and delete "MA" after your name, authors don't usually use qualifications on book covers

Nice. Move your name to the lower part, make it bigger, reduce the size of the words "Doctoral Thesis", put that below your name. Make the transition to dark lower section sharp, to match the top. Reduce the size of the black portion at the base slightly

milk it for all it's worth

Evaluated 15 abstracts for papers for a humanities conference. Depressing. 2/3 apply a fashionable "theoretical framework" to arrive at foregone conclusions concerning "power dynamics", "recontextualization", "negotiated relationships" ... 😑 ... might as well let AI write this stuff

Thank you… means a lot to us!

the book "Stone and Fiber: Daily life in the Baliem valley, Papua"

we published this in English. We hope to publish in Indonesian later

a Hubula (Dani) adze from the Baliem valley, part of the Hampton Archive of Papuan ethnographic material

a Hubula (Dani) wealth stone, part of the Hampton Archive of ethnographic material from the Baliem valley, Papua

the Hampton Archive is collected from Tracing Patterns Foundation, Berkeley, CA, for shipment and repatriation to Papua

Conserved, catalogued, photographed, re-housed ... after 5 years work a major ethnographic collection (the Hampton Archive) is on its way back to Papua, where it will form the nucleus of a new museum ...

the scheme is based on time depth, and geographic scope, which are linked to vertical and horizontal transmission

Classifying things isn't the same as understanding them, but it's a necessary first step. In this book chapter I establish a classification for cultural phenomena, and apply it to some southeast Asian traditions ... www.researchgate.net/publication/...

I wrote this around 5 years ago, but I still like it (publishing is kinda slow in the humanities). Looking at this again, it reads like a precis of a book ... a book I will probably never write haha

Traditions are usually considered (by definition) in terms of long-lived features, but consideration of innovation (by definition) involves novel features with short histories. This discussion points out how we can classify and 'get a handle on' short-lived and long-lived aspects of traditions ...

Gilt bronze statue of Acala, a Tibetan protector god

New book chapter ... "The Anatomy of a Tradition". Compares notions of tradition, innovation, lineage, fashion in two different fields: Tibetan Buddhism and rural weaving in southeast Asia, discusses why they are similar, and why this is so ... www.researchgate.net/publication/...

I hadn’t looked at the study. These kinds of papers are the lowest form of academic literature, the modern equivalent of the marketing “studies” of old: “nine out of ten owners said their cats preferred it”

😱😅

removal of same drums increases oxytocin levels in adults

I love those HTW books

adding things that I've already done to the list, so that I can have the satisfaction of crossing them off

Family Tree Model The family tree remains the main metaphor for describing the evolutionary history and relationships of languages. Languages, like biological species, evolve following processes such as descent with m...

Our chapter on the tree model (with @thomaspellard.bsky.social and @robinryder.bsky.social ) is at last published online: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

a tubular skirt made by Li (Hlai) speakers on Hainan Island, decorated with ikat, warp patterning and supplementary weft designs

For those in the Bay Area ... Serena Lee and I will be doing an introduction to weaving in southwest China and southeast Asia at the Asian Art Museum in SF. We will try to make sense of this most complicated region in Asia and its rich traditions ... www.societyforasianart.org/program/text...

I prefer to juggle the hoops, catching them all in sequence at the end for a strong finish

Cultural Evolution with Rob Boyd YouTube video by Evolutionary Psychology (The Podcast)

in which Rob Boyd lays into a couple of students of Toobey and Cosmides (in the politest possible way). He mentions my work at around 57mins in ... but forgets my name. Ah well, you take what you can get ... www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoqB...

Yes, and for instance the word for "bow" in Lakhota itázipa has been proposed to be a borrowing from a central Algonquian language (though the phonetic details are a bit involved)

Rapid adoption of bow technology across western North America ∼1,400 years ago Abstract. The replacement of the atlatl and dart by the bow and arrow marks a major technological transformation in the human past, yet the timing and dyna

The bow spread rapidly across the Americas, the result of diffusion rather than migration. I'm reminded of studies of the diffusion of arrow designs in New Guinea ... also rapid (there's nothing like being shot at with a novel weapon for generating awareness 😉) academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Talk by Chris Buckley, on the Baliem valley in Papua, at the Hillside Club in Berkeley, California

This evening, at the Hillside Club in Berkeley, CA

I predict that their recreated moa will look a bit like Beth Shapiro

😊

This is from the supplementary material for this paper (preprint)

There are other odd similarities between Naga (Sino-Tibetan speakers) and some Austronesian speaking peoples, eg some loom features. I don't have an explanation for this ... long distance contact seems unlikely ...

(PDF) The origins of southeast Asian weaving traditions: the perspective from archaeology PDF | This paper presents a new map and account of the emergence and spread of spindle whorls in archaeological sites across southern China and... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on Re...

Also, what might be an iron age top from Sulawesi ... see discussion of Anggraeni et al's finding of a very large "spindle whorl" in section 2 of this paper: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

(PDF) Spindle whorls and the emergence of weaving in the East Asia region PDF | We present the largest and most wide-ranging survey to date of archaeological spindle whorls, across more than 350 sites in East Asia, including... | Find, read and cite all the research you nee...

Decorated spindle whorls are known from the
Quijialing, Shijiahe and Huangguashan cultures (6000-4000BP), these are the right size for spindle whorls, but they are so tempting that I am sure they were also used as toys (see section 3.6 in this preprint www.researchgate.net/publication/... )