Postblogging Technology, October 1954, II: The Miracle of Transistors

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

We have had an exciting few weeks as various European diplomatic efforts and one American one have inserted themselves in our little Crisis. We got to show the French the Tuapse detainees, which drew some looks from one fellow, who seems to have been a China hand who  has talked to people who perhaps do not have the family's best interests at heart, but there is some urgency to the action, as the Europeans do not have a feel for American politics and find it hard to believe that a single mid-term election could end the McCarthy era at a stroke. WE can hardly argue the point without raising questions about just who we are, so hopefully someone else has. I wish I could coach them. While Lindley is a nepotism hire at Newsweek, he's perfectly right that any prediction based on historical that Eisenhower will lose in '56 if the Democrats take the Senate is stuff and nonsense. It is hard to see the way that the Democrats are falling in line behind Stevenson as anything as conceding in advance. The idea is that if Kefauver really wants to be President, he needs to be thinking about beating Nixon in '60. But what I want to ask is how likely it is that Ike will even run in '56 given his health. He really doesn't seem to be enjoying being President right now. Sherman Adams might be able to carry the load when the GOP holds Congress,but he is not going to enjoy tussling with the Democratic leadership in the back half of his term, so why try for another? 

Anyway, that's my thought. Hopefully this Crisis wraps up before Christmas.

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

The Electric City, VII: Normalising Telegraphy

 

So, and as will come as no surprise, I've had the experience of a short work week pulled out from under my feet at something like the last minute. It was perhaps not impossible for me to write Postblogging Technology, August 1954, I: I Know Eyewash When I See It, and I'm honestly not sure who besides me to blame for my taking a day off on the 11th and yesterday, but I'll settle for Larian Studios, for making Baldur's Gate III so seductive. That, of course, means that instead of something long, with a lot to chew over, you're getting a bit of a dive into semi-random thoughts I had this week. 

In this case, and as a development of "smokeless powder is just another textiles industry development, therefore the modern rifle, and modern war, comes out of industrial cotton," I am wondering about how normal early telegraphy was. (Is the rifle, or telegraphy, more important to the transformation of war before 1914?) So 

let's forget about all that "information  industry" stuff, and look at the telegraph as it came in, and try to understand why people might take the first steps to improve on semaphore and heliographs and pony expresses, and see where we are.

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIV: Fall and Revival

 

Iron Age sheep shears, found at Flag Fen

First, a housekeeping note: There was a hitch in my techblogging process at terms' end in April, resulting in my having to return all my materials and recall them, which I have done this week. Or, rather, two hitches, as my summer holidays and stat days were all heaped up and pushed to the end of August, leaving me off from the 14th to the 31st, or possibly the 2nd of September, although I am not counting on  having the first Sunday of September off work. I currently intend to get caught up on the postblogging from the 14th to the 21st and then leave for my summer road trip, unless the province is on fire by then. 

Meanwhile, the icy hand of mortality, in the form of knee pain that started on my trip to Kamloops and which was exacerbated by having to run around the store for days on end covering for other peoples' vacations has reminded me that I Would Run Away to the Air, Plantation of the Atlantic, and Sacred Spring aren't writing themselves. Of the three I have no manuscript material for Sacred Spring apart from blog posts, and while I am hardly satisfied by the first two projects, Plantation is steadily progressing in  my off-blog writing time and I have decades of investment in I Would Run Away, so Sacred Spring deserves a bit more attention here. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXXIII: Buttons

 

The Heraion of Argive Hera at Prosymna

Like many other cities of Classical Greece, Argos was a synoecism of nearby towns, overshadowed by the older sites of Mycenae and Tiryns. The construction of a temple of Hera on a massive artificial terrace, deliberately built in the "Cyclopean" style of the Before Times, and convenient to the earlier cities, amidst a group of "Mycenaean" monumental graves, may be seen as a way of appropriating the prestige of the earlier foundations. I talked about it very briefly as an example of a sanctuary of a city (polis) goddess that wasn't Athena. What did not appear last time was a gruesome story out of Herodotus, which I embed in about as much of the Father of Lies as the reader is likely to tolerate since the whole thing is so evocative:

This is the Athenian story of the matter; but the Aeginetans say that the Athenians came not in one ship only; "for," they say, "even if we had had no ships of our own, we could right easily have defended ourselves against one ship, or a few more; but the truth is that they descended upon our coasts with many ships, and we yielded to them and made no fight of it at sea." But they can never show with exact plainness whether it was because they confessed themselves to be the weaker at sea‑fighting that they yielded, or because they purposed to do somewhat such as in the event they did. The Athenians then (say the Aeginetans), when no man came out to fight with them, disembarked from their ships and set about dealing with the images; and not being able to drag them from the bases they did there and then fasten them about with cords and drag them, till as they were dragged both the images together (and this I myself do not believe, yet others may) fell with the selfsame motion on their knees, and have remained so from that day. Thus, then, did the Athenians; but as for themselves, the Aeginetans say that they learnt that the Athenians  p97 were about to make war upon them, and therefore they assured themselves of help from the Argives. So when the Athenians disembarked on the land of Aegina, the Argives came to aid the Aeginetans, crossing over from Epidaurus to the island privily, and then falling upon the Athenians unawares and cutting them off from their ships; and it was at this moment that the thunderstorm came upon them, and the earthquake withal.

 87 This, then, is the story told by the Argives and Aeginetans, and the Athenians too acknowledge that it was only one man of them who came safe back to Attica; but the Argives say that it was they, and the Athenians say that it was divine power, that destroyed the Attic army when this one man was saved alive; albeit even this one (say the Athenians) was not saved alive but perished as here related. It would seem that he made his way to Athens and told of the mishap; and when this was known (it is said) to the wives of the men who had gone to attack Aegina, they were very wroth that he alone should be safe out of all, and they gathered round him and stabbed him with the brooch-pins of their garments, each asking him "where her man was."

 88 Rawlinson p294Thus was this man done to death; and this deed of their women seemed to the Athenians to be yet more dreadful than their misfortune. They could find, it is said, no other way to punish the women; but they changed their dress to the Ionian fashion; for till then the Athenian women had worn Dorian dress, very like to the Corinthian; it was changed, therefore, to the linen tunic, that so they might have no brooch-pins to use. But if the truth be told, this dress is not in its origin  p99 Ionian, but Carian; for in Hellas itself all the women's dress in ancient times was the same as that which we now call Dorian. As for the Argives and Aeginetans, this was the reason of their even making a law for each of their nations that their brooch pins should be made half as long again as the measure then customary, and that brooch-pins in especial should be dedicated by their women in the temple of those goddesses; and that neither aught else Attic should be brought to the temple, nor earthenware, but that it be the law to drink there from vessels of the country.

 89 H & WSo then the women of Argolis and Aegina ever since that day wore brooch-pins longer than before, by reason of the feud with the Athenians, and so they did even to my time; and the enmity of the Athenians against the Aeginetans began as I have told. And now at the Thebans' call the Aeginetans came readily to the aid of the Boeotians, remembering the business of the images. The Aeginetans laying waste the seaboard of Attica, the Athenians were setting out to march against them; but there came to them an oracle from Delphi bidding them to hold their hands for thirty years after the wrong-doing of the Aeginetans, and in the thirty-first to mark out a precinct for Aeacus and begin the war with Aegina; thus should their purpose prosper; but if they sent an army against their enemies forthwith, they should indeed subdue them at the last, but in the meanwhile many should be their sufferings and many too their doings. When the Athenians heard this reported to them, they marked out for Aeacus that precinct which is  p101 now set in their market-place; but they could not stomach the message that they must hold their hand for thirty years, after the foul blow dealt them by the Aeginetans.

I swear Herodotus privately identified as Carian. Anyway, we hear about Athens' long and strange conflict with Aegina, about the obsession with symbolic acts of war like the seizure of images leading to real human tragedies; another intimation that the Athenian identification with Ionia was deliberate self-fashioning; and some mythical references. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXXI: Queen of Victory

 

John Byrne, "Goblin Queen" (From a story by Chris Claremont)

Good news! My employer has been persuaded that "But I don't wanna!" is not an adequate argument against the labour code requirement that I get an extra day off to celebrate the birthday of our undying Queen-Empress.That's next week; this week I celebrated it with lots of overtime instead, so I am going to pluck another low-hanging fruit before engaging with postblogging next week. 

So the story here is that the Indo-European languages emerge into the light with The Proclamation of Anittas, a unique document on Old Hittite extant in an early as well as late-Kingdom copies, anchoring the  use of the Hittite tongue to a c. 1600BC central Anatolian context.  And I am engaged here in the fun and low-stakes enterprise of arguing that this is not only the oldest Indo-European, but the source of the language family. Today we're going to go a bit further and single out an individual:  Puduhepa, the Queen of the Night. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXX: Quoi?

 

This one originally qualified as a response to something I read online: not here, of course: Over at Quora, where the best of the resident historical geneticists, Ygor Coelho, accepts the final collapse of the "Yamnaya expansion" thesis as far as it concerns ancient Anatolia --and then reconstructs it. 

Some time ago I wrote that my understanding about the origins of the Indo-European language family and the early Indo-European migrations, after reading many scientific papers about the archaeogenetic findings in connection with the archaeological ones, had been evolving to favor the Pontic-Caspian Steppe hypothesis, but not in its classic “Yamnaya hypothesis” (too late to be really representative of Proto-Indo-European, as opposed to some Indo-European branches, possibly those ancestral to Greek, Armenian and perhaps Albanian), and also in complete disagreement with those population geneticists that were interpreting the data as an evidence of an origin of Proto-Indo-European south of the Caucasus, probably close to Armenia.

It could also qualify as a book review, in that I took the decision to spend a lazy Saturday working this material over as an invitation to read Eric Cline's  After 1177: The Survival of Civilisations. Also, Narendra Modi is going to win re-election in India on his "Sure would be a shame if an ethnic cleansing were to just happen around here" platform, and if I can't do anything about that, at least I can direct some impotent aggression towards his Hindutva loons. 

So, first, Professor Cline. I read  1177 BC: The Year Civilisation Collapsed as a somewhat less than passionately felt book, and that is even more true of  Survival. That's not to say that it is a bad read, much less bad scholarship. I see omissions and neglect in the literature, But Cline has a professional expertise in the field so that is much more likely to be my misperception than reality, except insofar as I was hyperfocussed on his treatment of the brilliant Saro Wallace, and found his use of her work shallow. To be fair,  Travellers in Time came out too late to be considered; but Cline's whole monograph is permeated with the idea of a "successful collapse," and Wallace offers a mechanism for it that would explain what Cline finds so mysterious about the Phoenician anti-collapse and which might have come into his treatment of Israel if he had taken Finkelstein more to heart. (A redistribution of everyday economic activity across elevations enriches the "Phoenician" city states and makes the Kingdom of Judah possible). 

Oh, well, maybe I'm just white knighting it But, you know, Cline only catches fire when it ambles off the reservation to talk about climate change. I'm totally on board with worrying abot climate change, but the presumed "mega-drought" plays an important, if not quite starring role in Collapsed, and is central to Survival, is rooted in archaeobotanical studies, and drawing universal conclusions from localised archaeobotanical sites is a fraught activity, as witness repeated revisions of claims about forest cover changes based on revised understandings of the environmental history of specific sites. I get that Cline would like to use the enormous amount of money he has made for his publisher and turn into public intellectual clout in the service of something more important, but there are fine young scholars out there failing to get tenure-track jobs, and I'd like Cline to back off them if he can.  

Back to Ygor, who, as an Internet warrior still has his bones to make, and can get down into it. Ancient Anatolians do not have Steppe ancestry, and that's that. The Indo-European language family was not spread into Anatolia by a wave of demic advance. "Migration." So then he fixed it by finding a mutual ancestral group in the southern Caucasus in the right timeframe for Proto-Indo-European (4000BC, according to him. 

No disrespect to Ygor, but this is crazy. It's like, "I read some historical linguistics stuff on the Internet, and now I'm going to do a genetic study of the recovered DNA of more than 200 Neolithic individuals and unleash enough statistical analysis software on them to take a Lunar lander to the Sea of Tranquility and back." 

See? This is why linguistics is secretly the hardest historical science. We all take it for granted that we're not going to understand what the historical linguists are talking about, so we just nod along. It's like the Grand Unified Theory. Or it would be if we were using the contradictions between General Relativity and quantum mechanics to justify some light genocide. 

A Technologo-Scientific and Popular Cultural Appendix to Postblogging Technology, September 1953, II: Soylent Green is Etc!

 

I'm sure everyone has seen 1973's "Soylent Green is People" clip, and the opening credits are actually pretty fun. And a good reminder that Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room, came out in the same era as John Brunner's Dos Passos-inspired pseudo-found novels beginning with 1968's overpopulation-centred Stand on Zanzibar. I'm not sure how the movie money came to be left on the table for Harrison. but he did have the good sense to write a police procedural instead of a quadrology of sprawling, experimental novels. Harrison was, if anything, too succinct for his own good, hence Deathworld not being Dune. 

Blue green algae might also be too succinct for its own good. It's small, and short-lived; There have been a million generations since blue-green algae started out being the next big thing in fighting overpopulation and the "limits to growth," and as far as I can tell, we're still waiting. But, then, that's the point of the movie, isn't it? "Soylent" is the food of the future; Blue-green algae would should have been the food of the future,  but it turns out that there's a problem. 

I know, I know, that's a link to a weird and poorly reviewed science fiction novel from the early Seventies. The Ballentine second hands are everywhere, so I suspect it sold well but was received coldly, and I can see why, because it is a strange, if epic, story. And it happens to be the place where the  idea of the empty oceans was introduced to me --along with a lot of other very weird stuff.  T. J. Bass probably deserves some kind of attention, and the idea of a dead ocean was definitely resonating in the early 1970s, replacing earlier optimism about the bounteous harvest to come of "Fish and plankton, sea greens and protein from the sea." Protein. It's always protein. And cannibalism. Yum!

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVI: A Bronze Age/Iron Age Transition in the Maghreb?

 

So, three things: i) There is no way that I am not posting this ad, especially the week I read Edith Outland on "the Effingham libels." Man, did Horace Greeley know how to stick in the knife! ii) I'm off on a bonus week of vacation to see my Mom, so I'm looking for a blog post that requires more wandering-around-the-Intenet-at-the-kitchen-table than blasting away at the keyboard whilst surrounded by ancient tomes. iii) Lameen has confirmed that "there was no North African Bronze Age" is something people say. 

I have academic confirmation of the commonplace that makes it a bit less bizarre, but there is a deeper problem in that there seems to be a lack of communication between research silos. Something isn' t right in the prehistory of the Maghreb.

A Technical, But Not At All Technological, Appendix to Postblogging Technology, March 1952: Pound Sterling But Also Energy

 

That was weird.

So much for more talk about the Comet this week! (After a planned week off from work collapsed due to labour churn, before which it was going to be April, 1952, I, possibly with Flight and Fortune.)

Promoted from the comments:

ChrisM: So, I need some clarification on the "in 1947, sterling represented 87% of global foreign exchange reserves" (noting from the paper that this means that roughly half of the world's reserves outside of the US in practice, because gold was still the actual dominant reserve) because I'm not understanding what it means. Does this basically mean that India, Pakistan, semi-demi-hemi colonies like Egypt and the White Dominions, and heck even the colonies themselves, mostly stored their foreign currency reserves in Sterling (and outside of Latin America I would expect the colonial mainland currency to be the dominant exchange reserve, so mostly Sterling, with some Franc or Peseta or whatever for their colonies).

Basically, is the argument that these countries turned all of the dollars they earned into steel or wheat or whatever, and sat on the Pounds because they couldn't buy cool things like the Comet, in practice? And that is replacing the previous "they continued to save Sterling because of affinity for the old country" theory?

I'm just very confused here, tried reading the source paper, and still didn't understand.

With you 100%, Chris. I was brought up with opinions about economists, that, well, when I went searching for the appropriate Bloom County cartoon, I found that, first, Bloom County cartoons are not well indexed; and, second, that lots of people want to explain the joke on the Internet:

"One of the first references to economics I ever saw was in a “Bloom County” strip when I was about nine. Binkley’s anxiety closet had opened, and two balding white guys wearing suits had come out to sit on his bed. “Who are you?” Binkley asked nervously. “Why, we’re economists,” one of them answered. “Economists!” Binkley said in horror. “Well, for God’s sake, don’t talk about the economy!” “The economy?” said the first. “Why, it’s improving.” “Improving?” said the second. “Poppycock!”

At which point Binkley started drooling and eating his blanket."

Economists talk funny and never agree about anything, so you can probably just ignore them and watch Demi Moore do a full-bikini strip tease to the Eurythmics, "Money Can't Buy It," instead. If only the real world worked like that. It's kind of like how no-one explores what impact the tens of thousands of British military in the Canal Zone might have had on the citizens of Cairo in discussing the events of 1952. Apparently all that rioting and guerilla warfare was motivated by "nationalism" and "fanaticism," and the fact that the Sweet Water/Ismaili Canal, in spite of being the main source of drinking water for Canal Zone cities, was deemed to polluted to drink, isn't worth having a serious conversation about. 

Evangelists and Politicians: the Fall of Rome, IV: With Bonus Sacred Spring Engagement (Edited)

 

So I understand that the way to get ahead in this blogging game is to go after the big guns and Brett Devereaux, of A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, did a three-parter on the fall of Rome back during the winter. Well, I did a three parter back in 2013, and I could easily do a fourth, and I have some things to say about the things that Devereaux says about the fall of Rome!

Which, big deal. Everyone talks about the fall of Rome. People were talking about it before Edward Gibbon decided it would be a good idea for a big book that would make him famous and offer a sly commentary on the whole thing with America, which everyone was on about back in the day. The idea for the series was foisted on Devereaux by his Patreon patrons, and I am only talking about it because it is a way to focus on the throughline from the Early Iron Age Revival of the State. Also, apart from some minor errors in the ongoing archaeological-reconstruction-of-the-Roman-economy thing, Devereaux mainly put me out by trash-talking Gibbon. Which, the thing about Gibbon is that it is easy to trash talk the man; the writing finger moves on, and all that. But what we know about ancient Rome is still dominated by what ancient Romans said about Ancient Rome, and Gibbon lived in a milieu in which everyone read the ancient Romans in the original, and talked about them. We don't do that today, and it is easy to see how Gibbon might have had a fingertip feel for the way that Romans thought and lived their lives that even a modern archaeologist might lack. 

Also, and most importantly to get at the throughline from Revival to Decline we go by the most prolific literature of ancient Rome, ancient Christian apologetics. and while I am not going to make a point from this literature that Gibbon knew so well, I am going to make a point about it.

A Continued Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, October 1951: British Nuclear Submarines, What's Going On, Here?

 

This is a pretty famous boat these days, HMS R3. It is the best photographed of 10 R-class boats built during WWI, and I see from my hard drive that it has appeared around here before. Designed specifically for high underwater speed as submarine hunter killers, they were fairly unsuccessful due to not being able to actually find their targets. Evaluating the USN's extensive trials of USS Albacore from 1953 to 1960 (but in particular a 1955--56 series), Norman Friedman called attention to another aspect of the R-class's unfortunate performance, their poor underwater handling. He points out, somewhere in The Postwar Naval Revolution,  that the R-class were in the range in which simplified fluid dynamics modelling fails, much as is the case with the transonic flight regime in  aerodynamics. Just as postwar aerodynamics depended extensively on full-scale models due to the inability to extrapolate from wind tunnel testing, so the Albacore was a good way of getting past the limits of theory to a good hull form for Skipjack and later nuclear submarines. 

Whether any of this features in the Admiralty response to WWI-era experience with the R-class, the fact remains that another R-class, R4, was retained in service until 1934 as a high-speed underwater target. The whole idea of a submarine optimised for submerged speed with a "teardrop" hull was no novelty for the postwar Admiralty, is what I'm saying, and it is hard to believe that anyone ever thought that it was. 

Unbelievable, but because of the October, 1952 decision to cancel the British nuclear submarine programme, one that I want to hold up to the light and squint at for a bit.  Seriously. What's going on?

Postblogging Technology, August 1951: New Armageddons or Happy Days?

R_. C_.,
Arcadia,
Santa Clara,
California

Dear Father:

I intend to post this from the Port as soon as I clear my baggage through customs, which means that you will see me in Palo Alto long before you see this letter, And that is my excuse for writing this note while waiting for final docking, and not including any of the family gossip that I will have already have shared with you in person. As opposed to, say, being very, very lazy.

Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie

A Technological Appendix to July 1951, II: Cracks, Clerks, Picks

 

John E. "Red" Parkinson, Chosin veteran, of the Weapons Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, was to have been honoured in death by a "Patriot Guard Rider retinue at his 11 April 2018 funeral, according to the website. 

Doesn't sound like the footloose troubadour of the Summer of Puppy Love, but that's your Silent Generation for you, and, anyway, people change. 

A long time ago, in the first days of this blog, I offered a half-assed connection between various British ventures in computing and sound processing during WWII, and Abbey Road. With July of 1951, we've come to the point where the connection is pretty much inevitable. We're done with faffy British stuff and have arrived at the beating heart of the rock and roll music of the kids today. Kids like Sergeant Parkinson. 

The Bishop's Sea: Train Oil, The Atlantic, and Africa

 As close to Sable Island as to Europe, but not the doorstep of America: The Island of Crows. 

Postblogging Technology, June 1951, II: In The Time of the Magnet

Magnets and electricity are funny things. The language of electromagnetism currently permeates our discourse. You think you know what you're talking about, and then, bam, it turns out that you don't. This is especially true of "amplifiers," which sound like blindingly obvious gadgets that give an extra oomph to an input current. There's all kinds of uses for a gadget that turns a small input into a large output. But that's not what they do at all, and it isn't until you understand what they actually do that you appreciate why conversations about historic amplifiers so often turn to logic gates. 

Which turns out to be pretty important when everyone's talking about these new "computers" they have now. I have included a Kerrison Predictor, a very simple computing fire director, here because it contains a magslip element. Magslips are more often described as electric motors than as computing elements, probably because if we don't distinguish "control" from "computing" discussions about automation become impossible. Magslips also don't use the "one weird trick" that makes magnetic amplifiers possible. See? You think you know what's going on, and then the language betrays you! 

A Technosocio-educational History Appendix to Postblogging Technology, April 1951: The American Mind Is Closed For The Season

 

On 12 April 1951, the search committee of the board of trustees of the University of Chicago announced the replacement to Robert Hutchins as Chancellor of the University of Chicago: Lawrence Kimpton (1910--77)[corr]. A deeply obscure figure (his Wikipedia page doesn't even get his death date right), Kimpton was a successful chancellor and his life makes for a rich reading of a critical decade in technological and educational policy. 

On the morning of 25 April, 1951, 45 Field Regiment, RA, broke position  to withdraw behind the Delta Line, stripping First Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment, isolated far behind the PVA advance on Hill 235, overlooking the Imjin River, of fire support. Fifty-nine Glosters had been killed in action to this point, and 522 now went into captivity, of a total of 1091 casualties killed, wounded and missing suffered by the   29th Commonwealth Brigade in this single action.

Apart from happening in the same month, and the dominating influence over all news that month of the MacArthur dismissal, the two are not unrelated, a point brought to mind by a recent email correspondence with friend of the blog, Chris Manteuffel, over the last few days.

Gathering the Bones, XXIII: Wyandotte Days

So. Precolumbian deforestation. Or the reverse! 

My interest in Fenimore Cooper's 1843 Wyandotte: Or, the Hutted Knoll, is currently confined to the introduction, which describes the creation of the eponymous patent in the western(!) New York wilderness somewhere between the headwaters of the Delaware and the Susquehanna. In it, Cooper describes how the patent, once located and cleared of Indian title, is created, by breaking a giant beaver dam and draining a vast low saucer of land, at once creating a large and fertile farmscape, devoid of tree trunks. Various adventures set in the American Revolution, follow which I may follow up on at some point, at the end of which all that is left are the ruins of the mansion and fort built on the rocky hill, or "hutted knoll" at the centre of the pond. 

The image of a hill, surmounted by a chieftain's hut, in the middle of a flood seems to be referring to the spring renewal/creation myth and to the obligatory hutted mound/pyramid which has been the ritual centre of city settlements in indigenous North American civilisations  since Olmec times, and extending up until at least Cahokia. Turning the flood into the breaking of a beaver pond seems to add another layer of allegory referring to the fur trade, and to its later end, when the beaver was driven out of the Eastern Seaboard to make way for farmland. At least as a hypothesis, it makes sense that the beginning of the fur trade would have seen a change in attitude towards the beaver, one that might well have had a significant effect on the landscape. Cooper talks a great deal about the cycle of civilisations, and while I am dependent on a Cliff's Note summary in talking about the "ancient ruins" of Wyandotte, as they appeared to the returning heir to the patent in 1795, in Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, Cooper quite explicitly refers to the fort at the centre of the little settlement of Wish-ton-Wish as having been built on an ancient ruin. 

Does the planting of Wyandotte restore the pre-fur trading status quo of the "hutted knoll?" Probably not. Probably I'm reading too much into it; but we do have some interesting evidence for shifting populations and ecological change in the right time frame. While it continues to be analyzed in terms of a disease-driven demographic collapse, in this post I want to explore the possibility that the evidence we have is explicable in terms of human agency. God knows there's not a lot of effort made to think outside of the box in  terms of American antiquity, Mormons apart (Bless their souls.)  The frontier and the west confuses us.

Sacred Spring: A Recap to February, 2021

(Aeneas dumps Queen Dido, founder of Carthage, and goes off to found Rome instead, two separate 'Ver sacrum" episodes.) So she kills herself, and leaves her ashes to be exhibited at Templeton Hall, the fictional counterpart to Cooper Hall in Cooperstown, New York. Two obscure literary references for two separate blog obsessions!) 

I seem to have an extra week in my monthly schedule, so I will leave MacArthur, the Korean War, jets, approximately a million different "early computers" and the horrors of mid-century medical research till next week and pick up the glove. Can I summarise where the "Sacred Spring" is going? Yes. Can I do it succinctly? Not a chance. Oh, well. First you indulge. Then you cut.

This one is going to be rough, a progress report, not exactly what you'd call "edited," but also an attempt to engage (or re-engage) with some material rather than gesture at it. 

I'll start with the title. I know that we're supposed to click on all the hotlinks for sources and to be self-promoted at, but this only means that I am a bad Internet person and I'm probably not the only one. The Ver sacrum is a an "ancient rite of the Italic peoples" in which 

. . . [A] vow (votum) to the god Mars of the generation of offspring born in the spring of the following year to humans or cattle [is made] . . . [Those] devoted were required to leave the community in early adulthood, at 20 or 21 years of age. They were entrusted to a god for protection, and led to the border with a veiled face. Often they were led by an animal under the auspices of the god. As a group, the youth were called sacrani and were supposed to enjoy the protection of Mars until they had reached their destination, expelled the inhabitants or forced them into submission, and founded their own settlement.

George Dumezil sees this as one of those Indo-European myths that he's always on about, this one referring back to the ancient migrations that preceded their domestication. Me, I just like the phrase. I'm not sure that the gruesome subtext of human sacrifice is necessarily warranted. It is licensed by the ancient Roman authors, but they were about as far from actual Early Iron Age conditions as we are. Let's face it: "Sacred spring" sounds cool, and, at least to my ears, is inherently optimistic, and we could all do with some more optimism in this day and age. 

I usually append "the Early Iron Age Revival of the State" to posts under the "Sacred Spring" label, referring to the collapse of the archaic states of the Late Bronze Age that was, naturally enough, followed by a revival of the state in the early Iron Age. Politics therefore comes first. In the Marxian analysis that appeals more the older I get, politics is the art of extracting surplus value and showering it on the dominant class. Marxism has its limits, and seems to have missed the role of sacrifice as the core of Ancient political economy until it collapsed of its own absurdity at . . . well, at the end of Classical Antiquity. Talking about the role of sacrifice in Antique politics implies a conversation that is not going to be able to escape technological praxis, ritual and even the history of ideas, so a political discussion more-or-less demands a parallel discussion of bronze-casting, horses, and cosmology. Even in a recap post this seems like a lot of material for a short summary, so I'll get to it below the jump.

 That said, the actual examples that interest me are all new states, where there is less to say about ideas and rituals because most of our information is archaeological. One of the most striking facts of the Early Iron Age is that urban civilisation spread rapidly through the Western Mediterranean basin in the Early Iron Age, after having been present in Egypt for above two thousand years without inspiring an earlier wave of urbanisation. Similar episodes of urbanisation on virgin ground occurred in Cyrenaica, the Gangetic Plain. In the case of proto-states like Venetia and Seville that do not come into focus until well into the Roman Empire, we really are at the mercy of the  archaeologist; but even early Rome and Carthage escape capture by the historians of Antiquity, for all that they pretend otherwise. Perversely, the most influential book ever covers the rise of the Judaean state Jerusalem. Similar claims, which I do not believe are warranted, are made for the early states of the Gangetic plain, while China is perhaps somewhere in the middle. 

Having conjured with Rome, Confucius and the Bible, the case would be made that the Early Iron Age was a watershed moment in human history. However, while preparing for writing this post, I happened to crack open Barry Cunliffe's magnum opus/beautiful coffee table book, Europe Between Two Oceans, and was reminded that he has an entire chapter on the Early Iron Age enttitled "The Three Hundred Years That Changed the World, 800--500BC." While Cunliffe for just this moment avoids the issue,  this is perhaps the most clearly defined programmatic claim for technology mattering before the modern age. It's the Iron Age, after all.

 As a history of technology blogger, I could hardly ignore it even if the programme around here weren't the restoration of the cavalry to its roll as an exogenous driver of technological change. Although the history of equestrianship is controversial, perhaps more so than it needs to be,  this is quite clearly the era in which cavalry first appeared. More than that, there are some related technologies that are profoundly important, if poorly covered in mainstream historical sources. iI debated reviewing the highlights of technological change in the Early Iron Age before the jump, but found myself leaking mush all over the page as I tried to deal with what I've learned from antiquarians meandering through the pages of Engineering. So I'll leave it for below where I don't have to strive so hard for brevity.  

Beyond that, a case can be made for the Early Iron Age as an episode in the history of ideas, and particularly religious ideas. As I have already said, this brings us back to politics forthrightly, but there is material here that cannot be reduced to ideologies of domination. Spreading technology requires teaching, and pedagogy emerges as the central concern of the earliest recorded thinkers. Whether that is accidental or not, it is important. Beyond that, many of the great founding sages of modern religion and philosophy appear at the end of the Early Iron Age. Some of the most important, such as Jeremiah and Zoroaster, appear in the role of prophets, and while the prophet is arguably a universal, psychological type, we need to remember that the earliest intellectual projects were efforts to put prophecy on a rigorous and scientific basis, and that the Iraqi solution to this stands at the origin of the Antique political economy of sacrifice. As debatable as the actual historicity and interests of the teachers of the Axial Age might be, the traditions that place their activities in this period are insistent and formative.  

Circling around Athens and Jerusalem, it might seem that this has much to due with yet another new technology, the alphabet. The alphabet and coinage are both important new inventions of the era and symbolic systems with a great future ahead of them, but the changes of the Early Iron Age clearly predate them, and the Chinese parallel makes the case that they are not necessary to the full unfolding of the social changes of the Early Iron Age. Lacking the powerful new symbolic system of the alphabet, the Chinese improvised their cumbersome writing system into a tool that could memorialise Confucius. It is the impulse to memorialise, not the method adopted, that matters. 

Lastly, religion is not the only window through which we can observe the past that pivots around Iraq, the still centre about which the world history of the Iron Age revolves. Zoroaster stands sui generis as the sage of the ancient Iranians, while the Buddha is located in a longer Vedic tradition, both seeming to Nineteenth Century historical linguists as something close to primordial sources of the great family of Indo-European languages. Whether one is using this as a point of departure for a racist or quasi-racist larger story of wandering "Indo-Europeans," or as a scientific fact to put at the centre of historical linguistic scholarship, the Early Iron Age is a seminal moment. Seminal! Primordial! Centres of world history revolving! As you can see, I'm going for Significant with a capital "S" here, somehow avoiding the Holocaust, and in general drawing the kind of premature Big Picture that cries out to be tested against the facts. Language stands apart from the technological pretensions to detachment that I managed above. It appears that you cannot talk about the historian of equestrianship without taking a stand on "the Indo-European" question, and the question also comes barreling into politics. We are in the absurd situation of having dates for the Zoroastrian moment ranging from 6000BC to 600AD (with the actual, historical Zoroaster most likely a figure of 600BC). One might think that the foundations of a science that relies on the dates of the Zoroastrian scriptures are therefore built on shifting sands indeed --but no! (To be fair, historical linguistics as actually practiced does a pretty good job of quarantining the Indo-European arguments methodologically, but there's still the question of whether Indo-European is a good model for language family development or not.)

A final question for the historian of technology concerns their place as citizens of the modern world. Did all of this happen on its own, or do we need some kind of explanation? If the latter, what does it say about technology policy in the modern world?   

The Bishop's Sea (With a Literary Appendix to Postblogging Technology, 1950): The Fishing Event Horizon and the Great Forgetting

 Robert E. Howard was born on 22 January 1906, the son of an itinerant doctor, which doesn't sound like a real job, but, then, we're talking about Texas. In the postwar boom, Dr. Howard's finances improved  enough that he was able to settle his family in Cross Plains, Texas, where his son died seventeen years later by his own hand on 11 June 1936, predeceased by his mother. 

Howard is best known to  posterity as the creator of Conan the Barbarian, but his turn to the nascent "Sword and Sorcery" genre was initiated in 1928 by a hundred-dollar sale to Weird Tales os a story featuring "Kull of Atlantis."  Unfortunately, the success of that story was a fluke. While Kull is a literary prototype of Howard's much more popular character, Conan the Barbarian,  Howard sold no further Kull stories in his lifetime. Four years later, a rewritten "Kull" story, now featuring Conan, was equally successful and launched that character into the pulp magazines. Conan was popular enough to almost escape the pulp ghetto, winning a book contract for Howard from a British publisher. Unfortunately, the press failed and Conan the Conqueror finally came out from Gnome Press, in 1950.   

Kull wasn't only a literary precursor to Conan. Howard made an explicit family connection in an unpublished essay, "The Hyborian Age," which lays out his prehistoric imaginarium in some detail, further hinting at a connection with some of his other characters, notably Cormac Mac Art, a "Gaelic pirate" of the time of King Arthur, and not the quasi-historical High King of Ireland. The comic panel opposite makes Cormac the descendant of Kull's sidekick, Brule the Spear Slayer, but close enough, because Brule is the reason for this digression. 

"The Hyborean Age" presents us with a prehistory of the Earth that is catastrophism on steroids. Kull lives about 20,000BC, and is brought up on the barbaric island continent of Atlantis, to the east of the Pictish Isles. Further east is a blobby continent in place of Eurasia, where (Western) humans fight evil serpent-men. Some time later, but after Atlanteans and Picts have colonised the northwest bit of the blobby continent, catastrophe reshapes geography and causes the collapse of civilisation, such as it is. The Picts and Atlanteans became barbaric, the Atlanteans becoming Cimmerians, Conan's people. Another catastrophe brings an end to the age of Conan adventures, and reshapes the geography of Eurasia one more time, so that the Picts and Cimmerians are isolated on what becomes the British Isles, now as Celts, and, well, Picts. 

In Howard's writing, although not in the published fan fiction he has inspired, the later Picts are notably more barbaric than the Cimmerians, almost to the point of being subhuman. In defence --somewhat-- of Howard, this is the Picts of popular history at the time that he was writing. Speakers of a non-Indo-European language, of "Asiatic" phenotype, possessed of an unusual, matrilineal legal system, and in some writing, so "degenerate" as to live in holes in the ground, the Picts had become an object of racist fantasy. Of particular interest to this blog is the implication of a connection with North American First Nations, who notably also practiced matrilineal succession and are of Asiatic phenotype. 

How this could possibly work geographically has never been clear to me, although that's not saying that the crackpots haven't been making it work.  It is also an excellent example of fiction having the advantage over bare facts, since Howard can simply assert that the same catastrophe that sank Atlantis, raised the Pictish Isles into the tops of the Appalachian mountains, inhabitants included. 

Although it seems as though this is a story we've been telling since long before Howard. The historically rooted connection was  between the low-cost Highlander and Irish establishment regiments used to fight colonial wars in the southern United States between the foundation of Georgia and the Revolution; but the idea that the Picts were somehow Indians pops up independently here and there in the Nineteenth Century. It's probably no great surprise. The disappearance of the Picts was marked as one of the great mysteries of British history virtually at its foundation, by Henry of Huntingdon.

Well, no. This blog post is inspired by Siân Grønlie's introduction to his 2006 translation of the Kristni saga, the story of the conversion of Iceland. Grønlie's introduction discusses both the saga and its precursor, Ari the Wise's account of the conversion of Iceland in the Islendimgabok, assuring the reader that the lacunae in the two accounts are as important as what is actually said, because these accounts are intended to create an Icelandic nationality, and one of the key features of a national identity is a "collective amnesia" about alternative accounts of national origins. 

In this week of nationalism run amok, I have finally found an excuse to talk about Robert E. Howard and the Picts that is actually related to the topic at hand. "Collective amnesia" is a powerful concept, and the Picts may be its most spectacular victim.

A Pseudo-Scientific Appendix to Postblogging Technology, September 1950: A Watershed Year for Pseudo-Science?

 

Three of the biggest pseudo-scientific books of the Twentieth Century were published (in English) 1950. For example, Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision was published in April; L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics was published in May; while Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki came out in an English edition late in the year, having been first published in Norwegian in 1948. I'm not an expert on Fortean bullshit, but off hand only  von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods (1971) and Berlitz's Bermuda Triangle (1974) really engaged the public imagination to the same degree as 1950s' trinity of absurdity. 

These three books were not, of course, the only ones. I was finally driven to write this post by a Time reviewer calling our attention to the sales success of Frank Scully's Behind the Flying Saucers and telling me, as the self-appointed voice of posterity, that there was something going on. Behind the Flying Saucers doesn't even come close to being in the same league as the first three titles, but, as the reviewer points out, it was making money hand over fist for Scully and his "conservative" publisher, Henry Holt, and that makes it significant in its own right.

Finally, the University of Washington signed up for a single go in the Ivy League Nude Portraiture Scandal in the fall of 1950. Although definitely pseudo-science, the ILNPS seems like a pretty different kind of phenomena. But was it? The answer is that it might not be.