Gay Caveman? Uh....

The supposed "gay caveman" (photo courtesy of http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/04/06/article-1374060-0B81BCAD00000578-340_634x520.jpg)

Gay caveman? First of all, I'm not even going to go into the "caveman" part of that and how horribly inaccurate it is because this post is about gender in archaeology. So, onto the "gay" part of it. This assessment fraught with assumptions and biased projections of a modern Western cultural perspective.  First of all, it's entirely possible that the skeleton was sexed incorrectly and that it is indeed a woman, buried with the "proper" female burial. BUT, for the purpose of this blog post, let's assume that the skeleton was indeed sexed correctly and that this is a male buried in the fashion of a female.

After reading some newspaper articles online about the discovery, it's clear to me that the term "gay caveman" is obviously something the media is using, but no so much when it comes to actual archaeologists who acknowledge that the burial possibly indicates the "man" was of a gender other than male or female. The media, by labelling this discovery a "gay caveman," is not inferring something about the person's gender identity but rather their sexual orientation, something that is impossible to tell with archaeological remains such as this. A lot of people seem to often think that one's gender identity is going to directly correspond with a certain sexual orientation, but this is false. For all my fellow "30 Rock" fans our there, I'm going to use an example from the show: Jenna's boyfriend Paul. Paul does drag, but is a heterosexual man. Drag is merely something that he enjoys and implies nothing about his sexual orientation.

This just in: the media is full of turkeys. (photo courtesy of http://cdn.theatlanticwire.com/img/upload/2011/04/gay-caveman-courtesy-abc/large.jpg

We can't even really know the gender identity of this man, especially since he didn't bury himself. We can make some educated guesses about how those who buried him viewed his gender status, and we can speculate that this reflects how he viewed is own gender status. However, there are various possibilities other than the notion that he was physically a man that was identified -- either by himself or his community, or both -- as being a female. There's the possibility that he was a social deviant who was buried improperly for a man as a way to shame him or prevent a proper afterlife. It's also possible that he was some sort of ritual specialist, or some sort of other figure within the community that had special status.

News reporters are also looking at this burial as though it's isolated -- there is no information about whether or not there have been other burials like this found in the area or form other Corded Ware areas, and it does not really acknowledge that outside of the Corded Ware Culture many similar, possibly alternately-gendered graves have been found.

This also shows a case of a sort of double standard. A lot of the time people pay attention to graves where a physical female is buried as a male, and label these women as warrior women or women with higher status in their communities. These are generally not labelled lesbian, transgendered, or transsexual graves. This article http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8433527/First-homosexual-caveman-found.html acknowledges that Siberian shamans of the Corded Ware time would bury male shamans in a similar fashion but with richer funeral accessories -- this is the author's reason for ruling out that this burial may be of a ritual specialist. It does not take into account the fact that maybe resources were scarce when this individual was buried or that some other sort of situation occurred that would call for scaling back the grave goods for a ritual specialist.

My take on the media explosion of the story and the absurdity and idiocy of most of the reporting: don't harp on the archaeologists. The reporters twisted the assessment of what this burial possibly is just for a story. Which is terrible. Most people, outside of the academic discipline of anthropology (or archaeology...), are not going to be reading academically-written articles on this subject and will take what the media tells them at face value. They will assume that what they're being told must be true and will not know any of the actual facts. They take they parts of the story -- in this case, the "man buried in the fashion of a woman" part -- and ignore the other parts in order to have an exciting story. Classic media reporting.

photo courtesy of http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/legacyimg/2009/04/media-bias-2.jpg

Luckily, there are some journalists who will set the others straight.

There is actually an article I found here http://www.salon.com/2011/04/08/gay_caveman_absurdity/ that points out that a lot of journalists writing about the discovery were using the terms transsexual, transgendered, homosexual, and intersexed interchangeably and how utterly idiotic this is. This same article points out that the discovery could be exciting for the reason that it can remind those people with a rigid view of gender and what it is that gender is really a fluid concept and that it's probably been this way since the concept of gender was first socially constructed by our ancestors, which could (hopefully) show the less-than-accepting people in our world that homosexuality and genders outside the Western binary of male and female have existed in our species forever and are therefore natural and a part of who we are.

This article http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/04/17/gay-caveman-probably-not-gay-or-a-caveman/ actually points out a lot of the kinds of things I've said up until this point and is probably the most accurate and thoughtful piece of reporting on the find I've found so far (even pointing out, in addition to the diversity in human gender and sexual behaviour, the sociosexual behaviour of bonobos as evidence that the common North American heteronormative views are just strange...). It takes into account a much more academic standpoint on the discovery and the interpretation of it, and condemns the misinformed and attention-seeking news reporters that came up with and disseminated the term "gay caveman."

Monument Analysis: Anglican Graves at Ross Bay Cemetery

First things first: here is the link to our group's Google map for those of you who would like to see it http://maps.google.ca/maps/ms?vps=2&hl=en&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=214005049597555568959.0004b8900ded7fa7ea4ad.

Second order of business: here is the list of research questions that we came up with while in the field:

1. It appears that something has broken off the top of monument 5. What could this have been?
2. Why do you think there is so much variation in the monuments within this small section of the cemetery?
3. Notice the differences in the dates of the standing carved monuments (monuments 1, 3, and 14 -- family ones -- and graves 5 and 7 -- individual monuments) and the flat stones for individual burials (and even monument 6, which is standing but much simpler than the other standing ones, and has a similar date to the flat ones). What  happened in this time gap of about 40 years that could have changed attitudes towards, and therefore practices surrounding, death and burial? Do you think these changes could simply be attributed to the passing of time?
4. For monument 1, the dates of the deaths of younger (under 20 years old) family members are close together (1884-5). Could something specific (e.g. disease, etc.) have happened to these individuals that could have caused their deaths to occur so close together?
5. What are the differences and similarities between the standing family monuments and the standing individual monuments? Why do you suppose these occurred? 
6. Why do you suppose, within the individual graves with flat stones, that  there are some that have their plot marked with stone boundaries (e.g. 9 and 10) and some that do not (e.g. 4 and 8)?
7. What did a typical Anglican family monument in the late 1800s look like?


Now, on to my own interpretations/analysis/answers to these questions. For the sake of brevity, my focus will be on questions 2, 3, and 4. 


First, I will address question number 4:


Two babies, Edwin and Ernest Leigh, died three days apart (August 19 and 22) in 1884, 16-month-old Bernice died January 16 of that same year, and 16-year-old Agnes died March 23 of that year as well. The other death that was close in time to these occurred in 1885 and was of a 29-year-old, so I will actually separate this person and not group her (Edwina) in with the babies and Agnes. It's quite possible that these four young individuals -- Edwin, Ernest, Bernice, and Agens -- coincidentally all died within this short time frame. However, based on the time and the ages (relatively young) of these individuals, I am going to hypothesize that it was possible for them to have been killed by polio. The 1880s were a time when polio was still somewhat common, and young people were likelier to contract it. Of course, there are various other maladies that could have plagued these people, such as small pox; polio just seems to make the most sense to me in this case. It is also possible that perhaps there was some sort of genetic cause for their deaths (all members of the same family), but disease (polio in particular) seems like a likely culprit to me. 


Next, I will address question number 3 (which really addresses number 2 as well...):


I will propose three reasons for the amount of variation seen between graves from different dates, individual graves -- standing and flat -- and family graves: fashion through time, war, and economics. 


The earlier graves coincide with the later portion of the Victorian era. None of the standing monuments are particularly elaborate or carved intricately, and the carving present is relatively simple and does not display any complex or highly decorative sculpting; the standing monuments include family monuments and individual ones. Seven standing individual monuments (two of which are very small and very simple, presumably in the memory of children), four flat individual monuments, and three standing family monuments are present in this set. Only one standing individual monument occurs after 1890 (this is monument 6), but this monument is contained within a family plot so can be seen as an exception to the pattern that, eventually, individual monuments are generally only flat.  


Because the monuments we chose are within the Anglican portion of Ross Bay Cemetery, I will use Cannon's "The Historical Dimension in Mortuary Expressions of Status and Sentiment" (1989) and its study of Victorian - Modern English mortuary displays as  a guide for my analysis of the monuments dedicated to those that died from ca. 1880-1910. I am going to guess that these family monuments and the contemporary individual ones were the result of the fashions of the times. Cannon's evaluation of status as expressed in grave monuments --  that the wealthy, during the later Victorian era, reduced the amount of ostentation present in their funerary monuments after a period of high elaboration as a way to distinguish themselves from the lower classes and that the lower echelons of society followed suit and opted for simpler monuments themselves -- leads me to believe that the carved yet simple monuments (family and individual) are the result of lower class mimicry of the rich. The area of the cemetery we chose did not seem like it was occupied by once-wealthy dead that set the trends (as there were areas within view that looked, let's say, more polished) but rather by the ordinary folk that emulated their economically higher counterparts. 


These monuments follow some of the general patterns noted by Cannon, such as the tendency for the amount of variety in monument shapes to decline during the latter half of the 19th century. If you look at the three family monuments, they are almost indistinguishable from one another. I think this actually had to do with the fact that each monument was created by the same carver. If we look to Cannon's Fig. 1 (p. 440) and Figure 2 (p. 441), we see that, in terms of monument shape/style, all the monuments from this time period (ca. 1880-1910) in our set fit in with general Victorian English patterns, where shape diversity declines from a peak in the mid-19th century but was still relatively high compared to, say, the first quarter of the century. There is definitely a higher diversity in monument shapes among monuments from this 30-year period than the later monuments that we looked at, which followed the pattern of decline in variety. These patterns explain why standing family monuments, standing individual monuments, carved flat individual monuments, and simple individual monuments all coexist over this time period in this section of the cemetery.


For the later monuments (of the 1920s-30s), two are flat and all are individual while monument number 6, also individual, is standing. The exception that number 6 represents can, I believe, be explained by the fact that it was added to a family plot. I assume that it is a standing monument at a time of almost exclusively flat monuments because (yes, we only have 3 monuments from this time, but from looking at other monuments in the same area it seemed as though the simple, flat monuments were quite common at this time), had it been flat and added to the middle of this family plot, it would have looked odd and been displeasing aesthetically. The rest of the monuments from this time are all simple, flat and small. This can perhaps be explained through the normal progression mortuary fashion (as Cannon there was a general trend of increasing simplicity), but I am going to suppose that the stark simplicity of these monuments can be attributed more, but not exclusively, to changes in mortuary display due to the Great War and possibly event he Great Depression. 


As we can conclude from Garazhian and  Papoli Yazdi (2008), disasters can affect mortuary practices and monuments rather noticeably, and the first world war was indeed a disaster. It stands to reason, then, that it had an effect on mortuary display. It is frequently the conclusion of psychologists and sociologists (e.g. Field 2000) that exposure to mass and frequent death can cause those exposed to become somewhat desensitized to or detached from death, causing alterations in the population's overall attitude towards it. This alteration in attitudes would, more likely than not, be reflected in grave monuments. Field notes that wartime experience can cause a loss of religious belief, especially in those that engage in actual combat, and more acceptance to the fact of our own individual mortality. Loss of religious belief would explain the absence of any religious markers on all three monument in our set that are dated after the first world war (note that monument 6, marking one person that died in the 1920s and one that died in the 1930s, is within a family plot next to a monument from the 1880s that is shaped like a cross), and the simplicity of the flat monuments in particular can perhaps be explained by a desensitization to death resulting in a feeling of not being obligated to devote a lot to mortuary display. Another possibility is that, during the first world war, monuments became simple because of resource conservation and this continued after the war. 


Economics of the times may also be a factor in the simplicity of these monuments, but this seems less likely because 2 of the 3 monuments from this time were created for people who died in the 1920s, before the Great Depression hit (so during a time of relative economic prosperity). However, they may reflect the economic status of either the people they are dedicated to or the people who did the dedicating. 


References


Cannon, A., 1989. The historical dimension in mortuary expressions of status and sentiment. Current Anthropology, 30(4), pp. 437-58.


Field, D., 2000. Older people's attitudes towards death in England. Mortality, 5(3), pp. 277-97.


Garazhian, O. and L. Papoli Yazdi, 2008. Mortuary practices in Bam after the earthquake. Journal of Social Archaeology, 8(1), pp. 94-112.

Why Did I Choose the Second World War Group Project?

Lacking a prompt this week and realizing just how fast we're coming up on the group projects, I figured I'd blog this week about why I chose the WWII project over all of the other topics.

First of all: it was tough to finally make a choice. Our class managed to come up with a list consisting of what I though were all interesting topics rife with potential and possibilities. I originally narrowed my pick down to a shorter list of 4 topics -- still not horribly narrowed down. These 4 topics were: Ancient Greece, the Scythians, Ancient Egypt, and, obviously, the Second World War (or, as our Russian friends would call it, "the Great Patriotic War" -- nationalism reared its ugly head as part of Stalin's massive propagandistic mobilization campaign...).

Ancient Greece was one of the topics I contemplated working on because I've looked at some ancient Greek history, art, architecture, etc. and I find it all fascinating. When I took classes on these subjects, burial came up every now and again. I learned a little about the Kerameikos (the main necropolis) of Athens, but this was focused largely on the ceramics found. These ceramics were interesting, though, because they included items such as cinerary container and vessels for offerings during funeral processions, and contained painted depictions of funeral processions. In addition, for my Art and Architecture of Ancient Greece class (which, by the way, was a great class and I would highly recommend it, especially when taught by Dr. Burke!), I wrote my term paper on the debate over whether King Philip II of Macedon or his son Philip III Arrhidaios was contained within the gold larnax in Tomb II at Vergina (the site of the family's royal cemetery). As much as physically writing that paper was not my idea of a fun day-before-the-paper-is-due kind of thing (so I procrastinated on the writing a little...), researching the topic was incredibly interesting (I actually chose that topic because it seemed more archaeological than a lot of other topics I could have chosen). Studies of the tomb include forensic analysis of the cremated remains found within it as well as analysis of the myriad artifacts found -- alongside historical writings of the lives and deaths of Philip II and Arrhidaios. Based on these two ancient Greek burial topics I learned about, I thought it would be neat to learn more. Alas, I decided against it (for this class at least).

                                           The gold larnax from Tomb II at Vergina. Did it contain the cremated
                                                          remains of Philip II or Philip III Arrhidaios? 
                                                          image courtesy of  http://b.vimeocdn.com/ts/221/290/22129037_640.jpg)

The Scythians and their kurgans (burial tumuli/mounds) were on my list because, well, the Scythians were early inhabitants of Russia and I love anything Russian. These kurgans would also sometimes be incredibly elaborate and rich and included some very colourful textiles, beautifully crafted metal objects, etc. Also, the Scythians sometimes had some pretty cool tattoos. I happen to really like tattoos, and ancient body modification fascinates me as much as modern body modification. There have also been recent developments with the study of the Scythian mounds as someone (I think it's the Dutch...) is working on developing 3-D models of the kurgans. Like my Ancient Greece leanings, though, the Scythians fell by the wayside.

Tattoos on a male Scythian, 5th century BCE, found in modern Kazakhstan, now displayed at 
the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg (image courtesy of www.britannica.com/bps/media-view/869/1/0/0)

As for Ancient Egypt....well, let's be real: who doesn't like mummies? Or ancient Egyptian beliefs about death and burial in general? Side note: I find this stuff so interesting I have a tattoo of Anubis -- the Egyptian god of mummification and embalming that had a tremendous role in funerary practices -- on my body. This topic also did not make the final cut. I am somewhat regretting this decision after seeing a Discovery Channel special a few days ago in which a chemical archaeologist mummified a body donor to test his hypothesis on how the 18th Dynasty (including Ahmenhotep, Akhenaten, Tutankhamen, Hatshepsut, and Nefertiti, just to name some famous names) was mummified differently than every other Dynasty that practiced mummification. This chemical archaeologist discovered, via radiographs, that the mummies of the 18th dynasty (and only them) had salt crystals within their mummified flesh. This would not have happened had their bodies been covered in natron like the other pharaohs' bodies were (because this would simply draw water out of the body, not bring salt into it), but rather the 18th Dynasty pharaohs must have been submerged in a concentrated natron bath, which would allow the flow of water out of the body and salt into it, allowing for salt crystals to form. This special was really awesome, so if anyone has a spare hour lying around one day, I suggest you hunt it down and watch it. Just be prepared for watching some scientists pull the dead guy's organs out of him!

I almost regret my decision to not select ancient Egypt, but only almost. I am fully happy with my selection of WWII. Firstly, I love learning about the history of WWII. Secondly, I find it to be one of THE pivotal historical events. Now, this may be because it was quite recent and extremely well documented, giving me the opportunity to learn about it in more detail than a lot of historical events as well as the aftermath and reverberations of these events and how they relate to my life today. However, also because WWII was so recent, a lot of new archaeological studies are being done, much of the archaeological data are fresh, and there are so many more opportunities to study WWII from an archaeological perspective. This is different from places like ancient Greece and Egypt which have been studied archaeologically for a couple of centuries now. In addition, I tend to find any case involving mass burial particularly interesting, and there were a lot of mass burials during WWII relating to varying circumstances. Also, when we think about WWII, we tend not to think about how it would (and must have) altered beliefs about and practices surrounding death. Lastly, I really want to be able to look at anything to do with the Soviets whenever possible...

In Soviet Russia....They Put the Big Kahunas in the Kremlin Wall

Since we already discussed the monument analyses in class and decided where they'll be done, I'm not going to discuss here where in Victoria I'd like to do a monument analysis. Instead I will stick to the prompt involving where I'd like to do a monument analysis if I could do it anywhere else in the world. Given my previously stated enthusiasm for Russian history, of course I'm going pick somewhere such as the Kremlin. I not only think this would be interesting to me because it has to do with Russian history, but I also think it would be interesting for anyone wanting to do a comparative grave/monument analysis because there are several types of burials within Red Square. There are the mass graves of the revolutionaries that died in the street fighting of 1917, Lenin's mausoleum, and the Kremlin wall necropolis containing the cremated remains of the Bolshevik/Communist Party's upper echelons as well as other prominent figures, such as cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

"Gagarin and Seryogin, Kremlin memorials. Guards of honour stationed at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis next to the shrines erected following the interment here of the ashes of Soviet heroes Gagarin (right) and Seryogin (left). Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968) had become the first human in space, orbiting the Earth in the Vostok 1 spacecraft on 12 April 1961. He died on 27 March 1968 with Soviet test pilot Vladimir Seryogin (1922-1968) when an aeroplane they were flying crashed. Their remains were cremated and the ashes were placed in the Kremlin Wall (behind plaques) with full military honours. Photographed in Moscow, Russia, on 30 March 1968." (courtesy of http://www.sciencephoto.com/media/122992/enlarge)


Cremation was the ideal form of Soviet body disposal. The Bolsheviks faced some substantial obstacles with this though. Russia, at the time of the revolution, was a deeply Orthodox country. In the Orthodox tradition, cremation was forbidden because one's body needed to be intact for resurrection on Judgement Day. Because of this, no crematorium actually existed in Russia! The Bolsheviks tried to build one, but they had difficulties finding a place to build one and had no idea how to actually construct a working one. The first crematorium in Russia opened in December 1920, but it was a converted bathhouse that had wooden components. Apparently the Bolsheviks didn't think about the fact that it's not a great idea to have large fires in a wooden building -- it burned down two months later. The first working crematorium did not open until 1927 or 1928 in Moscow, so although cremation was the atheist ideal, good Soviet revolutionaries had to have their actual corpses buried for about a decade. The Bolsheviks began burying their fallen comrades in mass and individual grave underneath the Kremlin Wall. This honour was for revolutionaries who spilt their blood for the cause, ordinary Red Army soldiers, victims of the Civil War...basically any good communists who died at least somewhat heroically or at the hands of anti-revolutionaries, as well as top-ranking Party members. This practice, of inhuming people in the Kremlin wall necropolis, continued until 1927.


Once the Soviets worked out the cremation problem, they began cremating their dead and placing them inside the Kremlin wall. This first occurred in 1925, but it did not become a regular practice until 1927/8. In this 2 year period, inhumations beneath the wall and cremated remains being placed within the wall (with memorial plaques on the facade) both occurred, but inhumation was generally for honoured communists but not top Party officials (the top officials were cremated and placed in the wall). An interesting thing about these cremation burials in the wall is that, since cremation was an entirely  new practice in Russia, people were unfamiliar with how to go about burying someone's cremated remains, so at first they would put the remains in an urn and carry this urn to the wall in an ordinary coffin. Only individuals were placed within the wall -- families of the honoured dead were buried elsewhere.


Apart from these burials, Lenin himself is interred within Red Square in his own mausoleum, built by his successors as a massive political strategy, after having been embalmed (and re-embalmed, also a political statement) -- he can still be viewed by tourists today (seeing Lenin's body is at the top of my list for my eventual trip to Moscow...). Following "The Great Patriotic War" (AKA WWII), individual tombs were built behind the Mausoleum. Burials in Red Square ended with Konstantin Chernenko (Mikhail Gorbachev's predecessor) in 1985.

Vladimir Lenin's entombed and embalmed corpse on display in is mausoleum in Red Square (photo courtesy of http://jornale.com.br/wicca/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/pop2.jpg)


So, over a period of less than 70 years, many different disposal styles were used within Red Square. This makes not only the graves and monuments themselves interesting, but also the landscape of Red Square.