Back in August of 2009, I posted the results of a little experiment I conducted. Specifically, I posted some papers to several Acasocial portals to see what happened. I was particularly interested in Time-to-Google-Scholar, in an attempt to make my stuff more available for others to cite. Part of academia is, after all, getting cited. Nothing wrong with a little self-promotion; while making my work more easily accessible won't guarantee citations, if no one can find it it sure as hell won't get cited!
You can read my previous post for The Way Things Were; after assessing the features of each, I determined that "The real winner here is SelectedWorks. I can see people are accessing and downloading my stuff. It is totally easy to update my site. And, time to Google Scholar for everything (book, journal articles, conference papers) = 1 month."
In the year and a bit since I posted my results, a lot has happened. Here's an update:
Mendeley.com I am still using Mendeley as a reference management tool. In fact, I abandoned EndNote in favor of Mendeley for this purpose. Mendeley lets me access and manage my bibliography from any computer with internet access and to grab .pdfs from my personal library. From any computer with the Mendeley desktop installed, I can access, upload, read, and make comments in .pdf files. I've put Mendeley Desktop on my home computer, my laptop, and my computer at work. The ready access to my research library has been invaluable. Mendeley's incorporation of DOI has made adding journal articles to my database fast and painless.
But there is more to Mendeley. One advantage to the bibliography software is that you can group papers by whatever topics you like. Mendeley gives you the opportunity to make those groups public so you can easily share your bibliography with others, and (depending on how public you make it) can collaborate with others. I made several of my groups public, and have had several people join them. I haven't yet taken advantage of the collaboration/discussion abilities. A new improvement that I quite like is the ability to find publications related to ones I have in my bibliography; to do so, I just click the button from within the Desktop and a window opens in my browser showing how many others have that article in their databases, and a list of similar publications. I can add these other publications to my database with a quick click.
Mendeley has a free option (1GB storage space); they also have very reasonably-priced paid options (up to 15GB storage space). Their support folks are very, very responsive and helpful.
CiteULike: Although I reviewed this back in August 2009, I quit using it. Too clunky, and I much preferred Mendeley. I have no update for you.
Academia.edu: Still Facebook for academics. People are finding me and my publications via Academia (and I can see how often and when my stuff is accessed), but this isn't the real strength of the site. For me, there are three main strengths at Academia: 1) being able to follow specific journals; 2) being able to follow specific topics; 3) an environment conducive to contacting researchers.
1. Being able to follow specific journals. This is a relatively new feature, but may actually be the best part. I have pretty wide-ranging interests (I am, after all, a fox), but can't afford the money or time to follow printed journals. With Academia.edu, I can "Follow" particular journals; when they come out with new issues (or pre-publish stuff to the 'net), I see the table of contents in my feed. If a particular article interests me, I click on the feed, grab the citation, and pop over to my Friendly Neighborhood Inter-Library Loan Request Form (a total, total perk to my adjunctivity) and within a couple of days, have a .pdf version in my email. I can also see which journals others are following; I've found several of interest this way. I've found some really great stuff this way, in journals that I'd normally never read.
2. Being able to follow specific topics. Following particular researchers is great (though there are several people whose work I'd love to follow who haven't signed up to Academia yet); being able to follow particular areas of research is super-great. I've found publications and researchers using this feature that I'd not previously been aware of.
3. An environment conducive to communication. It is very easy to send a short note to others via Academia. I've had some very good exchanges with others, generally prompted by reading a paper they'd (or I'd) just posted. The setup, whereby you can read someone's paper and send them a note from the same page, that makes this sort of communication easy. Though people without an account on Academia can see my basic profile, they cannot see my updates nor send me notes without signing up. So far, I've not been on the receiving end of any weird/abusive notes.
One more note about Academia: their technical support is super-easy to access (there's a field at the bottom left of every page) and super-responsive.
SelectedWorks: No real changes here since last August. But still my favorite place to get my stuff "out there" -- fast to Google Scholar, monthly updates with statistics of downloads, and emailed notifications for whatever search criteria you give them. Not as "networky" as Academia, but I've still found papers this way (especially conference proceedings and gray literature) that haven't surfaced elsewhere. As best I can tell, more people are finding my work via SelectedWorks than all the others combined.
To my surprise, I ran experiments on four sites and ended up using three of them on a regular basis. I was expecting to find one place to dump my stuff to make it easily accessible online. What I ended up with was a suite of Acasocial Networking tools that have made my research and organization more efficient; exposed me to new research; allowed me to easily collaborate; and make my stuff more easily accessible.
Showing posts with label Analysis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Analysis. Show all posts
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Social Annihilation
America was a very interesting place in the very late eighteenth/early nineteenth century; interesting, at least, from the distance of two hundred years.
Fresh out of the Revolutionary War, riding early waves of the Industrial Revolution and snowballing scientific discovery, Americans sorted out what it meant to be American. We left our small towns, and pushed west; we mined coal and built canals to carry it to increasingly industrialized cities, our manufacturing no longer dependent on water power. We built railroads, and new towns sprung up along them like a string of pearls. Free of the Church of England, we sought our own meaning in utopian communities and home-grown religious traditions.
It all sounds very progressive and romantic. But there was, of course, a price. When a person's world was limited to a couple of days ride by horse or buggy on shitty roads, and they knew or were related to pretty much everyone they encountered, they (and everyone else) knew exactly what their place in the community was. As people began to travel further, move to industrial centers, or set out to make their fortunes, communities became very fluid. Members of families who had lived in one place for generations would move away; people who had no family ties to an area would move in, or just stay a spell before moving on. The social order was in flux, and there were so many strangers...
It became necessary to wear your social rank and status on your sleeve; to visually advertise to the strangers around you, where you placed in the social pecking order. There was an entire ballet of right clothing, right mannerisms, right pursuits, right language that, it was assumed, only true members of the elite could pull off. But because none of these things are inherent within a person, social rank and status became contested -- people of lower social rank and status emulated the social ballet of the elite, and when too many of them got close to being good at it, the bar was moved. This even played out in cemeteries:
It was important to be important enough that your body was not exhumed by the Resurrection Men and sold to medical schools for dissection or dumped in an anonymous paupers' grave. Funerary display was one way that families could assert their place in society; that they could show, by virtue of having All The Right Trappings, that they belonged. I think the idea of social annihilation is an interesting one in the context of material status display and negotiation.
Significant sources for the above include:
Baker, Faye Joanne
1977 Toward Memory and Mourning: A Study of Changing Attitudes Toward Death Between 1750 and 1850 as Revealed by Gravestones of the New Hampshire Merrimack River Valley, Mourning Pictures, and Representative Writings. M.Phil Disseration, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
Halttunen, Karen
1982 Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut.
Hoffman, Frederick L.
1919 Pauper Burials and the Interment of the Dead in Large Cities. An address read at the National Conference of Social Work, Atlantic City, N. J., June 4, 1919. Prudential Press, Newark, New Jersey.
Sappol, Michael
2002 A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomies and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.
Shively, Charles
1988 A History of the Conception of Death in America, 1650-1860. Garland Publishing, Inc., New York. PhD dissertation, Harvard University.
Fresh out of the Revolutionary War, riding early waves of the Industrial Revolution and snowballing scientific discovery, Americans sorted out what it meant to be American. We left our small towns, and pushed west; we mined coal and built canals to carry it to increasingly industrialized cities, our manufacturing no longer dependent on water power. We built railroads, and new towns sprung up along them like a string of pearls. Free of the Church of England, we sought our own meaning in utopian communities and home-grown religious traditions.
It all sounds very progressive and romantic. But there was, of course, a price. When a person's world was limited to a couple of days ride by horse or buggy on shitty roads, and they knew or were related to pretty much everyone they encountered, they (and everyone else) knew exactly what their place in the community was. As people began to travel further, move to industrial centers, or set out to make their fortunes, communities became very fluid. Members of families who had lived in one place for generations would move away; people who had no family ties to an area would move in, or just stay a spell before moving on. The social order was in flux, and there were so many strangers...
It became necessary to wear your social rank and status on your sleeve; to visually advertise to the strangers around you, where you placed in the social pecking order. There was an entire ballet of right clothing, right mannerisms, right pursuits, right language that, it was assumed, only true members of the elite could pull off. But because none of these things are inherent within a person, social rank and status became contested -- people of lower social rank and status emulated the social ballet of the elite, and when too many of them got close to being good at it, the bar was moved. This even played out in cemeteries:
... the working poor tried to assure themselves a place in funerary society by securing burials in cemeteries or churchyards that were equivalent to those of the bourgeoisie, or within bourgeois cemeteries in inferior graves and spaces. The alternatives - to be sold and/or stolen, dissected, and/or displayed in a museum, or to be dumped anonymously in a mass grave in a potter's field - represented social annihilation. The dissected body was nothing but a collection of body parts and waste, a thing; potter's field was a dumping ground, a place of exclusion…. For working men and women, burial in the cemetery or churchyard symbolized inclusion in the social order. (Sappol 2002: 35-36)
It was important to be important enough that your body was not exhumed by the Resurrection Men and sold to medical schools for dissection or dumped in an anonymous paupers' grave. Funerary display was one way that families could assert their place in society; that they could show, by virtue of having All The Right Trappings, that they belonged. I think the idea of social annihilation is an interesting one in the context of material status display and negotiation.
Significant sources for the above include:
Baker, Faye Joanne
1977 Toward Memory and Mourning: A Study of Changing Attitudes Toward Death Between 1750 and 1850 as Revealed by Gravestones of the New Hampshire Merrimack River Valley, Mourning Pictures, and Representative Writings. M.Phil Disseration, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
Halttunen, Karen
1982 Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut.
Hoffman, Frederick L.
1919 Pauper Burials and the Interment of the Dead in Large Cities. An address read at the National Conference of Social Work, Atlantic City, N. J., June 4, 1919. Prudential Press, Newark, New Jersey.
Sappol, Michael
2002 A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomies and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.
Shively, Charles
1988 A History of the Conception of Death in America, 1650-1860. Garland Publishing, Inc., New York. PhD dissertation, Harvard University.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Mostly Foxy with Shades of Hedgehog
Notorious PhD has two posts up (and a third brewing) about academic identities -- Fox vs. Hedgehog -- and what it means when you aren't anymore (Part 1 and Part 2).
Foxes, in this dichotomy, know a little about a lot of things; hedgehogs know a lot about a few things. I've tended to be more foxy than hedgehog-y (except in the mornings, just after a haircut, when I really do LOOK like a hedgehog...). In fact, the deep knowledge hedgehogs have of their subject matter has intimidated me. And I've fretted that I don't have such a topic that I want to dive into and commit myself totally to, for the rest of my career. It was very cool to find out that I'm not alone in being a fox, and that it is not necessarily a detriment! There are some broad common themes I'm interested in, but the specifics of addressing them are very varied (and their are more than one...).
In addition to being mostly foxy with shades of hedgehog (which I shall embrace and no longer decry!), I am also a splitter.* So there.
* Splitter: in archaeology, there are lumpers and splitters. These traits are deeply coded into our very beings. Splitters are always splitters, unless forced to lump; lumpers are always lumpers unless forced to split. As a splitter, I tend to put things in several smaller groupings; lumpers tend to put things into fewer, larger groupings. These "things" can be soil layers, artifact types, fill deposits, etc.
Foxes, in this dichotomy, know a little about a lot of things; hedgehogs know a lot about a few things. I've tended to be more foxy than hedgehog-y (except in the mornings, just after a haircut, when I really do LOOK like a hedgehog...). In fact, the deep knowledge hedgehogs have of their subject matter has intimidated me. And I've fretted that I don't have such a topic that I want to dive into and commit myself totally to, for the rest of my career. It was very cool to find out that I'm not alone in being a fox, and that it is not necessarily a detriment! There are some broad common themes I'm interested in, but the specifics of addressing them are very varied (and their are more than one...).
In addition to being mostly foxy with shades of hedgehog (which I shall embrace and no longer decry!), I am also a splitter.* So there.
* Splitter: in archaeology, there are lumpers and splitters. These traits are deeply coded into our very beings. Splitters are always splitters, unless forced to lump; lumpers are always lumpers unless forced to split. As a splitter, I tend to put things in several smaller groupings; lumpers tend to put things into fewer, larger groupings. These "things" can be soil layers, artifact types, fill deposits, etc.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
New Science Scout Badges!
Yay, the Order of Science Scouts has new badges! There are two more I can claim and add to my roster. Ok, one and a half, but I'm rounding up:
The I Have Survived Dangerously Inclement Weather in the Name of Science Badge. It comes with working outside, I suppose. No actual tornadoes, at least not in the line of work, but heat waves, hail, lightening storms, flooding, blinding snow and ice, yes, all of the above. All in cases where we really, really should have packed up and gone inside. I've gotten much more careful with my own safety now that I'm in a supervisory position. It's one thing if I do something stupid, it is quite something else if I let someone else/encourage someone else to do something stupid on my watch.
The I Have an Actual Human Skeleton in my Office Badge. I don't now, but I did. The skeletons I have around now are either real ones (from animals) or casts (from people). When I was an undergrad and a grad student, introductory physical anthropology classes were taught using real human skeletons. In some cases, they were purchased from medical supply houses; in other cases, they were archaeologically-recovered remains. In my opinion, however, there is absolutely no good reason to use real human skeletons in introductory courses. It is not respectful. And all of the skeletons used in these settings suffered damage as a result. The bones were from -people-, people! I think there is a need for exposure to real skeletal material in upper level and graduate classes, particularly when you get into the huge variations that actually exist between individuals and when dealing with pathologies and trauma, but hopefully by the time students have reached this point, they have developed a different way of being around human remains. But this also is ethically fraught, and the wishes of descent groups and living relatives must, imo, be taken into consideration, as must how the teaching will work. There is a big difference between having bones around that get dragged out for classes, and having an assemblage with which students can get important experience by helping to record and analyze.Thursday, January 14, 2010
And I thought the concealments were interesting...
I so wish I could post details about this one, because truth sure can be stranger than fiction. But I would put large sums of money down on a bet that I was the only one in this -particular- situation. And by only, I mean, really, totally, only. Which means to give details would blow whatever pseudonymous cover I have, such as it is.
So I'm going through an artifact catalog for one of my projects. I generally don't catalog my own artifacts; that's done by folks down in the lab. When they're done, I go over the catalogs pretty thoroughly right off the bat, looking for duplicate entries, spelling issues, formatting weirdness, put together a reference list, pick out things I know I'll want to have a closer look at, identify things that need to be dated or dated more closely, etc.* This gives me a sense of what the artifact assemblage looks like for the whole project, and gives me a chance to make some big-picture and more detailed connections between and among contexts (excavation units, shovel tests, soil layers). It's picky and time consuming, but pays off in the long run.
Lalala, messing with a catalog of a few thousand artifacts, some interesting stuff, I'll have to get the faunal folks to look at these bones for foodways info, wow, lots of nails, nothing jumping out at me in particular... until BOOM. WTF is this really weird entry? That piece of ceramic has WHAT on it? I've never seen anything like what was described, so I go fish out the piece to see for myself. Sure enough, the description was accurate.
Next stop: Google.
Next stop: pick me up off the floor.
This particular item was made in a foreign country for, and only for, an export market that is literally on the other side of the world. I don't even know how to imagine it ended up where it did. Damn thing is, I'm going to have to come up with -something-! I have a feeling I'll be putting Occam to the test on this. Because there is no way the folks who lived at this location vacationed on that side of the world.
* Sure, whiteware dates after 1820 (as opposed to creamware, pearlware, and other types of refined earthenware bodies). But if there is any design on the piece, and sometimes based on form, it is possible to get a tighter date. For example, the technology to paint ceramics in bright colors (chrome colors) was only developed circa 1830, and caught on pretty damn quickly. Prior to that, there was no true black, and colors were kind of muddy (think painting watercolors with a dirty brush). So if you have muddy colors with no true black on a piece of whiteware ceramic, you know it dates after 1820 (for the whiteware body) and before 1830 (for the pre-chrome colors).
So I'm going through an artifact catalog for one of my projects. I generally don't catalog my own artifacts; that's done by folks down in the lab. When they're done, I go over the catalogs pretty thoroughly right off the bat, looking for duplicate entries, spelling issues, formatting weirdness, put together a reference list, pick out things I know I'll want to have a closer look at, identify things that need to be dated or dated more closely, etc.* This gives me a sense of what the artifact assemblage looks like for the whole project, and gives me a chance to make some big-picture and more detailed connections between and among contexts (excavation units, shovel tests, soil layers). It's picky and time consuming, but pays off in the long run.
Lalala, messing with a catalog of a few thousand artifacts, some interesting stuff, I'll have to get the faunal folks to look at these bones for foodways info, wow, lots of nails, nothing jumping out at me in particular... until BOOM. WTF is this really weird entry? That piece of ceramic has WHAT on it? I've never seen anything like what was described, so I go fish out the piece to see for myself. Sure enough, the description was accurate.
Next stop: Google.
Next stop: pick me up off the floor.
This particular item was made in a foreign country for, and only for, an export market that is literally on the other side of the world. I don't even know how to imagine it ended up where it did. Damn thing is, I'm going to have to come up with -something-! I have a feeling I'll be putting Occam to the test on this. Because there is no way the folks who lived at this location vacationed on that side of the world.
* Sure, whiteware dates after 1820 (as opposed to creamware, pearlware, and other types of refined earthenware bodies). But if there is any design on the piece, and sometimes based on form, it is possible to get a tighter date. For example, the technology to paint ceramics in bright colors (chrome colors) was only developed circa 1830, and caught on pretty damn quickly. Prior to that, there was no true black, and colors were kind of muddy (think painting watercolors with a dirty brush). So if you have muddy colors with no true black on a piece of whiteware ceramic, you know it dates after 1820 (for the whiteware body) and before 1830 (for the pre-chrome colors).
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Read This: The Value of Sheet Middens on 19th Century Sites
This is the first post in what I anticipate will be a series of "Read This" posts. This series will include summaries of articles or books that offer what I think are good, new approaches to something; super syntheses of a particular topic; or that simply rocked my socks.* Definitions of assorted terms flagged with asterisks are jammed down at the bottom of the post.
Decoding the Message in the Midden: What Can Nineteenth-Century Sheet Refuse Tell Us? by Nina M. Versaggi.
Published in "Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Domestic Site Archaeology in New York State" (2000), edited by John P. Hart and Charles L. Fisher, New York State Museum bulletin 495. University of the State of New York, New York State Education Department, Albany, New York.
Click here for Worldcat Bibliographic Information
Click here for the full volume in pdf format (and KUDOS to the New York State Museum for making their publications available free, online).
Historical archaeologists run into sheet middens** all the time. Even on sites with pit middens, we often find areas of sheet midden deposits. One place these turn up is outside doorways, where household sweepings are pushed out the door, rather than picked up and deposited elsewhere.
Versaggi argues that many sheet middens have high analytical potential. Most often, sheet midden deposits are dismissed by archaeologists as random, temporally mixed***, secondary deposits**** of stuff with no or minimal analytical value -- i.e. nothing beyond "yup, someone at this site, at some point in time, used this thingy, broke it, and threw it out. Can't tell you who or exactly when though."
So who cares? Well, she argues, if you're on a site with no subsurface features (like wells, cisterns, foundations) or excavating a site where the project boundaries do not encompass such features, a sheet midden may be all you get to assess the significance of the site.***** Versaggi also argues that, in prehistoric contexts, "artifact scatters are accepted as a source of information on community organization, refuse disposal patterns, technology, and household activities" (p. 46). Why not in historical archaeology?
Why not, indeed. She argues that structural and other shaft features are nice, and can provide tons of good information, but that the behavior that produces them are unique events, and do not necessarily tell us about everyday lives. Sheet middens, however, created during the relatively mundane disposal of daily trash, can:
She is clear that sheet middens don't trump other site features; rather, that
Versaggi goes on to describe the attributes of sheet middens that contribute to their research value: spatial (artifact density and dispersion); temporal (age, and controlling for accumulation over time); composition (what's in it); context (intra- and inter-site). Although all of these inter-relate and play off one another in practice, breaking them out for discussion in the article is very helpful. In each case, examples of the type of information available (and how to get at it) are given. What struck me was the amount of information about site use, ideology, and changing activity areas across a site that can be teased out of close-interval shovel test pits (i.e. 15 foot interval), with a little planning, even at the Phase I level******. This includes identifying sheet middens used to dispose of different things (domestic vs. food vs. architectural materials) in different areas of the site; of changing ideals regarding refuse disposal (front yard vs. side yard; sheet midden vs. pit); of different class ideals regarding refuse disposal; etc.
The article finishes with a case study, and then a comparative study between the site in the case study and several other sites in New York state. The comparison, based only on information from sheet middens, spanned several types of sites: rural landowner elite, rural landowner middle class, urban landowner elite, urban renter middle class, and rural lower class farm labor. The discussions of the similarities and differences between and among these sites is compelling. The table used to present the data is straightforward, and its organization and categories can easily be adapted/implemented for use with other sheet middens.
Overall, I find Versaggi's argument persuasive. The examples she provides are of middens where the "message" is worth decoding. I'm convinced that some sheet middens can have real potential to get at significant information about a site. The problem, which she identifies, is how do we know when to spend the time to tease out the message? Phase I budges are often extremely tight; creating distribution maps and vessel analysis is expensive. But if the information is there, particularly if it's all you've got for a site, then it becomes important to tease it out to determine if further work is necessary. Also, if the potential isn't there, it's important to know that too!
I think the article has value in thinking about the results of Phase I shovel test pits and assessing "yard scatter." It also has value in considering testing strategies and placement/intervals of Phase I shovel test pits. I think that the real value of this approach, though, is at later stages of more intensive excavation. Versaggi provides a cost-effective methodology and framework for excavating, assessing, and analyzing sheet middens. It is also at these later stages of analysis that comparisons with other sites become important.
I have a site in mind that I think this approach could be gangbusters. It's a rural, late 18th century farmstead that appears to have been relatively un-messed with for the last 200 years or so. Fingers crossed, I get to take a run at it! If not this site, another. I'm curious to put this into practice.
(One pet-peeve about the article, directed at the editors/publisher: I hate bibliographies that only give authors' initials, instead of full first names.)
* I was going to limit it to archaeological works, but knowing me, I'd violate that in the very next post. So, there is no subject limitation.
** Middens = accumulations of garbage/refuse. Sheet middens are scatters of trash, often in very thin layers, found across sites. Before there was municipal garbage collection, trash had to be disposed of in other ways. Some folks dug holes (pits) to dump their trash in; others scattered it on the ground surface (sheet middens); others used animals, like pigs (into the twentieth century, even!). If you were lucky, you had a hole previously used for another purpose (like a well or privy) that you could fill in.
*** Temporally mixed = things from different time periods. Deposits that include artifacts from several different time periods are problematic, because they do not (easily) give us information about a particular occupation of a site. It is also an indication that the deposit may be disturbed (i.e., may have had a groundhog dig willy-nilly through it), and so can no longer provide good information.
**** Secondary deposit = something that was initially left in one place, then moved. When it gets moved, it loses the contextual information from its initial deposit. It's why bodies that have been moved from where they were murdered are such a pain for investigators.
***** Site significance has to do with its potential to provide information of value. It is assessed using criteria set out for listing sites in the National Register of Historic Places. Archaeological sites generally fall under Criteria D.
****** Phase I investigations include documentary research and limited excavations to determine if a site is present in a particular area. Excavations usually are limited to shovel test pits; in my part of the world, these are dug with a garden spade. They are generally 1 foot in diameter, and are excavated until natural, undisturbed soils are encountered.
Decoding the Message in the Midden: What Can Nineteenth-Century Sheet Refuse Tell Us? by Nina M. Versaggi.
Published in "Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Domestic Site Archaeology in New York State" (2000), edited by John P. Hart and Charles L. Fisher, New York State Museum bulletin 495. University of the State of New York, New York State Education Department, Albany, New York.
Click here for Worldcat Bibliographic Information
Click here for the full volume in pdf format (and KUDOS to the New York State Museum for making their publications available free, online).
Historical archaeologists run into sheet middens** all the time. Even on sites with pit middens, we often find areas of sheet midden deposits. One place these turn up is outside doorways, where household sweepings are pushed out the door, rather than picked up and deposited elsewhere.
Versaggi argues that many sheet middens have high analytical potential. Most often, sheet midden deposits are dismissed by archaeologists as random, temporally mixed***, secondary deposits**** of stuff with no or minimal analytical value -- i.e. nothing beyond "yup, someone at this site, at some point in time, used this thingy, broke it, and threw it out. Can't tell you who or exactly when though."
So who cares? Well, she argues, if you're on a site with no subsurface features (like wells, cisterns, foundations) or excavating a site where the project boundaries do not encompass such features, a sheet midden may be all you get to assess the significance of the site.***** Versaggi also argues that, in prehistoric contexts, "artifact scatters are accepted as a source of information on community organization, refuse disposal patterns, technology, and household activities" (p. 46). Why not in historical archaeology?
Why not, indeed. She argues that structural and other shaft features are nice, and can provide tons of good information, but that the behavior that produces them are unique events, and do not necessarily tell us about everyday lives. Sheet middens, however, created during the relatively mundane disposal of daily trash, can:
As anthropologically-trained archaeologists, a good part of our research mission is to learn about the everyday aspects of cultures, and sheet midden is an essential part of this. (p. 46)
She is clear that sheet middens don't trump other site features; rather, that
all modifications to a domestic landscape need to be assessed as important analytical components of a behavioral and ideological system (p. 46; emphasis mine).
Versaggi goes on to describe the attributes of sheet middens that contribute to their research value: spatial (artifact density and dispersion); temporal (age, and controlling for accumulation over time); composition (what's in it); context (intra- and inter-site). Although all of these inter-relate and play off one another in practice, breaking them out for discussion in the article is very helpful. In each case, examples of the type of information available (and how to get at it) are given. What struck me was the amount of information about site use, ideology, and changing activity areas across a site that can be teased out of close-interval shovel test pits (i.e. 15 foot interval), with a little planning, even at the Phase I level******. This includes identifying sheet middens used to dispose of different things (domestic vs. food vs. architectural materials) in different areas of the site; of changing ideals regarding refuse disposal (front yard vs. side yard; sheet midden vs. pit); of different class ideals regarding refuse disposal; etc.
The article finishes with a case study, and then a comparative study between the site in the case study and several other sites in New York state. The comparison, based only on information from sheet middens, spanned several types of sites: rural landowner elite, rural landowner middle class, urban landowner elite, urban renter middle class, and rural lower class farm labor. The discussions of the similarities and differences between and among these sites is compelling. The table used to present the data is straightforward, and its organization and categories can easily be adapted/implemented for use with other sheet middens.
Overall, I find Versaggi's argument persuasive. The examples she provides are of middens where the "message" is worth decoding. I'm convinced that some sheet middens can have real potential to get at significant information about a site. The problem, which she identifies, is how do we know when to spend the time to tease out the message? Phase I budges are often extremely tight; creating distribution maps and vessel analysis is expensive. But if the information is there, particularly if it's all you've got for a site, then it becomes important to tease it out to determine if further work is necessary. Also, if the potential isn't there, it's important to know that too!
I think the article has value in thinking about the results of Phase I shovel test pits and assessing "yard scatter." It also has value in considering testing strategies and placement/intervals of Phase I shovel test pits. I think that the real value of this approach, though, is at later stages of more intensive excavation. Versaggi provides a cost-effective methodology and framework for excavating, assessing, and analyzing sheet middens. It is also at these later stages of analysis that comparisons with other sites become important.
I have a site in mind that I think this approach could be gangbusters. It's a rural, late 18th century farmstead that appears to have been relatively un-messed with for the last 200 years or so. Fingers crossed, I get to take a run at it! If not this site, another. I'm curious to put this into practice.
(One pet-peeve about the article, directed at the editors/publisher: I hate bibliographies that only give authors' initials, instead of full first names.)
* I was going to limit it to archaeological works, but knowing me, I'd violate that in the very next post. So, there is no subject limitation.
** Middens = accumulations of garbage/refuse. Sheet middens are scatters of trash, often in very thin layers, found across sites. Before there was municipal garbage collection, trash had to be disposed of in other ways. Some folks dug holes (pits) to dump their trash in; others scattered it on the ground surface (sheet middens); others used animals, like pigs (into the twentieth century, even!). If you were lucky, you had a hole previously used for another purpose (like a well or privy) that you could fill in.
*** Temporally mixed = things from different time periods. Deposits that include artifacts from several different time periods are problematic, because they do not (easily) give us information about a particular occupation of a site. It is also an indication that the deposit may be disturbed (i.e., may have had a groundhog dig willy-nilly through it), and so can no longer provide good information.
**** Secondary deposit = something that was initially left in one place, then moved. When it gets moved, it loses the contextual information from its initial deposit. It's why bodies that have been moved from where they were murdered are such a pain for investigators.
***** Site significance has to do with its potential to provide information of value. It is assessed using criteria set out for listing sites in the National Register of Historic Places. Archaeological sites generally fall under Criteria D.
****** Phase I investigations include documentary research and limited excavations to determine if a site is present in a particular area. Excavations usually are limited to shovel test pits; in my part of the world, these are dug with a garden spade. They are generally 1 foot in diameter, and are excavated until natural, undisturbed soils are encountered.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)