tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post2153000361134196554..comments2024-03-26T14:19:33.332-07:00Comments on Bench Grass: The Art of Not Being Governed, II: Flight Considered As a Lack of LitterErik Lundhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-66147468513252960412012-04-05T16:38:00.166-07:002012-04-05T16:38:00.166-07:00I think that there's some debate about what la...I think that there's some debate about what late Roman Moorish states would look like. Building mountains out of an epigraph that links one burial site to a guy actually mentioned in late Roman history, we can vaguely see one family presenting themselves as patricians to the Romans and as ...Moors(?) to other Moors?<br /><br />On the other hand, there's a push to see the Vandal state as an only barely not-Roman late Roman province, and the big changes being indicated by Procopius' lugubrious account of the troubles of the reconquered province. Again, there are some who accuse Procopius of exaggerating. When, in doubt, I turn to my copy of Wickham, where I'm told that the export infrastructure of African Red-Slipped pottery producers linked to oil farms only shows signs of recession at the end of the Vandal period. I like the idea of the camel pastures of the pre-Sahara as a refuge from the Roman state. But even if it holds up, I'm right now agnostic about when it started to function as such.<br /><br />And there have been mitochondrial studies of the proportion of Indian markers in White Americans. I've even found one on the Internet, but I'm not finding it now. IIRC (dubious -discuss), it showed that a minority of Americans have a varied proportion of native ancestry, and a majority have none. This looks like the result for Black ancestry as well, and confirms me in my theory (surprise, surprise!) that pur laine North Americans are descended from a multiracial ethnogenesis event, while most of the genetic lineages of modern white North America crossed the Atlantic under steam. <br /><br />I'll post a link to the study when I find it, but Combo C at Tang's Noodle House is calling me loud and clear right now.Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-81483391821357968992012-04-05T10:14:12.835-07:002012-04-05T10:14:12.835-07:00From my language-centric perspective, the fewer Va...From my language-centric perspective, the fewer Vandals the better. As far as I know, no one has ever identified a single Vandal loanword in North Africa (Berber or Arabic). It's clear that some speakers of a Germanic language really did show up (http://unisi.academia.edu/NicolettaOnesti/Papers/705271/Tracing_the_Language_of_the_Vandals), but they seem to have shifted to Latin rather quickly.<br /><br />The Moorish states were already showing up during the Vandal period, surely?<br /><br />You know, since you mentioned the peopling of the US again - you haven't made any allusion to the genetics of this, but as it happens, there are several haplogroups nearly or completely absent from Europe but common in Native Americans. So has anyone checked to see how much Native American DNA Yankees have?Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-7044268700903992552012-04-05T09:02:23.728-07:002012-04-05T09:02:23.728-07:00Now that we've done the boring stuff, the cool...Now that we've done the boring stuff, the cool stuff: those darn Vandals. <br /><br />First off, we can agree that if 80,000 Vandals got from Spain to eastern Algeria, they got there by sea. No horn helmeted blonds standing on a mountain in the Rif and waving their longswords in the direction of Carthage: "Come on, we've got to make it before Augustine dies!" <br /><br />The only profound improbability in the by-sea theory is that on the basis of sixteenth century warfare along the littoral, I doubt that Roman Hispania could have mustered the bottoms to lift an army of 80,000 (including camp followers) from Andalusia to Algiers. That is, however, a big improbability. We can, of course, allow a smaller army.<br /><br />Here's the bigger problem: by land to the number of 80,000 is what our sources give us. This is the classic problem with revising classic sources. Once we're flying alone, why are we tied to <i>any</i> specific element of the old narrative?<br /><br />If the Vandal army was quite small, then there's not much separation between the classical account and Pohl's <i>Traditionskernel</i>, a small group of Vandals around whom a larger ethnogenesis takes place. <br /><br />Once we have ethnogenesis, we have one of Scott's "art[s] of not being governed." It looks like the Vandals mainly cut off the delivery of taxes in kind to Rome. If those were particularly onerous, we have a quite sufficient explanation for why the indigenous North African elite might have Vandalised. <br /><br />Now, in the case of the collapse of the late Roman state, we have pretty clear evidence of the rise of inland "Moorish" states in resistance to Justinian's restored government. <i>That</i> looks like a case for camels. It also looks like a spontaneous, bottom-up repudiation of the late Roman economy. This is why I want to suggest that the "prosperity" of late Roman Africa is probably another of the Empire's rigged games. I'll talk about farming next time. I don't think that interregional nutrient balances are the way to go, but I do think that there's agrotech issues here. <br /><br />Also, horses.Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-29132340002352537352012-04-05T08:47:34.767-07:002012-04-05T08:47:34.767-07:00On downturns, the argument I got at the breast arg...On downturns, the argument I got at the breast argues that homeostasis requires a recovery mechanism from demographic crisis. Less crowding might mean better hygiene. (Not unrelated: giardia sucks.) Fewer people might mean higher living standards.<br /><br />Of the two, I'd probably go with the latter, only nuanced. Before considering population density, hygiene first requires social discipline. Do people poop in the woods if the camp boss doesn't get a latrine dug? Of course they do. <br /><br />Second, location matters. That's the lesson of the whole "malaria" issue, where people were aware of adverse health outcomes in regions with "bad air" long before they were able to disaggregate the causes and understand the different reasons that poor drainage leads to a sickly population. Nineteenth century engineers detected sickly towns and healthy ones without being able to move people out of the former, and Peter Fleming has tried to detect evidence of this same disparity of public health outcomes in sub-Roman cemeteries. <br /><br />The second claim is traditionally Malthusian. The land isn't producing enough food at peak population (and we'll imagine that we've made some kind of argument about labour inputs to cover the big hole here), so fewer people means more food. Okay, sure, but what kind of mouths have we lost? The epidemiological argument is that they're likely to be the old and the young, or unproductive mouths. That's an economic booster right there, in response to which the population mobilises its reserve fertility. Young widows, no longer needing to look after parents and children, remarry.<br /><br />So to make a long story short, we're not lacking potential mechanisms to explain homeostasis. We're not clear if people get to move up out of the fever swamps, but some version of the vulgar Malthusian account looks to be right. <br /><br />The issue here is the scale of possible deviations from the homeostatic mean. The Malthusian version, mainly gesturing at pre-Revolutionary America, assumes rapid population change. People (or, if we're faithful to the Reverend Malthus' account, Catholics) are capable of reproducing very quickly. What we know from the life table investigations is that this is wrong. That is why, among other things, we need an alternative explanation for the peopling of the United States. <br /><br />The further extrapolation is that historic population deviations can't be as great as they're meant to be in the sources. For epidemics, for example, we can hypothesise that they might have had the mortality rates as well as the huge social impact of better-documented Nineteenth Century epidemics. Out with 30% population mortality, in with 8%.<br /><br />None of this means that we can discard the hypothesis of a late Roman population decline. It just gets less likely, and, if it happened, less severe.Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-62456177631351866052012-04-05T06:04:36.350-07:002012-04-05T06:04:36.350-07:00On rereading, I see your argument about the downtu...On rereading, I see your argument about the downturns - but it still looks suspicious. In the aftermath of a downturn, we might expect improved hygiene in the cities (if part of the hygiene problem came from overcrowding) and improved nutrition (if there was a land shortage beforehand), and expect the downturn itself to disproportionately affect the weakest (assuming it results from epidemics / starvation / etc. rather than war.) So in the aftermath of a downturn life expectancies might well be a good bit higher than the long-term average, letting the population go back to normal faster. Dunno how applicable the conditions are here.Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-48846280016345736032012-04-05T05:11:47.972-07:002012-04-05T05:11:47.972-07:00I think I'll be a little obnoxious here and th...I think I'll be a little obnoxious here and throw you a bunch of questions all at once:<br /><br />Why would the Vandals have marched from Tangier to Annaba, when they could just hop back on their boats and hug the coast? Why bother with the marginal lands of Mauretania when you could head straight for the breadbasket of the empire?<br /><br />On which subject, all other things being equal and in the absence of fertiliser imports, export agriculture slowly impoverishes the soil by sending nutrients far away faster than they can be replaced by other processes. After several centuries of grain boats leaving Africa (and not, I assume, bringing back sewage), surely it would have been able to support fewer troops anyway?<br /><br />Given that camels were well-established in North Africa by the late Roman period - and trans-Saharan trade had already begun, at least on a small scale - how do they fit in to the collapse of Roman authority in Africa? It would be tempting to invoke military use, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence for this (or so Mattingley says), and I suspect another factor is more important: with a camel herd, you can make a reasonable living on land too marginal for non-camel-owners to even seriously consider, which would certainly facilitate efforts to "escape exploitation."<br /><br />I don't see the problem with hypothesising frequent population downturns; what's to stop subsequent upturns from making up for them? Animal populations are strikingly prone to booms and busts, so it's not as if that's absurd on the face of it.Lameen Souag الأمين سواقhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00773164776222840428noreply@blogger.com