SHA

I think I'm going to go to this.
It's a SHA conference that's held annually. This year it's in Sacramento.

The professor from ECU (East Carolina University) recommended that I should go, stating all sorts of opportunities for networking.
I guess it'll be worth the cost.
That and I get some time off from that horrid thing called work.

Even though it's called the Society for Historical Archaeology, it's also coupled with underwater archaeology.
Nathan Richards, the professor I've been in contact with is presenting (or at least involved with a presented paper on Friday, January the 13th.

I better get my tickets soon...

5th D

I went on over to my dive shop Saturday.
I'm part of a yahoo group that receives emails from a buddy list.
One of the emails was the owner promoting a sale, so i thought i'd head down on the last day, Saturday.

i get there and no one's in the store, not even the owner. so i check some shit out until the owner comes in. i tell him what i'm looking for and he plops it out on the glass counter: 2 scouts.
these are back-up lights for the primary light that i don't quite yet own.
they strap on to your chest straps that hold the BC to your body.

but then the owner and i start BSing. he shows me videos of some of his 250+ feet dives.
tells me of his 320 foot dive (his deepest), and other crazy stories about people stealing coordinates for wreck sites to sell to other losers.

i proceeded to ask him about other emails. a diver he knew died in florida while he was using a rebreather. these are devices that 'scrubs' the exhaled CO2 back into useable O2. i guess the problem was that the guy was using a closed-circut type that can sometimes get fucked up from the salt water. as mark, the owner said: electical wiring + salt water = death.
he says that he'd never use them and only condones their use when hauling a shit ton of gas isn't an option.
like when the founders of GUE went 40,000 feet into an underwater cave system in florida.
but i guess there's semi-closed circuts that aren't totally reliant on all that electrical mess.

the conversation moved to "The Life Aquatic".
Apparently when mark was first getting into diving, he worked at underwater sports. and during this time, Jaque Cousteau came up and did a documentary in the Puget Sound about octopuses. Mark got to dive with him; one of those god-like figures that's like a dream come true.

well. come to find out, mark learned that Jaque was really quite the asshole and treated his crew and son like shit. his son started to make a name for himself in Fiji, until his father promptly sued him for rights to their surname.
it was also said that his wife was the brains behind the outfit (as seems to be the case for many couples, i.e. the Leakey's of Australopithecine fame [Lucy, ring any bells?]). yet by the time Cousteau reached his 70's, he dumped that wife of his for some hotter, much younger girl.
go Frenchie!
coming back to Life Aquatic, mark said that whoever wrote the film did an excellent job of pegging cousteau and must have known the man intimately/first hand.

so not only did i get to hear all these interesting details, but i'm realizing that slowly i'm starting to integrate myself into the 5th dimension social scene.

it started with mark who i initially met and didn't think much of until i came back again, got some info, paid for a class, and my third time back he recognized me.
he introduced me to Cory, my dive buddy who's out from knee surgery.
Cory introduced me to Cam.
When taking my fundamentals class, i met Steve, who on our second day of diving brought along Laura.
she was the one who filmed our shoddy diving.
then during this conversation with mark about cousteau, etc, i met this other guy named Bones.

the only reason why i'm mentioning all this is because these four dove together to create this short edited film.
it's small, and of questionable quality, but you get the idea.
it gets better as it goes on.

the other major player in the 5th D diving scene is Walter.
he's the head of SCRET and dives, at least annually, with mark on all the major, deep-dive wrecks in Lake Washington and the Sound (200+ footers) as the camera man.
He seems rather friendly and gave me some pointers on contructing my BC.
He's probably a good person to know.

Anyway. i'm glad that i'm gradually getting put into this social arena.
it's also very comforting to hear everyone i meet offering to dive with me even though i'm still very unadapted to the water.
they always seem to have helpful info on gear as well.
i'm glad i found this place.
it almost makes me question whether i want to leave for school or just pursue more diving classes.

wreck

the next time you're rolling across 520 to seattle, take a look to your right.
there's shit way down there: 170 - 200 feet.

DIR

ok. well. i don't really know what to say about my class.
what i can inform you about is how good of a class i think it was.
anyone who's really serious about diving needs to skip all the other people out there who will just teach you the basics for recreational purposes.

this class drives home the idea of neutral buoyancy: hovering in one spot and maintaining that postion while undertaking a task.

it's so much easier said than done. for instance, in my open water class that wasn't through 5th dimension/GUE, they had you kneel on the pool bottom while removing your mask and replacing it back in postion. simple.
in the GUE class, they have you hovering about a foot or so from the bottom of the Sound, so when you eventually get your mask reapplied, you can either see how much silt you've kicked up, or you can see how much you've risen in the short amount of time it took you to put the mask back on. it's daunting. you think to yourself that you remain stationary, but when you regain visibility, all your classmates are 10 feet below you!

the other thing i liked about this DIR class is like i said, they teach buoyancy control, but also streamlinedness. on saturday, as seen when looking at my pictures, there are tons of people diving in our same location. however, where we have every possible entanglement tucked away or removed, almost everyone else there (i wish i had an example) had snorkels, octopuses, lights, SPGs, and other such objects wildly flailing and ready to impose its ability as a snagging hazard and ultimately a killer (if used properly).

this mentality spawned from the two co-founders of GUE, who were pioneers in cave diving.
they teach this streamlinedness not only for ease of movement in the water, but also, of course, safety; caves can hold some tight squeezes.
with safety in mind, they also teach the rule of thirds, where you should always return to the surface with a least a third of your air.
the reasoning behind this is to suppose that even if your buddy runs out of air, that after you've dove using a third of your air, you head back, so both you and your buddy will have a third of the tank for the return journey.
in open water, this isn't so serious, as you can just surface in an emergency, but in a wreck or cave, this is vital.

again, with caves in mind, they teach a style of transport that i've never seen before. basically, you hold your body totally horizontal (ok, not that novel), but with your legs bent at the knees.
so you look something like: Z____0
supposing that the 'Z' was your legs and the 'o' your head.
from there, they teach a frog kick or modified flutter kick, which basically keeps the kick from pushing downward and instead pushes it backward, offering better propulsion.
not only does this work to improve efficiency in movement, but it prevents the stirring up of silt.

but the greatest realization that i think this class gave me was with respect to buoyancy.
when i took my initial plunge, i thought that the BC (buoyancy control/vest [actually wing now, in my case]) was the sole means for controlling buoyancy.
boy was i wrong! it does a great deal of work, and is definitely needed when you initially descend so you don't crash into the bottom, but once in a position where you want to be, just breathing itself can significantly displace your depth.

taking a deeper breath, while still maintaining your breathing, but just keeping your lungs more full, will actually put you on an ascent to the surface until you exhale enough air to regain your stability.
the same goes for exhalation. if you're too high and want to drop a few feet, just breathe out more air, yet still maintaining your breathing, but with less overall volume in your lungs.

it's amazing how effective it is.
for one of the dives, after an initial fill of my BC, i only used breathing to control my depth. it worked rather well. the only time i really needed to dump air was when i got really shallow on an upward slope. (in waters about 10' - 15', that slight change can greatly increase the air pressure held in your BC, which is one of the reasons why GUE prefers to test in shallow water, not to mention safety.)

what more can i say?
this class exponentially increased my knowledge of diving.
i also got to meet a woman (the one who filmed us) who has been deep diving since before it actually had a lot of the safer technology that we take for granted today (and she's only 30 something! she co-owned her own dive shop when she was 19!)

which reminds me:
the filming was also integral to my learning experience.
after the first dive, i realized how wildly i was sculling the water to keep neutrally buoyant.
the second day of diving i set out to kill that habit.
i thought i had done a very good job of it, but the camera told otherwise.
dammit!

so once again that's my biggest problem. buoyancy.
i'll have to get in more dives and just practice.
hopefully this fatty bruise that should appear on my right thigh any day now won't hinder my progress too much.

damn, diving is cool.
it's just so crazy how hard "good" diving is.
it's like learning to walk all over again.
cuz i guess to an extent it is like flying, just in water.

the right positioning, muscle use, and proper air use all contribute to maintaining buoyancy.
if any of those are slightly off, you have yourself a problem.

FUCK, I NEED A DRY SUIT.
i think my diving experience would be even that much more enjoyable.
the wet suit i really don't mind when in the water.
it's the being totally wet on the windy surface that's the killer.
that and it takes FOREVER to get out of a wet wet suit, which of course leaves you exposed to the elements even longer.

Bag Bowl

Holy crap! Bag Bowl rocked my nuts.
good times playing, but i got a nice knee to the thigh that's got me limping.
thanks, Calen.

last weekend had nearly the same effect.
total exhaustion.
i put up some pictures, but when i have more time or am less tired, i'll describe my scuba class in detail.

in the set you can see the underwater camcorder they used to show us how much we suck.
apparently my kicks are good when i'm buoyant. otherwise i look retarded.

Adovasio

I'm reading more of Jim Adovasio's book, and I'm actually to the part where he's describing his own field work
(took him about 120 pages, but you know, that's cool).
Anyway, the man's fieldwork is so fucking detailed.
You compare it to what we did at Broken Mammoth and it's like using a bulldozer vs a toothbrush to move dirt.

We only looked for rather large items (unless it came to debitage, small rock chippings) whereas Adovasio looked for pollen and other such deterrioratable objects, such as baskets and weavings (his specialty).

What this is making it look like though, is a much better argument for the legitamacy for the site.
Many people chalk up bad dates to contaminated coal flowing through the rockshelter, but Adovasio talks his way out of it saying that the people doing it were the best in the country and that he has multiple (11) that was much more that most sites at that time could boast.
I'm still looking to get through it, but he has stomped on the problem that most people seem to have with the site:

At the time, Meadowcroft was only about 40-some miles away from the glacial maximum. Most people hypothesize that this would make life (not only human life, but other biota) impossible.
This is, in fact untrue, if you check out areas around Alaska, where people can walk around in tee shirts in good weather with the forests sustaining animal life.

before this, Adovasio was getting into the overkill vs. climatic change argument.
whether or not people killed off all large megafauna, or if the receding glaciers took its toll on the animals.
Adovasio is very opinionated, but for the life of me i can't remember which way he leaned.
I'm sure he made his point clear... He was ragging on Metzler. Who wrote shit with my prof Grayson. who were saying that there wasn't much proof of interaction between Pleistocene fauna and man. Maybe they were going for the climate, and Adovasio was for overkill.
don't know for sure, but we'll go with that.
either way, it doesn't really matter (for my purposes).

why i mentioned this, was cuz today at the pool, i saw a guy carrying a book entitled "fieldbook".
i was interested, cuz it looked like outdoorsy stuff was on the pages he was looking at.
come to find out, it was a boy scout handbook.
it wasn't anything archaeologically related, but it just so happened to be another topic that i'm fairly well-versed in. his kid's 12 and a tenderfoot.
anyway. we were talking about how boy scouts is the best thing for young people cuz it exposes them to so much stuff that normal kids wouldn't really get to see, namely nature.

somehow this took us to the weather.
where he tells me that weather patterns here have changed a lot in the last 40 years.
it used to drizzle all the time and have generally many overcast days.
he says (i guess) that it's different now. the rain comes a little harder and when its done raining, the sun usually is able to burn away the clouds.

then he goes to say that spring comes about a week earlier and that it messes with the herding animals.

that's what i've always wanted to know!

if animals can get fucked up in 40 years time, imagine what one thousand years of climatic change can do.
breeding will be off, young can't keep up, food might be scarce.
things will die or not propagate properly.

16,000 years ago, people may have been in meadowcroft, PA, but now it seems somewhat possible that nature may have done it on its own.

personally i had been leaning more on the overkill side, but now this opens up a whole new avenue of thought!

dammit! the more you learn, the less you know!

i always had the notion that climatic change was the main killer, but overkill was the final dagger.
i guess that could still be true.
look around at island examples.
well. actually most of those are advocates of overkill: hawaii, pitcairns, where ever the crap the dodo's are from.

but i guess there's still places like easter island and new zealand that hold out for a bit of hope that environment is the real killer and man is just stupid enough to bring the final demise of a given (tasty) species.

long time

ok. let's get the bitching out of the way, then i can get to business.
worked 16 straight days. some longer hours than others.
worked 64 hrs in a week. worked 133 hrs in that 16-day stretch.
that's 8.3 hrs averaged out per day.
that's a bit more than every average person works in a given day, not to mention that they usually get a day or two off during the week as well.

but it's worth it now, cuz tomorrow i get to not work and go down to issaquah for some scuba classes! i get the rest of the weekend off too (don't think that's happened since i went to alaska in july), not to mention thanksgiving! and yes. there was a possibility of me working on thanksgiving. the only day my stupid-ass store is fully closed is on xmas. thanksgiving they're open til 6pm.
but the payment i must give is that i must rise early for the 6 hr sale the day after thanksgiving.
the day that should be the true holiday.
my ass has to be at the store at 4:45 in the AM, and put in a full day that will get me off at 1:15, which is barely in the PM.
but. i get the next day, saturday off as well. so my boss isn't all that cruel.

so i guess the moral of the story is: I'm tired.

field school

Unless i find something underwater, this is my new wet dream.

One of the oldest, well-established cultures in South America.
... as far back as some 5500 years ago.
(That's Egyptian pyramid age.)

The Valdivia culture has pottery that some try to correlate with an ancient culture from Japan called the Jomon.

Some people are also trying to say that Kennewick Man was also of the Jomon because of its matching cranial features.

Similar pottery, similar phrenology.
These Jomon either get around or they are the subject of multiple independently parallel biological and cultural adaptations.

It can happen.
I mean, pyramids/mounds are prolific around the world:
Britain, Cambodia, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Mexico, Missouri, Peru, and I'm sure tons more places.

tired

this is a weird kinda tired that i'm not sure i haven't felt since Alaska.
the kind where you're running yourself into the ground.
just a constant state of tired with some unexplained muscle fatigue.

in the last 7 days, well. 7 with the day i'll do tomorrow, i'll have worked:
12, 12, 11, 8, 11, 4, 8 hour days.
what's that? 64 hour week?
kinda killer.
and this doesn't even mean i've had breaks on either end of this.
my last day off was tuesday the 1st and i don't know when my next break is.
i know i at least get the 18th - the 20th off.
so that's comforting.
but until then, i need to get some fucking rest.

Lost World

I finally finished that book, Lost World, the other day.
It was an interesting enough book, I really enjoyed it, except for the end where the author took five pages to try to envision how maritime adapted life may have been 12,000+ years ago along the coast of British Columbia.

But either way, I was excited to see that actual underwater archaeology on paleoindian sites had been attempted (although maybe not thoroughly successfully. I mean they figured out a way to do it, but their finds weren't all that great.)

Everytime I finish a book, i feel a little saddened that i've expunged all knowledge that the book was able to give me. that, and it takes me so damn long to get through any of these books, that i lug it around like its a part of me.

This time, however, i was left with a question that i know the book shouldn't have covered, but my mind tangented in that direction anyway.

ok. so once again, the major theory about the peopling of the Americas (shown by the answer you'd get from asking an random person) is that people walked across the Bering Land Bridge following the herds of grazing animals into the New World.
Fine. Plausible.

But the up-and-coming theory is for a coastal migration.
Many people scoff at this questioning the integrity of humans that long ago in their maritime adaptations.

Can i just say that people made it to Australia conservatively 40 kya (thousand years ago) and possibly even 60 kya over a 62 mile gap.
You can't just accidentally float your ass to aussieland like that. especially with enough people (at the very least 10 - 15) to populate the continent.

then by 17 kya, the Jomon culture was in Japan doing japanese things: fishing.
So why couldn't these Jomon, or other similarly adapted cultures around 15 kya make their way around the southern fringe of the Bering Land Bridge, traveling from refuge to refuge that science has shown to exist on down the Alaskan and B.C. coastlines?

but that's not really my question.
my question is:

What did the settlement patterns look like when the Europeans of the 15th to 17th century started to divide and conquer the New World? And how would this compare to possible settlement patterns of the First Americans?

Granted there are many variables that would differ when comparing these patterns to possible ones from the original settlers of America. influences like agriculture and land that was already inhabited (variables that weren't present 15 kya) could change settlement strategies.

the other problem with this is that i'm assuming that people did come by sea, rather than the supposed big-game hunting strategies where mobility over land was the only option.

nevertheless, even though i always really hated US history, anyone can really see the settlement strategy. Even without much knowledge of what really happened on down to the fine details, if you look at the original thriteen colonies, you will see that their extent doesn't go much further than a couple hundred miles from the shore.

ok. again, possible things such as warfare and attachment to homebases across the sea may have inhibited an inland growth, but wouldn't it be a somewhat similar situation for the First Americans?
If they were maritime adapted (another damned supposition) then why would they want to change their lifestyle if they were perfectly capable of subsisting on their current way of living?
Also, back then, wildlife was EXTREMELY larger than it is today. Open areas around the beach and the buffer to the thick forests must have been the preferred place to hang out.
Who wants to live in a dangerous, dark forest when collecting mussles at low tide is an easier solution to finding a food source?

I don't know. But what I do know, is that there are way too many archaeologists out there that may have not even thought about this, or haven't wanted to think about this.

So many of them stake their work and reputation on one theory and in doing so thrive by debunking all other theories. I guess the best way to do that is to totally detach yourself from other possiblities and only look into (and after) your own.

be open-minded, bitches!

Manuel

damn.
manuel must have been bored/inspired the other day and came up with a compilation of all our snorking activities the summer.
there may be more out there from last year.
i'll have to check my archives.

even so, it's still surprising to see how much we actually did.
good work, Swell.

Alki V

I went to Alki for the 5th time on Tuesday. I'm almost a pro (yeah, right).
I almost asked if I could take my camera along this time around, but unfortunately after I learned that we'd add something new to the equation (lights), I thought otherwise.

So once again, the pictures of my Alki trip were from above the water, and rather boring.

I SO wish I would have had it. There's always new things down there.
We headed out on our usual route, but then went out to these sunken I-beams.
Don't know why or how they're there, but they are, riddled with anenomes.
Those guys will attach to anything that's not dirt.
i saw a dog toy down there with an anenome attached to it that was twice its size!
That doesn't seem too safe to me, but only time will tell with that one.

So the overcast made the use of the lights essential. I have one, but the one day I take it out of my car, I need it. Luckily Cory had a backup that I could use. We trodded out to my new record depth: 91 feet!
I don't even know how to describe it down there. In other instances, the view in the water slowly fades away at enough of a distance that it doesn't bother you. But down at this depth, a good 5 feet ahead, and you everything gets blurry. A green haze. Very odd.

Once again we found a cluster of long, purple sea cucumbers. But what i actually found with my own light, is that if you shine your light directly on them, they turn blood red. Same with the crabs. It makes the sea life appear even more eerie and dangerous.

I spotted a new fish while out at those I-beams that are a good 80 - 85 feet down.
Halibut! I almost missed spotting this guy, as they do a very good job of blending in with the muck around it. And even though the link I posted was of Altantic Halibut, the two that I saw looked exactly like that. I'm guessing mud is brown no matter what ocean you're in.
These things weren't massive like those you sometimes hear about, they were only about a foot long.
But still, it was something I could easily identify, so it was rather exciting.
It's so weird how the migrating eye sticks way up.
I wonder if halibut are "sided," meaning that they lean to one side. If i remember correctly, the two that I saw were both lying on their left side like the halibut in the picture.

Creeping back up to the Honey Bear, the sunken tug boat that has harbored either an octopus or an eel-like, purple fish on some of my last visits, I came upon a large engine block, presumably from the sunken vessel itself.

Chilling on the block was a dungeness crab. Yeah, by now I've seen a ton of these, but this one was different. Between its claws, and hugging to its chest was a smaller dungeness crab. They were both chest to chest with the smaller one being perfectly cradled between the larger one's massive claws.
I didn't want to piss them off too badly, but I moved toward them to see how they would react.
The smaller crab stayed nestled between the claws, while the larger crab initiated its sideways-walk away from possible harm.
So I really don't know if that was a male and female crab doing the hibbity-jibbity (I don't know if sexual dimorphism exists in dungeness crabs) or if that was just a parent guarding it's juvenile. I have seen other dungeness crabs the same size as the smaller one out on its own, so that's a tough call.
Man that would have been an awesome picture!

Moving on further, we came to the remains of the top part of the Honey Bear. It looked like there may have been round portholes that survived the foundering. No glass or anything, just the structure itself. It resembled something like an old-school submarine: a big bulbous dome with a small, round porthole just large enough to stick your face into.

Then we came to a point that I always recognize: the spot where the octopus and large purple fish tend to hang out.
This time, however, we came from the back side.
This meant that we had to swim over the wreck, then come down to the overhang where these creatures lurk.
Since I had a light this time, i thought i'd be brave enough to check it out simultaneously with Cory.
so we came over the overhang and dropped down to where we can peer under the broken bow.
as we were shining our lights in, we saw nothing.
darn. first time we've checked out the Honey Bear to find nothing.
Then! from my periphery comes this elongated purple flash!
that large purple monsterous being that was hiding there before just shot by me at about 3 feet away!!
it slithered into its tight nook and positioned itself after a 180 so it could keep its powerful-looking jaws between us and him.
it almost seemed like the fish was protecting something.
maybe it was being terrritorial, maybe it has some eggs or young hiding back there and it was just out foraging when it saw us sneak up upon its nest.

we both thought this would be a good time to leave, so we did so until we came upon two I-beams that were almost vertical, and once again, covered in anenomes.
about 15 feet from the bottom, still about 40 feet down, there was a small (3 inch long) fish-looking eel.
my description sounds wholly uninteresting, but this thing looked weird huddled in between all the anenomes.
Cory called it a "decorated something". i just can't remember what that something was. Decorated War Bonnet sounds about right. and looks about right too.

finally around 45 minutes of down time, we emerged to a hot chic with a barking bull dog who was on the shore giving us a hard time.
she eventually drug the dog away. sad.
my air was getting pretty low: in the red about 600 psi left.
every other time, unless purposefully releasing air to 500 psi, we've come out at around 1000 psi.
being down at that 90-foot level really eats up that air!

my finds, which i'll photograph later were a fork, an oyster shell, and a clay-like lump.
i can't really figure out if that's what it is or not, but the grey substance rubs off in your hands.

getting out of the 53 degree water wasn't bad until i started to disrobe.
then i froze my nuts off.
i drove however many miles to my pool in lake city, only to find that the motor for the hot tub had blown up, and it wasn't warm at all!
that totally sucked. but i still made the best of it.
i went into the sauna which didn't quite do it for me, so i went instead to the steam room.
i went in dry, which i'd never done before, and it was really weird to sit there and feel the perspiration form on your skin.
you can literally feel it transpiring through your pores. an odd feeling.
as my feet were pretty numb, i just sat there forever with my eyes closed.
possibly 20 minutes to a half hour.
longer than anyone else could stand it.
i had to warm up a good deal.
when i came out i was all shiny from pure sweat so i thought i'd hit the showers.
man, i tell you, being surrounded by hot mositure is SO not the same as being consumed by half-boiling water.
that tub better be up the next time i need it.

Candy

On Halloween I worked at the pool.
No one came AT ALL.
except Connie and her mom.

Connie came up to me in her usual fashion and puts on her biggest grin.
Cocking her head she holds out her hand, hiding the skittles that she wanted to give me.
I thought it was cute and told her I was really sorry I didn't have anything to give her in return.
but then she proceeds to pull a wad of candy from her purple coat pocket.
"HERE" she giggles, and dumps it in my cupped hands.

There was quite the random assortment, which I really didn't want, so I told Connie I'd hold onto all of it for her. But she never returned for it. I'm guessing her mom was greatful that she could unload all that sugar on me.

But the reason I'm posting this at all is because of the one interesting piece of candy she gave me. I'm fairly sure that the body is made of rice, but what constitutes the head alludes me.
Any wording on the candy is in Chinese. So I'm at a loss.

Any help?