Stone Age Zombies vs. Oldest Gay Caveman

Look, scientific proof of caveman zombies.

Every generation writes the past it wants to read. This week, my favorite greenwashing network has a seasonally-appropriate article on Stone Age zombies:

The zombie apocalypse may be much more than a plot device exploited by modern horror movies. In fact, fears about the walking dead may go back all the way to the Stone Age. Archaeologists working in Europe and the Middle East have recently unearthed evidence of a mysterious Stone Age "skull-smashing" culture, according to New Scientist. Human skulls buried underneath an ancient settlement in Syria were found detached from their bodies with their faces smashed in. Eerily, it appears that the skulls were exhumed and detached from their bodies several years after originally being buried. It was then that they were smashed in and reburied separate from their bodies.

According to Juan José Ibañez of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona, the finding could suggest that these Stone Age "skull-smashers" believed the living were under some kind of threat from the dead. Perhaps they believed that the only way of protecting themselves was to smash in the corpses' faces, detach their heads and rebury them apart from their bodies. 

But here's the creepy thing: many of the 10,000-year-old skulls appear to have been separated from their spines long after their bodies had already begun to decompose. Why would this skull-smashing ritual be performed so long after individuals had died? Did they only pose a threat to the living long after their original burial and death?

Who the heck knows? People do weird stuff with bodies. Sky burial? The Paris catacombs? Until recently in some parts of Greece people would exhume their relatives five years after death and wash their bones with wine. But did these ancient Syrians think the dead would come back in search of spicy brains? Notice that Ibañez (a colleague and a fine guy) doesn't make any such claim - it's the journos trying to make archaeology 'hip and relevant'. It's not the first such 'find': we also have ancient zombies at Hierakonpolis in Egypt, Cahokia in Illinois, Easter Island, and Ireland.

It reminds me a lot of the gay caveman story from last year:

Does he set off your gaydar?

The skeleton was found in a Prague suburb in the Czech Republic with its head pointing eastwards and surrounded by domestic jugs, rituals only previously seen in female graves. "From history and ethnology, we know that people from this period took funeral rites very seriously so it is highly unlikely that this positioning was a mistake," said lead archaeologist Kamila Remisova Vesinova. "Far more likely is that he was a man with a different sexual orientation, homosexual or transsexual," she added. 

The papers had too much fun with this one (headlines: "first gay caveman", "the oldest gay in the village", "caveman outed"), provoking rebukes from the excavators. As John Hawks noted, "to have a 'gay caveman,' you need a skeleton that is both gay and a caveman. And this ain't either!" Indeed, we're talking about the Bronze Age here, and 'non gender normative' is far from our concept of 'gay', (as Kristina Killgrove and Rosemary Joyce elegantly explain). In practice every culture has many ways to express gender, even in ours which sometimes pretends that there's just two kinds.

But ultimately these stories - like a lot of popular writing about the past - are about making our  contemporary cultural obsessions seem normal by finding them in an excavation trench. The LGBT struggle for equal rights has been all over the news for a decade now (and winning). And with the proliferation of zombie-themed media in recent years you'd think there was a zombie community in the midst of some kind of recognition struggle too. I've been sloggin my way through AMC's zombie-themed soap opera (much too much family drama for my taste), and puzzling what's behind this increasingly crazy obsession. Why are the US Marines running actual zombie combat drills? Why does the CDC have a zombie preparedness page? I want to say it's a mélange of American fears: foreign hordes, terrorists, and the loss of our empire rolled up together. But I'm still scratching my head.

Regardless, keep your eye out for these archaeological headlines that seem a little too hip to be true: they're pointing to our own present cultural obsessions more than the past. With that in mind, let's look at the logical next step: Clive Barker directs 'Zombies vs. Gladiators'!!! 

"My brief to myself on this project is to give the audience not only zombies they have never seen before but also a Rome they have never seen before"!

 I'm so excited!

Occupy Academic Publishing

May 1 commemorates the men and women who fought and died for the 8-hour workday. One of the labor movement's explicit arguments for cutting working hours was to allow more time for people to pursue their own personal development. To a lot of people, that means reading about archaeology. But today, much of the best research is locked away from the public behind publishers' paywalls. This May Day, let's reflect on how academics can help end their complicity in a publishing system that denies publicly-funded research to everyone except the shrinking handful of universities in rich countries. In December I pointed out where the current model is taking us:

For-profit academic publishing is a suicide bombing mission against the academy. In pursuing their doomed business model, the big publishers risk turning the work we do as scholars into a giant echo chamber. Students take on a lifetime of debt, partly to pay for journal subscriptions that enrich a few corporations. Scholars are turned into serfs who must feed the beast new product for it to sell, or risk losing their already tenuous livelihoods. Institutions bankrupt themselves paying for ever more expensive journals without which they cannot compete.

Even Harvard University is buckling under the pressure. The faculty association and library have circulated memos demanding open-access publication, as the Guardian reports:

Robert Darnton, director of Harvard Library told the Guardian: "I hope that other universities will take similar action. We all face the same paradox. We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free … and then we buy back the results of our labour at outrageous prices.

According to the Harvard memo, journal subscriptions are now so high that to continue them "would seriously erode collection efforts in many other areas, already compromised". The memo asks faculty members to encourage their professional organisations to take control of scholarly publishing, and to consider submitting their work to open access journals and resigning from editorial boards of journals that are not open access.

I hope I don't need to point out that if Harvard University can't afford journal subscriptions, the system is badly broken. America's richest and most prestigious university library, unable to afford basic journals?

Though it's depressing that elite institutions have to be inconvenienced before anyone does anything about an obviously unjust system (imaging being a scholar in Africa!), momentum seems to be building to reform the system. The Federal Research Public Access Act, which would mandate that publicly-funded research be open access, is slowly making its way through the US Congress. The Academic Spring project is launching a mass boycott of Elsevier by scholars, and Britain's Wellcome Trust (the world's second-largest private funder of science) announced this month that all funded projects must be available to the public. (And kudos to the UK Guardian, which has been way out front in reporting on the growing movement).

Shockingly, some archaeology professional societies have been on the wrong side of the issue. The president of the Archaeological Institute of America, Elisabeth Bartman, came out against open access in a recent letter:

Here at the AIA, we particularly object to having such [an open access] scheme imposed on us from the outside when, in fact, during the AIA’s more than 130-year history, we have energetically supported the broad dissemination of knowledge, and do so through our extensive program of events and lectures for the general public and through our publications. Our mission statement explicitly says, “Believing that greater understanding of the past enhances our shared sense of humanity and enriches our existence, the AIA seeks to educate people of all ages about the significance of archaeological discovery.” We have long practiced “open access.” 

Beyond the obvious misunderstanding of what 'open access' is (the AIA's scholarly journal is not), Bartman shows off the paternalistic attitude that gives academics a bad name. Keep the serious research for 'serious scholars', while giving the public the 'lite' version of events and lectures, better suited for their little pea brains. Thankfully AIA presidents usually serve for very short terms. She certainly does not speak for members with this ill-informed drivel, as many eloquent responses in the archaeology blogosphere attest (like this one, this one, this one, and especially this one).

The foolishness and greed of the big academic publishers, however, give us the chance to correct one of academia's original sins. Bartman's condescension is typical of scholarly attitudes for the last few centuries: the public deserves only the table scraps of scholarship - a few lectures here and there performed as charity work - while the good stuff is kept behind the closed doors of laboratories or the paywalls of academic publishers. Frankly if the publishing situation wasn't hurting scholars at 'good' universities I'm not sure there would be any movement on opening scholarship to the larger public. But think about it. But as Sebastian Heath and Charles E. Jones note in their great response:

The general public has to pay [to read articles] and that reduces the impact that archaeology has on public discourse. Shouldn’t we be giving our best, most carefully produced work the greatest chance to be widely read? 

One thing that drives me crazy as an academic is feeling that my research is irrelevant. But much of that irrelevance is self-imposed: the public can't read our articles, even if they wanted to! The open access movement can help bring scholarship out the ghetto and toward the public.

The model of restricted academic publishing has been a stinking zombie for years, but is now starting to rot in earnest. As we all know, zombies need fresh brains to keep going. Elsevier, Springer, and their undead friends appear to have eaten their way through the whole population of the academic village. Here's hoping their immoral business model falls apart into a pile of stinking ooze ASAP.