Tag Archives: archaeology

Quick Review: Caesar’s Druids

Cover image of Casar's Druids by Miranda Aldhouse-GreenI am a little more than halfway through Miranda Aldhouse-Green’s Caesar’s Druids: Story of An Ancient Priesthood.

As the British archaeologist Stuart Piggott pointed out back in the 1960s, there are no texts written about Druids by Druids. The sum of what ancient writers of the Greco-Roman world wrote would fill a few typed sheets—and many of those writers never saw a Druid.

One of the few who did was, of course, Julius Caesar, and he was busy trying to conquer and then govern their societies in Gaul and Britain, which gives his writing a certain slant.

Miranda Aldhouse-Green’s approach, however, is to look at the archaeological evidence, chiefly from Britain and France, and then reason like this: If the archaeology shows elaborate grave construction, or evidence of repeated sacrifices (including human) at a special site, or temple construction, or burials of certain high-status individuals who were not necessarily kings or queens, then that level of religious complexity implies that there were religious specialists to administer it.

And if we try to describe those religious specialists—using primarily Caesar’s writings and those of Tacitus, but also other writers who actually met Druids or their descendants in Gallo-Roman society—then we can probably assume that they were the Druids. She writes,

In order to make any sense of the Druids as a powerful class of religious leads we can examine contemporary material culture for, if they did exist in Caesar’s day, the Druids would have operated within a context of regalia, ritual equipment, sacrifice, and sacred places (xvi).

Much of the book, therefore, discusses ancient sacred sites, excavated burials, artifacts, etc., leading to open-ended questions on the line of “Do these artifacts mark this as the grave of a Druid?”

Generally these seem to be reasonable inferences, although even if one could be sure that it was the grave of a Druid, for example, that still says nothing about what that Druid thought, believed, or did.  So often the texts that claim to answer those questions come from a writer who lived at the other end of the Mediterranean Sea from the nearest Druid.

Nevertheless, it is a thought-provoking book. I had not realized the extent of the archaeological evidence that could be brought out and associated at least hypothetically with the Druids.

Her evidence of religious practice in the space between Roman and Gallic or British ways is most fascinating, for it would suggest perhaps that “Druidism” changed and evolved when in contact with the Roman world and Roman religion. (Despite what happened on Anglesey  [Mona] in 60 CE, not all Druids were ever killed.)

 

Old Underground Doings in Tennessee

In cave-riddled Tennessee, archaeologists are discovering more and more ancient art, mostly from the High Mississippian culture (roughly coeval with the European Middle Ages) but some much, much older.

Just to whet your interest, here are a few paragraphs from John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “America’s Ancient Cave Art.”

The imagery was classic Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC), meaning it belonged to the vast but still dimly understood religious outbreak that swept the Eastern part of North America around 1200 A.D. We know something about the art from that period, having seen all the objects taken from graves by looters and archaeologists over the years: effigy bowls and pipes and spooky­-eyed, kneeling stone idols; carved gorgets worn by the elite. But these underground paintings were something new, an unknown mode of Mississippian cultural activity.

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High Mississippian culture fell apart just before the Spanish reached Florida, not just after as you’d expect, given the diseases and the massacres—it’s a riddle of American archaeology.

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A good archaeologist, Russ Townsend—he’s now the “tribal historic preservation officer” for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Townsend has worked with Jan on plenty of projects, but he has never gone into the caves. I asked him about it. “The Cherokee interpretation is that caves are not to be entered into lightly,” he said, “that these must have been bad people to go that deep. That’s where they took bad people to leave them. So they can lie on rock and not on the ground. It makes a lot of Cherokee uneasy. The lower world is where everything is mixed up and chaotic and bad. You wouldn’t want to go to that place, where the connection between our world and the otherworld is that tenuous.”

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It was easy to see what had so impressed Simek about this place. You could look through any number of coffee-­table books on prehistoric Native American art from the Southeast and see absolutely nothing that looked like these pictures. We saw birds, yes, but this seemed to be a sort of box bird—its square body was feathered. Now there were more of them.

Read the whole thing here.

Another ‘Discovery’ of Atlantis

In one of the crudest examples of “news hook” writing that I have lately seen, Yahoo links this week’s earthquake-tsunami in Japan to an upcoming National Geographic special on Atlantis, which may have been an actual city in what is now Spain and which also may be been destroyed by a tsunami.

To solve the age-old mystery, the team used a satellite photo of a suspected submerged city to find the site just north of Cadiz, Spain. There, buried in the vast marshlands of the Dona Ana Park, they believe that they pinpointed the ancient, multi-ringed dominion known as Atlantis.

The team of archeologists and geologists in 2009 and 2010 used a combination of deep-ground radar, digital mapping, and underwater technology to survey the site.

Freund’s discovery in central Spain of a strange series of “memorial cities,” built in Atlantis’ image by its refugees after the city’s likely destruction by a tsunami, gave researchers added proof and confidence, he said.

I don’t get that channel, so someone will have to let me know how it goes.

That legendary Atlantis was on the Iberian peninsula makes more sense than the hypothesis that the eruption on Santorini/Thera in the Eastern Mediterranean produced the legend. Plato might have been sort of correct about the “beyond the Pillars of Hercules” part.

Nothing here on the Dion Fortune-y stuff.

If You Really Practice the *Old* Religion . . .

. . . then you need some ritual skull cups.

Come to think of it, I think that I know someone who does.

Famous Archaeologists Who Fail

They are all fictional, of course.

Actually, in my experience, archaeologists are indeed a vicious bunch, but they usually eschew large-caliber revolvers and bullwhips.

(Tip of the stained fedora to Caroline of Necropolis Now.)

Is Anthropology a Science?

Politicized anthropologists gain ground against archaeologists and physical anthropologists after their chief American professional organization rewrites its mission statement.

The decision has reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based anthropological disciplines — including archaeologists, physical anthropologists and some cultural anthropologists — and members of the profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights.

According to the AAA’s new long-range plan, anthropology is about “public understanding,” not “science.”

Some public understanding occurs no matter what, but the dispute seems to favor those who want anthropology to favor their political agendas.  These are the same postmodern folks who argue that anthropology always served a political agenda, so perhaps they are simply being more up-front about it.

Until now, the association’s long-range plan was “to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects.” The executive board revised this last month to say, “The purposes of the association shall be to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects.” This is followed by a list of anthropological subdisciplines that includes political research.

Anthropology is easily politicized because it deals with social structures, kinship, war, death and burial—everything to do with identity at various levels. And yes, anthropologists have often served larger, powerful interests. Think of Ruth Benedict researching The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, studying Japanese culture to benefit the American occupation.

But I still think that there is a place for “science” and objectivity as ideals, even while keeping one’s eyes open (“reflexivity”).

An Icelandic Approach to the “Reburial” Issue

Here is a twist on the controversy over the reburial of ancient remains: Bury the skeleton and grave goods at the museum.

Of course, it helps it the remains are Norse and the museum is the Viking World Museum in Iceland. Not so many problems of cultural continuity there.

According to museum director Elisabeth Ward, research has shown that most Icelandic settlers were pagan [sic] and that paganism was practiced among the first generations of Icelanders.

“We are reconstructing the pagan grave from Hafurbjarnarstadir,” Ward explained. “The skeletons are placed in a wooden boat, which is a replica of a Viking boat, and sand from Hafurbjarnarstadir has been put inside. Some people believe the man was buried inside a boat, but it is not quite clear.”

(Hat tip: Caroline Tully at Necropolis Now.)

An Icelandic Pocahantas?

In 1998, the Icelandic parliament passed a bill authorizing creation of a database of all citizens’ genetic, genealogical, and medical records, sometimes called The Book of Icelanders.

Now, reports National Geographic, researchers have found traces of possible American Indian ancestry in some Icelanders. They hypothesize that some of the explorers or settlers in Vinland might have brought back a woman, or women, from a North American tribe.

Fascinating. Next they will be telling us that Severed Ways is a documentary.

It’s still not as weird as the legend that some western Chinese are descended from Roman soldiers.

Get Right with Tlaloc

On a recent trip to look at some Anasazi / Ancestral Puebloan ruins in northeast Arizona, I took Craig Childs’ book House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest as my guide book.

Driving and backpacking from southwest Colorado down into Sonora, Mexico, over a period of years, Childs interviews archaeologists, walks trails, and examines ruins to try to begin to construct a narrative history of what might have happened in the Southwest between the 11th and 15th centuries CE.

A god’s presence lurks throughout the book but is not revealed until the latter parts. That god is Tlaloc (his Aztec name, but he is cross-cultural), the god of rain,  whose cult he calls “the oldest recognizable religious complex in the Americas.” (But might not some hunters’ gods be older?)

In essence Tlaloc is a rain god and has long been the focus of mountaintop and cave offerings and sacrifices …. Both the symbolic and the practical aspects of Tlaloc religion are very similar to those of the Pueblo katsina religion still practiced in the Southwest (459).

This “pan-American rain god” is still acknowledged in the United States. Climbing a mountain in one of the isolated “sky island” ranges of southeastern Arizona, Childs notes, “Caves throughout the Sky Islands are stashed with wooden katsinas and painted offerings. Hanks of human hair are hung in natural subterranean passages, and precious stones are positioned around springs” (364-5).

His is a religion “centered on the mechanics of water,” the spiritual expression of the hydrological cycle.

Here where we track thunderstorm cells on the NOAA radar via the Web, wishing them to veer north or south and pass over our house, where we monitor the creek levels day by day, water is serious business. (In my newspaper days, I referred to the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District as “the secret government.”  Who needs the Freemasons, Communists, or Opus Dei?  None of them control the water.)

Tlaloc needs a local shrine, and I know just the place, about thirty minutes’ hike from the back door. It will do for a start.

Hot Baths and Battle Wounds among the Norse

A summary of ancient Norse practices on personal hygiene, bathing, treatment of disease, and battle wounds.

Both the saga literature and forensic studies of skeletal remains suggest that battle injuries could be horrific …. The femur (leg bone) shown to the right is from another man who died of battle injuries in the 11th century. The bone shows clear marks of the impact of ring mail against the bone, suggesting his upper leg was hit with a sword blow so powerful as to force the rings of his mail shirt through the muscles of his leg into contact with the bone. Astonishingly, this injury was not the cause of his death. His skeletal remains show other serious injuries received in that battle. However, it was a cut that partially severed his spine at the neck that killed him.

My own modest reading of the sagas suggest that when two men went at each other with battle axes, usually after no more than two swings of the ax someone had serious arterial bleeding.

But in Iceland they sure loved their natural hot tubs—and who wouldn’t?

(Via Making Light.)