Weights and Measures: Prehistoric Edition

The Poles call them “little stone cheeses.” The Germans prefer one long word that translates “small stone balls with a groove carved in them.” The come in many sizes, although most are smaller than large, and can be made from any of a list of kinds of stone. Archaeologists have found them from northern Italy to the Baltic, from Gaul to the western steppes in what is now Beylarus and Ukraine. They are all Late Bronze Age, thus far, and no one knew quite what they were for.

Then someone said, “What if they were weights fo some kind. Not loom weights, but measuring weights?” And someone else, four someones else actually, did a lot of careful tedious work weighing, measuring, and recording the little stone cheeses and running the data through computers. Lo and behold, they probably were weights. Prehistoric metrology for the win!

Doing business without standardized weights and measures is…a challenge. Ask any medieval or early modern merchant. A London pound and a Paris pound and a Florentine pound might be very different weights. Each town with an official market had its measures, some of which were metal bars posted on the wall of the customs/toll/market master’s building. Everyone had to measure his cloth or other goods against the town foot or ell, since it was different from the last place’s official measure.

The same was true in prehistory, once trade became common enough. Metal in particular, but other goods as well, had to be semi standardized in some way that was acceptable. It’s one of those things that we take for granted today, and I mentally slapped my forehead (not physically, since I had students doing work and didn’t want them to think I was criticizing a project or discussion) when I read the paper. Of course there were weights and measures. That a standard had developed, and become accepted, and spread so widely opened up all sorts of interesting possibilities. Why had developed it, and when? How had it spread, and how quickly? How long had the trade network lasted and the weight unit been accepted as the standard? Who made sure that everything was legal and enforced the rules and prices?

Barry Cunliffe pointed out in his book about trade and civilization in the steppes of Eurasia that once trade begins, it is remembered even after it is interrupted. Trade and exchange were more common than we used to think, and far more extensive. Finding places that didn’t trade is unusual, or means that what went back and forth was something not easily seen in archaeology – furs, bone, wood, textiles, dye-stuffs, hides, slaves, ivory. The absence of the usual bronze and other status goods in parts of the southeastern Baltic raises all sorts of questions about trade, social organization, and so on.

So the little stone cheeses are a symbol of a far more complicated world in northern Europe than most of us realize existed in 1500 BC/BCE or so.

Whose Was it, Anyway?

Archaeologists find someone long dead (as in, thousands of years) with lots of grave goods, some of which were very old when they were buried with the individual. One of the questions that is arising more and more often for the oldest graves is, “Where they personal goods or office goods?” Did they actually belong to the deceased, or were they group property that belonged to anyone in that office within the clan/tribe/sept/whatever they called it. For a long time, European and American archaeologists tended to assume that goods buried with someone were personal belongings, private property, that the deceased was supposed to take with him or her. Now … we’re not so certain.

Why people bury things with the deceased seemed to (and seems to) vary. If the belief is that the dead take a journey to reach another life or the place of punishment/reward, or to reach the ancestors, then sending the person with food and drink, perhaps spare shoes and things to mend worn clothes makes sense. If a person’s tools and everyday possessions can absorb a bit of the individual’s spirit, then it might be safer for the group to bury/burn those items with the dead, so the spirit doesn’t return looking for them.

Over time, it seems that some people were buried with more (or at least more durable) goods. And with more people, servants, slaves, wives, concubines, warriors to defend the dead person in the after life. The assumption had been, based on classical sources and later accounts, that these gems, chariots, horses, serving tools, jewelry, musical instruments, fancy fabrics and tapestries, and so on, belonged to the individual and so had been sent with him or her into the next world. King Tut’s tomb and Mesopotamian finds are probably some of the things that strongly pushed interpretation of other finds, like the kurgan mound burials of the steppes. Only powerful people could amass all the stuff, so if someone was buried with the stuff, it had to be their personal stuff. And a spirit that didn’t get enough stuff might come back and no one wanted that! Or so a lot of archaeological books, displays, and the like assumed.

It was probably true in some cases. But in others, archaeologists found things that didn’t fit. Why would a petite female or a male child be buried with a strong-man’s weapons? A 12-14 year old could not possibly have earned or traded for all the goods found in some of the graves. Not could the small adult woman have used a weapon that long and heavy. (In that case, the remaining bones didn’t show the changes associated with training for swordsmanship, which is another CLUE.) What if … the goods were not for the individual but for the rank? And the burial wasn’t just “send the dead on their way” but “marking our territory and showing the Ancestors that we still honor and respect them and their teachings and guidance.” Not all cultures consider the dead in the same light.

One question that bubbled up in Europe had to do with Neolithic and Chalcolithic blades and pottery being deposited in Late Bronze Age graves. Why was this spear-blade or arrow head here? Why had it been preserved? Some might have been the individual’s accidental find that he or she kept as a novelty. Others might have been associated with ritual power, something known to be ancient and magic-touched. Or it might have been a sign of the Ancestral authority that had been passed down and was now being returned to the Ancestors, or even to the gods? Think of Britain, and the tiny stone hunting points called “elf shot.” They were associated with the Good Folk, and explained certain mysterious aches and pains, or ill-fortune. This is after Christianity had taken strong root. What about pre-Christian places, or still-pagan places? Why not bury a shaman or person-of-power with things of power? Besides, it might be safer for the community not to have magic-touched goods in the hands of those who didn’t know how to channel or control the magic. (When a Comanche medicine-practitioner dies, his or her spirit bundle is immersed in running water to remove the puha before it is disposed of.)

All the neat stuff in those rich graves could well be group goods, sent along to show the other spirits, or the gods, or someone else how strong, rich, and well-connected the group was during the life of the deceased. As well as a bribe to keep him or her dead and his spirit far, far from the living.

Reading the Dirt

Ah, dirt. Without it, nothing grows aside from lichen. Too much of it and you get loess hills, dust storms, and the inability to build sky-scrapers without some really, really expensive and tricky engineering. Dirt can tell an archaeologist stories, environmental historians likewise, if you know what to look for and where, or what shouldn’t be where.

Dirt is made up of powdered rock, bits of plants and critters, air, and water. The proportions and chemistries of all those lead to classifications of soils based on percentages of sand to loam to clay, how weathered they are, and how much air and water they will hold. If you have sandy clay loam, you can do different things than if you have loamy clay. Dirt often comes in layers, called horizons. The surface in some places is the O horizon, with lots of organic matter (ideally.) Below that comes the A horizon, where you have humus. Here you find most growing plants, decaying plant matter, and moisture. The A horizon is often easy to spot when someone digs a trench because it is clearly different from the layer(s) below it. Darker perhaps, fluffier, has plant roots, more moisture … It depends on where you are and what’s in the dirt.

Depending on the categorization, you might find the E horizon next. This is a layer that has been tapped for nutrients without fresher decaying material or windblown dust (or waterborne silt) mixed in to replenish it. It’s often paler, if it is present.

Lower down you have the B horizon. This lacks layering in some places, and tends to have more clay, if clay is present in the soil chemistry. It looks “empty” because there are almost no tree or plant roots that reach that completely penetrate the layer. It might be relatively dry or wet, depending on local water tables and drought/rainfall patterns. Below that’s the C layer, the substratum, and depending where you are, sub-layers of C until you reach bedrock, if bedrock is present. Most archaeology and history types don’t worry so much about hitting bedrock if we are looking at the recent past. Unless bedrock crops in ways that shaped how people could use the land (i.e. Manhattan Island. There’s a reason all the buildings in the middle are low.)

What can dirt tell us? A lot. Finding people stuff in dirt lets us know that people were in the area (unless you are surveying a flood plain, in which case you might be looking at items from farther upstream). It can tell us about climate. For example, at the Lubbock Lake and Clovis Sites, there is an “archaeological sterile” layer of windblown dust between periods of human and faunal occupation. What happened? It got so dry and so much dirt and sand blew that the critters departed and people followed (moved to the mountains or farther east to river valleys.) Baked, reddened soil could show where a hearth was set, or a major destroyed a structure that was later abandoned, or an ancient lava of pyroclastic flow baked the soil and changed the composition somewhat. The presence or absence of certain plant roots hints at climate and weather pattern shifts, at least on the Great Plains in North America. Finding fresh water snail shells and other signs of there once having been a pond where now are soybean fields provides information about climate and water flow back thousands of years ago.

Sub-horizons and their stories: Creative Commons Fair Use. Original source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/4-These-soil-samples-correspond-to-the-soil-horizons-in-figure-1-3-The-soil-structure_fig8_313753994

Salt crusts in a place once known for agriculture reveals shifts in the groundwater table. Combine that with records of people changing from wheats (low-tolerance for salt) to barley (higher tolerance) to grazing, to abandoning the land, and you get the story of over-irrigation with river water in a hot climate, and a lack of drainage that allowed salts to build up. The drainage problem might be natural (semi-pervious layer close to the surface) or man-made (allowing irrigation water to rest on the soil and evaporate, rather than draining off excess.)

If you find fields under sand, you might see climate change, as can be observed along the Texas-New Mexico border in the Canadian River watershed. Layers of silt where no river now flows? The geology attacked (Sarasvati River), or a river captured another, or people diverted the stream.

Not a Battle? Tollense, Assumptions, and the Past

Back in the late 1996, someone found an arm bone sticking out of a river bank in northeastern Germany. The police were called, and discovered a “mass casualty site” that dated to the Bronze Age. This … wasn’t supposed to be possible. Except over a hundred people and two horses were killed by violence inflicted by unfriendly people. The assumption shifted from “old cemetery” to “battlefield,” and that opened a whole can of worms. Who, back then, could organize that many people on two sides, and some from as far away as the Massif Central in France?

The location of the site. Creative commons fair use. Original source: https://broread.com/2020/10/26/battle-of-tollense-valley-4250-years-ago-was-a-massacre-of-1400-bronze-age-merchants/

The Tollensee in Mecklenberg-Vorpom. Creative Commons Fair use, original source: https://www.vorpommern.de/aktivitaeten-in-vorpommern/aktivurlaub/kanu-fahren/kanuinfo/die-tollense/

Except, what if it wasn’t a battle?

Of course it was a battle. Why else would you have a lot of men’s bodies left in a marshy stream valley with arrow points, stab wounds, skulls cleft open, and other things? That’s battle damage, so obviously someone fought someone else. Some of the men came from hundreds of kilometers away, which means … Well, now it gets more complicated. Why were they in this part of Europe, what were they doing besides fighting, and who organized the two or more groups?

But what if it wasn’t a battle? What if a large group of men and horses, perhaps women as well, were taking goods from here to there, along the only route through a rather rough part of the landscape, and got ambushed and robbed? After all, we know that a lot of trade was in progress in that part of the world, amber and furs from the Baltic going south, tin moving east and west, copper moving all over, beads and silks, olive oil, and other things moving north.

In other words, if someone wanted to get rich quick, attacking a caravan of traders might be the way to do it. It could also be political, so to speak, if the goods were going to be distributed to win support and followers. The route through the Tollense Valley had been improved, with a good ford over the stream that kept people out of the mire and allowed heavier loads to be moved. So you might have had a group of wealthy people, relatively unarmed or lightly armed, on a predictable route, and unable to flee easily from an ambush.

One thing that archaeologists observed is that the “soldiers” in the battle didn’t have the skeletal changes associated with archers, swordsmen, and other people trained for fighting. Instead, they had normal wear for people who carried heavy stuff and walked a lot. No evidence has been found thus far of any social or political organization of the kind that would lead to a true army, let alone two, not in northern Europe at that time. So … the original theory of a battlefield no longer fits what we now know.

Was there fighting? Yes. Was it a battle? Perhaps not. Assumptions don’t always fit the evidence, and vice versa. It will be interesting to see what new develops from further research.

https://www.science.org/content/article/slaughter-bridge-uncovering-colossal-bronze-age-battle

Battle of Tollense Valley 4,250 years ago was a massacre of 1,400 Bronze Age merchants 

The Archaeology of Death?

I’d never really thought about what humans did with the dead before concepts like spirits, ghosts, and an afterlife of some kind developed in humans. When did that appear, and how could anyone tell? It turns out, paleoanthropologists and archaeologists found some patterns and survivals of remains that suggest a specific point in time when people stopped treating dead band or tribe members the same way they treated other dead or broken things.

One caveat: what we know depends on what survived. Very little not stone lasts for thousands of years, unless the conditions are exactly right. Absence of evidence might not be evidence of absence, just the law of statistics and survival. Even so, sometimes the dog that doesn’t bark, and the remains and grave goods not found, might tell a story …

Once people began to view the dead as remaining within the culture for some period after death, either as a form of benevolent ancestor, or malevolent dead, true graves begin to appear. Interestingly, that’s also when the signs of fear of the undead, those who have not gone on for some reason, or whose bodies have been inhabited by a malevolent force, also appear. Stones wedged into jaws, stakes in the heart, deliberately broken bones in a skeleton buried under an unusual and large rock … The dead did not remain in their proper place. The idea of the dead remaining as part of the extended clan appears in several ways, including the layered burials of skulls and in some cases full skeletons within dwelling areas, or as boundary markers, showing a claim to the land. Think of Genesis and Exodus, and the “land of his fathers,” idea, and you see how it continued on.

Belief in an afterlife has been claimed for the Neandertal, based on the famous Shanidar Cave finds in the 1960s-70s in Iraq. Later research and excavation has pointed to some problems with this, and highlights an on-going tension within archaeology – do archaeologists see what they want to find? The Solecki’s, the primary excavators of the cave and “graves,” argued that flower pollen and some other things were proof that the Neandertals were peaceful, lived in harmony, and cared for the disabled in their society (perhaps better than modern society at that time did.) Many of their findings have been questioned, including how deliberate the burials were, since rock-falls were a major hazard in the cave even in modern times. What we can be pretty certain of is that with the rise of agriculture and the later Neolithic period, people started treating their dead in ways that were more likely to lead to preservation of the remains (to an extent).

Burials, ritual burials to prevent a return of the body or spirit or both, the incorporation of parts of the dead in buildings, apparent veneration of skulls, grave goods even with cremations, all are hints about beliefs in something after death, and elements in the desire or fear of the proximity of the deceased to the living. Francis Pryor has some fascinating speculations about the relationship of the excarnation* site called Seahenge to Stonehenge and other elements on Salisbury Plain. He suggests that both were used, the first to remove the flesh from bones, which were then ritually removed to Salisbury. From there, they were deposited in a grave following a communal feast. Wood was for the living, stone for the dead, the inverted oak tree at Seahenge being where the separation of the dead from the living truly began, a rite finished at Stonehenge or one of the other stone-marked places on the plain. Pryor also makes clear that he is speculating based on archaeology and what we know of comparative anthropology. Timothy Taylor has a different take, but both point out that the “spaces between,” the liminal spaces that are neither water nor land, not earth or air, neither truly living nor perhaps not yet fully dead, were and are considered unsettling and especially dangerous. Thus the near-universal worry about the should-be-dead-but-don’t-act-like-it, aka vampires.

Archaeology provides teasing glimpses into the distant past. We cannot easily reconstruct beliefs without writing, and even then what we see is often official, formalized belief and ritual, not everyday magics and traditions. The modern western separation of the dead – often sterile, no longer part of the community, clinical and distant – is very new. Very few members of western culture worry about the dead returning in some form, or turn the mirrors backward or cover them so that the spirit can leave peacefully, or stop clocks, or stake the suspect dead. Death is final, clinical, the end.

Or is it? The fascination with the occult, the market for Ouiji boards, mediums, and other things, paranormal romances and urban fantasy, Goth music of certain kinds, suggests that perhaps we’re not so far from our ancestors as we’d like to think.

*Excarnation is the practice of exposing the remains of the dead until only bones remain. These might be left to be broken apart by animals and weathering, as the Parsee do with their Towers of Silence, or they might be gathered up and deposited in a certain ritual location as part of the “final death,” as Timothy Taylor phrases it.

Lost Super Civilizations vs. Occam’s Razor

I’ve been rereading part of Francis Pryor’s book about the archaeology of the English Landscape, including the various henges – stone, wood, and sea. I enjoy both the topic and his presentation, and how clearly he sets out “this is what archaeology tells us” as compared to “this is what I think people did, but we can’t be certain.” His extrapolations are based on observation, experience, and logic, with a large dash of informed imagination. They are plausible, given the evidence, and suggest a long series of development and outside influences that leads to the next visible cultural period.

I also enjoy reading about other things, notably the sites in Anatolia like Catalhuyuk and Gobleki Tepe. The first one is very well documented, and the layers of physical evidence show the changes that took place over a very long time. Gobleki Tepe is much older, the non-stone evidence is sparser, and some of the “pieces” don’t fit the long-time assumptions held by archaeologists and anthropologists. Slowly, very slowly, people are teasing out plausible possibilities, just as they are doing with the Cucuteni and Tripilia sites farther north and west. But there will probably always remain much we can never know. Belief systems are hard to excavate, unless they are written in some way (Egypt, Mesopotamia, some Chinese cultures).

This is where the … I don’t want to use the term conspiracy theorists, because it’s pejorative. People with some unusual conclusions based on geographically scattered data sets create possible explanations. The lost super-civilization theory has been around for a very long time. I remember reading old US history textbooks that theorized a super-civilization (or at least superior) had existed before the Native Americans, and had left the mounds found along the Mississippi River and Chaco Canyon and so on. When that was disproved, Eric Van Dannekin’s Chariots of the Gods, the Viking Rune Stones in Oklahoma, and other things developed.

Currently, there are cryptoarchaeologists who theorize that an ancient civilization existed during the period called the Paleo-and Mesolithic. A disaster of some kind (great flood?) caused the collapse and scattering of this civilization, and the survivors tried to uplift and enlighten later peoples, with perhaps a little success. Stonehenge and Gobleki Tepe are both supposed to be parts of this super civilization. The “Book of Enoch” might include half-understood fragments of their teachings.

I admit, it’s fun to read, and I enjoy piecing out how people come to these conclusions. But, having grown up with Chariots of the Gods (which did give us the original Battlestar Galactica, so I can’t diss it too hard), I need extraordinary evidence to go with the extraordinary claims.

William of Occam was a monk and philosopher who argued that when faced with multiple possible explainations for something, the simplest answer was probably correct. Not always, but usually. It’s a good rule of thumb as long as you keep the exceptions in mind. Occam’s Razor is the term for this idea.

I find that Francis Pryor’s gradualist ideas fit the razor better than do the lost super-civilization, especially for Stonehenge and the landscape around it. Gobleki Tepe is, thus far, a one and only, and so we can’t draw too many conclusions from the landscape and contemporary sites. I don’t find it implausible that Neolithic peoples might come together to create a complex ritual landscape on their own. The American Indians like the Anasazi and Hohokom certainly did, in their own way. So why not in Anatolia? Yes, there could be something older having influence on the culture, but why a superior civilization? Why have all traces of the older group been lost/destroyed/misinterpreted?

I know that those who support the super-civilization argument have explanations. I firmly believe that they should be heard, and I oppose censoring them if they want to have TV programs or publish books. Lay out the arguments and let me judge, please. At the moment, I’m still more persuaded by the gradualist school. For now.

Book Review: Tombs and Cultures

Rawson, Jessica. Life and Afterlife in Ancient China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023) Kindle Edition

Short version: A fascinating walk through the history of China’s cultures up to the Qin Dynasty by way of archaeology.

Long version: Jessica Rawson is an archaeologist and curator, who became intrigued by jades. pieces of jade with carvings and texts on them, that she was assigned to sort and organize. As she did, she began to realize that they varied far more in age and style than people assumed. This led to her tracing the jades back through time and place, and realizing that far more variety of culture, beliefs, and social organization had existed in China than is generally assumed (or encouraged by later imperial governments.)

The book begins with a general overview of geography and environment. It then highlights the main thesis of the work: there was more variety and outside influence than most westerners assumed, and that we cannot fully understand what those beliefs and systems of government were. Rawson hammers that last point so often in some chapters that I wonder who she is arguing with, and why she is so vehemently opposed to comparisons and speculation.*

The author goes back to the earliest late-Neolithic elite burial that has been fully studied and excavated. It is not in the Yellow River valley per se, where most of us consider the origin place of Chinese culture, but a place more remote, where jade was plentiful and revered. Jades link all these burials, and the Chinese considered jade to be more valuable than gold. Jade, then bronze, then iron, then gold was the sequence that developed. Jade connected people with the Ancestors, as bronze would also do at a later date. The jades found in this earliest burial will be copied, passed along, and appear in later burials up to the Qin.

Honoring Ancestors and connecting the past with the present also links almost all of the burials. The afterlife was seen, based on archaeological finds as well as later documents, as a continuation of the present. Enemies here would need to be prepared for and defended against there. Feasts, servants, music, transportation, all had to be provided for the Ancestors so that they would continue to live. Patterns of jades, shapes of bronzes, and other things continued down the centuries in the Yellow River watershed, unless a dynasty opted to make a break with the past, as transpired with the Zhou and the previous dynasty’s consumption of alcohol. Since the successor was more virtuious than the overthrown group (the Shang) they put far less emphasis on alcohol containers in their tombs.

Another thread Rawson follows is that of influence from the steppes and points farther west. Wheat and barley, bronze and iron work, horses, chariots, horses, gold, horses, all came from the north. So too did threats of invasion by mounted nomads and herders. The tombs often show influences from the north and west, but either moderated or mediated through other influences. The presence of Shang/Zhou/eastern-style bronzes reveal a balancing act between cultures and polities.

Some things, however, remain mysteries. What was the meaning of the bronze masks, created to be mounted on pillars and trees, from the Yangze Valley? Why did only one culture in all of what became China make bronze statues, and what did it hold in its hands?

The final grave is that of the First Emperor. Even that one, as Rawson points out, isn’t quite what it seems. It is the only one thus far to show signs of communication with the Hellenistic world, the eastern edge of the Alexandrian Empires. And no later notables or monarchs followed that influence.

Sacrifices of animals and people are treated factually. The scale waxed and waned, but it seems that servants, wives, concubines, or others always accompanied the dead notables into the afterlife. The tombs that nodded to the steppe culture often had the most horse sacrifices, but Warring States burials might have easily a hundred people along with a few horses and a dog or two.

I thought the book was fascinating. The maps are quite good, as are the other illustrations. The author writes very well, balancing technical detail with readability and story. I got mildly irked at the repeated “we can’t know how the people of the time and place saw these things/ can’t speculate about what they believed/ about how they understood the world …” I get that. Enough, please, more archaeology. The emphasis on the variety of traditions and apparent belief systems, with a few unifying threads, really helps remind the reader that China was not a monolith, no matter what official records tried to show. The Shang and Zhou did not record bad things, because that might encourage more bad things. Nor did they record weakness or difference, something archaeology reveals.

I’d recommend the book the people interested in the complexity of Chinese history and prehistory, people who like archaeology, and researchers comparing funeral customs and beliefs (as best we can understand them). It can be a fast read, or a slow one if you take notes and really chew on the material, so to speak.

*This could be something within the Chinese academic realm, or in archaeology and museum sciences. European archaeology seems more open to speculation as to beliefs and customs.

FTC Disclaimer: I purchased this book for my own use and received no remuneration or consideration from the publisher or author for this review.

Predicting an Earth Burp

OK, so that’s not a really romantic or mature name for a volcanic eruption, but some of them do more closely resemble an eructation than a formal textbook eruption. How to predict earthquakes and volcanic eruptions is something people have tried to do for thousands of years. Sometimes shifts in animal behavior are a clue, or when water wells and springs begin to show odd colors, smells, or to start of stop flowing. In other cases, people are caught off guard, and fatalities result. Or things get worse, faster, than anyone anticipated.

I was reminded of this because of the loss of life on Mt. Merapi in Indonesia this past week. The volcano is active but not wildly so, and hikers and others climb the mountain. Like most tropical volcanoes, people also live on or near the slopes. The volcano erupted with a pyroclastic flow (nuee ardent), ash falls, and some lava (up to 8000 feet into the air, but generally contained in known flow channels.) At least a dozen hikers died, more were injured, and people in the surrounding area have to deal with ash and debris on their houses and crops. This is not the first time a volcano has erupted “without warning,” and it will not be the last. I use quotation marks because there are often signs, but how to tell real “it’s gonna blow!” from “Oh, it always does that” is sometimes very difficult.

Traditionally, earthquakes and fore-eruptions are the cue to start leaving the area. Often, volcanoes have eruptions that build in intensity until The Big One, and then they calm down. The problem has been 1. deciding when to leave, and 2. if things really are getting worse, or if this is just “one of the usual eruptions.” As Pompeii and other sites show, sometimes the Big One comes sooner than people anticipate. Or you get pyroclastic flows (Pompeii, St. Pierre) and lahars (Nevado del Ruiz, Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Ranier) that go in directions people weren’t ready for. Or new vents open up and surprise! (Mona Loa, Mona Kea)

Other times a known active volcano erupts and catches people off-guard, like Mt. Merapi, or Mt. Semeru, or Mt. Unzen, or Galeras Volcano, the latter of which killed 6 experts (who were attending a volcanology conference) and three others. After the Galeras eruption, a bit of controversy erupted because a few experts suggested using atmospheric chemistry monitoring to predict eruptions. Sulfur dioxide levels drop just before some events, and that had been noted prior to the 1993 Galeras eruption. That has gone from “fringe” to “not uncommon” practice as data have accumulated.

There are a number of things to watch, but we don’t know even more. And some people will go into danger zones, either knowing the risks, or just for kicks and giggles. Some volcanoes seem dormant until they erupt, catching everyone off guard.

Industrial Revolution Medieval Edition?

Blame Gibbon and the other “Augustan Era” historians for calumniating the pre-Renaissance people. They considered the period between the Fall of Rome in AD 476 CE and Da Vinci et al to be one of the nadirs of civilization, an era without the benefits of technology, good taste, and organized secular government. The Medieval world in Europe was full of darkness, superstition, and groping for the few tiny morsels of Roman glory and technology that remained.

Or, so was the general sense if you read histories of the period, in English, from before the 1950s or so. After the 1870s, ish, bashing the Medievals took on the sense of reaction from the Romantics, but you also had people who tempered their criticisms with the observation that it wasn’t easy to build cathedrals, huge bridges, and other things. So the people weren’t entirely barbarians, just … alas, not Roman.

Keep in mind, archaeology in Europe considered Medieval layers something to get through to find the good stuff. It wasn’t until the 1960s that archaeologists began seriously looking at finds from the period of AD 500-1500. So there was a lot we didn’t know enough about to give credit where it was due. The rise of sub-sections of history that focused on technology, the working people, consumption and consumer goods, and stuff like that also helped, because they could link with the archaeologists. As a result, we historians have been reevaluating the Middle Ages, especially when it comes to technology. There was a revolution of sorts during the Middle Ages, as it turns out. That revolution was the shift from people and critter power to water and wind power.

As I’ve written before, how dark the Dark Ages were depended on your location. If you were in the path of invasion, plague, flooding, storms, and so on, life tended to be brutish and short. If you were in one of the places where the weather wasn’t that bad, order survived to some extent, and someone stepped up to take charge when Rome went away, life continued at a poorer but still steady pace. Water-powered technology increased as the population declined, and trade also declined. You had to be more self-sufficient, so after the initial shock, people began repairing Roman stuff, adjusting, and improving it. That the Church wasn’t opposed to technology and innovation helped a lot. Once the climate improved after the 800s or so, the economy started growing again, along with the population, and you had the people, resources, and baseline tech for the high Middle Ages in western Europe and England.

Horse power, water power, new ways of using and refining metal, improved mining technology, rediscovery of certain things, they all helped spur a sort of Industrial Revolution. Once wind power got added to the mix (not without objection), technology and the uses of wind and water power spread even faster. Water had been used for grinding and pumping for quite a while. Sometime between the 1100s and 1300s, people sorted out how to use that rotation to make a lever work, and water-hammers, fulling-mills, paper mills, saw mills, mills for pounding bark for tanning, all sorts of work got mechanized. If you can work a lever, you can power bellows, which allowed for hotter, steadier fires and better processing of metals and cheaper glass.

By figuring out how to harness a horse without choking him, you added a new form of propulsion that was faster than an ox, more maneuverable than an ox, and more versatile than an ox. Oxen were for heavy work, where you needed a long, steady, strong pull. Horses could pull less, but faster*. Horses can be ridden. Only rarely did people ride an ox**.

By the 1500s, pumping, draining, sawing timber, grinding, and a lot of other things had been mechanized when it was possible to do so. Good sites for wind and water mills had pretty much been filled, leading to complaints about new constructions, and law suites. People are lazy – we will work very hard to devise a way not to work so hard. Some things still required hand labor, either because you couldn’t take the mill to the forest, or because we didn’t have power sources stronger than wind and water. Also, mills did rough work, not delicate, precise things for the most part. It had taken a long time to perfect the grist mill, and translating that into other fields … You needed tools and measuring devices precise enough, and a great enough need to justify the expense to be able to measure and cut timber to the quarter-inch, say.

The Romantic ideal of the pre-industrial world misses all that, often deliberately. Everyone wants to be a lord or lady, with happy peasants and fat, jolly friars. No one dreams of being a miller, or millwright, or cartwright, or wheelwright, or plumber (someone who worked with lead in all its many uses) or hard-rock miner, or salt miner, or dyer, or cooper, or fletcher, or …

*We are before the Age of the Draft Horse. Those will come with time.

**And yes, I’m thinking of that movie too.

Book Review: The Buried Soul

Taylor, Timothy. The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death.

Short version: An anthropologist looks at how cultures treated the dead, and how human attitudes toward the dead and death shifted over thousands of years.

Long version: When, roughly, and why did mankind stop ignoring the dead, or treating them as something to be locked out for safety? Anthropologist Timothy Taylor considers these questions and more in a fascinating, well-written book about the culture of death, and how different groups of people reject the dead, or incorporated them (sometimes literally) into themselves. He doesn’t shy away from things like ritual and/or revenge cannibalism, human sacrifice, dealing with people who are rejected in life and then rejected in death, and other topics. Some of his ideas are rather controversial (the bog bodies chapter), but I found his book a very useful reference and easy to read.

Taylor begins by considering the idea of death, and when does a person die? What does death mean? How are the dead accompanied, and what does this tell is (if anything) about their culture? And why do modern humans react certain ways to the ancient (and not so ancient) dead. Then he touches the third rail, ritual and revenge cannibalism. Well, not just touches, but grabs and yanks, including a discussion if why anthropologists balked at admitting that it happened/happens. Which also leads to some thoughts on why western cultures generally balk at anthropophagy.

His next sections are about the treatment of the dead, and the dangers of the liminal period between body death and the spirit moving on. He spends a great deal of time with Ibn Fadlan’s account of the Viking (Rus) burial. Then Taylor compares Lenin’s preservation with the accidental preservation of Kurgan steppe warrior chiefs, and the symbolism of preservation and veneration. What about people who were inside and outside society, or whose actions were deemed beyond the Pale? The bog bodies and other deaths and burials where the spirit was NOT allowed to pass on, nor to return, but trapped with the body forever – these are the result, or so Taylor argues. This is a rather controversial take on some (not all) of the people from the peat bogs, and strongly contrasts with some more recent work.

Vampire fans, rejoice, they also appear, or rather, people who were thought to have become (or been at risk of becoming) angry undead make an appearance. The author then compares disposition of the dead over time, from just bodies to still-present family/clan members who were interred inside dwellings or in great tombs to mark territory, to the personal and private dead. The book concludes with a personal meditation on death, dying, and society.

I found the book very useful, although a straight chronology would have been helpful. Some of Taylor’s interpretations of events and finds seem a bit stretched, but he always supports his arguments with examples and cultural parallels. He’s an excellent writer, and the book is very readable. If you are not familiar with the broad outline of archaeological dating (stone ages, Chalcolithic, Bronze Age, et cetera) and European history, you might get a little lost in spots.

I recommend the book for those interested in the cultural meanings of burial and the disposition of the dead, and archaeology buffs. It would also be great material for building a new world or culture for fiction.

FTC Notice: I purchased this book with my own money for my own use, and received no compensation for this review.