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A few reminders

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Important Due Dates

• Friday, March 27th

Term Paper Draft
(Drafts reviewed in order received)

• Wednesday, April 8th

Exercise 5 (Visualization) and Revised Term Papers
and Extra Credit Exercises
plus Take-home final distributed

• Wednesday, April 15th (10 AM)

Final Take-home Exam

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The Words We Use

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“Marpole Midden Site” vs. c̓əsnaʔəm

“artifacts” vs. “belongings”

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“Belongings” in “c̓əsnaʔəm: the city before the city”

A blog by Jordan Wilson
http://www.sfu.ca/ipinch/outputs/blog/citybeforecitybelongings%20

“Many times people are buried with things that are important
to them or to the family that is putting away their loved ones.
For that person to be in the other world, in the spiritual world,
they need their belongings in order to use them. Those things
belonged to somebody; they didn't just appear in some pile of
dirt. They belonged to someone, and that's how it was always
explained to us.”
sʔəyəɬəq (Larry Grant), 2014

“Belongings” in “c̓əsnaʔəm: the city before the city”

https://vimeo.com/117828827

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The Problem with “midden,” “ruins,” “abandoned,” …

“Archaeologists normally tend to be profoundly careful and detailed in

their application of taxonomic and analytical terms, arguing over the
attributes of each taxon, discussing whether artifact types are mutually
exclusive, and even debating the precision of site boundaries. They are
not always, however, careful in their use and understanding of other
terms that impinge on their work and even their very understanding of
the past. They seem to assume that such terms are more or less neutral,
but some actually have the potential to affect interactions with
archaeological stakeholders.”
Larry Zimmerman

“Archaeology Through the Lens of the Local.” In Archaeology in situ: Local

Perspectives on Archaeology, Archaeologists, and Sites in Greece, edited by A. Stroulia
and S.Buck Sutton. Lexington Books. pp. 473-480. 2010

Useful Resources: academia.edu

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In Sma! Things Forgotten: An Archaeology

of Early American Life—James Deetz

1977

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In Sma! Things Forgotten: An Archaeology

of Early American Life—James Deetz

1977
1960 An Archaeological Approach to Kinship Change in Eighteenth-
Century Arikara Culture. Doctoral Dissertation, Department of
Anthropology, Harvard
TO University, Cambridge, MA.
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For more on Deetz (1930-2000),
TWO see Marley Brown’s tribute:
http://www.histarch.illinois.edu/plymouth/JDeetzmem12.html
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In Sma! Things Forgotten

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Three Approaches to Materiality

Janet Spector’s Awl

Coupland et al.s’ Beads
Whittaker et al.s’ Typological Challenge

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What This Awl Means

Janet Spector

What This Awl Means

“ Those of us who produce knowledge
about other people hold a powerful and
privileged position. Male domination of
the field of anthropology has produced
distortions about women in many
cultural settings and time periods.
Similarly, Indian people have had little
part in producing archaeological
knowledge about their past, and
archaeologists have surely produced and
perpetuated similar distortions about
Indian histories and cultures. I did not
want to do this. I no longer wanted to
investigate the archaeology of Indian
people unless their perspectives and
voices were incorporated into the work”
What This Awl Means, p. 13

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What This Awl Means

Mazaokiyewin

What This Awl Means

Key Points:

• Argues academic language is only superficially objective

• Ideas/beliefs conveyed through facade of objectivity
-belief that European-metal tips were more valued than bone
awl handles
• Can female/indigenous roles in archaeology be portrayed other
than in a narrative format, without trivializing, stereotyping, or
distancing?
• Does the narrative format affect its role as an academic
resource?

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A Wealth of Beads: Evidence for Material Wealth-Based

Inequality in the Salish Sea Region, 4000-3500 Cal B.P.
Coupland et al.

Archaeologists working in the Salish Sea (Strait of Georgia and Puget

Sound) region of the Pacific Northwest have unearthed human burials
and non-mortuary features dated to 4000-3500 cal B.P. containing tens
and even hundreds of thousands of stone and shell disc beads. Several
sites are reported here, including burials recently excavated from site
DjRw-14 located in the territory of the shishdlh Nation. We argue that
the disc beads constituted an important form of material wealth at this
time, based on the amount of labor that would have been required to
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produce them and the capacity for beads to accrue in value after their
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production. A model of material wealth-based inequality is developed
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for a period much older than many archaeologists working in the region
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have previously thought.
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A Wealth of Beads: Evidence for Material Wealth-Based

Inequality in the Salish Sea Region, 4000-3500 Cal B.P.

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Evaluating Consistency in Typology and Classification

John C. Whittaker, Douglas Caulkins, and Kathryn Kamp

“When Donald Grayson mentions Lulu Linear Punctated,

does Robert Dunnell picture the same sherd?”

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Abstract
Typological systems are essential for communication between
anthropologists as well as for interpretive purposes. For both
communication and interpretation, it is important to know that different
individuals using the same typology classify artifacts in similar ways, but
the consistency with which typologies are used is rarely evaluated or
explicitly tested. There are theoretical, practical, and cultural reasons for
this failure. Disagreements among archaeologists using the same typology
may originate in the typology itself (i.e., imprecise type definitions,
confusing structure) or in the classification process, because of observer
errors, differences in perception and interpretation, and biases. We
review previous attempts to evaluate consistency in typology and
classification, and use consensus analysis to examine one well-established
typology. Both consensus and disparity are apparent among the
typologists in our case study, and this allows us to explore the kinds of
forces that shape agreement and diversity in the use of all typological
systems. We argue that issues of typological consistency are theoretically
and methodologically important. Typological consistency can be explicitly
tested, and must be if we hope to use typologies confidently.

Key Issues

•Archaeological consensus now seems to have arrived at the sensible

middle ground that typologies are indeed at least partly arbitrary
but, nevertheless, can be used to solve problems — to describe a
body of data, to communicate that description, and to answer
interpretive questions.

•Whether the types archaeologists define are “real” or not, and

whether they are produced intuitively or by the application of
mathematical algorithms, our ability to use typologies to solve
problems and our ability to describe, communicate, and evaluate
one another's interpretations depend to some extent on using
well-defined types and agreeing on the definitions of any types that
are in wide use.

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Basic Questions?

• Are types real, or invented by archaeologists for their own

purposes?
• Is artifact variability continuous, or can types be discovered as
nonrandom clusters of attributes?
• Is there a single best type division of a domain, or are there many
equally good ones?
• Can we formulate standard types, and should we?
• Are types basic data?
• Do we need more or fewer types?
• What should types mean (e.g., chronology, function, mental
templates)?

Conclusions

1. The problem of consistency has not been considered theoretically

interesting.
2. Evaluating typological systems can be complex.
3. Practical barriers to testing typologies are often large. Testing takes
time, energy, and money away from the interpretive pursuits that are
often our real goal. Quality control tests can be performed…using a
sample of data.
4. The cultural nature of typological systems hinders their evaluation.
Sometimes we learn typologies almost as a rite of passage into the
profession.…Those who rely most on a typology and have long
experience with it have often internalized it so well that they do not
readily question it.

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Why is this important?

• Is typology important? Why?

• What’s at stake here?

• How “real” are the typologies we create?

• How objective are the observations we make?
• How can we deal with ambiguities and variations in
observations of the same phenomena?

The New Materiality

Lynn Meskell

2005

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The New Materiality

2005

Entangled: An Archaeology of the

Relationships between Humans and Things
Ian Hodder

“But I know my attempt will offend; there is

nothing so annoying as someone attempting to be
a grand synthesizer feeding off existing scholarship
and distorting its individual messages.” 2012

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The New Materiality

“Using ideas from archaeology and

other disciplines, and engaging with
evolutionary theories, Hodder
shows how the co-dependencies of
humans and things are the hidden
drivers of human progress.”

2012

The New Materiality…. or is it a new Integration?

1) Humans depend on things. In much of the new work in the social and
human sciences in which humans and things co-constitute each other,
there is, oddly, little account of the things themselves.
2) Things depend on other things. All things depend on other things along
chains of interdependence.
3) Things depend on humans. Things are not inert. They are always falling
apart, transforming, growing, changing, dying, running out.
4) The defining aspect of human entanglement with made things is that
humans get caught in a double-bind, depending on things that depend
on humans.
5) Traits evolve and persist.

Ian Hodder
2010 “Human-Thing Entanglement:
Towards an Integrated Archaeological Perspective.”
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17: 154–177

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The New Materiality…. or is it a new Integration?

Building 5, Çatalhoyük

The New Materiality…. or is it a new Integration?

Tools and processes in making a fire

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The New Materiality…. or is it a new Integration?

The New Materiality…. or is it a new Integration?

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The New Materiality… and Mississippian Effigy Pots

The New Materiality…. and Personhood

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The New Materiality…. and Personhood

Pleistocene-age footprints
of 3 children
Reseau Clastres Cave,
France

Homelessness and Heritage: (Bonus Track)

Perspectives from Archaeology

Larry J. Zimmerman

Larry’s work focuses on

another marginalized
group —the “homeless”

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Can there be an archaeology of the contemporary?

Archaeology is really about the

present, not the past.

Archaeology is really about stuff,

not time.

We can do an “archaeology of ten minutes ago,” a way of thinking about

the world of stuff we live in, not time, which “casts the human world as a
place where people interact with and accumulate material culture, from
trash piles, to items on a knick-knack shelf, to paintings on a wall.”

“Archaeology is all around us, constantly created in that brief moment

between the past and the future, and is forever changing as it recedes
into the past” (Patel 2007).

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Archaeology’s Unique and Useful Perspectives

Archaeology can:

•analyze material culture: what people acquired, used,

and disposed of.
Artifacts don’t lie! Their presence or absence
require explanation and interpretation.

•develop narratives or stories based on material

evidence.
They are systematically developed , not anecdotal.
They may support or challenge existing
narratives.

•define and specify tangible and intangible heritage.

Derived from material evidence and
accompanying narratives, archaeology can
recommend a course for heritage preservation
and social policy.

What does homelessness really look like?

Confusions of definitions, stereotypes and approaches

• They are more than just “someone without a home,” but could some
actually be “home free?”

• “They are vulnerable, cognitively impaired, lazy, dirty, uneducated,

thieves, have no money, have few possessions, and frankly are not all
that pleasant to be around.”

• “They are largely responsible for their own situations.”

• “Providing aid in campsites just perpetuates the problem.”

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Many of us think we know about homelessness, but what

happens away from the usual public places?
•Almost all studies of the homeless have been done in shelters.

•Except for a few ethnographies, almost all information about living

“rough” is anecdotal.

Archaeology can provide systematic, evidenced-based information because

of its emphasis on “stuff.”

The realities often challenge what we think we know

People move in and out of being homeless,

unless they are “hardcore.”

They have possessions; they may have

shelter; they may—but rarely—have
consistent social groups, yet only for a few
is it a chosen lifestyle.

They are largely invisible to us except

when they are in public spaces (street
corner beggars, parks, etc.).

And, yeah, they can even be fun to be

around!

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Homelessness and urban archaeology in Indianapolis:

Material culture

A landscape of trash?

Or a surprising portrait of human adaptability?

A range of ad hoc shelter types

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Longer term use of pre-existing, more durable structures

Personal property? More than you might think!

Caching behavior seems to be everywhere

The storage choice is large plastic

garbage bags, but suitcases, plastic milk
cartons, cardboard boxes, and covered
shopping carts are favored.

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Obvious Ethnicity: Hispanic camps in Indianapolis

Gender sometimes seems visible in campsite remains

Though growing, the number of women is small.

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Explaining and interpreting the material culture

One night in Downtown Eastside Vancouver…

Above: Hastings Street, Downtown Eastside

Vancouver, Carnegie Centre. A neighborhood
and homeless day shelter. Left: (bottom)
Typical image from the area; (top)
Demonstrations in advance of the 2010 Winter
Olympics in which the area was to be “cleaned
up” and gentrified by replacing low cost
housing with condos.

YouTube: The representation of homeless people and their

material culture on videos

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IUPUI Fieldwork

Courtney Singleton (Columbia

University) photographically
documented how one site
changes from day to day but
also developed micro-mapping
experiments

Archaeology and Homelessness in Bristol and York

Rachael Kiddey and John Schofield (York University)

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Changing the narrative of homelessness

• Homeless people constantly strategize to

find or make private, safe, functional,
comfortable, and supportive places for
themselves in a landscape designed to
exclude them.

• Adaptation is an imperative of street life,

and homeless people have developed a
community-of practice in which material
and spatial knowledge is commonly shared

• Homeless people develop their own ways to

make a place for themselves in the urban
landscape, transforming seemingly barren
spaces into meaningful personal places.

Making the changed narrative public

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Students organized a public forum with numerous homeless guests

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Do we acknowledge homeless heritage‒or hide it?

Superbowl XLVI, 2011, Indianapolis

https://iupui.academia.edu/LarryZimmerman

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 2018 Society for American Archaeology Meeting,
Washington, DC
One more thing about Larry

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Personal Connections

“Made Radical by My Own”: Acknowledging the Debt Owed to Larry

Zimmerman in Radicalizing Me” – George Nicholas, Simon Fraser
University

[ IMAGE - see next page]

Rarely do we get the chance to thank our makers.

All of us here have been influenced by Larry Zimmerman, often deeply so. His
contributions to our discipline—including his insistence on ethical discourse with
each other, as well as the model that his has set for respectful engagement with
descendent communities—have been addressed in various ways by the previous
speakers. How very privileged we have been to be within his orbit.

I take this opportunity to offer an unabashedly personal approach to

acknowledging the debt I owe to him. I situate my remarks within three broad
themes: autobiography, humility, and activism.

“Made Radical by My Own”: Acknowledging the Debt Owed to

Larry Zimmerman in Radicalizing Me”

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