Footprints

The southern tip of mainland Italy is called Calabria.  It's a strikingly beautiful place, containing three national parks (Pollino National Park, Sila National Park and Aspromonte National Park), and a stretch of coastline -- near Reggio, facing across the Straits of Messina to Sicily -- that poet Gabriele D'Annunzio called "the most beautiful kilometer in Italy."  It's a region blessed with more than its share of dramatic scenery.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Cliff at Tropea, Italy, Sep 2005 , CC BY-SA 2.5]

Calabria forms the "toe of Italy's boot."  I remember noticing the country's odd shape when I was a kid and first became fascinated with maps (a fascination that remains with me today), and wondering why it looked like that; back then, when plate tectonics was still a new science, I doubt they really understood it on a level any deeper than "it's near a plate margin, and that moves stuff around."  Today, we have a much more detailed understanding of the geology of the area, and it is complex.

Tectonic map of southern Italy and Sicily [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jpvandijk, J.P. van Dijk, Janpieter van Dijk, Johannes Petrus van Dijk, CentralMediterranean-GeotectonicMap, CC BY-SA 4.0]

On its simplest level, the entire southern half of Italy is being pushed to the southeast, and it's riding up and over the northern edge of the African Plate.  This process is responsible not only for the volcanism of the region -- Mount Etna being the most obvious example -- but the massive earthquakes that have shaped it, in part creating the gorgeous topography.  (It also has made it a dangerous place to live.  The Messina Earthquake of 1908, with an epicenter right across the straits from Calabria, had a magnitude of 7.1 and killed an estimated eighty thousand people, most of them in the first three minutes after the quake struck and the majority of the buildings collapsed.)

As interesting as the geology of the region is, that's not what spurred me to write about the topic today.  What I'd like to tell you about is Calabria's tremendous linguistic diversity, an embarrassment of riches packed into a small geographical area.  The main language, of course, is standard Italian, but a great many people there (especially in the southern parts) speak Calabrian, a Greek-influenced-Latin derivative that is mostly mutually intelligible with Italian but has some distinct vocabulary and pronunciations. 

Then there's Grecanico, which is derived from an archaic dialect of Byzantine Greek, and is spoken by a group of people descended from folks who settled in the region more than a thousand years ago and have somehow maintained their ethnic identity the whole time.  It's written with the Latin, not Greek, alphabet -- but other than that has more in common with Thessalian Greek than with Italian.

Another language that has little to do with Italian is Arbëresh, a dialect of Albanian brought in with migrants during the Late Middle Ages.  From some of its idiosyncrasies, it appears to be related to Tosk Albanian, a group of dialects spoken in the southern parts of Albania, near the border of Greece.  It's astonishing that we can still identify the part of the world the ancestors of the Arbëreshë people came from centuries ago -- by the peculiarities of the language they have spoken during the more than six hundred years they've lived in isolated communities in Calabria.

Finally, there's Gardiol, which is related to Occitan (also known as Provençal or Languedoc), the Romance language widely spoken in the southern half of France.  Like with Calabrian (and also Catalan in Spain), most Occitan speakers in France speak the majority language as well, but use Occitan when speaking with family, friends, and locals.  The ancestors of the speakers of Gardiol came in with the persecution of the Waldensian "heretics" in France in the thirteenth century, who found a refuge in a thinly-populated part of northern Calabria.  Once again -- amazingly -- they've retained their ethnic identity and language through all the vagaries of time since their arrival.

All of that -- and standard Italian as well -- in an area of around fifteen thousand square kilometers, a little more than the size of the state of Connecticut.

UNESCO describes all four of these languages -- Calabrian, Grecanico, Arbëresh, and Gardiol -- as "in serious danger of disappearing."  It's sad to think of these footprints of history vanishing, and taking along with them pieces of human culture that somehow had persisted for centuries.  I understand why this happens; in modern life, speaking and writing the dominant language is not only useful, it's often essential for getting a job and making a living.  These little pockets of other languages survived better when people had little mobility and even less connectedness to others living far away.  In today's world, they seem doomed.

Change is the fate of all things, but it inevitably comes with a sense of loss.  The linguistic diversity of the beautiful region of Calabria will, very likely, soon be gone.  Like biodiversity loss, this diminishes the richness of our world.  I hope that linguists are working to catalog and study these unique languages -- before the last native speakers are gone forever.

****************************************

The rain of fire

On the morning of October 24, 79 C.E., Mount Vesuvius erupted in one of the deadliest volcanic events in recorded history.

The nearby towns of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, and Oplontis had warnings.  There was a series of earthquakes during the lead-up to the eruption, which got a few people to leave the area -- everyone remembered that there'd been a powerful earthquake in February of 62 that had destroyed a number of buildings, and the skittish thought that something similar might be about to happen again -- but by and large, the residents just shrugged their shoulders.  Pliny the Younger, who wrote the only extant eyewitness account of the eruption (he was safely in Misenum, thirty kilometers away across the Bay of Naples, when it happened), said that the earthquakes that preceded the eruption "were not particularly alarming because they are frequent in Campania," and thus the majority of people in the area ignored them and stayed home.

This turned out to be a mistake.

The morning of October 24 dawned clear and bright, but there was already a plume of steam coming from the summit of the mountain that loomed over the four cities.  This, too, was nothing unusual; it's doubtful many people even noticed.  But at around midday, there was a sudden jolt, and the entire peak exploded, sending a column of ash, rock, and superheated steam an estimated thirty kilometers high, blasting out material at a rate of 1.5 million tons per second.  Rocks and ash rained down on the cities, but worse was to come; by evening, the pressure forcing the column upward dropped suddenly and the entire column collapsed, causing a pyroclastic surge with an estimated temperature of six hundred degrees Celsius pouring downhill at about a hundred kilometers an hour.  Anything or anyone left that hadn't been killed by asphyxiation or roofs collapsing died instantly, and the ash flow blanketed the region.  The greatest quantity of ash landed in Herculaneum, which was buried under a layer twenty meters thick.

But all four cities were completely obliterated, to the point that within a hundred years, most people forgot that they'd ever existed.  References to Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, and Oplontis, four prosperous towns that had been wiped out by the wrath of the gods, were considered fanciful legends -- a little like Plato's mention of the mythical land of Atlantis sinking beneath the waves.

Then, in 1709, a farmer was plowing his field, and the plow hit the edge of a buried wall.  It turned out to be a surviving piece of masonry from Herculaneum.  Something similar happened in Pompeii in 1748.  Archaeologists were called in, and gradually, the work started that is still ongoing -- clearing away meters-thick layers of welded ash to uncover what is left of the four cities.

Today it's a strange, somber place.  Wandering around its cobblestone streets, and looking at the snaggletoothed silhouette of Vesuvius in the distance -- the mountain lost almost half of its original height in the eruption -- was chilling despite the bright warmth of the sun.  We looked at remnants of homes, shops, temples, baths, the central forum, and even a brothel (each room decorated with highly explicit paintings of what services you could expect within).

We got to see some of the casts of the people who died during the eruption, their names long forgotten, their bodies entombed in fused hot ash, then burned and decayed away to leave a cavity that archaeologists filled with plaster to reveal their ghostly forms.

Many of the 1,044 molds of human victims were found with their hands over their faces, futilely trying to shield themselves from the choking, scalding ash.

Today, around three million people live in the shadow of Vesuvius, most of them in the city of Naples and the nearby towns of Pozzuoli, Bagnoli, San Giorgio a Cremano, and Portici.  Our guide said there were two reasons for this, and for the number of people living in other volcanic areas, such as Indonesia, Japan, Costa Rica, Cameroon, and Ecuador -- (1) volcanic soil is wonderfully fertile for agriculture, and (2) people have short memories.  But now that we have a better understanding of plate tectonics and geology, you have to wonder why people are willing to accept the risk.  A man we talked to in Rome had an explanation for that, too.  "Those people down in Naples," he said, shaking his head, "they're crazy."

Today Pompeii is seemingly at peace, its ruins as quiet as the cemetery it in fact is.  Flowers grow in profusion in every grassy spot.

But not far beneath the surface, the magma is still moving.  The processes that destroyed the region in the first century C.E. are haven't stopped, and the tranquil scene up above is very much an illusion.  After seeing the city, we hiked up to the summit of Vesuvius and looked down into the crater, the hole blasted out of the center of the mountain.

The whole thing was enough to make me feel very small and very powerless.  We flatter ourselves to think we can control the forces of nature, but in reality, we're still at their mercy -- no different from the residents of Pompeii on October 23, who knew the mountain was rumbling but figured there was nothing to worry about.  The rain of fire that was to come only twenty-four hours later was unstoppable.  Although now we can predict volcanic eruptions better than the first-century Romans, we still are at the mercy of a natural world that cares little for our lives.

But there's nothing wrong with being reminded of this periodically.  A bit of humility is good for the mind.

****************************************

Southern European retrospective

Greetings, loyal readers, I'm back a couple of days earlier than anticipated from a two-and-a-half week's trip to Europe, still a bit jet-lagged but otherwise unscathed.  We visited Italy, Croatia, Greece, France, and Spain, so only got a touch of each place (Italy is the place we got to explore the most thoroughly), but it was still, overall, a wonderful trip.

Flying, not so much.  Unlike certain other trips I can recall, it was mishap-free -- no missed connections or lost luggage, and not so much as a delay -- but flying in general has become a fairly miserable experience.  Witness our flight from Paris back to New York, wherein a passenger in the seat in front of my wife reclined her seat so far that Carol had about six cubic centimeters of space left in front of her.  She couldn't even bend over to get anything from underneath the seat.  It was tempting for her to recline her own seat, but she resisted, not only out of consideration and compassion for the passenger behind her, but for fear of triggering the dreaded Reclining Seat Chain Reaction, which continues like a row of human dominoes until you get to the row in the very back where the seats don't recline, and the last person ends up getting compressed into a vaguely human-shaped splat mark against the rear bulkhead.

But, honestly, these are clearly First World Problems, and we were privileged to get to travel and see some amazing places.  Here are a few high points, and some photos I took of cool spots, in the order we visited them.

First off, Rome.  Oh, my goodness, Rome.  The sense of antiquity there is palpable, almost everywhere you go.  So is the sense that you're taking your life into your own hands when you step into the street.  Roman drivers are flat-out insane.  They use their horns to communicate three things: (1) buongiorno!; (2) get out of the damn way, you idiot tourist; and (3) my car has a horn.  Lane markings are considered merely suggestions.  If you're on a motorcycle, lane markings are considered imaginary.  But we escaped without being run down, and got to see places like Palatine Hill:

Palatine Hill is where Augustus and Livia had their home.  Yes, that Augustus and Livia.  The foundation of their house still exists, in fact, which I find astonishing given that Augustus died in the year 14 C.E.  Then there's the Forum:

And the abso-freakin-lutely huge second-century temple of the emperor Antoninus Pius:

And the Fontana degli Dioscuri:

The last-mentioned is one of many giant statues we saw featuring extremely attractive naked people, which was a popular subject of sculpture back in ancient Rome and a tradition I definitely think we should bring back.

From Rome, our next stop was the lovely city of Dubrovnik, Croatia.  Here I parted ways with the rest of our group (Carol and I were traveling with four friends) and went on a boat ride through a wetland nature preserve north of the city.  The coastline of Croatia is stunningly beautiful -- one of the prettiest places I saw on the entire trip.

After Croatia, we had a day on the lovely island of Corfu.  Coastal Greece has the clearest water I've ever seen -- unfortunately, it was still a little cool to go for a swim.  The following photo is unretouched -- no filters, nothing.  That's actually the color of the water.

We got to do some tasting of local food and drink -- something that became a bit of a theme on the trip -- and were treated to Greek limoncello (much better than the Italian variety, we were told by the proprietor), various olives and olive oils (with freshly-baked bread), honeys, jams, and marmalades.

After Corfu we were supposed to go to Malta, long a fascination of mine for its role in the Crusades, but the weather turned very windy and the ship was unable to dock.  So, unfortunately, we had a day at sea instead -- Malta will have to wait for another time, I suppose.

The next stop was the island of Sicily, where we got to take a cooking class in the town of Taormina.  Here's a picture from near the restaurant.  That's Mount Etna in the background.

We learned how to make traditional hand-made pasta and pizza and then got to lunch on the results -- accompanied, of course, with large quantities of amazingly good wine.

At the end of the meal, we had a digestif of limoncello, which the proprietors assured us was much better than the Greek variety.

At this point we were in volcano-and-earthquake territory, which long-time readers of Skeptophilia will know is a major fascination of mine.  The 1908 earthquake in Messina, our guide told us, killed eighty thousand people and flattened nearly the entire city; most of the casualties, she said, died within a span of thirty-seven seconds as the ground lurched and buildings collapsed.  The Messina-Taormina fault, which lies just offshore of the east coast of the island, is still very much active, and as you saw, Mount Etna looms over the town of Taormina.  As we were sailing away that evening, we got a light show from the pretty well constantly-erupting island of Stromboli, which has been nicknamed "The Lighthouse of the Mediterranean."

Speaking of volcanoes, we next went to Naples, which sits in the shadow of Vesuvius -- in fact, a magmatic system underlies the entire region, leading to its nickname of the "Campi Flegrei" ("burning fields") about which I've written before.  We visited the ruins of Pompeii, which was an overwhelming enough experience that I'm planning an entire post devoted just to that, so you'll have to wait for photos and commentary.  But here's a photo of the city of Naples taken from the slopes of Vesuvius, just to give you an idea of how many people live in the bullseye.

After Naples we docked in the rather unattractive industrial port town of Livorno, and took a bus into Florence.  Florence, as you undoubtedly know, is famous for its art and architecture, including the Duomo -- the city cathedral -- which is truly incredible.

We also got to see David -- not the David, but a replica that is out in the square near the Accademia Gallery, home of the original.  Even the replica was suitably amazing.

As an amateur sculptor, I was gobsmacked by the beauty of the human figure, and the incredible detail Michelangelo was able to work into the musculature.  That man was a true genius.

It rained just about the entire time we were in Florence, so we went to the Galileo Museum, which is very much worth a visit if you're a science nerd.  The museum has a fine collection of early scientific devices, including this amazing armillary sphere that stands about eight feet tall:

And a hand-cranked glass lathe used for making lenses for telescopes and microscopes:

After Florence, we had a quick stop in coastal France.  This was the place I most felt shortchanged about, time-wise; we only had time to take a quick run in from our port (Cannes) to the charming little village of St. Paul de Vence.  It was still raining, but it's a lovely place, and one I wish I'd been able to spend more time exploring.  I also would have loved to go farther north; my father's family comes from only about two hundred kilometers north of there, up in the high Alps.  Once again -- like Malta -- that'll have to wait for another trip.

After Cannes, we went to the island of Ibiza.  Ibiza is one of two islands in the Balearic Archipelago, east of Spain, that we got to visit.  When a friend found out we were going to Ibiza, he said he'd been there, and that it was famous for sun, swimming, sex, and alcohol, and because of the last-mentioned he didn't remember much about the other three.  But true to form, we did something extremely nerdy instead and went to visit an organic farm, where we got to make our own herbal liqueur (which, amazingly enough, we were able to successfully transport home without the bottles breaking).

I didn't get any good photos of the farm, but here's an evening shot of the Ibiza lighthouse:

After Ibiza we went to another island in the Balearics, Mallorca, and while there we took a taxi up to Bellver Castle (which overlooks the city of Palma) and hiked our way back down, stopping along the way for some truly amazing cappuccino.

We finished up the trip in the city of Barcelona, where we got to visit the Sagrada Familia (again, which will be the subject of another post), and the wild, Dr.-Seussian Park Güell, conceived by the astonishingly creative mind of the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí:

From there, it was a quick flight to Paris, a long flight to New York City, a quick flight to Rochester, and a drive back home, where we got in at two AM.  Then had to get up at seven to go pick up the dogs from the kennel.  So I think I'll be fighting the dregs of jet lag for a couple more days.

It was a whirlwind tour but an opportunity to visit some amazing places, have some awesome food and wine (and limoncello, about which I will not be pinned down to rank by any Greek or Italian partisans in the audience).  But it's nice to be home as well, where spring has finally set in and the garden is ready to plant.

So goodbye for now, southern Europe.  With luck, I'll be back someday.

****************************************

The mystery of the Etruscans

One of the unresolved mysteries of European anthropology is where the Etruscans fit into the big picture.

The Etruscans lived in northwestern Italy, in the region now called Tuscany -- in fact, the name Tuscany comes from the Latin Tusci, one of several names they had for the people who lived there.  The Greeks called them the Τυρσηνοί -- the Tyrrhenians -- etymologically related both to Etruria (the region where they lived) and, obviously, the Tyrrhenian Sea that still bears their name.  They called themselves the Rasenna, a word which, like most of their language, is of uncertain origin.

The big question is whether the Etruscans were autochthonous (academia-speak for "they'd always been there") or allochthonous (migrants from somewhere else -- and if so, from where?).  Of course, the truth is that all Europeans are ultimately allochthonous, because we all started out in east Africa -- it's just that some of us have been in place for a lot longer than others.  We know the Etruscans were already in that region when the Romans got there, who encountered them in something like 500 B.C.E. and ultimately absorbed them completely.  (An occupation the Romans excelled at.)

The historian Thucydides said they were related to the Pelasgians, a bit of a catch-all term ancient Greeks used to describe the inhabitants of Greece prior to the arrival of the classical Greek-speaking Dorians, Ionians, Achaeans, and Aeolians.  The word Pelasgian was almost synonymous with barbarian -- the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans shared a rather off-putting self-congratulatory bent, summed up as "if you're not us, sucks to be you."  

Of course, they're hardly the only civilization to feel that way.  I could name a modern one or two that still haven't gotten over that attitude.

In any case, there's good evidence that the Etruscans had already been there a while when the Romans encountered them, and that they were not closely related to the people in the neighborhood.  Their language, for example, is still a mystery, and has only been partly deciphered by linguists.  The general consensus is that, like Euskara (the language of the Basque people), it is non-Indo European.  There are two other languages it seems to be related to -- the Rhaetic language, an extinct language once spoken by people in what is now eastern Switzerland and western Austria, and Lemnian, spoken on the distant island of Lemnos in the Aegean Sea prior to their being conquered by speakers of Attic Greek in the sixth century B.C.E. 

The latter suggests that Thucydides may have been right on the money in connecting the Etruscans to the Pelasgians.  Together, Etruscan, Rhaetic, and Lemnian seem to be related to no other known languages, and are tentatively classified as a linguistic isolate family (Tyrsenian).

None other than the Roman Emperor Claudius wrote a twenty-volume set on the history and language of the Etruscans -- apparently he himself was a fluent speaker, and was fascinated by their culture -- but tragically, no trace of that extensive manuscript remains.  It's one of a long list of works we only know by their titles, and through references in other books.

The Monteleone Chariot, bronze inlaid with ivory, from sixth century B.C.E. Etruria [Image is in the Public Domain]

A genetic study of Etruscan remains found that they seemed to be related to the central European Urnfield Culture -- so named because of their practice of cremation and burial in ceramic urns -- which probably originated on the steppes of eastern Europe.  But as this path was a pretty common one -- the ancestors of the Celts, Slavs, Hungarians, and Germanic peoples all came that way -- it might not tell us all that much about how or when the Etruscans arrived.

At least their later history was happier than that of many people who bumped into the Romans.  There was some warring and jockeying for power, which the Etruscans ultimately lost, but they were eventually subsumed into the Roman Republic, becoming full Roman citizens.  Many Etruscan towns went on to make large amounts of money as middlemen between the Romans and the conquered Celtic tribes to the north and west.  Several prominent families who were to rise to position of power in the Republic (and later Empire) had Etruscan roots, including the Caecinia, Urgulania, Tarquinia, and Volumnia families, all names that will be familiar to aficionados of Roman history.  Most of the people from modern Tuscany have Etruscan roots, indicating their ancestors have been living in the same place for over three thousand years.

In the end, though, we're left with a mystery.  A people who left behind buildings and works of art and an only partly-understood language, whose connections to other ancient peoples are lost to the shadows of time.  And a mystery is always fascinating -- even if we might never fully discover the answers to all the questions.

****************************************

A piece of the puzzle

Given how thoroughly explored the world seems to be, it's easy to assume that we've found pretty much everything there is to be found.  Yeah, we continue to stumble across small, obscure, well-hidden stuff -- frog species living in the deep parts of the rain forest, fossils buried under meters of sedimentary rock, a cache of flint tools out in the middle of the steppe.  That sort of thing.

The fact that sometimes we find something big and flashy sitting, as it were, right under our noses should give everyone hope that we are far from understanding everything there is to understand, and that we're not yet down to the level of simply cleaning up the minuscule details.

The latest example of this continues along the archaeological path we've been following for the past week or so, and looks at the discovery of a huge intact mosaic, made over two millennia ago, in Rome.  Not just in Rome, but on Palatine Hill, surely one of the best-studied, most thoroughly excavated historical sites in the world.

The mosaic, which has been described as "a jewel" by archaeologists, is estimated to be about 2,300 years old.  It was constructed of a variety of materials, including chips of marble and travertine, shells, pearls, coral, and pieces of a rare and expensive blue-green glass paste thought to have been imported from Alexandria, Egypt.  (The latter, Egyptian blue faience, is a semi-vitrified, or sintered, opaque quartz material colored with calcium copper silicate -- the exact recipe for which was a closely-guarded secret known only to a handful of master artisans.)

So whoever commissioned the mosaic -- at this point, unknown -- had money to burn.  The design appears to commemorate land and naval victories that were probably funded (if not actively led) by the project's patron.  There are also intricate decorative motifs, and fanciful representations of mythical creatures, including sea monsters swallowing enemy ships.  The wall holding the mosaic is thought to have been part of a large, ornate banquet hall.

A detail of the Palatine Hill mosaic [Image courtesy of photographer Emanuele Antonio Minerva]

“This banquet hall, which measures 25 square meters (270 square feet), is just one space within a domus (the Latin word for house) spread on several floors," said lead researcher Alfonsina Russo, head of Rome's Colosseum Archaeological Park.  "In ancient times, when powerful noble families inhabited the Palatine Hill, it was customary to use rich decorative elements as a symbol to show-off opulence and high social rank...  We have also found lead pipes embedded within the decorated walls, built to carry water inside basins or to make fountains spout to create water games."

Further excavation into the site might not only turn up more artifacts, but could reveal who had the structure built -- likely a Roman senator.  "The person was so rich they could afford to import such precious elements from across the empire to decorate this mansion," Russo said.  "We have found nothing so far to shed light on their identity, but we believe more research might enable us to pinpoint the noble family."

It will be fascinating to see what else the researchers find out about this site, occupied by a fabulously wealthy Roman at the height of the Roman Republic.  (When this was built -- if estimates of its age are correct -- the Empire was still in the future; the first Roman Emperor, Octavian/Augustus, was born in 63 B.C.E., at which point this mosaic would already have been over two hundred years old.)

So this should provide some incentive for people to keep looking.  We are far from finding everything there is to find, even here on the Earth's surface, much less out in space.  And whatever new bits we come across -- like this mosaic, hidden beneath one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world -- will add one more piece to the puzzle of the complex and beautiful universe in which we live.

****************************************

New old things

A quick assessment might lead you to think that, at least with stuff down here on Earth, we've discovered about all there is to discover.

We can go pretty much anywhere now, from the tops of the tallest mountains to the bottom of the Marianas Trench.  We've explored all of the continents; even remote places like Antarctica, Siberia, the Yukon, the Amazonian rain forest, and Tibet have been the subject of intensive study.

It's easy for most of us, with our relatively insular lives, to underestimate the size of the planet.  Even those who -- like myself -- have been lucky enough to travel extensively can lose sight of how inaccessible some places are.  Despite technology now allowing us to visit (and live, if we want) pretty much anywhere, there are still huge areas of trackless wilderness out there.

Meaning that huge areas have minimally-studied plants, animals, geological history, paleontology, and -- apposite to today's topic -- archaeology.  So if you're going into science, fret not; it will be a long time before we run out of stuff to explore.

The topic of new discoveries occurred to me when I was reading a couple of articles sent to me by my friend, the outstanding writer Gil Miller, having to do with recent bits of human history that have been uncovered (literally) by researchers.  The first was about the discovery of a previously-unknown two-millennia-old Buddhist temple at a site in Pakistan near the town of Barikot thought to have been completely explored.

The temple, which has been tentatively dated to the second century B.C.E., contains a stupa -- a hemispherical temple, often ornately-carved, used for meditation in the Buddhist tradition -- as well as the bases of several columns, and the foundations of vestibule rooms and a public courtyard.  It's thought to have been constructed during the reign of Menander I, who was Greek by origin, but a Buddhist convert who spent most of his life in what is now India and Pakistan, and who was said to have "conquered more regions than Alexander the Great."  In an all-too-common pattern, the conquests didn't last long after Menander's death; his son, Strato I, and (possible) grandson, Menander II, were plagued by attacks from the Maues, a Scythian tribe that eventually conquered most of what had been Menander I's kingdom.  

Unfortunately, archaeological dig sites often get destroyed by plunderers who have figured out that tombs frequently contain valuables, and this site is no exception.  Apparently there are trenches all over the place, dug by robbers, who tore through and destroyed "worthless" artifacts like walls and floors, but -- fortunately -- the area around the temple was relatively unscathed.

The second study is from halfway around the world, in the Yucatán region of Mexico, where a unique bit of research gave us a lens into the peak of Mayan civilization (on the order of eight hundred years ago).  It's been known that cacao was a sacred plant to the Mayans; they're the ones who started humans consuming chocolate, and we pretty much haven't stopped since.  Cacao is a remarkably tricky plant to grow.  It needs a particular combination of soil chemistry, air humidity, calm, and shade in order to flourish.  The Mayans became experts at finding places to grow cacao -- so the researchers reasoned that where you find abundant wild cacao plants, it might be a good indicator that there were Mayan ruins nearby.

However, cacao plants aren't immortal; the plants cultivated by the Mayans eight centuries ago are long gone.  But researchers from Brigham Young University realized that there might be persistent biomarkers -- like the chemicals theobromine and caffeine -- that might indicate where cacao had been grown historically.

So they started sifting through soil samples.

What they found was that the biomarkers were predominantly found near limestone sinkholes -- nine of the eleven sinkholes tested showed measurable theobromine and caffeine in the soil nearby.  They began investigating the sinkholes themselves, rappelling down the walls to the bottom, and found jade and ceramic artifacts, including some tiny ceramics shaped to look like miniature cacao pods.

"We looked for theobromine for several years and found cacao in some places we didn’t expect," said Richard Terry, the senior author of the paper.  "We were also amazed to see the ceremonial artifacts.  My students rappelled into one of these sinkholes and said,  ‘Wow!  There is a structure in here!’  It was a staircase that filled one-third of the sinkhole with stone...  Now we have these links between religious structures and the religious crops grown in these sinkhole.  Knowing that the cacao beans were used as currency, it means the sinkholes were a place where the money could be grown and controlled.  This new understanding creates a rich historical narrative of a highly charged Maya landscape with economic, political and spiritual value."

The third paper was about a dig site in Italy -- surely a thoroughly-studied place if ever there was one -- where researchers uncovered a trove of helmets and other relics from near the Acropolis of Elea-Velia, in the Cilento region.  Elea-Velia was settled by Greeks in the sixth century B.C.E., and became a major trading center between the resident Greeks, the Etruscans to the north, and the rising Roman republic in the south.  The helmets are thought date from the late sixth century, and to have been part of a ritual of thanks for the victory the Greeks and their Etruscan allies had over the Carthaginians in the Battle of Alalia, off the coast of Corsica.

One of the newly-discovered helmets from Elea-Velia

Also uncovered were a tile floor, various pieces of painted ceramics, and the remains of weapons.

Whenever I read about stuff like this, it always makes me wonder what other amazing finds are waiting to be discovered.  If a trove like the one at Elea-Velia, ritual sites such as the one in the Yucatán, and the Buddhist temple in Pakistan can escape notice for the hundreds of years we've been digging up ancient relics, there has got to be a ton more out there to find.

So we need to keep looking.  Every time we find something like this, it enriches our knowledge of our own past.  It reminds me of the wonderful quote by Carl Sagan -- he was referring to astronomy, but it could equally well be applied to any science -- "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

*********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week combines cutting-edge astrophysics and cosmology with razor-sharp social commentary, challenging our knowledge of science and the edifice of scientific research itself: Chanda Prescod-Weinsten's The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred.

Prescod-Weinsten is a groundbreaker; she's a theoretical cosmologist, and the first Black woman to achieve a tenure-track position in the field (at the University of New Hampshire).  Her book -- indeed, her whole career -- is born from a deep love of the mysteries of the night sky, but along the way she has had to get past roadblocks that were set in front of her based only on her gender and race.  The Disordered Cosmos is both a tribute to the science she loves and a challenge to the establishment to do better -- to face head on the centuries-long horrible waste of talent and energy of anyone not a straight White male.

It's a powerful book, and should be on the to-read list for anyone interested in astronomy or the human side of science, or (hopefully) both.  And watch for Prescod-Weinsten's name in the science news.  Her powerful voice is one we'll be hearing a lot more from.

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

The burning fields

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I have a peculiar fascination for things that are huge and powerful and can kill you.

I'm not entirely sure where this obsession comes from, but it's what's driven me to write here about such upbeat topics as giant predatory dinosaurs, tornadoes, hurricanes, massive earthquakes, supernovas, gamma-ray bursters, and the cheerful concept of "false vacuum decay" (which wouldn't just destroy the Earth, but the entire universe).  I'm guessing part of it is my generally anxiety-ridden attitude toward everything; after all, just because we don't think there's a Wolf-Rayet star nearby that's ready to explode and fry the Solar System doesn't mean there isn't one.  I know that worrying about all of that stuff isn't going to (1) make it any less likely that it'll happen, or (2) make a damn bit of difference to my survival if it does, but even so I don't seem to be able to just relax and focus on more positive things, such as the fact that with the sea-level rise predicted from climate change, it looks like here in upstate New York I may finally own ocean-front property.

It's also why I keep regular tabs on the known volcanoes on the Earth -- on some level, I'm always waiting for the next major eruption.  One of the potentially most dangerous volcanoes on Earth is in Italy, and I'm not talking about Vesuvius; I'm referring to the Campi Flegrei ("burning fields," from the Greek φλέγω, "to burn"), which isn't far away from the more famous mountain and seems to be powered by the same magma chamber complex that obliterated Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 C.E.  Both Vesuvius and Campi Flegrei are highly active, and near the top of the list of "world's most dangerous volcanoes."

The problem is, the three million residents of Naples live right smack in between the two, only twenty-odd kilometers away from Vesuvius (to the east) and Campi Flegrei (to the west).  (For reference, Pompeii was nine kilometers from the summit of Vesuvius.)

The Campi Flegrei, looking west from Naples [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Baku, VedutaEremo2, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The problem is that volcanoes like these two don't erupt like the familiar fountains of lava you see from Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii, and the current eruption on La Palma in the Canary Islands.  The most typical eruption from volcanoes like Vesuvius and Campi Flegrei are pyroclastic flows -- surely one of the most terrifying phenomena on Earth -- a superheated mass of steam and ash that rush downhill at speeds of up to a hundred kilometers an hour, flash-frying everything in its wake.  That the Campi Flegrei volcanoes are capable of such massive events is witnessed by the surrounding rock formation called the "Neapolitan Yellow Tuff."  A "welded tuff" is a layer of volcanic ash that was so hot when it stopped moving that it was still partially molten, and fused together into a solid porous rock.

A video of a pyroclastic flow from Mount Unzen in Japan in 1991

The Neapolitan Yellow Tuff isn't very recent; it came from an eruption about 39,000 years ago.  But there are signs the Campi Flegrei are heating up again, which is seriously bad news not only for Naples but for the town of Pozzuoli, which was built right inside the main caldera.

That people would build a town on top of an active volcano is explained mostly by the fact that people have short memories.  And also, the richness of volcanic soils is generally good for agriculture.  Once Pompeii was re-discovered in the middle of the eighteenth century, along with extremely eerie casts of the bodies of people and animals who got hit by the pyroclastic flow, you'd think people would say, "no fucking way am I living anywhere near that mountain."  But... no.  If you'll look at a world map, you might come to the conclusion that siting big cities near places prone to various natural disasters was some kind of species-wide game of chicken or something.

In any case, the good news is that a recent study showed that even if Campi Flegrei is (1) heating up, and (2) eventually going to erupt catastrophically, there's no sign it's going to happen any time soon, and it's pretty likely we'd have plenty of warning if an eruption was imminent.  

But still.  Such phenomena make me feel very, very tiny.  And once again, thankful that I live in a relatively peaceful, catastrophe-free part of the world.  Our biggest concern around here is snow, and even that's rarely a big deal; we don't get anything like the killer blizzards that bury the upper Midwest and Rocky Mountain states every year.  Given my generally neurotic outlook on life, I can't imagine what I'd be like if I did live somewhere that had serious natural disasters.

Never leave my underground bunker, is probably pretty close to the mark.

**********************************

Some of the most enduring mysteries of linguistics (and archaeology) are written languages for which we have no dictionary -- no knowledge of the symbol-to-phoneme (or symbol-to-syllable, or symbol-to-concept) correspondences.

One of the most famous cases where that seemingly intractable problem was solved was the near-miraculous decipherment of the Linear B script of Crete by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris, but it bears keeping in mind that this wasn't the first time this kind of thing was accomplished.  In the early years of the nineteenth century, this was the situation with the Egyptian hieroglyphics -- until the code was cracked using the famous Rosetta Stone, by the dual efforts of Thomas Young of England and Jean-François Champollion of France.

This herculean, but ultimately successful, task is the subject of the fascinating book The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone, by Edward Dolnick.  Dolnick doesn't just focus on the linguistic details, but tells the engrossing story of the rivalry between Young and Champollion, ending with Champollion beating Young to the solution -- and then dying of a stroke at the age of 41.  It's a story not only of a puzzle, but of two powerful and passionate personalities.  If you're an aficionado of languages, history, or Egypt, you definitely need to put this one on your to-read list.

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

The bones speak

Yesterday I ran into two unrelated studies that are kind of interesting in juxtaposition.

The first was in the journal Heritage Science, and was authored by a team led by Kaare Lund Rasmussen of the University of Southern Denmark.  It describes analysis of bones taken from 17th century Franciscan friaries in Italy and Denmark, looking specifically at trace element levels as an indicator of wealth, diet, medical treatments, and pollutants. 

The similarities were as fascinating as the differences.  In both places, bones from tombs of wealthy patrons were lower in strontium and barium than were bones from the cloisters, where the rank-and-file monks were buried.  This was likely due to the better (and more meat-rich) diet of nobles; ordinary folks ate a great deal more in the way of cereals and grains, which tend to have higher amounts of those trace elements.

On the other hand, the Italian bones had over twenty times the amount of copper that the Danish bones, regardless of social standing.  This was almost certainly because of cookware traditions; there was a long history of Italians of all classes using copper cook pots and storage vessels, whereas the Danes rarely did.

Lead followed the opposite pattern from strontium and barium; the wealthier people had higher amounts of lead in their bones, regardless of where they were from.  Rich people had pewter vessels and serving ware, earthenware coated with lead-based glazes, and (in some cases) lead water intake pipes for indoor plumbing and lead sheets on the roofs of their houses.  Plus -- something that I'd never heard of -- fine wine sometimes had added lead salts, put in to stop it from spoiling.

It worked, apparently, with the downside that if you drank it, you got lead poisoning.

I guess you can't have everything.

Mercury was an interesting one.  Mercury-based "medicine" was used to treat leprosy and syphilis in the Middle Ages.  Like the lead/wine-spoilage thing, the medicine worked only in the sense that you died, after which you no longer had leprosy or syphilis.  What the researchers found was that in Italian bones, the greater the socioeconomic status, the higher the likelihood of having mercury in the bone tissue; not, apparently, that the lower classes didn't get syphilis or leprosy, but that they had less access to treatment when they did.  Danish bones, however, showed no such trend.  The availability of medical treatment for the Danes was much more even-handed -- although, as I pointed out, that was not necessarily a good thing.

It's fascinating that we can analyze four-hundred-year-old bones and make some shrewd guesses about the cultural and social context their former owners lived in.  What they had to contend with -- good and bad -- left a clear record in their graves, still discernible four centuries later.

Then there's the second study, which appeared this week in the journal Environmental Hazards.  Entitled "Gulf Coast Parents Speak: Children's Health in the Aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill," by Jaishree Beedasy, Elisaveta Petkova, and Jonathan Sury (of Columbia University), and Stephanie Lackner (of the University of Madrid), the paper describes a study of 720 families in the part of coastal Louisiana hit by the spill, looking particularly at children's health as a function of proximity.  Turns out 60% of parents reported their children having health and/or psychological/emotional problems following exposure, and those who had come into direct physical contact with the spilled oil showed a 4.5 times higher rate of problems than those who had not.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

As the press release about the study in Science Daily put it:

Although natural disasters don't discriminate, they do disproportionately harm vulnerable populations, such as people of color and people with lower incomes.  Children are another vulnerable group, because their coping and cognitive capacities are still developing, and because they depend on caregivers for their medical, social, and educational needs.  A growing body of evidence demonstrates that disasters are associated with severe and long-lasting health impacts for children.

Having just read the story about the Danish and Italian bones, what it immediately got me thinking was, what will future archaeologists say about us when they unearth and analyze our bones?  Will they be able to detect traces of our self-poisoning reliance on fossil fuels?  Will the years from 2016 to 2020 show an uptick in pollutants because of Donald Trump's systematic weakening of environmental protections in favor of zero restrictions on industry and corporate interests?

What will that say to them about our priorities as a society?

Sorry to end on an elegiac note, but since we started with bones buried in cloisters, I suppose it's natural enough.  People eventually wised up to the point that they stopped using lead water intake pipes and cookware, and stopped treating diseases with mercury salts.  They did that, by the way, because of science -- the patient study of cause-and-effect that linked lead and mercury to chronic poisoning.  Let's hope that humanity today starts listening to the scientists today who are warning us about climate change and the health effects of pollution.

Otherwise our distant descendants will make the same judgments of our intelligence as we do of the medievals who put lead compounds in their bottles of wine.

***********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is for anyone fascinated with astronomy and the possibility of extraterrestrial life: The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World, by Sarah Stewart Johnson.

Johnson is a planetary scientist at Georgetown University, and is also a hell of a writer.  In this book, she describes her personal path to becoming a respected scientist, and the broader search for life on Mars -- starting with simulations in the most hostile environments on Earth, such as the dry valleys of central Antarctica and the salt flats of Australia, and eventually leading to analysis of data from the Mars rovers, looking for any trace of living things past or present.

It's a beautifully-told story, and the whole endeavor is tremendously exciting.  If, like me, you look up at the night sky with awe, and wonder if there's anyone up there looking back your way, then Johnson's book should be on your reading list.

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