Gathering the Bones, XXVI: Philadelphia and Conestoga.

 Conestoga wagon at the National Museum of American History
By Daderot - Own work, CC0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26706952

 The Susquehannock were an Iroquoian-speaking people living in the lower Susquehanna valley. Successful in the early stages of the Beaver Wars, in which they fought, amongst others, the nascent colony of Maryland. From the 1680s the population collapsed, not least because a large number, designating themselves as the Conestoga, moved into a town settlement somewhat misleading known as their reservation, in Lancaster County, on the Conestoga River immediately above its junction with the Susquehanna that creates the ferry to York, Pennsylvania. The timing and extent of the Conestoga's population decline is not a matter of careful attention from the historians of colonial Pennsylvania, but must have been late and extreme for there to have been a flourishing town in the 1820s and  only twenty-odd victims of two massacres during the Paxtang Boys rebellion of 1764. 

The Conestoga is a characteristic but folk design associated with western American roads. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIV: Believing Because It Is Absurd

 

I did the Axial Age five years ago from the perspective of the relationship between religion and technological change. Let's come at the issue of learning, literature, scripts, and the problem of finding the "there," there. 

Wikipedia's article on the individual it designates as Siddharta Guatama is entitled "The Buddha."  in Buddhist theology, Prince Siddharta is one of a number of soteriological figures designated as "Bodhisattvas." I hesitate to refer to him as the first among equals, but that's the sense of the concept that I am going with, and one of the most important things that distinguish him from other Buddhist saviour figures is that he is considered to be a historical figure, "a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in the eastern Indo-Gangetic Plains during the 6th or 5th century BCE." One of the odder things about this conversation is that their is a tradition that places his life a century before Ashoka, who is fairly firmly dated to c. 250. Given that archaeologists have suggested that the picture of the state of civilisation in this region in the biographical stories of the Buddha more nearly fits 350BC than 550BC, you would think that the conversation would take this tradition more seriously. The introduction goes on to point out that the Buddha is first attested in c. 250, but this turns out to depend on the Ashokan attribution of the Lumbini Pillar, which refers to the Emperor in the third person and past tense, undermining the dating claim. It was also a discovery of  notorious fraud Anton Fuhrer. As a practical matter, the Buddha's existence is first affirmatively asserted in Greco-Roman literature by Clement of Alexandria. One would think that he would be a fascinating figure in early Christian Alexandria, well worth discussion.  

If, however, the Buddha lived in "the 6th or 5th century BCE," he was contemporary with . . . well, here's another level of difficulty. Per no less an authority than Plato, this was the age of Zoroaster, but Wikipedia, intending to present the consensus of scholarship, or as close to such as can be achieved, puts Zoroaster at 1500BC. The argument is that the Avestas (not attested before c.1200AD) have linguistic parallels with Vedic literature, and on the argument that the Indo-European languages arrived in India about 1500BC, this must be Zoroaster's flourit, not withstanding the authority of Plato and various etymological problems, of which the historian of technology must insist on the claim that "Zarathustra" means "Manager of Camels," and that camels were domesticated once and for all during the Iron Age. To this (non-)contemporary we add Laozi, almost certainly a fictional character and unlikely at best to have been a pre-Confucian figure if real, but certainly claimed as such in the Daoist tradition, and the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece, and let's not even get started on them! 

It seems as though arguing about the historicity and dates of the Buddha, Zoroaster, and Laozi in the same breath is a bad thing to do. It is weird that the traditional historical dates of the spread of Indo-European should be on the same level, but they are, and at the end of the day we launch into yet another realm of mystery by noting that these contested claims of contemporaneity (and more besides, as the Wikipedia account shoehorns in Jainism and "Second Temple Judaism") are in service of Karl Jasper's axial age, which cannot be better summarised than as this . . . 

But in the Iron Age. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State,, XXXIII: Fish, Tyrrhenian Pirates, and Mainstream Scholarship

 

Source: https://www.worldhistory.org/image/1064/bronze-coin-of-byzantium/

This is not the post that I wanted to write today, the first day of my last vacation week of 2025. (No more paid vacations, not including statutory holidays and paid time off, until the first week of February!) To speak frankly and autobiographically about my process and the University of British Columbia Library, the Library now loans bound periodicals on a two week, indefinitely renewable basis, the same as all other loans to alumni members such as myself. Fines are no longer levied, but replacement fees are. Loans overdue, or perhaps just held over term end (I keep missing the renewal because there aren't any consequences except in May and September) are automatically deemed lost, and the replacement fee exceeds the borrower block. That was my position last week. It was my intention to return my loans last Saturday, but I missed a volume, and because of work I didn't return it until Tuesday. I put in a borrower request for the six second-half-of-1955 volumes in my postblogging series before opening on Thursday morning. These are split between a remote storage facility (PARC), with slow but operational machinery, and the on-campus ASRS facility, which, it seems increasingly clear, will never work again quickly and efficiently. It may be that holdings that were in storage before ASRS are principally affected by this, which is bad news, since both Aviation Week are, very luckily, in that category. (Otherwise they would have been lost to pilfering engineering students generations ago, like Toronto's holdings of early aviation technical journals.) Neither facility was able to meet my peremptory demands yesterday, and here we are. Fortunately, I have something to say, and not just about the bonito of Byzantium. 

The Frauds of James Mellaart: A Scientific Appendix to Postblogging Technology, July 1955, I

 Specifically, the science of archaeology. James Mellaart is in the news in the summer of 1955, popularising the discovery and first year of excavation at the Bronze Age site of Beycesultan, which Mellaart identifies as the capital of the Arzawan appanage of Mira, or, more exactly, as Mira itself. There was by 1955 a longstanding discussion of the geography of Arzawa, in which the locations of the associated polities or cities of Mira, Hapalia, Wilusa, and the Seha River Land was much contested based on scant references in Egyptian and Hittite texts. If "Wilusa" suggests "Illium" to the alert reader, congratulations for picking up on the context of the debate. We now understand why Mellaart was so disappointed that, as of the publication of the Time article, his proof of the Beycesultan-Mira identity was "champagne glass-shaped vessels" and not "epigraphic evidence." 

Draining Lake Copais: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, May 1955, I With Bonus LBA Collapse

 Edit: A bit quick with this one. 

Responding to a 29 November, 1952 article in The Economist putting forward  "rather pessimistic predictions" about the future of the Basin after the departure of English managers, writing in a letter published in the 30 April 1955 issue, P. X. Levandis, the Greek Agricultural Minister was pleased to refute those predictions by citing high  production per hectare. I missed this letter because I don't do the end-of-month issues of The Economist unless I've screwed up my withdrawal requests, which never happens, practically. Well, hardly ever. 

I did not miss, and mentioned in the postblogging, the response of the Liquidator of the Lake Copais Corporation, F, W. Willis. Willis refutes the claim of increased productivity of wheat and cotton by showing that Levandis is using misleading figures, specifically only those of the freeholding farmers. When land held by the company, or now the Greek government, and run as largescale farms are included, there is no trend line. Without going back three years to find out just how pessimistic The Economist was being, consider it not refuted. On the other hand, there's evidently a whole history here of the people who actually farmed the land, and something of an elephant in the room in terms of what was farmed. Wheat and cotton are cash crops, and in particular the great cash crops of third-quarter Nineteenth Century agricultural expansion that gave us bonanza farms in the Americas and Australia and more complicated booms in the Old World. (For example, the "salinisation crisis due to irrigation/irrigation failure due to rampaging Mongols" story about Iraqi agriculture derives from abandoning barley for wheat in this period.) 

Wheat and cotton are, as these things go, extensive crops, not traditionally the ones you grow on expensively reclaimed land. The Greeks eat rice and make linen, right? Given the emphasis on the landholders, one wonders exactly how much consultation there was with the locals who might have been using the Lake for traditional purposes like retting flax for weaving prior to the beginning of excavation and pumping. 

Postblogging Technology, May 1955: The One I Forgot To Post On Saturday!

R_.C_.,
The Lodge,
Campbell River, British Columbia,
Canada




Dear Father:

The election is well on over here and how I wish I was off the Spit casting my line, and I hate fishing. Of course, so do you, but it is good to see you out of Vancouver, if only to look at mining plays. You will see a great deal in this letter about how the inflation in Britain is due to prosperity and can only be fixed by wage restraint. That's the real fishing for what matters, which is votes. Britain will feel the hook this summer, but by then we'll be in Hawaii and San Francisco. Sorry, sceptred isle. You should have known better than to trust Rab Butler. 

And while you're looking at Canadian investments, don't be taking any magic radar stopping paint!


Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXX: In The House of the Sea Lion

 The remarkable correlation between geographic and genetic difference in European populations (Callaway (2008) via Bintliff):

(Okay, so this is actually Ewen Callaway reporting in New Scientist on John Novembre, et al, "Genes Mirror Geography Within Europe," Nature 456 (2008): 98--101.)

Time to say goodbye to migration in history?

This is a map that does a terrible job of showing why I have a neighbourly and proprietary interest in the settlement that gives Quatsino Sound its name. In  my childhood it was linked to the rest of the world by a water taxi service from Port Alice, and we used to do weekend school trips there on the taxi to give the old day school and its aging staff of Catholic priests some purpose in their latter days, long story short. The actual Quatsino community was mostly Kwakiutl (not Kwakwaka'wakw per the band) associated by default with the Fort Rupert community in Port Hardy, and probably descended from the community that ran the Newhitty port of trade that used to compete with the old Hudson's Bay Company in the maritime fur trade. 

The perhaps under-reported implications of the genetic difference studies is the collapse of migrationist explanations of the spread of the Iron Age. We're seeing something like that occur in real time on Northern Vancouver Island as the European settler populations basically give up and leave the region. This post is another exercise in reading backwards, inspired by a recent trip (my first, at the age of 60! It was a family thing) to UBC's Museum of Anthropology. 

Aswan and Wittfogel: A Technological and History of Technology Appendix to Postblogging Technology, October 1954

Britannica. Which lifted it from Shutterstock, how the mighty have fallen, etc. 

The Aswan high dam is one of the biggest dams in the world, which is understandable, since it controls one of the world's most important rivers, although one with perhaps a bit less volume at the outlet than I expected. 

So, yeah, thought I'd start with negging the Nile. I'll let you all know if it decides to date me. The numbers, per Wikipedia, if you're a dam fan, which no-one is except when they're visiting them because civil engineering is boring unless you're there to see it is that it is 111m high and 3,830m long, and because it is an earth embankment dam, it is a kilometer wide at its base. It has an installed generating capacity of 2100 MW, which isn't actually that much by a jaded BCer's perspective. The Revelstoke Dam generates more current, and even the Keenleyside flood control dam at Castlegar that plays an important role in the tech blogging "story" such as it is by flooding beachfront Nakusp on its 1968 completion, still has a 185MW capacity.  This is because its main purpose is to regulate the flooding of the Nile, for which reason it impounds a 5250 square kilometer, entirely within the boundaries of Egypt, and it is the most historically consequential dam on the world's most historically consequential river.

The introduction to the Wikipedia article notes that it exists in large part for political reasons. The British had a plan to manage the Nile with sacrificial zones in Sudan and Ethiopia, to which Nasser and his colleagues said, "Thanks, but no thanks," which, given the historical reluctance of upstream authorities to sacrifice sacrifice zones when sacrificing is called for, seems like it was a wise choice notwithstanding the high evaporation rate off the Aswan reservoir.

In terms of its political history, there is a lot of meat on the High Aswan Dam bone. Were I to write about that, there are many satisfactory blog-sized conclusions that could be drawn, such as that John Foster Dulles was preposterously unqualified for his role; that the China Lobby is enough to have you rethinking the Great Terror (We could use a man like Robespierre today!); that, er, something about the post-Six Days War territorial settlement in the Middle East (Erik looks around, cringing pathetically); that imperialism is bad.

I do want to talk about politics, but not those politics, even if I come around to the margins of my cringe, because civil engineering is boring, and so people just can't help talking around it, and if it isn't geology and geography, it is . . .well, it's something that hopefully some scholar of science fiction has put a name to and received tenure for, because it's goldarned important, the usurpation of reality by a story that scratches the science fiction itch, and that's as felicitously as I can think to put this insight.

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 Fall of Rome, VI: Flying Canoes and Revolutionary Santas

 

There's nothing to discourage a guy from amateur FallofRomeism than the "Men think about Rome a lot" thing of a few years back, for which reason I haven't visited this thread in a long time. I'd like to say that I was into the fall of Rome before it went mainstream, but, yeah, no. Gibbon  might be the most influential historian in history, and I will actually read Pocock's Gibbon if someone can make  a case that he didn't have Seventeenth Century precursors. What brings me back this week is, first of all, a Quora answer about Picts that reminded me of a small bit of loose ends, and second the fact that it's Christmas, and I am off to meet my first great-nephew in Campbell River on Boxing Day, which is anything but a guaranteed day off in my line of work. O. is six months old, so a bit young for Christmas, but soon! I, on the other hand, am totally ready for Christmas, which the visiting and the family reunions and the long walks with dogs and the Baldur's Gate 3 marathons . . .Oops, definitely shouldn't have said that last bit. 

It has also been suggested that for various more widely applicable reasons that we should lighten up and just enjoy a Christmas for a change. And I don't disagree, so here's a Christmas message calling for peace on Earth, good will to all, and a proletarian revolution!

Yeah, Angela didn't say that last bit.

The Early Iron Age Rise of the State, XXVI: Yet Another Questionable Historical Comparison

 

Whatever else can be said about making an analogy between the coming of iron to the Mediterranean basin sometime between when we want to say that the Late Bronze Age collapsed (1171BC?) and when the classical age began (490BC?) and to the Northwest coast, we can at least be very sure of things like when iron came to northern Vancouver Island, what locations were inhabited and the languages spoken there, and the tribal ethnicity claimed by the grandchildren of the people who first encountered iron (to be maximally careful).

 The modern band councils are the Kwakuitl Nation of Fort Rupert, a suburb of Vancouver, which chooses to use an older rendering of the ethnic name Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw, understandably enough in my opinion but I'm just an old fart, and the Namgis Nation of Alert Bay, also speakers of Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw and perhaps a bit indifferent to the larger tribal identification. Of perhaps more importance is the traditional territories of the two nations, which are, respectively, spread along Quatsino Sound on the west coast, and the extended estuary of the Nimpkish River on the east coast of the Island. Both nations may be described as "migratory" in that they moved through their respective territories harvesting seasonal abundances in various littoral environments, and both had "capitals," at Quatsino in the narrows of that Inlet, which is a flat and fertile landscape suitable for camus beds, a rarity in the region; and on Alert Bay, where unlike on the more fluvial terrains of this very wet part of the world, you didn't have to worry about waking up to find your bed floating out to sea. Both peoples commanded passages across the island, respectively the narrows between Coal Harbour and Port Hardy, and the long portage up the Zeballos River and down the Nimpkish, ultimately from the bight of Nootka Sound, commanded from Nuchulnath-speaking Ahousat. 

In contrast it is necessary to speak with great caution about the earliest phases of the Iron Age in the Mediterranean, in part because so much of it is so implausible. That is, we  have been waiting for evidence that the earliest region affected by Phoenician connections was the southwest of Spain at the other end of the Mediterranean from the territory of these Israeli, Lebanese, and Syrian cities; and that the influence of Greek culture was first wielded (in the Iron Age) by one or both of the classical cities of the island of Euboea off the coast of Boeotia, cities which, afterwards, receded into obscurity as second-, or third-rate powers by Greek standards. 

Nevertheless, with centuries of archaeology under our belts by this point, we are unable to reject the priority of Huelva   or ignore the wide dispersal of Archaic Euboean pottery. Reversing my way into the question, I propose to problematise it by invoking the Northwest comparison.

Gathering the Bones, XXXI: Raven And The First Men

 

This morning I am thinking about Raven the trickster, creator and king. but I also travelled on the weekend and visited my world-travelling doctor brother and his wife, who in conversation chanced to mention how much better the Pacific Northwest art held at the British Museum is than that shown here in its homeland.

"After the great flood had at long last receded, Raven had gorged himself on the delicacies left by the receding water, so for once, perhaps the first time in his life, he wasn't hungry. but his other appetites, his curiosity and the unquenchable itch to meddle and provoke things, to play tricks on the world and its creatures, these remained unsatisfied.

Raven gazed up and down the beach. It was pretty, but lifeless. There was no one about to upset, or play tricks upon. Raven sighed. He crossed his wings behind him and strutted up and down the sand, his shiny head cocked, his sharp eyes and ears alert for any unusual sight or sound. The mountains and sea, the sky now ablaze with the sun by day and the moon and stars he had placed there, it was all pretty, but lifeless. Finally Raven cried out to the empty sky with a loud exasperated cry.

And before the echoes of his cry faded from the shore, he heard a muffled squeak. He looked up and down the beach for its source and saw nothing. He strutted back and and forth, once, twice, three times and still saw nothing. Then he spied a flash of white in the sand.

There, half buried in the sand was a giant clamshell. As his shadow fell upon it, he heard another muffled squeak. Peering down into the opening between the halves of the shell, he saw it was full of tiny creatures, cowering in fear at his shadow.

Raven was delighted. Here was a break in the monotony of the day. But how was he to get the creatures to come out of their shell and play with him? Nothing would happen as long as they stayed inside the giant clamshell.

They were not going to come out as long as they were so afraid of him. So Raven leaned over his head, close to the shell, and with all the cunning and skill of that smooth trickster's tongue, that had so often gotten him in and out of so many misadventures during his troubled and troublesome existence, he coaxed and cajoled and coerced the little creatures to come out and play in his wonderful shiny new world."

"Raven and the First Men" is a Haida creation myth, here truncated. The second image is a rattle, used in shaman and healing dances. The specific meaning belongs to the owner who commissioned it, but the general theme is the transfer of power, which is another way to understand the creation myth. Deprived of its context by the decision to sell it to an outsider, it remains an eerie symbol of the relationship between Raven and one man, no doubt privileged.  I would be stretching nonexistent wings in a ludicrous play at exegesis to go any further (Raven would approve!), but we can reasonably ask how it was made around here.

A Vacation Week Short That Is Also A Sacred Spring Contribution: Hurrians, Mitanni, and Owning Land

 I am just back from a cycling vacation in which I finally rode the Okanagan Rail Trail from Kelowna to Vernon. This turns out to be a trick, because between the exquisitely appointed section in Kelowna and the somewhat rougher but eminently ridable section between Lake Country and Vernon that passes through my childhood summer camping grounds, there is an  "unimproved" section that was very rough riding, and quasi-trespassing, as the landholder objects to the transformation of the CN rail right of what through their property into a recreational/highway bypass rail trail. 

It turns out that that the landowner is the Westbank First Nation; the parcel is remediated wetland, and I imagine was classified as reserve land because of seasonal bird hunting, which was ruined by the CN's railbed. The contrast between the all-but unpopulated Okanagan-owned parcel and the stretch approaching Oyama just north of it, in which one lakefront property after another evidently had its own private access across the tracks (at least my family settled for a culvert underpass, never used for its intended purpose of watering livestock) is striking. The Salishan-speaking Okanagans left a clear imprint on the geography that their descendants still occupy, but that doesn't make them any less of a marginalised group. You can draw all the property lines on a map that you want; if you don't have the social power to make them work, they are just lines. 

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, 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. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIX: Lazy Sunday Outline with Premonitions of Mortality

 Two things, first, a very late change of schedule; second, a scary moment at the Silver Kettle Lodge as my 92-year-old father seemed to be failing after his vaccination. These mean that I do not have Sunday to work on my postblogging, although I am covering a mid-shift on time change day, and do have some extra writing time. And I am reminded that we do not live forever and I should get my intellectual life in order. 

So here's a summary of work to date on Sacred Spring: The Early Iron Age Revival of the State  and a brief outline.

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVIII, With Lazy Public Engagement And Some Reference to the Fifties: Tin and the Resource Curse

 

This was the view east down Copper Street from the slight height of land that marks central downtown Greenwood, BC in 1906. The mountain slopes up to the right, but Copper Street takes a hard left turn just behind the photographer and descends to the terrace above the creek on which the road down to the Kettle River at Midway follows. 

Cross the street and move forward 117 years, and the view changes in two ways:

First, some of the older buildings are gone. Second, Copper Street has turned into Highway 3, because a major interprovincial highway has been run right through the downtown. You would probably see a crosswalk here somewhere if it weren't so easy to jaywalk across the highway. When I made the first of my annual bike trips through Greenwood to Gand Forks in 2017, I watched a family of deer do the same, but the city has picked up a bit in the interim. Oh, yeah, right, "city," because Greenwood's "biggest hockey stick in the world" claim to fame is that it is Canada's smallest city. 

The reason for that is that, unlike most of the instant towns of the first copper boom, before WWI, it had a revival. In 1941, a calculating and humane mayor grabbed the one opportunity that the war had so far presented and offered the town as a resettlement location for the Japanese Canadians then being ethnically cleansed from the Coast, and in 1956 the combination of a local workforce and the postwar revival of the international commodities market proved just barely enough to justify reopening the smelter on nearby Phoenix mountain. The ore at Phoenix is, Wikipedia says, "self-fluxing," meaning that whatever fluxing agent is added to the ore at the Trail Smelter, isn't necessary at Phoenix. (The veins have numerous intrusions of "calc-silicate alteration of limestone;" Maybe that's it?) This tidbit led me to Google around for something a bit more serious about the nature of the ores in "the Greenwood camp," which is apparently the technical term for the 400 square kilometer zone of 25 mines centred about half the way up Highway 3 to Eholt summit. Apparently, way back when the entire region was under volcanic hot springs which have produced an estimated 32 million tons of ore including 38 tonnes of gold, 183 tonnes of (native) silver, 270,000 tonnes of copper, 966 tonnes of lead, and 329 tonnes of zinc. The ores are "copper-gold porphyry," which is great, because it's an excuse to say "porphyry." 

I regret to report no evidence of more exotic metals, your germanium, your tantalum, or, of course, tin. All I can report is that the smelter  closed in 1976, just four years after its last upgrade, relatively painlessly inasmuch as it seems as though most of the workforce took early retirement, being children of the era of the last metal boom, which may or may not be a coincidence, and Greenwood gradually dropped back into its Depression-era sleep. The post-WWII commodities boom was not quite yet obviously dead, and the mills and mines would keep on closing for years yet until British Columbia's former high pressure labour market was decisively over, and my employer could ram through a two-tier contract that basically condemned the next generation to work at near minimum wage for, as it turns out, their entire career. (Unless they took advantage of an escape clause dangled before us in the years around the Olympics. Yay!) 

So. Was the Late Bronze Age Collapse a working out of the resource curse? By the way, can we have a round for Investopedia's formulation? 

The term resource curse refers to a paradoxical situation in which a country underperforms economically, despite being home to valuable natural resources. A resource curse is generally caused by too much of the country’s capital and labor force concentrated in just a few resource-dependent industries. By failing to make adequate investments in other sectors, countries can become vulnerable to declines in commodity prices, leading to long-run economic underperformance.

Oh, those feckless resource-rich countries, with their "failure" to "make adequate investments in other sectors." The picture, by the way, is from a press release about an event at the Aspers' prize Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg.  I can't even. 

Gathering the Bones, XXIX: Sons and Daughters

 

A little something for a lazy Saturday afternoon, before we get back to exploring the dark and stagnant depths of the Eisenhower Administration. (I honestly had no idea! How that man must have been eaten by imposter's syndrome . . . ). The first image is of Bonnie Prince Charlie raising the standard before the Men of Mordaunt. The second, probably instantly recognisable to people just a bit older than me, is Tom Jones the singer, as opposed to Tom Jones the Foundling. 

It's about my theory that the novel is a comment on the whole "warming pan baby" scandal, and specifically a reference to a theory that people had at the time that the baby, the future Old Pretender, James III, father of Charles Edward, was actually the son of James II's younger daughter, Anne. It's a theory that explains a great deal that is anomalous about the 1688--1714 period, the only drawback being that I have yet to find a contemporary spelling it out in any more detail than knowing nods to Anne's whereabouts over the previous few months. (She was in seclusion in Bath for some time for health reasons, then went to assist her step-mother, Mary of Modena, in the birth. Then, of course, she went on to have multiple miscarriages with her husband, like an Rh-mismatched pair, a condition that contemporaries perhaps already understood required a successful pregnancy, even if they did not know that the reason was that the mother needs to develop antibodies by exposure to the baby's blood, which normally does not happen before delivery. See? See?) But I am only putting these two up here for the thumbnail, because this post is taking off from Samuel, Sieur de Champlain. 

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?