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A History of North American Archaeology - Ep 140
2.9k Plays3 years ago
We are back! All three cohosts return and start a new series of episodes on everyone’s favorite topic: Archaeology Theory! Before we delve into the theory, we start off by talking about feedback we have received from listeners about how we can improve our podcast. After we address that, we take a deep dive into a history of North American archaeological/anthropological thought and practice. This podcast is a little heavy but worth your listen!
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Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/ruins/140
Literature Recommendations
- A History of Archaeological Thought by Bruce Trigger (2006)
- A History of American Archaeology by Gordon R. Willey and Jeremy A. Sabloff (1993)
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Transcript
Listener Feedback and Future Plans
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome to episode one 40 of a life ruins podcast, reinvestigate the careers and research of those living life ruins. I'm your host Carlton Gover. And I'm joined by my co-host Connor, John and David. How, before we begin listeners of a life ruined podcast, we have heard you on Reddit and Instagram, and we are going to make some changes to the show. One, if you're listening, you probably noticed that our cover art has changed. Boom.
00:00:36
Speaker
That was voted on over a year ago and we've done it. But that being said, so we went out to Reddit in mid-December, asked how we could help change the show. We got some constructive criticism from Redditors on r slash archeology.
00:00:54
Speaker
We also got just some pure fucking slander. So someone commented on the recent episode with just Connor and David and said that we had to use the n-word. We had not. We checked. Everyone checked and the kid couldn't back himself up. Nor was there one part of where we would have said it.
00:01:11
Speaker
Yeah, the whole thing was, it was just ridiculous. So then we decided to reach out to our followers on Instagram. Many of you also listen to the show and know us and aren't on Reddit. Big takeaways, one less interview style episodes. We'll continue to do those, but you all wanted us to do more content, article and recent events, focus episodes. That's what we have for you today is more content in which that we've done background research, provide a more systematic episode.
00:01:39
Speaker
Not to say that we won't be doing interviews anymore, but there were several, I guess conversations about how like the meat of the interviews, like where it takes getting into the segment one, then segment two, then finally the research, like maybe we'll condense that down a bit and just get right into the meat of it. I think was another thing. Yeah. So we'll change those up a little bit. The other one is a big critique was for those that aren't
00:02:04
Speaker
archeologists early career in the CRM that some of our episodes feel very much like you are at a partner's work party and you don't know what's going on. So we're going to do more to explain, define terms, theories, contexts, the content that we are talking about. Yeah. There was one other
00:02:27
Speaker
Oh, right. If you didn't see the Reddit post about our asking for criticism or what could we be doing better, we also posted it to Instagram. If you don't use either of those platforms, feel free to shoot us an email if you have any suggestions. We're not going to change who we are. We're not going to post an episode that we don't find fun or entertaining, but we want to make sure it's accessible. We want you to be able to be like, hey, I know this podcast and send it to my friends and not have to be like,
00:02:51
Speaker
Well, I mean, skip five through 44 and get to 50, you know, to like do their episode. Like we want you to be able to be proud of a podcast you can send to people. And if you do insinuate that we did a hate crime or of something of that nature, when we ask you to please provide a timestamp, please be able to say, Oh, it's at this timestamp, but not that you can't bear to listen to it again. Yeah. That comment was fucking ridiculous. Yeah. It's not productive. We're, we're, we're generally looking for criticism and, and trying to better
00:03:21
Speaker
because we want this podcast to evolve and grow. And that involves taking real looks at what we do and how we do it. And we want to be more accessible to everyone. But like everyone else said, we are not changing. We're still going to be ridiculous. That's the brand.
00:03:40
Speaker
Yeah, that's the brand. This is what you get. We're not changing that. We're just going to do a research a little bit more. So we're not going to, you know, we tried this more content and in factually based stuff in the past and we did it poorly with revolutionary boys one that we had to do a full second episode to correct what we said the first time. And that really burnt us out probably because one, we hit the revolutionary war, which a bunch of people really know about and they grilled us and we got kind of like, wow, well let's not do that again.
00:04:07
Speaker
But with this latest round of really asking you guys, because the three of us have really gotten burnt out from this and fundamentally sometimes bored of the podcast and we needed something to do and we felt like... Because there's no feedback at all for us to know how we're doing other than numbers.
00:04:25
Speaker
Exactly. And our numbers have kind of stayed stagnant. And after listening to both Chris and Rachel's feedback on her annual review, the Reddit and Instagram, and we've gotten plenty of emails and DMs and it's been fantastic, the outpour of support and the big one.
Colonial Roots of Archaeology
00:04:41
Speaker
more focused episodes that have research behind it. So today we're going to do one on probably the beginning of a little mini series on the history of archaeological thought and theory in an American context. Which, if that sounds boring to you, is not. It's very fascinating and it will help understand a lot more about archaeology.
00:04:59
Speaker
Yes, exactly. Because the history of the field is pretty fun. There's lots of racism, but it's pretty fun. Yeah, be prepared to be uncomfortable. If you didn't know archaeology was a colonial field and has its deep roots in colonialism, it's not like physical anthropology, which is now bioanthropology. If you want to take a trip down holy shit lane,
00:05:22
Speaker
Let's just say Hitler and the Third Reich were inspired by 1930s American physical anthropologists. They were like, how do we do what they did to the Native Americans but better? And hashtag that was the final solution. Those are uncomfortable. They are uncomfortable. And if you're someone who is currently where I get this on TikTok and Instagram all the time, oh my God, another millennial talking about race over a board. They're not going to listen to this anymore. This is one of those times where it's like, when we're talking about that kind of stuff, you might want to listen.
00:05:49
Speaker
because it's like where that comes from. Our discipline was the one to identify that race is a social construct that has, that has biological consequences, as we see with the enslavement and forced reproduction of American and not American Indian of American enslaved peoples. Paramount plus in the new show. What new show? There's a, I haven't seen Yellowstone. I almost saw the prequel, but that was a,
00:06:15
Speaker
a second prequel before Yellowstone with Harrison Ford in it. Oh, the 1920s one, yeah. The first scene was just some indigenous girl being beaten by a nun and I was like, yeah, I'm out. Like, you guys watch it. That also happened as a consequence of some of these things. So like early American archeology and anthropology is rife with colonial and racist doctrine. And the field has like 96% moved away from that.
00:06:42
Speaker
Yeah, we got some stragglers. There's some holdouts, people that will...
00:06:47
Speaker
They're the kind of people that are going to die typing on their desk and will be identified by the smell radiating out of their office. Like those are the ones like once, once they're gone, you know, but anyways, uh, one last thing I would like to say before we hop in, it was brought to our attention that I, and, uh, I guess by extent, Connor and the episode that we were in, in which we did not use a racial slur, I say like entirely too much. And when I went and edited my presentation, I gave you the day I was like, man,
00:07:16
Speaker
If I drank every time I said like, I'd be blackout. So if you're on the car, if you're on the drive today driving, take a sip every time Carlton says um, says like, every time Connor says um, says like, and every time I say um, and says like, and you will be pretty caffeinated. If you're at home listening to this, where you have an alcoholic beverage, I warn you, please be in your house, put your keys in a bowl, and strap in. I'm trying to get better at it, but we will try.
00:07:45
Speaker
Yes, I have found that when I take the Bob Kelly approach, where if I slow down and pause, I don't say my verbal crutches. But when I get worked up or my mind starts running, that's when comes out a lot more.
Public Speaking and Verbal Fillers
00:08:02
Speaker
As I told David and Connor, because we talked about this before, I had a professor, Dr. Gilbert, at Radford University, and I think the class was something 201, but it's one of those stupid welcome to college classes you have to take that aren't part of your major, and it was public speaking. This guy from New Orleans got polio before they had the vaccine, so he was in a wheelchair, cool cat, spent most of his life as a lawyer, but this asshole had one of those hotel reception bells.
00:08:32
Speaker
on his wheelchair and he Pavlov dog the fuck out of us. Yeah. He, you know, he, anytime someone used a verbal crutch, he would ring it and, and for a very long time,
00:08:47
Speaker
when someone says that kind of stuff, they use verbal crutches. I heard it. And I wasn't really aware of how bad David said it until we got that comment and listened to it. And now all I hear is, is what I do. It was a war crime. What that man did was a crime against humanity for everyone in that class and everyone from Radford had professor Gilbert knew exactly what we're talking about. So we're going to move away from
Speculative Archaeology and European Superiority
00:09:12
Speaker
it.
00:09:12
Speaker
Oh, yes. No, that was a crime against humanity. If there was a Cards Against Humanity card, it'd be David's use of like, but to the archaeology. So as we mentioned, archaeology has its roots in colonialism, particularly we need to delve on back to a time of
00:09:30
Speaker
Pigeon poop, powdered wigs. Yes. You know, founding daddy kind of stuff like way back when it's, what's his name? It's it's Jay bread. It's Jay bread. We gotta get him on the show.
00:09:49
Speaker
Anyway, archeology. Contextually, Europeans, Mediterranean folks have been exposed to each other for a long time and knew about existing cultures. There's a very much Judeo-Christian background to a lot of understanding of the differences between people across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
00:10:09
Speaker
as Europeans are finding a way to circumnavigate or circumvent the Silk Road and the holdings of people in the Middle East, China. Circumvent by circumnavigating. Yes, circumnavigating.
00:10:25
Speaker
Yes. Europeans were trying to basically, something to do with sailing that there's a lot of line of sight trying to keep the African coast in line. And if you lost sight of the coast, you basically you're traveling south across paralleling Africa. If you don't make a pretty critical left turn,
00:10:44
Speaker
You're going to Antarctica and you ain't coming back. You're just gone. So some Portuguese dude was able to figure this out and get around Africa to the East Coast. That was Bernal Diaz, right? Am I right in that? I don't know. I should know because I just saw his monument in Portugal for the SHAs.
00:11:03
Speaker
And I got, I got a whole history of Portuguese exploration. That wasn't John. No, no. Magellan. Magellan. He served and navigated. There's a person in the Cape of good. He didn't, he didn't finish it. He died in Java or something like that. And Papa New Guinea. Oh, he was eaten. I believe in yet to Haiti. He didn't make it home. The ship did and his crew did. He got the credit. Good for them.
00:11:33
Speaker
Bartholomew Diaz. I was close. Okay. And as they are coming in contact with cultures wildly different from themselves, they're trying to understand their place in the world, specifically in a Judeo-Christian context, the Bible, Genesis. They have Christopher Columbus, who is sailing 1492, the ocean blue, Hispaniola. Europeans are kind of late to realize North and South America exists, as we're starting to learn now. And the kid died thinking he was in Japan.
00:12:00
Speaker
No, he went back a couple of times. He figured it out. Well, he still, they were like, bro, this is Cuba. He was like, no, this is Japan. Yeah. There was, yeah, it was a whole, whole deal. Yeah. They were trying to make sense of a lot of this stuff. So really as Wiley and Sabloff 1993 call it, this is the speculative period, which is like 1492 to 1840 in which everyone's trying to figure out Europe's
00:12:22
Speaker
place in the world and understand these global cultures and societies and how they fit to one another. They're reconciling their worldviews essentially with what the new information that's coming out is that they're interacting and seeing all these new things and they're like, what the fuck?
00:12:38
Speaker
But the one thing that doesn't change, the Europeans are always on top. That never changes. They're just trying to rake everyone else below European society because they're like, where are the pinnacle? Where do all these other savages lie on the totem pole? That's what they're trying to figure out. That really doesn't change up until the 19th, 20th century, which sounds sad.
00:13:05
Speaker
Yeah, as Connor said, and what's important about this, these early expeditions are being funded by royalty, rich white guys who are going across the globe. Their worldview is coloring this aspect. And they're also coming in with a framework of trying to categorize people and cultures in relation to Europeans. So they're trying to figure out where everyone lies, what is a possible relationship. So that's where we start seeing instances of the Tower of Babel being used, which is biblical event.
00:13:35
Speaker
in which the Tower of Babel is broken, falls or something, and everyone gets different languages. These other people are the results of the Lost Tribe of Israel, the 13th tribe, or one that we see- Kainans were just omitted from Noah's Ark. Yes, like how did they, penguins, what are those? As well as, you also see things of like, well, black people are the children of Cain. Like they're really trying to, in this sense, like understand the world through the Bible, which doesn't work.
00:14:03
Speaker
And really, it's not until the 19th century, in the 1800s, when we have other fields of science becoming more institutionalized, we start seeing these other things. But one of the products of this antiquarianism, which are not even archaeologists, it's what precedes archaeology,
00:14:22
Speaker
antiquarians are the one people going across the globe pilfering things and bringing them back to Europe for curiosity cabinets, which are basically just imagine a shelf in your house and rich white guys dude with stuff across the world. They bring people over. British museum has a super sick whole room of the museum. That's just a curiosity cabinet. Yes. They're smoking opium with their other rich white guy buddies and showing the coolest stuff that they've collected. I took this from a hunter in Papua New Guinea.
00:14:48
Speaker
He was saying something. I don't believe it was anything about God. So I shot him and took his things. So that's, we start seeing institutions in the 19th century, like the British museum, the first culture specific museums in turn, Italy, which I just visited. And that's all about Egypt. Italy had a huge fascination with Egypt. Actually, in fact, when we talk about nationalism, which comes into play later,
00:15:10
Speaker
The kingdom of Italy, the United Kingdom, fun fact, the United States has been a country longer than Italy has. They really tried to tie themselves to Egypt. Like the Holy Roman Empire, the Czar's, how everyone tried to tie themselves to Rome, the Italians try to do so through Egypt. And so there's a lot of that going on. But out of this, we get the fun Italian circus strongman, Belzoni, who is Tino part of
00:15:38
Speaker
these excavations ransacking of Egypt in which he is instrumental in getting this very famous statue of Ramses II, Pharaoh Ramses II. I think it's called a bust, technically. A bust, yes, of the sand. And present for this event is Percy Shelley, who writes a very famous poem about the event, which is read by Bryan Cranston for the season, the final season of Breaking Bad.
00:16:06
Speaker
Bob Kelly plays this in his Intro to Archaeology class at the University of Wyoming, and we have it for you now. I met a traveler from an antique land who said, two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies.
00:16:31
Speaker
Tell that it sculptor well those passions read which yet survive stamped on these lifeless things. The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed them and on the pedestal these words appear. My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye mighty and despair.
00:17:01
Speaker
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, alone in level sands, stretch far away.
19th-Century Archaeological Shifts
00:17:13
Speaker
Safe to say that was a bop. That is a bop. I haven't saved mine. iPod, my iPod, iPhone. My iPod, your shuffle, my shuffle. Man, I forgot about that. Yeah. They were the precursors. So
00:17:36
Speaker
A lot of that's going on. It's not specific just to Egypt. This is when the Elgin marbles, well really the Parthenon marbles are taken out of the Parthenon of Greece and brought to the British Museum. So this is really a time of not only of European intellectuals trying to understand the world around them and categorize cultures, but also bring a lot of these objects across the globe back.
00:18:02
Speaker
for not really study, but really to show off. And it's, it's a product of imperialism. Fundamentally, it's a product of early antiquarianism is very much aligned with colonialism, imperialism, and a lot of other isms that make us very uncomfortable to learn about today. And they're just the billionaires of my bad ego.
00:18:23
Speaker
And on that note, we will continue in the next segment talking about the 19th century, which gets a little better. We're making steps towards less colonialism and racism, but we're still kind of in that period. So we'll catch you in the next segment, episode 140 of Life in Ruins podcast.
00:18:41
Speaker
Welcome back to Episode 140 of Life from His Podcast. We're going to pick right back off around the same time as the 19th century, which is the 1800s. There are some other issues that are popping up as they relate to colonialism and imperialism. There's two case studies that we want to take a gander at real quick.
00:19:00
Speaker
We got to talk about Tommy J. Good old, good old Thomas Jefferson. TJ. TJ. So. Inventor of the swivel chair connoisseur of pimento cheese. Most ordered thing on his logs, pimento cheese. He also smuggled wine to, uh, or grape seeds to America. That was a big no-no. And he smuggled them by, you know, like that, those like really poofy sleeve ends they used to have, like unsowed them, threw a bunch of grape seeds in there, sewed it back up. And that's how he smuggled it.
00:19:29
Speaker
American ingenuity. You know what they say, at World War II. All of our founding daddies were pirates. Founding daddy. It's J. Brad. Founding daddy. Do you want me to just lay it out? Lay it out, David. Thomas Jefferson, we kind of considered him the father of American
00:19:48
Speaker
uh, archeology in a way, the founding daddy, excuse me, because he oversaw the excavation of mounds, uh, in his, in his yard, essentially at Monticello. And he dissected those mounds and learned what they were. But was it, was it him digging the mounds?
00:20:04
Speaker
No, no, no. It was the enslaved people, Africans that he owned did that. So he oversaw it. Did he get dirty? No. The six foot four socially awkward guy did not get his hands dirty. And the reason why this was done is as we get to talk about colonialism again, as the States and Canada are being colonized by European powers to come in cross monumental architecture in the form of earth and mounds,
00:20:31
Speaker
They don't know what they are. They think the contemporary indigenous populations, there's no way in hell they could move dirt to make piles of dirt. It was well beyond their intellect. This is what we call the mound builder myth in which this was used to justify, one, the extermination of American Indians because they didn't
00:20:52
Speaker
European colonists and Americans, Canadians did not believe American Indians could have done that. So they must have killed the people who did do it, the mound builders, the contemporary Native Americans must have killed them all. And if we kill them, it's fine. Also, no one knew how long the Americas had been occupied. The prevailing theory is at this time, the Americas prior to European colonization, really people hadn't been there longer than a thousand years. So like really like no one was there before 500 common era.
00:21:21
Speaker
TJ has his slaves systematically, that's the keyword, systematically excavate the mounds to see the strata. And he was able to find European goods mixed with indigenous pottery and goods. And then he could see the context of cultural continuity between the outer layers, which had European stuff to the inner layers, which had pre European contact. And he was like, no, these are the same people.
00:21:46
Speaker
They made these, this wasn't too hard. Thomas Jefferson, everybody who was able to systematically, like first use of that, we know of a systematic excavation. Now that's not just to an American context. We have to throw the British under the bus again. Do hang on. Just do we wonder, do you think someone else did that before him too, but he was the only literate person to do it and like, or like not, let me just say literate, like person that had notoriety to get that published, I guess. There's like a history of the Mormon church. Hold with me.
00:22:15
Speaker
pilfering American Indian mounds was like a big business back in the day. So a lot of people used to do that and sell them as curiosities. And the founder of the Mormon church
00:22:28
Speaker
was a part of that in New England. Like that's his family did that for a long time. So systematically, I don't know. Like you said, TJ was, was one of the only ones to write it down or one that we actually know who wrote it down. They might be in some library somewhere in, you know, Rockford, Connecticut, and we just don't know. Yeah. But this, but this also ties like the larger world in general in science and things.
00:22:53
Speaker
So you're seeing Lyle, Thomas Lyle, publish on his principles of geology where we're really starting to understand the laws of superposition and the idea that geologically things have been happening basically the same for millennia and years. So a lot of this stuff is all interconnected to this kind of expansion in science and understanding of things. Enlightenment.
00:23:21
Speaker
Yes. The quote, unquote, enlightenment. Yes. Lyell is like law of superposition. Geologic layers on top are younger than the ones on the bottom. Through a lot of that, we're exploring like, wow, you know, the Grand Canyon, that must be very fucking old for that to take place because the same processes that happened today take place in the past. So we have Lyell doing that. We have Darwin figuring out in the origin of species.
00:23:44
Speaker
He's able to figure out one of the aspects of evolution, natural selection, is he doesn't coin evolution. I think we've talked about that in a previous episode, haven't we? We went on a whole thing. The very last word of the book is evolved, and that's it. Yes. The rest of the book is just pigeons. And that's a later edition too. He uses the word evolution or evolved in like a third or fourth edition. It's evolved, but then he got flack for it, so he changed it to
00:24:08
Speaker
And like breathed by the creator, or is like originally breathed into a few forms or into one, but then you got plaque for that. So you've got to originally breathe by the creator into a few forms, a different one. Yeah. So that's what it was. So there's in the sciences, we have all these different people in the, in the 19th century, like figuring out all these different laws, realizing the age of the earth is much larger, much longer than
00:24:28
Speaker
a couple thousand years. And this idea that the earth is only 6,000 years old as, as processized by some Christians, that's not in the Bible anywhere. I think it was like a monk, right? Like it was a monk who did like some calculations that were clearly off. And he was like, well, Adam and Eve must've been around 6,000 years ago. He didn't have enough for him. Yeah. It was just not happening. Um,
00:24:54
Speaker
But also at this time is when we find Thomas Jefferson, this relates to the megaphone in France we were going to talk about. Yes. Thomas Jefferson, when Lewis and Clark set out to go west was like, hey, there's these big bones and they were sloth bones. And he was like, you might want to be careful because this big creature like lives out there and it's something we haven't seen before. But he understood it was something like larger. And I don't think he knew if it was like old or not.
00:25:17
Speaker
So there's a couple of things going on at the same time, right? So real quick, Americans weren't the only ones doing mountain builder debate kind of shit. The British came across the same thing at Great Zimbabwe, which is site in East Africa, megalithic structure. They didn't believe that current
00:25:32
Speaker
African populations could have built those things because at this time Europeans are under this assumption that cultural evolution is just straight. Once you build something or you reach a certain technological level, you keep doing that, which is kind of weird because that's what the Renaissance was about.
00:25:49
Speaker
this realization that the rise and fall of civilizations, right? Reinforced by Sid Myers. Yeah, absolutely. So they're under this assumption that once you start doing monumental architecture, you don't go back to it. And they're also using a lot of this to justify. So they come across these great things,
00:26:07
Speaker
structures on the landscape or cultures in the past, can't believe that the original people who are living in a different life way than what they see on the landscape and say, well, they must have killed the old people, so it's okay for us to kill them because they've done it. So there's this really fucked up racial justification and colonial justification behind all this. Do you want to delve into the specifics of Tyler and Morgan and stuff like that?
00:26:31
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So when do they come up with that? So Taylor and Morgan, so around the same time in the 1800s as, as people are coming across.
00:26:41
Speaker
New things. New things. So the sciences like in geology and biology are coming across new things. Cultural anthropologists or earlier cultural anthropologists, ethnographers are coming up with their own, like really social scientists are coming up with ways to classify and define people. So one of the early ones is by this guy named Thompson, who's Danish. He comes up with the three age system, the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age and classifies groups into those. One of the more famous cultural and social
00:27:11
Speaker
forms of evolution are from... Louis Henry Morgan. Louis Henry Morgan and who's Taylor? What's Taylor's first name? Bartholomew. Edward Tyler. Edward Tyler, yeah. Morgan and Bartholomew. They come up with savagery, barbarism, and civilization. That's where the term savages and barbarians and the civilized folk come up with. Now, out of all these different social classifications that are presented
00:27:38
Speaker
Europeans are always in the civilized folk. Like they're, they're the pinnacle. Like there's no, who would have thought everybody else is below them and they're trying to figure out like, okay, where do these other people lie? So that's where a lot of these classifications of people come up. Like there's this really, and if you look at like the history of anthropology,
00:27:59
Speaker
they're always trying to classify people. And usually there's like, they do the rule of three. It has to be three. But as the field develops professionally, as we continue to try to fucking classify things, there's never a one size fits all rule and the classifications keep, it looks like a crazy March madness chart of classifications that just keeps getting bracketed, bracketed sub categorizations. And like the field is still like that today. Like if you look at modern archeological taxonomy,
00:28:28
Speaker
It's a fucking mess that no one ever wants to tackle because it's, we all just kind of use it and know like everything's a goddamn exception. And, but like, no one wants to go to the work of redoing it like at all. So it's really interesting because Thompson is focusing on his like stone, bronze, and iron age, specifically on Europe and those kinds of areas.
00:28:51
Speaker
And there's not a lot of values assigned to these things.
Franz Boas and Cultural Relativism
00:28:58
Speaker
The classifications are very simple. There's technological changes as people gain more technology. Tyler and Morgan specifically went to other countries and did ethnography. And they come up with these very, very specific things to describe other people.
00:29:19
Speaker
So he's like savagery, barbarism, and civilization. So it's very value-laden because he's talking about these other cultures and not just like the predecessors to Europeans. So there's always that underpinning of that racism that we're talking about. So it's like not European A or is it not European option C?
00:29:41
Speaker
Yes, it's gotcha. Yeah, it's not. It's not great, but it's I'm going to argue that it.
00:29:51
Speaker
maybe necessary is not the right term, but this is like the beginnings of trying to understand culture systematically. It's still very much done. It's a Eurocentric and ethnocentric worldview. This is kind of like early scientific method because people continue to like reframe and criticize this technique to be broader, broader, broader, broader, broader. This is just the foundations of it. It's not fantastic, but it started somewhere and that's
00:30:16
Speaker
where a lot of this social evolution starts from. And one of the big underpinnings of this, as I mentioned earlier, it's this form of social construct or social classification, it goes up. You start as a savage, you become a barbarian, and then you move to civilized. And there's no moving back or skipping a phase, it's very much you're going up.
00:30:37
Speaker
unilinear as the term for it. Yeah. Which we know today is not true. And thinking about culture linearly is wrong. And so for our listeners, you just, as we'll get to in a later episode, when we talk about modern day classifications, categorizations, or understanding of the breadth of human civilization and culture through time and space,
00:31:01
Speaker
there's a lot of ebb, flow, and movement between these different spaces. And what do they ultimately mean? Really, it's for archaeologists the ability to, upon knowing what something generally falls into, the ability to understand what that
00:31:22
Speaker
classification means in terms of what you can expect to see in that culture. And then you still have to do the fine-grained details. There's no one-size-fits-all to this. It's not as simple as evolution as we see in science. Humans are complicated and we don't evolve in one sort of way.
00:31:42
Speaker
The evolution part is slowly dropped as you get into it because we aren't like that. We have evidence of people creating mounds, which is supposed to be like cities and being awesome, and then eventually switching out of that and going back to basic farming and things like that. It's just not the reality of the situation. Human culture is a Pokémon.
00:32:08
Speaker
Fundamentally, human culture, it's not Pokemon. And as we see through time and space, it really isn't till like the organized state when people can't not revert to something simpler. People throughout time and space that we've seen through the breadth of human history do not like being controlled. They fucking have horror taxes and do their best to avoid it. And if they can see a way to what we used to call, what we call now like voting with your feet, just leaving, people did that. Like people don't like being told what to do. That's really not until like modern day,
00:32:38
Speaker
that we can't just not do that. There's kind of a big shift that we see specifically attributed to Franz Boas and we will talk about that in the beginning of the next segment.
00:32:50
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 140 of the Life and Ruins podcast. This segment, we're going to talk about Daddy, Daddy Boaz, Papa Franz, the father of American anthropology, or did you go archeology? Let's say anthropology. He is the, the parent of the parent of American anthropology. Papa Franz is what he's colloquially referred to in American anthropology.
00:33:17
Speaker
largely seen as the founder of American anthropology. He's the one that creates this four fields approach in anthropology. This is why archaeology in America is under anthropology.
00:33:32
Speaker
and not history, which fundamentally separates us from the limeys. Do you know why that is guys? Cause I have the answer or a answer. Tell us David. I'm actually curious. I don't, I don't know. Your voice for once.
00:33:52
Speaker
was one of those kind of like Einstein and Oppenheimer that came over later. That was because of the war. He was an immigrant for his family was like, yeah, it's probably, let's get out of Germany. And they came over here, emigrated from Germany. Sorry. Emigrated from Germany. Right. And so his family got here and he had a degree in physics, which I was, I was finding this fascinating. He had a degree in physics. Uh, I believe a PhD in it.
00:34:16
Speaker
He might've got the PhD once he got here, but because of that, he had a scientific mind. And when he started doing anthropology and like wanting, he was curious about indigenous American things. He applied that scientific method to understanding cultures and it really separates Boaz and like American anthropology from the rest of the world's archeology kind of programs.
00:34:38
Speaker
That's not so antiquarian. It's not just like collecting antiquities. It's he went to systematically study people. And I think that's like why it's such a fundamental change, you know. Yeah. And he so he goes out and studies.
00:34:50
Speaker
with the Baffin Island Inuit. And I also worked with cultures in the Pacific Northwest. But he did get his doctorate in 1881 in physics and he also studied geography. So that's, that's the thing. Sorry, just to clarify. No, he just studied it. He didn't get a degree in it. It's just maybe it was a minor. Okay.
00:35:10
Speaker
All right. So he studied with different indigenous groups and went out and did research. And the really important thing, his theory and his ideas that comes out of this is called historical particularism, which is in direct opposition to cultural evolution and these kind of larger theories that Tyler and Morgan had proposed. I think it was cultural relativism.
00:35:36
Speaker
Historical particularism is what Boaz was pretty much a proponent of, but he pushed for culture as well. And historical particularism is that each culture has its own intricacies and complexities to itself. It doesn't have to be related or evolved from another. I think that's right. It's particular in its own sense. And the only way to understand cultures is to study the history of that particular group. It's not a comparative thing. Gotcha.
00:36:05
Speaker
and that cultural values and the cultural elitism is cultural values are going to vary by specific groups and cultures. So he's like, he's just telling like Tyler and Morgan to like fuck off.
00:36:20
Speaker
Yeah, he's saying with cultural relativism, he's like, everyone's special, everyone's unique, stop comparing everyone. You just need to take the context of this culture and see it for what it is as it being awesome on its own, stop comparing it. He also is a really big opponent of, what was that thing where you measured craniology, craniomorphology?
00:36:40
Speaker
Oh, phrenology. Yeah, so not only was he tackling archaeology with historical particularism, cultural anthropology with cultural relativism, but with physical anthropology, he was demonstrating, like, hey, skull shape is pretty malleable, and is also dependent on diet and environment, that this is not a way, like, craniometrics or morphology
00:37:01
Speaker
is garbage. So, Frans comes across the ocean and lives in the Americas and he comes in with these backgrounds and is able to upend these long held notions and he creates this four fields approach of anthropology and really utilizing archaeology as a way to study human culture in the past or its material remains rather than in a historical context.
00:37:25
Speaker
And he has some pretty amazing students that we'll get on in a later episode. So like AL Krober, I'm actually, I, one of my colleagues is Krober's granddaughter. Wow. Yeah. Like I forget their name. I don't see them. They're not really in the office. Yeah. They, they, so we have the, one of their grandchildren, anthropologists here at Indian university, Ruth Sapeer. Yeah. Margaret Mead.
00:37:51
Speaker
superior of the superior war hypothesis, which I love the superior war hypothesis, but yeah, some people don't. You might want to not say you love it. Well, it's like one of those things, I guess, to contextualize, like there are some theories and materials that we learned in linguistic anthropology under Dr. Pamela Ennis that were just really tracked. And I really liked superior wharf. I know there's, there's issues with it, but it was also pretty, it was used somewhat in arrival, right? Yeah.
00:38:20
Speaker
So the cool thing is, and something we did as part of our intro to archaeology, I think as we traced our heritage, and we've talked about this before, our academic heritage, our pedigree, which all eventually leads to Boaz. All roads lead to Boaz. All roads lead to Boaz.
00:38:41
Speaker
So he is, he's not a perfect character. He's a product of the 19th and 20th century. So there are, yeah, there's, there's, we all got shrunken heads in our closets. It's just kind of.
00:38:55
Speaker
He literally did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's so, so we're, we, we want to give him the credit he is due, but also be aware that everything he did was not perfect. Right. It was 1875. You know, what can you do for, for the late 19th, early 20th centuries, his ideas about
00:39:19
Speaker
human culture, both past and present, were radically different than everyone else. And without him, you don't see the growth between him and 40 years, 50 years later, do we have a radical shift and it shifts in the field.
00:39:34
Speaker
Without him, prior to him for like 200, 300 years, everyone's thinking relatively the same about Europeans are on top. He comes in as a European from Germany where they produce white people and he's like, you know what guys, this is not correct, that we need to appreciate and study cultures for what they are. It's cool to compare and contrast, but not in order of a rank-based system.
00:39:57
Speaker
And he passes that down to his students who take that and continue to grow that. And really, if we look at these anthropological pedicrees like your family tree, within three generations, the field has radically shifted from what he was thinking.
00:40:13
Speaker
Absolutely. And over the breadth of, if you take a theory class in archaeology, things really ramp up post World War II, especially after the horrors of World War II are seen across the globe.
Evolution of Archaeological Theory
00:40:29
Speaker
And it's a pretty rapid shift. I think it's like damn near what, every two decades there's a paradigm shift within archaeology. And now we're at a point where it's like, as we get onto this in a later episode,
00:40:42
Speaker
really prior to the 1990s, archaeological theory and anthropological theory is seen as like, that's your glasses frame of reference for how you see the world. Like you apply everything you do through this theory, whereas now I'd argue
00:41:00
Speaker
theory is a toolkit. In order to answer the question you want to, you apply the theory that's going to help best suit that. Some people are still ardent Marxists, and that's all they do, is Marxist archaeology, and that's how they see the world is through means of production, the proletariat, bourgeoisie,
00:41:20
Speaker
Most of us are not like that. Which applies to large-scale societies and stuff. That's a great way to understand large-scale societies. You're talking about hunter-gatherers and Marxism? You've got to separate the trial from the means of production.
00:41:34
Speaker
Yeah. It depends on what you're doing and what your answers are. If you're looking at energy production and consumption, cool Marxist approach. That's probably going to help you more so than behavioral ecology. And to Connor's point, behavioral ecology, when all you have is a few stone chips and some bone, behavioral ecology is all you kind of can go by because there's no Marxism really in an egalitarian foraging band. Yeah. At least you can suss out from rocks.
00:42:00
Speaker
One of the more interesting things that I've read recently, and this, this is not a tangent, the dawn of everything has a really, actually very interesting, not critique, but perspective as to hunting and gathering societies.
00:42:17
Speaker
Yeah, it kind of talks about how the likelihood that there is a vast and complex difference between hunting and gathering populations where we just can't see it. We never will, but just it like helped me. Maybe like rethink hunting and gatherings populations more so than just the behavioral ecology approach. Can you prove it? No, but it's just a fun, it's just a fun way to just graver and graver and wag. Wagon row. Is that the one? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Win row. Yeah.
00:42:44
Speaker
It's cool. The first three chapters really dive into the noble savage and some of these concepts that we were talking about, like the early case studies and events that led to social scientists talking about really being exposed to indigenous societies without kings and how they brought back to Europe was kind of this catalyst for the French Revolution. Others were like, wait a minute, there's people
00:43:11
Speaker
that don't have kings and queens and are doing just fine, better than ours, we should be doing that. So there's this really cool dialogue that talks about
00:43:22
Speaker
how really being exposed to indigenous communities across the globe that did not have ranked societies challenged European worldviews of like, wait, this is what we were taught. Like we can do this, viva la revolution. So it's a really interesting aspect. We're reading it for, I guess we have like an anthropology department reading club. It's like the whole department, we're all reading it. Yeah, I got roped into being one of the
00:43:47
Speaker
Leaders of it. It's it's a fun time It's been really cool to talk about and they talk about the I said it's a fun time for those that are for those that don't want to read Trigger god forbid most archaeologists don't want to read trigger or Wiley and Sabloff Or the primary sources where you get into Bordeaux or you get into some so this book will probably be a good Analog so you don't have to go through and suffer. I'm sorry suffer through Bordeaux
00:44:17
Speaker
or Foucault, the goddamn French. Jesus. It just doesn't translate. The translations don't, they don't work. Yeah. They don't get, and they, they just aren't, they aren't readable to me. My brain, I can't, I can't get it. So there are, there are really good textbooks out there. There's good books that we'll probably throw some in the description here and also links to
00:44:42
Speaker
what we've been looking at. So that's kind of, I think, I don't know, in a future episode, we'll get into the students of Boaz, which are also very interesting and very fun. And you can really kind of... We should end real quick with what are the four fields real quick so we can leave people with a product of what you talked about today.
00:44:59
Speaker
archaeology, what was physical anthropology, now it's called biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and cultural anthropology. Those are the four primary fields that make up anthropology. Each one has its own subcategories that go on forever, and a lot of them overlap more so than you would think. How do linguistic anth and archaeology overlap? They do. That's the beauty of our four fields approach, is that
00:45:25
Speaker
We're all, we all have degrees in anthropology. We were anthropologists first. I really have to say like the University of Wyoming's four field approach is like one of the better four fields programs. They really, you leave with a master's from Wyoming. You're four fields anthropologist like.
00:45:40
Speaker
Yeah, I'm a hundred percent a proponent of that because they shouldn't be isolated. And I think that's something you'll see overlap in everything. And it's to understand humans, you have to understand all four of those aspects. Yeah, which includes our evolution, primatology and biological anthropology, anatomy, osteology. Then you get into linguistics, which is how you use language, not just how they develop cultures can be anything. Archaeology can be anything. And then.
00:46:11
Speaker
Yeah. You learn a lot. It's like you plug into the matrix for like two years in grad school and you're like, well, I can't look at anything the same again. Yeah. And we've mentioned that on previous podcasts is that once you put this filter on your brain, you, you think of things through anthropological lenses from, from here on out. It's never, I can hear Tucker Carlson like shitting his pants right now, thinking that's the liberal agenda at work. When I saw that Taco Bell commercial from a year ago, when it was like the, they were like,
00:46:40
Speaker
Power Rangers or something defending their Mexican spices against monsters. I just wanted to fucking cry at that aspect of it. I know I bitched about this on an episode before, but like, yeah, you get a degree in anthropology. You're going to suddenly hate most media that's present because you're like, well,
00:46:55
Speaker
That's fucked up. Well, that's racist. Cleaning commercial cleaning and sitting down on the floor. Exactly. It's, it, it changes it for the better. I would argue. I would, I would a hundred percent agree. I think it's, you get some truth and as much truth as you can in this fucked up world we live in.
00:47:16
Speaker
And surprisingly, some people can go through grad school in anthropology and still be closed-minded people. I went to school with a person that got their degree in physical anthropology and still did not believe in evolution.
00:47:33
Speaker
Wow. Crazy. And on that note, thank you for listening to us. Please leave us comments, send us emails. We want to know how we are doing and we want to get better. We want to for you guys not to suffer through this. So thank you for listening to us and we appreciate all of you.
00:47:52
Speaker
And if you're still listening to the show and they all shows feed, please switch over, subscribe to our show individually. It helps us grow our platform. Oh, you guys have been doing better. I'm going to tell you, I can look at the numbers and you guys are switching to our show. It's fantastic. Keep doing that. Please. It helps us. Please be sure to like and subscribe to the podcast on Instagram, Facebook. It's just a life in his podcast Twitter. I think it's a life in his pod.
00:48:19
Speaker
And if you don't mind, text from Stefan Mila. How's Stefan doing? Just had a second baby. He's scheduled interviews for Portland. Anyway, SEAs will be at Portland, Oregon this year. I will be going. I don't know about you, Carlton or Connor. I think you're going. Yes. Yeah. Carlton has to go. So we will
00:48:36
Speaker
We'll see you guys there. We can't really do a booth because that's like fucking two grand to do. But if you guys want to fundraise us to do a booth, we could do a live ruins booth. If you don't want to, we'll see you at a bar. And on that note, yeah, please be sure to rate and review the podcast. The reviews only help us grow. And if you want to give us a straight up roasting in our emails about what you think or not roasting, but you know what you think we could do better or some things that you would like to see. Constructive.
00:49:00
Speaker
That's the word. Do the compliment sandwich. Hey, love your show. David needs to stop saying, like, however, I like these kind of episodes. Yeah, and we just got a really good email recently about that. And it helped us to make sure that we are being more inclusive with our audience. Because we don't get paid. We can fucking quit this whenever we want. Yeah, for sure. We do not make any money off this. Yeah, like, no. Minus money. Minus money.
00:49:27
Speaker
so much minus money and time. So like if you're going to give us criticism, we want it. But like, give us a reason to quit. We'd like roast us. I did get an email or a Facebook message from somebody about we needed to cover more CRM and have more CRM people on here because that is 90% of archaeology and that is a very fair statement. So we will do that. And with that note, we are out.
00:50:02
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archaeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. And as always, if you were able to make it to this part, you know what time it is. It is time for Connors Whitty joke. Let's turn into you for us today.
00:50:29
Speaker
Hit that macho, man. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Did you hear about the kidnapping at school? Oh, Jesus. Uh, how long was he asleep, poor Connor? It's okay. He woke up. Yep. That's what I thought. Fuck off. We're doing another one. Why do nurses like red crayons?
00:50:54
Speaker
because sometimes they have to draw blood oh that's pretty good all right I gotta go to bed cuz I got PT in the morning
00:51:26
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.