MSc Dissy: the love and hate story of a student and her paper.

In a vain attempt to prevent all undergraduate and postgraduate efforts wordlwide from falling into a void and being forever forgotten by normal people and the academic community alike, I decided to post my MSc dissertation here, so that I, if nobody else, may remember it everytime I have a look at my blog and reflect upon hundreds of hours of hard work, procrastination and complaining. Bits of sentences have mysteriously vanished from my paper thanks to the magic of Microsoft Word (I think it happenend when I added the images, a job only trained professionals should attempt). I'm sure it's full of mistakes, but there's no point changing it so I'll keep telling myself it was just the work of a young and naive student of Archaeology.

I invite all graduates to post links to their own dissertations so that they may finally get out of the dark underground corridors in which all student papers are confined for eternity! Whaddya mean, nobody cares?

Oh and in case anybody wonders, it's about Iron Age roundhouses in Britain and in France. And also cultural diffusion, identities, and other stuff. I had a great time writing it (if you forget all the issues linked to the fact that I'm naturally super-lazy), and my tutor was amazing. Yay Edinburgh Uni!

Here it is.

The following pictures show why Daisy is to blame for any inaccuracies in my dissertation. She's been rolling over on my work material and tampering with my Word files.

Neanderthal and stuff...

Coming out of Niaux cave, lamps in hand.

Cave art projection, Musée National de Préhistoire.

Reconstitution of Neandertal life, Musée
National de Préhistoire

Perfectly accurate re-enactment (2): prehistoric
 rites at the Cro-Magnon rock shelter.

No posts in a long time! I've started studying at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and have thereby surrendered both my social and virtual lives. As one of the Prehistory and Quaternary '14 promotion, I've been sent on a trip to Dordogne and the Pyrénées to visit caves, drink wine, eat foie gras and climb up hills in the rain. I don't think I can explain how fantastic and moving it was to stand in a pitch black cave and suddenly see engravings and paintings of mammoths, rhinos, horses and bison appear as the guide lifted his or her lamp and shed light on the cave walls, or to know that Magdalenian adults and children had walked barefoot for hundreds of metres in these cavities (and no, I'm not making stuff up to try and make the story better, researchers did find and date adult and child-sized footprints at Niaux, one of the caves we were lucky enough to visit). So I'm just going to post a couple of pictures instead! Oh and I'd also like to point out that the INRAP (our national preventive archaeology institute) found a mammoth near Paris a few days ago, while excavating a Gallo-Roman site! That's just how random and awesome prehistory can get. [EDIT: funny how things work out, I actually got to do some conservation work on this mammoth! There's an article somewhere on this blog that covers this]

Homo Neandertalensis watching over the valley
from a rock shelter at Les Eyzies.

Bison skeleton, Musée National de Préhistoire,
Les Eyzies-de-Tayac.

Flint debitage explained, Musée National de Préhistoire.

My toilet placement with YAT

 I'm just back from a four week placement with the York Archaeological Trust (helping out on the ArchLive! training dig), and as I'm stuck in my new (tiny) flat with my dog and no furniture, I thought I'd take the student experience as far as possible and start working on something useless. So here's a new article! First, I'd like to thank the trainees and the supervisors again for all their help, hard work and singing rooster impersonations. I had a great time and almost didn't want to come home (but then I thought about the food and the weather and I changed my mind).

Non-staged photos of my awesome trainees, weeks 2-4.

Second, I'd like to tell anybody who's got an interest for field archaeology and a bit of spare money (or a lot, if they don't happen to live in the UK) that if they're looking for a training dig, they should look no further. ArchLive! runs every summer in York and allows trainees to do a bit of everything, from digging to planning, finds processing and barbecuing. And if you've spent so much time volunteering on digs that you're as poor as a Church mouse (yes, there is a theme developing here), you can apply for a placement position and spend your days running wheelbarrows, demolishing brick inspection chambers, cracking tasteless jokes and passing on your extensive knowledge to your amazed trainees. For more information, see ArchLive!'s facebook page, their site diaries or their website.

Conscientiously scrubbing Victorian grime off pots and pipes. 

 I'll leave the site interpretation to the YAT people, as I have a sneaking suspicion that some out-of-place feature is going to contradict everything we thought we knew about the back yards of the rather shabby Victorian terraced houses of Carmelite Street, their bad builders and  their  failed attempts at improving sanitation. Suffice it to say that I have proudly excavated two ceramic tipper toilets and a palimpsest of drainpipes, puzzling brick structures, walls and rubbly make-up deposits. The toilets (which require the tipper to be full of water for the flushing mechanism to do its job) have been put in in several contiguous back yards, seemingly during one improvement phase, in order to try and make the sanitary conditions of the houses more acceptable, but they clearly didn't meet the health and safety requirements as all the houses were pulled down in the 1930s. To my despair, my placement was over before the whole drainage system was exposed, and I'll have to wait for the supervisors' conclusions as to how exactly the whole thing worked and why it wasn't so great.    

A non-scaled, north arrow-less picture of the tipper toilet of 11 Carmelite Street. Take that, good archaeological practices.

Anyway. Thanks to the magic of single context recording, we now all master the difficult arts of taming the dumpy level, off-setting and drawing plans, filling in context cards in a fraction of a second, and taking lovely scaled pictures. A few exciting finds came out of "my" section (anything excavated by "my" trainees is "mine". That's just how it works). A clay pipe bowl with a different man in profile on each side, a nude woman from another clay pipe, some bits of medieval pottery, a bead and a potential giant dog tooth, but no dead prostitute.

We were lucky enough to get quite a lot of sun, so we were able to sit outside and enjoy the weather while processing finds, ie washing a load of Victorian rubbish and of dead people from a nearby medieval charnel that was being excavated by YAT too. We had more fun than would be considered "normal" or "sane" trying to match bones together and got a bit sad whenever we pulled children's bones out of their plastic bags, but it was all very interesting. Sorting and bagging finds went smoothly enough, and sorting small bits of shell, charcoal and other sieving residues from soil samples was more fun than it sounds (a little bit). So I might just have to go back next year and visit more pubs  do more archaeology. Or maybe I should get a job? Who knows.

Evaaaa! Pass me my trowel!

     

I iz a published author!

I haven't been able to write much lately (Part II of my History of Violence will eventually be published, I haven't given up on it!) BUT I received a copy of The Archaeological Review from Cambridge with my own little article in it. When I say "article", I really mean "book review". So, I don't have "a proven track record and extensive publications on [any] subject" yet, but I'm working on it. I had a great time writing the review (and I got a free book worth £75 for my personal library), so I'd really recommend book-review publishing to any graduate student who wants to eventually publish their research, as it's easier than writing an article but still an excellent way to get acquainted with the publishing process and with a number of obscure writing conventions. Anyway, the article is online here. It's on Scarre's latest book on the Neolithic of Brittany (which I enjoyed a lot).

Also, special thanks need to go to Danika Parikh, the reviews editor, who was a pleasure to work with. That is all.

Field-walking with Daisy

You know how it's always people walking their dogs who discover dead bodies? Well, I don't walk my dog early enough in the morning for that. And I can't imagine anyone disposing of a recently- or not so recently- murdered victim in the field behind our house. Anyway, I still get to find stuff when running after the dog. Mostly it's barbecue waste and not-very-exciting pottery. But yesterday, while walking in a freshly ploughed field, I stumbled upon a lovely little flint blade, with a plump percussion bulb, compression rings and maybe even some retouches. I'm a little bit excited about it because apart from a pair of bronze bracelets and a possible Bronze Age barrow, I couldn't find any mentions of prehistoric activity or of lithic finds in Malpas (Cheshire) anywhere. Anything pre-Roman is really quite rare here, as far as we know, although you don't have to go very far out of the parish of Malpas to find possible Neolithic occupations and Iron Age hillforts.

So here's a picture of our little friend. It's just under 4 centimeters long, with a bit of cortex left on the distal end and a few negatives of previously knapped-off bits on the dorsal face. Given the form of the bulb, I'd say it was probably made with a hard hammer. It has an eraillure on the bulb, and it's triangular in section.

You tell me what this little guy was arrested for. Nice mugshot.

We also got a few other bits of flint, one of them largely covered in cortex and exhibiting what looks like part of a striking platform and the negative of compression rings.

Edit 14/05/12: We found another blade today, in a different field not very far away from the one in which we found the first blade. It's very different though, with the bulb and compression rings much more diffuse, possibly suggesting soft-hammer percussion. There are very extensive retouches on the dorsal face, my guess being that they were made using pressure-flaking. This is a really lovely little tool.

Unless there's a hobbyist in the neighbourhood who keeps dropping worked flint everywhere in order to confuse us, Malpas was occupied earlier than we thought.

While walking in the fields, we were quite surprised to see that there were a lot of pebbles everywhere, so we thought we might be in an post-glacial valley. It turns out, as pointed out in a 2003 archaeological assessment of Malpas by the Cheshire County Council, that "at Domesday the town [Malpas] was called Depenbech which means ‘at the deep valley with a stream in it’". I thought that the local substrate, red sandstone, could tell us a little bit more about the geology of the area, as it forms in specific conditions. According to this website, the Sandstone Ridge, made of layers of sandstone and pebble beds, formed in the Triassic era in semi-arid desertic conditions (who would have thought?). Forward to the last glaciation and the region was under a huge ice-sheet which depressed the surface of the earth and, while receding at the end of the Ice Age, dropped loads of boulders and ice-worn pebbles picked up in northern Britain while it was moving southward. Now, the pebbles make perfect sense.

I'm also posting a picture of my dog, because it's totally relevant to this article.

Daisy McWooferson, treasure hunter.

A History of Violence: Part I

In archaeology, much like in entertaining, the most popular things are often either the grimmest or the most glamorous. This new post is more about gloom than glitter: we're going to take a look at one of modern human's most ancient pastimes - no, I'm not talking about fooling around with professional booby-flashers - warfare. Of course, there is no need to dig up ancient bones to think about violence, as it is just as alive now as it ever was. But how long has Man indulged in the sweet sound of its neighbour's skull crashing under a well- placed blow? Some of the evidence, and in particular that provided by broken, mangled or badly treated human remains- still hits home thousands of years after the events with a surprising intensity, and researchers have long tried to give back to silent remains and quiet battle sites the screaming voices they have lost.

"Hank always complained about his bad back."
Neolithic violences, flint projectile meets human vertebrae.
Musée des Antiquités Nationales, St Germain-en-Laye

Warfare at its origins was probably very different from what comes to our minds when we think about war. Various parameters can be compared. How many casualties? Who are the victims? Who fights: professional soldiers, conscripted/mobilised individuals, warriors? What are the tactics used and the nature of the combats? What is the value of the life of a soldier/civilian and how many deaths are the opponents prepared to accept for a particular cause? What are they fighting, or what are they fighting for? Are they fighting at home or abroad? Are people dying as a direct consequence of military action, or because of famine and disease brought by the war?

The way we conduct and envisage warfare has evolved a great deal, and it is difficult to imagine that, while the nations involved in the Afghan war Coalition find it increasingly hard to justify and cope with the deaths of approximately 2900 professional soldiers over 10 and a half years (so far, and with over 22,600 wounded soldiers to add to the victim count),  one estimation of the number of civilian deaths suggests a death toll of  12,500 to 14,700 as of June 2011. During the recent debate between the then candidates to the French presidential elections, Hollande and Sarkozy were asked when they would finally pull French troops out of Afghanistan. France has lost 83 soldiers there, and because of doubts surrounding the reason and the relevance of its presence in Afghanistan, these 83 deaths abroad are more than the French were prepared to accept. In very different circumstances and at a time when wars were fought differently and by different people, the Battle of the Somme alone, in 1916, lasted 4 and a half months and claimed the lives of  an estimated 146,431 allied troops. The Allied lost over 9.4 million soldiers in the War.

Understanding modern warfare is complicated, not least because of the various interests, official or not, which are at stake for the groups involved. Identifying and understanding warfare through archaeological remains is another task altogether.

According to Keeley, primitive warfare is generally described by anthropologists as less deadly in terms of numbers than modern warfare. Some authors consider that wars can only occur between states or other "complex" socio-political units, but in my opinion, this assumption is contradicted by the record. I suppose it's down to how one defines the word "warfare".

No, not this kind of primitive warfare.

Researchers are divided about the degree of violence prehistoric Europeans visited upon each-other. Some see signs everywhere, others see only ritual, and others yet are a lot more cautious about their interpretations. Identifying ancient warfare isn't as straightforward as we'd think: not only is a violent death not always recognisable when there is a skeleton to look at, often, there are no remains to study at all. Any wound not affecting the skeleton will go unnoticed, and of course not every bone in the skeleton comes out of a multi-century-spanning nap in the ground all fresh and pristine, allowing the osteoarchaeologist to admire all its potential cuts and breaks. Healed wounds can be distinguished from non-healed ones, but making the difference between a lethal blow and a bone accidentally smashed by careless undertakers while burying the body can be impossible. As for some of our favourite bits of evidence for violence, they too can be misleading. A parry fracture! Someone was defending themselves against an enemy. Or a brutal spouse. Or their own clumsiness.

"Here's a flesh wound that osteoarchaeologists will detect all right"

To make it even better - we'd all hate it if it was simple -  weapons from the Palaeolithic up to the end of the Neolithic aren't just weapons, they're agricultural tools (axes, adzes) or hunting equipment (arrowheads). And even when swords and shields make their appearance, they turn out to not always be functional weapons. Even practices such as decapitation don't always point to an armed conflict: what about ancestor cults? Some unusual deposits can also be the result of a violent answer to a crisis that does not involve warfare - I'm looking at you, human sacrifice.

Of course, this is not to say that ancient warfare can never be recognised, or that it doesn't exist. There is plenty of disturbing/alarming/saddening evidence for Prehistoric organised violence, so much so that it places the horrifying historic and contemporary conflicts we have learnt about at school or followed with the News within a long tradition. I wouldn't say that by putting them into perspective, one can diminish the horror attached to them, though. If anything, the continuing nature of interpersonal, large-scale violence points to a bleak future. Erm. Enough deep thinking, it's time for me to go eat some chocolate biscuits. I'll actually start talking about the evidence for prehistoric warfare in Europe in Part II.



References (more to come in Part II):

Keeley, L.H., 1996, War Before Civilization, the Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Oxford University Press, Oxford

The joys of 3D modelling

I have had quite a bit of spare time lately and have decided to try and use it in a productive way, so I started learning to model stuff in 3D. I'm using Google SketchUp because it's free and easily downloadable, and the basics are quick to master. There is also a wealth of SketchUp tutorials on the Internet, which makes more advanced techniques less of a nightmare to understand. It's still touch-and-go for me though, and it takes me a ridiculously long time to build anything, so I won't be modelling Hogwarts anytime soon.

In case anyone is wondering what this has to do with archaeology - and I'm sure that no-one is - 3D modelling can be very useful for tasks such as attempting restitutions of sites that have been largely destroyed. In other words, if:
- there is not much to take a photo of, but enough features to formulate hypotheses concerning the former shape and organisation of a building or a site, and
- you're useless at drawing,
then 3D's a good option to produce illustrations for books, videos, etc. Because without illustrations, it's all a bit boring.

Anyway, here's my first attempt at SketchUpping a site. It's purely a modelling exercise, and not in any way a scientific statement. I've copied existing restitutions the best I could, but I haven't studied the site extensively in order to provide an illustration that would reflect my own intellectual convictions. I don't know how accurate this is or what Shrine VI 10 looked like in any of its phases, and this was not the point of the exercise.  Dimensions are very approximate too, as they weren't relevant to the project. The decorative elements gave me an awful time, so I apologise in advance for how weird they look. Simple architectural features are a pleasure to model even for a noob, but anything else definitely isn't.  I've chosen a room from Çatalhüyük because it's a fantastic site (this 3D thing gave me an excuse to read about it again, bonus!), but most importantly it was just challenging enough for me. I would have loved to model Notre-Dame, but I'm not ready (or quite brave enough) for this. Making this simple picture almost drove me mad, but I still think 3D's a skill worth mastering, so I'll keep trying.

Here are the restitutions I've used: this room from the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, and this drawing (attributed to James Mellaart on various websites, but whose complete source I haven't found yet). Once more, I should probably feel guilty about the lack of academic rigour in this post, but  I'm not, so ha! I won't do it again, though. Promise. Go check out the Çatalhüyük excavations website  if you need your daily dose of actual - and amazing - archaeology.