Puritans, Pilgrims, and the Taliban

Wow, it's been a while since I last wrote.  I am likely not going to be getting back to a regular schedule anytime soon, but I will be able to write occasionally.

I am a fan of Dan Carlin's podcasts, especially his show Hardcore History (a terrible name for a show, but an excellent podcast nonetheless).  The most recent episode, as of the time that I write this, is about the Anabaptist rebellion in/occupation of Munster, Germany in 1534-1535.

If you are interested in this historic episode, I strongly recommend that you listen to the episode (just click the link above).  But the thumbnail is this:  The Anabaptists were one of the early Protestant sects that arose after Martin Luther posted his list of theses.  They were far more radical than Luther himself was, and the Anabaptists gave rise to numerous sub-cultures, including several that were essentially communistic doomsday cults (yep, history is often weirder than fiction).  One such group became violent, and established a short-lived government in the German city of Munster, where they managed to hold off the local authorities for a time, while establishing a miniature totalitarian theocracy within the city itself.  They were eventually crushed by the city's Bishop (a secular as well as religious authority figure at this time in Munster), and the leaders of the rebellion put to death in a rather horrific manner (though one that won't surprise students of Medieval history).

This story has echoes throughout Europe.  In England, Protestant sects gained power under Oliver Cromwell, and established an authoritarian theocracy in England (though, to be fair, many would have considered the deposed-then-executed Charles I's monarchy to be authoritarian as well, and arguably also a theocracy as Charles I was also the head of the Church of England), and then near-genocidal campaigns against Catholics in Scotland and Ireland.  Under Oliver Cromwell (the Lord Protector, a role different than, though in ways comparable to, the king), England became hostile to things such as drama, dancing, etc.  In fact, the attitude of the government under Cromwell towards the arts and entertainments is rather reminiscent of Afghanistan under the Taliban**.

Comparable stories played out across Europe, with Protestant sects rising, and committing acts of violence, including ones that we would now consider terrorism in England, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and on and on and on.

These stories fascinated me, but they do not surprise me.  They might, however, surprise many contemporary people in the United States.

There is a commonly held belief here in the U.S. that Middle Eastern violence and world-wide terrorism is a product of beliefs and ideals unique to Islam.  Islam, this belief holds, is unusual among the Abrahamic religions* in its advocation of violence.  Therefore, it is the only of these three religions that produces violence on the strength of the religion itself.  Sure, there have been evil/violent people who claimed to be Christian or Jewish, but they just used religion as an excuse to do what they were going to do anyway.  Islam actually causes the violence!

People who hold this opinion are thoroughly ignorant of history.

In part, the ignorance is willful.  People rarely want to acknowledge that the club to which they claim membership can produce bad seeds.  As a result, Christians tend to deny the role of religion in the European wars of the 16th through 18th centuries, but they are hardly alone.  Members of most ideologies that have produced violence tend to deny that the ideology produced said violence.  

In part, it's the fault of those of us who deal with the past professionally.  We have a hard time grappling with ideology, and as a result, tend to look for other causes for violence, when ideology may be the cause.  As is summed up by historian R. J. Knecht in his book The French Wars of Religion, 1559-1598:

Many people nowadays attach little importance to religion.  Consequently, they find it difficult to believe that it played a major part in the civil wars that tore France apart in the late sixteenth century.  They look for other reasons: political, economic and social.  Religion, they argue, was merely a 'cloak' used by the great aristocratic families to give respectability to their ruthless pursuit of power.  But the sixteenth century was not the twentieth: religion did rule the lives of thinking people...  

...even today religion can move people to action, as is daily demonstrated in the Middle East and India...Material interests, including brutal power-hunger and greed, were certainly present in the French Wars of Religion, but religion was also crucially important.

Although Knecht focuses on religion, it is not unique.  Any sort of totalizing ideology - a belief system that claims to encompass either everything, or at least everything that matters for living in the world - is capable of producing the zealotry and hysteria necessary to create violence.  Religious violence is nothing new, likely having been with us from a very early in our time in our history as a species, but is has at times been joined by other ideologies as a source of violence - witness the anarchist bombings of the 19th and early 20th centuries, for example.

We know that Christianity is capable of the same types of violence as modern militant Islam not because Christianity shares many ideological underpinnings with Islam (though it does), but because Christianity has produced precisely the same sort of sectarian violence, political and social oppression, and acts of terrorism in the past.  Christianity still has the potential, and a theocratic undercurrent still breathes and seethes and seeks power (look up the Dominionist movements).  The story that we often hear is that Christianity gave rise to the Enlightenment (or, if the commentator dislikes the science and necessity of doubt that came with the Enlightenment, they will try to claim that Christianity is the source of the parts of the Enlightenment that the commentator likes).  The truth, though, is that Christianity was muzzled by commerce and politics, beginning in the Netherlands during the Renaissance, where city officials and business interests realized that persecution of religious minorities could be bad for profits.  The more peaceful Christianity that we know today is a product of historic de-fanging, a religion that has been molded by social currents and mores, as much as (if not more than) it has influenced the social currents and mores.

The rise of ideological authoritarian states has happened many times before...and it sure as hell will happen again.  While religion is typically the cause (being the most common potentially authoritarian ideology among humans), it can also occur with non-religious ideologies (noteworthy 20th Century examples include Nazi Germany, the rise of the U.S.S.R., and Cambodia under Pol Pot).  Similarly, the rise of ideological violence and terrorism is also nothing new.  Essentially, all that is required is for some group to conclude that they know they absolute truth, and believe that they, therefore, have the right to impose that truth on everyone else.

But we need to not be ignorant of history.  We need to acknowledge that while the technologies and means used by ideological zealots may change, their presence seems a constant.  We need to acknowledge that our own religions and political ideologies could, potentially, lead to chaos and violence - in part we need to acknowledge this to keep ourselves humble and not demonize our opponents, and in part we need to do so in order to prevent our own creeds from becoming the enemies that we loathe.




*Worth noting: many people who hold this belief would leave out the Abrahamic religion part, as many people who believe this are so thoroughly ignorant of Islam that they are unaware that it shares a good deal with Judaism and Christianity.

**Monty Python produced a funny and informative song about the English civil war:



...or, if you have a bit of a different set of tastes, I will happily recommend Mark Steele's version to you:




***Though I would note that their own actions were a result of the overall form of communism to which they adhered, where atheism was a part, but not in any way the whole.  In much the same way, while most people are loathe to admit it, Protestant Christianity (specifically Lutheranism) was a part of Nazism, but it was in no way the whole of Nazism.

Ahistoric Blame Game

It happens every now and again, admittedly less often now that I live in Fresno, that I will be speaking with someone from Europe, and they will say something ot the effect of "I don't think that you Americans should assume that you have any right to talk about racial relations, after slavery and what you did to the Native Americans!"

They never seem prepared for my response, which is "yeah, you're right, our nation did continue to implement and further develop the policies put into place by England, France, Spain, Germany, etc."  I usually follow this up with "so, let's talk about your country's history in Africa/India/Asia/etc."

It has been my experience that Europeans often accuse Americans of being the slavers and genocidal maniacs who went after Native Americans, despite the fact that anti-Native American policies originated with early European colonists from throughout Europe, and the racially-based African slave trade as we would come to know it originated in Portugal and spread throughout Europe, from where it eventually spread to the Americas along with European colonists.  And, indeed, one of the reasons why slavery continued as late as it did in the U.S. is because cotton markets, including those in Europe, were comfortable with purchasing the products manufactured through slave labor.

Within the United States, we tend to blame the south for slavery, despite the fact that many northerners were not opposed to (and some even supported) slavery, and even where slavery was outlawed it would still appear under the guise of indentured servitude, prison-based hard labor passed out out of proportion to the crimes of the accused, and debt labor.

And on it goes.

The problem with this blame-game is twofold:  1) it is ahistorical, it requires us to be willingly (and often intentionally) ignorant of history; 2) it allows us to view the "others" who engaged in these policies as separate from us, different from us, and therefore allows us to ignore the role that our nation, or even we ourselves, may play in this.

Obviously, as someone who professionally deals with history, I have a special concern about #1.  I strongly feel that we should know our past, as accurately as possible, warts and all, and ignoring the culpability of our own culture in the sins of the past counts as a failure.

But #2 concerns me as a human who has to live in this world, in the here and now.  When we portray ourselves as being more enlightened and fundamentally different as creatures from those who committed past atrocities, we not only ignore the capacity of our own culture to produce equivalent atrocities, but we also ignore that we are sometimes culpable in the atrocities.  It's why the people of Ohio can feel superior to the American South's history of slavery and Jim Crow laws while fostering conditions in cities that have continued racial conflict.  It's why European government officials can persuade themselves that they are better and more enlightened than the U.S. in terms of race relations, despite the fact that Europe has increasingly worse problems with immigration and assimilation than the U.S.

Ahistoric blaming isn't just lazy scholarship, it's also a problem for those who are concerned about what is going on in the here-and-now.  It's a shell game that people (en masse in the forms of both regional and national electorates) use to tell themselves that their decisions are alright, or even good, while equivalent past decisions of other nations were horrible and should be looked down upon.  It allows us to put a false distance between "us" and "them" and therefore falsely assert that our decisions are better, smarter, and more just, when they are, in fact, almost identical.

Trying to Do Something New With It?

It seems that, whenever I encounter someone who is an advocate of some form of pseudo-archaeology, after I have exhaustively pointed out the flaws, inconsistencies, and made-up-shit that goes into their pet hypothesis, I am told something along the lines of "well, at least I (or the person who they are quoting) am trying to do something different with this information!  THAT has value!"

If you are genuinely trying to do something new and innovative with old information, and trying to do it in such a way that you are not engaging in fabricating information, using special pleading to make your case, or in some other way being a dishonest bastard, then yes, trying to do something new has value.

The people who use this as the last-line defense for their pet hypothesis, though?  Well, A) they are almost always just trying to maintain an older, stupid idea ("ancient astronauts," Biblical literalism, etc.) and aren't actually trying anything new, and B) they are pretty much always conflating "trying something new" with playing fast-and-loose with evidence and ignoring anything even vaguely approaching logic or honesty.

If you think I'm being overly harsh, then let's consider the fact that this explanation is pretty much only used in pseudo-science, and is not present in any other realm where people try to arrive at some sort of coherent explanation of events.

For example, in criminal investigations, you would rightfully dismiss someone as a nut if they insisted that a theft was committed by aliens, and then proceeded to "prove" this by making references to out-of-context information from unrelated crimes, pulling bits and pieces of conspiracy beliefs from pop culture, making up "facts", and ignoring relevant information from the actual crime scene.  They would certainly be "doing something new" with the information...but that something new would not only not get you anywhere closer to solving the crime, it would, in fact, move you farther and farther away from the real solution.  A person doing this would be immediately drummed out of the investigation and replaced with someone who was, you know, actually mentally competent.

And yet this same basic procedure - pulling out-of-context information from unrelated sites, pulling "facts" out of pop culture rather than data, making false claims about relevant sites, and often just making shit up - is the norm in pseudo-archaeology, and even people who are not directly involved in it often defend these practices by claiming that the pseudo-scholar is "trying to do something new" with the information.

Often, perhaps typically, implied under all of this is the notion that real archaeologists (or, as the pseudo-archaeologists often label us "establishment archaeologists - booo, hisssss, bad establishment!") aren't trying to find anything new.  Sometimes it is flat out stated - there are many claims from the pseudo scholars that actual scholars are just trying to maintain some sort of "status quo", which reveals the true depth of the ignorance of the pseudo scholars - but at least as often it's just sort of implied, clearly there as an accusation, but covered up enough that the accuser can deny it if called on it.

The truth, however, is that we are working far harder than any of these twits.  We are routinely trying to test and verify our methods and our results (see here for a summarized history of how archaeology has changed, or read this for a more thorough discussion).  I have opened myself up to criticism by my professional colleagues for presenting papers that were not in-line with established models of past cultures, I have also found and publicized artifacts that are out-of-keeping with established cultural chronologies, and I have long supported archaeologists who work on the frontiers of what we think we know (for example, those working on pre-Clovis archaeology in North America).  And I am not alone, some solitary warrior fighting against the "establishment" - every archaeologist that I know who presents papers or publishes their findings does similar things.  Trying to "do something new" is what archaeologists do.

Now, it could be said that we should be better at communicating this to the general public.  That is a valid criticism, and certainly one that I, and others try to address by keeping blogs, giving public lectures, appearing on podcasts, and so on.  Some of us are lucky enough to be able to participate in radio and television, which is where most people get their information.

However, while we might do a better job of communicating our work and our findings, that in no way absolves the pseudo-archaeologists who distort, lie, and obfuscate.  And, if you are someone who is going to  claim that real archaeologists aren't "doing something new" then I offer you a challenge:  When is the last time that you read an issue of National Geographic?  Smithsonian Magazine?  Or looked at professional journals such as American Antiquity?  If you haven't done so lately, then you don't know what archaeologists are up to, and you sound as ignorant as you truly are when you imply that we aren't doing anything, or are simply supporting the "status quo."

So, It's Been a While...

So, it has, indeed, been a while since last I posted an entry on this blog.  The reasons for this are simple - work and family obligations coupled with trying to complete an archaeological research project outside of work have kept me very, very busy.  And after a while, I didn't feel like posting routine posts that simply said that I would be getting back to writing soon when, as it turned out, I have not been able to.

That being said, I do enjoy writing this blog, and there are several topics that I'd like to cover, so I do intend to continuing writing...it just may be a while before I am able to get back to doing it on a regular basis.

In the meantime, I will mention that it looks like the PI on the research project with which I have been involved is getting ready to publish our results, so I will likely have another publication under my belt, soon.  I'll post here when that happens.

I would, in the meantime, like to point all y'all towards the CRM archaeology podcast Random Acts of Science.  Serr Head, of Archy Fantasies, is a panelist on the most recent episode, so it ought to be worth a listen.

Although we make up the vast majority of archaeologist, CRM archaeology is not well-represented in the media, so I support any effort to further our cause.

Not Much Simpler Times

It's been a while since I wrote - family, work, the usual.  But something occurred today that has me contemplative.

My sister wrote to me this morning to tell me that one of my childhood bullies, a kid named Sam, grew up to be a 36-year-old man who stands accused of beating a man to death.  While he awaits trial, and as always one should be cautious about referring to someone as a murderer rather than accused murderer until after the trial, it sounds as if the case is open-and-shut.  Sam got into an argument with a man in a bar, this escalated into a fight, the man ended up in the hospital, where he died a few days later.

As a kid, I had thought that my various tormentors would one day meet some sort of justice.  I remember thinking "one of these days, everyone else will see you the way that I do - and I'll be there to laugh."

Now that this day has come, I don't feel like laughing.  I feel like weeping.

Over the years, I have heard occasionally about my childhood bullies. I never asked, but sometimes people would tell me things, or else I would hear a familiar name on the news.  Several became meth addicts and then fell into complete obscurity.  One was arrested for sneaking into a house, undressing, and climbing into bed with a child.  Others have rap sheets that include a range of violent crime and property crimes.  I have no doubt that some of them turned out okay, but I have never heard any more of them, so I simply do not know.

And now, murder.  Looking up his full name and town of residence reveals a long string of crimes, mostly property crimes, committed by someone with his name (I can't confirm that this was him and not someone else with the same name, a distinct possibility, but he is at least of the correct age to have be the person cited in several of the reports).  This before his altercation in the bar.

As a kid, Sam was a shit.  I will not claim otherwise.  This was not some sweet, caring kid who grew up to be a violent man.  This was a violent, bullying child who grew up to be a violent man.

But I can't help but feel that it could have turned out differently.

The community in which I grew up was very much a blue collar neighborhood, and I came to know and respect many of the various mechanics, carpenters, and cannery workers who lived around me.  Most of them were decent people, and to this day I remain convinced that we, as a nation, need to have a better respect for blue collar workers as a result.

But there was also a frequent under-current of anti-elitism, anti-intellectualism, and anti-accomplishment that pervaded much of my neighborhood.  Calling someone "schoolboy" was a grave insult, academic achievement was frowned upon, and anyone who became "to big for their britches" by having aspirations was to be put down by a combination of ridicule and force.  Amongst the kids, and even a small (but active) set of the adults, bullying was the norm, even encouraged.  And I don't mean simple name calling - it was common for me to come home from school covered in bruises and cuts as everything from fists to feet to rocks to broken glass were used on me and anyone else considered "weird".  Add to this that a few of the fathers of some of the neighborhood boys instructed their sons that it was fine to beat up on anyone, and if they couldn't fight back, that was their problem...well, you begin to see what was going on.

The adults who encouraged bullying and violence were few in number.  But that the targets of the bullying were those who didn't quite fit in meant that the other adults, while they might try to stop, were often not trying too hard.  "After all," they often seemed to think, "maybe it would do those weird kids (weird kids being the ones who had interests outside of the norm, not necessarily kids with behavioral problems) some good to get some sense smacked into them!"  And kids who did have behavioral problems?  The general attitude towards "shrinks" was such that these kids would likely never see anyone who could help them.

I don't know whether or not Sam's father encouraged him to beat on the other kids.  But I do know that the environment in which we lived offered only a few checks on his behavior, and those generally ineffective and countered by other factors.

In this environment, where aspiration was often punished, where violence was encouraged, and where the ability to remain calm when faced with conflict was seen as a weakness, it's no surprise that someone emerged who would beat a man to death over a bar room argument.  What's surprising is that this hasn't happened more often.

I don't know that Sam had any underlying psychological problems.  He may have, but he may just as easily not have.  If he did, an environment such as this would have exacerbated his problems.  But even without underlying problems, this environment tended to feet aggression and anger, and tended to frown on people wanting to get out of the environment*.  That most of the kids I grew up with turned out alright (holding down jobs, raising families, and the kid who grew up across the street from me has become a very succesful business owner in a line of work for which he is very talented and skilled) is a testament to how resilient people tend to be.

But there were quite a few who are lost.  I do not claim that they are not responsible for their own actions.  However, it takes a special kind of ignorant fool to assert that our actions take place in a vacuum, without context, and are not influenced by where we come from and how we learned to live there.  Sam has no excuse for his actions, but that does not mean that his actions don't have an explanation.





*For example, when I left for college, a large number of the people with whom I had grown up either stopped talking to me, or else would only talk to me in order to be condescending and insulting towards me. They made it very clear that anyone who was leaving for college was not someone that they wanted to have anything to do with.

What's in a Name? Or, Why You Should be Cautious in Comparing Languages...

While driving out the the field the other day, one of the archaeologists with whom I am working asked what the linguistic connection was between Cachuma - a place name from Santa Barbara County - and Kuuchamaa - a similar-sounding place name from San Diego County.

I didn't know the origin of Kuuchamaa, but it is the native name for Tecate Peak, an important sacred mountain that is the spiritual center for the Kumeyaay peoples of southern California and northern Mexico.  Having read up on it, I still haven't a clue as to what the word means, but it is the name of both the place, and of a culture hero - a wise and powerful shaman - said to have once lived in that place*.  The translation of the word appears to be hard to come by, so I am at a bit of a loss.

Cachuma, however, is a bit easier.  Cachuma is the English bastardization of the Spanish bastardization of the Inezeno Chumash word Aqitsumu, meaning "constant signal", which was the name of a village located in the Santa Ynez Valley, near the current location of Lake Cachuma.

So, while Cachuma and Kuuchamaa seem similar at first glance, one appears to be the actual Kumeyaay word, while the other is a rather tortured telephone game version of an Inezeno word.  Now, there could still be some linguistic connection between them, but that seems somewhat unlikely, as Aqitsumu fits in perfectly well with the Chumash language family**, and Kuuchamaa, as far as I have been able to tell (though I am a bit shaky on this) seems to fit in well with the Kumeyaay language, a dialect of Diegeno, part of the Yuman language family.  So, there is no reason to assume a connection, despite superficial similarities.

The words, though similar, refer to different types of things (a sacred mountain/person's name and a village), and there is no reason to assume that they would have similar meanings.  What's more, the version of Aqitsumu that bears the most resemblance to the Kumeyaay word, Cachuma, is also the version that is most divorced from native pronunciation.  Further, the names come from two unconnected languages.

There is, in short, no reason to think that these words are in any way connected, and some reason to think that they are not.

What is interesting about this is that there is no reason to assume a linguistic connection between two groups of people who were separated by only a few hundred miles of space for centuries.   Pseudoscientific language comparisons are often employed by people who wish to show a connection between two completely unrelated groups of people.  It is a favorite approach of those who see the ancient Isrealites landing int he Americas, the Celts taking over parts of the midwest, Medieval Japanese explorers settling Mexico, or Egyptians colonizing South America (yes, there are people who believe every one of these things).

The method is as follows:

Step 1: Find a few words (or sometimes even one) from two languages that have even a superficial similarity

Step 2: Claim that the link between these two populations is proven

Step 3: Ignore everyone who actually knows what they are talking about when they point out that you are a fool.

But, as illustrated, even in a case where two words are both used as placenames, sound extremely similar, and are from groups separated by only a few hundred miles, there is still reason to doubt a connection.  Keep this in mind whenever your wacky neighbor claims that some vague language similarities prove that the native people of New Jersey were actually descended from a clan of Bavarian sausage-makers.




*Kuuchamaa appears to be a manifestation of a messianic religious concept that appeared throughout southern California either shortly before or around the time that the Spanish arrived.  Whether the Kuuchamaa version of the story is the origin for the others, represents a merger of the messianic story with another older religious tradition, or else a spontaneous manifestation of a similar story, I do not know...nor does anyone else as far as I have been able to tell.  It's neat that even after well over a century of research, we still have some mysteries like this to explore in California.

**Chumashan languages were, until recently, thought to be part of the Hokan language family, but that view has now been largely discredited.  As a result, Chumash is an oddity in that it has no known related languages (similar in this respect to the Basque language of Spain) and exists as a linguistic island alone on the California coast.  While this is speculative, some researchers have posited that Chumash may be the last version of the original Native Californian language family, as the other languages in California appear to have come in from elsewhere.  While intriguing, this idea remains speculation until such time as physical or paleolinguistic evidence can be found to back it up.

The Ghost Town of Calico

Just east of Barstow, in the Calico Hills, is a rebuilt old mining town, named Calico.  It is currently operated as a regional park by the County of San Bernardino, but was once a busy silver mining town.

Welcome...TO HISTORY!

The Silver Rush of the late 19th century is less well-known than the Gold Rush of the mid-19th century.  However, the Silver Rush was important in the histories of both Nevada and California (especially southern California).  The town of Calico was founded in 1881 by a group of miners who headed into the local mountains looking for silver.  Within two years, the town had grown to house around 1,200 residents, had 500 mines, and the usual accompaniments of a successful old west town (justice of the peace, post office, hotels, restaurants, numerous brothels, etc.).

Calico...never will you see a more wretched hive of scum and villainy

Before long, Colemanite borate (an ore of Boron that can be purified, and can itself be used for the manufacture of glasses, medicines, cosmetics, as well as for numerous industrial processes).  The town swelled to 3,500 people, with settlers from both Europe and Asia joining the American settlers.

The structures constructed during this time ranged from standard wooden construction, typical of 19th century houses and businesses, to stone structures that integrated the slopes and cliffs into their structure.

And, of course, there was no shortage of mining structures and equipment, including machinery such as a stamp mill.

Remember - it's not an exploitative Hell hole that OSHA would shut down anymore, it's historic!

However, as is so often the story with mining towns, the fall came almost as quickly as the rise.  The Silver Purchase Act of 1890 had the effect of reducing the price of silver.  As the decade wore on, Calico's silver mines became less economically viable, and the town began to depopulate.  By 1898, the post office shut down, followed by the school, and the town was pretty much abandoned by 1900.

In 1915, an attempt was made to recover unclaimed silver from the old mines, using cyanidation (a metallurgical process for the extraction ore using the chemical properties for cyanide).  While this did result in the brief resurgence of silver mining, it did not cause Calico to boom again.

In 1951, Walter Knott, of Knott's Berry Farm, bought Calico and began restoring many of the buildings.  While the purchase of historic buildings by the wealthy is hardly unusual, this was a unique turn in two ways: 1) Walter Knott had, as a young man, been a local homesteader and helped to build the cyanidation facilities, and 2) he turned it into a historic park with restored buildings, repaired or re-built based on old plans and photographs, and donated it to the County of San Bernardino in 1966.  

See, tacky Halloween decorations

While the buildings may have been restored to a close resemblance of their historic grandeur, the town is more tourist attraction than ghost town.  While it does serve to teach a visitor a bit about local history, it also has numerous souvenir shops and chachki stands that don't exactly stand up to historical scrutiny.  Oh, and if you happen to visit in October, as I did, you will witness numerous tacky "spooky" plastic skeletons and ghosts arranged about the place, further removing the historicity of the place.

Nonetheless, if you poke around outside of the central town portion and walk on some of the other paths, you will find the remains of buildings that have not been rebuilt, as well as some that have been rebuilt faithfully in ways that don't romanticize the old west.

The solution to California's high housing costs!

Oh, and if you visit, be sure to check out the cemetery.  It is fascinating both in terms of the tombstones, and of the construction of the graves themselves.  Observe: