Welcome to the 49th edition of the Four Stone Hearth, a blog carnival that specializes in anthropology in the widest (American) sense of that word. Here, anthropology is the study of humankind, throughout all times and places, focusing primarily on four lines of research:

• archaeology
• socio-cultural anthropology
• bio-physical anthropology
• linguistic anthropology

Each one of these subfields is a stone in our hearth.

I’ve hosted the FSH several times, but this will be the first time hosted at my new domain. If you haven’t noticed, A Hot Cup of Joe is no longer at WordPress (or blogspot, if you remember my first home). Here’s this edition’s roundup of great blogging on Anthropology:

Aardvarchaeology
First up is Aardvarchaeology where Martin Rundkvist has a Book Review: Alsdorf, auf den Spuren. In this review, which is a fascinating read, Martin discusses Dietrich Alsdorf’s book, Auf den Spuren des “Elbe-Kommandos” Rammjäger (2001). The topic is the Sonderkommandos who flew German planes which the used to “hunt” (jäger is “hunter”) Allied bombers they would then ram into. Visit the link, read the review, and see how it all relates to archaeology!

Neuroanthropology
Next is a set of posts from all three of the bloggers at Neuroanthropology, a collaborative weblog that “encourage[s] exchanges among anthropology, philosophy, social theory, and the brain sciences.”

• Is Evolutionary Psychology Really Rational Choice Theory?, by Greg Downey
• Foxy Evolution, by Daniel Lende
• Learning Evolution, by Paul Mason

A Very Remote Period Indeed
The only other submission I received this edition was from Julien Riel-Salvatore titled, Surveying Surveys. Julien is back from the field and, we’re all happy to see, blogging again! His post this edition is a review of a set of three reports of separate archaeological sites of the same general period. What’s interesting is the methods each site employs to obtain knowledge of the past. Read how Julien compares and contrasts their methods and get some insight into the process of surveying a site.

A Hot Cup of Joe
I’m going to add my own submission since it was a short carnival. A few days ago I posted The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Reviewing and Ethnography. I typically write about archaeology, but I subscribe to the Binfordian view that archaeology is anthropology and it’s necessary to understand ethnography and cultural anthropology to truly reveal the Truth of past cultures. In this essay, I review Ruth Benedict’s famous ethnography as well as two other essays praising and criticizing her.

You’ve Been Stoned!
If your blog post falls under this list, its because I noticed it and thought it would fit well with this edition of the Four Stone Hearth. Hope you don’t mind the link love!

• Neanderthals, Brain Size and Maturation [Afarensis]
  Peopling Of The Americas: Eva de Naharon, A 13,600 Year Old Skeleton Found Near Tulum, Mexico [Anthropology.net]
• Ometepe Archaeological Project: Field Work in Focus [About.com:Archaeology]

That’s it for this edition of the Four Stone Hearth. If you’re an anthropology blogger and want to participate, see below. If you’re an anthropologist or a student of anthropology that doesn’t have your own blog but interested in sharing your thoughts in anthropology, drop me a line (cfeagans@ahotcupofjoe.com). I’m interested in having the occasional guest-blogger and it can be a one-time thing or regular.

The next Four Stone Hearth, #50, is in two weeks at Yann Klimentidis’s Weblog. See you there!

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Four Stone Hearth is published bi-weekly, Wednesdays in odd-number weeks. If you would like to host the carnival, please write to Martin Rundkvist.

If you would like to submit content to the next issue of the carnival, please write to the keeper of the blog in question or to Martin. You are encouraged to submit other bloggers’ work as well as your own.

The Four Stone Hearth is tomorrow and I’d like to have it posted on time, so if you have any late submissions please get them to me no later than 11pm CST to cfeagans@ahotcupofjoe.net

The next edition of the Four Stone Hearth Blog Carnival will be hosted here at A Hot Cup of Joe on Sept. 10th, 2008. Please send your submissions to cfeagans@ahotcupofjoe.net by Tuesday, Sept. 9th.

The Fourth Stone Hearth is a blog carnival that specializes in anthropology in the widest (American) sense of that word. Here, anthropology is the study of humankind, throughout all times and places, focusing primarily on four lines of research:

• archaeology
• socio-cultural anthropology
• bio-physical anthropology
• linguistic anthropology

Each one of these subfields is a stone in our hearth.

As always, if you’re an blogger and would like to host the Four Stone Hearth, send an email to Martin Rundkvist.

You need not be a blogger that specializes in anthropology to host or participate, but the posts submitted should relate to some aspect of anthropology.

I’ve made a move to 1and1.com and I’m now using my own domain with 1and1.com as the host. Thanks to Kambiz’s recommendation. I hope the link he gave me had his promo code in it -if so, he should get a small commission since the cookie should have still been on my computer. If you don’t get it, sorry. I completely forgot about it until after the fact or I would have looked for the original link in our chat :-}

I’ve still got a bit of work to do and I’m not entirely sure this is the theme I want to use (I’m willing to take suggestions if anyone has them), but there should be some regular posts on the way. I’m thinking about posting here and using short descriptions on the wordpress.com domain with links to here for a while, so if you get the chance, be sure to update your links since I’ll eventually discontinue posting at the WP site.

Oh, and if anyone can educate me on how to add a favicon I can use the help. I put “favicon.ico” in both the root directory and the wp-content directory where the index.php file sits, but no icon in the address bar or my bookmark.. very frustrating.

I’ve written about Gilgamesh and ancient Mesopotamia several times in the past, but my articles and posts are nothing near the original work that Duane is doing at Abnormal Interests in translating ancient texts.

I’m a frequent reader of his blog (but one of the worst, I’m afraid, since I rarely post comments) and I highly recommend reading his work if you have even a passing interest in the translations of ancient texts.

His latest post is a translation of The Letter of Gilgamesh. In the letter, Gilgamesh, the King of of Ur, citizen of Kullab, creation of Anu, Enlil and Ea, favorite of Shamash, and the beloved of Marduk, makes a “gentle” request ruler of another land: “send me a large portion of your wealth and come visit me. If I have to come to you, it won’t be pretty and I’ll not only take everything I want but pulverize your cities.” Okay, I’m paraphrasing. Here’s a quote:

I[f ]on the fiftieth day of Teshrit, I do not meet you in the gate of my city Ur, (then) I swear by the great gods, whose oath can not to be revoked, (and) I swear by my gods, Lugalbanda, Sin, Shamash, Palil, Lugalgirra and Meslamtaea, (that) I will send (35) to you Zamana, and the divine lord of my person (‘head,’ my personal god?), the aggressor(?), whose name you honor. He will pulverize your cities. Your [palac]es he will pillage (and) your orchards he will [plunder(?)].

You gotta love Gilgamesh! He was two-thirds god and one-third human, so his threats weren’t to be taken lightly!

One of the things that I found so compelling about the Gilgamesh story is the love and friendship he had with Enkidu. Thousands of years have passed since the story was written, and yet the emotion of loss still comes through loud and clear in a tale written in a language long since dead, forgotten then deciphered and translated thousands of years later.

Gilgamesh was clearly pressuring this ruler, and probably other rulers in the region, to align with him. The demonstration of their alignments and their commitments was a substantial sacrifice of their national wealth, but what they received in return was the protective umbrella of his Empire.

It’s been held that the sunflower was originally domesticated in eastern North America then introduced to Mexico -the sunflower is a major seed crop in the world when it comes to obtaining oils. But recent evidence suggests very strongly that it may have been the other way around.

Shells of sunflower seeds (called achenes) were found in a dry cave in Mexico (Cueva del Gallo) which dated to about 300 BCE. Cueva del Gallo was used in antiquity as a ritual center -caves were thought to be the passages the sun used to travel the underworld from the west only to rise again from the east, so this may hold some significance that sunflower seeds were found. As David Lentz, of the University of Cincinnati, writes in his paper at PNAS, Sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) as a pre-Columbian domesticate in Mexico, “the modern O tomi word for sunflower, dä nukhä, trans lates to “big flower that looks at the sun god.”’

The cave presented a dessicated environment that preserved the shells in “pristine condition,” but the Cueva del Gallo shells weren’t the oldest found. That prize goes to a water-logged site at San Andrés where accelorator mass spectrometry dates sunflower remains to older than 2600 BCE! This puts the sunflower in Mexico as a probable domesticated crop far earlier than was previously believed. It was thought that the Spaniards brought the crop and that it was originally cultivated in North America. Now, the questions arise: did cultivation of the sunflower begin in one place then get introduced to another through trade. Corn made its debute in North America via trade from Mesoamerica northward -perhaps the same happened with the sunflower.

If your university library has access to all of PNAS or if you’re willing to pay the fee (or already subscribe) you can get the full paper by Lentz, et al, at this link. If not, here’s the abstract, also available at the same link:

Mexico has long been recognized as one of the world’s cradles of domestication with evidence for squash (Cucurbita pepo) cultivation appearing as early as 8,000 cal B.C. followed by many other plants, such as maize (Zea mays), peppers (Capsicum annuum), common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris), and cotton (Gossypium hirsutum). We present archaeological, linguistic, ethnographic, and ethnohistoric data demonstrating that sunflower (Helianthus annuus) had entered the repertoire of Mexican domesticates by ca. 2600 cal B.C., that its cultivation was widespread in Mexico and extended as far south as El Salvador by the first millennium B.C., that it was well known to the Aztecs, and that it is still in use by traditional Mesoamerican cultures today. The sunflower’s association with indigenous solar religion and warfare in Mexico may have led to its suppression after the Spanish Conquest. The discovery of ancient sunflower in Mexico refines our knowledge of domesticated Mesoamerican plants and adds complexity to our understanding of cultural evolution.

Personally, I find research into early domestication of crops and animals to be fascinating. I’m convinced that much of early domestication is related to religious and cult activity, some of it perhaps even because of it. Sun gods, fertility godesses, and the deities that people in antiquity assigned to the natural world created an intricate system of beliefs and rituals as they sought to appease imagined gods in order to bring about favorable conditions for subsistance. Indeed, and according to Lentz, et al, demise of the sunflower until its reintroduction at a later date by the Spanish was probably due to the power it held as a symbol for ritual use in pagan religion. Spanish preists were notorious for obliterating native culture and religion as they sought to convert indigenous Mesoamericans to Catholism.

When it’s a trojan or virus, of course. Some of you may have received the following email from me:

Hello,

I’m sending a quick email to a few friends/family just to alert about something I just noticed in my Gmail inbox.

I received an email that alleged itself to be from “GreetingCards.com” which is a respected Hallmark Cards site that happens, I think, to also allow you to send those cute e-mail postcards. The message says something like “someone who cares about you has just sent you a card. Click here to view it” (or something very similar (except “here” is underlined and an internet link).

Don’t click it. Especially if you’re using windows.

The link initiates a download to an ftp site and causes your computer to automatically run a .PIF file. This is the type of file that Windows uses to run old-school MS-DOS programs. Lowly skilled and wannabe hackers use this to pass on viruses and the .PIF file itself is an executable Trojan.

I only sent this email because I *almost* clicked on it thinking it was really a greeting card. I realized that if I can almost be fooled (I like to think I’m pretty savy with a ‘puter), then some of my friends might not think to investigate the link a little closer.

I run a Linux operating system rather than Windows, so its likely that it wouldn’t have affected me in the least, but it will definately affect Windows users and possibly Mac (I don’t know if Macs handle .PIF files or not).

If you get an email like this, its always best to hover your mouse over the link and read the status bar at the bottom of FireFox, IE or Safari to see what the link resolves to. In this case, its a numeric IP and never a good thing to click. I already sent copies of the email to abuse@greetingcards.com and the ISP for the IP address.

And I was just thinking of sending you all a silly e-card when I got that….Â

Carl

I’m always an advocate of forwarding phishing emails and emails that clearly link to trojans (usually files with extensions like “.pif” or “.scr”) to the ISP or company that is being impersonated. This allows big corporations like Citi, Chase, Hallmark, etc to sic their IT pros on the issue and resolve problems a little quicker. There are methods they can take to eliminate fraud, phishing, and inadvertant hosting of harmful programs that shortens the lifespan of a given virus, worm, or trojan. And, the less lifespan these things get the less willing the no-good, low-life, wannabe hackers are to create or pass them on.

So, if you ever get an email that says its from Paypal, Citi, Chase, Bank of America, or any institution that handles your money which asks you to click a link to verify your contact information, don’t click that link unless you’re willing to load up your computer with spyware and answer questions that will let a bunch of theives call up the legitimate financial instutitions that you’re a client with to use that personal information against you. They need only your birthdate and last four of a social security number, or simply a mother’s maiden name to access all your banking info and make any changes they wish.

I know. I work for a bank (when I’m not an archaeology student).

What to do:
1) don’t click the links
2) hover your mouse over the links and look for IP addresses, different spellings (http://www. chasse.com), etc.
3) login to you bank’s website using the links provided on bank literature such as statements or the back of your credit card
4) call your bank, credit card or customer service for the institution through the number on your statement or card
5) ask them about the email -my bank usually knows about the latest phishing schemes within hours of them being started and gets daily updates to all customer service reps
6) forward a copy of the email to abuse@institution.com (where “institution” is the domain for your bank, etc. -i.e. abuse@ebay.com)

And there’s one other thing that I recommend for Gmail users:
7) click on the little down arrow in the email header just to the right of “reply” and you’ll find a list of options. One of these is “report phishing.” Doing this will send the email to Gmail and will improve Gmail’s spam/phishing filter for everyone else. Don’t believe me? If you have Gmail, click on “spam” along the left-hand sidebar and browse the messages Gmail catches!

As many of you are aware, A Hot Cup of Joe is a blog that originated at Blogspot. In fact, the original blog is still there. I even continue to get hits and comments even though my last post was announcing the move to WordPress.

Some of the comments are interesting and I think each and every post that’s at Blogspot exists here thanks to the import feature of WordPress. But, occasionally, I’ll move a recent comment to the WP version just because its interesting, relevant or worthy of mention. Here’s a comment left on my last post at Blogspot:

Sheri said…

As this is day of memory and appreciation for those that have served our country, I would like to express my opinion on a particular blog that you placed in 2006 in Hot Cup of Joe. It was an Oregonian article by Brian Denson in regards to looting of Indian antiquities. I want to express to you that you do not have the facts and yet you revealed your non researched document as truth in the light of being an highly acclaimed archaeologist student. I too, am a student in college. I also have a love for the antiquities of the American Native Heritage as well does a fellow soldier, Harold Elliot, US Army six years active duty-Volunteered. Four of those years in Special Forces. One year in 82nd Airborne as officer. One year in 101 Airborne in Vietnam as an officer. Receiving Purple Heart, Silver Star, and the Vietnamese Cross of Galanty. Yes, He had a collection. That collection was honest and true and was with the heart of preservation of history and the respect for our Brothers the Native Americans. It is politics of those in office that want prestige and fame that disguise themselves as heroes. BLM Officials, Forest Service Officials, FBI Agents. All of whom have Antiquity collections themselves who steal from the confiscations under the name of operation bring em back. Not only has that been the case but they have destroyed these precious vessels and attempting to destroy the lives of two men, Harold Elliot and Miles Simpson who are innocent. THE GROWTH OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IN THE YEARS SINCE THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR HAS FED IN THE PARANOIA OF A PORTION OF THE AMERICAN PUBLIC: MILITIA. AS IN 1692 WITH THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS, SOCIETY BREEDS INDIVIDUALS THAT REQUIRE THE NEED FOR CONTROL AND THE ENJOYMENT OF STRIPPING INNOCENT PEOPLE THEIR CIVIL FREEDOMS. Harold Elliot and Miles Simpson’s civil rights were and still are being violated. Look at your previous blog Phillip Fields,Bly Oregon. MORE INFO IS AVAILABLE IF THERE IS AN INTEREST.

May 26, 2008 8:23 AM

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEOkxRLzBf0]

According to an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, the very process that John Lennon suggested we use to put religion and other human institutions out our minds might very well be the reason we have religion to begin with.

Imagination, says Maurice Bloch [New Scientist], is what sets humans apart from other animal species. Unlike even our closest relatives, chimpanzees, humans have the unique ability to imagine things that do not exist.

It seems like common sense when you think about it: art, theater, cinema, music, and language it self are each derived from the human imagination. The suggestion that religion is a product of human imagination isn’t necessarily a new one. Modern popularizers of the atheist movement have suggested as links to religion and imagination, though perhaps not as explicit as Bloch.

Daniel Dennett, in Breaking The Spell, tells us that language makes it possible for us to, “remind ourselves of things not currently present to our senses, to dwell on topics that would otherwise be elusive” as we consider our ancestors or other absent and dead people. This is what Bloch refers to as the “transcendental social,” comprised of a group with members one may have never met (clan members, ancestors, gods, deities, etc.).

Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, writes, “[c]onstructing models is something the human brain is very good at. When we are asleep it is called dreaming; when we are awake we call it imagination [...]”

V.S. Rmachandran, a prominent neuroscientist, describes many ways in which the human brain uses imagination to cope with damage to cognitive abilities of the brain after traumas or injuries. He includes an entire chapter on a syndrome known as anasognosia in which patients who suffer from strokes or brain injuries that result in paralysis of a limb construct elaborate and imaginative denials of their paralysis to the point that they actually believe an otherwise paralyzed arm is perfectly normal and sometimes even stronger than the non-paralyzed arm!

Perhaps the same neurological and cognitive functions that inspired the pages of Rama’s Phantoms in the Brain are related to the neural architecture Bloch believes was developed in humans some 40-50,000 years ago. This is the period of the Upper Palaeological Revolution in which lithic technologies and art “suddenly exploded in sophistication” and where funerary artifacts, rock and cave paintings begin, and stone tools take on new styles that allow for more advanced and diverse uses.

In my studies of the Neanderthal to human switch in Europe, where the dominant species of residence changed from Neanderthals to humans, I’ve often considered that it may have been the willingness of humans to believe and imagine which gave them a competitive edge over Neanderthals. If Neanderthals had a diminished capacity to utilize their imaginations, they would have been less likely to develop or adapt to changing climates or environments. They would have been less likely to migrate and spread out except to put space between rival clans or groups. Humans, on the other hand, are naturally curious and imagine every sort of possibility, giving rise to in-groups and out-groups and a natural drive to explore and migrate, perhaps seeking “the good life” in the next valley, and quickly adapting to conditions ranging from desert to arctic using their imaginaitions.

Given that humanity has had thousands of gods and religions in recorded history alone, it isn’t hard at all to imagine that they are each the result of, well, imagination.

Books mentioned:

Dawkins, Richard (2006). The God Delusion. London: Bantam.

Dennett, D. C. (2006). Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. London: Viking.

Ramachandran, V., and Sandra Blakeslee, (1998). Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind. New York: Morrow

I’m hooked. I’m an addict and I admit it.

It all began about one year ago when I caught my first episdode on PBS. Since then, I’ve sought out and watched each episode of Dr. Who (the modern series, that is).

And now I’ve found the perfect geek toy:

The Sonic Screwdriver!