Monday, 9 February 2009
This photo, taken a year ago today, kinda fits my mood: angular and upside-down! Or perhaps this is the architectural version of having your slip showing!Fuzzy would also fit my mood, but not the photo….
BTW, our photo collection shows the camellias were full out this day in 2008. Not this year. Instead, they’re still buds, big ones, but not open yet—at least on our [benchmark!] plant.
Friday, 6 February 2009
The mining company has piled this waste crap (okay, tailings) next to the road in Copperhill, Tennessee. I thought that strange until I got home and looked at GoogleMaps, and I can see that they’re using the pile as a visual buffer, so you can’t see the even uglier mining activities behind it. Clever. I had thought they would prefer not to remind us of the ugly by-products of their surface mining. Apparently, it was the lesser of two evils…. As one county webpage notes:
Copper ore was discovered in this region in the 1820’s.* From the time of this discovery through 1987 the Copper Basin had the largest metal mining operation in the Southeastern United States. Early profiteers gave no attention to the environment, cutting down every available tree for copper smelting, creating an acid rain that killed over 60,000 acres. This turned the land into what was later described as having the appearance of a red moonscape.
So, now most of that hideous moonscape is hidden, mostly by vegetation barriers, but also by being buried. Here, where the highway passes right next to the mine (or smelters, or other machinery—something ugly), they’re “using” the waste piles….
* Not quite; Native Americans knew about the copper deposits before Euroamericans arrived….
Friday, 30 January 2009
Am now reading Kurlansky’s The Story of Salt (2006), which I saw recommended somewhere. I thought it strange when I put the hold on it at the library last week that it was in the Juvenile collection, but I plowed ahead, Explorer that I am. Picked it up today and found out what I could have discovered with a quick google—it’s aimed at the Grade 3–6 set. Still, it’s interesting, although Kurlansky too strongly makes the argument that pre-modern history is based on the salt trade. On the other hand, salt is so cheap and plentiful today that maybe I cannot imagine what it was like “in the old days.”
Friday, 23 January 2009
I pretended to be a Girl Scout today, which made sense since I was at a Girl Scout camp that was empty of scouts. We had the traditional campfire after dark, of course, but since we were really a bunch of archaeologists, we also fired pots in the coals, and avoided dropping toasting marshmallows on the ceramics….
Tuesday, 6 January 2009
Finally, around 3:30 this afternoon, the overcast began to lift and blue skies appear.
Was this to celebrate the third load of laundry of the day? (Geeze, I hope not!) I did them in and around thinking about Mesoamerican archaeoastronomy….
Monday, 5 January 2009
Yeah, it’s still damp and overcast out….
The prime mover approach to explaining events in history—and prehistory—is seductive, however simplistic it seems once real data are marshaled. Certainly, the introduction of a new technology can mark a dramatic change in a society, but there is more to that change than just the new technology (or agricultural crop, etc.)—after all, it does not substitute for an existing technology or behavior, so not only is something of the old supplanted, but other aspects of technologies and behaviors will be altered.*
Among a series of desultory activities, today I dipped into Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron (2006), which we picked up on from a lovely little bookstore we stumbled over in Ocracoke, Books to Be Red. Thubron traveled the Silk Road westbound the year the SARS worries clouded China. He began at Xi’an, an old capital of China far west of Beijing, in the modern nation’s interior. On page 15, Thubron describes visiting the archaeological site just outside modern Xi’an (population in excess of 8 million people), famous for the platoons of buried terracotta warriors, entombed along with chariots and horses (and more!), as part of the funerary architecture honoring the first emperor of unified China, Qin Shi Huang.
Reassembled from the grave-pits, a terracotta messenger stood ready with his horse behind him. His harness and saddle were in place, but there was not yet a stirrup. The heavy stirrup was a Chinese brain-child as early as the fourth century AD, it seems, and as it travelled westward, stabilising its rider in battle, it made possible the heavily aromoured and expensively mounted knight. To this simple invention some have attributed the onset of the whole feudal age in Europe; and seven centuries later the same era came to an end as its castles were pounded into submission by the Chinese invention of gunpowder. The birth and death of Europe’s Middle Ages, you might fancy, came along the Silk Road from the east.
The Silk Road brought goods and ideas eastward, changing China. They learned polo from Persians and adopted their decorative motifs, which included peacocks and winged horses (similar to dragons, the Chinese probably thought). Although the name is fairly modern, silk was shipped westward on the Silk Road, and for a long time. For example, Thubron reports Chinese silk has been found in tombs in northern Afghanistan that date to 1500 BC.
Oh, I could go on!
Let me just say: however naive the prime mover explanation may be, I have rarely encountered such a proficient use of the concept—and here Thubron deftly tosses us a pair of prime movers!
* Often changes extend to labor patterns, which necessitate myriad adjustments, some quite extensive…. Oh, don’t get me started!
Sunday, 4 January 2009
Today has been so overcast that the outdoors seems like it just quit raining, although it hasn’t really rained since the dark hours. Droplets still cling to vegetation, signs, vehicles—no significant evaporation under these conditions!
In the meantime, I’m trying to track down a good bread machine recipe that uses lots of flax (aka linseed) meal, which is high in omega-3s and fiber, yet tastes good. Historically, flax was a darned important plant in the Old World, for both food and fiber (linen* is flax-thread cloth).
* A bit of etymology: lingerie is from the French linge, referring to washable linen clothing, thus undergarments.
Saturday, 3 January 2009
The lichens and mosses are very happy to soak up our winter rains.
We walked to the Saturday organic farmer’s market (with real farmers, even if they use hydroponics and greenhouses) this morning, and I lost count of the houses we passed with “for sale” signs in front of them….
The common technical term for this kind of market is the (weekly—or similar; periodicity varies) periodic market. They concentrate marketing, and are perfect if the vendors or buyers have to invest considerable travel time to reach the marketplace. Traditional market systems feature periodic markets, which allow vendors to be part-time or small-scale. In areas where most market activity is conducted at periodic markets, the market day rotates among major communities/market locations across a region.
Personally, I think periodic markets are pretty darned interesting when you think about their origins and development…. Bunching up trading is advantageous in multiple ways: e.g., it’s easier to tax by spatially and temporally bunching market activities, it’s safer for participants, it frees everyone for non-market activities (especially production) on the intervening days, it allows different communities to have markets with no simultaneous competitor in the immediate area.
* Apologies; this refers to the Mother Goose nursery rhyme: “To market, to market, to buy a fat pig…“.
Friday, 26 December 2008
Happy Boxing Day!
Wikipedia says the Boxing Day tradition of the wealthy giving gifts to those below them on the social scale (and the Brits are SO aware of this relationship) has its antecedents in the Roman Saturnalia, which also happened in December and featured social role reversals.
Monday, 15 December 2008
I couldn’t help it. Yesterday I mentioned the Currituck lighthouse toward the northern part of the Outer Banks. Tada! Here it is.
The compound’s only open for the high season, so we could only scrutinize it from the street. It seems somewhat far inland now; I don’t know if the shore has moved away from it since it was built.