Art Expose

On December 13, 2016 I had the privilege of exploring a "Chimu Effigy Vessel" from the Krikorian Collection at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee Art History Gallery. The vessel is an enigmatic object in that it has all the surface features of an authentic pre-Colombian vessel. It also has a hole from a barreto, or iron bar used for sounding soft earth in search of huacos, ancient pots. However, the composite face on the side of the vessel mixes Early Horizon/Early Intermediate Period (1000 BC- AD700) northern imagery with Middle Horizon (AD 500) highland imagery with northern Late Intermediate Period (ca. AD 1300) imagery. There's nothing preventing these three kinds of images to have been mixed by a pre-Colombian artisan; but it is very unexpected to see them together. Perhaps future research into the history of this object as well as residues on its surfaces - particularly interior surfaces - will illuminate the history of this mysterious object.

UWM Art Collection, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert V. Krikorian, 1986.006.07

Thanks to UWM Art Collection staff for the photo.

Lecture December 4, 2016. "Neighborhood Society: Ancient and Modern"

I'm honored to be presenting a lecture for the Archaeological Institute of America - Milwaukee Chapter on December 4, 2016 on the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee campus (Sabin Hall, Room G90).

This lecture will cover my current thoughts and efforts to connect neighborhood archaeology on ancient sites to what we know about the social life of American neighborhoods in recent history. Namely, I'll present recent conclusions and future plans on my work in Peru and compare it with recent research and teaching on historic Chicago neighborhoods. 

Thanks to AIA-Milwaukee and UW-Milwaukee for the invitation and hospitality! Scroll down for the calendar of all currently-scheduled lectures.

October is for skulls

October is the spookiest month. In its honor I'm posting all the representations of skulls at hand in my house. Is this exercise in repetition useful or enlightening in any way? Well, for one thing it demonstrates the wide variation in depictions of skulls available to consumers (like me). How might this representational variation compare with morphological variation in actual human skulls? How much "skullness" is required for us to read an object as a skull, specifically a human skull? What are the different conventions at work that modify a skull from being a "punk" image to being mass-produced Halloween decor to being expensive glass home decor/art?

Hyperreality in Tosa

In Wauwatosa - or just plain Tosa as is more often said - Hart Park shows us that hyperreality can give us everything we want, and more. But it can't blot out some of the more mundane elements

of landscapes we might like to forget. We can have trees emerging from rock formations that give us the option of either stairs or an escarpment for summiting and our choice of twisty or straight slides for the down climb. We can play in caves and half finished canoes formed from the trunks of impossibly large hardwood trees. Neither the trees will rot nor will the rock formations erode. 

Moreover, a hyperreality playscape allows us to engrave these impossible objects with dedications to donors and inspirational texts to highlight their connection to real things - like poetic thoughts - in the world: after all, few of us will ever encounter a hollow log large enough to walk through. 

Because these landscapes are an amplification of reality controlled by designers and town officials the masquerade can be dropped when necessary in order to reference the undeniably real historicity of the town itself. Here a sculpture inspired by Alexander Calder and Joan Miro, perhaps, attests to the 200 year history of Tosa. The sculpture is a reminder that we're here in the municipal present despite the efforts to convince children that they're in the unfinished project of the pre-tamed wilderness, a project abandoned and left for them to finish, like the oversize canoe.

Quietly in the background, the Menomonee River trickles by camouflaged by wild flowers, untrimmed weeks, and scrubby shrubs. This prairie reality enhances the deeply buried knowledge that all this furniture and its whimsy is make-believe. The wild creek bank reminds us that there really is a wild reality out there to be discovered as our plaything or place to discover or both.

Yet further in the distance polished chain stores anchor the reality that this suburban area, like most, is founded upon convenient access to basic necessities. Pick'n Save will sell raw and prepared goods,

Applebee's will provide hot starches, fats, and alcohol to cut the grease; and ATI Physical Therapy will help you put yourself back together after taking in the amenities of Tosa's suburban hyperreality.

American Indian Representations of Totemism Today at Indian Summer Festival 2016

Indian Summer Festival, reportedly the largest such festival for Indian People, took place from September 9th to 11th at the Henry W. Maier Festival Park on Milwaukee's downtown lakefront. Indian Summer Festival presents a somewhat different view of American Indian life and culture compared to what I saw at the Shalom Wildlife Zoo. I was particularly gratified to see an explanation of Great Lakes Indian tribal organization that presented the structure, meaning, and history of Great Lakes Indian totemism. As an anthropologist, totemism is an important symbolic cultural system that is foundational to our field. It continually re-emerges as a pillar of anthropological insight because it links the domains of symbolic, social,animal, and material worlds. Indeed, it would seem that under American Indian clan organization, there is limited separation between the animal, material, and human worlds. They are interrelated in a symbolic social system. They were represented in a grassy knoll with installations by 'living cultures of the Great Lakes.'

At the Shalom Wildlife Zoo totemism was represented as a personal avatar. A sign near the beginning of the zoo trail explained that Indians chose a totem animal that they felt close to; then it explained that if visitors had an animal that they felt close to as a child, then that is the visitor's "true totem." The placard finishes by referencing the phenomenon in which dogs and their owners tend to look alike.

There is some reasonable truth in some of this explanation. Emile Durkheim established social anthropology with his study of totemism in the late 19th century. He explained that people do indeed have individual totems that may be animals.

But totemism as presented at Indian Summer Festival 2016 emphasizes the social and collective levels of totemism, which is also the focus of anthropological studies of totemism.

At Indian Summer Festival totemism is presented as a structure for organizing tribal society. The totemic animals symbolize the divisions within this system. More than one's name - let alone a personal totem - the presentation at Indian Summer Festival shows that the most important aspect of one's identity was once one's clan within the totemic system. "What clan are you from" one would ask, not 'what's your name?'

This explanation of the clan/totemic system explains that the totemic system and its clans define both the meaning and location of 'community' for Ho-Chunk, Oneida, and other Great Lakes Indians groups, but also the overarching structure into which these community elements fit. Totemism, then, provides a multi-level social order as well as a symbolic map for keeping that system straight in one's mind. Moreover, according to the display at Indian Summer Festival, social functions and values are connected with different clan totems.

 

This explanation of Great Lakes totemism and clan organization also accords with Carol Mason's account of Ho-Chunk (aka Winnebago) totemism. But what seems most illuminating here is the presentation of a historical representation of Great Lakes clan organization. In this image (below) we see multiple clans represented by their totem with lines connecting them through their eyes and hearts. Notice that all lines go into the crane and leave through the crane's eye as a single strand. The Cran Clan was tasked with leadership and external communication (see above). This image, then, is a pictorial representation of Chippewa (Ojibwe) tribal structure and authority. Here we might interpret this image to say that the leader of the Cran Clan - probably Oshcabawis of "Monomoneau, WI" - is the legitimate spokesperson of the Chippewa clans. We might also interpret the twin badger-like creatures as depictions of the moity system Mason attributes to Great Lakes tribes. The small badger-like creature may be an additional division - an anomaly to a perfect moiety system.

At the Indian Summer Festival Milwaukee's Indian Peoples both presented and explored the past and present of Great Lakes area tribes. Indeed, as I suggested in my Shalom Wildlife Zoo post, Indian People are plenty able to speak for themselves; and they do, for our collective benefit.

Representing Wisconsin's Past at the Shalom Wildlife Zoo

Since moving to Wisconsin I have been eagerly exploring its history through visits to historical and prehistorical sites and by reading up on Wisconsin's Indian History. Some particularly excellent resources include Robert Birmingham's Indian Mounds of Wisconsin, Lurie's Wisconsin Indians, and Carol Mason's Introduction to Wisconsin Indians: Prehistory to Statehood. Unlike Illinois and the northeastern states where I grew up, Indian sites are fairly easy to find and experience in Wisconsin. There are mounds in the State Fairgrounds near Milwaukee, as well as in Milwaukee's Lake Park. Lizard Mount County Park in Washington County also has a lovely set of trails that wind through late Woodland Period effigy mounds as well as conical mounds that may be somewhat older.

Recently my family and I visited the Shalom Wildlife Zoo not far from the Lizard Mound County Park. Shalom Wildlife Zoo's (SWZ) website explained that it features a number of learning centers and an Indian artifact museum. My plan was to go, view the animals, experience nature, and enjoy whatever exhibits they had. I was fairly sure the exhibits would be more indicative of popular conceptions of American Indians and their culture, rather than a deeply-informed presentation of Indian culture and beliefs. Indeed, the presentation of the Indian past, natural present, and popular dispositions towards learning about the past and present were clearly on display at SWZ. I found that the zoo's presentations suggest an unresolved tension between genuine interest in learning and a hostility to information. This unresolved tension indicates to me that there is public interest in knowledge of Wisconsin's natural and social history, but that expert resources are either off-putting or inaccessible. Before examining some of the features of the zoo, I also want to emphasize that I share the zoo's message that experience of the outdoors is a powerful, necessary, and a disappearing learning opportunity.

The Shalom Wildlife Zoo began in 1979 when David and Lana Fechter purchased 30 acres to preserve from development. They started a deer farm there which became popular with locals and by 2010 they registered the farm as a federally-recognized zoo that today houses over 300 animals [1][2].

The animals include rare forms of white-tailed deer, such as piebald and albino varieties, as well as elk, wolves, brown bears, and American bison. Pebbly trails wind between the animal habitats, "learning centers," physical challenges, and other features, such as the Artifact Museum. Walking the trails - or riding in a rented golf cart - is legitimately fun and enlightening.

The signage, however, present the unresolved tension between 'knowledge' and 'wisdom' as the zoo puts it. Consider the experience of visiting the artifact museum. The museum is a small cabin flanked by a half-moon-doored outhouse. The museum is labeled with a laminated sheet that announces its purpose and also advises the visitor to seek wisdom - which is of the future - and not knowledge - which is of the past. However, the museum itself presents a historical review of artifact types in laminated posters above display cases of stone, ceramic, bone, and other unprovenenced artifacts.

 

Further down the trail, an artistic architectural installation built by a college intern reinforces this hostility towards knowledge by juxtaposing "knowledge" flanked by references to books, schools, libraries, news outlets, universities, science, culture, etc., to "wisdom," which is represented only by a framed (and admittedly beautiful) vista of the farms cultivated, semi-natural landscape. The SWZ website invites school groups to make field trips here, and one wonders what message students will take away from a didactic field trip that is anti-didactic.

At left: "Window to Wisdom." At right: "Window to Knowledge"
Note 'education,' 'university,' and 'learning' located in the right hand window.

The trails between these installations explain little bits of unattributed Indian lore to visitors, some of which explains that humans are unimportant and asks 'how does it feel to be unimportant?' Other bits of lore explain the uses of local trees and additional installments present Indian dwellings and burials as reconstructed by the zoo. Despite Wisconsin's great diversity of Indian People and cultures - not to mention the vast diversity in the current borders of the US - the SWZ tends to pick 3000 BC as the prime time for the Indian artifacts it presents.

 

There are other unusual attractions at the zoo: an above ground Indian burial, a 'bison pole,' a sadder version of a supposed Indian lean-to. And it appears that there have been complaints from concerned citizens about authenticity and animal welfare here. A change.org petition called for the removal of ferrets from an outdoor ferret enclosure because the ferrets were in fact domestic ferrets meant for indoor life as pets, not the wild ferrets they were presented as. The zoo apparently rectified the situation, as noted by the petition's administrators [3].

Critiquing the zoo or debunking its presentation of Indian Peoples cannot be my purpose here because I am not a specialist in zoo ethics or North American Indians (though I am a specialist in precolonial material culture in the Western Hemisphere). Moreover, I don't intend to pick apart and research every claim. Finally, it's not for me here to defend the history of Indian Peoples, as there are plenty of Indian People who can handle that themselves.

As an expert on researching and teaching the past I am most interested in the unresolved and problematic tension between information about the past and the attitudes by which it is presented. At the SWZ the past is clearly valuable and important. However, legitimate means for learning about the past are presented as unimportant and regarded with hostility. This apparent contradiction seems to me to be symptomatic of American ambivalence to legitimate intellectual pursuits and also the failure of education specialists at all levels to foster a positive engagement with our collective pasts. 

As a public-oriented anthropologist and archaeologist the solution to me seems to call for increased public outreach by specialists as well as public support for those specialists (e.g., teachers, professors, researchers, publishers, etc.).

I share the SWZ's firm belief that the field is an invaluable teaching resource. Moreover, the experience of the field is as important to me as the systematic absorption of information about the field through note-taking, book reading, lecture hearing, and etc. But the value of field experience does not devalue systematic attempts to record, analyze, and communicate knowledge about the field and its residents - as the Shalom Wildlife Zoo might have us believe.

[1] Shalom Wildlife Zoo. "About Us" webpage. Accessed 12 September 2016.
[2] The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle. "Why it's called the Shalom Zoo on Shalom Drive." Published 13 April 2016. Accessed 12 September 2016.
[3] Change.org petition."Take measures to provide a proper habitat for four domestic ferrets..." Accessed 12 September 2016.

Article Published in Journal of Field Archaeology

The Journal of Field Archaeology recently published an article to which I contributed in collaboration with Dr. Melissa Vogel (Clemson), Angela Garren (Clemson), and Dr. Bethany Turner (Georgia State). "Urban political ecology in late prehistory: New evidence from El Purgatorio, Peru" interprets the organic collections from El Purgatorio's monumental, cemetery, and residential (elite and commoner) districts. Find the full text here: 

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00934690.2016.1195231

Congratulations and thanks for the hard work to Dr. Vogel, Ms Garren, and Dr. Turner!

Renaming and Reigniting the Blog

Since earning a doctorate many rapid and positive changes have kept me away from this blog. I returned to Peru to start a new research project, I taught at DePaul University for a year, I co-founded a lecture series which I have left in the capable hands of a colleague and friend, my family expanded with the arrival of our first child, we moved to a new city and state, and I've taken the helm - with excellent colleagues - of two archaeological publication projects for which I am very enthused. 

These changes and the new opportunities they bring will give me plenty of material for reflection and sharing that may be useful to others. I'm most interested in sharing my experiences of creative processes; I think specifically about how people roughly in my position might be able to pick up tips on things that I troubleshoot regularly: writing, revising, editing, organizing research, parsing troublesome data, teaching  challenging classes, meshing academic and non-academic activities, making sense of an increasingly complex and sometimes fraught socio-cultural environment.

I make no promises to keep this blog strictly professional or even strictly academic, although those are the two domains in which I am most outwardly active. I'm likely to comment on art and music (avoiding total shameless self-promotion of my projects), rapidly-changing political currents, the challenge of finding, designing, and executing innovating teaching opportunities, and finally on doing intellectually creative work like research and writing. No promises either regarding frequency of posts, though I hope to complete at least one a month. (Pro-tip to myself: make a writing goal, remind yourself of it, complete it, and recognize your accomplishment).

Why 'Into Lost Time?' It's a phrase that has worked its way into my mind and returns regularly. On the one hand, it is a gesture towards my main training as an archaeologists. Archaeologists dig into the earth and scrutinize objects to gain insight into lost time. But I'm also taken with the idea - however mystical - that archaeological and historical curiosity is driven by personal and psychological desires to dig into one's own past in order to understand and liberate one's own psyche or, more plainly put, one's self. Herbert Marcuse saw this social archaeology as having a double-character. It was on the one hand personal and on the other hand broadly social. He felt that if we as a society might look at our own history we would find the kernel of a less oppressive society. This less oppressive society would be the context for less individually repressed people. These ideas appeal to me as an archaeologist (and perhaps slightly radical political thinker) because the implication is that by understanding the past, especially the past that remains unwritten, we find inspiration and reason to believe that other worlds (less oppressive ones) are possible. This liberatory model of archaeology I expressed in 2014 at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in proposing an anarchist attitude towards archaeological heritage. I argued that the exclusivity of state-sanctioned archaeological practice has alienating effects that undermine some of the humanistic goals of anthropological archaeology. I quoted Kropotkin, who used what he believed to be a metaphor to explain that if one digs under the cities and towns one finds evidence of the collective work required to create the civilization we enjoy today; therefore, he argued, no one can claim exclusive rights over the riches of civil life. 

It is in this light that I find the phrase 'Into Lost Time' an appealing textual totem for organizing diverse efforts and reflections.

Lecture December 4, 2016: Archaeological Institute of America - Milwaukee. "Neighborhood Society: Ancient and Modern"

I'm pleased to announce I'll be lecturing at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee on December 4, 2016. The lecture will be part of the Archaeological Institute of America - Milwaukee chapter's active and exciting lecture series. Thank you to Dr. Elisabetta Cova for the invitation and excellent work with the series.