Week 6: Cave or Village? The Cuba Site Problem

Jumping right into this last week...

Wednesday 7/11
Started off the day by organizing my notes and questions to go over with Kara. While I was waiting for her to get around to talking with me, I did a little research on the problem sites in Cuba. In the ledger there were two sites with related NMAI numbers that did not have the same sites. The ledger sites stated the locality was at a village site and the NMAI record stated the locality was in a cave. I asked Pat the Site Master for help and she recommended I look into Mark R. Harrington's publication "Cuba Before Columbus."

After I looked through the book and the descriptions of the location of each site, I could not find anything that specified whether the specimens from Cuba were from a village or a cave. Instead, I left each locality as they were and noted the discrepancy between the conflicting information. I also had another problem with another site in Cuba and the Goat Island site in Jamaica from a few weeks ago. These sites were dealt with in the same way as the cave v. village site.

Next, I updated the records with the new sites that I had sent to Pat from the previous week. I finally got to meet with Kara after lunch to go over my notes that I had taken when she was gone. We went through each and updated the records as we went down the list. I finished up the day by entering 12 records.

Thursday 7/12 and Friday 7/13

On Thursday I entered the usual 40 records for the day. I also learned a new word: trephination or trephining as it was in the ledger. This word was used to described cut marks and a hole in the skull. The word is used to describe pre-modern or ancient surgery. Wikipedia describes it as the following: making a burr hole, is a surgical intervention in which a hole is drilled or scraped into the human skull, exposing the dura mater to treat health problems related to intracranial diseases. It may also refer to any "burr" hole created through other body surfaces, including nail beds. It is often used to relieve pressure beneath a surface. A trephine is an instrument used for cutting out a round piece of skull bone.

I left work around 3:30pm on Thursday to go to one of the NMNH's SIMA program lecture series in Museum Anthropology. The lecture was by Dr. Marit Munson of Trent University. Her lecture was titled “Art & Artifact: Archaeological Approaches to Material Culture.” Here is the details of the lecture:
        In anthropological collections, the divide between art and artifact is idiosyncratic and subjective, with a few select objects 'elevated' to the status of art-- and most relegated to mere artifact.  This act of naming goes beyond philosophical debates, as it has practical consequences for the ways that we view, handle, and ask questions of objects.  Drawing on examples from the US Southwest, I demonstrate how ideas of art vs. artifact have pushed research on rock art and kiva murals toward questions of iconography, symbolism, and meaning.  By casting these objects as art, archaeologists have neglected the more material questions routinely asked of other artifacts, such as raw material sources, production sequences, and labor investment.  I illustrate the differing insights that come from each line of inquiry, arguing that researchers need to consider objects' potential as artifacts and as art if we wish to more fully understand the past.

Friday was pretty low-key. I entered another 40 or so records and am now at record number 300!