Florida GOP vs. Social Science http:// www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/12/florida_governor_challenges_idea_of_non_st

1. Florida GOP vs. Social Science • http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/12/florida_governor_challenges_idea_of_non_stem_degrees • Governor Rick Scott says “If I’m going to take money from a citizen to put into education then I’m going to take that money to create jobs. So I want that money to go to degrees where people can get jobs in this state. Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so.”

2. Sjaelland shell mounds • 1848 Royal Danish Academy of Sciences established interdisciplinary commission to study the shell middens. • Worsaae, Steenstrup, and Forchhammer (father of Danish geology) all involved. • 1850s they published a six volume report on their studies of the “kitchen middens”. • Middens were of human origin • When the middens formed, environmental setting consisted of fir and pine forests (different than modern). • The only domesticated animals were dogs. • Based on faunal assemblage, researchers concluded that the site was occupied in the autumn, winter, and spring but not the summer. • Experiments were conducted to see how dogs impacted the faunal assemblage.

3. The Anthropological Review 1864 • http://books.google.com/books?id=1r44AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA60&lpg=PA60&dq=danish+kitchen+middens&source=bl&ots=u4o1F8nCpz&sig=eFs2OOdR87nBoeeltmhW-0B5dlo&hl=en&ei=qX-VTuvAEqf20gGsnoDWBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CEIQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=danish%20kitchen%20middens&f=false

4. Developments in Scandinavia were slow to impact France and England • Scientific archaeology in France and England did not begin until late 1850s, focused largely on Paleolithic. • Not antiquaries but geologists and paleontologists • Corresponding Pleistocene deposits not present in Scandinavia, Scotland, or Switzerland. These areas were glaciated.

5. 1609, mammoth tooth found below London street. Antiquary John Bagford interpreted it as Roman war elephant. Selective use of historical record. • 1669 Nicolaus Steno (1636-1686) recognized the law of superposition. • 1797, John Frere described Acheuleanhandaxes found with bones of extinct animals. • “the situation in which these weapons were found may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed; even beyond that of the present world” • He meant antideluvian > 6000 years. • Paper published by Society of Antiquaries, but did not arouse public controversy.

6. Georges Buffon (1707-1788) began to propose naturalistic origins and that the world was tens of thousands or millions of years old. Argued for symbolic rather than literal interpretation of Bible. • Greater knowledge of geology came with increased mining and earth moving that accompanied the industrial revolution. • Widely read popular figure, monogenist, and degenerationist, accepted 60000 years as age of earth. • Highly critical of Carolus Linnaeus. • “American Degeneracy” argued that animals in the New World were smaller and less diverse than Old World. Jefferson reacted against these ideas and visited Buffon in an attempt to convince him otherwise. Jefferson’s “Notes of the State of Virginia” was a counter’ Jefferson opens the volume with a discussion of the American Mammoth.

7. Buffon in volume 5 of Historienaturelle states • "In the savage, the organs of generation are small and feeble. He has no hair, no beard, no ardour for the female. Though nimbler than the European, because more accustomed to running, his strength is not so great. His sensations are less acute; and yet he is more timid and cowardly. He has no vivacity, no activity of mind.“ • Jefferson in “Notes on the State of Virginia” replies that impressions of shortcomings are the result of misunderstandings and that they are subjected to difficult conditions that do not permit agriculture, but that Native Americans excel at oration and warfare • "To judge of the truth of this, to form a just estimate of their genius and mental powers, more facts are wanting, and great allowance to be made for those circumstances of their situation which call for a display of particular talents only. This done, we shall probably find that they are formed in mind as well as in body, on the same module with the `Homo sapiens Europaeus.' The principles of their society forbidding all compulsion, they are to be led to duty and to enterprize by personal influence and persuasion. Hence eloquence in council, bravery and address in war, become the foundations of all consequence with them. To these acquirements all their faculties are directed. Of their bravery and address in war we have multiplied proofs, because we have been the subjects on which they were exercised. Of their eminence in oratory we have fewer examples, because it is displayed chiefly in their own councils. Some, however, we have of very superior lustre. I may challenge the whole orations of Demosthenes and Cicero, and of any more eminent orator, if Europe has furnished more eminent, to produce a single passage, superior to the speech of Logan, a Mingo chief, to Lord Dunmore, when governor of this state."

8. Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) established paleontology as a scientific discipline and inspired Nilsson’s work in Denmark. • Cuvier employed comparative anatomy to reconstruct extinct animals. • Observed that older strata contained animals that were increasingly dissimilar to modern ones. • Cuvier assumed a short history of the world and thus assumed regional catastrophes destroyed areas and led to extinction. • William Buckland (1784-1856), geologist, came to view catastrophes as universal rather than just local. • The appearance of new species in strata was not product of sequential development but a series of increasingly complex creations by God. • In 1774, Johann Esper (1732-1781) reported on human remains and stone tools associated with extinct animals recovered from stratified cave deposits in Western Europe. • Paul Tournal (1805-1872), Narbonne France • Jules de Christol (1802-1861), northeast of Montpellier, France • Phillippe-Charles Schmerling (1791-1836), Liege Belgium • John MacEnery (1796-1841), Kent’s Cave. Artifacts under sealed travertine. Buckland argued that ancient Britons dug earth ovens that broke the travertine and stone tools migrated downwards. MacEnery denied the presence of pits but accepted that the tools were not contemporary with extinct animals.

9. Edouard Lartet, in 1859, may have accepted great antiquity of humans in observing cut marks on bones of extinct animals. However, he did not public on this. • Boucher de Perthes (1788-1868) in 1837 began studying stone and antler tools discovered in northwestern France. Industrial projects (canals and railways) revealed additional deposits. • Boucher de Perthes, catastrophist, suggested the tolls were antediluvian and extinct species destroyed by biblical flood. Afterwards, God created a new race of humans. • Narrative rejected, but empirical observations replicated by Marcel Jerome Rigollot (1786-1854) at St Acheul and Amiens. • Edmond Herbert, Sorbonne, and other geologists and antiquaries continued to dispute the claims arguing that the artifacts were intrusive.

10. New Views of Geologic Process • 1785, James Hutton (1726-1797) forwarded the uniformitarian view of geology. • Current strata can be accounted for by slow gradual processes. • William Smith (1769-1839) England, Georges Cuvier and AlexandreBrongniart (1770-1847) strata of different ages had characteristic fauna; used these to identify contemporary strata over large distances (cross-dating). • Charles Lyell (1797-1875) from 1830-1833 publishes Principles of Geology. • Supports the uniformitarian assumption using large data set • Uniformitarianismrequires a long history of the earth. • Sets the stage for biological evolution (E.G. Robert Chambers (1844) anonymously wrote “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation”) • Lyell did not accept it.

11. New view of geology raised important questions about the antiquity of humans. • In early 1800s biological and cultural evolution were ideas associated with radical politics • By 1850s, the growth of industrialism and increasing strength of middle class • Herbert Spencer 1850s promoted general evolutionary approach, development from simple to complex forms a general rule. Extended the theory from atoms to culture. • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Spencer • Initiative and enterprise key forces underlying cultural evolution. Self interested middle-class entrepreneurs brought about progress. Social evolution shifted from a radical politic to a common ideology. Exemplified by the Great Exhibition of 1851.

12. 1858, William Pengelly (1812-1894) excavated Brixham Cave, southwestern England. • Funded by Royal Geological Societies of London • Work supervised by Charles Lyell. • Excavations produced stone tools associated with animal bones. Material found under a thick sealed deposit that demonstrated significant antiquity. • 1859, Joseph Prestwich (1812-1896), John Evans (1823-1908) along with Charles Lyell, visited several sites in Somme Valley. • Became convinced of earlier claims by Boucher de Perths and Rigollot. • 1837-1859: Major shift in thought in England and France • Recognized that strata were older than 6000 years. • 1863, Lyell publishes “The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man”.