Trading Skins & Oil

I’ve been working on talks for the session on the Connected Arctic at next week’s Alaska Anthropological Association meeting in Seattle. My family was in Juneau lobbying, so I had some free time.  I’m almost done with the one about the trade networks  which moved large quantities of oil, blubber & baleen from the coast to be exchanged for caribou & sheep products from the interior.  By volume, this greatly exceeded  the amount of metal, jade and similar items that also moved through these networks.  For some reason, the skin & oil trade has received less attention from archaeologists, although it has been documented ethnographically.  In fact, it seems to have been a necessity for sustained interior occupation.  I’ve been trying to make a good visual presentation, which takes a bit of doing.  I think it should be done tomorrow.

I would have been done earlier if I hadn’t had to spend some time on sorting out some safety issues. The local phone company is installing a microwave link to carry  internet for science, and the best spot is on the BARC, apparently on the tower where the radar is.  For some reason, they didn’t think the FOUR signs on the locked door to the tower warning of possible radiation hazards and giving the numbers to contact someone who could  make sure the radar was disabled before they went up on the tower meant THEM.  The locked gate at the bottom of the tower deck stairway didn’t faze them either.  Fortunately the radar was off, so no one got hurt.  However, the radar can be activated remotely, so going up on the tower, even if you think you saw the radar was off when you went by the controls, is a really STUPID idea.  Since they presumably will need to go up there again to finish the setup and for periodic maintenance, it was necessary to impress on them (management, not just the crew) that they need to call and get an OK every time.  The excuse was that they’d talked to the building owner (who I’m sure approved putting stuff up there in concept, but never told them it was OK to ignore warning signs while doing it!)  If people would just read and think….

Frost and flags

I was walking into the BARC (where I have my office and lab) after lunch the other day, when I came upon this scene:

Flags at the BARC

A closer look:

Flags at the BARC II

Who put them there, or why, we do not know.  But there they were and are.

Last night, hoarfrost started building up on things.  By this afternoon, my car was covered in it.  Hoarfrost can be amazing, with long fern-like feathers growing off of surfaces.

Hoarfrost on the mirror.
Mirror close-up
Frost feathers I
Frost feathers II

The best was the spiral effect the frost that grew on the antenna made.

Hoarfrost spiral on antenna

 

Chipping away at things

I’ve been chipping away at a bunch of things.  The main ones are the big Late Western Thule chapter and an associated project which involve evaluating every Birnirk & later C14 date I can get hold from Alaska, to see which ones hold up (a number that are cited a lot are really early solid carbon dates!) and what exactly was dated.  In some cases, what was dated was in a different house from the “diagnostic” which is purportedly being dated, and there is no a priori reason to think the houses are contemporaneous.  It may have been the best that could be done at the time, but some revision is needed here.  Once those are done, I can finish the two other papers I am working on.

We got the symposium for the Alaska Anthropological Association meeting more or less put together, pending any additional papers submitted as general papers that the organizers may send us, and next week we’ll just have to decide on an order so the conference organizers can get their materials to the printer in good time.

I’ve also been invited to be a speaker at a small conference on Sustainability and Heritage in Kirkwall, Orkney which is sort of the main kick-off for a Research Coordination Network (RCN) on Global Long-Term Ecodynamics in which I am fortunate enough to be involved.  I’ve never been to Orkney, but I love the Shetlands, so I’m looking forward to it.  There are some great people involved, and we’re trying to do some really interesting things involving the use of archaeological data to illuminate questions about long-term sustainability.  I actually owe them an abstract by tomorrow (which it actually is in Orkney), so I better get to it.

About those gray whales that got stuck at Barrow a few years back…

I’ve noticed I’ve been getting more hits on search terms relating to those whales, probably since the movie “Big Miracle” just was released.  So, since I’m kinda busy with the Super Bowl, I thought I’d put up a few links to the real story.

1) Bill Hess’s blog, where he is doing a series on the whole event.  Bill took what were probably the first professional pictures of the whales, including some may probably recognize.  This features a lot of Bill’s really fine photographs.

2) An article in the Fairbanks New-Miner which has interviews with many of the folks in Barrow who were involved in the original event, including biologist Geoff Carroll.

3) An article in the Anchorage Daily News by Richard Mauer, who covered the original story and hauled out his notes to write this one.

Last Call for Papers: The Connected Arctic–An Alaska Anthropological Association symposium sponsored by the Arctic Conference

I wound up agreeing to help organize a session at the upcoming Alaska Anthropological Association meeting in Seattle.  Long story about Seattle, but we have gone to Whitehorse, YT once or twice, so leaving Alaska is not a first.

Anyway, the deadline to submit sessions (including paper lists) is this Friday, so I though I’d put a description up here, since the AnthroAlaska list seems to be a bit slow showing up (although it might be my email).  We have room for a few more papers and are being fairly expansive in our interpretation of the topic.  If you are interested, the description and directions for how to participate follow:

Although the Arctic tends to be viewed as a place apart, both in the sociocultural sense and as a research area, the first has never been true, and the second is becoming less so.  This symposium will look at the Connected Arctic from both perspectives.

Papers on any aspect of trade and/or travel (pre-or post-contact) from one or more disciplinary perspectives are welcome, as long as they involve the Arctic.  We are interested in both specific case studies and methodological works.

We also welcome in papers dealing with aspects of connected Arctic research, including virtual repositories which can be used from multiple locations, shared databases, digital teaching and outreach tools, and social media.

N.B.  People wishing to submit papers are asked submit the paper abstract directly to the meeting organizers by the deadline of February 3, using the Alaska Anthropological Association meeting website form:  https://catalyst.uw.edu/webq/survey/fitzhugh/139716 .  Note you will need to register for the meeting first.  Please put “The Connected Arctic” in the space on the form.  The symposium is not on the website list of symposia yet, but we have been assured that does not matter, since sessions are due the same day.  Please also send your name and at least a paper title (preferably with the abstract) directly to one of the organizers:  Anne Jensen (anne.jensen@uicscience.org), Herbert Maschner (maschner@isu.edu ) or Owen Mason (geoarch85@gmail.com ).

This was going to be a good post…

Well, I’ve gotten 3 of the six papers off to the editors, either in final form or waiting for review, and the big one on Late Western Thule (I think that’s what I’m calling it, pending any requests from the editors to change it for consistency in the volume) is coming along.  Right now it’s way too long, still missing a couple of topics, and in need of serious cutting & some illustrations.  So I don’t feel quite so guilty about writing anything not strictly part of the paper.

That was going to be the start of a good (nay, dare I say great) catchup post.  However, it has been very cold in Barrow, the rest of the family is in Juneau, and I have been trying not to use too much water because the trucks that bring it and the trucks that haul the sewage don’t work well below -30°F.  Alas, apparently I used so little water that the bathroom sink drain froze up (there is sort of a design flaw in the drain & I don’t think they ran the heat trace (heated wires along pipes to keep them from freezing) far enough), although thankfully the tub & toilet still are working.  So I think I have to go try to remedy the situation now :-(.

ICAHM’s 1st Springer publication is ava

ICAHM’s 1st Springer publication is available! Petra& tourism. Congratulations, Doug! http://ow.ly/8GDS1

Just got included on a list of CRM blogs over at Doug’s Archaology. This is one of a series of posts he’s doing on various types of archaeology blogs, all of which are worth reading.

Doug Rocks-Macqueen's avatarDoug's Archaeology

Here are some great blogs that discuss working in commercial archaeology/CRM. This topic can be tricky and some of these blogs do not actually cover just Commercial/CRM archaeology but they do give good insights into the life/conditions. This list of blogs and others can be found at my archaeology blog list.

If you want to subscribe to all of them in a RSS Feed you can do so here

10 simple steps to better archaeological management– http://10simplesteps.blogspot.com/

Martin Locock’s blog is a must read if you are interest in being successful in archaeology or life.

ArchaeoJobs– http://www.archaeojobs.com/

Archaeology employment inEurope& some more. Paolo’s blog is a great resource and posts lots of great information pertain to archaeology in all sectors.

The Charles Mount Blog http://charles-mount.ie/wp/

“Dr. Charles Mount has more than twenty years experience of archaeology and cultural heritage assessment. ” He blogs about many different things…

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Pain; or why I should probably learn to say no occasionally

I haven’t been posting here much lately, but it isn’t because I haven’t been writing anything.  In fact, I’ve been doing almost nothing but write, and my carpal tunnel has been acting up so badly that I’ve pretty much been trying to rest my hands.  Over the past year, I’ve  gotten  invitations to contribute papers to several interesting volumes.  I’ve sent in various abstracts for papers at meetings, some of which led on to proposed volumes.  Then I actually submitted abstracts to a couple of proposed volumes I heard about from my husband or various listservs.  All of them had deadlines well in the future, and I didn’t expect all of them to be of interest to the editors anyway.

But no one turned any of the abstracts down, and I had a more successful field season than expected, which lead to the RAPID proposal to NSF to salvage the Ipiutak structure, which took time to organize and execute.  Then the person in the parka turned out to have more than a parka, which meant more time for documenting things.  So now I have a bunch (by bunch I mean 6) of papers due by mid-January, along with a review, a short presentation for a meeting next week (which the organizers just asked be emailed to them by Thursday, a week before the talk!), travel for that meeting and another one, both in some way connected to developing repositories that are responsive to communities of origin, a proposal, Thanksgiving, Christmas shopping and travel to and from New York State for Christmas!  Yikes!  What in the name of caution was I thinking?

I don’t have much trouble doing papers for meetings.  I tried to avoid the cognitive traps of PowerPoint (Tufte 1993), and use lots of pictures, and I’ve spent a fair bit of time in Toastmasters, so I can get up and talk.  This is not a surprise to those who know me :-).

I can even write (via keyboard or voice recognition) fairly quickly, thanks to Freshman English at Bryn Mawr College.  Having to have x pages handed in by 9AM Monday morning come hell or high water concentrates the mind wonderfully.  However, actual papers, with proper references, formatted as required by the particular journal or publisher, take a bit more time.  I’ve got one paper submitted, four in various stages of writing (one of which the research for is continuing but almost done), and will start the talk for the meeting tomorrow.  My hands and wrists hurt a lot.  So does my head, now that I think about it.