Archaeology and the MediaWriting AssignmentChoose ONE of these.docx

Archaeology and the MediaWriting Assignment
Choose ONE of these popular news stories about archaeology
and write an essay on the way this story creates public
perceptions of archaeology and biological anthropology.
Topic A. What Lies Beneath New High-Tech Images Reveal
Monuments Buried Under Stonehenge Landscape. Author: Ed
Caesar. Source: Smithsonian Magazine.
Topic B. Hot Stew in the Ice Age? Evidence Shows
Neanderthals Boiled Food. Author: Dan Vergano. Source:
National Geographic.
PDF copies of these articles
Your essay should be:
· 3-to-5 pages of text, double spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point
font; a references cited section is not necessary but you should
cite direct quotes like so: (Caesar, p33)
· Follow a clear structure with an introduction, background,
analyses, discussion, and conclusion. Begin your essay with a
clearly written thesis statement.
Prompting Questions. The following are the types of questions
you should be answering in the text of your essay:
1. (Emotion, Perception) What qualities does the author want
the reader to attribute to the archaeologists and the
archaeological evidence or site discussed in the article, and how
have they done it?
2. How did the author of the article approach the topic
differently than the author of your text book and what do you

think accounts for these differences?
3. (Experience, training, degree?) What role do academic
qualifications of the people involved in the article, both the
author and the people discussed or quoted, play in the piece?
4. What do you think the people in this story would say the
value of archaeology is to the modern world?
5. How would you improve this article if you were the author?
Things to avoid:
· Bullet points. The questions listed above are meant to guide
the structure of your essay. Do not simply bullet point list
answers to these questions.
· Poor grammar and informal language. Read your essay aloud
to catch errors and have someone else read it over. This is an
academic paper. Use a formal and authoritative tone.
· Unintended plagiarism. We expect that you will use
information from this news article and your textbook in your
answer, but we also expect you to attribute direct quotes to the
source.
· Vagueness. It is possible to write an essay is that has correct
information in it, but is nonetheless poor scholarship because it
is vague and contains statement that are unsupported by
evidence. Be specific and make a reasoned, supported argument
in your essay.
Running head: Cause/Effect Essay
1
Cause/Effect Essay Comment by Taniya Hossain: You
need a title that references the subject of the paper.
Even though it seems impossible to imagine now, social media
hasn’t always been around. To socialize, people would go out

and physically meet individuals, and connecting with family
who lived far away meant a long distance telephone call, a
mailed letter or a car ride for the holidays. Now, with social
media, people can connect with others instantly. Along with
connecting with loved ones, people can connect and check out
businesses. If road trips are happening, then a person could
simply googleGoogle the route and find restaurants on the way.
Reviews of the restaurant will would be online, and, instantly,;
people can know whether to stop there or avoid it. Beforehand,
it was a gamble as you blindly drove through a town, and it was
a chance of luck whether the food would be worth the stop.
Businesses can post their menus and specials online and connect
to people in their surrounding areas by offering coupons and
discounts. Before we get to that, Social Media took off big in
1997 with a website called Six Degrees. “Six Degrees allowed
users to create a profile and then friend other users” . “(Terrell,
year, p.# Keith. "The History of Social Media | History
Cooperative.”). After that came other sites that have shaped and
changed the way humans interact and do business with each
other. Businesses have fully delved into the world of social
media and have increased their personal reach and growth
through word of mouth. Comment by Taniya Hossain: APA
format requires that you write out all words—no contractions or
abbreviations (i.e. he/she should be he or she). Comment by
Taniya Hossain: Remove the pronoun you from your academic
writing. Comment by Taniya Hossain: This is too informal.
Work to make your writing more specific. Comment by
Taniya Hossain: Your parenthetical citation should include the
page number as well as the author’s last name and year of
publication.
(Author’s Last Name, Year of Publication, p.#). With a direct
quote, you need to include the page or paragraph number in the
parenthetical citation. When you paraphrase, the page number is
preferred but not required. Comment by Taniya Hossain:
This is drastic shift from a person on a road trip to the way
business use social media.

The effects of advertising on social media haseffects of
advertising on social media have impacted social media
significantly by increased coverage and communication, which
has increased sales. Initially, social media was used only to
connect with family and friends. Businesses are embracing
social media because it takes very little money to utilize and
can have a tremendous effect on their sales.
Social media has been impacted by advertising as found in
studies of college students abusing alcohol more because of
seeing alcoholic advertisements on their social media so
frequently. Businesses are getting more business but not
necessarily from the right people. “Today’s generation of
adolescents and young adults are growing up immersed in social
media, such as Facebook and Twitter, that promote user-
generated content and interactions between users” (Lenhart et
al,. 2005, p.#). Companies like Budweiser and Smirnoff use
marketing terms such as hashtags to gain promotional reach and
promote alcohol-related content on a young person’s feed or
dashboard. It has been shown that “As of 2013, 77 percent of
adolescents used Facebook and 24 percent used Twitter
(Madden et al. 2013b); among young adults, the corresponding
percentages were 86 percent and 27 percent” (Duggan and &
Brenner, 2013, p.#).” This is producing a grand number of
alcohol related postings, which result in more alcohol related
actions, including underage drinking. “Finally, displayed
alcohol references have been linked to alcohol behaviors
offline, because older adolescents whose Facebook posts
suggested problem drinking behaviors are more likely to score
as “at risk” on a problem-drinking screen (Moreno et al. 2011).”
Considering how big social media is with youth spending
“around 30 h per month (comScore, 2011)” on social media.
With there being millions of social media users, alcohol related

posts get passed around, increasing purchases and word of
mouth of alcoholic brands. Comment by Taniya Hossain:
You need research that supports this claim. Comment by
Taniya Hossain: Explain any technical terms. Don’t assume the
reader will understand. Comment by Taniya Hossain: You use
single quotation marks for a quotation within a quotation.
“Did she say, ‘Who are you?’” Karen asked. Comment by
Taniya Hossain: This is a different form of citation. You need
to use APA citation format.
Bloggers or and vloggers have become increasingly popular due
to their more intimate connection with their viewers and have
been contacted by numerous companies to help market and sell
their products to customers that may have had no other way in
reaching. They pay less money but can branch out to different
people, worldwide, possibly without spending the same amount
of money that commercials and billboards would do. Vloggers
are bloggers who do their posts or reviews with video. Bloggers
usually use text and pictures, while vloggers do video posts.
Vloggers can reach a higher fan base due to the fact that you
can see them and hear them, creating more of a bond between
the viewer and vlogger. The review or post feels more
personalized and gains more hits and views. Due to this, certain
brands advertise with vloggers to persuade their followers to
follow suit. “For a growing cadre of bloggers, the opportunities
to score fat profits from pumping out posts on whatever their
particular passions might be are widening.” (Sloan, 2006.) With
this advertisement, bloggers are required to let their viewers
know if they were paid or sponsored to use a product or product
line in their posting. “Sponsored recommendation blog posts, a
form of online consumer review, are blog articles written
by bloggers who receive benefits from sponsoring marketers to
review and promote products on their personal blog. Because
national regulations require that marketer sponsorship must be
revealed in the blog post, sponsored recommendation posts can
no longer conceal their marketing intent. “(Lu, Long C. 2014)

Even with doing so, blogging is no longer just a hobby for
some. Some bloggers/vloggers make money from blogging and
advertising and that is their job. Strangely enough, this hobby
can turn into a paycheck. While direct pay is not always the
case, bloggers or reviewers may receive products at a
discounted or free price in exchange for a review (hopefully
favorable) for the retailer. In such cases as with Fiverr where
people were promising 5 star reviews regardless of the product,
have made online shopping, difficult for the retailer Amazon.
Amazon put a stop this in 2015. “On October 16th Amazon
charged that bess98 and more than 1,000 others were illegally
hawking customer reviews. The case comes just six months after
Amazon sued the operator of four sites peddling similar stuff.
Like Amazon, other websites have fought fakes with lawsuits,
carefully honed algorithms and even sting operations”
(Anonymous, The Economist, 2015) Despite this, reviewing and
advertising programs continue although they have cracked down
on fake reviews and continue to carefully monitor the reviews
and sellers. Social media has enhanced and improved seller’s
chances of making money but there also always risks with so
much technology involved. Social media has made it easy for
big box retailers like Amazon and Best Buy to connect with
consumers and promote their product lines without sending out
mailers or bothersome phone calls . Comment by Taniya
Hossain: This is an ambiguous pronoun. Comment by Taniya
Hossain: This repeats the information that began this paragraph.
Comment by Taniya Hossain: Why is this strange?
Comment by Taniya Hossain: This is an awkward sentence.
Social media allows the customer to have a more intimate
connection with the companies and express themselves easily.
Whether negative or positive, their business has been discussed
and most likely seen by thousands of people. “Social-media-
based advertising differs from traditional media such as TV
commercials, e-mail communications, and online banners in that
it enables interaction between firm and consumers, as well as

among consumers.” (Xie, K. 2015) Now people can speak to
companies in real time, express complaints and have them seen
worldwide in minutes. Once it is posted, the companies will
usually try to placate the customer and showcase their customer
service to promote their business structure. Social media can
help out a great deal but social media can also damage a
company’s reputation with a single tweet. A tweet is used on
Twitter, 140 character a message that is seen globally.
“Consider two days in January 2013 when a series of damning—
but false—tweets sent two stocks plunging. Some of the posts
claimed that a company called Audience was being criminally
investigated for "rumored fraud." A second set claimed that the
FDA had seized clinical-trial records of Sarepta Therapeutics on
suspicions the results had been "doctored." Only later did many
readers notice that the authors were not in fact the well-known
short-selling firms Muddy Waters and Citron Research, but
rather two fake accounts using similar names with misspellings:
@Mudd1waters and @Citreonresearc. The stocks fell 28% and
16%, respectively. (Wieczner, J. 2015) These were completely
false accounts and had there been no social media, there would
have been no stock less. These two wouldn’t have had the
manpower to manipulate or speak to so many people. However,
that’s how dangerous and powerful social media is. Businesses
have to be careful and watch their social media carefully
considering what people advertise. This happens with food
franchises as well. KFC had some social media trouble in 2014
when “ a three-year-old girl who was suffering facial injuries
from a pitbull attack was asked to leave a KFC restaurant. KFC
staff said Victoria’s face was “disrupting their customers,”
according to Kelly Mullins, the girl’s grandmother.”
(Comcowich, W. 2014) This was an enormous outrage. People
were bashing KFC and protesting eating the food. KFC had to
quickly reconcile and post public apologies and even paying
300k of the young girl’s recovery bills. Social media can push a
business to participate more with the community they serve and
in return, the more active they are, the more they’re talked

about and in people’s mouths. They benefit from being seen as
wonderful and charitable and once on the mind, people will
venture there. Comment by Taniya Hossain: Why have you
switched fonts? And then switch font size later in the
paragraph. By not providing consistent formatting, you imply a
lack of concern or effort. Comment by Taniya Hossain: This is
an ambiguous pronoun. Comment by Taniya Hossain: What is
it?
Social media has impacted businesses greatly. They can rally
participation and answers from a business or strike them down
with wrath, demanding an answer. Participation is demanded
and expected from the community and businesses usually have a
social media department now to handle these requests and
complaints. Today, compliments and complaints are handled
quickly within hours instead of days and weeks of the days past.
Social media isn’t going anywhere and is in face of everyone.
This is a good start. You have identified a timely cause and
effect relationship. Now focus on tone and thesis. Make sure
you have one strong sentence that clearly identifies the purpose
of your paper—your thesis statement. Your thesis statement
should identify your cause and effect and make a claim about
the relationship. You must set up the context of your discuss in
your beginning. What is social media? What is the alternative?
What was used before social media? Provide the reader with
enough information.
Each paragraph should impact your thesis—the evidence should
help clarify or complicate your initial claim. Try to begin each
body paragraph with a strong claim that frames the evidence
you will present. Analyze how your evidence impacts your
claim. And end your paragraph by explaining what new facet of
your thesis is learned from the evidence.
Now you need to work on making this a formal, academic
research essay. You need to move away from informal language.
You must properly format your final draft. You must properly

format your in text citations. You need a properly formatted
title page and your reference page should be part of the same
document.
Hot Stew in the Ice Age? Evidence
Shows Neanderthals Boiled Food
An ancient diet expert suggests our early cousins knew how to
boil their meals.
This female Neanderthal, found in a cave in Gibraltar, may have
enjoyed foods heated in birch bark
trays.
PHOTOGRAPH BY KENNETH GARRETT, NATIONAL
GEOGRAPHIC
Dan Vergano
National Geographic
PUBLISHED APRIL 30, 2014
Neanderthal cooking likely wouldn't have won any prizes on
Top Chef,
but a paleontologist suggests that our ancient cousins knew how
to
cook a mean stew, without even a stone pot to their name.
"I think it's pretty likely the Neanderthals boiled," said
University of Michigan
archaeologist John Speth at a recent meeting of the Society for
American

Archaeology in Austin, Texas. "They were around for a long
time, and they were very
clever with fire."
Neanderthals were a species of early humans who lived in
Europe and the Near East
until about 30,000 years ago. Conventional wisdom holds that
boiling to soften food or
render fat from bones may have been one of the advantages that
allowed Homo
sapiens to thrive, while Neanderthals died out. (Related:
"Surprise! 20 Percent of
Neanderthal Genome Lives on in Modern Humans, Scientists
Find.")
But based on evidence from ancient bones, spears, and porridge,
Speth believes our
Stone Age cousins likely boiled their food. He suggests that
Neanderthals boiled using
only a skin bag or a birch bark tray by relying on a trick of
chemistry: Water will boil at a
temperature below the ignition point of almost any container,
even flammable bark or
hides.
"You can boil in just about anything as long as you take it off
the flame pretty quickly,"
Speth says. His presentation included video of water boiling in
a paper cup (the water
keeps the paper from reaching its ignition temperature) and
mention of scenes in Jean
Auel's 1980 novel,Clan of the Cave Bear (later a movie), in
which Neanderthals boiled
stews in hide pouches.
"This wasn't an invention of some brainy modern people," Speth

says. (Related:
"Neanderthals Lived in Small, Isolated Populations, Gene
Analysis Shows.")
Quest for Fire
While conceding that Neanderthals were handy with wood and
fire, archaeologists such
as Mary Stiner of the University of Arizona in Tucson want to
let Speth's idea simmer for
a while before they swallow it.
"Whether they went as far as boiling stuff in birch bark
containers or in hides is harder to
evaluate," Stiner says. "I am not convinced."
The use of fire by humans goes back more than 300,000 years in
Europe, where
evidence is seen in Neanderthal hearths. (Related: "Oldest
Known Hearth Found in
Israel Cave.")
But most research has supported the idea that Stone Age
boiling, which relied on
heating stones in fire pits and dropping them into water, arrived
on the scene too late for
Neanderthals.
Evidence of cracked "boiling stones" in caves used by early
modern humans, for
example, goes back only about 26,000 years, too recent for
Neanderthals. And pottery
for more conventional boiling appears to be only about 20,000
years old.

Birch Bubbling
But who needs boiling stones or pots? Speth suggests that
Neanderthals boiled foods in
birch bark twisted into trays, a technology that prehistoric
people used to boil maple
syrup from tree sap.
Archaeologists have demonstrated that Neanderthals relied on
birch tar as an adhesive
for hafting spear points as long as 200,000 years ago. Making
birch tar requires clever
cooking in an oxygen-free container, says paleontologist
Michael Bisson of Canada's
McGill University.
"I've burned myself trying to do it," Bisson says, adding that
Neanderthals were plenty
clever when it came to manipulating birch. They likely ignited
rolled-up birch bark
"cigars" and plunged them into holes to cook the tar in an
oxygen-free environment.
If the tar is exposed to oxygen in the air as it cooks, "it
explodes," Bisson adds.
Supporting the boiling idea, Speth said that animal bones found
in Neanderthal settings
are 98 percent free of scavenger's gnawing marks, which he says
suggests the fat had
been cooked off.
And some grains found in the teeth of a Neanderthal buried in
Iraq's Shanidar Cave site
appear to have been cooked, according to a 2011Proceedings of

the National
Academies of Science report.
"It is speculative, but I think it is pretty likely that they knew
how to boil," Speth says.
In a separate talk at the meeting, University of Michigan
paleontologistAndrew
White noted recent evidence that Neanderthal mothers weaned
their children at an
earlier age than human mothers typically do. He said the early
transition from milk to
food supports the theory that Neanderthals boiled their
youngsters' food to make it more
digestible.
The idea that Neanderthals could probably boil their food first
came to Speth as he
watched an episode of the TV show Survivorman. Stuck in East
Africa with only dirty
water to drink, host Les Stroud sterilized the muddy liquid by
boiling it in a plastic bag.
"Who says you can't learn anything from TV?" says Speth. "I
figured if we could boil
water in a plastic bag, then Neanderthals could do it in a birch
tray."
Correction: The discplines of two experts mentioned in the
story, Dr. Speth and Dr.
Stiner, have been corrected.
Follow Dan Vergano on Twitter.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140430-
neanderthals-cook-food-evolution-
science/

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