Gathering the Bones, XXV: Iron, Butchery, And An Ecotone

 

Look what they found at Hattusa in 2015! It is unfortunately Galatian rather than Early Iron Age, but it's definitely a saw. I'll throw in a 17th C BC bronze saw below, but as an insight into my method, if the Blogspot automatic pagesetter leaves ugly spaces. I'm not fixing them!

I'm thinking about saws in connection with butchery rather than carpentry today, which means that I'm also thinking about pemmican, so I'm going to start by retelling the story of Fenimore Cooper's 1843 Wyandote: Or, the Hutt'd Knoll, which I may have talked about before here. (I'm holding it in my mind that I have, as an incentive to the brevity I find so impossible.)

Wyandote is a frontier novel, and a Western, "Indian" novel, as they said at the time. It is also a difficult one for American readers. Cooper was an Indian lover who supported Removal, and a champion of the uniqueness, originality, and value of American culture at a time when Americans of culture were hopeless in thrall to European norms, but at the same time a man of strictly hierarchical values who often suggested in his fiction that he would be much more strongly opposed to the Revolutionary settlement if he thought he could get away with it. The villains in Wyandote are the frontier farmers who live as tenants on the land ("patent") of a retired British army officer. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, they ally with some Indians and stage an "Indian" attack on their landlord in an attempt to convert their tenancy into freehold at the expense of massacring the officer, his wife, daughter, Maude, adopted daughter, and loyal retainers, because eggs, omelets. The "Wyandote" of the title, is introduced to us as the shiftless, drunken Indian, Saucy Nick, who in spite of his overt status on the page, flirts with  protagonist status, being omnicompetent off page, carrying off various adventures, and then, in what would be the climax of the fight, single-handedly defeating the enemy in desperate battle in the dark. Yet he also murders the British officer, to all appearances his friend, in cold blood shortly after declaring himself "Wyandote," and no longer "Saucy Nick." At first glance it is an almost perverse plot development, not that we'd expect any less of Cooper, who, after writing a romance explicitly pairing cousins, brings a brother and adoptive sister together.

And the perversity doesn't end there, as often in Cooper romances, the plot makes much more sense with a bit of added history and some race mixing. substitute Joseph Brant for Saucy Nick and one of Sir William Johnson's daughters for Maude, and it all makes sense, even the romance. Maude, is, under Indian law, the officer's daughter right up to the moment when she repudiates that status in order to pursue her relationship with his son. This instantly restores her uncle, Nick/Wyandote's, status as a Tuscarora sachem and her guardian, and her ownership of the patent. The contradictions between Indian and English inheritance are, as always, reconciled by marrying the Indian heiress to the English,and the murder becomes instantly understandable in a class and status-conscious society as a tragic clash of cultures. (And also because the officer had idiotically inserted himself into a rescue mission even though he is too old for the work.)

As an interpretation of the plot, I am hanging a great deal here on the patent itself, "the hutt'd knoll." Or, rather, on Nick/Wyandote's references to it in terms of its ability to sustain beaver. It is a natural hillock showing above a hundred-acre beaver pond, itself the centre of a disc of good land about the size of the officer's thousand acre patent, in the wilderness of the upper Susquehanna not far from Binghamton. It used to yield (maintain?) four beaver a year, but no longer does, and the local Indians are willing to sell, Nick tells the officer, "clearing" the patent of Indian claims, as required by New York law. The quality of the drained land under the pond is praised immoderately in the text. The soil is, of course rich, but years of decay under the pond have freed it of the stumps and roots that troubled frontier farmers. The hillock, a natural rocky eminence in the middle of the former pond, recalls a beaver lodge and is the natural place for a fortified manor, the "hut" of the title. This is why the tenants covet it, and why Nick darkly warns that it held beaver in the past, and might again. Of course, if Nick is using "beaver" in the  vulgar way that you might expect of Shakespeare, but not a Regency writer, that's exactly what happens. It used to maintain Maude's mother, and when Maude, a mature woman and mother, returns to New York as the wife of a major-general, and finds Nick (his crime never to be known by anyone but the reader) and the other retainers living in retirement at the knoll, it is still "maintaining" her, only with rents instead of pelts. 

Okay, yes, blah blah blah, Cooper the secret key to early American history, get over it, can't you, Lund? The dynamics of the fur trade are very simple. People go out to do very hard work on the trail and trapline. They have to be fed with a portable and durable food. That's your pemmican, and parched corn. Their work is thus based on the land, and we can ask ourselves how many acres and farmers are needed for each coureur de bois. The answer is "not a lot of land" for the corn, and "Hunh?" for the pemmican, because buffalo are just there. This here article I found with Google says that a 90lb bag of pemmican was the standard unit, and accounted for two buffalo. Which brings me to Robert Morrissey's People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America, which is a book in the UW Press's Weyerhauser Environmental Books Series, because this is 2026. Blogspot spellcheck doesn't recognise "Weyerhauser," by the way. Forgetting is the best greenwashing! Also, if you go to the link, you will find that the fabled forest products company characterising its "work" as managing 40,000 square miles of "timberland" in Canada and the United States. It's a giant landlord! (The fine print notes subsidiaries that are still in "wood products.")

The Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVI: The Past Isn't Even Past

 

Something about how for every Southern boy, it's 3PM on 3 July 1863, and Pickett's Charge hasn't been launched yet and I'm not even going to continue with this line of thought about history not being past. The last week of June isn't a good time to be thinking about the Neo-Confederate capture of American government in the Anglosphere because 70 million of us are suffering through a historic heat wave, and a major British political party's solution to the problem is to let the oil and gas industry rip.  

It hasn't been terrible in British Columbia. My work week was disrupted by a heat wave, and everyone in Vancouver felt it, but it was, as these things go, a normal heat wave with cooling at night. We're seeing plenty of early signs of a food security crisis in the form of chronic and persistent shortages of seasonal crops like watermelon, asparagus, strawberries, and sweet corn, and part of that is down to weather; but it is also in large measure politics, and I guess we're back to the first paragraph. 

I was away visiting last week, but I was rewarded for my time off with a five day work week followed by a single day off (yesterday). I didn't feel like high effort blogging yesterday, and there's some business to catch up, specifically Eric Cline's book about the "collapse and survival of civilisation" after the "collapse" of 1177, which struck me as fairly low effort for most of its run, until the final chapter, which was on about the IPCC's take on Climate Change and Cilizational Collapse, as the bloody Wikipedia article is titled.

(The short week is why Postblogging March 1956, II, isn't up yet. There may then be delays in July over library issues, and I still won't have an aviation magazine next week, as Aviation Week managed to fill up a whole volume with the January-February issues, and I have no idea what was going on with Flight in the spring of 1956, what with the labour trouble in the British printing industry.) 

The Fall of Rome, VII: One, Two, Many Irans

 

The real story of the week is that I finally dragged my ass out to the library on Wednesday, cleared my account, and placed my next batch of requests Thursday morning. The other story is this stupid ass war with Iran that someone is having. The robots at ASRS have so far agreed to hand over Fortune out of all my requests. Flight and The Engineer usually take longer to surface, and Aviation Week, The Economist, and Newsweek come from PARC, the new facility on the former experimental farm at the south end of campus that was built after it was realised that "tearing all the old magazines apart and putting them online" was not actually going to happen. Ha ha, enshittification, watchagonnado. This is a pretty long walk from the holding shelves or something, which is why I expect delivery on Monday or whenever. So postblogging is next week, and given a slack week, how about some "public engagement?" Obviously no one is talking about  the war any more because it's boring and we want to focus on the high cost of produce. Which, we have to admit, is related to this stupid war, but we can't do anything about the war, and we can complain that there's no out-of-season corn on the cob. 

I've already put some markers down. The story of two weeks ago was the rescue of the crew of an F-15E downed over Iran, which was very reminiscent of EAGLE CLAW, which provoked a safety review of the practice of having pilots wear night vision goggles, which gave us a tiny tiny bit of light(!) on the development of night vision equipment in U.S. service, a topic which is super obscure because of physicists making terrible historians. I made a heroic effort to avoid topical references last week, and also in a Quora answer I wrote on the subject of Third Century Gothic seapower, which is such a bizarre sentence to write even though it's absolutely a thing. 

 

So, now, what the hell, time to go all in. It's hard to stress enough how the world is getting fucked up over all of this, so some comment is surely warranted, and as far as the state of the research goes, I'm not sure I've blogged about the history since Gunther Martin's working group in Vienna promulgated the most recent of the fragments of what is probably Dexippus' Scythia Vindobonensia, they have recovered, which was  2017, per the Internet. But we all know the real reason is that ever since I talked about the subject on Quora, I've been thinking about the hapless twats who occupy the Trump White House and the Roman Emperor Valerian,

(Exactly like that)

who was captured by Shapur I some time between 257 and 260 (David S. Potter thinks that 260 is pretty secure, but I remain completely gobsmacked that the sources don't allow us to assert the year with complete confidence). Per Lactantius, Shapur treated his captive with great cruelty, while the early Muslim historian, Abu Hanifa Dinawari says the reverse. Neither historian seems impeccably credible, but there's a strong energy of  Valerian effectively defecting from a hapless Rome in Dinawari's account, and that's definitely in the spirit of the times. Potter, intrestingly, points out that the story that Valerian and his troops/staff were put to work building dams in the new Roman masonry tradition. The dams traditionally associated with Valerian do survive, and how could I possibly pass up a topical aside about Harvard failing its students by omitting civil engineering from the law school curriculum?  

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXXII: Tophets, Himera, Weird Digressions

Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein visits Vancouver Technical High School in 1954 because one of his nephews went there and the Field-Marshal was actually a fairly normal person with a life and stuff like that.  

Major General Wilfred George Fryer, RE (1900--1993)

 There's some fairly weird shit going on about Monty that doesn't speak well of WWII nerds, and one of the heights of this weirdness is the claim that he "held back" Eighth Army after Alamein because he knew that if Commonwealth forces cornered Rommel's Afrika Korps (what, there were Italians there, too? Get out of town!), the Germans would turn around and go all "Nazi supermen are our superiors" on their pasty Limey (now with bonus Antipodean content) asses. If you've a mind to refute that "thesis" with facts, you will explore the fighting after Alamein, and in particular the attempt to encircle the retreating Axis forces via an inland hook around the town of Sirte. To do that you will have to resort to the official histories, if not the archives, as no-one but an official historian could possibly care about the New Zealand Division's travails in the crusty saline bogs south of Sirte that very nearly exposed the isolated force to the Axis counterattack that didn't happen and which would have led to someone actually knowing that Eighth Army was fighting in December of 1942. If you go to Wikipedia you will learn that no less a figure than Milton has something to say about "a boggy Sirte, neither sea/Nor good dry land."  And if you go to Civil Engineers in War, the special series of The Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, you will get, via W. F. Fryer's "The Military Water Problem in the Western Egyptian Desert, 1940--43," a deep hydrological explanation of the roadbuilding problems discussed at some length by the official history, and otherwise apparently of interest only to the local historians of Sirte, and certainly not to the grand theorists of Classical Antiquity, which is why this post comes to tophets via a weird digression through Wilfrid Fryer's discussion of the problem of watering the Western Desert Force. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIX: Wood For Greeks

 In the relatively small genre of modern scholarly syntheses of Classical literature and current (as of writing) archaeology on some specific subject, timber is actually pretty well treated, though it turns out there's a bit of a controversy behind this.

This is a "Garden pavilion celebrating the origins of Classical architecture, designed by Gervase Jackson-Stops with Ian Kerby" www.follies.uk, July 2008." I'd like to give credit where credit is due, but the link has been redirected to some nice service offering body paint. The source from which I scraped the photo is Philip Steadman's Cabinet of Curiosities (as of date of access, https://www.philipsteadman.com/blog/greek-temples-made-of-wood/). Steadman explains that Jackson-Stops actually started work on two architectural follies in the gardens of the former Horton House, Northamptonshire, upon his 1973 purchase of the property, but does not date or otherwise attribute this very striking photograph of what a timber/wattle-and-daub precursor to a Classical Greek temple might have looked like. The columns, considering that they are made of untrimmed tree trunks, are especially striking. (And seem abundantly supported by the evidence.) Wiki gives Jackson-Stops' dates as 1947--1995, but the look of the photo, to my eye, is closer to the 1970s than the 1990s. 

Steadman blogs on architectural history and this entry covers the Classical evidence that the first generation of Greek sanctuaries were made of timber (Classical authors say so!) and more specifically that the forms, and in particular many decorative elements are skueomorphs of elements of the timber construction. This was the point at which architectural historians of the "late 19th Century" found an opportunity to stand up for the honour of Classical Antiquity and deny the legacy of an age of primitive construction methods preceding the Classical Age of Marble. Exactly how far one might want to push this is a question for someone who wants to push. I mention because it might explain why the modern conversation occasionally sounds a bit tentative. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVII: Ahousat/Huelva

 Let's see how far we can push this. 

Huelva from orbit, and a satellite map of Ahousaht from Google. The conjoint estuaries of the Odiel and Tinto have been progressively silting in, while in the post-glacial period Ahousat is located at the conjunction of two drowned valleys, or fjords. I do not see archaeologists going as far out on a limb as to tell us the situation of ancient Onoba ("Fortress of Baal"), but depending on the extent of the silting it might have been an estuarine island. Ahousat isn't technically an estuarine island, but there is significant outflow from the two fjords, both of which have productive watersheds in spite of their small size, due to the heavy precipitation of the region. 

We do not normally think of any place on the northwest coast as flat and fertile, but Ahousaht (technically Marktosis Indian Reservation 15) is almost as close to an exception as it gets:

 
The Ahousaht band is actually a confederation of eight tribal entities and has 25 smaller reserves attached, all seasonal fishing and resource extraction sites.

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXXII: Safety Pins

 

A copy of Aphrodite the
Warlike, perhaps the
cult statue in the temple
of Aphrodite Areia on the
Acrocorinth. 

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. 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, January 1954: Dieselpunk

 

Did anyone else reading this frequent Young and Bloor in the early Nineties? Remember the giant poster of Pamela Anderson as Barbed Wire? There's something about comic book movies about girl characters where a dyke director (I assume) gets hold of the property and makes a movie with an aesthetic that says, "Hey, straight guys, we're just not going to apologise for not being for you," and then the straight guys don't go to see it and everybody looks at the box office and is,  like, "What happened?' I mean, I don't want to be the culture warrior here. I liked Birds of Prey well enough. But "we're going to shoot Ella Jay Bosco like she's chunky (she's not!) because you should be ashamed of your male gaze" is quite a message to swallow to enjoy me some movie. While I am determined to validate the artistic choice, I am wondering how you get to spend eight figures on a movie when your head is that far up your ass. It's not like you got the MoD (MoS) to pay for it!

By MigMigXII - Animated from CAD drawing, CC BY-SA 3.0,
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24337752

Speaking of which, this cool animation adorns the Wikipedia article about the Napier Deltic, an 18-cylinder opposed-piston diesel engine consisting of six layers of cylinders arranged in a stack of equilateral triangles. Beginning as Napier's visionary submission to an Admiralty requirement for a diesel engine suitable for Coastal Forces, as of January of 1954 it has been at sea in a proving boat for almost two years, and is about to go into service on 18 "Dark" class 50t patrol boat, as noted in The Engineer for 5 January 1954, which covers the current state of the Royal Navy (which absolutely needs 60 cruisers and its battleships, but which can afford to cut the size of its new aircraft carriers from the excessive 37,000t displacement of Eagle and Ark Royal.) The article also notes that the Deltic has "been covered fully in these pages." But in the first half of whatever month the article ran in, damn it! Apart from the "Darks," Deltics went into a number of subsequent large coastal classes and several classes of British railways locomotives, Especially the Class 55, which made an indelible impression on the trainspotting public running 100mph services and hitting 125mph descending Stoke Bank with its distinctive noise. (Did I mention that this high speed, high power diesel was noisy? And smoky? I know. Next thing I'll be saying that it rattled!) Boring and conventional engines rule the diesel engine world today since given the costs involved in high speed rail infrastructure they might as well be electrified. The Deltic isn't precisely forgotten, but it is a curiosity of a bygone age, and not the only one in this post.

Postblogging Technology, December 1953, II: Girls Who Won't Say No

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

Norah Docker for woman of the year, 1953!

I guess the day had to come when I wasn't done writing one of these until after I was snug in my room and waiting for whoever it comes on the Twenty-Eighth. The ghost of the Park Royal Boxing Day Sale? Anyway, I'm going to drop this in the courier box so that everyone else can see it. Now this is the part where I mention a winsome event in my life and that of your grandchildren. So did I mention that I saw Field-Marshal Montgomery on the plane? I did? In giddy tones when I got here a week ago? Drat. I've got nothing else. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

A Socio-Technological Preface to Postblogging Technology, Decemer 1953: The Louche Years

I started the first installment of December technological postblogging yesterday before deciding that I was a bit too spent from the work week to have a hope of finishing it over the weekend. But before giving up (because it was hard), I did some pretty basic things, like finding the big Christmas song of 1953?

Which was Eartha Kitt's Santa Baby, which I'm saving for next week. Have some meta-commentary instead! So then I had a reaction. I'm not offended by Santa Baby. "Sex positive," I remind myself. We're sex positive these days. And it's a Christmas classic, which, I don't know, did we ever get it sorted out whether that saved Baby, It's Cold Out There? And it's not like Kitt invented the idea of putting double entendres in hit parade music. But it's Christmas. It's for the kids! So that was what I was thinking just before I thought to myself, "Speaking of louche things in popular culture, I forgot to make a fuss for the first issue of Playboy when it came out! When did it come out, anyway?"

December of 1953, it turns out. Begun, the louche years have! We are starting down a valley at the bottom of which is the moment when you're not allowed to complain about skin magazines at the front of the corner store, and all the cool high school teachers are sleeping with their students, and the "Me Too" moment, which might be over as a cry for justice, but sure seems like the mood in public culture. We may or may not be back where we started,  but this isn't about  before it began, some images below notwithstanding, and it's not about where we are now. It's about things that happened in the louche years, and here I'm thinking about that second wave feminist thing about pornography being a way to hold women back. Without going too far down that road, there's a story of images --or, should I say, because we're about technology around here, graphics?

Postblogging Technology, November 1953, I: Kulturkampf

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

An update from London, where yours truly continues to look for something to do that isn't swanning around film studios like a crazy investment-minded great aunt. Maybe I'll write a science fiction novel. It doesn't look that hard! Your son has not had any more chances to indulge his particular passions, because he has been attending one meeting after another in London about making sure that British radars play politely with American radars. Which, he says, "If I was interested in all this stuff I would be in television and making ten times as much money." SIGH.  

Your grandchildren are fine, not neglected in any way. It's just that I have plenty of help. The only reason Nat is cooking for us is that there isn't room to turn around in the kitchen due to the way that the building got a wall kicked in courtesy of Herr Goering, so the help doesn't eat here. Don't worry, though, Harry MacMillan has promised to pop over and fix it personally, so the place will be back at its full Edwardian grandeur by the time we leave next summer.

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

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!

Gathering the Bones, XXIX: Nose to Tail

 

So while I ordinarily don't work very much Christmas week because my contract guarantees me two stat days and my work place is closed on Christmas Day, it has not often been the case that my schedule is written to allow me to enjoy my holiday with holiday visits, and I have plenty of well-spaced time to write during the holiday week. That is not the case this year, and I am off to Vancouver Island tomorrow morning, back on Wednesday. Happy holidays to everybody! However, to satisfy my OCD and discuss an interesting thing which  has come up, here is a somewhat culinary, somewhat technological/economic thing which has come up. 

Gathering the Bones, XXIV: The Gardener's Problem and Smith's History of Virginia

 

It's been more than two years since I've done a "Gathering the Bones" post, and I can report some progress. I've finished reading Fenimore Cooper's Wyandotte: Or, the Hutted Knoll. It's a really good book, Fenimore Cooper continues to be a fascinating person, and the novel is a lot like Wept of Wish-ton-Wish in that it uses distance from the Leatherstocking Cycle to comment on some of the same themes as Deerslayer while being a bit more willing to admit the crime. (The Wyandotte Patent is assigned to the infant product of a private marriage and baptism and so remains the property of a British general while avoiding confiscation during the Revolution by appearing to belong to a local Dutch New York Patriot family.) On the other hand, the question of mixed marriages is handled even more obliquely than in previous novels, much less being explicitly admitted, as in Wish. The heroine, Maud Meredith (Willoughby) is born to her mother in a British army frontier post in 1758, and so her mother is neither British nor a member of American society, in that she is neither home in the United Kingdom nor in Albany. On the other hand, she has  money. So Maud Yeardley comes out of some kind of irregular circumstances that I'm not going to probe any further here, although obviously she is much better born than Judith Hutter of Deerslayer, and what about all that deerslaying?

 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVI: Against Apocalypse

Earlier this week, when my work schedule looked quite different from the schedule that eventuated, I spent some time writing an answer to a question over on Quora. That question asked if the Late Bronze Age Collapse was an apocalypse.

As is often the case, I wrote to the question in response to an earlier answer by a popular and usually quite insightful Quoran with an inane theory about how the collapse was a salinisation event, as totalitarian Late Bronze Age elites forced the peasantry to over-irrigate the soil to the point where yields were ruined by soil salination. 

My first response was along these lines:

There's a reason that old time Middle Eastern irrigated agriculture focussed on barley. Then it occurred to me that if people were seriously going to go to a substructural accouint of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, than an exposition of the sustructure of the Antique Middle Eastern economy was long overdue. It also occurred to me that another blast against our addiction to exogenous apocalypses was overdue. 

This would be a longer and more lucid anti-apocalyptic blast if I had not been at work at 4am this morning on a scheduled day off, but as it is, I can neither type nor spell[t], and this will have to do. 

Let's call it an exercise in putting a marker down.  

The Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIV: Revelations of St. John of the Cross

My employer is serving fresh, hot turnover again, so if you tuned in this week to hear about the prehistory of the cubicle, I'm sorry. That would take too much organising time. Instead, we're going to go up on Mount Carmel and receive a revelation from St. John. Not the author of Revelations, notwithstanding my link, the other one. St/ John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila's disciple in the  Camelites Without Hats movement. Okay, okay, "Discalced Carmelites," which turns out to be a reference to footwear, hence "barefoot at the head," for those into New Wave science fiction. 

The story, as I have it, is that the Carmelites were one of a number of mendicant orders founded in obscurity in the 1100s, or, more likely, early 1200s. Claiming to be descended from eremitical monks living in isolation on Mount Carmel and preserving pre-Christian traditions going back to the Prophet Elijah, they plugged into a line of thinking in Christian natural philosophy that traced Plato back through the Seven Sages, some of whom studied in "the East," taken for these purposes to be Mount Carmel, and linking Greek philosophy -okay, okay, Neo-Platonism-- to the wisdom passed down from God to Adam and so on through the Hebrew tradition.

Hardly content within themselves as between raging debates over how much masochism to allow in the order, the Carmelites were thus possessed of one the weaker and more outrageous origin stories of a major Catholic institution in the age of intense controversy that followed on Luther. Cesare Baroni, one of the great names in ecclesiastical history, ruthlessly cut the cord, freeing Catholic apologists of the liability of defending the Carmelite account, at the expense of leaving the order without a history, and natural philosophy short one Christianity-friendly epistemology in the bargain.  He also, unintentionally, engaged the ongoing dispute within the community. The upshot is that a Calched Carmelite named Paolo Foscarini took indirect aim at Baroni via his colleague, Roberto Bellarmino, in an arcane, ostensibly natural philosophical debate over the nature of the solar system, but, in fact, about possession of a Carmelite church in Rome, and a clause in the Tridentine reforms pertaining to the amount of plate a church was allowed to have. The dispute then drew in a Tuscan courtier, himself no stranger to artfully fanned pseudo-controversies bridging politics, Holy Writ, and natural philosophy, named Galileo Galilei, which is where yours truly, wearing his old historian of science, came on the scene, arriving via Biagioli's Galileo, Courtier, on the slopes of Mount Carmel, the 525m high, 39km-long, 7km wide "mountain range"  along the north coast of Israel, cradling the city of Haifa and also the archaic site of Tel Dor.

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIII: For the Bible Told Me So

 

(Richard Gere is only fifteen years older than I am, and was in a BBC show as recently as 2019. I find that I am extremely jealous so I'll repeat the gerbil insinuation)

It has been a while since I visited this topic, but interesting things have come up, so I thought I would write about them. Oh, I can hear you thinking, "But, Erik, weren't you just working on Postblogging Technology, December 1951, II, yesterday?" And I can firmly answer that I don't know where you heard that, but it must be wrong. I would never bail on a postblogging entry after realising that this was a three-issue-month and that I was running out of time even before realising that I would have to cover three issues of Newsweek and Aviation Week, and that next week I have three days off in a row instead of single days split up, like this week. You can hear more about the rise of the cubicle next week! (There's already been an ad for cubicles in the series, which is why I say, "more." It's going to involve another Illinois university experimental house, State, this time, and the guinea pigs are going to be a select nuclear family and not undergraduate engineers.)

So. Ahem. The general thesis around here is that, the end of the Late Bronze Age was, sometimes, at least, a "successful collapse" responsive to the breakdown of inter-regional exchange, involving a systemic reorientation of economic exploitation from the coastal lowlands to upland niches that were more productive at a subsistence level but less able to generate agricultural and craft exports, albeit still able to take part in exchange via livestock. For lack of surplusses, these polities were necessarily non-state entities, but as they succeeded and grew, economic activity pushed downslope to the lowlands to exploit biotically productive lacustrine environments, giving rise to what I think I dubbed "lagoon states" on the model of Carthage, in particular. 

In all of this, I have been neglecting what might be the paradigmatic case, the Land of Israel. 

The Bishop's Sea: Wage Slavery

 

Oops! Turns out that the Statute of Labourers was passed in the twenty-fourth year of Edward III. Although I was looking for a fashion-plate sort of image, and everyone knows that gay men are fabulous, right? Gaveston's gloves, at least, look like fine Moroccan leather. 

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.