What’s the difference between archaeology and grave-robbing?

Alun Politics, The Past No Comments , , ,

HMS Victory sinking by Peter Monamy

Loss of HMS Vic­tory, 4 Octo­ber 1744 by Peter Monamy

The HMS Vic­tory (not that one) is set to be recovered accord­ing to the BBC and many other sites. You could say speed. Archae­ology is an enorm­ously inef­fi­cient of rob­bing graves. These days archae­olo­gists can take years to study one bar­row (an earth mound mark­ing a burial) while in the 18th cen­tury aris­to­crats used to go on pic­nics and have the work­men open up one or two in an after­noon for gold.

There is a deeper reason.

Archae­olo­gists are so slow because they want to say some­thing about the people who live there. There’s a great Paul Bahn line: Archae­ology is not about find­ing things, it’s about find­ing things out. Obvi­ously find­ing things out is easier if you find arte­facts with people and that’s why sud­den dis­asters are great from an archae­olo­gical point of view.

It doesn’t stop a dis­aster site effect­ively being a grave. If you’re genu­inely inter­ested in find­ing out about people, it’s would be odd if you didn’t give a damn about their grave. Dig­ging up a site is effect­ively des­troy­ing it.* If you’re going to do that you’ll want to go slowly and make sure that the story you can tell about this person’s life is a bet­ter memorial than the one he or she already has.

The news stor­ies this week­end are all about find­ing the ship, along with a brief men­tion of the up to £500 mil­lion value of gold on board. What they don’t men­tion is that the UK gov­ern­ment has sanc­tioned the recov­ery in exchange for 20% of that. Is the gov­ern­ment more inter­ested in the treas­ure, or has it developed a keen interest in archae­ology so that, as Lord Ling­field says: “We hope it will give a unique insight into the world of the mid-18th cen­tury Royal Navy.”

The answer can be found in this story from Octo­ber 2011 in the Daily Mail.

Odys­sey said yes­ter­day the UK gov­ern­ment was ‘des­per­ately look­ing for new sources of income’ and was urging it to find more Brit­ish wrecks. It is also invest­ig­at­ing HMS Sus­sex, lost off Gibral­tar with 10 tons of gold in 1694, and HMS Vic­tory, a pre­cursor to Nelson’s flagship.

There are thou­sands of deser­ted medi­eval vil­lages in the UK. In the 21st cen­tury the biggest defence any buri­als in them have have against feed­ing bankers is that the fin­an­cial pay­off of crack­ing them open is too low.

*Not hyper­bolae. It’s recog­nised by pro­fes­sional archae­olo­gists then if you dig up some­thing it’s not going to be there for someone else to dig. +Kris Hirst col­lects quotes on her site, and a great one from Kent Flan­nery is: “Arche­ology is the only branch of anthro­po­logy where we kill our inform­ants in the pro­cess of study­ing them.”

A post that ori­gin­ally appeared on Google+.

Bookmarks for 16th of November through to 18th of November

Alun Life 1 Comment , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

These are my links for 16th of Novem­ber through 18th of November:

  • The Aca­demic Journal Racket « In the Dark
    Tele­scoper explains how aca­demic pub­lish­ing works. The only thing that would improbe the post would be the theme from ‘The Naked Gun’ in the background.
  • A Case in Antiquit­ies for ‘Find­ers Keep­ers’ — NYTimes.com
    You can make argu­ments in favour of repat­ri­ation of antiquit­ies. You can make argue­ments against. Being on either side doesn’t make you inher­ently fool­ish. But when you write that the Brit­ish Army took the Rosetta Stone from the French and “returned it to the Brit­ish Museum” then some­thing has gone wrong. It’s prob­ably a case of moment­ary brain­fade rather than idiocy, but it mat­ters because the whole ques­tion of own­er­ship of the Rosetta Stone is about where it right­fully belongs. Using the word ‘returned’ builds in the assump­tion that all antiquit­ies are inher­ently British.
  • Notes & Quer­ies; Sledges — The­or­et­ical Struc­tural Archae­ology
    Geoff Carter con­cluded he didn’t have evid­ence for a stag­ger­ingly early cart shed in Poland. Could it have been a used to house a sledge? I’ve just real­ised I know abso­lutely noth­ing at all about the his­tory of sleds and sledges. Not only that, but I can’t recall much atten­tion being called to them in early pre­his­toric archae­ology other than when people want to talk about mov­ing mega­liths to Stone­henge. Yet Martha Murphy (guest blog­ging) shows there’s plenty of ques­tions to ask about neo­lithic transport.
  • Brit­ish bank turns to treas­ure hunt­ing via @johnabartram
    Avast me hearties! Robert Fraser & Part­ners be scourin’ the high seas in search of booty. They be fundin’ Odys­sey Mar­ine Explor­a­tion, Inc. ter search the Carib­bean fer Span­ish gold. Arrr!
  • CRM Prob­lem in Cad­boro Bay « North­w­est Coast Archae­ology
    More on the prob­lems of pre­serving her­it­age in BC. Ancient buri­als have been scooped out of the ground, <em>after</em> an archae­olo­gical assessment.

Bookmarks for 12th of November through to 14th of November

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These are my links for 12th of Novem­ber through 14th of November:

  • Is the new policy state­ment PPS 15 a threat to her­it­age? — Build­ing Design
    I’d love to have a pithy and insight­ful opin­ion on this, but first I’ll have to look up what PPS 15 says. it’s import­ant as PPG 15 and 16 have been the basis of pro­tec­tion of her­it­age in the UK for many years.
  • Pagans for Archae­ology: Why reburial won’t work
    It’s all very well me say­ing there are eth­ical reas­ons to be against reburial, but I still haven’t found the time to write them down yet. Now this post hits almost every point I was going to make, espe­cially the point about memory. This won’t stop me from writ­ing up my thoughts when I can find the time though.
  • Iden­tity : Gambler’s House
    Teo­filo talks about Chaco and Navajo iden­tity and dis­cov­ers neither is as simple as you might think.
  • 3rd-century build­ing fuels debate over lost coun­try … asahi.com(朝日新聞社)
    “The cent­ral axis of each build­ing forms a straight line. Each build­ing is believed to have faced the same dir­ec­tion. Such care­ful plan­ning for build­ings was com­mon for palaces and temples dur­ing the Asuka Period from the late sixth cen­tury to the early eighth cen­tury. But it had not been found at sites from the early third century. “

    This is why I need to find an intro­duct­ory book to early Japan­ese his­tory. There’s a huge amount of fas­cin­at­ing stuff there.

  • Shame­ful hypo­crisy threatens our ancient shared her­it­age
    “One of the most egre­gious hypo­cris­ies we enter­tain in Brit­ish Columbia is our cava­lier atti­tude toward the destruc­tion and dis­posal of indi­gen­ous cul­tural land­scapes, arti­facts and her­it­age sites. In any enlightened nation such import­ant his­tory would com­mand pro­tec­tion — here it earns indif­fer­ence and even contempt.”
  • Moai in Cap­tiv­ity — a gal­lery on Flickr
    A great idea for a gal­lery. There’s some­thing about the facial expres­sion that makes even fake Moai appealing.

Blogging and Honesty

Alun Digital Academia 4 Comments , , ,

A ramble rather than a rant.

scrabble
How do you put your blog posts together? Photo after erix!

There’s been a spate of ‘Why Blog?’ posts in the Bib­li­ob­lo­go­sphere. They hap­pen every so often amongst blog­gers. Some­times they’re insight­ful and some­times they’re navel gaz­ing. Thank­fully the dis­cus­sion leans towards the former here. Charles Ell­wood Jones has put up a round up of posts at the Ancient World Blog­gers Group.

The entries that par­tic­u­larly caught my eye were on hon­esty in blog­ging. Jim West kicked that strand off, you should read the whole thing, but key pararaphs are:

In sum, do we refrain from blog­ging what we really think about this or that or the other because we are unsure of ourselves, or because we are fear­ful of the reac­tion or– and worst of all– because we are afraid we might not be called to serve at Har­vard or Yale if someone there reads what we cheekily say?
…
I find myself, at the end of the day, con­stantly amazed at the unwill­ing­ness of some to be them­selves. I take this as noth­ing but hypo­crisy. Hide your­self, don’t say what you think, play the hypo­crite, and someone may hire you or pub­lish you. As though being hired or pub­lished were more import­ant than hon­esty. Which I sup­pose, for some, they are.

Roland Boer is in agree­ment. There were a couple of other responses. Mark Goo­dacre com­men­ted on the split between his blogs into broadly pro­fes­sional and per­sonal, because some one might want to read the one and not the other. In a dif­fer­ent dir­ec­tion Missives from Marx argues that in some cases anonym­ity is neces­sary for hon­esty. I think that MM makes a mis­take. Missives from Marx is not an anonym­ous blog. It’s a pseudomym­ous blog and there’s the con­stant pos­sib­il­ity that someone will con­nect the pseud­onym to the per­son. To be hon­est you may struggle to find people openly blog­ging “Yes! I am a hypo­crite, AND PROUD OF IT!“
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Neanderthal Ethics

Alun Politics, Science, The Past 7 Comments , , , ,

Here’s an oddity I star­ted think­ing about fol­low­ing a tweet by Dr Kiki who poin­ted to this art­icle Return of the Neander­thals: If we can resur­rect them through fossil DNA, should we?. The strange thing was my reac­tion to this. The answer seems obvi­ous. I thought I’d missed the boat on this when The Philo­soph­ers’ Magazine blog covered it. Again the author, Jean Kazez, missed the obvi­ous objec­tion, so I left it in a com­ment, and it was eas­ily dis­missed — or rather ignored. See­ing as two people see no prob­lem with what I see as an insur­mount­able prob­lem I have to be open to the idea I’m being dog­matic.
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Why other histories matter

Alun Politics, The Past No Comments , , , , ,

brothel fresco
Photo Lupin­are III (cc) Nick in exsilio.

I have an interest in ancient pros­ti­tu­tion. It’s not what I’d call a guilty pleas­ure, because when you read about the miser­able lives the women had it’s hardly pleas­ure, but there is plenty of guilt. I don’t find ancient pros­ti­tu­tion sala­cious but given the expli­cit art, I can see how people would think it is and this trig­gers the feel­ing of being a dirty old man. Yet more and more I think to under­stand how ancient cit­ies worked you need to know about the seedy under­belly of the city. For every poet whose frag­ments sur­vive and whose words are pored over by philo­lo­gists, thou­sands of pros­ti­tutes died after miser­able lives missed only by their friends. I wouldn’t say that the study of poetic frag­ments is wrong or inher­ently inferior to the study of the ancient under­classes, but I think for the sake of hon­esty about the clas­sical world someone needs to tell these stories.

Someone who’s just done this recently is N.S. Gill. She’s pos­ted Firebaugh’s notes on Roman pros­ti­tu­tion. In some ways it’s depress­ing the notes are still rel­ev­ant enough to be worth post­ing. The lan­guage is dated. Well, no even that might not be true either des­pite Fire­baugh refer­ring to ‘har­lots’. Even more depress­ing is how little atti­tudes to pros­ti­tu­tion have shif­ted since ancient times. For instance who becomes a prostitute?

Accord­ing to the Romans it would seem that they were women who were mak­ing a delib­er­ate choice.

If the girl was young and appar­ently respect­able, the offi­cial sought to influ­ence her to change her mind; fail­ing in this, he issued her a license (licen­tia stupri), ascer­tained the price she inten­ded exact­ing for her favors, and entered her name in his roll. Once entered there, the name could never be removed, but must remain for all time an insur­mount­able bar to repent­ance and respectability.

I sus­pect it was a choice, but the choice was between pros­ti­tu­tion and star­va­tion. It is also a stain on the woman’s char­ac­ter, not the client’s. In mod­ern terms it’s been noted that crim­inal fines for pros­ti­tu­tion can actu­ally lead a woman back onto the streets in order to pay it off. Again it’s the woman’s choice. The notion of the will­ing pros­ti­tute serves the need of the cli­ents who could either be wish­ing for a will­ing part­ner, or else wish to feel mor­ally jus­ti­fied in their actions.

It’s not a choice any­one would want to forced to make. The Con­sti­tu­tion of the Atheni­ans gives a pretty grim pic­ture of where flute-girls, not the low­est pros­ti­tutes, fit­ted in the import­ance of the city.

[T]en men are elec­ted by lot as … City Con­trol­lers, five of whom hold office in Peir­aeus and five in the city; it is they who super­vise the flute-girls and harp-girls and lyre-girls to pre­vent their receiv­ing fees of more than two drach­mas, and if sev­eral per­sons want to take the same girl these offi­cials cast lots between them and hire her out to the win­ner. And they keep watch to pre­vent any scav­enger from depos­it­ing ordure within a mile and a quarter of the wall; and they pre­vent the con­struc­tion of build­ings encroach­ing on and bal­conies over­hanging the roads, of over­head con­duits with an over­flow into the road, and of win­dows open­ing out­ward on to the road; and they remove for burial the bod­ies of per­sons who die on the roads, hav­ing pub­lic slaves for this service.

I can­not believe any­one would want to be classed along­side dung and corpses. Life for the typ­ical pros­ti­tute must have been miser­able. It might explain why people have tra­di­tion­ally over­looked ancient pros­ti­tutes when writ­ing his­tor­ies, but it doesn’t explain why they are import­ant. Being poor merely makes you poor rather than inher­ently more worthy than the rich.

Another reason for ignor­ing pros­ti­tutes and the rest of the under­class is they have been con­sidered invis­ible. Could it be they are leav­ing traces, but it’s we in the cur­rent era who choose not to see them? A recent thesis by Clare Kelly-Blazeby could turn upside down a lot of assump­tions about the ancient city.

She’s been look­ing for archae­olo­gical evid­ence of tav­ernas. You wouldn’t think drink­ing would be dif­fi­cult to find in the ancient world. The texts have many ref­er­ences to the masses get­ting drunk in their bru­tish way. Yet whenever drink­ing assemblages have been found it’s been inter­preted as archae­olo­gical evid­ence of the sym­posium. The sym­posium is the drink­ing party of the élite. It’s the set­ting for many debates and the sort of his­tory which you can see chan­ging the world.

On top of that it’s very archae­olo­gic­ally vis­ible. Not only are there the cups and bowls there’s also the lay­out of the sym­po­sion, the room where the sym­posium was held. It con­veni­ently has couches arranged around the walls, head to foot so every­one reclines on their left side. Kelly-Blazeby has found that many assemblages of drink­ing cups are not asso­ci­ated with sym­po­sions, but ordin­ary look­ing houses. Even today archi­tec­tur­ally Greek tav­ernas can look the same as ordin­ary houses. After re-thinking what a tav­erna of the sort would look like, she’s rad­ic­ally altered how we see the urban eco­nomy and town plan. It also means we need to re-think what we mean by élite, which in some cit­ies may be a lot smal­ler and more élite than pre­vi­ously acknowledged.

Some­times look­ing at unfash­ion­able his­tor­ies can mean that more his­tory is being writ­ten. Yet some­times, like in the case of Gender His­tory, or Crime or Class it not only makes more his­tory it also makes the sub­jects of tra­di­tional his­tor­ies richer and more vibrant. This is why I’ve found Mer­curius Rusticus’s sum­mer strop both fas­cin­at­ing and pitiable.

Given two sexes and a vivid ima­gin­a­tion regard­ing sexual taboos seems to be a con­stant of human his­tory I think it’s a con­stant issue which needs to be tackled. I don’t think gender dif­fer­ences can be seen every­where in the his­tor­ical record, but it is wor­ry­ing if people can’t even see there is a ques­tion. If they can’t see these issue in the past, then why think they’re equipped to be able to see them in present?

Bad news for the Christians

Alun Politics, The Past No Comments , , , , , , ,

There’s a 1st cen­tury BC tab­let which has been found pre­dict­ing a Mes­siah that will rise after three days. I can’t really see this shak­ing Chris­tian­ity by con­nect­ing it to Juda­ism. The whole concept of a Mes­siah is Jew­ish. It’s not like Judea was short of Mes­si­ahs in this period. As for proph­ecies Mat­thew is known to have drawn on Jew­ish proph­ecies for his gos­pel, hence the whole being born in Beth­le­hem thing. It is of his­tor­ical interest though. It seems like a mes­siah proph­ecy we didn’t know about before. That could have told us more about the devel­op­ment of Christianity.

Sadly it can’t tell us a lot, because the mater­ial is unproven­anced. Any­one who’s Chris­tian has had inform­a­tion about tab­let of import­ance to their faith trashed and it’s inform­a­tion which can­not be replaced. It’s been com­pared to find­ing the Dead Sea Scrolls.* It’s not like find­ing the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s like burn­ing them unread and sift­ing through the ashes to see what you can make out.

How­ever as long as there’s a mar­ket for unproven­anced and illi­cit antiquit­ies there’ll be a profit to be made from other people’s beliefs.

See also: The Boston Globe and Jim West’s web­log.

*Actu­ally in some ways it is. An awful loot of inform­a­tion about them has been lost too due to the trade in unproven­ance antiquities.

The Burg­lars. Photo (cc) John Carl Johnson

Why context matters

Alun Politics, The Past No Comments , , , , ,

Find­ing buri­als is not always easy. Bod­ies decay over time, and their vis­ib­il­ity can vary for a num­ber of reas­ons. One reason in par­tic­u­lar is the wealth of the deceased. If you’re rich you can afford a very lav­ish and very vis­ible burial. As a res­ult our under­stand­ing of the past can be skewed in favour of the social élites. That’s one reason why archae­olo­gists get so excited about large cemeter­ies. News is com­ing out of Italy of one such cemetery near Fiumicino air­port. What has been found is a nec­ro­polis with around three hun­dred skel­et­ons. What makes these spe­cial is that they’re the skel­et­ons of the poor.

There’s vari­ous reas­ons why the Italian archae­olo­gists think they were poor. The grave goods aren’t as plen­ti­ful as you get from the richer sites. In the tombs there are ceramic tank­ards, oil lamps and what remains of ancient shoes. There’s also around sev­enty coins, mainly of Tra­jan and Faustina, used to pay the fer­ry­man Charon. The coins date the tombs to the early second cen­tury BC. The loc­a­tion may not have been as pres­ti­gi­ous, this was down towards the ports of Rome, which played a vital role in con­nect­ing Rome with its empire. In Trajan’s period, Portus, a new port was being built to ser­vice Rome’s boom­ing eco­nomy. Most tellingly, like the other poor people of the ancient world, their poverty is writ­ten into their bones. The cor­rel­a­tion between poverty and deform­ity was recog­nised in the ancient world. Mark Steel has a nice line on it:

Aris­totle wrote over 2,000 years ago, “It is nature’s inten­tion to dis­tin­guish even the bod­ies of free­men and slaves. The lat­ter are endowed with strength to suit their employ­ment while the upright car­riage of the former renders them unfit for servile work.”

So Ancient Greece was full of mas­ters burst­ing to spend the day labour­ing but just not up to it with that upright carriage.

The Greeks in par­tic­u­lar noticed that the aris­tro­cracy were on the whole much bet­ter look­ing than the callous-handed labour­ers they employed and recog­nised cause and effect, just not in the right order.

The buri­als are mainly men. Anthro­po­lo­gist Paola Catalano estim­ates the ratio of men to women is around 3:1. Sex­ing skel­et­ons is not always easy, but the pre­ser­va­tion of bones in the sandy soil is a help. Addi­tion­ally they’re also mainly adults, with many more adult buri­als than adoles­cent or juven­ile buri­als. The skel­et­ons are deformed due to the stress of work. They have stress frac­tures and crushed ver­teb­rae, her­nias and ten­don inflam­ma­tion. Don’t ask me how you spot the last two on a skel­eton — I have no idea. The evid­ence is that these are the people who built Rome and made it what it was. The value of the site is that it is a one of the largest cemeter­ies excav­ated, and the grave goods can tell use what life was like for the aver­age Roman, not only from what they have but also from what they lack.

At least that should be the case. Many ver­sions of the news story over­look a detail men­tioned in the Italian press.

Il Mes­sag­gero reports that the site was found fol­low­ing an invest­ig­a­tion by the Guardia di Fin­anza, one of Italy’s many police forces, at Fiumicino. The police were involved in track­ing down two tombaroli, grave rob­bers. A raid on thei homes revealed more evid­ence of pil­la­ging and they are now chas­ing down a third indi­vidual who they think was involved. The mater­ial, if it had got to mar­ket, would have said little about Roman life. In an auc­tion house they would have just been reduced to trinkets. No-one would know where they had came from or what they meant. As it is we will not know what was des­troyed in ran­sack­ing the tombs. One of the most poignant finds would cer­tainly have been trashed by the tombaroli if they had worked it over. To the right is a neck­lace found in a child’s tomb. The indi­vidual pieces wouldn’t make any sense at all and would be value­less, except in con­text with each other.

And that’s why con­text matters.

More Read­ing:
Il Mes­sag­gero
ANSA (Eng­lish)
IGN

Are Sainsbury’s mis-selling energy?

Alun Life, Politics, Science 1 Comment , , , ,

I was stopped in the bread aisle today by a nice lady who wanted me to switch my energy sup­ply to Sainsbury’s. It’s a com­mon thing in the UK and the energy com­pan­ies are col­lect­ively known for the eth­ical stand­ards they employ when selling their energy plans. It’s not a sur­prise so many of them spon­sor weather bul­let­ins — “Today’s weather is brought to you in asso­ci­ation with Happy Energy, because we’re a shower of bastards.”

What’s inter­est­ing is the sales pitch that you get as you try and find a loaf. My energy sup­plier was recom­men­ded by Green­peace. Gen­er­ally that’s enough to per­suade sales people from wast­ing my time. It’s grow­ing less effect­ive. I demurred say­ing that I didn’t want to sign any­thing because I was con­cerned that there was going to be a push for nuc­lear power and I’m not con­vinced it’s a good thing. Sainsbury’s, she assured me, had noth­ing to do with nuc­lear power. Sainsbury’s even sold a Green Energy plan.

Sainsbury’s don’t actu­ally have their own power sta­tions, they re-sell and right now they’re reselling for EDF. What was the news when I got home? French energy giant EDF has already said it plans to build four nuc­lear plants in the UK by 2017, without sub­sidies, fol­low­ing the government’s announce­ment. BBC News.

Nuc­lear power itself is not neces­sar­ily a deal killer for me, but being misled about it is. I’m also doubt­ful about the green nature of Sainsbury’s power. I’m sure they want to invest in renew­able resources, but what is a renew­able resource? Ask Lord Sains­bury. Lady O’Cathain offered me the oppor­tun­ity of … agree­ing that nuc­lear is a renew­able source of energy — it clearly is so. The Times.

So was the nice lady mis-selling Sainsbury’s energy, or do they have a con­tract with EDF that the elec­trons they sell are driven by non-nuclear power?

Archaeology, Photography and HDR

Alun Science 2 Comments , ,

Minard Castle
Minard Castle. Photo (cc) Mike 138.

If it were true that the cam­era never lies, then pho­to­graphy wouldn’t be a prob­lem. It does though. Or at least a pho­to­graph isn’t a wholly object­ive record of real­ity. A couple of years back I was happy with this and was dis­cuss­ing illus­trat­ing an event using a photo mosaic. The uni­ver­sal reac­tion to this idea was hor­ror, which sur­prised me. What I was plan­ning to do was take a pho­to­graph of a site and manip­u­late the sky behind it — and make clear that this was a recon­struc­tion not an ori­ginal image. The over­whelm­ing neg­at­ive reac­tion meant that I’ve never done this. The altern­at­ive, that I draw a recon­struc­tion of the event, and throw in a few ima­gin­ary people, with spec­u­lat­ive hair­styles and clothes, stand­ing around in small groups — without any evid­ence for this — was con­sidered fine. I assume that people are ok with draw­ings being highly spec­u­lat­ive, but still expect photo-quality images to be ‘real’, whatever that might be.

Photo edit­ing is a ser­i­ous prob­lem as pro­grams like Pho­toshop make it easier than ever to mess around with the expos­ure or the col­ours of a photo. If you’re pho­to­graph­ing the res­ult of an exper­i­ment, where the amount of col­our­a­tion is an import­ant part of the res­ult, like in bio­logy, then chan­ging those col­ours is effect­ively falsi­fy­ing your result.

I am won­der­ing how far this extends to archae­ology.
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