RE: {OzArch} Artefacts - extending to sites; getting money

[Jeannette Hope]

Dear John

 

We all understand how difficult it is to get people to give you money, especially for private research.  Here are some tips:

 

1. Go to the best begging site in Sydney, with a big sign ‘Desperate! Research to support! ’  If someone asks you what research, don’t go into interminable detail about  bumps in archaeospace, just say Research is your child’s or your dog’s name and they desperately need one of those drugs that aren’t approved in Australia and cost a fortune to import.

 

2. Get out your guitar and go busking.  Rewrite the lyrics  to some songs, for example:   ‘Oh the dump sites that blind the weary driver, And  no-one’ll give me money to research’. 

 

3. Try crowd-funding through Pozzible. You will probably need to have a catchy product , it may not be enough just to say: give me $50 to buy a map.  Be careful though, if you talk about bumps in archaeospace here, you may attract the Strongs’ crowd.  

 

4. Finally, do what the rest of us do: spend your own money on your personal research interests.   I have bought lots and lots of books, journals, papers, maps and images using my own moola. I never expected anyone to give me freeee moola for this. It’s called building up a personal research library.  (I know people who have sold  their house to raise money for their research).

 

There are of course circumstances where you can apply for government money for something you are interested in.  Generally you need a detailed written research strategy, a proposed product (book, article, interpretive signs, plan of management, etc.), a timeframe, a budget, a track record of production, owner’s permission, local community support, referees’ reports, and the expectation that you will contribute dollar for dollar.   Given this, it would be silly to apply for just $50.  That would suggest that you don’t understand how the system works. 

 

Good luck! But in the meantime, there’s not much point whinging on Ozarch. Most of us are in the same boat. If we have a spare $50, we’re going to buy maps for our own research.

 

Cheers

Jeannette  

 

 

From: oza...@googlegroups.com [mailto:oza...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of john...@ozemail.com.au
Sent: Saturday, 14 April 2018 1:50 PM
To: oza...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: {OzArch} Artefacts - extending to sites

 

 

Hello,

 

Re "In my opinion archaeologists tend to overstate, to over-interpret, to make things sound more important than they are" ... when I am seeking another $50 grant from the Gov I tend to do that too.

That's why I sent the last post about tips also being bumps in the archaeosphere.

I have a very long-running info search of the mystery tip 1 km east of St. Ives Showground .. currently being converted into a rifle range.

There are at least 5 "mining leases" in immediate vicinity on old parish map versions.

But to buy the lease plans .. and thereby learn who was working there and when (site will go back to early 1900s I reckon) .... one needs to have freee moola.

Something the gov. has heaps of and I only need to ask please sir can I have fifty dollars worth .. then I will get money to buy the government's own info (and the money then flows back to them in due course anyway).

But to make all this work one may need bigger words that just plain old .... "old mystery tip".

Whence I am rolling out "mysterious bulge in the archaeosphere" to see how that goes down.

It can't do any worse than 'progress' there so far.

And as for widening up meaning of "artefact" I am all for it .. to cater for whatever the Randwick 22,000 might end up being.

I learned some Latin where I went too (St. Pius X, Chatswood) .. then crawled under the school and was amazed to find it must have been built over a cemetery .. seemed to be stacked up headstones under it.

Cheers, JohnB

 

 

~~~

   

Yes Jo,

I was stirring the pot a bit - fed up with inadequate definitions.  However artefacts are as Biek stated, and the origins of the objects should be clarified which I hope the final report will do (not just being clear by inference).

And the word was first published by Coleridge in 1821.  As an English schoolboy he would have learned Latin.  Don't be diverted by copies of the word in Italian (unless you can prove they predate Coleridge, and if you do, please let me know)! 
Here's a draft of my ms:

"The Oxford English Dictionary finds that Samuel Taylor Coleridge first published the term in 1821.  Coleridge (1821:256) grappled with the problem of describing the concept of a generic inkstand:

What qualities and properties would you wish to have combined in an ink-stand?  Reflect!  Consult your past experience; taking care, however, not to desire things demonstrably, or self-evidently incompatible with each other; and the union of these desiderata will be your ideal of an ink-stand.  A friend, perhaps, suggests some additional excellence that might rationally be desired, till at length the catalogue may be considered as complete, when neither yourself, nor others, can think of any desideratum not anticipated or precluded by one or more of the points already enumerated; and the conception of all these, as realized in one and the same artéfact [sic], may fairly be entitled, the IDEAL of an Ink-stand.

It may be suggested that Coleridge uses ‘artefact’ quite easily in the above extract, and it seems that if Coleridge invented ‘artefact’ he may have done so as early as 1810 when he wrote his extensive commentaries on the works of Jeremy Taylor, the Commonwealth and Restoration divine ‘for the perusal of Charles Lamb’ (H. N. Coleridge 1838: ix). This study, with many others, was published posthumously.  In the commentary on the concept of communion, Coleridge wrote ‘a lump of sugar of lead, lies among other artefacts on the shelf of a collector’ (Coleridge 1838:III: 347)." 

Copies of the Coleridge are in the University of Auckland library, so have a look when you're at AAA/NZAA in November.

Also, as we all know, one of the difficulties with consulting is not identifying artefacts but 'sites'.  What do you do when every open scald along a river bank for several kilometres is littered with discarded stone artefacts?

The grass is just covering the evidence shown in the scalds? There could be up to 40K of short term camp evidence dispersed in the lag deposit that now remains, and about a hundred scalds. If each scald was registered as a site this

over-rates the farmer's grass!  

 'colleague’s are simply being parsimonious in not continually repeating the word Aboriginal' 

---

 On 11/04/2018 10:47 AM, Johan Kamminga wrote:

Hello Eleanor,

My opinion is that these definitions of ‘artefact’ are too broad. You need to look at the ultimate origin I’ll deal with definitions in a book about Aboriginal stone technology which I’ve been working on far too long.  

For instance, consider

1821, artefact, "artificial production, anything made or modified by human art," from Italian artefatto, from Latin arte "by skill" (ablative of ars "art;" see art (n.)) + factum "thing made," from facere "to make, do" (from PIE root *dhe- "to set, put").

In my opinion archaeologists tend to overstate, to over-interpret, to make things sound more important than they are. For instance, a few shells in beach sand or a shelly horizon of sand is described by consultants as a ‘shell midden’, or a location where stone is picked up, say from a creek bed, and some of it is knapped At that location, is termed a ‘stone quarry’. It’s huff and puff. 

I think it’s a given that the aggregate represents colonial era artefacts (dating to 1879 or 1880), colleague’s are simply being parsimonious in not continually repeating the word Aboriginal. 

In the early decades of colonial settlement around Port Jackson ballast was not so much left behind, or it was not offloaded at all, it was picked up. The relatively few vessels were offloading cargo and passengers, rather than loading new cargo and passengers. Ballast Point in Birchgrove is one location where these vessels took on extra ballast for their onward or return journey. 

With best regards,

Jo

 

 

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