Had lunch with Ralph Maurer today. He researches organizational behavior and is interested in how people get attached to what they make, the ideas they have and such, and how this attachment may lead them to manage work and intellectual property without reference to economic gain.

Economic relationships are embedded in all sorts of cultural values, of course. And this applies to institutions as well as individuals.

So we talked about property and identity, about creativity and its relationship to other than economic value, and how these work their way through organizations and institutions. A key concept is surely alienation - that making things that have some life and connection with the maker - work that is not alienated - is gratifying. Especially if such experience is in the midst of so many other thoroughly alienated experiences and things.

Marcel Mauss had to come up too - how gift giving is so much more than an economic transaction and is all about making relaytionships with others - people and things, things that sometimes take on an intimate life of their own.

This morning Philip put me on to a collectorand swap/trade/exchange site in the UK - “Tony’s Trading”

The site is all about media collectables, souvenirs and such - miniatures mostly - and making collections through swapping with others rather than selling and buying.

“My Collections” - @Tony’s Trading

What struck me was that at the end of a scroll down through Ton’y numerous collections comes a photo of Tony himself - the man behind the goods.

His collections are curiously antiseptic though - and especially the way they are displayed around his home. Super clean, dusted, neatly ordered as in an environmentally controlled museum. The collections dominate his home.

Curiously an-archaeological. [Link] [Link] [Link]

Great talk last night from Tim Webmoor at our New Media workshop at Stanford.

He is working at the fabulous site of Teotihuacan, Mexico, on different attitudes and understandings of the site - local and beyond. Teotihuacan has become emblematic of the Mexican state and Mexican heritage. I posted some comments last year from Meg Butler about the Wal-Mart controvery there - [Link]

Rather than study the site and people’s reception of it as a conventional anthropological object, he has set up a software network to enable the expression and publication of the different understandings. An active prompting and enabling.

He has done a great service in carefully outling one crucial context for this kind of work - a science that does not, as a guiding principle and premise, separate professional application of reason from vernacular understanding.

All this in pusuit of a way of holding on to different understandings of the past - the multivocality that is much discussed by more and more archaeologists.

Read more at Tim’s website - [Link]

A fascinating item today in the Guardian - History of modern man unravels as German scholar is exposed as fraud

Flamboyant anthropologist falsified dating of key discoveries

Luke Harding in Berlin

It appeared to be one of archaeology’s most sensational finds. The skull fragment discovered in a peat bog near Hamburg was more than 36,000 years old - and was the vital missing link between modern humans and Neanderthals.

This, at least, is what Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten - a distinguished, cigar-smoking German anthropologist - told his scientific colleagues, to global acclaim, after being invited to date the extremely rare skull.

However, the professor’s 30-year-old academic career has now ended in disgrace after the revelation that he systematically falsified the dates on this and numerous other “stone age” relics.

Yesterday his university in Frankfurt announced the professor had been forced to retire because of numerous “falsehoods and manipulations”.

Archaeological scientist, friend of Governor Arnie, studies the bones of Hitler and Eva Braun?

During their investigation, the university discovered that Prof Protsch, 65, a flamboyant figure with a fondness for gold watches, Porsches and Cuban cigars, was unable to work his own carbon-dating machine.

Instead, after returning from Germany to America, where he did his doctorate, and taking up a professorship, he had simply made things up.

…

German police began investigating the professor for fraud, following allegations that he had tried to sell the university’s 278 chimpanzee skulls for $70,000 to a US dealer.

…

Other details of the professor’s life also appeared to crumble under scrutiny. Before he disappeared from the university’s campus last year, Prof Protsch told his students he had examined Hitler’s and Eva Braun’s bones.

He also boasted of having flats in New York, Florida and California, where, he claimed, he hung out with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steffi Graf. Even the professor’s aristocratic title, “von Zieten”, appears to be bogus.

Far from being the descendant of a dashing general in the hussars, the professor was the son of a Nazi MP, Wilhelm Protsch, Der Spiegel magazine revealed last October.

The university is investigating how thousands of documents lodged in the anthropology department relating to the Nazis’ gruesome scientific experiments in the 1930s were mysteriously shredded, allegedly under the professor’s instructions.

They also discovered that some of the 12,000 skeletons stored in the department’s “bone cellar” were missing their heads, apparently sold to friends of the professor in the US and sympathetic dentists.

Yesterday the university admitted that it should have discovered the professor’s fabrications far earlier. But it pointed out that, like all public servants in Germany, the high-profile anthropologist was virtually impossible to sack, and had also proved difficult to pin down.

…

Yesterday the professor, who lives in Mainz with his wife Angelina, didn’t respond to emails from the Guardian asking him to comment on the affair. But in earlier remarks to Der Spiegel he insisted that he was the victim of an “intrigue”.

“All the disputed fossils are my personal property,” he told the magazine.

Another case of intellectual property tied so intimately to personal identity? [Link]

In the light of my recent posts about creationism [Link], contemporary culture and the science wars [Link] and then the Barbie Doll Bronze Age [Link], Cornelius (Holtorf) has put me on to The Brick Testament.

Yes - the Bible in lego bricks …

The death of Jacob by The Reverend Brendan Powell Smith

Stringy Carter has put me on to an extraordinary web site - Minoan Culture, a Discussion by Frederick John Kluth of Kent, Ohio

Barbie as prehistoric matriarch

He has created a series of scenes from his reading of Minoan Crete using Barbie dolls …

not the usual gendered interpretation of Minoan culture and society!

But I suspect this has a lot in common with the way excavator Sir Arthur Evans thought of bronze age Crete.

Have a look at our rumagings through the site of Knossos [Link] and [Link]

For some time I have been promoting collaborative information building and sharing.

Philip put me on to Flickr - a photo store and share site. You can upload your pictures from camera phone or computer and organize them, keep them private or share them with others. You can “tag” them or part of an image with labels - and this is where it gets very interesting.

Thomas Vander Wal coined the term “folksonomy” - a conflation of “folk” and “taxonomy”, to refer to the “bottom-up” organisational categories that emerge when individuals tag or describe information and images and those tags are pooled.

Clay Shirky and others have argued that folksonomies that use tags - “user-created metadata” - are the only cost-effective way to generate order in large dynamic systems such as the net. Critics insist this will never yield the clarity of controlled classifications administered by professionals. Each approach has strengths. Folksonomies bring structure to the chaos of the net, but you’d probably be happier if your doctor used a more controlled database when it came to figuring out if you had a life threatening disease.

The folksonomy discussion inspired David Sifry, founder and chief executive of blog aggregator/search site Technorati to launch its “Tags” service. Searching on a particular tag (eg China) calls up all links loaded under that tag on del.icio.us, all photos using it from Flickr and all blog posts categorised under that word. Sifry admits that categories that bloggers choose for their posts are broader than tags. But users can add tags to their posts on top of their categories, and he suggests that people might start to change the way they categorise blog posts to take advantage of Technorati Tags. For example, an Irish blogger has suggested that if his compatriots all tagged their posts with “irish blog”, it would generate an Irish group blog on the relevant Technorati page, without anyone having to do anything more.

[Guardian Link]

Bottom-up self-organizing networks.

Archaeological relevance -

Too much top-down organizing of data, for example in the use of standardized forms for recording things found, tends to pre-determine what is found. This art of anticipation means you end up finding what you were looking for.

Consider instead the possibility of systems like Flickr - load stuff up and see what people make of it all. Do it right and all sorts of unxpected patterning/connection/order will emerge and, as important, will change as more gets added.

photo - BBC - amended

There is an item today on the BBC web site connected with what sounds like a comprehensive TV treatment of the now classic puzzle of the end of the Neanderthals - BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | The icy truth behind Neanderthals.

What happened to the Neanderthals?

Did they die out? Were they wiped out by “modern” humans?

Are they still with us now - their unique qualities assimilated by a superior species?

Most answers are based upon the classic biological view - that they couldn’t comepete with modern humans - Neanderthals were too specialized and adapted to a particular (cold and icy) environment, less smart, with less sophisticated tools, more “primitive”.

There’s some great stuff reported here.

The TV program producers got two people to sit in cold baths -

… one with the long limbed, athletic shape of a runner, the other with the stockier, heavily muscled body plan closer to that of a Neanderthal.

The heavily muscled person lasted longer in the ice bath, so Neanderthals would have had an advantage. His muscle would have acted as an insulator, and his deep chest did help to keep organs warm.

Even so, the advantage doesn’t mean that Neanderthal could have survived the icy extremes - this was a polar wasteland and his heavily muscled body plan needed a lot of feeding: about twice as much as we need today.

Nearderthals had powerful forearms - a sign, apprently, of an ambush hunter -

… waiting in a forest for his prey to stray close, and then attacking with a thrusting spear. Neanderthal was possibly the most carnivorous form of human ever to have lived.

Beasts!

And it seems they could have talked - albeit with high squeeky voices!

So what is the verdict?

It seems that something much more random could have played a significant role. About 45,000 years ago, the climate of Europe went through a burst of very sudden switches between warm and cold conditions that would have transformed the Neanderthals’ environment.

The forests on which they depended began to recede, giving way to open plains. Here, Professor John Shea believes, the Neanderthal thrusting spear and ambush strategy did not work. Neanderthals retreated with the forests, their population falling as their hunting grounds shrank.

By comparison, modern humans made lighter stone points that could be fitted on to lighter spear shafts. These could be thrown, enabling our ancestors to hunt more effectively in an open landscape.

Hunting in an open landscape also required high levels of mobility to follow migrating herds, and the agility to throw the spears themselves. So the question for our team was: how did Neanderthal stand up to our ancestors in agility?

Analysing the inner ear of a Neanderthal, Professor Fred Spoor, from UCL, has discovered clues to Neanderthal’s agility.

The semi-circular canals of the inner ear provide us with our sense of balance, and by studying a range of animals, Spoor, has found a high correlation between the size of the canals and agility. Throughout human evolution, our canals seem to have increased in size as our agility has increased.

But Neanderthals have smaller canals than modern humans, and even earlier ancestors suggesting they were less agile.

Returning to the skeleton, Professor Trenton Holliday found an explanation for this - that the short limbs and wide pelvis of our Neanderthal would have resulted in less efficient locomotion than modern humans.

Neanderthals - they stumbled and tripped into oblivion? (Photo - BBC)

But hold on, I say.

Archaeologically, one of the key features of this prehistoric time is the marked change associated with what is technically known as the middle/upper palaeolithic boundary. It is all about culture, as well as the muddle of new and mixed species of humans [Link - interbreeding Neanderthals]. People start making different and more varied tools, living in different kinds of camp, and, most spectacularly, they start painting caves, and carving and making figurines.

My point?

What about culture in all of this? What about ways of thinking and ways of life - not just stabbing with a spear or throwing it, springing through the undergrowth or stumbling muscle-bound, but everything to do with the cognitive and cultural capacity to deal with life.

It is a no-brainer, as they say in the US. We have to reconcile biology and culture. A simple behavioral and biological answer to such an enigma as that of the fate of the Neanderthals will never be adequate if it focuses upon biology and anatomy and ignores the main evidence we have for what was going on - the cultural evidence of the life of human species, “modern” or “primitive”.

We have to overcome these eighteenth century stereotypes of modern and primitive, smart and agile, dumb and stumbling.

The story is far more interesting than biological success and failure.

I think the enigma of the Neanderthals takes us to the heart of what we place at the core of human identity - culture, communication and self-consciousness. I think we can archaeologically track changes that mark the emergence of such a distinctive cognitive capacity that marks human identity. And it is about the co-evolution of biology and culture that accounts such as this offered by the BBC avoid.

This is the subject of one of the chapters in my Origins book.

Randommedia, the UK based games/web design people, have a fascinating virtual world called Dreamdomain.

You design yourself a “drone” - a flying insect, with a “blindwatchmaker” genetic algorithm and then off you go to fly round some very weird landscapes.

The dots are messages - text, and video!

But you are not at all alone - there are others in there too - you can talk to them, leave messages, or, if you have a video camera attached to your machine, you can send in live video.

The new Presence Project “Preforming Presence: from the live to the simulated” has got me thinking of the issues of virtuality and what makes you commit to an environment such as this.

It certainly isn’t photographic verisimilitude!

Archaeological connection and relevance -

Think of archaeological landscapes - their fragmented folding - and their collective constitution - all those accreted stories that people know and retell. And that they are never complete - always being rebuilt as people make new stories and archaeologists find old remains. How might we deal in such topology, this ever-changing and percolating time.

Well, here is one attempt to re-present, to work with such experiences.

Thanks to Sam (Schillace) for this link.

Suzanne Goldenberg writes an informative summary today in the Guardian of the latest stage of the creationist debate in the US - Religious right fights science for the heart of America.

Classroom confrontations between God and science are under way in 17 states, according to the National Centre for Science Education. In Missouri, state legislators are drafting a bill laying down that science texts contain a chapter on so-called alternative theories to evolution. Textbooks in Arkansas and Alabama contain disclaimers on evolution, and in a Wisconsin school district, teachers are required to instruct their students in the “scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory”. Last month, a judge in Georgia ordered a school district to remove stickers on school textbooks that warned: “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things.”

…

Officially, the teaching of creationism has been outlawed since 1987 when the supreme court ruled that the inclusion of religious material in science classes in public teaching was unconstitutional. In recent years, however, opponents of evolution have regrouped, challenging science education with the doctrine of “intelligent design” which has been carefully stripped of all references to God and religion. Unlike traditional creationism, which posits that God created the earth in six days, proponents of intelligent design assert that the workings of this planet are too complex to be ascribed to evolution. There must have been a designer working to a plan - that is, a creator.

I regularly hold classes for incoming Stanford freshmen and in summer camps at Stanford for smart high school students. I usually use archaeological examples to explore the character of interdisciplinary science and cultural difference - the unfamiliarity of the archaeological past. In every class there is at least one student who raises an objection to archaeological accounts of prehistory on the grounds that they are based upon an unproven theory of evolution.

I have actually had one student tell me the world was created 6000 years ago. Another came out with the old one that we are not descended from monkeys, for why would they still be around today? (Once they get to Stanford I assume I no longer hear from these students because they avoid classes like archaeology that challenge their view of things.)

Australopithecus Afarensis: footprint left in the sand, Laetoli, east Africa, 3.6 million years ago. Or part of an archaeological record created to puzzle us with the rest of the universe 6000 years ago?

Intelligent design is another old theological idea meant originally as a proof of the existence of god. If you were to come across a complex mechanism, parsimony of explanation, the argument goes, would have you infer that it was made by a skilled and intelligent maker, rather than have you posit a long and involved process of mutation, selection and adaptation.

Life is complex. Evolutionary science cannot agree on the precise processes that govern the emergence and disappearance of life’s complexity. Surely a more parsimonious adherence to the wonder of the world is to believe in a skilled and intelligent maker?

The terms of the debate about evolution are changing. The argument is now about the character of science itself. And of the nature of humanity.

And there is much on the side of the creationists and intelligent designers - when the terms of the debate are no longer religious faith versus the supposed atheism of science.

I have mentioned in this blog a favorite thinker of mine - Daniel Dennett. [Link] His book “Freedom Evoloves” is a superb attempt to rethink determinism. Our history has a sense to it, involves causes and effects. This is nevertheless compatible with people being ethical beings who possess freedom of choice and are not determined by the impersonal forcesof nature and history. At the core of his thinking is an emphasis upon selection as the fundamental process that drives natural history. And though he does not emphasize it, his understanding of selection is that it is a process of design.

Last year in a class on the history of design that I ran with Barry Katz, we interviewed Ilan Kroo, who designs supersonic aircraft. He showed us the implications of genetic algorithms, processes of selection operating on random mutation, for the design of aircraft wings. Enabled by superior computer processing power NASA and Boeing engineers are generating many solutions to a particular design issue (a certain kind of lift, given constraints of certain materials and the purpose of the aircraft, for example), and repeating many times the process of constrained mutation and selection. They are coming up with some startling new designs that would not have come out of a traditional design process.

Just the other day I was talking about Agile Development, as employed in the software indusry, as a model of iterative design, analogous to these genetic algorithms. [Link]

No serious scientist is going to say that evolution is a fact. It is certainly the best way we have of rationally understanding natural history. But this does not make it a “fact”. There are problems with constructing a narrative of deep time - the fragmentary nature of the palaeontological and archaeologoical record is an argument for cladistics, a different kind of understanding of how the history of relationships between species might be understood. [Link]The mechnaisms of evolution are not fully understood.

The “truth” of “facts” is a matter for metaphysics, not science. So yes, this brings the truth of evolution into the same theological field as faith in creation.

Then there is the issue of human culture. Ideas of cultural evolution and the co-evolution of the human species and our social and cultural artifacts are rooted in seriously flawed nineteenth century ideas of how you classify people and stories of history that center upon economic success and measures of social complexity. I have always had serious misgivings about theories of cultural evolution, in spite of the tremendous archaeological reworking of ideas of cultural evolution in the 60s and 70s. And I am committed to the neo-Darwinian thinking found in the likes of Daniel Dennett.

What gets called postmodern relativism challenges ideas of absolute truth and reality. Whatever the excesses of some of this thinking, it is also now very clear from detailed historical and sociological studies of scientists that they are flawed humans like the rest of us, and science is something done in messy social circumstances. Real science is not some abstract confrontation of reason with the forces and forms of nature.

Creationists are smart and know science is flawed. But this is their argument for abandoning reason and taking us back to pre-enlightenment faith. They say - All science is flawed. We need universal truths. There can only be trust in faith and creation.

Is it as bad as this? Is it not just down to some wacky fundamentalists in the southern states of the US?

I wish I could invite you one of these classes when I confront smart young Americans who have had their minds closed by this very neat argument.

It is really about how we think of ourselves. This debate is all about human frailty, the desire to have some certainty when faced with the mess of history, the complexity of the world that threatens even our supremely successful science and technology. It is about how we get on with our world and with other species.

So much western economic success has been founded upon the notion that the world is god-given to be used by people, that societies who have not fully exploited what was there for the taking are in some way failures, or primitive and less complex, or less developed, or just non-western. People are in this way seen as a unique species that builds and develops. And possesses soul and consciousness.

To really tackle the creationists we need to stop saying that evolution is true and that science has the “answer”. That archaeologists can tell the story of “the real past”.

We need to accept that the world as we know it is messy. People have an imperfect hold on it, and much of history is lost. Science, history, evolutionary biology, archaeology are processes of dealing with these fundamental questions of what makes us who we are. Processes, not answers. And this smart reasoning that will change and adapt to the messiness of the world is the only hope we have.

I wound up a fine conference at Stanford today - Seeing the Past - Building knowledge of the past through acts of seeing. Congratulations to the organizers - Stacey Camp, Sarah Levin-Richardson and Lela Urquhart.

All the papers are on line and available for comment - [Link]. It is a high quality collection and worth a look - not least for what it shows of some cutting edge thought in academic archaeology.

There were papers that explored visual culture in the past - Celtic coins, sex scenes at Pompeii, the Mausoleam of the emperor Augustus, Greek drinking parties. Criticism of the distorting uses of imagery in archaeology, how ways of seeing direct attention to certain aspects of the past rather than others - aerial photography, for example, or simply a predisposition to look rather than use all available senses in exploring the past (Ruth Tringham was at her best on an immersive exploration of that amazing early farming settlement at Catal Hoyuk in Turkey).

My points?

Work on the irony at the heart of our seeing the past. That we can never see what happened - it is gone. Yet it is all round us to see - in its remains and in what it has become for us now. This is a classic “undecidable”, in Derrida’s sense - [Link]

So put to one side the usual distinction between the real past and its representation, the authentic past and its secondary representation. This is not the way I see images of the past at all.

Photos, drawings and diagrams aren’t so much representations of our archaeological data - pots, sites, any other kind of facts - so much as acts of inscription - ways we deal with the past. The are part of the way we engage with the past and others who have an interest - colleagues, or anyone else with an interest in the archaeological past.

Key term - intermedia - this referes to the fungibility that we are so familiar with now as one traditional medium merges into another - because a medium is no longer to be defined by its material or substance - paint, film, magnetic tape. My iPod deals in sound, radio programs, voice memos, snapshots, lecture presentations, calendar items, my address book. All can be interchanged and combined because of digital computation.

Key term - mixed realities. Rather than separate reality and representation, think of how we live in a world of subtle gradations from the hard reality of mortality through to wild unrealized utopias - and there are all sorts of inscriptions along the way.

Working on the fungibility of image and text - here an experiment in layout and typography dealing with the deep mapping of three archaeological encounters in Wales UK, Sicily and California - a Visual Primer for the Three Landscapes Project (Stanford 2001 -).

Key term - sensorium. By this I mean that we should treat sight as part of a particular array of all the senses (this is what I mean by sensorium). A way of seeing is connected with ways of hearing, touching, feeling. Nowadays we tend to value rich photographic verisimilitude and are less attuned to the subtle difference of feel of material surfaces, for example. What then of past soundscapes ( a new area of interest and research in archaeology)? Or the smell of the past? - archaeologists have researched the olfactory cityscape of Novgorod (tanning factories within the city walls stinking out the whole place). Chris Witmore did a great presentation on ancient and modern Greek soundscapes.

Key term - manifestation. It’s not just cause and effect or making sense of an ancient temple that matter. Simply manifesting the past to people is a good thing - letting them experience what is left of the past in all its richness.

An exhortation. Too many talk about what’s wrong with imagery and representation in archaeology. Cut down on talking about seeing and get on with the looking and imaging. Practice as the best form of critique.

An example of good practice - architects like Daniel Libeskind who have pioneered new ways of seeing building, embodied in the way they draw and plan as well as the buildings themselves. Architectural drawing here not as a “representation” but as a crucial part of architectural practice - from visionary beginnings though concept definition, persuasion of client, through engineering calculation to the logistics of building. None of these plans, diagrams, renderings are simply “representation”.

A few traditional aphorisms and gestures.

Adorno - the best magnifying glass is a splinter in the eye. [Link]

Bertold Brecht’s gesture of verfremdung - interrupting the illusion of a theatrical performance - stopping the flow of “representation” and the storyline with comments directly engaging the audience.

Walter Benjamin reflecting on the Nazi expertise in new mass media - political progress is now intimately and inextricably intertwined with technical facility. If we want to reach out to people with enlightening stories of the archaeological past we have to go one better than Disney. [Link]

Seeing the past? I want archaeologists to help us all to see it freshly. Not as another hackneyed image.

And I think these are some ways of achieving that goal.