 So I started to work on the concepts of demarcation of those things investigated by empirical sciences and those things that we consider through mythic and metaphysical types of ways of looking at the world. And I did this because I work with indigenous peoples of the Americas who have gifted me with their knowledge and a place to live. And in their traditional description of themselves they do not describe themselves as separate in the world. Nature and culture are one and the metaphysical is very important in terms of interpreting the world. But demarcation can be powerful and in this case it does not necessarily move to all cultures. So the world view that is central is that observations are about life and death and they're pragmatic for survival decisions but they are not removed from the spirituality in which you live. And to come to reconciliation between the observed and the observer when removed in time or place in some sense we can return to the concept of emic and etic in anthropology. The person telling you what their life is like and the anthropologist is interpreting what they said. And of course for us as archeologists who work in this stuff we don't have that other place to go. The negotiations of meaning between actors and shared spaces and time crossing contingencies of cultural differences are not there for us. We have only one side of it. In many of the decisions exemplified in material culture however and environment landscape choices are available to us. But we have to always be aware that we are working our own taffanomic process as we do this kind of analysis. And that we are captives of our own methodological and theoretical time. Lacking face to face interaction and seeking explanation I am suggesting that we can turn to our reflexive selves. We really have to get in there and we have to consider how the contemporary mind is defined now. It is this contemporary mind and its filters that will stop us from being able to move into this wider expanse that other cultures see. Here we can reach the potential to become aware of our methodological conditioning because we are the children of the myths of our own culture. We would see that contemporary mind is itself delineated in dominant sectors by Western tradition. Consider the disappearance and I want to get this up here for you just to come down here. I put this in because we published on this pot. This is a pot that is a moving picture. And it gives you time in the way we look at time down through stratigraphy. But I want you to see this because this is very, very important. Come up, you did before. Yes. This is a map of the endangered languages of the world. Now watch this. It's going to come up. These are the endangered languages of the world. Look at them. Look. This is frightening for an anthropologist. It should be for an archeologist too. Because the voices of the elders are disappearing. They're going into history. They're going into prehistory. And they hold things we can't even imagine. So what we have then is a world where indigenous languages are disappearing. And the lingua franca is essentially becoming English. Even if we capture the voices of the last speakers, we gain only a portion of their linguistic universe without the intersubjective. The meaning of specific words or phrases with no direct translation are missed. There is no rendezvous with ancient intersubjectivity. Deeper in time we can find and interpret the pragmatic, the magical, the metaphorical. Or can we? Are there actual encoded lessons for remembering an oral tradition of great antiquity as well as lessons for constructing, constituting, life way teachings whispering to us from the past? Can we recognize criteria for creating ancient demarcations allowing for shifting boundaries over an investigative field of greater or lesser breadth, subsuming more including less than we may have assumed to be the content? Can we consider that we may be part and parcel with the universe and thus reflect the anthropic principle? The anthropic universe is articulated by the physicist John Archibald Wheeler, one of my heroes because he wrote for us to be able to understand quantum. And he says, we are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here, but the far away and long ago. We are, in this sense, participators in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past. And as such, well, get rid of this. The most cogent question to be asked is that while honoring the data, can we come to an interpretation that if they could stand before us again, they would recognize what we're saying? Have we participated enough to bring it there? So I want us to contemplate the possibility of creating meaning that places our modern time in a way that we can reach into explanations in the past. And I bring you the late Marshak here who I absolutely adored in terms of his work and things that happened. This is a war tool out of Jordan that ended up being made into a child's wagon. So everything goes around and around. Let me go back to go to Marshak and then come back. OK, so Marshak did all of this work on early, early art. And at the time, he was sort of like, go away. And then everybody started to go, oh my God, this guy's telling us the truth. And so Marshak is an example of interpretation through the material culture of the European Ashilean and Musterian. And he suggests highly evolved potentially variable hominid capacities, highly evolved skills and conceptual in nature for planning, mapping, or modeling the territory and culture in time and space. The all-important precursor, he said, to the cultural elaboration of the European Upper Paleolithic. He claims rightly that Neanderthal and Homo sapiens actually, he called it the hominization, continued from an earlier selective process that evolutionarily differentiated us from the Great Apes, through our ability to start signing. And he said, in certain types of classes, the problem solving and symboling capacity, moving from the sign to the symbol is the big jump cognitively. And he goes on to say this, but please look at the Blombast cave now dating to 100,000 years in South Africa. Now the word artist is being added to this capacity. And this, of course, for many of us is a place to be. Complex memory is essential for the development of transgenerational learnings that come to define cultural identity. And we can see through Popper, I wanted to go back to the other one here. Well, I wanted to see some symbols that we look at in this. We look at place, we look at measurement, we look at future planning, we look at relationships, depictions of marking through adornment. And I've given you this National Geographic picture of a Neanderthal, look at his necklace, his paint on the face, you know, the child in his arms. And we look at past remembering. And of course past remembering is one of the big issues. So what we have here is that Popper tells us there's three ways of knowing. There's physical objects, which we dig up all the time. There's thought and subjective experience, some of it mostly on our side to say what's going on there. But it's in that item too. And the products of the human mind. These come together creating our cultural boundaries and forms of demarcation. We are slowly gaining insight into the development of our cognitive capacity, as evidenced by Stout in his short but informative little piece called His Tales of a Stone Age Neuroscientist. Significant for archaeologists that the evidence of developing technological complexity over time is seen as specific and diverse Shane operatoire. Currently, many North American schools do not consider memorization to be a useful skill. But contemplate the concept cells that are being discussed in our brains now, sets of neurons that group together and bring associated ideas together. And as they're called, link perception to memory. They constitute the building block for the memories of facts and events that can be used to make new associations and memories. Thus, we should not discount the depths attainable through sequential memory. The links and the resulting networks remember such memory was a repository of all we knew before the literate world came to us. And yet, invention and innovation in stories became transgenerational and inter-culturally mobile. And I refer you back to the American archaeologist Dietz and his concept of the Doppler effect. Things went out. Let's look at the technology in the musterian in Europe, but somebody did something and everybody else learned it over the continent. The new world of written was for generations, indeed millennia, restricted to elite classes. But the spoken word world remained even in the face of loss. It was indubitally mutated, altered and eliminated many oral histories, but still it hung on in many places. It echoes varying, even with varying past filters, it is with us yet. And I'd like to refer you back to Ray Bradbury and his book Fahrenheit 451, where the hero ends up memorizing books, whole books. And I suggest to you that you take the challenge, perhaps for the sequential world of memorizing, perhaps the old image epic, Bear Wolf, all 3,182 lines in the original Old English language. Somebody did that in the past. These literative lines went on and on and on to come to an era when we had written work. And it remains with us now as written texts, but now and again, there's somebody who does remember them in the voice. Sometimes cultural memory held in the minds of the elders can withstand these ravages of time. As attested to in the Gethsemane with Sowiton, here's Ray Bradbury. And I give you Hanama Sfany Johnson here. She's a chief, a traditional chief in a line where matrilineal leaders rule. Now the Geth Kan, what Sowiton land claims are a big issue. Line claims in Canada are. Ancient scheme of mountain life lived in the memories of the chiefs. The core facts of these stories were accepted from oral tradition by Canadian courts when augmented by geological and archeological record that places these memories 7,000 years back. This is a teachable moment for us. For the Geth Kan, what Sowiton and many other cultures time is not merely unidirectional. It can be linear, but I have some stuff over here afterwards, we can play with and look at it. It actually spools back in itself and comes forward again. Rather it is a network of relationships where there is a reiteration of cultural meanings, looping spiraling through time, myth and metaphor in code life in a memorable landscape of cultural understanding. Prescient are echoes over space time. And how am I doing for time here? I've just about done in time, I might not. So I have to move on. So what I'm gonna leave out a bit in here in terms of some of the quantum I had put in here. But I like to look at stories of transformation and transformation also goes into that anthropomorphism as well because they teach us lessons. But what I end up with in the paper I've given you is that once upon a time, there lived a giant ape in Asia. This giant ape, Gigantepithicus, went extinct about 100,000 years ago, but it had lasted for nine million years. And it is in a sense for some Asians and some North Americans too, a pre-atomite story that perhaps never made the Bible. It is possible that this critical time overlap of this giant ape with Eurasian forms of Neanderthals and Denisovians and the advent of the genus Homo out of Africa met because certainly when we look at the description of this animal as it comes to us as Yeti, Bigfoot, Sasquatch, it talks about in an anthropomorphized way because it talks about long hands down as long and it's human face and so forth. I am suggesting to you that these stories of great psychological import came forward as diverging biological and cultural histories and extinctions occurred. This was a tough time. Gigantepithicus walking upright, walks through time through the memories of the stories that hold still. And what is even more interesting when we see this? Please note the timeline for these three species of humans. And I put the green in where they come across each other. This is about 100,000 years ago. And please note the distribution now of what those that don't do Yeti, the blue-covered area, and those that do do Yeti into North America, the red area, which is exactly the area where this happened 100,000 years ago. So I'm suggesting to you go for it. Dig through time, get out of your current mindset, go to mythologies of others and see if they can tell us something, something more about what's going on. And of course, the big thing I'm working on right now on all of this is how does this memory stay in cultures? I'm going to suggest to you it stays in cultures because the cultures have a different idea of time altogether. Linear time I have and a piece over there with the dots that we can cut it into pieces and disappear it. And of course, we see linear time up here at the top. See if we slice it, we get different stories. Then if we do it another slice the other way, we have two, two, one, none. And my big thing is that I'm suggesting to you that linear works have spirals back and forth, but I like mobius better. Mobius is everything all together. And I have a mobius I'm going to do over here that we can see afterwards. And I want you to think about that for most of us, we are still in our infancy on shared ideas about current scientific concepts of time. Craig Callender, who's another one of my heroes, asserts that we are the descendants of the age of enlightenment and live in linear time. There is context and contradiction, not in place, but in time itself, because essentially time in the universe is static. For us, the metaphor of time as flow of a river is actually an illusion. And yet is through imagining time, I want you to consider a possible story of nearly unimaginable time depths. And for this, I end with a small demonstration after we're all done here. Thank you very much.