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, 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 ( Life at Keatley Creek. )

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.