Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Good morning, everybody.
It's my pleasure to be in downtown Nashville
after seven years.
I had an abstract of about 800 words in a foreign language
I was going to have you read,
but after seeing Tom's abstract in physics,
I eliminated it.
What I want to do is talk to you today
about three impacts in my life and my career,
and two of those -
with my research teams and students -
have impacted certain thoughts about society and culture,
past and present.
And the last impact relates to me being impacted by my own work.
So I want to get into that,
but before I do, I want to define anthropology for you
because most people think of it and they think of stones and bones,
or, number two, somebody in a pith helmet
hovering over some indigenous individual -
it's that too, but it's much more than that.
A short definition -
the definition of anthropology is the totality of the human experience.
And that means all the way through time,
all the way through circumstances,
all the way through space.
There's four subdisciplines to anthropology.
One's what we call "ethnography."
That's the person who goes out, the ethnographer,
and embeds him- or herself in the society
and they study that particular society for a very long period of time -
all aspects of it or some very specific parts of it.
Second, archeology.
And archeology studies not only all the way back into time
long before the written word -
which is 1492 here, so we go back about 15,000 years in the Americas -
but also modern-day studies.
The real definition of archaeology
is human behavior observed through the use of material goods,
mainly trash - we play with people's trash -
past and present, again.
A third part of it is bio-anthropology, the study of the human body -
anatomy, genetics, changes taking place in human evolution -
through time as well,
all the way back to the hominids and the work of the Leakeys,
up to your, my changing bodies today.
And fourth, linguistics, social linguistics:
How does language change?
What has been the impact of the computer
as an instrumentation, information device,
on society and culture as well.
Well, I'm primarily involved in two kinds of those anthropologies:
archeology and ethnography.
So when I say I'm going to go into the deep history of Native Americans,
it's going to be in South America, way back in time,
on one of these impacts,
and then I'm going to talk about living people as well,
in two areas where I've done some work -
in the Amazon basin and also down in Patagonia, southern Chile.
This is a shot of the Southern Andes,
a shot that I took that I'm quite proud of;
if you take thousands and thousands of shots with multiple cameras like I do,
eventually one of them satisfies National Geographic Society,
as this one did.
But let me talk about the first impact,
and that has to do with program development.
When I was in my 20s - and this gets back to Meredith's talk -
I had some great discoveries then,
and I hope that I still have some
in mid-career and now in the twilight years of my career -
which is still a ways to go.
And I went into -
I was doing my field work and dissertation work In Peru
and was contacted by the Inter-American Foundation
to go to Chile to open up departments of anthropology, in the 70s,
after the Augusto Pinochet regime and dictatorship
had exiled or killed off most of the social scientists
at most of the universities.
So I went as an anthropologist and founded two departments of anthropology,
that are still viable today, in Chile.
And since then, I have gone on to develop other academic programs
in other Latin American countries,
with colleagues and with ex-students of mine.
So, it has been one of the delights of my entire career.
And I'm not ranking it over the others,
but I think it's extremely important that when people are in need
and if you have the opportunity -
I certainly didn't have the skills back then,
I learned those in place at the time -
to take that opportunity to help people,
it's a healing experience for them and for you as well.
Let me tell you a little bit about one of those experiences I had.
At the time in Chile, at the Catholic University,
where the first program I helped to develop [was],
the deans and the rectors were military men,
within their military uniforms.
So I showed up from Lima, Peru, coming into Santiago,
and went to the dean's office, general,
and he said, "Well, I'm glad you're here."
And I had long hair and a beard,
and that was a negative sign
because that meant you probably leaned to the left
and you worked with indigenous people as well,
and this was a right-wing, hard-core military individual.
He says, "Your office is ready for you,"
because he was ready to receive me.
And he said, "Follow me,"
and he picked up a cushion, and he took it with him.
He said, "This cushion is really important."
So I followed him, and I was thinking,
"What? My dog carries its teddy bear around ... "
and I'm thinking, "Why does this guy need a cushion?
Does he got ... " if you don't mind me saying,
I was really thinking, "a bad case of hemorrhoids or something?"
You know, I didn't know.
He takes me to his personal bathroom,
unfolds a table, puts it in front of the toilet, slams the lid down,
puts the cushion on it, and says, "Here's your office."
And I spent one year in that office,
running and developing the anthropology program.
So I learned perseverance.
I learned to hang on.
I learned not to ever look behind me as well.
And when he came and knocked on the door and wanted to use his "office,"
I would leave for a considerable amount of time.
But that's an experience that has stayed with me for years,
and in that same department of anthropology today, 30 years later,
the lid to that toilet hangs in the departmental office.
So, it's a moment I'm quite proud of.
But more than that is still giving to programs,
and still working with and developing students.
And I have a lot of ex-students scattered throughout the continent,
South America, Latin America in general.
It has been a very, very rewarding moment in my life,
and, perhaps, one of the deepest meanings I've had.
Let me turn to a second impact,
and that is breaking a theory
that I was not only involved in but sat at the center of,
that started back in the 70s when I was in my 20s -
again, going back to Meredith's talk -
discovered a site down in Southern Chile,
which would be the very last arrow on the right in South America,
right where that tip stops;
it's called Monte Verde.
I'll show you a few slides of this in a moment.
The old theory of who were the first Americans,
where did they come from, and why is this question even important,
has its what's called Clovis Theory, Clovis, New Mexico.
Big game hunters,
mainly following big game across from Alaska -
see the orange and yellow lines -
all the way down through the Americas,
ending up in South America around 11,000 to 12,000 years ago.
When in my 20s, when I was living down in Chile,
I discovered this site,
and I mounted a research team of more than 80 specialists -
geneticists, ecologists, entomologists,
sedimentologists, all these -ologists,
including a psychologist at one point -
studying the spatial makeup of huts and things.
And I'll show that to you in a few moments.
And we mounted this team and studied this particular site
over a period of 30 years
and published the results with Smithsonian Institution
in some large volumes.
But it took until about five years ago for the theory to be accepted,
the Clovis theory, which is the Clovis First theory,
having people coming over around 11,000 to 12,000 years ago.
It was big game hunters quickly migrating and moving their way through the Americas.
Where our work at Monte Verde -
This is the Clovis site in New Mexico, discovered back in the 20s.
It's a mammoth kill site.
Just to show the scenario - it's sort of an arid zone,
and this is the first great "American invention," as experts had it,
which is called the "fluted point."
It has a channel, or flute, down at the bottom,
which, once it penetrates the animal, is for bloodletting.
That was the theory that had been around for 70 years
and very difficult to break and to buck up against the experts,
mainly experts from North America, but a few in South America as well.
It took us multidisciplinary research
in excavating the Monte Verde site,
which is located here in southern Chile,
that dates back to about 14,500 years ago,
putting it roughly 1,000 to 1,500 years earlier than Clovis.
So the question is how could it be
that if you had people coming over from Asia -
Mongoloids, Asians -
going down through Alaska,
down through into the lower 48 and all the way down in South America,
why is the earliest site down in South America?
People had to have been earlier in North America.
Well, talking about theories and paradigms and expertise,
the way the disciplines, scientifically, are defined sometimes
is that when you obtain research funding,
you have to follow a very strict paradigm at times.
And individuals who get outside of that paradigm, that theoretical model,
often have extreme difficulties getting funding and thinking about new things,
as Meredith was talking about as well.
This is a site that's located in Central Valley,
incredibly beautiful.
I mean, there's volcanoes everywhere, it's snow-capped,
it's an ecology and environment
very similar to the Seattle-Vancouver area.
And this is Monte Verde site over here.
What makes this site so unusual is that it was covered over by peat bog.
Some of you might have seen in National Geographic magazine
some of these raisin-preserved bodies, human bodies
that are under peat bogs or in ice sheets.
We found organic material at Monte Verde.
And what you see on the two left-hand slides here
are the foundation remains of long tent-like structures.
Found human hair,
found people who who were chewing their fingernails off and throwing aside.
We did not find any of the humans -
nobody died when they were there, so they didn't bury them in the site.
We found human footprints, as you see off on the right:
toe impressions, the arch impression, the heel.
Extremely good preservation of animal hides, animal hair,
food remains, meat.
It's incredible - in fact, in two of the huts that we found there,
there were two chunks of meat
that looked like big, Wendy's hamburg patties,
which is interesting and sends a signal to us
that these people must have had some kind of a sharing unit -
you cut the meat in a certain way, and you share it in a certain way.
And I don't have the time to go into all the details on this,
but this site broke the Clovis theory
and changed the first chapter of unwritten history
of humans in the New World - Monte Verde did.
And since then a number of other sites have come forward,
breaking the Clovis paradigm, or the Clovis theory,
in North America as well.
We did this, again, with a lot of perseverance,
a lot of interdisciplinary research,
and it was a personal struggle
where, at times in Chile and outside of Chile,
I was often accused of being a CIA agent:
"Nobody can find these sorts of things," we were told.
Because usually what you find in the archeological record
are stones and bones - they preserve better.
But we found the organic remains,
and what you see here are these foundations of wooden huts,
and this is a medicinal hut, in the lower left-hand corner here,
where we found quids, or masticated cuds,
that people had been chewing on and spit out and put on the floor.
Only of this wishbone, or kind of a U-shaped hut.
They were combining a tea called "boldo,"
two kinds of seaweed from the coast about 50 miles away -
has a high iodine content -
and also two other plants.
So it was sort of like a pharmaceutical quid or package.
And it seems like sick people went to this place.
We're still studying the sediment, the floor inside the hut,
bringing in parasitologists to do microscopic analyses.
So as I said, it's a highly interdisciplinary project;
it still is going on
although most of the data has been published.
Let me speak on a more personal note.
The impact here is obvious:
we, as I said, rewrote the first chapter of human history in the New World.
These people, let me tell you something about them.
You look at the skeletal remains -
not from Monte Verde, but from other sites -
they were dying off at the age of about 22 to 28, 30 years old.
You were old at the age of 25 or 30.
What you see are stress fractures in the skeletal material,
stress fractures from carrying heavy weight
at the age of, roughly, 9, 10, 11 years old.
I can't go into the data why we know how old some of these early skeletons are.
Looking at the scar tissue
built up around the pubic zone of the young females,
and once they reach puberty,
they were either aborting or giving birth to children.
So, you were a full-blown, mature working individual
on and through what we could call teens and adolescent years.
And if you look at the skeleton material from all over the late Ice Age period,
this pre-10,000, pre-11,000-year period
all the way down to about 8,000 years ago,
very few male or female skeletons show individuals living beyond 25, 28 -
30 years old would be the equivalent to about 80, 90 years for us.
These were the people who laid the foundation,
culturally and socially,
for others to come,
not only in the Americas but other parts of the world as well.
I have taken, over the past several years,
great pride in helping to break this paradigm,
and I want to say, Meredith, to you and to other people
experiencing similar kinds of hindrances and obstacles
as you move forward professionally or even personally -
if you're 22 years old, you're going to outlive your critics.
Okay?
But I've had numerous opportunities since this theory was proven
not only to lift the middle finger on one hand
but two fingers, simultaneously, on both hands.
(Laughter)
So, stick with it.
Somebody tells you "No," and you think and know you're right,
and you're working with people - stick with it.
And on a personal side, try to have options.
Because I had different research options when the going got really tough here,
to the point that,
at the universities where I were,
there were colleagues signing letters and sending them in, saying,
"You have to fire this guy. He's off on the wrong track."
So we, me and my colleagues, lived through all of that.
That's an impact that I think that our research team had.
So, let me say something about these early people as well.
99.99% of the existence of humanity
is associated with these hunters and gatherers.
They're sophisticated;
they had options, they had choices;
they had technical sophistication, and social organization and so forth.
They're not just individuals who kind of mulled around in different places.
Briefly, as I conclude, I want to talk about two living groups
because I work with living people:
Jivaro in the Amazon jungle
and the Mapuche down in south-central Chile.
I work with shamans, religion, with the Mapuche -
this a shaman in the Mapuche culture.
They have a completely different mindset than we do.
We think in terms of profit, goal-oriented practices and exercises;
we think in terms of linear time - they don't.
This kind of leans back into the talk on physics a bit.
They are nowhere, but they're also everywhere,
because their thinking is flow-oriented.
They never talk about - and it's not the only indigenous group that does this -
they never talk about the flow of events:
"When I was a child," or "When I get old."
They talk about events through all times,
and you never know if it was happening
during their childhood or adolescenthood or present-day adulthood.
I've worked with some of these groups, too, in the jungle.
And let me end on this note by saying that they have a different idea of us too,
and what would we do without Gary Larson in anthropology?
On occasion, in the Selva, or the jungle in the Amazon,
I was out with a colleague of mine,
and I had not had my stomach accustomed to the local food yet -
monkey meat, tapir, rodent meat as well -
and so I took cans of tuna fish and a plastic knife.
These people lay a palm leaf out,
put worms on it, insects, meat, vegetables - wild - and other things
and eat it.
But they have another leaf where they would take a bite,
put their fingers in the water, clean their fingers and then get another bite.
Well, one night they left us, just simply left us.
We caught up with them a day later,
and they told us, "Look, we left for the following reason:
when he opened his tuna fish can, he put the plastic fork back in,
took a bite, put the fork back in, took a bite -
without cleaning it each time.
We thought that he was an uncivilized barbarian.
(Laughter)
Thank you very much.
They had an impact on me.
Thank you.
(Applause)