End of Fall 2011

Well, that’s that! Another semester down, and this guy is officially a junior!

It used to be that when a break came along, I did not cherish it. I wanted more than anything to continue my classes, keep moving, keep going. I could never bring myself to read for fun, because I felt that any time that wasn't spent studying was time wasted. That’s not really the case now, but I’m still torn. I look on the ensuing break as a chance to breathe, but I still look at it as an opportunity to study what I want to study. Reading for “fun” pretty much means reading textbooks or edited volumes, as opposed to reading ahead in the textbooks for the coming semester. I might even let myself play a video game here and there. (I do fear playing Skyrim however, as it may put my relationship with my girlfriend and school in jeopardy.)

My First American Anthropological Association Meeting

The title of this article rings like a child’s story or artwork – “My First Bicycle,” or “My First Vacation.” Typically, these stories are those of great anticipation for someone that may have not yet experienced it in like, but more commonly they are stories that those experiential veterans can read with appreciation, remembering to forgive the writer for naiveté; after all, it is their “first.” I title it this way because that’s how I feel here this week, at my first American Anthropological Association: a neophyte in a sea of weathered professionals and their favored protégés.

This would have been my second, had our Student Government come through on funding last year. Alas, we did not make a solid case to them, and still more, were going for nothing more than personal enrichment. This year is different; this year, our department sent four students to the AAA to present posters. And here I am. So let’s start with what I expected:

Changing Our Minds

The Gateway District is where Progressive Field and the Quicken Loans Arena stand today, but until the 1940’s it was a residential and market district. Before the Jacobs brothers built Jacobs Field for the Cleveland Indians (currently Progressive Field), they called in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History to do archaeological investigations. The materials that were excised from the lot went back to CMNH and hadn’t really been touched until 2000 when they were donated to Cleveland State University’s library (along with two other collections of historic artifacts). It sat there, dormant, until 2009 when the stewardship was passed on to someone who could put it use: the Department of Anthropology. And unfortunately, the collections came with very little documentation.