You can't choose your ancestors, or can you?

Besides the virtual lectures, I'm also teaching on another course with live audience. The subject is general archaeology, and the course is basically supposed to include no less than the prehistory of the whole world, although by the dept. of archaeology tradition and by restrictions set by limited time, the view tends to be centered on prehistoric Europe. Yes, you might ask like my dissertation's supervisor, how and why a person supposedly specializing on the Late Classical Near East is doing this. Well, you see, I still need to eat even after I ran out of my research grant, and in fact I rather like teaching (I can hear the teen-age me howling in terror and despair, as one of the reasons I started studying something as useless as ethnology was my firm intention never to end up as a teacher).

Anyway, on last Tuesday I got to start the course by introducing our ancestors to the students. Having to go through more than 20 million years of human evolution in three hours I barely had the time to present the bare bones of the subject (quite literally). I tried to put on a lively show, but by the end of the session the group of students seemed slightly stunned and more than a little glassy-eyed. I honestly think I got more out of the subject myself, while preparing the lecture.

I'm sure I'm not the first to notice these things, but because this was something of an interesting notion to me, I'd like to share it. It is about Lucy, the fossil Australopithecus afarensis. When Lucy was found, she was quickly dubbed our ancestral mother, as it was thought at the time that we are descended from the Australopithecini. However, recently the human family tree has been extensively pruned and grafted, and now it seems that the Australopithecini were a branch separate from us. This heavy-handed gardening stripped Lucy of the status of our esteemed great-grandmother, a change which I think is reflected in these two reconstructions which I happened to find in the Internet when browsing for illustrations for my lecture.


In the first one, which is said to be from a French museum, Lucy is portrayed as remarkably human. The second one I found on BBC's site. It is a recent reconstruction and probably closer to the reality - Australopithecini were quite chimp-like in body, with the one remarkable difference: they walked on two feet. But it would not do to portray our grandmother as an ape, would it now? However, after Lucy lost her post-humously acquired touch of humanity, it is quite acceptable to do so, and by doing, to distance ourselves from these less-successful relatives.

From creating a national past towards sharing it

Yesterday evening I was eating out with friends from the Jordan project. After a couple of glasses of wine I launched into one of my favourite rants concerning Finnish archaeology, namely, why do we not publish our research in international journals?!

While studying in England some years ago I, for the first time, realized that although we do not have here in Finland things that would really capture the imagination of the public, like Roman villas or Egyptian pyramids, we have something that might capture the attention of other archaeologists: very well-preserved hunter-gatherer dwelling sites dating to the Mesolithic and the Neolithic and even later periods. I understand that in Central Europe and in the Mediterranean these are rare because of intense cultivation, erosion and such. Dozens if not hundreds of these sites have been excavated and documented with care in Finland. The information available from those excavations might be very interesting and useful for archaeologists interested in prehistoric hunter-gatherers worldwide. So why the hell do we not publish our research more widely?

Why are we happy to write about our research just to each other? The Finnish community of archaeologists is not big, let me tell you - even by the little I have told about myself in my blog I'd say most archaeologists in Finland who have ever met me already know who I am. If they don't, they know somebody who can tell them.

But back to the business: In my opinion (you may disagree) this disinterest towards reaching an international audience is largely due to the historical background of archaeology in Finland. Archaeology of Finland was started as a part of the nation-building program in the 19th century. It was aimed at creating a past for the Finns, and at present day it still carries that ballast. I dare argue that most Finnish archaeologists doing archaeology in Finland have the underlying idea that they are studying the past of the Finns (or, in some cases, the past of the Sami) although they might not even be conscious about having it. And that, I would claim, is why we do not see that resarch on our Mesolithic and Neolithic hunter-gatherer sites might actually have something to give to a larger, international audience, who don't give a damn about whose prehistory it is, but would dearly love to achieve a better understanding about hunter-gatherer sites. It is just a matter of viewpoint.