Gayveman

Back to the Caveman subject. I'm kinda glad we touched on this again, since I think when Erin brought it up on one of the first days, I wasn't really paying attention 100%. I remember seeing the title "Gay Caveman" under one of the pictures just as she was changing a slide, and thinking "wtf?".

Anyways, after researching it on google and discussing gender in class, it's clear that it is certainly quite an interesting idea. However, what I want to focus on more so in this entry are the reactions I read to the various articles posting about this groundbreaking "Gay Caveman"

 Since this individual was in fact a member of a bronze-age farming community, why must the media label him as a "caveman" in the first place? I think this is a perfect example of how skewed media perspectives can be, particularly in archaeology, and just goes to show that you can't believe everything you read -scary thought considering how many news papers/articles actually took him to be a caveman.


Judging from the comments on the national post article, it's bizzarre how many people were angered by the interpretation of the team excavating the "gayveman" -yeah, made that up myself. Sure, I understand that sexual orientation is still very much a touchy subject, but people seemed more annoyed by the fact that these archaeologists came up with (what they believed) was such a far fetched hypothesis based on the evidence at hand. Although we've all been guilty of ignorance at one time or another, it seems many of these folks commenting don't understand what archaeology is about. Sure, skepticism and questioning is definitely a healthy aspect to any field of research, but what it seems many people don't understand, is that theoretical approaches are a huge aspect of archaeology. Without theory and interpretation, what could we discover from the past? There are so few situations where the evidence completely speaks for itself, due to preservation issues or what have you, and so you gotta start somewhere, right? As crazy interpretation as the gayveman may be, I still think it's a valid one. Questions and additional revised ideas  are necessary on any subject, but complete refutation in such a case is simply ignorance.


   I don't really want to pick out individual comments, but the replies to the article I'm talking about can be found at
 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-hot-button/has-the-first-gay-caveman-been-unearthed/article1976257/comments/

TGIF

Death is a mysterious thing, I think we can all agree on that. It only makes sense then, that graveyards also hold their share of mysteries. As a group, we decided to explore the vast Ross Bay Cemetery, with a specific interest in the War memorials and graves. Therefore, it is only natural that we should have questions about such graves. Who were these individuals? how did they die? What was it like to live, fight and die for your country- or is that how they viewed it? Unfortunately, questions such as these are not easily answered, if answerable in today's day and age at all. However, there are other questions which may be more appropriate to examine; this is what we chose:
 The first we chose to look into was the positioning of the war graves within the cemetery. The majority of graves were found in two separate sections, one in the lower eastern corner of the cemetery, and one in the lower west. It appeared to us that the graves in the east must have been the earlier ones; this area seemed more dedicated to those who had specifically perished in either of the world wars. Found within this section was also a large memorial commemorating fallen seamen from both wars (this was also one of our mapping points). It seemed possible that this area was originally designated for those who died fighting in the first world war, since nearly all the tomb stones were dated around 1916.
     Our next question involved the western area of the graveyard. Here, we found the majority of graves were dated to the mid 1920's. To make things even more puzzling, we found a fair number of them were multiple-burial graves, with a soldier being buried with his wife or even entire family at a single plot. Why was it that these soldiers should be commemorated with their comrades who died in the war, while their deaths took place after the first world war had ended? Why were these soldiers being buried with their families? Perhaps the answer involves something around the real estate of burial. Perhaps these individuals had already purchased burial plots in the grave yard, and that's the reason they were buried with their families. However, the date of their deaths still confuses me, and I honestly have no idea where to find the information to answer it. Here's the link to the map we created: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=204947318620268261385.0004b84028b3297997c63