"A little wine for thy stomach's sake": Wine History Roundup

Randall Stephens

Marc Kaufman, "Ancient Winemaking Operation Unearthed," Washington Post, January 11, 2011

Now actual proof of early vintners comes from a cave near a remote Armenian village, which, perhaps not coincidentally, is within 60 miles of Mount Ararat. Scientists have unearthed a surprisingly advanced winemaking operation, surrounded by storage jars, and say it dates back 6,000 years, making it the earliest known site in the world for wine-making with grapes, by far.>>>

Stephen Meuse, "But Was It Plonk?" Boston Globe, January 13, 2011

The earliest known winery has been discovered in an Armenian cave complex. An international team investigating the site has identified a treading platform for crushing grapes, a vat for storing wine, a drinking cup and bowls believed to be more than 6000 years old.>>>

Wynne Parry, "In Vino Veritas: Wine Cups Tell History of Athenian Life," MSNBC, January 12, 2011

Over centuries, the ancient Athenian cocktail parties went full circle, from a practice reserved for the elite to one open to everyone and then, by the fourth century B.C., back to a luxurious display of consumption most could not afford. The wine cups used during these gatherings, called symposia, reflect this story, according to Kathleen Lynch, a University of Cincinnati professor of classics.>>>

Talia Baiocchi, "Vintage America: A Brief History of Wine in America," eater.com, January 3, 2011

But America's wine history reaches much further back than the 1970s and covers much more ground than the West Coast. In many places, the remnants of 500 years of wine growing and consumption are still evident. Ohio still grows Catawba, the native grape that was the centerpiece of Nicholas Longworth's first commercial winery in the United States in the 1830s; Virginia's Roanoke Island is still home to a 400-year-old Scuppernong vine trained by the Englishmen that washed up there in the late 1500s; and Texas, whose winemaking history dates back to the mid 1600s, may just be the next great American wine producing state.>>>

Jeremy Bowen, "Lebanon's Vines on the Frontline," BBC, January 12, 2011

Compared with the world's wine superpowers, Lebanon's wine production is tiny but its history goes back to the Phoenician civilisation in the ancient world. In Baalbek, in the Bekaa Valley, the Romans left a temple to Bacchus, the god of wine, which still stands.>>>

Thomas Jefferson to M. de Neuville, December 13, 1818, in Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies: From the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Thomas Jefferson Randolph (Charlottesville, 1829), 312.

I rejoice, as a moralist, at the prospect of a reduction of the duties on wine, by our national legislature. It is an error to view a tax on that liquor as merely a tax on the rich. It is a prohibition of its use to the middling class of our citizens, and a condemnation of them to the poison of whiskey, which is desolating their houses. No nation is drunken where wine is cheap; and none sober, where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage. It is, in truth, the only antidote to the bane of whiskey.>>>

Dogs through Time

Randall Stephens

No other animal has been as shaped by humankind as Canis lupus, the gray wolf. There are now 400 different official breeds. They range in size from the itty-bitty Chihuahua, which can sit comfortably in a teacup, to the Mastiff, weighing in at well over 200 lbs.

And just how much has human history been shaped and altered by dogs, and domestic animals in general? Ancient grave sites are littered with animal bones. The domestication of animals more than 10,000 years ago brought with it significant changes. Groups could settle and channel energies into new cultural pursuits. And since we first figured out how to keep cats around, use yeast to make intoxicants, and herd cattle, our lives have been caught up with the lives of animals.

A recent article in Der Spiegel, "The Pharoahs' Pups: Egyptian Bones Could Help Solve Canine Conundrum," looks into the roots of human-dog interaction. The earliest archeological evidence suggests that we've been linked closely to them for 14,000 years. Even more surprising: "Scholars believe that wolves first started to have peaceful interactions with Stone Age humans about 30,000 years ago."

"How did all of these various [dog] breeds develop?" asks the author in Der Spiegel.

Reliefs, grave paintings and statues indicate that the ancient Egyptians played a major role in this development. The first known depictions of dogs come from rock carvings along the Nile River dating back almost 5,000 years ago. Not long thereafter, the pharaohs were already hunting with slender greyhounds. A leashed dog with black-and-white spots that vaguely resembles a dalmation is painted on a sarcophagus from the 6th dynasty, or roughly 4,000 years back.

Around 1500 B.C., small, bowlegged mutts and lapdogs were already scurrying around the palaces of the pharaohs. Brawny hunting dogs were bred for the battlefield, and mastiffs imported from Assyria were crossed with the domestic breed. A bronze figure from the grave of King Tut strongly resembles a dachshund.>>>

For more on the amazing transformation of dogkind over the ages, and for a look at how humans have interacted with dogs, watch Nova's Dogs Decoded (2010) and The Science of Dogs (National Geographic, 2007) on Netflix. (Each is a "watch instantly" title.)

On a related note, check out this preview of Werner Herzog's new 3-D documentary, Caves of Forgotten Dreams, about a group of 32,000-year-old cave paintings of animals and humans in southern France.

History of the World in 100 Objects

Randall Stephens

For those who missed it, check out BBC Radio 4's "History of the World in 100 Objects." (The series ends this week.) I read about it in the TLS a few weeks back. The reviewer praised the audio exhibit for its elegant, almost cinematic qualities, something that stretched the radio format in amazing ways. Yesterday, the Guardian lauded host Neil MacGregor, who "wears his knowledge lightly. He manages to both charm and enthuse at the same time, a hard trick that, but at the core of each bite-sized podcastable talk is an ardent and contemporaneous message: civilisations do not so much clash as learn and borrow from each other. One picks up from where the other leaves off."

The program might work well in the classroom. (How often do we listen to audio, rather than watch film, with students? Once in a blue moon, I'll find a segment on NPR that fits into what we are going over, but otherwise, it's rare.) Here are a few bits from the series:

035 Head of Augustus, 21 May 2010, Listen, Duration: 15 mins

Head of Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, looks at one of the world’s most famous rulers, whose powerful, God-like status is brilliantly enshrined in a 2000-year-old bronze head with striking eyes. He explores how Augustus dramatically enlarged the Roman Empire, establishing his image as one of its most familiar objects. The historian Susan Walker and the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, help explain the power and methodology of Augustus.

057 Hedwig glass beaker, 22 Jun 2010, Listen, Duration: 15 mins

Glass beaker from central Europe probably made by a Muslim craftsman. Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, examines a glass beaker made in Syria or Egypt at a time when Christians were warring with Muslims in the crusades. The glass became associated with the miracles of a Christian saint, Hedwig, who turned water into wine when it touched her lips. But how did Islamic glass reach Christian Europe during the Crusades?

088 North American buckskin map, 6 Oct 2010, Listen, Duration: 14 mins

Map of the area between the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, explores the differing attitudes towards land and living of Europeans and Native Americans in the 18th century. He looks at a buckskin map drawn up by a Native American as the British negotiated for land between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. With contributions by cartographer Martin Lewis and historian David Edmunds.

The Usefulness of "Prehistory"?

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The following guest post come from Randall Foote. This is part of an exchange he had with the eminent historian John Lukacs about the usefulness of the idea of "prehistory." See Foote's earlier post on a related topic here. Foote is retired from his business and now teaches as an adjunct instructor at Roxbury Community College.

Dear Professor Lukacs,

As to your question:

“. . . . Because of your thoughts about the genesis of mankind: do you agree with Barfield (and myself) that, strictly speaking or, rather, thinking, there was no such thing as ‘prehistoric’ man?”

Yes, that goes to the heart of one subject I am working on.

In brief: no, the idea of “prehistoric man” makes no sense to me, in either of the two ways in which it is understood. The sense of “pre-history” as that which comes before written history is very odd, as if the discovery and use of writing were some particular defining moment in human evolution, rather than merely one means by which we understand the present and the past: Man’s past defined solely by our own current means of comprehending it. This concept leads, for example, to a belief that the early Romans were a “historic civilization”, while their neighbors the Celts were a “prehistoric” archaeological Culture-type, who only entered into “History” when Caesar wrote about them in his Commentaries? All that changed was the historical tools by which we can learn about them. It is not difficult to trace these newly “historicized” Celts back to the Hallstatt culture of Central Europe, it merely requires different tools than reading primary sources. And these are similar to the tools that we might use to understand the daily lives of non-literate peasants of medieval Europe – the “testimony of the spade” (pace Bibby).

The broader sense of “prehistoric” is as that time before, for example, the Neolithic Revolution – which actually was a type of defining moment in certain parts of the human world. I would instead use the term “Archaic Man” for this. For me, and I believe for you and for Barfield, there is only one defining moment in the History of Man: which is when human consciousness and human language began, when the Word took human form in some mysterious manner. This may have happened in an instant or it may have been something that occurred over a few generations, but this essential change is not something that “evolved” over a million years in some Darwinian process from hominoids and hominids.

There was time and a place when human history truly began: perhaps 100,000 years ago in the northeast of Africa. A spark went into a physical body that then became Man. God breathed a soul into Adam’s nostrils. Spirit became matter, brain became mind, as consciousness and language were born for the first time. The mechanism for this change in consciousness is not understood yet. Perhaps it is an unknowable Act of God, as the cosmological Big Bang will ever be unknowable, the first moment of Creation.

But just as physics can trace the path back to almost the first moment of the Big Bang, so too can linguistics, genetics and anthropology point roughly to the conception of Man as a conscious being. Language families (and macro-families) converge at some point in the past, pointing to one original language; there still exist traces in the most unrelated of languages of common words for the simplest of things (finger, one, two, eye). In addition, unique elements of human genetic material also converge back in time, circa 100,000 years ago. Further, a modern physical form of Man emerged out of Africa into the Middle East about 80,000 years ago. With this new human (“anatomically modern homo sapiens” in anthropology) is found evidence of burial, symbolic expression (“art”), and apparently unnecessary and changing elements of design in tools and clothing (“fashion”), among other differences from earlier hominids (Neandertal, Erectus, etc.). And the other, older hominids soon vanished before the newcomer, for whatever reason. Human history began as man became fruitful and multiplied, out of Africa and across the earth.

I am only able to understand this and other evidence as pointing to the inception of human language and human consciousness, which define Man (in the image of God). In the beginning was the Word. There does not seem to be any gradual Darwinian “evolution” leading up to this beginning of human culture, of humanity itself (as opposed to the evolution of the hominid body), nor any radical change since that time.

Of course, human culture has evolved over the millennia, just as the understanding of God has evolved, but human Language (as distinct from all the supposed animal “languages”) either is or it is not, across the races of man as well as in the growth of a child. There are no “primitive” or unformed or partial languages. The fact that any human infant can learn any human language fluently argues convincingly for the monogenesis of language, with no significant/essential changes having occurred since that genesis. Evolution of language (as in Barfield) is cultural refinement, not essential change, as is “the evolution of consciousness, which is probably the only evolution there is” (End of an Age). (vide Lincoln: “The only progress is of the human heart”). Human consciousness begins with language, and since that point “evolution” might be refinement and growth, but not a change-of-state.

Perhaps much as you found correspondences to your own historical thinking in Heisenberg’s writings, I have been working to connect science and linguistics (not a science) to my own historical sense of human beginnings. This sense, this human story, is not Darwinian or “scientific”, nor in a strict sense religious--but human, historical, including and larger than science and religion. Currently, science and religion are each devolving into their own forms of fundamentalism, and the time is past when either can alone provide the needed understanding of man’s “evolution” (or of the universe for that matter). I see this “historical Genesis” as the opening chapter of the new kind of history, as that you call for, a history for a new era, following upon a “conscious historical recognition of the opening of a new phase in the evolution of our consciousness.” ( JL, Confessions of an Original Sinner.)

Area Historian

Randall Stephens

Heather sends along this amusing satire of historians "making it all up" from the Onion. I knew there was something fishy about the Golden Age of Greece. Especially the 5th century. Just too much fascinating intellectual development for one century. And so long ago!

"Historians Admit To Inventing Ancient Greeks," The Onion, October 7, 2010.

WASHINGTON—A group of leading historians held a press conference Monday at the National Geographic Society to announce they had "entirely fabricated" ancient Greece, a culture long thought to be the intellectual basis of Western civilization.

The group acknowledged that the idea of a sophisticated, flourishing society existing in Greece more than two millennia ago was a complete fiction created by a team of some two dozen historians, anthropologists, and classicists who worked nonstop between 1971 and 1974 to forge "Greek" documents and artifacts.>>>

See more absurdest takes on history from the Onion. Some favorites:

"Second-Grade Class Has No Questions For Visiting Local Historian"

"Historian Has Big News For Grover Cleveland Fans"

"San Francisco Historians Condemn 1906 Earthquake Deniers"

"U.S. Dept. Of Retro Warns: 'We May Be Running Out Of Past'"

But is it History? II: Deep History

Randall Stephens

Harvard University professor of history Daniel Lord Smail has challenged the idea that history begins only with the advent of writing. In his 2008 book, On Deep History and the Brain (University of California Press), he lays out his arguments about how history and biology have worked together over the long arc of time. Smail asks "When does history begin?" and "What characterizes it?" He follows up on the work of evolutionary biologists and the macro history of Jared Diamond, with a new way of understanding the past.

"The ancient world is unimaginable without archeological evidence;" Smail observes, "the Middle Ages very nearly so; and the effort to reconstitute the lives of peoples without writing has been one of the signal achievements of the twentieth century." In light of that Smail asks: "So what does it matter that the evidence for the deep past comes not from written documents but from the other things that teach--from artifacts, fossils, vegetable remains, phonemes, and various forms of modern DNA?" (On Deep History, 6)

But, as Heather asked earlier on a different topic, is it history? How can we undertsand preliterate humans and societies in a historical sense? Can historians add to our understanding of pre-historic humans in ways that anthropologists and archeologists cannot? Historians inside and outside of the guild will have to figure those questions out for themselves.

What follows are some recent macro-historical, deep history, evolutionary history essays, and tidbits from the web:

Drake Bennett, "How Animals Made Us Human," Boston Globe, September 12, 2010.

. . . . What explains [our] yen to have animals in our lives? An anthropologist named Pat Shipman believes she’s found the answer: Animals make us human. She means this not in a metaphorical way — that animals teach us about loyalty or nurturing or the fragility of life or anything like that — but that the unique ability to observe and control the behavior of other animals is what allowed one particular set of Pleistocene era primates to evolve into modern man.>>>

Cynthia Haven, "Stanford historian tells why the West rules - for now," Stanford University News, September 14, 2010.

. . . . Stanford Classics and History Professor Ian Morris puts forth some bold answers in his ambitious new 750-page book, Why the West Rules – For Now (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). And that places Looty in a longer story going back to the last ice age.

Morris' book argues that history is a slow, complicated tango between geography and social development.>>>

How could a civilization that mastered the planet suddenly Collapse? Inspired by the New York Times best-selling book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed", NGC time travels 200 years into the future to see what the world would look like after civilization as we know it collapsed. Guided by author Jared Diamond, we'll piece together the remarkable story of what on earth triggered our decline.

Collapse: Based on the Book by Jared Diamond, National Geographic Channel.

How could a civilization that mastered the planet suddenly Collapse? Inspired by the New York Times best-selling book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed", NGC time travels 200 years into the future to see what the world would look like after civilization as we know it collapsed. Guided by author Jared Diamond, we'll piece together the remarkable story of what on earth triggered our decline.>>>

Mary Gray, "Are You Descended from Neanderthals?" New Zealand Herald, September 2, 2010.

. . . . With the expansion of human populations and climate change, Neanderthal populations are thought to have shrunk toward Europe and Spain. Europeans and Neanderthals had potentially longer to interbreed compared to other human populations, but there is no evidence for this - so far. Did waves of human migration from the Middle East replace ancient Neanderthal-human Europeans or did the first human inhabitants of Europe and Neanderthals keep to themselves? >>>

Roundup: Asian History, Ancient and Modern

History News, Reviews, and the Like from around the World

"N. Korean-Japanese Team Finds Koguryo Tomb in Pyongyang," The Chosun Ilbo, Aug 15, 2010‎.

Academics from North Korea and Japan have unearthed a large tumulus from the Koguryo period in Pyongyang, providing valuable material for studying the history of ancient East Asia, Japan's Kyodo news agency said Saturday. About 4.5 km away from the downtown Pyongyang, the tomb was discovered during construction work in Tongsan-dong, the Lelang District of the Koguryo era and is presumed to have been created around the 5th century. >>>

Jim Eagles, "Silk Road: Tracing the path of ancient footsteps," New Zealand Herald, August 11, 2010.

Jim Eagles travels a well worn path through a historic landscape and finds plenty of remnants from its fascinating past still in place. The old caravanserai stands beside a section of the Silk Road as it has done for over a thousand years. On the other side of the road is an equally ancient cistern built to to provide water for camel caravans plying the hot, dry, dusty path between the timeless cities of Samarkand and Bukhara. >>>

Edward Wong, "China Seizes on a Dark Chapter for Tibet," New York Times, August 9, 2010.

GYANTSE, Tibet — The white fortress loomed above the fields, a crumbling but still imposing redoubt perched on a rock mound above a plain of golden rapeseed shimmering in the morning light. A battle here in 1904 changed the course of Tibetan history. A British expedition led by Sir Francis E. Younghusband, the imperial adventurer, seized the fort and marched to Lhasa, the capital, becoming the first Western force to pry open Tibet and wrest commercial concessions from its senior lamas. >>>

Razib Khan, "Empires of the Word & anti-Babel," Discovery Magazine blog, August 16, 2010.

European nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries was in large part rooted in the idea that language defined the boundaries of a nation. During the Reformation era some German-speaking Roman Catholic priests declaimed the value of the bond of language against that of religion, praising those non-Germans who adhered to the Catholic cause against German speaking heretics (in the specific case the priest was defending Spanish tercios brought in by the Holy Roman Emperor to put down the rebellion of Protestant German princes). . . . Newer lingua francas, French and later English, lack the deep unifying power of Latin in part because they are also living vernaculars. They may resemble Latin in some particulars of function, but eliding the differences removes far too much from the equation to be of any use. Linguistic diversity is a fact of our universe, but how it plays out matters a great deal, and has mattered a great deal, over the arc of history. >>>

"Pearl Buck in China by Hilary Spurling," New Yorker, August 16, 2010.

Emphasizing the imagination’s power to “make bearable things too ugly to confront directly,” Spurling sensitively traces the biographical background of Buck’s writing. Buck, the daughter of missionaries, spent nearly all of the first forty-two years of her life in China, and her childhood was marked both by grand upheavals such as the Boxer Rebellion and by the stark asperities of everyday poverty. >>>

[I'll be interviewing Spurling about her biography for an upcoming issue of Historically Speaking]

Archeology Roundup

Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, "Long time archaeological riddle solved," Jerusalem Post, July 2, 2010

The riddle of the identity of a 3,200-year-old round bronze tablet with a carved face of a woman has apparently been solved, 13 years after it was discovered at the El-ahwat excavation site between Katzir-Harish and Nahal Iron (Wadi Ara) by scientist Oren Cohen of the University of Haifa.

The small, broken-off piece of metal is probably part of a linchpin that held the wheel to a war chariot sent to battle by the Canaanite general Sisera against the Israelites, says Prof. Adam Zertal, who for 33 years has led weekly walks with university colleagues and volunteers over “every square meter” of Samaria and the Jordan Rift to search for archeological evidence from biblical times.>>>

"2000-year-old human skeleton found at Gloucestershire Roman villa dig," This Is Gloucestershire, July 5, 2010

A 2,000-YEAR-OLD human skeleton has been unearthed alongside Iron Age artefacts near Tewkesbury.

Archaeologists uncovered signs of the ancient Roman villa in a field on the edge of Bredon's Norton. It is thought the finds could be of national importance.

Metal detector hunts in recent years had led historians to suspect an ancient community might be found there.

That was confirmed when contractors who were laying a new water pipeline began digging.>>>

"Female 'gladiator' remains found in Herefordshire," BBC, July 1, 2010

Amongst the evidence of a Roman suburb in Credenhill, they have found the grave of a massive, muscular woman.

The archaeological Project Manager, Robin Jackson, said: "Maybe the warrior idea is one that you could pursue, I'll leave that to people's imaginations."

Her remains were found in a crouched position, in what could be a suburb of the nearby Roman town of Kenchester.>>>

Nicole Winfield, "Lasers uncover first icons of Sts. Peter and Paul" AP, June 22, 2010

ROME — Twenty-first century laser technology has opened a window into the early days of the Catholic Church, guiding researchers through the dank, musty catacombs beneath Rome to a startling find: the first known icons of the apostles Peter and Paul.

Vatican officials unveiled the paintings Tuesday, discovered along with the earliest known images of the apostles John and Andrew in an underground burial chamber beneath an office building on a busy street in a working-class Rome neighborhood.>>>

Dinesh Ramde, "Chilly waters preserve 1890s shipwreck well," San Francisco Chronicle, June 25, 2010

A great wooden steamship that sank more than a century ago in a violent Lake Michigan storm has been found off the Milwaukee-area shoreline, and divers say the intact vessel appears to have been perfectly preserved by the cold fresh waters.

Finding the 300-foot-long L.R. Doty was important because it was the largest wooden ship that remained unaccounted for, said Brendon Baillod, president of the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association.>>>

Pseudohistory on Parade

Randall Stephens

In November 2009 Ronald H. Fritze wrote an essay for Historically Speaking: "On the Perils and Pleasures of Confronting Pseudohistory." He discussed his work in the trenches of fake history and asked questions about the enduring popular appeal of far-fetched stories and bizarre apocryphal tales. (Note to publishers: find some enterprising author to make a serious case for the existence of zombies and/or vampires in Alexander the Great's army.) According to Fritze:

As pop culture shows us, these ideas fascinate people. They form the premises of movies, television series, novels, and video games. They provide fodder for hours of fantastic chat on late night radio and drive legions of faithful audiences to weekend conferences devoted to the latest hot idea. Pseudohistory can be fun, just like a Star Trek convention or a Renaissance fair can be fun—as long as your pockets are deep enough and your skepticism sufficiently submerged.

But, he went on, there is a dark side to all this; hucksterism at best, a justification for all sorts of nastiness at worst. "Pseudohistory can sometimes bring about very real and tragic history for unfortunate acolytes," observes Fritze. (The history channel is a great purveyor of the lighter side of psuedohistory. They make expert use of the question mark to make documentaries on zany subjects seem plausible. Did Hitler live on in South America? Did ancient aliens roam the earth? Were their whalers on the moon in olden times?)

Here are a few recent, and not-so-recent, pseudohistorical items.

"Looking for alien DNA," cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com, June 15, 2010.

Zecharia Sitchin says he's willing to stake everything he's written about alien astronauts on DNA tests that could be performed on the 4,500-year-old remains of a high-ranking Sumerian woman. It's the latest - and possibly the last - cause celebre for a fringe celebrity.>>>

"APOLLO 11 HOAX PHOTOS: 8 Moon-Landing Myths -- Busted," National Geographic, July 20, 2009.

Forty years after U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon, many conspiracy theorists still insist the Apollo 11 moon landing was an elaborate hoax. Examine the photographic evidence, and find out why experts say some of the most common claims simply don't hold water.>>>

Amber Baker, "In search of the ark: Lovelander claims recent discovery points to evidence of biblical craft," Loveland Reporter-Herald, June 10, 2010.

A Loveland man who has written books and produced movies about the search for Noah’s ark said a recent discovery could “turn things upside down.” In April, Hong-Kong-based Noah’s Ark Ministries International announced that Chinese and Turkish explorers had found what the Christian group believes are the remains of Noah’s ark.>>>

Mark A. Chancey, "Lesson plans: The Bible in the classroom," Christian Century, August 23 2005.

J. O. Kinnaman is not a name well known in contemporary academic circles. He has argued (in Diggers for Facts: The Bible in Light of Archaeology) that Jesus and Paul visited Great Britain, that Joseph of Arimathea was Jesus' uncle and dominated the tin industry of Wales, and that he himself personally saw Jesus' school records in India. According to an article by Stephen Mehler, director of research at the Kinnaman Foundation, Kinnaman reported finding a secret entrance into the Great Pyramid of Giza, in which he discovered records from the lost continent of Atlantis. He also claimed that the pyramid was 35,000 years old and was used in antiquity to transmit radio messages to the Grand Canyon. Kinnaman might not be the best figure on which to base material for a public school textbook.>>>

What is it Good for?

Randall Stephens

Standards, standards, impact, impact. In recent years historians in the UK have had the Research Assessment Exercise to contend with. (Sorry, your publications with Yea-oh University Press and Oxfort College Press don't pass muster.) Administrators and the public also push for disciplines in the humanities to prove their "usefulness" and "impact."

"As with philosophy," writes Ann Mroz in THE, "it is hard to show history's value beyond an intellectual pursuit. Any moves to make it demonstrate 'impact' risk pushing it down the heritage trail . . ." Your knowledge of Medieval tax law will help you to . . . ? Your study of child rearing in the Elizabethan Age equips you to . . . ? Start training to become a reenactor. Polish up your English Civil War "armour." Get that pike out of the closet.

Richard Overy's April 29 essay in THE, "The Historical Present," has created a stir. He throws down the gauntlet with these words:

Historians have always generated impact of diverse and rewarding kinds, and will continue to do so without the banal imperative to demonstrate added value. There is no real division between what historians can contribute and what the public may expect, but the second of these should by no means drive the first.

Nor should short-term public policy dictate what is researched, how history is taught or the priorities of its practitioners. If fashion, fad or political priority had dictated what history produced over the past century, British intellectual and cultural life would have been deeply impoverished. Not least, the many ways in which historical approaches have invigorated and informed other disciplines would have been lost.

Over at the NYRB, Anthony Grafton worries about the results of this utilitarian calculus. England's Slow Food academy has morphed into McDonald's. "Have it your way." Scholars working in fields that administrators deem useless--paleography, early modern, and premodern history, philosophy--have landed on the chopping block. "From the accession of Margaret Thatcher onward, the pressure has risen," writes Grafton. "Universities have had to prove that they matter. . . . Budgets have shrunk, and universities have tightened their belts to fit. Now they are facing huge further cuts for three years to come—unless, as is likely, the Conservatives take over the government, in which case the knife may go even deeper."

Historians working in America, too, struggle with the burdens of constrained budgets, reduction in full-time positions, eliminated raises, and the push for "relevant" curriculum. But, if the buzz in THE is any indication, what's happening in the UK is something else. Surely, the field of history won't vanish into thin air, as Overy imagines. (More doubtful are his comments on Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan, who "in her 2008 book, The Uses And Abuses of History, called on her peers to reduce their commitment to theory and to write shorter sentences. To do so would be to dumb down what history as a human science is doing." Really?) Still history across the pond may suffer much in this new climate.

Roundup: Maps through Time

Randall Stephens

What better way to learn about the past, and what people once made of the world around them, than to study maps? A few days ago I read a fascinating passage in Herodotus: "If, therefore, I judge correctly of these things, the Ionians are mistaken with respect to Egypt; but if their opinion is correct, then I will show that neither the Greeks nor the Ionians themselves know how to reckon, when they say that the whole earth consists of three divisions, Europe, Asia, and Libya; for they ought to add a fourth, the Delta of Egypt, if it be not a part either of Asia or of Libya." A wonderful picture of the world.

I post here some wonderful recent on-line articles dealing with history, cartography, and cultural context. (One piece in particular got me thinking about an iPhone app I'd like to see. How about an interactive historical, walking map of 18th-century Boston? Strolling around the city, the iPhone-toting flaneur would notice that he would be under water were he at this or that place in 1770.)

Michael Church, "The Truth about Maps: How Cartographers Distort Reality," The Independent, March 20, 2010.

As a fascinating new exhibition shows, it's not always what they put in that matters – but what they leave out

What is a map? In effect, says Peter Barber, head of maps at the British Library, a map is a lie. "Unless you have a scale of one-to-one, every map is subjective, and always will be," he explains. "You have to select what you put on it." And selection involves rejection.

Throughout history, such lies have generally served purposes which have been political, religious or philosophical rather than scientific. >>>

Shirley Dent, "Literary London on your iPhone," Guardian Books Blog, March 23, 2010

A new iPhone application which brings the capital's literary heritage to life has made me a hazard on the streets of London. >>>

Cora Lewis,"Maps and Manuscripts Illustrate an Old Worldview," Yale Daily News, March 23, 2010

Napoleon Bonaparte famously had his men re-draw the world’s map to make France larger, but he wasn’t the only historic figure who tried to alter the public’s perceptions with cartography.

“Invented Bodies: Shapely Constructs of the Early Modern,” now on view at the Whitney Humanities Center, features maps and manuscripts from the 15th through 18th centuries, depicting Europeans’ interpretations of their world — from realistic renderings to fantastical imaginings. >>>

Steven Heller, "The World as Their Canvas," New York Times, March 5, 2010

There’s nothing like sitting by the fire with a good book, except maybe sitting by the fire with a good map—or better yet, a good book about maps. I’ve noticed an upsurge in cartographic interest these days, especially for maps’ value as conceptual artwork. >>>

Michael Elliott, "A World Map Under Eastern Eyes," Time, February 25, 2010

What does China really think of the U.S.? Spend some time in the Middle Kingdom, and you'll hear both protestations of admiration and plenty of disparaging comments about the West. Such attitudes have a long history. In 1602 the imperial Chinese court learned that the inhabitants of North America were "kindly and hospitable to strangers." >>>

Göbekli Tepe, the Origins of Religion, and Early Societies

Randall Stephens

An amazing archeological find is changing what we think of ancient societies and human development. Göbekli Tepe is the first human site of worship--at 11,500 years old--a startling neolithic temple. The site, not attached to a village or settlement, also challenges what archeologists and anthropologists make of the roots of religious belief. Did civilization produce religion? Did religion produce civilization?

Newsweek's Patrick Symmes reports on the find and its chief archeologist, Klaus Schmidt. (Patrick Symmes, "History in the Remaking: A Temple Complex in Turkey that Predates Even the Pyramids is Rewriting the Story of Human Evolution," Newsweek, February 19, 2010.) "The site isn't just old," writes Symmes:

it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization.

See also:
Andrew Curry, "Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?" Smithsonian Magazine, November 2008.

Gobekli Tepe was first examined—and dismissed—by University of Chicago and Istanbul University anthropologists in the 1960s. As part of a sweeping survey of the region, they visited the hill, saw some broken slabs of limestone and assumed the mound was nothing more than an abandoned medieval cemetery.

Sandra Scham , The World's First Temple," Archeology (November/December 2008).

Before the discovery of Göbekli Tepe, archaeologists believed that societies in the early Neolithic were organized into small bands of hunter-gatherers and that the first complex religious practices were developed by groups that had already mastered agriculture.

Nicholas Birch, "7,000 Years Older than Stonehenge: The Site that Stunned Archaeologists," The Guardian, April 23, 2008.

Never mind wheels or writing, the people who erected them did not even have pottery or domesticated wheat. They lived in villages. But they were hunters, not farmers.

Cahokia: Donald Yerxa's Interview with Timothy R. Pauketat and the January issue of Historically Speaking On-line

Randall Stephens

The January issue of Historically Speaking is now up on Project Muse. As a preview, I post below a part of Donald Yerxa's fascinating interview with Timothy R. Pauketat on Cahokia, site of a sophisticated pre-Columbian civilization near the Mississippi river.

The landscape and burials there long perplexed American settlers. In 1826 poet Micah P. Flint wrote these lines on the enigmatic mounds. His romantic soliloquy still resonates all these years later:

Ye mouldering relics of departed years!
Your names have perished; not a trace remains;
Save, where grass-grown mound it's summit rears,
From the green bosom of your native plains
Say! do your spirits wear oblivions chains?
Did Death forever quench your hopes and fears?

Cahokia: An Interview with Timothy R. Pauketat
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Almost 1,000 years ago the city of Cahokia emerged with amazing suddenness on the edge of the Mississippi River where only a few small towns and villages had once existed. Cahokia became the hub of a major pre-Columbian Indian nation, but by 1400 the sprawling city had disappeared. Only the giant earthen mounds remained. Timothy R. Pauketat’s recent book, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (Viking, 2009), reconstructs this mysterious culture, drawing on the work of a number of archaeologists, including his own. Senior editor Donald A. Yerxa interviewed Pauketat, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, on November 13, 2009.

Donald A. Yerxa: Would you provide our readers with a brief summary of the rise and fall of Cahokia?

Timothy R. Pauketat: Cahokia’s rise has been a particular interest of mine, and it remains a work in progress, since the more we know, the better questions we ask and the more we keep developing our explanation. The fall of Cahokia isn’t as dynamic of a research topic, but we still have a good general idea of what was happening. So here it goes.

Cahokia’s rise can be broken down into the slow growth of what I’ve called “Old Cahokia,” and the abrupt transformation of that big village into what I call “New Cahokia.” It’s New Cahokia that you see today, the city with pyramids and plazas. Old Cahokia was a very large agricultural village, possibly the seat of a loose confederation of villages or perhaps regional communities of people who minimally ranged across most of the northern American Bottom (which is the large patch of Mississippi River floodplain east of modern-day St. Louis), and maximally might have included other agricultural villages farther up and down the Mississippi. Farming was good in the American Bottom, and especially around Old Cahokia, which began to attract immigrants around 800 A.D. By 1000, in fact, Cahokia was probably the largest village in the Midwest, with perhaps 1,000-2,000 residents. That might have been it, end of story.

But—and we’re not really sure why—around 1050 the Cahokians redesigned their village into a city, with numerous large earthen pyramids surrounding one large plaza, and lesser pyramids enclosing smaller plazas to the north, east, and west. Many immigrants poured in, both local farmers from nearby villages and people from as far away as southern Missouri and northeast Arkansas. Something was attracting them, and it had to have truly tugged at their sensibilities, because Cahokia swelled pretty quickly to about 10,000 people. And that population estimate doesn’t include Cahokia’s suburbs, outlying towns, and new satellite villages, many of which were also being founded and populated in the years immediately after 1050. All of this gives one the impression of a great expansive new culture, which is why I’ve dubbed it ancient America’s Big Bang.

We have found and analyzed massive deposits of refuse from giant religious festivals dating to the decades after 1050. At one of these festivals Cahokians butchered 2,000 deer, cooked large fish and vats of pumpkin and sumpweed soups and stews, ate many berries, and smoked large amounts of strong tobacco. Unprecedented sacrificial rituals began shortly after 1050. These seem to have involved the sacrificing of young adult women every decade or so; the exact timing is still speculative. Such activity suggests that Cahokians were building a new religion that attracted followers from surrounding regions.

Yerxa: How has our understanding of Cahokia changed in recent decades?

Pauketat: Cahokia was misunderstood for a long time, even into the 1990s. Many archaeologists didn’t stop to think of the historical impacts that Cahokia and Cahokians might have had on the entire middle of the continent. Now archaeologists think about history differently, and they are beginning to appreciate that Cahokians had tremendous effects on American Indians’ identities and heritage for centuries, even impacting the ways in which Europeans colonized North America and then Anglo- Americans expanded the young U.S. westward. Those Europeans and Anglo-Americans didn’t know it, but they were being alternately enabled or impeded by descendants of Cahokians and a landscape radically changed by Cahokians centuries earlier. >>> read on

Table of Contents, Historically Speaking, January 2010

A Complex Parade: Problems and Prospects for Picturing the Nation
Wilfred M. McClay

On Using History
Mike Rose

Murder by Duel: Welch, West Virginia, 2009
Bertram Wyatt-Brown

The Hidden Dimension: “European” Treaties in Global Perspective, 1500-1800
Peter A. Coclanis

How to Teach the Writing of History: A Roundtable

Riding the Melt
Stephen J. Pyne

Historians on Writing
Michael Kammen

How to Write a Paper for This Class
Jill Lepore

Response to Stephen Pyne
John Demos

Peter’s War: An Interview with Joyce Malcolm
Conducted by Chris Beneke

The American Archipelago
Kenneth Weisbrode

The Midwestern Historical Imagination

Beyond the Frontier: An Interview with David Brown Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Midwestern States of Mind: Regionalism in American Historical Writing
Ian Tyrrell

Patriotic Progressives
Paul Gottfried

Cahokia: An Interview with Timothy R. Pauketat
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Letters

End-of-Year History On-Line Roundup

Randall Stephens

Trapped in the Midwest because of a snowstorm, I've been catching up on some on-line reading. Choice items I've come across:

"Digitizing Monk," Here and Now, WBUR, December 24, 2009
BOSTON–Father Columba Stewart has made it his mission to digitize precious manuscripts found in some of the most threatened communities around the world, including Lebanon during the 2006 war with Israel, Iraq, and Ethiopia. The project has discovered and preserved chronicles of how the early Christians living in the Middle East perceived the arrival of the Crusaders, as well as the oldest known Ethiopian-language copy of every book in the Bible. >>>

"Digital Scripture," NGM Blog, December 8, 2009
A fourth-century Bible that includes the earliest known complete copy of the New Testament now has a 21st-century address: codexsinaiticus.org. For much of its existence, the sacred text—handwritten on parchment in ancient Greek—resided at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai, from which it takes its name. As with many old manuscripts, it was eventually split up, and some of it was lost. Only 823 of an estimated 1,487 pages survive. >>>

"Google & the Future of Books: An Exchange," New York Review of Books, January 14, 2010,
By Paul N. Courant, Laine Farley, Paula Kaufman, John Leslie King, Theodore Koditschek, Anthony Lewis et al.
To the Editors: In his recent article criticizing the Google settlement ["Google and the New Digital Future," NYR, December 17, 2009], Robert Darnton fails to acknowledge the significant role that libraries have had in the creation of Google Book Search as well as the concrete steps they are taking to address the sorts of concerns he raises. >>>

"800 years on the Cam: Low living and high thinking at Cambridge University, from Henry III to Peter Mandelson," by Peter Linehan, Times Literary Supplement, December 16, 2009
This year the University of Cambridge celebrated its 800th birthday, an anniversary no less secure than any other of thirteenth-century origin, with an “anniversary portrait”, a handsome volume illustrated with the reminiscences of recent and not so recent alumni. >>>

"'War Is Over! If You Want It': John and Yoko, 40 Years Later," The Nation Blog, Jon Wiener, December 27, 2009
"War Is Over! If you want it" – a full page ad in the Sunday New York Times Dec. 27 must have puzzled many readers. The ad marked an anniversary: it was 40 years ago today that John Lennon and Yoko Ono launched their "War Is Over!" campaign, with billboards in New York, London, Hollywood, Toronto, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Athens and Tokyo proclaiming the message in giant black letters on a white field – and in much smaller type at the bottom, "Happy Christmas, John and Yoko." The message was repeated on posters, leaflets, and newspaper ads. >>>

Anglo-Saxon Treasure: The Border of History and Prehistory

Randall Stephens

In late September the NYT reported on a massive Anglo-Saxon find: "LONDON — For the jobless man living on welfare who made the find in an English farmer’s field two months ago, it was the stuff of dreams: a hoard of early Anglo-Saxon treasure, probably dating from the seventh century and including more than 1,500 pieces of intricately worked gold and silver whose craftsmanship and historical significance left archaeologists awestruck."

More recently in the October 14, 2009 issue of the TLS, Alex Burghart writes about "The 1,500-piece collection unearthed from the Staffordshire mud" which is "the richest collection of gold from Anglo-Saxon England ever found." This find brings up all sorts of questions about Anglo-Saxon England. The date of the find is already being debated along with the circumstances and context. Burghart observes: "There is always a temptation to link any rich Anglo-Saxon archaeology with a king. Sutton Hoo has often been called the grave of Raedwald of East Anglia (d.616–627), and the burial chamber from Prittlewell, Essex, has been linked with early kings of Essex, though the associations are far from provable. Some authorities, no doubt, will look at the bent crosses of the Staffordshire Hoard and claim it as the booty Penda of Mercia (d.655), the last great pagan King of Anglo-Saxon England. Such guesswork is good fun, but it is also slightly disingenuous."

The whole can of worms opened by the discovery is particularly interesting to historians. Questions it brings up are fascinating: What can or can't we know about the past? What are the limits and boundaries of history? When and where does the archeology come to the aid? Burghart concludes: "At present it seems unlikely that we will ever know who buried it, why they did, when they did, or where they got it." Bummer.

See also this piece in the National Geographic.

Mary Beard on Pompeii in Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

The latest issue of Historically Speaking includes my interview with Mary Beard. I post an excerpt of it here. The full piece can be accessed on Project Muse.

Rome Unearthed: An Interview with Mary Beard on Pompeii and the Ancient World

Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at Cambridge University. She was Visiting Sather Professor of Classical Literature for 2008–2009 at the University of California, Berkeley. Beard is the author of a variety of essays and books on the ancient world, including: Religions of Rome, with John North and Simon Price (Cambridge University Press, 1998); The Parthenon (Harvard University Press, 2002); and The Roman Triumph (Harvard University Press, 2007). Beard is also the classics editor at the Times Literary Supplement, and she is the author of the popular blog, “A Don’s Life.”

Beard’s scholarship has long challenged certain widely held views of the ancient world. Her recent book The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found (Harvard University Press, 2008) introduces a note of mystery and uncertainty into what we think we know about Pompeii and the lives of ancient Romans. Pompeii was not frozen in amber, she argues. Its history stretches back centuries before the 79 A.D. eruption of Vesuvius, and it bears the marks of later excavations. “The bigger picture and many of the more basic questions about the town remain very murky indeed,” she writes. Historically Speaking editor Randall Stephens recently interviewed Beard about her work and popular perceptions of the distant past.

Randall Stephens: Do you remember your first visit to Pompeii?

Mary Beard: I have a very vivid memory of my first visit. I went with a friend. I’d been studying Pompeii at Cambridge as an undergraduate, and she hadn’t. I was going to be the guide. I was devastated when we got there. So much of what I’d learned, particularly about the art and the wall decorations, had been made to seem so clear and so important and so sort of fixed. But none of the stuff I saw in Pompeii matched what I’d learned. There seemed to be a huge gap between people’s desire to explain it and systematize it and what you actually saw when you walked around.

Stephens: In The Fires of Vesuvius you write, “The fact is that we know both a lot more and a lot less about Pompeii than we think.” Could you say a little about what you mean here?
Beard: What is amazing about Pompeii is that you can walk around and try to reconstruct the life of the town. I remember walking down the street a few years ago and noticing little holes drilled in the curbstones, often outside houses, but not always. I’d never seen these mentioned in books. My husband and I started trying to hash this puzzle out, and we decided that they must be where they tied up animals. There had to be tethering posts because there were loads of mules and other animals going through the city. I eventually found a few articles debating what they were. So all you need to do is go to Pompeii with your eyes open and say: “I wonder what that was.”

Stephens: Even ancient graffiti, which you point out is so ubiquitous at Pompeii, gives us a more complex picture of this world than one might think.

Beard: You can go into a house and, even if you don’t read Latin, you can see that some of the graffiti scrolled on these walls is about three feet high. Well, that’s obviously someone kneeling down, or it’s a child—much more likely a child. I think there’s an enormous amount of fun in trusting your innate powers of observation and going from there.

Stephens: The layers of interpretation and the layers of ruins that you’ve uncovered in the book are intriguing. How much of what we know of Pompeii is shaped by what happened after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius?

Beard: It has an interesting history after the eruption—in the period, that is, when we think of Pompeii as happily asleep, waiting for rediscovery. While I’m suspicious of the view that the Romans undertook an enormous and systematic rescue operation soon after the eruption, it seems extremely likely that salvagers came to get the really valuable stuff—statues from the forum, and so on. It must have been frightfully dangerous, and some of them almost certainly died in the attempt because the tunnels would have collapsed. Some of the bodies that you can now see—casts of bodies made where their remains left a vacuum in the lava—are almost certainly bodies of looters, not those of the unfortunate Pompeii victims. . . .

Adam’s Ancestors

An Excerpt of Donald Yerxa's Interview with David Livingstone from Historically Speaking (June 2009)

David N. Livingstone is a professor of geography and intellectual history at Queen’s University Belfast. He is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Arts. One of the most talented and perceptive scholars currently working on the history of science and religion, Livingstone is especially interested in exploring the spatial as well as the temporal contexts within which ideas are produced and consumed. Among his many books are Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and most recently Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Historically Speaking senior editor Donald A. Yerxa caught up with Livingstone on March 3, 2009, to discuss his latest book as well as his approach to intellectual history.

Donald A. Yerxa: Your most recent book, Adam’s Ancestors, is a history of pre-Adamite thinking. What is pre-Adamism?

David N. Livingstone: Pre-Adamism is actually a notoriously simple idea, though its consequences are multifaceted. It’s the idea that the Adam of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament is not the first human being. In some incarnations Adam is simply the father of the Jewish people, whereas in other versions Adam is viewed as the father of Caucasian people. But the material point of pre-Adamism, at least in its early days, is that there were, and perhaps indeed continue to exist, peoples who are descended from a pre-Adamic or at least non-Adamic source. This would mean that there were at least two (and arguably more than two) creations of the human species. In pre-Adamism lie the origins of what anthropologists used to call polygenesis. And, indeed, that has been and continues to be something of an issue right up to contemporary paleoanthropology. Should we look at all humans as derived from a single source, let’s say, a “mitochondrial Eve”? Or did the human species emerge in many different places? So the debate in that sense, without the biblical significance of Adam, continues to be important in thinking about human origins more generally.

Yerxa: How significant was pre-Adamism in Western intellectual history prior to Darwin?

Livingstone: There are a couple of things to be said about this. Another historian who worked on this subject some years ago, Richard Popkin, made the arresting suggestion that pre-Adamic theory was much more destabilizing to European intellectuals in the 17th century than the Copernican revolution or indeed the mechanical universe of the Newtonians. Popkin reasoned that pre-Adamism challenged human beings’ sense of their own identity, of who they really were. For a very long time, going back to the church fathers, to Augustine, and indeed to much earlier times, descent from Adam came to be a definition of what it was to be human. So I’m inclined to agree with Popkin because while you can scarcely find an advocate for the idea after 1655 when it first began to achieve wider publicity, you find many, many refutations. Although pre-Adamism seems initially to have had few converts, a lot of people felt the need to refute it.

Yerxa: Throughout your book it is clear that this notion is quite versatile and can be adapted to a number of arguments. Could you speak to that?

Livingstone: Pre-Adamism can be used for many contradictory purposes and is hugely adaptable in different environments. Let me just pick out three or four of these. Initially, when it was first put forward in the 1650s by Isaac La Peyrère, it was rapidly castigated as a heresy. Emissaries from the Vatican picked up La Peyrère when he was traveling in what is now Belgium and took him off to Rome, where he was forced to recant before the pope. Clever devil that La Peyrère was, however, the recantation never really admitted he was wrong. Pre-Adamism was considered heretical because it plainly challenged a literal reading of the Genesis narrative. One has to rethink a sequence of other related theological precepts if one accepts the notion that there were pre-Adamites. For example, did they also fall from grace? How representative is Adam of the human race? How does original sin come into the world? How is it transmitted?

Pre-Adamism has been quite versatile, however. In the 19th century—and indeed on into the 20th century—the idea was promulgated by those who were much more conservative in their theological outlook. It was adopted in a new guise by conservative believers who wanted to hold onto the historic significance of Adam while at the same time take some notion of human evolution seriously. So pre-Adamism, once deemed a massive heresy, was later taken up by conservative, orthodox believers.

Let me provide another instance of its adaptability. In the 1650s La Peyrère thought that Adam was the father of the Jewish race, but he was convinced that we all, whether Jews or not, participate to some degree in the benefits of the Jewish religious tradition and divine action in the world through the children of Israel. So in that sense, pre-Adamism is inclusive, humanitarian, and sweeps all of humanity—whether Jewish, Adamic or non-Jewish, non-Adamic—into a human family that benefits in Israel’s redemption. But later, pre-Adamism was used for the grossest forms of racism by depicting certain racial groups as non-Adamic and thus inferior and perhaps even subhuman. So pre-Adamism has been used for both humanitarian and racist purposes. . . .

Yerxa: You were trained as a geographer, and yet much of your recent writing has been in the area of intellectual history and the history of science. Is this an unusual intellectual trajectory? Or is this question premised on a false assumption about what it is that geographers do?

Livingstone: Being trained in geography in my generation encompassed aspects of physical science as well as the humanities and social sciences. Geography integrates nature and culture, or environment and society. Since its institutionalization in the 19th century, geography has always had considerable interest in the history of exploration. If you go back to early examination papers at the University of Oxford, you will find papers dealing with the history of what was then called, in those colonially unconscious days, the Age of Discovery or the Age of Exploration. So there was always interest in the history of growing geographical knowledge about the globe. . . .

Summer Travels in Roman Western Europe

Randall Stephens

In time for the summer travel season Elaine Sciolino writes an interesting piece on "Roman France" in the NYT travel section.

Over the years, I have discovered traces of Roman civilization throughout the country, from Arras in the north to Dijon in the center and Fréjus in the south. My hunt for Roman Gaul has turned up treasures in the oddest places, including the middle of wheat fields, the foundations of churches and the basements of dusty provincial museums. . . .

If French history books tend to underplay ancient Roman rule, local politicians and entrepreneurs in the south do not. In the summer, area restaurants offer “Roman” menus with 2,000-year-old recipes: dishes prepared with cumin, coriander, mint and honey.

The article features a map with key sites marked out and a slide show. Related pieces include: "Traces from When Paris Was Roman" (May 17, 2009); and "Amid the Glory of France, the Grandeur that Was Rome" (May 17, 2009).

There's plenty to see across the channel, too. About a year ago Kevin Rushby wrote about a short trip he and his four-year-old daughter made to Hadrian's Wall and the Housteads fort, "England's Great Wall" Guardian, March 29, 2008. The serpentine wall is UN World Heritage site and a fascinating window into the distant past.

Built around AD124 in a commanding position on a swathe of the dramatic Whin Sill escarpment, Housesteads is one of the most important sites of Roman remains in Britain, in its day the last decent bath house before the great unwashed of Caledonia. . . .

Many interesting finds have come from the fort, even more from the settlement of hangers-on clustered below its walls. Two counterfeiting coin moulds from the 3rd century AD were discovered next to the remains of a house, the forger's den. Under his floor were two skeletons, one with a knife still stuck in the ribs.

What Can Historians Learn from Biologists

David Meskill

Can historians learn anything from biologists? Jared Diamond’s 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel sparked a flurry of interest among at least some historians, who published a special forum in the American Historical Review and held panels at the annual AHA meetings. A more common response to Diamond, however, if I go by numerous conversations with historians, has been disapproval tinged with an almost visceral rejection. I surmise that this disdain derives from the book’s underlying biological premise: as with other species, Diamond argues, humans’ fates have been determined by the environment and the availability of natural resources. It may also have to do with Diamond’s emphasis on the long term and his relative lack of interest in individuals and events. None of these things - the biological roots of human behavior, environmental determinism, the disregard for particularities – historians can abide. In fact, most historians have probably not taken a stance one way or the other in regard to Diamond’s book – or to the growing number of intellectual encroachments by natural scientists onto terrain usually reserved for historians. Whether due to parochialism or indifference, we historians remain, as Daniel Lord Smail has put it, in the “grip of sacred history.” We still conceive of history as starting with civilization and written records some 5,500 years ago in Sumer.

The relatively generous attention paid to Diamond actually confirms the extent of the problem: Guns, Germs, and Steel was a gripping, popular (but not unserious) read. If it hadn’t been a best-seller, it almost certainly would not have earned the AHA’s attention. Less visible, but in many cases even more important, works by natural scientists usually go unnoticed by historians. Since the 1980s, for example, several schools of biologists and anthropologists have been developing ambitious theories of “coevolution.” These approaches treat human culture as an evolutionary system in its own right and investigate its properties and its interactions with its genetic counterpart. They thereby hope to develop comprehensive, indeed potentially revolutionary theories of human behavior, something one might think would be of interest to historians. Yet a JSTOR search reveals that none of these books received even one review in a historical journal.

They deserve better. The following is a review of one of such project: Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson’s 1985 book Culture and the Evolutionary Process. (The others are Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman’s Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach [1981] and William Durham’s Coevolution [1991].)

Culture, as Boyd and Richerson (B & R) define it, includes all episodes of social learning of ideas and behaviors, whether by teaching or imitation. B& R provide considerable evidence that social learning of this type – and not individual learning or rationality, as neo-classical economics and rational choice approaches assume – plays a predominant role in human behavior. They point to the numerous cases of “cultural inertia,” in which people don’t respond to new circumstances, even for generations (see, for example, David Hackett Fischer’s excellent book, Albion’s Seed, on the persistence of different English folkways in America), and to psychologists’ plentiful evidence that people operate by various, often inaccurate, rules of thumb.

According to B & R, culture shares with genetic inheritance the three crucial ingredients necessary for an evolutionary system: variation, inheritance, and selection. I.e. people have different ideas and act in a variety of ways; they pass along these cultural traits to “cultural offspring,” who usually include their biological offspring, but can also include friends, students, etc.; finally, some cultural traits get passed on more often than others (for reasons to be discussed below). B & R therefore call their model a “dual inheritance” theory.

Crucially, the two inheritance systems, while similar, are not identical. Cultural evolution allows for “acquired variation.” It is Lamarckian. In genetic evolution the behavior of an individual has no effect on the genes she/he passes on. With culture, however, an individual can learn something on her/his own or otherwise pick and choose from her/his cultural heritage. What she/he passes on to cultural offspring has been changed. Additionally, in cultural evolution there can be many “parents,” not just the two of biological reproduction.

B & R distinguish between several different “forces” giving cultural evolution its directions. The first two, which belong together, they call “guided variation” and “direct bias.” Guided variation involves the interaction of individual learning, or innovation, and cultural evolution by social learning. Despite having culturally inherited certain ideas or behaviors, individuals are also capable of assessing their surroundings and options and developing a new response, one they did not inherit. For example, a medieval farmer stumbles upon a different way to plow his fields. If he can ascertain that this is an improvement over traditional methods – something that may not be easy to evaluate - he is then likely to pass on this new variant to his cultural offspring, in this case primarily his sons but perhaps also neighbors. Direct bias, on the other hand, is less innovative: the person does not invent a new response, but adopts one of the various options she has inherited from various cultural parents. However, a certain predisposition may favor – directly bias – one kind of cultural alternative over the others. In the cases of both guided variation and direct bias, criteria are needed to make individual judgments. And these criteria, B & R argue, must come from our genes, i.e. from biological natural selection. For this reason, they refer to these two forces as socio-biological. That is, cultural inheritance will track and reinforce biological inheritance.

With the other forces – which, B & R argue, are likely to be more important than guided variation or direct bias - this is not necessarily the case. The socio-biological forces depend on individual learning or discrimination: even in the case of direct bias, the individual has to make judgments about the available options, which bias to apply, and how to do so. But gathering such information has costs, which opens the door to other, less costly “forces” affecting social learning. Two of these are “indirect bias” and “frequency bias.” With the first, one individual identifies another whom he deems successful – an older brother, a village headman, a movie star - and copies many behaviors from him. Overall, this process is less costly because the first individual is not trying to assess which behaviors of the cultural parent have caused the latter’s success; he simply copies many or all of them. However, in some instances, B & R argue, costly “runaway” processes can ensue: people go to great lengths to dress like rock stars they admire, efforts that could never be justified in terms of clothes’ evolutionary selective power. The process is akin to the evolution of the peacock’s tail, in which an arms race over sexual attraction may impair the creatures’ survival. Frequency bias means that people simply copy the most frequent cultural variant, which will often prove to be a simple, efficient strategy.

A final force is natural selection, not of genes, in this case, but of cultural variants. This arises because genetic and cultural evolution are asymmetrical. We inherit our genes from our mother and father and the same two individuals are often important for imbuing us with our ideas and behaviors. However, we often inherit cultural variants from many other sources as well (siblings, teachers, friends, religious leaders, public figures). These non-parental sources will become relatively more important as we age. If we only inherited culture from our parents, B & R argue, we might expect that those ideas and behaviors would track or conform to the biological impulses we inherited from them: for example, we would imbibe the idea that having large families is a good thing. However, the existence of asymmetrical strands of cultural inheritance means that ideas and values can spread that may run counter to our biological imperative (and hence to what our biological parents on their own would teach us). Thus, teachers and other professionals may spread the message that professional success - something they themselves have achieved, and which requires sacrifices of the time and energy necessary for physical reproduction – is of great value. A Darwinian competition would then ensue – between biological parents and teachers over whose ideas and values would spread faster. B & R make a convincing case that this kind of asymmetric inheritance and the resulting natural selection of cultural variants probably lie at the root of the current, extraordinary demographic revolution. People, especially in affluent countries, are having fewer and fewer babies. Biology and biological Darwinism would predict just the opposite: as resources increase – as they have for humans over the last century or more, especially in industrialized countries – birth rates should steadily increase. In these cases, B & R say, the cultural variant “enjoy your own life, be successful professionally, don’t acquire these noisy, troublesome little creatures” has undermined the biological imperative to reproduce as much as possible.

Because of these final three forces – indirect bias, frequency bias, and natural selection of culture – cultural evolution will often come into tension with the dictates of biological evolution. They help to explain the internal conflicts that individuals experience much the way Freud described the struggles between id and superego. They also distinguish B & R’s approach from a strictly socio-biological one and from William Durham’s 1991 Coevolution, which foresees greater – though still not complete - congruence between biology and culture.

Finally, B & R ask how cultural evolution itself could have arisen in the first place? This is especially acute given cultural evolution’s frequent (biologically) maladaptive consequences. The generic answer is that as long as culture is overall biologically adaptive, its benefits outweigh its considerable costs. More specifically, culture may be expected to arise under particular environmental circumstances. If the environment remains constant for long periods, the best strategy is to hard-wire behavior in genes. This eliminates the costs associated with learning, either of the individual or social kind. If, on the other hand, the environment changes significantly quite frequently, then not only is genetic hardwiring the wrong strategy. Social learning, with its inertia, is as well. Under these circumstances, individual learning is the best option. Social learning – which allows for limited individual learning and variation – is best when the environment remains fairly constant but changes to some degree. In later work, B & R suggest that this was precisely the environment during the ice ages starting 2.5 million years ago and lasting until 12,000 years ago.

Culture and the Evolutionary Process is a challenging work. B & R rely frequently on mathematical models, which will not always be easy to follow unless one already has considerable facility with such methods. However, the authors always take the trouble to walk the reader through the main steps and, most important of all, the conclusions of the models. They also offer tangible examples from history and other social sciences to illustrate their points. The book should be required reading for anybody interested in “big” or “deep” history. Even at smaller time scales, the book offers a very stimulating framework for analysis, especially for thinking about broad patterns of social and cultural development. So, can historians learn anything from biologists? Yes – if they are willing.

David Meskill received his Ph.D. in Modern European History from Harvard University in 2003. He will be Assistant Professor of History at Dowling College in fall 2009. He blogs regularly at http://davidmeskill.blogspot.com/