not sure if i'm flogging a dead horse here or drawing a line in the sand -
        the whole phenotype debate and all this stuff about caucasian features
on an old skeleton really just goes back to variation within population, doesn't
 
it? statistics 101... until we have more than a single individual and until we
have obviously european grave goods (where is that strange greek guy when we
need him? isn't this obviously an example of hellenistic colonization of what is
 
now washington state?) it's strictly an "outlier" or statistical anomaly or
whatever - curiosity, but not really all that interesting (to me, at any rate;
let the statisticians fight it out, let the forensic jockeys recalibrate or
recalculate their indices or whatever it is they do in such cases)
        the implications of the debate - neonazis crawling out of the woodwork
and even the suits and/or countersuits with native groups and everyone and/or
everything - seem to indicate to me that we are - as archaeologists, as
serious scientists and/or as professionals and/or whatever it is we think we are
 
and/or think we are doing - just aren't selling ourselves -
        everyone complains when the press misreports our excavations - turns
your 14th century iroquois longhouse into the lost palace of the northern incas
- or when they seize on one little detail (caucasoid features) and makes
something like the kennewick controversy -
        how much of that is our own fault? we're in it for the truth and the
science and because we just plain love to get our hands dirty - to some degree
we tend to despise the press because they do tend to get so much of it wrong so
often - and because they're in it for the money, not truth - but because they
are in it for the money, there is the tendency to try to make a story out of
everything - make it exciting - because if it isn't exciting, the editor will
put in a picture of a girl in a bikini instead, and the reporter will get fired
for wasting time...
        hyperbole, i know, but: do we really take the time and the effort to
educate the public? here in germany i still think you'd find that erich von
daniken probably outsells all works on archaeology combined - and the bastard
still goes on lecture tours every year... sure he's selling snake oil, but he's
selling stuff that people want to hear - if we're selling truth and reality and
that doesn't sell, it could just be that we aren't selling our product or
ourselves right... a reporter or just any member of the general public comes to
your site and what does he/she see? a few dirty pot sherds - and for this we're
wasting all that tax money and/or blocking redevelopment? try saying "oh,
they're 500 or 5000 years old" and they just shrug and say, yeah, so? i was a
bit angry at a co-worker's defence of our excavation this last summer: "the
people of this town have a right to know about their own history" doesn't really
 
cut it when someone from that town is complaining that he's going out of
business because his customers can't drive to his pizzeria because our
excavation had been blocking the street for too long - his pizzeria was more
important than whether or not the moat depicted on 17th century documents really
 
had existed or not, and whether it had first been dug out in the 14th or 15th
century - maybe we have to come down out of our ivory towers and explain things
in ways that people understand and relate to: not just "500 or 5000 years old"
but "this is part of a cooking pot; someone broke this and threw away the
pieces; there were no metal pots or pans in those days..."
        someone was talking
about "telling a story" in relation to one of the conferences a few months back
- and i don't think we need to turn everything into disneyland/york, but i do
think we need to make a little more of an effort at communicating - i somehow
imagine all the palaeolithic and other lithic folk have it easier because
they're already used to dealing with ideas like mental templates and trying to
follow/plot the design/manufacture/use of a nice clovis point or acheulian
handaxe - the amount of time and effort involved in manufacture, and what
loss/breakage represents in that sense - trade patterns revealed by sourcing the
 
materials, kill/butchery techniques, etc. - all very physical and visual,
showing how flakes were pressure/percussion/bi-polared away... the rest of us
get excited by fibulae or bits of broken pottery - we know what they represented
 
in terms of prestige/expense/trade or just plain peasant poverty, but try
telling that to the great unwashed: everything is disposable nowadays, and
mass-produced; we're talking about people who didn't have money, who maybe had
just one pot, who couldn't afford to replace it when it broke... and ok, we too
get cynical and just look at it all as being so many rims, so many bases... but
that doesn't help either educating or bringing the great unwashed over to our
side -
        i don't know - i don't think there are any easy solutions - but i have
trouble with the idea of just blaming the press or blaming either the stupidity
or gullibility of the general public shifts too much of the burden off of our
shoulders - the way we despise the press and/for their mistakes might just be
compounding the problem: do we take the effort to inform them about and correct
their mistakes when they're in print? in cases like this kennewick skeleton, do
we make enough of an effort to explain our methods (explain the fact that this
is going to cause a debate, that physical anthropologists are going to argue
about phenotypes and length/width indices, and... the facts of variation, the
facts about statistics, the facts about the very nature of scientific
investigation and analysis and interpretation and... possibly our own
shortcomings), or are we too busy trying to get a quick soundbite, a nice
headline, to sound assured and in control and as if we know what it is that we
are doing and talking about because we are experts and that is the image we must
 
present to the public...?
        my argument seems to have turned full circle here: from abusing to using
the press (when it suits our purpose) - and i really think we need to fight on
both fronts: correct them when they're wrong, but at the same time make a
concerted effort to have our stories told: if neonazis are wilfully
misinterpreting our misquoted press releases, we should make correct the
misquotes, and fight the nazis - we may think its beneath our dignity to argue
with the likes of erich von daniken or the aryan nations or whichever branch of
the lunatic fringe ventures to rear its ugly heads at any given juncture over
any given discovery, but their propaganda is ultimately winning the war for the
hearts and minds of Mr and Mrs John Q Public - who will continue to ask you
inane questions about brontasaurus and UFOs and the hellenic settlement of
washington state unless we tell them otherwise... and OK, so scraping up
potsherds isn't quite the same as Raiders of the Lost Ark, but there is a lot of
 
drama in this debate over kennewick - there is a hell of a lot of human interest
 
in a hell of a lot of the sites i've been reading about from the hist-arch list
(chinese labour camps, dating to the building of the railways; slave housing
down in the american south, etc.) and how does that differ, really, from what
sherlock holmes and columbo and quincy do all the time, or all the "real life"
docu-dramas and talkshows and homevideo shows and whatnot on TV - there is drama
 
and conflict there in the material and in the debates - there are very real,
very human stories in the artifacts - and that's why we love archaeology, isn't
it? - but people won't see that until we step away from behind the jargon and
all the statistics... why it matters to them and why what we're saying is more
important and even more interesting than neonazi or alien-conspiracy lies...
        in an age of spindoctors and media consultants and i don't know what
else, we're definitely not ready for the big league - i suggest we take a look
at what greenpeace and some of the other environmental activists are doing and
have done, and learn a few lessons about how to deal with big time developers
and their big time lawyers, legislators, lobbyists, native groups, other public
interests, and the "opposition" (how to counter disinformation campaigns, etc.)
- i don't know how we should organize, or where we'll get the financing, or
anything like that, but i do think we should at least start to rethink our white
 
gloves, mamby-pamby ivory tower idealism and begin to face (and fight) the real
world...
        as i said, a line in the sand; dunno if it hasn't all been said and
argued and flogged about a thousand times or more, but... gonna do anything
about it?
 
geoff carver
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