Tag Archives: history

The Real Mrs. Miller, Businesswoman and Brothel Madam

November 5, 2010

At one time or another, we’ve all seen the private workings of a 19th-century brothel, thanks to the silver screen. My own favorite film on this subject happens to be something that you will only see on the Turner Movie Channel these days: McCabe and Mrs. Miller, directed by none other than Robert Altman.

Did Altman get any of it right? Well, archaeologists have dug a wide range of 19th century brothels in recent years, including a very upscale establishment in Washington D.C. that once catered to politicians. Now an ongoing research project by Boston University archaeologist Mary Beaudry is shedding light on the life of a brothel madam, Mrs. Lake, and her employees at 27 and 29 Endicott Street, Boston. For more, see my new post at The Last Word on Nothing.

Fear and Loathing in the Caribbean

May 19, 2010

I think there are few more fascinating reads around than the early 16th century narratives of European adventurers in the Americas. Most of these travelers had sized up their financial prospects at home and found them grimly wanting as younger sons of nobility or aspiring merchants. So they signed up for long dangerous sea voyages in small sailing ships to lands few of their friends or family had ever heard of and fewer still could really imagine.

My overall impression is that these early travelers spent a good deal of their time in the Americas quaking in their boots. Yes, they had their swords and arquebuses and Spanish mastiffs, but in the early decades of contact, before smallpox and European diseases swept across the land and turned thriving villages into ghost towns, these would-be colonists were hugely outnumbered. In Jamaica alone, for example, the early Spanish sailors encountered some 60,000 Taino. Read more…

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.

A Maya King’s Common Touch

April 14, 2010

Now here’s a very cool concept of time. Put away for a moment your iPhone clocks and Outlook calendars and imagine time as an endless series of year bundles, specifically 52-year bundles. At the end of each bundle, imagine that you and your neighbors climb someplace high–a rooftop say, or the top story of the Empire State Building–and stay up all night. Then, as you see the pink glow of the rising sun and the renewal of the world’s 52-year-long lease on life, you celebrate like crazy; go home and ritually cleanse your house; and find all new stuff to put in it.

That’s pretty much what the Aztecs did. And according to a cool new study by University of Illinois archaeologist Lisa Luceros, that’s exactly what ordinary illiterate Maya men and women did–recording great cycles of time in their housefloors for nearly 700 years, from AD 450 to 1150. “Commoners,” says Lucero in a public statement, ” had their own way of recording their own history, not only their history as a family, but their place in the cosmos.”

I’ve followed Lucero’s work for sometime now. She’s a perceptive and observant archaeologist, with interesting things to say about the Maya. But I found this new work of hers in the small Maya center now known as Saturday Creek in central Belize particularly fascinating. Here’s why.

Lucero and her team excavated two houses in Saturday Creek, carefully peeling back the layers. What they found was a lamination of burnt house floors, each containing careful arrangements of broken pottery and complete vessels; human skeletal remains (frequently missing spinal and pelvic bones); and pieces of obsidian and chert.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. The occupants buried the humans in the same spot each time. And they placed ritually significant objects on top of the bodies and around them–objects that Lucero and her colleagues began to decode. You might expect, for example, to find bits of black pottery scattered around the bodies, for the Maya associated black with death and Xibalba, the feared underworld. Instead, Lucero’s team found sherds of red pottery–red being the color of life and rebirth–and chunks of stone linked in story to the Maya equivalent of paradise. In other words, the ritualized burning of the house was an act of rebirth–both for the living and the dead. And evidence showed that it took place every 40 to 50 years.

Archaeologists have long known that Maya upper classes paid close attention to calendrical time, for royal stelae and palace walls abound in such references. And this knowledge was likely ” a source of great power,” notes Robert Sharer and Loa P. Traxler in their book, The Ancient Maya. “The complexities of calendrical calculations demonstrated that king and priests held close communion with the supernatural forces that governed the cosmos.” What’s new in Lucero’s work, though, is the evidence that ordinary people recorded these great cycles of time in their own way.

Moreover, Lucero takes this one intriguing step further. She proposes that rulers of the Classic Maya city states took age-old domestic practices–like celebrating year bundles–and performed them on a grand scale, a kind of theater that brought an entire community together. “Nearly everything royal,” she concludes in a formal statement, “emerged or developed or evolved from domestic practices.”

It’s a fascinating thought. Even the mightiest Maya king is a commoner at heart.

In the Presence of Death at Pompeii

April 6, 2010

I once spent an entire a year flying to remote parts of the world to see mummies. I was researching and writing a book that became The Mummy Congress, and during this time I got to know the preserved dead exceptionally well. I watched them being unwrapped from their linens in Egypt, poked and prodded with fiber optics in Italy and haggled over in China. And I feel obliged to state something clearly. I have never seen a mummy that struck me as ghoulish or macabre or indeed anything other than what it was generally was–a dead human being who had been mourned, prepared, arranged and preserved.

I can’t say the same, however, of the plaster casts that archaeologists have made of Pompeii’s victims, a thought that occurred to me this morning as I read on the BBC website of a new exhibit of these objects at Antiquarium de Boscoreale, a short drive away from Pompeii.

Archaeologists produce these casts whenever they find skeletal remains lying in cavities in the volcanic rock that still blankets much of Pompeii. They pour plaster into the hollow and pry it loose when it hardens. And what often emerges is an object not quite human, and not quite artifact, something that captures in eerie detail the final moments of one of Pompeii’s inhabitants during the deadly eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Once seen, such casts are not easily forgotten.

I saw them for the first time a few years ago, when Cambridge University archaeologist Andrew Wallace-Hadrill took me to see the one of the grandest and most opulent homes in Pompeii, the House of Fabius Rufus. As I recall (and please correct me, someone, if I am wrong), this immense villa had never been open to the public, and Wallace-Hadrill and I spent nearly an hour admiring its exquisite frescos and its private bath.

At one point in this behind-the-scenes tour, I was climbing down a shadowy stairwell and I stumbled on something obstructing one of the steps. I stopped and peered down to see what I had nearly fallen on. It was a plaster cast of a human victim sprawled across the stair, a slave perhaps who had no chance to flee and who had literally perished on the spot. At that moment, I felt a deep, penetrating sense of the ancient tragedy, and although two thousand years had passed since the toxic volcanic gases had swept through the city, I could see all too clearly a life being snuffed out right in front of me.

As Wallace-Hadrill and I continued roaming the house, we came across several more of these casts lying on the floor, in various attitudes of death. The archaeologist, an expert on the architecture of Pompeii, paid no attention to them, as if he scarcely saw them any more. But a terrible chill came over me each time I found another huddled or splayed form, another a human life cut short.

All this came to mind today when I read of a new exhibit. The show marks the first time that museum goers will see such a large collection of the casts in one spot.

Women, The Earliest Brewmasters?

March 31, 2010

Until last night, I had never given much thought to the gender of the world’s ancient brewmasters. But while surfing the net in the wee hours, I came across a British newspaper article with an irresistible headline: “Men Owe Women for ‘Creating Beer’ Claims Academic.” According to the Telegraph, British author Jane Peyton now proposes that Bud Lite, Tsingtao and Victoria Bitter drinkers around the world owe their favorite suds to women brewmasters.

Peyton furnishes several examples in this article. Only women, she noted, were permitted to brew beer in Mesopotamia. Much later, among the Vikings, women owned all the equipment for beer making and controlled the entire process. And until the beginning of the 18th century, most of Britain’s ale came from ale-wives who worked out of their homes for extra income. But the mass production of beer during the Industrial Revolution apparently put a end to all these female microbreweries.

The Telegraph article made no mention, however, of who Jane Peyton is. So I googled her and stumbled upon a whole unsuspected world of beer pedagogy in Britain. Peyton is a tutor at the Beer Academy in London. She is also the principal of the School of Booze, an outfit whose model is “Think While You Drink,” (a splendid oxymoron) and which offers tutored beer tastings. Clearly there are a lot of beer connoisseurs out there who want parity with wine snobs.

I don’t know where Peyton is getting her info from or whether she has a book on the way on feminist beermakers. Her website offers few clues. And because of this, I might have dismissed the article entirely, but for one thing. Peyton mentioned that before the Industrial Revolution, people thought of beer as a food: as a result, many cultures deemed beer-making women’s work.

Although my knowledge of early brewing is very limited, I recently read a wonderful paper by Justin Jennings, a curator at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, on the Andean art of making chicha, or corn beer. According to Jennings, Andean families have long brewed two types of this beer–one thin, the other quite thick. They reserve the thicker and more filling chicha for daily consumption as a food. But they prepare a thinner corn beer for festivals, so that celebrants can drink more and get pleasantly high faster.

As Jennings points out, “gender roles are often fluid in the Andes,” but “chicha brewing is primarily a female activity. ” He then goes on to note that “the preparation and serving of chicha, like all food, is central to women’s identity, and for women who sell chicha [today] the drink offers considerable social power and autonomy that they aggressively defend.”

I think Jane Peyton is on to something here.

The Silk Road Merchant Who Loved Haute Couture

March 29, 2010

I have just returned from a three-day trip to California, where I attended the opening of a major new exhibit on the Tarim Basin mummies. The new exhibition at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana did not disappoint. I spent hours marvelling at the mummies and nearly 150 spectacular artifacts which date as early as the Bronze Age, 4000 years ago. I’ll be writing about some of the more fascinating aspects of the exhibit this week. But today, I’ve posted an entry over at Archaeology magazine on the sartorial splendor –no other way to describe it–of one of the mummies, Yingpan Man. Please click here to read today’s post.

When Did We Begin Supersizing Dinner?

March 23, 2010

Every time I venture into the produce departments of large supermarkets, I am stunned by what I see on the shelves. Arranged to perfection on trays and lit by soft lighting are foods I scarcely recognize anymore: grapes the size of a squash ball, naval oranges as big as a child’s head, and pineapples larger than a football. How did we ever get to this, I ask myself, pumping our crops so full of chemicals until they reach Brobdingnagian dimensions? Gulliver would have felt right at home.

All this came to mind this morning, as I read a very clever new historical study that Brian Wansink, a nutritional scientist at Cornell University and the author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More than We Think, and his theologian brother Craig Wansink, just published in the International Journal of Obesity. The two researchers examined 52 images of the Last Supper painted between A.D. 1000 and 1900, and measured the size of the portrayed portions. (They did the later by scanning the food items and plates with computer-aided design technology, then calculating the relative food to human head ratio.)

What they found was a strong trend over time towards supersizing. The entrees grew by a whopping 69%, while the plates themselves expanded by 66%. Even bread loaves swelled by 25%. Could religious practices account for this trend? Craig Wansink, the theologian on the team, says no. “There is no religious reason why the meal got bigger,” Wansink told a BBC reporter. “It may be that meals really did grow, or that people just became more interested in food.”

Brian Wansink’s earlier research strongly suggests that the monster-sized portions we see today in restaurants, fast food joints, and on our own dining room tables have a lot to do with the current obesity epidemic. And there are some simple things we can do to cut the calories. Just switching from a 12-inch to a 10-inch plate, for example, will result in a 22% decrease in the amount of food we eat at dinner.

Above: The Last Supper by Jacopo da Ponte, ca 1546

Below: The Last Supper by Alonso Vazquez n.d.

Repatriating the Lewis Chessmen from the British Museum

March 17, 2010

I sometimes think that one of the worst jobs in archaeology today would be to work as a curator at the British Museum. Yes, there is the prestige of researching and mounting massive exhibitions that attract international attention. But who would want to be on the receiving end of all the ire of foreign governments who want their treasures back, from Iran demanding the loan of the Cyrus cylinder to Greece pressuring for the return of the Parthenon marbles? And I sure wouldn’t want Zawi Hawass lecturing me on the return of the Rosetta Stone.

Now a new front has opened up in the diplomatic war to pry loose national treasures from the British Museum showcases–and it’s not at all where you might think it would be. Last week, Scottish National Party MP Angus MacNeil called for a debate in the British House of Commons over the repatriation of the very famous Lewis Chessmen discovered in a sandbank on the Isle of Lewis, in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides Islands sometime before 1831.

First a very short primer on the Lewis Chessmen, which are my all time favorite artifacts from Medieval Europe. A 12th century artist carved the exquisitely beautiful chess pieces–93 in all–mostly from walrus ivory, which could well have come from the Greenland colonies, or possibly even from the Canadian Arctic. (That’s another story I’ll save for another day.) No one knows for certain, however, where the chessmen were carved, although some scholars lean towards Trondheim in Norway, since similar chess pieces were found there. How these wonderful chessmen–one of the best preserved sets from the medieval world- came to lie in a sand dune near Uig on the Isle of Lewis is unknown.

Shortly after they came to light in 1831, however, the Hebridean finder decided to sell them. A private buyer purchased 11 of the pieces and the rest went to the British Museum, which displays several of these miniature artworks in one of its galleries.

But now people in the Outer Hebrides want their famous chessmen back. Indeed, their MP Angus MacNeil is working hard to repatriate them to the Museum nan Eilean in Stornoway, the major town of the Outer Hebrides. And what has provoked this protest? It appears that the British Museum has stepped very clumsily on toes and local sensitivities in the Outer Hebrides. Its curators have been working on a major travelling exhibit of the chesspieces to Scotland and according to a recent online article in The Press and Journal, advertising for the forthcoming exhibit attributes the chesspieces to Norwegian craftsmen, completely ignoring the possibility that they were carved in the Outer Hebrides.

Is this just a tempest in a teapot? I don’t think so. The Lewis chesspieces are objects of of immense pride in the Outer Hebrides, and someone at the British Museum should have known this. I am becoming more and more sympathetic all the time to foreign governments and even local museums who want to repatriate their greatest treasures from the vaults and exhibition cases of the British Museum. It think it’s patronizing in the extreme today to think that only the big national museums in developed countries know how to take care of the world’s most important cultural heritage.