The Green Knight's Quest

Not saying much because I’m overwhelmed and struggling with a health problem that is eating my spoons; but this needed to be shared:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/the-worlds-oldest-pants-are-a-3000-year-old-engineering-marvel/

These are riding trousers. These are riding trousers with advanced material engineering, reinforced and stretchy in the right places, and it all being a single piece of weaving means fewer seams.

(If I owe you an e-mail, I'm sorry. I thought I'd reached equilibrium and I clearly haven't, and right now, doing paid work and trying to find a health team take priority over everything else.)

http://explore.tandfonline.com/page/ah/archaeology-heritage-free-access

Since there are a) archaeologists and b) just general scholars on my flist, and not everybody had journal access through their library, I hope that some of you will enjoy this.

Expires 17th of April.

It's a dangerous assumption that the people of the past were like us, thought like us, had the same dreams and aspirations.

I've recently read some children's books written in the 1920s (?) which could have been written by aliens. I felt very, very uncomfortable with them at times, because the assumption was that you'd tell the child to behave, and it would - because a) it would want to please you, and b) if it didn't, it would get hit.

This is a series starting with the protag age four, and there's a lot of hitting children 'for their own good' 'it hurts me more than it hurts you' and all that rhethoric. Very often the parents make no attempts to educate their children - they just draw up a random list of musts and must nots, and if the child breaks the rules - wham. Children also hit their siblings a lot, and classmates are hitting each other... that's normal, isn't it?

I was also apalled at the 'children going bad' - if they don't thrive under this education and rebel, they're labelled as hopeless and sent off to institutions where they are met with even greater strictness, or, if older, cast out from the family and sent off to America.

So, the past is a different country.

Apart from when it isn't.

I read another book from roughly the same time, the story of a dog, and it was almost every bit as modern as you could wish for - yes, there _were_ some differences in husbandry practices, but the attitudes towards education-not-punishment, avoiding physical punishment whenever possible, never labelling an animal as 'bad' for things the owner messed up and, and, and were a welcome antidote and restored my confidence in previous generations: see? Some people had totally messed up attitudes (and the way the children in the first books are treated reminded me of bad animal husbandry practices), _some people didn't_.


Enter Onfim

http://slavic.freeservers.com/onfim.html

Onfim lived in Novgorod at the end of the 12th or beginning of the 13th century. Onfim, when we meet him, is a seven-year-old boy... a doodler, a dreamer, a boy who wants to be like his dad.

Sometimes a single find can challenge a lot of assumptions.

It's mere coincidence that we have, not just a couple of medieval doodlings, but a whole series of them, that we can attach a name to them, that we learn more about the circumstances. Of course there's no guarantee that he wasn't the only boy in the whole of history who engaged in these things, and you probably need to have a number of things coming together - the cultural concept of drawing is very important, I think - but I'm going to stand out on a limb and say that much of what he's drawn seem to be perfectly logical things to draw _from a point of view of small, fidgety human beings with drawing materials at hand_.

I think it's far more likely that he was one of many than that he should be unique. We don't have a lot of evidence for this kind of doodling because the coincidence of cheap writing material that happens to be endurable is something we're unlikely to find very often - all those children doodling on slate, with chalk, with sticks in sand, on paper that deteriorated - but given these finds, I think it's far more likely that children - not all, but some - under the right circumstances *did* produce such doodles than that none should.

Much as one should avoid projecting one's own attitudes at the other cultures, past and present, I think it's a fallacy to assume that human beings don't have things in common, either.

Actually going to the meet other writers, and have gone early to snatch an hour in the library. My personal place of power and all that.

Anyway, am skimming Hodder's 'Theory and Practice in Archaeology' (1992) and am reminded why I hate New Cultural Anythings.

"Merriman (1987) has shown that prehistoric archaeologists can answer questions about even the most abstract intentions. He shows that a wall built in Iron Age central Europe was built like examples in the Mediterranean in order to gain prestige by association with the exotic Mediterranean civilisations." [p,13]

Well, I haven't read the source in question, but it seems to me like the sort of value judgement I'd only make after talking to a person directly; _ad even then I'd wonder whether they were telling the truth_. 'exotic Mediterranean' is such a loaded concept, and... I feel very uneasy to assign this kind of thinking to iron-age Celts. and the whole idea of 'gain prestige by association' - that's *loaded* with assumptions, and furthermore I'd hate to extend this to any sizeable group of people. After serious anthropological study one might be able to say it about a particular person, or a group of them - but material sources and third party accounts can't really support such statement.

In my opinion, all you can say for certain is 'this wall resembles style x.' The rest is speculation an should be marked as such - if you present it as 'truth' you devaluate everything you've written.

That should not come as a surprise. After all I went to school and university in Europe However, it has taken me until now to _see_ the blatant racism in history-as-she-is-taught. I'm just - thanks to sara reading up on a particularly promising archaeologist,V. Gordon Childe, and he talks about the very qualities of energy, independence, and inventiveness which distinuish the western world from Egypt, India or China.

And I'm thinking - maybe I'm doing my younger self an injustice, for I hope I would have questioned this at least somewhat - that actually it's not just skewed, it's utter and total rubbish. I mean, I don't know much about the history and cultures of India and China (because there are just *too bloody many of them) and my knowledge of Egypt is limited to a recent visit with Tutenchamun, but while those words might not refer to every civilisation at every stage of its development, they're pretty universal.

( Fear of the Other )

On the other hand, that kind of cultural superiority - and unashamed defense thereof - is perfect for some of the antagonist ivory tower inhabitants the argument being that since the Fey did not become an industrialised civilisation (they adapt some aspects, but not wholesale, and they do not manufacture, much less on a grand scale) this means that human civilisations are superior. That just tosses another match into the fire...

Bleh. Must part from books and set out for work. Don't wanna.

So a team of Italian archaeologists has found a vanished Persian Army.

And it's all very, very exciting - they went back to the sources and reconsidered the route the army would have been taking, and found evidence, and it's all wonderfully exciting stuff until you come to the last segment of the article:

At the end of their expedition, the team decided to investigate Bedouin stories about thousands of white bones that would have emerged decades ago during particular wind conditions in a nearby area.

Because, of course, asking the people who live in an area is completely superfluous when you can just make your own scientific enquiries and gather your own evidence. And listening to a story that says 'there are thousands of bones' and saying 'hmm, do we know any events that could have yielded thousands of bones? No? Thousands of bones sounds interesting, let's take a look anyway' is something you do as an afterthought, after you've proven your own intellectual superiority - you worked things out yourself!

If someone had listened to that story, asked to see the place, and taken proper note of it, the following might not have happened:

a beautiful sword which was found among the bones was sold to American tourists

Whenever I hear a story like that, I feel rage for the destruction of history. I'm not particularly angry with the people who see grave robbery as a means of survival/wealth building (because, when you are very poor, wealth is your social net that will help you survive when you need it - remember Jane Austen and the need to marry a partner of moderate wealth? It's not about greed. It's about fear.). I am angry with what they do, but as long as there is poverty and deeply ingrained mistrust of goverments, that is not likely to change.

Nor will not change if we continue to ignore the people whose lands and history we dig up for our own edification and amusement.

(aka, the return of library liveblogging)

Hill, J.N.: The methodological debate in contemporary archaeology: a model.

( This, oops, got rather long <whistles> )
I'm beginning to think that this whole 'study design' thing is a lot more complicated than I had appreciated - not just in terms of actually deciding which data to collect and how to collect it, but in terms of the wider theoretical implications behind it.

Which, in a way, makes me very happy indeed.

From the 'things I never knew' files: The Spiegel (and booh sucks to their English Edition of the website which is completely different to the German edition and contains a different set of articles) had, the other day, an article about Qatna. (I can think of two readers of this blog who might have known about it). To me, it was a total case of who? What? Where? I mean, there's this Bronze Age civilisation building complex cities... and I had not known they existed at all.

Ooops.

I mean, how can one not be interested in a site where the Wikipedia entry contains the phrase The discovery of the Royal tombs and cuneiform tablets in 2002 have led to a state of cold war between the German and Italian excavation team.

It appears that the excavations have been going on since 1999, have been quite sensational (including amber from the Baltic Sea)... and I had *still* not heard of the place. Admittedly, it's neither my region nor my period, but still - I should have thought that a site of that magnitude was, at least by name and vague concept, known to me.

The Italian site has a lot of info, including maps, sattellite pictures, and surroundings. The Spiegel image gallery (in German) shows some of the finds in detail.

A couple more pictures here: http://www.thelocal.de/gallery/news/663/

There will be an exhibition in Stuttgart from the 17th of October to the 14th of March next year.

SIGH.

This is a well-known and well-documented feature. It explains not just about how religion can work, but how different people can have different experiences in the same situations, because they bring their own filters and their own experiences and their own interpretations to it.

Neustupnẏ provided me with one subjective reality. By relative coincidence, I have on my desk a book that provides a completely different view of the history of archaeology, a much more interdisciplinary one. And if I'm honest, this is much more what I would have expected to find, and much more useful for the Swamp Thing.

This is the introduction to an interdisciplinary conference, and the outlook is different - but not just because the author (Bintliff, apparently also an emanent archaeologist) obviously tries to be inclusive rather than exclusive.

The interesting part, for me, is that he's talking about a paradigm shift from early archaeology (with heavy use of biblical and classical sources) to a more evolutionary one. Given how much enthusiam science created in the 19th century (I must catch up with Dracula; I get glimpses on the feed, but I've missed a chunk, so it's teasing me, but what I've seen, it seems to make points about science - in this case, psychology- that are entirely in line with other authors of the time), that is what I would expect - in the age of Darwin and Lyell, of one discovery after the next, I did not expect the same old paradigm to hold from the early 19th century through to the 1950s. Or, at least, not uniformly so.

And I would expect the multi-faceted gentleman scholars of the 19th century to dabble in a number of things, and to import new thoughts from one discipline into the next. And I think that in a way, Bintliff puts his fingers on the same wounds as Neustupnẏ, only in a different context - he presents archaeology in the context of what he calls 'history of battles and famous men' [p. 6]

I don't know. Placed in this context, Neustupnẏ makes more sense again. Maybe I am trying the impossible again: trying to _understand history_ at least to an approximation of handwaving. If I can work out, in my head, and with no guarantee that it will withstand close scrutiny 'how history worked' in our world then I have a good chance of being able to tweak it for the Swamp Thing.

And oh dear, why theory is like a russian matrushka: "Social Anthropology decisively turned away from its association with Archaeology in reconstructing past social systems, and [...] focussed on the systematic analysis of contemporary non-industrial communities as almost ahistoriacl organisms. [p. 6]

In *that* light, the statement 'Archaeology is anthropology or nothing' becomes a different statement again, almost a declaration of war. I'm not certain yet with which _side_, but yes, definitely hostile. And on that note, I shall leave.

http://festival.britarch.ac.uk/

- I had to navigate my way to the PDF programme as the other wouldn't display, but there are plenty of things to do in plenty of areas of the country. There's not much I can do this week, but it's running for a fortnight, so I'm hoping to catch something else. I would be particularly interested to take part in a one-day dig - just to experience archaeology properly. Write what you know and all that.

(And how do you find jobs as a professional, though untrained excavator? I wouldn't mind doing this for a few weeks, but I'd have to be able to pay my bills in the meantime.)

The Swamp Thing has a fairly sophisticated archaeology. It didn't quite happen in the same way as our world did, but it was roughly following similar lines for a long time.

The Five Kingdoms, on the other hand, are seeing the beginnings of an archaeology. They're on the cusp of 'investigating ruins and learning about the past' and I need to dial down my expectations of what they would be looking for, and "what they find" (in the sense of what they learn from their findings).

( Archaeology and Magic )

As a reverse insight from writing - which is not new, but just slipped my mind for a while - the storyverse - the extent of things that can be done or thought within a particular society - seems no less important in relation to historical periods than it does to other worlds.

No, I'm not talking about very early plundering of ruins, but I've just progressed to page 15 in my history of archaeology - I am not reading it, it's just lieing by my computer for those 'gods this is taking a long time to load' moments, and much to my suprise, I found the date excavations in Herculaneum began.

1709.

Excavations in Herculaneum began during the rule of Karl IV, who organised further digs in 1738; in 1748 they began on Pompeji, and in 1763 they were finally certain that they *had* found Pompeji rather than an anonymous city-under-ash.

Seems as if the fascination with antiquities - which segued into the Grand Tour and dreams of Arcadia - _began with_, rather than _led to_ excavations.


I also, thanks to a brief brain fart, found out that Shakespeare and Richelieu were kind-of-contemporaries, but let's be silent about the 17th century...