Archaeologist Problems

Doing some quick research to get a date range on a light bulb, and I discover that we are sadly living in a time when it is no longer possible to buy General Electric’s 1920 range of novelty figural light bulbs. I am heartbroken!

Clearly that dog has seen some things.

Look health and safety guy, I know you're just trying to do your job and keep the contractor from getting sued keep us safe, but trying to tell a group of archaeologists not to sharpen their trowels is not going to end with compliance

Lmao WHAT??

He watched me sharpen my trowel (because I was cleaning up some truly atrocious clay) and went "wait you guys sharpen the tools?" in a semi-panicked tone. My boss replied that yes, we do, because a sharp trowel makes it easier to dig.

Several hours later, he held an after lunch safety meeting to tell us we shouldn't sharpen trowels but that if we really need to it should be in a safer way and proceeded to use my method as an example of what NOT to do. My method is A.) what I was taught was the safest way to do it and B.) the only way I can get an even edge because of how my left hand bends

Update: it's specifically the fact that we use flat files to sharpen them. Still not sure what he expects us to use instead, since whipping out an angle grinder every time I need to sharpen something seems both impractical and significantly more dangerous...

Power move: being a cheese grater to the site and make him suffer through watching you try to use that instead

Like @buckets-of-dirt​ is implying: everyone reading this should know that, unfortunately, a lot of specific health & safety reps are employed not to make workers safer, but to make companies look safer to the public eye, and to protect companies from liability issues.

See for example: telling employees to call their head office before calling 911 in an emergency; stating that to avoid the spread of COVID everyone should mask unless “sitting down at their desk” even when that means 20 people sitting elbow to elbow in a 20′ construction trailer breathing stale air can remove masks; not disclosing details of unsafe conditions or previous work refusals despite the legal workers’ right to know; etc.

Workplace safety is hugely important and a safety rep’s job is important. But not every safety rep is doing their job the way they should. Please remember this and look after yourselves and your co-workers accordingly.

I'm not sure which baby archaeology student needs to hear this, but if you're even considering a job in CRM I need you to understand how much of this job involves getting weird scratches and/or bruises that make strangers stare at you in public. That's not to say don't do it but just that you should be prepared

100%, you’re just inexperienced. I was just out on a field survey with a new crew member and was pointing out things to her that are obvious to me, but not to her until I pointed them out, and they are absolutely things I would not have seen when I was first learning. I have nearly fifteen years’ worth of field experience under my belt now. Not my first rodeo.

Classroom study is important, but what you’re going to benefit most from in this field is experience. Give it time, and don’t be afraid to ask questions or ask for help. We’ve all been on Day One at one point!

Archaeologist problems: 15-year-old trowel too small. Trowel available at local hardware store too big.

Archaeologist solutions: Grind like there’s no tomorrow.

I mean honestly I’ll probably have a copy of it cast in bronze so that when I’m eventually buried with it in my hand, it’ll have a better chance of surviving than the wood and steel do.

If I’m dug up in a couple hundred years, those archaeologists are gonna know I was one of them.

Archaeologist problems: 15-year-old trowel too small. Trowel available at local hardware store too big.

Archaeologist solutions: Grind like there’s no tomorrow.

I mean I’ve literally excavated like 4 privies with it. So, yes.

Not to mention three cemeteries, about a million and one shovel test finishing passes, maybe a dozen house cellars, a million urban brownfield sites, a couple military fortifications, good handful of First Nations sites, and a very fun iron foundry.

Oh! And an eighteenth century fishing station.

Archaeologist problems: 15-year-old trowel too small. Trowel available at local hardware store too big.

Archaeologist solutions: Grind like there’s no tomorrow.

But will it KEAL?

Uhh... I don’t think so?

YEP.

Have you ever seen sections so smooth? so perfectly straight and angled? so supple? This crew is filled with artists and I will kill for them

look at that clean dirt

I would kill for profile walls that pristine

Archaeologist problems: experts have so many names for a particular time period in the region that it becomes a published meme. (Tag yourself, I’d pick Kejikawe’k L’nuk but looks like there wasn’t even room for that one on here.)

Isn't CP-3 that robot from star wars?

reblog from chaotic-archeologist

originated by archeologist problems

Hey whoa put the “a” back in those user names please, there’s no need to insult us!

(ID: A screenshot of tags that read "#Prev what are some alternatives to the word primitive that are less derogatory" /end ID.)

@panicdeleter I'm responding to your question on a new post so that the op of the original doesn't get this in their notes because answering in good faith is going to take a lot of explanation.

Short answer: there isn't one.

Long answer: as you say in your tags, "primitive" is a derogatory term with a very loaded meaning. Removing it from your vocabulary is less a matter of finding a more PC alternative, and more a matter of understanding why it's derogatory and changing your perception of what's being discussed. To do that, we're going to have to look at archaeological theory for a minute. Stick with me, I do have suggestions at the end.

Archaeological theory is a complicated subject and there's no way I'm going to try to summarize all of it in a Tumblr post since it's a topic arch programs devote at least a semester (if not longer) to. So we'll focus on the relevant bits.

Essentially, in the bad old days when archaeology was starting to become a discipline instead of a thing rich dudes did on the weekends, there was this idea that certain European societies were the peak of civilization and everywhere else was less evolved and therefore primitive. It was based on the misunderstanding of the theory of evolution that was common at the time. Like so:

(ID: a diagram drawn in pen. It's titled "Ye Olde Arch/Anth Theory TM". The next line says "Primitive = simple, less evolved, bad". Below it there is a vertical arrow pointing down, with the words "one way line" next to it. Under the arrow there is a line of text reading "Advanced = complex, most evolved, good". /end ID.)

These early archaeologists believed that all of humanity lived on a hierarchy with the "advanced" societies they lived in (and their ancestors like Ancient Greece) at the top and all the "primitive" past and current societies (destined to either become like them or die out eventually) at the bottom.

It's been a long road for archaeological theory. The 20th century was fraught with theoretical movements and debates that sometimes literally devolved into fistfights. But eventually we all ended up more or less here:

(ID: A hand drawn diagram in a similar format to the one above. It's titled "Arch Theory Today (Short Version). Below the title there is a single line of text centred around a horizontal line with arrows at both ends. The left side of the arrow reads "simple" while the right side reads "complex". The line itself is labeled "continuum or spectrum". /end ID.)

While you'll still find some archaeologists who disagree, the main consensus appears to at least be on the same page that instead of the old primitive vs advanced hierarchy, societies exist on a spectrum that ranges in complexity. In the most basic terms, because I'm glossing over A LOT of nuance here, hunter gatherer societies tend towards the simple end of the spectrum while big state societies are on the more complex end. This is not meant as a value judgement of these societies, but merely an attempt to classify them so other people have a frame of reference for what you're talking about. Even so, there's considerable debate about the language used for certain terms and societies, and I am not necessarily qualified to go into that in this post.

I say all that to help you understand why I can't give you a catch-all term to replace "primitive", because if one did exist it would be just as derogatory. In certain contexts there may be more appropriate words that you can use, such as simple (as in the case of the meme that inspired this post) or old. But a lot of the time an alternative just doesn't exist because we are not better or 'more evolved' than our ancestors any more than people living in big state societies are any better than people still living as hunter gatherers.

I know this has been a very long post, but I really am just scratching the surface here. For more information I suggest looking at podcasts like The Dirt or A Life In Ruins, youtube channels like The Welsh Viking or Archaeology Tube, or the blogs of any of my fellow dirt lovers here on Tumblr like @chaotic-archaeologist, @micewithknives, @art-thropologist, @archaeologistproblems, and @rhysintherain to name just a few. Archaeologists are generally a bunch of nerds who will take any opportunity they can to talk about the human past, and we rarely bite.

I would also recommend Skull Wars by David Hurst Thomas. It came out in 2001, so it's a little outdated now, but it does a good job of explaining how the Ye Olde Anth Theory described above shaped the discipline of American archaeology and anthropology.

It's written in such a way that you don't need to be an expert to understand it, and it does a good job presenting arguments and evidence. It's an assigned reading for the North American Arch class I TA for a reason. You can access a copy for free through the Internet Archive.

Can definitely second the recommendation on Skull Wars for those who want to dive a bit deeper and don’t want to take a full course right now! It was a textbook in my undergrad History of Anthropological Theory course and I still have my copy 15 years later.

A little comment I can add to the above excellent summary is that, in arch theory we can also think about whether having complex technology is necessary or important in all cultures. A great example is the ancient “tool kit” or usual style of lithics (arrowheads, stone knives, querns, etc.) in Australia - I’m not a specialist on that subject (maybe @micewithknives​ can correct me), but my understanding is that the tool kit remained the same for tens of thousands of years because it was so effective and efficient it didn’t need to change.

Contrast that with, say, the native culture in my area of Mi’kma’ki (now Nova Scotia), where the tool kit changed fairly noticeably every couple thousand years to adapt to changing climate, changing resources, and interactions with other cultures. Or, say, in Europe, where technology has been having to change and be refined constantly to make it better or more effective (or these days, more marketable). Is that better? In some ways, maybe, but definitely not in all ways.

I think it's important to know that there is also growing dissent in archaeology about the simple to complex model as well, in part because of how pervasive the ideas behind "primitive" still are. Many archaeologists, especially those from underrepresented communities, feel that "simple" is just a reskin of "primitive" in that implies that a culture is lacking something relative to others. There are archaeologists who argue that it isn't meant in this way, but in English, the definitions of simple and complex are in opposition in much the same way as primitive and advanced. Western countries, who have historically dominated archaeological and anthropological narratives, are extremely drive by constant development of increasingly complex technologies, so in English, complex carries a similar positive association over simple in much the same way as advanced does over primitive.

There is a lot of literature trying to put greater detail into exactly what it means to say a culture is simple or complex, but the more common critique of that literature is that the suggested measures are purely subjective. Familial connections has been suggested as a way to gauge complexity, but how do you really measure the "complexity" of a social or familial network in a meaningful way? Technology has been suggested, but as archaeologistproblem points out, is the technological toolkit of a cultural a real measure of their "complexity" or rather a measure of how culture interacts with specific stimuli? At the core of these critiques is a relatively straight-forward question: why are we interested in using comparative generalizations when every culture is too unique and complex in its own right to really be compared? Many scholars argue that trying to create a sorting system like primitive to advanced or simple to complex ultimately still pedestals a "winner" (which is conveniently always western culture).

Perhaps the most compelling argument I've seen draws from biology - we may call single-celled organisms "simple" relative to just about any multi-cellular organism, but a single cell is wildly complex in its own right. Single-celled organisms fill fascinating ecological niches, they are what they are and why would we rank them against something they will never be? Any given culture in the world is what it is, has evolved the same as every other, and has come to fit specific needs and respond to specific environments. What is the point of trying to compare them in their entirety? Archaeology loves a comparison, but more people in the field are pointing out the faults in that approach. They're too numerous to get into on a Tumblr post, but it shows how much this field is grappling with the persistent legacies of it's colonialist upbringings. Primitive is such an unacceptable word that we have to be critical of even alternative efforts that do little more than recast the same idea with new words.