This is what happens when a parasitologist/archaeologist muses on the origin of mythology. It gets interesting at about the 6:30-minute point.
And this is a very famous turd in English archaeology.
Tag Archives: archaeology
On the Keeping of Pet Hermits and Druids
Some of the eighteenth-century hermits employed by rich landowners were in fact characterized as “Druids.”
Campbell clearly had fun with his quest for real hermits. At Hawkstone in Shropshire, a bare-footed and venerable Fr Francis regularly posed with his stock-in-trade: a skull, an hourglass and book. Although replaced at times by an automaton, Hawkstone’s hermit – a hereditary post – may have survived into the twentieth century. The impecunious Charles Hamilton reputedly advertised for a hermit for his Gothic hermitage at Painshill in Surrey, offering a fee of 700 guineas (some reports say 500) to anyone able and willing to meet his stringent conditions over seven years: to go barefoot in a woollen robe, never to cut beard or nails, or to speak with the servant who brought his food. Although the advertisement cannot now be traced, the hermit undoubtedly existed, and Campbell’s exhaustive enquiries confirm how ubiquitous hermits were in Georgian Britain.
Maybe there is still a niche waiting to be exploited here, for either philosophy majors or designers of animatronic hermits.
BBC: Our Ancestors Were Stupid
Here is the Beeb with a story about an ancient monument in Scotland:
“Excavations of a field at Crathes Castle found a series of 12 pits which appear to mimic the phases of the moon and track lunar months.”
Then they trot out that stale old idea that ancient people needed to build giant monuments to tell themselves what time of year it was:
The pit alignment also aligns on the Midwinter sunrise to provided the hunter-gatherers with an annual “astronomic correction” in order to better follow the passage of time and changing seasons.
And these, mind you, were hunter-gathers, not agriculturalists — not that any farmers need a calendar to tell them when to plant. Every traditional farming culture has its signs: “When the leaves of such-and-such tree are big as a mouse’s ear, plant such-and-such a crop.”
And hunters? They watch the animals and factors affecting animals. “It’s snowing hard. The elk will be moving down off the mountain.”
And gatherers? They watch the plants. “It’s rained for the last week. Let’s go check our mushroom-gathering area — they might be coming up.” I plan to do that tomorrow, in fact.
You don’t need twelve posts in a circle to tell you when it is time. Even today, would you need a calendar to tell you when it was spring? Changes in vegetation, bird migrations, and other natural signs are quite enough.
Astronomically aligned structures are meaningful, but sometimes we do not know why. But many instances, ancient Tenochtilan, for example, aligned grand buildings showed that the rulers enjoyed the favor of heaven/the gods. Likewise in imperial China and in the Middle East.
Possibly these twelve posts in a meadow were erected on the orders of some Paleolithic “Big Man” whose ideas about the “formal construction of time” were connected to his sense of self-importance. That makes as much sense as allegedly telling people when it was time to hunt and gather.
Circles and Rectangles: Does Your House Shape You?
My first year as an undergraduate, I lived a in four-person dormitory suit. One day I entered the (rectangular) room of my suite-mate Bill and found that he had placed his bed, desk, etc. at diagonal angles to the walls.
“I got tired of everything being so rectilinear,” he said. It was funny how Bill’s new arrangement felt oddly disquieting.
A circular room, however was not an option.
People in some times and places have favored circular shapes and in other times rectangular shapes. Do these preferences say something about the societies?
These kinds of idea have a long history. In the early 1930s, the Soviet city planner Mikhail Okhitovich claimed that the right angle in architecture originated in private land ownership: curvilinear structures, whether they be round buildings or chairs with curved backs, were therefore communist in principle.
This quotation comes from a review essay in the Times Literary Supplement: “Seeing Straight,” discussing three books that examine questions of shape, perception, and society:
Vision is a form of cognition: the kinds of things we see shape the ways we think. That is why it is so hard to imagine the visual experience of our prehistoric ancestors, or, for that matter, the girls of nineteenth-century Malawi, who lived in a world without right angles. Inhabitants of, say, late Neolithic Orkney would only have seen a handful of perpendicular lines a day: tools, shaped stones, perhaps some simple geometric decoration on a pot. For the most part, their world was curved: circular buildings, round tombs, stone circles, rounded clay vessels . . . . What does a round building mean? Does it mean anything, or is the choice of one shape of house over another simply a matter of practicalities?
I think that I want to read at least one of the books reviewed, How Ancient Europeans Saw the World: Vision, Patterns, and the Shaping of the Mind in Prehistoric Times.
As for my roommate Bill, he eventually put his furniture back in line with the walls, as the non-rectilinear arrangement made it too hard to move around his dorm room.
Multi-media Sutton Hoo
A multi-media site about the excavation of the Anglo-Saxon era ship burial at Sutton Hoo in1939, with archival footage from the British Musem and more.
It is often believed to be a king’s burial site, since it contained armor and weapons, a lyre, gold coins, and many rich grave goods from different places.
Sacred Geography in the Cumberland Plateau
Interpreting prehistoric rock art is a challenge, and I suspect that some of Professor Simek’s colleagues may well challenge his interpretation, but he has been looking at petroglyphs from the Mississippian culture and thinks that they describe a three-tier cosmology (Upper, Middle, and Lower Worlds), already attested elsewhere.
A Mississippian priest, with a ceremonial flint mace and severed head. Artist Herb Roe, based on a repoussé copper plate. (Wikipedia).
The Mississippian Culture is a term applied to people living in the area from about 800–1500 CE, contemporary with the European Middle Ages. These people lived in fortified villages, and some built large ceremonial mounds.
Simek and his team analyzed 44 open- air art sites where the art is exposed to light and 50 cave art sites in the Cumberland Plateau using nondestructive, high-tech tools, such as a high-resolution laser scanner. Through analysis of the depictions, colors, and spatial organization, they found that the sites mimic the Southeastern native people’s cosmological principles.
“The cosmological divisions of the universe were mapped onto the physical landscape using the relief of the Cumberland Plateau as a topographic canvas,” said Simek.
The “upper world” included celestial bodies and weather forces personified in mythic characters that exerted influences on the human situation. Mostly open-air art sites located in high elevations touched by the sun and stars feature these images. Many of the images are drawn in the color red, which was associated with life.
The “middle world” represented the natural world. A mixture of open air and cave art sites hug the middle of the plateau and feature images of people, plants and animals of mostly secular character.
The “lower world” was characterized by darkness and danger, and was associated with death, transformation and renewal. The art sites, predominantly found in caves, feature otherworldly characters, supernatural serpents and dogs that accompanied dead humans on the path of souls. The inclusion of creatures such as birds and fish that could cross the three layers represents the belief that the boundaries were permeable. Many of these images are depicted in the color black, which was associated with death.
Read the rest at Heritage Daily, an online archaeology magazine. Wikipedia’s article on the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex connects with all this, particularly the section on cosmology.
One Ring
Ring from Roman Britain with Latin inscription. (BBC)
Is this Roman ring the inspiration for J. R. R. Tolkien’s ring of power?
Maybe, maybe not. It makes for an interesting story, and at least you can say that he was thinking about magical rings before Lord of the Rings was written.
Archaeologists Find Secret to Norse Sunstone?
This might be one of those “But we already knew that!” deals, but French archaeologists think that they have an actual example in hand of a “sunstone,” said to be used by the Norse to navigate in cloudy weather.
This one, however, comes from a Tudor-era shipwreck. Same principle though.
(LDS historians and scholars, this is not about you.)
Peaceful Minoan Crete . . . Was Not
Boy boxers smack each other in a Minoan fresco. (Wiki Commons).
Bronze Age (Minoan) Crete is often portrayed as this peaceful place where people gathered flowers, danced, sang, and worshiped the Great Mother Goddess.
Um, no, says an archaeologist from the University of Sheffield:
“Their world was uncovered just over a century ago, and was deemed to be a largely peaceful society,” explained [Barry] Molloy. “In time, many took this to be a paradigm of a society that was devoid of war, where warriors and violence were shunned and played no significant role.
“That utopian view has not survived into modern scholarship, but it remains in the background unchallenged and still crops up in modern texts and popular culture with surprising frequency.
“Having worked on excavation and other projects in Crete for many years, it triggered my curiosity about how such a complex society, controlling resources and trading with mighty powers like Egypt, could evolve in an egalitarian or cooperative context. Can we really be that positive about human nature? As I looked for evidence for violence, warriors or war, it quickly became obvious that it could be found in a surprisingly wide range of places.”
Much like other people, in other words. Read the rest here.
Death and the Viking Mind
Stora Hammars stone : Wiki Commons
A short piece from Heritage Daily summarizes research by Neil Price of Aberdeen University into Viking-period burials.
Aside from these literary work [sagas], Professor Price suggests that the grave assemblages of the Viking Age may be used to tell stories and provide an insight into the Viking conscious. There is an “infinite diversity of Viking Age burial,” he says, and whilst certainly there are similarities, these common aspects are ‘themes’ for the burial stories to be played out. So how do these stories take place?
If you scroll to the bottom, there are links to YouTube videos of three of Price’s lectures.