viking gravesites I'm reading The Sea-King and the Sorceress; Life and Death in the Viking Age by Neil Price. Price is the Professor and Chair of Archeology at Uppsala University and has published extensively on the Viking Age, a well defined period extending from 750-1050 CE. The book has 21 chapters, each dedicated to the description and interpretation of a gravesite. Only one of these chapters is dedicated to a Viking gravesite. The term "viking" refers to a warrior class which have come to represent the Viking Age. Just like our own time, however, the Viking Age was comprised of many different kinds of citizen. The vast majority of Viking Era citizens were farmers. Price's book aims to break free of the warrior/pillaging stereotype and describe Norse culture in its full complexity of trade, religion, and culture. The book is astounding because of its detailed demonstration of how much archaeologists know about these individuals. Newer technologies like archeogenomics can tell us the year that someone died and the season. Science can describe the person's last meal and their cause of death. The meticulous description of the objects and the arrangement of burial objects gives us considerable insight into the inner lives of the deceased. linguistic anthropology I've had a request for my final paper in the anthropology course I took at UBC! I wrote about the incredible linguistic diversity of British Columbia. knee surgery emily carr redux I attended a guided tour last week of the Emily Carr retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery (That Green Ideal). The tour was organized for Museum of Anthropology volunteers as part of our regular educational series. It was led by the curator of the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibit, Richard Hill. I realize that this sort of information transfer is not for everyone but, honestly, I don't understand why it isn't. Richard Hill is the Curator of Canadian Art at the gallery. He has spent a lifetime studying art history and museology. He spent years studying Emily Carr in preparation for this exhibit. He condensed all of this knowledge into a two hour tour, and at the end of it, those of us in attendance realized we had only scratched the surface of his knowledge about Carr. One might not be interested in art, or in Emily Carr, or in whatever some academic had to pronounce about it. But it still strikes me as an incredible opportunity: to have that much knowledge condensed into two hours. I haven't talked a lot about this, but guided tours at the institution I volunteer at, the Museum of Anthropology, have become problematic. Guiding the public to new knowledge is facing major headwinds. A lot of the problems pertain to the fact that MOA is an anthropological museum dealing with "other" cultures. There is definitely a problem with the optics of old white guys explaining First Nations culture to visitors. This problem is not easily rectified. One might also ask if someone from the Haida nation could explain Kwakwaka'wakw culture, or even if a woman from northern Haida Gwaii could explain masculine culture in southern Haida Gwaii. You get my point, I'm sure. We would never be able to have first person accounts of all the cultures represented at MOA - we have belongings from all around the world! But even beyond these considerations of authenticity, there is a feeling in museology that information is not hierarchical. That is the old paradigm, right? The professor teaches the grad student, the grad students teach the undergrads, and the general public gets a small label next to a museum object. More commonly these days, museums want to engage visitors in conversation, a sort of Socratic method - but this is not easily taught or learned. I guess I take a pragmatic approach to the problems that pertain to representing new information to a naive public. You will never know it all. No one will ever know it all. Not all of humanity put together over time will ever know it all! The goal must surely be to engage museum visitors in an introductory way - hopefully to inspire curiosity. progress! Okay, I'm being sarcastic. The photo below shows a new pole they've just erected to provide power to Westham Island, population 50. That's Mary and T'aanuu down at the bottom of the pic. The old system was essentially telephone poles. Everything has to be huge these days - and now we can look forward to a mammoth 10 lane bridge so more people can live in Ladner! The pole is actually much taller than it looks in the photo above; I've used a wide angle lens. The shot below shows the pole at some distance next to a telephone pole. I've come to understand that my idea of progress is dramatically different than most people's.