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ANTH 3420 Urban Archaeology OER
Archaeology is undoubtedly most famous for its exploration and discovery of “wonderful things” from the deep past in “exotic” places: Tutankhamun’s tomb! Lost Maya cities! Archaeologists are also keen sift through and ask questions of ancient garbage: What do these tools at Stonehenge suggest about Neolithic and Bronze Age social networks? These discoveries and questions are important for understanding where we came from. However, more and more archaeologists are turning their attention, their theory, and their methods to the recent past and contemporary worlds. This course explores a body of work that advances these efforts in American urban places and considers debates that make the more recent American urban world its object. The course then asks students to assess and evaluate various aspects of American urban life through exposure to a broad range of archaeological case studies.
Admins:
Week 15: Counterculture and alternative Urban Experiences
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DUE TUESDAY 12/5 BEFORE CLASS
We wrap up our semester long reflections with readings from alternative urban landscapes. Compare and contrast these articles and reflect on what they may imply of archaeology going forward.
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Matthew Brunwasser’s Digging the Age of Aquarius discusses the future of archaeology when researching and observing contemporary objects that could be considered artifacts in the future, but are considered as trash by today’s standards. Severin Fowles and Kaet Heupel’s The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World discusses the relationship between people and absent material, especially at a hippie commune in New Mexico during the 1960s and 1970s called the New Buffalo Commune. Ruben G. Mendoza’s Cruising Art and Culture in Aztlan: Lowriding in the Mexican American Southwest discusses the urban culture of Mexican, American, and Mexican American with an ethnographer’s viewpoint.
The main focus of these documents is the possible future of archaeology. They focus on the hippie community during the 1960s to 1970s in the American West. Most of the artifacts that the archaeologists they are obtain are typically mundane materials or objects that are considered trash like melted sneakers, baseball caps, Styrofoam cups, and other pieces of debris that were left behind. They consider these objects to be future artifacts that will be researched by future archaeologists. While these documents discusses communes in the American West, they research different communes in different areas of the American West, like New Mexico and California.
Reflection # 15
We wrap up our semester long reflections with readings from alternative urban landscapes. Compare and contrast these articles and reflect on what they may imply of archaeology going forward.
The first article by Matthew Brunwasser discusses his efforts to preserve the history of and show what life was like at the Olompali commune, a hippie commune located north of San Francisco, California, by preserving the artifacts related to it. The commune was founded by a real estate developer. The main part of the commune was located in a mansion and the secondary part was at a horse ranch. Residents called the commune “The Ranch.” The commune lasted for only about two years, from 1967 to 1969, when a fire destroyed the mansion. Commune weekend parties attracted hundreds of guests, with bands like the Greatful Dead playing at them. The commune attracted many counter-culture figures, including Timothy Leary.
Preservation efforts surrounding the mansion were supposed to begin in October 1997, but were shelved when asbestos was discovered in the mansion’s walls. The mansion itself only exists as a ruin now with a concrete and tin shelter protecting it from further decay. Artifacts already collected were sealed in fifty-five gallon drums until they could be decontaminated, which finally occurred in January, 2009. The artifacts collected are remains of everyday items, as well as remains of animals collected at The Ranch which appear to have been slaughtered for food. While many artifacts were collected from the site, only a much smaller sample is needed to properly curate the site. Brunwasser had several museum curators help him sort through the huge number of artifacts to determine what to keep and what to throw away. He also had two former members of the commune helping him with his decision making and interpreting the artifacts which were found. The most prominent of the former commune members was Noelle Olompali-Burton, who took the name of the commune as part of her surname.
As a consumer culture, we create a lot of trash/potential artifacts and we are starting to run out of places to put it. The material that we have generated has a potential to survive much, much longer than that of previous cultures. As a result, we are running out of places to put anything, from regular trash to ancient artifacts. The result is that going forward archaeological digs will have to be much more selective in what they keep to analyze. This will most likely lead to competition between various archaeological projects, not only in the country but worldwide for storage space.
The second article by Severin Fowles and Kaet Heupel deals with the New Buffalo hippie commune which existed in the 1960s and 1970s near Taos, New Mexico. The authors approach their subject by looking at the absence of things. Archaeology, for the most part, looks for artifacts or material culture. It only very rarely examines how a community is affected by the absence of something. The authors examine the commune through archival material, including photographs, articles and personal journals, oral histories and the material remains of the site itself. They found that in the early stages of the commune buildings were created without the use of advanced tools and daily life was conducted without modern conveniences, like electricity. They found bras in the midden, which when combined with archival material and oral history, they interpreted as a form of liberation. This article and the one by Brunwasser have the unique position in that the archaeologists can actually ask people who inhabited the site for clarification on things that were found, such as the bras. Without the oral history, one would have thought that bra use was a common thing at the commune, which it was not.
The third article by Rubin Mendoza deals with the culture which arose around certain customized cars in Los Angeles, California and other areas of the American Southwest. The article covers the start before World War II and evolution of the cultural phenomenon known as low riding. A feature of all of the cars is a hydraulic system which can raise and lower the height of the vehicle with regard to the roadway. The author consulted contemporary publications, such as Life Magazine for opinions of the culture, diagrams of cars and the author’s own memory. This article, unlike the other two, is based on solely on a cultural phenomenon, rather than a site. It also utilizes the author’s own experience as a participant in the low rider counter culture.
The three articles shed light on an interesting aspect of archaeology, especially urban archaeology, and that is that you can mine through other people’s data to gain additional insights or draw new conclusions without having to go back and dig. With urban archaeology, digs tend to be in densely populated areas, causing many challenges. You have to take many precautions to ensure that the dig doesn’t endanger surrounding inhabitants. You also need to take precautions against the possibility that the site might be contaminated with all sorts of chemicals and heavy metals. The articles make the point of using oral histories and actual living participants to clarify details of cultural life that would not have been clear if they had based their conclusions on only artifacts from a dig.
Attachments:
You must be logged in to view attached files.Severin Fowles and Kaet Heupel The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World Edited by Paul Graves-Brown and Rodney Harrison
I found this weeks’ readings to have a philosophical aspect to them. They were non-traditional and questioned what it means to have physical evidence in a very material reliant field that is archaeology. In this article archaeologists Fowles and Heupuel studied the New Buffalo Commune, a hippie commune in the 1960’s-1970’s located in New Mexico. In this commune many “suburbanites” participated in the act of giving up material commodities, to live the lifestyle described as connecting to the earth more directly. The suburbanites otherwise labelled hippies adopted Native rituals, which led to a question of whether the adaptations were appropriation or a way to express admiration to a certain culture. The authors brought up an interesting point, that poverty is a construct, “ an internalized set of culturally constructed desires on the part of the accused”. Having objects that society may deem as less valuable, may be accompanied with the label of being poor. This made me question, according to whose standards are these people poor? In the article it states “such absences were actively protected precisely because they afforded a ‘richer’ life with greater freedoms and larger amounts of leisure time”, people place value on different things, in this case more freedom and time to do things they pleased were more valuable. My interpretation of the article, was to study absent things can be of value to archaeology, as it can provide a glimpse of something might’ve missed. For example, the findings of the high heel shoe, the manufactured cans, the bow tie, fragments of bras, were all odd materials to find in a hippie camp, but the placement of the items were significant. They were typically found in the garbage, or discarded, one might be quick to think why are these items present? I found it interesting that the authors proposed a different question, where is the person that discarded the shoe? What does it mean that the item is discarded? Most likely a person rejecting the norms of society, the central force that made the suburbanites gravitate towards the Buffalo Commune.
The three articles analyze the role which material things played in the history and social-cultural lives of communities in the industrialization era. According to Fowles and Heupel, the world is filled with an accumulation of material things as humans feel the absence of things they need and continue to invent more (2013). Concurrently, as archaeologists compare modern society with the premodern communities, people feel the loss of touch with the sensuous nature and feel the need to abandon the presence of their material objects (Heupel, 2013). For example, the New Buffalo commune was a group of people who escaped corporate America to settle in an indigenous land to get in touch with old culture, but they still felt the need to use material objects despite having abandoned the modern world. According to Mendoza, America experienced a fast-paced evolution of culture, especially among the Mexican American youth in dressing, behavior, and culture, mostly driven by the desire to fill voids in culture, as illustrated by the evolution of low-rider vehicle (2000). Similarly, Brunwasser states the importance of studying and preserving material items recovered from archaeological sites, to study the behaviors of the people as they evolved (2009). However, as Fowles and Heupel understate the need to study material possessions of the people to know their culture, Brunwasser stresses that material possessions can reveal about the behavioral patterns of the past. Mendoza, on the other hand, studies the changes in the society that propelled the changes witnesses in the material evolution by the Mexican Americas.
Urban archaeology, as the branch that studies the debris accumulation in the ancient human settlements over the years, anchors its concepts on the study of the material possessions recovered from archaeological sites. Considering the above information, urban archaeologists need to dig deeper into premodern communities and analyze the role their material possessions played in their evolution as communities and the presence and absence of these things in society.
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