There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.
(Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History)
Fleeman Garcia, Trace. "Beyond Geomythology: An Ethnobiology of Fossils." Ethnobiology Letters 17.1 (2026): 67-73.
Abstract: is the study of the relationship between humans and fossils. So far, this emerging discipline has been dominated by geomythology, a research orientation that seeks to historicize traditional knowledge and narratives as premodern explanations for geological phenomena. I argue that this methodology fails to capture the most pertinent information about human interactions with ancient organisms, and instead primarily subsumes these engagements into an uncritical, ethnocentric narrative about the development of Western science. I propose that ethnopaleontology should be reconfigured as an ethnobiology of mineral life.
Fleeman Garcia, Trace. "Why Has Avian Archaeology not yet Emerged?" Biosemiotics (2025): 1-9.
Abstract: In the more than 15 years since the formal inauguration of primate archaeology, which studies the material record of all nonhuman primates, there has been surprisingly little interest in constructing a similar program for birds. Yet there is rich evidence for avian culture and complex tool use, dating back over a century and at times exceeding that for nonhuman primates. Rather than the end of archaeology’s anthropocentric era, as some have contended, primate archaeology emerged from the space opened by anthropology’s interest in the human-animal boundary, a space which, conversely, does not exist for birds – thus avian archaeology has been impeded, even a priori excluded from consideration. I contend that biosemiotics is the necessary grounding for avian archaeology, or the excavation of avian ways of knowing as inscribed in the environment. This program seeks to foreground birds as individuals and historical actors: entities that not only signify and interpret, but are signified and interpreted, in their own right.
Fleeman Garcia, Trace. "An Archae/pelago in the Valley: On Cultural Landscapes of the Southern Tulare Basin." SCA Proceedings (2022): 35.
Abstract: At the southern margin of the former Tulare Lake stands a range of loose dunes, locally known as Sand Ridge. It was a uniquely stable, defensible position within the otherwise ephemeral boundaries of the lake, from the Paleoindian Period onward. As late as the 1870s, it represented a characteristically resilient refuge for the Lake Yokuts. Spanish colonists knew Sand Ridge as the ranchería of Bubal, which figures as a center of native resistance in Hispanic records. Anglo topography refers to an archipelago, including Pelican, Hog-Root, and most infamously, Skull Island. However, by 1898, Tulare Lake had become desiccate and Americans tilled, then settled, the once-archipelago. In this manner, the transformation of ecological landscapes, and the reterritorialization of cultural landscapes, were innately tied to each other and the more general settler-colonial dynamics of North America. Contemporary scholars recognize the dry bed of Tulare Lake as an environmental disaster. Such a view, while accurate, proves myopic. Little attention, if any, has been given to this event as an instrument of settler-colonialism. Ethnohistorical and critical archaeological methods can elucidate the social history of the Tulare Basin, in particular, how settler-colonial dynamics are entwined with environmental catastrophe.
Fleeman Garcia, Trace. "Don’t call it a comeback: California’s Tulare Lake never really went away." Los Angeles Times (23 March 2029).
Incipit: Only two centuries ago, a shallow inland sea dominated California’s Central Valley. In a ring of impenetrable reeds, called tules, was Tulare Lake — then the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi River. At the end of the 19th century, newly arrived settlers began draining it to provide water for agriculture and growing cities and to defend against destructive floods. But during wet years, as 2023 has turned out to be, Tulare Lake seems to rise from the dead — with some labeling it a “phantom lake.”