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was playing 20 questions on the 8 hour drive to visit my grandparents & after like 10 minutes of utterly fruitless questioning my brother suddenly asks me with such exasperation & contempt "is it some sort of petrified remains"

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Look at this little guy I found in the archives!!

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american leftists seem extremely focused on anti imperialism (good) but rarely- if at all- discuss decolonization in their own fucking country, despite acknowledging that it is a settler colonial state.

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We have 30 days until the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) laws are rescinded. This is the 50-year bedrock of American conservation. Normally, these actions take years but the administration has provided 30 days for public comment gutting clean water and clean air. Drop what you’re doing, before you make any more calls or read any more social media posts, please populate the Federal Register with dissent.

A. Go to https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/02/25/2025-03014/removal-of-national-environmental-policy-act-implementing-regulations

B. Click on the green rectangle in the upper right corner ("SUBMIT A PUBLIC COMMENT") .

C. Fill in your comment, and info at the bottom, and SUBMIT COMMENT.

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there is a special place in hell for instructors who structure their class to require significant amounts of lab time outside of the scheduled class hours and then treat the students as if it is their own personal failings for having other classes scheduled during that time, as if they should have know during registration that there would be an unlisted, required lab time

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Look, if you're having a bad day, here's a 6,000 year old pig-shaped pottery pot.

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Nothing is quite as tragically funny to me as how finds are treated on site vs in a museum setting.

In a trench on a dig site: oh look another undecorated pottery sherd. The hundredth from this trench today! *holds with bare hands, covered in mud* nice, where’s the cassetto? YEET! I’ll clean that with a worn out plastic toothbrush in a bucket of water later. Another sherd? Oh damn, it’s from the wrong SO layer - into the spoils heap you go :(

The same pottery sherd, in a museum: so we need to sign this sherd out to examine it in a temperature controlled room. I’m going to wear powder free gloves and hold it with two hands no more than an inch above the padded surface of this table because I’d rather die than have any harm befall this sherd.

Or, in other words:

No hate to either museum-based archaeologists or field archaeologists. I have done both.

Also this is not to say I condone this. This is just a representation of the absolute whiplash my mostly-museum based arse got upon seeing how things were done on my first dig.

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I was reading one of my childhood diaries the other day and there was a whole paragraph saying how hopeful I was that my writing will help the archeologists in the far future. Then it proceeded to describe my lunch that day and how my dog was probably secretly able to talk. 

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do you ever see paleolithic art and go “oh fuck that’s good” like they hadn’t developed agriculture or the wheel but god damn could they paint horses real good

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Yk as a person in linguistics and also dabbling in anthropology i always like, have a xkcd 2501 moment every time someone has a take about current state of anthropology/archeology.

I thought a lot of the bad rep was just exaggerated internet nonsense, but—no—i was too naïve to think that people would believe that they don't do "let's just hoard artifacts" anymore.

I guess also tangential and it's probably because of how a lot of archeo-anthro is packaged in the media, as if "oh this very obvious thing hasn't been noticed by archeologists/anthropologists, yet the locals knew all along" isn't something I see a lot on the news… (most of the time, fwiw, these are already known to the field, but just not yet explored deeply). Kind of weird how that gets the clicks.

Unfortunately, the bad rep is in no way exaggerated.

I've genuinely not found a way to counteract the repetitive memes about 'stealing shit' that people love so much. Like did colonialists steal stuff? Yes! They absolutely did! Is that all that happened at the time? No! Is that all the museums contain? Also no!

Media and social media do play a huge role in how we're perceived. Archaeology, though it is a science, isn't treated like one by others. You'll find a tonne of Archaeologists have tales about how scientists in labs have told them they're not 'real' scientists when they're in said labs. So because we're not perceived as a 'real' or 'important' science we tend to get lumped in with the 'those intellectuals are in their towers looking down on us, but their knowledge and degrees are useless!' subjects. We all know how people love to dunk on subjects they don't perceive as important, don't we?

It's more rewarding for people to get clicks on 'these dumb academics didn't know what they were looking at!' (the terms baffled/astonished/dumbfounded/shocked come up a lot) because then it's 'hahahaha the smart people got owned by regular people' and thus a culture/class war than it is to say 'archaeologists suspected this thing was the same as the thing in the past and when they finally got funding to conduct a study they found out from locals that it was plus extra info.'

Then you have the continual misrepresentation of archaeology in any media. Never once do they show it being done even close to right. Other professions have 'most of it's good but if you do that you'll kill someone' (medics) or 'the law doesn't quite work that way but alright' (lawyers, cops etc). But archaeologists? Nah we'll just stick with the way it was done in 1875 because showing that it's changed in 150 years would be boring. No one wants to look at very neatly dug pits and talk about keeping things in context.

Add that to the way we're talked about online: all colonialism and atoning for the past. None of those are bad topics, and they need to be discussed, but often that's all people will talk about to the detriment of everything else. So when people who aren't as involved in it see only that, then that's all they'll talk about because that's all we are to them. If those are the only topics we give people to talk about when it comes to what we do, then it's no wonder that's all people talk about.

At the minute, archaeology, anthropology, museums, and heritage are all stuck in the middle of a culture war. You all know the culture war I'm talking about. They want us gone, and they want to go back to how it was in 1875 when they can hoard all they like because heritage decided that hey maybe we should give back some of the stuff we've stolen and it shouldn't just be one set of people that get to control the narrative of history. Those people are now actively working to destroy us so you forget that poc/queer/women history etc exists, and perpetuating the memes only makes more people dislike us and in turn that makes it easier for them to get rid of us.

To paraphrase something I saw in a fb comment section the other day: 'heritage has got too woke for people who literally steal shit, and they want us to be sorry about it and give it back? why are we giving them any money? we should just shut them down. that'll shut them up.'

So I need people to think who benefits from making statements like that, and whether or not you support those people.

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Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them. 

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job. 

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Do you want to tell us about Western Mexico in Mesoamerica?

It's an older meme I made, but it holds true. I could talk for hours if people let me. Especially if I had a screen to share images, show citations, etc.

But instead I will take this opportunity to address many of the tags in the reblogs asking why West Mexico has been ignored.

There's no definitive answer as to why, but more just a collection of small reasons that has resulted in a different historiography. Other than the Kingdom of Tzintzuntzan, there were not large states for the Spanish to conquer. It was much more fragmented, politically, culturally, and linguistically, than other parts of Mesoamerica.

To add to that, after the Mixton War of 1540, many parts of West Mexico were depopulated as a result of the war, enslaved and sent east, killed as retribution for participating in the war, or fled to other areas of Mesoamerica (such as the mountainous areas to the north of the Chichimeca area of north-central Mexico).

There's also the colonial and historic history of Mexico to consider. Mexico City was the center of New Spain and later the country of Mexico. So the focus was on Central Mexico, as a political center, trading center, and cultural center.

After the revolution about a century ago, Mexico began building its nationalism and part of that hinged on the history of Central Mexico (and also the Maya, who have a long and drawn out conquest history, history of rebellions in the colonial period, and general resistance to anyone that isn't Maya) leaving many areas of Mexico's cultural heritage to languish.

There was also a misconception about West Mexican archaeological potential beginning in the late 19th century. Because there were no large states other than the Kingdom of Tzintzuntzan, it was assumed there had never been states before the Postclassic. So one really tried to look for settlements and surface architecture. Instead, interest in the region stemmed from the ceramic figurines most often looted from shaft and chamber tombs located underground.

Those are some of the big ones that come to mind.

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Pictured is a cache of four bison scapulae (shoulder blades) excavated at the Pammel Creek site just south of La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1983. Pammel Creek was a late precontact Oneota site dating to about AD 1400-1500. The cache consisted of two right and two left scapulae. Each one had the scapular spine removed, and three showed wear at the broad distal end of the blade, suggesting use as hoes. Since no other cultural materials were associated with the scapulae, the feature has been interpreted as a cache. No other bison elements were found in the animal remains from the site, indicating that bison were not hunted locally or butchered/processed at the site. Rather, it appears that bison scapulae were obtained from non-local sources specifically for tool use. This suggests some interaction with outside areas, or possibly seasonal travel by some members of the group to the Plains. Kathy Stevenson is pictured excavating the bison scapula cache.

For a closer look at bison scapula hoes and how they were made, check out Jim Theler's video: https://www.uwlax.edu/mvac/educators/archaeology-terms/?letter=b&term=169393

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one thing about archival research for stuff about a very rural community in the 40s is that even though there is a fairly robust catalog of oral history recordings done in the 70s, it’s all very casual and low key. i just spent an hour listening to “An Interview with [name]: an Old-Timer”

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I'm firmly convinced that there are certain archaeological artifacts we'll never fully understand because what sparked their creation was some prehistoric craftsperson thinking to themselves "hey, you know what would be fucked up?"