30 April 2006
So the exams are... over. At least, if I pass them, they are. In case
you're at all curious, here are the four questions that I had to answer.
I had 2 hours for each, but the essays have to have a "detailed
discussion, with examples and references drawn from your reading." For
all three parts. Of each question. In two hours. It was rough.
- A) Concepts of social stratification and even class have often
been applied to the investigation of Roman imperial culture, and from a
variety of theoretical perspectives. Explain how your research positions
itself within this discourse, with particular reference to
hypothesis-building and underlying assumptions. B) The identification of
social class as regards ancient cemeteries has many dangers. What are
they, and how will your work take these problems into account?
- A)Choose four Classical authors whose writings are central
to the understanding of life in Rome, one each contributing to the
understanding of Roman demography, mobility and migration, diet, and urban
stress (or urbanism). How would you go about establishing the credibility
of each author? What are their biases? In what ways might you nonetheless
use information gleaned from their work, even when you are able to
establish considerable bias? B) Discuss how the bioarchaeological
approaches you list in your proposal can be used to provide further
information to the historical documents, especially with regard to such
issues as bias, and the affirmation or rejection of hypotheses primarily
formulated by the historical documents. C) Furthermore, how should
bioarchaeologists (who study bones), archaeologists (who study artifacts
and the architectural expressions of urbanism), and historians collaborate
to produce a more nuanced picture of ancient identities and statuses? Is
bioarchaeology some kind of corrective to or check on ancient cultural
sources and modern interpretations of them, or do the various sources
inform each other?
- You cite Cucina and coworkers (2006) study which links a low
rate of carious lesions in a suburbium population to a diet based on
non-commodities - fruit, vegetables, and livestock. A) Draw on literary,
historical, and archaeological research to discuss how suburbium residents
would have access to these non-grain products. In other words, give a
clearer pattern of the suburbium settlement and the ways in which
residents could (or could not) have produced food for household
consumption, while shipping high-valued grain to the city center. B) If
there was sufficient space for fields and/or house-lot gardens, would
density dependent diseases have been prevalent, and if so, discuss how
they might have been contracted? C) Are there diseases that actually
might have been more prevalent because the suburbium population was
located in a partially rural setting amidst fields, pastures and garden
plots? If so, discuss the diseases briefly and why this partially rural
setting might influence their transmission routes. What skeletal and
dental lesions might inform you of those diseases?
- A) Your bibliographies, like the proposal itself, cover a wide
span of time and big issues for the development of Rome as a city and the
Roman Empire as a whole. The populations to be studied are high empire in
date and limited (you propose to analyze human remains from two of the
"dozens" of lower-class suburbium Imperial cemeteries). To what extent can
the cemeteries available to you for study illuminate the broad issues you
are addressing? Is there a danger of drawing misleading conclusions from a
relatively small sample? B) Discuss how this sample was selected. If it
is simply a matter of these are the ones offered to you, explain how you
will "justify" your focus on these two cemeteries and the degree to which
you can consider them representative. If you had the ability to select a
sample of the "dozens" of cemeteries for analysis, what criteria would you
use to derive a representative sample? C) To what degree can cemetery
samples from "urban centers" such as Teotihuacan inform your study of
Roman populations?
Posted at 1731.
29 April 2006
So I'm taking my written exams in, oh, less than 2 hours. And today just
happens to be Spring Fest at the elementary school behind my house.
Which means that the pumping base started around 11am and will continue
until my exams end at 5pm. In past years, there has been a karaoke
competition to such lovely artists as Britney Spears and N Sync. Good
lord, I'm going to have to wear earplugs throughout my exam. Fabulous.
Posted at 1105.
22 April 2006
My mom and her boyfriend went to an
open casting
call in Charlottesville recently. (Of course the first link I came upon
searching for this was Waldo's blog... I can't believe he'd never heard of
Morgan Stewart's Coming Home.
*sigh* Younguns.) Anyway, Mom got a call from the casting agent yesterday, and she
gets to hang out in Crozet as an extra for 6 days making $65 a day to get water
dumped on her for the ark scene in
Evan Almighty. Apparently the
casting people didn't want Lefty.
Posted at 1228.
20 April 2006
UCIS decided to give me a doctoral research travel award to go to Italy
this summer. Yay! Anyone else going to be in Rome in July and August?
I bet I'll need to talk to some native English speakers after butchering
my way through Italian conversations for a while. Now if I can just get
the NSF, I'll have it made! :)
Posted at 1847.
18 April 2006
OK, peeps, check this out and tell me
which
celebrity you look
most like. For me, it was apparently Cate Blanchette and Jared Leto,
and for Patrick it was Michael Keaton. Juline's pic got Rita Hayworth,
but Bryan got an amazing range, from Tony Leung Chiu to Gary Oldman to
Mary-Kate Olsen. My brother is apparently quite male, as only guys
came up for his. They included: Gene Wilder, Adam Corolla, and 50
Cent. Yeah.
Posted at 2219.
14 April 2006
Two websites that I've been spending a lot of time at today:
- Dead Man Eating - a site
about prisoners' last meals. Oddly compelling.
- The Banker's Blog -
ever seen Deal or No Deal? The
fake banker has
a real blog. Read the comments. Viewers think he's real. One claims she
fantasizes about him. It's hilarious but at the same time really sad.
Enjoy.
Posted at 1554.
7 April 2006
I couldn't have timed it any better. Having just lectured to Bioarch on
cremation, I got two phone mail pictures from my aunt today of her cat,
KittyPops. *
Warning: If you click this
link, you might see pictures that are unsuitable for young children. But
that really amuse me in a twisted sort of way. * What's even more
amusing is that Patrick's comment was, "What kind of sick person sends
phone mail of a dead cat before it's cremated?" I had to remind him of
the time my mother sent me phone mail of her dead uncle at his wake. And
people wonder why I work with bones.
Posted at 1910.
6 April 2006
Patrick was looking for a hotel or B&B for our trip to Edinburgh at the
end of May. Some of them promised a "full Scottish breakfast." We
googled to see what that entailed, and it was your standard juice, fruit,
toast, sausage, and eggs... and black pudding. Huh. More googling, and
we found out that
black
pudding contains four main ingredients: Onions.
Pork fat. Oatmeal. And pig's blood. Now, I'm an anthropologist. I know
that people have eaten blood since time immemorial. But
oatmeal?
Just throw in some ground up toast and mashed potatoes, and you've got an
entire tubular meal. I just hope the Scottish share the love for Indian
food like the rest of the English or I won't be eating for a few days.
Posted at 2210.
1 April 2006
I was flipping through the City & State section of the N&O today and came
across this story about a
castration parlor
in Waynesville. It appears that two 60-year-old men and a 50-year-old
man whom they referred to as their "slave" lived in a house and performed
castrations in addition to a variety of BDSM acts in their "dungeon."
It's truly an amazing and gross story. I had no idea this kind of kink
could be found in western NC. The weird thing is, the guys are charged
with crimes: castration without malice, maiming without malice, and
practicing medicine without a license. Now, the last charge I understand.
Even a man who wants his balls cut off might not understand the health
risks associated with going to someone who's not a doctor. But come on.
Charges for maiming someone who wanted to be maimed? It's not even like
the castrati were the ones who alerted the police. It was an anonymous
tip, probably from a neighbor. Should it really be a crime to have
"plastic containers of what appeared to be frozen testicles" in your
house?
Posted at 1737.
