18th Arctic Conference–Part 1 (the scenic view of Bryn Mawr College).

I’m back from the 18th Arctic Conference in Bryn Mawr. It was really busy, and the Wi-Fi at Wyndham, where I was staying and had downtime, was amazingly slow, so I didn’t try posting from there. I’m pretty busy, since I’m only here for a week before we go on a family vacation in Hawaii, so I’m going to break this into small chunks.

We were really lucky to have great weather the whole time. Apparently the weather has been rather awful this fall in SE Pennsylvania, but last weekend it was perfect. Bluebird days, still some leaves on the trees, not too hot or muggy. The campus looked lovely.

18th AC Bryn Mawr — Taylor Hall, first building built at Bryn Mawr College, from Thomas Library steps.

I went inside Thomas, which was the original College library. It is a bit Hogwarts looking, I suppose. There used to be a free coffee hour every day in Thomas Great Hall, where just about everyone on campus showed up. It was very handy.

Dalton Hall is where the meeting was held. It is the home of the Anthropology Department, and other social sciences. Dalton was built in 1892 as the first science laboratory dedicated to academics. It underwent a major rehab, which came out really well. The old building had central stairs, which weren’t up to code, so the “lantern” got stuck on to put the new stairs in. The labs and lecture spaces are just great, way nicer than when I was doing my AB and my PhD coursework there.

A gorgeous fall day at Bryn Mawr

I’m in Bryn Mawr, PA for the 18th Arctic Conference. The trip went well, with the biggest problem the 30+ minute taxi from the runway to the terminal here in Philadelphia. I’m staying in Wyndham, the Bryn Mawr College Alumnae House, replete with antiques, oriental rugs, etc. Rick Davis pretty much had everything in hand, so I had some free time to check out the 125th Anniversary exhibit in the Rare Book Room at Canaday Library, which was really pretty neat. A First Folio (Shakespeare), a Nuremberg Chronicle, a Maria Martinez black-on-black pot, Ansel Adams prints, Northwest Coast basketry, Mary Cassatt, Japanese woodblock prints, some lovely Greek pottery (including a plate by the Bryn Mawr Painter!) all in the same small room.

Had a nice dinner with Rick and Rick Knecht, and now off to bed to try & catch up on sleep so I can get up at what my body thinks is 3:45 AM.

Finally starting to catch up

I’ve been insanely busy for the last several weeks. I do now have a temporary admin assistant, Melinda Nayakik, who has been filing up a storm, which has been really helpful to get a handle on the office situation. Fortunately, Susie Stine, who has tons of accounting experience and has filled in on UIC Science’s accounting side before also became available. She’s helping Melinda learn the 2 (!) accounting systems and the paper-flow routines. Susie has also been really helpful as we work through moving billing to the main accounting folks. A good thing, too, since I’ve had the first round of corporate budgets and two CRM reports to take care of.

The budget is in the hands of the higher-ups until the next round, although there are a mass of questions flying back and forth as usual. One of the CRM reports is just waiting for a nicer background for the main map of this season’s work, assuming it is forthcoming soon, and the other has a couple of references that need to be added.

Other than that, the main thing that is urgent is the presentation for the 18th Arctic Conference in Bryn Mawr. I leave Tuesday night (since it takes a couple of days to get anywhere that is not in Alaska), so it has to be more or less done by then. I’ve got an outline, but I need to talk to a couple of whaling captain couples to make sure everything is correct, and I’d like some more pictures of current gear. I was going to work on this today, and maybe go visit some folks, but I somehow wound up with a stomach bug & couldn’t go out.

I’ve been working on the travel for the Christmas holidays (in upstate NY) and one of the two conferences I’m going to early next year. My husband & I are both giving papers at a conference in Munich in late January. He’s going to a meeting at Abisko in Sweden in mid-January, and they’re willing to have me come too, so we’re trying to arrange it as one trip. Less travel time, and it’ll keep the costs reasonable, I hope. The organizers are reimbursing a good bit of it, but still, no point going crazy. I’ve got to go to Tromsø in mid-February, so that travel needs to be figured out next.

Glenn & I may be the only folks at these meetings who actually think there’s a lot of daylight. Nothing like meeting in the far North in the dead of winter:-).

Two abstracts submitted!

I still don’t have an admin assistant, and I’m getting stretched pretty thin. The other day I had to print some checks, and got interrupted by something else before I got the check stock out of the printer. The first five pages of an interesting white paper by Tom McGovern wound up on check stock. I didn’t even notice until I got home and started to read the thing… So there were some checks to void.

But I did manage to do a good bit of work yesterday on the maps for the ice road corridor for the Barrow Gas field project. Still not report ready, but I was able to talk with the woman who is the main GIS person for the project, and mark up a map so she could constrict the cleared corridor a bit where it got close to some possible hunting stand locations. It’s still plenty wide, although apparently the engineers were worried that if they can’t go exactly there, they’ll have to go through lots of polygonized ground, which is more expensive to build ice roads on. The thing is the well pad the ice road is going to is on polygonized ground, and surrounded by lots more of it, so I don’t think they’re going to avoid much that way. I can always test it next summer if they really want to go just there.

Today I managed to get two different abstracts for talks in, which is pretty amazing. One was for the Saturday Schoolyard talk that Trace Hudson, one of the Barrow HS students from this summer, and I are giving on the 16th (gotta get my part done before then…) and the other was for the 18th Arctic Conference, which is being held at Bryn Mawr College this year. Since I’d been implicated in talking Rick Davis and the BMC Anthro department into hosting this (the fact that I hosted it in Barrow, with 2 HS students for assistance, while writing my dissertation and working full-time so how hard can it be did figure prominently in my arguments), it really was incumbent on me to give a paper. I’m talking about the material culture of modern whaling (the stuff that a whaling captain and his wife and crew members need to have specifically for whaling) and where those things get used and stored.

So folks, especially East Coast Arctic types, the registration/paper/poster deadline is Friday, October 15. So get a move on!

Paris–Visit to Notre Dame

Matt Betts & I decided to go see Notre Dame on Friday morning. We went right after we figured mass would be over, since tromping around during a service would be rude to say the least. We didn’t get to go up the towers, because the lines were already a block long and we did want to get back to the conference to hear some papers. Next time…

Notre Dame is a very old cathedral, construction having started in 1163, finishing some two hundred years later. It had fallen into a state of some disrepair, thanks in part to its conversion to a “Temple of Reason” during the revolution, when Victor Hugo wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame. That inspired calls for the restoration, which was completed in 1864.

Repair and restoration are ongoing processes here. For example, the huge chandelier which normally hangs in the crossing was on the floor being worked on.

Some of the side chapels had clearly been cleaned and had their painting restored, while others were completely black from the soot given off by candles which had been burned there over the centuries.

The interior is an amazing space. The architects who first figured out how to build cathedrals were true geniuses.

Paris–Visit to the Louvre

I promised a number of people I’d put some pictures from the trip to Paris up, so here goes. I took these with my iPhone, which isn’t quite up to even my Optio S, let alone the Nikons, so the picture quality isn’t that great.

The first set is from the Louvre. A few of us went to visit on Thursday, which the conference organizers had allowed as a day off. This was a great idea, since day after day of papers can leave people sort of “conferenced out” and really not able to pay much attention to papers on the last day. This avoided that syndrome.

The Mona Lisa looks a little forlorn hanging by itself on a wall that is apparently also a protective vault.

It looks much smaller than one expects, particularly since it is facing a really immense painting.

The room is really crowded, and it takes a while to get close enough to get a good picture.

The Louvre itself was pretty amazing in terms of over-the-top interior decoration. The craftsmanship was amazing.

Some interesting papers so far

I’ve heard a number of interesting papers so far. A bunch of them were in a session on digital archaeozoology. I find this interesting in part because I live and work in a remote area with limited research resources on hand, although for the size of the place they are truly exceptional. A number of highlights from the session below:

1) A paper by Matt Law on zooarch on the Internet. He’d done a survey of on-line arch data archives. People often use them heavily, but so far are not good contributors. People still see on-line publication as less prestigious (which is a problem if they are working toward tenure), but most would still be willing to participate if the process were straightforward enough.

2) A paper by Isabelle Baly & others about a big national database (INPN) the French are building of data on plants and animals from archaeological sites. Much of the data they are including comes from salvage and compliance excavations, which often don’t get published. This is a huge amount of work to pull together (especially with the staff of three that they have!), but it lets people do analyses which they could never afford to do otherwise. It seems to be available through a public website, which will let students and members of the public see and use the data themselves, which is pretty cool.

3) A paper by Jill Weber and Evan Malone about a set (30+) of skeletons of equine hybrids between donkey and onager, which are currently a unique sample. These are thought to be the Syrian Royal Ass, the Kunga, which was actually the Animal of the Year in Syria a few years ago. The problem was how to be able to preserve & share these bones, and study them without damage to the originals. Answer–3D laser scanning & “printing” them. 3D printing actually makes a replica of the item, and is very cool technology. Depending on the budget, the replicas can be very good. The scanned models in the computer are actually even better for doing measurements on ( something we do a lot in zooarchaeology) than real bones in some cases.

4) A paper by Katherine Spielmann and Keith Kintigh on the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR). TDAR is a large-scale data archiving and integration tool, developed at Arizona State University. The impetus was that a lot of archaeologists there had data that they were interested in comparing, in order to look at things across a broader area than any of them had studied individually, but were stymied by differences in the way that their data was stored. They are trying to develop an integration tool and data warehouse. I haven’t tried it, but it seems interesting.

5) A paper by Matt Betts, and a number of others about the Virtual Zooarchaeology of the Arctic Project (VZAP) –very cool 3D models of Arctic (and subarctic, since ISU has been working in the Aleutians/Lower Alaska Peninsula area under Herb Maschner for years, and that’s what they see most of) fauna. The bones are accessed through a very neat visual database interface, which lets you look for bones by species or by skeletal element (part of the body), which is the most common way to find things when identifying unknown bones. Often you can see you have a femur (thighbone) for example, but aren’t sure what animal it’s from. The best physical comparative collections of bones actually have a set of femurs you can look at, rather than having to go to a bunch of skeletons and find the femur. I’ve used this one, and it’s handy. As more species get added, it will only become more useful.

Off to a conference of archaeozoologists

… or zooarchaeologists or faunal analysts (people who study animal remains from archaeological sites), in Paris. The trip over was a two-day affair, involving not one, but two red-eyes. We had a good tail wind, so the Salt Lake City flight was about an hour and a half shorter than expected, which made up for a late departure due to bad weather.

The conference is feeding us lunch every day, and it’s pretty impressive for a university cafeteria. One starter, one main course, one cheese, one desert and one drink. The folks I ate with didn’t see it, but there are rumors that wine was available. The coffee breaks have great pastries and fresh fruit.

The opening reception was amazing, and they didn’t run out of food, frequent problem at such events. They held it in the Grande Galerie de l’Evolution (Great Hall of Evolution) of the National Museum of Natural History, which is just amazing. A few pictures from there follow. I took them with my phone, so the quality is not the best.

Arctic or Pacific loon, probably Pacific. They look alike, and the ranges overlap.

A small portion of the assembled multitude.

There are also some neat older mounts. The one of the tiger on the elephant is because a French duke was hunting on elephant back in India, and a tiger leaped onto his elephant. He was only saved because she was so heavy she broke the basket he was riding in. She was shot, and that’s the tiger in the mount, which he had made and donated. It didn’t say if it’s the same elephant.

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