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schoolwork
So most of what I did while in my hammock yesterday was reading The Pithouses of Keatley Creek, by Brian Hayden, which is an archaeology case study on a town of Salish Indians that mysteriously packed up and left a couple thousand years ago. (Heh. You haven't got to Spirits in your Stargate watching yet, have you, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
stellar_dust? Heh.)
Of course, the people he describes are not at all like the noble savages they put in the TV show. Actually, he seemed to be using a cultural ecology approach to make -- er, belabor -- the point that these people were slaveholding, usuring, exploitative, materialist, misogynist, stratified elitists just as bad as anything Western culture has produced. It got on my nerves after a while. Not that I'm some sort of pie-in-the-sky idealist who believes it's possible to write an unbiased account, but if they're going to be that blatant about an agenda, I'd prefer that they be up-front about it, too. Plus the kind of relentless focus on self-advancement he describes doesn't even make *sense* in a society so stable that families lived in the same houses for *fourteen hundred years*. And he's trying to describe the origins of an elite class without even considering the possibility that creating and supporting an elite might actually have real, tangible benefits for the commoners as well.
But his utterly deadpan snark about NAGPRA was kinda entertaining. And I liked his discussion of the useless junk that people kick under the bed and pile in the corners. I'd never seen the useless junk under the bed discussed in an archeological context before. Apparently it's *not* just trash that I refuse to get rid of -- it's items that have been "provisionally discarded." I *like* that term. "Yes, Mom, I cleaned my room, all the garbage has been provisionally discarded." "Yeah, I went through my craft supplies and provisionally discarded all the scraps and ends." "No, that three-week-old slice of pizza isn't still sitting on the floor, it's been provisionally discarded, can't you tell?"
Actually overall I enjoyed it, and I love that sort of advanced, seasonal hunter-gatherer culture, and except when his agenda got in the way, it was good writing. Except the last chapter. The last chapter was an attempt to do a first-person account of everyday life. Yeah. Only by trying to emphasize material evidence and support his thesis, he ended up sucking out all the joy and fun, and all the hypocrisy which is what *makes* a complex society run, so it just sounded like an unrelentingly depressing way of life. Plus he exoticized everything, which annoys me in day-in-the-life accounts, because to the people whose daily life it is, it *isn't* exotic! Really! So here's my own attempt at re-writing his description of
After the first snows hit, you pack everything up and head down the mountain to the winter town, where you soon settle in to life in the house where your family's spent winters for hundreds of years. It's nice to be warm again, and to have nothing much to do all day but snuggle up in a big pile with the dozen people you love most in the world, and to eat the junk food you've been storing here all year. Of course cabin fever starts to set in eventually, but around that time is the big holiday party up at the Eagles' lodge, so you bundle up everyone in their glad rags and dash out across the cold snowy street and into the big house. While you're waiting out the crowd at the entrance you stamp your feet and chat with the half-frozen guys manning the roasting pits and scold the kids for trying to play tetherball with the sacrifices hanging out front. When you finally crowd inside, the place is packed *full* and all the hearths are lit and somebody's started passing around an aromatic pipe, and it's noisy with conversation and somebody's playing a drum in the corner and it's full of the smells of roasted meat and mulled serviceberries. And you drop the gift baskets you've brought for the hosts over in the corner with the others, and put your contribution into the pot-luck buffet, and set out do some *serious* socializing and eating and having of fun. Near the end of the night you talk third-wife into joining the others for the fox dance, since she started taking lessons last fall, and you cheer her on and watch the rest of the dances, and get into a couple of friendly dice games. Early the next morning you all stagger home, laughing and overheated and exhausted and full, and tumble back into the cold bed. The kids spend the next three days tormenting everyone with the duck feathers they got as party favors.
That's how it goes all winter. Of course, after a couple months even the parties aren't enough to keep the cabin fever away, and you're going to barf if you even have to *look* at another piece of dried salmon, and you've forgotten why you married these people in the first place, because they're all psychopaths, plus they have bony elbows, and you're seriously considering the advantages of ritual child sacrifice. But that's about when it starts warming up outside, and some of the early plants are coming up, so you can get out and take long walks and gather some fresh food. You're one of the first families to close the winter quarters and move down by the river to set up spring and summer camp, and oh boy, does it feel good to leave behind that dark, stinking, lice-ridden, sewage-covered *pit* for the fresh, if chilly, air by the river. You set up the camping kit that got patched and cleaned on the more restless days overwintering, and make friends with your dog-packs (and each other) again, and check over and repair the fishing gear that was put in storage down here last summer, gather bark for new warm-weather clothes, and eat freshly-picked vegetables every meal and often a chinook or two that one of you caught.
By the time the salmon runs have truly started going, and the river is boiling with sockeye and pink and spring salmon, everybody's come down, even the clans from the big houses. All the good fishing spots are occupied all day and the men call out to each other as they work and whoop with laughter when somebody falls in and has to be hauled back out of the soup by his tether. The women keep busy gossipping and matchmaking while they butcher and dry their catch for winter, and everybody falls into bed at night exhausted from good hard work. If it's been a good year for salmon (and most of them are) you're all more than ready for the run to end and the last of the salmon catch to finish drying. Then you load up yourselves and your dogs and head back up the valley, stopping by the winter village again to drop off the dried salmon and berries in the cellars. Late summer and fall is spent up on the high meadows, sleeping under the stars. There are deer-hunts every day and roots and berries to gather (and doesn't *that* sound cliche, but it makes a nice change from fish, okay?) And everybody's getting plump and beautiful, and you take two or three day trips over the mountain to the other valley to get stone for new tools, and there's dancing and story-telling in the evenings, and the last of the traders stop by and visitors from other towns and everybody's keeping busy getting ready for winter and making things and getting together and checking the borders one last time, and it starts to get chilly at night, and then the first snow hits.
There. *That* sounds like much more fun than all the obsessing about prestige rankings and three-generation-long power games that Dr. Hayden made you do.
stellar_dust? Heh.)Of course, the people he describes are not at all like the noble savages they put in the TV show. Actually, he seemed to be using a cultural ecology approach to make -- er, belabor -- the point that these people were slaveholding, usuring, exploitative, materialist, misogynist, stratified elitists just as bad as anything Western culture has produced. It got on my nerves after a while. Not that I'm some sort of pie-in-the-sky idealist who believes it's possible to write an unbiased account, but if they're going to be that blatant about an agenda, I'd prefer that they be up-front about it, too. Plus the kind of relentless focus on self-advancement he describes doesn't even make *sense* in a society so stable that families lived in the same houses for *fourteen hundred years*. And he's trying to describe the origins of an elite class without even considering the possibility that creating and supporting an elite might actually have real, tangible benefits for the commoners as well.
But his utterly deadpan snark about NAGPRA was kinda entertaining. And I liked his discussion of the useless junk that people kick under the bed and pile in the corners. I'd never seen the useless junk under the bed discussed in an archeological context before. Apparently it's *not* just trash that I refuse to get rid of -- it's items that have been "provisionally discarded." I *like* that term. "Yes, Mom, I cleaned my room, all the garbage has been provisionally discarded." "Yeah, I went through my craft supplies and provisionally discarded all the scraps and ends." "No, that three-week-old slice of pizza isn't still sitting on the floor, it's been provisionally discarded, can't you tell?"
Actually overall I enjoyed it, and I love that sort of advanced, seasonal hunter-gatherer culture, and except when his agenda got in the way, it was good writing. Except the last chapter. The last chapter was an attempt to do a first-person account of everyday life. Yeah. Only by trying to emphasize material evidence and support his thesis, he ended up sucking out all the joy and fun, and all the hypocrisy which is what *makes* a complex society run, so it just sounded like an unrelentingly depressing way of life. Plus he exoticized everything, which annoys me in day-in-the-life accounts, because to the people whose daily life it is, it *isn't* exotic! Really! So here's my own attempt at re-writing his description of
After the first snows hit, you pack everything up and head down the mountain to the winter town, where you soon settle in to life in the house where your family's spent winters for hundreds of years. It's nice to be warm again, and to have nothing much to do all day but snuggle up in a big pile with the dozen people you love most in the world, and to eat the junk food you've been storing here all year. Of course cabin fever starts to set in eventually, but around that time is the big holiday party up at the Eagles' lodge, so you bundle up everyone in their glad rags and dash out across the cold snowy street and into the big house. While you're waiting out the crowd at the entrance you stamp your feet and chat with the half-frozen guys manning the roasting pits and scold the kids for trying to play tetherball with the sacrifices hanging out front. When you finally crowd inside, the place is packed *full* and all the hearths are lit and somebody's started passing around an aromatic pipe, and it's noisy with conversation and somebody's playing a drum in the corner and it's full of the smells of roasted meat and mulled serviceberries. And you drop the gift baskets you've brought for the hosts over in the corner with the others, and put your contribution into the pot-luck buffet, and set out do some *serious* socializing and eating and having of fun. Near the end of the night you talk third-wife into joining the others for the fox dance, since she started taking lessons last fall, and you cheer her on and watch the rest of the dances, and get into a couple of friendly dice games. Early the next morning you all stagger home, laughing and overheated and exhausted and full, and tumble back into the cold bed. The kids spend the next three days tormenting everyone with the duck feathers they got as party favors.
That's how it goes all winter. Of course, after a couple months even the parties aren't enough to keep the cabin fever away, and you're going to barf if you even have to *look* at another piece of dried salmon, and you've forgotten why you married these people in the first place, because they're all psychopaths, plus they have bony elbows, and you're seriously considering the advantages of ritual child sacrifice. But that's about when it starts warming up outside, and some of the early plants are coming up, so you can get out and take long walks and gather some fresh food. You're one of the first families to close the winter quarters and move down by the river to set up spring and summer camp, and oh boy, does it feel good to leave behind that dark, stinking, lice-ridden, sewage-covered *pit* for the fresh, if chilly, air by the river. You set up the camping kit that got patched and cleaned on the more restless days overwintering, and make friends with your dog-packs (and each other) again, and check over and repair the fishing gear that was put in storage down here last summer, gather bark for new warm-weather clothes, and eat freshly-picked vegetables every meal and often a chinook or two that one of you caught.
By the time the salmon runs have truly started going, and the river is boiling with sockeye and pink and spring salmon, everybody's come down, even the clans from the big houses. All the good fishing spots are occupied all day and the men call out to each other as they work and whoop with laughter when somebody falls in and has to be hauled back out of the soup by his tether. The women keep busy gossipping and matchmaking while they butcher and dry their catch for winter, and everybody falls into bed at night exhausted from good hard work. If it's been a good year for salmon (and most of them are) you're all more than ready for the run to end and the last of the salmon catch to finish drying. Then you load up yourselves and your dogs and head back up the valley, stopping by the winter village again to drop off the dried salmon and berries in the cellars. Late summer and fall is spent up on the high meadows, sleeping under the stars. There are deer-hunts every day and roots and berries to gather (and doesn't *that* sound cliche, but it makes a nice change from fish, okay?) And everybody's getting plump and beautiful, and you take two or three day trips over the mountain to the other valley to get stone for new tools, and there's dancing and story-telling in the evenings, and the last of the traders stop by and visitors from other towns and everybody's keeping busy getting ready for winter and making things and getting together and checking the borders one last time, and it starts to get chilly at night, and then the first snow hits.
There. *That* sounds like much more fun than all the obsessing about prestige rankings and three-generation-long power games that Dr. Hayden made you do.
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