The Glenwood Erratic petroglyph vandalism: some red flags

The Glenwood Erratic
From The Pincher Creek Voice (C. Davis Photo)

News of unusual vandalism of a petroglyph site (the Glenwood Erratic) in southern Alberta has been making the rounds.  It is not the fact of vandalism that is unusual (unfortunately vandalism of Native American sites is not unusual), but the nature of the vandalism. The vandals reportedly used a power-washer, powerful acid, and a rock drill to destroy the petroglyphs, as well as supporting materiel—a truck, portable generator, and a 16 ft ladder.  That’s not casual vandalism.  It was reported in The Indian Country Today Media Network--“Aboriginal Petroglyphs Destroyed By Vandals Armed With Acid and a Drill.” The Indian Country article is based on a report to the Pincher Creek Voice by one Stan Knowlton, who identified the vandalism ("Local history drilled out and washed away? Update"). This article gives some insight into what might be going on here.  The photos are particularly informative. 

One interesting development is the RCMP, the Alberta Archaeological Survey, the Royal Alberta Museum, and the Writing on Stone archaeological department (the what?! The Writing on Stone Provincial Park  archaeological department) found no evidence that there were petroglyphs at the site or that any vandalism had taken place. 

I can’t reach any solid conclusions about what went on at the Glenwood Erratic, not off a couple of newspaper articles, but there are certainly some red flags in the articles that indicate something odd is going on.
 
Red Flag 1: An unknown form of writing
Knowlton pointed out in his report that this is just the latest in a string of vandalized pictogram and petroglyph sites in Alberta and thinks someone is out to destroy evidence that could prove the Blackfoot First Nations had a written language before European migration.

“I suspect the link to this destruction is to nullify my long held claim that the Blackfoot had a written language before missionaries arrived, which could force archeologists to rewrite history,” Knowlton wrote in his report.

The writings on the erratic—a rock that differs in size and shape from the rock surrounding it, having been transported from its place of origin by glacial action—were highlighted and preserved using red ochre.

“Blackfoot/Cree Blackfoot is the older version of syllabic writing,” he told the Pincher Creek Voice. “This glacial erratic was dropped here about 10,000 years ago. It’s hard to date the writings. It would have been possible to carbon date the oils in the red ochre.” (ICTM)

 The idea the Blackfoot had a written language, a syllabic one to boot, is a big claim.  Full-blown writing systems are usually associated with militarized states, which is unsurprising since writing probably developed out of record keeping and taxation. 

Even more surprising is Knowlton’s claim that he can read this hitherto unknown language

As the lichen crust was so thick it was hard to get a good image of the entire rock surface. Several places were covered in a thick layer of sahm (Red Ocher) and the syllabic characters were partially exposed. The best I could make out was NA WE NI T_ __ __ __ O ^. The whole surface was a face and the syllabic characters were in or near the eyes. [Knowlton 2012]

Since whatever Knowlton claimed he saw is no longer there, and since he made no record of it when he did see it, not so much as a cellphone photo, we can't say much.  Previous claims of precontact writing systems in North America have not panned out.  Probably the most notorious one is Barry Fell and his identification of something called “Punic Ogham” all over North America, pretty much anywhere he found parallel scratches.

Knowlton’s claim that red ochre survived for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years on a very exposed erratic on the prairie also needs to be examined carefully.  It seems unlikely. 

Red Flag 2: The Evidence
Obviously there is no evidence for writing (since it has been destroyed) but the evidence for the vandalism itself, at least as given in the photos, is not convincing.  The staining and discolored depression supposedly caused by acid is visually indistinguishable from natural weathering and water staining.

Acid/detergent damage
From The Pincher Creek Voice (C. Davis Photo)

The drilled section looks bad until you realise it is only an 8x4 inch area.  They are not drill holes, but core holes.  They were made by a hollow drill.  This looks like geological sampling, which is what the RCMP investigation concluded. 

Drill damage
From The Pincher Creek Voice (C. Davis Photo)

There is apparently a second drilled area, but since this is the one that is appearing in the media, it is safe to assume it is the more dramatic example.

The amount of work Knowlton is claiming the vandals put in is also eye-raising.  Who hauls out a generator, lights, a drill, 100+ litres of detergent, and powerful acid to destroy petroglyphs?  What the hell is wrong with using a hammer?

Red Flag 3: Conspiracy theory
I am not sure what evidence Knowlton has for his writing theory, but one thing we do know is that what evidence exists is being destroyed by a cabal of archaeologists (of course).

 After spending an hour or two at the Glenwood Erratic site, Stan Knowlton took us on a lengthy tour of another site on the Piikani Nation. Following a path that he said was the original pioneer highway for wagons running between Fort Macleod and Pincher Creek, we came to an area that demonstrated the systematic destruction of a culture.  Huge holes left behind are now all that are left of the erratics there and pillars that were deliberately dynamited in the 1920's in an apparent attempt to remove any and all references to the culture that existed there before the europeans came.  Historian George Classen wrote "Stonehenge of the Foothills" about this site. [Davis and Lucas 2012]

 And in Knowlton's own words:

In 1884, George Dawson records petroglyphs located on the bank of the big bend in the river west of Monarch, they are gone now. In the 1960's the Big Rock at Okotoks had petroglyphs and those were drilled out and recently sanitized. Now, Glenwood. George Classen stated in 1993 that these type of arky site were "slated for destruction." We must now find whom and why these Archaeology sites are being targeted or nothing in Alberta is safe. [Knowlton 2012]

And

Today, September 13, 2012 I found a well-dressed Man from Edmonton washing down Big Rock graffiti.  This man claimed to belongs to a group of four under a supervisor that also does graffiti cleaning as well.  They have their own pressure washer but must get approval from the Head Archaeologist before they can use acid or special detergents.  This interesting gentleman claimed they have a data base of over eight hundred sites across Alberta, including Glenwood. The crew is said to have been visiting sites in Southern Alberta over the last few days.

There are pictographs at Big Rock as well as petroglyphs.  A lot of the pictographs have been destroyed by harsh chemicals and the pictographs have been covered over with epoxy cement.[Knowlton 2012]

And

"I suspect the 'link' to this destruction is to nullify my long held claim that the Blackfoot HAD a written language before missionaries arrived, which could force archaeologists to rewrite history". [Knowlton 2012]

Knowlton also does not explain how the representatives of the International Archaeological Conspiracy ™ (IAC) found out about the his petroglyphs when he was the one who found them. I suppose he may have reported them, but if he didn’t have photos I doubt anyone at the IAC would have been worried about having their theories overturned.

And let's get real,if these guys are well-dressed as Knowlton claims, then they are probably not archaeologists.  QED. 

When people start using conspiracy theories to explain their lack of evidence you don’t need to listen to anymore. This is true in any field. The bigger and more elaborate the conspiracy, the less likely it is, especially if the conspirators are archaeologists—nobody wants a conspiracy of garrulous boozers.   

Supposed unknown writing systems, maps engraved in rock, monumental architecture, and the like, that are actually natural features are pretty common.  The proponent usually has something he is pointing to, even if it is natural.  The unusual thing about this case is the claim that the evidence had been destroyed, when, apparently, it hadn’t—it was just never there.  I am not sure what is going on there. 

In the end the problem here is not with the archaeologists, it is with Knowlton.  By his account he knew those petroglyphs were there, and he didn’t record them when he was there, not a cellphone photo, not a drawing.  That’s not responsible, especially since he thinks there is a concerted conspiracy to destroy such petroglyphs.  Instead we get a unsupported story of them being destroyed the night before he was going to go out there and record them. 

Vandalism of Native American heritage is common enough that the police are often surprised to find out that there are often laws against...if they bother to check at all.  My first reaction when the articles about the Glenwood Erratic starting showing up in my feeds was that the vandalism happened and that the vandals were unusually determined.  I wondered if there was some personal animosity involved. I didn't pay much attention to the red flags until I heard the RCMP and the relevant archaeologists hadn't found any vandalism.  When I went back and looked again, the problems with the claims (as presented) were obvious.  There's a lesson there.

It's also a shame that it is a dubious case like this that is getting such coverage. But then, what makes it dubious is probably what is getting it the coverage. 

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References cited

Davis, Chris, and Toni Lucas
2012  "Local history drilled out and washed away." Pincher Creek Voice, September 17, 2012

ICTM (Indian Country Today Media Network)
2012 "Aboriginal Petroglyphs Destroyed By Vandals Armed With Acid and a Drill" The Indian Country Today Media Network, September 18, 2012.

Knowlton, Stan
2012  "Desecration of the Glenwood Erratic." Pincher Creek Voice, September 17, 2012

And again...is archaeology science?

And we have a resounding “NO!” from Willie Mc Loud of Life in the Universe. In fact archaeology’s not even history either. Harsh.

This is old ground, and I don’t have the burning interest in the topic that I used to, but  I was interested in what Loud had to say because he isn’t an archaeologist, but a physicist, one with, apparently, an interest in archaeology. Now I do think if you are going to criticise a discipline, it behooves you to get up to speed on the basics of that discipline, at least enough that the criticisms make sense. Loud stumbles in this regard. For example, his criticisms of archaeological dating made no sense to me until I realised he was unaware of the difference between dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating. Mistakes like that are a red flag, and make it hard to exercise the principle of charity.  But we must.  

Loud has some definitional problems.  His take on the goals of archaeology, and history for that matter, is pretty limited. His interest is Mesopotamian archaeology, and I suspect he, as with many buffs, is interested in archaeology insofar as it can fill in gaps in a rather conventional history. In his examples he judges archaeology on whether it can identify the reign dates of Naram-Sin, the occurrence of a historically recorded “great rebellion” against the aforementioned Naram-Sin, the existence of the Akkadian Empire, or the presence of Assyrian colonies in Anatolia.  This is “pots=peoples” archaeology failing at “big men, big battles” history.  Archaeology does not excel at this kind of history.  In fact history does not excel at this kind of history.  

His other definitional problem is what he means by “science”.  He’s a little slippery here, conflating “empirical science” (which is in reality all science) with experimental science.  An experimental science is one whose findings come from controlled repeatable experiments.  By this definition, psychology is a science, but astronomy, geology, evolutionary biology, and, yes, archaeology are not. Obviously not all sciences are experimental sciences—there is an important distinction to be made here between experimental and historical science, in which researchers use  pre-existing evidentiary traces to discriminate among hypotheses (e.g. Cleland 2002). If archaeology is a science, it is a historical science, not an experimental one (setting aside the subfield of experimental archaeology).  
       
Loud also criticises archaeology for problems that are general in science.  He notes, for example, that “archaeological data is provisional in the sense that there is always the possibility that new data will be found that could (even dramatically) alter the picture.” I assume he means archaeological interpretations or theories are provisional, rather than “data”.  Regardless, it seems an unfair observation, since provisionality and a willingness to revise theories in the face of new data are hallmarks of science. 

He is careful to note that scientists that scientists approximate reality rather than discover it, writing that “although reality exists, we do not know - and would probably never know - what it truly is like.  There is absolutely no way to establish whether any model describes reality as it really is - the best we can hope for is that models provide reliable results when tested against reality. ”  Of course this phrasing raises the question of how one “tests” models against an unknowable reality. What we actually do is test models against human interpretations of the effects (”evidence” or “data”) of that unknowable reality.  This is an important distinction, since he then goes on to state that archaeologists cannot test models since the reality they are approximating no longer exists. There are a lot of criticisms I can make of Loud’s idea that the particular reality under investigation needs to be coterminous with the researcher to be available for testing. But the simplest one is that it doesn’t, not in the historical sciences. For examples, nobody deals with long-gone realities like astronomers do.  The effects of the bygone reality are still present, and that is what we test against.  I also wonder at the practical difference between testing against the effects of an unknowable extant reality, and testing against the effects of an unknowable extinct reality. The practical difference between the two is non-existent.  

The question of whether archaeology as a whole is science is not one I worry much about anymore.  A lot depends the questions the archaeologist is asking—some variation no doubt of Christopher Hawkes’ “Ladder of Inference”.  When humans first migrated into the Americas is a scientific question.  How a group of people uses material culture to assert (or deny) group identity is less so, but nonetheless still worth exploring.  We can’t just look where the light is strongest.  Also archaeology, like history, is a form of social memory and thus embroiled in contemporary politics in a way that physics and geology are not.  

For the most part I agree with Loud that the kind of archaeology and questions he is interested in are not science. I just disagree with his reasons, and that his experience of archaeology is sufficient to take on the whole field.  Maybe a more limited title?

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References cited

Cleland, Carol E.

2002    Methodological and Epistemic Differences Between Historical Science and Experimental Science. Philosophy of Science 69(3):447–451.

Loud, Willie Mc 
2012    A critique of archaeology as a science.  Life in the Universe.  Posted 19 August 2012. 

Atheism+ as a threat to community

The reaction in the atheist community to the formation of Atheism+  is not surprising. There has been the predictably enraged response from men’s rights activists, who comprise a surprisingly significant population in the atheist movement.  The MRAs, Dawkins aficionados, and their ilk operate under their own logic.  But the reaction of the more intellectually-inclined elements, even the more liberal ones, has also been negative.  This is also not surprising, but in an understandable way.

In part this is territorial.  While Atheism+ is loose grassroots setup at the moment, really little more than a forum, it is potentially a new organization that might compete for membership.  So here we see many Humanists claiming Atheism+ as their own.  The philosophical arguments are not necessarily wrong here—the two groups do share many of the same values. But there are practical differences. 

Atheism+ can also be seen as a rebuke to existing organisations, in that it implies a purpose that they have not been fulfilling. 

Atheism+ also explicitly reconnects atheism to political and social values.  For established atheists, this has a number of consequences. There is a pretty consistent set of arguments: Atheism+ is just Humanism, you can’t derive values from the definition of atheism, and it is divisive. I think the last one is actually the real argument for most of the “old boy” atheists. Whatever argument is being made it is nearly always prefaced with an overwrought statement about how Atheism+ threatens the fabric of the atheist community (although rampant bigotry apparently does not).

I think there are three main actual concerns.

1. Atheism+ may lead to factionalization. There is now a segment of atheists organizing on the basis of political and social beliefs.   Can further factionalization be further behind?  Will Libertarian atheists form their own group?  Ayn Rand devotees? MRAs? Most people would not see this as a bad thing.  The existence of interest groups within large organizations is standard operating procedure.  I have lost count of how many interest groups the American Anthropological Association has, but it trundles along regardless.  However ut older atheists see this as splitting up their community—the single large club they are used to may dissolve into many clubs. 

2. Athesim+ threatens old friendships. Atheism+ formed after at least a year of vicious harassment of women by bigots. This sounds simple enough, but the online struggle soon sucked in other members of the atheist community who are not necessarily bigots but who, for whatever reason (cluelessness, friends who are bigots, resentment over being roughly handled in comment sections, etc.), ended up aligned against the atheist feminists.  The formation of Atheism+ calls out a number of prominent atheists who have been critical or dismissive of feminists in the atheist movement  by either denying sexism exists in the movement or blaming feminists for the problem of sexism.  This confronts many old boy atheists who  might otherwise agree with the goals of Atheism+ with the problem of choosing between friends or supporting a bunch of loudmouthed upstarts. 

3. Atheism+ undermines value-neutrality.  A persistent argument against reconnecting atheism and values is that you can’t derive any values from the definition of atheism. I haven’t considered this a good faith argument—it’s trivially true in one way, wrong in every other way.  But I now think it is sincere in that it does cover a deeper anxiety. Whether value-neutrality is viable or not, it is important as a unifying ideology of the atheist movement. Atheism’s self image is that of an embattled community of rationality. For many atheists a crudely scientistic understanding of reason provides an identity, providing membership in a select group—those who have penetrated the veil that blinds the sheeple. Atheism+ may come across as an attack on what many atheists see as either a core value or an important social glue. 

I have no idea how Atheism+ will develop. Right now it is simply a “safe” place for a subset of atheists to thrash out ideas without having their right to do so continually challenged or sabotaged through trolling and harrassment. It may become something more formal, it may not. It may just peter out, although the change it has set in motion will probably continue—it is no longer so easy to ignore the scale of bigotry in the atheist community. 

If Atheism+ continues on the present course of just being a place for progressive atheists to interact, I imagine the overheated rhetoric on the part of established bloggers, etc., will end once they no longer see Atheism+ as having a negative impact on their community and relationships. Debate over issues such as value-neutrality will no doubt continue, but, one hopes, a little more rationally once the fear of communal disruption is alleviated. One always hopes.

Atheism, and atheism with values

I am an atheist, more precisely an agnostic atheist.  Usually I identify as a Humanist for various reasons.  Humanism has a positive ethical stance that replaces religious morality, and there is a little more going on there than talking about how many ways god doesn’t exist.  However, the atheist movement has a much more vigorous on-line presence than Humanism, and is much more given to debates and controversies. More fun than Humanism in some ways, much more unpleasant in others.

I like the vocalness of the New Atheists and that they have undeniably broadened the appeal of atheism. But their critique of religion often veers off into xenophobia and, when it came to Iraq and the “Global War on Terror,” resulted in atheism being associated with some of the most unhinged elements of US politics.  I felt a little more comfortable politically with the Humanist movement than I did with a movement dominated by figures such as Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, and  Sam Harris. 

Atheism obviously did not begin with the New Atheists (although it does for many). Atheism and free-thought have a long history in US Left and progressive history.  But at some point, I am not sure when, US atheism largely lost its leftist ties.  This happened somewhere in the period from the 1920-1960, basically from the Red Scare to McCarthy, when atheism and communism became practically synonymous. As a result, US atheists focused on constitutionally safer issues, primarily church-state separation, and dropped the left-wing politics. Oddly enough, the growing popularity of Ayn Rand may have legitimated atheism in some way, by associating it with right-wing politics. 

The New Atheists’ contribution was latching atheism to science and skepticism, bypassing atheism’s fraught political heritage with a hefty dose of scientific objectivity. This move went a long way to giving atheism a respectability it had always lacked.  The appeal to neutrality, science, and rationality dovetails nicely with middle class attitudes to technical rationality and distrust of political extremism.

However, the illusion of value neutrality, of regarding my own position as the norm or the default from which other people deviate by adding extraneous factors (such as their values) is an old trap, and one that has insidious consequences.  If my culture is the  dominant one, it becomes easy to see my cultural attitudes as the absence of culture, in much the same way that whiteness is seen as the absence of ethnicity. And when I see my cultural assumptions as simply the disinterested functioning of science and rationality, the possibility of debate evaporates. Everyone else is irrational and unscientific. Thus we have the thunderous declamations of the New Atheists about other cultures, particularly the treatment of women in Islam, but deafening silence about women’s issues at in their own culture, a culture which is of course, more rational, scientific and value-neutral than any other. Probably the most infamous example of this is Richard Dawkin’s “Dear Muslima” letter to Rebecca Watson, in which he cynically used the status of Islamic women as a tool to silence Western women. 

This missive was a shocking and unexpected response to Rebecca Watson’s mild comment on the etiquette of picking up women at conferences—”Guys, don’t do that" ("that" being hitting on a lone woman in an elevator at 4:00 AM). It unleashed a completely unproportional firestorm of vituperation that engulfed Watson  and then rapidly expanded to any outspoken woman in the atheist movement.  The scale and fury of the response to such an innocuous statement suggests a resentment that had been building for a while.

Predictably, although I think much to Dawkins et al.’s surprise, the women in question did not shut up, but closed ranks. I cannot begin to cover the ins and outs of the controversy, but the net result is that over past year or so the skeptical and atheist community has been engaged in internecine warfare, primarily over feminism and misogyny, but also racism, homophobia, transphobia, and whether atheism should be involved in social justice issues.  To say the least, the controversy has exposed out a very unpleasant misogynistic streak in the atheist movement, similar to that flushed out of the gaming community by Anita Sarkeesian. 

The sources of this outburst of misogynistic resentment would be well worth analysing at some point. Right now, the reasons and motivations behind the attacks are pretty opaque.  As with any event on the Internet, the communications we see are not even the tip of the iceberg. I can’t deal with the crazy misogynistic end of the spectrum--I am not sure what is going on there. The prevalence of trolling and anonymity don’t make the motivations any clearer. I am not sure many of the attackers know their reasons themselves; they are just reacting. There may well be a Tea Party phenomenon at work here, angry white guys responding to erosion of their privileges as other groups assert their rights. 

A more comprehensible factor may be the changing demographics of a homogeneous, rather clubby, community.  Atheists are not the most diverse group.  There are a lot of reasons for this, many of which have nothing to do with the atheist movement.  Regardless of the reasons, if the atheist movement piled into a big room, it would look like the GOP convention. And sound a lot like it since it shares the same somewhat absurd sense of oppression. It comes across as a white man’s movement with, at best, a bunch of auxiliaries.  One blogger, Natalie Reed, made the interesting observation that atheism serves as an ersatz civil rights movement for white men. They can be rebellious and take a bold stand that, for most atheists, has very few practical consequences (although not always) . For me, Natalie Reed’s observation has a ring of truth.

But this has been changing, the movement has been getting larger and more diverse. Partly this is due to canny use of the internet, but also to historical factors like 9/11, increasing secularity, and the threat of the Christian Right.  As a consequence, people who were not white men became more prominent—young women, such as Rebecca Watson who founded Skepchick, or Jen McCreight of BlagHag, who kicked off Boobquake, a huge p.r. coup for atheism and skepticism. There is an element in the push back of putting upstarts in their place.  

The upshot of the whole debacle has been the launch of Atheism+, a movement that maintains the scientific/skeptical element of the New Atheism but reconnects atheism with social justice (”Atheism+social justice”).  Right now it consists of a forum for people interested in social justice issues to thrash things out without having to deal with a horde of commenters who object to the very idea that these topics are being discussed.

It’s regrettable that it is necessary for a group of atheists to demarcate themselves in this way, but given the situation it is a reasonable, in fact necessary, response.

Cultural Relativism and Skepticism

Will at Skepchick has a nice piece on Franz Boas. I liked what he had to say about cultural relativism, especially given that it is a skeptical blog. 

I know "relativism" is often a dirty word among many skeptics, but I find that this is generally based on a conflation of any kind of "relativism" with "moral relativism." Cultural relativism as introduced by Boas is simply a method of anthropological inquiry that says that the best way to understand why a culture is the way it is (or why people within a society do things in a certain way) is to gain an emic (or insider's) understanding. Cultural relativism as a method is the rejection of ethnocentrism when trying to learn about other societies. Cultural relativism should not be conflated with moral relativism, which is the idea that there are no objective or absolute moral or ethical standards such that morals should never be judged as objectively good or bad. Cultural relativism is a method that seeks to suspend value judgments in order to understand a particular phenomenon. Anthropologists also draw on an eitc (outsider's) understanding, not during the process of data collection but during data analysis and writing the ethnography.

Moral relativism has very little to do with Boasian cultural relativism. Boas himself held very strong views about the morality of racism and human rights. For Boas (and for American anthropologists today), an attempt to approach other cultural systems with dispassionate objectivity (i.e., cultural relativism) did not entail moral disengagement from the world (i.e., moral relativism). In this way, Boasian cultural relativism is an attempt to apply scientific objectivity to the study of human culture.

The skeptics and atheist communities do have a "thing" about cultural relativism. I'd add add two more reasons to Will's observation. 

1) These are movements established around being right about the wrongness of certain beliefs--pseudo-science, alternative medicine, god.  Confronting these beliefs is important.  That's not a point I need to stress.  But it isn't something I consider "fun", at least after a certain point. There is pleasure in demolishing someone with a well rehearsed set of arguments, but I have to admit it is a bit of a douchey pleasure. But there are other engagements with difference, where it is not clear who is right and wrong.  These engagements are rewarding, but in another way.

Anthropology is about this second type of engagement, about understanding people who have different beliefs, rather than proving them wrong.  On a practical level, as a basis for action, understanding why people have obviously wrong beliefs is more useful than simply proving those beliefs wrong over and over.  Right there, that makes anthropology an object of suspicion for many skeptics. For these skeptics, difference entails someone being right and someone being wrong.  I wonder if this attitude might be part of the current skeptical/atheist meltdown over the treatment of people who are different (i.e., not white cisgendered males). 

2) Another problem is the charismatic figures of the skeptic/atheist movement, such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, are not exactly examplars of cultural understanding.  Part of their appeal is the decisiveness and clarity that comes with moral certainty. 

Finally, as Will says, cultural relativism tends to be a huge straw man, being conflated with an undefined  series of "fings wot I don't like"--things like postmodernism, political correctness, and multiculturalism.  This seems to be true even with relatively thoughtful skeptics. 

Most skeptics' understanding of cultural relativism probably comes from these two paragraphs in Dawkin's 1995 book River out of Eden.

There is a fashionable salon philosophy called cultural relativism which holds, in its extreme form, that science has no more claim to truth than tribal myth: science is just the mythology favored by our modern Western tribe. I once was provoked by an anthropologist colleague into putting the point starkly, as follows: Suppose there is a tribe, I said, who believe that the moon is an old calabash tossed into the sky, hanging only just out of reach above the treetops. Do you really claim that our scientific truth-that the moon is about a quarter of a million miles away and a quarter the diameter of the Earth-is no more true than the tribe's calabash? "Yes," the anthropologist said. "We are just brought up in a culture that sees the world in a scientific way. They are brought up to see the world in another way. Neither way is more true than the other."

Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I'll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes built according to scientific principles work. They stay aloft, and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications, such as the dummy planes of the cargo cults in jungle clearings or the beeswaxed wings of Icarus, don't.* If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there-the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field-is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their suns right. Western science, acting on good evidence that the moon orbits the Earth a quarter of a million miles away, using Western-designed computers and rockets, has succeeded in placing people on its surface. Tribal science, believing that the moon is just above the treetops, will never touch it outside of dreams.

[Damn, if nothing else Dawkins is a formidable quotable sound-bite producing machine. Let me tell you, having the basic underpinning of anthropology and archaeology (both fieldwork-oriented disciplines) dismissed as "fashionable salon philosophy," and by Richard Dawkins of all people, is a bracing experience.] 

I realise Dawkin's isn't really making a scholarly argument here, merely pandering to his base, but it still an awesomely ignorant argument. He is making the standard mistake of conflating cultural relativism with epistemological relativism and what is no doubt postmodernism. He does try to put a fig leaf over his nonsense by the use of "in its extreme form" and a rather dubious anecdote, but it is nonetheless an outrageous straw man.

At its core cultural relativism is, as Will notes, an attempt to apply scientific objectivity to the study of human culture. There is some element of at least the popular understanding of moral relativism involved, in that a suspension of moral judgment is required (the content of morality being cultural). Think about it.  In what field does one approach one's object with prejudice (i.e pre-judgement) as a valid tool?  Does a biologist judge some animals as "good" and some as "bad" based on ideology?  Would you take your car to a mechanic who reached decisions based on whether he thought the engine was good or evil?  Probably not.

Anthropology is the study of human variation--cultural, linguistic and physical--across and through time.  Humans are the anthropological object of study. Cultural relativism is the appropriate scientific stance for the study of human variation.  If you disagree with this, then what is the appropriate stance? As a basis for action in the world, explanations like "their beliefs suck" and "they are evil and hate our freedoms" have not worked out so well.  If a group has beliefs we find reprehensible, it is still worthwhile, and practically more useful, to find out why they have those beliefs. 

I will be honest, the fact of the object of anthropology is people complicates things no end. It would not surprise me if Dawkin's anecdote is true.  Anthropologists' "objects" are subjects, who study us back, and we are implicated with them through multiple sets of relations, relations that do not play a role in the considerations of, say, physicists or biologists.  Anthropologists have responsibilities and obligations that other fields do not.  There is debate within the field as to what cultural relativism means beyond being an objective perspective. But if you are going to take issue with cultural relativism as something other than a neutral stance for the study of human difference, you then need to be explicit about who you are talking about and what their arguments are.  Cutesy anecdotes about anonymous anthropologists are not useful.
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References cited

Dawkins, Richard
1995  A River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life.  BasicBooks, New York, NY.

Archaeology and the Holocaust

Sobibór 2008: areas of mass graves in the open field around the

ash mound, as defined by deeper green hues in the vegetation
(courtesy of Paul Bauman, Worley Parsons).
(Gilead et al. 2010: Fig. 16)

 I've been wondering when someone would start doing archaeology on the Nazi death camps.  It seems that time has come.  A team of Israeli archaeologists has been working at the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland since 2007.  There has actually been some investigatory work prior to then at Chelmno (1986) and  Belzec and at Sobibor in 19997-1999. Most of the work was prior to the actual camps being converted to memorials, in the process destroying the remains. 

The archaeologists, Yoram Haimi, Isaac Gilead, and Wojciech Mazurek have a more detailed article that is available on line, Excavating Nazi Extermination Centers, which is well worth reading. 

My first thought was the archaeology would be evidence against Holocaust denial, but the authors note that this is unrealistic.  The ephemeral and disturbed remains that archaeology will reveal are unlikely to persuade those who find the substantial remains of Auschwitz and Majdanek unconvincing. Given what we are starting to understand about denialism, I think they are right. 

Archaeology won’t rewrite the Holocaust, and it may not add much to the overall history.  We will certainly learn more about camp layouts and the locations of buildings, such as the gas chambers.  And we will learn something of the things that people took with them on their final journey.  These treasured personal items can tell new stories about the people who went into Sobibor.  To be in presence of items that participated in events like the Holocaust is extremely powerful. The past is no longer an abstraction, but a material reality.   It is not necessarily rational, but it is something we have all experienced, and is a large part of the appeal of archaeology.

The camps are under threat by looting. This shouldn’t surprise me, but it still does. The locals around the camps  have been working over the areas looking for valuables since the end of the war.  They cite an article from the Gazeta Wyborcza titled “Gold Rush in Treblinka.”  The link they gave no longer works, but this article, “The Treblinka Gold Rush”  (Gross 2012) covers the topic as well.  Metal detectorists had been digging at Sobibor a couple of days before the archaeologists got there. I despise looters, all archaeologists do, but this is something else. The Austrlian has another example of the looting of Nazi-era sites, in this case German graves for the Nazi memorabilia market.

Interestingly, another threat to these sites is heritage tourism and memorialization.  An enormous monument now covers the entire camp at Belzec.  Beautification at Chelmno also destroyed a substantial part of of the camp.

Pawlicka-Nowak (2004a: 15) describes the activities in the early 1960s in the mass graves area of Chełmno in the Rzuchów forest:

Bulldozers, deep plowing with forest plows, making the terrain more beautiful by planting bushes and trees, concrete roads, all this obliterated the traces of the centre’s operation still visible during those years.

On another note, the authors are working on a politically charged topic.  Looking at the comments where this article has been posted, and considering my own conversations about the article highlights the intertwining of present and past.  The conversations and comment threads slide  immediately into the policies of the modern state of Israel and questions of the archaeologists’ motivations in studying the Holocaust, as if studying the Holocaust is an argument for Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
The Holocaust is a “useful history.” All histories are, that’s why we remember them. But we  need to balance what we want from a history with what actually happened—to accept that people, including those in the past, act for their own reasons, not ours. The past did not happen as a result of today’s political interests.  When we forget that, we are no better than David Barton.

There are only hints of controversy in the articles.  Orthodox Jews felt the use of a mechanical auger to identify mass graves was desecratory.  Another aspect is the feeling that the camps should not be interfered with or studied at all.  Commemoration of the Holocaust is fraught with conflicting claims and interpretations, and is a worthy topic of study in its own right (e.g., Dwork and van Pelt 1993; Linenthal 1995; Young 1989, 1993).

I remember being struck by Edward Linenthal’s (1995) account of Holocaust survivors being consulted about the Holocaust Museum being agitated by some of the practices of museum curation, such as assigning accession numbers.  If I remember correctly, the human hair was a particularly difficult topic.  I wonder how well the numbering and gridding and careful tracking of archaeology might be perceived.   I hope at some point it will be possible for the archaeologists to discuss the negotiations around their work. 
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References cited
Dwork, Deborah, and Robert Jan van Pelt
1993    Reclaiming Auschwitz. In Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, Geoffrey H. Hartman, editor, pp. 232–251. Oxford, Blackwell.

Gilead, Isaac, Yoram Haimi, and Wojciech Mazurek
2010     Excavating Nazi Extermination Centres. Present Pasts 1(0). http://presentpasts.info/index.php/pp/article/view/2. Accessed 2012-08-25 13:15:24

Gross, Jan T.
2012     The Gruesome Story of Polish Peasants Hunting for Riches at Former Nazi Death Camps. Tablet Magazine. May 21. http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/99982/the-treblinka-gold-rush.  Accessed 2012-08-22 17:52:17

Linenthal, Edward
1995    Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum. New York, NY, Penguin Books.

Moody, Oliver
2012     Grave Robbers Loot Nazi Memorabilia. The Australian. August 20. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/grave-robbers-loot-nazi-memorabilia/story-e6frg6so-1226454012622. Accessed 2012-08-21 17:29:24

Young, James E.
1989    The Biography of a Memorial Icon: Nathan Rapoport’s Warsaw Ghetto Monument. Representations 26:69–106.

1993    The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press.

Niall Ferguson, history, and punditry

It looks as if Niall Ferguson has been caught being a bad boy, lying about his evidence, and for a Newsweek cover story no less!  I never paid much attention to him. It's one thing to have an ideological slant, we all do, but it's another to be a courtier.   Ferguson crossed that line long ago, becoming just another political pundit, but with history as his shtick. He's basically Victor Davis Hanson for the New Yorker set.

Eric Zeusse, an "investigative historian" (I wish I'd known about that job when I was making career choices), discusses the rarefied world of star pundits in relation to Fareed Zakaria.  We've known that some pundits have staffs working for them ever since the revelations about George Will and his "quote boys."  It is reasonable to have staff to do research, but the volume of material that star pundits produce suggests the staff duties often extend to ghost-writing.  Fareed Zakaria may not have actually been the one who plagiarized, although he will certainly never admit this.  

I would like to be charitable and assume that, like Fareed Zakaria, Ferguson probably got caught up in the punditry machine.  I imagine the pressure of producing reams of politically submissive opinion and analysis, often on areas outside one's expertise, on deadline will wear anyone down.   However, he is accused of lying about and manipulating the evidence.  This has no potential to be explained away by lack of research, carelessness, or sloppy note-taking under pressure.

If the allegations are justified (and they are about matters of fact), The Daily Beast and Newsweek should sack him...and invest in fact-checking departments. However, it is unrealistic to expect Harvard to do the same. It is possible Ferguson's alleged behaviour as a pundit does not extend to his scholarly work, although this work would have to now be treated with caution.  Whether Harvard wants faculty that have been rejected by The Daily Beast is up to them.