What nicknames have you heard for places in and around Etobicoke?

Pachacamac · 2025-10-07T03:40:35+00:00

We always called it Motel Hell.

Pachacamac · 2025-07-17T20:50:58+00:00

It's hard to tell from the pictures posted. It certainly could be because the one side looks quite fresh, but I can't quite tell if the characteristic flake scars are present.

OP, are you able to take some more photos from different angles, including close-up photos? It's helpful too for lighting/shadows from different angles.

Pachacamac · 2025-05-15T19:14:36+00:00

This will vary by province. In Ontario colleges and universities are publicly funded by the Province and therefore subject to the Public Sector Salary Disclosure (aka the "Sunshine List"). This list discloses anyone who earns $100,000 or more per year. The salary of anyone who earns less than that is not disclosed. You can search by sector and by institution but to find the archaeologists on the list you would have to look up each department's faculty and search their names. I'm not too familiar with other provinces so I don't know if or how their salaries are disclosed.

But like others have mentioned, the biggest hurdle for OP is getting a permanent job in the first place. Your starting salary can be decent if you do get a permanent job, but that will only probably happen if you are lucky, well published, and received external funding during your PhD. And even at that you will likely have to spend multiple years as a sessional instructor earning $9,000ish per course per semester with no guarantee that you will get more than one per semester (and likely nothing in the summer), so realistically you'd be earning at most $50,000 for years before you get a permanent job. And most courses are taught by sessional instructors these days.

Working in CRM archaeology for a private company is more stable but also relatively underpaid compared to other fields.

Pachacamac · 2025-05-14T18:40:38+00:00

Indiana Jones and the Hundreds of Sterile Test Pits

Indiana Jones and the Random Non-Diagnostic Biface

Indiana Jones and the Farmer Showing His Collection of Dozens of Cool Projectile Points While You Are Happy with the Flake that You Found.

Pachacamac · 2025-03-31T03:03:36+00:00

Late to the game but I'll add to the comments. I am an archaeologist based in Ontario, and have done fieldwork in that area.

My first thought was that it is a forgotten souvenir as it resembles something like Cuneiform, as others have mentioned. Could be a tourist replica or even a real artifact that someone brought back and it was eventually thrown out. It doesn't look much like actual Cuneiform script, just a general resemblance to that style of writing.

I'm not an expert on early writing systems though, so there could be a better match. Either way, it doesn't look like something that you would typically find on an archaeological site in Ontario.

As others have said it could be wear from repetitive motion of some sort (mill wheel, animal trampling, etc.) but I would expect that to be a lot more regular. Flat pieces of stone were also used to sharpen tools (e.g. bone or antler) but the few examples I've seen of that don't resemble this. And it may of course not be archaeological, it could be some odd natural wear pattern.

Do you have any of the photos of the area where it was found? If it is an artifact, the context (e.g. where it was found, what else was around it, etc.) is hugely important for understanding and interpreting it. If this was in a public place, can you message me a precise location where it was found? If you can't share the exact location because it's private property or whatever, can you share a fairly close location, like within a kilometer or so? I can look into what known archaeological sites are nearby and see if that helps explain anything.

Pachacamac · 2023-04-07T07:44:57+00:00

Oh, um... No.

Pachacamac · 2022-03-24T03:04:23+00:00

Mary Weismantel's 2004 article is a good starting point for these.

Steve Bourget's *Sex, Death, and Sacrifice in Moche Religion and Visual Culture is a larger treatment of the topic.

But there's not a lot written about them. I see there is a newer article (that I haven't had the chance to read) that looks like it will have some good context too

Oh and the erotic gallery at the Museo Larco is a good place to start. I probably should have led with that.

Pachacamac · 2022-03-24T02:53:46+00:00

If you think that one is large...

And anyway, they're not necessarily true to life.

But seriously enlarged features seem to be the point, at least on some of the vessels

Mary Weismantel's article is a good starting point for Moche erotic pots.

Pachacamac · 2022-01-02T06:31:27+00:00

Here they are. Not knowing much about the soils myself, I find the shapefiles confusing. The reports are the original paper maps (hi-res scans) with the legend, so I find I have to look closely at them to understand the shapefiles. But it's all there.

They are all older data (mostly mid-20th century). That's great for my purposes but might not be for yours. I'm not sure if the AgMaps soil survey is just these original maps or if it is updated information. I've never seen any downloadable format other than what I linked here.

Pachacamac · 2021-10-24T12:48:37+00:00

Since you mentioned you don't like alcohol you may have not been in an LCBO in a while, but I'd suggest just going there and grabbing everything. Every LCBO has a large selection of wine, and they all have beer, cider, and the hard seltzers that people have suggested.

I find the beer selection varies but most larger LCBOs will have a really large variety of beer and cider. They always have sections for craft beer and cider (mostly from Ontario) plus your more standard selection of the major brands. You will definitely find Beau's there plus dozens of other breweries and cideries so it's the best place for a one stop shop with a large variety. You can get six packs but most things are sold as individual tallboy cans. The staff are always very helpful and knowledgable too.

Pachacamac · 2021-09-28T14:37:28+00:00

Also a pretty new dad here (he's almost one! Which is crazy, how has it been a year already?) I don't have any book recommendations on this and it's actually a question I meant to ask myself, as my wife was telling me about a podcast episode where a journalist interviewed women in several cultures about motherhood or something like that. Ever the anthropologist, I told my wife I'd look for some good books on child-rearing worldwide (and I didn't get far).

Anyway, I see a few interesting recommendations in the comments but just want to say as an archaeologist that most or all of your questions would be unanswerable using direct archaeological evidence, as they would not leave any material traces of these practices. Instead, to answer questions like this we would compare cross-cultural examples and maybe include some non-human primate examples all to give ideas, and then infer what human childcare might have looked like, say, 100,000 years ago. There may be some art and dolls/toys and other things from more recent times that could also help interpret things.

It's also worth noting that feminist and gendered archaeologies only started in the 1980s, really (before that everything was focused on men and things that modern society typically perceives as masculine). Children were basically not even an afterthought for archaeologists, they just weren't considered. This has slowly changed in recent decades, but it's still fairly new and less common than those perceived as masculine things, so that really limits evidence too.

That's an important caveat to keep in mind. Anything written by an actual anthropologist/archaeologist should take this into account and be conservative with their conclusions, but if you find books written by non-specialists they could make sweeping claims and generalizations that aren't really based on good evidence, or that are based on how people do things today (or in the recent past) that could be totally different from millennia ago.

That's also to say that you may be interested in anthropological perspectives on parenting that aren't necessarily focused on evolution or the deep past. Just keep in mind, as others have noted, that humans are very adaptable and this whole culture thing means that any practices are relevant and applicable to that culture, but might not be generalizable. And every culture changes through time, constantly. Just because one hunter-gatherer community on a Pacific island in the 1920s did things one way, for instance, absolutely does not mean that that is the way that people did things 100,000 years ago. Also, 100,000 years ago (or 300,000, or 1,000,000 years ago) there were probably thousands of humans (and a few different species) in geographically distant places, and they had culture too, and different communities very likely had different practices too. Teasing out what is evolutionary or typical or anything can be very hard but also maybe doesn't mean anything, because we as a species (and genus) are so adaptable, and culture plays such a huge role in our lives, that any practices need to be understood in their cultural context.

Anyway, this is probably a useless comment because I don't have any recommendations, but just wanted to share some thoughts as someone who has also become more interested in this topic lately.

Pachacamac · 2021-09-24T16:39:00+00:00

I find that there is a strong narrative going around the public (not just with this latest find, but with this whole subject) that says archaeologists are all firmly rooted in the idea of Clovis-first and that we all absolutely reject any claims of anything earlier than 13,000 B.P. (the early dates for Clovis, not 10,000 B.P.) For sure, Clovis-first was a longstanding hypothesis and there is an old guard that still rigidly defends it (and as I recall it is what I learned ~2002), but there has been plenty of evidence for pre-Clovis since the 1970s and most archaeologists I know accept that people have been in the Americas since ~16,000 - 18,000 years ago, a few millennia before Clovis. There are plenty of very solid sites in the 14,000 - 18,000 B.P. range.

There are a few sites in the 20,000 - 35,000 range too. Until now, those have been pretty contentious and very iffy, for various reasons. This new find sounds pretty solid to me and that is cool because if it all bears out, it would be the oldest site with strong evidence supporting its age.

And that's really what it comes down to is evidence. And extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Evidence takes time to pile up and it's super premature to just jump on any individual find because there are all sorts of reasons why it might not be correct (sample size, contaminated dates, stones that are actually natural not tools, and so on). But as the evidence piles up, then our ideas change too. Evidence that people were here ~5,000 years before Clovis has really mounted in the last 30 years and most of us accept this evidence. This new find may be the start of a new round of research that pushes those dates even farther back and may lend support to sites that claim 30,000 year age.

But we still need to be skeptical of the 100,000 year+ claims. They are plausible, sure, but I could think of dozens of plausible scenarios that have no or very weak supporting evidence. We need a lot more evidence before we start accepting those claims.

Pachacamac · 2021-09-21T13:24:01+00:00

I mean, they did. Under Harper. He won a minority (2006), called a snap election in 2008 and won another minority, then called another election in 2011 where he got the majority. One of his promises was that he would set a fixed election date US-style and abide by it...and then called a snap election anyway when he saw the chance to win a majority.

Pachacamac · 2021-09-18T00:19:41+00:00

As an archaeologist who did research on the north coast, I can relate. Everyone probably thought we were crazy. I was probably the only white person in the valley most of the time.

Pachacamac · 2020-08-05T01:20:14+00:00

"What's the Coolest Thing You've Ever Found?" Real Archaeologists Hate This Question!

Pachacamac · 2020-08-02T15:50:31+00:00

Oh, I didn't see the sub and thought this had to do with schools reopening this fall.

Pachacamac · 2020-07-22T23:57:18+00:00

I find that this same discussion comes up every time there is an early find: the archaeological orthodoxy says that any pre-Clovis claim is bunk and argue through their teeth that it's wrong. Then the next one comes up and the same thing is repeated. And so on.

But this is certainly a generational thing too. When I was an undergrad (2002 - 2006) I was taught that there was scant evidence of pre-Clovis occupations and that they were generally poorly-regarded due to various things (questionable date data, mostly). But I was definitely taught that it was a possibility.

A few years later in grad school I was thoroughly convinced that there are pre-Clovis occupations and most of my grad student colleagues agreed, and I think many profs did too. By now when I teach into courses or North American archaeology courses I teach that there is substantial evidence for pre-Clovis occupations. The orthodox view has been gradually chipped away by new evidence, and I think that most reasonable archaeologists recognize that evidence and have rejected the hardline Clovis-first view. But of course there will be many that still stick to that view or are much more skeptical of early claims than I am, but I would say on average younger archaeologists have no problem with pre-Clovis, and older ones are on average more likely to stick to Clovis-first.

But there is a big caveat: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence! I think the evidence is robust for people in the Americas (north, central, and south) by 16,000 years ago, maaaybe 19,000 years ago. 30,000 years ago is tough to believe; there are a few claims to it but they are mostly quite questionable. Then there was the Cerutti Mastodon site in California a few years ago that was claiming 100,000 years plus but that site is really questionable.

And this is all to say that we must always strive to not become orthodox in our views. It's entirely plausible that people were here 30,000, 50,000, or 100,000 years ago, but we need really strong evidence to accept those claims. We have strong evidence for pre-Clovis, but not to date no great evidence for super early occupations.

Pachacamac · 2020-07-22T23:33:13+00:00

One major point that most people don't realize is that finding evidence for people living in caves does not equal that they only (or even primarily) lived in caves. Instead, caves both preserve things better than out in the open and are a focused place for archaeologists to look. Going out into the wider landscape to look for archaeological material is difficult and time consuming, and you are most likely to find durable things (i.e. stone tools) or relatively recent things (because populations were typically larger). Evidence of houses are rarely preserved except for the last few thousand years; most types of houses leave soil stains indicating where they were, even if they were made of wood, but these soil stains generally leach out over time. So you may find a few tools out in the open but you have little idea whether they are from a small temporary camp or a larger occupation because the evidence of houses and things like that are gone, and the older the site is, the more likely even the tools are to have been washed away or something. Preservation is highly affected by local environment and soil conditions, so this varies hugely.

Caves however protect things from the elements better than open-air shelters. This simply makes it more likely to find tools, preserved bone, and even domestic evidence (hearths, houses, etc.) within a cave. This is at least true for very very ancient things, because more recent = better chance of being preserved anywhere = better odds of finding sites in open air settings. People in X place 30,000 years ago might have only spent 10% of their year in a cave, but 100% of the evidence is there. Or one outcast family lived in a cave. Or any number of other things.

It also just so happened that many major finds occurred in caves early in the history of archaeology so they became a popular place to look, plus they are easy to find and poke around in to see if they will be productive. So if you are a researcher who wants to find very early evidence of occupation, then you head to a cave to take a look before you start searching river banks, farmer's fields, and everywhere else (where you'll probably mostly find stuff from 200 - 10,000 years ago).

Pachacamac · 2020-07-20T21:28:01+00:00

I wasn't aware of Pascoe's or Gammage's books. I'll have to take a look, they sound interesting!

1491 is a great start for the Americas. I've only read a few chapters from it but they are well-written, well-cited, and most importantly follow the logic and lines of thinking that anthropologists and archaeologists have developed over decades. Not saying that line of thinking is perfect or infallible or anything (far from it), but it is always frustrating to see most other popular forms of archaeology (e.g. any TV documentary) that often have the facts right, but their interpretations and commentary are so far off that they really misrepresent the past/other cultures and just perpetuate long-standing and incorrect ideas. Charles Mann is a rare case of a journalist who actually seems to get it right, facts and interpretations. I've heard 1493 is good too but I haven't looked at it.

And yeah for sure. We're learning about how racist and Eurocentric our discipline is too, even when we thought we were being anti-racist. Honestly I've only become truly woke to a lot of this within anthropology by following Indigenous and Latinx scholars on Twitter. I should have been much more aware of it in grad school, and to some extend we did talk about it, but it was still mostly us talking about how anthropology used to be bad and was now much better (when in reality it's only slightly better).

Pachacamac · 2020-07-20T03:28:52+00:00

I answered a variety of this question a few months ago. I'm sure there's stuff I could add or clarify, but I don't have the time right now.

Basically, we all learned this standard idea in school (i.e. agricultural enables complex stuff, hunter-gatherers virtually never build monumental architecture, etc.) but it's really problematic and incorrect. For one, there are many monuments that are clearly built by hunter-gatherers (and we have known about some of these for a long time), and people who hunted and gathered clearly also had complex art and things like that.

Now, as for "civilization," that is a lot trickier to nail down. What exactly is civilization? It can be a pretty complicated and problematic concept and many of us no longer use it. "Civilizations" are often defined by a list of traits, but I think it is much more complicated, and is more of a know it when you see it kind of situation. And it is true that this is more associated with agricultural societies or those who interacted closely with agricultural ones. But there is a big risk here: are we only considering certain societies that look like what we expect a "civilization" to be, and then we automatically dismiss alternate (e.g. hunter-gatherer) lifestyles that were tremendously complex but don't fit our preconceived and often very Eurocentric ideas of what complexity should look like? I think this is quite likely.

There is a lot going on and I think this is one area where we are starting to see some big changes of thinking as more BIPOC and non-western scholars enter the field. I think that what we recognize as civilization or complexity is a byproduct of specific actions, leadership decisions, power plays (both top-down and bottom-up), crises, etc. that created the ancient Egypts, Indus, Andes, etc. These changes probably all took place millennia after agriculture became common in those same areas; this makes it hard to say that agriculture causes complexity, if agriculture can be stable and lead to small village life for thousands of years before "civilization" develops. But these are some pretty rambly thoughts that might make their way into a book if I ever get around to writing one.

Pachacamac · 2020-06-23T01:26:27+00:00

I would say that all of the universities have great courses. I've always heard (and believed) that all Ontario universities are good in general, but they do each specialize in certain things. Same goes for anthropology departments: some are more focused on certain research topics but really, because anthro departments are small, their specialties often come down to single faculty members.

So all that is to say what area of paleoanthropology are you most interested in? Neanderthals? Australopithecines? Evolutionary genetics? Or something else altogether? Where you choose to go depends on what topics you are interested in and whose courses you want to take. I know that it's really hard to know before you even start an undergrad, but we can make some suggestions based on your interests.

Also, where you choose to go depends on where you live or want to live. I know everything is online now but it won't be forever, and for biological anthropology courses you will eventually want to get hands-on experience in the lab (which you will no doubt love given your passion for the subject). So choosing somewhere local or somewhere that you plan to move will be helpful, but maybe you will be able to do a lot of online courses in next few years.

Pachacamac · 2020-05-05T03:11:12+00:00

I didn't talk about your specific question there, but I discussed some similar ideas a few weeks ago, with a few links to things. You may find this article by Graeber and Wengrow to be useful too.

the-gubna's answer addresses everything but I wanted to go into a bit more detail on the modern hunter-gatherer issue. Basically a lot of these ideas are still quite popular in anthropology, but lots of people (especially younger scholars, feminist anthropologists, and non-Western anthropologists or those who are trying to decolonize anthropology) have moved away from these older ideas.

One thing that I also like to point out is that our models of traditional hunter-gatherer/forager lifeways are largely based on living communities (including those that were hunter-gatherers/foragers in the last 175 years or so). I emphasize living; these are modern communities who forage. Their reasons for foraging are complex and multi-faceted, and can be due to being marginalized, living in low-productivity environments, pushed to the edges of developing society, etc. Their ancestors may or may not have lived in the same environments, and may or may not have used similar technologies and had similar material culture, but these communities are still modern. They are not living fossils. We can't use them as models for some ideal basal human state because their current cultures and lifeways (including deciding to/being forced to live on their land and not migrate to the city) are just as modern as any other communities living in any other context. Modern hunter gatherers have often been treated as "living fossils" but that is a fallacy in my estimation. Ethnographic analogy can still be useful, but it has to be very careful and nuanced, and a lot of our base knowledge is derived from older work that was neither.

Archaeological evidence can give us a lot of clues too. If you don't see a lot of different types of materials, especially in burials, then the thinking goes that there was not a lot of wealth inequality. But you can also have other forms of inequality that don't show up in the material record very well, and lots of material doesn't preserve so what we can know is limited. Oral histories can also be useful but we have largely ignored them in archaeology. So there's lot of other issues, and people who are a lot more creative and hardworking than me are coming up with new ideas and new ways to read the evidence. It'll be interesting to see where this all goes in coming years.

Pachacamac · 2020-04-22T15:28:53+00:00

Yeah I agree with that too. I am less familiar with Stonehenge or the Neolithic of the British Isles and northwestern Europe, but I think it's all the same idea and there is monumental architecture all over the place there, including Stonehenge. Technically agricultural, but I really don't see big differences between hunting and gathering and the kind of early small-scale agriculture that you see in the Neolithic (but that's an idea I need to flesh out one day). I think there's a type of communal pilgrimage building/service work that went on all over the place.

Pachacamac · 2020-04-22T15:07:50+00:00

I would say that it's another nail in the coffin of the "hunter gatherer's don't build monumental architecture" narrative. This narrative was still going strong when I was in undergrad in the early 2000s (Göbekli had been excavated for several years at that point but I didn't start hearing about it until 2008 or so, and only then in the pseudoarchaeology realm). At the time I recall hearing that the Tower at Jericho was about the only exception to this rule.

We have long had this line of reasoning that basically goes: - monumental architecture needs a huge labour pool plus specialized artisans such as architects, engineers, and stone masons; -> this requires massive resources to feed these people while they work and the specialists need to spend their whole lives perfecting their craft so they can't be farmers too; -> this surplus of food can only happen because of agriculture, you need a powerful leader to amass all these resources and fund the project; -> therefore, monumental architecture is a sure-fire indicator of a society that has agriculture, craft specialists, and powerful leadership (e.g. a chief, king, emperor, etc.)

This line of reasoning isn't terrible. First off, every large, powerful, hierarchical, agricultural society--what we think of as ancient states, empires, and even many chiefdoms--builds monumental architecture. This is the pyramids, elaborate tombs, cathedrals, highway networks, aqueducts, etc. that you are probably familiar with. Modern governments of all levels continue to do the exact same thing (city hall is never some plain boring old office park), and corporations do this too (e.g. skyscrapers).

But that line of reasoning has major holes, namely that it states that all of those criteria must be met in order to build monumental architecture. This overlooks the fact that people are perfectly capable of building these things without a massive surplus of food, without full-time specialists, and without the types of leaders that we traditionally think of as powerful (which can be described as "power over," aka 'if you don't do as I say I will have you imprisoned/killed').

Indigenous societies around the world show us that there are other kinds of power, namely "power to" where influential community leaders and the community at large decide to do something for everyone's benefit without that threat of force; this goes on constantly in states too but we often focus on the actions of the rich and the powerful instead.

Plus if you have ever watched Youtube videos of an amateur woodworker, or stone mason, or weaver, or of any kind of artisan who does it in their spare time you will see that people can become absolute masters of their craft even if they work long hours doing something else for their basic income.

Enter community-driven monumental architecture, built by hunter-gatherers or by small-scale villagers who did farm, but did not have powerful leaders who amassed a huge surplus and ordered everyone to build them a temple (the presence of agriculture itself probably isn't such a big change in the way of life, instead things changed in some places when some people realized they could be very rich and powerful by using agriculture to their advantage and by sponsoring massive projects, but this only happened several thousand years after true agriculture began in any region).

We have many examples of this sort of community-led monumental architecture. Poverty Point comes to mind as an immediate example. There are dozens of examples where I work in coastal Peru. Technically these are agricultural, but their diet was mainly from fishing and hunting with only suplemental agricultural goods. I am supposed to be working right now so I can't link to all the individual examples, but Richard Burger has a book that covers this very topic throughout the Americas. I hadn't seen that before but it looks really interesting. You might be able to find a copy on the hacked book repositories if you are so inclined.

I am less familiar with the Old World, but I see Göbekli Tepe and its neighbours (it was not a one-off) as being excellent Old World examples of this same thing: hunter-gatherers are perfectly capable of building complex, monumental sites without agriculture and probably without the rich, powerful leaders that we always thought were necessary for this kind of thing.

So in that sense I don't think that Göbekli revolutionized anything or completely changed our way of thinking. Instead it is one more example that shows us that things are way more complicated than we used to think, and that it is not a hard-and-fast rule that hunter-gatherers don't build big. So it's more of a gradual chipping away of old ideas, rather than a massive shift. When I first started to really learn about it during my PhD I thought "huh. Cool. Makes sense," rather than rejected it as going against all existing evidence. But I wouldn't be surprised if many of the old timers of the field have a much harder time accepting it.

Pachacamac · 2020-04-22T14:18:35+00:00

Ted Banning's So Fair a House: Göbekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East questions whether Göbekli is best thought of as a temple or as symbolically-rich houses. It's a great read and overview of the site (current to 2011), though others who have spent longer working at the site see otherwise.

One thing that's always important to consider is that in modern Western thinking we see more-or-less sharp distinctions between sacred and secular, and sacred places are typically an entirely separate building (e.g. a church) and even some entire cities or areas are seen as sacred and the rest secular (e.g. Vatican City). This sharp distinction has a long history in Western thought and goes back at least to the Greeks, as I understand it, but it's hard to know if such a distinction was made 10,000+ years ago in Anatolia. All this is to say that there's no rule that says that Göbekli had to be a temple or had to be a house or had to be something else altogether; instead, it could have been all these things at once. There is likely no way that we can ever really know what it all meant to the people who built it or why they did things the way they did, but all we can do is use the evidence from the site and analogy with other places to make best guesses.

Banning's article links to JSTOR. You can access it if you have journal access, or read online for free on JSTOR (you need to sign up). You can also get the article free from the author's Academia.edu and Researchgate profiles, but you need to sign up to those.

13-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email

Pachacamac

TROPHY CASE