Category Archives: Sources of Inspiration

Thoughtful comments, links, and original content designed to inspire discussion about all things archaeology-related.

Burial Grounds, Archaeological Sites, and the Oil Pipeline

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Chief George Thurman

This article by Katie Fretland of the Associated Press serves as a reminder that the lands that we live and build on today have been lived, built, and died on by other people for millennia. The Keystone XL oil pipeline is meant to improve the United States’ oil transportation system, the whole thing extending from Canada to the Gulf Coast. The pipeline is already a contentious topic among people who are concerned about its impact on the environment, but there are others who have concerns as well. This article focuses on the concerns of Chief George Thurman of the Sac and Fox Nations, specifically that the portion of the pipeline running from Oklahoma to Texas will interfere with Native American burial sites. He and others believe that there might be unmarked graves in the proposed route of the pipeline.

TransCanada, the company in charge of building the pipeline, does have archaeologists to help determine when historical sites, artifacts, or graves might lie in the path of construction. They claim that construction ceases when any such sites are found, and that when they find a site, they then work with the relevant tribes or concerned parties to figure out how the situation should be handled. In Oklahoma alone, seventy archaeological sites have already been identified in the preliminary survey of the area where the pipeline is to be built. It will be interesting to see what is unearthed during construction, and whether any compromises are made on TransCanada’s part if, in fact, burial sites are uncovered.

Viktor Deak and Visual Science

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Per this week’s readings on the power of visuals, I thought I’d post something about paleoartist Viktor Deak:

Homo rudolfensis, Viktor Deak

Deak has created innumerable models of early humans for museums around the world, and has been featured in NOVA’s human origins documentary, Becoming Human. He works with sculpture and digital imaging, often combining mediums to get the hyper-realism he desires (e.g. taking a picture of a sculpture and then photo-editing in minor details). His computer models have also been used to as starting points for simulating the movements of the specimens in question. Deak always begins his work by examining the physical fossil remains, then works his way upwards from a cast of the fossils, laying on muscle structure, cartilage, and finishing up with skin, eyes, and hair. He defines his work as inherently grounded in science: “If there’s no science to begin with, we unfortunately don’t get to do any art.” (New York Times, Envisioning Our Distant Past, 2009)*

However, just from his murals and landscapes (such as the series “Lucy’s World”), it is evident see that human origins as a concept captured Deak’s imagination in a thoroughly un-scientific way, and this (though, far be it from me to pass judgment) is a good thing. In this sense, Deak’s work connects back to our discussion of the power of creative agency and imagination in creating formative epistemologies, even if the modes of learning we are discussing are purely visual. You can’t hypothesize about what something looks like unless you know how to hypothesize (that is, imagine) what something might look like. As colonized archaeology takes away the ability to create new trains of logic from material evidence by limiting the archaeologist’s scope before they even get to the dig, science that is grounded in reiteration and rearticulation without imagination is inevitably a regurgitation of the same information. Thus, imagination becomes a mode of “enskilment”. (Perry 2009)

Neandertals, Viktor Deak

Deak’s own fascination with his subject material is telling in regard to the ways museum practice and archaeological displays capture the hearts and imagination of the public: “Once the eyes are in the face and there’s a face on that thing, I feel as if there’s a chasm of time that’s eliminated. I wish I could travel in time to look at these things, but I can’t. [recall Bolter and Grosin’s discussions of immediacy] So the best thing I can do is to try to bring them to us.” (NOVA, Building Faces From Fossils, 2009; embedded below)**

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*If you choose to watch this interview, be forewarned of the New York Times’ choice of a didgeridoo for representing a “pre-modern human ambiance”.

**Come to think of it, this soundtrack is pretty jarring as well.