A BBC article on the new species of homo UK | Magazine | Eton or the zoo? raises some excellent questions.

How would the new species be treated? If it is such a close relative, would we give these people the vote?

The discovery of homo floresiensis reiterates what anthropologists have been saying for a long while - that we are not unique as humans.

All living creatures may have a soul, but to what extent are we different? What is the character of humanity?

We are certainly a biological species. So is it that humans are conscious of their world? Many animals are clearly conscious and communicate their awareness. Maybe we have a higher order of self-awareness above this primary consciousness? Or maybe we are intentional beings. Again, many animals display what can be interpreted as intentional behavior.

How about this as a way to think of these questions -

The notion of species is too centered upon the characteristics of the individual biolgical organism.

Australopithecus Afarensis - reconstruction from Johanson and Edgar From Lucy to Language

What makes a species is also its ecology. And modern humans have a peculiarly cultural ecology (for at least 35 thousand years). This makes our identity and self awareness distributed phenomena - to be found outside the individual in cultural networks.

Don’t look for the soul inside the human being but outside.

An argument from my new book.

Jody (Maxmin) has directed us to a review of an exhibition in New York City -

“Mirrors to the Past: Ancient Greece and Avant-Garde America” is at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, 111 Amsterdam Avenue, at 65th Street, Lincoln Center, (212) 870-1630, through Jan. 8. The Hellenic Festival, presented by the library in collaboration with the Queens Library, offers various public programs and performances; information: (212) 642-0142.

Edward Rothstein reviews it in the New York Times - How the Ancients Became Trendy: The Road From Euripides to Revolution

Chris (Witmore) takes issue with Rothstein:

Review:

If someday, ages hence, archaeologists were to come upon the objects now on display in the Vincent Astor Gallery of the New York public Library for the Performing Arts, what would they make of them all? The items in the exhibition “Mirrors to the Past” all refer in one way or another to ancient Greece. A pomegranate-colored gauze wrap is meant to be a reconstruction of Greek fashion. A dancer in a white tunic is shown dreamily posing at the Parthenon in erotic reverie. A director broods in Greek peasant dress as if straining to hear the chords of the Delphic oracle. Posters and photographs show Trojan women, the citizens of Colonus, Antigone and Medea variously reincarnated as European exiles, gospel singers and earnest political rebels.

Judging from much of the material, an archaeologist might conclude that ancient Greece was a civilization of sensuous narcissists, antiwar activists and ardent feminists that had little patience for convention and little taste for bourgeois life. It was a culture, in other words, that closely resembled some avant-garde movements in the 20th-century United States, for that is the real focus of this exhibition, which bears the subtitle “Ancient Greece and Avant-Garde America”.

CW

This “what if … ?” motif often comes up in popular understanding of archaeology. It has archaeologists in the future digging up contemporary society only to come up with wild images of what we might have been like. It assumes that as the world changes archaeologists will always be getting on with business as usual. This public image of archaeologists as arbiters of the distant and disconnected past has changed little since the professionalization of the discipline in the nineteenth century. Sure we have interrogated such divides within the discipline, but these ideas have hardly filtered into the public imagination. Would Mr.
Rothstein be shocked to find out that archaeologist deal in the contemporary past? That our mobilizations, our manifestations of the material past form are chasmatic because they intertwine with aspects of the present? This “what if” scenario may seem a harmless literary trope for writers who have difficulty coming up with a more original beginning for a story, but it perpetuates a radical divide between past and present and makes archaeologists out to be complacent in the maintenance of this divide.

I do hope Cornelius’s new book on popular culture and archaeology will be part of a wider debate about these matters.

Nevertheless, the exhibition itself precisely foregrounds the intermingling of classical past and present. Of late ancient Greece seems mostly to be again the reference point for rather conservative political opinion. It is good to be reminded that radical counterculture has also taken ancient Greece as a founding moment. Throughout the 20th century, for example, Greek plays were increasingly seen as celebrations of internationalism, pacifism, dissent and women’s rights. Such ideas inspired the productions whose programs, posters and images make up the largest section of the exhibition. Rothstein criticizes the exhibition for not questioning more deeply the reasons for the different attitudes to classical Greece. I wholeheartedly agree with Rothstein - what is really needed is a reexamination of ancient Greece itself in the light of contemporary interest and desire to find ourselves in such pasts. This would indeed be a chiasmus or intermingling of pasts and presents.

Emma Hamilton as three muses - eighteenth-century classical avant-garde?

Abram (Stern) was through at Stanford last night talking to our Mellon Workshop in New Media about net.art - here is the talk in his wiki - [link]

There are many interesting matters for an archaeologist - net.art’s focus on broken bits of computer code, frequent nostalgia for older art forms, reuse of media fragments. And above all the classic issue of media archaeology - how to archive and document work that is insubstantial, time-based and ephemeral?

The evening turned out to less of a presentation and more of a shared exploration through the collection of pieces held in his wiki.

Abram’s own work is actually more interesting then most of the classics of net.art. Fred (Turner) made a comment on his wonderful IP collage that got me thinking.

This work takes the IP address of a visitor to the site, treats the numbers as coordinates and color reference and maps the rectangle onto a white canvas. The result is a growing layered image of quite extraordinary beauty. Fred’s comment - this is a work in the aesthetics of archiving.

Philip (of philosophistry) also uses a color coded graphic to visualize and navigate the postings on his blog - a remarkable manifestation of changing tones and themes.

Then I recalled a work of the Three Landscapes Project at Stanford - the book in a room, a diary of our inquiries into the notion of landscape, produced by Cliff McLucas for the project.

It explicitly worked upon the graphics of record - how to represent a year long inquiry into the notion of place - a layered intermingling of our research, information and findings on three specific landscapes, talks with colleagues, and how it changed in the process of collaborative inquiry, the collaboratory.

More of the scope of media archaeology.

The discovery of remains of another species of homo that lived alongside modern humans only 18 or even 13 thousand years ago is everywhere today - Guardian Unlimited | Life | “From 18,000 years ago, the one metre-tall human that challenges history of evolution” - a new “hobbit” species found on the Indonesian island of Flores.

Why didn’t I believe it until I read the original report in Nature?

And I am still skeptical.

Too fantastic?

Did I need the sober language and measurements? Lots of graeco-latin biologisms?

Description of Homo floresiensis (MS - not the homo floresensis of many google searches)
Order Primates Linnaeus, 1758
Suborder Anthropoidea Mivart, 1864
Superfamily Hominoidea Gray, 1825
Family Hominidae Gray, 1825
Tribe Hominini Gray, 1825
Genus Homo Linnaeus, 1758
Homo floresiensis sp. nov.

Etymology. Recognizing that this species has only been identified on the island of Flores, and a prolonged period of isolation may have resulted in the evolution of an island endemic form.

Holotype. LB1 partial adult skeleton excavated in September 2003. Recovered skeletal elements include the cranium and mandible, femora, tibiae, fibulae and patellae, partial pelvis, incomplete hands and feet, and fragments of vertebrae, sacrum, ribs, scapulae and clavicles. The repository is the Centre for Archaeology, Jakarta, Indonesia.

Referred material. LB2 isolated left mandibular P3. The repository is the Centre for Archaeology, Jakarta, Indonesia.

Localities. Liang Bua is a limestone cave on Flores, in eastern Indonesia. The cave is located 14 km north of Ruteng, the provincial capital of Manggarai Province, at an altitude of 500 m above sea level and 25 km from the north coast. It occurs at the base of a limestone hill, on the southern edge of the Wae Racang river valley. The type locality is at 08° 31′ 50.4″ south latitude 120° 26′ 36.9″ east longitude.

Horizon. The type specimen LB1 was found at a depth of 5.9 m in Sector VII of the excavation at Liang Bua. It is associated with calibrated accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dates of approximately 18 kyr and bracketed by luminescence dates of 35 4 kyr and 14 2 kyr. The referred isolated left P3 (LB2) was recovered just below a discomformity at 4.7 m in Sector IV, and bracketed by a U-series date of 37.7 0.2 kyr on flowstone, and 20 cm above an electron-spin resonance (ESR)/U-series date of 74 - 12 + 14 kyr on a Stegodon molar.

Diagnosis. Small-bodied bipedal hominin with endocranial volume and stature (body height) similar to, or smaller than, Australopithecus afarensis. Lacks masticatory adaptations present in Australopithecus and Paranthropus, with substantially reduced facial height and prognathism, smaller postcanine teeth, and posteriorly orientated infraorbital region. Cranial base flexed. Prominent maxillary canine juga form prominent pillars, laterally separated from nasal aperture. Petrous pyramid smooth, tubular and with low relief, styloid process absent, and without vaginal crest. Superior cranial vault bone thicker than Australopithecus and similar to H. erectus and H. sapiens. Supraorbital torus arches over each orbit and does not form a flat bar as in Javan H. erectus. Mandibular P3 with relatively large occlusal surface area, with prominent protoconid and broad talonid, and either bifurcated roots or a mesiodistally compressed Tomes root. Mandibular P4 also with Tomes root. First and second molar teeth of similar size. Mandibular coronoid process higher than condyle, and the ramus has a posterior orientation. Mandibular symphysis without chin and with a posterior inclination of the symphysial axis. Posteriorly inclined alveolar planum with superior and inferior transverse tori. Ilium with marked lateral flare. Femur neck long relative to head diameter, the shaft circular and without pilaster, and there is a high bicondylar angle. Long axis of tibia curved and the midshaft has an oval cross-section.

Many of the reports claim that the finds prompt a rewrite of human evolution. Well no - it has been clear for some time that there is no single evolutionary line that leads to modern humans and that for most of human history there have been more than one contemporary species of homo and australopithecine precursors.

Homo floresiensis in Nature, photo by Peter Brown

The fascination for me is the remote island setting and story. Homo floresiensis - remnants of homo erectus maybe, dwarfed by an island isolation and the forces of evolutionary selection. Not enough to eat? Wiped out by a volcano?

The island is home to the giant Komodo dragon lizards.

It is Conan Doyle’s “Lost World”

Eaten by dragons?

In class this morning I ran a google search for a picture of Mycenaean marine style pottery, and it turned up an obituary for Michael Casson, the studio potter. He was a giant in the world of craft pottery, a pioneer of 20th century studio ceramics, and a lovely man. He died last December. We hadn’t known.

I had a good deal of contact with him in the early 90s when he taught at Cardiff Art College. I was researching ancient Corinthian ceramics, was keen to get expert opinion on pottery manufacture and had heard about his interest in the history of ceramics from Helen, my wife, also a studio potter, whom he taught. We met several times when we discussed archaeology and pottery at length from his perspective and with his vast experience of all kinds of pottery making - industrial, studio, ethnographic. I particularly recall a lunch at St David’s Hall in Cardiff when I showed him several seventh century BC Corinthian aryballoi that Anthony Snodgrass at Cambridge had generously let me borrow from the university’s collection. He loved them. Key issues for Mick: the brushes for painting these exquisite miniatures - they must have been so refined; the clear evidence for using apprentices on the best wares - poorly applied handles; the trickiness of applying slip on slip - some of the perfume jars are multicolored; the clay - needing considerable preparation; and the speed with which they could have been made - a skilled thrower could run one off in 45 seconds or less. I incorporated this and more from him in my book on archaic Greek art.

photo - UK Potters

He was such an inexhaustible energy and a delight to talk with. A delight. He had an expert interest in everything to do with ceramics, craft, art history. And he could engage you because he listened. He crossed borders.

And sure enough - his salt-glazed stoneware shows his interest in Mycenaean pots. Simple beautiful things.

What a loss.

[Link] [Link]

A bunch of comments on the veto by John Hennessy, Stanford’s President, of Dennis Oppenheim’s “Device to root out evil” from sculpture.net.

Dennis was also in the New York Times this week - [Link]

My blog entries - [Link] [Link] [Link] [Link]

Earlier this week I was airing the matter of copyright and intellectual property in connection with acdemic citation, pulling it all into the issue of democratic cultural creativity. [Link]

The The Creative Commons blog announces a radio show this Sunday on the art of remix in a broad perspective - from Roman intertextuality to DJ Dangermouse - 2pm this Sunday on the Bay Area’s KALW (91.7) - Benjamin Walker’s “The Creative Remix”.

More details and the radio show itself - [Link]

A sad occasion this afternoon - a remembrance service for Mike Jameson, my colleague in the Department of Classics here at Stanford. He died in August.

It was in Stanford Church - first time I had attended any kind of event there. A good turn out.

There were some very nice anecdotes told by friends and colleagues. He was not at all self-promoting, and many of us had little idea what a talent he was, because we didn’t cross paths much.

Mike was a pioneer in social and economic history, interested in ancient agriculture, slavery and sacrifice long before it was mainstream. And regional archaeological survey - again, leading the way in classical archaeology in the Argolid (and Chris Witmore is picking the project up and taking it forward). I like to think that this pioneering spirit is what Stanford Archaeology should be all about.

He was also a fan of British comedy - the Goons and after!

You don’t realize the loss until they’re gone - he was very welcoming when we were deciding to come to Stanford, but I never really got to talk to him once we got here.

He had a wonderfully open mind.

Some tributes - from Jim and Christina Dengate and Tom Boyd

New York Times

Those from the service will be available soon - [Link]

I am sitting in a colloquium on Open Knowledge and Social Research Networks at Stanford Humanities Center. On the agenda - more of the issues that I summarized the other day in another colloquium at Stanford. [Link]

how does open knowledge work with digital technology in academic institutions?

how does collaboration at a distance work?

Lawrence Lessig is talking about intellectual property in a digital age. The topic is coming up a lot in this blog. John Unsworth (in Illinois) is talking about collaboration and community.

Lawrence Lessig@Stanford Humanities Center - 18 October 9.50 am

Recently I have commmented on Jennifer Wallace writing a book that, in my reading, didn’t properly acknowledge previous work on her topic of the archaeological imagination [Link] [Link] There was a piece of mine that stressed the positive features of fakes - because they challenge notions of authenticity that in turn lie behind the notions of property and ownership of the past that justify the trade and collection of illicit antiquities [Link]

More broadly I regularly celebrate cultural remixing - reworking the past. Using Rick Prelinger’s media archives to create new movies, whatever … [Link] I am particularly critical of notions of cultural identity that is conceived as something you can possess and own - heritage, for example [Link]

Lawrence Lessig’s case for a Creative Commons can help us work through some of the issues in the friction between authorship and originality (I thought/wrote this and it is mine) and the way ideas live on in their resuse.

We are in trouble with copyright and intellectual property. It started when copyright law changed in 1978, along with modes of reproduction. Copyright used to be an opt-in system, where an author or publisher would opt to have a work subject to copyright and, on average, copyright lasted only 16 years. There was an enormous amount of material in the public domain. Now all works are subject to copyright of at least 95 years. At the same time the cost and ease of copying has tumbled. Where once printing and publication needed presses and publishing houses, now the means to copy any cultural work, rework and author and then publish electronically is available to anyone with 1500 dollars or less for a computer and only a little expertise.

This unleashes the potential of extraordinary cultural creativity. But intellectual property brokers are working their hardest to stifle it - because they conflate creativity with individual property. They see digital copying and reuse as the same thing and an equal threat to revenue.

Since copyright became something applied to every work, and since digital reproduction has become so easy and cheap, the legal project of Digital Rights Management has become one of making cultural remix illegal and impossible. Use anyone else’s work in your own and you have to track down every copyright holder. The burden of clearance is considerable and and the chance of success minimal. The recent movie Tarnation took the Cannes Film Festival by storm and surprise - it cost 218 dollars to make. Cost of tracking copyrights and permissions for background music - 400,000 dollars. Steal a CD from a Virgin Megastore and it’s a misdemeanor carrying maybe a 1000 dollar fine. Share the same CD over the net and you could get sued for 1.5 million dollars of copyright infringement.

Lessig, like me, begins with the premise that knowledge and culture are remix. Reworking stuff. Life is remix. Creativity always builds on the past - taking stuff and reworking it. Creativity is not about individual genius producing something to be owned - something that somehow expresses their inner being or soul.

This is Lessig’s creative commons - we need to be able to reuse and rework a cultural commons - work in the public domain.

This is not necessarily incompatible with copyright and intellectual property - we can, and should, recognize individual creativity, agency (as Sepp Gumbrecht is now saying), contibutions and work. Copyright needs to be understood however in a limited way - as precisely control over copies. Not control of access or reuse, but control of making and distributing copies.

So when someone doesn’t cite other people’s work that has a real bearing on theirs, the issue is not that they are copying and infringing intellectual property (though they may be). Citation is actually about sharing. Tracks and links are what matter because remix is what intellectual creativity is about (and security and understanding). This is where citation fits. Not as some sacrosanct institution of academe, but because citation should be seen as part of particular kinds of open, active and democratic knowledge communities. Citation is not a matter of origins (where ideas come from and so who owns them), but of genealogy - tracking relationships that do not carry any authorization of ownership.

It applies to remains of the past - they do not stand on their own but need connections with context, past and present. Data are site specific.

I have been at pains to make this point for archaeology. Just recently Kris Hirst at about.archaeology picked up on an article in Current Anthropology - George Nicholas and Kelly Bannister on copyrighting the past. - [Link] - for those with a subscription to the journal.

The question raised in this article is - Who owns the past and knowledge produced of it? Of course the past may potentially be of value - antique and collectable works of art, cultural tourism, heritage and the rest. The authors want the past to be owned collectively and knowledge to be produced collaboratively rather than owned exclusively by particular agencies. The past needs to be in the public domain. But actually, it isn’t.

Their argument reads well and clearly has relevance to archaeologies that deal with competing claims on the past - when native American groups, for example, dispute science’s claim on exclusive knowledge of the past, and ownership of data or remains.

But we do need some caution - collaboration and community are not self-evident givens. An archaeological team may be working together, but I have experiences of many projects where division of labor (into specialized tasks that don’t affect each other) and strong hierarchical management work against collaboration. An academic community may well appear exclusive and guarded to outsiders. What it all hinges on is an ethics and politics of community building.

To get back to intellectual property. We should first disconnect it from creativity. We do better to associate cultural creativity with richness and vitality of connection, reference, linkage - remix. In this light think of an archaeological fake.

Now maybe I don’t want a fake because the genuine article has more market value. A real piece of history to possess. Well, there are ways that you might take care to ensure you get what you want. There is, of course, more to the value of an archaeological artifact than market value. My line is that the authenticity and aura of an item is to do with the story of its life, where it came from, who was associated with it, hwhat happened to it, how it came to be where it is now. These stories, contexts, bits of information make things fascinating and valuable. They may, or may not have anything to do with whether the item is a forgery. And some forgeries are far more interesting than some originals.

It comes down to desire - What kind of things do we value? I suggest that those with fascinating stories and connections, fake or not, are of far more value than those simply with the right date and provenance. [Link]

More media archaeology

Chris (Witmore) put me onto this item in Yahoo! News -
Mustang Ads Feature Late Steve McQueen. Ford is to resurrect Steve McQueen in its promotional campaign for the new 2005 Mustang.

They did this in the UK a few years back - clever cuts of footage from Bullitt - the very stylish 1968 movie set in San Francisco, and in which McQueen drove a Mustang.

As Chris says, the switching is a chiasmus - as present and past exchange places. We find this structure more and more. It is profoundly archaeological.