So, here I am...

One year without a cell phone. blissssss.

But now I am back to technology, cell phone in hand.

Back in the UK after four short months in the US.

Back to lots of work, lots of thoughts, a lot less sleep.

Next up...

Science Brevia article

Research in Nara, Japan

Diana and her hunting dogs by Jan Fyt

Just back from nearly two weeks excavating on the Isle of Harris and Lewis in the Outer Hebrides Island of Western Scotland. Lovely, breathtaking, amazement - how can one come up with the words to describe it? There is a sense of wildness and necessary self-sufficiency that is conjured up in the mind when seeing the vast salt-marsh, the sandy Scottish machair plains, the steep rise of the highland. The people primarily speak Scottish Gaelic. There are black-faced sheep everywhere, defiant to cars and people. And mostly importantly there are dogs. Lots of them. All seeming clones of each other: black and white piebald, long collie faces, bright eyes and desperate to corral sheep. Walking along the rocky hills with the cold ocean breeze coming at me I fancied myself a sort of Diana.

No recent posting because I have been out-of-my-mind busy. And it isnt looking to stop anytime soon.

Schedule:

Aug 6-Aug 21: excavating, Northton, Isle of Harris, Scotland

Aug 21-Aug 28: ICAZ conference, Paris, France

Sept 15-Dec 15: internship, Illinois State Museum, Springfield, IL

A view of my home for the next few weeks:

Northton, Harris, Scotland

The Dog Burial

Because, of course, I search YouTube for dog burial related items I give you the following:

"The Dog Burial" by Sopor Aeternus

"Be quick, be quick, you must climb down!
I heard him breathing below the ground!
Bring forth some light and break the lid!
What is wrong with you, why do you hesitate?!
Open the grave, oh please be quick, before his poor heart gives up its last beat!"

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Last night saw the Swedish movie Girl with the Dragon Tattoo based off the book by Swedish author Stieg Larsson. I hadnt read the book and wasnt really sure what to expect with the movie. All I had heard was that it was 'good', 'controversial' and that they were planning to make a US version of the movie soon.

Leaving the theater after the movie I was in a bit of a daze. Im not sure what I was expecting, but that movie rocked my senses. I think I barely breathed for the whole 2 hours. Its like taking Saw, Underworld and some vintage murder mystery and putting it into one movie. The friend I was with said that the movie was much more tame than the book, and that was not a tame movie. The sex, violence, sexual violence and perversity are on a pretty high scale, but it all seemed critical to telling the story.

It will be very interesting to see how they make a US version of this movie. I can see this movie being much too graphic for a majority of US audiences. I cant imagine an American actress who could pull off the lead role of Lisbeth. Im not convinced some of the themes of the movie are something that a US audience would handle very well unless it is watered down significantly. Will be interesting to see how they pull it off.

My life this month...

I saw him standing there

I decided to take a little stroll through the Botanical Gardens here in Durham the other day on one of the few sunny days we might have this year. A little stroll turned into a long stroll when I realized that the gardens are 60 acres of winding paths through meadows, forests and swamps.

At the end of one quiet, empty path through a forest I came to a sort of clearing. Looking around and listening to the birds and the movement of the leaves I had the strange feeling that someone was watching me. I scanned the treeline. No one. I looked down the path, but no one else was headed my way. Then I saw him, with a look on his face that encouraged me to keep walking.


Move along, sister.

18 weeks without a cell phone and loving it...

Impressions

Recently been having a series of very - colorful - dreams which often include vivid impressions of past events in my life, particularly places I have visited. Here are some of the most memorable experiences.

• Seeing a poisonous sea snake swim right under me while snorkeling in Jamaica when I was 12. I clearly remember thinking that the only reason I didnt get bitten was because it chose not to bite. Thats when I realized that being in the sea is really being out of the human element.
• Waking up pre-dawn on a 19hr. train from Chennai to Delhi, India with four older men staring at me, waiting for me to get up so they could play cribbage.
• My first time using Spanish while on vacation in Mexico during junior high. I was really proud of myself.
• The looks you will get as a single woman standing alone in a movie line in Cairo.
• Winning a booty-shaking contest in a Winnipeg, Canada bar (yes!)
• The pure joy of everything about the town of Dalyan, Turkey. The Kaunos ruins, families that sell honey on the side of the road. Lemons the size of your head.
• Realizing that street vendors in Bangkok are very serious when they say 'last price'. They hold grudges.
• Watching my best friend Nichole chugging mass amounts of root beer in a contest (we were 14) in Laughlin, NV then watching it all come back up. Some through her nose. (Yes, Nichole!!)
• The hurried Londoner that looked at me and shouted, "MOVE" on my first day figuring out the London subway system. Thank you random Londoner, you inspired me to figure it out very quickly.
• Sitting for seven hours in a grungy beach bathroom in Haiti while a woman braided all my hair into tiny plaits.

Intolerance

So, Ive given in.

I am eternally, terribly, horribly lactose intolerant. Cow, goat, sheep - if it makes milk, I cant process it. I am not alone in this, but there are many of you out there who still dont realize how intolerant of dairy products you may be.

I have now gone about six months without dairy products of any kind and it has made a world of difference. A WORLD. Anyone very close to me knows about my long battles with stomach problems (sorry to share) and I have finally realized the culprit (after years of trying to eliminate everything else). Dairy is like poison to my body. This is a lesson I have recently had to learn again when I got weak last week and had some goat bleu cheese. Not pretty.

If you are interested in seeing if you have a dairy intolerance (anything from very mild to strong) there is a ton of information out there. I suggest everyone try at least a month without dairy to see what sort of differences it can make for you. I will warn you that the first week isnt the greatest as your body is busy purging itself of milky toxins, but after that it is smooth sailing. There are lots of great blogs about dairy-free cooking and living, but this is one of my favorites.

Somehow this song, and Sigur Ros music in general, always recharges me. Time to plan a trip to Iceland.

(ive always loved this picture of a Hadza man keeping a lookout on a tree, from National Geographic)

Our culture, well my culture at least, is obsessed with ways to remove fat from the diet. The grocery store shelves are filled with products stating that they are 'lite', 'fat-free', 'skinny', 'skim'. These qualities are promoted as a means to encourage buyers and we fall for it willingly and without fail.

If you were a prehistoric hunter-gatherer you would feel very differently about fat. In contrast to modern diets, you would spend your life searching for fat resources in your diet. More and more it looks like hunter-gatherers based their entire subsistence practice around the acquisition of fat. Hunting intensely in the late autumn when deer, boar and other prey species were at their fattest (after they had gorged in order to survive through the winter), moving to follow herds of caribou or reindeer which provided a main fat source during the Paleolithic period in the North, splitting the bones of hunted animals in times of desperation in order to retrieve the fatty bone marrow.

As we try to avoid fat like the plague, hunter-gatherers would have searched after it relentlessly.

In other news, our weather here has been quite inconsistent, which isnt inconsistent for the UK. We had a long streak of warm, sunny days and then suddenly cloudy, windy, cold rain. Yesterday was particularly interesting as most of the day Durham was filled with just the finest mist of moisture in the air. Things noticed:

• a baby pink tulip covered with the slightest hint of misty dewdrops
• lots of birds loving the escapee earthworms the rain produces
• a layer of Icelandic volcano ash covering my black rain boots
• and increased level of green to the trees and plants that makes it look like someone adjusted the color and brightness modes on a TV
• that smell of fresh rain air
• people on the street in a hurry to get out of the rain have no problem knocking you off the sidewalk
• coffee tastes better when its cold outside
• paying attention in German class is hard when you are concentrating on the rhythm of raindrops on the window
• things always look better the next day after the rain

(vintage Durham Cathedral)

Willow smoke, dogs tails and albino deer

The year I was born Lewis Binford, the so-called 'father' of New or Processual archaeology, wrote a seminal piece of archaeological literature outlining the differences between 'forager' and 'collector' hunter-gatherer groups. It talked about 'affluent societies', logistical strategies and settlement systems.

If you arent an archaeologist you are dying of boredom about now.

Anyway, in his 'Willow Smoke and Dogs' Tails: Hunter-Gatherer Settlement Systems and Archaeological Site Formation' (1980) he included the following excerpt which always stayed with me:

"An old Eskimo man was asked how he would summarize his life; he thought for a moment and said, "Willow smoke and dogs' tails; when we camp it's all willow smoke, and when we move all you see is dogs' tails wagging in front of you. Eskimo life is half of each."

On a related, but unrelated note:

I came across these pictures on the web today as I was looking for pictures of white-tail deer to include in a Powerpoint (power point! power point!) presentation. I nearly died of cuteness overload. Albino deer (and a baby!). Makes me wonder if this is what people saw that made them think unicorns existed. An antler could easily be mistaken for a horn.

Now all the simple things are simply too complicated for my life.

ELO

Electronic Light Orchestra (ELO) is such an underrated band. If you can find someone who produces more joy than Jeff Lynne and his afro, Ill give you a dollar. Heavenly.

The Amazing VNO

So, I am still in the process of reading The Vegetarian Myth though, admittedly, it is taking me quite the effort to push through it. After reading Foer's Eating Animals, which I found to be engaging and a page-turner, The Vegetarian Myth is proving a slow read. I think I just dont like the voice of the author. She went from loud, aggressive, radical vegan to loud, aggressive, radical meat-eater. Something about her tone irks me (which makes it difficult to buy her story).

Which brings me to another point. I have been reading many of these nutrition, animal-rights, factory farming/agriculture, etc books lately and have noticed a certain overlying thread - and not a good one. The incidence of taking scientific one-liners and basing huge chunks of an argument on them is enormous. This is the downfall of a non-scientist writing about scientific things. They have no way to accurately interpret what they are putting down, they are just putting it out there in its raw form (and thus a crowd of readers learn to believe it as well). In the last few months of reading these books I have seen SO many biased uses of scientific figures to prove an author's personal viewpoint, it is truly unbelievable (or not). I wonder if the author, or the reader, or the public in general realizes that we as scientists arent even sure about a lot of these things and are still debating them within the scientific community. I read an 'archaeological fact', presented as such, about the earliest agriculturalists in The Vegetarian Myth last night (something that has been in contentious debate in archaeological circles for many decades) and thought, "Oh great, well, Im glad she settled that. Ill just quit my PhD now and let Peter Rowley-Conwy and Doug Price know she solved the mystery."

One thing that did come up in the book last night, which I hadnt heard much about was the VNO or vomeronasal organ. What an amazing thing with such possibilities. It is basically our 'sixth sense' organ. A list of its uses in animals, from Wikipedia:

• Salamanders perform a nose tapping behavior to supposedly activate their VNO.
• Snakes use this organ to sense prey, sticking their tongue out to gather scents and touching it to the opening of the organ when the tongue is retracted.
• The organ is well developed in strepsirrhine primates such as lemurs and lorises, developed to varying degrees in New World monkeys, and underdeveloped in Old World Monkeys and apes.
• Elephants transfer chemosensory stimuli to the vomeronasal opening in the roof of their mouths using the prehensile structure, sometimes called a "finger", at the tips of their trunks.
  
• Painted Turtles use this organ to use their sense of smell underwater.

Also suggested that this is the organ that makes human females living together sync on the same menstruation cycle. Brilliant!!

Last night as I stood up for bed after many, many, MANY hours hunched over books and my laptop I was reminded of something: muscle atrophy. The simple act of standing and stretching made my muscles sing for joy and reminded me that although I may live primarily in my head at the moment, I am in fact made of muscles, ligaments and blood.

I lie on my bed, flat on my back and made a conscious effort to reconnect with the individual pieces of my body. I started at my toes. I curled them and flexed my feet, attempting to feel each muscle as it pulled and released. Then my legs, raising them, lowering them. Knees. Thighs. Arching my back, stretching the muscles that have only recently attempted to keep me from falling over in my desk chair. For the first time in a quite a while I allowed myself to be aware of the small miracle of the body, something we take for granted every day.

I stretched and rolled and folded and squeezed and breathed deeply and it was wonderful.

"I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I cannot transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls." -Anais Nin

Anais Nin's books saved me during my isolated and awkward time at OSU.

roma flag

Also, while it is on my mind (because I saw the menu of a new Portland restaurant with a dish called 'Gypsy toast'), please stop using the word 'gypsy'. It is not politically correct in any sense and is truly a demeaning word for the Roma people. It is true they often use it themselves as a means of identification because most people havent a clue who 'Roma' are, but it is certainly not an acceptable term for outsiders to be using. Ever wonder where the term, 'I got gyped' comes from? Yeah. You wouldnt call an African-American that, or a Hispanic person that, so start a revolution and stop with the word 'gypsy'.

This morning I have been thinking about how lucky I am to have been able to travel to all the places I have been. I really believe seeing the world the way it truly is, not just through pictures or movies, is a goal everyone should have. I have been fortunate enough to visit every continent outside of Antarctica and Australia (on the list!) and have seen a host of amazing things.

Some of those amazing things have been the simplest: sunrises and sunsets. The thing about sunsets and sunrises is that they happen everywhere, every day, but somehow they manage to be different in every place you go. Thinking about the greatest sunsets I have seen around the world, I knew immediately which location I was most in awe of.

2006. Palolem Beach, Goa, West India. The sunsets here were unreal and this vibrant every evening. At sunset the beach would fill with people just sitting around quietly, staring at the horizon. Just minutes before there were old men hustling fruit, groups playing cribbage (hugely popular in India), people laughing loudly at the Nepalese momo cafe. Just minutes after people were bargaining for cheap wine #7 at the liquor shop, conversing about beach parties, and passing around joints. But for a few minutes in between it seemed like everyone was silent, focused on the small miracle happening in front of us, every night.

Also, here is Pom-Pom, the angora rabbit. He was the pet of a Swiss hostel owner I stayed with in Udaipur. Pom-Pom had more attitude than any dog or cat you have met and was fickle about who he liked and didnt like. Mostly he just couldnt be bothered.

Whirlpool

So many things in my head right now. I am at the height of my research creativity currently and things are whirling around in my mind all together like a blender. I am finding that I need to discipline myself to not just go all-out on every idea I have as it comes to me. Recently this kind of research tactic has been wearing me out and pulling me in a billion directions at once when I should really be focusing on one or two things at a time for the best results.

My research encompasses so many interesting things. Obviously I get into ancient cultures, specifically during the Mesolithic/Archaic time period (between 10000-3000 years ago), but I also do a lot of work on past environments, climate change, animal ecology (roe deer are solitary animals, red deer arent), hunting techniques, subsistence practices, sedentary vs. nomadic lifestyles. Each of these topics have thousands of offshoots of their own and if I get stuck wandering down one of these paths I could be gone for hours.

During my research this week, Ive come across many interesting things. While looking for possible images of deer hunting in ancient Scandinavian art I came across this haunting etching. I just couldnt get it out of my mind after I had first seen it. It depicts seidmen, practitioners of the traditional Norse pagan religion, being tied down in a bay during low tide to face their impending death by drowning when the tide came in. This was a practice ordered by King Olaf of Norway in his process of the Christianizing of Scandinavia.


Continuing to look for artistic evidence of dog hunting, I came across this great find. This will undoubtedly become a key piece in my theory of dog-assisted boar hunting in Japan. It is taken from a ceremonial brass bell from the Yayoi culture (staring about 3ooo years ago) in Japan. Though they were rice agriculturalists, they were known to depict traditional practices (in this case, Jomon ancestors hunting boar) on their ceremonial brass pieces. Dogs holding down a boar while the hunter shoots it. Brilliant! This fits with my research perfectly.


Finally, another Japanese piece from the site of Fujioka, a clay dog figurine. The only piece of its kind ever found.



Currently Japan holds one of the most prolific records of intentional dog burials during the Mesolithic period. There are said to be over 200 burial sites in central-eastern Japan. The problem is that there is little to no archaeological literature about these burials in English. The spread of this knowledge has been lost to western scholars because they simply arent aware of it. I am working to rectify this situation. I am currently in the process of getting a mass of Japanese archaeological literature (which has been generously shared with me by numerous Japanese scholars) translated and published so western archaeologists can join the discussion about what is happening at Jomon (Japanese culture group from about 14000-3000 years ago) sites per the zooarchaeological record. It is a lot of work, but I think it can make a real contribution. I am also working to prepare an application for a large grant to support my visiting both Japan and Taiwan to do ethnographic work with native boar hunting groups there as well as examine the Japanese dog collections.