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Sunday, January 28, 2007
Pirates and indians, oh my
This is probably the fourth or fifth post I’ve written to let the few people that read this blog know I’m alive (I recently found out a that couple of my grad school colleagues here at USF have discovered my embarrassing little nerd secret…hi Diana and Jamie). I just haven’t had anything worth while to post about. The semester is steaming through at full speed, although I’m not always on the train. This weekend was completely useless as far as work goes. Ever look at your calendar, know you have things that you have to do, yet you don’t do them in your spare time just to get them out of the way? That was me this entire weekend: I got one chapter of Osteology read and the first section of a GIS lab due in a couple of weeks. In the grand scheme of things, that would be like setting out to paint the house and getting a set of shutters done. But hey, I like my shutters perfect.
The Gasparilla pirate festival was this weekend in downtown Tampa. I didn’t go because although I am fond of pirates (and of females in revealing pirate costumes) I didn’t want to deal with the parking, the drunk frat boys, and the even drunker middle-aged men who think drinking Miller Lite from a plastic bottle and donning plastic Marti Gras beads takes years off (just browse the Gasparilla photo album at the St. Pete Times website to see examples of all of the above).
I also spent the bulk of Saturday evening digitizing and organizing my Radiohead discography, perhaps the nerdiest activity I’ve done in months beside write this blog. Nearly 13 hours of music, 200 song files, and over a gig later I discovered that I’m more obsessed with Radiohead than with what brought me to Tampa in the first place (interestingly, someone has actually written a legit doctoral dissertation about Radiohead at the UT-Austin).
I also finally saw Apocalypto this weekend, Mel Gibson’s less than flattering treatment of the ancient Maya civilization. I’m not going to write a review because it’s been analyzed to death elsewhere on archaeology/anthropology blogs, but I will say that I am on the fence about it. On the one hand, I agree with those who say that there are some important inaccuracies that need to be addressed, but I wouldn’t go so far to say that it is an overtly racist portrayal. Traci Arden (U. of Miami) in Archaeology magazine mentions the colonial history that has wreaked havoc on indigenous Maya since the 16th century all the way up to modern times. Andrea Stone of U. of Wisconsin, also writing in Archaeology magazine, addresses the smallest details that do not match with the archaeological record. For example “She [Jaguar Paw’s wife] has loose hair (Maya women put their hair up in neat buns and tresses), an absurdly short, pubic-length tattered skirt (they wore mid-calf skirts and dresses of cotton cloth), stacks of tiny beads conveniently covering her breasts (never seen that before), and tight, woven armbands. Some Maya scholars have criticized Apocalypto by citing such minutia because we don’t have evidence for it. While much liberty was taken with respect to certain aspects of the film, complaining about something as obscure as hair length borders on denying the ancient Maya of variability within their own culture (in other words, I’m sure there was a Maya woman somewhere at sometime who wore her hair long on a regular basis). Overall, it is a good film, beautifully filmed and costumed, with quite a bit of inaccuracies that have been addressed elsewhere. Is it dangerous in the sense of focusing too much on Maya brutality and blood-thirst and emphasizing the “saving” effect of Christian Missionaries? Perhaps. But history is not owned by anyone and Gibson’s is but one interpretation; academic archaeologists do not have a monopoly on what happened in a long-disappeared culture.
Posted by Will at January 28, 2007 12:04 PM in Graduate School | Maya Archaeology