danielcho123a

[danielcho123a]

Transported Landscapes in Popular Media

Okay, so this is where I take my creativity up a notch and showcase some really interesting, possibly funky, ways in which different forms of “transported landscapes” are depicted in the popular media today.

First, I want to share a video that I presume was used as a supplementary material for an Introduction to Ethnobotany class at The University of Hawai’i. The video, being a form of recorded lecture, is rather long, but does a great job at tying up some of the ideas of transported landscapes that were addressed in Anderson’s “Man and His Transported Landscapes”, emphasizing the movement of people, plants, and ideologies, as well as their impact on biodiversity. Beyond that, he even goes into (this is where it gets really interesting) the subject of interplanetary movements of people (a popular scientific topic which is often discussed along with NASA in the media today) as a form of transported landscape, talking about which species of crops would be best suited, both biologically and culturally, to be brought to Mars and cultivated for human use and consumption.

From there, we can also think about how transportation of “home” species of plants, animals, materials, and even sometimes literal homes are often depicted in our popular media today, in the forms of a house turned into a makeshift airship using balloons to a mechanical amalgamation of residential buildings that moves across the country using sorcery as fuel.

Lastly, as per my tradition, I want to share one of the most charming and visually delightful game that I played recently called Raft, an open-world survival game where, due to climate change and rising temperatures that caused the polar ice caps to melt and flood the entire planet, you are stranded on nothing but a simple 2x2 raft and a hook, which you can use to collect various debris floating on the ocean such as wooden planks, barrels, palm leaves, and so on to craft objects, gardens, and tools that you can then install on your raft that you’re standing on, eventually creating something that resembles a functioning settlement that floats!

[danielcho123a]

Landscape...within a Landscape?

One of the key questions that came up in our class discussions during this semester revolve around how we identify landscapes and places through examining the material culture, as well as the material context, represented in the archaeological record. But with the world becoming more globalized, cities more urbanized, and communities more diversified, another important question that I believe archaeologists will have to ask in the future is, how do we identify and distinguish the different marks left on a landscape that is shared by different cultures, and how they interacted?

In cultural geography, a similar process of different cultures leaving their own mark and interacting with one another overtime within a single shared landscape is called the Sequent Occupance, as better explained in this video during 3:22 mark.

For example, within the vast urbanized landscape of Los Angeles exists the ethnic landscape of Koreatown (where I’m from), in which exists a Japanese restaurant (that I worked at), which in turn houses a number of diverse employees with various cultural backgrounds (my co-workers), each representing a different “layer” of the cultural landscape that becomes more and more localized as you look deeper into.

So with that in mind, we can think about how a particular landscape transforms over time as their occupants change and/or diversify, creating different “layers” of cultural landscapes that are significant to different groups of people, and also about how we would be able to identify those in the archaeological record both now and in the future.

[danielcho123a]

Cultural Landscapes: Agave and Olives!

We’ve spent a good amount of time in class talking about different forms of cultural landscapes that humans created, occupied, and used throughout (pre)history. But some of these thousand-years-old landscape traditions and practices are still ongoing today, particularly in the forms of agave and olive productions in the cases of Mexico and Palestine.

According to UNESCO’s description of Mexico’s Agave landscape, people have been intensively farming and producing blue agave plants between the foothills of the Tequila Volcano and the deep valley of the Rio Grande River for at least 2,000 years. These plants were also then processed by people to make vinegar, syrup, wine, sugar, and of course, the world famous Tequila. Today, both the plant and the cultural landscape in which they are cultivated (also known as the Agave Region) are seen as an important part of Mexico’s national identity.

Another contemporary example of a cultural landscape (as well as the traditions of constructing/maintaining them) that we can see in the world today, lies few kilometers south-west of Jerusalem in Battir, in the form of irrigated terraces used by the farmers to produce olives and vines. The UNESCO website describes the Battir terraces as a major Palestinian cultural landscape that is inhabited by farmers whose family has lived and worked on the land over a millennia, passing down the knowledge, traditions, and practices of developing and maintaining these terraces from a generation to the next. Today, the preservation of these terraces are threatened by the Israeli government, and as a form of ritual landscape, they act as Palestine’s way of defining and legitimizing their occupation of their traditional homeland.

[danielcho123a]

One Hour One Life

Do you like Anthropology AND Video Games? If your answer to that question is a yes, I highly recommend trying out this multiplayer survival game called “One Hour One Life”, or watch some gameplays like above. I discovered this game couple years ago on Steam and have had so much fun playing it with some of my friends. You’re basically born as an helpless infant (who can’t even communicate with other players) in small hunter-gatherer community and have to depend on your parents and other relatives to acquire food and survive, and as you grow older, you learn to become the caretaker and hunter/gatherer members of your community that increases in number as more people join, until your eventual death after an hour of gameplay.

It has both super interesting and hilarious interactions between players that you really can’t get from any other games, try it out!

[danielcho123a]

Domestication of Plants, Animals, and...PEOPLE!

Frank and Ernest comic, Thaves

Domestication of plants and animals is definitely regarded as one of the biggest, if not the biggest, factor involved in humanity’s transition to agriculture, but not only did we shape our surrounding ecology on a global scale through the domesticating practices, but we’ve also changed ourselves throughout the process.

Through selectively cultivating and breeding specific species of plants and animals that exhibit favorable traits such as bigger kernels on grains and corns, or more docile and fattier cows and sheep, we’ve permanently changed how animals look and behave, unrecognizable form their progenitors.

This process of us acting as an “artificial natural selection”, as anthropologist James C. Scott heavily criticizes in his book, “Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States”, bears deep consequences: Many of the domesticated animals and plants cannot survive without human care due to their defense mechanisms and other anti-predator traits that helped them survive in the wild being stripped away or diminished as a result of human intervention and domestication.

But the effect of domestication of plants and animals, and also of agriculture, don’t just end there. As Scott further argues in his book, human beings themselves might have transformed by domestication and agriculture both physically and behaviorally, since we rely on these animals and plants for food as much as they rely on us, if not more.

Art by Jonathan Bartlett

According to “Biological Changes in Human Populations with Agriculture” by a biological anthropologist Clark Spencer Larsen, recent study of archaeological human remains challenge the traditional interpretation that transitioning to agriculture and domestication traditions improved our nutrition and health, but instead, they led to overall decline in oral and general health, most likely due to less diverse diet and therefore nutrition, and the less active, more sedentary lifestyle of modern humans.

On top of that, according to the Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Physiological Science, prehistoric hunter-gatherers were capable of living up to 70 years without including the factors of violence, diseases, and high infant mortality, which is extremely impressive considering they didn’t have access to medical technologies and other modern amenities as we do. With these in mind, it’s not unlikely that through domesticating the nature, we in turn, have domesticated ourselves throughout history, becoming more docile and maladapted to our surroundings, not too different from the domesticated animals that we eat.

[danielcho123a]

The Right Tool for the Job

Various tools from Minecraft (2022)

Although sometimes utilized by animals other than humans such as primates and elephants, tools are another major characteristic that many anthropologists attribute to human evolution and what it means to be human.

Stone core and flake from Lokalalei, Kenya, about 2.3 millions old (Smithsonian Institution)

Tool technology have advanced and developed closely along side humanity since the dawn of our species more than 2,000,000 years ago (earliest evidence of stone tools). Smithsonian Natural Museum of History, where the picture of stone tools above originate from, suggests that various styles and types of tools were invented, produced, and refined for different purposes, usually for acquiring different natural and food resources—handaxes for digging/cutting woods/processing plant materials, blades and carvers for harvesting and processing animal parts, harpoons and hooks made out of bones for fishing, potteries to store food, and so on. To put it simply, new tools = new foods.

As an example, one of the most prominent tools that our prehistoric counterparts intensively produced and utilized was none other than the Atlatl, a spear/javelin-like weapon thrown with the hand to hunt animals.

At first, the implement looks rather basic and primitive in design but don’t let its appearance fool you, as Atlatls are described to be highly efficient at killing even the biggest megafaunas like bisons according to this archaeology blog and the demonstration video above, travelling at upwards of 30 m/s in the hand of a capable thrower.

The more “non-utilitarian” contributions of tool technologies in human evolution are discussed in “Impact of Tool Use & Technology on the Evolution of the Human Mind”, an academic conference that included none other than Professor Tim White from UC Berkeley as one of the speakers.

The basis of this symposium addresses that advancement in tool technologies, from stone tools to computers, had a substantial impact on the human cognitive development as the tools themselves have co-evolved along with us humans. 

All these are just a fraction of evidences that present tools as an intimate and critical aspect of human nature, after all, we structure our prehistoric periodizations (Paleolithic, Neolithic, etc) based on technological advancements and innovations of tools, an Epoch-long human tradition that is still going on today.

[danielcho123a]

Fire: Humanity’s Trump Card?

(SpongeBob, 2002)

It’s generally accepted that fire has played an important role in our lives since the prehistoric times, they provide warmth in the cold, lighting in the dark, and protection from predators among other things. But how our prehistoric ancestors used fire to cook their food and, to what extent, such practice contributed to their survival is a highly debated topic.

Richard Wrangham, a British primatologist/anthropologist, claims in his book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, that the controlled use of fire to process and/or cook food was a valuable, and even an essential, characteristic of human evolution due to the increased nutrition cooked foods provide.

Now, the idea that cooked food provide more nutrition compared to raw food is rather controversial and frequently debated even today, some argue that heating food can reduce certain nutrients such as Vitamin C and Vitamin B.  But there exists a general pattern of foods having increased calories (energy) when cooked with heat, especially meat (hey that rhymed!) as you can see in the video above. This supports Wrangham’s argument that our prehistoric ancestors often cooked their food to maximize the calories they can get from them.

With these in mind, it’s not surprising to see anthropologists like Wrangham and James C. Scott attributing mankind’s use of fire as one of the major contributors of human evolution, going as far as to call fire a “species monopoly and trump card”, hence the title.

[danielcho123a]

Hunting-Gathering to Agriculture: Fire, Tools, and Domestication

Illustration of "Neolithic Settlers" from ancient-origins.net (Link)

Welcome!

Through this relatively short blog, we’ll be exploring some of the different subsistence strategies and traditions that humans have practiced throughout the Paleolithic period up until today, and perhaps more importantly, their effects on both us and our surrounding environment.