Engagement Within: An Anthropological Exploration of First Nations Engagement and Consulting Archaeology Within a Transnational Corporation

This article details our research within a large, publicly traded company to understand the ‘corporate culture’ within Cultural Resource Management as it is practiced today. We outline the trials, twists, and roadblocks in our attempt to first change, and then to merely understand, the nature of corporate culture in a large-scale environmental assessment company situated within development capitalism. In the end, we share how corporate archaeologists think about engagement with Indigenous communities in British Columbia in an attempt to look within the corporate sector to understand its worldview and perspectives. We then offer ‘solutions’ to drive internal, structural change in hopes of engendering a community-first approach as first step towards decolonizing commercial archaeology.     

Pre-Columbian Fishing on the Coast of the Atacama Desert,Northern Chile: An Investigation of Fish Size and Species Distribution Using Otoliths From Camarones Punta Norte and Caleta Vitor

The bountiful marine resources of the northern Chilean coast offset the extreme aridity of the Atacama Desert in pre-Columbian times, underwriting permanent human occupation, and providing the basis for a long tradition of marine subsistence. We analyzed fish otoliths (n = 549) recovered from the sites of Camarones Punta Norte (occupied ca. 7,000–5,000 years ago) and Caleta Vitor (occupied ca. 9,500–300 years ago) to investigate species distribution and changes over time. We also estimated the size of the fish based on relationships between otolith weight and fish total length (TL) obtained from modern samples of the predominant species, Sciaena deliciosa. The estimated size range of S. deliciosa from Caleta Vitor included fish that were significantly larger than those from Camarones Punta Norte, with the maximum TL (970 mm) almost double the modern maximum length documented. The fluctuating abundance of fish species and other marine taxa from Camarones Punta Norte indicates intense but sporadic use of the site over the span of occupation. In contrast, human occupation of the Caleta Vitor estuary is more continuous. Comparisons of the fish assemblages with a nearby contemporaneous site, Quebrada de los Burros in southern Peru, suggest that fishing technologies were similar along this section of the Pacific coast.     

Political myth and sacrifice*

This article examines the relationship between political myth and sacrifice. In recent years, as a result of theoretical advances as well as practical concern to understand the rapidly changing landscape of contemporary politics, the phenomenon of political myth has attracted increasing scholarly attention. This has led to a refined and robust theory of political myth, with a sharp analytical edge and relevant practical applications. The relationship between political myth and sacrifice, however, has not been convincingly addressed so far. Gathering insights from the works of Hannah Arendt and Hans Blumenberg, it is argued here that while political myths succeed in providing guidance and orientation to people in a world that is significant to them, they may also involve a loss of sense of reality and produce a dangerous logic of sacrifice.     

The Pepsi-Jenner disaster: Translation and collaboration in global image markets

In 2017, Pepsi released a video advertisement online that became an international pop reference for ignorance regarding race relations and police brutality. This video offers a rare but theoretically productive moment to examine the errors and interpretive disjunctures that characterize the global labour market in advertising. More videos are being outsourced offshore due to decreasing budgets for video production internationally. Although the international provenance of creative advertising videos is well hidden, their nonscalability produces a trail of strange images that can provoke unexpected responses.     

Virtual zooarchaeology: building a web-based reference collection of northern vertebrates for archaeofaunal research and education

Osteological reference collections are a crucial tool in archaeofaunal analysis, but few are comprehensive; most lack a broad range of taxa or multiple individuals per taxon. This problem is especially prominent in arctic zooarchaeology, where difficulty in obtaining, transporting, and processing northern taxa has led to a dearth of appropriate reference collections. The Virtual Zooarchaeology of the Arctic Project, or VZAP, seeks to develop a comprehensive virtual comparative assemblage for the skeletons of northern vertebrates. VZAP (http://vzap.iri.isu.edu) is designed to assist with identifications in the lab or field and provides significant educational value, for both classroom demonstration and personal consultation. The VZAP website presents high-resolution digital photographs and 3D models of skeletal elements via an intuitive graphical user interface, designed to mimic the visual experience of working with a real comparative collection. This custom-built interface, the Dynamic Image Engine, represents a new way to present heritage media in an interactive and engaging format. VZAP also implements unique 3D scanning protocols to increase the realism of 3D models, and delivers them on a platform that allows for point to point measurements, cross-sections, morphological labels, and anatomical orientations.