The Lost City of Z

News media have been abuzz the last week with reports on an article recently published in Antiquity on monumental earthworks in the Amazon. In the article, Martti Parssinen, Denise Schaan, and Alceu Ranzi discuss the geoglyphs they found in Amazonian highlands. My dad sent me an article from AOL news (can you believe people still use AOL?) and David Grann of the New Yorker found one at Times Online. Grann himself has written a book (and various New Yorker articles) on the site of these discoveries, the "Lost City of Z." Grann's book, published a year ago, traces the history of men who lost their lives in quest of this mysterious civilization. Percy Fawcett, a British geographer, was the first in the series, and when he disappeared with his son and colleague in 1925, probably at the hands of hostile or defensive natives, several other adventurers braved the wild forest to uncover his bones. The story is exciting and terrifying, and it left Times with an incentive to dub Fawcett "the British Indiana Jones."

For such an exciting subject matter, the Times article leaves something to be desired. First of all, the sensationalism of Fawcett's quest should have worn out by now, and needn't be the basis of reports that should be about the ecology of the civilization itself. But more appallingly, the Times' reporter is so fixated on the notion of an Edenic, pristine past, that he contradicts himself in his writing. Though the writer claims that "Z" was an enormous and complex civilization, which required serious modification in the landscape (it was in the Amazon, after all), he seems to think that deforestation is counterproductive to our understanding of Z. The subtitle of his article reads: "The newly discovered rainforest civilization shows that deforestation is not just vandalism but a crime against history." ...What?

Pärssinen et al. explicitly state that "In the last 30 years,...areas once believed to be pristine forest began to be cleared for the cattle industry. In their new treeless, savanna-like landscape, the ancient earthen structures became visible, especially from the sky." As harmful to biodiversity as deforestation is, the ancient city would not have been found if trees hadn't been cleared. Maybe it was an editor who wrote the Times subtitle, but it's still irresponsible journalism.

Internet Archaeologist

I love this video from The Onion. It's supposed to parody online social networks (Friendster, in this case), but it's very revealing of the public's perception of archaeologists. Look at this guy's wardrobe!

Moreover, the archaeologist (Dr. Maxwell Frye) embodies all of Holtorf's archetypal figures. He is at once an adventurer (boldly digging through a web browser's history), a detective (explaining the cryptic purposes of the website he found), a sage (proposing contrived explanations for the fall of the Friendster civilization) and a conservationist ("You may go to the site, but leave everything as it is!").

The medium is the real message, here

Today, Wired's science news blog posted an article about paleoartist Viktor Deak, who provided the reconstructions for the PBS documentary Becoming Human. Deak sculpts models of early hominids and imports a series of pictures of the sculptures into Photoshop, where he makes composite images and tweaks them to make their appearance more "realistic." The blog post suggests that Deak thinks the digital medium is useful for conveying more accurate ideas about the past (or at least, the people of the past). For instance, he gushes,

"I’m excited about it, because it means you’re not just dealing with static appearance,” he said. “One of the great challenges of science communication is taking dead, dusty things we find in the ground, and helping people understand that these were part of a living world. Our ancestors were living and dying, just as we do. Bringing things to life in the digital world can really help.”

Much of the article implies that because these digital reconstructions are mobile (or animated), they seem to be alive, and are therefore best to illustrate a form of past life. Mobility probably doesn't make an image more lifelike: we can look at static pictures of modern humans or animals, and understand that they are living. Equating animation with life is not only not useful, it may be harmful. Animating Deak's reconstructions brings into question the ways our ancestors moved, and creating new problems for representing the past.

My reaction to the Wired article reminded me of Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan would remind us to consider the "effects" of the medium, not just its content. Specifically, he might want us to employ his tetrad of media effects to analyze the sort of meaning that the digital medium creates. He would encourage us to determine

1. What the medium enhances
2. What the medium makes obsolete
3. What the medium retrieves that has been obsolesced earlier
4. What the medium flips into when pushed to extremes

I've already begun to answer these questions (1. mobility, 2. stillness) with regard to Deak's work, and I will certainly consider them as I prepare my ethnographic account of our class, and analyze our construction of knowledge about Inca culture.

Image from http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/viktor-deak-paeoartist/

African Fractals

Hearing Dr. Zuidema describe the ceque system this week, and even compare it to a computer, reminded me of Ron Eglash's work on African fractal geometry. Eglash is an ethno-mathematician and professor in the Science and Technology Studies department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In the 1980s, Eglash noticed that traditional African architecture was based on fractal geometry. He began to study other parts of African culture, looking for recursion in other contexts. He found social hierarchies, hair braiding techniques, and textile patterns that were similarly self-organizing.

Recursive weaving pattern. Image from http://csdt.rpi.edu/african/African_Fractals/homepage.html

Nankani homes are a series of fractal cylinders. Image from http://csdt.rpi.edu/african/African_Fractals/culture5.html

I don't think that the ceque system is the Inca version of fractal geometry, but Eglash's research is useful for our website. His analysis of African mathematics is used to teach African communities computing skills. Eglash has developed tutorials for relevant math concepts that instill users with pride in their heritage and encourage them to learn modern computing skills.

If we are still allowed to entertain wild ideas for our final project, I would consider developing a tutorial on the mathematics of the ceque system to use for school children in the Andes.

Naked Archaeology

I recently came across an old episode of Naked Archaeology--actually, I think it's the very first podcast--which happens to discuss Peru's historical ecology. I'm having trouble embedding it, so follow this link and scroll down to the bottom of the page if you want to listen.

The first segment features David Beresford-Jones, an archaeobotanist who studies the collapse of Nazca civilization. The prevailing explanation for the Nazca's demise is El Nino flooding. However, Beresford-Jones feels that it is wrong to ascribe cultural change to climatic events entirely. In an article in Nature, he notes that "...this [explanation] is not satisfying based on what we know about human culture. It paints a picture of culture sitting there, not changing, hit by events over which they have no control. But Native Americans did not always live in harmony with their environment."

Beresford-Jones and his colleague Alex Chepstow-Lusty have analyzed the pollen left by the Nazca's landscape at different time periods. They found that early in Nazca history, most pollen was left by riparian trees, like huarango, indicating that their land was heavily wooded. Over time, though, pollen sources were mostly agricultural (maize and cotton), indicating that the Nazca cut down their woodlands to make way for farmland. Unfortunately, these trees had a major impact on the local biodynamics: the huarango trees lowered floodwater velocity, allowing it to soak into the ground and replenish the water table. Deforesting the landscape allowed for El Nino to hit the floodplain directly and erode the farmland, rather than recharge groundwater that was essential to future crop viability.

Reflections on Reflexive Methods in Archaeological Research

I've basically decided that I want to contribute to the class project as an ethnographer. I think I'm prepared literarily for this undertaking, since I've read extensively on cultures of science and technology, on the social construction of scientific facts, and on communication within and between scientific disciplines. (My senior thesis deals with the social construction of a laboratory.) However, most of my research experience is in history. So the prospect of interviewing archaeologists, who are themselves familiar with ethnographic methods, is a little intimidating. Fortunately, Brigitte, who is probably much more experienced in ethnographic field work than I am, is also considering this role in the class project. Her expertise is reassuring.

My inexperience aside, I do have another scruple with participant-observation: I am not sure what to do with the information I uncover. If I find flaws in the research behaviors of my classmates, when, if ever, should I notify them? Carolyn Hamilton met this same problem in a 1999 preliminary study at Çatalhöyük. Her early analysis of the production of archaeological knowledge revealed a number of "faultlines"--areas where the methodological bricks that were built into the research project to encourage interaction and reflexivity "slumped in." She concludes a presentation of her early findings at the Theoretical Archaeology Group in Liverpool by noting,

"If the aim at Çatalhöyük is to produce a research structure with a strength set in stone, able to withstand all pressures and pulls, then the emerging project is flawed...If the production of knowledge is viewed as a process, and if the aim of the project is to be responsive to change, the faultlines are a guarantee of flexibility, contingency, provisionality and multiplicity."

I'm still trying to track down a copy of Ian Hodder's book Towards Reflexive Method in Archaeology: The Example at Çatalhöyük, so I do not yet know how quickly Hamilton's findings were used to change some of the "methodological bricks" that were proving problematic.

In analyzing our own methodological bricks, I am faced with the same options that Hamilton met. I can point out faultlines (or cornerstones) as I see them, or wait until the end of the semester to produce a comprehensive critique of the architecture of our methodology; to be more of a participant or more of an observer. I think the former option would benefit the class product, but it might detract from my own final product.

Çatalhöyük's "mutable immobiles"

Image from http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/jghsillustration/

Since reading John Swogger's treatise on the transparent, mutable illustrations for the Çatalhöyük project, I decided to evaluate the efficacy of these images. Perusing the Çatalhöyük Project's website, though, I did not come across any of the "intermediary" images that Swogger hoped to make widely available. Even on his own website, all images are finished images. Undoubtedly, the extra effort in making the intermediate pictures available, and of encouraging a viewership, was detrimental to progress at Çatalhöyük.

The power of an image, as Swogger failed to recognize, is not the amount of pure, a-textual information that it contains, but its deceptively simple appearance. An illustration is easy to ingest, easy to remember, and easy to replicate.

Bruno Latour explains the rise of modern science with the development of inscriptions, or what he describes as immutable mobiles. Using the example of La Perouse, an explorer for Louis XV, who travelled to China to acquire a map to bring back to France to settle a dispute over the land's geography, Latour notes:

"If you wish to go out of your way, and come back heavily equipped so as to force others to go out of their ways, the main problem to solve is that of mobilization. You have to go out and come back with the "things"if your moves are not to be wasted. But the "things" have to be able to withstand the trip without withering away."

John Swogger's mutable images can't mobilize. They require too much effort for viewers to go out of their ways to understand their meaning, and too much energy to transfer to new contexts.