Life during chaos

If there's one place and historical period I could choose to know more about, it would be England during, and immediately following, the withdrawal of the Romans in the fifth century C. E.

For one thing, this would settle once and for all the question of whether King Arthur was a real historical personage, a completely fabricated legend, or somewhere in that gray area in between.  Whoever (or whatever) he was, I doubt our picture of him was anywhere near accurate:

This one, either:

Both of which are kind of a shame, for completely different reasons.

In any case, besides finding out more about the King of the Britons, I'd love to have more knowledge about what exactly was going on back then.  There are very few written records from Britain following the withdrawal of Roman troops from the northern and western parts of the island by the (usurping) Emperor Magnus Maximus in 383.  Things stabilized a little after Magnus was deposed and executed in 387, but Roman rule in the west was definitely crumbling.  The final blow came in 410 when Roman settlers in what is now southern England -- many of whom had been born there -- pleaded for help from Rome against the "barbarian" Celts, who were not above taking advantage of the instability, and Emperor Honorius basically told them to bugger off and take care of their own problems because he had more pressing concerns, the biggest being that Rome had just been sacked by a shitload of Visigoths.

This meant that running England fell to whoever could manage to keep their head on their shoulders long enough to do so.  In some places, these were the Romano-British magistrates who chose not to decamp when the powers-that-be back on the Italian peninsula left them to their own devices; in other places, Celtic or Pictish warlords.  This period saw the beginning of the Saxon invasions from what is now Denmark and northern Germany, something that would historically and linguistically change the entire face of the country.

But the fact remains that we don't know much for certain.  The earliest record we have of the era was written at least a century after the events it chronicles -- Gildas's De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain) -- but it contains as much hagiography and finger-wagging about pagan sinfulness as it does history.  (For what it's worth, Gildas doesn't even mention King Arthur; the first time the Once and Future King appears in a written record is Nennius's Historia Brittonum, from around 900.  If Arthur was real, this omission seems a little curious, to say the least.)

In any case, between the withdrawal of the Romans in 410 and the unification of England under King Æthelstan of Wessex in 927, we don't have a lot of reliable sources to go on.  To be fair to the English, they had other fish to fry during those intervening centuries, what with the horrific Plague of Justinian ripping its way through Europe in the middle of the sixth century, repeated invasions by the Angles and Saxons, and then the depredations of the Vikings, starting with their destruction of the "Holy Island" of Lindisfarne in 793.  Virtually the only people who could read and write back then were monks and clerics, and you have to figure that what they'd have been writing while they were being hacked to bits would have been gruesome reading anyhow.  (Possibly, "Here may be found the last words of Joseph of Arimathea.  He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of Aaarrrrggh.")

The topic comes up because a new study out of the University of Cambridge that found something surprising -- at least in one region, the economy didn't tank completely when the Romans jumped ship.  Pollution by heavy metals, as nasty as it can be, is a decent proxy record for the robustness of trade and industry; when things are really bad, chances are you're not going to be doing much smelting of silver, iron, and lead.  The team, led by archaeologist Martin Millett, found that in sediment cores from the River Ure in Yorkshire, the levels of metal contamination stayed fairly constant throughout the period.  This is evidence that the Roman settlement at Aldborough -- the Roman Isurium Brigantum -- continued to be a trading hub despite the chaos.

This, of course, doesn't tell you what was happening in other parts of the island.  It could be that Aldborough just happened to hang on longer, for reasons we'll probably never know.  Eventually, the plague and the repeated invasions caught up with them, too, and in the seventh and eighth centuries, there wasn't that much happening, at least not smelting-wise.  The "Dark Ages" in England are "dark" not because they were necessarily any more barbaric than any other period, but because we know so little about them -- and this gives us at least a small piece of information about one town's fate after the fall of the Roman Empire.

I'm always attracted to a mystery, and there's something compelling about this period.  Undoubtedly why there have been so many works of fiction that are set in pre-Norman England.  It's nice to have one more bit of the puzzle, even if neither the worlds of Sexy King Arthur nor Silly King Arthur are likely to come anywhere near the reality of what life was like back then.

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The worst century in history

I've always loved a mystery, and for that reason, the European "Dark Ages" have fascinated me for as long as I can recall.

But the moniker itself is off-puttingly self-congratulatory, isn't it?  It's not like Roman rule was that pleasant for your average slob to live under, after all.  Be that as it may, after the conquests of the Roman Empire started to fall apart in the fourth century C.E. from a combination of invasion, misrule, and downright lunacy, things went seriously downhill.  Life was pretty rough until the eighth and ninth centuries, when some measure of order returned as damn near all of Europe coalesced around the Roman Catholic Church, ushering in the Middle Ages.  And what we know about the period in between is... not a hell of a lot.  Accounts are scattered, vague, and full of conflation with mythology and legend.  The few that were written by contemporaries, rather than long after the fact -- such as Gregory of Tours's History of the Franks -- contain as much hagiography as they do history.

St. Gregory and King Chilperic I, from Grandes Chroniques de France de Charles V (fourteenth century) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Which is why I was thrilled to read a paper that appeared in Antiquity about a study of the "worst decade to be alive" -- 536-546 C. E.

The research, which combines the skimpy evidence we have from accounts written at the time with hard scientific data from analysis of ice cores, paints a grim picture.  Writings from the year 536 describe a mysterious "fog" that lasted for eighteen months, generating widespread crop failure and what one Irish cleric called "three years without bread."  From the ice core analysis, medieval historian Michael McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski identified what they believe to be the culprit: a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland that dropped the global temperature an average of two degrees Celsius in a matter of months.

This was followed by another eruption in 540, and the following year, the single worst plague on record -- the so-called "Plague of Justinian," which killed between a third and a half of the inhabitants of the Eastern Roman Empire, and resulted in so many corpses that people loaded them on ships and dumped them in the Mediterranean.  The disease responsible isn't known for certain, but is believed to be Yersinia pestis -- the same bacterium that caused the Black Death, almost exactly eight hundred years later.  But to give you an idea of the scale, there's reason to believe the Plague of Justinian dwarfed both the fourteenth century Black Death and the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919 -- usually the two examples that come to mind when people think of devastating pandemics.  The death toll is estimated at sixty million.

There probably was a connection between the cold and the plague, too, although not the obvious one that famine triggers disease susceptibility.  Many scholars think that the lack of food, and cold temperatures following a period that had generally been warm, forced mice and rats into homes and on board ships -- not only in close proximity to humans, but in their means of travel.  The fleas they carried, which are vectors for the plague, went with them, and the disease decimated Europe and beyond.

The effects of the eruption, however, were felt all over the Earth.  Tree ring analysis from North America shows 540 and the years following to have been unusually cold, with short-to-nonexistent growing seasons.  Volcanic dust is found in those layers of ice cores everywhere they exist.  Famines occurred in Asia and Central America.

All in all, a crappy time to be around.

Things didn't rebound for almost a hundred years.  Archaeologist Christopher Loveluck, of the University of Nottingham, found traces of dust containing significant amounts of lead in ice strata from the year 640, which he believes were due to a resurgence in silver smelting for coinage.  (I suppose if there's a hundred years during which your three main occupations are (1) not starving, (2) not freezing, and (3) not dying of a horrible disease, then making silver coins is kind of not on your radar.)  And the tree rings and ice cores bear out his contention that this indicates better conditions; although there were a couple of other volcanic eruptions we can see in the glacial records, none were as big as the one in 536.  The silver smelting, Loveluck says, "... shows the rise of the merchant class for the first time."  Things, finally, were improving.

What's coolest about this study -- despite its gruesome subject -- is how hard science is being brought to bear on understanding of history.  We no longer have to throw our hands up in despair if we're interested in a time period from which there were few written records.  The Earth has recorded its own history in the trees and the glaciers, there for us to read -- in this case, telling us the tale of the worst century the human race has ever lived through.

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After the Pax Romana

My fellow author and twin-brudda-from-anudda-mudda Andrew Butters is one of several people who are always the lookout for cool developments in science and history to throw my way, and this time he's found one that is right square in my wheelhouse.

I've always had a near-obsession with the western European "Dark Ages" -- between the collapse of Roman rule at the end of the fourth century C. E. and the consolidation of Frankish rule under Charlemagne in the middle of the eighth.  Part of the reason for my fascination is that so little is known for certain about it.  When people are fighting like hell just to stay alive, not too many of them are going to prioritize writing books about the experience, or (honestly) even bothering to learn how to read and write.  Add to that the fact that during the turmoil, a great many of the books that had been written beforehand were destroyed, and it all adds up to a great big question mark.

The people who lived on the fringes of the once-great Roman Empire -- the Celts in the west, the Germanic tribes and Scandinavians in the north, the Slavs in the east -- took advantage of the chaos to reestablish some degree of autonomy, although they left little in the way of written records either, so what we know of their customs, politics, and beliefs is only from what's left of their buildings, monuments, and other durable artifacts.

But that doesn't mean there isn't more out there to find.  The link Andrew sent me, from the site LiveScience, describes a site from the province of Galicia in northern Spain, an area that even today owes much of its culture and music to its Celtic heritage.  Castro Valente, originally thought to be from the Iron Age and therefore pre-Roman, has turned out to be from that awkward blank spot in history I'm so fascinated with -- the fifth century C.E., shortly after the Romans wrote finis on the Pax Romana and hightailed it back to Italy to defend the home country against the Visigoths and Vandals.

Using lidar (light detection and ranging -- a relatively new technique using lasers to map out underground archaeological sites), researchers from University College London and the University of Santiago de Compostela found that the site is the remains of a fortress that had been built on the remains of an Iron Age settlement, but the main structure is of early fifth century construction.  It's huge, covering an area of twenty-five acres, comprised of thirty towers and a defensive wall a little over a kilometer long.

Part of the wall at Castro Valente

The people of the region had never been "pacified" (using that term from the Roman perspective) for long.  The northwestern part of the Iberian peninsula was inhabited by three Celtic groups, the Callaeci in the far northwest, the Lusitani in what is now northern Portugal, and the Astures a little to the east (you might surmise, correctly, that the last-mentioned gave their name to Asturia, the modern name for the north-central province of Spain).  All three were perpetual thorns in the side to the would-be rulers of the region.  The northwestern part of the Iberian Peninsula was only under nominal Roman control even at the height of the Empire, and when a long spate of unfortunately-timed inept rulers kept the central government of Rome in continuous upheaval, followed by repeated invasions from the east by Germanic and Slavic armies, the subjugated people in the west thought that'd be a fine time for them to assert their own independence.  (In fact, right around the same time that Castro Valente was being built, Rome itself was sacked by the Visigoths under Alaric -- a blow from which the Roman Empire never really recovered.)

The hilltop fort could only do so much, though.  Most of that region eventually fell to the Suebi, a Germanic people originally from the Elbe River valley.  The Kingdom of the Suebi lasted for 170 years, at which point they, too, were conquered by the Visigoths, which lasted until 720 C.E. when the Muslim Umayyad Caliphate pretty much overran the entire Iberian Peninsula.

When you think of the history of Spain, chances are you don't think of the Celts and the Germans -- but they had a major role in shaping the language and culture of the region.  This influence is strongest in the northern and western parts of the region; in fact, in modern Galicia there's a significant link still to the Celtic nations.  They even share a musical tradition -- I own a set of Galician bagpipes (a beautiful instrument called a gaita).  Check out this incredible performance by Susana Seivane -- whose father designed my pipes!

It's fascinating to see ancient history still present around us -- not only in the artifacts and archaeological sites, but in the culture we enjoy in the modern world.  These traditions have their roots in the distant past -- in this case, stretching back to a tumultuous period when it looked like the entire established order was collapsing permanently.  That it didn't is a tribute to human resilience and perseverance through a time where day-to-day life was fraught with danger, something we can read in the remnants of stone walls and foundations still standing in the now-peaceful Spanish woodlands.

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A coin out of chaos

Allegedly there is a traditional Chinese curse that goes, "May you live in interesting times."

It's certainly true that the periods in history that are the most engaging to read about are often the ones no one in their right mind would want to experience first-hand.  For myself, I've always had a near-obsession with the western European "Dark Ages" -- between the collapse of Roman rule in Britain at the end of the fourth century C. E. and the consolidation of Frankish rule under Charlemagne in the middle of the eighth.  Part of the reason for my fascination is that so little is known for certain about it.  When people are fighting like hell just to stay alive, not too many of them are going to prioritize writing books about the experience, or (honestly) even bothering to learn how to read and write.  Add to that the fact that during the turmoil, a great many of the books that had been written beforehand were destroyed, and it all adds up to a great big question mark.

I riffed on this idea in my recently-completed (not yet published) novel The Scattering Winds, in which a similar crisis in the modern world propels us into a new Dark Age -- and five hundred years later, when the surviving remnants of humanity have reverted to a non-literate agrarian culture, one man discovers what's left of a modern library that has somehow survived all the intervening chaos.

The effects such a discovery would have on a people was fascinating for someone like me -- a linguist and (very) amateur historian -- to explore.  But to find out what happened, you'll need to wait till it's in print!

Anyhow, back to reality.  Only a hundred years earlier than the onset of the canonical European Dark Ages, the Roman Empire went through its own Interesting Times -- the "Crisis of the Third Century."  Things had been moving along rather nicely for the Romans (if not for all of the various people they conquered), but then a series of short-lived and completely incompetent emperors led to a period of about seventy years of utter chaos. 

The spiral began with the emperor Elagabalus, who was only fourteen when he succeeded to the throne.  Historians haven't been kind to the young man, largely because he was (1) a raging egotist, (2) completely uninterested in running the government, and (3) gay.  Elagabalus seemed to look upon his position as being not much more than a golden opportunity to find large numbers of hot-looking young men to have sex with, and it's unsurprising that his reign didn't last long.  Just under four years after he was crowned, he was assassinated by the members of his own Praetorian Guard, and was succeeded by his cousin, Severus Alexander.

Severus Alexander was only thirteen when he was crowned (222 C.E.), but for a while, it seemed like things were going to be okay.  The "interesting times" started in earnest when Rome was invaded (for the umpteenth time) by Germanic tribes from the north and then from the Sassanid Empire from the east.  Severus Alexander did a pretty good job meeting both of these threats, but there were members of the Roman army who didn't like the fact that he used both diplomacy and bribery in his peace efforts -- and in the year 235, they murdered the emperor and put one of their own, a man named Maximus Thrax, on the throne in his place.

Maximus Thrax was the first of the "barracks emperors" -- men who had been declared emperor by some faction of the military, despite having neither the skills to rule nor the hereditary claim to gain support of the people.  238 C.E. was called "the Year of Six Emperors," during which six men rose to the high throne and were one after another defeated and killed within weeks to months.  The once-mighty Roman army became a fragmented mess, where different legions supported different claimants to the throne, and spent more time fighting each other than fighting the threats on the imperial borders.

Then, in mid-century, the Plague of Cyprian struck.  No one is completely certain what the disease was, but whatever the cause, it was bad.  Here's an account of the epidemic, by one Pontius of Carthage:

Afterwards there broke out a dreadful plague, and excessive destruction of a hateful disease invaded every house in succession of the trembling populace, carrying off day by day with abrupt attack numberless people, every one from his own house.  All were shuddering, fleeing, shunning the contagion, impiously exposing their own friends, as if with the exclusion of the person who was sure to die of the plague, one could exclude death itself also.  There lay about the meanwhile, over the whole city, no longer bodies, but the carcasses of many, and, by the contemplation of a lot which in their turn would be theirs, demanded the pity of the passers-by for themselves.  No one regarded anything besides his cruel gains.  No one trembled at the remembrance of a similar event.  No one did to another what he himself wished to experience.

There are no good estimates of the death toll, but what is certain is that for the Roman Empire, it made a very bad situation a great deal worse.  Fortunately, in around 270, there were a series of barracks emperors who at least were able to garner enough popular support (and to stay alive long enough) to fight back invasions from the Goths and the Vandals, and the whole miserable period finally ended when Diocletian was crowned in 284.  While he was no one's idea of a nice guy -- Diocletian's known as the leader of the last and bloodiest persecution of the Christians the Roman Empire perpetrated -- there's no doubt that his reform of the government and military was a brilliant success.  He also did something virtually unknown amongst crowned leaders; he ruled for twenty-one years then voluntarily abdicated, preferring to spend his final years gardening.

The reason all this comes up is that the chaos in Europe in the third century leaves historians having to piece together what happened from fragmentary records, and new discoveries can sometimes generate some surprises.  Like the gold coin discovered in 1713 in Transylvania, long considered a fake, that was just demonstrated to be genuine by microscopic analysis of the material it was embedded in.  And the image and inscription on that coin turned out to be of an emperor no one even knew about -- a man named Sponsian.

Sponsian seems to have been another of the barracks emperors, and ruled at least part of the Roman province of Dacia (now part of modern Romania) some time between 260 and perhaps 270.  Given that he's only known from a single coin, we don't know much about him -- the likelihood is that he met the same end as most of the other mid-third century claimants to the Roman throne.

All of which makes me wonder why any of these people wanted to be emperor during this period.  Did they really think, "Okay, the last fourteen guys have all been brutally murdered by howling mobs, but everyone is gonna love me!"?  Myself, I think I'd pre-empt Diocletian and take up gardening from the get-go.

Be that as it may, this new analysis of an old discovery is pretty cool -- and points out that even the Dark Ages may have left behind enough traces that we can piece together what happened.  Even if we never find an intact library, like in my novel, we can still know something about an era that until now has been largely a mystery.

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Grave matters

Today we take a trip into the past with three new discoveries from the world of archaeology, sent my way by my eagle-eyed friend and fellow writer, Gil Miller.

The first one has to do with ancient fashion.  Have you ever wondered how our distant ancestors dressed?  Whether it was crudely stitched-together rags, as the peasantry are often depicted?  Leopard-skin affairs, like the Flintstones?  Or nothing but a brass jockstrap, like this guy?

Turns out it wasn't so different from what you and I are wearing.  (I'm assuming you're not naked except for a brass jockstrap.  If you are, I won't judge, but I also don't want to know about it.)  An analysis of the clothing worn by a 3,200 year old mummy recovered from China's Tarim Basin was wearing tightly-woven, intricately-made trousers, built to be durable and allow maneuverability -- a little like today's blue jeans.

The pants worn by "Turfan Man" [Image from M. Wagner et al./Archaeological Research in Asia, 2022]

The cloth is a tight twill weave -- something that was assumed to be invented much later -- and had a triangular crotch piece that seems to be designed to avoid unfortunate compression of the male naughty bits while riding horseback.  The decoration, including an interlocking "T" pattern on the bands around the knees, is very similar to patterns found used on pottery in the area, and as far away as Kazakhstan and Siberia.

From ancient Chinese fashion items, we travel halfway around the world for something a little more gruesome -- a burial in the Lambayeque region of Peru that seems to contain the skeleton of a surgeon, along with his surgical tools.

The burial has been dated to the Middle Period of the Sican Culture, which would have been somewhere between 900 and 1050 C. E., and was recovered from a mausoleum temple at the rich archaeological site of Las Ventanas.  The man was obviously of high standing; he was wearing a golden mask pigmented with cinnabar, a bronze pectoral, and a garment containing copper plates.  But most interesting was the bundle of tools he was buried with -- awls, needles, and several sizes and shapes of knives.  This, the researchers say, identifies him as a surgeon.

It's hard for me to fathom, but surgery was done fairly regularly back then -- up to and including brain surgery (called trepanning).  There was no such thing as general anesthesia, so it was done under local anesthesia at best, probably supplemented with any kind of sedative or painkilling drugs they had available.  Still, it was a horrible prospect.  But what is most astonishing is that a great many of the patients, even the ones who had holes drilled into their skulls, survived.  There have been many cases of skeletons found that show signs of surgery where the surgical cuts healed completely.

But still, the ordeal these poor folks went through is horrifying to think about, so let's move on to the third and final article, that comes to us from England.  An archaeologist named Ken Dark has led a team of researchers in studying 65 grave sites in the counties of Somerset and Cornwall that date back to a time of history I've always had a particular fascination for -- the Western European "Dark Ages," between the collapse of the Roman Empire as a centralized power in the fourth and fifth centuries C. E. and the reconsolidation of Europe under such leaders as Charlemagne and Alfred the Great, four hundred years later.

The "darkness" of the so-called Dark Ages isn't so much that it was lawless and anarchic (although some parts of it in some places probably were), but simply because we know next to nothing about it for sure.  There are virtually no contemporaneous records; about all we have, the best-known being Gildas's sixth-century De Excidio et Conquesto Britanniae, are accounts that contain legend mixed up with history so thoroughly it's impossible to tell which is which.  I bring up Gildas deliberately, because his is the only record of King Arthur written anywhere close to the time he (allegedly) lived, and the graves that Dark and his team are studying date from right around that pivotal time when Christianized Romano-Celtic Britain was being attacked and overrun by the pagan Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.

The burial practices of noble sixth-century Britons stands in stark contrast from Anglo-Saxon burials from the same period; the Britons, it's believed, scorned the ostentation and ornate decorations of pagan funerals, and by comparison even high-status individuals were buried without much pomp.  What sets these graves apart from those of commoners is that they were set apart from other graves, had a fenced enclosure, and were covered with a tumulus of stones that the early Celts called a ferta, which was a sign of high standing.

"The enclosed grave tradition comes straight out of late Roman burial practices," Dark said.  "And that's a good reason why we have them in Britain, but not in Ireland -- because Britain was part of the Roman empire, and Ireland wasn't...  We've got a load of burials that are all the same, and a tiny minority of those burials are marked out as being of higher status than the others.  When there are no other possible candidates, that seems to me to be a pretty good argument for these being the ‘lost' royal burials."

So that's today's news from the past -- ancient blue jeans, primitive surgery, and Dark Age noble burials.  Sorry for starting your day on a grave note.  But it's always fascinating to see not only how things have changed, but how similar our distant ancestors were to ourselves.  If we were to time travel back there, I'm sure there'd be a lot of surprises, but we might be more shocked at how much like us they were back then.  To borrow a line from Robert Burns, a person's a person for a' that and a' that.

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Illuminating the Dark Ages

A writer friend of mine threw out a question on social media that I thought was fascinating: if you had a time machine and could visit (safely) any time in the past, when would you choose?

There are so many to choose from -- at least, if safety were guaranteed -- it's hard to pick one.  If you add in pre-Homo-sapiens times, even more so.  There are the ones that would be fascinating just from their spectacular nature.  Think of watching, from a distance, the Chicxulub Meteorite striking the Earth, ending the Cretaceous Period and the hegemony of the dinosaurs in one fell swoop.  Or how about the eruption of the Siberian Traps two hundred million years earlier -- thought to be the biggest series volcanic eruptions ever, releasing four million cubic kilometers of lava -- one of the events that kicked off the Permian-Triassic extinction, the largest mass extinction known.

Even the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. would have been something to see.

Then there are the ones of historical import.  Imagine witnessing the Mayan, Inca, or Aztec civilizations at their heights.  Consider visiting the Library of Alexandria before it was destroyed, and getting a chance to browse through works of literature for which we have no traces left.  So many classic works didn't survive -- we have only seven of the 120 plays written by Sophocles, eighteen of the 92 by Euripides, seven out of the eighty-odd written by Aeschylus -- and think of how many other amazing writers had their entire body of work obliterated, and whose names we might not even know.

So choosing only one would be fiendishly difficult.  But for me, there's one that jumps to mind whenever I consider the question.  I would love to visit Britain during the "Dark Ages," some time between the withdrawal of the Romans from the island in 410 C.E. and the consolidation of Anglo-Saxon rule starting with Penda of Mercia in the early part of the seventh century.

My main reason for choosing this time period is that it's such a historical mystery.  We have a number of accounts of events from that time, most famously the Arthurian legend cycle, but given how few records actually date from that period -- most were written centuries afterward, and based upon sources of dubious reliability -- no one knows where the myth ends and the history begins.

For example, consider the research I found out through my friend and frequent contributor to Skeptophilia, the author Gil Miller, indicating that one of the sites associated with Arthur dates from much much earlier.

The site in question is on the River Wye in rural Hertfordshire, and is nicknamed "Arthur's Stone."  Depending on who you talk to, the Stone is said to be the place where Arthur defeated a giant, a place where he knelt to pray before going to battle against the Saxons, or a monument marking where he's buried.  Whether the Stone actually had anything to do with Arthur himself (presuming he even existed) is a matter of debate, but what this research has shown is that Arthur's Stone predates Arthur himself...

... by about 4,500 years.

This site is Neolithic in origin, and in fact was built before Stonehenge, which is itself incorrectly associated with Druids and the Celts.  In fact, neither of them was around at the time; that area of Britain was inhabited at that point by the Western Hunter-Gatherer culture (originally of Aegean or Anatolian origin) and the north African and Iberian Bell Beaker People, so named because of the characteristic shape of their clay drinking vessels.

So even the sites that are associated with King Arthur have no certain historical connection.  And as far as Arthur himself, we don't even know for sure who he was.  Various theories include his being one of a number of different Welsh chieftains, a half-Celtic, half-Roman military man who stayed behind when Rome made their official withdrawal, or possibly just someone who had a sword bunged at him by a watery tart.

There's no doubt that a good many of the legends that have been spun about Arthur and the Round Table and Camelot and the Holy Grail are complete fairy stories, but once again, what's impossible at this point is to tease out which bits (if any) are actually historical, all the way down to which of the various characters even existed.  I mean, I have my doubts about the Lady of the Lake and the Green Knight and even the Killer Rabbit of Caer Bannog, but what about Guinevere and Galahad and Lancelot and the rest?  Do any of these even have a glancing connection with real historical people?

I would love to know the answer to that.

So those are my musings for this morning.  Going back and witnessing the Battle of Badon Hill.  I still would have to think long and hard to choose between that and the Library of Alexandria -- but I have the feeling I'd stick with Arthur, especially since I doubt the people who ran the Library of Alexandria would have been okay with my grabbing a few dozen manuscripts to take back with me.

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One of the most enduring mysteries of neuroscience is the origin of consciousness.  We are aware of a "self," but where does that awareness come from, and what does it mean?  Does it arise out of purely biological processes -- or is it an indication of the presence of a "soul" or "spirit," with all of its implications about the potential for an afterlife and the independence of the mind and body?

Neuroscientist Anil Seth has taken a crack at this question of long standing in his new book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, in which he brings a rigorous scientific approach to how we perceive the world around us, how we reconcile our internal and external worlds, and how we understand this mysterious "sense of self."  It's a fascinating look at how our brains make us who we are.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

King of the who?

Given yesterday's post on odd coincidences, I thought it was kind of amusing that I stumbled upon the topic for today's post -- more or less by random chance -- immediately after reading two books that touched on the subject.

Both of them are about the Arthurian Legends, which has been an interest for years, so my reading them isn't itself odd.  It's odder, perhaps, that I didn't like either one of them at all.  The first was the novelization of the story from the point of view of Morgaine (Morgan le Fay), Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon.  I found just about every character in the story somewhere between obnoxious and downright repulsive, and it's hard to stay invested in a novel when I honestly don't give a damn if the characters live or die.  (My distaste was only deepened when I found out about the disturbing allegations against Bradley and her husband made by their children -- allegations which were proven in the husband's case, leading to his being sent to prison for pedophilia and dying there in 1993.)

The second was intended as historical scholarship, and although I'm hardly a qualified expert on the subject, this one seemed to me to face-plant rather badly as well.  Norma Lorre Goodrich's book King Arthur looks at the literary sources of Arthuriana, focusing especially on Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, and Thomas Malory.  Glossing over the fact that the earliest of the three -- Geoffrey of Monmouth -- was still writing a good five centuries after Arthur's time, she goes through intellectual backflips to support her contention that Arthur and his pals weren't from Cornwall and Wales as usually depicted, but from Scotland, more specifically the area around Stirling and Edinburgh.  Like I said, I can't give a knowledgeable opinion about her use of the source material, but I am qualified to say that her attempts at historical linguistics are nothing short of silly.  (They amount to, "if you change this letter to this one, and reverse the syllables, and add a prefix, you can clearly see these two words are the same!")

Oh, and when she mentioned "fifth century Vikings" I wasn't sure whether to laugh or to hurl the book across the room.

Speaking of authoritative sources...

Anyhow, I just stopped reading Goodrich's book last night (didn't finish it and don't intend to), so I was a little startled when, in the course of looking for a topic for today's post, I stumbled quite by accident on an article in Edinburgh Live from only last week about some new archaeological discoveries on "Arthur's Seat," the remains of an extinct volcano overlooking the Firth of Forth.  Researchers have found the site of a village occupied by the Votadini, a rather mysterious Iron Age Celtic tribe who spoke a Brythonic language (i.e. more closely related to Welsh, Breton, and Cornish than to Scots Gaelic), centered around Traprain Law, a hill fort seventeen kilometers east of Edinburgh.

Arthur's Seat [Image licensed under the Creative Commons David Monniaux, Edinburgh Arthur Seat dsc06165, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Which, of course, is exactly the area Goodrich claims was Arthur's bailiwick.  That she's not the only one who thinks there's a connection to King Arthur is evident from the name of the site, although it seems likely that the place was named a long while after Arthur's time by people who thought the Arthurian connection gave the place more gravitas.

Anyhow, the new research on the topic is more grounded in history, and more interesting.  The remains of the village on Arthur's Seat showed some significant fortification, including buildings surrounded by a hundred-meter-long, five-meter-thick rampart blocking the easiest path up to the top of the hill.  Fifth-century Roman silver coins were found at the site, suggesting the Votadini traded with the Romans living in the northern parts of England, although the evidence is their territory was only under actual occupation during a fairly short time in the middle of the second century C. E.

The archaeologists, however, found zero evidence of King Arthur having anything to do with the site.  If, in fact, there ever was a historical Arthur, something the jury is still out on.  The problem is, you can't really base history on a bunch of (way) after-the-fact, quasi-mythological accounts.  One of the best and most exhaustive analyses of the topic -- Francis Pryor's Britain A.D.: A Quest for Arthur, England, and the Anglo-Saxons -- found that the earliest source known that explicitly mentions Arthur, Nennius's Historia Brittonum, was written in the early ninth century, still a good three hundred years after Arthur's (alleged) reign.

Not exactly an eyewitness account, that.

Still, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as cosmologist Martin Rees was wont to say.  There could have been an Arthur messing about in Britain back then.  And there's no doubt that it's at the very least a fascinating legend.

I do still find it funny that I ran across this research literally the day after reaching the limits of my tolerance for Norma Lorre Goodrich's wild speculations on the same place and the same topic.  Not only that, a day after writing here at Skeptophilia on the subject of odd coincidences.  Which you have to admit is kind of meta.  Either it's the universe having a good laugh at my expense, or else I need to re-read my own post about how strange coincidences don't actually mean anything.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about one of the most terrifying viruses known to man: rabies.

In Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, we learn about the history and biology of this tiny bit of protein and DNA that has, once you develop symptoms, a nearly 100% mortality rate.  Not only that, but it is unusual amongst pathogens at having extremely low host specificity.  It's transmissible to most mammal species, and there have been cases of humans contracting rabies not from one of the "big five" -- raccoons, foxes, skunks, bats, and dogs -- but from animals like deer.

Rabid goes through not only what medical science has to say about the virus and the disease it causes, but its history, including the possibility that it gave rise to the legends of lycanthropy and werewolves.  It's a fascinating read.

Even though it'll make you a little more wary of wildlife.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The worst century in history

I've always loved a mystery, and for that reason, the European "Dark Ages" have fascinated me for as long as I can recall.

But the moniker itself is off-puttingly self-congratulatory, isn't it?  It's not like Roman rule was that pleasant for your average slob to live under, after all.  Be that as it may, after the conquests of the Roman Empire started to fall apart in the 4th century C.E. from a combination of invasion, misrule, and downright lunacy, things went seriously downhill.  Life was pretty rough until the 8th and 9th centuries, when some measure of order returned as damn near all of Europe coalesced around the Roman Catholic Church, ushering in the Middle Ages.  And what we know about the period in between is... not a hell of a lot.  Accounts are scattered, vague, and full of conflation with mythology and legend.  The few that were written by contemporaries, rather than long after the fact -- such as Gregory of Tours's History of the Franks -- contain as much hagiography as they do history.

St. Gregory and King Chilperic I, from Grandes Chroniques de France de Charles V (14th century) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Which is why I was thrilled to read a paper that appeared last week in Antiquity about a study of the "worst decade to be alive" -- 536-546 C. E.

The research, which combines the skimpy evidence we have from accounts written at the time with hard scientific data from analysis of ice cores, paints a grim picture.  Writings from the year 536 describe a mysterious "fog" that lasted for eighteen months, generating widespread crop failure and what one Irish cleric called "three years without bread."  From the ice core analysis, medieval historian Michael McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski identified what they believe to be the culprit: a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland that dropped the global temperature an average of two degrees Celsius in a matter of months.

This was followed by another eruption in 540, and the following year, the single worst plague on record -- the so-called "Plague of Justinian," which killed between a third and a half of the inhabitants of the Eastern Roman Empire, and resulted in so many corpses that people loaded them on ships and dumped them in the Mediterranean.  The disease responsible isn't known for certain, but is believed to be Yersinia pestis -- the same bacterium that caused the Black Death, almost exactly eight hundred years later.  But to give you an idea of the scale, there's reason to believe the Plague of Justinian dwarfed both the 14th century Black Death and the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919 -- usually the two examples that come to mind when people think of devastating pandemics.  The death toll is estimated at sixty million.

There probably was a connection between the cold and the plague, too, although not the obvious one that famine triggers disease susceptibility.  Many scholars think that the lack of food, and cold temperatures following a period that had generally been warm, forced mice and rats into homes and on board ships -- not only in close proximity to humans, but in their means of travel.  The fleas they carried, which are vectors for the plague, went with them, and the disease decimated Europe and beyond.

The effects of the eruption, however, were felt all over the Earth.  Tree ring analysis from North America shows 540 and the years following to have been unusually cold, with short-to-nonexistent growing seasons.  Volcanic dust is found in those layers of ice cores everywhere they exist.  Famines occurred in Asia and Central America.

All in all, a crappy time to be around.

Things didn't rebound for almost a hundred years.  Archaeologist Christopher Loveluck, of the University of Nottingham, found traces of dust containing significant amounts of lead in ice strata from the year 640, which he believes were due to a resurgence in silver smelting for coinage.  (I suppose if there's a hundred years during which your three main occupations are (1) not starving, (2) not freezing, and (3) not dying of a horrible disease, then making silver coins is kind of not on your radar.)  And the tree rings and ice cores bear out his contention that this indicates better conditions; although there were a couple of other volcanic eruptions we can see in the glacial records, none were as big as the one in 536.  The silver smelting, Loveluck says, "... shows the rise of the merchant class for the first time."  Things, finally, were improving.

What's coolest about this study -- despite its gruesome subject -- is how hard science is being brought to bear on understanding of history.  We no longer have to throw our hands up in despair if we're interested in a time period from which there were few written records.  The Earth has recorded its own history in the trees and the glaciers, there for us to read -- in this case, telling us the tale of the worst century the human race has ever lived through.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one -- Mary Roach's Spook.  Roach is combines humor with serious scientific investigation, and has looked into such subjects as sex (Bonk), death (Stiff), war (Grunt), and food (Gulp).  (She's also fond of hilarious one-word titles.)

In Spook, Roach looks at claims of the afterlife, and her investigation takes her from a reincarnation research facility in India to a University of Virginia study on near-death experiences to a British school for mediums.  Along the way she considers the evidence for and against -- and her ponderings make for absolutely delightful reading.