Flash Drive vs. Sumerian Clay Tablet

April 20, 2010

I was just at Costco this weekend, wheeling one of those immense, T-Rex shopping carts past the ever-so shiny electronics section, when my eye fell on a row of flash drives. I currently back up all my research and stories on a battered 8 Gigabyte Kingston flash drive that I bought in Cuzco last summer and that I strongly suspect is a knockoff. But Costco’s new line of drives, the LaCies , are 32 GB and look like house keys. I immediately wanted one.

Now you might reasonably think that a brand-new flash drive would win hand’s down every time as a back-up system when pitted against, let’s say, a 5000-year-old Sumerian clay tablet. But you’d be very, very wrong. According to a fascinating study I recently came across by Paul Conway, who teaches in the School of Information at University of Michigan, there is one critical way in which the Sumerian clay tablet, the world’s earliest data storage system, beats the hell out of the flash drive jingling on your key chain. Longevity.

Here’s Conway’s main point. Someone who knows how to read Sumeria’s cuneiform script (which gets its name from the Latin word cuneus, meaning “wedge”–an apt description of the little wedge-shaped marks that Sumerian scribes made with their styluses in moist clay) can still read the message on a clay tablet 5000 years later. Now what about a LaCie flash drive? All the computers we use to read it today will be obsolete in 20 years, and we will have no way of accessing what’s on it. It might as well be a big lump of metal. You scoff? Just think about the stacks of floppy disks that littered our desks back in the 1980s.

Conway calls this “our central dilemma”: the capacity for storing information is soaring exponentially just as the longevity of storage media is plummeting. In other words, the more ancient the storage system, the longer it tends to live. A 4500-year-old Egyptian papyrus can still be read, so can the Dead Sea Scrolls. But a book published in 1851 on acidic paper only has an average life expectancy of 100 years. And the pace of obsolence has greatly accelerated over the past 40 years: if I handed you a computer punch card or a magnetic tape could you read it?

I am not Luddite. I love new technology (bring on the iPad!), but it’s clear to me that Apple, Microsoft and Google don’t have all the answers. Maybe the guys in Silicon Valley and Redmond, Washington ought to give a little more thought to cuneiform tablets and a little less to flash-in-the-pan data.

The Last Place on Earth for Humans

March 30, 2010

While I was at the Bowers Museum in California this past weekend giving a talk on mummies, Peter Keller called me into his office to take a gander at something remarkable. Keller is the director of the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California, and the man who succeeded in bringing the very famous Tarim Basin mummies and their associated artifacts to North America for the exhibition, Secrets of the Silk Road: The Mystery Mummies of China. These European looking mummies, some as old as 4000 years, have never travelled outside Asia.

Keller had just located the earliest known necropolis in the Tarim Basin, the site known in English as Small River Cemetery No. 5 and in Mandarin as Xiaohe, on Google Earth. And the two of us spent a good half hour or so examining the area with researcher Victor Mair. This made a great impression on me.

The Tarim Basin lies at the very heart of Asia, nearly encircled by steep snow-capped mountains. It is an exceptionally harsh, forbidding land. In summer, temperatures there can soar as high as 125 degrees Fahrenheit; in winter, they plummet to minus 40. And it is one of the most arid places on Earth, right up there with the Atacama Desert. For all these reasons, modern humans took their time settling the Tarim Basin. Indeed Victor Mair, the sinologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied these mummies for nearly twenty years, suggests that the Tarim Basin was the last place on Earth to be colonized by humans. And this didn’t happen until some 4000 years ago.

In the reign of Mao Tse-tung, the Chinese government put all this harshness to work. It constructed labor camps in the Tarim Basin, knowing that the desert would be a powerful deterrent to escape. And it built a nuclear testing range there, confident that no one would dream of crossing the barrens to spy.

It is one thing to know all this intellectually. It is quite another to see all the desolation of the Tarim Basin on Google Earth. Small River Cemetery No. 5, named for a stream that no longer exists, is surrounded by miles and miles of sand dunes, dried river and stream beds, and pure nothingness. If you’d like to see for yourself what I’m talking about, here are the coordinates: 40 degrees, 20 minutes, 11 seconds North and 88 degrees, 40 minutes and 20.3 seconds East. (And if anyone knows how I can embed the Google Earth photo of the site in this blog, please leave a comment below.) I can give you these coordinates without any fear of encouraging looting, as Chinese archaeologists have now completely excavated Small River Cemetery No. 5, and reconstructed the site, with its remarkable phallic looking wooden posts.

Surveying the area via Google Earth has given me a whole new appreciation for the Bronze -Age Europeans and Asians who colonized this region some 4000 years ago. Mair believes that water would have flowed then along many of the small streambeds that meander through the desert. I’m sure he’s right: how else could the colonists have survived there?

But life must have been a daily grind in the Tarim Basin, and I often wonder if the early migrants didn’t drift off to sleep each night dreaming of their greener and gentler homelands.

Google Streetview and the World’s Megaliths

March 24, 2010

This is pure genius. Over at The Megalithic Portal, they are having a competition. Between now and May 31st, they are asking megalithomaniacs around the world to help them locate henges, barrows, mounds and the like on Google Streetview. There’s a lot of turf to cover. Two weeks ago, Google rolled out a deluxe version of Streetview in the U.K., encompassing 95% of the roads.

And the organizers aren’t just limiting the competition to good old Albion. “There are thousands of obscure and unloved standing stones, earthworks etc in roadside locations all over the world,” say the organizers. With a little crowdsourcing and a few prizes to the sharpest eyes, they hope to locate these sites for all of us on Google Earth.

What a brilliant scheme! A few months ago, I posted on the immense fun I had toodling around Pompeii for hours on Google Streetview. An astute reader then put me on to the Google views of Stonehenge, and there went another good hour as I moved around inside this wonder –something I’ve never been able to do in the real world. So the folks at Megalithic Portal hope to do us all a big favor by mapping thousands of other sites, and I think the least we can do is return the favor, by sinking a little spare time in hunting for megaliths.

I have to say, though, that I’m both touched and a little dismayed by some examples they have posted to date. At 7 Ravenswood Avenue, Edinburgh (my father’s home town), there’s a standing stone piercing the sidewalk in front of what looks to be an apartment block. It’s completely encircled by a black iron fence. I suppose the iron bars are there to protect the stone from vandals or careless parkers. But the fence reminds me a little of a miniature prison, dividing the past from the present, the mystery from the mundane, the ritual world from the real one.

Who’s really in prison here?

Virtual Museums and Repatriation

November 25, 2009

I would like to applaud Google this morning for the important new project that it is undertaking in Iraq. As the New York Times reported yesterday, Google will be creating a new virtual Iraq National Museum, by imaging the museum’s crucial collections and placing them online. In a press conference yesterday in Baghdad, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Iraq officials and journalists, “I can think of no better use of our time and our resources than to make the images and ideas of your civilization available to all the people of the world.”

Like many, I am a little skeptical about what use Google might eventually put these images to. The megacorporation has already digitized vast numbers of books (including two of mine) without obtaining permission to do so, and the company is now trying to purchase sweeping digital rights to these books in a lawsuit hardly anyone understands.

But leaving that aside, I’d like to point out that Google is far from alone in its interest in creating virtual museums. Indeed, some research teams are already way ahead of Google. At the Unversity of Arkansas, for example, a team at the Center for Advanced Spatial Technology led by Angie Payne has already scanned some 350 artifacts from the collection of the Hampson Archaeological Museum State Park in Wilson, Arkansas. The result is the Virtual Hampson Museum.

The Hampson Archaeological Museum State Park holds an absolutely superb collection of Native American pottery, particularly from the Mississipian era. Now with the Virtual Hampson Museum, researchers can perform basic measurements on the artifacts and gather data for analyses, without scraping together grants for traveling. This will be very important for struggling graduate students in years to come.

Moreover, as more and more museums repatriate key artifacts from their collections–either to Native American tribes or to countries of origin– 3-D images of the artifacts can be still be preserved online, providing access to all. I’d call this the best possible solution right now to a very sticky issue.