Archaeopop: The Past in Popular Culture

Gaming: Let's Play Ancient Greek Punishment!

2012-01-18T00:12:00.000-08:00

From perverse game designer Pippin Barr comes the game you've all been waiting for: Ancient Greek Punishment! Choose from Prometheus, Tantalus, Sisyphus, the Danaids, or Zeno, and relive their thrilling punishments. This is a game you could literally play forever. Makes me feel nostalgic for playing some games on my Apple IIc. Click here to get started!


My boy Prometheus, punished for his mantic pretensions.

Our boy Sisyphus. Only a few more feet to go!

Links January 18

2012-01-17T23:56:00.000-08:00

Been traveling the last few weeks. Some belated links to a variety of archaeopop subjects...

The New York Times asks, "What's up with all the UNESCO sites?" A good introduction to the problems of WHL listing.

“The dark side, of course, is consumption,” said Francesco Bandarin, assistant director-general of Unesco and head of its World Heritage Center, speaking of the consumerism that so often surrounds heritage sites. “And consumption and preservation do not go together.” If a site is “within an hour of a harbor,” he added, “it becomes inundated by a flood of tourism and geysers of money.”

The post-eviction archaeology of Zuccotti Park (OWS-Archaeology). Some objects are now curated at the Columbia archaeology lab!

The first thing I noticed was change. Lots and lots of change: pennies and nickles mostly. Going through the gutters taking pictures of objects in situ before picking them up attracted attention and as I got to talk with a number of people I learned that earlier that morning (I arrived around 8:30am) people had already been seen picking up change. This would explain the lack of quarters and dimes.

How to downsize a transportation network: the Chinese wheelbarrow (Low Tech Magazine, h/t Exiled). Invented 1000 years before the European model, still more efficient. This 'European technological superiority' thing is a historical blip.

Fascinating historical research on the relationship between education and industrialization (VoxEU)

Peru's Culture Minister (was) Susana Baca

2011-12-29T17:39:00.000-08:00

Clarification: I was late to this one. With the resignation of the Prime Minister and reshuffling of the Peruvian cabinet in mid-December, Baca was replaced as Minister of Culture by Luis Peirano Falconí, a professor of communication studies at the Pontificial Catholic University of Perú. Good luck to Prof. Peirano.

From The Guardian. Susana Baca!

Chosen in July by President Ollanta Humala, Baca is Peru's first Minister of Afro-Peruvian descent. It's a joy to see a giant of culture actually in charge of culture, but I can't say I envy her: being a great artist and being a great administrator are, shall we say, different skill sets. I hope she can find a way to juggle her career while looking after the nation's culture. Not to mention its overworked archaeological sites!

Negra presuntuosa indeed. Bring 'em on, the world could use many more.

Ruins of the 1%: Inequality Worse in 21st Century America than 2nd Century Rome?

2011-12-29T17:22:00.000-08:00

New research by Walter Schiedel and Steven Friesen suggest that income inequality in the United States today is slightly worse than in the Roman Empire in the 2nd century CE. Their article in Journal of Roman Studies is a good overview of debates on how to measure ancient Rome's GDP, wages, and income distribution. It's also a bit dizzying, but this is not easy stuff to calculate, given the absence of regular economic data.

By their calculations, 10% of the population went hungry, 74% had income 1-1.5 times basic subsistence, and 14% had a 'respectable' income between 1.7 and 10 times basic subsistence. The top 1.5% controlled 15-25% of total income, the next 10% another 15-25%, while the bottom 90% split the remaining half or so of all income. This works out to a Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality, with 1 being perfect inequality and 0 being perfect equality) of 0.42-0.44. By this measure the Roman Empire was actually less unequal than some other pre-modern societies, like 18th-century Britain or France (0.52-0.59) - but only because these societies were richer overall. (You need larger surpluses to foster larger inequality.)

Tim de Chant at Per Square Mile (a fantastic geography blog) places this research in context, noting that the Gini coefficient of the United States is now 0.45 and rising: more unequal than a pre-modern empire famous for its oligarchs and mass enslavement. He concludes on a sobering note:

Schiedel and Friesen aren’t passing judgement on the ancient Romans, nor are they on modern day Americans. Theirs is an academic study, one used to further scholarship on one of the great ancient civilizations. But buried at the end, they make a point that’s difficult to parse, yet provocative. They point out that the majority of extant Roman ruins resulted from the economic activities of the top 10 percent. “Yet the disproportionate visibility of this ‘fortunate decile’ must not let us forget the vast but—to us—inconspicuous majority that failed even to begin to share in the moderate amount of economic growth associated with large-scale formation in the ancient Mediterranean and its hinterlands.”

Let us never forget: most ruins are ruins of the 1%. An Occupy Archaeology movement would have to include field survey and rural settlement studies in its call to arms.

Academic Publishers: Suicide Bombers Against the Academy

2011-12-28T09:17:00.000-08:00

I lost my marbles the other day when I saw this article from Cambridge University press offering to rent me some academic articles:

For just £3.99, $5.99 or €4.49, users are now able to read single articles online for up to 24 hours, a saving of up to 86 per cent, compared with the cost of purchasing the article.

Of course, you can’t save, print, or do anything with the article except read it on line, then it disappears. What useless crap! Say you’re doing some research and you need a citation. $5.99 might be OK if you only needed one article. But the average academic article has 20-100 citations. And honestly, a good article is not something you read once and have done with it – you need to check it a few times and do some re-reading to absorb it. So this rental is really just a ‘teaser’ – it’s just enough access to decide if you really need to have something, after which you have the privilege of buying one of these articles for $30-$75. Yes, that’s really how much they charge! For one fucking article!

So when I read something like this:

Cambridge University Press is committed to widening dissemination and lowering barriers to accessing journal articles.

… I can smell the bullshit. Article rental is a scam. But it’s only the tip of the iceberg in the larger and much more heinous scam being run by the major academic publishers – Springer, Thomson, Elsevier, a few others – who are looting the academic commons for private profit while denying access to the public and increasing inequality.

Does that sound harsh? I hope so. Because most academic knowledge is produced by scholars whose pay comes from the public purse. The rest – i.e. tuition dollars – is still subsidized heavily by the government as in the form of below-market-rate student loans.

Like with so many other things that used to be public goods, academic knowledge (in the form of journal articles) has effectively been privatized in the last few decades. The ‘big four’ academic publishers have acquired rights to the articles you need to make it as a scholar, and have been jacking up prices steadily every year – an average 8.5% increase between 1996 and 2004. For a reality check, see the Springer price list for 2012. Institutions pay an average of $2168/year for a Springer journal. For four issues! The humanities and social sciences are cheaper – The Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, for instance, costs just $764. Anything to do with chemistry, mathematics, or medicine will set your library back $3250-6500. And what are the publishers’ costs? Content is provided for free. Peer reviewers and editorial boards also work on the public dime to do quality control. You do need decent copy editors and some computers. (The posh office building in New York or London and multi-million dollar executive salaries, however, are perhaps not integral to scientific production).

And the cost of making a digital copy of a journal article? Zero, or so close to it that it makes no difference.

So what to do about this? Internet commenters naively suggest that scholars boycott for-profit journals and only publish in open-access ones. But that also means boycotting ‘having a career’. In most universities, scholars are rewarded for publication and only publication (rewarding good teachers remains a quaint idea). And because of ‘university reform’, publications are increasingly valued by ‘impact factor’, numerical metrics that purport to measure the quality of an article based on how often it gets cited. Take the University of Bologna, where I work. Starting this year, promotion for researchers and professors is based on publication in journals listed in the Scopus index. Those are the only journals that count. The idiocy of judging academic work by its popularity I hope is obvious, but there even more foolish consequences.

If this continues, archaeologists are screwed: many of the most important journals in the field do not have an impact factor. People publish a lot in edited volumes and obscure yearly serials. And what happens to your career if you want to go open access? That work is invisible. You’ll never get a raise or a promotion. The result: a scramble by scholars to find journals with an impact factor, whether they’re really appropriate or not. And, not surprisingly, the journals with impact factors – and the ranking system itself – belong to the big publishers. Scopus is produced by Elsevier, one of the biggest publishers. The most commonly-used impact factor ratings are created by ISI, owned by Thomson Reuters. It’s a pernicious, self-reinforcing racket. The management, dissemination, and assessment of academic knowledge, produced with public funds, has been outsourced to a cartel of unaccountable corporations without anyone quite noticing what was happening.

I’ve done a lot of research in two of the world’s richest and best university libraries (Berkeley and Michigan) and I’ve seen and heard them being squeezed hard by the dual forces of budget cuts and price increases, to the point that they have had to seriously cut journal acquisitions. In the book world the call it the ‘serials crisis'. (See this article for another example - and look at the 2009 graph) I’ve been spoiled by such libraries: the University of Bologna library is provincial by comparison. Doing research is a string of frustrations as I find journal after journal where we don’t have subscriptions, or whe have a limited range of dates online. The same is true in Australia, according to Simon Marginson of the University of Melbourne:

Few universities can afford to maintain the full set of minimum necessary journals to be able to provide research infrastructure on a comprehensive basis. Indeed, even the strongest Australian university libraries are forced to do without material they need to hold. In New Zealand the problem is significantly worse, and in major universities in such countries as Indonesia, Philippines or Vietnam there is simply no possibility of providing even the most minimum set of necessary journals.

And the are the rich countries, doing without basic journals they really need! Imagine the situation in Nigeria, Brazil, Malaysia, or, really poor countries like Nicaragua or Zambia. No matter how talented the student, how ambitious the professor, they simply have no access to the full range of relevant scholarship. Adam Habib of the University of Johannesburg nails it in a recent interview:

It is a completely feudal system.The costs of the research production are borne by the universities, and as a result, by public monies, in most cases. Then, private companies publish the research, and charge the universities and public institutions for the very research outputs that they paid for. This is effectively the subsidy of the private sector by public money.

…Simply put, students from poor backgrounds in large parts of the developing world will not have access to quality academic journals in their universities. This means that they will not be as well trained, and as a result will not have the same opportunities as the privileged. Is this not a violation of the principle of equal opportunities for all. There is a myth that this is an example of entrepreneurialism. In my view, all it does is facilitate enrichment at public cost with huge consequences for those most disadvantaged.

And we’re talking about access problems for graduate students and people with PhDs. Don’t have a library card and online login to a major university research library? You will NEVER read any of the research that your tax money goes to support. EVER. This crisis threatens to render academic research sterile and irrelevant. Like wealth, knowledge is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, with more and more institutions cut off if they cannot pay preposterous sums to the new rentiers of academic knowledge.

Or maybe I should say, it will make American and European academic research irrelevant. That’s really what we’re talking about when we say ‘the academy’, isn’t it? Who publishes in so-called ‘international’ journals? Few scholars in the global south have full access to the fruits of the north’s scholarship. They can’t participate in academic debates if they can’t follow them, no matter how deep the pool of talent and no matter how fast the growth of their economic and geopolitical power.

Already places like Brazil, Turkey, and China offer better economic opportunities than Europe or America, despite radical asymmetries in access to knowledge, capital, and expertise from the so-called ‘developed’ world. Why shouldn’t they just tune out the Anglo-American dominated academic discourse entirely?

This system can’t last forever (though its pernicious effects might). The big four will eventually see revenues drop as they squeeze the last drops of blood out of the world’s universities. But even as they undermine their own business model, they will destroy the power of universities to generate knowledge for the betterment of society. (Yes, I’m old-fashioned that way.) Meanwhile, universities, governments, corporations, and ordinary citizens will turn to other sources of information – which they can get for free, or at least affordably – undermining the relevance of public scholarship.

For-profit academic publishing is a suicide bombing mission against the academy. In pursuing their doomed business model, the big publishers risk turning the work we do as scholars into a giant echo chamber. Students take on a lifetime of debt, partly to pay for journal subscriptions that enrich a few corporations. Scholars are turned into serfs who must feed the beast new product for it to sell, or risk losing their already tenuous livelihoods. Institutions bankrupt themselves paying for ever more expensive journals without which they cannot compete. Fewer and fewer people can read the rapidly increasing number of scholarly articles.

Is that grim enough for you? It’s all true. Let me call your attention to American hero Aaron Swartz of hacktivist group Demand Progress, who downloaded 4 million articles from JSTOR from the MIT servers using anonymous logins and automated programs. JSTOR and the university freaked out and called the cops, and now Swartz faces federal charges and up to 35 years in prison. Not for disseminating the information, just for downloading it. But ‘theft is theft’ said the MIT administration. JSTOR bills itself as a harmless public repository of knowledge - as long as you don't want too much of it.

The copyright zealots who make it their business to restrict access to the world’s artistic, musical, and visual patrimony are perverts. Two hundred years ago these guys would have been hanging hungry people for stealing food. Under the logic of copyright, the miracle of the loaves and fishes would be theft from the bakers and the fisherman, and Jesus and his disciples criminals who should pay $1 million per loaf illegally downloaded from heaven. Who cares if we can make an infinite amount of bread, and a lot of people are hungry? Think of the rights of the bakers!

More:

Jean-Claude Guédon's wonderful long article on the history of scholarly publishing and how we got into this mess.
CalPIRG report on academic journal prices
Superb interviews from Australian journal The Conversation
Journal pricing data from the University of California (a bit out of date but still shocking)

Palaeo-browsers of the primitive web

2011-12-16T04:51:00.000-08:00

The Viola Browser. Love the color scheme

Ars Technica profiles the forgotten web browsers of the early 1990s:

When Tim Berners-Lee arrived at CERN, Geneva's celebrated European Particle Physics Laboratory in 1980, the enterprise had hired him to upgrade the control systems for several of the lab's particle accelerators. But almost immediately, the inventor of the modern webpage noticed a problem: thousands of people were floating in and out of the famous research institute, many of them temporary hires.

"The big challenge for contract programmers was to try to understand the systems, both human and computer, that ran this fantastic playground," Berners-Lee later wrote. "Much of the crucial information existed only in people's heads."

So in his spare time, he wrote up some software to address this shortfall: a little program he named Enquire. It allowed users to create "nodes"—information-packed index card-style pages that linked to other pages. Unfortunately, the PASCAL application ran on CERN's proprietary operating system. "The few people who saw it thought it was a nice idea, but no one used it. Eventually, the disk was lost, and with it, the original Enquire."

Samba, the first Mac browser. 'Disque dur'! le Français d'internet est fantastique
Some years later Berners-Lee returned to CERN. This time he relaunched his "World Wide Web" project in a way that would more likely secure its success. On August 6, 1991, he published an explanation of WWW on the alt.hypertext usegroup. He also released a code library, libWWW, which he wrote with his assistant Jean-François Groff. The library allowed participants to create their own Web browsers.

"Their efforts—over half a dozen browsers within 18 months—saved the poorly funded Web project and kicked off the Web development community," notes a commemoration of this project by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

This is another step toward mapping the early history of the digital age. Also a nice example of how the search for a unique inventor or moment of origin for historical movements is a distraction. These palaeo-browsers are an important part of the heritage of the digital age, and at the same time irrelevant. They were part of the evolutionary web that led to Netscape, which eclipsed them all. Here's Netscape's daddy, the original Mosaic browser. I remember using this on some machines when I first got to college in 1994.

Thursday Links

2011-12-14T23:28:00.000-08:00

The Magdalenburg Iron Age tomb complex in Germany is a map of the lunar cycle and constellations (Past Horizons). Ridiculously cool.

A photographer sneaks into China's deserted fake Disneyland (Reuters). China has reached the heritage singularity, full of ruins of a future that won't actually happen.

Antiquity has published a rock art analysis of Johnny Rotten's graffiti on the walls of the Sex Pistols' old flat on Denmark Street in London. "Deconstruction of the graffiti...presents a layering of time and changing relations." Yep folks, punk is dead...

I'm beet red

2011-12-14T04:48:00.000-08:00

GROSS!

As the memory studies people would say, I'm glad that part of doing history is deciding what part to forget. Via Failblog and/or Easy86 on Tumblr. Hat tip to Katie!

Guest Post: Beautiful tableware? On beauty and 'doing' pottery

2011-12-08T05:17:00.000-08:00

Today's guest post by Rinse Willet, a PhD student at KU Leuven and archaeologist at the Sagalassos project, is a meditation on beauty in objects and what it means for archaeologists who 'do' pottery.

In my study of Roman tableware, I find myself often in awe of the quality of the pieces of terra sigillata, so commonly found throughout the Roman Empire. Millions of these vessels were made from the mid-2nd century BC to the 7th century AD. During this period, Many production centers were active, though dominance of the ancient 'market' shifted over time. The shapes, decorations, and sizes of the vessels changed over time as well.

Yet for this entire period, terra sigillata is associated with the formal serving and eating of food and drink. Though I am intrigued by the sheer effort expended to produce and transport these vessels, but I also have to appreciate how beautifully most of them are made. Is this a fluke on my part, or did the actual users of these vessels think they were beautiful too?

The Portland Vase (Wikimedia)

More after the jump.

This question for me becomes even more intriguing when Roman tableware made in silver or glass is considered. Pieces such as the glass Portland Vase (early 1st century AD), the silver Boscoreale cups (1st century AD) or the silver Missorium of Theodosius (late 4th c AD) are renowned for their richness in decoration and complexity in design.

The Missorium of Theodosius

A cup from the Boscoreale Treasure, now in the Louvre, Paris (Wikimedia)

To see these as just utilitarian vessels is to overlook their design entirely. (Though the Portland Vase is famous, to my knowledge, little research has been devoted to its actual use in Antiquity!) The vessels served as signifiers of the owner’s and user’s status, identity, political alignment, and religion. These (rarely encountered) vessels in silver were copied, mimicked, emulated or ‘reimagined’ in terra sigillata as well. But again, I wonder when looking at these objects, whether they were also appreciated for their aesthetical value as well. Were these objects considered beautiful and if so why?

Left: Silver dish, Turin. Right: terra sigillata dish, Athens National Museum.

My intuition is that the ancients must have appreciated these pieces for their beauty. Through the study of Roman art and architecture we can establish the aesthetic values of the day. Ancient texts like Vitruvius help us in that respect as well. There seems a slim likelihood that all these objects were disliked aesthetically by their creators and users!

But how do we answer these questions scientifically? We can never really know the minds of people in the past - and we probably can all think of decorative objects we think are ugly. Basically, when we ask whether an object (or anything for that matter) is beautiful, we are asking a question about taste. In the best case, we can say that tastes are a product of the culture in which the arbiter is situated: in other words, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To try to enter the Roman mind via our personal taste for these Roman objects is rightfully critiqued by processual archaeologists such as Colin Renfrew (1994,6):

This total experience of 'being' that other, long-dead person, or at least undergoing an experience to be compared with theirs, is what characterizes the subjective, idealist and interpretationist approach of the anti-processual and 'postmodern' archaeologist. The cognitive-processual archaeologist is sceptical of the validity of this empathetic experience, and sceptical too of the privileged status which must inevitably be claimed by the idealist who is advancing an interpretation on the basis of this intuitive, 'I-was-there' experience.

Another (more scientific) way to reconstruct the ancient perception of beauty is to see if there is a non-culturally determined aspect of (the appreciation of) beauty. That is to say, are there any aspects of perceived beauty that are common for most humans in different cultural settings? Are aspects of beauty hard-wired in our brains? Is the experience of beauty in effect part of our human nature?
The study of human cognition can be traced back to philosophers such as Plato, Descartes, Spinoza and Locke, but the cognitive sciences took off in full earnest in the middle of the 20th century. Behaviorism was an influential philosophy in the first half of the 20th century in the quest for explaining human actions, thought and feelings. Bluntly speaking, behaviorism considers all human action as behavior, which is shaped by our responses to the environment and thus that our behavior is determined by past learning experiences. (Think for example of Pavlov’s dogs or the conditioning in the movie A Clockwork Orange).

The focus on behaviors as a ‘learned’ trait (such as language) was challenged in the late 1950’s by several scholars, notably the linguist Noam Chomsky. He argued instead that much of the knowledge of syntax (basically the grammar underlying the language) is innate. This explains why young children pick up a language very quickly and animals are unable to learn a language at all. This challenge to the behaviorist school paved the way for what is now called the cognitive revolution, starting from the 1960’s onward.

Chomsky speaks at Carleton College. Warning, talk is two hours! (YouTube)

Together with advances in neurology the internal workings of the brain and the mind are beginning to get unraveled. This has revealed how language and the mind relate: more recently, scientists at Berkeley have even developed techniques to visualize the movies in our the mind via brain scans.

To come back to beauty, recently the late professor of philosophy Denis Dutton presented the case for the more hard-wired aspects of aesthetics. In his book The Art Instinct, Dutton explores a Darwinian model to explain what and why various things are considered beautiful. He is not proposing a solution to aesthetics, but rather a tool to understand it better. He argues that the experience of beauty is the result of our evolved psyches. Next to natural selection – based on traits that increase survivability and which explains why certain foods taste good or smell bad – evolution also works with sexual selection to increase the chances of procreation. Think of the tail of a peacock, the antlers of a stag, or the songs, dances, or colorful display of some male birds, which they perform to attract the attention and interest of female birds.

Dennis Dutton: A Darwinian Theory of Beauty (TED Talks)

The experience of being attracted and interested can help make better adaptive decisions. Dutton connects this to the experience of beauty: in a sense, beauty has evolved in human culture to help us make better adaptive decisions. Dutton relates this directly to an observed cross-cultural preference for a certain type of landscape, similar to the savannas of the Pleistocene (and to which we are supposedly best adapted?). Dutton continues to link beauty to display of craftsmanship and the arts as well, whereby skilled performance and virtuoso display (among eleven others aspects) are the cross-cultural universalities in art. His book does not so much explain the diversity of beauty, but rather explores its commonalities.

Although I am not qualified to judge Dutton's proposal, I find it appealing that it can be applied to 'high culture' (whatever that means) but also to art or craft found in daily life: the landscapes depicted on calendars, or Acheulean hand-axes. Although he makes a clear distinction between art and craft (Dutton, 2009, 226-230), Thorstein Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption is also linked to sexual selection and the handicap principle. It basically states that if you can make an item that is not strictly utilitarian, or able to consume such an item, then you display your might ('I can take on the world with one hand tied behind my back!'). Think of the peacock, whose elaborate plumage impresses mates but lowers its chances of survival (Dutton, 2009, 156). In this framework Dutton also addresses the link between experienced beauty and perceived costliness:

The very idea that costliness and art are intrinsically connected in our aesthetic psychology may be a disagreeable possibility, but if it turns out to be true, it is a fact that is better faced than buried.

But does this explain my experience of Roman tableware – or, more importantly, the Roman experience of their tableware? Every expression of art has its own cultural peculiarities. It is one thing to say that the Portland Vase is a virtuoso display of craftsmanship, or that its general shape is symmetrical, which is a trait commonly appreciated by people living in many different cultures. But this does not explain directly what is displayed in the (asymmetrical) scenes, and why. The Boscoreale cups are a display of skilled craftsmanship – and of the consumption of craftsmanship – but this is only part of the story. Terra sigillata can be made to resemble ornate silver vessels, but they were probably not as highly regarded as the silver. If Dutton is correct this is not just because the material is less costly, but because of a different appreciation of their beauty as well.

The beauty of the ‘Art Instinct’ is that it provides a very human side to the analysis of art. As archaeologists, we try to bind the past and the present together through the study of material objects. Dutton’s model, which tries to explain the experience of beauty as something which connects all humans, can help us in our quest – which makes it doubly sad that he did not live long enough to further develop and apply his ideas.

Further Reading
D. Dutton, 2009, The Art Instinct. Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution, Oxford University Press, Oxford
C. Renfrew, 1994, "Towards a cognitive archaeology", in C. Renfrew and E.B.W. Zubrow (eds.), The ancient mind. Elements of cognitive archaeology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 3-13
J. Hayes, 1997, Handbook of Mediterranean Roman Pottery, British Museum Press, London
E. Swift, 2009, Style and Function in Roman Decoration. Living with Objects and Interiors, Ashgate, Aldershot
R.E. Leader-Newby, 2004, Silver and Society in Late Antiquity. Functions and Meanings of Silver Plate in the Fourth to Seventh Centuries, Ashgate, Aldershot

Pepper-spraying cop meme goes archaeopop

2011-11-23T01:59:00.000-08:00

It had to happen eventually... From the delightful Pepper Spraying Cop Tumblr. Hat tip Lindsay!

“Jesus, do you realize how hard it is being in charge of the WHOLE FUCKING SKY? Its rough, man. ROUGH. I got all these assholes praying to me for this or that, I got Osiris crawling up my ass all the time pulling those fucking guilt trips on me because I don’t want to run the family business forever… LAY OFF. Can’t I just take a break for a minute and have a seatAUUUAHAGHAHAGAHAGHGHHHHHHHHHHH”

“Morguk got wasted and rolled his razor scooter again. God dammit, now we have to schlep all the way over the Euphrates to get parts for that damn thing. Again. Grounding doesn’t work. Taking away internet privileges doesn’t work. Should we send him to boarding school? Would that make us bad parentsAUUAHHAGHAGAHAGHGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH”

Breaking news: Indiana Jones denied tenure

2011-11-17T03:39:00.000-08:00

McSweeney's reprints Indiana Jones' tenure denial letter. Bad methodology, never shows up for class, and worse! A highlight:

Meets professional standards of conduct in research and professional activities of the discipline:
The committee was particularly generous (and vociferous) in offering their opinions regarding this criterion. Permit me to list just a few of the more troubling accounts I was privy to during the committee’s meeting. Far more times than I would care to mention, the name “Indiana Jones” (the adopted title Dr. Jones insists on being called) has appeared in governmental reports linking him to the Nazi Party, black-market antiquities dealers, underground cults, human sacrifice, Indian child slave labor, and the Chinese mafia. There are a plethora of international criminal charges against Dr. Jones, which include but are not limited to: bringing unregistered weapons into and out of the country; property damage; desecration of national and historical landmarks; impersonating officials; arson; grand theft (automobiles, motorcycles, aircraft, and watercraft in just a one week span last year); excavating without a permit; countless antiquities violations; public endangerment; voluntary and involuntary manslaughter; and, allegedly, murder.
Dr. Jones’s interpersonal skills and relationships are no better. By Dr. Jones’s own admission, he has repeatedly employed an underage Asian boy as a driver and “personal assistant” during his Far East travels. I will refrain from making any insinuations as to the nature of this relationship, but my intuition insists that it is not a healthy one, nor one to be encouraged.

NO TIME FOR LOVE DR. JONE!!!

Telecom Italia Mobile Goes Ancient

2011-11-14T06:54:00.000-08:00

Telecom Italia Mobile has this fantastic series of ads with ancient Romans chilling out and talking on their cell phones. Love the costume design, good production value trumps the cheerful banality any day.

From the marketing text:

"The secret of Julius Caesar's success? A smartphone for navigating online, chatting with Cleopatra, and uploading battle photos to Facebook! But among the senators, there are some who doubt his supremacy...;)"

Three Forays into the History of Climate Change

2011-11-14T06:32:00.000-08:00

From Archaeopop's environmental desk, here's a roundup of three interesting articles on archaeology and the environment:

1) Via Ars Technica, a new paper uses residue analysis to suggest that the advent of farming didn't change everything all at once

A recent paper in PNAS brings some evidence to challenge the prevailing notion that farming immediately and completely changed everything about human society, from diets to economies to tool usage. The authors suggest that hunting and gathering persisted even after farming had been established. They deduce as much from the presence of specific lipid biomarkers left inside ceramic vessels that date from the time that plants and animals were first domesticated.

More evidence that farming was maybe a side-effect of the neolithic revolution, rather than the cause of it. In other words: massive transformation of land use is maybe not necessary for technological advancement.

2) In Low-tech Magazine, Kris De Decker gives us a fascinating look into the Dutch energy crisis of the 1500s - and its catastrophic environmental effects.

By the time Antwerp came to dominate the world economy, its peat reserves had already been dug out to satisfy the energy needs of Flanders in the course of the preceding two centuries. As a result, peat digging shifted to the neighbouring province of Holland, from where the turf was exported to Antwerp... peat diggers developed a new tool, the "baggerbeugel" (a dredging net on a long pole, there seems to be no English translation for the term). Standing on a small boat or at the waterside, this tool allowed them to cut peat below water level and haul it up. This technique, called "slagturven" (again, no English translation available), greatly enlarged mineable peat reserves...
Worse, however, was the destruction of the landscape and the loss of agricultural land. Wherever the peat was mined below the water table, land disappeared into the waves. This was a rather ironic consequence for a country that spent so much effort reclaiming land on the sea elsewhere on its territory through the use of windmills. Every year, about 115 to 230 hectares of land was lost as a result of peat production below the water table. The exhausted peat bogs formed lakes that expanded to cover vast areas throughout Holland and Utrecht.

3) From Science News: was the Little Ice Age the Native American revenge for all those diseases?
More research that suggest that the 'pristine' North America found by European settlers was caused by disease rather than some innate Indian rapport with 'nature'.

By the end of the 15th century, between 40 million and 100 million people are thought to have been living in the Americas. Many of them burned trees to make room for crops, leaving behind charcoal deposits that have been found in the soils of Mexico, Nicaragua and other countries. About 500 years ago, this charcoal accumulation plummeted as the people themselves disappeared. Smallpox, diphtheria and other diseases from Europe ultimately wiped out as much as 90 percent of the indigenous population. Trees returned, reforesting an area at least the size of California, Nevle estimated. This new growth could have soaked up between 2 billion and 17 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air.

And thereby cooled the earth enough to cause a century of cold in Europe. I covered this line of research - which I find very persuasive - in a January article that you should read!

Hope you all enjoyed the non-end-of-the-world on 11/11/11/11:11.

A Meditation on Medieval Marketing

2011-11-11T08:16:00.000-08:00

Over at the Harvard Business Review blog (!) Grant McCracken muses on the marketing secrets of the middle ages (via Boing Boing):

The medieval world took for granted that the universe was filled with secret messages, placed there by God and the correspondences on which the world was built. What did not come from God or nature was made by man in the form of emblems, icons, and insignia insinuated into public life. The home of Sir Francis Bacon was covered with arcana. Only people with a keen eye and a university education could make sense of it.
By the 20th century, all of this was stripped out by the modernist impulse that said form should be about manifest function, not secret meaning. This world was rendered perfectly clear, rational, and transparent. No decoding necessary. Consider Mies van der Rohe's Seagram building. Or Charles and Ray Eames' lounge chair. What you saw was what you got.
Marketing was created in this moment. And the idea was complete transparency. Marketing came to stand for big, bold, simple messages, fired repeatedly at a mass target. "Keep it simple, stupid" was the order of the day. This was a world of absolute clarity and shameless repetition. How things change. The 21st century loves a puzzle. We have the skill and the patience. We have quicker eyes. No couch potatoes, we. Perhaps it's that we now live with so much noise that we are better at decoding signals. We are ready for secret messages. To judge from the rest of popular culture, we are hungry for them.

This is a take on Weber's notion of the disenchantment of the world. After a while, complete simplicity starts to look like idiocy. For some reason this makes me think: were the semiotics of the hipster moment - the emphasis on exclusivity, in-jokes, and irony, symbolized by the elevation of banal products like Pabst Blue Ribbon beer - an attempt to re-enchant this world of spare, obvious, distinctly un-magical consumer products?

UNESCO suspends programs due to US cuts

2011-11-11T08:09:00.000-08:00

In the wake of the acceptance of Palestine as a member, UNESCO has had to take a 22% budget cut - since US law forbids the funding of any UN agency that recognizes it. Without American funding, director-general Irina Bokova has announced total suspension of UNESCO programming until the end of the year, for a saving of $35 million.

More in Le Monde (in French).

As Le Monde also notes, Israel is increasingly isolated diplomatically: only 14 members voted against Palestine's admission, including the US, Canada, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and the usual stalwart allies like Lithuania, Panama, the Soloman Islands, and Vanuatu. Outside of the US and western Europe there's no debate whatsoever.

Palestine joins UNESCO; US Pulls Funding

2011-10-31T14:57:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to (the perhaps-one-day State of) Palestine for joining UNESCO. Members voted 107-14 (with 52 abstentions) to grant the Palestinian Authority membership. This is the first time it has gained full admission to a UN body.

This latest step in the Palestine Authority's UN gambit has been a ringing success, though at a cost to UNESCO. Unlike much that the body does, this move was not without real financial and political risk. Apparently the United States is prohibited by law from funding UN bodies that accept Palestinians as members (what the hell?!), and the US supplies 22% of UNESCO's funding. Yet the announcement by Director-General Bokova was couched in the classic language of UN idealism:

we are living in a historical moment, and we all feel at this time the historical weight and importance of this decision, for the Palestinian people and for UNESCO. This is the result of the aspiration of a people to join fully the world family of nations...

She goes on to say that UNESCO continues its commitment to Palestine's cultural heritage, including the development of management plans for Tel Balata in Nablus, the archaeological park of Qasr Hisham, and the Church of the Nativity and Riwaya Museum in Bethlehem. (See the official statement here).

Retaliation from Washington and Tel Aviv followed with predictable speed, per the Guardian:

Within hours, the US announced it would withhold its huge contribution to Unesco's budget as a result of the vote. State department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the US had no choice due to a 21-year-old law prohibiting the payment of funds to any UN body accepting the Palestinians as full members. A $60m (£38m) transfer that was due later this month would be halted in a move that will have serious consequences for Unesco activities. The US contributes 22% of the agency's annual budget.

Unesco's decision was "regrettable, premature and undermines our shared goal to a comprehensive, just and lasting peace [between Israelis and Palestinians]", said Nuland.
Israel also hinted at punitive measures. A statement from the foreign ministry said it would "consider its further steps and ongoing co-operation" with Unesco following the decision. The move was a "unilateral Palestinian manoeuvre which will bring no change on the ground but further removes the possibility for a peace agreement", it added.

As an American, it's depressing to see how the hard-core Israeli nationalists have engineered their ideology into our laws, even if it makes no sense for anyone: even Israel, which would benefit from a partner to cooperate with on heritage issues. Assuming that the government is actually serious about a two-state solution, as opposed to the current system of walled enclaves filled with increasingly desperate people who have no freedoms, no rights, and no passports. (It is citizenship in a state, after all, that gives you rights under international law. Palestinians, as stateless people, have no rights - largely due to Israeli military occupation for the last 44 years).

Israel's adamant opposition to the Palestine Authority doing anything that a normal country would do undermines its claims to be in favor of a two-state solution. If you wanted a two-state solution you would want to help your negotiating partner develop the apparatus of statehood, right? So maybe they have some expertise and institutions when they're ready to cut loose on their own? The far right/military cabal that has hijacked Israel has no desire, however, for Palestine to become a state and will do anything it can to keep it from happening, including historical revisionism such as denying that Rachel's Tomb/Bilal bin Rabah Mosque in Bethlehem was ever a mosque - and reinforcing the point by walling it off from the rest of Bethlehem with the 'separation wall'.

Unlike most of Israel's people, who are fine with a two-state solution on more or less the 1967 boundaries, the Israeli far right is still in denial that Palestinians even exist, or could have a heritage of their own. They do exist, however, and unless people like Avigdor Liebermann realize their fantasies of genocide or mass expulsion, there will be either a two-state solution or a one state solution at some point in the future. The latter, of course, could mean the end of Israel as an exclusively Jewish state.

More coverage at BBC News and Al Jazeera English.

Conspiracy week: white people are Satanic Illuminati Neanderthals!

2011-10-18T08:04:00.000-07:00

Here's the all-time winning YouTube video title: "The Satanic Neanderthal Edomite Evolution"

This is one of those weirdo slideshows that is hell-bent on proving a point: in this case, that white people are Edomites, descended from Esau (Jacob's brother in the bible) who had light skin and red hair. Then you connect the dots and realize that the Edomites were Neanderthals! Since they had light skin and hair too, maybe even freckles, and all-non African people today seem probably to have some Neanderthal genes (that much is for reals anyway). The savage Neanderthal genes explain the evil and sadistic behavior of white people in general. Then we get into the Illuminati, Satan, and the NWO! This is so weird, it's totally worth watching.

This is Black Hebrew Israelite type thinking with extra racism and paranoia thrown in. Undercover Black Man unpacks it pretty well in this article. The formula is pretty familiar however - the white supremacist Christian Identity movement is also interested in the Jacob/Esau story, except that they see the Jews as the evil Edomites, and non-Jewish Europeans as the real Hebrews. Some white supremacist groups are also seizing on the Neanderthal gene findings to "prove" that "race" is real after all. On the other hand, maybe Bob Marley is the real Edomite. It's all so confusing.

These conspiracy theories are funny, you see the same elements repeating themselves over and over again, like there's only a certain number of weird ideas to go around. Take a dash of Illuminati, add some alien interbreeding with humans in antiquity, reference Jacob and Esau or some other Bible story, add a reference to a scientific study or excavation, and you're done! I should make a conspiracy generator.

Not to say there aren't originally freaky theories out there. This guy is my new favorite, he thinks that Silvio Berlusconi is suppressing telepathy and causing unnatural menstruation.

Conspiracy week: Akhenaten is president!

2011-10-17T12:46:00.000-07:00

I just decided this week is gonna be conspiracy week here at Archaeopop. Hold your hats.

Did you know that Barack Obama and his family are clones of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten and his family? If the picture above doesn't convince you... then you'll just have to watch the video. The Illuminati are involved, of course.

Oh yeah, and 50 Cent and Michael Jackson are clones too! and Prince Harry is the reincarnation of whoever's on the Shroud of Turin! Need more information? You should check out this book.

The book's blurb promises us some key info:

Who is this man we call the President? Will he cause a Constitutional crisis? What’s hidden within his name and his statements? Is he the coming Anti-Christ predicted by Nostradamus? Are we witnessing the rise of the Fourth Reich? Or are things much stranger than we thought?

I'll go with "much stranger than we thought".

EAT LIKE A CAVE MAN

2011-10-11T08:05:00.000-07:00

This article first appeared in PORK #3. PORK #4 is out now, get it here!

The Palaeo Diet is an archaeology role-playing game cleverly disguised as a health food fad. The idea is to eat only what was available to our Palaeolithic ancestors, before the invention of agriculture. That includes lots of meat, fish, fruit and vegetables, but no cheese, milk, bread, rice, pasta, potatoes, beer, wine, or whiskey. It’s the Atkins diet (remember that from the ‘90s? all meat, no carbs) with an archaeopop veneer, as interpreted by bearded tech workers in Brooklyn.

There’s some truth to it: until 10,000 years ago, people ate very little sugar and no refined carbohydrates. Palaeo fans argue that the real causes of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and other ‘diseases of civilization’ are the foods that were introduced in the Neolithic Revolution: processed grains, dairy products, and alcohol. The Palaeo diet means radically rethinking healthy eating: carbohydrates and sugar, not fat, is the enemy.

The diet, which has been featured in the New York Times (in the fashion section, naturally), Time Magazine, and even the Colbert Report, has spawned a tribe of entrepreneurs whose business is getting you in touch with your inner Neanderthal. The ‘Caveman Power Diet’ promises that by cutting out bread, fries, and beer, you will lose weight, increase your energy, detox your system, sharpen your mind, and get in touch with your inner self:

The Caveman Power Diet gets you tuned into your animal instincts, and as a result your senses will become sharper; like an animal in the wild who needs all his senses to survive.
When you are in tune with your animal instincts, you are in tune with your body's wants and needs. Throughout this diet you will notice yourself having more clarity of mind, and a deeper sense of knowing thyself.

The idea of recreating a pure ancient lifestyle is key to the appeal. Last year the NY Times profiled the trend, including French Palaeo guru Erwan Le Corre:

Mr. Le Corre, 38, who once made soap for a living, promotes what he calls “mouvement naturel” at exercise retreats in West Virginia and elsewhere. His workouts include scooting around the underbrush on all fours, leaping between boulders, playing catch with stones, and other activities at which he believes early man excelled. These are the “primal, essential skills that I believe everyone should have,” he said in an interview.

Another caveman trick involves donating blood frequently. The idea is that various hardships might have occasionally left ancient humans a pint short. Asked when he last gave blood, Andrew Sanocki said it had been three months. He and his brother looked at each other. “We’re due,” Andrew said.

Here's Le Corre in action. It's basically parkour in the jungle!

This is definitely a nice change from the office job and the McDonald's drive-through, but the archaeological theories behind the Palaeo diet are about a 50 years out of date. The Palaeolithic used to be taught as the age of ‘MAN THE HUNTER’: endless buffets of wooly mammoth steaks washed down with some wild berries and seeds, while you sit on bearskin rugs around the fire in your cave dwelling. As it turns out, archaeology suggests that animal meat was not a majority in most ancient diets. Men brag about hunting like they brag about anything, but in most cultures women made a greater nutritional contribution with their gathered nuts, grains, vegetables, fruits, and seeds. But the Palaeo diet comes out of folk archaeology, not real archaeology. “Caveman” and “Neanderthal” evoke raw, authentic manliness for a generation of overeducated cubicle serfs with neglected bodies.

But what about the idea that we ‘evolved’ for a Palaeo diet? I'm not so sure. Genes evolve quickly: most sedentary human populations (Europeans, Africans, and most Asians) gained genetic tolerance for lactose and alcohol within a few hundred generations, an eye-blink in evolutionary time. As desperate as we are for absolute truth since we kicked God to the curb, you won’t find it in our genes. They change quickly when they need to. If humans are ‘naturally designed’ to do anything, it’s to adapt to new environments. (This is why the current geological age – the Anthropocene – is named after us).

Which brings me to the next point: which palaeolithic diet are we talking about? Even today, there’s an incredible diversity of hunter-gatherer lifestyles around the world. Native people in the Arctic get 75% of their food from animal fat, but that’s a recent innovation too (the high arctic was only settled around 15,000 years ago). African hunter-gatherers get about 25% of their calories from animal products. And it’s simply not true that grains and starches played no role in Palaeolithic cultures. Aboriginal Australians made (and make) a carb-rich “bush bread”, and in my home state of California, acorns were a staple food in the period before contact. There is no singular ‘Palaeo diet’. The only rule is diversity, adaptation, and change.

As a role-playing game, the Palaeo diet seems like fun – you get to try new eating patterns (including lots of expensive, high quality meat and fish) while feeling superior to everyone down at the pub grubbing on fries. And running around on all fours grunting in the underbrush sounds pretty awesome too. But let’s keep it in perspective! The Palaeo diet is playtime for rich people in the global north. Feeding the world on mostly meat products is ecologically impossible.

Of course, if you're serious about the lifestyle, you gotta catch that fish like this (via Discovery):

There’s also a misanthropic primitivist agenda lurking in the corner. As Ray Audette (of NeanderThin.com) writes:

my definition of nature is the absence of technology. Technology-dependent foods would never be ingested by a human being in Nature. I determined, therefore, to eat only those foods that would be available to me if I were naked of all technology…

What a moron. Humans have always used technology – what else is a stone tool? – and our chimpanzee cousins do too. A human being without technology… is not a human being. It’s a meaningless concept, unless you read it as a theological statement: humans have fallen from the grace of our ancestors and been punished with obesity and disease. If we return to an upright lifestyle, we’ll be rewarded with health, happiness, and long life. It’s a pastiche of Original Sin, with pizza and beer in the place of the apple.

That said, I still find the Palaeo diet appealing. Underneath the bullshit there’s some real sense to it – eating nutrient- and protein-rich foods is good for your body, while sugar and white bread are not. A bit of perspective is in order, which is why I love Kurt Harris’s blog Archevore, which is full of interesting discussion of the Palaeo diet from a scientific perspective. Harris strikes a middle ground:

That we are eating some things we are clearly inadequately adapted to seems certain, but the idea that the dietary bright line is narrow and exists at the 10,000 year mark is a cartoon view not supported by the science. I believe most of the dietary damage is due to industrial processing amplifying the effect of things that have always been around and were never good for us in the first place, even as I do believe wheat and other grains to the exclusion of animal products has been an issue for 10,000 years.

Want more? There's lots of trainers and lifestyle gurus that will help you get in touch with your inner caveman for a modest fee:

Hunter-gatherer.com

Cavemanpower.com

Palaeodiet.com

Cavemanhomecompanion.com

Playing fetch in the Palaeolithic

2011-10-10T08:40:00.000-07:00

Today's mammoth NOMs brought to you by Discovery News:

The remains of three Paleolithic dogs, including one with a mammoth bone in its mouth, have been unearthed at Předmostí in the Czech Republic, according to a new Journal of Archaeological Science paper.
The remains indicate what life was like for these prehistoric dogs in this region, and how humans viewed canines. The dogs appear to have often sunk their teeth into meaty mammoth bones. These weren’t just mammoth in terms of size, but came from actual mammoths.
In the case of the dog found with the bone in its mouth, the researchers believe a human inserted it there after death.
"The thickness of the cortical bone shows that it is from a large mammal, like a rhinoceros, steppe bison or mammoth," lead author Mietje Germonpré told Discovery News. "At Předmostí, mammoth is the best represented animal, with remains from more than 1,000 individuals, so it is probable that the bone fragment is from a mammoth."

I call that burying Fido properly. These dogs had heads with a similar shape to the Siberian husky, but were larger and more muscular. That's a big dog! It's unusual to find such strong evidence of domestication at such an early date, but being an archaeological optimist, I'm more pleased than surprised. So many of the things that surround us have very deep roots, including throwing bones for your favorite furry critter.

Argh my eyes

2011-08-25T10:27:00.000-07:00

It's been a little quiet around here lately. I'm getting married next month, so I've been a bit distracted from things bloggy. Archaeopop will be back in full effect sometime in September.

In the meantime let me scar your retinas with this! (Daily Mirror, via Cracked).

Still dazed after being anaesthetised for three hours, a pedigree pet is hauled upright to show off its new tattoo. The controversial “body enhancement” was carried out on Mickey – a rare Canadian Hairless breed also known as a Sphynx cat. His female owner was said to be delighted with the Tutankhamun design inked on to his chest at a tattoo parlour.

She said: “I wanted something new and different for the times we live in.” But horrified animal rights campaigners last night slammed the sick fad in Moscow as barbaric – and fear it could catch on among wealthy pet owners in the West.

It's a Sphynx cat. Get it? Get it? Sphinx? Like the Egyptian thing? Yeah!

Gladiator graffiti from Ephesos

2011-08-02T00:51:00.000-07:00

Gladiator graffiti from Ephesos Terrace House 2. That's the retiarius with his spear and net on the right and the secutor with his shield and funny-looking helmet on the left. Apparently the secutor was supposed to look like a fish, with the retiarius as the fisherman. Kind of a sick metaphor for a bloodsport, but that was the Romans for you, they liked their cruelty dressed up in pastoral sentimentality.

Thanks to Sinan Ilhan for the behind-the-scenes tour that let me get this close!

Glass Dildos and Palaeolithic Bronzes: Why Private Collections Are Not Always a Good Idea

2011-07-31T12:56:00.000-07:00

Here's my first dispatch from Gaziantep, which I visited for 10 days this month. Gaziantep is an up-and-coming metropolis in southeast Turkey that's been making a lot of money off of industry (a lot of European firms make products for the Middle Eastern market in factories there), and also investing a lot of money in parks, museums, and restoration of historic buildings. Since our research was on exactly that, we stopped by some neat places like the new city museum, the Emine Gögüs Kitchen Museum, and the new Zeugma Mosaic Museum (all very cool).

We also stopped by the Medusa Glass Museum, which is a stunning private collection of ancient glass hosted in a charmingly restored Antep house.

It's hard to overstate the quality of the materials - the place is packed with Roman glass and jewelry. It's all completely unprovenienced, of course, and no doubt was all pulled from tombs by looters not too long ago. Not sure how they got the collection legalized.

Seriously, check it out. There's three floors of it: perfume bottles, wine jars, oil bottles, and water jars, all in ancient glass. The quantity and quality is stunning.

Despite the quality of the stuff on display, but there's a total lack of quality control on the labels, with hilarious results. This one is labeled 'ROMAN TIME SEXUAL OBJECT'.

Here's a close up, cause I know you want one.

Now look, I'm willing to call a dong a dong, as in the Swedish archaeo-dildo controversy last year. But these aren't phallus-shaped at all, and believe me, the Romans were not shy about realistic depictions of the phallus. (And, I gotta point out that this looks like a real uncomfortable dildo.) In fact, these look to me like the glass rods used as raw material in glassblowing, given a little 'extra imagination'.

Then we have this thing here, which is labeled 'BREAST PUMP, 2nd Century AD'. I have no idea what this particular vessel is for, but I'm pretty sure it's not a breast pump.

Here's another howler, though you have to be a nerd to laugh really hard: 'PALAEOLITHIC TIME AXE, 3500 BC'. It's made of METAL, dumbass! The Palaeolithic is the 'old stone age'! There was no metal stuff! Plus, it ended about 20,000 years ago in this area. Obviously whoever wrote this got confused with the Bronze Age, but even then 3500 BC is still way too early.

And that axe head doesn't even fit the mold! Who knows, it could be modern, or a fake. There's no way to know.

Though I commend the creators of this museum for having information panels, they apparently used Google translate or something for the English, because it's hilariously incomprehensible. In all, I was left both thrilled by the stuff on the shelf and horrified by the inanity of the people who own it.

Now, I'm not saying this to rag on Gaziantep or Turkey, but rather to point out that private collections are prone to this kind of thing. When I was a kid I remember going with my grandfather to a lot of private galleries and homes with large collections of cool, weird, sometimes ancient artifacts. Inevitably these things were put together by super-enthusiastic collectors who loved the objects but had no idea about their history, and so just made up their own interpretations.

Now there's lots of art market types out there, like say the Getty Foundation's new director, who would like to make it easier to buy and sell antiquities. They run under the assumption that private collectors are all smart, sophisticated, fancy people who are just as good stewards of the past as a public institution or nation-state - therefore we should jettisoning protections against looting and loosening the scrutiny of stolen antiquities. Now, I'm a critic of the mania for state ownership of cultural property too, but let's be real. For every collector who is a highly educated aesthete with impeccable knowledge of ancient history, there's an uninformed dumbasses who can't tell a dildo from a doorknob. With these people you get bad conservation conditions, poor information for visitors (if visitors are even allowed to see the stuff), and ample room for the kind of hilariously ignorant fantasy we see here.

As I've said before, it's not just a question of being pedantic about ancient history. The truth about the past is COOLER than bullshit, and it can mean something to people. Letting random people make up whatever they want about history might be a good business model (see the 'History' channel), but it's a disservice to the future.

Archaeopop in PORK: The Remix is Old Fashioned

2011-07-29T02:07:00.000-07:00

PORK #3 is out on your sophisticated newsstands all over the Best Coast (and select spots on the Beast Coast) of North America. This issue's ARCHAEOPOP column is about the 'Palaeo Diet', the latest diet trend where overeducated westerners are try to get in touch with their inner caveman. Read PORK #3 online here.

In the meantime, here's the ARCHAEOPOP column from Pork #2 (also online here)!

THIS REMIX IS OLD FASHIONED

Since people started filesharing on the internet the media has been parroting this hysteria about ‘stealing’ music. The copyright racketeers want clubs to pay royalties for every song played at an open mic night, and to charge employers for playing CDs at work. In Britain, a woman was sued for singing at the grocery store she worked at without paying royalties for her “performances”. In 2009, ASCAP decided that even ringtones on your phone were a “public performance”! The courts threw it out, because they’re not THAT stupid. And we’ve all heard stories about the battles between the record companies and the entire genres of hiphop and techno over sampling: those fights have been rolling since the 1980s.

Negativeland's ripping parody of U2 and radio personality Kasey Kasem was ruthlessly suppressed by U2 and SST Records in 1992. It was totally unavailable until rescued by YouTube.

Let me lay the archaeo-pop perspective on you, PORK readers. Politicians and record companies would like you to believe that this intellectual “property” trend – which coincidentally makes a lot of money for certain people – is some kind of manifestation of cosmic justice. But that’s bollocks. Copyright didn’t even apply to printed music in America before 1831, and no one thought of charging royalties for performance until the 1880s. Records didn’t hit the mass market until the 1890s. Before then, the idea of a musical performance as a commodity that could be bought and sold was literally unthinkable. It’s been with us barely more than a century.

One century?! Get serious. Pop music has been around as long as people: both us humans and our Neanderthal fuck buddies had flutes by 40-60,000 years ago. (Music could be even older: apes are known to beat rhythms on logs.) In a lot of preliterate traditions, music and stories were shared by travelling bards, whose fame relied on their ability to tell familiar stories in new ways. The stories behind the Odyssey and Iliad were 500 years old by the time they were written down. Before that, bards told the stories in hundreds of different ways, using poetic formulas to make the story familiar but different at the same time. The fame of the bard was in his musical ability – to tell the story well – but also in his ability to innovate based on familiar material: remixing old riffs into something fresh and new. No one thought that someone ‘owned’ the story of Achilles’ rage, or had the exclusive right to sing about how much Nausicäa wanted to get boned by Odysseus.

Music from the bone flute of Divje Babe, Slovenia. Neanderthals weren't ASCAP members, so you can play this flute without paying them.

As soon as we get written history, there’s mention of pop music: as the anecdote goes, a Chinese king once asked the sage Mencius, guiltily, if he was a bad guy for listening to nothing but pop music and ignoring the classics.

On another day, when Mencius was in audience with the King he said, “You told Zhuang Bao that you liked music. Is that really so?” The King blushed. “I’m not capable of appreciating the music of the ancient kings, I just like popular music.” “If Your Majesty loves music deeply, then the state of Chi is not far off! The music of today comes from the music of the past.”

This in the 4^th century BC! Already we get the famous tension between music we SHOULD like and the music we actually DO like. In the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman Empire, the music we DO like was transmitted from town to town by solo artists and groups who travelled a circuit of festivals and and auditoriums, often competing for prizes. These groups weren’t exactly like our pop bands: they could include dance, poetry, and music (in the Greek sense, all the arts were ‘music’, i.e. the things of the Muses). But more importantly, they played both pop music and the classics: what artists brought to the table was their performance skills and their ability to make something innovative out of familiar sounds and stories. They played new tunes, but no one told them they had to pay to play the old ones. Reworking a riff so that it got stuck in the heads of girls from Argentomagus to Alexandria: that was dominance.

Fast forward to our century. All of a sudden, music as a physical thing is irrelevant and impossible to control. Music companies that got bloated and smug during the 1970s heyday of album-oriented rock have been watching their sales go down the toilet and responding with typical baby-boomer petulance. "Computers are never going to get worse at copying things," as Cory Doctorow observed in a recent column in the Guardian. There is NO GOING BACK. The music companies have lost the war to control recordings, and within a generation most of humanity’s recording music will be available for free to everyone online. Cretins like Bono whine that no one will ever pick up a guitar again if he doesn’t get paid every time I whistle ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’. I’d be happy if he followed through and stopped making crappy albums, but the man is an idiot. Music is hardwired into people. The only interesting question is how it’s made and who can make a living at it. I see two implications from our modern trend. If recordings are free, the experience you pay for is the performance: groups with good stage presence have the edge. And, if you can’t control copyright, you can’t control remixing and music gets in touch with history again. Freed from the need to have recording contracts and obey copyright musicians can focus on being good performers and embedding themselves explicitly into the fabric of music that has gone before.

The digital age, then, has basically returned us to historical normality: the trends everyone was shocked by in the last couple decades (Sampling! Remixing! Filesharing!) return us to a situation that is more 400 BC than 1950 AD. Lady Gaga vs. Judas Priest? Bards respecting their elders by telling the old stories in new ways. Excellence is not: is it all new? but, does it make us happy? As Mencius says, if you enjoy pop music, you get good Chi. In 100 years – no, in 50 – this war to make the world’s music the private property of some cartels in London and Los Angeles is going to be seen for what it is, a sinister and repulsive attack on human culture.

Remixes and Mashups: The new normal, same as the old normal

LISTEN:
Wax Audio - I'm in love with Judas Priest (Lady Gaga vs. Judas Priest)
A Plus D – I Keep Forgettin To Regulate (Warren G. & Nate Dogg vs. Michael McDonald)

(courtesy recent sessions of the international mashup network Bootie)

WATCH: Jay-Z vs. Alphaville

Watch: Ghostface vs. Tears for Fears

I CAN HAZ POTSHERDS

2011-07-28T09:33:00.000-07:00

The internet was invented to transport cute cat pictures. We are not immune.

This little varmint lives at the Sagalassos excavation house in Ağlasun, Turkey - and has complete control of the entire project.

Music to dig by: Wild Yaks, 'Million Years Old'

2011-07-27T21:45:00.000-07:00

New archaeopop jam for your Thursday morning: Brooklyn's Wild Yaks ruminate about what it's like to be a million years old.

Wild Yaks, "Million Years Old" by The FADER

Fine American rock n' roll!

Mohamed Elshahed: The Case Against the Egyptian Museum

2011-07-21T13:07:00.000-07:00

From a brilliant article on the politics of the new Egyptian Museum by Mohamed Elshahed, published at Jadaliyya (one of the best Middle East blogs, period). It's an indictment of the security mindset, slavish devotion to foreign mass tourism, and contempt for ordinary people that has characterized Egypt's heritage establishment for the last generation. Long excerpt follows, read it all here:

The Egyptian state has been firmly in control of archaeology and of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities for several decades. Egypt’s first and only Minister of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, personifies the notion that Egyptians are in control of their ancient heritage, previously dominated by Europeans. This control has translated into security-oriented policies that claim to protect artifacts from theft and vandalism. In reality, this has meant protecting artifacts from Egyptian masses, while making them available to tourists. The government has not capitalized on Egypt’s material legacy as a cultural resource central to discourses on national identity and heritage. The Supreme Council of Antiquities’ main goals have been security not accessibility and mass tourism not culture.

My first visit to the Museum as an adult was in 2006, when a friend was visiting Cairo from the United States. As we approached the security checkpoint, a foreboding first encounter with a cultural institution, identification was requested of us. I had never been asked for identification to enter a museum anywhere else in the world, let alone the most important museum in my home country. While she had no problem entering, being American, I was questioned about my relationship with my friend and my reasons for entering the museum. As an Egyptian, who is not a tour guide, I was treated as an object of suspicion.
The real audience for Egypt's antiquities? (elshahedm on Flickr)

This visit made clear to me that the purpose of the Egyptian Museum is purely touristic. Museums have become fortified storehouses for badly labeled, disorganized artifacts meant to be consumed purely as objects with little historical significance besides their apparent old age. Tourists are meant to be the prime consumers of these objects, as they pay seventy to one hundred pounds to enter in contrast to Egyptians who are charged a few pounds.

Adding insult to injury, during the Tahrir protests of 9 March, the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities became known as salakhana: the torture chamber. Military police used the museum as a command center, due to its secure location, where they held, interrogated, and tortured protesters. The single most important museum in the country with Egypt’s most valuable artifacts was transformed into a place where Egyptians were beaten and humiliated.
...
There is no excuse for Cairo’s Museum of Egyptian Antiquities’ current condition with peeling paint and missing artifacts replaced by hand-written notes saying in Arabic “under restoration” or “in a traveling exhibition.” The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities is in need of serious remodeling and expansion. This surely will be expensive and will need a grand vision to transform and update this important institution of world heritage.
However, the recent drastic decision to move this urban institution out of the heart of the city and into the desert two kilometers from the Pyramids is a calamity and a disgrace. To signal the decision, in 2006 the red granite colossus of Ramses II that adorned central Cairo since 1955 was removed to a storage facility at the city’s edge, where it awaits a new home in the proposed Grand Egyptian Museum.

Public museums are fundamentally urban centers firmly tied to their metropolitan contexts. The mere visibility of Paris’ Louvre pyramid and inside-out Pompidou Center or New York’s Metropolitan Museum in their urbane settings is as important as the contents of these world-famous buildings. The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities is forever associated with its Tahrir Square location, especially after the well-photographed and documented uprising that took place at its doorstep. Moving the museum into a desert location outside the city center serves the museum’s current priorities of security and tourist exclusivity. Are these still the priorities of Egypt’s leading museum in light of the unfinished and ongoing uprising?

Sinatra plays the pyramids

2011-07-21T12:48:00.000-07:00

Frank Sinatra played the pyramids of Giza on September 27, 1979. This one goes out to Zahi Hawass:

&amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;gt;:Lot

Lots more videos from the concert here. Sadly no pyramid action, 'cause it's at night.

Egypt: is Hawass finally out?

2011-07-18T13:23:00.000-07:00

In Egypt, the Zahi Hawass saga keeps twisting and turning. After resigning, being subject to protests, and then returning to office, the overseer of the pyramids was fired yesterday as part of a cabinet reshuffle. The AP reports:

CAIRO (AP) — Egypt's antiquities minister, whose trademark Indiana Jones hat made him one the country's best known figures around the world, was fired Sunday after months of pressure from critics who attacked his credibility and accused him of having been too close to the regime of ousted President Hosni Mubarak.

Zahi Hawass, long chided as publicity loving and short on scientific knowledge, lost his job along with about a dozen other ministers in a Cabinet reshuffle meant to ease pressure from protesters seeking to purge remnants of Mubarak's regime.

"He was the Mubarak of antiquities," said Nora Shalaby, an activist and archaeologist. "He acted as if he owned Egypt's antiquities, and not that they belonged to the people of Egypt."

Hopefully this means the end of this sort of thing (via Vintagedept on Flickr)

Hawass was immediately replaced by Abdel Fattah Al-Banna as Antiquities Minister. Al-Banna had the merit of being a) not Zahi Hawass and b) frequently present during protests in Tahrir Square. He has met resistance, however, from within Egypt's antiquities establishment, as Al-Masry Al-Youm reports:

The Supreme Council of Antiquities secretariat rejected the appointment of Abdel Fattah al-Banna as antiquities minister. The appointment was part of the cabinet reshuffle ordered by Egypt's prime minister.

In a statement, the secretariat said Banna, a restoration specialist, does not specialize in archaeology and should not assume the ministry's responsibilities.
The statement called for dissolving the Antiquities Ministry and returning its responsibilities to the council, which it said would act as an independent, scientific institute run by specialists.

The new minister looks a bit nervous (Al-Masry Al-Youm)

The last line is the real point: the SCA doesn't appreciate losing its power to a political appointee, whoever he may be. They want the ministry dissolved and overall authority returned to 'specialists'.
I don't know enough about the internal politics of the SCA to have an opinion about whether this is a good idea, or not. I wish the new guy well, though my gut tells me he won't last long either. Hawass? Between cozying up to Mubarak and his own authoritarian personality, he set the stage for an undignified exit. More AP:

Just before news of his departure, Hawass was heckled near his office Sunday as he left on foot. Protesters tried to block his way, until he jumped into a taxi to get away from the melee, the taxi driver, Mohammed Abdu, said.

I doubt this is the last we'll hear of him, but perhaps his star has finally started to fall.

These day's I'm getting my Egyptology news from the Egyptologists for Egypt group on Facebook, which has an excellent news feed. Check it out!

Electro-funk, Bewigged

2011-07-11T00:53:00.000-07:00

Reader Sean submits the amazing nostalgio-futuristic styles of the Jonzun Crew, an electro-funk outfit ca. 1980-1983 that floats somewhere between Parliament and Kraftwerk.

Images stolen from hell of cool music blog by SALTYKA. As he says:

"These dudes totally rocked it VICTORIAN FUTURISTIC SPACEDUDE style. What more is there to say?? Seriously, these guys were on some whole other thing. They took part of their inspiration from the whole Parliament/Funkadelic spaceship thing, but no one could even come close to the one and only Jonzun Crew."

I have to dispute the 'Victorian' part. It's more like Louis CXXXII with the Three Musketeers in outer space. The band was Michael 'Spaceman' Jonzun, Maurice Starr, 'Gordo' Worthy, 'Stevo' Thorpe, and Princess Loria.

This photo sums up everything good about New York. Read more at SALTYKA, and definitely watch this Pack Jam video off of German television (of course). The costumes there are more sci-fi than archaeo-pop, but aren't they the same thing anyway? The past is what inspires us for the future.

Ruin Porn: Greek Orphanage, Büyükada

2011-07-06T01:38:00.000-07:00

Büyükada is one of the Prince's Islands, in the sea of Marmara just outside of Istanbul. The Büyükada Greek Orphanage (Büyükada Rum Yetimhanesi) is one of the world's largest wooden buildings, now a stunning semi-ruin. Built in the 1898-1899 by French-Turkish architect Alexandre Vallaury, it's the largest and one of the finest examples of Ottoman Beaux-Arts architecture. Vallaury, the head of the architecture department of the School of Fine Arts ("Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi", now Mimar Sinan University), also designed the Istanbul Archaeology Museum and was a friend of Osman Hamdi Bey.

They're serious with the dogs and guards, otherwise I would have been in here in a hot second. The orphanage was used as a government building in the 1940s, and was abandoned in the 1960s. After a lengthy court battle, title to the building was returned to the Greek Orthodox patriarchate last year.

I've had trouble finding interior photos, but this one from the Turkish Forest and Environment Ministry's website gives a taste of the incredible interior decor. There's vague rumors of restoration plans, but I have trouble even imagining the expense involved.

Greetings from Paestum

2011-06-15T13:34:00.000-07:00

Stopped by the ruins of Paestum on the Campanian coast yesterday. The temples are as fantastic as they say. Here's the Temple of Hera II (the sequel!) built around 450 BC. It manages to be rustic and Doric, and refined and Classical, at the same time. Props to John G. Pedley for teaching me about this site well enough that I remember something about it 10 years later.

Sorry for the tumbleweeds here at Archaeopop the last couple weeks, I've been decompressing from a long month in Istanbul and am taking a little vacation on the Campanian coast with Jenny. If it would stop raining, I might have a tan by now.

Sally Binford: archaeologist, sexual liberationist, old-school feminist

2011-06-15T13:24:00.000-07:00

Recently I wrote about the death of archaeology pioneer Lewis Binford. His third wife and longtime collaborator Sally Binford was a pioneering woman archaeologist in a time when most digs didn't allow women in the field, a pioneer of the New Archaeology along with Lew, and a more interesting and wild character than he was (which is saying something): a feminist and sexual liberationist avant la lettre.

Sex writer Susie Bright's blog excerpts a fabulous autobiographical interview (originally published here) from the early 1990s. Here's a few of the archaeological tidbits. Sally Binford started her PhD at the University of Chicago in 1956 (at the age of 32, two things unheard of for a woman at the time):

If ever my feminist conscience was forged it was during the experience of being a grad student in the Anthro Department at the University of Chicago. My interest turned rapidly to prehistory. The guy who was in charge of Old World archaeology was a famous but not very bright man. He was the kind who came on like gangbusters and implied that my Ph.D. was safe only if I hung around his office and made coffee for his distinguished guests and perhaps put out a little on the side.

Anthropology is a strange field because its most famous practitioner at that time was a woman, but Chicago’s department had an all-male faculty and still has. The anthropology graduate faculty at Chicago has never hired a woman. It’s just a scandal. I was not taken seriously because I was overage as well as female.

I split with my husband after the first year. He was convinced I was in school just to have affairs on the side. I was working so hard there was no way I would ever have had time to even carry on that way. It became crystal-clear to me while watching what went on: one thing a grad student should never do was fuck faculty. I got it on with a lot of my fellow students, but never with faculty. I chose as my faculty advisor the only guy who did not put out sexual vibes. He was very dedicated and serious.

After finishing her PhD on the prehistory of the western Sahara in 1962, and marrying Lewis Binford shortly thereafter. They moved to Santa Barbara in 1965:

Lew did not get tenure at Chicago which surprised no one. In 1965, the University of California at Santa Barbara was trying to change its ‘surfer school’ image into a real school. The University of California has a nepotism law where two people from the same family can’t get full-time jobs within the Cal system. Lew got the full-time job and I got a part-time job as a lecturer and we moved to Santa Barbara.

Santa Barbara was a weird experience for me. I had come from a super academic atmosphere in Chicago, out to this ‘surfer’ campus. I arrived with my hair back in a bun, dressed in my spike heels and knit suits. Little girls were running around in mini skirts and no bras. Everybody was stoned all the time. There were 85 kids in the first class I taught, an introductory course in human evolution. I realized about halfway through the course that one of the reasons I was having trouble in teaching those kids is that they were all stoned.

I changed my teaching technique and went into showing movies and slides like show and tell. I was in total culture shock. I think it is true now, but even truer in the Sixties: there is more cultural difference between the East and California than there is say between the East and England or France. Much more. This is really a strange place. They speak the same language and do the same things but, my God, it’s a whole other scene.

The chairman of the department and two of the faculty members there, who have since become significant names in the field, made the bargain where this would be the one anthropology department, besides Harvard, where no Jews were hired. Sometime that fall I heard this and made a great point of signing myself Sally Rosen Binford. I also made a point of speaking a few words of Yiddish at the faculty gatherings.

There's lots more like this, and plenty of juicy tidbits about her early life and the craziness Lew Binford inflicted on those around them. I understand there's some embargo on speaking ill of the recently dead, so I'll let Sally do the talking: click here and read the rest!

Besides this seminal text, some more of Sally's academic bibliography can be found here.

I have to agree with Sally - when I moved to the East from northern California, I felt like I had finally moved to America.

Music to dig by: three ruined covers

2011-06-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

Just three great records with ruins on the cover.

1. Sun Araw, 'Ancient Romans' (Sun Ark)

Stirring minimal tropical-psych (?!) out the LBC. Album out August through Drag City. Double LP on white vinyl! Many thanks to Patrick for turning me on to this one.

LISTEN: Sun Araw, 'Crete'

2. Xeno and Oaklander, 'Sentinelle' (Wierd Records)

This album was my jams last spring. The minimal synths perfectly capture the ascetic spirit of European Classicism.

WATCH: Xeno and Oaklander, 'Nuit', live at the Cowley Club, Brighton.

If you're in New York you can see X+O live at Public Assembly in Brooklyn on June 16, along with my former WCBN comrade Laurel Halo.

3. The Art Museums, 'Rough Frame' (Woodsist)

The Art Museums are a great San Francisco duo that play low-fi Bohemian pop. The cover obviously has archaeopop charm, but the whole album's great to listen to. I played them a lot on my show on KUSF last year.

LISTEN: The Art Museums, 'Sculpture Gardens'

A jug of beer, a glass of wine, and trowels

2011-05-24T12:45:00.000-07:00

One charming thing about Turkey is that so many alcoholic beverages are named after archaeological sites. About 90% of the beer sold in this country is Efes Pilsen, which is both refreshing and named after the ancient city of Ephesos. They also sponsor some archaeological work, for instance at the great Hellenistic city of Assos.

This sign is first thing you see when you pass the ticket gate: Assos ruins, brought to you by Efes Pilsen! Yeah. Some bright bulb in the Ministry of Culture and Tourism decided that all of Turkey's archaeological sites should have signs like this: an oversized rusty diamond with a notch. The design doesn't look good anywhere, I promise you, though this one with the multiple beer logos is especially bad.

It's a great site, though, with a dramatic acropolis, fantastic Hellenistic walls, and a super cool necropolis and a panoramic view of the Greek island of Lesbos. (Cue Lesbian jokes.)


The necropolis of Assos is right outside the city walls.

There's also a few archaeological digs (which shall remain nameless) that get free beer from Efes Pilsen as an 'in-kind donation'. I am told it is used for 'professional development'.

Then there's wine. There's lots of examples but it's been a real long day, so I'll give you one: the 'Kızıbel' wine from Likya vintners. It's named after the wonderful painted tomb discovered near Elmalı in Muğla provınce in 1969, and excavated by the late Machteld Mellink of Bryn Mawr College. The bottle reproduces the charioteer from the inner walls of the tomb, which demonstrates Greek influence in southwest Anatolia already in the 6th century BC. Honestly I have little memory of how this wine tastes. Kind of merlot-y I think. The Turkish wine industry is more or less where California was in the early 1980s - lots of ambition but lacking a lot of phenomenal product. They have labeling covered, however.

Like my memories of this wine, the wall paintings in the tomb itself are fragmentary but show a lively realism. The ancient Likyans were optimistic that their favorite things in daily life (chariots, drinking parties) would be with them after death, too, which led to a lot of cool paintings and carvings, most now lost. The southwest coast is a very beautiful region of the Turkey, I recommend a trip.

Six Degrees of Archaeopop: Wu-Tang to the Knights Templars

2011-05-18T11:26:00.000-07:00

Step 1. The Wu-Tang Clan. (onethirtybpm.com)

Let me introduce you to Six Degrees of Archaeopop. It’s exactly like ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’ or 'Hitler Hops' except with history and archaeology themes. Take a pop culture phenomenon on the one hand, a distant historical event on the other hand (I recommend 300+ years), and figure out how they connect in less than 6 steps.

Step 6. Jacques de Molay, the Templar leader, goes to the stake (Getty)

The first pairing that jumped to mind: the Wu-Tang Clan and The Knights Templar. Actually this one's pretty easy! If I may:

1) Most Wu-Tang Clan members are part of the
2) 5 Percent Nation, who are an offshoot of the
3) Nation of Islam. Wallace Fard Muhammad, the founder of the Nation, was involved with the
4) Moorish Science Temple, an esoteric offshoot of
5) Freemasonry. And Freemasonry was inspired by, if not directly founded by, the
6) Knights Templars.

4) Noble Drew Ali and the Moorish Science Temple of America (Wikimedia)

Wasn’t that fun? Maybe this will be a regular feature. I invite your submissions and challenges in the comments or at archaeopop@gmail.com.

Now, to address a philosophy-of-knowledge issue: is it “true” that the Wu-Tang and the Templars are connected?

In every way that matters, yes. The Wu-Tang Clan are as much descendants of the Templars as they are inheritors of Kung Fu traditions from China - actually, more so given their Western cultural origins.

In fact, all historical revivals involve a selection and manufacturing of the past. The Nazis wanted to find Germanic Aryan tribes in the archaeological record, so they decided what archaeological characteristics fit the bill, and then went looking for them. Biblical archaeologists find it hard to see anything that doesn’t fit with a bible story. Israeli archaeologists enjoy excavating the "city of David" under Palestinian neighborhoods of Jerusalem, for obvious reasons.

It's a different approach than archaeologists themselves take, but that's just fine with me. Popular culture is free: we can decide that we’re the reincarnation of Napoleon, or Seti I's mother, or the high priests of Atlantis, and live our lives as if that was true. I like having these characters wandering around. The challenge for archaeologists is not to eliminate fantasy, but to create versions of the past that are more accurate and just as appealing.

Togabombin'

2011-05-12T11:59:00.000-07:00


Martin Gee/Boston Globe

Just a cool picture, from this article about ancient graffiti.

Zizek: Why archaeologists are the best lovers

2011-05-10T14:51:00.000-07:00

Today's archaeopop moment is brought to you by philosopher Slavoj Zizek.

Wandering around a garbage dump in New York, Zizek holds forth on the ideology of ecology, and why we have to find beauty pollution and garbage if we really love humanity. He's not joking, and I completely agree with him.

I think that this notion of nature, nature as a harmonious, balanced, reproducing, almost living organism which is then disturbed, perturbed, deranged by human hubris, technological exploitation and so on, I think is a secular version of the story of the Fall. The answer should not be that 'there is no Fall, we are part of nature', but on the contrary that there is no nature. Nature is not a balanced totality that we then disturb. Nature is a series of unimaginable catastrophes. And we profit from them!

A lot of ecological thinking embraces the idea of nature as something perfect and external to humanity. As we've said before in this blog (here, here, and here), that's self-righteous idiocy that is harmful to people and biodiversity at the same time. On this planet, in this age (the anthropocene), ecosystems are a cultural phenomenon. Our garbage matters. It is nature. We have to own it, and learn to love it, as Zizek says:

To recreate, if not beauty, than an aesthetic dimension in things like this, in trash itself, that is the true love of the world. Because what is love? Love is not idealization. Every true lover knows that if you really love a woman or a man you don't idealize him or her. Love means that you accept a person with all its failures, stupidities, ugly points, nonetheless the person is an absolute for you, everything that makes life worth living. You see perfection in imperfection itself. and that's how we should learn to love the world. A true ecologist loves all this. [Points to huge pile of garbage.]

He's exactly right. Trash has a sensual quality: like sex, it can be harsh and garish or light and gentle. Compost in your backyard, or a toxic vortex that covers the sea. Excavating someone's trash, as archaeologists do, gives you a moment of intimacy with people long dead, and gives us the chance to judge them. Archaeologists are obligated to be interested in these moments of waste and discard, since that's what the archaeological record (and the "environment" itself) is. The challenge is to find beauty in the ruins, to love the flaws and ugly moments that we manifest as a species. If we don't, we lose the struggle for sustainability.

It's the new Archaeopop slogan: "give me ruins, middens, and can dumps, and I will show you true love."

Sun god flamingo eagle bowl eye.

2011-05-05T09:23:00.000-07:00

"Sun god flamingo eagle bowl eye" sounds like some tattoos I've seen, actually...

From Married to the Sea, via Cultural Property Law.

Research notes: Istanbul

2011-05-03T09:46:00.000-07:00

I'm in Turkey this month, doing research with some colleagues from Bologna on how cultural heritage here is organized, administered, and funded. I'll be blogging a little less than usual, but I'll share some reflections on our research as I'm able.

The vast excavation area at Yenikapı

One of our case studies is the excavations at Yenikapı, the hub station for the Marmaray metro that will connect the European and Asian sides of Istanbul under the Bosphorus. The Japanese-Turkish consortium building the subway thought that they had picked a clever spot outside of the archaeological zone of the ancient city - but as they excavated they found a Byzantine port with 32 well-preserved shipwrecks dating from the 5th-11th centuries! Many of them sunk with their cargos abord. This video from NatGeo is a good introduction (they don't allow embeds).

Look at these cool-ass shipwrecks!

Salvage excavations at the site are winding up after 5 years, and we're looking forward to learning more about the history of the project, which has been the largest urban archaeology project in Turkey's history. Funded by the construction subcontractors of the subway project, the archaeological work was supervised by the Istanbul Archaeology Museum with cooperation from Istanbul University, Texas A&M, and many other institutions.

Oh, and they found some 8,500 year old burials, extending the earliest known settlement of the city by a couple thousand years!

Salvage archaeology in an urban setting is pretty different from the Indiana Jones stereotype. It's more of an industrial operation, with huge tensions between construction companies (who live and die by deadlines) and archaeologists (who would much rather take their time and not think about money). What we're going to be doing is reconstructing the administration of the project: its organization, funding, history, controversies, and aftermath (what are they going to do with all those boats?!). It should be fun. I'll keep you posted.

PORK: Archaeopop in print

2011-04-27T06:59:00.000-07:00

The format of this blog notwithstanding, I love print magazines. So jumped at the invitation to do a regular Archaeopop column in PORK, the new lifestyle and fashion rag from GOBLINKO that's burning up the Pacific Northwest. Issue #2 is just out, with my article on how the remix is an old, old cultural form. I’ll republish it here eventually, but in the meantime get on the bandwagon and read it in PORK! You can get a paper copy in all these places or read it online here. The PORK blog is also a great source of weird and important cultural nuggets, check it out!

A Roman Shed in Berkshire

2011-04-23T12:08:00.000-07:00

Tony in Berkshire has turned his garden shed into a Roman Folly. It was named 'Shed of the Year' in 2007!

Once Tony got past the wife, he was able to give it appointments fit for an Emperor:

I remember admiring a ruined temple one year at the Chelsea Flower show in a garden-stone display. Following on from my interest in all things Roman, I was standing at the kitchen window one day some time later when I casually suggested to my wife that the shed might look better if it was converted to a Roman Temple. She was not amused! Three years passed during which time I produced a computer- simulated view of the garden with the proposed shed / Temple, and I continued to promote the idea at every opportunity. Then, on 23rd December 2004, I was at home when a parcel lorry arrived with my Christmas present, four (very big 2.2 metre) plastic/fibreglass Roman columns. I assumed this meant that I now had "Official Permission" to go ahead. Also featuring - Roman window bars / Amphora / Grape lights / Blue LED mood lighting / Alarm and CCTV / Roman cushions / Interior mural panels / Mosaic table / Two time zones (Britannia and Rome time). Future projects - statue of the Emperor.

Nice one Tony! See lots more pictures here. I got turned onto this amazing contest by Boing Boing's coverage of this American diner built in a Welsh shed.

RIP Lewis Binford

2011-04-23T11:56:00.000-07:00

Lewis Binford, one of the giants of 20th century archaeology, died earlier this month at the age of 79. He was among the leaders of the 1960s New (or 'Processual') Archaeology, which took the discipline from its culture-history roots into the thickets of scientific explanation. It's impossible to underestimate his impact on ethnoarchaeology, archaeological theory, and the study of the palaeolithic. He got his PhD at Michigan, where, as Wikipedia notes

he saw a sharp contrast between the "excitement" of the anthropology department's cultural anthropologists (which included Leslie White) and the "people in white coats counting their potsherds" in the Kelsey Museum.

As an alum of the Classical Archaeology PhD program based in the Kelsey I'm duly amused/outraged! (Though I think the potsherds were all counted by the time I got there.)

SMU

Obituaries in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, but the best I've seen is this one by Laurence Guy Straus (via John Hawks).

Music to dig by: Tragic Error, 'Tanzen'

2011-04-20T22:29:00.000-07:00

SEAN turned me on to this tight and super Archaeopop video. Sean sez:

New Beat was an underground Belgian dance music that peaked in 1988. It mixed EBM, Acid House, Hip House, Electro & Euro Disco into one style, with very martial-looking dance moves. Epitomized by acts like Silicon Dream, Hithouse & Plaza/Confetti.

Love it. This song has incredibly serious Belgian girls with frizzed-out hair and day-glo t-shirts doing their "martial-looking dance moves" in a gallery of Classical sculpture, while the singer guy does jerky crazy dances and fondles the statues. Best three minutes of my day, almost.

This video could make a great class game for Greek Art 101: spot the famous sculptures in this video! I see the Laocoon, how about you?!

Bert and Ernie in 'Caveman Days'

2011-04-19T02:34:00.000-07:00

My heroes 

Look both ways before you cross the street or you will get STOMPED BY A DINOSAUR!

300 Friends

2011-04-18T21:48:00.000-07:00

OMG I love my Facebook feed sometimes.

Zahi Hawass launches fashion line

2011-04-15T09:51:00.000-07:00

If archaeology is a brand, Zahi Hawass is a master marketer. Egypt's Minister of Antiquities Affairs has taken a page from Bono's book and launched a 'adventurous' fashion line named after... himself. Designed by Lora Flaugh of branding firm Art Zulu, ZAHI HAWASS will have a shop at Harrod's sometime later this year. The press release is hilarious:

ZAHI HAWASS is a novel fashion line not just for the traveling man, but the man who values self-discovery, historicism and adventure. Rich khakis, deep blues and soft, weathered leathers give off a look that hearkens back to Egypt’s golden age of discovery in the early 20th century. Natural dyes, vegetable dyes and organic cottons were thoroughly researched to come up with the most premium and environmentally friendly fabrics for the versatile shirting, shorts and pants that comprise the collection. Ample time was spent developing the hardware and finery to make it feel extraordinary.

The ZAHI HAWASS vision can only be fully realized in an environment that matches the grandeur and classicism of Egypt. Combined with an elegantly themed in-store shop at Harrods, ZAHI HAWASS clothing will promote a look that is both trendy and casual, conservative and cool. More than anything else, the proposed ZAHI HAWASS collection and shop will be a retail experience that evokes the beauty of Egypt through its décor, and invites consumers to pack their suitcases and journey to the exotic locale.

Trendy, casual, conservative AND cool?! Pimping orientalist nostalgia? I'm speechless, probably from laughing so hard. As blogger 3arabawy said:

I strongly recommend Zahi Hawass leave our antiquities alone, and stick to his “eponymous menswear line.”

Heritage Lists for the Internet Age?

2011-04-14T22:34:00.000-07:00

This week celebrated the 42nd anniversary of the first ARPANET message (which was 'the birth of the internet', depending on how you keep score). UCLA is planning to restore the room where it happened - 3420 Boelter Hall - to its 1969 vintage appearance and open the space to the public as the Kleinrock Internet Heritage Site and Archive. Leonard Kleinrock was the guy that pressed 'send' on that first message (though he himself is humble enough to acknowledge that the net has many fathers and mothers). It's a cool idea. Or is it? I'm not sure yet.

Anytime there's a big historical transformation, our culture has to pick which events to remember as milestone, and figure out how to turn it into 'heritage' (by which I mean the 'official selection' of historically important places and things). The internet generation saw nerd culture rise to dominate and transform our world, which poses some odd problems for making a list of 'heritage' that needs 'protection'.

First of all, nerd spaces look like crap! They're not monumental or even especially pretty. I mean, any third-rate European castle with absolutely no historical relevance looks way better than any of the places from where the nerds have unleashed a new civilization. To demonstrate, a tour of some potential 'heritage sites' for the digital age:

Steve Jobs' garage in Los Altos, California, where he and Wozniak built the Apple I in 1976:

Photo Cicorp

And the garage in Menlo Park, California, where Google was founded:

Here's Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook, surrounded by garbage and flipping the bird in his squalid Harvard dorm room:

Here's the cubicle at PayPal where YouTube got started after hours:

I want to puke just looking at these pictures. Ranch houses, dorm rooms, and cubicles: these are the paragons of American architectural mediocrity that launched a billion facebook stalkers, iphone obsessives, and cute kitten videos. But places are important, so I'm gonna calm the gag reflex and think about them. They're all modest, closed in, unremarkable, normal spaces. No surprises. Almost every American has been to one of these.

These 'heritage' places of the internet age say nothing, not power, not wealth, not authority. They were the nondescript vessels of something transformative, mute witnesses of events that their architectural surroundings were never intended to facilitate - events that their architects could not even have comprehended. Even the lamest, most irrelevant medieval castle in Europe has these places beat hands down for architectural drama.

But something different is going down here, too - the difference between the cubicle and the castle is that it's a moment of invention that's being fetishized, rather than an aesthetic system or social class. Most monuments on the World Heritage List were built to sustain these kind of ideas, in an effort to make power grabs seem like something permanent. Here's where the 'heritage' model gets kind of warped and twisted: the moments and places where something new is launched are usually pretty run down and uninspiring compared to the events that take place there. Finding a fit setting for the great stories of history is something else entirely.

UNESCO, in fact, has some ideas about preserving Internet Heritage, though a lot of it involved vapid comments like "digital heritage is likely to become more important and more widespread over time". Duh. But they're mostly talking about media, the portable stuff - not the monuments. When will the great centers of computer innovation get on the World Heritage List? Or is the strangeness of that question are an argument that the monument is dead as a cultural form?

Egypt: now taking complaints

2011-04-12T11:35:00.000-07:00

Al Ahram online reports that the Ministry of State for Antiquities Affairs - with Zahi Hawass back in charge - will now begin accepting complaints:

Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s minister of state for antiquities affairs [MSAA], said that the administration will look into and review all complaints and suggestions to develop the MSAA. Archaeologist, Magdi El-Ghandour, director of the archaeological documentation centre, will lead these efforts.

Hawass promised that each complaint will receive a reply within a week.

It's a new era in Egypt! I'm interested to see what in practice comes out of the reorganization of the Ministry (itself established only a few months before the Egyptian revolution).

Everglades tree islands: an archaeological biodiversity

2011-04-10T13:35:00.000-07:00

Florida's Everglades, a huge wetland in the southern part of the state, are dotted with small 'tree islands' that stand slightly above the wetlands, allowing trees and shrubs to grow. These islands provide a dry refuge for birds, alligators, and small mammals and are an integral part of the biodiversity found in the Everglades region.

Photo J. Kleen (USFWS)

But these 'tree islands' are actually... trash piles. (Or middens, as archaeologists say). Under the trees and layers of calcium deposit, archaeologists have found ancient trash pits made up of bones, broken pots, discarded tools, and other waste. About 5,000 years ago the Everglades were more a grassland than a wetland, and easier for people to live in. As the water table rose over the centuries, people used the land less but the trash piles they left provided dry places for trees and shrubs that were being forced out by the rising water. Read the article at New Scientist, or the press release from the American Geophysical Union.

Photo Rita Robinson

What super cool news. Archaeopop has explored nature, culture, and climate change a bit recently (see here and here). This news from Florida is more evidence that human activities that are good for biodiversity if they're done right - and that the distinction between nature and culture is an illusion that does us more harm than good. The real environmental question is not 'why are people so evil to the earth?' but 'what kind of human activities are good for biodiversity, and how do we structure our economies to make it happen?'

Historically Hardcore: Posters by Jenny Burrows and Matt Kapler

2011-04-06T18:01:00.000-07:00

THIS is what I'm talking about for history education: sex, violence and swearing. Start there and see if the kids are still bpred. Posters from a noncommercial project by Jenny Burrows (design) and Matt Kapler (copy). Burrows originally used the Smithsonian's logo, but the museum was upset about the cool, free advertising and demanded they change it. Wimps.

Genghis Khan and Teddy Roosevelt after the jump.

Hawass Back in the Saddle in Egypt

2011-03-31T12:09:00.000-07:00

The dead rise! (AFP)

As I suspected - and despite his resignation - we haven't seen the last of Zahi Hawass. AFP and the Middle East News Agency both reported his reappointment as Minister of Antiquities yesterday. The AFP story:

CAIRO — Egypt's chief archaeologist Zahi Hawass, the guardian of some of the world's most important treasures, was on Wednesday named minister of antiquities, the official MENA news agency reported. Hawass had served as head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities and later became minister of state under ousted president Hosni Mubarak. Nationwide protests that erupted on January 25 overthrew Mubarak and saw power handed over to a military council. Hawass's appointment is likely to anger pro-democracy activists who have been calling for the cabinet to purged of all old regime elements.

His nomination comes amid multiplying calls by the UN cultural agency to protect Egypt's heritage after reports of looting and theft during the unrest that followed the popular uprising. UNESCO said on Tuesday that it would write to Egyptian authorities to officially ask for more protection for the country's archaeological sites. Earlier this month, the UN body voiced growing concern for such sites which it said were threatened by pillaging. Robbers raided several warehouses around the country, including one in the Egyptian Museum, after the uprising gave way to looting and insecurity. An antiquities official said last week that 800 relics stolen by armed robbers from a warehouse east of Cairo were still missing.

Hawass' website has no announcement on this yet, so we'll have to wait for his explanation for more detail. I stick with my guess when he resigned - it was a negotiating move to improve his position within the ministry. For more, see Egyptology News' roundup of stories or CultureGrrrl's report.

Genghis Khan Week: Genghis Khan energy drink

2011-03-24T20:33:00.000-07:00

Which great conqueror in history gives you the most energy?! That's right!

Genghis Khaaaaaaaaan

Genghis Khan Week: Genghis smokes a Century

2011-03-23T10:49:00.000-07:00

"Hi, I'm Genghis Khan. In the 1100s we built the Mongolian Empire and changed the face of the world. It was fun! But I'm only doing this commercial to tell you of a real impressive century. This century. When your usual cigarette loses its charm, smoke a century."

One of many, many amusing historically-themed ads for Century 100s produced in the 1960s. Kudos to Youtube user Meatpies62.

Genghis Khan Week: Dschinghis Khan

2011-03-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

Let me introduce you to Germany's 1979 entry into the Eurovision song contest: Dschinghis Khan.

Music starts at 0:46. Some of the finest German historical disco ever produced! The song is basically about Genghis Khan's conquests, loves, horses, etc. Totally mesmerizing faux-Mongol outfits and disco dancing. Read this fantastic DK fan blog for translations of a ton of interviews and lifestyle pieces about the band. The video for 'Moscow' is pretty good too.

Dschinghis Khan was insanely popular, spawning cover versions in English, Estonian, Spanish, Finnish, and especially Japanese. Here's a recent cover by Japanese girl group Berryz Koubou ('Berry Workshop'):

I wish there was a reality where I could sit down with Genghis Khan and show him this video while drinking a Chinggis Beer.

Genghis Khan Week: Chinggis Beer!

2011-03-21T09:12:00.000-07:00

Archaeopop theme weeks continue as we check out pop culture versions of world-conqueror Genghis Khan. Beginning with this ad for Chinggis Beer from 1998.

Glorious and refreshing. Yes, it's in Mongolian. No, I don't understand the voiceover either. But I'm pretty sure that's supposed to be the Great Khan getting turned on to beer by a monk. (Indeed, beer is the most precious contribution of Christian monks to world civilization.)

According to their promo material, the company is a Swiss-Mongolian joint venture that brews according to the 1516 German beer purity law, the Reinheitsgebot. That would explain why the brewery has a very German-looking beer hall attached, which you can visit if you ever find yourself in Ulan Bator. How's that for globalization and history combined?!?! The Chinggis Beer website is in Mongolian but has a great trance-downtempo-throatsinging soundtrack, check it out.

This is not to be confused with the Genghis Khan Beer of Inner Mongolia (part of China), which "has miraculous health effects to the diseases of gastrointestinal, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular systems as well as ten more other diseases. So far it is the only natural health beer in China approved by the Ministry of Public Health of China and it is the first origination in the world." So healthy. (It also says "Guinness" at least twice on the label, whoa!)

Elginism: For or Against?

2011-03-20T11:00:00.000-07:00

From a 2001 print ad by TBWA\Athens highlighting the plight of the Parthenon Marbles. There seems to be no elginism.org any more, but you should definitely be reading elginism.com, a great source of news on repatriation struggles from all over the world. Lord Elgin was the man who ripped the Parthenon Marbles from the Parthenon and brought them back to Britain in 1801.

Via someone's Facebook feed (sorry, forgot who!)

Ancient Pastoral and Ecocriticism, Part II

2011-03-19T17:31:00.000-07:00

Guest blogger Ricardo Apostol of Case Western Reserve University send the second part of his essay on ancient pastoral poetry and modern environmentalism. Catch the first part here!

III You Don’t Win Friends with Salad

As the Simpsons have taught us, it doesn’t do any good to serve a wholesome vegetarian salad if it causes everyone to skip out for a pig roast. Aside from the untenable and arbitrary nature of the Romantic Nature Myth, pragmatic considerations make it clear that however leafy and green it might be, it is politically unpalatable on the international stage (and arguably even on the American political scene) and must be replaced. A post-environmental set of values might then be formed in response to the criticisms of the current environmental movement presented in the first part of this article.

You don't win friends with salad!

Instead of the Nature Myth as the lynchpin of the entire structure, we could recognize a diverse spectrum of landscapes with varying degrees of human presence as acceptable. If Nature no longer has to be pristine or exist in a vacuum, we could shift from a purely ecocentric ethics to the recognition of many valid ethical objects (humans, animals, plants) or even a primarily anthropocentric ethic that takes into account the fact that humans don’t exist in a vacuum any more than nature does. These changes in turn will help create a dialogue that can accommodate locally-based needs, both human and environmental. This makes environmentalism less of an elitist imposition of an inflexible agenda “from above” by wealthy developed nations or special interest groups.

Since ecocriticism is built on the framework of environmental ethics, a change in the political agenda would necessitate a change in the literary approach. A place is thus opened for texts that embody our new, more global values. Under this new canon, an good ecocritical text could show many kinds of landscapes and situations where humans interact successfully and sustainably with their environment to fulfill their needs. It would not shy away from showing the larger local frameworks within which these interactions are articulated, such as the economic and political contexts of characters' lives, ownership, and production. It could focus on, or at least be sympathetic to, the struggles of non-elite players in the environmental drama. And it would not offer up universalizing cookie-cutter solutions, but rather respect the many pragmatic approaches available, as it were, “on the ground.”

This last point is very important – we’re not talking about Soviet realist literature here. So what are we talking about? I thought you’d never ask…

IV Making Friends with Vergil

OK, call me self-indulgent; it’s obviously not only Vergil that meets these criteria, but he’s what I know best. Vergil’s Eclogues are exemplary ecocritical texts. His collection of 10 short poems offers vignettes of herdsmen, farmers, hikers, and other figures, mostly working people, against a varied background that includes everything from towns and farms to pristine mountain glades. There is no environmental metanarrative or agenda, besides the need to live in harmony with the environment, broadly conceived (including distant cities and political players). Are the characters “realistic” through and through? Of course not, there are literary conventions at play; but they are not allegories or caricatures, and they are usually placed in very concrete situations and surroundings, which is what really matters here. For instance, the first Eclogue deals with the politically-motivated dispossession of rural folk after a civil war, with a great deal of attention to the details of landscape and agrarian production. Everywhere you turn in these poems, you see that the fate of human beings and nature are intertwined, a notion that many traditional practitioners of ecocrit have dismissed as the “pathetic fallacy”; what’s truly pathetic is the belief that one element of the system can be (even conceptually) singled out.

Some shepherds chilling, from a late antique copy of the Eclogues.

As exciting as such readings might be for Vergil scholars, though, this piece would hardly pack much punch if that was all it came to; sure, I hope people make friends “with” good ol’, dead Vergil, but better to re-interpret our little “with”: that is, not to make Vergil a friend, but to make friends through Vergil (in the same sense as one hopes to make friends “with” salad).

Coming as they do from far outside mainstream theory, classical scholars can question the assumptions of academics who take it for granted that modern ideas are simply “the truth”, and not constructs with a particular intellectual pedigree and political spin. Being so close to the material, and so involved in a debate that takes its premises for granted, makes it hard to see these assumptions in historical context. Though classics tends to get lumped in with “Western Civ”, antiquity is actually quite a different cultural animal. Its material basis is also often far more akin to that of developing societies than modern Europe.

If you think that diverse perspectives are essential to maintaining healthy scholarly debate, then the research of classicists is essential. In particular, those who have taken seriously the warnings of cultural critics like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno about the repressive effects of the totalizing discourse of modernity will see the need for the kind of “reality check” that could be provided through the natural alliance between scholars of the pre-modern world and members of developing societies. Our little environmental reading is just one piece of evidence that not only can one make friends with Vergil (and, by implication, other classical authors), one can even hope to make friends with sweet, sweet benefits.

Donny George Youkhanna, 1950-2011

2011-03-16T08:01:00.000-07:00

Dr. Donny George Youkhanna, the former head of the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad, died from a heart attack in Toronto last Friday. He was 60. From the NY Times obituary:

Dr. George was director of research for the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage when United States troops and their allies invaded Iraq. He fought through blocked bridges, explosions and troops to report to the museum in the chaotic days afterward, finding he could not persuade American troops to protect it because no order had been issued to do so.

An estimated 15,000 artifacts were stolen, less than a tenth the initial guesses. Working with Col. Matthew Bogdanos of the Marines to investigate the thefts, they recovered half the stolen the artifacts, partly by granting looters amnesty.

Dr. George soon became head of the museum, then chairman of the antiquities board, replacing a cousin of Saddam Hussein. He slowly put the museum back together, rebuilding damaged walls, fixing the plumbing, installing guard houses and much else. He obtained aid from Italy to build a new Assyrian hall and started a conservation training program.

George's tireless work to recover artifacts and secure help for Iraq's heritage was heroic, and put his life in danger. He was an excavator and a scholar with a distinguished career and many publications on He left Iraq in 2006 after death threats against him and his family. He behaved admirably in abominable conditions, and did a lot to salvage the wholesale destruction of Iraq's heritage because of the hallucinatory narcissism of American neoconservatives. I met him briefly in 2005 - he was kind but looked very, very tired. I hope wherever he is he has found some rest.

His 2006 interview with Cindy Ho of Saving Antiquities for Everyone gives a sense of the man and his achievements:

What if the Commies and Muslims become mummies?!?!?!

2011-03-15T08:53:00.000-07:00

OMG what if that happened?!?!? Joe McCarthy was probably worried about this.

Cartoon by Mr. Fish. Via Truthdig.

Asterix and Obelix cause a Roman ruckus

2011-03-13T10:12:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I'm hanging out with our lovable Gaulish heroes, Asterix and Obelix.

What a ruckus. I learned more about Roman Gaul from these comix than from taking classes!

Ghost ships under San Francisco

2011-03-10T06:59:00.000-08:00

Being around archaeology and archaeologists makes you convinced that every city is numinous with subterranean mystery. It's given me an almost theological perspective on my everyday environments.

Archaeologists at work in the bowels of the city (SF Gate)

As if to prove my point, construction workers in my hometown, San Francisco, discovered the remains of two 19th century ships, buried under 14 feet (4 meters) of sand. They were building a new sewer line to serve Visitacion Valley when they found the two 45-foot (14-meter) scow schooners. These were flat-bottomed cargo boats with sails used to deliver materials up and down the city in the later 1800s, which became obsolete after the introduction of motor vehicles in the 1900s. The excavation was contracted to Past Forward, an archaeological consulting firm. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

When engineers working near Candlestick Park last March drilled deep into the ground for soil samples, they pulled up chunks of wood and figured it was an old pier.
They had no idea it was a century-old ship, let alone two.

But that became clear this week when the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission uncovered what maritime experts believe are a pair of scow schooners, 90-foot-long workhorse vessels that plied the bay shallows in the late 1800s to deliver hay, salt, bricks, pork, coal, lumber and other cargo. Buried under more than 14 feet of sand and fill dirt, the 45-foot-long hull sections came to light at the mouth of an enormous trench that will house a new overflow sewage pipe for the Visitacion Valley neighborhood.

"These were the flatbed trucks of San Francisco Bay from the late 19th and early 20th century," said Jim Delgado, director of maritime heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington, D.C. "They're largely forgotten now, but these scow schooners moved the goods that built the city and the Bay Area economy."

The Alma: Last surviving scow schooner on the bay (SF Gate

The boats will be recorded but not preserved: waterlogged wood is absurdly expensive to move and curate. It's too bad, since the boats are a last remnant of the weird marginal shoreline communities of southeast San Francisco in the late 1800s:

Before it was piled with fill dirt and paved over for development, the site held a small lagoon and spit that appeared and receded with the bay tides. Archaeologists theorize the bayfront spot became a popular ship graveyard around the turn of the century. Hundreds of vessels were run ashore, stripped of rope, sails and valuable metals, broken apart, burned and left to sink.

I've researched the area before: the shore around Candlestick point was dotted with Chinese shrimp fishing camps, slaughterhouses, shipbreaking yards, and run-down shacks with people doing god-knows-what. It was a kind of stinky-but-romantic isolation from the bustle of the city. For more, see Pastron and Delgado's article on the shipbreaking yards of Yerba Buena Cove.

And, I couldn't sign off without mentioning San Francisco's long history of underground ship discoveries, dating back to the 1870s. A whole Gold Rush fleet was abandoned on the waterfront, and absorbed into the growing land of the city to form an archipelago of buried ships. At least one of them was turned into a restaurant! They turn up every couple of years, most recently in 2005.

Hawass talks about his resignation

2011-03-09T11:49:00.000-08:00

Zahi Hawass, Egypt's former Minister of Antiquities and longtime head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, resigned on March 3. In an interview posted on his website, he gives two reasons why: the lack of police presence at archaeological sites and political opposition within the ministry. The first makes no sense to me; I suspect the second is quite accurate though: Zahi's enemies within the ministry have taken advantage of the revolutionary moment to try to force him out. His rhetoric about the student protests against him is Gaddafi-esque: my enemies were behind it! I'm still undecided if he was really forced out or left voluntarily in order to strengthen his hand in the long run.

I am leaving because of a variety of important reasons. The first reason is that, during the Revolution of January 25th, the Egyptian Army protected our heritage sites and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. However, in the last 10 days the army has left these posts because it has other tasks to do... That is why at the meeting of the Egyptian cabinet yesterday I had my speech prepared already and I said: “I cannot stay in Egypt and see antiquities being stolen when I cannot do anything to stop it!” This situation is not for me! I have always fought to return stolen artifacts to Egypt. I did fight Ahmed Ezz as well, the man in the Parliament, who was the most powerful man, because he wanted to allow antiquities to be sold in Egypt again.

The second reason is that there are two crooks in the Antiquities Department, who have accused me of stealing antiquities and doing other illegal things all of the time. Their files talk about this. A third person started saying similar things, a university professor who was the Antiquities Director for almost 6 years before me, who never accomplished anything in that time. As a corrupt man, he even gave his signed permission to a rich lady from another Arabic country to take manuscripts out of Egypt! These three people encouraged young Egyptians to protest against me personally, to shout outside my office that they needed jobs... Because of all of these things, I believe that if I stay in my position for another six months, I will never be able to protect the antiquities I love and I will never be able to work during this mess. All my life, I have been excavating, discovering, writing books and giving lectures all over the world. My work is responsible for bringing many tourists to Egypt, which helps our economy. But now I cannot do this! Therefore, I decided to resign.

Nefertiti Cigarettes

2011-03-09T06:55:00.000-08:00

A 1970 TV ad from Egypt for Nefertiti cigarettes, posted by dianamherrera on Youtube.
&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;I&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;

It's got cartoons AND stop motion AND a funky song AND pyramids. 'Nuff said.
(Via Heritage Key)

Ancient Pastoral and Ecocriticism

2011-03-07T12:43:00.000-08:00

Our guest blogger is Ricardo Apostol of Case Western Reserve University, with the first part of an essay on ancient pastoral poetry and modern environmentalism. He believes that Classics has important things to say to other disciplines (and much to learn from them, too!).

"There is nothing more natural than nature." Sounds straightforward, but it’s not. “Nature” is first and foremost a concept, and so there is nothing particularly “natural” about it. As a specialist in ancient pastoral literature, I’m hyper-aware of this fact, since the prevailing notion is that pastoral has about as much to do with “real nature” as Marie Antoinette’s country excursions did with real milkmaids and shepherds. Once you start to unravel the cultural constructs that underlie this dismissal, though, you can see that the “modern, scientific” discourse about nature has a role beyond marginalizing the pre-industrial ideas of antiquity. Its broad dismissive sweep shunts aside all traditional and alternative views of nature, including those of people in developing countries today. Paradoxically, this makes classical literature a “fellow traveler” in the contemporary struggle over the environment. All that from the study of classical pastoral, you ask? Or, in other words…

I What’s Pastoral Got to Do (Got to Do) with It?

Simone Martini, frontispiece to 1366 edition of Vergil

According to traditional ecocriticism, nothing. But I might be getting a little ahead of myself; first of all, a quick-and-dirty introduction to ecocriticism, also known as green criticism in the UK. Ecocriticism is to the ecological movement what feminist lit-crit and post-colonialist lit-crit are to their respective social movements, i.e. a literary branch concerned with a) investigating literature with an eye to uncovering the relevant themes, and b) advocating for texts in accord with the movement’s political values. Although these literary branches can sprout off in their own directions, they tend to at least share basic values, concerns, and goals with the political movements from which they sprang.

Ecocrit is no different, except that it’s even more self-conscious about this relationship; this is because ecocrit is a later development. Somebody woke up one day and noticed that most social movements of the 60’s had resulted in lit-crit branches, but that somehow the ecological movement (a very active part of the same Zeitgeist) had missed the boat; so they decided to make up that lack.

So what values did ecocriticism draw from the environmentalists of the 60’s and 70’s? It boils down to the exaltation of Nature as an end unto itself. Exemplary Ecocritical texts should foreground the natural environment, not simply use it as a framing device; should support the interests of pure Nature as opposed to human interests, and make humans accountable to Nature; they should also display a suitably enlightened understanding of Nature as a process, and not an eternally unchanging given. When you combine this set of values with the fact that most practitioners of ecocriticism reside in modern language departments (and tend to study modern/contemporary literature within them to boot), you end up with a dismissal of older styles of literature involving nature. The big one is, of course, what is described as “classical pastoral”, a category in which a recent introductory ecocrit text lumps all pastoral before the Romantic period, the more efficiently to dismiss it all en masse.

So, what’s classical pastoral got to do with it? Not much; or maybe it’s a poster child for environmentally unsophisticated thinking. Take your pick.

Watteau's Indifferent lover of nature

II Second-Hand Emotions

Now, as a Vergil scholar (quick summary: he was the ancient Roman poet who wrote the Aeneid, but also the Eclogues, probably the key text in the development of the pastoral tradition), this breaks my achy breaky little heart. Sure, I could go on and on about how the descriptions of “classical pastoral” in ecocrit and other modern sources are shallow and uninformed (and how could they not be, when they lump 2000 years of literature from all over Europe and the Mediterranean together as if they were the same thing?). But the real target, as usual, should be the underlying premises that ecocrit inherited from the American ecological movement of a particular time. This means that I’ve got allies in this argument. Tons of them, in fact.

Some folks are even talking about a “post-environmental movement.” This isn’t a right-wing thing; in fact, a big impetus for the challenge has to do with what many see as the inadequacy of the old movement to deal successfully with new environmental challenges as they must be dealt with, that is, on a global scale. So, yes, to a great extent this is about global warming, and how you might convince countries like the United States, China, Bolivia, etc. to all come to an agreement. Hint: It’s not by telling them that they owe it to Nature to exalt and respect Her for Her own sake.

So authentic... so natural

Major charges against the nationally-based environmental movements include: elitism; excessive ecocentrism; that they uncritically subscribe to a Romantic “Nature Myth”; and that, because their claims are ethical rather than pragmatic, they fail to respect local conditions when making policy recommendations. All of these are closely intertwined. You start by positing an abstract, pure entity, “Nature”, that is, by definition, not-human, not-touched, not-used; and then endow this entity with a kind of spiritual, quasi-living existence, and hence a set of basic rights. Never mind whether humans might be considered animals/part of nature, or whether “pristine” nature really can or does exist. You then center your movement on the rights of this entity, which should ethically and unconditionally override the rights of encroaching humans. This means no local exceptions, and a call to “shared” sacrifice, which is an easy and convenient position for you to maintain since, hey, you’re a (relatively) affluent member of a developed nation.

Stay tuned for our second installment, where we build an alternate set of values for ecocriticism, and show how developing societies ancient and contemporary make natural common cause against “developed” societies’ attempts to marginalize them through myths of modernity and progress. You can get in touch with Ricardo at ricardo.apostol (at) cwru.edu

Hawass "will not stay on" as Antiquities Head

2011-03-04T08:43:00.000-08:00

A pleading look from Zahi (NY Times)

With the resignation of the Shafiq government in Egypt and the appointment of professor and former Transport Minister Essam Sharaf as Prime Minister, Zahi Hawass has said he will leave his position as head of Egypt's antiquities authority, according to the New York Times:

In the interview, Mr. Hawass lashed out at his critics but said he was leaving his job because he could no longer protect Egypt’s antiquities. “Those people are insects, they are nothing, but what really bothered me is the situation that you read today on my Web site,” he said.

Egyptologists and cultural heritage experts said they did not know who would succeed Mr. Hawass, and one expert expressed concern that his departure would lead to more looting.

“I am terrified by the idea that this might be a sign to potential looters that now that last element of control is gone, and now we have a free hand to continue looting,” said Karl von Habsburg, the president of the Association of National Committees of the Blue Shield, a body that tries to protect cultural heritage in conflict zones.

I'm really not sure what Hawass' game is here. He doesn't seem like the type to meekly retire, and there is a big rhetorical difference between 'resign' and 'not stay on'. Al Jazeera reports that Hawass was facing opposition from within his own ministry:

Meanwhile on Friday, Antiquities Minister Zahi Hawass was quoted in Egyptian newspapers as saying he would not participate in the new government to be led by Sharaf.
Hawass has been a cabinet minister since January 31 when Mubarak named a new government led by Shafiq.

Hawass said he was no longer able to carry out his duties amid what he called a campaign against him by officials at his ministry.

Sounds like the student protests might have been the tip of the iceberg of opposition to Hawass among the archaeological establishment.

Despite the drama of this headline, I would be very, very surprised if this is the end of Zahi Hawass. Among the Egyptology-oriented Facebook posse there is surprise + skepticism. Is this some kind of shock tactic he's using to make a point? I suspect we'll find out soon. Stay tuned.

Tut Week: Sesame Street's 'Telly Tut'

2011-03-04T08:11:00.000-08:00

Big Triangle lover, more than any other!
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We wrap up Tut week with a homage to Steve Martin's King Tu t skit. Superb art direction.

If you like this sort of thing, there's also a Chipmunks version and a Ron Paul version (!?)

Henj

2011-03-04T05:19:00.001-08:00

This lifted from the past-o-philes at Retronaut. (c) QI / Faber, written by Justin Pollard.

Tut Week: Steve Martin, 'King Tut'

2011-03-03T15:35:00.000-08:00

"He gave his life for tourism"

Kossan.se

First aired on Saturday Night Live. Steve Martin spoofs the Tutankhamun mania gripping the USA in 1978: one of the first true international blockbuster exhibits, 'The Treasures of Tutankhamun' attracted more than 8 million visitors in the US. Between 1976 and 1979 the exhibit was shown at the Field Museum (Chicago), the New Orleans Museum of Art, LACMA, the Seattle Art Museum, the Met (New York), and the de Young (San Francisco) in 1978 to sold-out crowds. My parents took me to the exhibit at the de Young in late 1978 or early 1979, but I was too young to remember it. But I was fascinated by the poster they brought home, showing the boy king's golden sarcophagus, which kicked around our house through the 1980s.

Archaeo-protest: Gaddafi supporters at Sabratha

2011-03-03T15:17:00.000-08:00

Let's face it. Ruins make great stage sets, whether you're protesting against education reform, global warming, or for the continuation of Muammar Ghaddafi's glorious fashion sense. This "protest" by paid supporters is at the Roman theater in Sabratha, as Martin Fletcher reports for The Australian:

On its 1800-year-old stage, crazed young men stomped and chanted. "Allah and Libya need Father Muammar," they roared. "Muammar Gaddafi, we will protect you."

It was a sight to make any archeologists blanch and, worse, it was put on to convince Western journalists that support for Libya's embattled leader is much greater than it is.

The previous night, we had asked our government minders if we could visit Sabratha because we had heard of fighting there. After a long delay, we set off late on Monday morning, local time. Predictably, we were greeted in the main square of the town by several hundred finger-jabbing men waving green flags, holding aloft portraits of Colonel Gaddafi and shouting their adoration for the benefit of the cameras.

The article goes on to note that many of these men despise Gaddafi, but aren't above taking his money to put on a show for the foreign press.

Tut Week: Toute Uncommon Tattoos

2011-03-02T05:29:00.000-08:00

Tut bombing continues today with two pieces of skin art. This back tattoo is SERIOUS.

http://www.fashionclothingtoday.com/

This one's a little milder, but still expresses COMMITMENT to... what exactly?

Heritage OK in Libya... So Far

2011-03-01T10:20:00.000-08:00

Leptis Magna

So far, Libya's rich heritage (especially its famous Roman sites) seem to be unscathed by the ongoing revolution. (Though with the near information blackout, I'm not ready to be too optimistic). Marie-Louise Gumuchan of reports for Reuters:

While communication with Libya difficult sketchy amid the uprising against Gaddafi's four decade rule, two archaeologists who frequently work in the country said cultural artefacts appeared to have been spared the ravages suffered during Egypt's recent revolt.

"So far there are no records whatsoever of any areas from the cultural heritage of Libya being affected by the troubles," said Hafed Walda, a Libyan who advises the country's department of antiquities and once led an excavation at Leptis Magna. "We're always worried about this in terms of chaos. It's going in the right direction so far but I'm not sure it will carry on like this. I don't know," he said from his London base.

The theater at Sabratha

Walda and his colleague Paul Bennett say that local militia, soldiers, and antiquities department staff are protecting sites. The article has an interesting reflection on nationalism and archaeology in Libya:

Libya's archaeological work began in earnest in the 1930s when fascist Italy, the colonial power, hoped to demonstrate the Roman presence and prove Italy's historical dominance of the Mediterranean. That work also led to the discovery of oil. Archaeology took a back seat after Gaddafi's 1969 revolution although some foreign archaeologists continued work, making finds even during the low point of relations with the West.

"It's been neglected by the regime for quite a while. At one time it was seen as not Libyan heritage as such but imperialist," Walda said. The Gaddafi government had sought to improve resources and infrastructure in recent years, he added, amid efforts to develop tourism. "I'm hoping attitudes will change -- we want the department of antiquity to be seen as part of the Libyan identity and the future of Libya," Walda said.

Tut Week: Breakdancing with King Boogaloo Tut

2011-03-01T03:52:00.000-08:00

This week I'm bombing you with Tut. Today, let's meet 'Tutting', a funk dance style inspired by Egyptian Hieroglyphs (and a cousin of popping). Check out this 1979 video with Mark Benson AKA King Boogaloo Tut and the dance crew Street Scape:

Those gold knickers... man I wish I could pull that off. The fruity white guy in suspenders is amazing too.
To add a layer of crazy, King Boogaloo Tut says he was inspired by this Bugs Bunny cartoon:

This clip is from 'A Hare Grows in Manhattan' (1947). The cigarette billboard scene was censored in later broadcasts as too un-PC! This scene, of course, has nothing to do with Tutankhamun: but it's a nice illustration of how 'King Tut' functions as a catchall for anything with an Egyptian theme.

Regardless, the sequence Egyptomania > Bugs Bunny > Breakdancing is some serious historical alchemy.

Maybe you want to learn tutting at home? This site will help you. Also check out these crazy videos of 1980s tutting from Soviet Russia: Dontesk 1988 and Palanga Festival 1988.

Virtual Panoramas of Herculaneum

2011-02-28T07:00:00.000-08:00

The Herculaneum Conservation Project has a great gallery of panoramas and walkthroughs of the ancient city. Ever wanted to walk around inside the city's sewers? Or maybe Insula Orientalis I? Here's an app for that.


A bit of the Herculaneum sewer system, walk on through

Insula Orientalis I

I like this project a lot and the site works beautifully. But I'm struck by how much this QTVR technology (which has been in use by archaeologists for over 10 years now) seems old-fashioned compared to Google street view. The Quicktime and flash images are nice, but they take a while to load and the distortion as you move around in an image makes my eyes hurt. Street view has a more intuitive, less static interface. (Compare, for instance, the Street View of Pompeii.) I have no idea how much that technology costs compared to QTVR, which can be implemented with just a camera, tripod, and laptop. But it does make me think about the dilemmas of choosing a technology for a project like this, knowing that it will probably be superseded in just a few years by something new.

Tut Week: Batman vs. King Tut

2011-02-28T04:51:00.000-08:00

I've got lots of Tut for you this week, starting off with Batman!

The original Tut was, shall we say, somewhat more svelte.

The Adam West Batman series of the late 1960s featured a recurring villain named "King Tut", a batty archaeology professor who turned into an Egyptological supervillain whenever he got bonked on the head. Deliciously campy. Here's "King Tut's Coup", which aired March 8, 1967 on ABC.
Part One:

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Parts two and three after the jump.

Part Two:

Part Three:

Thailand and Cambodia War over World Heritage Site

2011-02-27T13:00:00.000-08:00

For two weeks this month Thai and Cambodian troops repeatedly clashed with tanks, infantry and aircraft over a disputed border territory that includes the UNESCO-listed Preah Vihear temple complex.

Preah Vihear (Wikimedia)

The spectacular temple complex is one of the architectural masterworks of the medieval Khmer Empire, but was awarded to Cambodia in 1962 by the International Court of Justice. Thailand never accepted the judgment, and considered 2008 Cambodia's nomination of Preah Vihear to the World Heritage List as a provocation. The temple complex was inscribed by UNESCO in July 2008 in a dizzying climate of mass demonstrations, rival Buddhist prayer marches, and military build-ups along the border. High tension ahd sporadic fighting has followed, including firefights in October 2008, January and April 2010, and again this month. The video, from February 7, is terrifying. Apparently some temple buildings have been hit by artillery.

Unpacking this story is a headache for the non-expert (me): the wikipedia article has much more detail on the conflict. The temple itself was constructed in the 11th and 12th centuries and was the spiritual heart of the Khmer Empire, which had its capital at the much more famous city of Angkor, which was the world's largest preindustrial city. The empire was majority Hindu in this period, though neither Cambodia or Thailand has a large Hindu population today. The temple complex has had a gory recent history: it was the site of the last stand of the Republican forces resisting the Khmer Rouge in 1975, and a massacre of up to 10,000 Cambodian refugees by the Thai army in 1979 after their forcible repatriation from camps in Thailand. Thai troops forced over 40,000 refugees over the steep cliffs of the temple onto the minefields below.

Preah Vihear certainly has 'outstanding universal value' in the sense of the World Heritage List. But I find it strange that the World Heritage Committee was so tone deaf to the modern tragedies and current nationalist tension when they chose to inscribe the site. So far from serving as a tool for increasing international understanding, inscription provided a flashpoint for nationalist feelings. Bazookas and high-caliber bullets are bad for ancient architecture.

This raises an important questions for UNESCO: surely there are sites whose preservation and appreciation would be advanced by being kept off of official lists of cultural heritage? And now that the fighting has started, why is the site not on the list of heritage in danger? Situations like this are ones which the UN system has few tools with which to cope.

Bert and Ernie Explore a Pyramid

2011-02-24T03:00:00.000-08:00

Classic Sesame Street.

All these years later, I still totally relate to Ernie.

Tunisian dictator looted Carthage, too

2011-02-23T01:16:00.000-08:00

Nice pool deco

The family of ousted Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was apparently using Tunisia's museums and archaeological sites as their private collection, reports Marisa Katz in The Art Newspaper:

Many of the artefacts and antiquities confiscated by the Ben Alis originally came from the Bardo Museum, which has the world's largest collection of Roman mosaics. According to Samir Aounallah, the Tunisian museums committee president, Leila Ben Ali used museum artefacts, including mosaics and frescoes, to decorate the family's villas.

Archaeological sites have also been affected. “I have accredited sources that have said sites in Cap Bon had objects taken from them by the Ben Ali clan,” said Aounallah. Although the director was not sure whether these pieces had been returned to their rightful owners, he did point out that a significant amount of “objects found in the villas of the Ben Ali clan have now been put back in their rightful collections.”

According to Julien Anfruns, the director general of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), several international archaeologists and curators are currently in Tunisia surveying potential damage to objects as well as drawing up revised inventories for the country's museums. Despite the violence, which according to a United Nations mission saw 219 people killed and 510 injured, museums have for the most part remained well protected. “People there are very understanding of the importance of the preservation of these museums,” said Anfruns.

Ben Ali shared the goodies with friends, too. As Richard Miles notes in the Guardian, the dictator's developer buddies were given sweet real estate deals on top of archaeological areas:

I started excavating in Carthage in the mid-1990s and it was clear that [Tunisian archaeologist Abdelmajid] Ennabli and those who had strived for decades to protect Carthage were fighting a losing battle against a cabal of influential businessmen and politicians who all enjoyed presidential patronage. For these people Carthage was nothing more than a piece of prestigious real estate ripe for "economic development". The legislation that protected the ancient city was a mere inconvenience that could be ignored and brushed aside.

As an archaeologist one understands that the needs of the present have to be balanced against the preservation of the past, but the regular flouting of the planning laws by members of Ben Ali's family had little to do with solving Tunisia's severe housing shortage. One only has to look at the brochure for the "Residences of Carthage", a luxury housing development illegally built on protected land to see that. One can marvel at the chutzpah of the developers' boast of its proximity to Roman ruins when there is little doubt that they were probably built on top of Roman ruins.

The Residences de Carthage are indeed super swanky. Take a look here, then go and sign the petition to restore protections to the site of Sidi bou Said/Carthage.

UPDATE: PhDiva has raked up articles from the French press, suggesting that the Ben Ali/Trabelsi clan may have been involved in antiquities smuggling as well. Read it here.

Egypt: Young Archaeologists Protest Hawass [UPDATED]

2011-02-15T09:40:00.000-08:00

Ben Curtis - Associated Press

The January 25 movement is having all kinds of ripples, including inside Egypt's archaeology establishment. Yesterday 150 archaeologists, many young graduates, protested at the Supreme Council of Antiquities, demanding that Zahi Hawass resign. (Hawass was elevated to Minister of Heritage about 10 days ago, during the height of the protests.) Christopher Torchia of the Associated Press reports:

The archaeologists' protest was also deeply personal, with protesters saying Hawass was a "showman" and publicity hound with little regard for thousands of archaeology students who have been unable to find work in their field.

"He doesn't care about us," said 22-year-old Gamal el-Hanafy, who graduated from Cairo University in 2009 and carried his school certificates in a folder. "He just cares about propaganda."
...
The graduates said the antiquities ministry had offered them three-month contracts at 450 Egyptian pounds ($75) a month, hardly enough to survive. They noted that Egypt's tourism industry is a major foreign currency earner, and yet it was unclear how exactly the government was spending the income.

A foreign tourist spends up to 160 Egyptian pounds ($27) to visit the pyramids of Giza and descend into a tomb there, said 25-year-old Said Hamid. Multiply that, he said, by the thousands who used to visit daily until upheaval drove away foreign visitors and plunged the lucrative industry into crisis. "Where is the money?" said Hamid, a 2007 graduate who works in a travel agency but specialized in restoration of artifacts as a student.

Unlike lawyers or doctors, who have private options, archaeologists in Egypt mostly rely on the government for jobs. Protesters also complained that less-qualified people secured posts in the antiquities office through "wasta," which translates roughly as connections or influence.

$75 a month! That's an insult even in Egypt. The kids are right to be galled, given the ticket revenues the country receives from its archaeology. In many monument-rich countries the money sucked out of tourists at heritage sites disappears into the government somewhere, with no relationship between visitor numbers and funding for research or conservation.

Khalil Hamra - Associated Press

Even more of a problem is the number of university graduates in relation to available jobs. Egypt has a 25% rate of university attendance, the highest in the nation's history, and comparable to Europe and the United States. Although the country has a 9.4% unemployment rate, it's 25% for people under 30, who are 87% of the unemployed. The gap between expectation and reality for university grads is bad all over, but there is a special starkness in poor countries where the safety net is thinner. The social explosion spreading across the Arab world is fueled by this mass of young, educated and frustrated people.

It's great to hear these young archaeologists speaking out (Hawass' reputation as a totalitarian media whore seems well-deserved) but never form within Egypt. Let's hope the new order makes room for better funding and career opportunities for the next generation of archaeologists and conservators.

UPDATE (February 23): Nevine Al-Aref at Al-Ahram Online reports that Hawass has met with the protesters and outlined hisplan to create more jobs in the heritage sector:

During the meeting, which Ahram Online attended, the students made it clear that their protests were only held because there had been a lack of information about how the ministry, formerly known as the Supreme Council of Antiquities, was trying to address the lack of jobs available for newly-qualified archaeologists and restorers.
Achraf El-Achmawi, a legal consultant at the ministry, said that the new appointments would be made according to a schedule starting in March.
The first phase of this plan will provide jobs for 900 archaeologists and restorers, who will be given paid training within the ministry for a period of five months. The second phase, he continued, will follow the completion of the first one and will provide the same paid training for 500 people followed by an identical third phase.

The promises sound a bit vague to me given the unstable situation, but let's hope Hawass can make it happen.

Richard Pryor: Egypt, 1909

2011-02-15T07:23:00.000-08:00

In an ancient tomb, Richard Pryor discovers humanity's secrets... and his colleagues can't take it.

First aired on the Richard Pryor Show on September 20, 1977

Love Among the Ruins

2011-02-14T01:35:00.000-08:00

Happy Valentine's Day from Archaeopop and Robert Browning.

'Love Among the Ruins' (1852, first published in Men and Women, 1855) Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles,
Miles and miles
On the solitary pastures where our sheep
Half-asleep
Tinkle homeward thro' the twilight, stray or stop
As they crop--
Was the site once of a city great and gay,
(So they say)
Of our country's very capital, its prince
Ages since
Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far
Peace or war. 
Now the country does not even boast a tree,
As you see,
To distinguish slopes of verdure, certain rills
From the hills
Intersect and give a name to, (else they run
Into one)
Where the domed and daring palace shot its spires
Up like fires
O'er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall
Bounding all
Made of marble, men might march on nor be prest
Twelve abreast.

And such plenty and perfection, see, of grass
Never was!
Such a carpet as, this summer-time, o'er-spreads
And embeds
Every vestige of the city, guessed alone,
Stock or stone--
Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe
Long ago;
Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame
Struck them tame;
And that glory and that shame alike, the gold
Bought and sold.

Now--the single little turret that remains
On the plains,
By the caper overrooted, by the gourd
Overscored,
While the patching houseleek's head of blossom winks
Through the chinks--
Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time
Sprang sublime,
And a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced
As they raced,
And the monarch and his minions and his dames
Viewed the games.

And I know, while thus the quiet-coloured eve
Smiles to leave
To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece
In such peace,
And the slopes and rills in undistinguished grey
Melt away--
That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair
Waits me there
In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul
For the goal,
When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb
Till I come.

But he looked upon the city, every side,
Far and wide,
All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades'
Colonnades,
All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,--and then
All the men!
When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,
Either hand
On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace
Of my face,
Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech
Each on each.

In one year they sent a million fighters forth
South and North,
And they built their gods a brazen pillar high
As the sky
Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force--
Gold, of course.
O heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth's returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best.

Music to Dig By: Pink Floyd plays Pompeii

2011-02-13T04:59:00.000-08:00

In October 1971, Pink Floyd recorded six songs in the amphitheater of Pompeii, without an audience. The film 'Live At Pompeii' was released in 1972 (and a director's cut in 2003).

Super epic and purely theatrical at the same time. The lack of an audience symbolizes what happened with progressive rock: the 18-minute jam became the end in itself, without the need to hold a live audience. 'Album-oriented rock' is meant to listen to at home, alone, and stoned, so you don't mind the fact that the song never ends.

Still sounds rad though. Here's 'Echoes', Part Two:

Mubarak: That's a Wrap

2011-02-12T13:42:00.000-08:00

Hahahahahahaha

(Via Boing Boing/Glynnis MacNicol)

UFO Phil Wants to Build a Pyramid on Pike's Peak

2011-02-11T05:55:00.001-08:00

I have to admit, Photoshop makes this idea seem almost cool.

'UFO Phil' is a comedian and writer of terrible songs about UFOs. He's been implanted with a "telepathy chip" that allows him to communicate with "Zaxon" and "Rogness", a couple of aliens from somewhere or other. Lately he's been eating out on an unlikely plan: building a replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza on top of Pike's Peak in Colorado (14,112'/4,302m). As AOL News reports, The pyramid will function as an UFO docking station. Denver's KMGH TV 7 is there with hard-hitting coverage:

Besides serving as landing stations, the pyramid will also generate free energy:

Hill alleges that the ancient Egyptian pyramids -- designed by extraterrestrials, of course -- were massive stone power stations. Through his ongoing otherworldly contacts, he's been singled out and gifted with secret blueprints and schematics. These plans, of alien design, of course, reveal how the pyramids can generate enough hydrogen gas to power everything on Earth.

Apparently one alien ship brings sand, and the other brings hydrochloric acid, and they mix it in the pyramid, and it makes hydrogen, then the spaceships take it "all over the galaxy". Phil explains it to a reporter at the Colorado Springs Gazette (free energy technique at 1:52):

Dude is pretty annoying, but has some funny jokes. Building the pyramid will create jobs, since it takes so many men to lug the stones up to the top of the peak. "I can't pay them much, but I understand that was how it was done originally anyway." Priceless.

The gift shop and restaurant will be moved to a deck on the side of the pyramid.

Phil obviously came up with this pyramid thing as a media stunt to sell some songs on iTunes and turn himself into a meme. But hey, he seems to have managed it all right. In case you're not sick of this dweeb yet, he's got a facebook page, too.

Three ages of denim

2011-02-09T10:03:00.000-08:00

This month Gallery Didier Aaron in New York (didieraaron.com, via Boing Boing and NYT Magazine) is showing a newly-discovered fragment of an archaeology of daily life - an anonymous 17th century painter known as 'the Master of the Blue Jeans'. His paintings show scenes of everyday life in Italy: a barbershop, a woman sewing, a family begging, a poor child. In each one, we see a familiar blue fabric in a most unfamiliar setting.

Galerie Didier Aaron

The exhibition of seven works by this previously unknown painter was organized by Gerlinde Gruber of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and runs in New York until February 18th. She was the one who attributed these paintings to a single artist - previously they had been attributed to a variety of other masters.

Denim is so deeply ingrained into the fabric of everyday life today (excuse the pun), that its history has been obscured. I hadn't known until today, for instance, that blue denim-like fabrics have been in use since the 14th century in Europe. The name comes from 'serge de Nîmes': it was a type of serge, or twill, made in the French city of Nimes. It was a tough material for poor people. 'Blue jeans' as a name for denim trousers seems to come from 'bleu de Genes', or 'Genoa blue', since the trousers were adopted as workwear by Genoa's navy (according to wikipedia, anyhow).

The paintings make it obvious how totally we've forgotten the early history of the fabric that rules our lives. Putting 17th century characters in denim is weird and provocative - the kind of thing you'd expect from an art student's master's thesis. Look at this kid in his thrashed, too-big denim coat. He's ruddy, a little vacant, a little fearful maybe. He looks beaten down by life, and he's probably only nine. It's radically dissonant from everything we associate with a jean jacket.

I put this dissonance down to the power of the American ideal of denim. The fabric always had totally different connotations there. Since blue jeans became the iconic look of the California gold rush, they've been associated with the frontier, with its miners and cowboys. Blue jeans were the dress of free men and adventurers - the jeans might be ragged but they say 'hard work' and 'self-sufficiency' rather than 'grinding poverty'. The paintings in the Master of the Blue Jeans exhibit not only show denim fabric, but associate it with the ragged, hunger-stalked life of the urban masses of Europe: lives of subjection to which America formed a symbolic counterpoint. They present an almost total contrast to the cowboy image.

Look at these miners: hard-working frontiersmen, not sad-eyed beggars (The Fashionary)

In the 1980s we started the third age of denim: thanks to the Hollywood-industrial complex the fabric of working men, greasers, and hippies has become a massive, globalized business that dresses billions. For the first time, we no longer pretend that denim is workwear, or supposed to be cheap. Try finding a decent pair of jeans for under $60 (I recommend 511s)! In a lot of places, wearing jeans is a mark that you've emerged from developing country gloom and joined the global society: check out, for instance, Levi's new China-focused branding and marketing efforts. Rather than signaling poverty, donning denim is now a marker of its opposite. An object lesson in the mutability of material culture, and a good reminder for the archaeologist that the meaning of objects is never fixed.

Look, they're wearing denim. But are they European beggars, or gold miners? I'm confused.

Some extra links:
More denim history is here.
Fawning yet nonetheless interesting microhistories of many luxury denim brands at Denimblog.
See the 100-year old pair of Levi's discovered in the Nevada desert.

Tracking the Looting in Egypt

2011-02-02T09:21:00.000-08:00

A decapitated mummy in the Egyptian Museum (National Geographic)

If you can spare an eye from Al Jazeera's live feed from Cairo, I want to recommend two sites tracking what we know about looting of museums and sites since the protests began in Egypt last week:

Kate Phizackerley's (her real name!) Egyptological Looting Database covers sites around the country
Egyptologist Margaret Maitland's Eloquent Peasant, which has a good link, video, and photo roundup updated today.

I'm glad these sites are out there: given the mix of bland optimism (Zahi Hawass says everything's just fine) and alarmism ("UCLA Egypt Professor: Museum Looting, Mummy Beheading is a Huge Loss for World Heritage") it's hard to know what exactly is going on. Obviously, with the national police AWOL for a few days and the army otherwise distracted, this is a great window of opportunity for looters.

Standing guard (National Geographic).

In the fuss about the attack on the Egyptian Museum (which seems to have been orchestrated by the police for propaganda value), I hadn't heard about the thefts from less-known depots and sites (Qantara, the Coptic Museum in Cairo, Memphis, Herakleopolis Magna, Saqqara, Giza), though some of them are rumors as yet without any hard data. Let's hope that Zahi is right, and everything remains under lock and key. And props to all of the demonstrators who formed that human chain in front of the Egyptian Museum.

Nat Geo has a good article on how bloggers and ordinary people are pitching in to protect museums and recover stolen artifacts, and a good summary of the museum attack (dated Sunday), including this video:

De-moralizing climate change: archaeology and the terraforming of earth

2011-01-29T06:49:00.000-08:00

This month three major studies on historical climate change have hit the press. They all seem like great pieces of research and could help us rethink our twisted, overly moralistic approaches to dealing with the global climate change that is now in progress.

The most widely circulated was the work of a German-Swiss-Austrian-American team, who created a record of Europe’s summer climates for the last 2,500 years from tree-ring data. The database itself is a major accomplishment: they assembled over 9,000 samples to build the longest and most comprehensive dendrochrological record to date. (The process is fascinating - since Europe has no 2,500-year old trees, you have to find overlaps between rings in many different samples.)

Sampling a tree (Dendrodan)

The research, reported in Science Daily and Science, suggests that Europe’s climate was warm and stable in the period of the high Roman Empire (0-250 CE), and colder and changeable during the later Roman Empire and the Migration period (250-600 CE). Intuitively, this makes sense: running a stable empire is easier when your basic source of revenue (in the Roman case, agriculture) stays more or less the same from year to year, especially if you have to import huge amounts of grain to feed enormous cities like Rome, Alexandria, and Ephesus. While the authors themselves warn us about drawing cause-and-effect conclusions, newspapers were above such subtlety. The Daily Mail, for instance, asks “Was climate change responsible for the rise and fall of the Roman Empire?”, with the media's typical enthusiasm for finding simplistic, mechanical explanations for human events.

Model of a Roman grain ship (right). These babies made the Empire go 'round (Hotz Artworks)

The other two publications help us understand how complicated the story actually is. Researchers from Lausanne have created a climate model of the last 8,000 years that suggests that humans have been modifying the earth’s climate for at least that long, beginning with deforestation connected to the introduction of farming and the Neolithic revolution. The data show

a first major boom in carbon emissions already 2000 years before our era, corresponding to the expansion of civilizations in China and around the mediterranean.

Deforestation reduces the absorption of carbon in the atmosphere, burning wood adds it, and farming releases yet more stored in the soil - thus a big bump in atmospheric CO2, even without petroleum. It’s not entirely a one-way street, though: a significant decrease in global emissions began in the late 16^th century, leading to a colder period in the 1700s and 1800s. Jed Kaplan, one of the researchers, speculates that this cold snap was connected to the destruction of Native populations of eastern North America by disease (at least 80% of the indigenous population of the Americas died between 1492 and 1650), leading to a swift reforestation of large areas of the continent and a reduction of atmospheric CO2. The sophisticated agricultural cultures of eastern North America used land a lot more intensively, and cleared more forest, than we learned about in school – something to think about the next time you have a fit of romantic yearning for a pure, ‘sustainable’, 'indigenous' lifestyle.

So what we see here is a more complicated relationship: people affected climate, and climate affected people, often in unpredictable ways. If Kaplan is right, you could say that for a minute, smallpox played a major role in regulating atmospheric CO2. It’s a depressing but accurate point: mass death reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Which brings me to the last of the three studies, reported with one of the most disgusting headlines I’ve ever read:

“Was Genghis Khan history’s greenest conqueror? The Mongol invasions scrubbed nearly 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere, according to surprising new research”

Aside from the science, such unbelievably idiotic rhetoric is why a lot of people hate environmentalists (though this ‘Mother Nature Network’ outfit, funded by Coca-Cola, General Electric, Coors, and Georgia-Pacific, seems like a disinformation operation to me). Genghis Khan and his predecessors destroyed a number of civilizations and killed (after raping and torturing) something like 40,000,000 people. Hulagu Khan’s gory destruction of Baghdad in 1258 was the worst thing to happen there until the recent American invasion.

Hulagu takes Baghdad (Wikimedia)

Of course, killing all those people means massive reforestation for a couple centuries, which takes a huge amount of carbon out of the atmosphere. Unfortunately the environmentalists’ tendency to treat carbon dioxide as an immoral substance lends a kind of triumphal air to discussion of genocide.

To be fair, the research itself (by scholars from the Carnegie Institution and the Max Planck Institute) seems sound and makes the important point, along with the other two studies above, that people’s actions affect the environment just as much as the environment affects us. It’s a complex relationship that can’t be reduced to simple platitudes like ‘climate change caused the fall of the Roman Empire’.

Understanding this dynamic is important. The debate about climate change has been immature and moralistic in a really counterproductive way. “The environment” is presented as a monolithic, passive thing that corrupt humans are “destroying” with their evil actions. This view flows directly from Christian mythology about original sin (the corrupt nature of humanity) and the Fall from Eden.

These myths have a deep emotional resonance for people of European-Christian cultural backgrounds but are a stupid – and misanthropist - way to approach climate change. If people are evil and reducing carbon dioxide is good, then one starts to flirt with genocide as a ‘moral solution’ to our ‘climate problem’. And indeed, some strains of Deep Ecology and ecological anarchist philosophy make exactly this point. Primitivist anarchists, like John Zerzan even go so far as to imply that language and symbolic thought are the origin of human “crimes against nature”, with the implication that the only way to “save the earth” is for us all to die, or stop being human. Despite the obvious self-hatred and borderline insanity contained in these ideas, they are extremely influential on the way people think about the environment in Western countries today.

John Zerzan's utopia: back to caveman grunts (image by SEAN)

Good archaeological and ecological research have an important role to play in countering this stupidity, and (if I may be so bold), redeeming humanity. The research above shows that as long as there have been humans, we have influenced the Earth’s climate and ecosystem. Human history has been one big terraforming project, and no ecosystem on the planet has been unaffected by human activities. In fact, many landscapes we revere as ‘pristine’ are actually the product of human interventions. Even that darling of conservationists, the Amazonian rainforest, may be anthropogenic: huge areas of human-created soils left by much larger pre-Columbian populations nourish the primary forests we seek to preserve today. Let that sink in for a second: your biodiversity hotspot is an ecosystem that was created in concert with humans.

Terra Preta, Brazil (Philip Coppens)
This story of human omnipresence in ancient ecosystems can be told about many places. I myself remember hiking up to a remote pass in the John Muir Wilderness – a zone legally off-limits to most human activities – and finding a giant scatter of flaked obsidian, remnants of a trading zone where people from the eastern side of the mountains came to trade good-quality stone for goods from the western side. That isolated, rugged place, marked off in our contemporary rhetoric of nature as ‘holy’, ‘untouched’, and ‘pristine’, had been a lively summer trading center some hundreds of years before. For me, it made it more beautiful to know that people had been there before, that the place had functioned as part of a social system as well as an ecosystem.

The fact is, we have coevolved with our home planet. It’s time to get over the idea that there is any ‘nature’ separate from ‘culture’. Archaeological evidence shows that humans are an integral part of Earth’s ecosystem and have been for a long time - and we will continue to be until we go extinct. The research also shows that stable climates make it easier to create stable and prosperous human societies. The question then becomes not ‘how do we stop hurting the earth’, but ‘how do we manage the climate for stability’? If we stop treating carbon dioxide like a new age Satan – invisible, omnipresent, fed by our sins – we improve the prospects for making progress on the real threat of climate instability. It's not a question of "saving the earth" (the earth would do just fine without humans) but of saving ourselves.

World Heritage List now includes inequality

2011-01-26T14:56:00.000-08:00

The Onion brings us the latest news from UNESCO:

PARIS—At a press conference Tuesday, the World Heritage Committee officially recognized the Gap Between Rich and Poor as the "Eighth Wonder of the World," describing the global wealth divide as the "most colossal and enduring of mankind's creations."

"Of all the epic structures the human race has devised, none is more staggering or imposing than the Gap Between Rich and Poor," committee chairman Henri Jean-Baptiste said. "It is a tremendous, millennia-old expanse that fills us with both wonder and humility."

The wealth gap, compared to some monuments (The Onion)
"And thanks to careful maintenance through the ages, this massive relic survives intact, instilling in each new generation a sense of awe," Jean- Baptiste added.

The vast chasm of wealth, which stretches across most of the inhabited world, attracts millions of stunned observers each year, many of whom have found its immensity too overwhelming even to contemplate. By far the largest man-made structure on Earth, it is readily visible from locations as far-flung as Eastern Europe, China, Africa, and Brazil, as well as all 50 U.S. states.

At first I was going to make a joke about how the wealth gap could be part of the Intangible Heritage list, which includes "traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors". Among which inequality is certainly one.

But although neoliberalism and postmodern urbanism have tried their best to make class differences literally intangible by making poverty invisible, the inability to see the wealth gap is a selective blindness, shared only by the rich. From the archaeological point of view, the unequal distribution of wealth in the 21st century will leave very tangible material traces, especially in the development contrasts between the global south and the global north. The wealth gap is indeed a 'structure' in the sense that it organizes people's ability to consume material things, where they can go, even the chemistry of their bodies. Archaeologists who find skeletons from our era will be able to infer class from the chemicals in our bones. A monument more visible (but hopefully not more permanent) than the great structures of the past.

Archaeopop is now on Twitter

2011-01-24T02:16:00.000-08:00

As you can see on the right hand side of the blog over there, Archaeopop now has a Twitter stream: @archaeopop. I'll be sharing things I think are interesting/funny/awesome but don't have the time or inclination to blog on in detail. Follow along!

p.s. I'm stoked that the archaeopop stream will go straight to the Library of Congress. Immortality!!!!!!!!

A third archaic human population, and yes - we bonked them

2011-01-23T03:00:00.000-08:00

The Denisova cave, Siberia (nsc.ru)

In the wake of recent news that a lot of us carry around Neanderthal genes, there's new evidence that a third species of modern human used to roam Eurasia. A couple small bones found in Russia's Denisova cave have mitochondrial DNA sequences that diverged from Neanderthals 640,000 years ago. Comparison to modern humans shows that Denisova people left a genetic legacy in the Melanesian people of Papua New Guinea - suggesting that they may have been a widespread population.

Where does that leave us? The big picture of recent decades—that modern humans evolved in Africa and spread from there, displacing all other populations—is still largely accurate. But the details are looking much more complex than they were just last year. Those other populations are suddenly seeming a lot more diverse, and they didn't go away without contributing a bit to the genetic diversity of the modern human population (Ars Technica).

That leaves us a recent family tree that looks something like this:

(Via Sciblogs)

The moral of the story? Sex. Modern humans got it on with Neanderthals and whatever other random types of humans they ran into on all those Palaeolithic wanderings across the steppes. Can we finally sweep the last remnants of racialist archaeology out the door now?!

Much more detailed analysis and updates at Discovery's The Loom blog.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams: a 3D documentary on Chauvet Cave by Werner Herzog

2011-01-22T03:00:00.000-08:00

The Chauvet-Pont d'Arc Cave in France is one of humanity's oldest art galleries. Over 1,000 feet underground, the cave has hundreds of complex drawings of animals, monsters, and people from between 26,000 and 32,000 years ago - well into the Upper Palaeolithic.

Werner Herzog just finished a 3D film documenting the cave, and I'm wetting my pants with excitement. Check out the trailer:

3D is a brilliant choice for a documentary like this, for real. It even converted Herzog!

For Herzog, 3-D was the perfect tool to capture the drawings, since after all, the cave that held the drawings was akin to a modern-day theater or gallery where primitive people could view, by torchlight, this mysterious new form of art. "Once you see the cave with your own eyes, you realize it had to be filmed in 3-D," Herzog says. "I've never used the process in the 58 films I made before and I have no plans to do it ever again, but it was important to capture the intentions of the painters. Once you saw the crazy niches and bulges and rock pendants in the walls, it was obvious it had to be in 3-D."

Since the cave is not open to the public, this is an especially great service for all of us that would give an arm to get in there and see things like this:

The Chauvet website has reflections from the very limited number of people allowed to visit. Australian researcher George Chaloupka:

It is not surprising that every visitor to the Chauvet cave first comments on its dramatic setting and the great masterpieces of art within it. Although stylistically similar to Lascaux and other Magdalenian sites, the art of the Chauvet cave stands apart from others. Chauvet's complex compositions are executed over prepared rock surfaces, where pictorial depth is achieved through shading and the overlapping of subjects. The depicted animal species are drawn in firm, unfaltering lines, the charcoal having been worked into flat tints or skilled relief that provide a sense of depth.

Looking at the pride of lions streaking nominally across the wall, I wondered what Pablo Picasso, that old shaman of an artist, could now add to his comment about the art of Lascaux when visiting the cave soon after its discovery. "We have discovered nothing", he said about modern art and artists, for the artists of the Lascaux and now those of the Chauvet cave were magicians of aesthetic creativity.

Herzog himself has been obsessed with cave art since he was a boy, apparently:

As it turns out, when Nelson approached Herzog about doing the film, he was preaching to the converted. As a boy in Germany, Herzog had been mesmerized by a book about cave paintings that he saw in a store window. Practically penniless, he got a job as a tennis ball boy to earn enough money to buy the book. "I'd sneak into the store every week to make sure no one had bought it," he explained. "After six months, I had enough money to pay for it. The deep amazement it inspired in me is with me to this day. I remember a shudder of awe possessing me as I opened its pages."

I'm glad we get to share the awesome.

Boy George Repatriates Looted Icon to Cyprus

2011-01-21T08:30:00.001-08:00

The Greek Bishop of Brussels, and Boy George. Loltastic combination (BBC).

When Boy George learned his juicy 18th century icon of Christ had been looted from a church in Cyprus, he did the right thing, as the AP reported yesterday:

Boy George agreed to return the 18th century icon he bought from a London art dealer in 1985 after being presented with proof of its true origin, the church said in a statement posted on its Web site.
Boy George, who said he was unaware of the icon's history when he bought it, personally handed the icon over to Bishop Porfyrios in London on Tuesday. In return, the bishop gave him a modern icon of Christ as a token of gratitude and "with the wish that others soon follow his example."
The leader of the Cyprus church, Archbishop Chrysostomos II, lauded the singer for doing the right thing.
"The moment he heard that the icon was stolen, I think that he did right to return it to the Church of Cyprus to which it belongs," the archbishop said. "We thank him and if he ever comes to Cyprus, we will certainly welcome him."
The church statement said Boy George expressed hope that the icon would soon be returned to the church of Saint Charalambos in the village of Neo Chorio Kythreas from where it was taken. The icon is now in Brussels and will return to the island later.

Good for George. The photo of this odd couple on either side of Jesus is fantastic!

Kythreas is in northern (Turkish) Cyprus, northeast of Nicosia. Since the 1974 military coup, Turkish invasion and civil war, the northern (Turkish) part of the island has seen systematic looting of its heritage, especially of Christian religious icons and frescos. Though even the Greek Cypriot government acknowledges that looting is problem on the whole island, the northern Cypriots should be ashamed that they've done such a poor job of protecting the Christian heritage of the region.

Boy George, of course, should also be ashamed of himself for buying looted art. London is one of the world's major centers for the trafficking of stolen art and antiquities, and even in 1985 there was enough information available for the savvy buyer to understand that most antiquities on the market were illicit. Nowadays, anyone who buys such a thing is simply colluding in the theft.

Music to dig by: Delia Darbyshire, 'Tutankhamun's Egypt'

2011-01-17T23:59:00.000-08:00

This spooky electronic number evokes the trumpeters of the Middle Kingdom.

Delia Darbyshire, 'Tutankhamun's Egypt'

Delia sets the mood with a sample of the 1939 BBC recording of one of Tutankhamun's trumpets being played, and then delves into her own take on the sound of the time. Great stuff. The great website dedicated to Delia notes that they're not quite sure how this recording came to be, but that it's probably from 1971.

Delia Darbyshire (1937-2001) was an electronic music pioneer, longtime staff of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and acquaintance or collaborator of artists including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pink Floyd, Brian Jones, Ringo Starr and Harry Nilsson. She's most famous for her recording of the original Dr. Who theme! If you're an electronic music fan like I am you should check out the work of the Radiophonic Workshop and the Delia Darbyshire tribute site: super coolness.

I had never heard about Tutankhamun's trumpets. (There were two, one silver and one bronze.) Apparently a British Army trumpeter named Tappern was recruited to play the silver one for a 1939 BBC recording, fitted with a modern mouthpiece. The trumpet immediately split and had to be patched, but Tappern got at least a minute of sound out of it. The bronze trumpet was played in 1939 and 1941 and survived a bit better. Here's the 1939 recording:

Pretty rad if you ask me, though the idea of the thing shattering makes me wince. Strangely, the links to this story take you deep into dead webpages from the mid-1990s, so I couldn't really verify these details. This short documentary tells the story in full if you're craving more:

Rice Krispie Stonehenge

2011-01-17T08:27:00.000-08:00

Looks delicious. By Laser Bread, from the Boing Boing Flickr pool.