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BLOOMSBURG UNIVERSITY
Pennsylvania
Bloomsburg
ANTHROPOLOGY NEWSLETTER
Vol. 17, No. 6
April 1993
Summer School 1993: The Department of Anthropology is offering the following
courses for the 1993 summer sessions:
46.101
46.102
46.200
46.220
Introduction to Anthropology - Mr. Reeder - Session 1
Anthropology & World Problems - Dr. Minderhout - Session 3
Principles of Cultural Anthropology - Dr. Minderhout - Session 3
Human Origins - Mr. Reeder - Session 1
Though it is listed in the summer school bulletin, 46.210, Prehistoric•Archaeology has
been cancelled. All of the courses offered satisfy the general education requirements
for the Group B distribution, and 46.102 additionally may be used to satisfy the Values,
Ethics & Responsible Decision-making requirement.
Attention Anthropology Majors: Mr. Reeder has announced the following
schedule of required upper level classes.
Fall 1993
Spring 1994
Fall 1994
Spring 1995
Fall 1995
Spring 1996
- 46.405 - Primates
- 46.4 70 - Anthropology Theory
- 46.405
- 46.4 70
- 46.405
- 46.4 70
Please schedule these courses before your last semester of graduation.
Privacy in American Life: People coming to the United States from other countries
often have a hard time understanding the concept of privacy as Americans use it. To
illustrate this point, we present this selection from a letter written by a Korean national
living in the United States to a friend of his in Korea. This letter attempts to explain
several aspects of American life to someone who is about to come here to live:
My first Greyhound bus trip in 1972 was a long one from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to
Syracuse, New York. During this twenty-four hour trip, I met a divorced Catholic
woman who confided in me the most intimate aspects of her private life, including her
sexual hang-ups. By the time I got off the bus, she not only gave me her telephone
number, but also demanded I call her daughter who was allegedly a student at
Syracuse University. Two weeks after this incident, I rushed to Massachusetts to visit
Michelle and Bob. You may remember these Americans whom I befriended at college
in Korea; they had come to our university, in the midst of the Vietnam War, to do
"peace' work instead of being involved in the acts of savagery in the Southeast Asian
rice paddies. Our friendship, conceived and nurtured in the homespun Korean cultural
climate, was indeed a special one ... Our mutual respect and affection were such that
Bob and I even showed unmanly tears at the airport when they returned to the states
after three years. You can imagine, MK, how heartbroken I was when I arrived in that
small New England city and was told they had been separated for several months.
Their Korean-born son, Daniel, was on a biweekly parental-visit schedule. I had to ape
Daniel's visiting schedule, seeing my old friends separately. On the second night I
·
spent with Bob, he had a small dinner party for several of his friends, and I met an
interesting woman with a radical political viewpoint. She was apparently a hard-core
Maoist with a strong conviction that only a Mao-style revolution could solve America's
mounting problems of the time. After dinner, she cordially invited me - me alone, that
is - to her apartment, which was in the same building as Bob's, When I knocked on the
door fifteen minutes later, I was greeted with a lifesize poster of Chairman Mao
hanging on the living room wall... That gigantic red poster alone was sufficient to make
my heart palpitate, but, my friend, it was nothing compared to what I .was to discover
next. On a more careful scrutiny of the woman with whom I found myself alone, I
realized that she was in a see-through evening dress with nothing under it! Admittedly
it was a hot summer evening, and even a most stoic Confucian disciple might have
chosen relaxing attire. Even so, displaying the most private parts of her body to a
virtual stranger completely threw me off. To be honest with you, I have no recollection
of how coherent I was that night when I argued against the inhuman nature of
Communist ideology, especially as it was practiced in the Chinese Communist
Revolution, which claimed approximately eight million lives.
These two encounters - that is, the one with the babbling woman on the Greyhound
bus and the other with the naked Maoist revolutionary - led me to believe, however
temporarily, that in America a voluntary abandonment of one's privacy precedes a
long-lasting personal friendship. In Korea, as I remember, MK, it was always a lengthy
friendship that was used as a pretext to forego one s own privacy or violate that of
another person.
1
Several days later, it was time to visit Michelle and her son. After spending a
splendid New England summer aft~rnoon on a beach where Michelle painfully
explained how her separation from Bob came about, we headed home in her brand
new Volvo. Out of curiosity and anxiety about my transportation problem in Syracuse, I
asked Michelle, "How much did you pay for this car?"
"Michael, you do not ask a question like that in the States," said she, using my
baptismal name.
"What do you mean?" I responded, perplexed.
"Because it is a matter of privacy. If you really need to know, 'Did you get a good
deal for this car?' would be more appropriate," Michelle stated matter-of-factly.
As her voice or look did not indicate any sign that she was less than serious, I
'\-
.
repressed my urge to protest against her apparent contradiction. What about our sixyear friendship, I thought, and all the intimate facts of private life involving the imminent
divorce, which she just passed on to me at the beach? My perplexity and puzzlement
were slow to diminish, since she never told me how much she paid for the car.
From: "American Graffiti: Curious Derivatives of Individualism," by Jin K. Kim. This
article can be found in DISTANT MIRRORS: AMERICA AS A FOREIGN CULTURE,
edited by Philip R. DaVita and James D. Armstrong (Wadsworth, Inc. 1993).
SSHE Undergraduate Anthropology Conference: A number of BU students
attended and participated in the Fifth Annual SSHE Undergraduate Anthropology
Research Conference at California University of Pennsylvania on March 27. Three
presentations by BU -students were on the program. A paper jointly presented by Rich
Lewis and George Stout were joined on the program by papers by Shannon Leonard
and Erica Libhart. Also attending were Bill Lowthert, Melissa Pertooy, Jennifer
Scales, and Richard White. (Dr. Aleto also had planned to attend, but unfortunately,
his car broke down near the Lock Haven exit of 1-80.) The students who attended were
enthusiastic about the program, and they volunteered BU as the host of the sixth
conference to be held next spring.
Translating Prehistoric Languages: In the March 19 issue of SCIENCE,
anthropologists John S. Justason and Terrence Kaufman report that they have been
able to decipher the hieroglyphic writing system of the cuture known as the epi-Olmec.
This culture flourished in southern Mexico between 150 BC and 450 AD. The culture
is called epi-Olmec because it follows the well-known Olmec culture (1200 BC-500
BC) in the same region. Epi-Olmec writing is known from symbols carved on stone
mouments discovered in archaeological excavations. The authors' work make epiOlmec the earliest Mesoamerican writing system to have been translated.
In making their translation, Justesen and Kaufman made the assumption that the
language of the epi-Olmec people was related to the Mixe-Zoque languages spoken
in that region of Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest; members of this language
group are still spoken in that area today. Work by historical linguists on the MixeZoquean languages has yielded insights into what the languages ancestral to modern
Mixe-Zoque must have been like, and Justason and Kaufman were able to base their
research on those historical reconstructions. They were also helped by the work of
earlier researchers who had identified the signs for dates and numbers in epi-Olmec
and by the similarities between epi-Olmec signs and ones used by later Mayan
cultures.
As noted, the writing system of the epi-Olmecs was based on hieroglyphics (or
logographs, as linguists call them). In a logographic system, each symbol is a stylized
picture which stands for a concept (as opposed to an alphabet in which each symbol
stands for a sound.) In epi-Olmec, the concept involved can be a word, as in the case
of signs signifying numbers or days of the week, or a syllable. Epi-Olmec apparently
combined signs representing different syllables into words; an example of a modern
.,.
language which does this is Japanese. Essentially, Justeson and Kaufman took all
they already knew about epi-Olmec and Mayan writing (which uses the same kind of
logographic writing) and combined that with 2 ssumptions about the grammar of
historic Mixe-Zoquean languages to produce a translation. In this process, a
knowledge of Mixe-Zoquean suggests something about word order. The researchers
then looked for repetitive signs, made assumptions about their meaning, and looked to
see if they made sense in a Mixe-Zoquean syntax.
As noted, the main sources for epi-Olmec writing are stone monuments, especially
the La Mojarra Stela I (AD 159) and the Tuxtla Statuette (AD 162). The stela shows an
epi-Olmec warrior-king. The hieroglyphics associated with the warrior-king describe at
length his rise to power through several years of warfare and ritual activity. Justason
and Kaufman note that the stela text is unusual in that it emphasizes the role of the
king's supporters in his ascension. The statuette may represent the spirit helper of one
of those supporters, a shaman. The statuette is of a human being in the costume of an
animal, with a duckbill mask and a cape of bird wings and claws. Originally thought to
show a god, the statuette may represent a spiritual companion of the shaman who was
called upon to aid in the rise to the throne. The statuette text describes a ritual which
was performed on the sixth anniversary of the ruler's last recorded battle before taking
power.
Justason and Kaufman are anxious for more monuments to be uncovered through
archaeological excavation so that they can expand their readings of epi-Olmec texts.
Society for American Archaeology: Bloomsburg University will be represented
at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology this year by Dr. Tom
Aleto and students Faith Katherman, Erica Libhart, Bill Lowthert, and Dan Snyder. The
meetings will be held in St. Louis from April 15 to 18.
New Evidence for Environmental Degradation in the Ancient Americas: by
Dr. Tom Aleto. One of the goals of anthropology is to understand the cultures of the
world, both in prehistory and in the present. In so doing, it hopes to inform the
scholarly and lay communities about the true nature of these cultures and to overturn
misconceptions about their ways of life. Unfortunately, anthropology itself sometimes
is responsible for creating misunderstandings about culture that become deeply
imbedded in the scholarly literature and the popular imagination.
One such misunderstanding concerns the relationship between the prehistoric
peoples of the Americas and their natural environment. Since the 1960's, many
anthropologists have held that native Americans had lived in harmony with their
environment and have adopted strategies that conserved natural resources. This view
emerged from several sources of information. Studies of tropical rain forest cultures
throughout the Western Hemisphere seemed to indicate that, by living in small groups
at low population densities and by practicing a form of shifting cultivation known as
slash and burn agriculture, native peoples had been able to develop a sustainable
system which provided adequately for the needs of society while preserving the
f
.
natural environment for future generations. Additionally, analysis of native religions
and philosophies suggested that the aboriginal Americans viewed themselves as Qfil1
of nature rather than apart from it. Since in this view humans were immersed in nature
and human survival was based on the continuation of the natural world, many
anthropologists argued that native Americans consciously organized their economic,
social and political activities in such a way as to make a minimal impact on their
physical surroundings.
On the basis of this kind of information, many anthropologists portrayed the ancient
Americas as an unspoiled land in which people lived in harmony with their
environment. In this view the degradation of this paradise could be attributed to the
post-Columbian period when Westerners, with a Biblical view of the world (which
challenged humans to dominate and transform nature) destroyed the native people,
their philosophies and their conservationist ethic.
In recent years this idyllic view has been challenged by research which suggests
that native Americans, like their prehistoric and historic counterparts in the Old World,
had over-utilized their natural environment and found themselves face to face with
ecological catastrophe. Much of this work, initiated in the late 1970's, focused on the
Maya of southern Mexico and Guatemala. In an attempt to explain the collapse of
Classic Maya civilization in approximately AD 900, archaeologists began to take
sediment cores from lakes in the region. These cores provided records not only of the
sedementation rates in the lakes' drainage basins, but also samples of the pollen
produced by plants in the area.
A general pattern emerged from the cores. In the period immediately preceding the
abandonment of the cities, sedimentation rates increased dramatically. This suggested
that the Maya, as they cleared larger areas of their territory in order to augment food
production, were denuding hillsides. The pollen evidence supported this
interpretation. As sedimentation rates grew, the pollen profiles changed from ones
dominated by mature forest communities to ones dominated by pioneer species of
weedy plants which colonize eroded, barren soil. On the basis of these data,
archaeologists have suggested that the Classic Maya experienced a population
explosion in the centuries preceding the collapse. In response, they abandoned their
conservation system of shifting cultivation which had had a limited effect on the forest
and adopted a more intensive system of agriculture unsuited for the fragile tropical
soils ·that characterize their area. This, in turn, so transformed the natural environment
that the Maya were unable to feed themselves and were forced to flee their cities and
their civilized way of life.
A study of soil cores from Lake Patzcuaro in western Mexico, recently published in
the British journal NATURE, indicates that the Maya were not the only native
Americans overtaxing their environment and that degradation of natural resources was
a more widespread and frequet 1t phenomenon. Sara O'Hara and two colleagues
demonstrate that the Lake Patzcuaro region underwent three distinct periods of soil
erosion. The first of these, a minor event in comparison to the later two, occurred
...,-
between 1900-1250 BC. This corresponds to the period when agricultural
subsistence and village life were first developing. This land-clearing episode probably
represents the effects of the establishment of Neolithic society in Mexico. The second
and more severe period of erosion dates to 600 BC to 600 AD, the time when the
Teotihuacan empire - the largest prehistoric conquest state in ancient Mexico expanded beyond the Basin of Mexico. It could reflect an increase in loc·a1 population
or the effects of tribute demands imposed by the Teotihuacanos to feed their own
burgeoning population and to build their enormous city.
The most severe erosion took place between AD 1200-1600 when the Aztec empire
expanded throughout Mexico. The Aztecs never conquered the Lake Patzcuaro
region, which was controlled by the powerful Tarascan state. However, the Aztecs and
the Tarascans fought to a military stand-off over a period of more than a century. The
environmental degradation indicated by the third episode may reflect the natural
population increase of the Tarascans coupled with the effects of sustained warfare.
Clearing the landscape may have been necessary both to feed the besieged
populations and to provide wood for protective battlements and military weaponry.
Erosion rates reduce dramatically after the arrival of the Spanish when the forests
recolonized the slopes. This is an ironic twist, considering the role Europeans
traditionally have been thought to play in degrading the environment.
These data, when added to those for the Maya, suggest that the native American's
exploitation of the natural e·n vironment was not so different from that of other
prehistoric and modern people around the world. When confronted by population
increase, taxation, warfare and other stresses, they were forced to use their
environment in a way that led to long-term degradation. Under such circumstances, a
conservationist philosophy and the knowledge of how to manage the environment
under less demanding conditions apparently are not enough to prevent people from
despoiling the world within which they live, especially when the short-term
consequences - famine, starvation or surrender to an enemy - are unacceptable
alternatives.
Unintended Consequences: The following excerpt is from DO'S & TABOOS OF
HOSTING INTERNATIONAL VISITORS by Roger E. Axtell (John Wiley 1990):
You would think that one cultural common meeting place would be the dinner table,
but as we have seen here some startling surprises can easily be served up along with
the food. An anecdote that seems to typify this whole chapter was related to me by a
woman from Rockford, Illinois. She and her family reside near a large community
college there and often host foreign students as a way of helping them acclimatize.
On one of these occasions, they invited a student from Iceland to stay at their home
and while helping him unpack she noticed that he had a collection of forks, each
pattern different from the other. "Do you mind me asking why you have all these
forks?" she said. "Well, it's a curious thing," the student replied, 'Whenever I am invited
for dinner in an American home, when the hostess serves dinner and then clears the
plates, she says to me 'Keep your fork.' So I do."
.,
-
Congratulations!: to Dr. Dee Anne Wymer, who is cited in the April 1993 issue of
the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. The magazine contains a brief article about the
mastodon research conducted by Dr. Wymer and her colleagues. To quote the article,
"The intestines also contained the mastodon's last meal, according to Dee Anne
Wymer of Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, an expert on ancient plants.
Mastodons are known to have eaten spruce branches, but this one had devoured
water lilies, pondweed, and swamp grasses. 'That's a very rich, nutritious diet,' Wymer
says. 'This guy was focusing on yummy stuff.' "
Congratulations are also in order to two graduating seniors who are going on to
graduate school. Erica Libhart has been offered admission and financial support at
both the University of Illinois and the University of Pittsburgh, while Bill Lowthert has
accepted admission and support from the University of Kentucky.
BLOOMSBURG UNIVERSITY
Bloomsburg
Pennsylvania
ANTHROPOLOGY NEWSLETTER
Vol. 17, No. 6a
April-May 1993
Addenda: So much has happened in anthropology since the "last" newsletter of the
semester was sent to Duplicating during the last week of March that the editor decided
to put out an update. So think of this brief issue as number 6a or 6+ or whatever ...
Cross-Cultural Feast: On April 21, the Anthropology Club sponsored a crosscultural feast in Multipurpose Room A of the new Kehr Union. Students prepared
dishes from around the world and described/served them to their many guests. The
feast was well-attended, with students and faculty members from several programs on
campus participating. Congratulations are in order to club member· Crystle Reustle
who put in many long hours organizing the feast.
Congratulations!: to anthropology majors Doug Hibshman and Shannon Leonard
who were recently inducted into the honor society, Phi Kappa Phi. Both will graduate
Magna cum Laude in May. Dr. Tom Aleto was one of several faculty members
inducted into the society as well.
Errata: In the last issue, we reported on those members of the anthropology program
who participated in the Society for American Archaeology Meetings in St. Louis, April
15-18. We inadvertently left out the name of anthropology major, Regina Girton, who
also attended. Sorry, Regina! Early returns report that the meetings were productive
for all who participated.
And Other News: Dr. Dee Anne Wymer attended the meetings of the Pennsylvania
Archaeological Council in East Stroudsburg on April 23 .... Dr. Dave Minderhout
addressed the inductees of the National Honor Society at Bloomsburg High School on
April 26.
HAVE A NICE SUMMER!
Pennsylvania
Bloomsburg
ANTHROPOLOGY NEWSLETTER
Vol. 17, No. 6
April 1993
Summer School 1993: The Department of Anthropology is offering the following
courses for the 1993 summer sessions:
46.101
46.102
46.200
46.220
Introduction to Anthropology - Mr. Reeder - Session 1
Anthropology & World Problems - Dr. Minderhout - Session 3
Principles of Cultural Anthropology - Dr. Minderhout - Session 3
Human Origins - Mr. Reeder - Session 1
Though it is listed in the summer school bulletin, 46.210, Prehistoric•Archaeology has
been cancelled. All of the courses offered satisfy the general education requirements
for the Group B distribution, and 46.102 additionally may be used to satisfy the Values,
Ethics & Responsible Decision-making requirement.
Attention Anthropology Majors: Mr. Reeder has announced the following
schedule of required upper level classes.
Fall 1993
Spring 1994
Fall 1994
Spring 1995
Fall 1995
Spring 1996
- 46.405 - Primates
- 46.4 70 - Anthropology Theory
- 46.405
- 46.4 70
- 46.405
- 46.4 70
Please schedule these courses before your last semester of graduation.
Privacy in American Life: People coming to the United States from other countries
often have a hard time understanding the concept of privacy as Americans use it. To
illustrate this point, we present this selection from a letter written by a Korean national
living in the United States to a friend of his in Korea. This letter attempts to explain
several aspects of American life to someone who is about to come here to live:
My first Greyhound bus trip in 1972 was a long one from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to
Syracuse, New York. During this twenty-four hour trip, I met a divorced Catholic
woman who confided in me the most intimate aspects of her private life, including her
sexual hang-ups. By the time I got off the bus, she not only gave me her telephone
number, but also demanded I call her daughter who was allegedly a student at
Syracuse University. Two weeks after this incident, I rushed to Massachusetts to visit
Michelle and Bob. You may remember these Americans whom I befriended at college
in Korea; they had come to our university, in the midst of the Vietnam War, to do
"peace' work instead of being involved in the acts of savagery in the Southeast Asian
rice paddies. Our friendship, conceived and nurtured in the homespun Korean cultural
climate, was indeed a special one ... Our mutual respect and affection were such that
Bob and I even showed unmanly tears at the airport when they returned to the states
after three years. You can imagine, MK, how heartbroken I was when I arrived in that
small New England city and was told they had been separated for several months.
Their Korean-born son, Daniel, was on a biweekly parental-visit schedule. I had to ape
Daniel's visiting schedule, seeing my old friends separately. On the second night I
·
spent with Bob, he had a small dinner party for several of his friends, and I met an
interesting woman with a radical political viewpoint. She was apparently a hard-core
Maoist with a strong conviction that only a Mao-style revolution could solve America's
mounting problems of the time. After dinner, she cordially invited me - me alone, that
is - to her apartment, which was in the same building as Bob's, When I knocked on the
door fifteen minutes later, I was greeted with a lifesize poster of Chairman Mao
hanging on the living room wall... That gigantic red poster alone was sufficient to make
my heart palpitate, but, my friend, it was nothing compared to what I .was to discover
next. On a more careful scrutiny of the woman with whom I found myself alone, I
realized that she was in a see-through evening dress with nothing under it! Admittedly
it was a hot summer evening, and even a most stoic Confucian disciple might have
chosen relaxing attire. Even so, displaying the most private parts of her body to a
virtual stranger completely threw me off. To be honest with you, I have no recollection
of how coherent I was that night when I argued against the inhuman nature of
Communist ideology, especially as it was practiced in the Chinese Communist
Revolution, which claimed approximately eight million lives.
These two encounters - that is, the one with the babbling woman on the Greyhound
bus and the other with the naked Maoist revolutionary - led me to believe, however
temporarily, that in America a voluntary abandonment of one's privacy precedes a
long-lasting personal friendship. In Korea, as I remember, MK, it was always a lengthy
friendship that was used as a pretext to forego one s own privacy or violate that of
another person.
1
Several days later, it was time to visit Michelle and her son. After spending a
splendid New England summer aft~rnoon on a beach where Michelle painfully
explained how her separation from Bob came about, we headed home in her brand
new Volvo. Out of curiosity and anxiety about my transportation problem in Syracuse, I
asked Michelle, "How much did you pay for this car?"
"Michael, you do not ask a question like that in the States," said she, using my
baptismal name.
"What do you mean?" I responded, perplexed.
"Because it is a matter of privacy. If you really need to know, 'Did you get a good
deal for this car?' would be more appropriate," Michelle stated matter-of-factly.
As her voice or look did not indicate any sign that she was less than serious, I
'\-
.
repressed my urge to protest against her apparent contradiction. What about our sixyear friendship, I thought, and all the intimate facts of private life involving the imminent
divorce, which she just passed on to me at the beach? My perplexity and puzzlement
were slow to diminish, since she never told me how much she paid for the car.
From: "American Graffiti: Curious Derivatives of Individualism," by Jin K. Kim. This
article can be found in DISTANT MIRRORS: AMERICA AS A FOREIGN CULTURE,
edited by Philip R. DaVita and James D. Armstrong (Wadsworth, Inc. 1993).
SSHE Undergraduate Anthropology Conference: A number of BU students
attended and participated in the Fifth Annual SSHE Undergraduate Anthropology
Research Conference at California University of Pennsylvania on March 27. Three
presentations by BU -students were on the program. A paper jointly presented by Rich
Lewis and George Stout were joined on the program by papers by Shannon Leonard
and Erica Libhart. Also attending were Bill Lowthert, Melissa Pertooy, Jennifer
Scales, and Richard White. (Dr. Aleto also had planned to attend, but unfortunately,
his car broke down near the Lock Haven exit of 1-80.) The students who attended were
enthusiastic about the program, and they volunteered BU as the host of the sixth
conference to be held next spring.
Translating Prehistoric Languages: In the March 19 issue of SCIENCE,
anthropologists John S. Justason and Terrence Kaufman report that they have been
able to decipher the hieroglyphic writing system of the cuture known as the epi-Olmec.
This culture flourished in southern Mexico between 150 BC and 450 AD. The culture
is called epi-Olmec because it follows the well-known Olmec culture (1200 BC-500
BC) in the same region. Epi-Olmec writing is known from symbols carved on stone
mouments discovered in archaeological excavations. The authors' work make epiOlmec the earliest Mesoamerican writing system to have been translated.
In making their translation, Justesen and Kaufman made the assumption that the
language of the epi-Olmec people was related to the Mixe-Zoque languages spoken
in that region of Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest; members of this language
group are still spoken in that area today. Work by historical linguists on the MixeZoquean languages has yielded insights into what the languages ancestral to modern
Mixe-Zoque must have been like, and Justason and Kaufman were able to base their
research on those historical reconstructions. They were also helped by the work of
earlier researchers who had identified the signs for dates and numbers in epi-Olmec
and by the similarities between epi-Olmec signs and ones used by later Mayan
cultures.
As noted, the writing system of the epi-Olmecs was based on hieroglyphics (or
logographs, as linguists call them). In a logographic system, each symbol is a stylized
picture which stands for a concept (as opposed to an alphabet in which each symbol
stands for a sound.) In epi-Olmec, the concept involved can be a word, as in the case
of signs signifying numbers or days of the week, or a syllable. Epi-Olmec apparently
combined signs representing different syllables into words; an example of a modern
.,.
language which does this is Japanese. Essentially, Justeson and Kaufman took all
they already knew about epi-Olmec and Mayan writing (which uses the same kind of
logographic writing) and combined that with 2 ssumptions about the grammar of
historic Mixe-Zoquean languages to produce a translation. In this process, a
knowledge of Mixe-Zoquean suggests something about word order. The researchers
then looked for repetitive signs, made assumptions about their meaning, and looked to
see if they made sense in a Mixe-Zoquean syntax.
As noted, the main sources for epi-Olmec writing are stone monuments, especially
the La Mojarra Stela I (AD 159) and the Tuxtla Statuette (AD 162). The stela shows an
epi-Olmec warrior-king. The hieroglyphics associated with the warrior-king describe at
length his rise to power through several years of warfare and ritual activity. Justason
and Kaufman note that the stela text is unusual in that it emphasizes the role of the
king's supporters in his ascension. The statuette may represent the spirit helper of one
of those supporters, a shaman. The statuette is of a human being in the costume of an
animal, with a duckbill mask and a cape of bird wings and claws. Originally thought to
show a god, the statuette may represent a spiritual companion of the shaman who was
called upon to aid in the rise to the throne. The statuette text describes a ritual which
was performed on the sixth anniversary of the ruler's last recorded battle before taking
power.
Justason and Kaufman are anxious for more monuments to be uncovered through
archaeological excavation so that they can expand their readings of epi-Olmec texts.
Society for American Archaeology: Bloomsburg University will be represented
at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology this year by Dr. Tom
Aleto and students Faith Katherman, Erica Libhart, Bill Lowthert, and Dan Snyder. The
meetings will be held in St. Louis from April 15 to 18.
New Evidence for Environmental Degradation in the Ancient Americas: by
Dr. Tom Aleto. One of the goals of anthropology is to understand the cultures of the
world, both in prehistory and in the present. In so doing, it hopes to inform the
scholarly and lay communities about the true nature of these cultures and to overturn
misconceptions about their ways of life. Unfortunately, anthropology itself sometimes
is responsible for creating misunderstandings about culture that become deeply
imbedded in the scholarly literature and the popular imagination.
One such misunderstanding concerns the relationship between the prehistoric
peoples of the Americas and their natural environment. Since the 1960's, many
anthropologists have held that native Americans had lived in harmony with their
environment and have adopted strategies that conserved natural resources. This view
emerged from several sources of information. Studies of tropical rain forest cultures
throughout the Western Hemisphere seemed to indicate that, by living in small groups
at low population densities and by practicing a form of shifting cultivation known as
slash and burn agriculture, native peoples had been able to develop a sustainable
system which provided adequately for the needs of society while preserving the
f
.
natural environment for future generations. Additionally, analysis of native religions
and philosophies suggested that the aboriginal Americans viewed themselves as Qfil1
of nature rather than apart from it. Since in this view humans were immersed in nature
and human survival was based on the continuation of the natural world, many
anthropologists argued that native Americans consciously organized their economic,
social and political activities in such a way as to make a minimal impact on their
physical surroundings.
On the basis of this kind of information, many anthropologists portrayed the ancient
Americas as an unspoiled land in which people lived in harmony with their
environment. In this view the degradation of this paradise could be attributed to the
post-Columbian period when Westerners, with a Biblical view of the world (which
challenged humans to dominate and transform nature) destroyed the native people,
their philosophies and their conservationist ethic.
In recent years this idyllic view has been challenged by research which suggests
that native Americans, like their prehistoric and historic counterparts in the Old World,
had over-utilized their natural environment and found themselves face to face with
ecological catastrophe. Much of this work, initiated in the late 1970's, focused on the
Maya of southern Mexico and Guatemala. In an attempt to explain the collapse of
Classic Maya civilization in approximately AD 900, archaeologists began to take
sediment cores from lakes in the region. These cores provided records not only of the
sedementation rates in the lakes' drainage basins, but also samples of the pollen
produced by plants in the area.
A general pattern emerged from the cores. In the period immediately preceding the
abandonment of the cities, sedimentation rates increased dramatically. This suggested
that the Maya, as they cleared larger areas of their territory in order to augment food
production, were denuding hillsides. The pollen evidence supported this
interpretation. As sedimentation rates grew, the pollen profiles changed from ones
dominated by mature forest communities to ones dominated by pioneer species of
weedy plants which colonize eroded, barren soil. On the basis of these data,
archaeologists have suggested that the Classic Maya experienced a population
explosion in the centuries preceding the collapse. In response, they abandoned their
conservation system of shifting cultivation which had had a limited effect on the forest
and adopted a more intensive system of agriculture unsuited for the fragile tropical
soils ·that characterize their area. This, in turn, so transformed the natural environment
that the Maya were unable to feed themselves and were forced to flee their cities and
their civilized way of life.
A study of soil cores from Lake Patzcuaro in western Mexico, recently published in
the British journal NATURE, indicates that the Maya were not the only native
Americans overtaxing their environment and that degradation of natural resources was
a more widespread and frequet 1t phenomenon. Sara O'Hara and two colleagues
demonstrate that the Lake Patzcuaro region underwent three distinct periods of soil
erosion. The first of these, a minor event in comparison to the later two, occurred
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between 1900-1250 BC. This corresponds to the period when agricultural
subsistence and village life were first developing. This land-clearing episode probably
represents the effects of the establishment of Neolithic society in Mexico. The second
and more severe period of erosion dates to 600 BC to 600 AD, the time when the
Teotihuacan empire - the largest prehistoric conquest state in ancient Mexico expanded beyond the Basin of Mexico. It could reflect an increase in loc·a1 population
or the effects of tribute demands imposed by the Teotihuacanos to feed their own
burgeoning population and to build their enormous city.
The most severe erosion took place between AD 1200-1600 when the Aztec empire
expanded throughout Mexico. The Aztecs never conquered the Lake Patzcuaro
region, which was controlled by the powerful Tarascan state. However, the Aztecs and
the Tarascans fought to a military stand-off over a period of more than a century. The
environmental degradation indicated by the third episode may reflect the natural
population increase of the Tarascans coupled with the effects of sustained warfare.
Clearing the landscape may have been necessary both to feed the besieged
populations and to provide wood for protective battlements and military weaponry.
Erosion rates reduce dramatically after the arrival of the Spanish when the forests
recolonized the slopes. This is an ironic twist, considering the role Europeans
traditionally have been thought to play in degrading the environment.
These data, when added to those for the Maya, suggest that the native American's
exploitation of the natural e·n vironment was not so different from that of other
prehistoric and modern people around the world. When confronted by population
increase, taxation, warfare and other stresses, they were forced to use their
environment in a way that led to long-term degradation. Under such circumstances, a
conservationist philosophy and the knowledge of how to manage the environment
under less demanding conditions apparently are not enough to prevent people from
despoiling the world within which they live, especially when the short-term
consequences - famine, starvation or surrender to an enemy - are unacceptable
alternatives.
Unintended Consequences: The following excerpt is from DO'S & TABOOS OF
HOSTING INTERNATIONAL VISITORS by Roger E. Axtell (John Wiley 1990):
You would think that one cultural common meeting place would be the dinner table,
but as we have seen here some startling surprises can easily be served up along with
the food. An anecdote that seems to typify this whole chapter was related to me by a
woman from Rockford, Illinois. She and her family reside near a large community
college there and often host foreign students as a way of helping them acclimatize.
On one of these occasions, they invited a student from Iceland to stay at their home
and while helping him unpack she noticed that he had a collection of forks, each
pattern different from the other. "Do you mind me asking why you have all these
forks?" she said. "Well, it's a curious thing," the student replied, 'Whenever I am invited
for dinner in an American home, when the hostess serves dinner and then clears the
plates, she says to me 'Keep your fork.' So I do."
.,
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Congratulations!: to Dr. Dee Anne Wymer, who is cited in the April 1993 issue of
the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. The magazine contains a brief article about the
mastodon research conducted by Dr. Wymer and her colleagues. To quote the article,
"The intestines also contained the mastodon's last meal, according to Dee Anne
Wymer of Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, an expert on ancient plants.
Mastodons are known to have eaten spruce branches, but this one had devoured
water lilies, pondweed, and swamp grasses. 'That's a very rich, nutritious diet,' Wymer
says. 'This guy was focusing on yummy stuff.' "
Congratulations are also in order to two graduating seniors who are going on to
graduate school. Erica Libhart has been offered admission and financial support at
both the University of Illinois and the University of Pittsburgh, while Bill Lowthert has
accepted admission and support from the University of Kentucky.
BLOOMSBURG UNIVERSITY
Bloomsburg
Pennsylvania
ANTHROPOLOGY NEWSLETTER
Vol. 17, No. 6a
April-May 1993
Addenda: So much has happened in anthropology since the "last" newsletter of the
semester was sent to Duplicating during the last week of March that the editor decided
to put out an update. So think of this brief issue as number 6a or 6+ or whatever ...
Cross-Cultural Feast: On April 21, the Anthropology Club sponsored a crosscultural feast in Multipurpose Room A of the new Kehr Union. Students prepared
dishes from around the world and described/served them to their many guests. The
feast was well-attended, with students and faculty members from several programs on
campus participating. Congratulations are in order to club member· Crystle Reustle
who put in many long hours organizing the feast.
Congratulations!: to anthropology majors Doug Hibshman and Shannon Leonard
who were recently inducted into the honor society, Phi Kappa Phi. Both will graduate
Magna cum Laude in May. Dr. Tom Aleto was one of several faculty members
inducted into the society as well.
Errata: In the last issue, we reported on those members of the anthropology program
who participated in the Society for American Archaeology Meetings in St. Louis, April
15-18. We inadvertently left out the name of anthropology major, Regina Girton, who
also attended. Sorry, Regina! Early returns report that the meetings were productive
for all who participated.
And Other News: Dr. Dee Anne Wymer attended the meetings of the Pennsylvania
Archaeological Council in East Stroudsburg on April 23 .... Dr. Dave Minderhout
addressed the inductees of the National Honor Society at Bloomsburg High School on
April 26.
HAVE A NICE SUMMER!
Media of