Anthropology students survey cars, draw conclusions

We all do it. We make judgments about others based upon their clothes, hair style, body shape, piercings or other manifestations of appearance.

We may even, heaven forbid, judge someone by the car they drive.

It is this last tendency that UW–Madison archaeologist Sissel Schroeder is using to deliver a fundamental lesson to her students: Beware of making judgments based on fragmentary data.

The assignment in her Anthropology 112 course: Survey a small number of cars in designated UW–Madison parking lots and based on what you observe – make, model, age, color, condition, bumper stickers, whether the vehicle is parked legally or not and other factors – draw some conclusions about the gender and social standing of the owners. The lots (numbers 10, 11, 34 and 40) were chosen, says Schroeder, to represent the three annual parking lot rates charged by UW–Madison Transportation Services.

This lesson, Schroeder notes, is of vital importance to the archaeologist forced to read from a record that is usually incomplete, jumbled by time and the elements, and out of all context to the daily experiences of the humans who left it.

“In archaeology, when you are dealing with the prehistoric world, there is no reality to check it against, so our inferences are always subject to reinterpretation,” says Schroeder, an assistant professor of anthropology.

Archaeologists, of course, are confronted daily with scraps of prehistory. From buried relics, these explorers of the distant past must make assessments about the people who made or owned them. And often, Schroeder explains, those judgments can be very wrong.

In a modern context, cars can be a handy and accurate indicators of status, Schroeder says. But they also can mislead. She likens cars to the ancient burial mound, a place were the archaeologist most frequently encounters relics that can indicate the social standing of some long-dead individuals about whom there is no other information.

“One of the dimensions of the archaeological record that people reflect on is burials,” Schroeder explains. “It reflects the way an individual was treated at death. It probably doesn’t reflect every dimension of their persona, but we tend to make our assumptions about status from graves.”

Ancient burying grounds have similarities to modern parking lots, Schroeder notes. They can be partitioned to denote status, or space can be allotted – at a price – for the sake of convenience.

“Cemeteries are organized spatially. They can be arranged according to status. Parking lots have spatial divisions, by cost, for example,” says Schroeder. “And just as people tend to bury their dead close to home, people want to park close to their work place.”

And so, as archaeologists will judge you by your grave, so shall students judge you by the car you drive. Luxury cars, of course, belong to higher-income older people, according to Schroeder’s student surveyors.

Although this seems intuitive, says Bethany Nelson, an Anthro 112 teaching assistant, anthropologically it highlights a common social perception: Student surveyors were claiming that, in our society, status is achieved, not ascribed.

“‘Only older, more established people can afford nice things.’ They worked from this assumption even though they told me that they knew of people their age who had nice cars,” says Nelson. “They may not be thinking about ascribed status.”

Certain car customizations, leather seats and tinted windows, in particular, were attributed by the students to higher-income drivers. If your car is dirty or dinged and dented, you are clearly at the lower end of the socio-economic heap, the students believed.

But true insight for the students, it seems, comes from the stuff inside your car. This is especially true when the students were asked to assign gender to the owners.

You are a male if:

• The interior of your car is a mess, but the outside has recently been waxed.
• You drive a truck or a sports car.
• You drive a stick shift.
• The customizations on your car have anything to do with the engine or exhaust system.

You are a female if:

• The interior of your car is clean.
• You drive a minivan.
• You drive an SUV – unless there are signs the vehicle has been taken off road. Then you are a male.
• If anything in you car has flowers on it.
• If you have any children’s items in you car.
• There is any evidence in the vehicle that you drink diet soda or use tissue.

“When students were forced to assign gender, age or class when there was no clear indicator, they fell back upon some pretty typical stereotypes, even if they said they didn’t always believe them to be realistic,” Nelson explains.

For Schroeder, seeing how her students assess our possessions, things that may someday be archaeological relics themselves, is interesting and instructive: “We mostly look at this as a lesson in drawing conclusions with an incomplete material record. It produces a dynamic discussion in class and really gets students to question how high-level archaeology is done.”