Art – Colleen Morgan

Queering Archaeological Representation – The Flintstones?

I’ve been going through old publications that were abandoned for one reason or another and found a chapter, written in 2016 for a volume that never materialised. Here’s a small section that I thought would be fun to share.

Using multiple images to demonstrate the complexity of past lives can be a powerful way to queer visual reconstructions. In particular, comics have been used in archaeology to engage with the public, teach archaeological methods, illustrate a PhD, as a mode of personal expression by developer-funded archaeologists and even to bring forth new understanding of ancient texts. As John Swogger notes, sequential art allows interpretations to incorporate multiple iterations of potential reconstructions, depict time spatially, and to juxtapose current archaeological thinking with interpretations of the past.

For example, John Swogger created a comic based on a formal academic journal article regarding ceramics at the Casas Grandes in Mexico. Swogger reinterpreted the academic argument made by the authors into a visual narrative that clearly linked the analysis of the ceramics with the phasing of the site, with portraits of the authors of the works cited within the article, stating their interpretations of the archaeology. Interestingly, this also reveals the overwhelming white-maleness of the sources cited within the original academic article. Comics can also allow creativity and experimentation that photo-realistic depictions often fail to capture. For their forthcoming comic, One Girl Goes Hunting, John Swogger and Hannah Sackett have illustrated a character named “Sea-Eagle Woman,” blending animal attributes with an ambiguous person to animate Neolithic religion.

Sea Eagle Woman, with a long black cape, long hair and a face painted like a bird.

Outside of their use as specialist heritage interpretation, the field of comics about past people is vast. These range from the deeply problematic, exemplified by Frank Miller’s racist, sexist, homophobic retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae in 300, to Asterix, a long-running, goofy series about Gallic resistance to Roman occupation; certainly a full account of the variety of comics about the past is outside the purview of this chapter. Of particular note to queering representations of past people are Age of Bronze and the recent revival of The Flintstones, an iconic American cartoon about the “Stone Age.” In Age of Bronze, Shanower’s intensively researched retelling of the Trojan War, Sulprizio notes the relationship between Achilles and Patroklus is a prominent storyline, “a heartfelt relationship with profound implications for AOB’s overall plot invests this lesser-known story with a new importance and works to subvert stereotypical representations of homosexuality, both ancient and modern.”

The Flintstones cartoon depicted a heternormative family with modern (1960s) housing and accessories that were made out of stone and “primativized” in various ways. The Flintstones comic book relies heavily on the iconic source material, but modernizes the characters and draws from more current social theory. Much of the comedic value plays with the perception of the past as uncomplicated and unagentive, maintaining the mixed, fantastic-chronological setting of the cartoon while addressing difficult and sometimes dark topics. Fred Flintstone is a veteran of The Paleolithic Wars and Wilma Flintstone creates handprint art to exhibit at the local museum, inspired by rock art from her youth. Wilma states, “The day I put my handprint on the wall was the day I became a human being. The day I meant something.” Intermixed with cartoonish and obviously inaccurate depictions of pygmy elephants as vacuum cleaners, these small moments in the comic book are compelling and resonate with current interpretations of the past.

A comic book panel from the Flintstones describing Adam and Steve's help in raising Fred Flintstone

In an extended treatment of religion and the controversial and unnatural introduction of marriage over ritualized polygamy, a “non-breeding” couple named Adam and Steve (a play on the conservative slur: “God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve”) decide to get married. When they are met with resistance by the religious figure advocating for marriage, Fred recounts his history:

"I grew up in a tribe of hunter-gatherers. Life was a struggle. It wasn’t always possible for people to take care of their own kids. The non-breeders gave our tribe extra hands to help with the children. Having them around often meant the difference between life and death. Our tribe--maybe even our species--wouldn’t have made it without guys like Adam and Steve."

This is obviously an oversimplified evolutionary argument, but even so this very brief and simple treatment in a fantastic past normalizes non-heteronormative relationships more powerfully than any academic literature previous. The Flintstones comic book revival as a satiric and occasionally dark lens on ourselves and our perceptions of the past resonates with the previous examples of détournement, particularly as the original Flintstones cartoon series is perceived as a safe, conservative, typically American portrayal of family life. The Flintstones was widely lauded both in comic-specific and the mainstream press and was nominated for several Will Eisner Comic Book Industry Awards, widely recognized as the highest award for comic books.

(Since I wrote this, several amazing things have happened in the realm of archaeology and comics, most notably this book, Comics and Archaeology, which I really need to put hands on!)

INELIGIBLE Exhibition: Shoe

Last February Doug Bailey emailed me (and many others) to see if we’d participate in a unique experiment: he would mail us artifacts from the excavations that preceded the recent construction of San Francisco’s Trans Bay Transit Center that were deemed unworthy of archival. His prompt:

In accepting the invitation, you commit to repurpose (disassemble, take apart, grind up) the artefacts that you receive so that they become the raw materials with which you will make creative work. There are no other limitations, instructions, or guidelines, beyond the suggestion that the work you make should engage contemporary social or political issues and debates. Engagement may relate to San Francisco and its current energies (e.g., the tech revolution, disenfranchisement, home/houselessness). Engagement may flow from your personal reaction to your assemblage of artefacts, or to your own personal, professional, or local political experiences, desires, and frustrations.

A few months later, I received a box with some disintegrating leather inside. I put it on my desk and thought about it for a while. I’ve been teaching filmmaking to Master’s students for a couple of years now, but most of my time behind a camera has been spent making promotional videos for York in my publicity administrative role. I really wanted to engage creatively with film again and this was the perfect chance.

The Ineligible prompt also included the line:

Ineligible urges contributors not to think of the material as archaeological, as artefactual, or as historic.

Well, damn. So over the summer I put the shoe in peoples’ hands and filmed it. Though these people happen to be archaeologists, I think I was able to draw out different encounters with materiality, beauty, and our association/disassociation with the lives of our objects. To be honest, I think I failed in that part of the prompt, but these are the stories we wanted to tell.

I was prompted to write an artist statement, and I wrote this clumsy thing:

As an anarchist, a mother, an archaeologist, I’m deeply concerned with making kin through the investigation and care of objects, places, and people. Finding a politics of joy and intimacy, and building things together as a way to resist Empire. In this short film I gave an alienated object, a child’s shoe, to my kin, the caretakers of the discarded to understand and reanimate this object, even as it disintegrated in our hands.

I was delighted when it was selected to be shown at the Ineligible exhibition curated by Doug Bailey and Sara Navarro at the International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture in Santo Tirso, Portugal. The exhibition opens March 6, 2020.

Amsterdam Book Launch: Lonely Planet Yamatai Koku

I’ve had the lovely opportunity of having part of my undergraduate honors thesis tarted up and reprinted in the artist Susan Kooi’s book, Lonely Planet Yamatai Koku. The book is printed from right to left, Japanese style, and there is an official book launch in Amsterdam on 15 February, between 20:00 and 22:00 at San Serriffe.

From Susan:

There will be books, music and saké for sure, but there is still space for other happenings as well. So if you have anything you would like to contribute, you are very welcome to add something to the program!

I love working with artists pretty much more than anything and it was a great privilege that Susan took an interest in my previous research on Queen Himiko and the Yayoi period of Japanese archaeology.

Telepresence, Cyborg Archaeology and the Molecular Age

km14_come_around_lost_or_found — Come Around, Lost Or Found, by Kendal Murray

Perhaps the greatest gift of my postdoc has been the crash introduction to the Molecular Age. As a digital archaeologist, I have been immersed in all things technoscience, but it was still a revelation to understand the incredible, diverse detail archaeologists can glean from a single tooth. Finding the interfaces between molecular bioarchaeology and digital methods is incredibly exciting, especially as it allows me to articulate a cyborg archaeology–drawing from Donna Haraway, Elizabeth Grosz and N. Katherine Hayles to understand archaeology, artifacts and bodies.

Found, Hound, Common Ground by Kendal Murray

A theme running throughout my research over the years is telepresence, where you are when you are talking on the phone–not with the person you are speaking to, but not quite in the room you are standing in either. Telepresence is an incredibly productive metaphor for research on the past, not entirely where you are, not in the past, but somewhere in the middle. These themes within archaeology and science came up in the recent Then Dig themed issue: The Senses and Aesthetics of Archaeological Science.

Telepresence is deeply implicated within the Molecular Age; archaeology must now telescope between vastly divergent scales of analysis, from the traces of aDNA to network analyses of regional and temporal change. Digital technology is the connective tissue, our telephone call to the past. But, it turns out, so is art.

km14_discreet_sweet_deceit — Discreet, Sweet Deceit by Kendal Murray

Kendal Murray’s artwork immediately struck me–her playfulness of scale, in the artifacts containing lifeworlds, microcosms that surround the artifact forever implicated in the artifact. Growing trees from pollen grains found on shoes. With molecular analyses we can hint at those lost lifeworlds, and with augmented reality we can reanimate those lifeworlds, and tie them to the artifacts.

So, yeah. Welcome to my research.

Art, Archaeology, and Fonts at the Van Eyck

The Jan van Eyck Academie felt otherworldly, a precise, modern shadowbox surrounded by winding medieval streets. Artists wandered in and out of studios, only vaguely curious as to what a gaggle of archaeologists was doing at an art institute in Maastricht, Holland.

I was almost too distracted to notice. I about to give the keynote lecture for the NEARCH meeting, on Archaeology and the Image, and navigating between the two audiences I would be addressing was making me nervous. Very prominent, senior academic archaeologists and cutting-edge contemporary artists would be hearing all about archaeological photography, modernity, and representation. Or my take on it, at least.

http://instagram.com/p/yKb8h4PoOV

So when I came across this pair of doors leading into studios, I had to laugh. What better description of life as a postdoc? “Super confident, always worried” indeed. Except in my case those two doors would lead to the same office.

http://instagram.com/p/yNgsxWvoP7

Later, we’d go on a tour of the Van Eyck, including the print workshop where artists and scientists print and bind beautiful catalogues and single, masterful pieces. I knew that they specialized in older, analogue printing techniques and yet I couldn’t conceal my delight when the cabinets of heavy typeface were opened. As a child I toured a print shop where they were switching over to digital printing and I was given my initials in letterpress lead block caps, all in slightly different sizes: C.L.M.

http://instagram.com/p/yNg-iFvoAb

The print master showing us around had twinkling eyes and a million inks spread across his work shirt–I couldn’t resist asking him about the Van Eyck’s particular, casually stylish font. Apparently it was traced from the remains of the work of the sign painter, Pierre Bonten, who painted the “no parking” signs outside the Institute. It was clever; the font combined an appreciation of the past of the institute, a nod toward craftmanship, and the interplay between analogue and digital forms of expression.

This artistic, archaeological font is named Bontepike, Here’s a video about the process:

Special Delivery – Endless Canvas’ Huge Warehouse Graffiti Show

I’ve been more peripatetic than usual lately; we subletted our apartment in anticipation of a visa that was a month late in coming so I’ve been housesitting all over the East Bay. I’ve stayed in four different places, all inhabited by archaeologists–I’ve started making jokes about how I’m studying their settlement patterns. I thought about drawing plans of the layouts of the houses, but then felt like it would be an invasion of privacy–so what kind of implications does that have for archaeological practice?

Anyway, last Saturday night I took the bus down from my latest domicile in Richmond to check out Endless Canvas’ unbelievable “Sistine Chapel” of graffiti art in a warehouse in West Berkeley. It was held in the former Flint Ink building, a warehouse that has been vacant since 1999. When I walked up to the warehouse I was stunned to see a huge line full of families along with the requisite cool kids. The three floors of the warehouse were lit with industrial spot lights and there were multiple DJ setups, infusing the concrete with thudding hip hop and techno. The building was absolutely covered and I walked through the warehouse several times, up stairs, looking down elevator shafts and out onto the nearby train tracks.

There were several gargantuan pieces by my favorite Bay Area artists–GATS, SWAMPY, Deadeyes along with a few I didn’t recognize. I didn’t have my DSLR, so I took a few shots with my iphone, but I felt that it was mostly unnecessary–so many people were shooting that you could probably reconstruct the entire installation from images on the web. Besides, I’m not sure I could really add to the gorgeous documentation:

Along with the photographs are a series of videos that show the intense connection to place that graffiti artists have and how they express this through their art. The videos also features a “buffer,” a guy that goes around and paints over the graffiti art and so is deeply familiar with all of the different artists.

When I walk through Oakland the graffiti resonates so strongly with my experience of the city. New pieces, old pieces, new artists, artists referencing each other–it’s an intense dialog with place that can be both intimate, you won’t see certain pieces or stickers unless you walk the street and grandiose, such as the huge pieces that welcome you back to Oakland after you go under the Bay in the BART. Graffiti in Oakland is a passionate expression of defiance and home and I feel deeply lucky that I managed to be around for its effloresce.

The Unfamiliar: Archaeology and the Uncertain Edge

Last winter I submitted an article to the Anthropology Graduate student journal at the University of Edinburgh, The Unfamiliar, to be included in their second issue. The print version is already out and I look forward to the online version. I chose to write about drawing conventions in MoLAS archaeology, particularly the uncertain edge. It caused particular problems as I submitted gifs to illustrate the process, not realizing that there would be a print version, as films were also solicited. So I had to re-send stills from the gifs for the print publication…funny stuff, digital archaeology.

Anyway, here is the article. It appeared in The Unfamiliar V2(1) 2012:

http://journals.ed.ac.uk/unfamiliar/issue/view/2

Archaeology and the Uncertain Edge

The author, drawing a multi-context plan in the field, 2012. Photograph by Ruth Hatfield.

Until this point the line had been steady, confident, true. The sandy, shelly deposit curved left, then right, was truncated by a later fire pit, and then continued west-ward and my pencil recorded all of the contours in a perfect 1:20 centimeter representation. But then the deposit lost its hard, defining edge, feathering out, getting mixed and lost in an interface with the underlying dirt. Where did the sandy shelly deposit stop? Where did the layer beneath it begin? My pencil hesitated, then drew a series of quick zig-zags, reminiscent of a line of heartbeats on a heart monitor from a dramatic TV scene, arcing around my deposit. Upon excavating the deposit, I may go back to the drawing, erase the zig-zags and replace them with a single, smooth line. But for now, the edge was ambiguous, open for interpretation, and so I used the drawing convention of a zig-zag, indicating an uncertain edge.

As Tim Ingold (2011:177) notes, archaeology is one of the few specialist disciplines where drawing is still valued as part of our daily practice, as as a way to record, understand and engage with the materials of the past. We represent skeletons, landscapes, walls, houses, pottery, rocks, and stratigraphic sections in technical, measured to scale drawings. While some of the illustrations end up in our lectures in publications, the majority of these drawings are by archaeologists, for archaeologists, and remain in our grey literature. Still, drawing is a vital part of the most important skill in archaeology—learning how to see, or what Charles Goodwin (1994) calls “professional vision.”

By drawing we intimately inspect our subject, gaining knowledge that transcends taking a photograph or even a laser scan of the same feature. Learning how to discern the stratigraphic relationships in archaeology is a difficult task and “drawing a definite line around something rests on reserves of professional confidence and interpretative skill” (Wickstead 2008:14). To add to the complexity, there are very few universally agreed-upon drawing conventions. I was trained in both Americanist and British styles of excavation and the accompanying drawing conventions wildly differ across the Atlantic. Americanist archaeologists draw the sections of their meter-squares with little tufts of grass on the top, English archaeologists use hachures to indicate slope across their wide-open trenches. While American-style archaeological technical drawing has few conventions, English archaeologists have standardized lines and rugged tracing paper called permatrace so that they can overlay the drawings of the deposits in stratigraphic order. These differences aside, learning to see and draw archaeological deposits remains at the core of our profession.

This most important skill, that of learning to see and describe archaeological deposits is almost impossible to teach within the confines of a classroom. We rely on field schools to impart this information, taking students to archaeological excavations so they can interact with the archaeology. Sometimes while training students we inscribe the ground with our trowels, teaching them how to see subtle differences in color or texture. While working in red dirt with colorblind archaeologists in Texas I had to use sound to establish the difference between solid ground and a posthole, tap-tap-tapping my way across the ground with the butt of my trowel until there was a slight change in tenor. Tap-tap-tap-thud-thud-tap-tap-tap, there was the hole that the Caddo dug for the center post of their structures. Still, there are times that we are uncertain, even after many years of experience. During these times the solid line jolts back to life, a jagged heartbeat of subjectivity in a profession that still struggles for objectivity even after postmodernity.

This small selection of photographs and gifs that I have taken during my time as a field archaeologist in Qatar attempt to demonstrate the concept of the uncertain edge in archaeology. Perhaps as a parallel to teaching field archaeology in a classroom, demonstrating the uncertain edge through photography might be an impossible task; therefore I have chosen to augment a selection of the photographs, sometimes directly inscribing them with the Museum of London Archaeological Service drawing conventions. In this I hope to convey insight into the craft of archaeology and to the interpretive process during excavation.

At times we directly inscribe the dirt in order to teach students, or even to remind ourselves. This is not favored amongst many, and certainly I do not do it before I take photographs of the deposit. I scored this deposit to show my workmen where to begin digging. Photograph by Colleen Morgan.

Click on the gif below to see it animated.

: Some features on archaeological excavations seem obvious, even when the features are intercut. There are four fire pits here; in the single context methodology we record the cut of the fire pit and the fill of the fire pit as two separate events. Photograph by Colleen Morgan.

(Click on the following gif to view a higher quality version…that is actually animated.)

Larger surfaces can be more ambiguous; the sunlight, differential drying, and relative cleanliness can all make deposits look very similar or radically different. I have indicated the uncertain edges of this deposit, though I have since excavated the area and found more certain edges. In this gif the dot-dash-dot lines indicate the limit of excavation and the double dot-dash-double dot lines indicate truncation lines. In single context drawing, each of these cuts and deposits are drawn on individual sheets of permatrace, then overlain to replicate the stratigraphy of the site. Photograph by Colleen Morgan.

References cited:

Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being alive: essays on movement, knowledge and description. London: Routledge.

Goodwin, Charles. 1994. “Professional Vision”. American Anthropologist. 96 (3).

Wickstead, Helen. 2008. “Drawing Archaeology,” In Drawing – the purpose, ed. Duff, Leo, and Phil Sawdon. Bristol: Intellect Books. 13-29.

Assembling Archaeology in Sheffield

I immediately regretted my decision to walk to the University of Sheffield. My hair whipped around my eyes and mouth and I had to keep dodging blowing garbage. The hurricane that had ripped up the east coast of the United States was making its presence known on the other side of the Atlantic. This was represented on the news by what looked like a giant invasion of white ghosts in a psychedelic, swirling arc across Ireland and Northern England. (Learning about how the English talk about the weather has been an education on its own–who’d’ve known that the forecast could be “white cloud,” “gray cloud,” or simply “dull.”)

I ran into the conference room for the Assembling Archaeology seminar late and windswept, but quickly found a seat at the back and settled in to hear Helen Wickstead speak about art and archaeology. She memorably spoke about some of the annoying aspects of conducting this “cross-disciplinary” research, in short, that the only relevant art within archaeology is illustration and depiction of antiquities; that art/archaeology is “self expression” and not research; most research of art/archaeology looks mostly at the boundaries between the two; finally, that art is primarily used to communicate with the public. I think it was this last point that riled up a certain Twittering audience member, but I think it was just a misunderstanding of terms and positioning.

Next, Bill Bevan and Bob Johnston presented separately the fantastic photographic work that Bill Bevan was doing as the Leverhulme visiting artist at the University of Bristol. His residency and the work that he produced definitively proved the value of such a program. It would have been amazing to be able to have an artist in residence in anthropology at UC Berkeley to collaborate with on projects. I asked my first annoying question–did he actually do any kind of content or semiotic analysis of the assemblage of photos that he had created during his time as an artist in residence. Sadly he had not. I’m not sure how useful it would be to analyze your own photos, but I found the big analysis of the photos taken over the years at Catalhoyuk extremely informative to my own photo practices. I really should publish that sometime. I also wanted to ask him nerd questions about his camera, editing process and whether or not he uses Creative Commons–judging by the image protection set up on his webpage, I’d guess not. I just wanted to look at your metadata! And maybe link to an image! Honest.

Paul Evans is another Leverhulme artist in residence, creating and interacting with bioarchaeology, in particular, bones that have been modified in some way. I highly recommend his blog, Osteography. His work ranges from very intense and gripping:

to a bit more lighthearted:

I was happy to see my friend Aaron Watson again, who has a finished version of his Stones From The Sky film, which combines digital photographs, video, and 3D animation seamlessly into a fantastic meditation on the stone axes and quarries of the Lake District.

Probably the most entertaining presentation of the day was Mark Antsee speaking about his work reflecting on the Stonehenge Cursus. He began by tagging the landscape (in non-permanent charcoals and chalk) with a line representation of the Cursus, then, influenced by the deep ties that the region has with the military, elaborated on this work by making flags and cow trough sarcophagi around the landscape.

I particularly liked that he framed his work as a provocation, a response to the provocation of the act of archaeology, particularly the act of digging in the landscape. Mark was able to reframe this monument, add a sense of disorientation to this well-known (though often overshadowed by its neighbor Stonehenge) monument. I loved that he managed this all while staying within the bounds of what you can feasibly do at historic monuments–I’ve often struggled with methods of inscribing landscape or indicating that there was interpretive material available without getting the park rangers and such angry with me. Anyway, he also made sure all of the seminar participants were similarly inscribed: My very own Cursus Awareness bracelet!

Simon Callery presented the work he had done a decade ago wherein he lay down plaster directly on top of the excavated chalk ditches, creating a curvy, chalk-embedded representation of the site surface. He spoke about the long collaboration he had with the University of Oxford archaeologists and spoke at length about the true nature of this collaboration. He felt it was key that neither artists nor archaeologists “leaned” on the other’s work but rather explored the question, “what is it about questions that we ask do we share?” That is, what are archaeologists and artists interested in and how can we use that shared interest as a collaborative space.

ADDED – (sorry, I skipped a page in my notes)

Antonia Thomas presented another perspective as an archaeologist who made an incursion into an art gallery, presenting art and artifacts associated with excavations in Orkney. She took up residence in the art gallery, much like the artists who come and live with archaeologists in the field, and transformed that space into a more ambiguous blend of art and archaeology. Her reaction to the space of an art gallery is probably the same one I would have had–she recorded it in 1:20 on a sheet of permatrace. I probably would have phased it as well, or started peeling off the layers of paint in one of the corners to understand past installations.

The last presenter was Angela Piccini who showed her video work as she spoke about her experimental video work and using the camera as part of her research process. She is interested in working against the aesthetics of film and narrative to find the “anti-beauty” in place. I asked her how it was to work against narrative when digital editing tools enforce placing video clips on a timeline, etc. It was nice to be able to talk to another archaeologist who deals in film, and really made me want to delve into one of the several projects that I don’t have time for right now.

In all it was a good experience, especially in that I was able to see some folks that I’ve met over the years and check out the progression of their work in particular and of the dialog surrounding art and archaeology in general. I’m happy that we seem to be moving on from the same discussions (as noted by Wickstead) into a more productive space. I came away both inspired and motivated to continue my work in the art/archaeology/digital realm. One quick criticism is that while most of the speakers had a defined online presence, much of their work was either hard to find or annoying/hard to link. It is tempting to just leave these people and works out of the discussion.

Anyway, as Angela Piccini said, (and I paraphrase) “I hope that the relationship between art and archaeology continues in its grubby way, afraid of neither the banal nor the sublime.”

Graffiti & Archaeology I: Bahamian Ship Graffiti

Electronically leafing through archaeological marginalia is probably an overly-obvious habit of mine, and occasionally I’ll find fascinating bits that I’ll throw up on my tumblr blog, to put aside for later while I get back to the main research topic at hand. I’ve been looking into the serious study of graffiti within archaeology for a project I have brewing, and some unexpectedly wonderful things have came up.

Grace Turner conducted a fascinating research project (for her MA thesis, if I glean correctly) regarding graffiti inside the slave cabins in the Bahamas. In many cases ships were etched into the plaster and stone walls of these small buildings, and from these drawings she makes inferences about the ships that are depicted in the graffiti. There were almost 100 instances of this type of graffiti and sloops, warships, and schooners were drawn in such a way that indicated that the inhabitants of these buildings (presumably enslaved people) were “familiar with ship construction and rigging.”

Yet these graffiti-ships “do not appear as decorative or representational images in other Bahamian contexts,” implying (as Carver says, that “Bahamian ship graffiti did not serve any aesthetic or decorative purpose.” She then connects the graffiti with a tradition of “wrecking” which involves both the court-endorsed practice of salvage and a more clandestine practice of putting lights on the coast in improper places, for ships to follow and crash upon the rocks.

Turner also describes each of the sites in detail, considering where the graffiti occurred, who was living there at the time, what tools were used to inscribe the stone and plaster surfaces, and even how much light was available at the time. Her conclusions about the socio-economic status of the graffiti artists and their intentions in depicting these ships trails off a bit–like a good archaeologist she’s trying to consider more than one explanation for these phenomena. If these lower-classed Bahamians were making plans and wrecking ships it certainly implies a willingness to prey upon the very same ships that might have brought them to the New World.

Kudos to Grace Turner and her interesting research! It must have been difficult to locate and draw all of the ships for her project.

Neue Grafik Archaeologie

My friend and fellow UC Berkeley grad Tom Sapienza made these “cover remixes” and I asked if I could share them on my blog. There is a heavy Berkeley representation among these, unsurprisingly.

My absolute favorite:

A few more:

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