Yeah, I'm back

One thing about central Illinois' summer weather: it's less monotonous than southern Oklahoma's. (Though this year hasn't been TOO bad here, but it looks like I got back in time for the onslaught of heat). But up in Illinois, we got a couple of rainy overcast days, a thunderstorm, some nice bright days, a couple of hot days....monotonous weather gets me down, I think that's why I don't like summer here most years.

As is typical, pictures of finished items will come later on, when my camera charges back up. (Next week is also going to be a mess; it's the Week of All Meetings and so I will probably be involved from 8 am until 3 or later, and exhausted outside of those times).

I guess I'm looking forward to fall semester. My schedule is not as awful as I had anticipated (no PI labs) but I am doing the team-teaching of GIS for zero load and therefore consider myself as not getting paid for it. (We are salaried, so really, we do what we need to do until the work is done...but if I were the instructor of record I'd get two credit hours for it and therefore adjunct pay on top of my regular pay, but). I have already decided that I am permitting myself to pull out the old "Crying? There's no crying in GIS!" line if someone gets upset. (We have, several years going, had someone come in who was inexperienced/computer phobic, or else someone who needed their hand held for every little thing, and yes, there have been tears in the past (Not mine.)

Also, it's a 5 to 7 pm class, which, while I understand that is useful for people in the workforce, if it were up to me? I'd ban evening classes. Or at least ban the expectation that faculty teach them unless they are DYING to. Once I month I will have to eat my dinner at 4:30 pm. (Early bird special!) as I have AAUW and that can go until 9 pm....and as it is, I will have to leave GIS early for it.

***

I finished the book on Cahokia and read most of the Brian Fagan book ("The First North Americans"). Fagan seems to hypothesize more (which I thought was dangerous in archaeology) about motivations of the people and stuff. But one thing....the idea that many have of Native American life being some kind of Edenic perfection of peace and being in "harmony" with the land isn't entirely (or even mostly, for some groups) true. (Fagan also suggests that in some of the later tribes, once they got horses and therefore were more mobile, they became very warlike and essentially raided their agricultural neighbors). But one thing Fagan kept bringing up for many of the different groups (especially the Pacific Northwest peoples), and which Pauketat hints at, is that "rank and status" were incredibly important.

Perhaps one of the side effects of reading pop-archaeology as a novice is that it does make you side-eye your own culture a bit. In the tribes Fagan studied, he hypothesizes that the people who had "rank and status" were either:

1. Charismatic individuals who could convince others that they 'deserved' to be the leaders
2. Good peacemakers, people who could listen and use wisdom and do things like negotiate how resources would be used
or
3. People who were particularly gifted in some skill deemed important

Hm. I don't see so very many of #2 gaining "rank and status" in our culture, but #1  could be either your average politician or your average celebrity, and #3 would clearly be the pop singers and athletes - though in the peoples Fagan wrote about, being a shaman/healer or a craftsperson or perhaps someone very gifted at figuring out when the seals were migrating were the kinds of skills that actually mattered.

(Then again - would people in the #2 group necessarily WANT "rank and status?" I've known a lot of wise people who have gifts in getting arguing parties to shut up and actually listen to each other, and most of them seem happier unrecognized in the background).

Also, Pauketat, in his discussion of the ancient city of Cahokia seems to imply that it almost might have been sort of a despotic system....there are remains of "peasant farmers" from outlying areas who didn't seem to get enough of the right things to eat, and who may have been there essentially as slaves. Pauketat also notes that the whole Cahokia system collapsed (or seemed to; at least, people moved away from the city and seemed to abandon it) after a couple of centuries. (Despotic systems may be inherently unstable. And also, that perhaps explains the human sacrifice...a despot could want to exercise control by either a "look what I can do if you step out of line" or by getting rid of all the "pretenders to the throne")

I don't know. I get somewhat the same feeling reading this as I get (oddly enough) from reading the Pauline letters....a mixture of relief and frustration. Relief in the sense that we're not, perhaps, seeing some rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem as the dismaying news comes out in the world. But also frustration, in that some not-quite-2000 years have passed (in the case of Paul), or about 1000 years have passed (in the case of Cahokia), and we've still not figured out how not to screw up living in community with one another...