Ray's Thought for the Day - Agonizing Archaeology

All righty then. I, Ray Pistrum have, in lieu of engaging with an onerous task that much offends me, an activity that has its roots in shoat skitter wrangling in fact, have opted to do the forthcoming, for the nonce, alternatively.

As previously noted, I intended to re-read the article with the amusing subtitle “The Agonizing Dilemma of Modern Archaeology”. Now I have done just that, re-read it. So now I believe myself as ready as I’ll ever be, to spell further. In fact, I intend to completely spell my guts out on this particular subtopic so that the spell will then be complete and I will have done with it, forever. Oh, by the way, the title of the article is “Science, Social Science and Common Sense”, by R.C. Dunnell.

Archaeology, as I understand the term is a systematic study of human and proto human artifacts, perhaps to include evidence of human or proto human impacts to their environments of a non-artifactual nature. I include the latter in deference to an archaeologist colleague who studies snail shells found at archaeological sites. I’ve been meaning to ask if any of those snail shells had human bite marks on them, but this may be crossing over into cultural anthropology or some such related field and I don’t want to raise a fuss.

Now I, Ray the normally curious, have never had the slightest interest in human artifacts. I don’t even find valuable antiques interesting. But that’s all just personal prejudice, for my focus has historically been elsewhere. However, when Rayetta and me were wandering the countryside for all those years, ornithologizing and botanizing and naturalizing in general, we discovered that one could fluff up a plant list by checking out the vicinity of historic human habitations because of the propensity of humans to surround those habitations with botanical oddities from foreign parts. That’s how we first made the acquaintance of (Zizyphus zizyphus) formerly (Zizyphus jujube), or just jujube. (Why is it that changes in scientific nomenclature trend to becoming less, instead of more, interesting?) Apparently. this phenomena of finding odd plants in the vicinity of human habitations also may apply to prehistoric humans as well. For example, wild tobaccos, Nicotiana species, often turn up in the immediate vicinity of rock shelters, although, come to think of it, smoking, bygone Native Americans may be only one hypothesis potentially accounting for such a distributional pattern. And Great Goddess, what might an ethno-botanical study of the distributional pattern of big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) conclude a hundred years from now if sample points included the immediate environs of the homesteads of the Druidry in these parts.

Yikes! I spelled hypothesis. Yikes!

Why is it that everyone engaged in a systematic study of something or other wants to be called a scientist? Perhaps, back when all this agonizing was on-going among the archaeologists, a scientist had more potential access to other peoples’ resources than they do now, so the archaeologists felt obliged to be scientists if they were going to compete with scientists for funding. In hindsight, with the passage of the National Antiquities Act, this problem went away because instead of having to become scientists, archaeologists could find employment as participants in cultural resource management, just as hoards of sort of biologists became integrated into various facets of natural resource management. I know lots of archaeologists who are cultural resource managers in one sense or another. In fact, those are the only kind I do know.

So if you are an archaeologist working in the general vicinity of cultural resource manager, you spend all your time and energy trying to protect the antiquities you know about, while simultaneously cataloging the ones you don’t know about, keeping one step ahead of the bulldozer. This aint science, but it may be generally useful in a societal sense and could be interesting, I surmise, at least some of the time.

But getting back to, or perhaps on to, that article. There were several terms used that I could not figure out the context of the use. The first of these was the author’s use of the term, nomothetic, as in “When the idea of archaeology as a nomothetic science first appeared as an explicit goal, its advocates were few.” Hmmm. Archaeology did not in those days attempt to foist abstract, universal statements of law on an incomprehending public with regard to the systematic digging up of artifacts. That’s a bad thing?

Then there’s the troubling “It is precisely for this reason that I have argued for a phenomenological/ideational distinction in formulating a scientific archaeology.” After reading this statement, I realized this was a joke article much like a similar article published years ago in some dubious wildlife journal that purported to detail black bear behavior resulting from exposure of the black bears to used tampons. The joke hypothesis was confirmed further along when the subtopic common sense was broached, but immediately and unfairly shifted to a discussion of common senses.

Now, I am tired out by this particular spell and can spell no more, on it. Furthermore, even spelling on it to begin with shows that I am less a Man of Action than the Crumby Ovate, or even, Goddess Bless, Rayetta.
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It really pisses me off that ornithologizing is not a real word. Well, we’ll soon see about that just like we’ll soon see about a lot of stuff that aint right.

Ray Pistrum
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Go Ray!

Hope
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It's nice to see that Ray and Hope are getting along and cooperating.

The Arkdruid