Delinquency

I know, I know, I start this new exciting blog and then promptly go on vacation for almost two weeks (and take a week to recover). And it's a shame, really, because the first 4 days of that "vacation" were actually archaeology-related. I went to the AIA conference in Philadelphia, where I interviewed with graduate schools, voted on AIA resolutions at the Council meeting, drank more than I should have, and discovered Philadelphia might not be the worst place in the world to spend 5-7 years of my life. I had a mental list going of blog-related topics from that weekend, too. I'll save them up for a later date, when I lack other inspiration.

But not today! Because today, as I was eating my breakfast cereal, I heard on Morning Edition a crazy story about Ohio and Kentucky feuding over a rock with some graffiti on it (dating back to at least 1847, when an "archaeological publication" noted it). Essentially, some guy decided it would be fun to try to find this rock, which had been underwater since the 1920s, when the Ohio River was dammed. So he and a buddy went out scuba-diving, found it, hauled it to the surface, and offered it to the local (Ohio) museum. Eventually Kentucky found out, and now they are raising a stink about the rock belonging to them, since it was an antiquity registered in Kentucky (having, presumably, been on the Kentucky side of the river before it was submerged). The original guy and his buddy are also facing charges because they illegally moved an antiquity.

There are so many convoluted issues in this story, I am forced to make a list to keep track of them all.

1. What the heck is the archaeological significance of this rock anyway??? The story doesn't say anything about who made it, when, what's inscribed on it (other than a face that "looks like Charlie Brown"), or any other bit of information that would tell us why we should care. This is why people don't understand what's so wrong about removing an object from it's in situ location, and why it is against the law to do so.
2. I'm sure some people care about legal disputes and state's jurisdiction, etc. I'm not one of them.
   
3. A major problem in China right now is that with the building of the Three Gorges Dam, tons of ancient sites are being covered up. Conveniently for China, a lot of those sites are thought to have associations with non-ethnically Chinese people who lived in the region and might make a territorial claim to the land based on ancestry. Damming of the Nile has also destroyed many sites in Egypt. Damming = bad for archaeology and site preservation.
4. Now I'm looking more closely at the face image, and it seems to have the year 1856 inscribed in it. Does something just over 150 years old count as an antiquity or not? Where do we place that line, both ethically and legally?
5. Is it actually wrong - ethically - to have moved this rock and brought it to a place where people can see and study it? (If it warrants either of those things - I'm still not convinced.)
   
6. Other thoughts? I know there's more!
   

Takes a licking and keeps on ticking

400 year old miniature Swiss watch found in China?

It's difficult to say what is more surprising about this little news story: that an apparently modern object was found in an ancient context, or that China actually let people know about it.

This seems like as good a time as any to discuss the title of this blog, In Situ. The phrase is Latin for "in place" and is used in archaeology to describe something which is in its primary context. For example, the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis is in situ, but its sculptural adornments spirited away to the British Musuem in the early ninteenth century by Lord Elgin are not. If a volcano erupted right now and buried you, your computer, and your cup of coffee, you would all be in situ until some archaeologist came and found you several centuries later. If the miniature watch were in situ, meaning it was used and deposited in the tomb 400 years ago, it could serve as evidence for sophisticated miniatured technology in Ming Dynasty China. (Or, as noted on Hot Cup of Joe, evidence that Hiro Nakamura was there.) More likely, however, the area is not so undisturbed as archaeologists there would like to think, and, while other objects in the tomb might be in their original mileau of cultural objects, this watch certainly isn't.

It is important to distinguish generalized context from in situ. Everything has context. To go back to our Elgin Marbles example, they certainly have a context in the British Museum: they have been there for almost two hundred years, they are surrounded by other works of art and antiquity, people travel just to see them. But they are not where they were originally intended to be, stuck on the side of the Parthenon.

Finding something in situ is the best way for archaeologists to determine the original function, appearance, and age of objects, rooms, and sites. Several storage jars found on a floor may indicate something about the use of the room or the jars themselves (like if, say, there were also a mill found in the room, grain storage would be likely). The dating of those jars helps indicate when the room was used and abandoned. Those same jars floating around in soil above the room, perhaps disturbed by later looters or agricultural activity, offer little by way of specific information that the in situ pots would. But they still have a context, belonging with everything else found in their soil level.

So why In Situ? Well, first off, it's a cool archaeology phrase. Secondly, highlighting the importance of contextual archaeology and placing archaeological news and ethics into this framework are two of my main goals in writing this blog. And third, just like the storage jars, I make most sense in context, and the field of archaeology is it. As a friend pointed out to me the other day, as I was describing how people can often be better understood in the context of their families and backgrounds: "Spoken like a true historian."