For or five of us sat squeezed into the booth at Shuluski’s Diner, internalizing a much deserved lunch following a long morning of digging trenches all over town. Waterford, New York had never had a proper modern sewer system. The entire town’s sewage, and at the time this was the most populous “village” in the state, entered an ancient pipe and vault sewer system that barely served as a septic tank as the sewage made its way fairly quickly to an outlet just below the waterline in the Mohawk River, down on Front Street. None of us will forget the day we discovered the outlet, which had never properly been mapped.

We were sitting there on the edge of the river eating our lunch, when a change of hidden currents in the murky, notoriously polluted river below our dangling feet caused several minutes of fresh effluence to rise to the surface before dispersing downstream. I guessed that it depended on the temperature of the water and the flow of currents around the nearby Erie Canal locks. Fresh human shit, wadges of recently used toilet paper, and a condom came floating by in the first batch. Being some ten feet or so below us, it didn’t smell any more than the background olfactory heaviness that followed this river for much of its course. But it did strengthen our resolve to continue with our trenching, which would ultimately lead to the installation of the most modern, cleanest, and most efficient waste water treatment system Superfund money could buy for this quaint and sleepy town on the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson rivers.

Across the restaurant at a table were Henry and his two boys. Henry was little and tough, the boys very large and in his employ. Henry wore a wife-beater tee and a perpetual two-day-old shadow, and when he worked the levers of his backhoe, his tongue protruded from the side of his mouth to keep an eye on things. He was precise, professional, and fearless. He could pick up a shard of historic pottery from the shadowed bottom of a 15-foot trench. Most of the time, I was the crew leader and had the job of telling him where to dig, how deep, and most importantly, when to stop and when to switch from trenching to centimeter by centimeter careful archaeological excavation. This old historic village was build on amazing prehistoric and contact period sites, and a sewer pipe was going to be laid down every single street. So by the time we got half way done with the backhoe survey, looking for sites, assessing the lay of the underground historically modified landscape, tracing out areas of disturbance vs. “high potential” for sites, Henry and I had become twins connected at the bucket. My subtle hand signals guided him, but he needed little guidance. I rode the bucket into and out of the deepest trenches, and the occasional shared knowing sidelong glance would have us agreeing tacitly but firmly that a particular trench was too deep. Then, as we would watch the trench collapse with no one in it, we’d exchange another sidelong glance knowing we were right to not go in that one.

And as I said, fearless. We had a trench that would ideally be dug perpendicular to the edge of the bluff overlooking the rapids below the damn and waterfall. Henry dug the trench perfectly, backing his machine up to the point that only two of his four wheels were on the ground, the giant back left wheel dangling off the cliff with nothing but air for a hundred feet below, the smaller front right wheel hanging forward in the air like the flailing arm of some moron going down on the ice for the last time. He balanced the damn backhoe with his tongue, sticking out, watching him straighten the edge of the trench and just as the last bit of solid ground started to crack beneath him, using the bucket to drive the backhoe off to the side and to safety. Even his sons, almost pathologically emotionless as they watched their father daily work his backhoe magic, breathed a sigh of relief. And somehow I was not surprised when Henry sauntered over to me and pulled up his shirt, pointing to two bullet holes in his chest.

“I had to do almost the same exact thing in Korea once, but under fire. Today was easy!”

So as we sat munching our cheeseburger specials, Arnold sat at his habitual, perpetual, butt-worn stool at Shuluski counter, overlooking the window through which we could see Albert S. cooking up the orders transmitted to him by his wife Agnes. Arnold was a young man in an older adult’s body. A very young man, if you know what I mean. And his main job seemed to be to say, “Hello,” to every person who came into the diner and, “Goodbye,” to everybody who left the diner and, “That looks good,” to every blue-plate special Albert shoved up on the back counter for eventual delivery by Agnes to an expectant, hungry customer. And if he knew your name, he’d append that to his goodbye or his hello. So, when he said, “Goodbye, Mr. Wilson,” it was not a surprise to see Old Man Wilson, a crumpled mess of bills and change left on the table next to his empty soup bowl…oh, the soup at Shuluski’s was the best for miles around, and this was soup country…hobble, all old and shit, towards the front door of the diner. Mr. Wilson’s left arm rose in a backhand, friendly goodbye for Arnold’s benefit, but he mainly focused on keeping his balance as he maneuvered his oldness around some tables, bones creaking and joints stiff.

Munching on my double-catchup’ed cheeseburger special, about halfway done now, I watched as Old Man Wilson stopped on the sidewalk in front of the diner and cleaned his glasses, waiting for a car or two to pass on the only busy road in town. Which was not. Busy, that is.

And I thought about our afternoon. We’d go with Henry down to Front Street to continue trenching the low ground in the oldest historical part of town. In my mind, I was imagining how long it would take for us to dig each trench, how much time we had before shutting down for the afternoon. If we could get in four trenches, we’d be done with the zone and could move on to the next area. Not likely to get that many trenches in one day. The engineers were hoping we could finish here and move on because they needed clearance on on the northwest side of town for some geotechincal work they’d be doing. Yes, yes, I was thinking, we’d push to get all the trenches done this afternoon and that would make Mohan, the head engineer, happy, and my job was to respect the archaeology, abide by the regulatory law, and keep the engineers happy, all at once. With luck, this would be an easy week to do that, in case nothing went wrong….

…and as these thoughts developed and started to settle down from analysis to conclusion, I noted that Old Man Wilson had made it across Main Street and was just closing himself into his giant wood-side suburban wagon. I started going over the trenching pattern in my head again, trying to think whether there was a certain order we could do the trenches in so we could possibly rule out digging the last one…if we found evidence of disturbance, or evidence of amazing archeology. Either way, digging the fourth trench would be unnecessary.

Old Man Wilson was starting his car as I thought of the irony…if three trenches showed nothing, we could go home knowing the fourth would be of no use. Mohan would be happy, we’d move to the new area on Monday morning. If three trenches showed great amounts of early archaeological material, we would not need the fourth trench to know that much more archaeology would need to be done here. Either way, we could likely finish this afternoon if…if nothing went wrong.

And it was just at that moment that Old Man Wilson slammed his car into gear and took off in a sudden lurch. Then, as quickly as his giant wood-side suburban station wagon had lurched its first 15 feet backwards and onto the curb, in the wrong direction, Old Man Wilson stopped the big-ass car on a dime.

Unfortunately, the dime was sitting right next to a recently painted red and yellow fireplug.

The fireplug sheered off cleanly at the base. This fireplug was the second or third lowest fireplug in elevation in the whole town, I was thinking. I knew this because it was my job to know things like that. This meant that this fireplug would have a very high pressure unless there was a fire or something bleeding off the water. Which naturally there was not. The water that came out of that fireplug was enough to keep one or two tires of Old Man Wilson’s wood-side suburban wagon off the ground as the vehicle rocked back and forth and side to side and up and down, rubbing on a nearby power pole, which kind of kept the vehicle in place as it bounced up and down on the unnatural cold water geyser.

Old Man Wilson found his own personal athleticism just at that moment. He was out of that car and standing, staring back at it from the middle of the street, in a matter of seconds. And as he stared, head-scratching, and I finished off the last of my hamburger and was about to start on the french fries, the images of a dozen cartoons in which I had seen this exact event or something like it flashed before my eyes. And probably his as well.

The new guy said, “Wow, what do we do?” to no one in particular, and following this cue, we all looked over to small, tough Henry and his giant sons, who were now squarely on their feet, watching Mr. Wilson’s wood-side suburban wagon dancing on the water column across the street.

“Well,” Henry said, “we’ve got to inform the head of the public works department, call the fire chief, and have the city’s fix-it contractor get out there, turn off the water, and fix the fireplug.”

The new guy stared at Henry. Henry’s sons started to laugh. I said, “Well, I guess that means we all are going home for the day, because if I recall correctly, those three people would be you, Henry.”

Dennis, who had progressed to about the same point as I had with his french fries, all the cheeseburger specials at the table ancient history, glanced at Albert, who was standing in the cook’s window holding his patty-flipper to the ready. And he looked at Agnes who’s eyebrows were riding high over her lightly watering eyes, visibly working out something kind to say to Mr. Wilson (Agnes was nothing if not kind). Old Man Wilson himself was by this time heading back to the diner to fetch help. And as he glanced around the diner, Dennis groked the situation. And he said what we had all been thinking.

“Finally, for once we have time to get a bowl of that soup!”

And we did.

Mohan would understand, and one more day of sewage after 300 years of wanton effluence by the good people of Waterford, New York would make very little difference. That day’s soup was Minestrone.

Let me explain.

At the wedding, a lot of people got up and spoke about the happy couple, generally about one or the other, but mostly about my friend’s groom. The difference in treatment of the two has to do with a couple of things, one of which being the culture of the associated families and friends. The groom is from California, with many family and friend connections in Latin America and elsewhere, while my friend is a Minnesotan, mainly with Minnesotan connections. Minnesotans just don’t do what his friends and family were doing: talking about each other. At length. In front of other people.

At first I felt a little bad for her, even considered telling a story or two, but then I realized that the last thing she wanted anyone to do was to stand up and say stuff about her on her behalf, tell stories and so on. So although I was being encouraged to get up and spin a yarn, I chose not to.

The other factor, at least for me, is that our relationship is very private. Not secret or covert. Just private. I’m sure that many things have passed between us in conversation that would never be spoken by either of us to anyone else. It is just the nature of our personalities and how we happen to interact. In contrast, many of her new husband’s stories (the stories told by his extensive network of family and friends) were clearly extensions of long-running, widespread, somewhat loud and always entertaining conversations that have been going on and developing forever. For instance, he has several nicknames, and each nickname comes with an amusing story. In contrast, my friend does not really have any nicknames (nor have I ever had one for that matter).

Were I to have stood up for her, I would have to have told a couple of stories that are actually pretty funny to her and me, but that probably no one else would get or care about.

Until now.

I’ve just come across a web post on an interesting linguistically oriented blog called Rosetta Rants, located, on your local internet, here. Don’t go look yet, you may ruin my story.

So here is the story. My best friend and I were traveling with a few others in South Africa, doing research. One of the members of our party, whom I will call Suzie, was not really, it turns out, a person very much oriented towards travel in such far away lands or accustomed to experiencing such harsh conditions. She was a trooper in some ways, but her going on this trip was a bad decision. She left her boyfriend only days after he proposed (left in the sense of going on this trip, to return later…and by the way, they are happily married now with children and everything). She had not traveled before, except once, and it was a bad, homesick experience. We were, after all, in a place where 1 out of 3 (according to my own fairly extensive experience in this area) young, Midwestern, suburban white girls believe, well, that they will die or something.

Okay, now we have to hold that thought and go back in time. Some months earlier, I had been traveling in Japan on a lecture tour. While there, I found out that the Japanese have the coolest ever appliances. They have refrigerators and washing machines that make so much more sense than the American styles that it is just unbelievable. For example, their refrigerators may have four doors instead of two. Instead of a freezer on top and a fridge on the bottom, they have a freezer on the bottom, a cool but not too cold chamber on top, and the two in-between layers, each with their own door, are increasingly cold as you go down towards the freezer. Efficient and effective. In Osaka, which has suffered significant killer storms in the past, windows sometimes have shutters that resemble the metal curtains that are lowered on storefronts in urban zones, but these are to protect the windows from hurricane-force winds. And so on.

Then, they have an amazing array of toilets. Some of the toilets have a lot of buttons and stuff that you can press to get various…results.

I had been telling my friend about these appliances, and in particular the toilets. I had explained that you did not have to know Japanese to use the toilets. There were symbols on each button, and they were generally absolutely hysterical. Imagine, what symbols would you use for functions built into a do-everything electronic toilet?

Take a moment and think about that. When you’re done, return to reading this post.

…

Okay, so I drew a couple of the symbols for my friend to see what I was talking about, and we had a great laugh about that. There might have been some wine drinking going on as well. The wine in South Africa is so good and so cheap, how could there not have been? Anyway, we had a big laugh about these symbols.

So anyway, one day, we were out in the bush somewhere, and Suzie had been sinking more and more deeply into a funk about being where she was. She had started to get paranoid that some of the others on the expedition were having fun at her expense, which, honestly, we were not doing…or at least trying really hard to not do. But you know how it is. Somebody gets into a bad state and repeats the same behaviors over and over again, and it gets a little absurd. One gets alarmed at this. Then one gets a little frustrated. Then mad. Then finds it funny. Somewhere along the line one does something about it…has a talk with the girl…and believe me, I did that a number of times, with no effect. Anyway, right or wrong, and mostly wrong, Suzie got into a funk where she got a little paranoid about the rest of us.

So one day my friend and I were returning to camp, on foot, after being out looking at some rocks or something, and Suzie came running up to us in a panic. “The phone company called,” she said. (We had a cell phone.) “They said they were going to shut off service unless you call this number.” The phone company would do this whenever our minutes got low, in the hopes that we would buy more minutes, then I would enter a secret number and fix it–routine–but Suzie did not know about this. She just knew that we were out in the middle of nowhere and all communication with civilization was about to be cut off forever and we were gonna die.

So Suzie came running over to the two of us, expressing these concerns, red-faced, in tears.

“What are we going to do when the phone is shut off!?!!??” she said.

Suzie told us that she had taken down the number left by the phone company, and indeed, she was waving around a piece of paper with stuff written on it. I took the paper, and my friend and I could see a phone number written on it.

But next to the phone number was something else. See, this piece of scrap paper…the one Suzie had written the phone number on…was the same piece of paper that had one of the Japanese toilet symbols on it.

Now, my friend and me, we had forgotten about the toilets. But this symbol, shown here:

reminded us of it.

I’m absolutely certain that Suzie did not even see this symbol. It was kind of off in the corner of the paper, non-central, nondescript, almost non-visible. But my friend and I, well, that’s all we saw. We already knew the phone number was not important. It was already obvious that Suzie was panicking over nothing. If Suzie had been paying attention instead of hiding in her tent all the time, she would know about the phone. And the fact that she spent hours of time and hundreds of dollars (not all her own money) on the phone had kind of dulled us to her concerns. And so on.

And there was this symbol. A heinie with something spraying on it.

hei·nie (hn)
n. Slang
The buttocks.

We tried. We tried to hold in that which could not be held in. Had we been drinking something, it would have been Danny Thomas Spit Take time. You know, where the guy spits out a mouth full of coffee. A great wave of hysterical, uncontrollable, can’t-hold-it-in laughter overcame both of us. My best friend and I were on the ground in stitches. Suzie ran away and was not seen for several hours.

Here’s a blow-up of the toilet:

As usual, we have a great diversity of topics in this carnival, including archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and biological anthropology. Please visit those posts that are of interest, comment on them, submit them to social networking sites, and tell your friends and family about how great they are. Remember, we are all anthropologists, and we’ve got to stick together to promote our academic, societal and political endeavors!

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Quick, answer this question: What is art for? If, when I say “art,” you think of drawings and similar things, and you were a member of certain societies, your answer would be quick and easy: “Art is for magic. Don’t ask me any more questions; I’m not the shaman.” Or words to that effect. Or at least, this is somewhere between a reasonable assumption and an observation based on the available ethnographies. But how do we see shamanism in art in ancient, archaeological societies? How do we “know” that a particular element in ancient art signals shamanistic behavior? Kris Hirst has this covered: Shamans and Archaeology.

Typically, archaeologists have used the presence of a ritual-specific artifact or a rock art drawing of an anthropomorphic creature with animal characteristics to tentatively suggest the presence of a shaman within a given society. VanPool makes a cogent argument that by now anthropologists have identified a suite of cross-cultural traits that can be identified archaeologically and thus used to confidently argue for shamanism as a practice at an archaeological site or set of sites.

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Afarensis asks: Chimps, Dogs, Or Ants: Which is a Better Model For Human Sociality? For me, the answer is obvious. Birds. But never mind me, what does the ol’ hominin have to say about it?

The idea that dogs might serve as models of human behavior is not a new idea. Dogs, like humans are highly social animals that evolved from other highly social animals. For example, one line of research looks at the ability of dogs and wolves to perceive and act on cues provided by humans (turns out wolves don’t pay that much attention to cues provided by humans).

(Wolves have also been used as models for land use patterns among temperate or subarctic long distance logistical hunting peoples. Which might make more sense in some ways.)

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Is it a boy or a girl?

Sexing a pelvis is one of those things that takes practice. In fact, that’s one of the problems with it. There are very few things in a pelvis where you can just look at it and say, “that’s a male” without having a good deal of experience.

A primate of modern aspect addresses this ancient question: Quick and Dirty Pelvis Sexing.

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Check out this video of Oliver Sacks on Neuroanthropology, then read to see how Daniel thinks neuroanthropology has advanced since. What’s that you say? Sacks wasn’t a neuroanthropologist? Well, you’ll just have to read it, won’t you.

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I hate when this happens: Daycare Looters.

Not far from my home, in the woods down by the tracks, are the foundations of an abandoned railroad man’s homestead. Its name, Vinterbrinken (“Winter Slope”), survives in a nearby street name, though few know that anymore.

The house was built by the railroad company in the 1890s and was torn down, along with its barn, in the 1950s. The municipal archives have photographs of the buildings and the people who lived there, and they are all known by name…. Lately, the staff at a nearby daycare centre has been taking the kids down to the site and had them excavate parts of it,…

Teaching children about archaeology by engaging in criminal activity (looting) is not recommended by any archaeologist, including Martin at Aardvarchaeology.

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In a follow-up on some earlier work, Mark Dingemanse discusses the Siwu funeral dirge in a post called A cultural revival?

Last summer I wrote about the ideophone kanana. Here is a funeral dirge in which that ideophone, evoking a tranquil silence, plays a central role. It would normally be sung during the wakekeeping, in the middle of the night.

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This is very funny: Lego Archaeology. Go check it out.

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From SNPwatch at The Spittoon: Genetic Variation May Explain Why Young Women Are At Greater Risk For Melanoma Compared to Young Men:

Melanoma, a rare but potentially deadly form of skin cancer, is more common in women under 40 than in men in the same age group. After age 45, the tables are turned: men are more likely to be diagnosed with melanoma.

Between the ages of 40 and 50 happens to be when many women enter menopause or perimenopause, a time of declining estrogen levels. This has prompted some researchers to suggest that estrogen exposure may play a part in melanoma risk.

In a report published last week in Clinical Cancer Research, researchers show that a genetic variation previously associated with several other cancers may be the link between estrogen and melanoma in younger women. The riskier version of the variation increases the odds a woman will be diagnosed with melanoma before age 40 more than fourfold.

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“People are just animals.” If you say that word in Siwu, an African language, it sounds a certain way. A local bird “says” the same thing when making one of its natural calls. Which the Siwu speaking people find annoying, for obvious reasons. Please visit this multimedia post from The Ideophone to find out what the heck I’m talking about here.

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Consider this:

…a model of the brain as an information processing and memory retrieving machine that manipulates information suggests catching a fly ball is a calculation and comparison problem; calculating the path and recalling previous experience to compare the current situation with previous experiences of catching (or failing to catch). In contrast, an ecological psychology approach ‘argues that the fielder observes the flight path of the ball and can react using the angle monitoring system.’

So which is it? Read this post at Neuroanthropology to find out: Catching fly balls: taking a step forward.

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That’s it for this edition. Now you know what to do. Start clicking away!