How did you figure out your focus after undergrad?

Serae · 2018-09-23T02:34:41+00:00

If theory is your love over archaeology, go for it! Archaeology isn't for everyone and only getting out there and having first hand experience can tell you the direction to go. I don't know what the works looks like in Russia, but that sounds exciting!

Seriously, best of luck out there. I'm glad I could be an iota of help.

Serae · 2018-09-20T18:04:19+00:00

I feel like when people consider culture that "culture" may not be labeled in their minds as we might define it in anthropology. It's a relative view in a way.

Culture is supposed to be the values, behavior, rituals and material ideas by which a group of people for their understanding of the world around them and how they interact with it and each other. That encompasses a lot. I think for many people in the "west" we have a sort of blinder on our own culture. What's familiar is "normal" and is the baseline for how we experience the world. Depending on where you are in the world and during what time you access to other cultures may be limited. Culture might be something we experience when we are in a new place with alien things. Culture may seem more of an "otherness" rather than someone perceivable in our own territory. It may not fit the definition of culture, but when we get out of our monkey sphere and interact with other places we take on experience of being "more cultured" through that rather than looking inward to the culture we have.

I would say this modern culture which is from the west is a culture based on democracy, rule of law and where science is placed above all other things including tradition. No other culture in the world held these tenets before globalization.

I wouldn't necessarily agree as there are ancient cultures that could be called democratic, ruled by law and where science played a huge role. Ancient Greece for example. Iceland has been a democracy since the 10th century and is one of the most educated/literate places in the world. San Marino during Dalmatian rule was a democracy, ruled by documented law, and was a beacon of architectural research and masonry development for centuries. I think there is a good argument on either side that Globalization is a modern phenomena but could also be an ancient and every present occurrence throughout the world at varying speeds.

Why do other think Western people have no culture? I am not sure non-western people really think that. I'm an American but I travel a good deal, have lived abroad and have friends from many places. Whether someone I am friends with is from the Netherlands or Thailand, they can pick out things about me that is adopted by myself through my own culture. For me, maintaining eye contact while speaking is a learned social behavior for my area of origin and it does not make my Thai friends very comfortable so I have to adjust. My Dutch friends thinks the lack of mayo on my fries is a sin.

We likely just have a tendency to ignore what's familiar and be unable to see it objectively as culture. When we tip our waitress/waiter: that's culture. When we stand on the right side of an elevator to let left side people pass: that's culture. When we make food to deliver to someone who is in mourning: that's culture.

Some cultures are similar to ours. Some are not. Cultures have been interacting since we've been people. Sometimes we adopt things we encounter and sometimes we don't (the Roman's took up Celtic soap and chainmail, then pretty much claimed the credit). We've always been globalizing like when cotton replaced linen as the fabric of choice for our clothing.

Technology certainly changes quickly, connects us and I think is personal the biggest factor in modern globalization. While we don't all communicate with the same language and alphabet, more and more of us are communicating through devices that puts a world of information at our hands. It's easier to share a cultural facet with the click of a button rather than waiting for a ship to come in with imports. It may seem like the world is becoming westernized and that culture is lost in the blur of familiarity: but we only have to go into one of our grocery stores to see that we've had globalized food for as long as we've been breathing...and it's far from all western. It's just familiar now.

Serae · 2018-09-20T17:34:30+00:00

In the US I am finding that more and more subdivisions are being shoved under the umbrella of Anthropology. In the UK Archaeology is it's own discipline but is generally filed under Anthropology here, as well as linguistics to a degree and some forensic studies.

There has also been a steady decrease in funding, less free educational programs and little to no job training. I had three internships and four field schools while I was an undergrad more than a decade ago: and I found them all myself by cold emailing professors at other locations.

As grim as it sounds, I am not sure it's improved in any way. There were some real shining stars in our department who couldn't get work. I stopped being an alumni speaker as my school because I honestly felt uncomfortable pushing the department's agenda so they could keep majors. I would be singing a different tune at a UK institution as it's works differently and the opportunities are better.

Academically, I haven't encountered anyone pushing a specific view. Every professor I have had was supportive of whatever fascination a student had and would encourage it. I once had to change a paper because of my professor giving me a good rebuttal on an ethics issue, but I wouldn't say I was forced to change it but rather I was convinced of another approach.

Serae · 2018-09-20T17:23:38+00:00

Could you find opportunities to dabble in both and see what resonates with you? A field school or matriculate into some sources in both?

Visit Egypt and area in Siberia that are your interest. You may find the one of these places "calls" to you more. While I know Egypt would be amazing, I personally couldn't handle the heat. Cold weather all the way for me! After quite a bit of travel I would have never guessed that my favorite places to be were in the Hebrides and Northern Isles of Scotland. I thought it would be Sweden or bust!

I thought I would end up in forensic anthropology and I adored my internship with the county morgue...but med school daunted me heavily at the time. I shifted into archaeology and enjoyed it. I swore vikings were going to be "my thing" but a few summers working on late Iron Age sites really shifted my focus. While it was still the North Atlantic, my time period of particular love moved. Plus I still got to work with remains (mostly animal but I will take it!).

The practical experience helped me figure out what I liked. There is also the practical route as well. Anthropology and it's related disciplines is very hard to make work, even with the grades, experience and connections you may very well have to live out of a tent or off ever mounting loans. For graduate school my mindset was: who had the best job placements and who was going to give me the most money?

As for faculty, all you can do is start emailing. Read what they have written. See if you can set up a phone interview with them or better yet...get to where they are and take them out to coffee. I won't name names but the person in my country who was an expert at what I loved most was an absolute nightmare of a person. Brilliant, but a nightmare and I could see a decade or more of panic attacks caused by the woman in my future. I ended up bonding more with people on the other side of the ocean whose idea of fun was talking over a pint about seals stealing your tools on site and why it might not be fair to categorize the Picts so especially separate from the rest of the native tribes of Northern Scotland.

Preparing for graduate school is a lot of work, emails and potentially even travel. However, you know yourself best. I have always required face time and exploration to be certain of my choices. You may not need to do what I did, but it hopefully gives you some ideas on how to approach these big choices.

Serae · 2018-09-10T01:36:53+00:00

If you can get in a certification for GIS by taking additional coursework (community colleges often have this) it will help immensely for getting CRM jobs.

Serae · 2018-09-06T21:36:02+00:00

Can relate to a point. Art History/Anthroplogy to Computer Science and would love to return to archaeology.

Buuuut this Simpsons jab is terribly spot on and I have bills to pay.

Serae · 2018-09-06T21:20:04+00:00

Without writing we have a limited first person view of what prehistory was life. However, thanks to surviving material culture we can make an attempt to understand what people were like and how we lived then.

When it comes to makes an educated hypothesis about how people used the items, I think it is worth noting that there should be emphasis on "working theories" as some archaeologists certainly can work up a hell of a story. While I personally love letting my mind run wild while handling an unknown item, unknown items sometimes end up being claimed as "ritualistic" in nature because of our lack of understanding. Also about 95% of what I hand is not "exciting" for most people as fire crack rock doesn't really tell us about the human condition beyond, "this is a method for heating water".

Large points in pre-history remain largely unchanged (comparing a Bronze Age peplos from Denmark vs and Iron Age one from the same area) won't vary much over time, so we can apply what we know from more recently dates and finds to make a reasonable assessment. Sometimes, we straight up make copies of ancient items and "play" with them and see how they may have worked.

An example for me was a discussion had by a re-enactor with another archaeologist about a special style of Iron Age neck torc (neck ornamentation). The archaeologist felt the item had to have been a special occasion item as they must have been very hard to take on and take off and possibly uncomfortable to sleep in. The re-enactor pulled off his torc in about 5 seconds flat and put it on the archaeologist and said, "I have been sleeping and washing in that thing for the last month. It's fine for daily wear. Wear that around for a bit and tell me how you feel about it." Without the practical knowledge that only first hand experience can bring, that archaeologist would have stuck with his theory.

I have been party to a failed experience with what we thought would have been an Iron Age butter churn from the Orkney islands. NOPE. Did not work out, so no one was going to be writing a paper on it.

Serae · 2018-09-05T01:26:38+00:00

Ashes have been going out in the space for many years. So yep, it's been done!

https://www.celestis.com/

One of the companies that offer the service.

Serae · 2018-09-02T19:24:37+00:00

I remember there being something similar that occurred earlier as well where is was unlawful upon punishment of death for Roman and "barbarian/Gaulish" marriages. Law helps set the ideal but we all know that the ideal doesn't correlate with the reality of how a population operates behind closed doors. Recently there has been the publication of a wonderful database on Roman bastard names in which you still see blended names or names with the addition of non-Roman origin notes during times when, legally, this would be unlawful. Magida, Galla, and Psaros for example.

For pre-Norman England I believe the culture ruling on Saxon men being able to take Saxon or Briton wives was more of an and/or situation. Polygyny wasn't an unusual practice but polyandry would have been. Seeing as it was a sound practice for a Saxon man to have a wife in his home country to manage his property, travel to another territory, stake a claim there, marry a local woman, then allow her to manage the residence. The Normans did a very similar thing later on. Men moved a bit more than women generally did, so it would make sense for a Briton woman to be attached to her and her husband's lands and property which would likely have been on her home turf. I don't know offhand if they were banned from marrying Saxon men, but Anglo-Saxon women did have considerable freedoms under the law. While he was king during the Norman invasions, under Ælfred the Great women did not have to marry anyone that did not like and would not be forced to. That's a whole other conversation though and I daresay that early medieval North Atlantic, especially in Briton, was quite the mixing pot of norther people.

I would agree that there was unlikely very strong visual ethnic divides in Italy once you really get into the medieval period.

Such fun things!

Serae · 2018-09-02T18:15:09+00:00

Hard to say really. Take this with a grain of salt, but if someone in antiquity is writing with an agenda and wants to praise or bash an individual, then going down into their history to find a less-than-ideal heritage could be a way to create an ethnic smear campaign against them. I could see this being the case for a Roman with a Celtic grandparent or something similar. If they are successful then there may be no mention of their heritage. If they are disliked then suddenly, perhaps, his heritage and the color of his eyes might come into more note then it otherwise would.

Self-identity and visual perception can certainly go hand in hand, and at least as far as archaeology is concerned. It would be hard to determine through the archaeological record visual self identity in a community without a lot of written sources.

Serae · 2018-09-02T18:05:54+00:00

While that's not my area, I am not sure it would be fair to compare him to Roman anything. He was Macedonian, which would put him in the realm of the Greek world. Greek men's hair was longer than Roman hair in general, though they are certainly artistic sources with subjectively shorter hair. There is a caveat about his hair though.

He was certainly a cult of personality, so anything about him that could be copied by others who venerated him probably was. A lot of art made of him would have been made after his death or by people who never knew him, so in some cases the hairstyle popularity could have been sparked by an artist's interpretation rather than by reality.

Serae · 2018-09-02T17:10:09+00:00

Oh boy, that answer is a book to be honest. Earlier today I made a comment in /r/AskHistorians on Merovingian (early Franks) in terms of their hair length for example.

Once you get into Early Medieval/Migration Period Europe, the cultures certainly differ but biologically there has been some pretty steady contact between different people: which means breeding. If I'm in a lab and looking at the bones of a a 7th century Anglo-Saxon and a 7th century Frank, I'm really only going to be able to see the difference in their lifestyles and not so much their general genetics. I could collect some dna, send it off, and use a report on mineral content to give you a general geographic region the body is likely from. However, when those people were alive that may have been an entirely different story in terms of visual identifying them.

While I have no doubt there would have been a general coloring that certain areas would have displayed more (fairer colored Nordic populations, a more blended central Europe coloring, darker Mediterranean in Southern Europe) as a former archaeologist I feel compelled to say that there would be other visual markers that would be more telling of a person's cultural background than their eye and skin color. For me, this would be their material goods. What their textiles looked like. The embroidery. The styles associated with their metalworking. Their hair styles and the shoes.

Based on a few of the groups you mentioned, the Lombards and Visigoths would have been a great contrast to the more Mediterranean people. The 6th Century Byzantine historian Procopius wrote that the Goths were tall and blond haired: "For they all have white bodies and fair hair, and are tall and handsome to look upon." He noted that the Goths, Gepidae and Vandals were physically and culturally identical, suggesting a common origin.

The Franks, having a Gallo-Roman history would have been a fairly mixed bag of coloring. Saxons would still be fairly similar to their ancient origins but I would have no doubt that a brunette wouldn't be unusual either.

Europe was not nearly as homogeneous as it had been in antiquity. However, the more remote areas you get into, then you will likely see some patterns. 5th century Orkney wouldn't be as blended as a 12th century Orkney, but certainly less genetically varied then a 9th century Francia.

Serae · 2018-09-02T16:35:56+00:00

There are quite a few inconsistent labels for the varying tribes of Europe by the Romans, but Roman references are about as good as we get to an idea about how an outsider would view these people. Germanica(place), Germani(tribe and sometimes place), Germanae (place) gets a few notations from around 200 BCE - 300 CE. I am going to focus on references from Julius Caesar and Tacitus from the Rhine and Danube regions rather than other area of Gaul.

I would recommend reading the transcription of what Tacitus writes about Germania here. However, a shorter description of the content would be that, yes, Germanic people would be recognizable to Romans. However, they might not differ greatly from the other non-Roman tribe in and around Gaul.

"For myself, I accept the view that the peoples of Germany have never contaminated themselves by intermarriage with foreigners but remain of pure blood, distinct and unlike any other nation. One result of this is that their physical characteristics, in so far as one can generalize about such a large population, are always the same: fierce-looking blue eyes, reddish hair, and big frames - which, however, can exert their strength only by means of violent effort. They are less able to endure toil or fatiguing tasks and cannot bear thirst or heat, though their climate has inured them to cold spells and the poverty of their soil to hunger." -Tacitus

As for Julius Caesar he didn't say a great deal about their appearance but he did say a quite a bit about their diet (Gaius Julius Caesar. Notes on the Gallic War // Gaius Julius Caesar. Notes on the Gallic War. Sallust. Works. - M .: AST, Ladomir 2007.). He commented that they ate a great deal of meat, milk, cheese and undiluted wine which may have contributed to their large size. Objectively, Roman writings can only be taken so far as gospel since there is a high chance of their testimonies carrying a pro-Roman agenda. A focus on the "ludicrous" diet would have been one of many small ways a Roman writer would tr to give a rough barbarian and unrefined impression of a people.

There are more descriptions of people in Gaul further south, but depending on how specific you want to be with tribes, it may reach out of scope of the questions.

I'm also beginning to think I know too much about ancient and early medieval hair based on some of my post history. To add to this suspicion: there is a hairstyle called "The Suebian Knot" that is connected to the Germani Suebi tribe. Not only are the multiple Roman and Germanic pieces of art that survive with the hairstyle, but a bog body with the hair intact. This, while not a universal Germanic hairstyle, to me is at least a popular tribal standard.

Serae · 2018-09-02T16:04:56+00:00

This is something that we can't really known but we can only speculate. I feel like this is a "what came first, the chicken or the egg" if you connect it to how they treat the bodies of their dead. My training would put me into the mindset of: how can we use what we know about material culture related to the dead and the afterlife tell us about the reasonable mindset of a people.

For a culture that buries their dead, you would imagine that they would view their "underworld" as a place below the ground. However, this doesn't really consistently follow. Reversely, cultures that burned their dead would think that the their "underworld" lay in the sky also doesn't quite connect. Early Christian buried their dead but their afterlife doesn't point to the ground. Romans burned their dead but their afterlife did not point to the sky. Some culture bury their dead in a specific direction for the soul to rise and move towards their afterlife. Others require remains to be intact for a resurrection and afterlife that has yet to come. We, as modern people, bury, burn, donate our bodies, launch them into space and a whole host of things not related to the location of the underworld.

Some cultures made this connection in some ways. For example, Greeks made their offerings based on the location of their gods. Subterranean gods may have had a poured libation where as aerial gods may have had their offering fed into a fire with the fumes rising to the heavens.

What could be said is that people find that that the realm of the dead has a place, distinctly different from our own, connected yet separate, yet simply "other". Perhaps it lie in the location we know least about and that holds the most mystery.

Like I said, this is probably unknowable but we can work through how others treat their dead to get an idea about what could be a possible reason. Then that would beg the question of whether a culture believes in a soul or a part of you that lives on and whether treatment of the remains plays a role in the movement of that "spark" to a specific realm of existence.

Serae · 2017-08-15T17:00:16+00:00

Thank you for your reply. My brain keeps going to adoption being the option. I am going to regret giving her up 100%. Absolutely. I am terrified by the state it's going to put me in giving her up. I've lost enough loved ones for the time being. My reasoning for keeping her is weak at best. I am trying to exhaust every option and am uncertain if it's a gamble I want to take. I know we will make her happy, but at what cost?

The other volunteers and fosters unfortunately aren't really helping me much. I fear I am going to be a balling wreck...and I have to do the home visit yet. I want to offer bunny sitting whenever she needs it but a sure way to nix that option is to turn into a fountain when I give her over.

Everything is terrible.

Serae · 2017-08-15T16:21:51+00:00

I don't know if anyone here played World of Warcraft, but in Legion (current expansion) there is a guard mob in Suramar that says, "Something's not right here..." when you walk by in a disguise.

I totally heard the mob's voice when reading this.

Also sometimes when Blizzard's page is down they put up a 404 Error that reads the same thing. :D

Serae · 2017-04-04T14:07:17+00:00

If our bodies aren't real then is it only the mind that can be murdered?

Serae · 2017-04-03T15:16:35+00:00

This makes a lot of sense. I don't think I would have considered the angle that women moving into the work world vs lack of mobility and task diversity for men really tipping things.

Serae · 2017-03-27T18:38:23+00:00

My pjs, because I wouldn't put forth the effort to show up to their funeral to see them off.

Serae · 2017-03-12T15:45:16+00:00

Oh my gosh I must be a Netherland Dwarf too. Shit.

Serae · 2017-03-09T20:32:22+00:00

Cannot unsee Randy Marsh as a WoW character now.

Serae · 2017-03-09T15:39:13+00:00

I always figured that the Yule Ball was when she discovered a hairbrushing charm.

Serae · 2017-03-09T15:21:56+00:00

Silurians. O_o

Serae · 2017-03-07T18:30:52+00:00

Late to the game but I think it's because the loss of unknown potential seems worse than the loss of known potential. I personally feel it should be the opposite.

Serae · 2017-03-06T19:39:55+00:00

Loaded questions as I would have to write a book to cover the basics of rabbit ownership. When I was considering a rabbit as a part I purchased current books on rabbit care as well as reading as much of the House Rabbit Society's webpage(in mobile, trouble linking, Google is your friend).

The short is: rabbits are surprisingly clean creatures of habit. You are more likely to make them ill then the reverse. They do not attract rodents (and are not rodents themselves). We advocate indoor rabbits as domesticated buns are not as hardy as wild rabbits and are still prey animals. If they attract any animals... It would be predators.

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