Tag Archives: methodology

Was Hadrian’s Wall Proceeded by an Earth-and-Post Construction?

08 Sunday Sep 2019

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Hadrian’s wall across Britain has left complex traces in the forms of trenches, pits, scraps of stonework which were not salvaged by later farmers and road-builders, and of course inscriptions boasting of what the dedicator had accomplished.

Geoff Carter, the archaeologist of Britain, is working on his theory that Hadrian’s Wall was first built as a dirt-and-cross-beams construction just in front of the later stone wall. At the eastern end of the wall the stone wall was completed, at the western wall the dirt-and-cross-beams wall survived as what archaeologists call the turf wall. He sees the deep ditch behind the wall as a construction trench for a stone road which was never completed rather than as a marker defining the southern edge of a military zone or a barrier to keep the soldiers’ horses, mules, and donkeys from straying.

If he is correct, the obvious explanation was that plans changed and the initial, very expensive plan for a 73 mile long stone wall and stone highway had to be scaled back. The evidence for this is post-holes, mounds of spoils and rubble, pollen analysis of the western “turf wall,” Statius’ description of how a Roman road was built, and a fort which was built over part of the wide ditch not long after its initial excavation. His theory also implies a considerable use of local labour to dig ditches and fell timber aside from the soldiers who left inscriptions on stone to commemorate their work.

While he decides what form of formal publication to make, he has blog posts at https://structuralarchaeology.blogspot.com/ and videos at Geoff Carter Theoretical Structural Archaeology (warning: Youtube).

He is convinced that he got caught up in an ideological battle between scientific archaeologists (like he sees his own work) and post-processural archaeologists (he tried to do a PhD on what kinds of building a set of post-holes could support, in a department which wanted him to talk about the cosmologies of prehistoric societies, and he just did not see a way to talk confidently about such abstract things using postholes and potsherds as evidence). Not being a Briton or an archaeologist, I can’t comment, but I like that his theory matches what we know about other monumental building projects in general (cathedrals often spend a few hundred years half-built) and Roman military engineering in particular (most forts and frontier defences were built first in earth and timber, and only later replaced with stone). So I hope he can find time to finish his book. In my experience, most scientists are open-minded about a new theory, as long as it is published as a formal argument with an accepted academic press or journal.

Big Data in World History: Seshat vs. DRH

10 Friday May 2019

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Ancient historians have been in the big open data business for almost 200 years, with Mommsen’s establishment of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum to publish all surviving ancient Latin inscriptions in 1853. Right now there are two competing projects to create an encyclopedia of quantitative data on world religious history which could be subjected to statistical tests: the Database of Religious History at UBC, and Peter Turchin’s Seshat project in the USA. Turchin belongs to a Russian tradition of social scientists such as Andrey Vitalievich Korotayev who want to find predictive, mathematical laws of history, often in the forms of cycles. A recent paper based on Seshat data has provoked not one but two responses only six weeks after publication.

  • Harvey Whitehouse et al., “Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods Throughout World History,” Nature 568 (20 March 2019) pp. 226-229 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1043-4
  • Edward Slingerland et al., “Historians Respond to Whitehouse et al. (2019), ‘Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods Throughout World History'”, PsyArXiv Preprints, 2 May 2019 https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/2amjz
  • Bret Beheim, Quentin Atkinson (yes, that Atkinson), et al., “Corrected analyses show that moralizing gods precede complex societies but serious data concerns remain,” PsyArXiv Preprints, 2 May 2019 https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/jwa2n

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Folk Wrestling in Poland

02 Saturday Mar 2019

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The field behind the Zentrum für alte Kulturen, Langer Weg, Innsbruck, on 31 January 2019

Over on Patreon, Maciej Talaga talks about the folk sports which Polish peasants used to play in the slack times of the agricultural year. As he says, outside of the harvest season peasant societies tend to have more workers than useful things for them to do, so people on the land have to find ways to amuse themselves.

Biady, that is wrestling, was one of the most popular. It was played mostly by older boys and unmarried men, but there were exceptions. Participants would establish a specific hold – you can see it demonstrated on the video – and try to throw each other down without breaking it. Such matches could last anything from a few seconds to up to half an hour (with a single successful throw!). They involved no judges or coaches, as none of the participants would receive any formal training.

The latter was also the very reason why documenting “biady” required a specific research strategy. Since this martial game had no technolect or jargon, practitioners had no consistent way to talk about it. They couldn’t discuss given techniques, as we are used to do in HEMA, since there were no names for wrestling actions involved. Even less so in regard to tactics and theoretical concepts. In effect, my Grandpa also had hard times answering my inquisitive questions which I started bombarding him with after I discovered he has a vivid memory of this fascinating tradition. Being a simple man, he not only was surprised that anyone found it interesting, but also lacked words to explain martial matters in a structured way.

Having realised these difficulties, I called for help: I have a pleasure to run a little youth club teaching HEMA to some fantastic boys and girls. Three of them, Krzysztof Markowski, Marcel Kwapisz and Bruno Biernacki, enthusiastically agreed to assist me in a research trip. We went by bus to Wizna, a town located some 30 km away from my grandparents’ house in Łomża, and took a walk to visit the only Polish folk wrestler we knew about. And this time we were prepared much better – instead of asking questions, we started “biadying” in front of my Grandpa in the hopes that it would be easier for him to comment on our performance than talk about “biady” from a scratch on his own. And it worked!

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Historiography, Forschungsgeschichte, and Geschichtsschreibung

26 Saturday Jan 2019

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I am going to say a bad word: historiography. The problem with this word is that it can either mean “the writing of history” or “the history of writing about history.” Thus Roman historiography can be history written by Romans, but it can also be the things which people in the last few hundred years write about those Roman writers. Sometimes it even refers to the science of history, and to whether arguments obey the rules of logic and the rules of evidence, as when Karin Wulf writes:

And no, I don’t always read this way [intro, first and last pages of each chapter, conclusion, skim the footnotes, done]. For work that’s in my research area, and when I’m reading for the joy of reading history (which I try to do regularly), I read more deeply and thoroughly. But thinking historiographically, getting a sense of how evidence and argument are related within a book (or essay), and how those relate to other scholarship, I find pretty well served by this approach.

It is as if we had one word which covered novels, book reviews, and textbooks for would-be novelists, but not the words “novel” “book review” and “composition textbook” or “writer’s guide” (or if archaeology and museology were one word, so that sometimes you opened a book hoping for a casual read about Edwardian exhibitions of mummies and found yourself neck-deep in First Intermediate Period pottery chronology). When you see a book like Luke Pitcher’s Introduction to Classical Historiography on the shelf, you have to look closely to see whether it will talk about ancients like Xenophon and Sallust or moderns like Mommsen and Rostovtzeff.

Fortunately, in German we solved this problem a good long time ago. In German we have the two terms Geschichtsschreibung and Forschungsgeschichte. Geschichtsschreibung (“historical writing”) talks about the past, but Forschungsgeschichte (“research history”) talks about what people have said about the past and how they make a case for it. I find that this leads to less confusion.

English does have the term reception history which is the history of how people in general, without policing by a community of experts or commitment to particular professional standards, talk about the past. This can look a lot like the second kind of historiography, but it notices people outside a tiny academic circle. (This can be messier, because while historians usually cite the writers who influenced them, Gary Gygax did not feel the need to explain where he got his definition of a glaive-guissarme, and its hard to prove how much people’s ideas about Xerxes were shaped by seeing Xerxes played by a castrato in an opera). I don’t know why English borrowed this term but not the others, except that since the Second World War American academics have generally been more open to European literary theory than to the German-Dutch tradition of scientific history (although there are exceptions like Michael E. Smith).

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Further Reading: I would like to work through Anna Wierzbicka, Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language (Oxford University Press, 2013) which argues that the quirks of English shape many fields of academic research.

Rochberg on Omens

22 Tuesday Jan 2019

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Your humble correspondent in the Central European blizzard of January 2019

One of the books which I would like to find time to read is Francesca Rochberg’s Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science (University of Chicago Press, 2016) {available from the publisher}. About a decade ago, she was puzzled why Mesopotamian omen lists include situations which can never occur, such as the appearance of the sun at midnight or a lunar eclipse which moves from west to east across the moon. The Mesopotamian literati were intimately familiar with the movements of the heavens, and had thousands of years of records, so they probably had a firm conviction that this was not the sort of thing which could happen in the ordinary course of events. Were these absurd? The result of block-heads mechanically multiplying omens to cover different combinations of left/right, the three watches of the night, the four directions, and so on regardless of whether that combination was possible? Violations of the order of the heavens on special command of the gods?

Perhaps this is where we step into the realm of the conceivable, or the conceptually possible, as differentiated from the possible, or at least the metaphysically possible … To say certain phenomena in the omen lists are “impossible” or “absurd” because they do not occur and cannot be observed is our judgement and occurs nowhere in the ancient sources. That is to say, our definition of impossible (not in accordance with real properties) is not expressed in the texts. It seems more consistent with the overall makeup of the omen lists that recording a phenomenon as an entry in a codified omen list is evidence that it was regarded as epistemically possible [something which a reasonable person may chose to believe]. That is, the list of statements (P) constitute data, or knowledge, on the basis of which the diviner makes judgements and draws conclusions about what will happen. The use of the terms possible and impossible are, among other things, relative to one’s accepted knowledge of how and what things are.

– Francesca Rochberg, “Conditionals, Inference, and Possibility in Ancient Mesopotamian Science,” Science in Context 22.1 (March 2009) pp. 5-25
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A Basic Problem in Interpreting Herodotus

06 Saturday Oct 2018

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A Roman bridge across a hundred-metre-wide river at sunset

At Rimini there is an old stone bridge over an arm of the sea called Portocanale. The Riminese say it was built by their emperors Augustus and Tiberius, but I did not see the inscription.

The ancient and medieval writers who claim to have travelled the farthest- Herodotus, Marco Polo, Ibn Battua- have not convinced all their readers. Herodotus goes to great trouble to cite different views on controversial questions, give verifiable evidence to support his opinions, and remind his audience that knowing about the past requires deciding between contradictory and self-interested sources, but he also says that Upper Egypt is only narrow for a few days’ sail upriver after which it widens out like the Delta, gives detailed accounts of bedchamber conversations between Xerxes and Amestris, and says that flax is only worked by the Colchians of the South Caucasus and the Egyptians (2.105). One of Herodotus’ most influential and radical critics was the late Detlev Fehling. Fehling’s polemical work attracted a lot of passionate responses, and I would recommend that people read it rather than let someone else tell them what to think about it. However, I think that the following passage from one of his later articles is a good statement of the problem:

Any discussion of Herodotus’ methods will necessarily have to begin with a basic problem, which has been seen clearly by all serious scholars for more than a century. … There are no direct autobiographical statements in Herodotus (except that he calls himself a citizen of Halicarnassus, a small town on the coast of Asia Minor, but that counts as part of his name). But there are distributed over his work quite a number of passages where he says that he is reporting what is said in diverse places: ‘The Egyptians say …’, ‘the Spartans say …’ etc. There is also a smaller number of passages which, if what Herodotus states is correct, unequivocally imply his presence at the place he is talking about: ‘I heard from …, I asked …, I saw …, they told me …’, and in one exceptional case even: ‘I went to Tyros in order to ascertain …’ (ii.44.1). I do not count these as autobiographical, because they are clearly not meant to tell about Herodotus himself, but are closely bound up with the information he is presenting. Now the problem with these remarks– and I repeat: a problem recognized by everybody- is that much of what Herodotus tells us precisely in these places cannot be taken at face value, mainly for two or three reasons. [Fehling gives them] … We should not treat Herodotus as if he awoke one morning and said to himself: ‘I have a splendid idea how to make my name famous for many a century: let me be the first historian. Of course, this puts me under the moral obligation to behave like a conscientious historian, but, being an honest man, I should be able to live up to that.’ It has often been pointed out that the nearest thing to Herodotus’ enterprise existing in Greek literature before his time were the Homeric epics. The Greeks used to believe that the war which was the subject of these epics was, in principle, historical, and yet no Greek could or did overlook the fact that they consisted for the most part of pure fiction. Such considerations should help us to solve the dilemma in which Herodotean scholars always found themselves enmeshed. They believed that they had only the choice between Herodotus the truthful scholar and Herodotus the liar and impostor. They simply thought that between these two tertium non datur. Given this, it is understandable that the second possibility never had many friends. Herodotus so obviously makes the impression of a morally responsible and serious personality that nobody felt happy about catching him in a lie. Rather scholars would feel that it was not decent to do so, and so many of them preferred to close their eyes firmly in front of obvious observations.

Detlev Fehling, “The Art of Herodotus and the Margins of the World” in Z.R.W.M. Martels (ed.), Travel Fact and Travel Fiction: Studies on Fiction, Literary Tradition, Scholarly Discovery and Observation in Travel Writing (Leiden: Brill, 1994) pp. 1-15, the quotes come from pages 1, 2, and 7. You can find the article on Google Books.

You could say many things about this passage, but I think that Fehling has struck upon the key reason why few others accept his ideas completely. Herodotus sounds like a careful investigator with a keen interest in epistemology and encouraging his readers to think critically about what they are hearing. It is hard to believe that he lied, or that when he said ‘I asked them and they said …’ he did not mean that he, himself, talked to his sources. Many of his stories resonate with Near Eastern texts which are otherwise unknown in the classical tradition. At the same, it is obvious that he saw the world, its laws, and his duties as a storyteller differently than anyone does today. In his worldview, big things tend to become small and small things big not because of entropy or imperial overstretch but because such cycles are part of the world, and the Nile in Libya and the Danube in Europe are not just two big rivers but balanced parts of the earth whose forms and functions correspond in a way out of James George Frazer’s work on magic not a textbook on geology and the water cycle. The same man who carefully undermined his readers’ expectations and the messages which they would want to draw from his words also wrote that only the Colchians and the Egyptians work linen (2.105) in a world where linen had been grown, spun, and woven everywhere for thousands of years (Nosch, “Linen Textiles and Flax in Classical Greece: Provenance and Trade”).

Just what Herodotus felt was acceptable to do in turning other people’s stories into his own is a hard problem. It is very hard to believe that he systematically invented sources, but it is also hard to believe that he saw and heard everything which he says he saw without at least massaging them to fit his own needs and his audience’s expectations.

Edit 2018-10-09: Clarified what Herodotus says about linen in Egypt and Colchis and added a link to Nosch’s article

Edward I’s Draft Dodgers

20 Saturday Jan 2018

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As I have been working on my thesis, I found a reference which I was looking for but could not find back when I was writing my Master’s thesis. It described one of Edward I’s wars in Scotland where over the course of a few months, half of his infantry threw down their issued crossbows and headed home. The story comes from Michael Prestwitch, “Edward I’s armies,” Journal of Medieval History 37 (2011) pp. 233-244:

The logic of the way the infantry were organised, and the quality of the officers, was not, however, sufficient. Desertion was a major problem, and it did not prove possible for Edward I to keep large numbers of men in the field for any considerable length of time. For example, there were almost 3,500 Yorkshire infantry in the army when it mustered at the end of June 1300. A month later the number was down to 1,483. Edward was understandably furious, and wrote to the keeper of the wardrobe. ‘We are sending you under our seal the names of the footmen from the county of York who have left our service and our host without our leave. These people have maliciously deceived us and have traitorously failed us in our business.’ In 1301 he complained to the officials of the exchequer that as he had no money, he could not prevent his troops from leaving.

Now, a medievalist like Prestwitch can explain the customs of warfare around the year 1300 which made invading a distant country unbearably expensive better than I can (There is a handy article on the situation in Geoff Mortimer ed., Early Modern Military History, 1450-1815 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)). But this is relevant to a point which I make in the Doktorarbeit.

People often describe Achaemenid infantry as “reluctant levies” and explain that the kings did not trust their subjects in the provinces and preferred to rely on Persian cavalry and foreign mercenaries rather than train and equip the peasants. Eduard Meyer was trying to decide what he thought of this idea a hundred years ago (Geschiche des Altertums, Band 4, S. 63 if you read German). But in every single society with conscription which I have looked at, I find that there was a great deal of reluctance amongst the future draftees to spend years in a distant land. Kings and republics were often much more eager to recruit soldiers than to feed and pay them, provide medical care when they were wounded, and support their children if they were killed. So in every society which I have looked at, conscription for a distant war at least provokes grumbling, and usually efforts to avoid going, whether those involve legal loopholes and convenient ailments, hiding from the census-taker, or getting together to murder the conscription officer on some lonely road and hide his body. The more ambitious the rulers, the more intense the resistance. Nathan Rosenstein noticed that after Gaius Gracchus offered free land to citizens, the next census registered 25% more cives, which suggests that at least a quarter of the eligible population had avoided being registered on the list which was used to recruit soldiers. Some armies turn reluctant draftees into an effective fighting force, and others do not. So whether or not Babylonian levies were “reluctant” is about as relevant to the question of their effectiveness as the shape of their skull.

The Wellcome Trust and the Urban Graveyard Effect

09 Saturday Sep 2017

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In the first two weeks of August there was a great kerfuffle about a BBC educational cartoon which showed a couple in Roman Britain who would be called multiracial in Late Capitalist Britain. Angry essays were typed, tweets flew with the wrath of the Stymphalian Birds, and many people hurried to let the Internet know which faction they aligned with. Neville Morley did a good job of summarizing how most ancient historians think about the problem in his blog post Diversitas et Multicultaralismus (no, a dark-skinned official and his light-skinned wife would not have been unheard of at Bath or Hadrian’s Wall; genetic data is exciting but just one of many kinds of evidence which historians draw upon to understand the past; genes are only loosely connected to identity). The Romans could be horrible snobs and bigots, but most of their stereotypes and slurs were directed at people from other parts of Europe and the Mediterranean … they do not seem to have been very interested in whether people had dark skin and kinky hair. In this post, I would like to talk about one of the methodological questions I have after reading the Wellcome Trust paper from 2015 by Leslie et al. which some people have been citing as evidence that negligible numbers of people from Africa had children in Britain before the 20th century (doi:10.1038/nature14230).

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War and Culture

29 Saturday Jul 2017

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The countryside in Khuzestan (ancient Susiane/lowland Elam) near Ahwaz where 30 years ago the king of Babylon and the assembly of the land of Iran fought a terrible war.

As part of my dissertation I have to talk about conscription and how well it functioned in the Ancient Near East, and that turned me to a classic article. As I was searching for it I found another which I want to talk about.

Back in 1999, Norvell Atkine set out to explain to the American imperial elite why the “Arab armies” which they had armed and trained were so reluctant to fight the way that Americans told them to fight. These armies kept losing, so why were they rejecting help from more effective soldiers like him and his friends? “There are many factors—economic, ideological, technical—but perhaps the most important has to do with culture and certain societal attributes which inhibit Arabs from producing an effective military force.” When I read it the first time, I took away his lovely anecdotes about the culture clash between American military personnel and the Arab officers which they had been assigned to collaborate with. Atkine focusses on the armies of Mubarak’s Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. But a few years ago, Caitlyn Talmadge wrote a scholarly article on one of the Arab armies which he is less interested in: Saddam Hussein’s. Her article has an abstract, so I will let her speak for herself:

Saddam’s Iraq has become a cliché in the study of military effectiveness—the quintessentially coup-proofed, personalist dictatorship, unable to generate fighting power commensurate with its resources. But evidence from the later years of the Iran-Iraq War actually suggests that the Iraqi military could be quite effective on the battlefield. What explains this puzzling instance of effectiveness, which existing theories predict should not have occurred? Recently declassified documents and new histories of the war show that the Iraqi improvements stemmed from changes in Saddam’s perceptions of the threat environment, which resulted in significant shifts in his policies with respect to promotions, training, command arrangements, and information management in the military. Threat perceptions and related changes in these practices also help explain Iraq’s return to ineffectiveness after the war, as evident in 1991 and 2003. These findings, conceived as a theory development exercise, suggest that arguments linking regime type and coup-ridden civil-military relations to military performance need to take into account the threat perceptions that drive autocratic leaders’ policies toward their militaries.

To put it bluntly, Saddam spent his time in power worried that someone would toss him in his own torture chambers. After all, most of the governments in the region, including his Baˀath party, were descended from a group of soldiers who had overthrown the previous regime. So he set up policies to ensure that the army was not a threat to him: strictly limiting communication between units, requiring minor acts to be authorized from Baghdad, refusing to allow different types of troops to train together, and killing officers who were too popular. This kept him in power for 25 years and able to play warlord, even if it also meant that his adventures cost the lives of too many of his own soldiers for little or no gain. The only time that he relaxed these politics was the late 1980s, when it seemed like if the war continued, his regime might collapse. As soon as he had driven the Iranians back across the border and made peace, he treated the army just like he had before, because once again he was more worried about a coup from within than an invasion from without. And while Saddam was crazy (and perhaps not the sharpest knife in the drawer), his 25 year rule suggests that he knew how to stay in power.
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Needle Cases and Knowing the Past

21 Friday Apr 2017

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A case for pins and needles consisting of a flat piece of leather lined with felt

A flat leather needle case or ‘housewife.’ The two large flaps covered in felt fold together, then the third smaller flap folds over them to hold it closed.

I sew by hand, and I like to use this needle case. It holds pins better than my pincushion, it is easy to pack away and set up wherever I am working, and I like the feel of the stamped leather in my hand. I bought it from someone at a medieval fair 20 years and several lifetimes ago.

Now, if you ask most people how ancient and medieval people stored pins and needles, they will show you metal or bone cylindrical cases with lids, and maybe speculate about leather or wooden versions. As for the pins and needles themselves, they will usually point out clumsy things suitable for making sails or picking a lock. But there is a problem of evidence. They point to these things because they appear in collections of small finds and are reported by metal detectorists. And wee little fishbone or steel needles don’t survive as well as giant bronze ones, and are not as easy to detect and identify. A folding needlecase is just as hard to spot, especially if it is not of vegetable-tanned leather. Hide which is treated in other ways, with drying, oil, fat, or alum, tends to break down in the ground, and in many cultures these other treatments were much more common than tanning with oak or other sources of tannins. A folding needlecase also suits conditions before the 20th century, because it required few materials or tools: just a scrap of leather and felt, which can be made from the ‘cabbage’ left over from cutting larger items, and a needle and thread to put it together. Before the 20th century, preparing the materials for clothing was usually much more expensive than turning them into a specific product.

So how long have people been using these before someone at the fair sat down at their crafts table to earn some pocket money? I have no idea. But I would expect it to be very long indeed, and much longer than I can prove. In studying ancient history, you have to accept that all kinds of things were done which you can’t prove. And I am OK with that.

Further Reading: http://larsdatter.com/sewingkits.htm Carol van Driel-Murray of the Archaeological Leather Group has been one of the leading figures in laying out the evidence that vegetable tanning was not the dominant way of treating hides in the ancient and medieval world.