Rosemary Joyce

@rajoyce

Archaeologist, anthropologist, once upon a time blogger. Author “The Future of Nuclear Waste”, “Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives”, “Sites, Traces and Materiality”. Distinguished Professor Emerita of Anthropology, UC Berkeley, Honorary PhD, Leiden Univ

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Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· 14d

What’s your sign?

A street sign in Oxford England says “No stopping” on a yellow background above “End” on a white background in larger letters. Read as two imperatives it creates a crisis of decision making: don’t stop? Or end—which is after all a stop…

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· 24d

Baicha watching bird videos for the first time. Happy Caturday!

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· 29d

Apparently it’s rock day? With my most recent book all about rocks I should have tons to share but nope, just one. This is an obsidian core from Honduras. It’s hard to take pictures of volcanic glass indoors with tungsten lights on a really old cell phone. But obsidian isn’t bothered.

Large rock with multiple facets, scars left where blades were removed by applying pressure to the flat side (opposite the end we are viewing). The image is black and white but the rock itself is black volcanic glass, obsidian.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Jun 21

Egon Schiele, “Setting Sun”, in Vienna.

Egon Schiele “Versinkende Sonne” (Setting Sun) painted 1913, in the Leopold Museum in Vienna. Painting uses somber colors to suggest hills and countryside in the foreground from which two trees grow. The trees extend to the top of the painting, with their branches cut off by the gram. In the upper section the trees are dark against pink tones suggesting additional landscape, hills or mountains. An orange disk next to one mountain references a setting sun.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Jun 20

Damn.

Screen shot of output from “In the Weights” purporting to measure the degree to which a person is digested by specific LLMs. Lucky me: I’m in the top 4%. Bar graphs for specific models but not clear what they mean.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Jun 10

Landscape with conifer and beech forest beyond waterlogged fields of lower vegetation. Not visible is the black bear that was in the trees shortly before this.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Jun 6

—Lauren Winchester, “Eating the Glacier”

Water laps against bluish wall of ice at the front face of a glacier. Only the base of the wall is visible, lit by sunlight, as grey fog hovers a distance above the water. Pieces of ice float in the water, remnants of calving when large pieces of ice break off the face, becoming ice bergs.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Jun 5

Ice bergs float on turquoise water in front of a retreating glacier flowing out of the snow covered mountains. Columbia glacier.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Jun 4

Iambic lines drafted in silt are revised when glaciers melt so verses ending in heroic couplet are more epigram than sonnet.

A solid line of mountains covered in snow rise above a bluish wall of ice confronting the ocean. This is what the face of a glacier looks like.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· May 29

A definite block here for anyone who cares about writing, history, truth, justice…

Screen shot from an account promoting an AI that is arguing with real people claiming AI is just like the introduction of typewriters. Block!

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· May 13

Our dog Baicha

A cat (or dog, categories are arbitrary) stretches her legs out in the sunlight revealing her long paws which, like her tail and ears and face, are darker than the rest of her body.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· May 2

Post your warning sign

Crossing street sign showing skeletal figure walking in the direction indicated by an arrow.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Mar 28

Today in a tiny Bay Area city (pop. 19,000) hundreds of people of all kinds stood on our major intersection and manifested the will to take back this country.

A street corner outside the local tavern. Along the main and cross streets a crowd of people, old and young, hold makeshift signs demanding No Kings, no wars, ICE out and more. Passing cars like one at the right side honked in solidarity and music rolled out from a guitar playing protester.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Mar 27

Welcome back!

Baicha, a blue-eyed Siamese cat, peaks over the back of the couch to see what all the excitement is about.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Mar 6

Kitty!

Photograph of display at La Brea Tar Pits museum. A complete skeleton of a California Sabre Tooth cat is flexed ready to pounce on its prey. A small illustration inside the case shows the imagined fully fleshed and furred cat, with a lynx-type tail that somehow makes it seem cuddly.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Feb 28

Post a pic you took, no context, to bring some zen to the feed.

Sunset over a city illuminates clouds turning them deep orange with zones of grey-blue.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Feb 25

The targets of the analysis are Ulua Polychrome vessels like this one. Made between 450 and 850 AD, by ancestral Lenca people in what today is Honduras. Looking at them makes me happy.

Fragment of a fired clay cylindrical vessel, a beaker that would have held chocolate drinks. The exterior is slipped orange with an extensive black layer revealing the main design in a kind of negative, with red used to suggest feline skin on a serpent emerging from a conch shell below the hand of a costumed human dancer.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Feb 20

Existing Section 232 and 301 tarriffs in place and a new 10% Section 122 tarriff plus investigations under other sections. Reupping this graphic

A table showing the approaches to tarriffs that are legally allowed and now being cited by the regime.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Feb 20

I did a screen shot to post on FB

Screenshot of a post from Bloomberg News on legal routes to US tariffs. Link in original post by @brianplatt.bsky.social

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Feb 20

Actually that’s unfair to pigs, which are delightful and far more interesting to look at. So here’s a couple of cute piggies to wipe away the image of that misogynistic jerk.

On a sunlight grassy slope two pigs are browsing for food. The one in back is mostly covered in black patches; the one in front mostly white with black spots. There are only these two pigs on this farm.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Feb 9

I like where this placed me

Screen shot of a data visualization of BlueSky users as a cloud of green dots. Pink circle locates the current posting author in a region labeled “Humanities Academics and Scholars” not far from “Left Wing Academic Intellectuals”

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Feb 4

Every cat when it’s people come home (2/2)

A car sits facing the screen. An empty (!) food bowl is in front of her. Humans have failed in their duties.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Feb 2

This is who runs this account

Photo of a child with curly blonde hair seated inside a television cabinet, looking out at the viewer through the glass. The CRT tube has been removed but she is on TV.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Jan 29

I am a pottery specialist, so happy to hear this! I can actually also tell you how it was made, and likely what it was used for. This one I excavated in 2009 from the buried ruins of a house burned in 1779. It was either made in Antigua, Guatemala before 1774, or in Comayagua Honduras after that.

A broken piece of a bowl, with a dark reddish interior covered by a thin layer of glassy glaze and pigments. The glaze has a greenish tinge, and the visible paint is green or black. It is mayolica, tin-based glaze. The reddish fired clay is high in iron. It is from a shallow bowl decorated on the interior.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Jan 11

Really amazing dinner to celebrate an anniversary during a week working on a project with multinational colleagues, many former students.

A tiny tartlet filled with smoked mussels sits on a plate. Tiny cilantro flowers dot the top. At Quintonil in Mexico City.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Jan 4

Not alt texting bc just helping someone see a blocked post.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Jan 1

We did not die!

4 panel cartoon by Nathan Pyle in which a child tries to understand New Year’s by analogy with birthdays. The adult involved explains we are celebrating collective survival, not individual survival. We did not die!

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Jan 1

Happy New Revolutions Day. We did not die!

A four panel cartoon by Nathan Pyle. First, an adult putting up decorations tells a young one “We celebrate because we completed a revolution around the star.” Second, the young one comments “So it is identical to emergence day?” And the adult replies “Emergence day is for one individual’s survival”. In panel three, the adult continues “New Revolution’s Day celebrates collective survival.” “Oh” says the young one. The final panel shows the adult and young one, both wearing comical hats striped in spirals, with their arms high. The young one says “We did not die!”. The adult replies “Exactly”.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Dec 30

Interesting exercise. I’d rather have more city-based map but this one was interesting and I didn’t have to let it harvest my identity to use it.

Map of the United States with each state and DC colored to indicate how likely I would live there. “Never” applies to the Great Plains and most of the South; Texas and Louisiana, the Carolinas and Virginia are possible. I would return to the inland Midwest reluctantly; the ocean is so compelling. New York State remains my origin place. But the truth is winter in western NY is a deal breaker.

Rosemary Joyce@rajoyce· Dec 23

Baicha took over the couch early today. She says the pillow was an invitation she just had to get it properly oriented.