Musings

Archaeologists commonly monitor pollen types in sealed (buried) horizons—well, if the project has sufficient funding for it. From the pollen, you can discern things about the climate, the season the material was buried, etc. Only in unusual circumstances do we find seeds. Archaeologists found date palm seeds at Masada (yes, the fortress built by Herod around 35 BC and destroyed by the Romans in AD 73), and one is now three years old and more than three feet tall! (Science link, too.)

Posted at 11:52 AM | Comments Off on Dated date

Somewhere in Tennessee—or was it Kentucky—we stopped for gas the other day, and this closed-up stone house was across the road from the gas station.

I woke up early this morning, sometime around 4:40 am. Sigh. But there was no falling back asleep, so I got up to read the news on the internet.

Wrong.

JCB found out it’d been out since 1:00 am and it didn’t come back on until 7:30 am. I’m still discombobulated.

Posted at 3:54 PM | Comments Off on Whatta morning!

Is this what they mean by negative space?

We imported a friend to distract us this weekend, and distract us he has!

Late this morning, he and I went to the Southeast Region office of the National Archives and looked at some of the TVA records. When the government ousted all those folks so they could flood their land, they did social work/outreach as part of the resettlement. I looked at case records for some of the 800-odd families who had to move for one reservoir in Alabama, and geeze those folks were poor. For some perspective, a chicken was valued at 50¢ and I saw one mason’s helper made 25¢ per hour; this was in the 1930s.

The photos were all mixed up, and haven’t been indexed, so we couldn’t know where the Alabama ones were in the acid-free archive boxes. Out of the thousands of negatives, we pulled only a few, and as luck would have it, none were from Alabama.

This farm in this lovely valley is in Tennessee, however; the photo was from 1942. It is labeled as the Mack Swann Farm, Jefferson County. Here’s a wee bit about Mack Swann’s wife and her family….

And that excursion was over by 1:30 pm!

Posted at 6:43 PM | Comments Off on Past and present

Here’s a hand-dug well abandoned in the woods of the piedmont. It’s about three feet across and was used during the early-to-mid-20th century.

NB: it’s only a bit more visible if you’re standing there.

Posted at 10:22 PM | 1 Comment »

Do you think of ancient objects as artwork rather divorced from their cultural context, or as information-impregnated windows into the past? From which paradigm do they obtain their value?

Apparently, although he takes his salary from an art museum which espouses the first, James Cuno* actually believes the latter.

Fact

The earliest surviving printed document is known as the Diamond Sutra. It dates to AD 868 and is a Chinese translation of a Sanskrit Buddist text. It was printed using carved wood blocks, and the separate pages were then stitched together. Although it was found in northwest China, the British Library controls it.

Or owns it, depending on your perspective….

* Cuno’s new book is Who Owns Antiquity?

Posted at 6:06 PM | Comments Off on What are things?

Fire pink (Silene virginica), with its lovely forked petals. Peterson says these wildflowers begin blooming in April, and that’s true down here, but not in more northern climes, I’m sure.

I often think about production intensification when I contemplate issues surrounding sociopolitical evolution. More people only happens if there are more resources; of course, in the long run those additional people can garner most of what they need on their own, but in every cross-cultural case, it seems like there’s an additional amount of “stuff”/“product” needed in the long run, so it’s not a linear relationship.

In world news right now, we hear about food shortages, rising fuel costs, and now fertilizer deficits. Another way to put all this is that demand is outstripping supply, which is directly related to increased and increasing human populations.

Global climate changes are altering the production/risk profile, thus exacerbating shortages.

The short-cut way to decrease shortages is to intensify production (increase efficiency, some would say). So now, we’ve pretty much done all the practical intensification to the global political economy, and voila!, if any part of the system falters, oops, problems! People are hungry! They become restless! The status quo is threatened!

What next? This is the stuff of history….

Posted at 11:16 AM | Comments Off on Intensification of production

What we do for love: stay inside, in a windowless room, mostly with the lights off. On a nice day. On a nice Saturday!

Yes, but I found many, many people to talk to at the semi-annual SGA meeting, held this spring at Fernbank Museum of Natural History. One of Fernbank’s galleries is called “A Walk Through Time in Georgia.” For this particular visit, presentations focused on the Spanish period in Georgia, in the 1500s and 1600s, and mostly from the coast.

You may be surprised to learn that one of the hallmark artifacts from this period is the glass bead, used in rosaries and necklaces and the like. One site’s glass beads came from as far away as India and China, as well as, I think, Holland and Bavaria (might have those last two a bit wrong, but from what is now across Europe). Now that’s political economy!

Posted at 6:12 PM | 2 Comments »

A virus has wiped out lots of dogwoods around here, providing food for scavenger species….

Today, the number of people in the world who are highly vulnerable to drought is enormous and growing rapidly, not only in the developing world but also in densely populated areas such as Arizona, California, and southwestern Asia. Judging from the arid cycles of a thousand years ago, the droughts of a warmer future will become more prolonged and harsher. Even without greenhouse gases, the effects of prolonged droughts would be far more catastrophic today than they were even a century ago

That’s from pg. 238 of Brian Fagan‘s latest book, The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations (2008)—and lacks a closing period, just as reproduced here (oops).

But what I really want to say is that Fagan’s books are far superior to publications by Jared Diamond and other non-archaeologists because of the data he marshals and how he analyzes our human past.

Still, I’d bet that the Great Warming in the title was pushed by the marketing people, because Fagan’s message really is that the changing rainfall patterns, with less precip especially in the central, equatorial latitudes, are what will have the biggest effect on human life—not the warming part, although the two facets of the changing climate are definitely linked….

Posted at 6:35 PM | Comments Off on I’m thirsty (really)

Our tulips are fading, but some of the neighbors’ still look tip-top. I saw the first drifts of yellow pollen yesterday (sneeze).

Today’s vocabulary: aliquot (‘alikwət)

(noun) a portion of the larger whole, especially a chemical sample

(verb) to divide a whole into parts, or to take parts from a whole

Posted at 4:03 PM | 3 Comments »

Southbound on I-75 today, we went through rain, actually several wide bands of rain; fortunately, the Prius handles sodden (paved) roads pretty well. We left in fog around 6:15 am, then the misty-moisty fog became rain and intermittent wipers would no longer keep the window clear. Eventually we went through (miles of) real rain, and I watched beige-brown waters flowing down the hillsides and through ditches where water only combs the grass when it rains heavily, leaving them dry within hours after the precip ceases.

Luck finally arrived in southern Tennessee, when the rain petered out and the clouds began to break up. In celebration, we left the Interstate at Ooltewah and wandered cross-country, passing through Red Clay, the capital of the Cherokee Nation while they were under seige by EuroAmericans during the 1830s*, and eventually meandering down to ATL, using the iPhone’s lovely current-traffic info to avoid highway blockages with evasive route selections.

* The State of Georgia wouldn’t allow the Cherokees to meet, so they moved their venue from New Echota Georgia up to Tennessee (you might also like this link from the state of TN). I admit I didn’t know why the name “Red Clay” was rattling around in my mind until I did the googling for this blahg entry….

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Travel serendipity