Filed under: Teaching
I mentioned the “Frauds and Fantastic claims in Archaeology” course that I am TAing for this semester shortly in my last post so I figured I would share something interesting that has (already) come out of the class.
The assigned textbook for the class is the most recent (2011) edition of Kennth L. Feder’s “Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology”. In the introductory chapter Feder discusses a survey he gives to his students every year on their belief in fantastic claims. While many of the questions focus on generally fantastic claims from all scientific disciplines, p5 has figures of responses to his questions regarding belief in Atlantis and Ancient Astronauts (see image below).
Note the spike in agreement around the year 2000 - does this correspond with the real dawn of the internet age or with the beginning of dominance of Discovery channel type media? Total speculation on my part, but interesting nonetheless
Naturally, we conducted a similar survey (albeit it with questions directly related to topics that will be covered in the course) through the google docs survey function to start compiling data through the next few years. While the data can’t quite be explored in terms of interesting trends seen in Feder’s figures we still got some interesting results. The survey was sent out to students in the class and they were told to take it and send it to someone you know who is currently not enrolled in an academic institution, and while not everyone responded we ended up with reasonable sample sizes for the purposes of the course (123 students and 80 non-students). Now the survey is nascent and will be tweaked, and we played around with a source-of-information question that while promising, will need to be altered to get nay meaningful results in the following years. Anyway, the results are shown in th figure below. What was most interesting to me was the consistently higher number of “don’t know” responses in the student sample versus the increased level of relative certainty of position of the non-student sample (and often more certainty towards belief in a fantastic claim). What does this mean? My working hypothesis is that students enrolled in the class realize they are supposed to be thinking critically but do not currently have the evidence available to them make a decision so it is better to respond with “don’t know” (note – we have discussed the sensationalism common to Discovery channel programming in class already). Conversely the non-student group is quite simply, not in the class, and are more prone to persuasion by popular-media on the subjects as most would theoretically lack the archaeological expertise/knowledge to evaluate claims and the evidence (if any) used to support them. I stress that these are only hypotheses and would require questions relating to them being posed on next year’s survey – like one on the degree of “don’t know” (not knowing the evidence vs. uncertainty in evaluating evidence etc.) or a better question relating to most common source for archaeological information. Anyway, the results are below, comment if you see any interesting patterns you’d like to discuss. The last striking thing is that the survey was conducted after our lectures on bigfoot…and for some reason a small number of students seem to still think bigfoot is a real animal…I guess they weren’t there for that lecture, or, they just want to believe regardless of the lack of support for such claims.
Student sample (n=123)
Non-student sample (n=80)
References cited in this post:
Feder, K. L. (2011). Frauds, myths, and mysteries: Science and pseudoscience in archaeology (7th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Howdy Folks. I know that this is about the 15th time that I have claimed to be getting back on the blog horse, but this time I mean it. I finished my prelims in December, found out that I passed (sigh of relief), had a nice holiday and am now back in A2 getting focused. I’ve got an interesting semester lined up which will hopefully provide some nice topic fodder for the blog. I’m taking a Human Osteology course, a biological anthropology/anthropological archaeology seminar on modern human origins and the Neanderthal debate (in which we will be covering recent genetic work, paleontological work, and, of course, the archaeology!), and lastly a directed readings course on the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic in the the classic South Western France. Exciting no? I am also a teaching assistant for an interesting class called “Frauds and Fantastic claims in Archaeology”, which is a course designed to teach undergraduates critical thinking as we review such wonderful topics as Bigfoot, Atlantis, Von Daniken and his Ancient Astronauts, and other fun but fringe topics that are prone to glamourization and Discovery channel specials.
So that’s what’s up. I will now be able to explore things more related to my future research interests and fumble my way through the next semester or two looking for pre-doc paper, and of course, dissertation topics. While I had trouble believing it last semester apparently there is life after prelims.
Anyway, that’s all for now. We discussed the relatively recent Neanderthal genome paper (Green et al. 2010) this week in my modern human origins seminar and people had some pretty interesting things to say – something I will likely bring up in the next post, which will actually come soon.
Alright, so I’ve started TAing for a class here at UMich called the Archaeology of Early Humans. Thus far I have only had one week of section to teach so naturally it was mostly devoted to the syllabus, but then I gave them an introduction to the concept of Four Field Anthropology and defined some basic anthropological terms to help them make their way through the course as many of the students have no background in anthropology or archaeology. Of course, because I am a jerk, I asked my students to define culture. There were a few good responses, most highlighting ritual or religious systems, but mostly, there were blank stares. So I gave them my working definition of culture, for which I currently have two variants (and obviously I favour one), and it is upon these two variants which I would like to get your feedback. As you can probably guess from the title of this post, the variations revolve around the relationship between behaviour and culture. Here are the two variants:
Culture A – Shared, learned, and cumulative knowledge that structures, guides, and patterns human behaviour and interaction with the social and natural environment
Culture B – Shared, learned, cumulative, and patterned human behaviour that structures and guides how people interact with their social and natural environments
While the difference in wording is relatively slight Culture B implies that behaviour IS culture, while Culture A separates the two. Now why is this difference important? Here’s my logic. Point one: not all human behaviour is cultural, and I don’t think many would argue with me about that once we got down to thinking and talking about it. BUT culture (as we observe it in practice or in the archaeological record) is inherently behavioural because cultural knowledge has to be acted out in some way (intentionally or unintentionally) for the external or internal observer to be able to identify (again intentionally or unintentionally) said behaviour as cultural. Does that make sense? While culture and behaviour are two very different things we often are dealing with somewhat of a conflation of the two because we need behaviour to “see” culture, otherwise cultural knowledge remains in the realm of ideas as opposed to the realm of actions and materiality that we depend on to decipher it. So basically we can have behaviour without culture and we can have cultural knowledge without behaviour, but we can’t “see” culture without the behaviour part. A little fuzzy? Yes, I know, my thoughts are currently a bit fuzzy on the matter, and hell, is this distinction even really that important? Probably, we should be able to adequately define the actual material we study yes? Would stating that we study the material record of past human cultural behaviour do it? And upon a second look over Culture B, it seems to imply that the behaviour itself structures and guides interaction…that seems a bit problematic to me.
Anyway, long story short, and as you probably could have guessed, I’ve been using Culture A because it distinguishes between culture and behaviour in a much clearer fashion than Culture B, even though one could interpret the human behaviour aspect of Culture B as highly qualified and therefore distinct from non-cultural behaviour. Do you think I’ve made the right decision? or do you think I’ve completely missed the mark? What are your thoughts on the behaviour/culture relationship? Should we actively enforce such a distinction? This was originally only going to be a quick post so that I could get back to work, but my inability to elucidate my argument (is it even an argument? or are we all in agreement?) has turned it into an hour long ordeal, and now I need a beer. This is why I would like your feedback. Bouncing ideas off of the walls of my own head becomes unproductive after a while, I start to feel like I’m chasing my own tail.
And before you all get scared by my fuzzy headed attempts at grand theory, I’m not going off the deep end into radical post-processual land. I’m just trying to see whether my favoured definition of culture does an adequate job!
Also: SCIENCE SCIENCE SCIENCE, HYPOTHESIS TESTS AND FALSIFIABILITY. Don’t worry, I’m still here.
REVISION: So I stepped away from the computer for a while and my mind is now clear(er), and I realize that maybe the whole post’s confusion was unnecessary if we sit down and define our terms more clearly. If we define culture as a body of knowledge as above (shared, learned and cumulative) and we say that culture is enacted through behaviour, and we distinguish between cultural and non-cultural behaviour, we have clearly defined our relationship between culture and behaviour while still emphasizing that not all behaviour is cultural. I think anyway. And in terms of translating that to the archaeological record I would say that we are dealing with (generally) the material residues of cultural behaviours – once we have filtered out the non-cultural influences/modifications (A la Schiffer) – in the Archaeological record, as I stated above. Anyway, I think that makes sense, and it still fits very well with the definition of culture I’ve been giving to my students…thoughts? The fuzziness had lifted temporarily for me, how about you?
Filed under: Uncategorized
Hey Folks,
To the three of you who will ever actually read this post: how were your summers? To the rest of you: you will never see this anyway so I can be as offensive as I want! WAHAHAhahaa…… Ok, maybe I wont. I’m supposed to promote readership (and archaeology for that matter) right? I’ll try not to send anyone running, but I’m not making any promises.
Let’s talk about me. My summer was great – an excellent two months of field work at Hohle Fels in the Schwabian Alb of south western Germany would put anyone in a good mood. The project is run out of the University of Tübingen, and I’ve got to say, it was well organized and just a great project, one that I enjoyed very much! I suppose excavating Aurignacian layers and finding pierced teeth, i.e. some of the earliest examples of consistent ‘style’ through personal adornment in the archaeological record, is enough to convince anyone that Palaeolithic Europe is (and was?) the place to be!
Now it’s back to the grind here at UMich and, of course, I’ve got too much work to do already, but I’m going to try and build the blog back into my weekly schedule as a means for my prelim studying (which are coming up in late November early December!). After all the best way to learn is through teaching right? and who better to try to teach than a non-existant readership? A readership that probably knows more about the subjects I will approach than I do. This is going to go swimmingly.
Are you ready for a few months of fuzzy headed posts on Archaeological theory? Oh dear.
Filed under: Archaeological News
Dear BBC – Thank you for making archaeologists everywhere sound like we ARE the cutting edge of science…WHY WOULD YOU PICK THIS PARTICULAR QUOTE!?
“We took the [points] directly from the site, in little [plastic] baggies, to the lab”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11086110
Interesting story though.
And on another note – I will be coming back, slowly, I am preliming this semester after all.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I apologize for stating in August that I would be getting back on the blog train soon. The fact is I truly didn’t take into account the fact that my life and free time would be COMPLETELY EATEN by the first semester of graduate school. Thus for the next while posts will be very sporadic at best – but do not lose hope – for it looks like next semester I will have more free time and will be able to actually get back on the blog train. And in all likelihood, it won’t be until next semester that I finish Archaeodigms, because those posts require a significant amount of time to work on, which is something I simply do not have right now. So if I do post in the next couple months it will likely be about being in the field this summer, commenting on articles/news that I’ve read, or just first impressions of grad student life here at UMich. On that note, my first impressions of graduate school in anthropological archaeology here at UMich are as follows: I am working like crazy, but enjoying doing the work, the program is suiting me perfectly, and the graduate student support network here is fantastic. All in all – it couldn’t be any better! Until next time!
Filed under: Uncategorized
Hey All – Welcome to the new blog…I’m going to get back into it soon, so look forward to some new posts, we’ve got some unfinished business to attend too (ahem…Archaeodigms). Until then!
So I made my decision regarding grad school a few weeks ago, and in the rush that is the end of my undergraduate career at McGill, I completely forgot to update you all (well, the few of you who actually read my blog) as to what that decision was.
I’ve decided accept the offer of admission to the Anthropology PhD program at the University of Michigan. Done and done. I guess that means I’ll have to move myself to Ann Arbor this summer.
The posting frequency will increase again in May as by then I’ll have written my last exams and finished my thesis. Accordingly, the next Archaeodigms post will be up in early May. Also, Megalith just had a gig and has another two coming up in the next few weeks, if any of our material gets youtubed I’ll be sure to post it here.
The next post will have some sort of substance, I promise. Until next time.
Filed under: Uncategorized
So after some positive feedback from Steve over at Glossographia I refined the gradient divisions on the Arret/Stop map from last post (from 20% increments to 10% increments) to emphasize the hypothesized increased tendency for anglophones to break language laws in regards to stop signs in Montreal. And what do you know? It works. Take a look:
Well I think it’s cool. Check the caption on the Arret/Stop map from last post if you need more info. Until next time.
So it’s going to be a while before I post Archaeodigms part 3 as I’m quite busy now and I’ve got a ton of other work to get done before writing that up. I can however update you some of the work that I’m currently getting done (woooooo…?)!
For those of you who read Steve Chrisomalis’ blog Glossographia (and for those of you who don’t…you should!) you may remember him discussing the Stop Toutes Directions project. I’m not really going to explain the project here because I just don’t have the time, but I encourage you to check the website out if you are interested. In a nutshell it’s a project analyzing various aspects of the distribution of Stop Signs in Montreal, Canada. A few of Steve’s former students (myself included) are still working with him to further analyze our large Stop Sign database in hopes of putting together an edited volume for publication. My contribution to the project is producing a GIS of spatial linguistic variation of stop signs vs. spatial linguistic variation of language spoken in the home using census tract data. I’ve done the GIS as a project for my socio-economic application of GIS class, which I presented today, but I wanted to share the preliminary GIS maps I produced for the project and give a little bit of preliminary interpretation for you all. The following maps are of census tracts we surveyed in the central Montreal area.
This next map is essentially the last map inverted, with more blue CTs having a higher proportion of ‘Arret’ signs and more red CT’s having a lower proportion of ‘Arret’ signs. The pie charts represent the same thing as the last map. (Click image for larger view)
This last map is the coolest (I think) in that it tells us the most. In this map the gradient goes from yellow/tan to blue, with yellow/tan CTs representing a low proportion of ‘Arret/Stop’ signs, and the most blue CTs representing the greatest proportion of ‘Arret/Stop’ signs. Again, the pie charts still represent the proportions of language spoken at home CT data. (Click image for larger view)
So what does this mean? Well if you look at the maps you can see that there is some distinct clustering and patterns showing up in some areas of Montreal and not in others. In north-western and downtown Montreal there seems to be at least a correlation between a dominance of English spoken in the home and a dominance of ‘Stop’ signs. In eastern Montreal there also seems to be a correlation between a dominance of French spoken in the home and a dominance of ‘Arret’ signs. The most interesting pattern is highlighted in the last map. If you take a look at it all of the CTs which have the highest proportion of ‘Arret/Stop’ signs are correlated with predominantly anglophone areas. Why is this interesting? Because of language laws in quebec which technically make clearly bilingual signs illegal (as both ‘Stop’ and ‘Arret’ signs are technically french and thus legal, whereas ‘Arret/Stop’ signs, which are logically bilingual, are illegal). Now I don’t have the time to get into the peculiarities of Quebec language politics, but I think this is enough info to at least give a bit of a primer on the situation. Though I’ve only shown some correlations here (and we all now that correlation doesn’t necessarily mean a causal link), it seems clear that it’s predominantly anglophone CTs where the law is being broken most often. This could be because anglophones are a minority in Montreal (and Quebec), and are thus unlikely to report language law infractions, and thus assist in enforcing a provincial language law that puts them at a disadvantage, whereas in predominantly francophone CTs there is perhaps a higher chance that illegal signs are reported as the language laws are intended to preserve the French language and thus benefit Francophones (I think in a cultural heritage sense?). Anyway, this is just a working hypothesis and a preliminary analysis, and some more statistics need to be run, but I thought it was pretty interesting, and I hope you do to!
This post turned out to be a lot longer than I expected, which means I need to get back to work! Until next time (which will hopefully be Archaeodigms part 3)!
