box 61203 Phoenix AZ, USA 85082-1203 http://www.swanet.org/images/license.pdf SWA invites you to redistribute SWA's "Got CALICHE?" Newsletter. We also request your timely news articles, organizational activities and events, technical and scientific writings, and opinion pieces, to be shared with our digital community. SWA's daily newsletter deals with quotidian issues of anthropology and archaeology -- cultural survival, time and space, material culture, social organization, and commerce, to name just a few. Our electronic potlatch and digital totemic increase rites focus and multiply historic preservation activities in the Greater Southwest. SWA's newsletters are "txt" format only, contain no attachments, and are virus free. Newsletter archives and free subscription . For information archived on SWA's server, visit . Thanks for reading today's edition! Southwestern Archaeology, Inc. (SWA) - A 501(c)(3) customer-centric corporation dedicated to the ethnographic study of the scientific practices of the American Southwest and the Mexican Northwest. Our goal is to create and promote diverse micro-environments and open systems in which archaeologists can develop their talents and take the risks from which innovation and productivity arise.