So I’ve Put My Second Badger Pelt In The Tumble Drier Just To See What Happens. Will It Dry Nicely?

In the mineralogist’s defense, that’s much tidier than trying to eat watermelon on its own.

Also being a scientist pretty much gives you a free pass to be as eccentric as you want like you’ll be at a conference and it’s like “is that guy wearing socks and sandals and plaid pants???” “Ya but he was on the team that discovered gravitational waves let him be”

Back from Florida. Time to scare the boyfriend!

You only have to look at how cis hetero people try to interpret being transgender to see how history and anthropology inherently biased 

“So they used to be female, but they’re now male”

“Sort of, but the thing is, he was never female. He was simply assigned the gender at birth but later recognized he was male.”

“But his records show he was female”

“I’m saying he’s never been female, he was just falsely identified as female”

“I don’t get it. So like, they used to be female but are now male biologically???”

“No… ugh, never mind, just understand they’re male”

They don’t get it because they don’t have context for it, so try to apply a context they understand. It’s not accurate, but it’s the kind of argument that becomes moot when they understand the most important details. 

That’s what happens in history and anthropology as well. 

There are existing concepts that colonial historians DO NOT HAVE ANY CONTEXT FOR and they will therefore attempt to apply their own context to those concepts, even if they are incorrect. 

I use transgender people as an example because that’s one of the many concepts largely misunderstood by early colonial historians. They don’t GET the concept of a “third gender”or a “spiritual female”/ “Spiritual male” accepted as part of the community, they don’t understand that two genders are a concept THEY have that the community they study DOESN’T. They don’t understand that the language DOES NOT HAVE GENDERED PRONOUNS thereby eliminating hangups on gender that they themselves have. 

Then they attempt to apply their own context – ie the context of a largely heterosexual, largely cis, and largely male community with pre-programmed ideas of what women are to them rather than what women are to the community they are studying. A society which, given English and other European languages, gender their pronouns in a way that isn’t done in other societies. 

It’s the historical equivalent of 4Kids Dubs changing original Japanese names from anime into weird English names. 

History and anthropology must be challenged CONSTANTLY by different outlooks less affected by white imperialist colonial mentality so that anything misunderstood in the past century or two can be remedied. 

Like the fact that Viking women were warriors and buried as warriors, among other biased misinterpretations. 

Lioconcha Hieroglyphica is officially my favorite mollusc

The Languages of Iran

Just by looking at this map of Iran’s spoken languages, you can tell it has a long history of immigrations, migrations, and conquests. Pretty neat!

“The State of  Archaeology”

Such a scary title right? Well, boy oh boy do I have an adventure for you today.

So, I was at a really bougie historic preservation conference because my bosses were presenting. The last panel I went to was supposed to cover the kinds of issues with Cultural Resource Management (CRM) the state was coming across. 

They ended up talking about how all of this would kind of be fixed if we had more funding from the state and more robust laws surrounding archaeological materials.

But this was a room of basically only archaeologists, and mostly professional archaeologists over the age of 35. We were in such an echo chamber. I was the only “young” student there.

SO. I start getting pissed because the same people just kept practically saying “but HOW do we fix our funding problem, we have such AWESOME sites.” “oh, the public is definitely a vital piece to archaeology” but no one was saying the (what I thought was) obvious.

TL;DR If archaeologists want to fix their problems, they need to DO something about it instead of sitting in an echochamber. WE need to make sure the public knows what we do, and more importantly, WHY it matters. We need to make sure the information we disseminate is not just for ourselves in the present, but for the public, for EVERYONE, and for everyone in perpetuity.

Is it possible to be involved with the anthropology "community" despite not having a degree in anthro?

I don’t see why not. I think we encourage interdisciplinary work. 

Academics

In popular culture: wear tweed/plaid/some sort of bland pattern; often in suits; pristine appearance, maybe with wild hair or ink stains; drink tea and coffee; constantly reading books for work and pleasure; erudite conversationalists; love what they do

Me: mostly wear sweatshirts and leggings with a messy bun because if no one needs to see me then screw getting into nice clothes; my blood is tea at this point; ink stains were surpassed long ago; spend a lot of time crying over theory texts and papers; eat a lot of ice cream and watch a lot of Netflix to avoid work; love what I do

Today's Men Carry Traces of Ancient Wars in Their Genes

Modern men’s genes suggest that something peculiar happened 5,000 to 7,000 years ago: Most of the male population across Asia, Europe and Africa seems to have died off, leaving behind just one man for every 17 women.

This so-called population “bottleneck” was first proposed in 2015, and since then, researchers have been trying to figure out what could’ve caused it. One hypothesis held that the drop-off in the male population occurred due to ecological or climatic factors that mainly affected male offspring, while another idea suggested that the die-off happened because some males had more power in society, and thus produced more children.

Now, a new paper, published May 25 in the journal Nature Communications, offers yet another explanation: People living in patrilineal clans (consisting of males from the same descent) might have fought with each other, wiping out entire male lineages at a time. Read more.