Neanderthal innovation at tonight's Denver Café Scientifique

Hiya folks! Yes, I'm still alive, but have been incredibly, incredibly busy, a business that shows no sign of abating until December 11. Why December 11? It's when I'm hosting the Front Range Neanderthal Workshop on the UC Denver campus! But more on that in a but.

Focusing on the here and now, tonight, December 6 2010, at 6:30PM, I'm presenting an overview of some of my recent research on Neanderthal innovation and niche construction as part of the Denver Café Scientifique series. In their words, at the

"Café Scientifique, people (often science buffs) come together in a friendly pub after work and hear an informal (no PowerPoint!) introduction to an interesting current scientific topic, led by an expert. We take a short break for refreshments, to meet new people, and chat, and then we return for questions and answers and general discussion. All questions and comments are welcome, as this isn't a seminar, it's a chance for all of us to express an opinion, expert or otherwise."

So this is a non-technical talk (and powerpoint-free, to boot!) geared to an educated, but non-specialist audience. The talk's titled "So Easy a Caveman Could Do It: Neanderthals Innovated Independent of Modern Humans." So if Neanderthals float your boat, or if you'd like to learn about them, by all means, come down. The event is free and open to the public, at it starts at 6:30PM at Brooklyn's, just North of the UC Denver campus. So if any Denver-area readers want to come and meet, I'll be there and would love to meet you!

PS: To the readers who left comments on my post about my recent JAMT paper, thank you! I haven't forgotten about you, and I'm hoping to be able to provide replies in short order.

Todd Surovell - Late Pleistocene Megafaunal Extinction talk at UC Denver, Friday Sept. 24

This Friday, September 24, 2010 (at 4:00PM in AD 200), the UC Denver Department of Anthropology is hosting a colloquium by Todd Surovell on Late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions in North America. Details below.

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The Associational Critique and the Late Pleistocene Extinction of North American Megafauna

Todd A. Surovell
Associate Professor
Dept. of Anthropology, University of Wyoming

Abrstract

Humans first arrived in North America approximately 14,000 years ago. Over the next two millennia, some 35 genera of Pleistocene megafauna suffered extinction. While it is tempting to see causality in this chronological correlation, after more than 80 years of fieldwork concerning the Pleistocene human occupation of the Americas, we can only demonstrate with confidence that humans hunted at most five species of extinct fauna. Fundamentally then, we must ask if it is possible that humans caused the extinction of some 35 genera of large mammals but left behind very little evidence of that act? This question is at the heart of what I call the "Associational Critique" of the overkill hypothesis. Critics of overkill argue that anthropogenic extinction will remain highly controversial until unambiguous material evidence of human hunting of a large number of taxa is discovered. In contrast, I will argue that a huge amount of circumstantial evidence points to humans as the primary causal agents of extinction, and that the associational critique puts forth unrealistic if not impossible requirements for the overkill hypothesis to fulfill.

Friday, September 24, 2010 – 4:00PM

Room AD 200 (Administration Bldg., 1201 5th St.)

Hosted by the

UC Denver Department of Anthropology

AIA Denver Lecture - Linda Scott Cummings

The Denver Chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America is hosting a lecture by Dr. Linda Scott Cummings of the PaleoResearch Institute, Inc. this coming Sunday, January 24. It will take place at the Tattered Cover bookstore downtown, at 2:00PM. Details below.

“Delving into the Mystery of the Visible, Nearly Visible, and Invisible Records of PaleoEnvironment and PaleoSubsistence at Archaeological Sites"

Linda Scott Cummings, PhD
Tattered Cover Bookstore (1668 16th Street, Denver, CO), 2:00PM

Understanding the environmental setting in which people have lived is critical to understanding any people. So, too, does our picture of diet color our opinion of people of the past? Both combine to build a picture of the past as “real people” who lived in well-defined time and space.

2009 Loveland Stone Age Fair

I unfortunately won't be able to attend this, but I encourage everyone living in the Front Range with an interest in prehistory to attend the 75th (!) edition of the Stone Age Fair, in Loveland, CO this coming weekend, Sept. 26-27. From a short feature in the Denver Post:

Everything on exhibit is from private collections and institutions, including a pre-eminent display of points from the Smithsonian Institution.

"And everything is legally obtained, all these fantastic collections that have come in from all over the country," says Andy Coca, president of the Loveland Archaeological Society, which sponsors the fair.

Coca is keenly sensitive to the problem of black-market artifact sales like the federal investigation that recently sentenced two Utah women for stealing more than 800 Indian relics.

The events will include a flintknapping demonstration by Bob Patten, as well as lectures by several Paleoindian archaeologists: Jason Labelle (From the High Country to the Hogbacks to the High Plains: Prehistoric Lifeways in the Cache la Poudre River Basin, Northern Colorado), Mike Waters (The First Americans: A View from the Gault and Buttermilk Creek Sites, Texas), Pegi Jodry (Sacred Perspectives from Horn Shelter) and Dennis Stanford (Probing the Past: Seeking New Paleolithic Paradigms). If any readers of this blog attend, I'd love to hear some feedback about the whole thing.

More information can be found at the Stone Age Fair website.

Ed Wilmsen lecture

The Dept. of Anthropology and the Center for Society, Technology and Development at McGill University are sponsoring a talk by Ed Wilmsen (UT - Austin), famous for his 198 book Land full of Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari, and for his spearheading in part the 'revisionist' side of the 'Kalahari Debate' over the past 25 years. This is an especially timely talk, since this very debate was discussed in my seminar last week (as discussed here).

Wilmsen will be talking about “Globalization before the globe: Regulation of intercontinental trade in southern Africa, ca. CE 700-1800.” Here's the abstract

In this paper, I engage a social geography in order to map the processes by which intercontinental trade was regulated in interior southern Africa during the 8th-15th centuries. This region was at that time part of an early form of "globalization" encompassing the entire Indo-Pacific province as well as the Islamic caliphates of the eastern Mediterranean. There are no written records for or from this interior region until the beginning of the 16th century when Portuguese captured the Swahili trading entrepôts on the east coast and began to penetrate into the interior. Other forms of evidence must be adduced to illuminate the social processes active in the interior in the centuries I am considering. Material artifacts are a prime source of evidence for this task, for, I contend, they have the same ontological status as words. Drawing on the works of Locke, Marx and Engels, Simmel, and Veblen I argue that, marked by distinct intentions of their makers and users, material artefacts are potentially as comprehensible as verbal documents. With these premises set forth, I turn to the scope of early Indo-Pacific commodity exchange, then to an overview of the southern African landscape, and finally to episodes of origin mythology widespread in the region. From this I specify certain minimum components of a structure of rights to possession of things, rules governing who may inherit specific things, rules governing movement of these things, rules governing who may handle them, and rules governing processes of their valuation.

It's open to everyone, so if you're in the Montreal area next week and are interested in those issues, you should definitely try to attend! The whole thing takes place Monday, January 28, 2008, (12:30-2:00PM), in Room 738 of the Leacock Building, McGill University.