archaeology

Over the past 20 years or so I’ve gotten more and more interested in archaeology, especially the archaeology of the American southwest.

Looking way back, I guess I initially learned about the topic when my family visited Mesa Verde National Park when I was in my early teens in the early- to mid-80s. Back then, the park service was still talking about the “Anasazi” who lived all over the Four Corners area and then mysteriously disappeared around the year 1200 AD. Today, most people no longer use the word “Anasazi” and use the more accurate - and less politically charged - term “Ancestral Puebloan”. And at some point the park service started listening to the modern day Pueblo people who have been basically saying, “Dude, they weren’t some strange race that disappeared. Those are just our great-great-grandparents who moved. Now the family lives over here.” But in the 80s, it was the kind of mysterious thing that caught my mind as a teen.

In my 20s and 30s as I had more free time, I traveled around and started learning more history and pre-history of the area. In my 40s I started reading a lot of archaeology books and magazines. Eventually I got to the point where I knew all the common stuff in the general literature, and started reading research papers like archaeologists’ Ph.D. dissertations and professional publications. Then I realized I have more interest and knowledge of this topic - at least parts of it - than any other subject except maybe aeronautics or computer science.

So, around 2023 I discovered that the State of Colorado was revitalizing its Program for Avocational Archaeological Certification (PAAC). So I signed up. It’s basically a semi-structured way for people with an avocational interest in archaeology to learn more about the field and get professional training. I figured I’m too old to go back to college to get a formal degree in Archaeology. And besides, what would I do with it? I don’t want a job working at an archaeology services company, living in a tent digging trenches every day. So the avocational approach seemed right on.

In the PAAC program, you accumulate credits for in-person training courses and also for attending webinars. I was already watching a lot of archaeology webinars, so that part’s been easy. Think of it like a martial arts “belt” rating. You get a Level 1 belt when you’ve studied a certain amount, then a Level 2 belt, and so on. The system either goes to Tier 5 or 8; like so many things related to the state government, it says one thing in one place and a contradictory thing in another. I haven’t gotten a trophy or a colored belt or even a certificate of achievement to print out - just an email that says I’m now at “Tier 2-Lindenmeier 20+ credit hours”. So yay me!

Bonus content

Since archaeology has become something of a “special interest” to me, I’m gonna explain one thing that particularly interests me.

I wrote earlier that I’m not interested in going back to college, but I have occasionally fantasized about getting a late career Ph.D. I started thinking of this around the time I learned about a specialty called Computational Archaeology that could combine my experience in software engineering with my interest in archaeology.

You see, especially in the Four Corners area, excavations from the 1880s to the 1970s have gathered a huge amount of artifacts and raw data - more than people have had the ability to analyze. A lot of the time, depending on what question an archaeologist is trying to answer, they don’t need to do more digging - they need to do more analyzing of what’s already been dug up in the past.

A great example of this is something I heard from an archaeologist about Mesa Verde. They said that every beam of every ancient dwelling within the bounds of the national park has been cored and dated using dendrochronology. Imagine how many logs that is. There are a couple dozen major “ruins” that the tourists visit, but there are hundreds that have been studied and not drawn on the tourist maps. Each of these has somewhere between 1 and 100 beams. So we’re talking a few thousand tree trunks, and archaeologists have sampled them all. Nobody needs to go into the field and date more logs. They just need to make use of the data that already exists. Slicing and dicing that dataset is part of the field of computational archaeology.