In the spirit of more introductions, and because I spend a lot of time critiquing archaeology-especially the archaeology of the "Paleoindian" period, I'm going to make a thread about my MA thesis, which will reveal my secret-academically, anyway, I AM a Pleistocene archaeologist!

I haven't published my MA thesis or turned it into articles for a number of reasons-the first and foremost being that the PI of the site is someone that I have absolutely no interest in ever communicating with ever again.

Unfortunately, my research ends up bolstering the work of someone who is a genuinely bad guy. You may or may not remember him from the whole SAA2019 debacle. I also don't want to see my research used as a "well she worked with him, so how bad could it have been?" sort of thing.

Ok. End Disclaimers. Let's get into it!

A Feminist Archaeological Approach to the Analysis of the Osseous Tool Suite from the Broken Mammoth Site, Interior Alaska

So. One of my favorite things about archaeology is the ability it has to get into people-summarized tidily by this quote:

"Yes, there are big questions about the evolution of sociality or some of the standard ones, like the origins of agriculture, or whatever, ....

yet the nature of archaeology is that we can really address some of the more on-the-ground, day-to-day kinds of things, sort of the quotidian of past human lives, as well as how those might have been part of grand narratives about the human past....

There are these little mini inquiries that get into the everyday, the microscales more than the macroscales" (Conkey and Morgan 2013:549)

I used this quote as the"north star" of my explorations

The goals of my thesis were:
1. Summarize Broken Mammoth because there is a LOT of conflicting info about Broken Mammoth in the published record.
2. Put the osseous tools from Broken Mammoth in context with other similarly aged osseous tools from Beringia and North America

Thesis goals continued
3. Just put the osseous tools out there descriptively, since they hadn't been presented and are frequently not included in organic tool roundups from the Pleistocene/Holocene transition.

and last, and most favorite goal:

4. Provide an interpretation of life at the Broken Mammoth site during the Pleistocene/Holocene transition that explicitly discusses women and their contributions to the archaeological record.

I started my thesis by talking about the Paleoindian imagination. You all know this: It's the guy by himself on hill with a spear in his hand, his hair blowing in the wind, picking out a mammoth to hunt. A "pristine" landscape. A cartoon version of America's Manifest Destiny.

This imagination is informed by settler-colonial science, theory, academic practice, all of it! And we look for that guy. We're always looking for that guy on the ridge. But who does that leave out?

It leaves out women, children, elders, folks outside the binary.

I mean, frankly, I exist. I only exist because women lived in the Americas during the Pleistocene. This is a completely uncontroversial statement....and yet...we have a really hard time imagining what women were up to in the past.

So, let's take a quick side bar and center ourselves on the landscape. I'm going to skip over the discussion about "Beringia" and all the culture history/ stone tool complex discussion I went over in my thesis.

So. Where are we? The Broken Mammoth Site

It is a REALLY spectacular place. I love the interior of Alaska with so much of my heart. Here's a picture of baby Annalisa-ELEVEN years ago, at the Little John Site (left) and at Broken Mammoth (right). The site overlooks the Tanana River and is 97km SE of Fairbanks

So, I'm only going to describe two of the "cultural zones" from Broken Mammoth for this--Culture Zones III and Culture Zones IV. There has been geoarchaeological analysis of Broken Mammoth, and that's not my area of expertise at all. Most of this draws from Krasinski 2005.

So. CZ III or the Middle Paleosol Complex can be summed up like this:
Dates: 12,355-10,330 cal BP
Environment: Cool, wet, open poplar-willow, scrub-forest parkland. Steppe-bison, wapiti, hare, marmot, ground-squirrel, tundra swan, goose, ptarmigan

Previous cultural interpretations of the activity in CZIII is a semi-permanent basecamp occupation; lithic tool manufacture with frequent faunal processing. Fall and winter season occupation.

CZ IV is very similar to CZ III in environment, with more birds present in the faunal material recovered, especially waterfowl. It dates between 19,259 cal BP-12,828 cal BP. The hearths identified in CZ IV and CZIII are separate, not superimposed.

CZ IV is interpreted as a Spring occupation. The lithic tools from CZ IV are unifacial core-scrapers, flake cores, chopper, anvils, and hammerstones. None of this is my research so please don't come at me for dates. We'll be looking a lot more closely at CZ III anyhow.

Ok. So now we know where we are, and what life might have looked like, environmentally, let's transition to osseous tool technology! Y'all. Stone tools have absolutely nothing on the amazing properties of osseous materials, and the extreme dopeness of osseous tools.

Bone: It's fracture resistant upon impact, holds a sharp edge, and it's literally everywhere! Imagine all the tools you can make from the critters you're already harvesting for food.
Antler: Frature resistant, workable, holds it shape after it's been formed

Ivory: Aside from being STUNNING, ivory has great bending strength when constantly loaded, fracture resistant on impact, and incredibly workable.

So. There are definitely fewer osseous tools than stone tools from this time period, but that's a product of taphonomy.

Osseous Tools are found everywhere!
9 from Eastern Beringia
4 in Western Beringia
8 in the PNW and CA
10 in the West
6 in the SW
5 in the Midwest
5 in the SE

Here are some terrible maps I made, because I didn't have access to GIS.

Zooming in, there are a number of tools in the Tanana Valley:
Swan Point: No tools, but worked antler and ivory
Gerstle River Quarry: Slotted rod preform
Upward Sun River: 4 bi-beveled rods
Mean: Antler billet, decorative pieces, and potential earrings.

And then there's the Broken Mammoth Tools! To explore them I did a literature review for the tools. I photographed, scanned, and used a micrograph at 10x, 20x, 50x, 100x and 200x magnification.

Here's me goofin' around with my little dino-lite

I took all those images, scaled them, and made diagrams to overlay the photos to show the wear I observed under different light conditions. I'll share those images coming up!

I used data collection lexicons based off of the work of Julia C. Byrd 2011, which is SO GOOD because it removes interpretative descriptions when you're talking about tools. Something isn't "pointy like an arrowhead" it "has a sharp point with significant rounding"

I also used scales for modification and surface damage to the artifacts.

So. What were my results?
The literature review: y'all it was a mess. Conflicting info, no complete analysis or summary. Different publications had the tools coming from CZ III or upper levels of CZ IV. A true cluster of confusion. I won't go into why, but I DO have opinions.

Here are some tables and the photo diagram of the tools I shared earlier so you can see my metric data and gross morphological descriptions of the tools

Photo and Micrography Results:
I took 662 micrographs, photos, and scans. I learned that I could best accomplish my goals by looking at low resolution images, and I learned a very important lesson.

When you use glue as an artifact preservation tool, you can't use microscopes

This is a diagram of the surfaces of some of the artifacts completely marred by some sort of glue. I spent about a year of my life trying to figure out how to safely remove this glue, but I couldn't get a straight answer about what kind of glue was even used.

I quite literally called in a favor and had someone hit a sample of the glue with a pXRF to see if I could get at what would safely remove it so I could do my planned research. I could not. They remained glued. Please don't dunk your artifacts in mystery glue.

OA-1 is an eyed bone needle with a bilaterally drilled eye, with polish on the shaft and around the eye. Likely a decorative sewing implement. It's the only E. Beringian needle, but it comparable to other North American needles. It was found under a hearth stone in CZ III.

This needle is the love of my archaeology life, y'all. It's 35mm long, it's made of bird bone (I think). It's so used, and it's SO COOL. Here she is by herself again, because I love her so much.

OA-2 was part of an ivory "cache". It had significant surface damage, but polish was visible on the dorsal surface, and has evidence of the manufacturing sequence. I think it's a rod preform. It's bigger than other Paleoindian rods. It really suffered from the glue dunk

OA-3 was also in the ivory cache. It's a bipoint, with wear on the midshaft, with a broken base. There are transverse striations on the midshaft, no use or impact wear on the tips or base. Could be a projectile point preform. Or a handle?

OA-4 is a straight up weirdo. I saved it in my computer as ???. It has a tranverse gouge at midshaft, suggestive of hafting. Someone suggested it could be a throwing board or atlatl handle...but honestly. What? No.

I think it's a flenser or a creaser.

Ok. I have to take my dog out to pee. I will be back with more tools in a moment! Here's the dog in question

And we're back. OA-5 is made of antler with a bi-beveled base and blunted tip. Hafting wear on the midshaft and base, with impact damage/pitting on the tip. This one is a pretty straight-forward blunted projectile, used for hunting small fur bearers or birds without damaging them

OA-6 is made of ivory. Broken to a flat termination on one end, but OG artifact photos indicate that it was bi-beveled. Repeated wear evidence, ventral surface is missing. This one is most consistent with other Paleoindian rods.

Like I said, OA-6 is missing it's ventral side, and the way it's broken/the work on the margins suggests to me that this may have been a slotted point for use with microblades, rather than a clothespin foreshaft.

OA-7 is made of bone, it's broken into 3 pieces, and it's most similar to OA-5. It has a circular cross section at the midshaft and basal portions, with visible hafting wear. I think it's another blunted projectile.

So. To sum up:
Hunting weapons with evidence of use:
OA-5, OA-6, OA-7
Hunting weapons without evidence of use/preforms:
OA-2, OA-3, OA-4
One unidentifiable object:
OA-4
One sewing needle:
OA-1

Now that we know the artifacts, what does this have to do with a feminist theoretical approach to all of this? I used a couple of methods to move toward an engendered understanding of the Broken Mammoth site.

1. Feminist theory drawn from Gero, Conkey, Spector, and Wiley. Embracing ambiguity, rejecting "objectivity," performing analyses reflexively, and explicitly centering women in analysis.

Y'all the first time I read that I could just...reject the idea that I have to be OBJECTIVE

My whole world opened. All of this is imagination, so why not just really lean in to that? Like my other Twitter thread...what else can we imagine?

I looked to ethnographic analogy, and built an "ethnographic activity matrix"

I looked at previous spatial analysis, leaning heavily on Krasinski 2005, and looked toward literature, especially Alan Osborn's "Eye of the Needle" and Susan Ruth's fantastic diss "Women's toolkits; Engendering Paleoindian Technological Organizations"

Doing all of that I developed the hypothesis "Tools associated with small mammal hunting, hide-working, and sewing makeup a toolkit that would have been used by Beringian women, and these tools are identifiable at Broken Mammoth"

One of the things I love about feminist theory in archaeology is its embracing of reflexivity. I firmly believe that you have to interrogate yourself and your scholarship to be able to work with the material culture of other people. Who are you? Why are you here?

How has my own personal and academic development shaped this thesis?
I have amazing women who helped guide me towards this-
These are my grandmas and my mom. My grandmas are the same age as me when I defended. My mom wouldn't give me a diff picture!

I started in cultural anthropology, and moved into archaeology because I was so interested in the past, especially about life with extinct critters! But I never really found papers that described what I was into-just day to day life. Women, children, not hunting.

I was also inspired/enraged by an article in Nat. Geo. It had so much potential. It was about the Naia cenote discovery and they talked to Jim Chatters. He described Naia as "diminutive" "subservient" the victim of the more powerful males making up his "wild man type"

Y'all. I was LIVID. LIVID. I've said this before, but my grandma is Raramuri, and Naia really struck a chord with me. She could be my relative, however distantly, and THIS is how we're talking about her. As Indigenous folks we already don't see ourselves in this world.

AND this is what we get?! It was racist, it was sexist, and it was gender essentialist in a way that made me just...I'm still mad about it.

Lastly, how could I not talk about the needle. There's just one of them-the sample size is 1. No statistics, it's just this one thing.

And so much of Paleoindian archaeology is about statistically significant sample sizes. But you just can't do that at Broken Mammoth. But that needle was so incredibly compelling, and I wanted to talk about what it meant!

How might a woman's toolkit be identified? What kind of ethnographic analogy would be required to help further develop the concept of a woman's toolkit?

Osborn 2014 outlined what you might find about/related to needles: Bone and ivory needles, needle blanks, fragments, grooved stone abraders, needle cases, sinew combs, cutting knives, cached sewing boards (Osborn 2014).

Ruth 2013 showed that the sexual division of labor in hide working is strongly related to latitude. No one can be an expert in every task.

I decided to look at the anatomy of arctic and subarctic clothing through ethnography to see who does what when it comes to making clothes

This is a portion of the ethnographic activity matrix I used to keep track of all the ethnography I read. I looked at making clothes from procuring the materials to the finished product

What I found was:

Men and women participated unequally in raw material procurement

Women participated in small mammal hunting and active support roles for large mammal hunting

Women processed large animal hides, with some support by men

I also found common features of cold-adapted clothing:

Base layers, fur usually on the inside
Trousers with attached feet or moccasins
Double –fur parka
Outer boots with hard soles

But clothing also had training, ritual, and economic significance
Training:Not considered an expert until later in life. Training passed from older women to young women, part of marriage rituals among the Chukchi. Well-dressed hides were usually seen on older women

Ritual: Chukchi infant to toddler ceremony (Vukvukai 2004)
No hunting during sewing time and no sewing in the low winter light ((Balikci)
Menarche seclusion (Osgood)
Economic:
Trading sinew packs (Wilder)
Marriage intent communicated through gifts of a parka

So. ALL ethnographic analogy comes with a GIANT caveat. Ethnography is usually conducted by white anthropologists who carry their own bias and general Bad Takes. However, what is consistent, is that it takes a lot of work to make clothes.

Everything-the large mammal for the bulk of the outfit, feathers and fur for decoration, the bones needed to make the tools, the stone needed to make the tools, all of it has to be harvested. Then it all needed to be processed, and then the clothes had to be manufactured

It takes so much skill to do these tasks, that not everyone could be an expert in each task. Somehow that labor needed dividing, and it seems likely that women procured the small critters for clothing, processed them, and used them to make very fly outfits.

Ok. So now we have to pull all these components together-much like the components of a composite tool (I love analogies). At Broken Mammoth we have a needle, we have blunted projectiles, we have hearth-based activity, we have birds and small mammals. We have women (which. duh).

Katie Krasinski's thesis that I've cited a few times talks about hearth activity areas hypothesizes that a "supranuclear family" visited the site over multiple years, working close together around the identified hearths.

I concluded with the idea that Broken Mammoth is largely discussed as a data point within the larger question of peopling of the Americas, when really, there is SO much to learn about Broken Mammoth on her own, and made a few other suggestions.

I love storytelling as an interpretive tool for archaeologists-it makes the fact that we're really telling evidenced based stories when we're interpreting archaeology explicit. I ended my thesis in a vignette that can be held in contrast to the solitary dude from the intro:

Anyway, if you want to read the thesis, please reach out via DM or find me on http://academia.edu  where it can be downloaded. I'm pretty proud of my works cited, and obviously there's a lot more to this all than the Twitter thread.

Thanks for reading!