Back in Peoria

Back in Peoria, and classes are tomorrow, as usual. It is cold and might snow; that is an irritation as my normal shortcut by which I used to walk to work has been closed down due to construction. So my routes will be distinctly unpleasant ones along widely traveled roads where the sidewalks are almost always not shoveled.

But we made it safe and sound.

Workout notes: I restart my usual routine tomorrow.

Of course, I talked about our little family 5 mile walk (Turkey Trot), and how my daughter and I carried a small stuffed frog (called “Froggy”) with us.

Well, “finishing” that 5 mile race has gone to Froggy’s little green head:

(note: I found a package of eight “medals” for a dollar; they have a star on one side and “winner” on the other! )

I certainly don’t want to damage Froggy’s self esteem by telling her that she was actually carried for the full five miles….

Other topics

The internet and the potential for plagiarism: a huge hat tip to Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub for alerting us to this wonderful TED talk. It is 19 minutes long but well worth it.

A cool math video: linked to from the blog 3 quarks daily

21 minutes:

A hat tip to Statistical Modeling.

Studying Shellmounds: what is the problem?

As noted by Bay Radical, the shellmounds were made by Ohlone natives… or so we think. The two most prominent mounds were in Emeryville, California and Alameda, California. I currently live in Alameda, California, just down the street from one of the sites of the old mounds. I bike over the sites when I do my cycling rounds. And have been to Emeryville more times than I’d like to admit. Since I live in the Bay Area and am interested in past human life, I’m very aware of what these sites were and what they are now.

At times, Bay Radical describes what happened to the shellmounds in an a realistic tone. At other times Bay Radical describes the shellmounds in exotified manner. That’s expected. The writer does go by the nom de plume of radical. So here’s a bit of reclarification…

Shellmounds are a form of midden. Midden is known as a dump for domestic waste. In archaeology, midden provides a lot of information. I spent two years sorting thru midden from a site in Moss Landing, California. saw how native Americans did not live harmoniously with nature as often glorified in popular culture. These people obliterated populations of norther fur seals to the point of extinction.

Like all middens, shell middens contain the debris of human activity and remains of their meals. They contain information on how people lived, what they ate, how they ate. As people who study material culture, we can figure out how they processed remains, if they left any tools or artifacts in the debris, etc.

Some middens are tiny, representing a single household’s waste. In the case of the Emeryville and Alameda shellmounds, they were monumental. Bay Radical makes the case that the Emeryville shellmound was largely obliterated in an ignorant and capitalistic manner to pave the way for an amusment park, several factories, and ultimately to what it is now an outdoor shopping mall.

What the hell? The shellmounds were phenomenal. I won’t say they weren’t, they were one of the largest structures known to be made by Californian natives. But they were trash.

Some descendants of natives claim that human remains were or are in the midden piles and that the archaeologists who excavated the mounds as well as the engineers who paved over the mounds caused them great disrespect. They completely skirt over the issue that their ancestors buried their dead in what’s the equivalent of modern day landfills. If their reburial so detrimental to their spiritual well being then why were they buried in trash mounds in the first place? There’s a potential to use science to understand why these people from the past dumped their loved ones in their community trash mounds. I also do not understand how and why archaeologists and engineers who are attempting to make the sites into informative and economically viable areas are now vilified for transforming trash? [...]

Furthermore, this may come off as completely naive but I really can’t find a way to phrase it any other way… I don’t understand why it’s so important that remains from people’s ancestors from several hundred to thousand years ago has any impact on their current well being. It seems so far removed, so far detached. Of course that’s awfully ethnocentric, and I admit my athiest upbringing is why I just simply don’t fully understand this problem. But we live in the now, we need to understand how people lived, what they were like, how they varied to figure out how we all got here. That, to me, is more important than whether or not my great great cousin twice removed from 200 years ago is buried according to my cultural traditions or not.