Hindsight into the future

I just finished making a summary of the student feedback from the general archaeology course last autumn. Finally that course is wrapped up. I bet the average student never realizes how much behind-the-scenes work is involved in teaching. The feedback was nice to read, though, we - meaning the other lecturer and myself - got good marks from the students.

I got this link from a friend. Hope you will find these as amusing as I did.

Conjunctions

or "The first Finns were Mongols, after all?"

Amazing things can surface when one is innocently googling for pictures to illustrate lectures. I came across this Neolithic comb-pattern pottery jar held in the National Museum of Korea:

Note the similarity with our own comb-ceramic pottery:

On navigators and perceiving the world

We got a navigator for our car last Christmas. Some time ago I used it for the first time when I had to find to a place in Kirkkonummi. The logic of the navigator takes some getting used to, so of course I took a wrong turn. There is something extremely annoying about a calm male voice telling you to make a U-turn when you a driving on a road where it is not an option. So after a while I found myself screaming back at the navigator as if it were a live person. (Although no real person, and surely no male I know, would have so admirably maintained their calm in that situation.) Silly, I know - it is a machine! But any computer user surely knows that sometimes you just find it helps to vent your feelings by cursing at the dumb machine.

I have been wondering, how things like navigators will change our way of perceiving our surroundings in the long run. Traditionally people have oriented themselves using landmarks, and in most parts of the world this is still the method of finding your way. The obsession with maps is a western thing. For example, if you take a taxi in Amman, you'd better know some handy landmark near the location you're going to, otherwise it might get tricky. The streets do have names, but nobody knows them. And if you show a map to your taxi driver you are just going to make him very confused. Even we westerners don't as a rule need a map to negotiate our daily lives - we know where everything is, through experience. That is the way people normally perceive the world - not as maps or street names, but as places and relationships between them.

What will happen, when we increasingly start to rely on navigators and similar appliances to describe the world for us? Will these useful gadgets actually make us dumber when we need no longer pay attention to our surroundings to orientate? I have already noticed that following the little arrows on the navigator screen and listening to the soothing voice giving you driving instructions means you pay little attention to where you actually are. The perceived world is substituted by the virtual reality of the map on the navigator screen. And even if we don't end up in a situation where we are unable to find our way home from work without our electronic little helpers, I think we are certainly going to miss much when we hand over our perception to these machines.

Temptations

I have never been very good at resisting temptations. Especially ones involving books. Although I admit that I did not even try very hard when I saw the most recent list of books on sale from The David Brown Book Company. I found a couple of very interesting titles at laughable prices: Letters from the Desert by Margaret Drower (2004), which contains letters and journals of Flinders Petrie and his wife, Hilda; and Women Travellers in the Near East by Sarah Searight (2005). I will try to find time to comment the books here after I have received and read them.

When I was a child, I dreamed of becoming an explorer. I read books about expeditions to the little known corners of the world and was an avid follower of the TV documentary series "The Silk Road", a Japanese-Chinese co-production filmed in the late 70's and shown in the Finnish telly in the early 80's. It was probably this dream which unconsciously drove me when I applied to study ethnology in the first place. Later, when it had become clear that I was not to follow the Finnish academics of the 19th century into expeditions in Siberia (I mean the ones who went voluntarily; a number of Finns were exiled there because the Tsar did not like their views), I turned my interest into archaeology. It seemed to promise at least the uncomfortable accommodation and not-too-good meals on digs, if not the excitement of discovering new territories and peoples. In hindsight, my ending up spending several seasons in Jordan, camping on a mountaintop*, was just a logical continuation of the kind of career choices I have made.

"The Silk Road" is currently being rebroadcasted on YLE Teema. And I still dream of traveling the Silk Road all the way through Central Asia to China, preferably on horse- and camelback.

*Although, truth to be told, the camp was relatively comfortable and the food was actually good if a little monotonous.

Athens, here I come

Just a brief note: I am going to Athens in early April. A Nordic post-grad seminar will take place. The theme of the seminar is Landscape archaeology, to which the subject of my dissertation fits very well indeed. So I applied and was accepted. Amazingly enough, although I have been to Greece thrice, I have never been to Athens. That is the problem of business travels: you don't get to choose your destinations. Greece in April does not sound too bad, either, when we are still waiting for spring to come here in Helsinki.

An appeal for KOTUS

Dear readers, if you have not yet signed the appeal for KOTUS (Research Institute for the Languages of Finland), please do it now. The institute is going to be hit hard by the so-called governmental productivity program I was ranting about in an earlier post. With the new additions to the program, they will lose 34 offices - about a third of the total they have.

The state has the policy for giving at least BA level education to 60% of each age group. At the same time they are heavily cutting down the number of civil servants - the governemental sector has traditionally been a large employer for those with education in humanities or social science. Young people, don't do like I did and train for something you will never get a job in. Go to vocational training and learn to be plumbers and electricians! At least those jobs cannot be outsourced to China.