Anthropologists Michael Taussig and Felipe Gaitan Ammann examine how Colombia simultaneously consolidates its culture and wealth through the National Gold Museum, managed by the Banco de le Republica de Colombia (hereafter referenced as the National Bank).1 The museum and bank parallel and conflict with one another as repositories and safes; though one ostensibly reflects cultural wealth and the other, the wealth of individuals, anthropologists worry that the Museum confounds archaeological gold with modern gold reserves, contributing to the country’s monetary wealth.2 Nevertheless, commodifying and revering gold as money lends itself to the preservation and exhibition of these artifacts. Does the museum conflate our modern value system with ancient worldviews and cosmologies? How do we value and interpret gold artifacts when to us, gold is rendered the embodiment of both wealth and greed?

Thus the bank–museum relation constitutes a paradox if one accepts that while banks usually chase their collections through the world (and underworld) of commodified goods, the preservation of these collections within museums also constitutes their death as objects of exchange. Yet in most cases, this process entails the refusal of a significant part of the material life cycles through which ancient artifacts have acquired at least a part of the cultural value that makes them significant in the present (Ammann 2006: 232).

To summarize the quote from Ammann, exhibiting gold artifacts removes them from the practices/contexts that gave them value in the past and present. They can no longer be exchanged for money, and they are no longer part of the social and ritual processes that created them (e.g. they are no longer votive offerings in tombs).

The establishment of the Museo del Oro contributes to the obscured boundaries between bank/museum and present/past. Guaqueriá, grave looting, is the source of a majority of archaeological gold collections in Colombia. Though unideal from an archaeological standpoint and criminalized in the 1930s, guaqueriá was a long-standing vocation in Central and South America and a “technically highly developed skill” according to archaeologist Karen Bruhns. Guaqueros are not necessarily “pillaging” sites willy-nilly, but following their own set of excavation methods as outlined in Bruhn’s article “The Methods of Guaqueriá”.3 Legends of opulent archaeological sites inspired treasure hunts in 19th century Colombia, with the most valuable treasures being incorruptible and malleable gold. There was of course an antiquities market for selling complete artifacts, but the lure of archaeological gold was that it could be melted down and sold by weight. El Dorado, a legend that inspired films and real-life treasure hunts, mythologizes a ritual of the Muisca people at Lake Guatavita. To initiate a new zipa, the ruler would be coated in gold and submerged in the lake along with his raft and votive offerings.4 A businessman, Don Enqrique Urdaneta, was obsessed with finding the gold artifacts associated with El Dorado and set his eyes on the high altitude Siecha Lakes northeast of Bogotá. He invested in the Lake Siecha Draining Company but in 1872 the venture failed along with the lake’s dikes, drowning Urdaneta in the waters that promised him endless fortune. The poetic justice of this history makes it sound like a greed-fearing parable in itself— and to top it all off, the golden Muisca raft5 from his personal collection was sold to a museum in Berlin but was destroyed in a dock fire upon arrival.6

It was not until the Second World War that the Colombian government regulated antiquities trading and cultural preservation, mainly because the government did not want archaeological gold to be sold outside of the country— they wanted to keep this wealth within their borders. In 1939 the Ministry of Education appointed the National Bank, which controlled the exchange of gold in the country, to purchase valuable artifacts before they could be sold to private collectors. And private collectors could sell their collections themselves, a practice that continued bringing potentially “shady” artifacts to the museum into the early 2000s. The original museum was literally within the bank itself and the collection was only available for private viewing. It was not until 1959 that the Bank opened up its basement as a public exhibition space. When an independent museum was constructed in 1968, the bank-museum relationship was still made cogent by “The Golden Room,” a bank vault rendering El Dorado into a spectacle of cultural and material wealth. This exhibition choice also feels like a translation of archeological significance into a modern capitalist language, repackaging artifacts as money. Gold’s role in economic exchange and the museum’s effort to purchase looted materials— to prevent their destruction via melting to ingots— consequently led to the destruction of archaeological sites whose data the museum would rely on to create exhibits and educate the public. For all the visual splendor of these vast gold collections, archaeological analysis of looted and unprovenienced artifacts is inversely poor. We are left with only the most “valuable” objects to try and make sense of a whole social world that undoubtedly consisted of more than just metal.

Paradoxically, this bona fide concern to save Prehispanic goldwork from being melted or sold outside the borders of Colombia would eventually become an uncomfortable commitment for the Central Bank. Although the purchase of archaeological gold from looters and private dealers was initially presented as a laudable activity that contributed to the preservation of Colombian national heritage, it also constituted a tacit recognition of the commodified nature of ancient goldwork (Amman 2006: 230).

Does dangling jewelry behind a glass case truly connect the modern museum-goer to the goldsmiths of the past? What do we make of the cultural and social world that led to the development of expert metallurgy in Colombia? A technology of communication innovated for the social and spiritual rather than utilitarian functions; but at the museum, these funerary goods and ceremonial objects are no longer attached to the culture produced them, no longer a part of either life or death.

I felt this alienation walking through the museum before I even read the Ammann paper describing this exact feeling, “Golden Alienation” for the Journal of Social Anthropology. Of course, I was not physically alone. Entry is free on Sundays and I was surrounded by tourists from all over the world. Us patrons were literally lining up in the galleries so we could walk along the displays, every person wanting a glimpse or a photograph of the gold, but that’s all it was. A glimpse of opulence which seemed to serve present material values more so than represent the diverse history of Colombia. Many of the artifacts displayed had no ascension numbers, no details, sometimes not even description of what they were. No material, no maker, no provenience, no date. I took photos of mysterious fragments and objects I couldn’t recognize because they had no information explaining their function or raison d’être. Artifacts, unlike art or commodities, cannot always explain themselves across cultural and temporal lines— and isn't that the whole point of the museum? To help us visualize a past we struggle to comprehend? Nevertheless, the end result of touring the museum’s permanent collection is an impression of the scale of “culture” in Colombia. But what about the depth and diversity of this “culture”? This is why Taussig describes the Gorgon as the patron saint of museums; artifacts are placed in front of Medusa’s eyes and turned to stone. Taken out of time, or as Taussig puts it, taken out of the conversation. Ammann also discusses how to “nationalize” is to “essentialize;” gold artifacts from an array of time periods, cultures, and ecological zones become one unanimous prehistory, bound by a border that was negotiated in the early 20th century. Nothing illustrates this alienation and this conflict of past/present more than the gold poporos whose gilded displays bear little resemblance to their use in the real world.

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The Poporo Quimbaya

The Quimbaya were the ancient peoples of the Cauca River Valley in the northwest of present day Colombia. This cultural designation is defined by the characteristics of its gold work rather than an understanding of social organization or territory.7 It is also unclear if the Quimbaya of the archaeological record are connected to the indigenous groups first encountered by Spanish conquistadors in the 1600s. Before the Quimbaya, the first human settlers in the area arrived around 9000 years ago and rapidly acclimated to the montane rainforest ecosystem. Non-native domesticated plants were grown in the region with the earliest evidence of maize dating to the 5th millennium BC.8 The Cauca river system provided a communication corridor through Colombia while also transporting gold deposits from the mountains to sandy stream beds. Deposits were collected by gold panning, building dykes, or even casting nets into the river during the wet season. Though the earliest evidence of metallurgy in South America dates 1500 BC in Peru, it is unclear if goldsmithing developed independently in the Cuaca River Valley or was introduced. Based on the early abundance of lost wax casting technology in the region, it is theorized that the Quimbaya were the early progenitors of this technology in Colombia eventually spreading the practice to other groups. The development of goldsmithing around 500 BC marks the beginning of the Early Quimbaya period, and goldwork techniques and production reached its peak around 500 AD. This era coincides more broadly with the Middle to Late Formative period in Mesoamerica where we start to see large-scale architecture such as step-pyramids and temples. It is theorized that the abundance of durable guada material (bamboo) and the lack of accessible stone in the region dissuaded the development of large scale architecture.9 And I am reluctant to use architecture as a metric of complexity because this characteristic is often used to support a evolutionary narrative of cultural development— implying that every cultural group should eventually meet our fabricated “complexity quota” and if they don’t, they have fallen behind.10 The material evidence and environmental setting of the Quimbaya points towards resource abundance and a stable social order that may not have “needed” or “wanted” to build pyramids (and, do you really need to build a pyramid to be taken seriously?). Archaeologist Restrepo describes the situation as such:

While other societies achieved a more advanced level of cultural development (during the Classic and Postclassic periods)—manifesting their worldview or cosmogony through material elements such as pyramid construction—the Quimbaya expressed theirs through gold poporos (lime containers).

In the Kogi language, the poporo is a traditional lime container commonly constructed from a gourd, but the word has extended to the more famous gold-alloy (tumbaga)11 containers in museums. Accompanying the poporo is a lid and a stick (or pin) used for scooping crushed lime into the coca-chewer’s mouth. These vessels and the powdered lime within them are an essential part of the coca-chewing toolkit— a timeworn tradition in Andean South America from prehistory to the present. Coca chewing has an 8000 year history in Peru and played a significant role in Incan pharmacopeia and ritual practices.12 The contents of the poporo is made by burning and processing limestone or shells into an alkaline powder. When chewed, the powder aids in extracting alkaloids from the leaves which prevents irritation while chewing and intensifies the effects of the coca.13 Though we have no archaeological coca plant remains, funerary poporos indicate both the time-depth of coca-chewing practices and lost-wax casting technology.

Gold and tumbaga poporos are often shaped like human figures representing both men and women or representing plants such as the gourd. They are often depicted seated, wearing serene expressions of contemplation, symbolizing both the physical and social modes of proliferating culture— women creating life and men transmitting cultural knowledge.14 The famous Poporo Quimbaya is both phallic, yonic, and vegetal, shockingly modern looking in its geometric abstraction (image above). The vessel appears like a stylized gourd, the calabash, while also feeling bodily— container and stick representing the full “tool-kit” of life. The metals themselves also speak to the balance of the masculine and feminine forces: gold represents the sun and the masculine, and copper represents the moon and the feminine. The Spanish did not understand tumbaga, believing that the alloy denigrated gold’s purity, while to indigenous Colombians the alloy held greater value (coalescence and transformation > purity). The manufacture of poporos indicates that the materials and the making of the object held just as much cultural value as the finished product. Color, light, and even sound were important dimensions of metallurgical practices— the sound of an alloy was considered when making ear plugs and pendants that both rang like bells.15 The upper portion of the gilded vessels are often larger which may have captured and reflected more sunlight, connecting the object to the sun deity (which we know played a significant role in the Muisca pantheon, but we know less about Quimbaya religion).16

Goldsmithing represents multiple dimensions of transformation which likely informed or reaffirmed symbolic meanings such as the coalescence of the masculine and feminine via copper and gold alloys. Liquid transforms to solid and formless becomes three dimensional. When discussing technological development in the archaeological record, technologies can be broadly categorized as “practical” or “prestige”; meaning they developed to serve a utilitarian function or to illustrate the prestige of an individual.17 Surprising perhaps to us in the 21st-century, but prestige technologies often evolved before the practical— metal body adornments preceded metal tools in certain contexts (e.g. prehistoric Ireland). However, these broad categories do not capture every impetus for technological development. There are plenty of examples of votive gold work in Colombia that serves neither a practical or prestige function. In fact, among the Muisca people goldsmithing may have been a ritual in itself.

The Muisca lived in a chiefdom society in the Eastern Cordilleria of the Andes in the Boyacá department of present day Colombia. Outside the town of Villa de Leyva remain landscape modifications and hydraulic systems built for intensive agriculture as well as sacred astrological sites such as “El Infiernito” (which will be the topic of the next article). Pilgrimage sites and temples that likely represented processional routes are still present in the area, though some sites were looted and burned by the Spanish.18 We know more about the social and religious structure of the Muisca because they continually occupied the region from 600 AD until Spanish contact in the 17th century, which resulted in historic records of indigenous-colonial interactions. Metallurgy was likely adopted from adjacent groups such as the Zenú, rather than independently invented. Researchers investigating the origins of the complex lost-wax casting method propose that deliberate experimentation was necessary for the technology to develop, propelled by ulterior motivations than efficiency or functionality— the form of final products could have been achieved through easier less intensive methods. Complex objects were constructed with a single pour of molten metal into the mold even when multiple pours would generate the same results, which may indicate cultural or ritual constraints governing production. Even jewelry with dangling elements would have precisely molded hoops so the entire object could be cast in one pour. Furthermore, miscasted objects were not discarded or fixed, indicating that the appearance of the object was not the primary concern of production. The abundance of imperfect artifacts suggests a taboo around modifying gold objects once they were cast. Muisca metallurgy likely represents the “ritual technology” model proposed by Martinon-Torres and Uribe to explain the invention of lost-wax casting in Colombia— though the Muisca were by no means the first group to use the technology. The most common gold objects found in Muisca sites are tunjos, votive offerings made for funerary rites and not intended to be viewed; functionally, they would not fit in the “practical” or “prestige” categories.

Whatever the case, the making of Muisca votive goldwork conveys the impression of a technological arena that was strongly bound by cultural constraints: the objects had to be made by the lost-wax technique and in a single pour; the waxwork had to be sculpted to perfection, often to the extent that details would not have been readily perceptible to the naked eye; lastly, repairs or other finishing touches on the metal were not desirable or acceptable (Martinon-Torres and Uribe 2015: 382).

Though nothing remains of the beeswax necessary for lost-wax casting, this material resource likely held specific significance to the casting process. Ethnohistorical data of the U’wa peoples indicate that bees were considered “daughters of the sun” and as propagators, represented life itself.

Like humans, bees are creatures with social structures whose behaviour is controlled by seasonal cycles. Chewing-thinking is a creative process shared by bees and deities. Female bees are understood to chew ‘yellow earth’ (which may be identified with gold) and produce female ‘embryo seeds’ and ‘basic original matter’, whereas male bees chew pollen and wood, and produce wax (Martinon-Torres and Uribe 2015: 382).

Chewing-thinking corresponds with the practice of coca-chewing, connecting the material resource necessary for creating poporos to the function of the poporo itself. Furthermore, the evidence of a Muisca “sun cult” that correlated gold with sunlight could suggest that beeswax itself held similar symbolic significance to the Muisca people. But of course ethnohistoric data can only offer us hypotheses. The authors surmise that lost-wax casting developed as ritual technology, and gold work specialists may have been considered expert wax sculptors rather than goldsmiths. An intimate relationship with bees and beeswax likely preceded and inspired the invention of lost-wax casting, imbuing the technology with the transformative and life-giving symbolism already associated with bees.

While the Muisca are well known for their votive objects, it is difficult to parse out who the anthropomorphic Quimbaya vessels represent and who would have used them. Shamans, ritual specialists, political leaders? Can you really delineate the religious or spiritual from the political? One researcher believes that the lack of zoomorphic or animal poporos may indicate that these vessels served political rather than shamanistic purposes, or more precisely, the vessels were tied to the political power of an individual rather than the spiritual power of a group.19 Another researcher invites us to shed Western ontology for an “Andean” worldview and consider camaquen, a common life force shared by all people and things.20 The vessels may not be representational but are rather real persons themselves.

Archaeological gold/tumbaga poporos served a different function than true gourd poporos used by indigenous communities today. But guaquería (looting) in Colombia and the gold trade has impacted archaeological assessments of museum collections, as previously discussed. Furthermore, metallurgy in the Americas has not been as seriously studied as its Old World counterparts, though more technical studies are coming out of Colombia’s museums using chemical analysis and X-ray imaging. One of the few Colombian gold collections with known provenience is housed at the Museo de América in Madrid. The collection consists of hundreds of gold artifacts from from two Classic Quimbaya pit tombs (4th-7th ce), though artifacts from both tombs have been jumbled together. Materially and iconographically, the physical poporo can elucidate the world view of its creators. Chemical studies indicate that the funeral gold was made in one batch probably for burial rites. Some of the poporos still contained burnt powder that could be analyzed and carbon dated, but the burnt powdery substance wasn’t the usual lime. These vessels contained human cremains that would’ve been consumed in a funerary coca-chewing ritual, a practice that has been recorded historically in South America21. The authors described this as a holy communion between the deceased ancestor and the living descendant perhaps as a final transmission of knowledge and a final life-giving transformation. While gourd poporos are associated with the living, the more famous gold poporos were associated with deceased political/spiritual leaders.

Coca vs. Cocaine/Gourd vs. Gold

Coca-chewing is still practiced by indigenous groups in South America and the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains can also inform our understanding of (though do not wholly reflect) the poporos of the past. Obviously, the common gourd poporo is separated by time, material, and commonality, from the Poporo Quimbaya— the inaugural object of Bogotá’s Museo del Oro. But of course, we have limited archaeological data to work with to interpret the world that existed around these objects. Examining the Poporo Quimbaya, we get a glimpse into two resources that have shaped Colombia from the pre-contact period to the present: gold and cocaine. Coca feels as far from cocaine as grain is from alcohol— the resource is foundational and life-giving. Even during prohibition, no one thought to regulate potato or wheat, yet coca leaves are categorized as a Schedule I drug by the United Nations. The conflation of coca and cocaine even inspired the UN to recommend eradication programs— spraying pesticides and uprooting coca farms which of course could not really be enforced. The coca to potatoes analogy may not be perfect, but it illustrates the gross misunderstanding of the plant’s natural properties as a medicine and a cornerstone of traditional practices in Andean South America.

It is quite devastating to reflect on how this traditional resource has been exploited and corrupted. In conversation with a Bogotá local I met at a bar, he lamented the destruction cocaine had caused his country and the subsequent demonization of the innocuous coca leaf. He said something to the effect of, America punishes us for making cocaine, but it’s Americans who buy it. They created the market they ostensibly despise. This conversation and this exploration of coca has shifted the way I think about the drug.

Chewing coca is a very different experience from cocaine. The mild stimulating effect of coca leaves improve focus and aid memory for reciting stories and transmitting cultural knowledge. Among the Kogi, for example, men gather with their coca-pouches and poporos to discuss community matters and the poporo is given to young men as part of their initiation to manhood. The living poporo is in constant use, rarely leaving a man’s hand and inextricably linked to the body, to saliva, and to chewing. It is a tool for thinking about the future while holding the wisdom of the past. When the stick is inserted into the poporo, it is jostled and stirred in a motion akin to writing, creating a sound that can be characterized as the resonance of thought.

“It is loud, this softer-than-soft sound, she tells me, the sound thus magnified, maybe like the sound of the Caribbean Sea from which the shells come as far as this high mountain.” (Taussig 2003: xi-xii).

According to Taussig, the poporo of “spit and sound” is “antithetical” to western economics of gold. As men break-in their poporos, the lime and saliva collecting at the lip of the container hardens, creating what looks like a rotary milling stone. Taussig describes men shaping this crust at the lip of the poporo, building larger as it’s used. I assumed these were relatively small additions to the coca-chewer’s hand, but seeing how these containers accompany men through their adult life, this growth can become larger than the vessel itself. Is the size of this lime-saliva stone an indication of a man’s wisdom or experience? If we could zap back 2000 years ago, would we see poporos used similarly? The lime-saliva stone, the time scale of use-life like a tree ring, is of course absent from the Museum. This cultural calcification can not sit in isolation behind glass and signal wealth and it cannot be melted down for ease of exchange. Though we both (the creators and the viewers) admire the material qualities of gold, we arrive at different evaluations of these artifacts. And the Museum reinforces our appraisal— the weight of the object is its significance and its present $$ value is why we should look at and admire it.

“But of course these are not the squeaky-clean golden poporos we see resplendent in the Gold Museum in Bogotá that stand naked and exposed, bereft of any sign of human use, let alone of any sign of this exceedingly strange crust of coca-saturated saliva around the mouth of the poporo (Taussig 2003: xii).”

Now let’s go beyond Taussig’s dichotomy, the gourd poporo and the gold. He implies that something is missing from the “squeaky-clean” museum poporos, which I agree with, but its not the lime-saliva stone indicating the use-life of the object.

Though ethnographic evidence illustrates the day-to-day role of coca chewing in Colombia, the gold poporos represent the cosmology and life-death rituals of archaeological cultures. So to say that something is missing at the museum, where the gold objects are clean with no saliva-lime buildup in sight, is not entirely accurate. The recent discovery of human cremains within gold Quimbaya poporos illustrates the distinct funerary function of these objects, and perhaps they should be reconsidered as sarcophagi or something to that effect. The vessels were likely created for the cremains-coca chewing practice and may not have been the possession of the coca-chewer, but the possession of the deceased. The lime buildup is not missing because it would not have been there in the first place.

While artifacts are taken out of the life and death cycle when encased in glass and rendered untouchable, unusable, there is a danger or a lack of nuance in dichotomizing the gold and gourd poporos. Indigenous lime containers are not artifacts of the past and gold-alloy vessels are not money, they served a specific ritual and funeral function. What is missing from the museum, in my opinion, is the distinction between the past and present and the distinction between the diverse cultural groups represented in the collections. The exhibit should confront our modern evaluation of gold rather than reaffirm it; we should be leaving the museum with a sense that this value is culturally prescribed. Furthermore, acknowledging the looted origins of collections can educate the public on why certain data is missing or limited, and why scientific excavation is necessary for interpreting the broader world that created these artifacts. When taken out of context, artifacts just become something attractive to look at and not something to interrogate or learn from.

The museum is nevertheless an impressive institution that houses the largest collection of gold in the world. Consolidating and exhibiting a vast array of cultural material is no easy task, and the museum does dedicate certain displays to distinct cultural groups and time periods as well as displaying body adornments on shadowed figures to indicate how an individual may have worn these items (photo below). Though I've taken a critical view into the presentation of gold artifacts through the lens of Taussig and Ammann, the museum is of course a must-see, as it synthesizes a vast and diverse history into a comprehensive narrative on the origins and development of gold metallurgy. And it is worth it just to take a“glimpse” at these gold artifacts; “interrogating” and “analyzing” is not required! While the permanent collection left me with some questions, I was blown away by their temporary exhibit on rock art, specifically large-scale pictograph panels. High-walls mimicked the scale of the panels and highlighted the various technical studies conducted at the sites. From experimental pigment preparation to direct chemical analysis, a viewer would leave the exhibit with a robust understanding of how both native peoples and researchers analyze and interpret the pictographs. The exhibit featured direct testimony from the various tribes associated with the sites, but a more thorough discussion on this exhibit is the topic for another article.

Thank you so much for reading Archaeolog. I do this research and writing to continue my education in my spare time, and it means so much to me that people are interested in my perspective on anthropological topics. If you want to support my work, consider a free subscription. I also have a paid-tier, but if that’s not your thing you can send a one-time donation to my Kofi to help support this publication.

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Obviously there is a lot going on in the United States right now and some of these issues are more pressing than historic preservation. But this is my discipline and career (though maybe not anymore), and I know that you all care about this too since you care about archaeology. The current state of affairs is grim. Culturally significant National Monuments are losing protections (Bears Ears), National Parks and ancient archaeological sites are getting bulldozed for border walls, and conservation is no longer a function of the Bureau of Land Management— a federal agency that is responsible for 1/8 of the United States landmass including significant native plant ecosystems, rare and endangered species, and significant cultural sites. The beautiful biodiversity of our public land and its deep cultural history is what, in my eyes, makes this country great. Sudden revisions to historic preservation laws may escalate the unraveling of guardrails meant to protect our shared cultural heritage.

The National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) was enacted in 1966 in response to federal construction and urban renewal projects that rapidly destroyed historic, archaeological, and cultural sites.1 The NHPA gave the National Park Service authority over the nomination and preservation of historic places, creating the NRHP (National Register of Historic Places). It created a review process by which federal agencies must consider the effects of their undertakings on NRHP listed and eligible sites.

Under the NRHP, a historic property can be a district, site, building, structure or object that meets one of the following criteria:

• A: property is associated with historic event or pattern of events (A is for Association)

• B: property is associated with the life and action of a significant historical figure (B is for Big People)

• C: property that displays characteristics/style/design that are architecturally significant to time period or architectural style (C is for Cute Buildings)

• D: property contains significant data potential and information about history or prehistory (D is for Data) (this is usually the criterion that archaeological sites are nominated for)

And the property must have integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association.

So, eligibility is not thrown around willy-nilly. All of the criteria needs to be assessed and argued for, often through consultation with the communities associated with these sites. I am not going to get into the weeds because I am just trying to get the word out on this issue. But much of boots on the ground archaeological work in this context consists of identifying, assessing, and analyzing sites to determine whether they are eligible for the NRHP, and determining if the federal undertaking/project is going to damage these sites. Because our government shouldn’t bulldoze through our history, right? And if destruction is unavoidable, the damage should be mitigated. It just makes sense. But the new revisions will no longer require federal agencies to avoid or minimize damage to historic properties, whether they are NRHP listed historic buildings or eligible archaeological sites that have yet to be studied.

Almost all archaeologists in the country operate under the NHPA and its review process Section 106 (archaeologists work directly for federal agencies like NPS, BLM, etc., or for private CRM companies). This process gives the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP), consulting parties (Native American Tribes and other stakeholders), and the public a reasonable opportunity to comment on the undertaking and its effects on cultural heritage. I emphasize public because we are talking about our public agencies and what they do with our tax dollars, what they do on our public lands, and how the preserve or destroy our shared history.

The revisions to Section 106 include removing public comment from the process, making it entirely optional for the federal government. Again, we are talking about our land, tax dollars, and history. Removing public consultation and comment from any federal process is anti-democratic. The federal government will also no longer have to consult with Native American Tribes on how development projects may impact tribal resources. I mean, so much work has been done to improve government-to-government consultation to improve meaningful collaboration between the federal government and tribes (which are their own governments!). It all speaks to a growing disdain of historic preservation and tribal sovereignty generally in this country.

Here are some of the proposed revisions as stated on the National Trust for Historic Preservation website:

• Federal agencies will no longer be required to try to avoid or minimize damage to America’s historic architecture, neighborhoods, and landscapes.

• State and local governments will no longer have the right to be notified or have the opportunity to comment when federal agencies propose to damage or destroy historic places within their jurisdiction.

• The public’s opportunity to comment on federal historic preservation policies or actions would now be entirely optional, at the discretion of the federal agency.

• The federal government will no longer be required to consult with Native American tribes or seek their expertise regarding their own significant cultural resources.

• Significant cultural landscape features would no longer be considered historic properties, so federal agencies would no longer be required to take into account any adverse effects to significant places such as the Grand Canyon.

• Federal agencies would no longer be required to consider the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions on historic properties, other than direct actions that physically damage the properties.

• These regulations are inconsistent with the National Historic Preservation Act and would violate the Council’s own rules and procedures.

• The proposed changes are also internally inconsistent and riddled with errors, likely to cause enormous regulatory confusion and chaos.

I know most Americans care about access to their public lands, conserving our wildlife, nature, and unique ecosystems, and of course, protecting and conserving our nation’s cultural history. The zone is being flooded so rapidly we cannot even process or respond in time and issues like this are easily swept under the rug since most Americans are not familiar with the NHPA and what it does for us.

The goal is to gut these laws in favor of rapid development and resource extraction, but as the NTHP states: these revisions violate the NHPA itself and will mire the process in confusion and litigation.

There are so many other points to touch on and I wish I could get more into the weeds, but I need to continue with my day. I am posting this out of urgency, frustration, and utter disappointment. Nothing like studying American archaeology for three years, earning my master’s degree in hopes of working in either the private or public sector to study and conserve my countries invaluable, irreplaceable cultural heritage, only for the very regulatory structure that dictates this work to cannibalize itself. And that is what this whole moment feels like right now: my country cannibalizing itself.

If you are a concerned American, you can call the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation to voice your concerns before they vote on this issue tomorrow July 24, 2026. Call 202-517-0200.

Further Reading:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/council-handpicked-by-trump-to-gut-review-process-of-historic-preservation-projects/

https://ncshpo.org/2026/07/20/the-end-of-section-106-as-we-know-it/

While researching this article I had a perspective shifting realization: AI cannot see. It is recreating Stonehenge without ever seeing sarsen stones or holding a blade of grass between two fingers. This is obvious, of course, but as humans we instinctually want to personify and anthropomorphize, extending bodily sensation where there is none. These tools do not see and sense; they digest images as numbers and the more images its fed, the better it is at predicting how these numbers align with prompts.1 No wonder AI images are often uncanny and we can recognize them without being able to explain why. They are created by something without any senses, but sensation is the very basis of communication and art. If we do think of AI-models as operating like human brains, can a brain without a body create something good? Can it create something sensical?

Fake history and science miscommunication

Nano Banana users and the like may have good intentions behind their prompts and may consider image generation a useful tool for illustrating their articles or short-form posts. Nevertheless, if an AI image is not attributed to AI, the intentions of the account or author are dubious. A recent note from one of my favorite writers on Substack, , discussed how she struggled with differentiating between all the real and fake (AI) images teeming online.

“Sometimes I think if I, an art historian, cannot tell if images are real or not…what’s the chance of someone who hasn’t had any kind of visual culture training?”

Material culture is the main subject of archaeological study. Through multiple levels of visual, physical, and sometimes chemical analysis, and employing both art historic and scientific techniques, we can infer how an artifact was created and used. We then use the tangible, material evidence to extrapolate the social-cultural world they came from. Every minute physical detail of an object or a structure is an important line of evidence, but AI images tend to smudge the details and take some algorithmic liberties, where even enhancing an image of an archaeological site can obscure valuable context and information. I believe in accurate and transparent communication, especially since archaeology is often the subject of conspiracy theories and misinformation.

María’s quote above makes the worrisome point that fake images take advantage of people’s interests and lack of expertise— users enjoy fascinating images without knowing that the “archaeology” they’re seeing is make-believe. I do not think we should glamorize or fudge real images of archaeological sites to please the social media news feed or to mislead the public, it’s unethical.

To address María’s note I did a reverse image search of the photo. The AI overview of the AI Mayan mural is a joke in itself and it fails to even accurately describe the image (though the real mural from Xultún does show black-painted scribes). The source is a Facebook post which was picked up by a few other accounts and reposted on Pinterest. One of the posts describes the mural as depicting a Mayan Queen named Ix Ch’ak Ch’een which was a discovery from an entirely different site, the Foundation Rock of Cobá, and published in Smithsonian Magazine last year.

A quick google search of either site will not yield the image above, because the image above is fake. One can hopefully identify the tell-tale signs: strange unidentifiable details, lack of actual Mayan glyphs, and a faux-painterly filter over the whole image. If you google the Xultún site, the results will bring you to the San Bartolo-Xultún Archaeological Project website which features murals that may have been used to prompt the AI-image. So everything about this is a nonsensical mess: the image, the description, and the reverse-image search results. This is why I am extremely skeptical of using AI to visualize the past; it very quickly becomes a misleading jumble communicating pseudoscience rather than real archaeological work. Much like an optical illusion, these uncanny, unrecognizable forms create a semi-coherent image when zoomed out and skimmed over. (Though of course, these models are getting better by the second and when no one can tell the difference anymore, images will lose their 1,000 words value).

Fake images and photoshop have been circulating the internet since long before AI, often proliferated by pseudoscientists and social media accounts that profit off of sensationalizing the past. AI-image generators have just given grifters a shiny new tool to feed the Ancient Aliens/Ancient Apocalypse rhetoric. If you google “AI image of Stonehenge construction” about half of the results are of aliens or fantastical creatures doing the work. (For an entertaining debunking of both Ancient Aliens and Apocalypse, check out Milo Rossi’s youtube videos on the topics). What are the intentions of these “science” and “history” accounts that use AI to enhance or completely falsify archaeological discoveries? I do not think it is to communicate anything with accuracy or nuance, my shocking hunch is that these accounts do it for views and clicks! If the intentions behind an AI image seem dubious and self-interested, I would not trust the information being communicated. Would you trust a scholarly paper with no author, no sources, no peer-review, and blatant conflicts of interest?

The flawed tool

I was going to discuss the “good, bad, and ugly” (how clever!) of AI image generation, but the structure of this article has taken a turn. There was little good to be found, and both the bad and the ugly come from the core of the tool itself. Images are scraped from the internet of real people, places, art, and a whole lot of stock photos. Images from media, movies, games and art are baked in with the real and historical. Does the tool know the difference between a real photograph and a still from a science fiction movie? Is there any difference between the factual and the fictional in the world of AI? Not really, because it only knows the world through two-dimensional media rendered in pixels and numbers. It’s a database of entirely secondary and tertiary sources. The distinction between the factual and the fictional, however, is crucial for creating accurate representations of archaeological sites and situations; but space, perspective, and physics, are also limited in AI’s virtual-world. Furthermore, databases are only as good as the data they contain; it is no surprise that biases and cultural stereotypes are reproduced and amplified by AI tools. While limitations and biases are addressed in scientific research, the AI-user tends to embrace them with open arms. The tool is wielded without discretion, but with authority, which again leads to poor science and history communication. Ultimately, AI image generators are not reflecting tangible reality, but a mirror reflecting another mirror and casting egregious distortions.

One of my major concerns with AI image generation is how these tools are used to render people. AI images of archaeological cultures often depict beautiful figures with symmetrical faces, European standards of beauty, and anachronistic clothes. The result is often a “yassified” version of history. Google “AI image of Aztec/Etruscan/Insert-culture-here” and you are guaranteed results of hot (pornified) women (but let’s not get into the gender politics of it all). Archaeologists should not be speculating about the physical attractiveness of their research subjects, but using AI image generation rather than reconstruction artists will yield these biased results. These images are not rendered by the tool to be accurate or thoughtful, but to please the user. This begs the question, does using AI to render historical figures or archaeological discoveries really humanize the past, or are we just jumbling scientific research with our own slop? Are these tools just filtering the past through our own biases, prejudices, and desire for pleasure and entertainment over accurate reality?2

Archeologist-influencer Miniminute Man (Milo Rossi) made a video on the Lake Waccamaw canoe from North Carolina that demonstrates the current state of affairs.3 The intersection of AI-image generation and archaeology is rife with stereotypes and historical inaccuracy. The real images of an 1,000 year old dugout canoe was not interesting, not “Indian” enough for what I believe are predatory, fake history accounts on social media. The 28-foot long dugout is mutated and disfigured into a painted mobile tipi. The artifact is associated with the Waccamaw tribe of North Carolina, while tipis are culturally specific to Plains tribes in the Western United States. The whole thing is inaccurate and nonsensical, only communicating racial stereotypes to attract views. Some of the AI-renditions show construction crews lifting an equally inaccurate canoe out of the water or depict the ancestral Waccamaw Siouan people, in stereotypical Plains garb, carving the canoe. It is not clear where the original tipi-canoe image came from, but it has been reposted on every platform, including Linkedin, to the admiring comments of viewers who believe that it is somehow representing a dugout carved from a single tree.

You’ll notice as you sift through this type of content that AI images and their descriptions do not add up and rely on the naivety of the viewer and the attractiveness of the image to be accepted. The tipi-canoe is clearly not a historic dugout carved from a single tree, nor is the Mayan mural from Xultún depicting a Queen from Cobá. Even if you struggle with recognizing AI visually, paying closer attention to the description of these images can help one recognize that they are fake. The reverse image search of the tipi-canoe states: “some observers have noted that the tipi structure seen inside the canoe in this specific image is inaccurate for this type of vessel and likely represents a computer-generated anomaly.”

A computer-generated anomaly… or someone egging on an AI image generator to make a canoe “look more Indian.” These tools are not being used to accurately and thoughtfully visualize the past, but to visualize and perpetuate modern biases and stereotypes. Once the image is made and proliferated the more effort and intentionality it takes to disentangle fact from fiction. As media literacy wanes, the more insidious and effective AI images become at misrepresenting archaeology and our world at large. Uncanny images with no source, no attributions, and many a slop-account reposts are likely AI and we MUST advocate for the labeling of AI content across platforms. Without transparency, the internet will become a dead zone where no images or individuals can be trusted or even tied to real people. (Which is already happening, i.e. dead internet theory).

With good intentions and discretion, should we use AI to visualize the past?

My concern is that even with the best intentions and expert knowledge, these tools will err on the side of inaccurate. Visually, I find real photographs or human-made illustrations more appealing, and of course more accurate, than anything an AI image generator could cook up. Since the overwhelming majority of historical AI images are created by dubious social media accounts, often with bad intentions, I think it would better serve a history/archaeology writer to distance themselves from this type of media. Though these images may attract viewers and drive engagement, they do not promote a deeper understanding of history or archaeological sciences, nor do they inspire trust from the luddite-leaning reader. Personally, I am skeptical of writers who use AI images since in our sphere of the internet (and many others) this tool is often used to mislead.

Fortunately, there are artists who specialize in illustrating the past. The difference between real artists and AI tools is accuracy and transparency. Artists who specialize in reconstruction drawings are often trained archaeologists themselves or work directly with experts. Whether computer-generated, pencil drawn, or water color, these images are clearly reconstructions made by real people. The viewer will know they are looking at a well-informed interpretation directly attributed to an artist. In many contexts, real hand-drawings are required to record rock art or murals that a photograph cannot completely capture. It is still standard practice that petroglyphs and pictographs are hand-drawn by archaeologists in the field (at least in my neck of the woods). In the real Xultún tomb, the archaeological illustrator Heather Hurst was immediately called in to draw the mural herself.4 Artistic skills are incredibly valuable and still required by our field5 , and my own artifact illustrations will be published in a monograph soon.

Reconstructions bring archaeology to life, helping a wide audience visualise and understand the archaeological remains. We offer a pioneering service in this area; our artists work closely with our specialists to accurately visualise past communities and landscapes based on the archaeology and environmental evidence we discover on site.

“Reconstruction and Visualisation” from Wessex Archaeology

Overall, I am skeptical of AI tools and the soulless, echo-chamber culture we are barreling towards. Whether its generating visual art or writing, I do not see any value in taking the humanity out of the creative process and off-loading the communication of emotions, senses, and experiences to a predictive model that can neither see nor feel. In our current image-driven media economy where images are rapidly torn out of context, it is more important than ever to cite sources and clarify where our art and images come from. Even though we are playing at science communication on social media, we should hold ourselves to the standards and ethics of our discipline (whatever that discipline may be). I may not be following the Chicago Author-Date style because I maxed out on that in grad school, but I am nevertheless citing my sources so you can access the same information as me.6 We need accurate science communication written by real people for real people, because pretty soon the internet is just going to be AI-bots advertising to each other. A picture may represent 1,000 words, but I don’t think looking at an image can replace the understanding that comes from reading (or listening) to an 1,000 word article. An artifact in a museum without context and description may be beautiful, but it will be impossible to interpret and understand; visualizing the past then becomes meaningless. Aesthetics alone are not what give archaeology value.

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One of the most famous artifacts in the British Museum’s Enlightenment Gallery is an obsidian scrying mirror that allegedly belonged John Dee, a polymath, magus, and advisor of Queen Elizabeth I. Through crystal balls and mirrors, Dee communicated with angels and envisioned British theocratic domination over the New World. 16th century theologians and intellectuals alike believed in an imminent apocalypse, so Dee fashioned the Queen as the leader of the Last and Greatest Empire. Knowing this, I wonder how the so-called magic mirror was used by Dee, if at all, and what it represents to a modern visitor of the British Museum. The Art History Project describes the mirror as “an esoteric obsidian artifact created by John Dee,” while other scholars have attributed the artifact to European or Ethiopian lapidaries.1 But the artifact is neither British nor Ethiopian: it is Aztec, manufactured by skilled indigenous artisans in Pachuca Mexico.2 The mythos of John Dee’s mirror was created by colonial fascinations with New World artifacts and the West’s enduring fascination with the occult, but was this mirror really used by John Dee? Did scrying through the obsidian mirror inspire visions of a transatlantic British Empire?

I was not familiar with John Dee before researching my last article, obsidian mirrors in Mesoamerica, which featured a photo and brief description of the artifact. The mirror’s entry in the British Museum’s database sparked my curiosity and suddenly I needed to make sense of the prolific scientist-magician who amassed the finest personal library in Britain, developed influential magical practices, championed “esoteric imperialism,” and died impoverished in obscurity. Posthumously enshrined by the Rosicrucian movement,3 Dee is described as one of the most well known “wizards” produced by Britain in Douglas Batchelor’s What Magic Is This? podcast.4 I listened to the episode to get a more robust understanding of Dee as a magician since I know very little about the history of magic beyond Harry Potter. The podcast painted an intriguingly vivid picture of Dee that went beyond the scholarly texts I was reading, and it clarified some of the vagaries of Dee’s actual practices.

If you have not read my last article, scrying is a method of divination where the scryer looks into semi-reflective or dynamic matter— water, fire, or dark mirrors— and enters a trance-like state. Once there, they may see images or visions that they use to interpret a question about past, present, or future. Scrying was practiced by elite specialists in multiple Mesoamerican cultures such as the Maya, Olmec, and Aztec. Many New World artifacts like obsidian mirrors were being exported by the Spanish back to Hapsburg Europe, stocking Kunstkammers and providing canvases for Baroque oil paintings.5 Scrying was also a popular method of divination in Europe in the 16th-17th centuries though it is not clear if European collectors knew how the artifacts were used in Mesoamerica— stone artifacts were sometimes misinterpreted as geological specimens. If Dee truly was using the Aztec obsidian mirror for scrying, was this pure coincidence?

Surprisingly, Dee himself was not blessed with the skill of scrying, so he contracted professionals to aid in his divine communications. Dee’s most famous scryer and collaborator is Edward Kelley, a figure whose life before Dee was scantly recorded and is framed with much skepticism by the What Magic Is This podcast. You can imagine how Dee’s occult beliefs, passion for divine communication, and desperate lack of supernatural skill created the perfect target for a charlatan. Though Kelley presented himself as a potential scryer to Dee he had no previous experience with the practice and was operating under a pseudonym to avoid forgery charges. Dee was nevertheless impressed by Kelley’s capabilities as a medium and they worked together from 1582-1589, eventually touring the European continent and attracting wealthy and royal patrons.

Though Dee purportedly contacted angels in the mid-16th century, performing angelic rituals for the then Princess Elizabeth, his thorough pursuit of “the speech of God” did not begin until he separated himself from the Royal Court in the 1580s. The magus and his scryer Kelley conducted their sessions during the day in Dee’s busy house, prefacing their sessions with abundant, hours-long prayers. Everything in the room needed to be precisely adorned; the scrying table was supported by wax seals incised with sacred symbols and the crystal ball was placed on Dee’s “Seal of God.” Kelley would enter a trance-state peering into the crystal “shew-stone”6 and facilitate conversations between Dee and various divine entities. Dee kept thorough records of his conversations with angels which were often in a “divine” language later known as Enochian. The angels dictated through Kelley to Dee The 48 Keys and Liber Loagaeth, the “Book of the Speech of God.” What Magic Is This highlights the many facts that point towards Kelley’s charlatanism, but what stuck out to me was how the “angels” requested that Dee and Kelley share everything, including their wives. Hmm…!

You may have noticed that there is no explicit reference to the obsidian mirror in that brief description of Dee’s scrying practice. That is because the mirror’s association with John Dee may have accrued over time via hearsay beginning with the claim by its first confirmed owner, Horace Walpole. The Gothic author and antiquarian wrote an inscription on the mirror describing it as “the Black Stone into which Dr Dee used to call his Spirits.”7 What Magic Is This describes Dee’s association with the mirror as mythical, pointing instead to records of Dee’s crystal ball as his scrying tool. The mirror’s association prior to 1770 lacks documentation but legal records from 1618, a decade after Dee’s death, describe a round flat stone he used to “find angels.” The mirror was auctioned numerous times after the dispersal of Walpole’s collection and was eventually acquired by the British Museum in 1966. The museum’s characterization of the mirror as Dee’s, as well as its exhibition in the Department of Britain rather than with its geographic of origin, further established the association with Dee as historic fact— thus transforming the Aztec mirror into a British occult object. In reality, the artifact is a testament to colonial interactions at the time and perhaps an accumulation of misinformation. Campbell et al (2021) believe that despite the lack of direct records, the mirror likely did belong to Dee; a belief that is not shared by the What Magic Is This podcast. I myself am still not convinced that Dee owned the obsidian mirror.

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Since the provenience and original ownership of the mirror was murky, there has been speculation that the artifact is actually a European replica of a Mesoamerican mirror. Recent analysis of Dee’s mirror along with similar polished obsidian artifacts at the British Museum clarified the mystery shrouding the object’s true origin. pXRF analysis, a widely used method of obsidian sourcing, confirmed that the mirror was from the Pachuca source in Central Mexico and manufacture traces on the object are consistent with obsidian artifacts produced in the region.8 The age of the mirror however, remains speculative. Though it is likely from the 14th-16th centuries, this range includes both the pre- and post-conquest periods after Spanish arrival in 1521. Whether this mirror was produced by Aztec lapidaries or colonial workshops under Spanish rule is unknown— circular obsidian mirrors and disks were produced during both periods. Hernán Cortés himself commissioned the production of artifacts to be exported from Mexico to Europe which researchers describing as blurring the lines between pre- and post-conquest artifacts (Campbell et al 2021: 1560).

Even if the obsidian Aztec mirror was never used by Dee, his saliency as the creator of Enochian magic brings into question the influence of the occult on his political beliefs. Recent academic scholarship on Dee has focused more on his philosophical and political contributions to Elizabethan England and there is some debate on whether his occult practices influenced his vision of a theocratic “final” empire. One of Dee’s most famous works is the Hieroglyphic Monad (1564), a glyph-symbol that represents universal religion inspired by concepts of prisca theologia9 and the apocalypse as a revolution in knowledge. In a 12-day fervor of writing, Dee recounts having visions of his sigil magically guiding a world emperor in statecraft— a pretty blatant marriage of the magical and political if I do say so myself. Historian William Trattner states that dichotomizing John Dee misrepresents Renaissance worldviews in which Dee’s seemingly disparate disciplines— the scientific, the political, and the magical— held coherency.10

“Dee should be recognized as a particular variant of the proto-typical Elizabethan marriage of science, pseudo-science, and religion,” one of the hallmarks of which was “mingling what has become the traditional elements of expansion with God and patriotism.”11

Dee’s vast interdisciplinary corpus of work has made summarizing his ideology difficult, but a 2019 paper explored the explicit connections between his interests in British colonization and universal religion. Arnold (2019) describes Dee’s ideology as esoteric imperialism rooted in cosmopolitics, which is a bit different from our understanding of a cosmopolitan today. The “cosmopolites” of the 16th century “think tank” the Sidney circle12 believed in the eschatological scope of empire which required religious, specifically Protestant, governance. Dee was heavily influenced by the Circle while advising the Queen in the 1570’s and wrote The Limits of the British Empire which drew on theories of esoteric imperialism, the beginnings of international law, and natural law, to justify British claim over the New World. Though rooted in historic and legal evidence, Dee invoked the legacy of King Arthur and the supreme guidance of the Christian God to expound British supremacy over Spain in colonizing the New World (King Arthur got there first, apparently). His mathematical and cartographic knowledge also contributed to devising expeditions for colonial expansion— he envisioned Britain as a Thalassocracy, or a Sea Empire.

Dee directly attributed his political writings to the Holy Trinity and advice of God even though these claims did not aid in his reception by the Royal Court. In fact, much of Dee’s work was criticized and met with skepticism by the Queen and her advisors. He would eventually leave the court in 1583 to pursue his “angelic actions” with Kelley. Dee may have had influence, but he was in no way the “mastermind” behind the British Empire. Though Christianity was an obvious tool for justifying colonial expansion, Dee’s goal in reaching one true religion through magical means was far-fetched even for the time. Other advisors in the court and even Kelley himself questioned whether or not the divine entities guiding Dee were benevolent angels or demons in disguise. When Dee tried to publish his “British Hieroglyphic” in 1578, a book cover which depicted Queen Elizabeth on a conquest vessel guided by an angel, Elizabeth halted its distribution.

Returning to the question that guided this research, did scrying through the obsidian mirror inspire Dee’s vision of a Final World Empire? The short answer, which is more educated guess rather than fact, is no. There are no records of Dee using the Aztec mirror and his endeavors in angelic communication occurred after his tenure on the Royal Court.

The mirror itself is nevertheless a fascinating artifact that demands thorough examination and contextual evidence to understand. What at first seemed like a simple error in categorization and association (Aztec, not British; unknown, not Dee’s) became a rabbit-hole into the historic influence of angelic magic on imperialism. The research also led me back to my own interests: colonial-indigenous interactions, cultural transformation and persistence, and the role of museums in defining history. The mystery of John Dee’s so-called magic mirror reminds me of the enduring gaze of the West which collects based on aesthetics and superficial understandings, resulting in Kunstkammers of artifacts out of context.

I think the British Museum’s exhibit could benefit from contextualizing the obsidian mirror as either a pre- or post-conquest Aztec ritual object and demystifying Dee’s alleged association with the artifact. I have never been to the museum myself so cannot judge the exhibition of the object and how it may be interpreted by visitors. To me, the mirror is a lesson in colonial interactions, cultural misunderstandings and syncretism, and how hearsay accumulates into myth. Could it be that John Dee learned of Aztec ritual scrying and sought to use the mirror accordingly, or did he intuit from the polish and reflection of the obsidian that it could be used for divination, just like his crystal ball? Or did Walpole misremember Dee’s practices, perhaps making the whole association up? Perhaps the mirror, with its dubious associations, should be exhibited with its Mesoamerican counterparts instead. What do you think?

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Scrying is a method of divining meaning from darkness, practiced by looking into a pool of water or dark glass and provoking a trance-like state. Once there, the practitioner can see past reflection and into vision, or as the prophet Nostradamus said: one can find “a slight flame in the emptiness.” According to the College of Psychic Studies, “the mind projects symbols and images onto our scrying tool to convey the information to conscious awareness.” A range of tools can be used to divine past, present, and future including crystal balls, tea leaves, flames, and mirrors. Scrying is one of many methods of divination practiced throughout human history that held particular significance to numerous Mesoamerican cultures. Our human longing for meaning in the mundane, divinity in the darkness, seems universal.

Divination was practiced throughout the ancient Mesoamerican world using a range of metal ore mirrors with varying degrees of reflectivity. Though their manufacture and function changed over time and across regions, divinatory mirrors were typically prestige ritual items exclusively used by ruling elites. The earliest archaeological mirrors are associated with the Middle Pre-Classic period from 1200-1400 BC and these objects were primarily made from highly polished iron ores. Olmec iron mirrors were uniquely convex and formed either a circular or parabolic shape which could invert reflections and start fires, while ballplayers wore mirror discs as pectorals during games. Maya of the Classic Period constructed iron ore mirrors while the cultures of Teotihuacan made mirrors of both iron ores and obsidian in workshops near the Pyramid of the Moon. Mosaic pyrite mirrors were also common during the Classic Period from 250-900 CE, but obsidian mirrors flourished in the later Post-Classic period from 900-1521 CE. “A dark light: reflections on obsidian in Mesoamerica” describes the coalescence of the natural, mythical, and sensorial dimensions in Pre-Columbian societies.

A defining quality of the Mesoamerican world-view is the cross-media sensual dimension which links objects to landscape, deities, myth and everyday life.

Saunders 2001: 221

Obsidian was the primary tool stone in Mesoamerica for 3000 years before the advent of metallurgy around 800-900 CE. The region’s deep history of volcanism, particularly in Central Mexico, meant volcanic glass obsidian was abundant and imbued with the spiritually qualities of the mountainous environments. The vertical shafts of obsidian mines may have also physically and mythically connected the material to the underworld (Saunders 2001: 224). It is no surprise that this lithic material, powerful in both spiritual and functional qualities, would be used to construct ritual objects and sacrificial blades. One of the supreme Aztec deities Tezcatlipoca whose name translates to “the smoking obsidian mirror,” is a manifestation of obsidian’s association with rulership and divine power (Saunders 2001: 222).

Obsidian’s role as transformed matter which bridged physical and spiritual worlds possessed mythological and religious dimensions. For the Aztecs, three of the nine levels of the underworld were characterized by obsidian – one featured an obsidian mountain where the dead had to walk over sharp cutting paths, another was the ‘place of obsidian bladed winds’, and a third the ‘obsidian place of the dead.’

Saunders 2001: 224

Tezcatlipoca is the god of the night sky, divination, and conflict, and he is considered the creator of the first iteration of the world. From the Aztec perspective our world is the Fifth Sun, meaning that four preceding worlds have been created and destroyed by divine conflict or the failure of humanity. In each of these iterations, one deity becomes the sun of the world to varying degrees of success. Tezcatlipoca collaborated with his cosmic opposite, Quetzalcoatl, to create the first world out of a primordial sea inhabited by a crocodile monster. Using his foot as bait, Tezcatlipoca captured the crocodile and molded its body into land and replaced his lost appendage with an obsidian mirror (though he is also depicted with a bone or serpent replacing the lost foot). As principle deity, Tezcatlipoca took on the responsibility of being the sun; however, as god of the night, he was not bright enough to provide sufficient light to for the creatures on earth. So, Quetzalcoatl knocked him out of the sky, and in Tezcatlipoca’s anger, he turned into a jaguar and destroyed the first draft of the world.1 In Aztec culture, scrying invoked the power of Tezcatlipoca, and divination was one of the primary uses of obsidian mirrors— though other functions have been described in historic records and proposed by researchers.

The functionality of obsidian mirrors: an experimental investigation

One study explored the functional use of mirrors in a lab setting in something of a MythBusters simulation. Professor of physics José Lunazzi and a team of students aimed to demonstrate “the images these artifacts are capable of producing” to improve our understanding of obsidian mirror functionality (2016: 163). Before mirrors were used in the Preclassic period, looking into still water was the only way to observe one’s reflection. While water has a reflectivity coefficient of 4%, obsidian mirrors are 20% reflective. Though not as effective as modern mirrors, obsidian and other polished ore mirrors would have been a vast improvement. In my opinion, the necessity of skilled lapidarists (stone workers) and culturally inscribed materials for mirror production amplified the exclusivity of divination practice. Now, the specialized divinely assigned skill of scrying had an equally specialized object to reinforce and represent their power. But back to the objects themselves; as previously discussed, divinatory mirrors were made of various material, shape, and reflectivity. The sample of obsidian Mesoamerican mirrors today includes concave, convex, and plane mirrors ranging from as small as a fingernail to substantial blocks. Lunazzi discusses the following functions of mirrors and their reflective images:

• Self-reflection and observing one’s own face

  • Though Mesoamerican mirrors generally have low reflectivity, when a mirror is thoroughly polished and the user is illuminated in sunlight, one can see their glowing reflection (see image above).

  • Convex mirrors can enlarge the image of the subject, allowing detailed examination or representing transformation.

  • The image in a large plane mirror appears behind the surface of the object, and this image/reflection may have been interpreted as another dimension or domain that only the mirror can access

• Creating inverted and convergent images

  • Mirrors may have been used to flip and invert subjects, perhaps inspiring inverted icons and images in Mesoamerican art.

  • A mirror laid skyward would bring the heavens down to earth— transporting and connecting worlds.

  • Concave mirrors will variably reflect the image of a subject depending on their placement in front of the mirror. The resulting image transforms the subject, inverting or enlarging it.

  • The mirror’s ability to transform the object/observer demonstrated its divine power and connection to otherworlds.

• Reflecting sunlight

  • Olmec parabolic mirrors did not produce great images but instead were highly reflective— the angled surface could capture and disperse sunbeams to distant viewers.

  • Rulers may have employed mirrors to reflect the sunlight to an audience of viewers, demonstrating their connection to sun deities and divinity more generally.

  • Lunazzi’s research team simulated obsidian mirror reflectivity with modern materials to test the distance at which the light could be seen. They found that reflected sunlight was easily visible at 1.4 km, the distance at which a human observer can no longer see “waving arms.”

  • Both obsidian mirrors and their more reflective pyrite counterparts could have been used to communicate via sunlight across great distances.

• Making fire

  • Lunazzi also experimented with low-reflectivity mirrors, simulating obsidian, to start fires. The mirror was successful at converging and concentrating sunlight to start flames which supports historic claims that the Inca made fires using mirrors (though the Incan empire of the Andes is not part of Mesoamerica).

  • A 1981 study also successfully demonstrated that Olmec concave mirrors could start fires (image below).

These experiments, though informative, only illustrate one dimension of functionality; while it is important to consider the literal uses of mirrors to infer practices of the past, the functionality of an object, especially a spiritual object like a divinatory mirror, is culturally inscribed (e.g. an object with no apparent use to a modern viewer may have numerous vital functions in an ancient society). The primary function of obsidian mirrors which is not addressed in this study is, of course, scrying. Mirrors are recorded in codices as specialist divinatory objects but the efficacy of divination is not something we can necessarily measure scientifically. The efficiency of a mirror in reflecting waves and producing images more aptly be explored, and the insights from Lunazzi as a physicist highlight the benefits of interdisciplinary approaches to archaeological questions. Mesoamerican mirrors were evidently employed in numerous ways to demonstrate the power of the object and its user, the diviner. Reflectivity, communication, and fire starting may have been of tangential importance to divination or their semiotics as body adornments and pectorals.

Obsidian “mirrors” in the Colonial Period

During the Museum Period from 1860-1900, newly established cultural repositories primarily in the United States and Western Europe were in a “collection frenzy” to stock their institutions. Opulent artifacts were often collected and sold by amateur excavators/looters2 which is why many Mesoamerican collections today, while being archaeological, have no provenience data. Gustave Heye was a voracious collector of Native American artifacts and his collection of 58,000 objects established the Museum of the American Indian. However, a majority of these objects originated from amateur excavations and lack contextual data from archaeological analysis. The phenomenon of obsidian mirrors in Mesoamerica spanned cultures and time periods and the lack of provenience data from these objects leads to conflations and misinterpretations. For instance, we may associate Aztec mirrors with the god Tezcatlipoca, but a Purépechan mirror would not reflect a deity from a different pantheon, and a polished obsidian tablet commissioned by Spanish officials may not be a mirror at all…

The following quote describes the conundrum of unprovenienced obsidian mirrors:

This lack of information shrouds their function, chronology, and precise cultural assignment, and in museums they are broadly identified as pre-Columbian mirrors from Mesoamerica (Martinez et al 2021: 138).

A reexamination of obsidian mirrors at the Smithsonian addresses misinterpretations of poorly documented collections by combining a historical archaeological approach (interweaving historic data, art history, and archaeological data) with technical studies to analyze the source and manufacture of these objects. The six rectangular obsidian mirrors at the museum were not recovered from archaeological contexts but were acquired or purchased by collectors from the Michoacán region of Mexico, the region of the Purépecha Empire. Since rectangular obsidian mirrors were not produced by the pre-Columbian Purépecha, nor the Aztec or Maya, these objects were instead manufactured in Spanish-controlled lapidary workshops. The authors also highlight historical and archaeological evidence of the colonial period which describes rectangular obsidian objects not as mirrors, but as features of Christian altars.

The unique elemental composition of obsidian can be characterized by portable X-ray fluorescence analysis (pXRF), a well-established method for sourcing obsidian artifacts to their geographic origin. Obsidian sourcing works because there are large databases of geologic source XRF data (i.e. known sources have been thoroughly analyzed using the technology), and instruments are highly-sensitive to critical trace elements. When XRF data of an unknown obsidian is statistically compared to sources in the database, a best fit can be established to correlate and unknown artifact to a known source. There has been some recent debate over the method being accurate vs. precise, as in it is accurate for determining the most closely aligned source but perhaps not precise enough for a geologist to want to use the data, but I digress!3 pXRF is an advantageous tool for sourcing unprovenienced artifacts in museums, especially for accurately characterizing or repatriation Mesoamerican artifacts. Five of the six obsidian objects from the Smithsonian aligned with the Ucareo source in Michoucán which was historically controlled by the Purépecha Empire. The odd obsidian out was actually a brecciated mahogony variety which did not align with any known sources tested (top right tablet in image above).

The authors also conducted technomorphological analysis which is the study of the physical and social processes in producing human technology. This can be done by simply observing the tablets under a microscope and assessing manufacture traces on the obsidian such as striations, pecking, and polishing. For the full production breakdown refer to the article, but the first step in reduction was direct soft percussion similar to standard stone tool reduction. Pecking, grinding, and polishing ensue to produce rectangular highly-reflective surfaces. The important discovery from this analysis was that production traces on the objects corresponded with sandstone grinding wheels which was commonly used in postmedieval European lapidary. Both the material sources and production techniques of rectangular obsidian objects were distinct from Aztec and Maya mirror technology. pXRF and technomorphological data show that the Smithsonian tablets were produced in colonial obsidian workshops and not Pre-Columbian mirrors or adornments. To put the Smithsonian collection in context, the distinct history of Michoacán is subsequently explored.

The Purépecha Empire, established in 1300 AD, were enemies of the neighboring Aztecs and prevented their westward expansion by establishing a territorial polity. Due to their relative cultural isolation, Purépecha developed distinct artistic, religious, and technological traditions and their advantageous location in the volcanic belt of western Mexico led to their control of obsidian sources. Similar to other Mesoamerican cultures, obsidian was highly valued for both its physical and spiritual qualities— representing royal and divine power— and production was centralized in elite residential workshops. Lapidaries produced body adornments such as labrets and ear flares which signified the rank of the wearer, and in the Late Post-Classic, obsidian disks and mirrors.

When the Spanish military arrived at the capitol city of Purépecha armed for a violent takeover, the some 100,000 Purépechan soldiers were ordered to stand down. Though the King submitted to Spanish rule in 1522, conflict ensued between local and colonial governments until the last vestiges of Purépecha power were usurped. Colonial reduccíon was the process of relocating communities into centralized towns, however the Spanish Bishop of Michoacán sought to preserve native crafts and establish specialized craft centers. Despite conflicting religions and cultures, it was in the colonial power’s best interest to maintain Purépechan obsidian sources and workshops. According to Martinez (2021), “obsidian played a critical role in the economy that fueled the European renaissance;” sumptuous, native made objects were sold back to the colonial center and used as canvases by Baroque artists (image below). Rather than a rapid technological takeover, colonial obsidian lapidaries represent hybrid production where Purépechan craftsmanship and cultural belief produced and informed colonial objects like the Smithsonian obsidian tablets.

Conclusion: Indigenous-Colonial intersections

Considering the vigour with which the Spanish eradicated all traces of pagan idolatry, the missionaries appear to have been unaware of the indigenous metaphysical and religious significance of obsidian, due partly to their inability to speak indigenous languages and capture obsidian’s abstract symbolism, and partly due to their different aesthetic engagements with its materiality (Saunders 2001: 226).

The Spanish characterized Tezcatlipoca as a pagan demon, but embraced obsidian lapidary as a commodity. In doing so, the Spanish failed to recognize that obsidian as a material carried on the cultural beliefs of the Aztecs and other indigenous Mesoamerican worldviews. Missionaries converted indigenous Mexicans to Christianity and attempted to regulate “idolatry” but according to Saunders, conversion was often more “apparent than real” (2001: 225). Formal Aztec priesthood dissolved under Spanish rule but covert worships of Tezcatlipoca continued; idols were hidden behind church altars and pre-Columbian religious and cultural practices were documented in rural communities a century after colonization (Saunders 2001: 226).

Colonial obsidian workshops in Michoacán similarly demonstrate indigenous-colonial intersections; misunderstandings and transformations resulting in spiritual syncretism. Though we can recategorize the Smithsonian “mirrors” as tablets or altar pieces, they are a testament to the conflicting worldviews in colonial Mexico that led to indigenous cultural persistence. Franciscan priests commissioned obsidian altar pieces and disks for monumental atrial crosses, reinforcing indigenous worldviews and also creating new material-spiritual connections.

The confusions and ambiguities of crosses and obsidian – in fact, the overlapping and part intermeshing of two different aesthetics – coalesced in a unique kind of object. These were the so-called atrial crosses whose visual attractiveness (for the Spanish) and syncretic symbolic importance (for native peoples) were enhanced by the incorporation of obsidian

(Saunders 2001: 227)

In a museum and out of context, the obsidian disk above could easily be misinterpreted as a pre-Colombian mirror when in reality it is the result of colonial interactions and cultural misunderstandings. The incorporation of obsidian art into Spanish colonial architecture speaks to a powerful cultural syncretism and is another example of indigenous cultural persistence in the Americas, as previously discussed in my article on California Mission Art and Architecture. Obsidian workshops and the market for obsidian art still flourishes, particularly for tourists. In Teotihuacan, the workshop district remains near the Pyramid of the Moon, the same locale of obsidian workshops in pre-Columbian times. However the primary types of obsidian craftsmanship are ersatz Pre-Columbian artifacts (replicas) and jewelry (Saunders 2001).

I’ll finish up the article with the story and resulting work of modern artists Robert Smithson (of Spiral Jetty fame!). On a trek through Maya ruins in 1969, Smithson says the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca appeared to him and instructed him to make art that would “collapse time” between the ancient and modern world. Yucatan Mirror Displacements is the result of this vision and revelation: the placement of mirrors in the Yucatan landscape, an exhibit of photographs of the mirrors, and a reimagining of a historic text Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan (1843). Despite conflating Aztec and Mayan deities, I believe Smithson successfully followed his divine assignment by employing mirrors to collapse time and space, connecting worlds in a similar manner to Mesoamerican divinatory mirrors. His work also juxtaposes our modern obsession with “image” to pre-Columbian practices of scrying— divining meaning from images in the darkness.

Anyway, I hope you learned a little something and perhaps feel inspired to test your scrying abilities through whatever medium you have on hand. If you want to support my work beyond subscribing, liking or sharing, consider donating to my kofi!

Works Cited:

Saunders, Nicholas J. 2001."A dark light: reflections on obsidian in Mesoamerica." World Archaeology 33(2): 220-236. Link.

Aztec Calendar. Tezcatlipoca. https://www.azteccalendar.com/god/Tezcatlipoca.html

Clampitt, Cynthia. 2022. Tezcatlipoca (Deity). EBSCO. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/tezcatlipoca-deity

Shaw, Gary. October 6, 2021. Obsidian spirit mirror used by John Dee, Queen Elizabeth I’s court astrologer, has Aztec origins. The Art Newspaper. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/10/06/obsidian-spirit-mirror-used-by-john-dee-queen-elizabeth-is-court-astrologer-has-aztec-origins

Lunazzi, L. José. 2016. “On How Mirrors Would Have Been Employed in Ancient the Americas.” From Manufactured Light, Mirrors in the Mesoamerican Realm. University of Utah Press. Link.

Carlson, J. B. 1981. "Olmec Concave Iron Ore Mirrors: The Aesthetic of a Lithic Technology and the Lord of the Mirror." In The Olmec and Their Neighbors: Essays in Memory of Matthew W. Stirling, ed. Elizabeth P. Benson, 117-147. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, The University of Maryland. Link.

Martinez, Maria M., Michael Brandl, Meredith Sharps Noyes, Thomas Lam, and Edward P. Vicenzi. 2021. "Reflecting on the History and Use of Rectangular Obsidian “Mirrors” from Mexico: Reinterpreting Old Museum Collections and Indigenous–Colonial Intersections."

The Getty Research Institute. 2010. “Obsidian Mirror Travels.” https://www.getty.edu/research/exhibitions_events/exhibitions/obsidian_mirror/through_the_mirror.html

Guggenheim. “Robert Smithson Yucatan Mirror Discplacements 1-9.” https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/5322

If reflection was a physical space, it would be the place where I learn the most. And perhaps it would look something like the Old Library at Trinity. You could even argue that true learning only happens interiorly, in this space rather than the classroom, because it is only what we process and hold on to that stays with us longterm. As I’ve gotten older the fickleness of memory has troubled me, but I am trying to change my habits so that the knowledge I care about sticks. Enacting this involves reading and rereading, journalling and taking notes on life1, reviewing coursework, and perhaps most importantly, tuning out the background noise. Unfortunately, we are so enveloped in the noise, this constant flood of information, that processing it all into knowledge is impossible. Rather than a closet of mirrors, reflection is a window into all the images and information we have collected and found valuable, like birds collecting scraps for a nest. Finishing grad school, I have collected excessively and the epistemological nest is a mess. Now what do I do with all of this?

It is time to take stock and reflect on being a so-called master in anthropology. Completing the assignments and achieving the grades is not enough for me personally to feel like I have fully chewed and processed the knowledge. As a student of our modern era, I am an expert at rote memorization which has gotten me through many undergraduate courses. However, rote memorization turns your brain into a trash can: throw in the knowledge like garbage and when it’s full, take it out for the trucks. For my graduate seminar in archaeological theory we read a chapter or two a week of Bruce Trigger’s INFAMOUS tome, A History of Archaeological Thought, and turned in a two page single-spaced summary of each chapter. Then one person was selected to read their summaries in class and we “discussed,” often finishing up well before our scheduled end-time. I was not thrilled with the teaching style in this course, the busy-work feel of the assignments, and the tangible rush everyone was in to get out of class. So much information was going in and out of my head I was left with a very broad impression of the history of my field. An unsatisfactory impression, obviously, but one I can fix.

If my thesis has taught me anything, it is that I don’t really know something until I’ve read it over and over and put it into my own words. I developed this habit in high school but it does not feel as instinctual anymore. I often have to stop myself from skimming everything and turning reading into a “scrolling” experience. When I was younger, I would read my favorite books multiple times and scour over poems until I had them memorized. I feel like the only way to know a poem is to be able to carry it around with you. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Lady Lazarus are a part of me now and can be consulted like prayers. The researching and writing process for my thesis forced me into this habit again. Whenever I am writing a research paper or article, I need to have my sources open so that I can consult them as I go. Every article or book chapter I cited in my thesis was read a dozen times over, which is why all of my thesis information has become a part of me, like an extra limb. Perhaps this form of memorization is more effective because it is not just regurgitating facts; I am processing the information myself and holding it up against everything else I know— factual, experiential, and emotional. I feel like I know something when I can talk about it easily in conversation and explain it to someone who may not be familiar with the subject. All of this knowledge building, the foundations and adornment of the nest, comes with patience, passion, and reflection.

The reason I am sharing this with you all is that I believe we are in a crisis of reflection. Time is essential for knowledge acquisition and we increasingly spend more time consuming than processing. The average American spends multiple hours on social media a day and its far worse for children and teens.2 The manufactured desire for entertainment has insidious consequences: the more time you spend consuming the less time you spend thinking. The less time you spend thinking, the less information you process about your life and the world around you. We are so overwhelmed with information that our primate brains cannot handle it, and the memory loss I have experienced as consequence has scared me. Remembering the context and the quotes has gotten harder. Sometimes I begin a thorough explanation of a topic, only to realize that I’ve lost all the details. The information has alluded me and the knowledge is lost.

Not only do our primate minds do well with reflection, I think we thrive on it. In the peace of monotonous work epic poems were composed and recited. In the quiet of the morning, waiting for my coffee to brew, I gather all I need to know about my day from birdsongs and the view outside my window. I always have a better, more productive day when I stave off the urge to look at my phone. Our cultural shift towards consuming and away from thinking has cascading effects on our psychological, spiritual, and creative well-beings. And this isn’t speculation: cognitive disorders in young people are on the rise.3 I am not speaking on this from a place of judgement, but as someone who is equally suffering from the consequences of our pleasure-seeking world.

If you have ever embarked on The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, a guidebook on unlocking creativity, “Week 4: Recovering A Sense of Integrity” may have troubled you. I have never been able to get past it. Every week, Cameron assigns exercises for the reader to follow and on Week 4 you are supposed to commit to reading deprivation, but it is more than that. It is full on media deprivation. In 1992, the concept of reading deprivation alone may have been troubling, coupled with abstaining from network TV. In 2026, a media free week seems unfathomable. Not only are we not reading (many Americans don’t read anyway4), we are coming home to streaming services, social media scrolls, and video games. Or we are too busy working and taking care of the home to relax.

It is a paradox that by emptying our lives of distractions we are actually filling the well. Without distractions, we are once again thrust into our sensory world. With no newspaper to shield us, a train becomes a viewing gallery. With no novel to sink into (and no television to numb us out) an evening becomes a vast savannah…

We gobble the words of others rather than digest our own thoughts and feelings, rather than cook up something of our own.

Cameron 1992: 87

Confronting Week 4 forces us out of dopamine cycles and desensitization, and it is terrifying. The savannah of a screenless evening sounds like getting dropped into the wilderness without equipment, Man vs. Wild style. But I think the path to cultivating knowledge is the uncomfortable path. And it is a path we are capable of walking down if we turn away from pleasurable distractions and towards what really fascinates us. Algorithmic newsfeeds are also antithetical to knowledge building. Rather than seeking the information you want, we are feed whatever the platform believes will keep our attention. Exploring and collecting becomes more like playing slots than pursuing knowledge. Unfortunately, nearly every platform (including Substack) follows the algorithm model and rather than guiding ourselves down a path of knowledge acquisition, we try to divine what is important from an oracle that does not have out best interests in mind. Were sifting through the garbage for something that shines and wasting our time while doing so. In the words of William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) from Seven, which I paraphrased in my post on AI:

You have a world of knowledge at your fingertips and what do you do? Play poker all night.

So my greatest takeaway from graduate school is this: we have to take control of our time and both the quality and quantity of information we consume. A majority of us have fallen into screen and social media addiction which will hinder knowledge building and creativity, but luckily we all have control over our time and what we do with it. You do not need to go to graduate school to continue your education or to cultivate your interests and skills. We can all develop our own curricula to build the nests we want to live in, and it begins with actively seeking out the knowledge we find interesting, processing it thoroughly, and incorporating it into our lives. Maybe we can all try Week 4 and see what happens, but my partner and I are starting with one media-free night a week, channeling Patti Smith and Robert Maplethorpe in their Chelsea apartment.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming— archaeological deep dives— next week! <3

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Graduation is just around the corner and burnout is still hunting me down. I have not been able to focus on tangential research for this publication, but I thought I could adapt some of my academic writing into a post. The Cultural Background section of my thesis, one of the most impactful and fascinating portions of my thesis to write, explores the label of “Mission” basketry and the value of Native perspectives in art history. My master’s thesis was a bit of an experiment with pXRF (portable X-ray fluorescence) technology and woven basketry to analyze a basket collection undergoing repatriation1. pXRF is a method of elemental and/or chemical analysis which uses X-rays to excite atoms in a sample and measure their elemental energies, creating wavy spectra that illustrate the elemental composition of the sample (click the links to check out previous posts on pXRF and my thesis). This project was a cross-institutional collaboration between my university, a county museum, and multiple Native American tribes. I am ever-grateful for having the opportunity to conduct this research and learn so much about Southern California basketry, historic museum practices, and pXRF technology. Since I had the freedom to dive into whatever background topics I saw fit, I made sure to situate the basketry collection we worked with in the context of Native Southern California history and weaving traditions.

For a bit of context, basket weaving traditions extend far into the past and some of the most ancient fiber technology in the Americas has been found in California, dating to the early Holocene.2 Local resources and environments shaped basketry traditions, and weavers shaped plant ecology by tending, pruning, burning, and cultivating fiber plants. In fact, many basketry plants must be tended in order to produce fibers of ideal size and length for weaving. Tending the Wild by M. Kat Anderson (a must read!) examines how interconnected basketry traditions are with land management practices and plant cultivation. Generally, baskets were constructed for everyday use such as food storage, processing, and cooking. However, baskets also served ceremonial and ritual functions and were used for storing valuable items like shell beads. Weaving traditions were as diverse as the 100+ tribes in California, and individual weavers developed their own idiosyncratic designs as well. Coiled basketry is a tedious, long-term process that requires expert skill for stitching tight weaves and mapping designs into three-dimensional space. The basketry traditions of Southern California (specifically in the Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and San Diego regions) are often lumped together as “Mission-style,” in reference to the Spanish Missions (1769-1834) where many tribes in the region were evangelized (forced assimilation) and forced to work to support Spanish settlements. As I described in a note from the other day, Euro-American collectors at the turn of the 20th century liked the idea of purchasing baskets from Mission survivors and descendants, perpetuating both the “Mission fantasy” and the “vanishing Indian” narratives of the time. Eminent anthropologist (though very controversial today), Alfred Kroeber, formally defined the “Mission-style” in 1922, effectively collapsing different tribes and time periods together and centering European influence on Native art. Recent scholarship has sought to reassess and reconsider the label of “Mission” art.

Reconsidering the Mission Era: 1769-1834

Alta California was first encountered by Europeans during Cabrillo’s 1542 expedition to connect New Spain to Southeast Asia. Traveling north up the coast, Cabrillo met the Kumeyaay in San Diego, the Gabrieleño on Catalina Island, and various Chumash communities in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo. Foul weather at Monterey Bay forced the San Salvador to return south, and Cabrillo died on Catalina Island where the crew took shelter for the winter. Though the expedition was considered unsuccessful at the time, it inspired European interest in Alta California and sparked numerous European voyages along the coast— Sir Francis Drake (on his way to circumnavigate the globe), Sebastian Rodriguez Cermeño (who mapped the coastline), and Sebastian Vizcaino (who urged the King of Spain to colonize the region). However, it would be another 166 years until the establishment of Spanish Missions in Alta California.

Expanding on the preexisting mission system in Baja California, Junípero Serra and Captain Gaspar de Portola voyaged north to establish missions from San Diego to Sonoma.3 Spanish Franciscans established missions and military outposts (presidios) which relied on the exploitation of Native laborers and resources. Missions also relied on military support to forcibly relocate and control communities. Initial settlements consisted of ephemeral structures of wood, willow, and tule, built with the assistance of Native peoples. Eager to evangelize the Gabrieleño (also known as Tongva) peoples, the first structure erected at Mission San Gabriel was the church; however, the open-air, tule-walled construction was closer to Gabrieleño oroyvekish than a Spanish church. The original site was established in a village called Hutukngna, demonstrating how Missions were built directly out of Native communities employing local culturally significant materials.

With limited imports of European materials, Spanish architecture styles needed to be reinterpreted through locally available resources. The Native-style temporary structures were eventually replaced with adobe, then kiln-fired brick and white-washed stone we associate with mission churches today. Gabrieleño/Tongva art historian Yve Chavez describes how Native and Spanish architecture reflect the different world-views of these colliding cultures; Native tule and willow structures reflect a connection and extension of the natural landscape, while the Spanish preference for monumental stone architecture represents human domination over the natural world. 4

While the goal of the Spanish government and the Catholic Church was to ostensibly save the souls of indigenous Californians, missions established an economic system that could support Spanish colonization of the region. One of the European explorers, Vizcaino, urged the King of Spain to colonize California because of both its natural resources and its “built-in” workforce. Though paid on the outset, by the turn of the 19th century the Church stopped compensating Native laborers while also selling Native-made art to supplement dwindling budgets. Pueblos, the first civilian settlements, cropped up around missions such as the pueblo de La Reina de Los Angeles in 1781, which was actually built out of a Gabrieleño village. The general Angelino sentiment today is that Native California history is separate from the history of LA— the connection seems ancient and tenuous.5 But in reality, the first iteration of the the city I call home was hand-built by Gabrieleño people.

The sordid history of Spanish missions is often sanitized in public education and at mission museums, which of course want to maintain an attractive narrative to support tourism. The assimilation process, or “missionization,” resulted in a drastic decline in Native populations who were forced off their lands, intentionally overworked, severed from traditional practices, and subjected to violence and torture (as well as massacres). Unmarried women were kept in monjeríos, chaperoned dormitories, where their relationships with men could be monitored by the church. These features of mission settlements are often excluded from historic narratives at mission sites today, and the location of the original monjerío at Mission San Gabriel was not recorded. Social reorganization broke down traditional familial and social structures and padres assumed reproductive control over the community (controlling who women married and the conditions those children were raised in). Mission records of Native converts and laborers often showed diminishing populations due to disease and oppressive conditions— resulting in an estimated 72% population loss.6 Despite the sanitization of mission history by the Catholic church, many anthropologists re-characterized missions as prisons and monuments to colonialism; but, as Yve Chavez explains, it is much more complicated than that.

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In her recent publication, Indigenizing California Mission Art and Architecture, Chavez describes missions as sites that are “deeply misunderstood, vilified, and romanticized” (2025: xiv). Native identities were not only tied to tribes but distinct villages, and as communities were brought together in Spanish missions, identities merged and shifted. Some of the descendants of Mission San Gabriel in present day Los Angeles identify as Gabrieleño, and since non-federally recognized tribes do not have reservations, the mission is a physical place where the living community can connect with their ancestors. As previously stated, Native peoples hand-built and supported mission settlements and their influence on mission art and architecture is often understudied and undervalued. As Chavez states, Mission San Gabriel is the place where her community “mourned, celebrated, and survived” (2025: xiv).

Recent scholarship on Native persistence and resilience challenge the metaphor of “missions as prisons” which severed Native people from their land, history, and culture. Documentary and archaeological evidence demonstrate how Native Californians mitigated and resisted European influence, maintained trade networks, continued hunting and foraging to supplement diets, and took paseos to leave the missions. And of course, Native communities actively resisted the mission system by meeting the Spanish military with force and organizing rebellions— when friars banned traditional dancing, the Gabrieleño fought back with the support of local village chiefs.7 Archaeologists Tsim Schneider and Lee Panich stress that terminal narratives of cultural discontinuity should be replaced with diachronic narratives of cultural persistence. The enduring tradition of basket weaving reminds us that colonization was just one chapter in the full timescale of Native history, and one of the many examples of how Native traditions adapted, transformed, and persisted to the present day (2020: 105).8

Indigenizing “Mission-style” Basketry

Basketry traditions are an example of Native Californians negotiating the “constraints and opportunities of colonialism” and continuing cultural practices through the Mission era (Panich 2013: 105).9 Early accounts of European-Native contact record that fine woven baskets were offered as gifts from tribes to visitors. Fray Juan Crespí described receiving “gorgeous and very elegant rushen baskets and bowls worthy of the admiration of any person with good taste” (Chavez 2025: 50). Native peoples continued weaving baskets and using ground-stone tools for everyday use, as well as maintaining ceremonial practices (such as Chumash dances and Gabrieleño Wind Sycamore ceremonies).10 As European settlers and traders became interested in Native art, weavers constructed baskets not only for domestic and ritual use, but for the beginnings of a commercial market. During the Mission era, Chumash weavers made large “presentation” baskets with heraldic imagery, designs from Spanish pesos, and lettering such as the name of the weaver herself (see image below). Padres allowed women time off from other duties to focus on their craft, trading and exporting baskets alongside other Native-made goods to financially support missions (Chavez 2025: 63-64).

Basketry traditions are dynamic; it is no surprise that Native weavers interpreted and incorporated European designs and forms into their work. Woven objects took on new forms such as the one-of-a-kind sombrero hat made by Chumash weaver in the 1790s (image below). Representing the breadth of cultural exchange at the time, the wide-brim form is reminiscent of Filipino salakot style hat which would have been imported from the new Spanish colony. When the Mexican government broke down the mission system in the 1830s, a process known as secularization, Southern California weavers continued crafting baskets to sell to Euro-Americans. Baskets were made smaller, finer, and in different forms modeled after European dish ware. The “basket craze” reached its peak in the 1880s and lasted into the 1920s, resulting in the trade of Native California art across the world and the formation of many private and museum collections. Native art collectors were inspired by the “perceived embodiment of desirable cultural values such as naturalness, primitiveness, and simplicity” (Smith-Ferri 1998: 69), as well as narratives of cultural decline— if they did not collect baskets soon, the art, like their creators, would be gone.11

Yve Chavez reassess the “Mission” basket style in her thesis and subsequent book, Indigenizing California Mission Art and Architecture. With basketry art dating back at least hundreds of years, Chavez seeks to separate post-contact basketry from pre-contact basketry, as well as separate post-mission basketry from baskets made during the Spanish mission era between 1769-1834. The “Mission” designation was defined by Alfred Kroeber in his 1922 publication for the American Museum of Natural History. Though there were 21 Spanish Missions throughout northern and southern California, Kroeber’s “Mission style” only includes baskets made by Southern California Tribes— Chumash, Gabrielino (Tongva), Fernandeño, Mountain, Pass, and Desert Cahuilla, Juaneño, Luiseño, Cupeño, Northern and Southern Diegueño, and Serrano. Kroeber attached the term “Mission” to baskets made before the establishment of Missions pre-1769 and post-1834, and included baskets made by weavers living outside of mission settlements. According to Chavez, Kroeber’s designation blurs the lines between traditional and post-colonial basketry and ignored tribal differences. Furthermore, the names of individual weavers were seldom recorded or considered artists at the time. Chavez stresses that baskets should be identified by tribal affiliation if possible and analyzed within the historical and cultural context in which they were created.12

Kroeber described some Native California basketry traditions as the finest in the world, but his analysis of Southern California basketry is more critical (1922). In his brief publication, Basket Designs of The Mission Indians of California, Kroeber primarily analyzed the physical characteristics of baskets and design elements, focusing on “irregular” baskets and “unbalanced” designs which he cites as being caused by “indifference [rather] than incompetence” (1922: 173). Following the conventions of the burgeoning field of anthropology, Kroeber described visual motifs and designs in western terms without discussing what they may have represented to the weaver or her culture and community (1922: 163-172). The absence of cultural background on basketry construction and design is because this publication was an analysis of museum collections which did not include ethnographic research or interviews with actual weavers.13 As anthropological analysis has developed, so have our interpretations and understanding of Native basketry; recent analyses by Chavez and Moser respectively consider historically overlooked factors to describe basketry construction and design. This theoretical development in basketry studies demonstrate how indigenous or emic perspectives are essential for analyzing basketry as art.

Chavez analyzes “Mission” baskets from an art historic lens based on material, form, and design, and incorporates anthropological and ethnographic research into her approach. Though European and American influence changed basketry production, weavers were preserving traditional culture through their craft. In terms of form, commercial baskets tended to be smaller than most utilitarian baskets and took on new or historically uncommon shapes. Collectors preferred “trinket” baskets— round vessels with small openings based on traditional baskets for storing “treasures” such as shell money and beads. Trays and bottle-neck baskets also grew in popularity and weavers incorporated pedestals, lids, and handles adopted from European dish ware. Grouping pre-Mission basketry, Mission era basketry, and post-Mission basketry styles together ignores the cultural and economic factors that influenced weaving traditions during these different historical periods. Though baskets were often sold in the late 19^th to early 20^th centuries as representing “traditional” or “authentic” Native styles, the Euro-American market influenced what styles of baskets were purchased by collectors and museums.

Stylistically, there are no cohesive “Mission” patterns according to Chavez and basketry expert Chris Moser— a stark contrast to Kroeber’s assertion that “Mission” baskets could be treated as a unit without considering tribal affiliation (1922: 153). Basketry styles were as diverse as the tribes represented and the individual skill and preference of the weaver. Since tribal groups shared some motifs and designs, and weavers themselves were often affiliated with multiple tribes (i.e., parents/relatives from different/multiple tribal backgrounds), it can be difficult to parse out tribal attributions without records. Primary classes of design elements include geometric motifs, plant motifs, land creatures, birds, and environmental motifs. Non-traditional motifs include words, domesticated animals, mission bells, and arrowheads (Moser 1993: 29). Moser warns that basketry designs can be easily misinterpreted by outsiders— some design elements were created simply to break up the monotonous process of weaving (1993: 29). While some designs can tell stories and convey meanings, others may be purely decorative and unrelated to social practices and worldviews (Moser 1993). On the other hand, nontraditional elements incorporated into basketry by weavers may also have been misunderstood— Moser suggests that weavers may have been employing European and American designs purely for aesthetics (1993). The perspectives of both Moser and Chavez provide valuable context and reflexivity for interpreting basketry construction and designs today.14

In Native American Basketry of Southern California, Moser (1993) explains how manufacture, rather than style, unites “Mission” basketry. Ipai weaver and author Justin Farmer contributes technical and cultural knowledge to reassess the “Mission” designation. All “Mission” baskets coil in a clockwise direction from the working surface— the side of the object intended to be viewed. The working surface of a bowl-shaped vessel will be the outer walls, while the working surface of a tray is the “inner” or the open, flat surface. Weavers also employed the same method of refining coiled stitching with the “Mission stitch”. Every sewing strand (weft element) has a beginning or “fag” end, and when the strand is sewn through the coil, a small ½ inch end of the sewing strand is left out. Before the following stitch is pulled through, the loose end is tucked into that stitch to conceal it. The result of the “Mission stitch” is seamless basketry construction which would have been appealing to weavers and basketry collectors alike. Chavez interprets the Southern California style of coiled basketry as representing a regional pattern rather than a style created by or representing Spanish Missions. Chavez (2012: 55) argues that Chumash baskets represent the only true “Mission” style as defined by Kroeber, since these baskets incorporate Spanish heraldic motifs directly influenced by Franciscans.

For Native SoCal weavers post-1890, there was a trend towards pictorial designs such as animals, insects, and arrowheads, likely due to collectors’ preference— a selective process that impacted design choices as well as the representative samples present in basketry collections today (Moser 1993: 115). Information on Native basketry manufacture and design prior to European contact is limited to archaeological evidence, historical and museum collections, indigenous memory, and oral histories. 19th and 20th century basketry traditions reflect, but do not wholly represent, pre-contact basketry; instead, they reflect the material and cultural world of a weaver at the time they were created. Cultural exchange between different tribal groups, and between Native Californians and Euro-Americans, influenced the materials, construction, use, and design elements of Native basketry creating the unique basketry traditions we have today.

Conclusion (slightly tangential)

During the “basket craze”, describing Native baskets as “Mission-style” fed into Euro-American fantasies of the Mission era. Today, the term is still used to describes baskets made during the late 19th and early 20th century. Museums do not often display contextual data on baskets— they may be exhibited alongside archaeological arrowheads and tools to represent pre-contact material culture even though the basket was woven in the 20th century for a private collector. Similarly, as baskets are accessioned with only the “Mission” label, the true cultural affiliation and historical context of the object is lost. My museum studies hot-take is this: provenance/provenience should be displayed for the public. Whether a collection was privately collected, looted, salvaged, etc. is valuable context that aids in our understandings of both material culture and the process of these materials winding up in museums.15 It is important to disentangle these labels and separate archaeological from ethnographic materials and give these objects, and their creators, the contextualization they deserve. But I digress…

I hope you learned a bit more about basketry and the value of indigenizing California mission art, I know I learned so much from Chavez’s work myself. We cannot only focus on the cultural devastation of the Mission era— narratives of destruction feed into the myth that Native peoples did not survive colonization and leads to their cultural contributions being overlooked. As we know, Native peoples actively preserved their culture despite oppressive conditions, and the mission era is just one chapter in the living story of California’s Native peoples.

I am embarrassed to reflect on how long it has been since I’ve put pen to paper for this publication. It’s not for lack of trying, I’ve had to redirect my creative energy elsewhere— towards finishing my Master’s thesis, presenting at conferences, and getting through the last semester amidst global turmoil. I know national/international politics may not seem relevant to this publication, but I am deeply affected by tragedies in my community and beyond (some of which have allegedly been committed on my behalf). Since Substack is an international platform and I have subscribers from all over the world, I wish you all safety and peace. I hope this post finds you well, or can at least distract you through a peace-less time. Thank you <3

I spent the strange and open space between Christmas and New Year’s in Dublin with my family, trying to curate an in-depth and entertaining experience of the county where I have done much of my archaeological research. The book I was text-marking every morning was Everything Now by Rosencrans Baldwin, a vivid and fast-paced contemporary history of Los Angeles. Told in vignettes, the “history" is grounded in interviews and first-hand accounts of the diverse and disparate concepts that create the “city-state” of LA, as he calls it— the entertainment industry, homelessness crisis, natural disasters, the fantasy of the self-made, and cults of self-help. I couldn’t help but view Dublin through the lens of Everything Now; how the past collides with the present, how the present occludes and reveals the past, how the idea of place often impresses us more so than the physical place itself.

In a partially blank back-page in Everything Now I scribbled my thoughts on “Irish pubs” after a conversation with our history tour guide. As a History Phd and educator, he knew there was more to Ireland than the Christmas-light covered pubs in Temple Bar— a dense pocket of bars designed and decorated for tourist photo-ops.

“It’s funny that to have ‘Irish themed’ pubs in Ireland that Irish people do not even go to,” he said. I realized, the idea of Ireland is often doled out to us in pints of Guinness, which makes it seem like the totality of Irish culture can be experienced within the confines of a pub— merriment, drunkeness, folk songs, and perhaps some dancing.

Despite the concept of an Irish pub, which seems central to experiencing Dublin, the country does an incredible job of centralizing its preservation and communication of archaeological sites and cultural history. So despite the prevailing attraction of Irish pubs, Irish history is made available to us in free museums and monuments. All archaeological excavations must be approved by the National Monument Service, where all reports and records are made publicly accessible, and archaeological finds are accessioned to the National Museum where you can learn about the results of these excavations for free.

It’s impossible to walk around Dublin and not encounter a stone city-wall, a Romanesque church, or a 250 year old pub and wonder about the capital’s 2000 year-long history. To set the tone, the first stop of our walking tour was in a Lidl grocery store. I thought at first we were cutting through the building, or perhaps our tour guide needed a coffee and croissant? Then we were standing on glass, looking down at a Viking floor below the supermarket tiles. The integration of archaeology into the everyday encapsulates Ireland’s preservation ethic: construction and development carries on, but archaeological remains are researched, protected, and made accessible to the public.

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Dubhlinn and St. Patrick’s Cathedral

We’ll begin our tour of Dublin with the etymology of its name. Dubhlinn, meaning black pool, was the Gaelic name for the body of water at the confluence of the River Poddle and the Liffey. The -bh is a “v” sound in Irish, and I am not sure when the soft “v” became a “b” pronunciation. The black pool was a perfect harbor for Viking boats to dock, raid churches for precious metals and other resources, and set up seasonal camps. The curved road around the Dublin castle today is said to follow the path of the pool and the now submerged River Poddle.

To commune with the earliest iterations of Dublin, we’ll go to the site of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the birth of the medieval period, when Patrick brought Christianity and the “historic era” to Ireland in the 5th century. Before the Vikings arrived, Dubhlinn was an ecclesiastical settlement rich with fresh water, aquatic resources, and fertile land. The cathedral is believed to be built on the site of a wooden church and holy well where St. Patrick performed baptisms, converting native Irish to Christianity. Of course, there is archaeological evidence of human activity in the area dating to the Mesolithic, but prior to the Vikings, Dublin was merely a small ecclesiastical settlement (with the settlement Áth Cliath nearby, and the two would eventually combine to form Dublin). You will often hear that there were no “towns” in Ireland before the Vikings.1 Built in the mid-13th century, the Gothic style St. Patrick’s Cathedral likely replaced the older wooden structure with limestone and grandeur. The building was added to, damaged, and rebuilt over the following centuries and many decorations and statues were removed following the English Reformation. Despite historic associations with the Catholic Church, Saint Patrick’s is Anglican today.2

Since Ireland was one of the first regions introduced to Christianity beyond the jurisdiction of Imperial Rome, the island country developed its own structures for centralizing and distributing the Christian message. After the religion was introduced scholars consider Ireland’s Christianity an insular development, hence its unique features and relationship with paganism (incorporating pre-Christian sites like holy wells and rag trees into ecclesiastical site structures). The diocesan model, in which ecclesiastical districts are led by bishops, was not imposed until the 11th century; instead, there were many free churches unassociated with diocese or ecclesiastical settlements. Fascinatingly, there was a high proportion of monks and monastic settlements in Ireland which I learned about first hand digging at the hermitage, Dísert. The wide range of early Christian site types from ecclesiastical “cities” to rural hermitages like Dísert, all displayed a similar pattern of stone enclosures. Ecclesiastical sites featured up to three concentric stone enclosures around spaces with increasing grades of “holiness”, which centered around a church and burial area. So, as St. Patrick’s connects us to the earliest iteration of Dubhlinn, Christchurch connects us to the city’s next chapter— the Viking Age. 3

Viking Dyfflin and Christchurch

When walking around the famous Christchurch Cathedral in the heart of Dublin, a glance down at the cobblestones may reveal a plaque of archaeological finds. The plaques, by artist Rachel Joynt, represent Viking4 artifacts discovered during excavations from 1974-19825. The Vikings docked in the blackpool of Dublin in 841 AD, adopting the Irish name Dubhlinn from the Christian monks there and translating it to Dyfflin. On the banks of the Liffey, the settlement was waterlogged which preserved unique and informative details of Viking life such as wooden architecture, post-and-wattle houses, leather objects, and woven items. In total, the settlement spanned 4-acres and was home to 120+ dwellings6. Dyfflin, however, did not likely begin as a year-round settlement but rather a seasonal longphort for raiding. There is evidence of dwellings being burnt and built over in layers, and the small 9th century community would eventually become a bustling town in the 10th and 11th centuries.7

Behind the Cathedral on a cobblestone walkway, bricks outline the footprint of a Viking house excavated there. A central aisle separated the home into three sections, with a fire in the center and long platform beds on either side where an immediate or extended family would sleep. After examining the brick reflection of a Viking home, we stood over one of the artifact plaques and our tour guide asked us if we could identify any of the objects immortalized in bronze. The swords and spearheads were obvious, as well as the woven fish weir and combs, but there were a few that seemed unrecognizable

“No one has ever guessed this one right,” our guide told us, pointing to a bronze hoop and clasp I thought resembled horse-riding equipment (image above).

“Is it a necklace? A torque for a child?” I asked. It was close, but not quite right. It was the iron collar of a child-slave, a common possession and practice in Viking society which fluoresced in Ireland in the 9th and 10th centuries. Another interesting bronze object that looked like an ornate hair piece was actually a flame starter.

The Norse acquired natural and valuable resources through trade with Irish kingdoms and by looting Christian monasteries and settlements. Though there were conflicts, there was also collaboration and exchange between the Irish and the Norse who soon adopted Christianity. There is a lot of well kept history on the Kings of Dublin and their conflicts with native Irish, so much so that my mind felt boggled trying to take in all the historic events and heroic names in the Dublinia Museum. Though our tour guide described the museum as pastiche or kitschy, I was impressed by how robust and accurate its information was and how the exhibits visualized and contextualized the Viking world. Norse power would lead Dublin for around 300 years until the Norman invasion in 1169.

Christchurch itself bears evidence from the Viking era through the modern period in its various additions and remodels. It was founded by the Viking King Sitric Silkenbeard in the 11th century to overlook the town at Wood Quay and it was rebuilt after the Norman invasion by Strongbow who is buried in the crypt. The crypt is considered the longest continually used structure in Dublin and it is the largest cathedral crypt in Ireland and Britain. It’s famous for housing the tombs of notable political and religious leaders as well as the mummified remains of a cat and a rat which are mentioned in Finnegan’s Wake.

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Before we move on, I want to return to the preservation ethic I mentioned in the introduction of this article. You may be wondering, why was the entire Wood Quay settlement dug-up in the 1980s? If excavation is controlled destruction, why not leave some of the site to rest, preserved? The Irish Government decided that the area behind Christchurch was the best spot for the new Dublin City Council offices and despite the discovery of the rich archaeological settlement, that development continued with much debate and controversy. There were periods of bulldozer-led destruction in which archaeologists had to scrounge through soil heaps to recover artifacts, now out of context (according to our tour guide). A section of historic city walls were also destroyed during development, prompting the project to be halted. There were numerous protests and sit-ins as well as logistical and aesthetic complaints about the site of the building and its proximity to Christchurch, but the construction ultimately continued.

Our tour guide lamented the decision because not even a half-century later, those brutalist government buildings are no longer in use.

“We destroyed hundreds of years of history just for some building to be used for 40 years!”

The park behind the building was supposed to justify the development to the public, but security gates prevent the park from being traversable, so today, the buildings and park serve little purpose…

Dublin Castle and City Walls

Ireland, as you may be noticing, has experienced waves of incursions throughout its history from the arrival of the “First Farmers” (the Neolithic), Christian missionaries in the Early Medieval era, Viking raiders, and then Anglo-Normans. I do not consider myself an expert in Irish history, but from the Late Medieval onward conflict seems to abound between native Irish and the Anglo-Normans, later known as the British, who established Dublin Castle as the seat of British power in Ireland. Despite the power shifts, Dublin remained an international city throughout its history.

King John of England ordered the construction of a fortified castle in Dublin in 1204 which was completed in the 1230’s. In the Norman style, the castle had four towers and fortified walls around a central enclosure with the River Poodle bounding the southern and eastern sides. Like many other long-standing structures in Dublin, the castle was changed, damaged, and rebuilt over time. Following a fire in the 1700s sections of the castle were rebuilt in the style of a Georgian Palace. The Viceroy of Ireland would host balls and regal ceremonies for the aristocracy in the palace’s new State Apartments. One of my favorite films, Barry Lyndon by Stanley Kubrick, was filmed onsite at the castle. Today Dublin Castle functions as a museum but it is also the center of operations when Ireland hosts the EU Presidency every 10 years (which will be this year, from July-December 2026).

The site of the black pool is now the Dubhlinn Gardens, a circular green that also functions as a helicopter landing pad. Seemingly abstract brick pathways actually form Celtic knots. Zoomorphic imagery is a common feature of Celtic art, and the knots are made of eels which connect the current gardens with freshwater resources of the past, associated with the black pool and the River Poddle.

Both the Vikings and Anglo-Normans took advantage of the landscape for fortifying their settlements, particularly the Liffey and Poddle rivers which create natural moats around defensive walls. During the Viking era, wooden palisades enclosed and protected the settlement of Dyfflin. After their defeat at the hands of Muirchertach Ua Briain in the 12th century, the wooden walls were torn down and rebuilt in stone which would be further fortified by a moat and mural-towers. These formidable walls were 7m high and 3m thick, and around 83 meters of wall are still visible today— you can even attend a wall-centric walking tour! 8

Sheela-Na-Gigs and Irish Quipus

The Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) stands in the old Royal Hospital Kilmahain, a striking classical-style building constructed in the 1680s with long-corridors surrounding a central cobblestone courtyard. Though I was more interested in visiting the National Museum (for the third time), modern art was a more attractive activity for my family that would hopefully uplift us before a visit the Kilmahain Gaol where Irish revolutionaries were imprisoned and executed.

Apparently, the Modern Art museum has struggled with the architectural layout of the hospital— narrow corridors limiting exhibit spaces and creating bottle-necks of foot traffic (they also had issues with water damage and mold which destroyed some collections prior to renovation in the early 2000s). I did not do any research before showing up at IMMA and was both surprised and enthralled by an exhibit by Chilean artist and poet, Cecelia Vicuña, bridging the visual and mythological worlds of the Andes and Ireland. What struck me most about the exhibit was how archaeological artifacts inspired and informed the overall message of Vicuña’s work. Central to the exhibit were two corridor-spanning installations hanging from the ceiling representing Andean quipus.

Reverse Migration: A Poetic Journey was born out of a visit to Ireland where Vicuña and her Irish husband pilgrimaged to archaeological sites across the island to perform rituals of gratitude. Vicuña reconceptualized travel as a return, where two seemingly disparate cultures and histories face one another and find their commonalities. The artist remarks that deer, an essential life source to the ancient Irish, shared a common ancestor with the vicuña, an Andean relative of the alpaca used for its high-quality wool. I have mulled over this idea since reading from a wall-scrawled poem at the museum. If you go back far enough, you can trace where all our histories and ecologies connect.

Quipus, an Incan technology, are systems of knots and cords that communicate information and perhaps functioned as a “written” language. Reverse Migration features two quipus, an Andean format constructed of Irish materials. The first one you encounter feels like the first steps onto the forested property of a witch— twigs and leaves hang like wind chimes from the ceiling, the finds of IMMA visitors to who were prompted to collect organic materials for the installation.

Vicuña seeked remains of dry plants, fungi, sticks, branches, seeds, roots, of all kinds, especially from native plants endemic to Ireland. The vegetable debris must be small and lightweight, and can be associated with any materials, of industrial or animal origin such as, wool, fabrics, plastics, metals, toy remains, fragments of painted wood, or biomaterials created from fungi.

The resulting exhibit is titled Foraging Quipu, a collaborative work between the artist, museum patrons, and the plants of Ireland. Another quipu hangs from the ceiling in billowing sheets of unspun Aran wool. I wasn’t sure if you could touch the installation, but other patrons reached out for the soft wool and walked between the hanging rows.

Vicuña’s paintings explore the connection between ancient Irish iconography and indigenous Chilean and Andean traditions with a particular focus on representations of the female form. Sheela-na-gigs occupy a fascinating/shocking space in Early Medieval Irish archaeology and debate still spirals around their meaning and raison d’être. Their etymology is similarly unknown and the words may mean old hag, “old hag of the breasts”, or “gig” may have been a slang term for genitals. These architectural sculptures found in churches and castles depict women exposing exaggerated genitalia that Vicuña compares to the Andean Pachamama— a mother earth goddess who represents the interconnectedness of all life.

One theory on the function of Sheela-na-gig’s is that they warn against lust and bodily desires, hence their ghoulish and thin appearance as well as iconographic relevance to the Christian church. Though some scholars believe that sheelas may be associated with fertility, the depiction of ribs and thin breasts on many sheelas negates this claim. Other scholars suggest they served an apotropaic function, warding off evil spirits or perhaps representing the Celtic hag-goddess Cailleach (though this would not explain the presence of sheelas in other countries!). It is important to note that there are male counterparts to sheelas more commonly found in Britain, and art historian James Jerman advises scholars to consider Irish sheelas within the broader “exhibitionist” phenomenon in Medieval European art. Jerman’s paper on the re-categorization of sheelas says the quiet part out loud— modern fascination with sheelas stems from misogyny and taboo in our own culture which can cloud our interpretations of past, culturally inscribed symbols. Vicuña’s artwork similarly challenges our reactions and understanding of sheelas and our unique fascination with female forms in the broader umbrella of sexual grotesques.9

The exhibit panel explains that sheela-na-gigs have a long history of fascination and speculation, read as “warnings, protectors, and potent symbols.” Sheelas still shock the modern viewer: I saw multiple people laughing, gawking, and generally making fun of how the female form was depicted in the exhibit. In Andean cosmology, the female body is considered a sacred source of life representing the life and death cycles of the earth. The two female symbols “speak to a shared understanding of the body as both portal and power.” Vicuña’s paintings reconsiders the scandal and shame of Sheela-na-gigs through the lens of modern feminism and Andean religion— offering a valuable retelling of feminine sexuality. Though I did not take a photo, one of Vicuña’s paintings depicts a sheela-na-gig with blood pouring from and surrounding her, bringing fertility and the cycles of life back into the visual-story of sheelas. I really wish I took more photos, but at the time I was focused on enjoying the exhibit! 10

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Conclusion

On our walking tour, each location we visited was connected, built upon, or directly above an earlier chapter in Ireland’s history. Even in places you wouldn’t expect— a Lidl grocery store or the Museum of Modern Art— there were windows into the past (or perhaps the past pushing towards us into the present, reminding us that we shape history just as much as it shapes us). Maybe I’m getting too poetic, but after reading and considering the work of Cecilia Vicuña and Rosencrans Baldwin, I’m feeling a bit emboldened.

How Ireland as a modern nation contextualizes and preserves its own history is a political process— reverence and pride is inspired by more recent histories of colonization and cultural destruction. There is a national sense of ownership, public ownership, to the history of Ireland; a sense we lack in America because a majority of the population is not from the archaeological landscape they inhabit. Archaeology as a political tool for history-writing and nation building is slowly becoming my point of view on the discipline, but that is a topic for another day and perhaps another thesis.

I decided in Ireland that I would read some Irish folklore, starting with The Táin11, or the Cattle Raids of Cooley, which is centered around Queen Maeve and the hero Cúchulainn. My next installment on Irish archaeology will be inspired by the Táin, discussing archaeological sites associated with the story and its Iron Age setting more generally. But for a bit of a break on the Irish stuff, I’ll be returning to North America for my next post to discuss large-scale ceremonial mounds and their destruction.

Thank you for reading. Archaeolog is always free, but subscribing helps support me as a lowly grad student. If you want to support me with a one-time donation, consider buying me a coffee <3

In a few days, I will be traveling back to one of my favorite destinations, Ireland, where both the summer and winter solstices are celebrated at the Neolithic passage tomb, Newgrange. It seems natural then, to write a brief post on the fascinating connection between ancient and modern spiritual celebrations at the site less than an hour north of Dublin.

Site Description

The Neolithic reached Ireland around the 5th millennium BCE, bringing with it new material culture and beliefs alongside agriculture and domesticated animals. Not only was this stone age new, it soon became mega— large-scale tombs and ceremonial structures began popping up across the island at sites we now call Megalithic. Newgrange was constructed around 3100 BCE and every website boasts that it predates two even more well-known ancient wonders of the world— Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids, which have their own astronomical alignments as well.

The large mound of Newgrange was built by piling local river stones, around 200,000 tonnes of material, into a cairn over the stone-lined passage. The material for the stone walls of the passage, as well as the large kerbstones at the base of the cairn and the enigmatic quartz and grandiorite stones, were sourced from far distances. The original excavator of the site, archaeologists Michael O’Kelly, believed that the quartz were ritual offerings that formed the facade of the tomb. The glistening walls of the site today are a modern reconstruction which may not accurately represent its original Neolithic design (see quote below). Now, the site stands 43 ft high with a footprint of 1.1 acre, with its cruciform chambers extending less than halfway into the structure.

The cairn is surrounded by 97 kerbstones— large oval shaped boulders decorated with megalithic art. These engravings include geometric forms like chevrons and lozenges, cosmic and solar designs, and cup-marks (concave marks made from pecking the stone material, found all over the ancient world). The main entrance stone displays one of the most famous example of Irish megalithic art, the swirling triskelion (see image below). During the initial excavations in the 1960s, the kerbstones were found flattened beneath the cairn material, and it is now known that the structure collapsed in prehistory from the immense weight of the cairn.

The entrance stones of the passage signify the transition of the World of the Living to that of the Dead, and the act of entering the passage-tomb mimics the transition between these two worlds. The main passage and its three chambers care enclosed by a 6-meter high corbelled roof that is considered a feat of engineering. The tight, dry stone construction kept water from entering the central chambers and protected them from the ancient collapse and ruination of the site. In fact, the chambers may have been completely sealed and undisturbed between the cairn collapse in 2500 BCE and its rediscovery in 1699.1 Three basin stones in the chambers may have held votive offerings to the individuals— possible high-ranking religious/political rulers— buried in the tomb.

Though scientific excavations did not begin at Newgrange until the 1960s, dozens of antiquarians visited the site in the 19th and early 20th century and engaged in a spectrum of non-invasive to highly destructive activities. By the time of the 1967 excavation, only the scattered remnants of five individuals were found (unburnt un-intact remains of two adults, and possibly three burnt un-intact remains). These remains did not represent primary burials and were likely disturbed from their original depositional context.2 A recent study of ancient DNA across Irish tomb sites found that some of the individuals were related, and one of the remains from Newgrange was the child of an incestuous union.3 The results suggest that a high-ranking family may have maintained their rule over various regions of Ireland by intermarrying, but this interpretation has been rather successfully contested…

Interpretations

A recent paper on Newgrange’s “kings” sought to recontextualize popular interpretations that a Pharaonic-like dynasty ruled Ireland during the Neolithic. In fact, the mortuary traditions of the Irish Neolithic were very different from Egyptian practices: human remains in passage tombs do not represent intact burials, but rather cremated and comingled remains. Furthermore, there are no other examples of incestuous unions in the current sample of Neolithic human remains. The authors warn that using ethnographic analogy to confirm, rather than test, theories of social identity and power, is misleading and inaccurate practice.

A substantial amount of modern osteological (re)analysis and archaeological (re)interpretation of Irish megalithic tombs now indicates that multistage activities (excarnation, dismemberment, disarticulation and cremation) were conducted at many locations (Smyth et al. 2025: par. 5)

To put it simply, whole bodies were not “buried” in Newgrange. Though it sounds unfamiliar and perhaps gruesome, these venerated remains were defleshed, dismembered, and cremated before being deposited within the tombs as part of the culture’s mortuary ritual. It is a logical leap then to suggest that the identity of the individual “high-king” was socially relevant when remains were mixed and moved overtime by religious specialists or worshippers. The authors challenge “evolutionary” notions that high-cost, large-scale architecture represents the linear transition from egalitarian to hierarchical societies. It is equally possible that the site was built through collaborative efforts without a class of elites lording their power over lower-class farmers. Ultimately, the authors challenge us “interpreters” not to view these vast chapters of history in a static, deterministic, or evolutionary manner. Recent excavations at similar sites, Knowth and Dowth, found that the passage-tombs were built episodically— structures representing the accumulation of generational actions, if that makes sense. Nevertheless, entry into the chambers and engagement in ritual practices, whatever they may be, was likely restricted to “specialists.” The article’s critique of chiefdom models in archaeological interpretation is enlightening and well worth the read. For example:

Regardless, the identification of ‘special’ treatment for some people is often automatically equated with ‘high status’. This is a product of long-standing evolutionary thought within archaeology, which attempts to identify material correlates for inequality, cast as dominance created through controlled access to resources….

In many ways, attempting to prove or disprove the presence of elites using complexity ‘checklists’ is a distraction. Evolutionary social models limit interpretation to an argument for increasing complexity (Graeber & Wengrow), while taking shortcuts with terms such as ‘elite’ severely constrains our narratives about prehistory (Smyth et al. 2025).

One element of interpretation I find fascinating as someone who enjoys lithic sourcing, is how far the builders of Newgrange travelled to source their materials. Some of the greywacke kerbstones came from 50 km to the northeast, while the glittering quartz came from the Wicklow Mountains, gabbro from County Louth, and granodiorite from the Mourne Mountains. Some of these sources were over 50 km away, speaking perhaps to the social, rather than logistical, necessity of these specific materials. Was this site in the Boyne Valley, where the legendary High Kings of Ireland were crowned on the Hill of Tara, also a representation of the unified lands of the country in even more ancient prehistory? This is just my own archaeological imagination running wild, and I also imagine there was a pilgrimage-esque motivation supporting these journeys for quartz and rounded granodiorite stones. Nevertheless, Newgrange remained a ceremonial center into the Bronze Age when the surrounding stone circle and woodhenge were built,4 and was incorporated into medieval Irish folklore as the home and birthplace of various deities.

There are of course many theories on how Neolithic farmers built the monument. The why or for whom, on the other hand, we will never fully understand. Much like ancient rock imagery in North America, the art of the Irish megalithic is a visual language we could not possibly translate. While the art can impress us with its long-lasting mystery, the construction of the site itself can hint at the technology of the time period. With so much raw material moving great distances, the construction definitely required organized laborers with the help of rolling logs, ropes, and watercraft to transport the materials. Some archaeologists say Newgrange was built in five years, while others suggest it took decades.5 I am inclined towards the Smyth interpretation that the site was built in sporadic and perhaps generational episodes, with individuals venturing out to source socially valued materials, or perhaps outsiders bringing them in to this cultural center.

It is no surprise that the movements of the sun played a critical role in the social and cultural life of early agriculturalists. The winter solstice (maybe) meant that Winter would concede to the Spring, the dark would become light, and life-sustaining crops could be harvested for another year.

Mythology and Celebrations

Irish mythology of the medieval period painted the Brú na Bóinne and its megalithic sídhe, or burial mounds, as the home of the Tuatha Dé Dannan— a divine tribe from the Otherworld.6 Though we may expect the passage tomb to be associated with death, the myths of Newgrange associate the site with conception and birth, reconfiguring the site’s chambers and passageway into the symbol of a womb. Legend has it that the chief God of the Tuatha, Dagda, seduced the Goddess of the River Boyne, Boann7, who lived in Newgrange. To hide the affair from Boann’s druid husband Elcmar, Dagda made the sun stand still on Newgrange for 9-months so that the divine child, Aegnes,8 was born on the same day he was conceived, the day of the Winter solstice. There seem to be different versions of this story, as expected for time-worn myths, and the winter solstice interpretations seem to have been added later (seeing as the astronomical alignment of the site was not rediscovered until the roof-box was reopened in the 1960s?). Nevertheless, seeing Dagda as the sunlight, Boann as the tomb, womb, and mother, and Aegnus as the incarnate of annual rebirth— the Winter Solstice— is some beautiful mythology.

The false-lintel of the “roof-box” (image below) above the passage entrance was noted by early historians and antiquarians, however erosion and time filled the aperture with earth. Early visitors to the site thought the lintel hinted at another passageway above the main entrance. It wasn’t until the O’Kelly excavations in the 1960’s that the false-lintel was thoroughly examined and the team found that it was, in fact, a smaller passageway— but what for? Local lore spoke of Midsummer light shining in the main passage, but O’Kelly realized that the site did not align with midsummer sunlight, but midwinter. He then returned to the site on the Winter solstice with the roof-box uncovered and restored and witnessed the chamber become fully illuminated for the first time in millennia.9

Today, hundreds of visitors will flock to the Brú na Bóinne to celebrate the solstice just as the builders of Newgrange did over 5000 years ago. Videos of the event show circles of people holding hands, banging drums, and heralding in the birth of the new year. A free annual lottery selects a handful of individuals who can witness the event within the chamber, though overcast skies and inclement weather prevent guarantees. The illumination lasts for 17-minutes and is live-streamed on the OPW’s Youtube: Link Here

I do not normally celebrate the Winter solstice, but I will be considering the day more thoughtfully this year, as more than the beginning of the end of dark winter days, but also a chance for renewal and change, a day to honor the wondrous entanglement of death and rebirth.

As always, thank you for reading and supporting my publication. If you enjoy my work, consider subscribing, sharing with friends, or contributing to my kofi.

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Archaeologist Peter H. Wood addresses how gaps in the archaeological record— lost material culture— create gaps in our imagination that effect our understanding of the past. The coursing Mississippi and Missouri rivers easily wash material remains into the ether, and though the subject of this article is lake-based canoes, Wood’s discussion of preservation remains pertinent; it is essential for archaeological discovery as well as a central tenant of archaeological practice (see principle No. 5 of the Society for American Archaeology’s Code of Ethics).

The forces of preservation favor durable, inorganic material like stone, ceramics, and metals which are less susceptible to bio-deterioration. It takes serendipitous conditions to preserve organic materials like wood, cloth, or bone for thousands of years: extremely cold or arid climates or unique geographic features like bogs and tarpits. Another preservation-friendly environment is water—the context of a recent discovery of dugout canoes in Lake Mendota. Waterlogging is when the anaerobic, underwater environment stalls biological processes of decay from bacteria and fungi, preserving organic materials for millennia.

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Waterlogged archaeological sites show us how much is missing from the broader picture when organic materials are not preserved. Investigations of waterlogged sites of the Northwest coast of Washington and British Columbia found that 95% of artifacts recovered were organics: woven fibers, basketry, wooden tools, and vessels1. The results of these excavations imply that without organic preservation, we may only see as little as 5% of an original site. It’s like trying to understand the whole picture of a puzzle with only a few pieces, which is such a common analogy in archaeology it has become cliché. I was fascinated with this site because we rarely see basketry material in situ alongside tools associated with their construction, but I digress.

I feel it is important to understand “archaeology news” like the Lake Mendota canoes within the greater context of the archaeological record— what remains and what disappears— to better appreciate these artifacts. For this post, I wanted to share the recent news from Lake Mendota and discuss the significance of wood canoes to the archaeological record and our understanding of the deep pre-contact history of North America.

The Canoes

Through dark green waters, a swimmer-by may think they are looking at sunken logs at the sandy bottom of Lake Mendota, but these wood objects eroding from the lakebed are far more extraordinary. First discovered in 2021, the canoes of Lake Mendota represent thousands of years of subsistence practices and trade networks in what is now Madison, Wisconsin.

The research was catalyzed by undergraduate student Ryan Smazal in 2018 at University of Wisconsin Madison, who sought to identify and properly document dugout canoes in collections and discover new remains via underwater surveys.2 The goal of the project is to record and measure these remains for analysis, ensure their care and preservation, and publish results for public access. Online 3D models allow everyone to see the results of the project as it progresses. Prior to The Wisconsin Dugout Canoe Survey, there were only 11 known dugout canoes in the state. Now, 95 canoes have been identified and 73 have been recorded and analyzed by the survey team.

Maritime archaeologists worked in collaboration with tribal representatives and the Wisconsin Historical Society to excavate and assess the assemblage of 16 canoes from Lake Mendota. Net weights were also found deposited with the canoes, clearly connecting the watercraft to ancient net fishing strategies. So far, there are no peer-reviewed papers on the canoe assemblage, but there are plenty of articles on the Wisconsin Historical Society website. Though there are few details on the carbon dating process, it appears that samples were taken from the canoes in situ.

The results place the canoes in a wide date range from 3000 BC to 1250 CE, and the ~5000 year old canoe is one of the oldest ever recorded in the Great Lakes Region. During its life, there was a drought in Wisconsin that lowered lake levels and it is possible that at 25-ft offshore, the canoes were deposited on the now submerged shoreline. However, is also possible that canoes were stored in the lake sediments over the winter to prevent freezing or warping.3

The canoes were found in two distinct locations, constructed from either red or white oak. The two distinct canoe deposits were close to historic trails and they likely represent storage areas for community canoes. Interestingly, oak is not the most suitable material for vessels since the its wood is water absorbent. However, when an oak tree is diseased it creates a “ballon-like structure” called a tyloses, a protective blister that slows water-processing and prevents the pathogen or disease from spreading through the wood. Tyloses may have been the ideal material for constructing canoes due to their heightened water resistance, an example of what archaeologist Tamara Thomsen calls “ancient bioengineering”. 4

Conservation and Collaboration

Due to conservation limitations and risks, only two of the 16 canoes were removed from the lake bed; however, the remaining canoes are being studied using non-invasive techniques like GPR (ground penetrating radar). One of the reasons that the canoes are being left in situ is that waterlogged materials are susceptible to rapid drying, cracking, and decay once removed from water. Conservation efforts are also costly and labor intensive, so leaving the canoes undisturbed is both ethical and practical for ensuring their continued preservation. Plus, what if the canoes were deposited in the lake by their original creators for a reason?

The conservation process is a two year affair: first, the canoes are stabilized using polyethylene glycol (PEG) which is used in the conservation of wooden ship hulls and even non-waterlogged materials like woven basketry. Once stabilized, the canoes need to be transported from Wisconsin to Texas A&M for freeze drying and kept in stable environmental conditions to ensure their preservation. An exhibit at the Wisconsin History Center is on track to open in 2027 to share the history of the Lake Mendota canoes with the public.

“Seeing these canoes with one’s own eyes is a powerful experience, and they serve as a physical representation of what we know from extensive oral traditions that Native scholars have passed down over generations,” says Bill Quackenbush, a historic preservation officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation.5 He added— “it is important that we document and share these stories, so that our youth feel that connection to our past.” 6

The recovery, conservation, and exhibition process has all been a collaborative effort between tribal representatives, archaeologists, and the Wisconsin Historical Society— an example of an inclusive research approach which aims to center indigenous perspectives and educate the public while also prioritizing preservation.

If the story of these canoes inspire you, consider donating directly to their conservation efforts!

Discussion

How do we understand past human relationships with aquatic resources when watercraft, paddles, and fishing equipment are made from wood— organic materials that do not preserve well in the archaeological record? This question is especially important for island, coastal, and underwater archaeologists around the world— especially when there are no records or oral histories to consult.

Ancient watercraft are inferred by lifestyles and trade patterns of archaeological cultures, and associated finds like faunal remains (fish bones) and stone tools (fish hooks, net sinkers) can imply the presence of watercraft. The aptly named archaeologist, Wood, discusses the scarcity of dugout material remains from pre-contact North America in hist article “Missing the Boat,” which has been referenced multiple times in this post. Historical accounts from the contact period, coupled with Native oral traditions, also shed light on the “missing” or misunderstood early history of canoes.

Wood describes river systems as highways and large 20+ foot canoes like semi-trucks facilitating long-distance trade. Without physical remains, the evidence of these trade interactions are reflected in Yellowstone-sourced obsidian blades or marine shell artifacts from distant coasts. Although group-to-group (or band-to-band) trade routes or overland travel could also facilitate these far-flung journeys, research has found that canoe based river travel could be more energy efficient than overland routes.7

As Wood states in the pull-quote above, where there were rivers and wood, communities were likely building canoes for river travel. Even with ~5000 year old dugouts, the origin of watercraft construction likely extends further back in time. The Dalton adzes, for example, date from 8500-7900 BC (~10,000 years ago) and were likely used for felling trees, woodworking, and constructing dugout canoes. Reconsidering rivers as highways easily traversable by time-worn canoeing traditions, it is easy to imagine the vast trade routes and interconnected cultures of ancient North America. It is no surprise that population hubs and ceremonial centers like Cahokia and Spiro were located at major river tributaries (and the Spiro mounds and looting may be the subject of a future article). This image of interconnected polities and cooperative trade routes spanning from the Rocky Mountains to the Great Lakes and all the way to Mexico, I believe, challenges paradigms of cultural isolation that have been generally cast over the pre-contact past of North America in classrooms and pop culture.8

Sorry for the shorter and more basic post, with finals and end-of-semester burnout, I did not have much brain power to put into this artile. But, I hope you learned a bit more about Wisconsin lake life, preservation bias, and archaeological analysis— I know I learned plenty in my research, and found some topics to explore in future posts.

As always, thank you for reading and supporting this publication. Happy holidays <3

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The Warrior Queen of Connacht

She could have called over the rim of the world
Whatever woman’s lover had hit her fancy,
And yet had been great bodied and great limbed,
Fashioned to be the mother of strong children;
And she’d had lucky eyes and a high heart,
And wisdom that caught fire like the dried flax,
At need, and made her beautiful and fierce,
Sudden and laughing.
O unquiet heart,
Why do you praise another, praising her,
As if there were no tale but your own tale
Worth knitting to a measure of sweet sound?
Have I not bid you tell of that great queen
Who has been buried some two thousand years?

“The Old Age of Queen Maeve” by William Butler Yeats

Medb, or Maeve, is the mythical Queen of Connacht from the Ulster Cycle, who rose to power after her father, Eochaid Feidleach, became High King of Ireland. The term “cycle” is employed by modern scholars to group Irish legends that rotate around central characters and time periods. The Ulster Cycle, for example, is a group of stories that center the Ulster King, his hero Cú Chulainn, and their conflict with Queen Maeve. The events of the Ulster Cycle take place during the Late Iron Age around the turn of the eras between 100 BCE and 100 CE; a period that is archaeologically sparse compared to the earlier Bronze Age or the later Christian-medieval period. Legends of the Ulster Cycle bring color to an otherwise “dark” period in Irish archaeology.

Queen Maeve was a cunning leader, warrior, and wife 5-times over (via divorce and death) who is most famous for catalyzing the Táin Bó Cúailnge1, the “Cattle Raids of Cooley”. The story begins with Queen Maeve and her husband Aillil talking in bed and comparing their possessions; they are equal in wealth, wisdom, and everything else, all except the ownership of a strong prized bull. The only larger and stronger bull than Aillil’s belonged to the King of Ulster. Of course, what Maeve wants, Maeve gets— the Queen raised an army of Ulster exiles to claim ownership of the prized bull, Donn Cuailgne, and she won by cursing the warriors and fighting off the young hero Cú Chulainn.

Whether viewed through a historic or mythological lens, Maeve represents an archetypical warrior queen and the embodiment of Brehon Law, the legal equality between the sexes in ancient Ireland2. A man could only be granted King by pledging fealty to Maeve and her land, and the Queen’s ability to raise an army or divorce a husband at any moment kept men both near and far on their toes.

The Queen’s name captures two different sides of her archetypal role: Medb could derive from the Proto-Celtic word for mead, meaning “one who intoxicates”, capturing her uniquely feminine and sensual power. Medb could also be the word for ruler, representing the values of sovereignty and self-determination in ancient Ireland. Queen Maeve’s power is immortalized today in the enduring legends of the Ulster Cycle and their attachment to archaeological monuments such as Queen Maeve’s cairn (video below, taken by me on my journey to Knocknarea).

According to legend, Queen Maeve is buried upright and armor-clad in the rock cairn of Knocknarea, County Sligo. Maeve is said to face Ulster even in death, an everlasting guard over her land and her enemies. Unsurprisingly, this legend inspired me to visit Miosgán Meadhbha, Queen Maeve’s cairn, while I was conducting post-excavation analysis at Atlantic Technological University, Sligo. Standing 33 feet high, it is one of the largest Neolithic cairns in Ireland. Summiting Knocknarea hill that morning through thick fog only accentuated the mystical power of the site.

To dig or not to dig?

Queen Maeve’s cairn resembles Neolithic passage-tombs like Newgrange or Knowth, however, if Maeve truly lived around the 1st century CE, the Neolithic structure would predate her reign by thousands of years. Despite the name, archaeologists do not consider Queen Maeve’s cairn to be the true resting place of the mythical queen.3 Based on the size of the cairn (70% the size of Newgrange) and its inter-visibility with other megalithic sites, it is likely a passage tomb dating between 3400-3200 BCE. Archaeologists consider the site as part of a broader ritual landscape: “Knocknarea forms the western anchor of a tri-partite passage-tomb axis with Carrowmore (35 tombs, 4 km E) and Carrowkeel (14 tombs, 23 km SE)” (Ackchurin et al. 2025). These interconnected, Neolithic cemetery sites have recently been nominated for UNESCO Status titled “The Passage-Tomb Landscape of County Sligo”.4

Though the cairn is supposedly a Neolithic passage tomb, I was shocked to learn that the well-known, legend inspiring site had never been excavated. Why?

I brought the question back to my professor after my hike up Knocknarea, and as a seasoned lead excavator, she laughed at the idea. The logistics, she explained. An excavation of that scale would be well over budget for a scientific research project— and imagine lugging equipment up that 1,000 ft hill? At such a public, tourist destination, managing an excavation while protecting the site and equipment from curious passersby would be tedious and costly. Well, even more tedious and costly than archaeological excavations are already. Another reason to excavate would be to mitigate damage before a development project, but since Queen Maeve’s cairn is a protected national monument, there is no risk of the cairn being paved into a carpark (which is good, but development can also be a great source of funding5).

Hikers and tourist actually pose the greatest threat to the site since people frequently climb on the cairn causing erosion and damage. There have been serious efforts to dissuade the public from climbing the cairn, as well as taking or adding rocks to the structure.6 Signs were added around the site to warn people of climbing on the rocks, but there are also thoughts of adding a rope or barrier around the cairn to further deter trespassers.

In summation, it would be near impossible for a research excavation to obtain adequate funding to properly excavate a site as large and significant as Maeve’s Cairn. Though it would be fascinating to better understand the architecture of the cairn and what may lay (or stand) beneath it, is excavation necessary? Would excavation further damage this invaluable site?

At the end of the day, all archaeology is controlled destruction— to understand the cairn we must first take the cairn apart. It reminds me of the oldest living animal ever discovered, a 507-year-old clam who was dated by scientific techniques (carbon dating and sclerochronology) that required the organism to be killed.

An excavation at Queen Maeve’s cairn may also necessitate reconstruction, but reconstructions can be complex and controversial endeavors. The reconstruction of quartz walls at Newgrange, for instance, inspired skepticism from some archaeologist who questioned this interpretation of quartz debris at the site. Though beautiful and imposing, does the new Newgrange accurately represent the passage tomb of the Neolithic? Are some sites better left in their natural state of ruin, free from modern disruption or misinterpretation?

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Muography Magic

Is it possible to research Queen Maeve’s Cairn without excavation? On a stroll through Google Scholar, I found a fascinating article published only two weeks ago on the application of muon tomography, or muography, at the site. Muons, apparently, are unstable subatomic particles much like electrons that almost move at the speed of light. Muography employs muon detectors which collect data of muons as they move through objects (watch the video in the footnote link for more!).7 Muons penetrate deeper than X-rays and CT scans into large, dense objects such as Queen Maeve’s cairn and generate an image of its internal structure. Researchers from Texas Tech University and Atlantic Technological University conducted a feasibility study to discover whether Maeve’s Cairn is a passage tomb without actually excavating it.

I am consistently blown away by new technologies in archaeological analysis, especially non-destructive methods that can offer valuable insights on sensitive sites. The researchers created a simulation of the cairn and two potential muon detector positions, one at ground level and another at 10 meters below the surface (which would likely not be possible given restrictions on excavating). Two scenarios were tested using the simulation: the presence and absence of an idealized 4 x 4 x 4-meter chamber. The results of the simulation found that mougraphy is capable of testing this hypothesis; and while a surface detector would take 60 or more days to collect enough data for analysis, a subsurface detector could take as little as 20 days to determine the presence of a chamber with significance. Of course, the circumstances of the simulation are “semi-ideal,” but nonetheless, this feasibility study demonstrates the potential success of muography in addressing the mysteries of Queen Maeve’s Cairn. Understanding of the presence and placement of a passage would help archaeologists accurately classify the tomb-type of the cairn.8

Legends, superstitions, and cultural preservation

If Maeve truly was a historical queen, her death would have occurred around 3000 years after the construction of the cairn on Knocknarea. Her connection to the site, however, cannot be dissuaded by archaeological fact; the legend has contributed to the site’s survival. Maeve’s Cairn is not the only example— Irish legends and superstitions have served to promote and protect archaeological sites across the country.

The oldest roundabout in Sligo, pictured above, was built around a Neolithic passage tomb. Rather than destroying the site for development, the neighborhood settled in around it. Antiquarian excavations in the 20^th century revealed cremated human and animal remains buried in the tomb, however all artifacts are now lost9 and the 5000-year-old stone tomb is another part of mundane suburban life where people walk their dogs or take a rest on the stones. Local lore kept the site protected for millennia since it’s believed that anyone who disturbed the site would die— a belief so pervasive no local workers would contribute to the site’s destruction. Outside workers had to come in to install the large white cross that consecrates/desecrates the tomb and one or two of them died, allegedly, for trespassing on history.

Similar superstitions dominate the archaeological consciousness of Ireland. If you fall asleep on top of Green Fort in Sligo, fairies will take you away and drive you mad. “Fairy forts”— stone circles and ring forts— are protected by Druid magic and disturbing these potential entrances to the Otherworld could lead to misfortune, injury, or even death. The resilience of pre-Christian sites in Ireland is unparalleled in the pre-contact United States— where superstition and veneration protected ancient passage tombs and ring forts, Native American earth works, burial mounds, and cities were plowed over by colonists in what is now the United States.

Hence, the Irish notion that there is “no archaeology in America.” Since I was an American student in Ireland many people assumed I was searching for something my home country lacked. There are plenty of well-known examples to contradict this claim—the city of Cahokia, mound building traditions of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, Mesa Verde, pictographs and petroglyphs of the Southwest, Poverty Point and the shell middens of Florida.10 And of course, there are plenty of more recent historic sites from the colonial period onward. The difference between Ireland and America is that pre-contact sites were edited out of our collective historical consciousness and/or not attributed to Native American ancestors. The narrative of American history has been shaped by colonialism, while Irish history is told from the native Irish perspective.11 The notion that there are monumental archaeological sites in Ireland that have never been touched speaks to a preservation ethic that extends from the academic and governmental spheres into the public consciousness.

One night in Sligo, after two-weeks of excavation in Donegal, I made a pit-stop at a little pub on my walk home from Tesco. It was raining and my carrots and chicken kievs were weighing me down, plus I had gotten into the habit of enjoying a Guinness after work. Halfway through my pint another lonely drinker, an old man named Noel, offered to buy me another round. Of course, one pint turned into several and we embarked on a multi-hour conversation on Irish history, world politics, and all the things he thought were wrong with both of our countries.

At one point in our discussion of archaeology, Noel got very serious. He said he needed to tell me the truth about Knocknarea. He told me— Queen Maeve is there, but she’s not buried upright in the stones, she’s beneath the cairn!

Beneath the cairn? I was surprised. I thought he was saying she was buried underground.

He believed that the cairn was the result of people carrying offerings up the hill, piling high over millennia to form the vast mound. Queen Maeve is beneath these offerings, he explained, because Maeve herself is Knocknarea. She is a mountain.

Noel’s truth aligns with the interpretation of Queen Maeve as an allegory for the sovereignty and fertility of the earth— she is the Connacht land beneath our feet. She is a mountain also sounds like the beginning of some lovely poetry.

I am as grateful for the old man’s truth telling as I am for the rain that led me into the pub that evening. I’m starting to think that some of the best archaeological insights can only happen over a pint of Guinness.

Thank you for reading. Archaeolog is always free, but subscribing helps support me as a lowly grad student. If you want to support me with a one-time donation, consider buying me a coffee <3

Grad school is hard, but so is everything else. It has become harder and harder for me to write here as I (try to) devote more energy to my thesis. I realized that I am slowing down this publication because Archaeolog1 no longer feels like a respite from academic writing, but a continuation of it. Time, of course, is another major limiting factor.

When I decided to start a substack, my goal was to find a creative outlet for all the intriguing threads in the world around me and tie them together in an anthropological bow, not just regurgitate facts and assign myself extracurricular essays. AI can summarize a scientific paper for you anyway, so what can I do with my human brain?2 Something a bit more interesting, I hope. Maybe a bit more of my perspective can bring some life to the facts that could otherwise be organized in a bullet-point list? Though archaeology will remain the focal point of this publication, I am also working on some posts that analyze current phenomena from an anthropological-ish lens.

So, let’s get into the post— the depressing realities of pXRF and how the past two years trying to understand and employ this technology has inspired a few meltdowns and doom-spirals, but its use in pictograph (rock art) research and pigment analysis gives me hope for the future of the sub-discipline. For those who are interested, I thought I would dive into how pXRF works and its applications and limitations in archaeological analysis.

X-ray fluorescence: annoying and/or amazing

Despite its rapid incorporation into the archaeological toolbelt, pXRF is not a magic x-ray gun with all the answers— Dr. Who’s sonic screwdriver, if you will. Though it is often presented as an easy tool for non-experts (me), a lack of expertise lends itself to misuse and misinterpretation.

Portable x-ray fluorescence (pXRF) is a method of elemental analysis that uses x-rays to measure the characteristic energy, or fluorescence, of atoms in a sample. Since every element fluoresces at a unique energy on the XRF spectrum, the instrument can detect and measure all elements (from sodium to uranium) in the sample (see below for image). pXRF is an amazing technology because it is a rapid, portable, non-destructive method for identifying multiple elements at once.

When I started grad school, I was presented with some false notions about pXRF:

1. “It’s quick and easy to learn and use all on your own!”

2. “It can quantify anything and everything!”

I realized quickly that I would have to do a lot of research and extensive practice to feel confident with this scary, x-ray gun-looking instrument. As a student of anthropology, not x-ray physics or chemistry, I had a lot to learn (and still do). This was a daunting realization during my first year of grad school, and I began to look at the pXRF instrument like an enemy— a reminder of my intellectual inadequacy. I came around when I realized there is nothing wrong with addressing one’s limitations. With the gracious help of some XRF experts, I developed research questions that I could address without going beyond my capabilities.

I also realized that woven plant fibers (the topic of my thesis) are not an ideal subject of pXRF analysis. They are inherently complex and heterogeneous samples that introduce a lot of uncertainty to XRF measurements. There were expectations that my research would not only identify elements in my samples, but quantify them too. Unsurprisingly, there are no reference standards for finely woven coiled baskets made of juncus and other plant fibers. Despite the limitations, there is still so much pXRF can do, especially as a portable, non-destructive tool. Elemental identification is one of the multiple research questions I am addressing, and quantification will not be possible without qualitative assessments first.

These instruments were not originally designed for archaeological analysis— they are frequently used in mining, consumer testing, environmental sciences, and recycling, where reference standards abound. Certified reference standards are essential for quantitative analysis, which not only identifies the elements in a sample but calculates their overall quantities.

Rarely, if ever, do we have reference standards for archaeological or ethnographic materials. How do you create a reference standard for the amount of iron in a handprint of hematite on granitic rock, or the amount of arsenic on a taxidermy animal? A myriad of extenuating factors influence XRF measurements from the subject, the environment, the atmosphere, and the instrument itself3. The object or sample being tested also needs to be considered— its substrate, density, homogeneity, and geometry will all impact XRF measurements. There is a complicating factor coming from nearly every direction when it comes to XRF analysis.

Nevertheless, there are countless advantages to pXRF. First, it is highly adjustable—the operator can change measurement parameters depending on what they are assessing and can also add filters to improve their measurements. Furthermore, pXRF can be taken from institution to institution to test sensitive objects, and most importantly, it can be brought to the field for in situ analysis.

Rock imagery and pXRF go hand in hand (pun intended), because it is a portable, non-destructive tool you can carry into the field to analyze elemental signatures of pictograph panels. While other methods involve removing pigments from the panel for destructive analysis, pXRF measurements are completely non-invasive and allow archaeologists to rapidly assess pictograph panels in the field without damaging them. Since rock art is especially susceptible to deterioration from the environment and from people, preserving these sites is of the utmost importance.

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What’s up with “rock art” research?

Depending on your engagement with the archaeological community, it may surprise you that “rock art” research does not have the best reputation. Or rather, rock art research is often viewed as unscientific, esoteric “woo-woo”, if you will. At least, this is the impression I get from some professors in my graduate program and beyond. This reputation stems from the interpretive limitations of the material itself during most of the 20th century.

There is also much debate on whether the term “rock art” should be updated. This recent article, “What’s in a label: Pictographs as ‘art’” by archaeologist Alicia Colson dives into the issue. I recommend reading it for a more comprehensive summary on how to reconsider this label. Colson demonstrates how the term rock “art” can be misleading, simplistic, or outright wrong. It is an extremely broad term that can project our Western understanding of “art” onto imagery that represented a unique, culturally specific language. From a technical standpoint, “rock art” is also incredibly broad, whereas terms like pictograph (painting) and petroglyph (engraving) more accurately describe the method of creation.

The Society for American Archaeology Rock Art Interest group has been debating the topic for a couple of years and has yet to reach a consensus, though it seems like a name change may be coming soon. I am not sure what to use myself, but I will be using the term rock imagery here to broadly discuss pictographs and petroglyphs, and will be more specific when applicable.

While rock imagery is a highly visible type of archaeological site in the American landscape, especially in the Southwest, the medium did not lend itself to rigorous scientific analysis. When we think about archaeological sites, we think of lived spaces now buried in the earth, or maybe resting on the surface of a desert or protected in a cave. Pictograph panels can stand alone, sometimes separated from the living context of their creators. Without this context it can be difficult to date and interpret rock imagery sites. Dating pictographs and petroglyphs is a continual area of interest for researchers.

New imaging and x-ray technologies, as well as elemental and chemical analyses, are advancing research capabilities and interpretive rigor in rock imagery research. I am particularly excited about the use of portable x-ray fluorescence (pXRF) for pigment analysis since I am using this technology for my own work. It is important to note that although pXRF can detect elements in bulk, it cannot (in this context) detect chemical compounds like iron oxides.4 For pictographs, this can be a bit troublesome since different iron oxides like hematite, limonite, and goethite, would all be detected by the instrument simply as iron.

Delving into the theoretical, how do we even interpret art in a visual language we no longer understand? Interpretations may be limited, but that doesn’t mean the research is pointless.5 Luckily, pXRF has the capacity to address the many mysteries of rock imagery research (though it cannot date it yet), allowing us to ask a wider range of questions and support interpretations with more evidence.

Emigdiano Blue

The Emigdiano were a part of the broader Chumash tribe residing in their namesake San Emigdiano Mountains, now represented by the Tejon Chumash. The Chumash are native to the Santa Barbara region, parts of Kern and Los Angeles counties, the Northern Channel Islands, and today are represented by 14 tribal bands.

The Chumash people created polychromatic rock imagery in shades of red, yellow, black, white, green, and blue. These culturally significant and iconographically rich sites, such as Painted Cave (image below), have been subject to vandalism and destruction since the colonial era. Many pictograph site locations are kept private, and known sites like Painted Cave have restricted access for their protection.

Traditional pigments were made from a wide range of mineral and organic materials. The usual suspects of ochre, cinnabar, and hematite were used for shades of red. However, the Chumash also used red tuna cactus fruit, octopus, and sea hare for red pigment. Charcoal, manganese dioxide, graphite, and galena produced black. Yellow and shades of orange were made from iron ores, limonite and goethite, as well as organic materials. White could be created with a range of minerals such as gypsum and chalk, as well as pulverized shells or diatomaceous earth. The Emigdiano are known for their unique use of blue pigment in rock imagery. Azurite, malachite, and sediment mixtures could produce blue and green, but the source of Emigdiano blue was unknown prior to pXRF analysis.

Archaeologists and cultural resource managers wondered what the source of this unique blue pigment was— azurite, European paints, or something else entirely? Research focused on one of multiple pictographs and associated village sites in the Wind Wolves Preserve.

From the journey of acquisition to source materials from the landscape, to the return transport, possible exchange or trade, processing and mixture of pigments with binding agents, the use of a painting implement such as badger tail brush, to the selection of painted surface (skin, material culture, rock surface) each stage of this chaine operatoire was imbricated within social relations. (Bedford et al. 2018: 153)

I pulled this quote because it lays out all the choices and factors that culminate in the creation of a pictograph. Chaine operatoire (french!) is an archaeological term for the stages of production of material culture. Every stage, and every choice, is influenced by social relations, worldview, culture, etc., which is why material analysis can shed light on the individuals and broader culture that created rock imagery.

pXRF was a capable tool to address the research questions in this study— what is this blue pigment?

An azurite quarry within the Wind Wolves Preserve previously recorded by other researchers was examined with a pXRF instrument. 33 measurements confirmed that the material was azurite by its characteristically high proportion of copper (see the Cu peak below). The azurite source could then be compared to pXRF measurements of the blue motifs in the Three Springs pictograph panels.

Harkening back to my discussion of pXRF, measurements will include everything in the sample. Not only the pigment, but the rock substrate beneath it, which is why measuring bare rock is essential for elemental comparisons. The researchers specifically measured “blueboy”, the blue anthropomorphic motif in the image above, to test the source of the pigment. Comparing the azurite and blueboy spectra, there is a distinct absence of copper peaks (see below). The absence of copper and higher peaks of carbon and iron suggest that “blueboy” was made by optical blue rather than azurite.

Before reading this paper, I did not know optical blue was used in pictographs. It is produced by mixing black and white pigments and juxtaposing the resulting grey pigment next brighter colors like red and yellow. The blue then, is an optical illusion.

Here is my favorite part of XRF analysis— interpretation. The spectra reveal what is present, but they won’t tell you how the elements got there or their cultural significance. The absence of an element can tell you just as much as the elements present. For example, the use of charcoal for black is inferred by the absence of manganese or phosphorus, which would be expected with mineral pigment sources. Elevated iron peaks, rather than mercury, suggest that red pigments are from iron-based ochres rather than cinnabar.

With an azurite quarry nearby, why would the Emigdiano creators of “blueboy” choose optical blue over blue mineral pigments?

This discovery is consistent with archaeological excavations that found no evidence of azurite fragments at nearby sites. According to the ethnographic record, azurite or kʔalyan, was only used as a face paint for women and for ceremonial and/or medicinal purposes. The authors suggest that pigments had specific categorical uses, and pigments used for face paint may not have been used for pictographs.

So, if rock-art was, at least in part, meant to be employed to be affectual works, then the care and attention of the elements produced with optical blue may be indicative of the power that was meant to be employed in their making. Were the charcoals and whites used in the paintings making reference to some special place in the landscape, something other than the azurite quarry? Were the artists (or artist?) viewed by others as having a special status? Though we have gained new insights into the creation and considerations of rock art, new questions arise. (Bedford et al. 2018: 169).

As always, one answer leads to a thousand more questions. Although pXRF has catalyzed more analytical research of a complex and sensitive archaeological resource, there are still a suite of limitations when it comes to assessing rock imagery. Nevertheless, I am excited about what the tool can do. 6

I hope this rant/essay elucidated x-ray fluorescence technology and showed that qualitative analysis can be a relatively uncomplicated approach when addressing technological and personal limitations. When I started writing this, pXRF and I were not on good terms, but now I think we can be friends again.

Thank you for reading <3 If you want to support me further, consider a one-time coffee donation!

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In the midst of reading Kat Anderson’s Tending the Wild, on traditional ecological knowledge in California, I watched the 1947 film Black Narcissus. Between these seemingly disparate pieces of media I found a clear connection— missionization. While Anderson chronicles the destruction of Native California under the Spanish Mission system, Black Narcissus shows British missionaries in action as they attempt to “discipline” a small Indian community. Though fictional, it captures the maddening motivations, hypocrisies, and failures of the missionary project.

Tending the Wild describes the environmental and cultural devastation of California during the various chapters of its colonial history. Spanish forays into Alta California were sporadic following the initial Cabrillo expedition in 1542. It wasn’t until 1769 that Spanish returned to establish Missions with the goal of converting the Native Californians to Catholicism. Missionization was the process of acculturation imposed on Native Americans in the establishment of 21 missions across California. Entire communities were forcibly removed from their lands and into Missions and presidios1. Though the goal was ostensibly to “save the souls” of Native Californians, in actuality, they were indentured laborers (slaves) to support self-sufficient settlements.2 Tens of thousands of lives were lost due to disease, malnutrition, harsh working conditions, and direct violence.3 As elders and Native leaders died, traditional social organization was disrupted. Community members were coerced into converting to Christianity and abandon their religious and cultural customs.4 Inter-generational relationships were severed as girls and single women were kept in monjeríos— isolated areas of the Mission designed to regulate women and teach Catholic gender roles.

Black Narcissus takes place during Britain’s colonial rule of India. It follows the efforts of a young Sister Superior named Clodagh who is sent to the Himalayas to start a school and hospital. The bare bones team of Sisters are isolated in a mountaintop palace, originally built for the old Raja’s “harem”— what juxtaposition! The European Sisters are uncomfortable, out of place, and completely reliant on the aid and expertise of the mountain villagers. Of course, they have a white liason (Mr. Dean) who is skeptical of their Christian mission but helps their efforts regardless. He also drives the Sisters mad with desire parading around in short-shorts, sometimes even topless (see pictures below)! At first, he describes the mountain people as simple folk just like any man, woman, or child in the world. This description is quickly lost as Mr. Dean goes on to repeatedly call the locals children who believe in magic instead of science. Village girls are sent to the convent, similar to the Spanish Missions, to study the ways of being a woman under British colonial rule. Chastity and obedience are juxtaposed against the exotic sensuality of Kanchi— a disgraced teenager who woos the regional General.

The young village children are also sent to the new convent for school, though a lustful Sister quickly turns over her teaching duties to a bilingual boy so she can stare longingly out the window at Mr. Short-shorts. Of course, the depiction of the local community is vague— various races of actors are employed to portray Indians. One of the nun complains that all the children look the same and the Sisters argue over whether to call the Young General black or not (played by Sabu, an actual Indian-American actor). They joke that he is a Black Narcissus, like the perfume that he wears. Scenes of shirtless men playing drums in jungle signal an ambiguous “tribal” vibe. The Old General is played by a white actor in horrible brown face, and the beautiful temptress Kanchi, also in brown face, dances instead of speaks.

The juxtaposition of white nuns in a Himalayan village reminded me of Picnic at Hanging Rock, which is considered a masterpiece of Australian cinema. Feminine purity is at the center of both films and the plot follows the female characters as they stray from Christian standards. Their deviation is seemingly caused by the foreign and distant lands they are occupying. Picnic at Hanging Rock is a hauntingly beautiful film following the disappearance of three boarding schoolgirls into a vast volcanic rock formation.5 It was filmed on location with the cinematographer draping bridal veils over the camera to create a gauzy, diffused vision. The aboriginal inhabitants of the region surrounding Hanging Rock were forcibly removed in the mid 19^th century, though you would not infer that from the film. The landscape appears completely inhospitable from the colonial perspective.

Between the two films there is a similar sense of estrangement and fear, pitting virgin purity against unknowable natural forces. Missionization takes direct action on Native women, isolating them and regulating their sexuality. Colonization, similarly, focuses on protecting the purity of women, both by policing European women and preventing European men from mixing with Natives. This is the subject of Prostitution, Race, and Politics, by historian Phillipa Levine who researches the establishment of regulated brothels in British Colonial settlements. Levine highlights the female body as a site of subjugation, desire, and control which becomes a divisive battleground on which colonization is fought. Missionaries focus on regulating Native women because they are the mothers of the next generation— their acculturation perpetuates Christianity rather than Native culture.

In Black Narcissus, the juxtaposition between the white Sisters and Indian villagers is paramount. While Black Narcissus shows colonization in action, Picnic at Hanging Rock shows us Native land in the hands of the colonizer. As missionaries, the nuns are disturbed by the Holy Man on their property who renounced all earthly goods and sits looking out over the dramatic mountainscape without speaking, eating, or sleeping. Sister Superior has the property line measured and is angry that the Holy Man has encroached, inviting the villagers to honor him instead of visiting the convent. This way of honoring nature is wrong— uncivilized, childish, impure. And yet, their white linen habits6 are feeble against the Himalayan winds. They grow sick from the water and the altitude. It’s too crystal, Sister Clodagh says of the air. It is too pure. You can look out and see too far. The natural majesty is too much, even too pure, for the “civilized” Christian comprehension.

The film is a glimpse inside the madness of Missionization. The nuns do not want to be there, and they are ill-equipped to deal with local issues. The locals do not want their education, medicine, or religion, and yet they are forced together. The settlers in the colony are reliant upon yet dismissive of the knowledge and labor of its inhabitants.

So says Mother Superior as she sends Sister Clodagh off to India. It captures the irony of the civilizing project— the false humility of the colonizer and their manufactured burden. Spanish explorers said that California was ripe for colonization not only because of the land, but because of the “free” workforce that came with it. Though Franciscan Friars believed in the import and necessity of their efforts in California, the result was cultural genocide. An estimated 72% of the Native Californian population was lost during the Mission period.7 Mother Superior’s quote should invoke some sense of responsibility to the powers that be, but that is not the case! Were the Sisters or Friars servants to the laborers they indentured?8 One Spanish Friar visiting from Mexico was appalled by the conditions he witnessed in California missions, saying it was some of the cruelest treatment of people he had ever seen. He was deemed “insane” by his brothers and sent away and his warnings were dismissed by the Church and the colonial government.9

Black Narcissus reminds us that within the relationship of the colonizer and colonized, which is paternalistic on its face, is a parasite. The Missions and the colonies cannot exist without exploitation of indigenous expertise. Aboriginal trackers and informants are employed to find the missing Australian schoolgirls, though they had warned white people not to enter Hanging Rock in the first place. Yet in both films, the colonizers cannot even face the awing reality of the landscape they are conquering. It drives European propriety and femininity mad. Their world order no longer makes sense. In Black Narcissus, the mission fails. Ill and maddened nuns leave India before monsoon season ends, just as Mr. Dean predicted. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, the landscape, devoid of its forbearers, consumes the pure living symbols of the colonial project.

I sought out Black Narcissus because it was a technicolor story of nuns with striking scenes of the Himalayas— all hand-painted practical effects. Visually, it is a stunning film. Yet its plot leaves much to be desired and the acting vacillates from okay to unbearable. However, it is an effective rendering of the idiosyncrasies of Christian colonialism. While saving souls, Missions took lives, uprooted entire communities and severed their connection to their land and culture. The nuns portrayed in Black Narcissus somewhat reflect the attitudes of Spanish padres— rendering entire societies as subordinate children, yet needing their knowledge, skills, and labor to survive. There is solace in the film, however, as the nuns turn back towards Europe and the Holy Man remains on the mountaintop unchanged. It was released just months before India earned its independence from Britain.

The mission’s failure in Black Narcissus is a happy ending— both the village and the nuns are free from this doomed relationship between missionary and missionized. Black Narcissus demonstrates how missionization, and colonization more broadly, regulates and subjugates women. “Protecting” yet demonizing female power, sexuality, and autonomy10. Christian hierarchies, gender roles, and understandings of the natural world disrupt life on both sides of the project. Unfortunately, the ending of Black Narcissus was not the reality in California. The result here was cultural genocide and environmental devastation. But the story continues.

Thank you for reading my brief foray into missionization. I know I take a negative stance against Christian missionaries, but this is based on the media I am exploring in this piece as well as the history here in California. This isn’t a diatribe against faith, just how faith can be used as a tool of oppression.

I spent a majority of my July hiking through the California chaparral1. Consequently, I’ve come to admire plant species I’ve never noticed before, like California buckwheat. It’s whimsical pompom flowers range from white to pink to rusty red as they dry up in the heat. When hiking in dense vegetation they become a familiar respite—their bushes are easy to walk through with no brambles or scraggly limbs to stab you through your clothes. Yucca and whitethorn, on the other hand, have become the enemy!

This past month I have been out in the mountains of San Bernardino working as an archaeological field technician. Long, hot treks through the sage scrub of the Channel Islands prepared me well for the job. But the heat was something else. We found the occasional respite beneath knobcone pines or interior live oaks, but hungry chaparral has taken over the once abundant forests.

You may be wondering where the verdant, shady mountains have gone. In some patches and ravines the old ecozone still flourishes, but most of these forests were voraciously logged in California’s early days. Back when Americans came running to the rich and boundless resources of the Golden State. Anderson Kat, author of Tending the Wild, describes that manifest destiny appetite as rapacious.2

I love working outside because I can spend time with endemic plants, learn their qualities and quirks, and get some bird watching in too. I love identifying plants because it’s an exercise in getting to know what resources are around you— what plants provide food, fiber, and other raw materials. I’ve found that much of California’s history can be learned from plants alone. History is in the denuded mountainsides, the lily blossoming between black sage, or the pinwheel shape of a sacred Datura flower. The land tells the story without saying a word— from the First Peoples to the Spanish Missions, to the Mexican and American eras. Each chapter of California has left a lasting mark, some more indelible than others.

The field of ethnobotany has recently grabbed my attention. It is the study of human-plant relationships or how we use plants and incorporate them into our social worlds. In archaeology, ethnobotany can help researchers understand subsistence strategies, land management practices, and traditional lifeways. I recently read books on Cahuilla and Chumash ethnobotany and am currently reading Tending the Wild, so human-plant relationships are really on my mind. I chose a few species to discuss just to shed light on the various uses and histories surrounding plants right outside our doors.

California Buckwheat: Eriogonum fasciculatum

Let’s start with buckwheat since it’s front of mind, and I have a bunch of photos on my phone. Having never seen buckwheat growing up, I assumed it was plain as golden wheat. Now, I see them more as a flowers with white clusters, pink stripes and stamens. California buckwheat enjoys dry soils and can be found in a variety of ecozones: chaparral, creosote bush, pine forest, etc,

The Cahuilla word for buckwheat is hulaqal. California buckwheat among other species of the plant were abundant on traditional Cahuilla lands. In summer, the seeds could be gathered with a seed beater) and eaten as a flour or porridge. However, this is not the same buckwheat flour we are familiar with today. Seed beating was a common method for harvesting seed bearing grasses and shrubs such as chia and sagebrush. A stick made of tule, wood, or other fibers, is used to knock mature seeds off from a stalk and into a burden basket. This process naturally disperses seeds and selects for mature, rather than immature seeds.

California buckwheat was also widely used for its medicinal properties. The flowers and leaves could be made into a tea for curing headaches, stomach pains, and menstrual cramps.

Manzanita: Arctostaphylus sp.

Manzanita are a genus of evergreen shrub tree that thrive in the chaparral landscape from the Channel Islands to the San Bernardino mountains. They are named for their small red fruits that resemble apples, hence, manzanita. These resilient trees can be found across the chaparral of the American west because they can survive in poor, dry soils.

One of the Chumash names for manzanita is sq’o’yon, while the Cahuilla name is kelel. Ripe berries could be harvested during from late spring to early summer. For the Cahuilla, early fruits were preferred for making a beverage from the mashed pulp of the berries. The Chumash also made use of manzanita beverages, though gathering in the summer when fruit was ripe was preferred. Both groups, among other SoCal tribes, would process dried berries and seeds in a metate into a coarse meal, which could then be stored and enjoyed throughout the winter. The wood of the manzanita tree was also used for constructing pipes, cook fires and tools.

Manzanita trees were dietary staples for California’s first peoples. Their import is reflected in the management of resource tracts, particularly by the Cahuilla. Family lineages reserved access to specific areas of manzanita, as well as oak trees and other essential plants. The practice of resource claiming resembles usufruct ownership rights, as Anderson describes in Tending the Wild. Individual weavers would stake out and tend to their own patches of rushes and grasses, while family lineages may claim a grove of mesquite trees. These practices do not reflect private landownership, but rather preferred or exclusive resource rights based on maintenance, cultivation, and kinship.

Mesquite: Neltuna glandulosa

When I think mesquite, I think southern barbecue and smoked ribs. It wasn’t until I moved to California and saw mesquite trees growing in my neighborhood that I realized they provide much more than wood. The trees produce large golden beans which can be processed into a nutritious high protein flour, often eaten in cakes and breads. The beans can also be eaten simmered or as a broth. Mesquite was an essential food source, especially for the desert Cahuilla. Every part of the tree was usable as food or raw material for woodworking.

Flowers were collected in the spring, fresh beans in summer, and dried beans in the fall. The Cahuilla have multiple modes of understanding the seasons, but one is based on the development of the mesquite bean. According to this method, there are eight seasons beginning with the first budding of the trees and ending with “cool days.”3

Urban development and the lowering water table in Coachella Valley have drastically diminished mesquite populations. Once abundant groves are completely gone, though you can still see them growing in parks and LA neighborhoods.

Yucca sp.

Though I have recently been stabbed by many yucca plants, their valuable fibers cannot be overlooked! While their leaves are used for weaving and cordage, their pointy ends can be used as needles and awls. One species of yucca, the Spanish Bayonet is called panu’ul by the Cahuilla. The Mojave yucca is known as hunuvat.

The yucca plant only produces a stalk before it dies, but this final growth-spurt is a nutritious food source. Before the spring blossom, yucca stalks can be harvested and roasted while they are full of sap. Dried yucca stalks can also be ground into cakes. Fresh yucca flowers can be eaten for their sweetness or boiled with salt once they’ve gone bitter. Yucca stalks and roots are high in saponins, meaning they can be used as a natural source of soap and hair wash.

Yucca fiber processing begins with cutting and breaking mature yucca leaves. Ripping leaves into strips and rubbing away the pith leaves long, durable strands for cordage. However, yucca retains a lot of water, so pounding is sometimes necessary to dry out the fibers. Beyond cordage and rope, yucca fibers can be used to construct baskets, sandals, and rugs.

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Conclusion

Traditional ecological knowledge and plant usage broadens our understanding of human-plant relationships and how the decisions of the past effect our environments today. Although you can still see these species across SoCal, their abundance has diminished. Tending the Wild centers indigenous land management strategies to demonstrate how California plant communities were cultivated, maintained, and tended by the First Peoples. Diving into ethnobotany reminds me how much our natural world has changed since colonization, and traditional knowledge is essential for conservation efforts today.

Thank you for reading! <3

Works Cited:

Anderson, M. Kat. 2005. Tending the Wild. University of California Press.

Bean, Lowell and Katherine Siva Saubel. 1972. Temalpakh: Cahuilla Indian knowledge and usage of plants. Malki Museum Press.

Timbrook, Jan. 2007. Chumash Ethnobotany. Heyday Publishing.

https://www.primitiveways.com/yuccas_and_agaves.html

Artifact Description:

• Limestone with visible mollusk shells

• Neolithic (~6000 years ago)

• 12-centimeters in height

• Absent face, abstract limbs, (emphasized sexual features ?)

• Evidence of wear from being handled or used

• Discovered in 2022 near Kołobrzeg, Poland

As a so-called Venus connoisseur, I was thrilled to see that a female fertility figurine was discovered in Poland. She is purportedly the only Neolithic artifact of her kind in the Polish archaeological record. And like most great archaeological discoveries, the Kołobrzeg figurine was found by sheer accident, or serendipity, by a farmer. It is housed at the Polish Arms Museum and has been analyzed by archaeologists from the Relicta Foundation— though I cannot find a scientific publication on the artifact (Perhaps it is in Polish or it has not been published yet… please let me know if you find something I missed.)

Archaeologists confirmed the uniqueness of the find and deemed its location of discovery credible, however, none of the articles I have read disclose how the Neolithic Age of the figurine has been proven. Perhaps more details are known about the context of the find than are being shared publicly. From what I have read so far, I have a lot of questions. What was the context of the discovery? Was it a surface find? Was it dug up by farming equipment? Are there associated artifacts? What is the veracity of its feminine/Venus nature?

My central question however, is this. Does the figurine definitely represent a female body? I would love to open this up for discussion, because on first glance, I assumed the upper body features were stylized arms.

I showed the above image to my partner and asked what he saw.

“A human? A baby? Maybe a baby because it has a big head?”

And thank goodness he said that because I thought I was going crazy. To me, I am not certain the figurine represent a female or a woman. I wonder what other archaeologists, art historians, internet folks, and anyone else, think about the “Venus?”

The Venus Phenomena

According to Smithsonian, when an amateur archaeologist found an ancient female figurine in the mid-1800s, he named it “the immodest Venus.” So from the beginning, our understanding of this class of artifact has been painted by European values and cultural norms. These female figurines dating from the Paleolithic (~30 to 11,000 years ago) were eroticized and sexualized by a culture where nudity was taboo. Furthermore, the creators of these hand-held figurines were assumed to be men without hesitation. Naming them after the Roman goddess of beauty also attaches religious and cultural beliefs to an artifact of an entirely different time period and context.

Of course, many of these types of assumptions have been abandoned since they are un-scientific. Archaeology has come a long way since the 19th century, evolving alongside social and natural sciences. However, the Venus obsession prevails! In a succinct and compelling article on the topic— Vandewettering invites archaeologists and art historians to challenge their underlying assumptions of the figurines’ makers and intended purpose.

These assumptions include:

1. That the figurines were made by men to serve male purposes.

2. That nudity = eroticism.

3. That exaggerated sexual characteristics = fertility. Ethnographic evidence shows that fertility is not a goal of hunter-gatherers. In fact, they may have wanted quite the opposite. Modern hunter-gatherers try to control frequency of pregnancy due to mobility and energy constraints.

Were these figurines made by men— eroticized images of femininity, sexuality, and fecundity? Or were they crafted by women— perhaps as a self-portrait? Are dramatic proportions the result of women examining their own bodies? This may also explain why they lack detailed faces.

Is she a Venus? Is she… a she?

Let’s go over the Neolithic, since that is the purported age of the Kołobrzeg figurine. We refer to this era as a revolution for a reason. The advent of agriculture and animal domestication fundamentally changed human society and culture. Agricultural knowledge, technology, as well as domesticated plants and animals, were carried out of the Fertile Crescent (what we now call “the Middle East”) and into what we now call Europe. If this artifact is associated with the Neolithic Period, its creators lived in a very different world, and culture, than the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers that created the Venuses of archaeological fame.

I will not pretend to be an expert on Neolithic Polish archaeology or Paleolithic Europe. But based on my basic knowledge of these chapters in human history, I hesitate to call the Kołobrzeg figurine a Venus. Compare the images of Paleolithic Venuses to the Kołobrzeg. The Paleolithic figurines are undoubtedly well-endowed. Breasts, stomachs, and hips are exaggerated representing pregnant or heavier bodies. Some examples also have visible vulva/female genitalia. Though there are a wide range of Paleolithic Venuses, the Kołobrzeg figurine appears distinct.

I also hesitate to even gender the artifact. The upper body features do no scream breasts to me. They could by stylized arms or even arms held to the chest with elbows out— kind of a chicken-wing situation. I see that the figurine has a “buttocks”, which men have as well, but it also lacks something very important. Genitals! (Cue “Janitor” by Suburban Lawns… sorry that’s a deep cut). The lack of genitals feels significant, and I do not think the ambiguity of the figurine’s gender should be overlooked in interpretation.

Even with just the Neolithic age in mind, I question how Ms. Kołobrzeg fits into the box of Venus Figurines. I recognize the political value in connecting an artifact of Polish pre-history to the “canon” of European Venus figurines. However, I think this specific example deserves more research. Perhaps it is a unique, regional manifestation of a tradition passed down from Paleolithic to the Neolithic era. Perhaps Ms. Kołobrzeg is evidence of some other cultural phenomena entirely.

Ancient artifacts, much like art, can be a Rorschach test of our own perspectives and cultures. During the naissance of archaeology, the male-dominated field assumed that “Venuses” were made by men to represent beauty and fertility. During the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 70s, Venuses became a symbol of ancient feminine power, inspiring a belief in a pan-European monotheism (Vandewettering 2015).

Some look at Mrs. Kołobrzeg and see a baby, a gummy bear, or a woman with laterally positioned breasts.

I’ll close it out with a quote from Vandewettering:

It is important to recognize that the Venuses are but one depiction of women from the Upper Paleolithic; any conclusions we draw about the men and women who created and used the Venuses based solely upon the figurines would reduce the complex and nuanced nature of human society to a single aspect of their material culture.

Vandewettering, Kaylea R. (2015) "Upper Paleolithic Venus Figurines and Interpretations of Prehistoric Gender Representations," PURE Insights: Vol. 4 , Article 7. Available at: https://digitalcommons.wou.edu/pure/vol4/iss1/7

Thank you for reading and please let me know what you think about this Venus situation!

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The Book of Kells is a relic of Early Medieval art and religious devotion. Young monks toiled over its vellum pages, writing in careful calligraphy the words of the New Testament. Vibrant miniatures and marginalia adorn the text in inks of ochre, imported indigo, copper green, and lapis lazuli. Title letters are decorated in Celtic knots, intertwining human and geometric forms. The production of an illuminated manuscript took effort, devotion, and time.

Amidst these AI debates, I often think of the Book of Kells. I think of the familiar— why don’t we make things like this anymore?— rhetoric on Substack. Why don’t we make manuscripts like the Book of Kells, or grand Gothic cathedrals, or enchanting public spaces? I worry that if such things were made today, some would see them as frivolous, expensive, and dare I say, useless.

However, I don’t entirely agree with that sentiment. There are still great artists, thinkers, and writers. The shift is in our evaluation of art and artists. Perhaps this is unique to my suburban American upbringing, but art was seen as a waste of time, not a career. Only the rare few artists or writers gain enough recognition to pay the bills, so why even try to be creative? Might as well sideline your passions and turn them into hobbies you only have time for once a month.

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I don’t know why illuminated manuscripts have become a symbol of resistance in my mind. I am not even Christian, just an admirer of monastic traditions. The life of an academic researcher (which I barely am) and a monk are very similar, I think.

There are some obvious cultural reasons why we don’t make monumental works of art in this era of late-stage capitalism… like why have a lovely stone/brick/wood home when you could have a millennial grey cement apartment? Cost efficiency is paramount! And efficiency digs its claws into every aspect of our lives. No time can be wasted! No moment left unproductive!

Perhaps this post is about more than resisting AI. I think I also want to resist the insidious metaphysical property managers who want to build a cement grey apartment inside of my head (does that make sense?). Why don’t we make beautiful things anymore? Well we can! We can still make beautiful things if we don’t sacrifice our effort, time1, and uniquely human thought.

Can a chatbot get my degree for me?

AI writing tools have been on my mind for awhile. I learned that some professors at my university actually recommend that students use ChatGPT for certain assignments. A student working with me at our writing center told me this, but he said it didn’t feel right. He wanted help from a human tutor, which gives me a lot of hope!

This past week I ended up laying out some classic anti-AI talking points for my family that I wanted to share here. My siblings had asked me if I used AI tools for my work. Do I research with ChatGPT? Do I use it to write and edit?

Not only do I not use it, I told them, I’ve never even tried. I guess I have used the unavoidable AI tools embedded in Google, like how it can translate texts from photos or identify plants (not very accurately). But no, I try to avoid AI.

So in that way, my critiques of AI are more general. And maybe I’m dogmatic about it. But this is just my opinion/worldview and it’s how I help myself sleep at night.

My siblings were surprised by my response. It saves so much time, they told me. It’s efficient!

Sure. But I am not in graduate school pursuing academic research to be efficient, necessarily. Though, I have become a much more efficient learner and writer the good old fashioned way! Nowadays, efficiency equates to putting in the least amount of effort for maximum results (though what this maximum result is, is subjective). I am sure it works for certain lines of work (writing monotonous emails all day/analyzing data/writing code).

We are fed this idea that AI is net-positive for the world and good for literally everything. It is a panacea to arduous thought! It is a personal assistant for reading, processing, and expressing yourself. In this way, it is antithetical to academia, and more generally, learning!

So here are some of the main talking points for AI and my critiques of them. It saves time, it saves effort, and it’s efficient!

Time: I am sure if I used AI to guide my research it would save me time. Hey, it could save me this whole year if I used it to write my thesis! But is it really saving me? Would I learn time management skills, how to organize my research and thoughts, how to write, if I didn’t do the work? Did I not take three years out of my life so I could have time to write a thesis? Isn’t taking time the whole point?

Effort: I am in graduate school to learn. I want to be an expert, and a scholar, and an educator2. It is not something you just pay for. It is not something you can wish into existence. If you want to grow, you have to feed yourself. If you want to improve, you have to try. You must put in the effort! Graduate school is difficult because you are working independently and often stretching yourself thin. You are diving into research areas you did not even know existed. And hopefully you find joy in it. You put in all this effort so that in the end, you feel like you achieved something. That is why we say you earn a degree. Hopefully, you didn’t just buy it.

Efficiency: Does efficiency mean quality? As the blurb from University of Washington states, will AI produce work that would withstand peer review by other experts? Maybe AI can point me in the right direction if I ask it the write questions, but stumbling into information and ideas is a vital part of research. It is how you add breadth to your work. Oh, this paper doesn’t discuss the fiber dying technique I was looking for, but I learned a lot more about material processing and basketry production by reading it. In fact, I found great papers to look at in the citations. It is hard to become an expert or engage in interdisciplinary research if you do not read a wide range of topics.

(It’s also bad for the environment and wastes water and energy!)

Getting worse is quick and easy! Improving takes time.. :(

Honestly, I don’t know how someone could succeed as a researcher, writer, or academic without putting in excessive amounts of time and effort— even if it seems inefficient. A lot of scientific research is “inefficient” on its face. For instance, I spent two years working as a research assistant in a lab where my efforts felt infinitesimal to the overall project. I had to do tedious work that required human hands and eyes, and though I didn’t see the end point of the research, I was there to get it started. It also made me realize just how much time, and how many hands, go into archaeological research.

A recent study from MIT demonstrated that using ChatGPT to think destroys neural pathways. It particularly harms critical thinking skills and cognitive development in young users. There is an unfortunate feedback loop when it comes to AI usage: if you do not do the reading and research, you are less likely to do the writing yourself too. It is much easier to write when you know what you are talking about— when you actually have an opinion on the subject! If you don’t, you are much more likely to pass off that work to AI.

So when friends or family wonder why I don’t use AI, it’s because doing it myself is the goddamn point!

I don’t want to be so harsh about it, but I am fed up. I am fed up that in this world of open and endless information— Anna’s Archive, Project Guttenberg, public libraries, WIKIPEDIA!— people are using ChatGPT instead of a basic search engine.

We have the world at our fingertips and we don’t even want to look at it!

I watched SE7EN last night and Morgan Freeman’s character said something similar. You have all this knowledge at your fingertips and instead you’re playing poker?

I think overstimulation and information overload is the cause of our inaction. It surely throws me into catatonia. It dulls my thinking and my mood, which is why I wait as long as possible in the morning to turn my phone on. Doomscrolling has replaced active curiosity. Instead of searching, I wait for the information to come to me. Like most people nowadays, I struggle with my attention span. Once I start scrolling it is impossible to stop. Going off the poker metaphor, it is easier to leave it up to chance and it’s addictive to hit the newsfeed slots. My only way around it is to turn my phone off or disable social media. My partner went so far as to replace his iphone with a dumb phone.

Maybe I’m a Luddite at the end of the day. If you want to hate on me for this opinion, it wouldn’t be the first time! In regards to being upset with my opinion, I want to reiterate that it is just my opinion. I mean, I wish using AI was sunflowers and daisies and we could frolic with our ChatGPT assistants in a virtual field, but that’s not the world we live in. (e.g. Big tech contracts with the US military to do god knows what, Grok becoming obsessed with “white genocide” in South Africa, sycophantic ChatGPT telling you to sell poop on a stick or to kill yourself).

I wish I could be a techno-optimist, but I am concerned about the minds of the future. I’ve worked with college students who struggle to write complete sentences, let alone entire papers. And I don’t think AI is the solution to this problem.

Big tech profits off our time, our data, our images, our thoughts. Thinking is something completely your own— your life, your world! It is our greatest blessing and burden. But no one can think for you. No one can take your cognitive power away from you, unless you let them. Sorry to be dramatic and cliché, but knowledge is power my loves! Resist and create! Channel that work of art you admire, that great achievement that seems so distant, and let it motivate you. We can still make beautiful things even if we are inefficient and slow.

Okay I am stepping off my soap-box now. Thank you for reading!

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Entry #1: Thor Heyerdahl and Hyperdiffusionism

In 1947, Norwegian ~explorer~ Thor Heyerdahl gathered funding, public excitement, and team of friends (including a parrot) to sail from South America to Polynesia. This was no ordinary crossing, but a reenactment of a proposed ancient voyage between the two worlds. Heyerdahl himself is difficult to categorize— he was a writer and a biologist interested in zoology, botany, and anthropology, but he was an amateur anthropologist at best. Despite embarking on arduous 5000 mile journey and facing high-seas on a handmade bolsa wood raft, the controversial theory motivating the expedition was never accepted by the academic community.

After 101 days, the Kon-Tiki mission came to a dramatic close on the reef of Raroia. Despite crashing the raft, Heyerdahl and his crew successfully proved that long-distance seafaring was possible from South America to Polynesia with indigenous technologies and knowledge. However, Heyerdahl believed that a race of white-skinned, light or red-haired people were the original colonists of Polynesia.1 Subsequently, he believed Polynesia was colonized from “East” to West, rather than from Austronesians, who must’ve migrated later in time.2 He also thought this mystical white race was also responsible for the civilizations of Middle and South America! Many documentaries and articles on the topic omit this unsavory but extremely relevant issue. Of course, there is no archaeological, historical, or genetic evidence to support Heyerdahl’s theory. It is extremely disappointing that the man who tested long-distance seafaring using indigenous technologies did so to prove that white people must have done it first…

Hayerdahl’s theories are an example of hyperdiffusionism— an untestable and widely discredited theory for explaining cultural change. Hyperdiffusionism is off-shoot of cultural diffusionism, which posits that technology, language, and ideas are transferred from one culture to another via direct, indirect, or forced contact. Hyperdiffusionists took this theory many steps further, believing that technology originates from one culture and is spread directly by people through migration or colonization, without acknowledging mechanisms of communication or trade. The term hyperdiffusionism was first used in the 1960s to derogatorily describe the most fervent and myopic cultural diffusionists. Sir Grafton Elliot Smith was a major proponent of hyperdiffusionism and believed that Egypt was the source of human civilization and that the ancient Egyptians were, of course, a European race! (Originally, he assumed that the origins of civilization must have been in Europe). His theory of a white Heliolithic (sun-worshipping) race inspired Heyerdahl’s expeditions across the Pacific. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, hyperdiffusionism functioned as a theoretical foundation for archaeological racism, a term I am defining thus:

archaeological racism is the attribution of archaeological sites and civilizations to disparate and untenable origins based on racial assumptions and prejudice. 3

Although hyperdiffusionism flourished in the early 20th century, it is the basis of much pseudoscience and pseudo-archaeology today. Beyond attributing Mesoamerican pyramids or Mississippian earthworks to ancient European colonists, this fallacious line of thinking has inspired shows like Ancient Aliens and Ancient Apocalypse. These shows attribute archaeological feats to aliens, Atlantians, and mythical races of giants. I hope that when laid out in this context people can see the racist/colonialist foundations of these theories. A better example of an anthropological seafaring expedition would be Hōkūleʻa, a journey from Hawaii to Tahiti using traditional technology.

After going down a Heyerdahl rabbit-hole, I think I am going to discuss racism and pseudoarchaeology in a future post.

Entry #2: California Cog Stones

Cogged stones, or cog stones, are an enigmatic class of stone artifacts found exclusively in Southern California, mainly in the coastal zone from Ventura to San Diego. They are named after mechanical cogs, but they definitely did not function that way. Since their discovery in the 1950’s archaeologists have proposed numerous theories on their function— almost 40 different theories according to California State Fullerton.

Cog stone sites are typically on coastal bluffs or cliffs near river drainages. They are associated with Millingstone Horizon artifacts— basin metates and manos for grinding grain. Cog stones have also been found in large caches and burial sites, which alludes to their social value and significance. Unlike other ground stone discs, cog stones have between 3 and 22 grooves which resemble suns, squash, or fish vertebrae (some remind me of Chinese mooncakes, imo). Some are perforated with a central hole, though a majority of the stones are unperforated.

Cogged stones are a salient example of how amateur collection can impede archaeological research and interpretations.4 Collectors in the late 19th and early 20th century often overlooked other associated artifacts or did not accurately record site locations. The rapid development of southern California also led to the destruction of archaeological resources. The image below, for example, shows artifacts recovered by Horatio Rust5 during a road grading project in the 1890s. Only a fraction of known cog stones were found in situ, so the full geographic range and contexts of cog stones are unclear. Researchers from California State University, Fullerton have recently reassessed the geology of cog stones and found most of the specimens to be made from locally sourced basaltic scoria (a type of volcanic rock).6 However, there are wide range of material types represented in the known cog stone assemblages including sandstone, limestone, granite, and other volcanic rocks.

Archaeologist look for use-wear to assess the function of a tool— smooth surfaces from grinding, pitting from hammering, or striations from usage. Since cog stones do not have any use-wear (and are an odd shape for a tool) it does not seem like they served a utilitarian function.7 It is also possible that they were used as net or line weights since they are found in coastal areas where net fishing was common. Pigments like red ochre on some stones may suggest they served a ritual function.8 However, cog stones also resemble discoidals used for games in other native cultures.

One of my favorite interpretations is from Dr. Paul Apodaca, a sociologist who specializes in Folkore, Mythology, and American Indian studies. He bases his argument on the game of camoiilcoj played by the Seri of Northern Mexico. Despite reading descriptions of the game over and over, may brain cannot really put together how it works9… BUT! the important thing is that barrel cactus slices are used as boundary markers, and when cacti are not available, players use stones instead. Apodaca suggests that cog stones of SoCal could have been used in a similar way, perhaps for a similar game in a landscape also rich in cactus species. For the Seri people, the barrel cactus is associated with different spiritual, medicinal, and utilitarian functions, and the central perforation of the cactus is sometimes used for holding ritual water and medicine. The article goes on to compare plant species, rock art, and linguistic evidence between the Seri of Mexico and tribes of Southern California like the Tongva and Chumash. Ultimately, Apodaca argues that the “summer squash” type cog stone actually bears resemblance to a cut barrel cactus.

Of course, we have to be careful with transporting ethnographic information from one culture to the archaeological record of another, but Dr. Apodaca addresses these limitations and makes a compelling argument.

Entry #3: The Adena Tablets

The Adena are an archaeological culture from the Late Woodland period in the Mississippi Valley dating from 500 BCE to 100 CE. Ceremonial earthworks, pottery, long-distance trade, and agriculture were hallmarks of the period. The Adena tablets are renowned for their enigmatic iconography with intertwined birds, reptiles, and human faces. However, the engraved visual language of the stone tablets was not easily “deciphered”. A 2015 paper in Anthropology and Aesthetics re-evaluated the tablets and found that some unidentified forms were not so abstract.

Almost all of the Adena tablets were found in burial mounds— great earthworks built over burned funeral structures. Similar to the cog stones, the Adena tablets are only found in a brief range of time and likely served a ritual, but albeit unknown, function. Their deposition, however, does leave some clues. Rather than associated with human remains, most tablets are associated with hearths in the upper layers of burial mounds representing an offering or a burial rite. Undecorated tablets of similar form and material (sandstone, siltstone, limestone) have also been found in burials and may be unfinished engravings. Ochre and pigment residue on the artifacts suggests that they were used as stamps for leather, skin, or even templates for tattoos.

The 2015 paper on the Adena tablets identified new motifs and visual illusions that may represent cosmological beliefs. Tablet rubbings reveal the impression of the objects, but closer inspection using digital imaging clarified some of the more abstract designs. Generally, curvilinear motifs represent animals and mirrored animal heads. The author identified a trend of embedded-head figures, where multiple animals can be seen within the body of another “as if digested”. These composite beings perhaps represent a mystical series or the cycle of creation and renewal. Mirroring is another common visual pun where different species face each other, perhaps representing a symbolic dualism.10

“…the imagery was designed to be seen in stages. The most obvious elements have been arranged to trick observers into believing they have seen the whole picture, hiding foils that can only be perceived when the tablet is reoriented or turned into a negative impression. This strategy of hiding one image within another probably mirrors a layered cosmology or initiatory process that involved phased recognitions.” Caldwell 2015: 108

The tablets were not meant to be understood at first glance, as Caldwell describes in the quote above. They should be held, rotated, and reconsidered. Visual puns and optical illusions reveal embedded figures, dualisms, and layered meanings to the viewer, a language only the Adena can understand. However, Caldwell identified new visual features and species in the tablets which helped in their re-categorization, and helps us get closer to “deciphering” their meaning. He organized tablets based on visual imagery rather than by geographic region or quality of engraving which was how they were previously assessed. Caldwell’s analysis demonstrated the coherent “canon” of Adena iconography, with a shared “grammar” but regional “dialects.” I enjoy the linguistic terminology for understanding these artifacts as visual languages rather than static objects.

“Re-encountering the McKensie Tablet after so many years of false assumptions was a humbling reminder that almost nothing is gratuitous or merely decorative in any imagery derived from complex and impassioned beliefs. This reminds us that we must revisit, rethink, and tease apart almost any prehistoric image before we can begin to fathom its layers of meaning - keeping in mind, of course, that even our most educated guesses may be flawed and that we may never approach full understanding.” Caldwell 2015: 115

When you Google the Adena Tablets, some of the first websites that come up are blogs ruminating on the cultural origins of the artifacts. For instance, this website compares the tablets to Austronesian iconography, theorizing that these artifacts are of exogenous origins rather than local manifestations. These claims are based on the formal features of the artifacts alone, not their context or other archaeological evidence. Since there is no evidence of Polynesian connection between the Eastern United States, this explanation seems highly unlikely (also, how and why would Polynesians go to Ohio, share some art, and leave without a trace?). Furthermore, the double-headed birds and other figures seem like predecessors to later art of the Hopewell period. The overlap of Adena and Hopewell both chronologically and culturally has led archaeologists to reconsider the Adena as an early manifestation of the Hopewell.

This type of superficial analysis reminds me of paleontologists/paleoanths connecting species based on skeletal features. Sometimes species that look similar actually have very different evolutionary lineages. All this to say, just because two things look similar (like Austronesian art and Adena tablets) does not mean they originated from the same source. I did not intent for these three “entries” to fit together, but as I was writing I saw all the threads connect! Some of the Adena interpretations perpetuate hyperdiffusionist rhetoric and there are some hokey theories about cog stones I did not even mention in this article. I appreciate Dr. Apodaca’s analysis of cog stones because it employed multiple levels of evidence and addressed the inherent limitations of this type of research— a good example of cultural comparison without being reductionist or diffusionist, I think!

I keep going back to some of these Caldwell quotes too and how he grapples with our inability to understand ancient art, but our longing to figure it out. O, the archaeological longing…

And despite my best efforts the post is still too long for email. Ugh!

If you’re reading this you should like comment and subscribe <3333

Works Cited:

APODACA, PAUL. 2001. Cactus Stones: Symbolism And Representation In Southern California and Seri Indigenous Folk Art and Artifacts. Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology. 23: 215-228. 10.2307/27825763.

CALDWELL, DUNCAN. 2014. A New Ordering of Adena Tablets Based on a Deeper Reading of the McKensie Tablet. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 65/66: 105–27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24871246.

Melander, Victor. 2019. “David’s Weapon of Mass Destruction: The Reception of Thor Heyerdahl’s ‘kon-tiki Theory’”. Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 29 (1): 6. https://doi.org/10.5334/bha-612.

Introduction

This past March, I travelled to Colombia with a group of friends for vacation. I didn’t have much on my bucket-list besides art museums, a coffee farm tour in Medellin, and the Zenú Gold Museum in Cartagena. I had very little knowledge of the pre-Hispanic history of Colombia before the trip, but seeing the wealth of gold ornaments and artifacts, as well as distinct styles of anthropomorphic pottery, sent me on a deep dive into Zenú (or Sinú) archaeology.1 This article has been a few months in the making because I decided to read a thesis on the subject and some other supporting articles. (Between finals, thesis research, and fieldwork, moments for side-research were few and far between).

Through art and history museums, conversations with taxi drivers, waiters, and local fast-friends, I learned about Colombia from past to present. It was a refreshing dose of experiential learning that was more dynamic, and perhaps more honest, than a wikipedia page or a textbook. Museums commemorating those lost in La Violencia2 and art exhibits on colonization, violence, and warfare, were impressive and impactful. Archaeological research was greatly impacted by political unrest in Colombia over the latter half of the 20^th century. One thing often overlooked about archaeology is how political climate and recent history affects our view into the more ancient past— environmental preservation and research investment shape and bias archaeological visibility.

Looting and amateur archaeology has produced many of the gold artifacts in Colombia’s museums. Burial mounds dug up not for the value of the artifacts themselves but for the gold material which could be melted and sold. Family traditions of grave robbing and looting date back to the 1800s, and archaeologist Granda notes in her thesis that looters often had more experience and financial backing than archaeologist in the early 20th century. Starting in the 1930s the Banco de la Republica, which owns Colombia’s Gold Museums, built its collections by purchasing looted artifacts.3 Though this may have led to more looting and amateur excavations, it also saved valuable pieces of history from being destroyed. It also means that most artifacts are unprovenianced, or that the location and context of their excavation is unknown. Such is the case with artifacts in museums across the world. In fact, at a LACMA4 exhibit recently there were many pre-contact Mexican artifacts of unknown (probably looted) origins. Some diggers were more amateur archaeologists than looters, and the thesis I cite throughout this article used amateur excavation notes in its research.

Originally, I was worried no one would be interested in this topic, especially since my most widely read piece is on gender and womanhood in Paleolithic Europe. Lo and behold, feminist archaeology is very relevant to Zenú gold. The role of women in pre-contact Colombia is a fascinating and under-researched topic (especially since archaeological evidence and research is very limited, for reasons soon to be discussed!) A majority of information in this article comes from “The Status of Zenú Women: A Study of Gender Relations in Ancient Colombia,” a graduate thesis by Rita María Cristina Granda from 1996.

*note to reader: when referring to South American history before European contact I use the terms pre-Hispanic and pre-contact rather than pre-Columbian to avoid confusion. I know pre-Columbian is the most used term but saying “pre-Columbian Colombia” sounded redundant*

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Zenú Archaeology

In the Caribbean lowlands of Northern Colombia where river complexes converge and flood the landscape, the Zenú region flourished with towns of goldsmiths, craftspeople, and agriculturalists. This wetland region, bounded by major rivers, experiences extremely dry and wet seasons. Despite the intense climate, with wet seasons lasting 7 months of the year, people thrived in this region for millennia. Life was a cycle of flood and drought, and agricultural fertility was paramount.

When the Spanish arrived in the 16^th century there were communities of chiefdoms supporting relatively large populations and toted gold ornaments like nose-rings, earrings, and pectoral plates. Archaeologically, the thousands of years of chiefdoms in the Zenú region represent the oldest decentralized chiefdoms in the world.5 Some of the most highly respected chiefs also happened to be women. Historic accounts of women chiefs, coupled with a wealth of female ceramic figures, has led to speculation that the Zenú were a matriarchal society. However, what exactly do we mean by matriarchy, and is there enough evidence to support this theory? Before we dive in, I wanted to specify that the cultural designation “Zenú” is from the point of contact, as recorded in the 16^th century. Human occupation in the Caribbean lowlands spanned thousands of years with various regional manifestations.

The earliest evidence of human occupation in the region dates to the Terminal Pleistocene (around 12,500 BCE) with sites like Tibitó in the Bogotá savanna, which yielded bone and stone tools associated with mastodons and equines. One of the oldest ceramic traditions in the Americas in San Jacinto date to 5900 years ago. Nomadic hunter-gatherers created this ceramic tradition and pottery likely served a ceremonial rather than utilitarian function. These vessels were ornately decorated using different techniques such as incision, modeling, and impression6.

Archaeologist use ceramic or lithic technology to create cultural chronologies (known as seriation)— since these materials survive in the archaeological record. Ceramic sequences in Colombia are used to this day to understand regional-temporal groups. The Formative Period, distinguished by incised pottery, is divided into the First and Second Horizon with the First Horizon spanning from 4000-1000 BCE. The earliest evidence of plant domestication in Colombia also dates to this period from 4000-3000 BCE. In the San Jorge region, the first man-made waterways and artificial channels, terraces, and platforms, were built during the 2^nd millennium BCE. This labor intensive land management strategy supported agricultural intensification in the region. During the Second Horizon of the Formative Period (1000 BC-500 CE), people began constructing and living on artificial platforms between 2000-14,000 square meters in size. Burial mounds were often placed at the end of these platforms. The emergence of manos and metates (grinding implements) and storage vessels for chicha7 marks a shift from root-crop to seed-crop agriculture, or a shift from manioc to maize.

Hydraulic technology fluoresced between 200-800 CE and continue into the Regional Period (500-1000 CE), leaving a lasting archaeological imprint on the landscape (see images below). Systems of canals and ridges were designed in perpendicular, fanning, and fishbone patterns, with housing and agricultural platforms protected from seasonal floods. These monumental systems controlled water run-off and collected nutrient-rich sediment for agriculture. Spanning over 500,000 hectares, the Zenú hydraulic system was the largest of its kind in the Americas. Gold smithing likely began during this period and there was a shift in material culture from incised ceramics to modeled and painted wares. During the Late Period from 1000-1500 CE, settlements moved upriver, abandoning the San Jorge region. Burial mounds in the middle river region were constructed on high ground rather than on the ends of living platforms.

“The salient characteristic of the Zenú region is its amphibious nature,” says archaeologists Granda in her thesis on women’s roles in Zenú culture. At the Museo del Oro Zenú, the same word amphibious is repeated throughout the exhibit. I had never heard the word used to describe people before. Granda uses the term to emphasize how the everchanging landscape erodes the boundary between land and water. The environment is dynamic and life-giving, transporting aquatic resources, precious minerals, people, and ideas. The valuable fauna of this environment like fish, reptiles, amphibians, and birds, are reflected in gold ornaments. The museum actually organized its exhibit based on groups of animals, and I cannot forgot to mention these unique crustacean figures worn as pendants (images below).

A video on the hydraulic systems in the region (in Spanish)

Zenú art and culture is of course well known for its goldwork. Along with zoomorphic pendants and ornaments, nose rings, earrings, pectorals, and penis sheaths were found largely in burial mounds. There was a whole class of craftspeople specializing in goldwork and ceramics. The Zenú used both lost wax casting and false filigree techniques to create beautifully detailed gold jewelry. Breast plates and necklaces were hammered and embossed to create designs like the caimans on the breastplate below. The mounds on breastplates are also thought to represent burial mounds where gold objects were deposited, transporting wealth between worlds. While early Zenú metalwork employed gold rich alloys, later periods used a copper rich alloy known as tumbaga8. Earring styles varied regionally by material and decorations, but the iconic semi-circular shape remained prevalent for 2000 years. In fact, this style of earring is all over gift-shops and jewelry stores in Colombia. The various sizes of earrings suggest they were worn by all ages and perhaps across social classes. Like ceramic styles, goldwork can also be grouped by culture-area and time period.

Gender Roles in Zenú Culture

“Ethnohistory is the study of past human behavior through written documents,” states archaeologist Granda in her research on the Zenú. She cites the writing of Spanish explorers, chroniclers, and missionaries from the 16th and 17th centuries. Some of these documents record evidence of women chiefs, though the social role of women is largely overlooked in historic documents. Granda addresses the limitations and biases of these Spanish authors, writing from a European, Christian, and patriarchal perspective. The earliest evidence of decentralized chiefdom societies comes from the Zenú region, and the political structure of Zenú society is recorded in these texts.

There were three main political regions in the 16th century— Zenúfana, Finzenú, and Panzenú. Tota, the woman chief of Finzenú, was the most respected of her peers, and would purportedly walk on the backs of her female slaves to get out of bed (quite an intense hierarchy!). When traveling long distances, elite women and men were purportedly carried in hammocks by a team of servants. Chiefs like Tota lived on a large house platforms with 20 secondary chief houses. Each chief house had 4 smaller dwellings for certain domestic tasks and crafts. Chiefs were buried in large earthen mounds surrounding an even larger mound dedicated to a god. The size of a chiefs mound reflected not only his or her wealth but the amount of time and labor his subjects would dedicate to construction. These mounds, like the many canals and terraces of the waterways, were no easy task. Red soil was sourced from distant (and unknown) locations to create these burial mounds where gold, ceramic, and shell goods were also deposited. The chief of Zenufana, Chief Tota’s brother, ordered all chiefs to be buried in her region, and if not their bodies, half of their wealth would be buried in a mound. Claims of Zenú matriarchy are based on the record of Chief Tota and the purported 1000 year presence of woman chiefs.

The Spanish also recorded, rather scantily, the role of regular women and division of labor in Zenú society. At the point of contact, women and men shared agricultural labor and military duties. Women young and old were recorded as skilled archers, though poison darts were also crafted by slave women who often fell ill from exposure. In terms of kinship structures, the Zenú were matrilineal— meaning daughters brought husbands into their homes while sons were married off. Consequentially, daughters were valued for bringing labor and wealth into the family home. Granda also discusses the rights of divorce and abortion as evidence of women’s social power and agency. Women purportedly had choice in their marriages as well as who they had children with and the Spanish recorded how Zenú women used certain herbs to stimulate abortions.

There is very limited ethnographic research on the Zenú people since a majority of the population was killed during Spanish colonization. Disease also devastated communities and explorers as early as 1515 recorded sparsely populated settlements. Native populations from Panama and other regions of Colombia were forcibly displaced into the present day Zenú reservation, so present populations represent a mixture of ethnic backgrounds. Granda discusses ethnographies from nearby groups, the Cueva and the Cuna, for inferring the role of women in Zenú society. In these neighboring communities, girls were highly valued and careful attention was paid to their physical health and beauty. Young girls received nose and ear piercings and were adorned with jewelry, while young boys received much less attention. All life-cycle events centered around women’s development while boys did not enjoy puberty or life cycle rites.

An account from Gonzalo Fernindez de Oviedo y Valdes (1478-1557) of women warriors in the region of Cartagena:

In that land, the women that do not want to get married are used to carrying a bow and arrows like the men, and they go to war with them, and they guard their chastity, and they can kill without penalty any Indian man who demands of them their body or virginity.

…and an Indian girl, 17 or 18 years old, came out of the hut full of Indians and stood amongst the Christians with a bow and her arrows . . . And before they could capture her, she wounded four Christians. imitating those warlike and fierce Amazons, whose strength and bravery Justino and many other authors mention. Therefore. amongst these Indians, many women have been seen as well trained and brave in war as the men.

Discussion

How do we interpret women’s roles in archaeological societies with limited evidence? Human remains do not preserve well in the moist soils of the Caribbean lowlands, therefore there is no direct evidence from women’s bodies for bioarchaeological analysis. Furthermore, there is limited ethnohistoric and ethnographic research on the Zenú— a cause of violent colonization. The accounts we do have of Chief Tota and other politically important women have been extrapolated into evidence of Zenú matriarchy.

With limited ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological evidence, Granda analyzes the representation of women in ceramic figures. The prevalence of these figures throughout the Zenú region begs the question— were women respected and highly valued members of society? Unlike female figurines from Paleolithic Europe which, I covered in a previous article, feminine features are not emphasized in these figures— which is more often than not interpreted as representing fertility (like literally it seems like whenever archaeologists see artistic representations of women, its like BOOM fertility symbol). Instead, heads are often enlarged with eyes and genitalia stylized as slits, or genitalia is absent. Incised designs also represent textures, body hair, and jewelry, or figures were adorned with actual gold ornaments. Though female representations are habitually interpreted as fertility symbols, Granda wonders if large heads emphasized the intellectual faculties of women. An interesting claim, though difficult to substantiate.

Granda also discusses how male and female figurines are not always distinguishable, though there are significantly more females than males represented. Both genders have similarly stylized features like large heads and exaggerated limb proportions. Granda suggests that perhaps gender differentiation was more fluid, and that the Zenú may have had a relaxed or flexible attitude towards gender.

But if matriarchy means the mirror of patriarchy, we may expect to see artistic representations of women showing dominance over men. Of course, feminist theorists recognize that conceptualizing matriarchy as an inverse of patriarchy (like Marija Gimbutas) is problematic. Our reading of past matriarchy depends on which definition of matriarchy we subscribe to today: some feminist scholars subscribe to an egalitarian model where there is gender balance rather than domination. Granda’s research and analysis of ceramic vessels does not substantiate the claim of female-dominated society. The Zenú were likely matrilineal, with women enjoying political authority and sharing military, agricultural, and domestic tasks with men.

Though matriarchy is an attractive buzzword, we should be cautious with its application. I appreciate Granda’s care with defining matriarchy, matrilocal, and matrilineal social structures in her thesis. She also discuses some alternative theories like Rian Eisler’s “gylany”, which is the equality of sexes. But of course, there is also this:

David S Temper ( 1992: 101) recently questioned the assumption of a Zenû matriarchy. He asks: Do the apparent smiling women on Sinú vessels reflect a degree of male-female equality in chiefly affairs or men's greater power and ability to promote an art style disguising inequalities?

I would love to dive even further into the theoretical nuances of this subject, but I have been working on this article for too long, and I need to publish it before I lose my mind!

I will be writing more on Colombian archaeology focusing on the practices of the Gold Museums and Michael Taussig’s ethnography on the subject.

In the works I also have:

1. A piece of Feminist Archaeology

2. Backyard Ethnobotany

3. Archaeolog #4 on shell artifacts I like, Thor Hagerdahl’s expeditions and crazy theories on hyper-diffusionism, palm fiber weaving of contemporary indigenous Colombians, and FAKE artifacts sold at art galleries!

Anyway, thanks for reading if you made it this for. The final edit of this was made with an espresso martini in hand and this may be like awful and full of typos im sorry. Much love!!!!

Works Cited:

Granda, Rita Maria Cristina. 1996. “The Status of Zenú women: A Study of Gender Relations in Ancient Colombia.” M.A. Thesis, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario Canada. 1997.

Pratt, Jo Ann F. 1999. “Determining the Function of One of the New World’s Earliest Pottery Assemblages: The Case of San Jacinto, Colombia.” Latin American Antiquity 10 (1):71–85. https://doi.org/10.2307/972212.

Oyuela-Caycedo, Augusto. 2008. “Late Pre-Hispanic Chiefdoms of Northern Colombia and the Formation of Anthropogenic Landscapes.” In Handbook of South American Archaeology, edited by Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell. Springer New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-74907-5

Our campus buildings have a lot of problems. First: they are old. Second: they are expensive.

I sit in an un-dusted room, surrounded by cabinets stuffed with the coursework of students long passed, with ceiling tiles falling onto the desks. These black holes in the ceiling occasionally sprinkle our coffees with dust (and maybe asbestos). I tried scanning the tiles with my XRF instrument, just for fun, but asbestos is too light to be sensed— just a collision of carbon molecules. I did find some lead though (from paint, possibly). Occasional exposure can’t be that bad, right?

I’m eager to use the XRF (x-ray fluorescence) instrument because it’s part of my research. My thesis involves surface testing and elemental analysis of museum objects with a focus on woven materials and basketry. I take my measurements and read the spectra— peaks and valleys of elemental energies— and look for poison.

Museum objects were “poisoned” not to harm us handlers, but to thwart pests that feast on these organic materials. I’ve been told that whenever you see organic material in a museum of a significant age, it must have been treated with something. Often times that something can only be deduced through surface testing. Before the digital age, conservators kept little record of their practices. Now, conservation histories at many institutions are just one big question mark.

You may be wondering why this is relevant to archaeology. The truth is, my thesis research is not exactly archaeological, but it is part of the broader story of archaeological research. Rather than working with artifacts in situ, I am learning about the end of the process— what happens to collections when they are curated? More pertinently, what happens to collections when they are returned to descendant communities?

Conservation histories threw a wrench in the repatriation process when NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) was passed in 1990. Some contaminated collections were returned, handled, and used by community members without knowledge of potential hazards. Artifacts are often considered community members themselves— living expressions of history and posterity. The realization that some repatriated collections could not be handled because of contamination added another complicating layer, and another point of hurt, to the repatriation process.

Pesticide research is it’s own field now, born out of necessity to protect descendent communities, museum workers, and museum patrons. If preservation means poison, we must confront what preservation is really for. Baskets, for instance, can be used for decades in the real world. With proper care and cleaning they can be continually used, but decay is the natural reality of organic materials. In many cultures, from Ancient Egypt to early Medieval Ireland, objects were ritually killed when their owner passed away. A sword may be broken, a metate or a quern stone smashed, to release the object’s spirit to follow its owner1. Preservation is essential for managing cultural resources, but contemporary issues beget the question of how and why certain materials should be curated in museums and kept in an unnatural state of immortality.

(I am not arguing against conservation or preservation, especially as someone who loves a visit to the art museum to see works that have been painstakingly restored and conserved. My research has just led me to wonder if this is always necessary, especially when there are descendant communities involved.)

When it comes to contemporary hazard, modern pest management has advanced since the days of arsenic and mercuric chloride. There are an array of treatment methods that are not hazardous to humans, the environment, or the objects themselves. Ideally, treatment and conservation methods should be reversible, which is not often the case for collections treated in the 19th and early 20th century. It’s estimated that 80% of ethnographic collections in the U.S. are contaminated by heavy metals. 2

These contaminants do not just go away. Heavy metals were successful at mitigating pests but!!! a basket sprayed with lead arsenate 100 years ago will still be contaminated today. As we pass the baskets from hand to hand, back to the homeland or back to the ground, these poisons cling to us. They accumulate in our bodies like they accumulate in the land.

When it comes to basketry, we sometimes wonder if the contaminants have grown into the plants themselves as they were harvested, processed, and woven into the story. Maybe poison isn't applied, but inherited. Did lead in the soil contaminate these plants? Did environmental pollution in the air or the museum contaminate objects over the course of the last century? These chemicals weren’t only used by conservators— our environment, as we know, is also polluted by long-lasting pesticides. And I’m not just talking about heavy metals like arsenic and lead, but also DDT and organochlorines/organophosphates. And of course these issues are not just isolated in the past. How do contemporary weavers deal with sourcing plant materials in contaminated environments? In a previous article I discussed an art exhibit that chronicled soil remediation from a neighborhood in LA. It felt synergetic, since their element of focus was also one of mine— lead.

On campus, my building with the possible asbestos falling from the walls, is not yet an issue. The administration has not looked too closely inside the building and instead of fixing the ceilings, they fixed the roof (a perfect image of the state of higher ed…). The main building, however, is a symphony of hazard. Mold blooms on the ceilings, and ambient lead forced our office to be moved to the library. If it is a risk to me in class, what will happen to professors exposed to contaminants for 8 hours a day?

I scan the past for contamination, for pesticides that pose an imminent danger, but the story does not stop there. Contamination seems to be all around us, in our infrastructure, our natural resources, and our bodies (e.g. microplastics and PFAS accumulating in our organs). My research deals with a infinitesimal fraction of the chemical hazards we face in our modern world, but even through the tiniest perspective we can get a glimpse of the universal. Past contamination cannot be ignored…

I know it’s been awhile since I posted an article, and this one seems like kind of a downer. But! I wanted to share a little bit about my own research with you all. Pesticide research has changed my perspective on museums and conservation, as well as my perspective on the world around us (hazards abound).

I have more interesting and exciting things in the works, but with field work coming up I am not sure when I will get everything done. Good research and writing takes time I guess.

Thank you for being here. If you want to support me further, buy me a coffee!

A reflection

January 2024, on way to Santa Cruz Island/Limuw1

The drive north feels expeditious— with an ocean to your left and mountains on the passenger side. Mountains as boundaries between the developed and the natural world, but there is a deeper juxtaposition. As an archaeologist, I often see this as a divide between the present and the past. That is why returning to parklands often feels like going back in time, because it gives us a glimpse of the landscape before– the chaparral, the oaks, the streams that supplied Chumash villages with fresh water. But those communities are no longer there. The streams have dried up. The chaparral inundated by livestock and invasive grass. This is not stepping back in time, I remind myself, but stepping into a mirage. Only a glimmer of ancient history comes through. We will never know how the islands looked before colonization, nor what lies hidden beneath the rising sea.

I wrote this over a year ago, but I feel like I can better articulate myself now— this image of the highway carving through the coast, bounded by uncontrollable forces, the earth and the sea. This is not the divide between past and present, but the competing concepts of time between the human and natural world. We carve the world to propel ourselves forward, all speed and efficiency. Natural time accumulates in mountains and collapses into the sea and cannot be flattened by human toil, nor quantified in our minds, and yet were always trying to make sense of it…

Thought I would open this article with this thought, to get us thinking about what parklands really represent and their value to us as our world changes. Anyway…

Channel Islands National Park

The Channel Islands are a natural wonder on California’s southern coast, situated in a uniquely productive ecosystem of the Santa Barbara Channel. Cold northern waters and southern currents meet here and facilitate an abundance of marine life. On my first ferry ride from Oxnard to Santa Cruz Island, we were escorted by a hundred or more dolphins who enjoyed riding in our wake. It’s only an hour and a half drive to get to the dock and yet the islands are world away from my neighborhood in Los Angeles.

With a suite of endemic flora and fauna— island foxes, coreopsis, spotted skunk, and torrey pine— some refer to the islands as the Galapagos of North America. Though you may not have thought so before the Northern Channel Islands became a National Park in 1980. Still beautiful, invasive species introduced by ranchers had taken a viral hold on the islands, outcompeting endemics and irreparably changing the landscape. This uniquely modern battle between endemic and invasives, preservation and development, captures the competing chapters of history that shape the islands today. Native Californians thrived on the islands with maritime economies and trade systems. After thousands of years, Chumash, Tongva, and Nicoleño were forced off of the islands and into the Mission system. The larger islands were used for agricultural land through the Mexican and American periods. All these chapters are visible now when visiting the National Park, whether it’s protected shell middens, rusting farm equipment, or Old World trees planted by previous land owners.

Almost all of the coastline in Southern California has been developed— to the detriment of coastal environments and archaeological sites alike. Coupled with rising sea levels and erosion, much of the early history of California’s coastal peoples has been destroyed. The Channel Islands, though much changed, were insulated from the rapid commercial and residential development that occurred on the mainland. It’s not perfect, but it paints a better picture of what coastal life may have looked like before European contact.

I want to look at the history of the Channel Islands through the lens of its peculiar endemic species starting way back in the Pleistocene. Long before humans arrived on the islands, pines, furs, and mammoths lived on Santarosae— the ancestral superisland of the National Park. If you go to the Channel Island’s visitor center you’ll see a reconstructed excavation of what appears to be the remains of a baby mammoth. But it's not! It’s actually a pygmy mammoth— a product of insular dwarfism. One of the most famous examples of this phenomena is Homo floresiensis, a member of our hominin lineage that underwent a similar shrinking process on the island of Flores in Indonesia. Lucky for us in SoCal, we have examples of insular dwarfism right in our backyard.

The peculiarity of island ecosystems

Insular dwarfism occurs when a population’s resources become limited due to geographic isolation. Over generations evolutionary processes will select for smaller bodied individuals with less energy requirements. The opposite phenomenon— island gigantism— can happen to smaller bodied animals such as Dodo birds or the giant rats on Flores (yikes). Both phenomena are part of Foster’s Rule, which posits that in insular environments small bodied animals grow larger, and larger bodied animals grow smaller depending on the ecological factors at play. This is a simplistic definition of course, but it works for our purposes. There are actually a number of proboscidean examples of dwarfism (elephants, mammoths, and stegodons) from across the world— perhaps because they are such good swimmers? During the time of Santarosae, the superisland was only 5 miles from the mainland. Columbian mammoths somehow arrived/swam there between 250-150,000 years ago, leaving thousands of generations for evolution to do its thing. The result was Mammuthus exilis, who was just 17% of the original mammoth body size and was just 5.5 - 6.5 feet tall. They went extinct around 13,000 years ago, and since their initial fossil discovery in the mid-19th century 160 more remains have been discovered.

So what drove the pygmy mammoths to extinction? Around the same time pygmy mammoths disappeared, humans arrived on the Channel Islands. Hmm… suspicious! There is a lot of controversy over whether humans followed mammoths out there or hunted pygmy mammoths at all. Some archaeologists argue dogmatically that humans and pygmy mammoths did not coexist! Yet the Arlington Springs Man dates to ~13,000 years ago, which just so happens to be the time period of interest. If people did hunt the mammoths, it wouldn’t have be the first time humans hunted an island species to extinction— think Dodo birds or the giant lemurs of Madagascar. However, there is no concrete evidence of human-mammoth interaction on the islands (yet)! It doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility that pygmy mammoths attracted the first peoples to the islands, but all of the remains discovered represent natural deaths. It is also possible that the population was suffering from climatic change, lack of resources, or an inbreeding depression. At the End of the Pleistocene around 10,000 years ago, the Northern Channel Islands began to shrink from one landmass into the distinct islands they are today, and another incidence of insular dwarfism occurred.

Island Foxes

After learning more about the history of the Channel Islands, I knew I had to visit, but I really had one thing on my mind— island foxes. I planned an off-season camping trip to Santa Cruz Island just for that purpose. I didn’t mind that the January weather may be cool or rainy (and it was). It seemed like the perfect opportunity to see Urocyan littoralis, transported to the islands by humans around 7,500 years ago (it’s possible people brought the spotted skunk with them too). In the early months of the year foxes break into breeding pairs— which we saw in January— then the mothers give birth in the spring. Fully grown at 10-months, island foxes only weigh between 2-6 pounds as adults, but they are key terrestrial predators on the islands. The species underwent a similar process of insular dwarfism as pygmy mammoths, though this miniaturization may have been aided by human intervention. Though they are not considered domesticates, oral histories and archaeological evidence show that island foxes were kept as pets. Fox burials also speak to the cultural significance of these creatures— how they were cared for and venerated. Their pelts were used for ceremonies and dances and the character of the fox played a prominent role in Chumash legends.2

The following summer I had the serendipitous opportunity to work on the islands conducting archaeological survey for the National Park. Survey means identifying/ keeping record of archaeological resources and entails rigorous, trail-less hiking through rugged terrain. Camping on Santa Cruz Island (SCRI), I was warned that there would be a lot of fox activity— they get excited by new people, they’re gonna be sniffing around your tent! Little fox noses did wake me up that night, nudging through the thin fabric of the tent to my feet. Unlike most wild-animal-at-night encounters, I was delighted by the disturbance and opened my tent to see two or three foxes scoping me out. I really appreciated the lack of scary things on the island. The foxes are the largest terrestrial animal, and there’s only one species of harmless snake. There was truly nothing to worry about except getting sprayed by a spotted skunk or lost in a labyrinth of fennel.

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SCRI Field Notes: June 2024

*abridged*

Fennel grows here like corn stalks, lining the road with their wispy yellow heads. You can see them conquering the mountainside— a fierce invasive. I would love to harvest and eat them, aiding in their mitigation no doubt, but they have all been sprayed with pesticides. Apparently, fennel seeds can last for 20 years before germination, and they drop new seeds every year. It’s a long battle for the plant people, a crew of two with warm smiling faces, who hike around like us with pesticide sprayers on their backs.

Manzanita grows gnarled and has red peeling bark. Buckwheat reminds me of sage but with fluffy white blooms. Same with the lupine, which grows purple from a misty green bush. Lemonade berries are sour candies you can suck on or add to your water for flavor. We put chia seeds in our bottles because they help you retain water and stay hydrated longer, which is essential for long-hours hiking in the heat.

We were delayed this morning by a broken GPS. Had to go back to the cabin and figure it out. I couldn’t help much and laid in the grass under the pepper tree, sun peaking through the ferny leaves…. You have to know a little bit of everything out here. The geology, the landscape, the flora and fauna. I am worried I do not know enough and am a total idiot… I know so little and am talking too much…

Generally, Limuw is heaven. The perfect place to live, 10,000 years ago or today…

Revitalizing Landscapes

On my first visit to Santa Cruz Island that rainy January, I wondered how the Chumash procured water. Where were the bubbling springs and streams? When I returned that summer to hike through towering, invasive fennel, I realized the full extent of modern impact on the island environment. In truth, the erosional ditch we walked through was once a stream that flowed year round. When the ranchers came and planted eucalyptus on the aquifer, the invasive roots dried up the freshwater. The ranchers who sought fertile grazing land in turn sterilized the island of its life-giving sources. Pigs rooted, disturbing plants and archaeological sites alike. Invasive grass overtook the native chaparral. A once self-sustaining ecosystem had been inundated with sheep, pigs, and men, who did not know any better than to propagate their industry.

Many species of flora and fauna were decimated by 19th-20th century agricultural industry, as well as by the elk and deer introduced for sport hunting. By the late 20th century the island foxes were severely endangered with 15 on San Miguel Island, 135 on Santa Cruz, and 14 on Santa Rosa. Their once abundant ecosystem was disrupted by ranch animals who out-competed the foxes for resources. After bald eagle populations declined due to DDT exposure, golden eagles filled their niche to the detriment of both foxes and birds.

Cat-sized and seemingly cuddly3, the island foxes drew a lot of attention to conservation efforts at Channel Islands National Park. The similarly cute and miniature spotted skunks have not received as much attention, and I still have not achieved my goal of seeing one. Though I have heard stories of campers drunkenly falling asleep and waking up with little skunks on their laps (which sounds like a dream). Another reason island foxes garner all the conservation attention is because they are a keystone species. As omnivores, they eat a range of fruits, insects, and small animals, working to keep island rat populations at bay. Without their predation, rats and skunks could overfeed on plants and bird eggs and further disrupt the ecosystem. The removal of predators big and small can have similar effects across environmental zones— the effect can radiate down trophic levels. This is especially the case on islands since these insular environments have higher rates of endemic species and are more susceptible to ecosystem disruption.

Once the northern islands became a National Park, the NPS set to work on revitalizing endangered species of flora and fauna— but not without controversy. Reviving the ecosystem meant undoing a century and a half of ranching and agricultural efforts. Since their are separate subspecies on the islands, falling populations also caused an inbreeding depression. Captive breeding programs helped resuscitate the fox population, but invasive mitigation was required to get the island ecosystem back on track. This involved culling all the feral pigs and sheep that had run amok on the islands, outcompeting native fauna and overgrazing plants. There was some public outcry against killing the abandoned animals, but the feral populations could not be removed or taken by farms since they were diseased. According to the ranger I spoke to on the topic, even if the NPS did go through the costly process of removing all the pig and sheep from the island, they would have been killed at whatever farm they ended up on. Instead, the park sent skilled hunters on an expedition to shoot feral animals from helicopters and hunting blinds. While I was working on SCRI this past summer, we would find the occasional pig bone and actually came across one of the abandoned hunting structures, now falling apart (too expensive to remove!). It’s quite a crazy, and impressive, story and you can learn more about it through this video from the National Park (Restoring Balance). Thanks to their efforts the island fox populations are now in the thousands. It’s impossible to hike on Santa Cruz and not stumble into a breeding pair of foxes, bounding off the gravel roads and into the sagebrush.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, stepping onto Santa Cruz Island is not like stepping onto Limuw how the Chumash may have experienced it, disembarking their tomols4. We only know how the island used to look from oral histories and a few Spanish records. Europeans described the chaparral mountainsides as so dense they had to crawl through the brush on their hands and knees. On the contrary, our hike over the marine terraces was upright and breathtaking (see photo above). An old ranch road guided us four miles around the eastern tip of the island towards Smugglers Cove. Occasional rock piles appeared in the grass, dressing the green hills in mysterious ruins. Those too were an artifact of the ranch era– rocks gathered up from the hillside so the sheep could easily graze. The persistence of invasives is a testament to the persistence of colonial impact. Acknowledge and repent all we want, but the corrupt seeds have been planted and the landscape irreparably changed.

The reality of things is that landscapes are always changing. Some National Parks are manufactured landscapes, crystallizing an image of a wild, terra nullis— void of human history. Yellowstone comes to mind, where native communities were forcibly removed to create the National Park. The controversial damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley is another poignant example of how even our protected parklands have been developed for industrial use (though there are definitely pros to the dam as well— it’s an ongoing issue!). Limuw will never be the same as it was before contact, and the grassy hillsides and eroding shell middens tell that story without saying a word. The silence there, besides the hum of distant motors, is the silence of thousands of years of society removed from the land. Still, every year members of the Chumash tribe paddle 25 miles across the channel in a tomol, continuing tradition and connecting to the coastal landscape.

Whether wild or developed, our parklands are not isolated from history. Flora, fauna, mountains, and coastlines, all hold chapters of our human story, our grappling with the past while running towards the future.

Thank you for reading

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