Meeting planners were smart and put the session on ‘the archaeology of intoxication’ in a relatively large room in the convention center. It attracted an early-afternoon crowd who were probably looking forward to a little bit of every archaeologist’s favorite intoxicant – alcohol – by the end of the day.

One thing that soon became clear is just how many ways ancient peoples dreamed up to get high. Ancient Peruvians took a version of snuff. Native Americans of the American Southwest and Mexico experimented with all sorts of mind-altering cacti, including but not limited to the famous peyote buttons. The Maya regularly administered enemas of hallucinogenic substances. Pretty much everywhere archaeologists look, they find more evidence like this.

Sean Rafferty, of the University of Albany in New York, reported on some work about how Native Americans of eastern North America used mind-altering substances. Tobacco, it turns out, was king. It may have actually been one of the first tended crops on the continent, he suggests – traces of nicotine decay products are present in two smoking pipes, from West Virginia and Vermont, that dated between 500 BC and 300 BC. Yet alcohol use didn’t take off until much later in the New World.

In other words, early North Americans were apparently too busy smoking to take up drinking.

Although this is a meeting of American archaeologists held on Canadian soil, the common link of Great Britain made an appearance in a special session on Stonehenge, the iconic standing stones in southern England that were constructed starting around 2600 BC.

The Stonehenge Riverside Project has been excavating for the past couple of seasons at both Stonehenge and at Durrington Walls, a few kilometers away. Because of the huge interest in the site, much of the team’s findings have been reported already (see for instance Nature‘s earlier story on the topic, subscription required). In short: Stonehenge wasn’t an isolated site but was instead linked as part of a far larger complex to the giant timber henges and settlements at Durrington Walls.

Michael Parker Pearson, one of the excavation’s leaders, talked here about how Durrington Walls may have served as the place of the living, and Stonehenge the place of the dead. At least 52 cremation burials, plus more than 40 unburnt human bones, have been unearthed at Stonehenge – perhaps the remains of a royal dynasty. People who weren’t important enough to merit burial at Stonehenge may also have been cremated but dumped instead into the River Avon; last summer, the excavation team uncovered three large timber monuments that may have been viewing platforms overlooking the Avon for such cremation burials.

All this goes to show that Stonehenge is more than a place of mystical rituals and a tourist must-see. Millennia ago, it was the biggest cemetery in Britain and a hugely significant place to transition from the living to the dead.

More small digs are planned for next week – so keep an eye out for more news from Stonehenge shortly.

It’s a little hard to figure out how to think about last night’s session on ‘consideration for archaeological property during military conflict’. In essence, we heard Army archaeologist Laurie Rush talking about how she tries to train US soldiers not to destroy significant archaeological sites in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is of course a noble goal, but one cannot help but wonder whether, as her colleague James Zeidler of Colorado State University quoted the critics, this is too little, too late. The US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 led to the looting of innumerable artifacts from the Iraqi national museum and elsewhere, though many were later recovered under the guidance of Col. Matthew Bogdanos and others.

But Bogdanos has a master’s degree in classics. What to make of the 18-year-old recruit who knows little of the rich history of Mesopotamia? How do you tell him that the rubble underfoot might just be a world-class archaeological site that needs to be preserved?

Rush’s solution: give them playing cards. With input from academics and many others, the Department of Defense has crafted a deck of cards featuring the archaeology of Iraq and Afghanistan. Try not to think immediately of the ‘most wanted’ playing cards that circulated around the time of the invasion, with Saddam Hussein as the ace of spades and his most-wanted lieutenants as the other cards. Zeidler swears their inspiration was far more mundane – a set of environmental awareness playing cards also put out by the defense department.

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You’d think that all those criminal-forensic television shows – CSI, Bones, Law&Order – would have turned a whole new generation on to science. After all, what kid doesn’t want to drive around Miami in a Hummer, nabbing bad guys while getting tan?

That’s true to a certain extent, and the rising number of people enrolling in forensic-science studies even has garnered a name: the ‘CSI effect’. But it’s not as straightforward as you might think, cautioned archaeologist and crime-scene photographer Jules Angel in a paper read here at the SAA by one of her collaborators.

Angel has been working with an Ohio-based group, the PAST Foundation, which aims to deeper public understanding and awareness of cultural heritage. As part of it, she set up a series of overnight and day camps for high school girls on CSI-style work. The girls got to do things like process a crime scene inside a car, conduct DNA analysis, try to link remains to actual missing-persons cases, and then prepare and testify as an expert in a mock jury trial.

Sounds cool, huh? Well, not quite. The main problem with the overnight camps? Kids stayed up all night talking and were too exhausted to handle the intricacies of collection procedures the next morning. A lot of them thought bugs were icky. And the worst bit of all according to the students, the thing that might just turn off a whole generation of girls to a career in science?

All the paperwork they had to do.

Image from NBC

The Society for American Archeology meeting kicks off today in lovely Vancouver, Canada (the picture is of the scenic convention center here). Of all the scientific meetings I’ve been to — these include geology, physics, neuroscience, astronomy, you name it — the archaeologists are by far the best at coming up with paper titles.

There seems to be some kind of unwritten rule that one must have a punchy, preferably pun-laden title followed by a colon and then what you actually mean to say. Take for instance the (not-so-interestingly titled) symposium tomorrow on ‘Socially Embedded Violence in the Ancient Americas: Beyond Sacrifice and Cannibalism’.

Here one will be able to sample the wonders of talks such as:

‘On Stars and Skeletons: reflections on the role of religion in state-sponsored violence’

‘Talking Heads and the Grateful Dead: unpacking the meaning of trophy heads at Tiwanaku’

and

‘Killing Them Softly, Killing Them Loudly: warfare and violent display in the Andes’

You must admit, those sound far sexier than any talk on neurogenesis in rat brains…

Image courtesy Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre