Suchergebnisse

A contract between the Ozark-St. Francis National Forests and the Arkansas Archeological Survey resulted in the 1995 Archeology Week excavations at The Narrows, a rock art site in Crawford County, Arkansas. The work was conducted to assess past looting activities and to identify any remaining intact cultural deposits. Areas of undisturbed midden, rich in botanical, fauna, stone tool, and ceramic material, were discovered. One feature, interpreted as a dump of refuse from cleaned-out hearths within the shelter, was identified. It contained a large amount of fire-cracked rock, charred nutshell, and burned bone. Radiocarbon dating indicates refuse in Feature 1 ranged in age from A.D. 1195-1495 (2 sigma, 95% probability); the most likely date for the episode that created Feature 1 is around A.D. 1435. Our most exciting discovery consisted of pigment-stained stone fragments, abrading tools, and hematite, an assemblage we linked to rock art production at the site. A date for creation of the rock art was established by association with these artifacts. The rock art was produced in the course of fall/winter occupation by people related in material culture to those of the Arkansas River Valley during the Spiro and perhaps later Fort Coffee phases

AbstractAbstract ‐ While cybernetic discussion has been much concerned to include the observer, it has done little to include this 'observer' as a writer and presenter of his theories. Since as writers we need at least to be conscious to be able to write, I take Gordon Pask's condition for observing, conversing and being conscious with an other in conversation, to consider how we are involved as writers, in writing with others. ‐ In writing "Against Reference", I write with Gordon's 'being conscious with', Susan Sontag's 'Against Interpretation', Paul Feyerabend's 'Against Method' and Gordon Pask's "Against Conferences".As writers we are involved in exchanges in the geometry of speaking in which you read and can potentially write with what I wrote. As such we are actively involved in the making of what we write. ‐ In writing "the making of what we write" I write with Gertrude Stein's 'The Making of Americans' and with the making (poiesis) in Maturana's 'autopoiesis'. Similarly, in writing science we are inevitably involved in the making of science. ‐ If you read 'the making of science' as writing with Kuhn of a history of shifting paradigms, I can say that with everything we write, we actively write or re‐write a paradigm.Instead, the conventions for writing in scientific discourse "tacitly taken for granted by all participants in that discourse" maintain a paradigm' which relies on and endorses our writing in the passive voice. ‐ Grammar teaches that the passive inverts the object and the subject of an active sentence and introduces an 'it' and an 'is'. What grammar, describing language from within the same paradigm as an 'it', cannot teach, is that writing in the passive voice we invert the geometry of speaking such that as writers we represent ourselves as though we were readers ('observers') of a text ('objects', 'reality') already written by some higher authority and to be treated as given. I call this paradigm for refering to the deeds of a higher authority, the paradigm of reference.I discuss particular consequences which hampered and brought to a virtual standstill the cybernetic discussions I care about (enough to spend most of my time developing formats which allow for writing with), and general consequences which amount to the undoing of science as a responsible pursuit, both in its own terms and in its contribution to our cultures at large.