miles27 – Accidents in Archaeology

Final Post: Beyond the Binary

Over the course of this civic issues blog, I have done my best to introduce to you and explain the gender spectrum and impart the knowledge that gender is not a binary system and there is so much more than male and female. I have tried to make you aware of some of the struggles that nonbinary and non-cisgender individuals face on a daily basis. I have explained that a gender spectrum has important implications for the orientation spectrum as well.

Now, at the end of Beyond the Binary, I’d like to reiterate the most important points that I hope you take away from your experience reading this blog:

Gender identity is not a choice.
Gender identity is not constricted to a binary system of male and female.
Romantic orientation and sexual orientation also fall along a spectrum, as there are more than just two genders to which a person could feel attraction.
Nonbinary, trans*, and non-straight individuals face extreme prejudice, discrimination, abuse, and fear in their everyday lives.

There are also many things that I would have liked to write full posts about, but sadly there wasn’t enough time. So, at this point, I’ll leave you with little blurbs of things that I would also like readers of this blog to be aware of, and hopefully you’ll be interested enough to look into them for yourself! (link to a great blog that talks about some of these issues: whatdoesenbymean)

Now that issues of heteronormativity and gay rights have become more popular in the media, television shows have started to replace the trope of a token nonwhite character with that of a token gay character.
There is a huge difference between “gender” and “sex,” and these terms are not interchangeable. “Sex” refers to a person’s biological organs and “gender” refers to a person’s innate identity. Also, biological sex itself can fall on a spectrum. Different chromosomal combinations lead to people being born with combinations of reproductive organs associated with both “male” and “female,” so even biological sex can’t be considered a binary system.

Intersex – (noun) someone whose combination of chromosomes, gonads, hormones, internal sex organs, and genitals differs from the two expected patterns of male or female. In the medical care of infants the initialism DSD (“Differing/Disorders of Sex Development”). Formerly known as hermaphrodite (or hermaphroditic), but these terms are now considered outdated and derogatory.

The issue of LGBT+ rights was not solved with the legalization of same-sex marriage. We still have a long way to go in terms of recognizing the minorities in the LGBT+ community and establishing equal rights and equal respect for all people. The “big progress” of legalizing same-sex marriage is really just a small step in the big picture. Also: it’s not the legalization of “gay marriage,” it’s the legalization of “same-sex marriage.” Just because the people getting married are the same gender does not mean that either or both of them are gay.
We do have some good news! Some toy stores have started making efforts to remove gendered labels on their toys to allow all children to play with whatever toy they want.
And perhaps the issue I would have most liked to make a full post about: pronouns. Learn them, ask for them, respect them, use them. It doesn’t matter if it’s hard for you to ask or if it’s hard for you to remember. Make the effort. Don’t misgender someone because you don’t want to use their pronouns. Look at it from their point of view, and imagine what it’s like to go every single day of your life being referred to as something you’re not.

Above all: be respectful and, as cliché as it is, treat others how you would like to be treated. Accept people for their differences and accept them for who they are.

Because they can’t change.

This Blog May Be Over, But History Never Ends

It is with deep sorrow that I must begin the final post for Accidents in Archaeology. Throughout this semester, I have done my best to bring you interesting stories from the archaeological world in as amusing a way possible. And as much as I loved writing about all of the real-life plot twists, what really made it worth it was seeing everyone’s reactions to the post in the comments (s/o to my regular commenters).

If anything, I’d love to have inspired you to be more interested in archaeology and also to have taught you to never take things at face value. When you hear about a new archaeology discovery, always look at the sources. Who provided the data cited in the discovery? What tests were used to analyze the artifacts? How many times were the tests performed? Does the person who made the discovery stand to gain anything if a certain interpretation is made? Are there biases present in the conclusion?

For this final post, I’d like to sum up all of the lessons we’ve learned from the cases we’ve studied.

Lesson #1: Always check that the information you’re using is coming from credible sources and qualified experts with experience in their field. Don’t go off of hearsay or allow inexperienced wannabes excavate and draw conclusions about a site.

Lesson #2: Don’t base your conclusions on the modern cultural, racial, or gender stereotypes of your society or of the area you’re investigating. Don’t even base conclusions on the stereotypes of the time period you are investigating. There will always be deviations from the perceived norm and there will always be certain aspects of past societies that we are not aware of.

Lesson #3: Be ready for new discoveries to be found in unusual places, and found by unusual people (and badgers). **Disclaimer: always make sure to analyze discoveries by non-professionals. Honey badger don’t care if he’s wrong, but we do, so always run tests and dig more.

Lesson #4: Make sure that you have thoroughly tested your artifacts and sites for fraud before going public with your find, and always test your data multiple times. Many groups stand to gain a lot from fraudulent finds, and a lot of people get their kicks making fraudulent artifacts.

Lesson #5: Don’t assume that old data is true. Old data was found based on old methods and old technology, and the old methods often have errors that have been corrected in newer technologies. Always retest past conclusions when new technology becomes available to ensure that the information accepted. Also, be ready for your conclusions to be negated by future technology. Even as advanced as today’s technology is, there are still errors we are not aware of and cannot account for.

Lesson #6: Even with all of the technology and knowledge we have today, it’s still possible to lose things to history. Sometimes you just have to accept that there are some things we’ll never know—at least not in our lifetime.

With this, I send you on your way. Hopefully I’ve made some hobby archaeologists, or at least archaeology enthusiasts, out of some of you. Good luck in you future investigations! Stay skeptical!

The Stereotype About Nonbinary Identification

This week we get to the hard-hitting, makes-you-uncomfortable-that-people-think-that-way kind of stuff: how people who are nonbinary are perceived by people who don’t know much about the topic or don’t bother to learn more about the topic once they’ve established their opinion. The viewpoint of these people is probably one of the most confounding, ungrounded views I’ve ever come across: they think that people who are nonbinary or trans* along the male/female binary are simply labeling themselves as such to gain attention.

I’m going to try to keep this neutral.

First things first, I would like to reiterate what I’ve said in previous posts: gender identity and orientation are not a conscious decision, they are not a choice, and if they fluctuate it is never on purpose.

This fact is the first point that conflicts with the popular stereotype. The idea that people deviate from the so-called “gender norm” on purpose is completely false. No one can choose their gender identity, and the repercussions and consequences that come with identifying as a gender that falls outside the binary male/female are too great to face on a whim. As much as I wish it were different, a person’s gender still largely dictates how they can act, what they can wear, and what they can do in today’s society without being ostracized. When a person figures out that they do not identify with the publicly accepted male/female system, they have to deal with the fact that clothes, behaviorisms, and even body language that are accepted and categorized by the majority are no longer completely applicable to them. Suddenly, they are faced with finding a mix or a happy medium or some combination of whatever makes them feel most natural and most like their outside reflects their inside, and most of the time the end result falls outside of societal “norms.” No one would choose to go through this experience.

The second point that conflicts with the stereotype is the fact that the majority of society is still largely unaware of or very prejudiced against a nonbinary gender spectrum. A lot of people today still attack, both verbally and physically, that which does not conform to their idea of what is acceptable. The majority of people who identify as nonbinary have experienced verbal and physical abuse, and this happens even without a formal statement from their person establishing their identity. They also have to face purposeful misgendering when people knowingly or unknowingly use the incorrect pronouns, or even worse: use “it.”

Even if a person who is nonbinary chooses not to identify themselves to others—which is a valid decision—many times their outward behavior or appearance still singles them out as different, and people attack. People have been beaten; harassed; assaulted verbally, physically, and sexually; denied medical care; raped; murdered; and even driven to suicide.

And now I ask you: who would voluntarily choose to go through that?

Identifying as nonbinary is not a cry for attention. It is not a choice. It is not always something that a person wants to do and they may deny it their whole life.

When a person publicly identifies as nonbinary, accept it for what it is: the truth. And when they do, support them and educate yourself so that hopefully their public transition may be easier than so many of the others who tried and have since lost their lives.

(lgbthealthwellness.files.wordpress.com)

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_towards_non-binary_gender_persons
http://nonbinary.org/wiki/Research
http://nonbinary.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_nonbinary_gender_people#Nonbinary_erasure
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kelsie-brynn-jones/when-being-trans-is-not-t_b_6340728.html

Stop Badgering Me, I Get It, You’re Important

Here’s a new one for you: a badger in Germany has quite possibly found one of the last pagan burials in Brandenburg. That’s right folks, nature’s furry backhoe is the star of this one.

On a farm in the town of Stolpe in Brandenburg, a badger dug its home and found much more than dirt and grubs: a 12th-century burial site of two members of an ancient social elite. Now, being a badger, it did nothing about the find and simply lived among the artifacts for a few years. Humans were not made aware of the odd interior decoration until 2012 when the owners of the farm wandered near the badger hole while planning a site for their art exhibition. Lars Wilhelm and Hendrikje Ring, two sculptors with a fortunate pastime of hobby archaeology, saw an obviously human pelvic bone outside the whole that had been dug up by the badger. Most people would probably be quite horrified by this, but as a field of ancient graves had been discovered near the farm in the 1960s, the find was not much of a surprise to Wilhelm and Ring.

The two men then “pushed a camera into the badger’s sett and took photos by remote control [and] found pieces of jewelry, retrieved them, and contacted the authorities.” After they presented their discovery, archeologists began an excavation of the site (don’t worry, the badger had been long gone by the time Wilhelm and Ring found the bone). They uncovered eight graves from the first half of the 12th century, and two of those graves are believed to contain the remains of Slavic chieftains.

The two lords’ graves had bronze bowls at their feet that would have been used for washing their hands before meals. Other artifacts found include an arrow head, a bronze buckle with snake heads at each end, and a double-edged sword almost a meter long.

One of the lords was especially well preserved, and based on the multiple sword and lance wounds on the bones and the healed fracture that may have been caused by falling from a horse archaeologists believe that the lord was a great warrior. The cause of death was not discernible, but Thomas Kersting (archaeologist at Brandenburg Department for Monument Protection helping with the excavation) remarked that the warrior must have been a pretty tough guy; the stature of the skeleton shows that he was relatively small, but healed sword wounds on the skull show that he survived many vicious attacks.

Next to the warrior lord is a female skeleton, believed to be his wife. What is remarkable about this body is that she had a coin in her mouth, which was in accordance with “the ancient rite to pay the ferryman for passage over the Styx into the realm of the dead.” This evidence of pre-Christian pagan rituals is especially interesting because the area of Germany in which the graves were found was thoroughly Christianized by the 12th century. According to this, the sort-of-archaeologist badger deserves great recognition, both for the fact that graves such as these had never been found before in Brandenburg and for the fact that the graves are quite possibly the last pagan burial in the area.

You go, badger. Too bad you didn’t stick around to get the glory.

Eurasian Badger Relaxing (eveningharold.com)

Sources:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/70412/10-amazing-archaeological-finds-discovered-ordinary-people-and-one-badger
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/badger-discovers-medieval-tomb-in-germany-a-916305.html

Let Me Pencil That In As “Racist Archaeology”

This one isn’t so much a tale of accidents in archaeology as it is an example of blatant racism, white-supremacist thinking, and complete idiocy in archaeology. It’s also a perfect example of the incomprehensible need to rewrite history to glorify one’s ancestors and beliefs.

The long-abandoned site known as Great Zimbabwe lies in what is now southeastern modern Zimbabwe. After its construction some time between 1200 and 1400 CE, the city served as the capital to a large and complex local civilization. Great Zimbabwe is best characterized by its high stone walls up to 30 feet tall surrounding the main area of the city and creating several enclosures within. These walls were built without mortar—but they still stand today—and are adorned with soapstone bird sculptures. In their entirety, the hilltop palace and surrounding city covered about 1800 acres and would have had the capacity to house more than 10,000 people before it was abandoned around 1500 (likely due to famine). And contrary to initial beliefs, this city was completely untouched by European influence.

An aerial view of Great Zimbabwe (image credit: http://www.xceptionalsafaris.co.za/uploads/pics/Great-Zimbabwe-National-Monument.jpg)

However, the inhabitants of Great Zimbabwe were by no means isolated. Discoveries made during the excavation of the site revealed evidence of trade with many cultures. Among the artifacts were pottery shards, gold working equipment, ironware, Arab coins, Chinese porcelain, and Persian beads. The traders that did business with the inhabitants of Great Zimbabwe spread tales of the city to other populations. This gave rise to many speculations and myths; some thought it was a biblical city built by the Queen of Sheba, and others thought it was the seat of a mythological Christian ruler named Prester John.

In 1871, the first of the idiots arrived at Great Zimbabwe. Karl Mauch, a “German Indiana Jones type,” came with a preconceived notion that the remains belonged to a civilized (read: white) society. In what may be the most poorly-founded conclusion ever seen in archaeology, Mauch concluded that since the hue of the wooden crossbeams matched that of his pencil, the wood used in the crossbeams must be cedar from Lebanon. He then used this conclusion to hypothesize that the Queen of Sheba once lived in Great Zimbabwe.

View from inside the walls of the main palace city structure (image credit: http://images.travelpod.com/tw_slides/ta01/497/5ce/7-great-zimbabwe-ruins-masvingo.jpg)

This theory caught on with Cecil Rhodes, head of the British South Africa Company, who funded another investigation of the site—to be led by James Bent, another idiot. Bent concluded that the city was built by a prehistoric northern race from Arabia. Next we come to idiot number four, arguably (or in my opinion, conclusively) the biggest idiot of all. Richard Hall, a local journalist—let me reiterate: a local journalist—began “excavating” the site. Instead of preserving it, he dug up a 3 to 12 foot layer of archaeological evidence across the site to remove “the filth and decadence of the Kaffir occupation.” He completely ignored every archaeological protocol that has been put in place to preserve evidence, disregarding stratification and disposing of artifacts.

This magnificent display of imbecility left very little for actually qualified scientists to use in future analyses. Luckily, in the first scientific excavation of the site from 1905 to 1906, David McIver was able to conclude that the “mud dwellings within the stone enclosures were definitely African in origin and dated to the middle ages.” Later data found and presented in 1929 by archaeologist (look, an actual scientist!) Gertrude Caton-Thompson backed McIver’s claims and dated settlement of Great Zimbabwe to 1100 CE.

Great Zimbabwe, view of southeast wall of Great Enclosure taken in 1906 by David MacIver. (Wikimedia Commons/PD-1923).

But that just couldn’t be the end of it. Scholars continued to debate the origins of the site, some proposing inhabitants from Malay or Indonesia. The Rhodesian government in the 1960s suppressed archaeological theories of black settlement and any papers suggesting African origin had to “equally address the possibility of Phoenician or Semitic builders.” Finally, the myth of European origin was put to rest in 1973 when archaeologist (wow, another qualified scientist!) Peter Garlake wrote the definitive book on Great Zimbabwe and, once and for all, concluded that the city was founded not by whites, but by black Africans.

Source: http://the-sieve.com/2013/08/15/bad-archaeology-the-queen-of-sheba-and-a-water-park/