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Happy Mother's Day: Academia and Maternity Leave

2013-05-12T08:00:00.000-04:00

I'm about half-way through my second pregnancy right now. I gave birth to my almost-4-year-old daughter while in grad school, right after I accepted a fellowship to complete my dissertation. It was a fairly traumatic delivery, and it was tough completing my degree with a nursing infant, but I did it thanks to the flexibility and funding that the fellowship provided. This time is different, though. Now I am employed as a tenure-track assistant professor, and negotiating a maternity leave at my university has been eye-opening.

I'd naively assumed that I had all the information this time. After all, I knew that my university offers no paid leave, and I had asked HR about FMLA early last fall. The FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act) policy, however, is the only one my university lists under information for parental leave; there are no policies at the university level going deeper or beyond this, including no policies for stopping one's tenure clock. So how does a faculty member due to give birth in early October deal with FMLA, which gives employees of my public university up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave? Teaching a full load of classes is not a great option; I'd have up to 7 weeks with my students (provided I don't deliver early) and then have to find someone(s) willing to take over my three courses for little or no pay. Taking a course reduction, though, means taking a reduction in pay, as our salaries are mainly tied to being able to complete our teaching duties, regardless of the fact that we also have research and service requirements. For other university employees, FMLA likely isn't as big a deal -- if you're an admin assistant, for example, you could work until you're due, and then a temp fills in while you're on leave. For faculty giving birth in the middle of the semester, being able to take FMLA requires a great deal of flexibility from your chair, dean, and the administration, as they have to OK a series of "alternative work assignments" to teaching. At my institution, in order for the university to keep subsidizing your health insurance benefits, you have to work full-time -- which means even if a faculty member is willing to work half-time because alternative assignments can't be found, it may not be in the faculty's best financial interests, as insurance premiums skyrocket when the university is not subsidizing them.

I am very glad I don't have to deal with the issues concerning FMLA and health insurance premiums, as my whole family is on my husband's insurance plan, which has much better coverage and is fully subsidized by his employer. I also worked out a compromise for my maternity leave with the help of my chair and the dean: my chair found me an alternative work assignment for this summer and the fall, and I am working a reduced course load (two instead of three classes) in the spring because of my concerns with returning to work full-time with a nursing 3-month-old (that I can't have on campus, as our daycare prioritizes students and won't take infants until 6 months). This compromise ends up with my working 60% time, so I get 60% of my annual salary. And it's literally the best solution I could come up with.

Map of paid maternity leave around the world.
(Credit: ChildrensChances.org)

Women in academia are starting to have conversations about maternity leave and work-life balance around the U.S. (And I specifically mention this country, as we are the only industrialized nation to provide no guaranteed paid leave for working mothers. I suspect most women in other industrialized countries don't have these conversations.) In a related vein, American funding organizations are asking how to retain women faculty and teachers in STEM fields in particular. My university has a several-year-long grant from the NSF to study issues related to female STEM faculty at my institution and to implement changes. A new program from Elsevier offers funding for organizations willing to find solutions to work-life balance problems for female faculty, as attrition at the assistant professor level for female faculty is high. Programs to help with childcare could make our lives better (it would be great if I could have my infant on campus with me for better bonding and breastfeeding, for example). Programs to form parent groups could help with emotional support. What we need in order to retain female faculty, though, is paid parental leave. What we need are clear policies at the university level that are fair and equitable for all working parents. What we need is the realization that faculty with PhDs have so many more skills than standing in front of a classroom and talking and that we can be paid for these skills.

I'd like to survey universities around the country, via their HR websites, to see what parental leave policies they have on the books. (Maybe this has already been done?) Who provides paid leave? Who provides alternative work assignments? What is the retention rate of female faculty there? Are faculty who are parents happy, successful, and supported?

Until then, here are some tips and suggestions about academic maternity leave gleaned from my months' worth of information-gathering at my university and elsewhere:

Know your rights under FMLA. This government policy covers employees at companies with 50 or more employees. At the very worst, you likely have up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave available, with the right to be reinstated to your position at full pay without any change to your original terms of employment. From what I understand, though, employers cannot require you to take more than 6 weeks of unpaid leave; they are required to find you alternate duties if you can't perform your normal ones due to pregnancy or post-partum/nursing issues. In reality, though, it can be difficult to convince universities that you have skills other than teaching that you can be paid for.

Find out if you have disability coverage or insurance. Many women in the U.S. take short-term disability (6 to 8 weeks) to cover maternity leave. Most plans will pay you 2/3 of your salary for the period of disability, and many employers specifically do allow maternity leave as a covered disability (which is a whole other conversation, of course). At my university, disability coverage is not automatically provided and is a separate insurance plan for which I would have to pay full premiums. This was not made clear to me during benefits orientation or an early meeting with HR. Once I found out about this option, I wasn't eligible, as I was already pregnant.

Contact your faculty union representative. That is, if you have a union. Here in Florida, we have the UFF. I'd naively assumed I was automatically a member of the union, as I was in the last state I worked that had a faculty union (NY), but here enrollment is not mandatory and requires dues of 1% of your salary per year. The union may not be able to do much, but they may be able to offer solutions and advocate on your behalf to your dean. You may also be able to contact the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) for help. We have only one chapter in the entirety of Florida, though, so I didn't look into this further. The American Association of University Women (AAUW) may have suggestions as well, but again, since we don't have a chapter anywhere nearby, I didn't pursue this.

Take sick and/or vacation leave. If you have paid sick and/or vacation leave, you can likely take this during a maternity leave, generally in concert with FMLA. I accrue sick leave at a rate of about 2 weeks per year, which means to earn a full semester's paid maternity leave, I'd have to be here 7-8 years first. We have a sick leave pool, where people can deposit unused leave and others can take that leave, but I am not eligible for that because I haven't been here a year yet. So check into the rules and regulations for taking leave.

Identify alternative work assignments. For me, this was the most difficult task, since I am new to the university and confused about navigating all the policies (or lack thereof) in front of me. I talked to my department chair, but I also talked to two other department chairs (both of whom are parents), emailed several women at my university about their experiences, and talked to friends who are faculty at other institutions for suggestions. These days, online or blended/hybrid courses are a reality on most campuses, as are MOOCs, so perhaps teaching a full load could work for some female faculty. If you've been at a university for a while, there may be administrative tasks you could take on: help with getting information in line for an upcoming department or university review (e.g., SACS accreditation). But for new, un-tenured faculty, your best bet may be to ask your department chair what can be done: revising and updating labs for a popular class; taking on extra advising of students; creating and hosting a mini-conference; working on and submitting a large grant proposal; redesigning and updating the department's public-facing marketing (e.g., website, brochure, newsletter). For what it's worth, I will be doing this last option for my alternative assignment.

Consider stopping your tenure clock. Many universities have policies for tenure clock stoppage, for reasons such as parental leave or illness of yourself or a family member. If you are eligible to stop your tenure clock for a semester or a year, consider doing it. But do ask if you will still be able to go up normally if you stop it, or will that count as "early" (and does your university allow for early tenure)? If your university doesn't have a policy, as mine doesn't, there are still likely ways to stop the clock, provided your chair and dean agree and put it in writing. I will be navigating the clock stoppage issue once I get my maternity leave plan in writing.

Look into childcare options on or near campus, particularly if you're returning to work while your infant is still nursing. If there are insufficient childcare options on campus, as on mine, bring these concerns to the administration. Retaining female faculty is a priority of many campuses today, but solutions such as better access to childcare and on-campus parent organizations don't often cross the minds of administrators. If you have flexibility in your schedule and duties, bring your infant to work with you during the week -- the world will not end if your infant is nursing in a faculty meeting, and it may even open many people's eyes to the challenges of work-life balance with an infant.

Find out if your university has a parent (support) group. At my grad institution, there were parent groups for the entire university and also for the grad students. The grad student one was supported by a dollar or two of our student fees each semester. (Then again, my grad institution offered 6 weeks of paid maternity leave to graduate TAs, so it's fairly progressive, particularly for a public uni in the South.) There's no parent group at my university now, so I'm starting one. Being able to talk to other faculty parents about the challenges they face, about the school system, neighborhoods, family-friendly activities, etc., really helps new faculty settle in to the area and the university. I'm hoping to meet a lot of great people through this organization that I might not otherwise see, as parents of young children in particular tend not to go to faculty happy hour at 6pm on Friday evenings, for example. A 10am bagel-and-OJ "brunch" on a Saturday at the gym, where my kids can run around while I chat with my colleagues? That's much easier for me to do.

Finally, please please please start talking about these issues on your campus. I've gotten advice--well-meaning, I'm sure--to keep my head down since I'm new and un-tenured. Many women feel the need to stay under the radar and not make waves while they're pregnant, for fear of losing their job or health insurance. But that is no way to effect change. If you are in a position to speak up or make changes at your university, even if it's just to open up a conversation with your fellow faculty members, do it!

So this Mother's Day, check into your university's parental leave laws, and start agitating for reform. And feel free to add your personal experiences in the comments below!

Is Blogging Really the Future of Public Anthropology?

2013-05-07T13:42:00.000-04:00

In a new short article out in the British Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Martijn de Koning asks what challenges anthropologists face in using blogs as a method of anthropological outreach. He begins by highlighting some of the motivations for anthropologists to blog: "[M]any anthropologists have suggested that for them the primary reasons for blogging are self-realization, creativity and networking, sharing research experiences and outcomes, and commenting on current affairs" (de Koning 2013:394).

As blogs have been around since the late 1990s, it seems a little strange that academic anthropologists are just now getting around to interrogating the utility of blogs and asking reflexive questions about our employment of the medium. de Koning quotes my 9 February 2012 blog post, "Blogs as Anthropological Outreach," to illustrate why some of us value blogging, although he only excerpts the first of these two paragraphs:

I blog because I find it rewarding - there's excitement in knowing that people who probably wouldn't touch my journal articles are reading about my work and about other developments in bioarchaeology; there's joy when I get emails from up-and-coming researchers, as young as middle schoolers, who want advice on how to make bioarchaeology a career; and there's the interaction with my readers that doesn't come across in the unidirectional, static medium of a publication.

Blogging is an exercise in writing for a different public, an exercise in taking all that jargon you learned in your coursework, distilling it, injecting your own ideas, and making it interesting. Writing a blog has helped me refine my research and my prose, and I think that my public lectures and my successful grant proposals in particular have greatly benefited from the practice. I always wish I had more time to blog. There's just so much cool stuff out there to talk about, and so little time to write...

Logo for PbO

Strangely, towards the end of the article, de Koning concludes that, "we can tentatively say that anthropology blogs appear to reach out mostly to fellow academics" (2013:396). Considering the brevity of the article and the lack of any sort of concrete assessment of the range of anthropology blogs (see Anthropology Report for a good ecology of the anthro blogosphere), I was surprised by de Koning's conclusion. After all, he cites my blog, one of whose prominent, recurring features is a critique of the forensic anthropology on the popular FOX TV show Bones each week. Those posts are aimed at the general public, and I can say with certainty from my analytics, comments, and emails that non-academics are the main consumers of that information. Further, my posts have been picked up by a variety of internet sources such as The Daily Beast, The Browser: Writing Worth Reading, and CounterPunch. My most popular blog post of all time, "Lead Poisoning in Rome - The Skeletal Evidence" is based on my own research but is written for the public; to date, it has garnered over 28,000 views but the article it's based on (Montgomery et al. 2010) has just one citation according to Google Scholar. This is quantifiable public outreach.

Logo for AnthInPractice

de Koning also cites Krystal d'Costa's Anthropology in Practice, which is similarly aimed at a non-academic audience in spite of its location at Scientific American, and Krystal's writing has been showcased by such pop culture websites as BoingBoing. Other blogs by anthropologists enjoy broad readership as well: bioanthropologist Barbara J. King writes at NPR blogs; archaeologist Rosemary Joyce writes at Psychology Today; the American Anthropological Association has a high-profile platform at The Huffington Post, to which dozens of anthropologists have contributed posts. While many of these sites are directed at an educated audience, that audience is not composed entirely of academics. Anthropologists are talking to the public. And all of these anthropologists can tell you that the public is listening and responding in comments, tweets, Facebook shares, and email forwards. Those stats are also quantifiable public outreach.

Flyer for T. Harrenstein's Foursquare
anthro outreach project in Pensacola FL

I will agree with de Koning, however, that the majority of anthropology blogs are likely focused on talking to academics in the language of academia, although I have not surveyed the blogosphere to test this hypothesis. If true, it is unfortunate, since a whole world of audiences exists if we are only willing to learn how to write for and engage them in our discussions. We definitely, in de Koning's words, need to "realize the full potential for public anthropology by blogging," (2013:397), and it was to this end that I required each of the graduate students in my Presenting Anthropology seminar this semester to create and maintain a social media presence. What I found interesting from reading the students' reports this past weekend was that the majority of them felt most comfortable with Tumblr, a short-format blogging platform, and were wary of the often lengthy, academic-style posts that show up on such sites as Savage Minds. My students by and large reported more engagement, in quantity and quality, through their Tumblr posts than through more traditional blog posts, even when those posts were the same content. So one of the questions we need to reflect on as anthropologists interested in engaging the public is: Who is our audience, and how can we best reach them? Is blogging the key? If so, what platform, what format, what language do we use? Or should other social media avenues be explored? Rhetorical question, of course; the answer is a resounding YES! Web 2.0 is founded on dynamism, and if we want to talk to the public, we need to be similarly flexible in our approach to reaching out. For example, my grad student Tristan Harrenstein devised a Foursquare outreach program over the course of the Presenting Anthropology seminar, and we're excited to see what happens now that it's been deployed by the Florida Public Archaeology Network.

Finally, de Koning notes that it's somewhat ironic that anthropology blogs largely focus on a Western audience and topics related to Western ideologies, when we're the primary field that prides itself on a cross-cultural and often non-Western focus. I endorse his call to create "a more global and plural anthropological community" (2013:397). We need more anthropologists writing in a variety of languages about a variety of cultures and topics, specifically engaging the public in our attempts to explain the fascinating biocultural nature of humans around the world.

Until that happens, though, I think it is important to take stock of anthropologists' attempts at outreach, as people like Jeremy Sabloff (1998, 2011) have been advocating for over a decade, but to more specifically focus on the breadth of outreach we are already doing. Although I maintain that blogging is important, and I continue to enjoy doing it, engaging in some much-needed self-reflection within the discipline on the methods of outreach that are currently ongoing and that can be deployed in the future would result in a much more thorough state-of-the-discipline article.

M. de Koning (2013). Hello World! Challenges for blogging as anthropological outreach. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19 (2), 394-397. DOI: 10.1111/1467-9655.12040.

J. Montgomery, J. Evans, S. Chenery, V. Pashley, K. Killgrove (2010). 'Gleaming, white, and deadly': using lead to track human exposure and geographic origins in the Roman period in Britain. Journal of Roman Archaeology, S78.

J. Sabloff (1998). Distinguished Lecture in Archeology: Communication and the Future of American Archaeology. American Anthropologist, 100 (4), 869-875. DOI: 10.1525/aa.1998.100.4.869.

J. Sabloff (2011). Where have you gone, Margaret Mead? Anthropology and public intellectuals. American Anthropologist, 113 (3), 408-416.

Roman Bioarchaeology Carnival XXVIII

2013-05-03T09:41:00.000-04:00

New Finds

Battered body from the bog
(credit: Washington Post)

1 April. A Danish team from Aarhus University found the remains of 40 men buried in the Teutoberg Forest during Roman campaigns in the early first century A.D. While these remains come from a bog, they are not bog bodies (which are shells of leather skin with few or no bones) but rather well-preserved skeletons.
9 April. "Archaeologists Find 10,000 Objects from Roman London"... and not one of them is a human skeleton, unfortunately. But still a neat find (including phallic good luck charms)!
14 April. So this is La Tene period and not Roman, but 14 burials in Iron Age Gaul point to possible warriors.
17 April. According to LiveScience, "Roman-Era 'Cosmetics' May Have Treated Eye Chlamydia." Wendy Morrison at Oxford University thinks that some of the so-called toiletry kits found in Roman Britain may instead be related to treatment of eye conditions like chlamydia. Yes, you can get chlamydia in your eye.
30 April. Workmen digging to lay a water pipe came across at least four individuals who likely date back to the Roman period in Stickford, England. Two were buried on their backs, but two -- an adult and child -- were "spooning," which isn't a common burial form for this time and place. I haven't seen any follow-ups to this story yet, but the bones are being analyzed now.

Old Finds in the News

Skeletons from Herculaneum (credit)

30 March. The bodies from Herculaneum are in the news this month. An article in Heritage Daily summarizes some of the articles and books that deal with the human skeletal remains in "Bones of the Victims at Roman Herculaneum." There was some additional news coverage of Erica Rowan's dissertation work on food remains from the sewers at Herculaneum in this BBC news video.
14 January. Smithsonian Magazine has a piece on how "Romans Did All Sorts of Weird Things in the Public Baths--Like Getting Their Teeth Cleaned." Frankly, cleaning one's teeth in a bath is not weird... it's what we do every day.
25 April. The Museum of London has launched their Romans Revealed project to teach the public about immigrants and other lesser-known populations in Roman Britain. There's a fairly long history now of finding Africans in particular in England, which I've covered previously here and here, and a great book called Roman Diasporas that you can check out for more info.
25 April. A new Roman cookbook has come out, which inspired The Independent to publish a summary of historical info on Roman cooking as "Dinner at the Pompeii Takeaway." No osteological or palaeobotanical info, of course. There are, at least, two Roman-inspired recipes at the end of the article.

Articles

26 April. The IJPP has an article by the team of Wheeler, Williams, Dupras, and Beauchesne on child abuse in Roman-era Egypt: "Shattered lives and broken childhoods: Evidence of physical child abuse in ancient Egypt."
28 April. An article out in IJOA by Andre and colleagues deals with "Cremated human remains deposited in two phases: Evidence from the necropolis of the Tuileries site (Lyon, France: 2nd century AD)."

Ongoing Projects

Project Noah is an attempt to crowd-source information about the natural world. They have a second on osteology -- people can upload pictures of animal bones they find lying around and ask for help with identification or identify the bones themselves. It's a neat repository of photos of contemporary wildlife and domesticated animals. Since I get several emails each year from people wanting to know what species the bone they found belongs to, this site is very useful to me.

Bones - Season 8, Episode 24 (Review)

2013-04-29T23:48:00.001-04:00

The Secret in the Siege

Episode Summary

Pelant and his nasty, mangled face is back! And he's hiding out in some sort of Batman-evil-supervillain computer lair, watching the Jeffersonian and FBI gang on various surveillance cameras around the city. Meanwhile, chez Booth & Brennan (which is always "the B&B" in my notes), Brennan doesn't want to buy Booth jerky, and Booth whines about not being married when a gift comes from his honeymooning mother. He then gets a call about a dead body, and they head out to investigate.

A nature trail that's been closed for two months has turned up a partially scavenged body that's been dead for only about five days based on blowfly larvae. Based on the gonial angle, dental wear, and shape of the palate, Brennan assesses the deceased as a Caucasian male in his mid-50s. The bullet wound to the base of the occipital likely killed him, and yet there are additional gunshot wounds. Booth suspects a hit man or some other trained killer who lured the unsuspecting man to the picnic area. Sweets begins to suspect Pelant, and then realizes that Pelant is using Sweets' old papers from grad school as a how-to guide.

At the Jeffersonian, Brennan notices several remodelled gunshot wounds to the man's body, dating to about 8 to 10 years ago. Overall, he seems to have been shot 12 times with a USP 9mm. Angela's facial reconstruction gets a hit: Alan Friedlander, a retired FBI agent who was Booth's partner years ago. Further analysis of Friedlander's body reveals puncture wounds on the tibia and humerus. Brennan suggests these date to about 10 years ago as well (based on Harris lines, which aren't what she thinks they are -- more below). There is no record of Friedlander's having been shot or bitten in the FBI's file on him, though.

Booth gets a call that agent Jeff Stone has been shot dead in public (in broad daylight in a nice part of D.C), with a gunshot wound to the base of the occipital and multiple shots to the rest of the body. A witness, who is clearly the killer, leads them to suspect a man with a dagger tattoo, and Pelant calls Booth to gloat. The Jeffersonian team finds similar injuries to Stone's body, also made with a 9mm USP. Further, remodeled injuries to the right tibia are puncture wounds from a dog around 10 years ago (again with the incorrect use of the term Harris lines), but there are no records of these injuries in Stone's FBI files.

Cut to Booth at the FBI, talking about a massacre at a compound called Crystal Creek (which I suppose is like Waco or Jonestown). Agents were attacked by guard dogs, and some were killed by being shot in the back -- likely by the cult members, but there was some disagreement that it could have been friendly fire. Booth was also involved with the Crystal Creek incident. Since Sweets thinks that Pelant is working through a surrogate, rather than killing people himself, he enlists the help of Angela and her google-fu to find Zane Reynolds, the child of one of the cult members whose parents were killed but who was unharmed in the incident, as he has a dagger tattoo. Booth waylays Reynolds and manages to prevent him from offing himself; at the FBI, he says he didn't kill those agents but wishes he had. Following all this drama, Brennan realizes she wants to marry Booth and proposes and gives him a big bag of jerky. But Pelant witnesses the proposal and gets upset because he is no longer center stage.

Brennan and Saroyan look over the remains of Friedlander and Stone again. Brennan realizes that both were shot 11 times; it seemed like Friedlander was shot 12 times, but the copper-jacketed bullet separated in his body and created two wounds instead of one. Sweets then thinks that perhaps the surrogate is the child of an agent who died at Crystal Creek. Sure enough, Harris Samuels was shot 11 times, including once to the back of the head, and his daughter Anna is an expert shot with complex grief disorder. She also happens to be the "witness" to the Stone murder. Anna, meanwhile, has been getting video messages from Pelant, who has virtually disguised himself as Samuels, and she has been carrying out instructions to kill various people. She is instructed to call Booth and arrange a meeting.

Booth shows up to meet with Anna, but she doesn't show. Cell phone coverage in the area is out, so Booth can't reach anyone. Brennan gets the information on Anna over to the FBI, who immediately recognize her as the fake witness to the shooting. Booth finds a pay phone and calls to get this information. The FBI meanwhile is searching Anna's apartment and gets Angela access to her computer. Angela decodes some mysterious message and realizes that Booth is not the target; Sweets is. Pelant has orchestrated a massive traffic jam so that Anna can kill him. Fortunately, Angela has car-recognition software too, so she finds Sweets' car instantly. Booth heads over there, as does Brennan, and he gets there in the nick of time: he wounds Anna, preventing her from killing Sweets.

Brennan and Booth are happy as newly affianced people, but Pelant calls Booth back. He threatens to kill five innocent people if Booth doesn't break off the engagement. Booth complies, upsetting Brennan. Season 8 cliffhanger, dun dun dunnnnn!

Comments

Forensic

Hoo boy. Well, as usual, Brennan's identification of Friedlander relied on really variable skeletal indicators of sex (gonial angle), age (dental wear), and ancestry (palate shape). I mean, generally I argue that the writers are simply trying to mix things up, but I just complained about the issues with dental wear and palate shape in the last two episodes...
As usual, Friedlander's ID was never confirmed with dental records, fingerprints, DNA, etc.
But the weirdest thing of all was Brennan's reference -- not once, but twice -- to using Harris lines to figure out when an injury happened. Now, Harris lines are radiopaque lines that indicate growth arrest. Or, in layman's terms, on xray you can sometimes tell if a person was malnourished or sick while a child, since the growth of the bone stops for a while (similar to enamel hypoplasias on teeth). So using Harris lines to figure out the chronology of an injury is possible... but only if the person is young and injuries happened when the bones were still growing. Both FBI agents were in their 50s, which means Harris lines can't tell Brennan when they were bitten by dogs. Brennan also diagnoses Harris lines on Stone's body from a cursory glance at the tibia, which is impossible.

Plot

Generally, the Pelant plot lines don't make a whole lot of sense (but are dramatic and interesting), but this was definitely the worst of all of them. I gather that Pelant convinced Anna to kill the FBI agents by telling her (in the guise of her dead father) that there was a conspiracy and the FBI actually killed her dad. So it would make sense that he'd send her after Booth, but Pelant actually wanted Sweets. Why did he want Sweets dead? (Because he understood him too well?) How did he convince Anna to kill Sweets, who was clearly not part of the Crystal Creek task force? If he didn't decide until after the B&B proposal that he wanted to target Sweets, what was he planning on doing before then? Alright, head hurts.
Angela's microfiche-looking google thingymabob is pretty impressive. It takes a few search terms from Sweets and finds the tattooed dude who didn't kill anyone.
Pelant can knock out cell service for a giant section of metro D.C.? Angela can find Sweets' car on grainy security video in a few seconds' time? This is pretty spiffy technology.

Dialogue

"When I thought about living with Booth for the rest of my life, my phenylethylamine and grealine(?) levels were elevated..." - Brennan
"I thought you'd want some weird tribal wedding and I'd have to pay for you with giraffes." - Booth
"The archaic Catholic wedding ritual is important to you. Even as an atheist, I see the beauty in it. Besides, I speak Latin. Tu fueres asciationibus, Christine?" First, Catholicism isn't exactly archaic; I mean, the entire religion is historical. And second, I also know Latin, and Deschanel's pronunciation was horrific. Just butchery. I honestly cannot figure out what she's trying to say. Regardless, sounds like classical Latin rather than ecclesiastical. I'll save judgment on the grammar until I can figure out what the hell she was trying to pronounce.

Ratings

Forensic Mystery - C+. Victims ID'ed pretty quickly, as were their injuries (nothing too complicated).

Forensic Solution - F. Seriously, that's not what Harris lines are. This is a giant, glaring error (I mean, a quick check of wikipedia would have told the writers that), hence the grade. (Yes, it's finals week.)

Drama - C-. Boo. I was so looking forward to a Pelant season finale. And that was a giant let-down. I guess I was worried about Sweets for all of about a minute, but that was it. And the B&B marriage drama was a snooze, honestly.

At any rate, thanks for joining me for the eighth season of Bones! Hope you've enjoyed these reviews. Every year, I wonder aloud if I should continue to do these in the coming season, and every year I whine that it takes too much time and just makes me cranky about the show. Then again, I'd be watching this show anyway and yelling at the TV anyway, so I might as well write it all down...

So what do you think will happen in season 9? A resolution to the Pelant drama?

Presenting Anthropology - Weeks 13&14 (Avant-Garde Projects)

2013-04-24T16:16:00.000-04:00

Last week in class, we attempted to define what precisely avant-garde is, and we got into the mood by watching some old Project Runway clips from an avant-garde challenge. The most discussion-worthy topics included Amber Case's idea of cyborgs and cyborg anthropology -- are we already cyborgs due to our reliance on technology? Do we suffer from split personality issues because of the various statuses and personae we maintain and project? From there, we talked about the potentials of and the drawbacks to technology -- are we constructing ourselves for us, for others? Are others helping to construct who we are through feedback and other channels? And we talked a bit about the field of anthropology in general in light of Dawdy's "clockpunk" anthropology -- should we collapse the historic/prehistoric, us/them, and indigenous/industrialized dichotomies? Should we collapse the Boasian four fields of anthropology? If we did, would we seem less scatterbrained than we often do to the public ("Oh, I'm an anthropologist. I study all of humanity, across time and space, and everything we've thought or have done or have said. Sure, that's a field of study.")? Mostly, we raised a lot of questions we couldn't hope to answer and looked at some projects on the web that we felt were particularly avant-garde.

This week's projects, then, ran the gamut, and I had no idea what to expect going in to class (which was kinda fun). Projects included: mixed drinks inspired by a student's thesis; an episode of Drunk Archaeology (on analogy with Drunk History); a genealogy of all the anthropologists in the UWF anthro department; a sensory anthropology exercise; brochure for an anthropological travel agency; high school archaeo class curriculum; human stratigraphy (performance art on campus!); a collectible pin series integrating with a FourSquare social media project and FPAN; a department t-shirt; anthropology flyer bombing around the Florida Gulf Coast; slideshow of "real" archaeology; and a prototype sculpture of an anthropology monument (to go on the Mall in D.C., of course). All of our scores this week were quite high (we rate each project based on aesthetics, quality of the topic, and ability to communicate anthropology), but the winners are below.

* Second Runner-Up: Tristan Harrenstein's idea to create a collectible, commemorative set of pins integrated with his FourSquare project, with the blessing of the Florida Public Archaeology Network. The idea is to give out one of five pins to people who participate in FPAN events. Each pin displays a representation of a local monument or historic site (Arcadia Mill, Fort Pickens, Pensacola Lighthouse, Old Christ Church, and the T.T. Wentworth Museum), and each pin will be available for a particular amount of time. Participants who collect all five pins over the course of a few months' time may then be eligible for an additional prize, such as an FPAN lanyard. We all thought this was a neat and different way to present our local archaeological resources to the public, as well as to get the public involved on a regular basis and engaged in history.

* First Runner-Up: Becca Booker decided to create four mixed drinks inspired by her thesis topic, which revolves around a partially submerged archaeological site in the Escambia River. Her drinks, then, include the Escambia River (which is very muddy), the Floating Bunkhouse, the Cypress Swamp Logging, and the Alligator Gar. Becca brought in giant nalgene bottles full of these drinks and kicked off the seminar by passing out drinks and encouraging everyone to try more than one. (What a way to cap the semester!) Only a couple people attempted all four; I unfortunately couldn't try any since I'm pregnant, which made the project hard to grade, but my taster-by-proxy Nelma proclaimed the Escambia River the best, followed by the Floating Bunkhouse, and others really liked the citrusy Cypress Swamp Logging. For my part, I learned that alligator gar is a type of fish---a really freaking terrifying type of fish that needs to be highlighted by Ze Frank or WTF Evolution. Here's Becca's drink list, in case you want to make your own:

* And the Winners of the Avant-Garde Challenge... Linda Hoang and Stella Simpsiridis created a "sensory anthropology" activity to counteract the over-reliance we tend to have as anthropologists on visual stimuli. Their project is actually based on the sensory stimulation exercises used by the Alzheimer's Society of Manitoba, using as many of the five senses as possible to trigger thoughts, emotions, memories, and ideas, and they explained to us that not all cultures divide the senses in the way that we in the U.S. do -- ESP, altered states of consciousness, and other sensory experiences may be more a part of other cultures' understandings of sense than they are in our own. So Linda and Stella got Nelma and Zach to volunteer -- they were blindfolded and handed a number of different objects: pottery, bone, woven blanket. They were encouraged to touch the objects, smell them, and even taste them, then talk about what the objects meant to them. Ground coffee, dirt, and bug spray were passed to the volunteers as well. And they were treated to an audio compilation of sounds, both natural and cultural. It was a neat exercise, and Nelma and Zach were excellent participants, often spinning tales about the memories that the object, scent, or sound triggered for them. Below is the flyer/info sheet Linda and Stella made for their project (click to embiggen):

That actually wraps up this semester's Presenting Anthropology (ANG6002) course here at the University of West Florida! It was interesting and helpful as the instructor to blog about this each week, and I am glad that I got to highlight some of the students' awesome projects to #ShareAnthro with a wider audience. Hopefully once the semester ends, I'll have a chance to reflect on the course as a whole in a separate blog post, so be on the look-out for that. And if you ever end up using any of these ideas, please come back and drop me a line to tell me how it's going for you! This is a seminar I hope to run again in the future, so any input from students, instructors, and the public at large would be appreciated.

Bones - Season 8, Episode 23 (Review)

2013-04-23T22:27:00.001-04:00

The Pathos in the Pathogens

Episode Summary

The Jeffersonian takes on a case at the request of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A body was found mingled with veterinary waste. An infection such as necrotizing fasciitis was first suspected, but the changes to the remains and the state of decomp suggest an unknown pathogen that is highly virulent and is replicating quickly. Dr. Ivan Jacobs of the CDC can't figure out what the disease is, so the remains are brought to the Jeffersonian so they can identify the victim and hopefully lead the CDC and FBI to the source and the cure.

Based on the (small size of the protuberance on the) occipital bone and the shape of the pelvic outlet, Vaziri concludes the victim was female. Brennan estimates based on mandibular dental wear that she was 25 to 35 years old when she was killed. The lesions on her long bones and ribs developed within the last 24 hours, and her soft tissue is turning to soup. Jacobs thinks they are dealing with a single-strain RNA virus, and Saroyan attempts to isolate white blood cells from the heart. Hodgins studies the larvae on the victim's clothing, which puts her in the Coral Hills, MD, area near time of death. Still, ID is proving difficult because they can't get fingerprints, her mandible and maxilla were smashed, precluding dental identification, and Angela's facial reconstruction scanner is getting multiple hits in the missing persons database. Brennan pores through the likely candidates on Angela's screen, and based on the prominent zygomatics, identifies Mia Garrett.

Booth questions Mia's boyfriend, Ben Carr, who reveals Mia was a blogger who focused on stories about big pharma, medical research, and doping in humans and animals. He is also a blogger, writing about travel. Angela tries to get through Mia's computer files, but her steganographic encryption is cumbersome. Of course Angela gets around it, and finds that Mia last spoke with Dr. Tessa Burke about mutations of SARS, Lassa, and yellow fever. Booth questions Burke, but she didn't know Mia was dead and was highly interested in working with her to expose illegal and unethical issues with labs.

The Jeffersonian team is still trying to figure out the pathogen. Blood results suggest it is not aerosolized, and the bone damage is similar to multiple myeloma, a fast moving type of cancer. The lack of response to antibiotics further suggests that the disease is viral. Brennan takes a bone marrow sample, and she, Jacobs, and Vaziri get ready to move the remains. Vaziri, however, gets stabbed by a small needle embedded in the victim's humerus, potentially exposing him to the disease. The bone marrow sample, however, tells Brennan, Saroyan, and Jacobs that the virus is similar to chikungunya (or CHIKV), owing to the look of the fibroblasts and the monocyte-derived macrophages. The strain, however, cannot be positively ID'ed, which means there is no immediate cure for Vaziri, and the team has to figure out how the pathogen was mutated and by whom.

Booth questions Byron Fuller, who worked at a lab making performance-enhancing drugs for horses and who was sleeping with Mia. Nothing infectious is found at his lab, though. Then Ben the boyfriend gets questioned again, since he was writing about travel in the Indian rain forest when he found out about Mia's affair with Fuller. Ben has access to syringes because he's a diabetic, but they end up being a different gauge. Booth checks into Burke again, as Mia had been zeroing in on Biosafety-Level 4 labs capable of mutating pathogens; Burke worked for SimaTech BioLabs two years ago, but had been fired. This time, he approaches Burke's former boss, Dr. Leonard Thorne, who accuses Burke of having stolen cultures of CHIKV from the lab.

Meanwhile, Vaziri is not doing well. His fever spikes, he seizes, and his joints start to deteriorate. The serum the CDC has for CHIKV doesn't help, but Brennan and Hodgins concoct an herbal folk remedy that gives Vaziri some more time by slowing the progression of the disease, and Saroyan and Jacobs induce hypothermia.

Brennan re-scans Mia's bones and notes an active pathogen still in her body. One of the long bones is bowing outward, and the site of injection at the humerus has developed a pocket in the trabecular bone. Something had been added to the CHIKV. Saroyan notes the presence of prokaryotes, and Hodgins identifies a strain of botulism toxin, one that's lab grade and therefore strictly monitored by the CDC. The nearest lab turns out to be SimaTech, but they were only given clearance for it in the last year, meaning Burke could not have mutated the CHIKV or killed Mia. Burke fingers Thorne, whose unethical practices she tried to shut down two years ago and that got her fired, as he was close to losing a large NIH grant and had been scrutinized by Mia. Booth arrests Thorne at his office, but Thorne refuses to admit guilt or to provide the antidote, so he hauls him to the Jeffersonian to look at Mia's remains and to see what the virus is doing to Vaziri. Even after an impassioned plea from Saroyan to save the man she loves, Thorne remains unswayed, so Brennan lies to him, telling him they have isolated the mutated CHIKV and injecting him with a syringe. All is well, though, as this convinces Thorne to produce the antidote, which saves Vaziri's life.

Comments

Forensic

Victim's ID was never confirmed. I don't buy at all that dental records would have been useless. It's not like the teeth were missing, damaged, or filed down. They were present; only her jaw had been damaged.
Sex estimate based on the robusticity of the skull and the shape of the pelvis are alright, I suppose. Age estimate based on dental wear was not; this is a poor, imprecise method of aging a skeleton. Considering they had the pubic symphyses, which give the most accurate age and sex estimates, it's always weird to hear them base their conclusions on other skeletal indicators. (Yes, I know it's for variety's sake. It's just not realistic.)
Glad to know that Brennan can ID a victim based on a photo more easily than a computer. Because this doesn't in any way call into question the reliability of Angela's facial recognition software.

Plot

Sounds like some of the House writers dropped in to the Bones writing room this week. Wasn't there a similar plot on House where Foreman contracts an unknown disease from a patient and is near death? And I'm sure there was an episode in which House brutalizes someone in order to save a life. That's not particularly in keeping with Brennan's character, though.
It's sad that investigative blogger is more plausible than investigative journalist.
Why didn't the CDC initially send more people? Mackenzie Astin and his weird ear aren't cutting it.
The part about the "fibroblasts and monocyte-derived macrophages" is straight out of Wikipedia. Tell me I'm wrong.
Yes, Saroyan's a doctor, and I guess the Jeffersonian is on lockdown, but... they really need another doctor to treat Vaziri. Why does Cam always get to flout modern medical ethics and practices?
Is Brennan really allowed to brutalize someone under arrest and not get penalized at all? Again, I'd buy this from House, but Brennan's married to the FBI. Then again, Booth brutalized a suspect a couple episodes ago...
Uhm, so, CHIKV is pretty nasty, with the joint effects lingering for years, even after the disease has cleared. Vaziri won't die, but it sounds like he'll have some very nasty, very painful arthritis for the foreseeable future.

Dialogue

"You're a lucky man, Agent Booth." -- Dr. Jacobs, being kinda misogynistic and definitely unprofessional. What the what?

Ratings

Forensic Mystery - C. Victim was ID'ed pretty quickly. Not too much of a mystery there.

Forensic Solution - D. The sex estimate was good; the age estimate based on dental wear was not. Facial reconstruction was unrealistic. ID was never confirmed. Buh.

Drama - B-. A bit of tension with Vaziri. I didn't think they'd kill him off, but then again, they offed Nigel-Murray, so I wasn't going to put it past the writers. I do hope Pej Vahdat's career takes off soon, though, so maybe there will be a Vaziri-offing at some point.

Bones - Season 8, Episode 22 (Review)

2013-04-15T22:26:00.002-04:00

The Party in the Pants

Episode Summary

A newbie attempting to work a backhoe at a building demolition site scoops up a decomposing human corpse and accidentally drops it on the forewoman. She gets it off, but somewhere off-camera, the remaining load falls on the corpse, crushing the skull. Brennan thinks that the individual was male, based on the crushed skull I guess, and Caucasian based on the parabolic dental arcade. A uniform that the victim was wearing makes him appear to be a firefighter, but it is quickly revealed that the pants are tear-away and he was wearing a thong -- so he was more likely a stripper. Flesh tone and ambient temperature put time-of-death at about four days prior.

Back at the Jeffersonian, Wendell notes that based on the epiphyseal union of the sternoclavicle, the victim was in his mid 20s. This makes sense, Brennan avers, as those are the prime years for a man to strip. Saroyan concludes, based on the lack of plaster and dust in the posterior pharynx, that the victim was dead before he was put in the building. Wendell finds a calf implant, which carries a serial number and ID's him as Jack Spindler, an investment broker at Duncorp Investments. Jack's boss, Seth Erikson, reported him missing, as Jack was one of their biggest earners, bringing in over $5 million in client investments as a rookie.

Angela gets to work attempting to find where Jack worked as a stripper, hoping to find some colleagues or a place he could have been killed. Wendell finds another clue in the bones: the left proximal tibia was cut and realigned, indicative of a tibial osteotomy, but it is an old, well-healed injury. Brennan suggests that Jack had Blount's disease, common in severely overweight children. Saroyan starts working on the vaginal fluid found in Jack's underwear, and Angela notices some of the cash Jack was carrying had been rolled up, leading Saroyan to think they might get nasal epithelial cells if it had been used to snort cocaine.

Sweets and Booth head to Jack's apartment, where they find evidence that he had been an overweight kid and also a voice message from his girlfriend, Kristi. Booth questions Kristi at the FBI, but she insists that they always fought. She does mention that her father invested over $1 million in Jack's company, and we later find out that she lost over $200,000 of that. She fingers Jack's friend Storm, as Jack kept stealing Storm's stripping clients, about which they got into a fight at the gym. Booth tracks down Storm at a bachelorette party and brings him back to the FBI for questioning. Jack's right distal fourth metacarpal is fractured at the neck, suggesting he landed a punch shortly before his death.

Meanwhile, at the Jeffersonian, Wendell finds a v-shaped cut at a near 90-degree angle to the posterior aspect of the third cervical vertebra, which would have caused a severe contusion to the spinal cord. Trace evidence wedged in the wound includes synthetic fiber and bedbugs. Epithelial cells are found on the rolled up cash, and they match Cynthia White, a bachelorette who had Jack strip at her party. The partial DNA evidence from the vaginal fluid matches her as well. Her fiance, Jason, found out about the affair, but only post-hoc. He pushed Cynthia, but he never saw Jack. Angela traces records and emails on Jack's computer and notices he was engaging in a felony: buying up stock cheap, artificially inflating its price, and then selling it to clients before it crashed. Seth Erikson is looking more guilty, but he has an alibi in Vegas for the night of Jack's death.

Additional fractures that Wendell notes to the cranium and ossicles finally give the team cause of death. Displaced fractures to the incus and stapes suggest Jack was pistol-whipped with the butt of a gun. Hodgins also finds evidence (oxidized malachite) in the wound that the victim may have been killed at the seedy Kingford Hotel. Brennan thinks that Jack was beaten with a fake gun, the kind a stripper such as Storm would carry. Storm had invested $5,000, all his savings, in Jack's fake stock and was devastated when he lost it all. While in his hotel room, Storm got angry at Jack. Meaning to give him a good beating, Storm pistol-whipped him, but Jack fell, knocking his neck on the edge of the bed. Storm didn't want Jack dead, but he isn't sad that he is.

Oh, also, Booth's long-lost mother comes back, to tell him she's getting remarried to a long-term partner. Booth is happy to see her at first, then pissed that she started a life without him (and his brother... what's his name? Jared? Isn't he in jail or something?), then forgives her and wishes her well by giving her away at her wedding. Brennan, predictably, catches the bouquet.

Comments

Forensic

Apparently now Brennan can just look at a crushed skull and tell it's male without reference to any bony landmarks. Handy! Caucasian based on dental arcade alone is sketchy (as all humans have a parabolic arcade in comparison to, say, australopithecines). I do buy the age-at-death, though, which was a nice vague range ("mid-20s") and also appropriately estimated based on epiphyseal closure of the medial clavicle.
Kind of pointless to throw in the stuff about the tibial osteotomy and childhood obesity. Not really relevant to anything in the plot.
Saroyan sure can work magic with epithelial cells. And Hodgins has that magic machine that identifies all sorts of bizarre particulates.
Is it just me, or was the neck injury never fully explained? I assumed in the summary that Jack fell while he was being beaten by Storm and hit his head and neck on the bed.
I still find it annoying that every single fracture in the prop bones looks the same -- all jagged and strangely discolored -- even on the teeny tiny incus and stapes.

Plot

Inconsistency: In the first scene, the body is whole when it drops on the forewoman. And then after the intro music, suddenly the head has been crushed.
Booth's mother has a longstanding injury to her left greater trochanter and femoral head, caused by being pushed down a flight of stairs by Booth's father.
Why does the 20-something victim have a land line? Seriously, who under the age of 30 has one of those anymore? (How I Met Your Mother hilariously mocked this TV plot contrivance in a recent episode...)
Most boring Bones-themed drinking game ever: Take a drink every time the show mentions Parker, Jared, or Russ.

Dialogue

"Based on your robust frame, muscular build, and symmetrical features, you could make a good income as an exotic dancer." -- Brennan to Wendell (actually, isn't Wendell a bit too old?)
"You have an alluring personality and a wonderful physique." -- Brennan to Booth
"I did [strip]. For my paper. I wouldn't be much of a scientist if I didn't." -- Brennan, getting really into anthropological participant-observation.
"The Jesus myth is all about forgiveness, isn't it? ... Water to wine, raising the dead, walking on water... these defy the basic laws of physics. But forgiveness... that's its value. That's why the myth has endured." -- Brennan going all anthropological on religion. (Still galls me, though, that she named her daughter after Jesus, yet this hypocrisy never comes up...)

Ratings

Forensic Mystery - C. Eh. Calf implant ID'ed the victim quickly. Not a lot of mystery, except perhaps in cause-of-death, and that was annoying because the team should thoroughly document all injuries at once, not look for them as a plot device at the end.

Forensic Solution - B. The way they ID'ed him, though, was entirely reasonable, if boring.

Drama - D+. If there had been some lead-up to the return of Booth's mother, I might have been interested in it. There was a bunch of drama surrounding the reveal of Max as Brennan's father a few seasons ago. But I honestly don't remember the story of Booth's mom abandoning him and his brother, so I wasn't invested in this storyline that took up a good chunk of the show tonight.

Presenting Anthropology - Weeks 13&14 (Readings)

2013-04-11T16:34:00.000-04:00

Avant-Garde Challenge

& Best Practices

My inspiration for this course was actually Project Runway. I don't particularly care for reality shows, since they largely highlight interpersonal relationships I couldn't care less about, but for me, the draw of Project Runway is that the contestants are actually very talented. On a weekly basis, I get to see people who are really good at their job employ their skills and engage in a creative process, creating things in a matter of hours that I could never accomplish. I was hoping that some of this same energy and creativity could be found within the graduate students here at UWF, and so far I have not been disappointed.

Augmented reality Loris at the London Zoo

The best PR challenge, though, is always the avant-garde one, where contestants come up with an outfit that is so outlandish and bizarre that it's actually compelling and chic. Sometimes they use strange materials, sometimes they use unnatural shapes, and sometimes their designs are complete and utter crap. But the point is always that they tried to do something totally innovative.

So, just as every season of Project Runway needs a high-fashion or avant-garde challenge, this class does as well. Over the course of the semester, we have explored traditional media with an attempt to use those media in non-traditional ways. In these two weeks, we will explore the more outlandish and outré ways that academics and scholars are presenting information. We will discuss which audience(s) these methods are reaching, and we will brainstorm ways that we can present anthropology that are innovative and different while still conveying important information.

Assignment 1: Find at least one example of what you would consider avant-garde presentation style and bring to class.
Assignment 2: Alone or in a group, create something awesome that has never or rarely been seen before in anthropology - ideas include Dance Your PhD, augmented reality, 3D printing or scanning or modeling, writing a Choose Your Own Adventure story, creating a hands-on lab activity, etc. Anything goes... well, just please don't turn in a pasta mosaic of Boas doing a Kwakiutl dance.

Reading

Case, A. 2011. We are all cyborgs now. (Video and critique on The Society Pages.)
Dawdy, S.L. 2010. Clockpunk anthropology and the ruins of modernity. Current Anthropology 51(6):761-793.
Hay, I. & M. Israel. 2001. 'Newsmaking geography': communicating geography through the media. Applied Geography 21(2):107-125.
Marcus, G.E. and F.R. Myers. 1995. The traffic in art and culture: an introduction. In: The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, Marcus & Myers, eds., Ch. 1, pp. 1-54.

Links

Augmented reality in a printed book of Paris
3D print of your own skeleton
Digitised Diseases
Social media as epidemiology tool (NY Times)
Dance Your PhD
Academic performance art: Nobel laureate physicist hangs out on street corners, answering questions
Ubiquitous Anthropology and other augmented reality articles by S. Iaconesi

Be sure to follow our conversation live on Twitter on Mondays at 1pm central time by following the hashtag #shareanthro!

Presenting Anthropology - Weeks 11&12 (Kids Projects)

2013-04-09T12:15:00.000-04:00

Last week in class, we discussed how best to present anthropological concepts to kids, from preschoolers to high schoolers. Unsurprisingly, there isn't one book or activity that is appropriate for this vast age range. Several students in the class have had experience doing outreach, mainly archaeological, with kids through the Florida Public Archaeology Network (FPAN), but the consensus was that teaching even basic concepts in archaeological methods was best done at the 3rd grade level and above. This makes a lot of sense in terms of childhood development, as by 3rd grade, the vast majority of children can read on their own, can use a computer, and can self-educate -- that is, they can follow up on information they're interested in, through the library, internet, summer camps, etc.

One very useful resource that I didn't know about is FPAN's Beyond Artifacts guide. This large PDF guide provides great information for Florida K-12 teachers about the archaeology of the state and activities to do with the students. Each activity sheet even includes the "Sunshine State Standards" -- that is, which specific public educational standards the activity meets, which I imagine is enormously helpful for teachers interested in bringing archaeology into the classroom. Gregg Harding then led the class in the first activity in the booklet -- Cookie Excavation! Yum.

But we also brainstormed ways to interest the younger kids (preschool-2nd grade) in anthropology. Some of the suggestions included books on cultural differences (e.g., Children Just Like Me), Dig, an archaeology magazine for kids, and coloring books with bits of information that parents can read to their children.

With all of this in mind, the students came up with their projects. Here are the winning entries this week:

* Second Runner-Up: Andy Derlikowski, last week's video challenge winner, created a cute little book called Allison Wants to Be an Underwater Archaeologist. Andy realized that there is a lack of good information about maritime archaeology for the public, especially for kids. Most of what is out there is unfortunately geared towards pirates and treasure hunting. The story is good, the language is spot-on for preschool-young elementary kids, and the illustrations (by his wife, Connie) are adorable. Here's a sample page from the book:

* First Runner-Up: Nelma Bell made a felt board to teach kids about famous biological anthropologists and the kind of work they do. I'd never heard of a felt board (apparently I had a deprived childhood!), but hers was a lot of fun. I particularly liked the Mary Leakey diorama, as you can "excavate" the Proconsul skeleton from the felt-rocks! Nelma included information about each famous bioanthropologist from their online bios, but she pointed out that the fun of a felt board is to create your own story as you go. The overall reaction in the class to this project was, "Shut up and take my money." If you are crafty, you can follow Nelma's instructions in her blog post here and make your own! If you want to buy one or more, you can find Nelma's listings for Bill Bass, Mary Leakey, and Jane Goodall on Etsy.

* And the Winner of the Kids Challenge... Stella Simpsiridis made a 4-minute video for her 4-year-old nephew, explaining the basics about each of the four subfields of anthropology. Here it is:

Thanks for checking out the students' kids challenge projects this week! Join us over the next two weeks for the final challenge of the semester: the Avant-Garde Challenge!

Bones - Season 8, Episode 21 (Review)

2013-04-01T23:31:00.002-04:00

The Maiden in the Mushrooms

Episode Summary

A couple on a scavenger hunt finds a body covered in mushrooms in the dirt floor of an abandoned building.The Jeffersonian team and the FBI are called to the scene. Hodgins identifies the variety of mushrooms as ganoderma, enokitake, bunapi-shimeji, and hypholoma. The frontal eminence and orbital margins tell Brennan the skeleton is from a Caucasian female. Cranial sutures suggest she was in her mid-20s at death. Based on the size of the mushrooms, Hodgins estimates time since death at 20-30 days, and then based on larvae he examines at the lab, 20-23 days. The victim has expensive shoes, a good manicure, and nice teeth, suggesting she took good care of herself. Sweets thinks that it was important for the woman to look good, that she was living beyond her means, and also suggests that her burial face-down indicates her assailant knew her and didn't want to face her.

At the Jeffersonian, Brennan finds hairline fractures to the occipital, indicating a blunt injury, but not one that would have killed her. Multiple fractures to her distal and medial hand phalanges and her metatarsals suggest she put up a struggle. Epithelial cells under her nails eventually come back as being her own DNA, but there are also purple nylon fibers. Angela gets a match back from the missing persons database -- Rebecca Pearce, who worked as a producer on the Judge Trudy reality courtroom show. The possible suspects in the case are therefore Judge Trudy Morris herself, the bailiff Griff (who was in a four-year-long relationship with Rebecca and shared custody of their dog, Isis, after their breakup), Jill Roberts (the interim producer), and a disgruntled guest on the show, Pabla Sepulveda.

Brennan and Abernathy reexamine Rebecca's skeleton and note a zygomatic fracture that occurred about three months prior to her death. Booth questions Gordie Rand, a man that Rebecca met on an online dating site who was stalking her and against whom she had a restraining order. Although Gordie is creepy, sending her tortured Barbie dolls, he doesn't seem to have killed Rebecca. They find out via tape from the show that the zygomatic fracture actually came from Judge Trudy, who came to work drunk and either accidentally or purposefully hit Rebecca in the face with her gavel. Rebecca then outlawed liquor from the set, but Jill started sneaking it in for Trudy.

Another reexamination of the perimortem fractures to Rebecca's skeleton shows that she jumped or dropped down onto a hard surface, causing damage to her talus, calcaneus, and distal fibula. Previously unmentioned hairline fracturing to the hyoid noticed by Abernathy could have resulted from strangulation, which was the likely cause of death. Because Rebecca was young, the hyoid wouldn't necessarily break when she was strangled. Abernathy and Angela try to reconstruct the pattern of injuries but are having a difficult time matching them. Brennan comes in for the a-ha moment: Rebecca was strangled, and then dropped, causing the fracturing to the hyoid first and then to the legs. Three small nicks on the anteroinferior mandible seem to be the result of spikes, as on a dog collar. Booth gets a warrant to search Griff's home and finds Isis' dog collar, which has a purple lining and studs. Griff owns up to killing Rebecca -- he loved that dog, but they had joint custody. Rebecca had left Isis on the porch, on a leash, and Isis seems to have jumped off, effectively hanging herself. Griff was upset that Rebecca would get away with neglecting his dog, so he killed her in the same way.

Comments

Forensic

Not sure how the frontal eminence and orbital margins gave Brennan Caucasian. But female, sure. Also, cranial sutures are terrible for age estimation, especially when they have the pelvis there. I know the writers like to change things up, but seriously, the pelvis is always where we go first for age and sex, not the skull.
The "hairline fractures" are always terribly portrayed on the show. The prop people make these massive, dark lines that look like comminuted or crush fractures. Hairline fractures are just that -- the width of a hair, often hard to see without magnification.
Also annoyed with how the information about these sets of "hairline" fractures was doled out over the course of the show. Brennan and Abernathy's job is to find all the evidence while looking at the skeleton, not to think, "Oh, hey, let's go look at the mandible now, at the end of the show, to see if there might be possible injuries suggesting cause of death." Irritating.
Ugh, why are the innominates always upside down now? Did they get a new prop person who doesn't feel like bothering looking up how to lay out a skeleton in anatomical position?
The hyoid doesn't always break in strangulation cases. This is a well known forensic fact; it doesn't have to be predicated on the victim's young age.

Plot

Booth wasn't being very professional, sneaking onto a TV set and then finally flashing his badge. Shouldn't he have gotten permission from the producer before intruding?
The Christine-biting subplot was lame. Especially because Brennan doesn't seem to think her kid's not-fully-erupted tooth could cause a bite mark. Because she's the worst forensic anthropologist in the world.
The Abernathy hot sauce subplot was even lamer. Is this supposed to make Hodgins' fortune back or something? By exploiting Abernathy's dead grandma?

Dialogue

"Emma C. Figures. She cries when they sing Itsy Bitsy Spider." - Brennan

Ratings

Forensic Mystery - C. I guess there was a mystery about how Rebecca died. But the only reason they didn't figure it out earlier was because the anthropologists weren't doing their job properly.

Forensic Solution - C+. They did figure out who the victim was and how she died... based on spurious hairline fractures, though.

Drama - D. This episode was all over the place. When the tag at the end of the episode is more than one quick scene, there wasn't enough forensic stuff going on.

Roman Bioarchaeology Carnival XXVII

2013-04-01T18:23:00.003-04:00

New Finds

Colchester ringfenced burials (credit)

8 March - Remarkable Ringfenced Burials from Roman Colchester (CurrentArchaeology). Wooden ditches and fences dating to the 2nd-3rd centuries AD appear to mark inhumation burials in Colchester. These clusters are unusual in terms of burial practices in this time and place.

9 March - Domus Aurea: Skeletons of Unknown Burial (Il Messagero). This Italian news piece reports on a 5th century AD graveyard lying atop Nero's palace. I haven't seen any further news on the skeletons themselves.

12 March - Monte di Prodica (Naples): An Appeal to Save an Ancient Columbarium (Antika Notizie). This Roman-era tomb complex is in danger of destruction and collapse.

26 March - A Necropolis on the Gargano, the Treasure of Monte Pucci (Corriere del Mezzogiorno). A Christian (4th-7th centuries AD) necropolis has been discovered in Puglia.

One of the skeletons found at the Domus Aurea (credit)

28 March - Roman Grave Unearthed in Bodrum During Construction (Hurriyet Daily News). This two-room grave dating to the Roman period in Turkey seems to have been looted, also in the Roman period.

Articles and Media Coverage

1 March - Most Ancient Romans Ate Like Animals (LiveScience). This science news outlet covers my latest publication on Roman diet (namely, the possible status difference in millet consumption). I also talked to the Canadian national radio program Quirks & Quarks about it (9 March), and Krystal D'Costa at Anthropology in Practice (SciAm Blog Network) covered it too (25 March).

Millet-eating Roman

21 March - Roman Ruins Yield Clues About Earthquake Risk in Ancient Times, Today (Huffington Post via LiveScience). In a recent article, seismologists examined a Roman mausoleum in Turkey and reconstructed the seismological events that would have to have happened for the structure to be in the condition it is today.

Brouhahas

6 March - For some reason, the Poggio Civitate bone fragments are back in the news, with Anthony Tuck having issued a press release through U Mass Amherst, which was picked up by PhysOrg.com and possibly other aggregators. I'll link again to my post, Baby Bones Were Trash to Romans (8 January), dismantling Tuck's sloppy and weak argument.

7 March - Dorothy King at PhDiva discusses the ongoing feud between archaeologist Joe Zias and filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici, which has now resulted in the latter suing the former for libel. Zias is particularly well-known for publishing information on crucifixion from bones dating to the Roman period in Israel.

27 March - The Tomb of Roxane, Amphipolis (PhDiva) and Roxane's Tomb Redux (Rogue Classicism). Roxane or Roxana was the wife of Alexander the Great, and her tomb may have been possibly found. Continued reporting on a story that broke last fall, it seems.

31 March - Boudicca, the Burger Queen of Brum (Birmingham Mail). And further in famous-dead-people news, archaeologists think they may know where the body of Boudicca (queen of the Iceni, who led a revolt against the Romans in the 1st century AD) lies... underneath a McDonald's in Birmingham, England.

Museum Exhibits and Historical Information

Under the Vatican
in the 1950s (credit)

LIFE.com put up a series of photos from the 1950s called Life at the Vatican: Unearthing History Beneath St. Peter's. It's a neat series of pictures of artifacts, bones, architecture, and more.

6 March - The Museum of London blog discuss the "Curious Case of the Dog in Display Case." It was found in 1984 in a Roman villa, but the mystery of the dog's death and the other zooarchaeological evidence are fascinating.

8 March - Toilet Issue: Anthropologists Uncover All the Ways We've Wiped (Scientific American). This article certainly doesn't cover all the ways that humans have wiped over the millennia (information that anthropologists do have a lot about), but it presents some of the interesting, historical, Western ones, including information on the Romans.

25 March - Review of the British Museum exhibit Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum (Guardian).

27 March - Archaeology, Journey Underground: A Map of the City Is Still Unknown (Pisa Today). News article in Italian on a variety of information and activities for the public, if they want to explore Pisa's history. Picture includes some bony feet.

Bio-Culture

30 March - Cumbrian Chef Recreates Hadrian's Wall Dishes (News and Star). The recipes re-created by chef John Crouch will be featured on select days at the cafe at Hadrian's Wall (which, as I recall, already has a variety of tasty local- and Roman-themed dishes available).

Presenting Anthropology - Weeks 11&12 (Readings)

2013-04-01T17:33:00.000-04:00

Kids Challenge

When did you first learn what anthropology was? My favorite quotation from Kurt Vonnegut goes:

"I didn't learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It's also a source of hope. It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it."

From today's class:
Cookie Excavation!

Unlike other social sciences, namely psychology and sociology, anthropology is almost never taught at the high school level, and only rarely seen in the lower grades' social studies classes. This lack of anthropology in K-12 education is problematic from many standpoints: first, it means that children do not get educated on the diversity of humans until college, and then only if they choose to take anthropology; second, it means that there are fewer anthropology majors (and consequently anthropologists) than biology majors; and third, it means that there are no opportunities for anthropologists to teach in the K-12 sector, limiting our job options after graduate school. Over the next two weeks, we will discuss the benefits to bringing anthropology into the K-12 classrooms and will generate ideas for presenting anthropology at different grade levels.

Assignment 1: Find at least one kids' book on anthropology (broadly conceived) at the library, bookstore, etc., and bring in to class.
Assignment 2: Alone or in a group, create something to teach kids about anthropology (either specific research or anthropology in general) - ideas include an interactive web game, a children's book, an in-class activity, a pop-up book, or an app. Be prepared to present it, justify your design and audience, and take criticisms and critiques. (Feel free to beta-test this with any kids you know first!)

Reading

Batten, M. 2001. Anthropologist: Scientist of the People. Houghton Mifflin Books for Children.
Dolenz, M. 2006. Gakky Two-Feet. Putnam.
Duke, K. 1996. Archaeologists Dig for Clues. HarperCollins.
Gardner, A. 2007. The past as playground: the ancient world in video game representation. In: Archaeology in the Media, T. Clack and M. Brittain, eds., Ch. 13, pp. 255-272. Left Coast Press.
Hynes, M. 2003. The Best Book of Early People. Kingfisher.
Killgrove, K. 2011. Teaching preschoolers about anthropology. UC Berkley's ThenDig.
Lorenz, A. 2004. Journey to Cahokia: A Boy's Visit to the Great Mound City. Harry N. Abrams.
McDonnell, P. 2011. Me... Jane. Little, Brown & Company.
Morais, B. 2012. Anthropological video games. The New Yorker.
Soprintendenza Archeologica di Roma. 2007. Gli antichi romani: Com'erano e come vivevano? (Available in the conference room. In Italian, but you'll get the idea.)
Thompson, M. 2011. Illustrated Man #5 - Journey to Cahokia and Jingle Dancer. SavageMinds.
Wecks, E. 2012. An Accidental Adventure: Anthropology for kids. Wired / GeekDad. (Also read a bit of We Dine with Cannibals.)
Winter, J. 2011. The Watcher: Jane Goodall's Life with the Chimps. Schwartz & Wade.

Links

SHA blog post on engaging kids and their parents in archaeology
FPAN Northwest's Top 10 anthro books for kids
PlaythePast, a website about the intersection of cultural heritage and gaming
Animated, interactively-created evolution movies for kids
BBC interactive game Hunt the Ancestor
BBC interactive game Dig It Up: Romans
TED-Ed video A Glimpse of Teenage Life in Ancient Rome (by Ray Laurence)

(I forgot to post this prior to class this week, but you can check in on our excellent discussion today with the hashtag #shareanthro.)

Presenting Anthropology - Weeks 9&10 (Video Projects)

2013-03-29T14:28:00.000-04:00

Last week in class, we discussed video media and anthropology. Mostly, we shared videos that we liked and disliked. But we also talked about which anthropological subfields work best on video -- the consensus was that all of them work, but that linguistic anthropology is probably the most difficult to translate to video. Then again, none of the students is a linguistic anthropologist, so this could be class bias. We all also liked videos that practiced "edutainment" -- informing us about a topic in a visually interesting manner -- and agreed that anthropology can easily be communicated this way. But there is a limit to edutainment, and that limit is definitely drawn before American Diggers. Yeesh. We even talked a bit about what "accuracy" and "truth" mean in storytelling through video, but I definitely think I was more interested in exploring that topic than the students were.

At any rate, here are the winning submissions this week:

* Second Runners-Up - The team of Becca Booker and Jayne Godfrey used Xtranormal to animate their short explanation of what "cyborg anthropology" is.

* First Runners-Up - Gregg Harding and Tristan Harrenstein teamed up to make a public outreach video for the Archaeology Lab at the Florida Public Archaeology Network headquarters in town. Specifically, their aim is to encourage more people to volunteer their time sorting and washing artifacts. It's a great video, especially the titles and FPAN logos, but they could have used some better steady-cam work in several scenes.

* And the Winners of the Video Challenge - Zach Harris and Andy Derlikowski created this awesome video using iMovie about Andy's thesis project, finding the shipwreck City of Tampa. It's visually interesting, the addition of background sounds enhances the viewing experience, and Andy provides loads of good information in his narrative voiceover. Andy plans to make additional videos as his thesis progresses.

Thanks for watching! Join us over the next two weeks for our Kids' Challenge, to see what kind of kid-related anthropology communication the grad students come up with.

Bones - Season 8, Episode 20 (Review)

2013-03-25T22:53:00.002-04:00

The Blood from the Stones

Episode Summary

A body is found in a car in an abandoned parking lot on federal land, necessitating the FBI and the Jeffersonian to investigate. Based on the state of desiccated tissue, Saroyan puts time of death at 5 to 7 days ago. Brennan notes that the body decomposed in two different ways, owing to microclimates in the car. (At the lab, Hodgins notes the presence of Necrobia rufipes from cool, dry climates and cheese skippers from hot, humid climates. The microclimates are never mentioned again.) Booth discovers a sawed-off shotgun in the trunk of the car. The victim was shot at least twice; bullets shattered the right fifth and sixth ribs, but the slugs were gouged out of the car upholstery so they couldn't be traced.

"Did you notice, Mr. Jursic, that the pelvis on this
skeleton is completely upside down? I didn't, but
then again, I'm only the best forensic anthropologist
in the world."

At the Jeffersonian, Saroyan introduces Andrew Jursic, a documentary film maker who is shooting a promotional video for the Jeffersonian. Saroyan instructs everyone to let him film anything he wants, because that's totally ok to do with ongoing forensic investigations. She starts dissecting the stomach tissue and finds a balloon full of diamonds inside, which Hodgins estimates as being worth $200,000. In order to get a facial reconstruction from the partially decomposed tissue, Saroyan attempts to rehydrate it with diluted maceration fluid and radiant heat. This magically makes the tissue remodel like a shrinky-dink in reverse.

Angela creates a facial reconstruction from the reconstructed face and gets a hit - Quentin Coles, a security guard for Oscar Schultz diamonds. When Booth investigates, he realizes that Coles was actually undercover cop Detective Ruben Martin, working under DC Metro cop Commander Joe Dinco. Martin was closing in on a two-person crew that was hitting up ATMs around town, and had already made out with $1.5 million. Dinco assumed that the ATM thieves were laundering the cash by buying diamonds.

Brennan and Edison, who is brought in by Jursic to make the forensic anthropology department seem more likeable, further examine the remains. Martin had extensive remodeled, antemortem fractures that occurred between two and five years ago. The injuries to the ribs and the ulna, however, are perimortem. Directionality of the bone splinters suggests that Martin was hit twice in his torso and one in his ulna; the latter is a glancing blow and was made with a small caliber bullet, whereas the former were made with a large-caliber bullet. Particulates from the glancing blow lead Booth and Brennan to the Benjamin Banneker Memorial Bridge, where peregrine falcons roost, whose feces were found in Martin's ulna wound. Brennan finds a severed foot. From the distal fibula and a histological analysis of the osteons, she thinks that the foot belonged to a Caucasian female in her early 20s. The level of decay places time of dismemberment at about 6 days ago. Foreign bodies in the foot suggest buckshot from Martin's shotgun. Booth, meanwhile, talks to Lauren Martin, Ruben's wife, and she insists that Dinco is at fault -- he always got raises, Martin never did.

Angela pulls footage from the ATM robberies to attempt to find the suspects, which she does in a matter of minutes (and which the FBI couldn't do in days' worth of work). The robbers remotely hacked the ATMs to spit out cash when a certain card was inserted. Angela traces the card's root code to a server at Carlisle University, and to Paula Byrne and Marcos Herrera, cyber-criminology majors there. Brennan and Booth head to the house they shared, and they find Paula confined to bed, with gangrene taking over her leg owing to lack of medical attention for her dismembered foot. Booth tortures information out of Paula, who claims they were meeting the diamond fence under the bridge. The fence held them up with a shotgun, but Marcos freaked out and shot the guy, who in return shot Paula in the foot and left.

Edison finds out that the striations on the injuries to Martin's ribs suggest the shots were fired by a .38-caliber bullet, the kind fired by weapons issued by the DC police force. Martin was shot at close range, by someone sitting next to him, someone he didn't have a reason to fear. Booth's APB gets him information on the whereabouts of Marcos Herrera, and when he arrives at the scene, he finds Dinco threatening Herrera, telling him not to talk. Booth questions Dinco, who lawyers up. He also questions Herrera, who admits to robbing the ATMs but corroborates Paula's story about the fence shooting her.

Gunpowder and other particulates found in the rib fractures are further analyzed by Hodgins. He also finds leather particulates and aerosolized alcohol mixed with jasmine. Martin didn't have any leather on his clothing or in his car. Booth gets a warrant to search Martin's house and finds his DC police-issued gun and a huge wad of money in his home safe. He realizes that Lauren Martin shot her husband with his own gun, through the leather of her purse. The bullet broke her bottle of perfume along the way. Martin stole the diamonds for his wife, which she wanted, but she didn't want her husband anymore, so she admits to having killed him.

Comments

Forensic

Sooo, there wasn't that much forensic work in this episode. I mean, why deprive me of the joy of making fun of the age/sex/height/ancestry assessment?
I don't buy that Saroyan's method would work. I guess she's making the tissue more pliable, but at the same time, drying it out again, to reshape it? Yeah, still no.
But hey, both innominates were upside down on the Jeffersonian's lab table for the entire episode. I didn't bother to look more closely at the rest of the bones since the upside-down pelvis annoyed me enough.
Histological analysis can certainly give Brennan the age of the person whose severed foot they found, but sex and ancestry too? Not buying that part.
Finally, would aerosolized alcohol stay in a decomposing body for a week? Wouldn't it evaporate pretty quickly? The leather particulates I get, but not the perfume.

Plot

Yeah, so filming an active, ongoing forensic case is rarely cool. Not entirely sure who would need to give permission for this, since the victim's wife was the killer, but I suspect some sort of legal agreement needs to be in place for this case to be filmed.
Why would there be a hit in a forensic database for the fictional Quentin Coles? Is that standard procedure for undercover cops, to plant facial reconstructions and other quasi-identifying information?
Once again, Angela does in five minutes with a computer what dozens of FBI agents and a couple undercover cops couldn't do in weeks' worth of work. Because she's a l33t hax0r.
Why does Dinco tell Herrera not to talk to anyone? I didn't really get that. There was also no resolution with Booth; I mean, he did accuse Dinco of murdering his employee and fellow cop, after all. A simple "oops, my bad" might have been nice.
So why did Martin swallow the balloon of diamonds? And when did he do that? Before he went to rob the students? After, but before he told his wife? (Then he would have been out of danger, though.)
Caroline and Andrew, sittin' in a tree... K-I-S-S-oh who'm I kidding, I don't really care about this plot line.

Dialogue

I've got nothing this week, except repeated expressions from Brennan of disbelief about sarcasm. Has she always been confused by sarcasm?

Ratings

Forensic Mystery - C-. There was no real forensic work needed to ID the victim. The work with the gunshots was pretty decent, though.

Forensic Solution - C+. Again, not much forensic anthropology in this episode. But the gunshot wounds themselves helped solve the case.

Drama - C. When the height of drama in the episode is a new relationship between Miss Julian and Dave Thomas, it's a pretty boring episode of television.

Bones - Season 8, Episode 19 (Review)

2013-03-19T22:42:00.000-04:00

The Doom in the Gloom

Episode Summary
A woman wakes up, groggy from having been injured in the back of her neck. She grabs her gun and heads for the door. When she opens it, a fireball engulfs her, mostly destroying her body.

Booth doesn't like the "crispy" ones.

The Jeffersonian team and the FBI are called out to the scene. Judging by the oval shape of the obturator foramen, the victim was female, and the granular appearance of her pubic face suggests she was in her mid-30s. Her head is found nearby in a toilet, as she was decapitated when thrown against a shelf by the blast.

After taking the body to the Jeffersonian, the team examines it and finds a bolo bullet in the victim's chest cavity. Her distal phalanges were burned beyond recovery, and her radius, ulna, thorax, and anterior aspect of her lower extremities are all calcined from the fire. Her back, shoulders, and buttocks are less burned, as indicated by the difference in color. The house and land were owned by Deanna Barbieri, a single, ex-Marine who was a part of a survivalist group. Medical records from the VA include a chest xray, and the size, shape, and position of the transverse processes of the vertebrae match the remains at the Jeffersonian, giving them a positive ID. From the angle of the entry wound of the gunshot, the slugs would have transected the inferior vena cava, killing her; also at play is the decapitation, although it's unclear if that was prior to or after death. Deanna had a history of misconduct with the military, and was most recently kicked out for fighting with fellow Marine Carlene Blaney, who was her ex-lover.

Hodgins swabs the chest wound and finds remnants of phosphorous and magnesium, which could have been used to make dragon's breath, a 50-foot flame that lasts for three seconds. The shot that killed her also started the fire. Meanwhile, Daisy finds evidence on the distal femur of a remodelled injury with striations from splintering. Brennan diagnoses it as a cannonball injury; Angela's statistical modelling and Hodgins' reconstruction confirm that that weapon could indeed have caused the injury to Deanna's leg. Brennan and Daisy also note pitting to the maxilla, which laughably Brennan calls caries sicca, resulting from gummatous lesions of tertiary syphilis, even though it looks nothing like caries sicca. They diagnose Deanna with a venereal disease, when the bones instead suggest nothing more impressive than scurvy, which a survivalist could easily have gotten without proper food for an extended period of time. Anyway...

Booth and Sweets track down Dr. Apocalypse, a trained medical doctor who quit to lead a group of survivalists. He has a YouTube video showing people how to make their own ammo, including a Civil War-style cannonball maker, and has a deed on land in Wise County, Virginia, on which he's built a bunker. Booth and the FBI team blast open the bunker, revealing a goat, a chicken, and four people -- Dr. Apocalypse, his wife Dolores, mechanical engineer Milo Mills, and retired minister Dennis Bukovac. Dr. Apocalypse admits that Deanna was part of their group and that he treated her for the cannonball injury, which was accidental, in a bit to ensure they were able to survive basic trauma on their own. He also gave himself a shot for syphilis, as he was sleeping with Deanna.

At the Jeffersonian, Angela digitally reconstructs objects that burned in the fire. This leads Hodgins to realize that, based on the melting points of the elements in a screwdriver and a shell casing, the fire must have started at 8:30, not 7, which means that no one in the bunker could have killed Deanna. However, Daisy notes a puncture wound to Deanna's clavicle, and Saroyan finds the likely cause: a 12-gauge needle, the kind used by vets, filled with benzodiazepine. Hodgins and Angela think that one of the survivalists must have worked out a way to sneak out of and into the bunker, but all their models fail to support this hypothesis.

Booth looks over the evidence from Deanna's house and finds the elements necessary to have booby-trapped her door, thereby ensuring the killer had time to escape and maintain an alibi. Milo, the mechanical engineer, would have the skill necessary to pull this off, but he had taught Dolores how to create traps like this, and she had taught him how to deal with animals. Booth hauls Dolores into the FBI for questioning; per Milo, she doesn't ever wash, so they might find residue from the firebomb on her hands. Brennan fails to find this and wants to take clippings of her fingernails, for which they don't have a warrant. Instead, she strikes a flint near Dolores' fingernails, and they catch on fire, indicating the presence of phosphorous. Dolores confesses; she didn't like Deanna, who was aggressive, overbearing, and dishonest, and didn't want to spend the rest of her life with her. Angela reconstructs one last item from the fire at Deanna's -- a letter she wrote to Carlene, which gives her peace.

Comments

Forensic

Everything was going along so well until the whole syphilis thing... but first...
As usual, the characteristics Brennan uses to estimate sex and age-at-death are right, but using just one method each for ID'ing a skeleton is poor forensic practice.
Speaking of an ID, if she was ex-military, they would certainly have dental records on her, and those are a much better way of getting a positive ID than chest xrays. The military is fairly good at recording soldiers' bodies (and now DNA) so that they can be identified later.
But getting back to the syphilis... So here's what caries sicca looks like. It doesn't look like simple pitting on the maxilla. It looks like giant, gross, cavitating lesions on the skull vault. And those gummatous lesions Brennan was talking about? Yeah, they look like this -- big, open, oozing wounds. With contemporary medical treatment, even on-again-off-again penicillan use, it isn't likely that Deanna would get to the tertiary stage of syphilis, which generally takes years of disease progression to reach. Sure, being a survivalist without great access to medicine could mean that her syphilis would flare up and recur if it was not treated properly in the first place; but it's really unlikely to result in gummatous lesions and caries sicca without anyone noticing. It's not like the actress playing Deanna in the opening scene had oozing wounds on her face. So yeah. No evidence of syphilis on her face, nor on her bones. I call shenanigans. (And would much more easily believe a diagnosis of scurvy from the bones and plot presented in this episode. But scurvy is hardly as romantic as the curse of Venus...)

Plot

I didn't really understand the whole booby-trap mechanism. How did it involve a gun (that was never found?) with a bolo bullet in it? Is a bolo bullet really a thing? I couldn't find anything in my two minutes of web-surfing. I feel like I missed something.
If the neighbor saw smoke at 7am and flames at 8:30am, but the blast didn't happen until 8:30am... what was the smoke earlier?

Dialogue

All I wrote down this week is, "Turdus migratorius is the scientific name for the robin."

Ratings

Forensic Mystery - B. This was a perfectly reasonable mystery, albeit mostly focused on the whodunit side, than the whoisit side.

Forensic Solution - B-. Oh, loads of points off for the ridiculous diagnosis of syphilis and the lack of consultation of dental records.

Drama - C. No one was in particular danger. Sweets got a new place (with roommates predictably named Chrissy and Janet). Daisy and Carlene got closure. Hodgins swooned over Angela's skills to encourage her because she's... planning to leave the Jeffersonian? Wait, what ever happened with that plot line?

Maybe next week will be more interesting. And less fake-VD-y.

Presenting Anthropology - Weeks 9&10 (Readings)

2013-03-17T13:20:00.002-04:00

Video Challenge

We anthropologists are, quite honestly, not the most fashion-forward academics, tending to prefer jeans or flowy, tribal-print dresses to other disciplines' sharp professionalism. And we don't tend to seek out opportunities to be on camera, to perform for an audience, preferring to sit back and take an etic approach to watching other humans enact culture. There has always been interest in anthropology from the mainstream television media, though, in the form of documentaries (and "documentaries") about past and present societies. It is therefore a good idea to feel comfortable both talking to a television camera and creating videos about your research and interlocutors. In these two weeks, we will take a look at (mostly short) anthropological videos and discuss how those videos differ depending on the audience and the video-creator's goals. We will also discuss the role of video in reporting anthropological finds and research - the phenomena of "research by documentary" and "publication by journalism" - which can be problematic for the academic anthropologist.

Anthro Major Fox on PBS' Idea Channel

Assignment 1: Find a good/bad example of video covering an anthropological topic. Searching YouTube is a great place to start.
Assignment 2: Alone or in a group, create something based wholly or in large part on video - ideas include a live-action video, a TED-style talk, a video compilation or clips or slides, an interactive game, or an iPad/Android app. Be prepared to present it, justify your design decisions and audience, and take criticisms and critiques.

Reading

Anderson, R., ed. 2012. Anthropologies Issue 10 - Beyond Words (the Visual Issue). Read entire issue.
Armelagos, G.J., M.K. Zuckerman, K.N. Harper. 2012. The science behind pre-Columbian evidence of syphilis in Europe: research by documentary. Evolutionary Anthropology 21:50-57.
Dornfeld, B. 2002. Putting American public television documentary in its place. In: Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, F. Ginsburg et al. eds., Ch. 12, pp. 247-263.
Finn, C. 2001. Mixed messages: archaeology and the media. Public Archaeology 4:261-268.
Kulik, K. 2006. Archaeology and British television. Public Archaeology 2:75-90.
Piccini, A. 2007. Faking it: why the truth is so important for TV archaeology. In: Archaeology and the Media, T. Clack and M. Brittain, eds., Ch. 11, pp. 221-236. Left Coast Press.
Pitts, M. & D. Klat. 2012. American Digger and archaeology. Anthropology Today 28(3):1-2.
Taylor, T. 2007. Screening biases: Archaeology, television, and the banal. In: Archaeology and the Media, T. Clack and M. Brittain, eds., Ch. 9, pp. 187-200. Left Coast Press.
VanDyke, R. 2006. Seeing the past: visual media in archaeology. American Anthropologist 108(2):370-375.

Links

2-minute thesis at PhD Comics - Language development and culture among sherpa in Nepal (S. Ciesielski)
Let's Talk about Evolution (SCOPE, response to Miss USA contestants refusing to support teaching evolution in school)
Making demographics and statistics visually interesting and dynamic (H. Rosling)
Apps - HistoryPin
Goodwin, C. 1994. Professional vision. American Anthropologist 96(3):606-633.
TAC, The House of Hermogenes
Secrets of the Dead, The Syphilis Enigma
What in the world? (c. 1952)
PBS, Time Team America
The Hunters
Babies trailer

(As always, follow our livetweets using #shareanthro on Mondays from 1-4pm central time.)

Roman Diet Media Coverage

2013-03-11T15:12:00.000-04:00

On March 1, my article, "Food for Rome," came out in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. It's gotten some media attention, so here's a collection of relevant links if you want to know more and don't want to read the article:

LiveScience, March 1, "Most Ancient Romans Ate Like Animals," by Stephanie Pappas. While the title is pretty laughable, the piece is quite good.

Polit.ru, March 5, "The Main Food of the Ancient Romans Was Millet" (title translated by google from the Russian). I like this coverage because it means I finally learned how to transliterate my name into the language of my maternal ancestors.

Quirks & Quarks, CBC radio program, March 9, "The Ancient Roman Diet." I talked to Bob McDonald, host of this Canadian science talk show, about isotopes, food, and Romans. (I confess I still haven't listened to it, since I hate hearing myself talk...)

Der Spiegel, March 10, "Fast alle Römer aßen Viehfutter" (Most Romans ate feed), by Angelika Franz.

Anthropology in Practice, Scientific American Blogs, March 25, "You are what you eat: unraveling the truth in food records," by Krystal D'Costa.

Presenting Anthropology - Weeks 7&8 (Audio Projects)

2013-03-05T13:41:00.002-05:00

Last week in class, we discussed audio media and anthropology -- how anthropologists are (or, generally, are not) employing audio to communicate their findings or interesting tidbits about the field.

To start, I asked the students to talk about how, when, and why they listen to the radio and podcasts. Most everyone had experience listening to NPR in their cars, as well as audiobooks. There was a surprising lack of people who routinely listened to podcasts, but I wondered if that is related to the nature of commuting here in Pensacola. When I was a grad student at UNC, I couldn't park on campus; this meant it took me 30-45 minutes each day to walk to the bus stop, ride the bus, and then walk from the drop-off to wherever on campus I needed to go. I listened to a lot of podcasts. Here at UWF, there is ample parking and poor public transportation, so students tend to drive to school, listening to their radios along the way.

Dr. Judy Bense, president of UWF, recording Unearthing
Florida radio program at WUWF, our campus NPR station

Based on their experiences, we came up with a list of likes and dislikes for audio programming. No one was particularly in favor of call-in shows (such as NPR's Science Friday, which can be painful to listen to) or hosts with monotones. Most students liked "noises" in the background; not distracting noises, but sounds that related to the content of the programming. This contributed to a feel of storytelling that they appreciated, and we discussed why, if that's primarily what anthropology is, we are not employing audio more in our research or presentations. (In Pensacola, though, we do have a regular audio series, Unearthing Florida, hosted by archaeologist and UWF president Judy Bense.)

As far as "best practices," we listened to a lot of examples of anthropological topics on radio, mostly from sources like NPR's This American Life, and realized that most of us preferred short(ish) segments (say, 10 minutes or less) on topics that related to our lives (like local history, food, relationships, etc.). I encouraged the students to take these ideas into consideration when they were creating their own audio projects: we may all thumb our noses at John Tesh's "Intelligence for Your Life," but millions of people hear those snippets and pay attention to the information in them because they're interesting and directly relate to their everyday lives.

Without further ado, here are the top three audio projects this week (sorry I can't embed them in Blogger; each link goes to an mp3 file in a new window):

Second Runners-Up - The team of Linda Hoang, Stella Simpsiridis, and Tina Estep created a series of under-2-minute audio programs called Anthropology: Did you know? Four of the six below have very good production quality, and all have interesting information to communicate. I like the idea of this series, which the students focused on little-known facts about well-known anthropologists, and the intro/outro music was created by Linda's husband, who also does the intro voiceover. They have a good mixture of subfields and nearly equal gender ratio. It was a smartly done project.

Anthropology: Did you know? Margaret Mead / Claude Levi-Strauss / Lewis Binford / Franz Boas / Clyde Snow / Jane Goodall (Run-time- 1:30 to 1:55 each)

First Runner-Up - Evan Springer, who came in third place in the print challenge, created an amusing anthropology-themed superhero in the vein of 50s radio broadcasting.

The Reluctant and Trivial Anthropologist (Run-time - 2:40)

And the Winner of the Audio Challenge - Gregg Harding, who won the print challenge, made a mini-podcast about the archaeological outreach project he works on, a 19th century industrial brick site called the Scott Site. The site, located in nearby Milton, FL, is being excavated with the help of high school students, so Gregg spoke with several students and their teacher about their hands-on learning experience. Gregg has plans to do one or more additional podcasts throughout the semester, to see how students' perceptions of archaeology and the site change. For more information, check out his blog, Building Heritage Education.

The Scott Site Archaeology Project Broadcast (Run-time - 4:18)

So far, none of the students has posted a transcript of their audio programs. I have encouraged them to do so, however, so that people can skim the information without listening and so that they are more easily accessible for the hearing-impaired. If they decide to create transcripts, you'll find them on their respective blogs.

Thanks for listening! Next week is spring break, then we're back for a two-week video challenge.

Bones - Season 8, Episode 18 (Review)

2013-03-04T22:32:00.002-05:00

The Survivor in the Soap

Episode Summary

Saroyan and Viziri are planning to knock off for a romantic dinner together when an FBI agent brings in a barrel found at a hazardous waste disposal facility. When he cracks the lid, a skeletonized arm comes into view. Booth and Brennan, who are at home having dinner and arguing about where to take a vacation, get the call and come in to work on the body in the barrel.

From the distance between the lunate and the third distal phalanx, Brennan guesses that the victim was male. Hodgins estimates from the state of the remains and the solid soap forming on the skeleton that time of death was at least 36 to 48 hours before. Once the chunk of soap-skeleton is out of the barrel, Viziri examines the skull and finds a broad nasal aperture with rounded nasal sill in addition to a protruding mandible, which suggests African ancestry. Brennan comments that the shape of the skull is more specifically West African. Based on the lack of osteoarthritis osteophytes, Viziri and Brennan estimate the man's age at death between 20 and 30 years. Unspecified lesions Viziri notices on xrays of the skull are diagnosed by Brennan as indicative of yaws, a treponemal infection common in sub-Saharan Africa. From those brief descriptors, Angela gets a hit in the missing person's database, as Symchay Conteh was the only young West African man to go missing in the last few days. He was reported missing by someone claiming to be Alvin James, who sounds like he was calling from a gas station.

Sweets and Booth visit Symchay's apartment, where the janitor, also from Sierra Leone, lets them in. There are no photos of Symchay's life as a kid -- no pictures of parents, friends, or himself prior to age 18. His bed is made, but the couch isn't. Booth suspects he was letting someone stay on his couch, and there are taxi cab logs that confirm someone else was in the apartment. Booth talks to Alex Radziwill from the State Department. Alex tells him that Symchay migrated from Sierra Leone to Guinea and applied for refugee status there as a young teen. Shortly thereafter, he immigrated to the US and applied for asylum at age 14. He was granted it, and became a US citizen five years later. Although Symchay had lots of part-time jobs, he worked regularly for Wilford Hamilton, an immigration lawyer, helping newly arrived refugees get on their feet and find jobs and apartments. Hamilton puts them on the trail of Breema Cheloba, who was deported back to Sierra Leone two years prior for almost killing a man in a street fight. Cheloba is back in the US illegally, but neither Hamilton nor Symchay turned him in. Fingerprints at Symchay's apartment confirm that Cheloba was the one staying on the couch.

Viziri tries to figure out cause of death, but the old injuries to Symchay's skeleton make that difficult. Viziri finds at least eight healed antemortem injuries, such as fractures to the tibia, clavicle, and mandible dating to childhood. Bone deformation in the knees, vertebrae, and feet suggests he had to carry heavy loads while barefoot. Brennan notices asymmetry in the shoulder joint; in Darfur, she saw this injury in child soldiers forced to carry and shoot AK-47s.

A check Symchay received before his death leads Booth and Brennan to an art gallery, where Kimberly Singer is exhibiting photographs she took as a war photographer in Sierra Leone nearly two decades ago. She met Symchay once, when she was hiring him to cater her gallery opening, as Symchay was trained as a chef. He broke down upon seeing a photograph in the exhibit, though, and she didn't see him after that. Brennan notices a boy in a photo and, based on the shape of the skull, the anterior nasal spine, and the mandible, the child is Symchay himself. Singer is astounded by this news. Although she has potassium hydroxide in her studio to develop photographs, she denies using it to attempt to cover up Symchay's murder.

Back at the Jeffersonian, Viziri has found cause of death: a linear cut to the right clavicle with adjacent fracturing on both the right and left sides of the cut. Someone must have employed a stab-and-cut motion to kill Symchay, the kind you'd use with a bayonet. Angela has compared the 911 missing person's call with taxi dispatch calls and finds a match: they think the driver of the cab and the called-in tip were both Breema Cheloba. Booth tracks down Cheloba, who is using a friend's cab to make money because he is in the country illegally, but Cheloba insists that Symchay was his friend, and he called him in as missing because he was worried. Cheloba talks about his amputated hand: he was asked to kill his teacher; when he refused, the rebels killed her, then cut off his hand to teach him a lesson. Viziri realizes that Cheloba couldn't have killed Symchay because the motions necessary to create the bone injuries couldn't have been done by a one-handed man. When Hodgins reports that the wound to Symchay's clavicle included chrome-plated steel and potassium chloride, commonly found on AK-47s, Viziri gets upset and accuses Hodgins of doing a bad job. It's impossible to slice the clavicle with the barrel of an AK-47. Saroyan reprimands Viziri, who later admits that, during the first Persian Gulf War, one of his cousins was forced to become a child soldier and was killed, so the case was hitting close to home for him.

After a late-night brainstorming session Chez Booth&Brennan, the two of them and Cheloba head back to Singer's gallery exhibit. Cheloba hasn't seen the pictures, but Symchay had been aware of the photograph of himself; it was published a few years prior. What Cheloba notices, however, is a photo of Joseph Embarga, who recruited thousands of child soldiers and was eventually indicted on dozens of war crimes. Booth takes a closer look and realizes that Embarga is the janitor who let him into Symchay's apartment. At the FBI, Booth questions Embarga, who insists he is Tony Dennis, in the US legally. He was never fingerprinted, and any DNA evidence from Sierra Leone was destroyed in the revolution. Embarga knows that Booth has no physical evidence on him. But Booth keeps Embarga talking so that he can have Angela do a voice-match between a previous recording of Embarga and his FBI questioning, to prove it's him and to have him extradited to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes.

Viziri and Brennan finally find the missing piece of the puzzle: a second stab wound to the victim's atlas. They think Symchay was stabbed with a double-pronged weapon made of chrome-plated steel. Brennan realizes that Wilfred Hamilton has an African tribal mask on the wall of his office, likely made out of a reclaimed AK-47. She, Booth, and Alex storm Hamilton's office, and a blacklight reveals blood on the mask, which Brennan suggests will prove to be Hamilton's and Symchay's; reflective infrared spectrosopy will verify that the blood was deposited at the same time. In essence, Symchay realized that his janitor was a wanted war criminal. Rather than confronting Embarga, he confided in Hamilton. However, Hamilton killed Symchay and blackmailed Embarga so that he could afford to keep his refugee center up and running.

Comments

Forensic

Distance between the wrist and finger I suppose could suggest male, since men tend to have larger hands than women, but there's a ton of overlap in this (as with, say, femoral head diameter).
At least the nasal aperture, nasal sill, and mandibular prognathism do suggest someone of African ancestry. The "this skull looks West African" part was crap, though. (Still wish forensics would stop using the rather offensive and historically-loaded terms Negroid and Mongoloid. The rest of anthropology has done away with them, and there are better terms we can use in forenics.)
If Symchay was a child soldier, prone to carrying heavy loads, why wouldn't he have osteophytes suggestive of arthritis? Too convenient a way to estimate age at death; and, with the skull definitely present, fusion of the sphenooccipital synchondrosis would be more useful. Also, "osteoarthritis osteophytes" doesn't make much sense. We do see osteophytes in osteoarthritis, but just the presence of osteophytes doesn't necessarily mean a diagnosis of osteoarthritis.
So, with yaws, about 10% of people suffer destructive bone lesions, but that's generally after having it for 5-10 years. It's possible that Symchay had yaws that long, since it tends to be a chronic condition. But the bone lesions from yaws are usually destructive joint lesions or destruction of the nasal aperture (similar to leprosy), as well as changes to the tibia. It wasn't clear what Brennan was referring to on the skull xray, and it wasn't clear why she looked at the zygomatics to conclude evidence of yaws.
Brennan's looking at a photo of a 7-year-old and realizing it was 24-year-old Symchay as a kid was total BS. There is no way she can age-progress a photograph in her head, much less come up with a specific person.
The IR spectroscopy idea seems plausible, but I don't know if it really works; anyone?

Plot

Places Brennan is considering for a vacation: Yangon (Rangoon, where my mother-in-law is actually visiting right now), Paris, and the Gulf of Thailand for, respectively, mass graves, catacombs, and mass graves. Fun places to take your 1-year-old. Definitely. (I do have to admit to vacationing in Paris primarily to see the catacombs, though. They are indeed impressive. But I wouldn't take a toddler.)
Who's in charge of Christine when Brennan and Booth both bolt from dinner to check on the skeleton in the barrel? Sweets? (Hey, Sweets is still living with them.)
Seems kind of convenient that all the Sierra Leoneans we meet happen to be in Singer's pictures and happen to have been from the exact same part of Sierra Leone.
Speaking of... how did a war criminal get into the US?

Dialogue

"A 2002 London urology study showed no correlation between the size of a man's penis and the size of his feet." -- Brennan (It's true. Here's the PubMed citation.)
"You're the intern. I'm the one with 'doctor' in front of my name." -- Hodgins, being a dick

-->

Ratings

Forensic Mystery - A. Even though the body was ID'ed quickly, the mystery of who killed Symchay and how was good; it was prolonged for almost the entire episode without feeling overly drawn out. The team picked up on clues and followed them, arriving at the answer after a couple red herrings.

Forensic Solution - B+. Generally good forensic work in this episode, but I didn't like the simplicity with which some of the analysis was handled (e.g., age-at-death, differentials for injuries).

Drama - A. This was a good episode of television. The forensic plot moved along nicely, the victim's back story was amazingly compelling, and Viziri was empathetic about the case. I could quibble about how Viziri is always brought in to satisfy the writers' seeming need for an "ethnic" intern to react to a case, but I like Viziri as a character, and he's easy on the eyes to boot.

One woman's trash...

2013-03-03T10:19:00.001-05:00

My mother-in-law is currently in Yangon, Burma (formerly known as Rangoon, Myanmar), travelling the world through UVa's Semester at Sea this spring. She posted this picture of trash on the street:

Look a bit more closely, and you can see...

There are numerous sets of dental impressions. Apparently she stumbled across the dental school's cast-offs. (Get it, cast-offs?)

I hope she picked some up for me. Curious as to the prevalence of shovel-shaped incisors in this population...

Roman Bioarchaeology Carnival XXVI

2013-02-28T13:30:00.000-05:00

New Finds

Graeco-Roman Tombs from Alexandria (via Ahram Online)

14 Feb - Collection of Graeco-Roman Tombs Uncovered in Alexandria (Ahram Online). These tombs may be the ones described by Strabo when he visited Alexandria in 30 BC, but they likely were for the general populace rather than the rich. Unfortunately, it seems no skeletons or grave goods remain.
20 Feb - Treasure-Filled Warrior's Grave Found in Russia (LiveScience). On the periphery of the Roman world, a 2,000-year-old grave found in the Caucasus mountains has yielded a male skeleton and a wealth of gold, iron, and bronze artifacts. Looters found the necropolis in the past, but this grave was untouched.
21 Feb - Bronze Age Necropolis Discovered in Romania (Archaeo News Network). This story is about 50 tombs dating to the 13th century BC, but Roman-era sites have also been found in the same area during a massive highway construction project.
23 Feb - Colchester Archaeologists Find a Roman Road, Bones, and a Well (EADT). While the well is Medieval, the road is Roman, and the bones... well, are from 600 sheep.

27 Feb - Ancient Shoes Found in Egyptian Temple May Reveal Wearers' Health Problems (LiveScience). Not exactly Roman and not exactly bioarch, but shoes! More specifically, a shoe-filled jar placed between two walls reveals that ancient Egyptians suffered from bunions and limps like many people do today.

Brouhahas

Cleopatra's Sister? (Not.)

24 Feb - Archaeologist Says Bones Found in Turkey are Probably Those of Cleopatra's Half-Sister (Charlotte Observer). In advertising an upcoming lecture in Raleigh on March 1, the Charlotte Observer renewed a long-standing (yet long-debunked) claim that bones found in Turkey are those of Arsinoe, Cleopatra's half-sister. The reaction to the news in the classical world was swift and incredulous...
25 Feb - Arsinoe's Tomb Redux? Really? (Rogue Classicism).
And Dorothy King's 3/16/09 post on a variety of old Cleopatra news is still relevant plus Mary Beard's 3/16/09 post in the Times Literary Supplement on the same.

Blog Posts

18 Feb - Death, Rome, and the Mitfords (Classically Inclined). Liz Gloyn discusses Roman attitudes towards death and brings in Jessica Mitford's iconic book, The American Way of Death.
10 Feb - Conference review: The Bioarchaeology of Ancient Egypt (A Bone to Pick). Scott Haddow reviews a conference in Cairo on all matters related to Egyptian skeletons.

Articles

6 Feb - Origins and Evolution of the Etruscans' mtDNA (Ghirotto et al., PLoS One).
28 Feb - Food for Rome: A stable isotope investigation of diet in the Imperial period (1st-3rd centuries AD) (Killgrove & Tykot, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology). Just email me if you'd like a copy!

Bio-culture

29 Jan - Greco-Roman Sex: Wilder & Weirder than Ours (HuffPo Blogs). Author Vicki Leon is coming out with a new book, The Joy of Sexus: Lust, Love, and Longing in the Ancient World and highlights some of her findings in this post.
21 Feb - 1 Kitty, 2 Empires, 2,000 Years: World History Told through a Brick (The Atlantic). In addition to shoes, I have a soft spot for hand/foot/pawprints on brick. A weird brick with a cat footprint found at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site in Washington state is consistent with a manufacture date/place of Roman Britain. The brick may have reached the western US via the Hudson's Bay Company in the early 1800s.

Bones - Season 8, Episode 17 (Review)

2013-02-26T23:04:00.002-05:00

The Fact in the Fiction

Episode Summary

A former investment banker-turned-farmer stumbles across a dead body while aerating his field to grow kale. The bones are heavily scavenged by coyotes, based on the three-cornered puncture marks, but presence of Nicrophorous americanus and its larvae give Hodgins time of death of 5 days ago. Flattened anterior and posterior aspects of the femoral neck lead Brennan to suggest the victim was an Hispanic male.

At the diner, Brennan is confronted by a young man with a head wound, ranting about the thing he has for her in his bag. Booth whips out his gun, the guy slides the bag across the floor, and a bloody head wrapped in plastic rolls out across the diner floor. The guy is not a crazy, though, but the new intern, Dr. Wells, who tracked the coyotes to a den 6 miles away and retrieved the skull of the victim. Wells is quirky, with a PhD in physics, master's degrees in astronomy and wildlife ecology, and is two credits shy of a master's in forensic anthropology; he has also passed the bar. Brennan complains that wrapping the skull in plastic could have compromised the remains because of condensation, but Wells had already calculated how much time he had before condensation started affecting the remains. Upon examination, Wells finds no cutmarks to the gonial angle of the mandible, the underside of the chin, or the cervical vertebrae, which means the head was most likely removed postmortem by scavengers. They note a strange glow emanating from the inferior nasal conchae.

The glow came from glow-in-the-dark paint, which they traced to the still-unnamed victim's brother's body shop. Alex Garcia identifies his brother, Benji, from... a facial reconstruction? He may also have reported him missing? Their mom is dead and their dad took off years ago; Benji broke up with his girlfriend Courtney around the time of his death. Courtney denies killing Benji, as she loved him, but he only had eyes for his truck, a tricked-out '59 El Camino like the one his dad used to own. Benji was smart, Courtney mentions, interested in time travel. Courtney's alibi checks out, though. Wells meanwhile finds a perimortem 20-mm contusion to Benji's occipital bone and slight scoliosis of the spine. There is also an incomplete perimortem fracture of the right anterolateral tibia and fibula.

Angela finds that Benji was talking a great deal with Professor Scott Hunter, including using his login information on the Collingdale University server, and had numerous files on his computer about time travel. Booth and Brennan go talk to Hunter, who has a prior record of electrocuting a student, which is how he lost his job at the university. Hunter denies killing Benji, accidentally or otherwise, but Brennan finds plenty of equipment in his home lab that could have electrocuted Benji. They bring some of this equipment back to the Jeffersonian so that Hodgins can run some experiments and see if the current could have caused the fracturing to the anterior and posterior aspects of sternal ribs 9 and 10 and the anterior aspects of vertebral ribs 11 and 12. After some goo splats Hodgins and Wells, they realize that electrocution was not what killed Benji.

Booth and Brennan go in search of more clues using Benji's phone records and tracking of his ATM withdrawals. He also borrowed money from Hunter on the night he was killed. Hodgins' spectroscopic analysis of the soil found on Benji's body points to serpentine soil, the kind found at a strawberry farm in Rockville. B&B search the area and find a barn with Benji's car in it. They also find another dead body -- rugged nuchal area on the cranium and convoluted sutures suggest Hispanic male, and the sternal rib ends suggest mid to late 40s. Booth thinks it's amazing that the body is basically the same as Benji's, only 20 years older, because of course there are no other Hispanic males in D.C.

The second victim suffered a single gunshot wound to the inferior right thoracic region. This is also what Hodgins and Wells conclude killed Benji, after getting Saroyan to shoot a gelled-up thorax. Judging by skin marbling and slippage, Saroyan estimates that the second victim was also killed 6 days ago. This man also has a roughly 20-mm contusion, but to the frontal bone. Brennan and Wells find a comminuted fracture to the right patella of the second victim with evidence of remodelling, as well as slight scoliosis. Wells thinks this could be evidence that Benji travelled through time, but Saroyan presents the DNA results: the man was Felix Garcia, Benji's father. Injuries to the two bodies suggest that Benji was standing in front of Felix, their heads knocked together, and they were shot by the same bullet.

Alex Garcia admits that he told Benji his father was dead, since he was a deadbeat and a junkie. Booth finds one of Felix's drug dealers, who happens to be Sidney Giran, a man who works at Alex's body shop. Sidney denies killing Felix, but he did inflict the kneecap damage with his tactical baton, as striations on the bone show, because Felix owed him money for heroin. The perimortem injury to Benji's leg, though, was made with more force and at a 45-degree angle. Sweets and Booth return to the body shop to question Alex, who is working on a car with scissor doors. Booth thinks that Alex was upset that Benji found out his father was alive and killed them. Alex admits the whole thing: Felix returned and asked them for money. Benji was going to give Felix his entire college savings, so Alex followed them to the barn at the strawberry farm. He shot at Felix, but Benji jumped in the way to protect him. Alex ended up killing them both.

Comments

Forensic

There is a suggestion that flattening of the femoral neck can suggest African-American ancestry (platymeric index), but I'm not aware of any clear skeletal indicators of Hispanic ancestry. Also not sure why the flattening of the femoral neck would give Brennan any indication of sex.
The introduction of the new intern was just stupid. Brennan does complain about how he presented her with forensic remains, but not nearly enough. There is no excuse for bringing remains in to a diner, compromising their integrity and the case itself.
They never actually obtain a positive ID on the victim. They track the paint in his nose to a body shop... and somehow know that it belongs to the victim's brother... who confirms it with... a facial reconstruction? This was really sketchy.
As for the second victim, a rugged nuchal area does generally suggest male, although I'd want pelvic confirmation of that one cranial feature. Convoluted sutures, though, are largely an ancestry marker for Asian heritage. Many Latinos, of course, have Asian heritage because that's where Native (North/South) Americans came from, but this means the complicated suture is not specific to Latinos.

Plot

I don't know about you, but if I were confronted with a job candidate who had four degrees in four wildly different subject areas, I wouldn't be itching to hire him. I'd be questioning his sanity and ability to think clearly. A PhD in physics and a law degree don't make one qualified to do forensic anthropology.
Not sure what "two credits short" of a forensic anthro master's degree is. I mean, after coursework, you have to take comps. And write a thesis. Plus, aren't all the other interns either PhDs in forensic anthropology or PhD candidates in it? Why is the Jeffersonian bothering with master's students?
Why doesn't Brennan get to pick her interns? Seems weird to have Saroyan decide who gets to work closely with her... Also, she has bad taste, since all the interns are beyond arrogant and all (except Daisy Wick) are men.
If Prof. Hunter was fired from Collingsdale University over two years ago, how can Benji access their servers with his login? Universities in my experience are all too happy to take away your email/library/server access the minute you graduate or quit.
Where did Saroyan get the DNA comparison from? That is, was Felix's DNA on file somewhere? Not clear how they IDed him, even though it was clear from the plot that the second victim had to be the first victim's father.

Dialogue

"On the island of Vanuatu, you could be cannibalized for disobeying your tribal chief." "And you could be forced to give your child to my clan to settle this petty conflict." "You're familiar with the Vanuatu?" "My knowledge is vast, which is why I'm here, right? So don't try to cherry-pick facts to win an argument." -- Pretty much what I want to say to Brennan every week.
"Theoretical physicists can be pretty weird..."
"Since you have a degree in complicated systems and imaginary numbers..."

Ratings

Forensic Mystery - B-. This episode was fine. The mystery was ok; it was pretty obvious that the two victims were related, and that the time-travel thing was a very bad red herring.

Forensic Solution - B-. Again, a fine episode. The osteology was reasonable, except for the Hispanic ancestry thing. The victims were never positively IDed from dental records or DNA (unless Felix was), which was disappointing. Cause of death was pretty reasonable.

Drama - B-. Nothing to get too worked up about. The new intern is obnoxious. Booth wants to mine meteors. Everyone discussed where in time they'd go back to, and Angela and Saroyan would go back to have sex with Angela's ex-husband (because of course?).

Presenting Anthropology - Weeks 7&8 (Readings)

2013-02-24T16:33:00.000-05:00

Audio Challenge

Margaret Mead takes to the radio

Anthropologists have not specifically embraced audio media through the years. We have a picture of ethnographers tape-recording (and now digitally recording) their interlocuters, but past presentations of these data were often made in print rather than attempting to incorporate the glorious variation in intonation, cadence, and meaning of language around the world. Jane Goodall stands as an exception; her pant-hooting at nearly every public appearance always gets a surprising reaction from her audience. A small number of anthropological podcasts exists, as well as parody songs (generally in the educational realm), but little is being done on a discipline-wide basis to integrate audio media into anthropological research, presentation, and outreach. In these weeks, we will explore the ways that audio is used in anthropology and create audio-based projects for various audiences, in an attempt to garner interest from earbud wearers attached to their ever-present iPods and phones.

Assignment 1: Find a good example of audio media covering an anthropological topic. YouTube and the iTunes store are good places to start.
Assignment 2: Alone or in a group, create something based wholly or in large part on audio - ideas include a podcast, a call-in interview with a UWF professor (e.g., NPR's Science Friday), a parody song, an audio lesson or course design (e.g., MOOC), or a downloadable walking tour of UWF campus/archaeological sites ("haunted tour"?). Be prepared to present it, justify your design decisions and audience, and take critiques and criticisms.

Reading

Anderson, J. 2010. The past in your pocket: mobile media and interactive interpretation. English Heritage Research News 13:17-19.
Bessire, L. and D. Fisher. 2012. Introduction. In: Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century, Bessire & Fisher, eds., Ch. 1, pp. 1-47. NYU Press.
Brittain, M. & T. Clack. 2007. In the camera's lens: an interview with Brian Fagan and Francis Pryor. In: Archaeology and the Media, T. Clack and M. Brittain, eds., Ch. 5, pp. 125-134 (esp. p. 129 on radio). Left Coast Press.
Catlin, L. 1999. Anthropology radio. Anthropology News 40(6).
RadioFrance. Tips for radio interviews.
Various. How to make a successful podcast. (Check out several links to see what they all have in common.)
Various. On good/bad radio interviews: Chris Lowis blog, NPR, DigitalSpy.

Links

Culture and the Anthropologists / Anthropology and Environment (BBC Radio)
Indiana Jones: Myth, Reality, and 21st Century Archaeology (podcast)
Audio (walking) tours - SF's Presidio, Gotham's Archaeo Past
Educational songs - e.g., Hominid rap
Anthropology on the Radio, links at Discover Anthropology
Talking Anthropology podcast
Recent 60-Second Science (SciAm) podcasts with anthropologists Nina Jablonski and Alan Mann

(As always, follow our livetweets using #shareanthro on Mondays from 1-4pm central time.)

Presenting Anthropology - Weeks 5&6 (Discussion)

2013-02-19T15:51:00.000-05:00

For the last two weeks, we've been talking about presenting anthropological information in print, both in terms of news media and in terms of posters/brochures/flyers/etc. I probably shouldn't hold off on blogging about our discussion until the end of the unit, though, as now I can't seem to find my notes from last week...

We talked a great deal last week about dealing with the media and about how we might approach different audiences. That is, an audience of colleagues at a conference is different than an audience of the general public. And yet, reporters are increasingly showing up at research conferences and covering stories that they think are of wider interest. The line between public and for-colleagues-only is increasingly blurring, and we were largely in agreement that making every presentation accessible to a general, educated audience was the best option whenever possible. One student suggested that anthropologists might want to learn a bit about journalism and public relations (e.g., how to write a press release) so that we can get better at disseminating our message (without jargon!) in a way that interests the general public. Not sure yet how to put together a workshop on this topic, but I thought it was a good idea and will be mulling that over for the future.

We also collected examples of bad presentations (generally posters) and discussed what turned us away. These are my favorite: Doing It Wyoming Style; Who Will Speak for Them? (as featured at Savage Minds); Conservator: The Invisible Hero; and Landscape Dynamics at Monticello (even though I have a soft spot for the place I did my first field school, that can't make up for a title in Comic Sans). We got a lot of our information and inspiration from Zen Faulkes' Better Posters blog.

Yesterday, we had our first official challenge -- the Print Challenge! In true Project Runway fashion, each student presented his or her design, and the rest of us offered compliments and critiques in person and on our spiffy Presenting Anthropology cards... (well, really they're just 1/3-sheet slips of paper; hey, I'm at a public uni; no money for fancy card stock here). I was generally impressed by what the students turned out. The top three are...

Second runner-up -- Evan Springer. Evan created a flyer for an entirely fictional Anthropology Career Day here at UWF (our colors are blue and green, by the way). I was a bit disappointed to learn that it was fictional, as the flyer made me want to attend. I loved the concentric circles (I'm a sucker for circles), but more than that, I could see this design modified slightly and extended to an interactive web page and to other documents that could be handed out or shown at a career day event. His use of the small icons for date/place/contact was also clever. Evan's research centers on the anthropology of academic dishonesty, and he blogs about it at Academic Misconduct.

First runner-up -- Tristan Harrenstein. For his social media project, Tristan is attempting to integrate archaeology and FourSquare, with the blessing of the Florida Public Archaeology Network. I can't wait to see how he does over the course of the semester getting the Pensacola public involved in local archaeological sites and museums through this social networking platform that I don't know much about. Tristan's flyer is simple but eye-catching, as the off-kilter cross is distinct but also makes sense with the FourSquare theme.

And the winner of the Print Challenge -- Gregg Harding. Gregg is currently working at a mid-19th-century industrial brick site. One of his challenges is to make archaeology accessible to students at local Milton High, and also to get them to do archaeology themselves. It's a very exciting public archaeology project, and Gregg's presentation (for the upcoming Florida Anthropological Society conference) is visually interesting without being overwhelming. We suggested some minor edits to this (e.g., desaturate the background a bit, fix the logo transparency issues, and change the spacing in the contact area), but we all liked it a great deal. For more on Gregg's work, check out his blog Building Heritage Education.

All told, we had a great showing in class yesterday. There were brochures, posters, business cards, flyers, and infographics. It was neat to see what the students came up with, and the winners above definitely deserve a round of applause.

Our next unit is on audio, so I can't wait to hear what they come up with!

Bones - Season 8, Episode 16 (Review)

2013-02-18T22:30:00.002-05:00

The Friend in Need

Episode Summary

A homeless man brings a locked suitcase to a pawn shop, trying to sell it. As he pries open the lock, he reveals the contents: a giant mass of blood, bone, and decomposing human flesh. The suitcase is transported to the Jeffersonian, where Brennan immediately identifies the victim as male based on the 90-degree gonion (sic) angle (where the mandibular body intersects with the ascending ramus, Brennan says, like no one on the team has ever taken an osteology course). The lack of fusion of the sphenooccipital synchondrosis tells Abernathy that the victim was in his mid-teens. Hodgins suggests that phytoplankton and krill could tell where the body was dumped, but then he disappears for the next 40 minutes of the show, never to bring up that point again. The fracturing on the bone appears to be mostly postmortem, which is odd since the body was in a locked suitcase the whole time, not banging around on anything.

During the first commercial break, the team apparently positively IDs the body using dental records, as Sweets and Booth head to Martin (Manny) Mantecone's house to give his mother the bad news. Her friends, Blonde Mom and Kat Martin are also there. Kat was the last person to see Manny, at a big party two weeks prior. Booth gets word from Saroyan that Manny's tissue revealed high levels of ketamine, or Special K. Manny's mom insists he wasn't into drugs. A search of his room shows Booth that Manny was "fixing" cell phones, and he had a huge wad of cash as well. Angela works her magic on the cells and finds that Manny was texting Kat quite a bit but also a guy named Nick Pavonetti. Booth questions Nick at his place of employment - Pavonetti and Sons Moving and Storage. Nick was the frontman for Manny's operation, selling the "fixed" phones.

Abernathy continues to check the remains for cause of death. He notices two depressions bilaterally on the frontal bone and one on the left parietal, which Brennan thinks were holding points from a halo traction brace, which apparently Manny was in as a kid due to a car accident. (This was never explained.) She also points out osteophytes on one of the cervical vertebrae at the transverse foramina. Somehow this gives her cause of death, namely that cervical nerves 3 and 4 were severed, causing asphyxiation because of their connection to the medulla.

Throughout the episode, Kat is searching for the person who raped her at the party. She confesses the rape to Sweets, who tells the cops. The cops then decide to subject Kat to an invasive medical exam for a rape that happened two weeks prior. Sweets shares his past with Kat and vows to help her find her rapist. For a while, they think it's Manny, since he had Special K on him, and Kat's mother confirms that Manny was being creepy. But histological examination of Manny's liver reveals he didn't take Special K, it was just with him at the time of his death.

Angela meanwhile pores through a site called HipstaShotz looking for clues about Manny's death. She finds him looking at Kat, and getting into a fight with the kid she was dancing with ("the Saunders boy"). Booth brings the Saunders boy in for questioning, because apparently he's 18 and doesn't need or want his parents there. He admits to yelling at Manny, but he didn't hit him and just started dancing with another girl. Later, Angela searches the photos for Kat, and they isolate her in the backyard, upset after Manny got into a fight with her dance partner, and see her being drugged and taken to the garage.

Abernathy finds a pattern in the bone fractures. There are six avulsion fractures that are symmetrical and nearly parallel, likely sustained after Manny was dead. The patterning of the fractures is a little more confusing, with injuries to the scapula, T verts, rib, and iliac crest. Abernathy suspects localized force imparted by three sets of evenly-spaced linear bands. Hodgins finally gets something to do--apparently there were particulates in the suitcase that he thinks are from a polyfiber woven material used in straps or belts. When ratcheting belts are placed around a suitcase, they would produce enough force to crush Manny's skeleton in the way the Jeffersonian team was seeing.

Since Nick works for a moving company, Booth and Brennan go question him. Brennan finds the straps, with blood still present on them, and Booth arrests the kid. They question him at the FBI (another kid who's apparently over 18 and doesn't feel the need to call in representation). Nick says that someone paid him and Manny paid in Special K for the phones; Nick then had plenty of the drug to roofie Kat. He raped her, but then Manny found out and got mad. Nick then killed Manny and dumped his body with the Special K in the suitcase in the lake. Booth suggests that he can't charge Nick for both rape and murder, so they get Nick to confess to rape. And then somehow have him also on a murder charge (that he didn't actually confess to?). The green eye that Kat kept seeing in her nightmares was a green evil eye pendant that Nick wore around his neck.

Comments

Forensic

Oh jeez. Not even sure where to start with this episode. So very confusing.
The age and sex estimation was just horrible. A 15-year-old boy (especially the one shown in the pictures) would likely not have a sexually dimorphic gonial angle yet. Besides that, gonial angle is a terrible estimator of sex; any number of things can cause changes to that angle that aren't related to sex. (Also, it's gonial angle, not gonion angle. Gonion is a term, but it means the osteometric point, not the angle.) Points to the writers for using my favorite osteological term of all time, the sphenooccipital synchondrosis, but negative points for their strange assumption about time of fusion. That joint (between the sphenoid and the occipital at the bottom of the skull) is probably the very last to fuse in humans; in most people, it's closed by the mid-20s. So there's no way an unfused sphenooccipital synchondrosis would narrow the age down to mid-teens. Iliac crest? Sure, I'd buy that. (But the iliac crest on the fake skeleton was totally fused when they were talking about injuries, so...) Also, the fake mandible they were using had three molars; a 15-year-old is very unlikely to have had his wisdom teeth come in yet. Eesh. Just terrible all around.
They positively ID'ed Manny based on dental records. During the commercial break. Argh.
Was the fact that Manny was in a car accident and in traction as a kid ever mentioned before Brennan dismissed Abernathy's findings?
I was completely unclear on the point of the osteophytes. Yes, those could definitely result from a childhood neck injury. But how were they cause of death? Osteophytes in the transverse foramina... dislodged?... when someone hit Manny? And if they're seeing osteophytes, how do they know that those caused an injury? I mean, it's just a complete guess; there's no evidence that that was cause of death.
When Abernathy tries to point out the left parietal, he indicates the right (direction is based on the sides of the person's body, not how you're looking at him).
So the avulsion fractures actually made a lot of sense. It was a good forensic touch, but unfortunately with this episode, it was equivalent to shining a turd.
Poor Hodgins gets nothing to do until the very end. He mentions figuring out where the suitcase was dropped, but no one cares because they positively ID'ed the victim during the commercial break.

Plot

Why do the Saunders boy and Nick both say they were surprised that Kat was only 15? I mean, she went to school with them. They knew she was a sophomore. Also, why would it matter? (Don't make me look up age of consent in... Virginia? DC? But generally three years isn't a big deal, even if one person in the relationship is 18.)
So if the two guys who were questioned by the FBI were indeed 18 already and seniors in high school... wouldn't they still be living at home? And neither one wanted their parents there with them? Is that not allowed?
Do police generally do medical exams on rape victims two weeks after the fact? I don't know the stats on longevity of foreign DNA in one's system, but I think it's only a few days at most. Just seems cruel to make Kat go through that.
Wait, why did Manny owe Nick money? Wasn't Nick the one selling the phones, then splitting the money with Manny? And where did Manny get Special K from in the first place?
Someone needs to explain to me the whole "gotcha" confession at the end. Makes not one damned bit of sense to me.
Oh right, and there was a plot about Abernathy still dating Saroyan's adopted daughter, Michelle. It is not worth mentioning, except that we discover Saroyan is still seeing Aristoo, which, well, is also not worth mentioning.

Dialogue

"Puritanical sexual values are shown to encourage secretive and sometimes deviant sexual behavior." -- Brennan
"In high school, I did a report on the effects of alcohol on muscle coordination." -- Brennan, the party animal (wait, wasn't she smoking cigarettes with boys last episode?)

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Ratings

Forensic Mystery - D. Not even sure what was going on in this episode. Aside from the avulsion fractures, the remainder of the forensics was completely sloppy.

Forensic Solution - D. Again, Brennan seemed to have knowledge the viewer didn't about Manny's medical history that was pretty relevant to the case. Except that knowledge was delivered in a very confusing manner that doesn't make much of the forensic solution sit well.

Drama - C-. The Kat plot was more compelling than anything else, of course, hence the PSA at the end from Emily Deschanel. The forensic drama wasn't very interesting, and the Abernathy-Michelle relationship was a really odd, poorly-thought out parallel to Kat's situation.