Jon Clindaniel is an Assistant Senior Instructional Professor and Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies in Computational Social Science at the University of Chicago. His specialty is computational anthropology, and he is focused on solving difficult archaeological problems using computational strategies. For more information about his research and teaching interests, as well as access to his Python code, check out his website at jonclindaniel.com. Address: 1155 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637
In a 2017 article, Holen and colleagues reported evidence for a 130 000-year-old archaeological s... more In a 2017 article, Holen and colleagues reported evidence for a 130 000-year-old archaeological site in California. Acceptance of the site would overturn current understanding of global human migrations. The authors here consider Holen et al.'s conclusions through critical evaluation of their replicative experiments. Drawing on best practice in experimental archaeology, and paying particular attention to the authors' chain of inference, Magnani et al. suggest that to argue convincingly for an early human presence at the Cer-utti Mastodon site, Holen et al. must improve their analogical foundations, test alternative hypotheses, increase experimental control and quantify their results.
This manuscript presents a novel approach to the study of contemporary material culture using dig... more This manuscript presents a novel approach to the study of contemporary material culture using digital data. Scholars interested in the materiality of past and contemporary societies have been limited to information derived from assemblages of excavated, collected, or physically observed materials; they have yet to take full advantage of large or complex digital datasets afforded by the internet. To demonstrate the power of this approach and its potential to disrupt our understanding of the material world, we present a study of an ongoing global health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we focus on face-mask production during the pandemic across the United States in 2020 and 2021. Scraping information on homemade face-mask characteristics at multimonth intervals-including location and materials-we analyze the production of masks and their change over time. We demonstrate that this new methodology, coupled with a sociopolitical examination of mask use according to state policies and politicization, provides an unprecedented avenue to understand the changing distributions and social significances of material culture. Our study of mask making elucidates a clear linkage between partisan politics and decreasing disease mitigation effectiveness. We further reveal how time-averaged asssemblages drown out the political meanings of artifacts otherwise visible with finer temporal resolution.
Pachacamac: El Oráculo en el horizonte marino del sol poniente, 2017
Reference Information:
Clindaniel, Jon and Gary Urton. 2017. “Quipus de Pachacamac: hacia la est... more Reference Information:
Clindaniel, Jon and Gary Urton. 2017. “Quipus de Pachacamac: hacia la estandarización de las convenciones de signos en el Tawantinsuyu.” In Pachacamac: El Oráculo en el horizonte marino del sol poniente, edited by Denise Pozzi-Escot, 274-287. Lima: Banco de Credito del Perú.
Inka khipus were a unique pre-Columbian semiotic technology that used three-dimensional signs–pri... more Inka khipus were a unique pre-Columbian semiotic technology that used three-dimensional signs–primarily knots, cords, and colors–as symbols functionally akin to those of writing systems in other cultures. Spanish chroniclers reported that khipus recorded everything from census records, to histories, and songs. Numerical Inka khipu signs were deciphered in the 1920s. However, scholars still have not deciphered any non-numerical Inka khipu signs, nor have they empirically demonstrated how such signs would have worked—whether as phonetic signs, individualized mnemonic devices, or types of semasiographic signs. I demonstrate that non-numerical khipu signs worked as Peircean dicent symbolic legisigns (dicent symbols, or predicates) in binary, hierarchical pairs. Furthermore, I argue that these paired legisigns were conventionalized across the Inka Empire, but circumscribed by genre and political geography. Over the course of my analysis, I decipher several non-numerical signs and demonstrate their use in Inka khipus. Finally, building on my findings from individual signs, I outline a preliminary grammar of the Inka khipu.
In a 2017 article, Holen and colleagues reported evidence for a 130 000-year-old archaeological s... more In a 2017 article, Holen and colleagues reported evidence for a 130 000-year-old archaeological site in California. Acceptance of the site would overturn current understanding of global human migrations. The authors here consider Holen et al.'s conclusions through critical evaluation of their replicative experiments. Drawing on best practice in experimental archaeology, and paying particular attention to the authors' chain of inference, Magnani et al. suggest that to argue convincingly for an early human presence at the Cer-utti Mastodon site, Holen et al. must improve their analogical foundations, test alternative hypotheses, increase experimental control and quantify their results.
This manuscript presents a novel approach to the study of contemporary material culture using dig... more This manuscript presents a novel approach to the study of contemporary material culture using digital data. Scholars interested in the materiality of past and contemporary societies have been limited to information derived from assemblages of excavated, collected, or physically observed materials; they have yet to take full advantage of large or complex digital datasets afforded by the internet. To demonstrate the power of this approach and its potential to disrupt our understanding of the material world, we present a study of an ongoing global health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we focus on face-mask production during the pandemic across the United States in 2020 and 2021. Scraping information on homemade face-mask characteristics at multimonth intervals-including location and materials-we analyze the production of masks and their change over time. We demonstrate that this new methodology, coupled with a sociopolitical examination of mask use according to state policies and politicization, provides an unprecedented avenue to understand the changing distributions and social significances of material culture. Our study of mask making elucidates a clear linkage between partisan politics and decreasing disease mitigation effectiveness. We further reveal how time-averaged asssemblages drown out the political meanings of artifacts otherwise visible with finer temporal resolution.
Pachacamac: El Oráculo en el horizonte marino del sol poniente, 2017
Reference Information:
Clindaniel, Jon and Gary Urton. 2017. “Quipus de Pachacamac: hacia la est... more Reference Information:
Clindaniel, Jon and Gary Urton. 2017. “Quipus de Pachacamac: hacia la estandarización de las convenciones de signos en el Tawantinsuyu.” In Pachacamac: El Oráculo en el horizonte marino del sol poniente, edited by Denise Pozzi-Escot, 274-287. Lima: Banco de Credito del Perú.
Inka khipus were a unique pre-Columbian semiotic technology that used three-dimensional signs–pri... more Inka khipus were a unique pre-Columbian semiotic technology that used three-dimensional signs–primarily knots, cords, and colors–as symbols functionally akin to those of writing systems in other cultures. Spanish chroniclers reported that khipus recorded everything from census records, to histories, and songs. Numerical Inka khipu signs were deciphered in the 1920s. However, scholars still have not deciphered any non-numerical Inka khipu signs, nor have they empirically demonstrated how such signs would have worked—whether as phonetic signs, individualized mnemonic devices, or types of semasiographic signs. I demonstrate that non-numerical khipu signs worked as Peircean dicent symbolic legisigns (dicent symbols, or predicates) in binary, hierarchical pairs. Furthermore, I argue that these paired legisigns were conventionalized across the Inka Empire, but circumscribed by genre and political geography. Over the course of my analysis, I decipher several non-numerical signs and demonstrate their use in Inka khipus. Finally, building on my findings from individual signs, I outline a preliminary grammar of the Inka khipu.
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Clindaniel, Jon and Gary Urton. 2017. “Quipus de Pachacamac: hacia la estandarización de las convenciones de signos en el Tawantinsuyu.” In Pachacamac: El Oráculo en el horizonte marino del sol poniente, edited by Denise Pozzi-Escot, 274-287. Lima: Banco de Credito del Perú.
Code/Data used in Analysis:
http://www.jonclindaniel.com/code
Clindaniel, Jon and Gary Urton. 2017. “Quipus de Pachacamac: hacia la estandarización de las convenciones de signos en el Tawantinsuyu.” In Pachacamac: El Oráculo en el horizonte marino del sol poniente, edited by Denise Pozzi-Escot, 274-287. Lima: Banco de Credito del Perú.
Code/Data used in Analysis:
http://www.jonclindaniel.com/code