Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
The State System of Higher Education

ANTHR OPOS -

The Anthropology
Newsletter
March 2000 Vol. 24 No. 4

Fall 2000: In the Fall 2000
semester, the Department of
Anthropology will offer the
following courses:

Anthropology & World
Problems (46.102) meets the
Values, Ethics & Responsible
Decision-Making requirement.

46.101 Intro to Anthropology
46.102 Anthropology &
World Problems
46.200 Principles of Cultural
Anthropology
46.210 World Prehistory
46.220 Human Origins
46.300 Archaeological
Method & Theory
:46.312 South American
Archaeology
46.320 Contemporary
World Cultures
46.340 Native North
America
46.385 Anthropology
Research&
Writing

The following courses meet the
university's diversity requirement:
46.101, 46.102, 46.200, and
46.320.

Some More Information:
All of the courses listed above
meet the university's Group B
distribution requirements for
General Education.

Majors, Take Note: 46.385,
Anthropology Research &
Writing, is now a required course
for anthropology majors.
Self-Serving Advertisement:
46.320, Contemporary World
Cultures, will be taught in the Fall
2000 semester as Peoples and
Cultures of the Caribbean. The
course will examine the
In
-

This Issue:
Living in Mongolia - p. 2
Archaeology in Oklahoma - p.3
More Lithics - p. 4
Women in Combat-p. 5
Man the Hunter? - p. 6

geography, prehistory, and history
of the Caribbean region, as well as
contemporary social and cultural
patterns there. Family life,
religion, the arts, language, and a
host of other features of daily life
in the West Indies will be
discussed. There will be a more
in-depth look at three prominent
islands in the Caribbean - Cuba,
Jamaica, and Trinidad. Tourism
and development issues will also
be discussed. The course will be
offered by Dr. Minderhout TuTh
from 2 to 3:15.

Living in Mongolia: by Andrea
Gonce. (Andrea is a 1998 BU
graduate; she is currently serving
in the Peace Corps in Mongolia.
She e-mailed this article for the
newsletter from there.)
Through my frozen eyelashes, I
saw a Mercedes--Benz with twenty
sheep carcasses drive past today on
my way to the coffee shop. I gave
a little chuckle and thought that ·
perhaps just the cold weather was
getting to me; something has got to
happen at -40C, although the
carcass thing happens too often.
While in Mongolia, I have
discovered, among other things,
that I have a terrible aversion to
mutton. But food is not the only
thing here.
Although my anthropology
classes at BU were amazing, they

could never have prepared me for
some of the things I have
experienced and seen here. I am
one of the seventy-two Peace
Corps volunteers serving in
Mongolia.
I am living in the capital city,
Ulaanbaatar. I am not, however,
living in a dirt and mud hut that
the typical Peace Corps volunteer
is supposed to experience. There
is a nice apartment for me with hot
running water and even a
refrigerator - though I'm not living
in it at the moment. I've been in
the sauna room for the past week
while they re-plaster my ceiling.
My job is at the Emergency
Medical Services Center - the 911
of Mongolia. You could dial 103
while in the city, ask for Andrea,
and, more often than not, I would
be there to take your call.
On a typical day, about three
hundred and fifty people pick up
their telephones and dial 103.
They are dialing 103 seeking
medical assistance for a multitude
of difficulties ranging from high
blood pressure to a potentially
broken leg caused by falling off a
horse. It is the job ofone of
fifteen physicians working that day
to respond and provide medical
assistance to the best of their
knowledge. Because of the many
calls the Center receives, as well as
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distance, it may take upwards of
twenty-five minutes for a doctor to
arrive. Upon arrival, the doctor
gives the highest quality care he or
she can, and in some cases, has the
patient taken to a facility for
further treatment.
The Center's staff works in four
twenty-four hour shifts; the staff
includes physicians, nurses,
pharmacists, and drivers. The days
are long, and various calls are
received. For example, one
physician, named Santugs, in a
nine hour period visited fourteen
patients with problems such as the
following: faintness, abdominal
pain, vomiting, car
accident/fractured knee, loss of
consciousness, hypertension, and
chest pain.
The Center is not without its
difficulties. It has been in the
process of introducing modern and
progressive methods during the
new era of democracy. The
doctors are trained in one of the
following specialties: internal
medicine, cardiology, trauma,
psychiatry, neurology, and
maternity. The problem is,
however, that all doctors have to
respond to emergency calls
regardless of their specialties.
The second major difficulty that
the Center faces is lack of Western
medical materials needed to

provide appropriate emergency
care. Equipment carried by
doctors or ambulances is limited to
various types of medicines,
injection equipment, maternity
equipment, a blood pressure cuff,
and a stethoscope. The differences
between American-run and
Mongolian ambulances are vast. I
am learning from the Mongolians,
and at the same time, I am
teaching them.
I will be working with the
Center for the next year and a half,
going on the ambulance calls with
the doctors as well as teaching
English. Perhaps one day, after
returning to the United States, I,
too, will pile my car high with
meat.
Archaeology in Oklahoma: (The
following is from the Sam Noble
Oklahoma Museum of Natural
History. Karin Rebnegger is a
former anthropology major and a
1997 graduate of BU; she is
currently a graduate student in
anthropology at the University of
Oklahoma.)

"A 1,500 to 1, 700-year-old
campsite in Roger Mills County of
western Oklahoma currently is
attracting the attention of
archaeology graduate students
Karin Rebnegger, Stance Hurst,
and Beau Schriever and museum
archaeology curator Don Wyckof£
3

Discovered and recorded over a
decade ago, archaeological site
34RM-507 appeared to be a badly
eroded, temporary camp where
prehistoric Native Americans were
making various tools from
quartzite cobbles collected from a
nearby deposit of Ogallala
Formation graveL Broken and
worn-out spearpoints found there
are of a comer-notched style
thought used around 1,500 years
ago.
Although the site was inspected
occasionally since its dis•covery,
every visit' s findings seemed
consistent with the location being a
temporary stone-working camp
that was virtually eroded away.
Ideas about the site changed last
spring when Wyckoff took his
Lithic Technology class to visit it
and to plot in any newly exposed
artifacts. By this time, erosion was
exposing several areas of
concentrated, fire-cracked rock
and occasional bone fragments.
Most exciting, however, was the
discovery of partially completed
stone tools, datable charcoal, and
the remnants of some kind of pit
eroding from recently cut banks of
the adjacent creek.
Students Rebnegger and Hurst
expressed interest in helping
document these finds, and
Rebnegger indicated her interest in

analyzing all the artifacts and
preparing a report for publication.
Landowner Pete Thurmond was
amenable to the project, and so
with funds from an anonymous
donor, Rebnegger will spend the
1999-2000 academic year on the
analysis and writing. The site was
extensively mapped in the spring,
and recently it was revisted and
more artifacts, the rock features
and the pit were mapped.
Contents of the possible pit
were removed for flotation of plant
and animal remains. Wyckoff,
Thurmond and graduate student
Debra Bradley are undertaking a
detailed study of the deeply
stratified alluvial sediments under
the site as part of their continued
effort to document landscape and
climatic changes over the past
25,000 years."
The article includes a picture of
Karin working at the site.

More Lithics: The March 14,
2000 issue of The Philadelphia
Inquirer contains an article about
University of Pennsylvania
anthropologist Jim Mathieu and
his Technical Archaeology class.
In technical archaeology, students
reconstruct prehistoric tools and
use them in real-life situations to
see what humans in the past
experienced in their everyday
lives.
4

In this particular case, Matheiu
and his class cut down two trees on
the Penn campus using a 6000year-old stone ax from the
collection of the Museum of
Pennsylvania and a replica of a
3500-year-old bronze ax based on
an artifact collected in England.
The trees were to be cut down
anyway to make room for a
construction project on campus.
Mathieu also had on hand a steelheaded ax purchased from Home
Depot.
The students took turns
chopping with the various axes to
see the differences in fee 1 and cut.
It quickly became apparent that the
eight-year-old wooden handle of
the stone ax was not going to stand
up to the task, so attention shifted
to the bronze one. As Mathieu is
quoted as saying, "You start
thinking about the blisters they
got. You start putting yourself in
their place."
It took 26 minutes for the
bronze ax to cut the first tree and
33 minutes for the second.
Though the article does not say
how big the trees were, the
pictures accompanying the text
suggest that they were 18-20
inches in diameter.
According to Mathieu, only 10
or so people now alive had used a

bronze ax before the tree-felling at
the University. By the end of the
afternoon, that number had swelled
to 17.

Why Do Some Societies Allow
Women to Participate in
Combat?: U.S. women can serve
in the military, but usually are
excluded from combat. Some
women feel that such exclusion is
unfair and decreases their chances
of promotion in the military.
Other people, including some
women, insist that female
participation in combat would be
detrimental to military
performance or is inappropriate to
women.
Why then do some societies
allow women to be warriors?
Anthropologist David Adams
compared 70 preindustrial
societies to try and answer that
question. Although most societies
exclude women from war, Adams
found that women were active
warriors, at ·least occasionally, in
13% of the sample societies. In
native North America, such
societies included the Comanche,
Crow, Delaware, Fox, Gros
Ventre, and Navaho. In the
Pacific, there were active warrior
women among the Maori of New
Zealand, on Majuro in the
Marshall Islands, and among the
Orokaiva of New Guinea. In none
of these societies were the warriors
5

usually women, but women were
allowed to engage in combat if
they wanted to . .
How are the societies with
women warriors different from
those that exclude women from
combat? They differ in one of two
ways. Either they conduct war
only against people in other
societies (Adams calls this "purely
external war") or they marry
entirely within their own
community. Adams argues that
these two conditions, which are
not particularly common, preclude
the possibility of conflicts of
interest between wives and
husbands, and therefore women
can be permitted to engage in
combat because their interests are
the same as their husbands'.
Because marriages in most
cases involve individuals from the
same society, husbands and wives
will have the same loyalties if the
society has purely external war.
And even if war occurs between
communities and larger groups in
the same society (what Adams
calls "internal war") there will be
no conflict of interest between
husband and wife if they both
grew up in the same community.
By contrast, there is internal
war at least occasionally in most
societies, and wives usually marry
in from other communities. In this

situation, there may often be a
conflict of interest between
husband and wife; if women were
to engage in combat, they might
have to fight against their fathers,
uncles, and brothers. And
wouldn't we expect the wives to
try and warn kin in their home
communities if the husbands
planned to attack them? Indeed,
the men's likely fear of their
wives' disloyalty would explain
why women in most societies are
forbidden to make or handle
weapons or to go near meetings in
which war plans are being
discussed.
Many countries today engage in
purely external war, so other
things being equal, we would not
expect conflicts of interest to
impede women's participation in
combat. Therefore, extrapolating
from Adams' findings, we might
expect that the barriers against
female participation in combat will
disappear eventually. But other
conditions may have to be present
before women and men participate
equally in combat. In Adams'
study, not all societies with purely
external war or intracommunity
marriage had women warriors. So
we may also have to consider the
degree to which a society seeks to
maximize reproduction (and
therefore protect women from
danger) and the degree to which

6

the society depends on women for
subsistence during wartime.
Adams is looking at other
questions as well. They include
whether military participation
increases women's participation in
politics and whether women's
participation in the military
changes the nature of war.

Man the Hunter or Woman the
Gatherer?: Anthropologists
know that it is important to
understand the foraging or
hunter/gatherer way of life, for all
humans were foragers until 10,000
years ago. Foraging is a lifestyle
in which humans collect their food
from the wild; no plants are
cultivated, nor are animals (with
the exception of the dog)
domesticated. Anthropology, the
study of humans, has long focused
on foraging since humans
developed into the physical,
cultural, and psychological beings
that we are today while living as
foragers. One important social
feature that presumably developed
out of foraging was the sexual
division of labor. In most foraging
societies, men specialize in one
aspect of food production, and
women in another. What then is
relative contribution of each of the
sexes to the total amount of food
consumed?

An important conference was
held in 1966 to bring together
anthropologists of all types to
discuss what was known about
foragers. Organized by Richard
Lee and Irven DeVore, the
conference and resulting book
were called Man the Hunter. At
the time, the word "man" was used
widely in anthropology as a way of
referring to humans in general.
But referring to man the hunter
appeared to ignore women, since
women rarely do the hunting
among foragers in the historical .
era.
It was not that women's
contribution was entirely ignored
by the contributors to Man the
Hunter. Indeed, Richard Lee
pointed out that some foragers,
such as the !Kung of southwest
Africa depended mostly on
gathering, which was mainly
women's work. Even so, the title
of the conference and the book
conveyed that hunting, and the
work of men, was most important
among foragers.
With the growing women's
movement in the United States,
thinking in anthropology
subsequently began to change.
New questions began to be asked.
What were women doing in
foraging cultures? How much did
they contribute to subsistence and
other essential economic
7

activities? How much time did
they work? What were their views
of the world? What kinds of mate
choices did they make? How
much influence did women have?

Collectors or Foraging Humans
might not be as catchy as Man the
Hunter or Woman the Gatherer.,
but it would be more gender-fair.

In 1981, a book edited by
Frances Dahlberg appeared. It was
titled Woman the Gatherer. The
editor was well aware that
gathering may not be the most
important subsistence activity
among all foragers. It appears to
be more ii:iiportant than hunting
among contemporary foragers such
as the !Kung and Australian
aborigines who live in warmer
climates. But gathering is less
important in colder climates,
where most recent foragers have
lived. Indeed, if a large sample of
recent foragers is examined, we
find that fishing is often the most
important subsistence activity,
more important in providing
calories than either hunting or
gathering. Why the title.Woman
the Gatherer then? Although the
editor did not say so explicitly, it is
clear that the title was intended to
raise consciousness about the
importance of women.
We now know that foraging
societies show considerable
variability in how they get their
food. Neither "Man the Hunter"
nor "Woman the Gatherer"
accurately describes most foragers.
A book title such as Food
8