Assessing a collapse

One of the coolest things about science is the cross-fertilization that happens between disciplines.

I'm always impressed when I see examples of this, and my reaction is usually, "How did you even think of doing that?"  It is, at its core, a highly creative process.  The best science involves looking at a problem from a different angle, drawing in data or methods from other disciplines, and putting the whole thing together in such a way that the answer is clear.  (Or at least, a piece of it is clearer than it was before.)  As Hungarian biochemist Albert von Szent-Györgyi put it, "Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen, and thinking what no one has thought."

The creative aspect of science struck me while I was reading an article yesterday in Ars Technica about a some new research into a historical puzzle: the sudden collapse of the Shang Dynasty in China, about three thousand years ago.  The Shang were in power for nearly six centuries -- a pretty long time for a single dynastic regime -- and had made some significant accomplishments, the most notable of which were the first recorded writing system for Chinese, and amazing advances in pottery making and bronze casting.  Then -- over a very short period, perhaps only a few years -- Shang rule imploded.  A rival group called the Zhou took advantage of the chaos to defeat the Shang in a bloody battle, then scattered the remaining Shang supporters throughout the land to assure they'd never be able to rise again.

Now, researchers at Nanjing University, led by meteorologist Ke Ding, have drawn on a variety of disparate fields -- meteorology, climatology, geology, archaeology, paleontology, and analysis of extant historical records -- to try to create a complete picture of the causes behind the Shang Dynasty's sudden demise.

Their conclusion: the collapse of the Shang was the consequence of a long line of dominoes that started with a series of prolonged and powerful El Niño events, thousands of kilometers away.

Paleontologists analyzing fossil remains in strata off the coast of Peru dating to around 1000 B.C.E. note a shift from cold-water species to those that favor warmer water.  The fact that there wasn't an oscillation back and forth, but a replacement by warm-water species that lasted perhaps a century, suggests that rather than the usual pendulum swing of El Niño/La Niña conditions -- the former causing a warmup of the surface waters off the west coast of South America, the latter a corresponding cooldown -- in the years before the Shang collapse, the climate seems to have switched over to a semi-permanent El Niño.  What would be the outcome of such a shift in the ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation)?  This is where the meteorologists and climatologists took over; they estimated the degree of warmup, and let their computer models predict what effects that would have.

One thing that popped out of the models was a drastic increase in the strength of Pacific typhoons, and a significant change in their paths.  The warmup shifted wind patterns, tracking large storms away from Australia (thus the droughts and wildfires in Australia and Indonesia that usually accompany El Niño years), and northward into China.  Typhoons, though, usually fizzle once they cross over from ocean to land; and the capital of the late Shang Dynasty was Zhaoge, in Henan Province, far away from the coast.  So how would typhoons have affected an inland city so drastically?

But the models showed that the altered wind direction didn't just shove storms toward China, it also fed warm, moist air inland -- atmospheric rivers.  These air currents flow until they meet a mountain range, and the humid air masses experience adiabatic cooling as they rise in elevation, causing them to dump their moisture as rain or snow on the windward sides of mountains.

In other words, the rain shadow effect.  The outcome; suddenly northern and central China were way wetter than they had been.

Now, enter the archaeologists.  One of the most common items in Shang-age archaeological sites are oracle bones -- usually the scapulae of ox, horses, or deer that are thrown into a fire, and the resulting cracks and scorch marks read by a shaman.  But fortunately for us, the shamans -- recall the Shang's development of the first Chinese writing system -- also recorded on the oracle bones what questions had been asked, and what the shaman's assessment of the results had been (i.e., the answer to the question).

And in the last fifty years of the Shang Dynasty, just about all of the oracle bones have to do with the weather.  A lot of them basically ask, "When the hell is it going to stop raining?"

A Shang Dynasty oracle bone [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Orakelknochen, CC BY-SA 3.0]

At the same time as this, the archaeologists also note the abandonment of village sites near riverbanks, an increase in burial of sites under riverine sediments, and the relocation of towns onto higher ground.

What Ke Ding and his colleagues concluded is that the Shang were weakened by years of floods, probably accompanied by poor harvests and resulting famine.  This set the stage for the Zhou rebellion, and the destruction of a dynasty that had ruled China for six centuries.

Now, here's the kicker.  The researchers caution that we're seeing a similar pattern today -- anthropogenic global warming is increasing oceanic surface temperatures, and the Pacific Ocean is seeing extended and more powerful El Niño events.  As Mark Twain observed, "History doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes."

Oh, except that noted climate scientist Donald Trump has evaluated the available data, and decided that global warming is a hoax, and the climatologists are big fat poopyheads.  So there's that.

Anyhow, it's a fascinating and elegant piece of research, and shows how creative the scientific enterprise can be.  Collaboration is the heart of discovery, and here we have an entire team of experts from disparate fields pitching in together to solve a historical puzzle.  One that, despite Trump's pronouncements, we had damn well better pay attention to today.

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

The blink of an eye

A while back I wrote about the rather terrifying idea of the "Great Filter" -- that life, especially sentient life, might be rare in the universe because there are hurdles of varying difficulties (those are the "filters") that have to be overcome in order to get there.  These include:

• abiotic synthesis of organic molecules
• assembly of those molecules into cells
• development of cells of sufficient complexity to segregate competing biochemical reactions (eukaryotic cells)
• multicellularity
• the evolution of intelligence
• the development of technology

The first two of these seem -- at least insofar as our models currently predict -- to be fairly straightforward, so most biologists expect that Earth-like planets in the habitable zone probably have lots of single-celled organisms.  The rest?  Uncertain.  After all, we have a sample size of one to analyze, so it's a little hard to make any inferences based on that.

All of this, of course, is by way of explaining the Fermi paradox -- that despite years of searching, we've found no good evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations.  But an even more alarming possibility is that the Great Filter lies ahead of us.  Perhaps all of those steps are surmountable, so stable rocky planets with atmospheres in their star's habitable zone ultimately do evolve intelligent life, but then it inevitably self-destructs.

I'm thinking about this today because yesterday I watched a short talk by the brilliant physicist Brian Cox about the topic, and while most of what he covered was information (and theorizing) I'd heard before, there was one piece of it that I honestly hadn't considered.  Suppose the Great Filter really does lie in the future, and technological civilizations always eventually come to naught.  Perhaps it's through nuclear annihilation, or biological warfare, or the catastrophic backfire of AI -- certainly at the moment, I don't think any well-informed person would argue that these are far-fetched possibilities -- but whatever the cause, intelligent species aren't intelligent enough to save themselves indefinitely, and their brief, fitful candle flames just as quickly wink out.

What that means is that at any given time, there might only be one or two civilizations in the entire galaxy, because their lifetimes are so short.  Cox describes visiting Frank Drake, the brilliant astronomer who gave his name to the Drake Equation.  Drake's hobby was raising orchids, and Cox said that on the day of his visit, he got to see one of the rare plants in Drake's greenhouse flowering.  Drake told him that this particular species only flowers once a year, and the flower is only open for a day or two; after that, the plant goes back into its previous quiescence.  Cox had simply lucked out and visited on the right day.

Could civilizations, Cox wonders, be like this orchid -- rising and falling so fast that you only have a moment's chance of seeing them before they collapse?

If this is true, then the galaxy's planets could be littered with the debris of dead civilizations.  Imagine it... planet after planet with archaeological sites as the only evidence that an intelligent species had once lived there.

It reminds me of the brilliant Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Chase," in which Captain Picard (himself an erstwhile archaeology student) is given a priceless, twelve-thousand-year-old ceramic piece made by the Kurlan sculptor called "the Master of Tarquin Hill" -- the product of an extinct culture now known only from the artifacts they left behind.

Of course, even artifacts don't last forever.  A few years ago, a couple of researchers considered the "Silurian Hypothesis" -- the idea that there may have been earlier, non-human civilizations right here on Earth.  (Named, I feel obliged to point out, after the reptilian Silurian race from Doctor Who.)  The question they asked was, if there had been such a civilization -- say, a hundred million years ago -- would there be any traces left?

And the answer they came up with was "No."  Likewise, the chances of any human-made artifacts from today lasting a hundred million years into the future is vanishingly small.  Consider that there's damn little left from humans who lived ten thousand years ago.  Nothing we make is likely to last a hundred million -- however rock-solid and permanent our creations may feel to us.

Understand that they're not saying there was such a civilization; only that if there had been, we'd probably have no way to know about it.  So even if there have been many intelligent species rising and falling throughout the galaxy, the marks they left on their planets would be nearly as ephemeral.

It's kind of a bleak prospect, isn't it?  All of our strutting and fretting is, for better or worse, over in the blink of an eye.  It reminds me of Percy Shelley's haunting poem "Ozymandias," which feels like a good way to conclude:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.  Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!'"
Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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

Taken by the flood

Not long ago, I was listening to one of my favorite pieces by Claude Debussy, The Drowned Cathedral, and I started to wonder what legend had given rise to the piece.  After a little bit of digging, I found out that Debussy got his inspiration from the Breton legend of the mythical city of Ys, built on the coast of Brittany behind a seawall.  Princess Dahut the Wicked tempted fate by engaging in all sorts of depravity therein, despite the warnings of Saint Winwaloe that God was watching and would smite the ever-loving shit out of her if she didn't mend her ways.  (Okay, I'm paraphrasing a bit, here, but that's the gist.)  Anyhow, Dahut wouldn't listen, and one night a storm rose and broke through the seawall, and the ocean flowed in over the city.  Dahut's father, King Gradion, escaped on a magical horse with Dahut riding behind him, but Winwaloe shouted at him, "Push back the demon riding with you!"

So Gradion did what any good father would do, namely, he shoved his daughter into the sea, which "swallowed her up."  The sea also swallowed the rest of Ys, which kind of sucked for the inhabitants, given that it wasn't really their fault that the princess was a little morally challenged.  As for Princess Dahut herself, she became a mermaid, and is still hanging around to tempt sailors into jumping into the ocean to their deaths.  And according to legend, on windy days, you can still hear the bells of the drowned cathedral of Ys if you stand along the shore of Douarnenez Bay.

The Flight of King Gradion, by Évariste-Vital Luminais, 1884 (in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, Brittany, France)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

Kind of a cool story, in a heartless, Grimm's Fairy Tales sort of way, even if Winwaloe and Gradion, not to mention God, do come across as pro-patriarchy assholes.  And whatever else you think, you have to admit that Debussy's piece is gorgeous (go back and give a listen to the recording of it I linked above, if you haven't already done so).

What I haven't told you, yet, though, is the other thing I found out while looking up the Legend of the Drowned City of Ys...

... is that French archaeologists diving only a few kilometers away from Douarnenez Bay just found the remnants of a seawall, now underwater, dating from seven thousand years ago.

The structure, found off the Ile de Sein at Brittany's westernmost tip, is a 120 meter long, twenty meter thick, two meter high wall with large granite monoliths sticking up from it at regular intervals.  When it was built, it would have been right at the shoreline -- at that point, we were just coming out of the last ice age, and the sea level was considerably lower than it is now -- but now it's under nine meters of water.  The archaeologists are unsure of its purpose, but given the legend the likeliest answer is that it was a seawall to prevent flooding.

"It was built by a very structured society of hunter-gatherers, of a kind that became sedentary when resources permitted.  That or it was made by one of the Neolithic populations that arrived here around 5,000 B.C.E.," said archaeologist and study co-author Yvan Pailler.  "It is likely that the abandonment of a territory developed by a highly structured society has become deeply rooted in people's memories...  The submersion caused by the rapid rise in sea level, followed by the abandonment of fishing structures, protective works, and habitation sites, must have left a lasting impression."

What strikes me about all this is that building this thing took an astonishing amount of work.  The mass of the stones is estimated at 3,300 tonnes.  Putting together a wall of this size, without any heavy equipment, was not an insignificant task.

But then, neither are Stonehenge, the Mayan and Egyptian and Aztec pyramids, Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat, the Easter Island moai, and the Great Wall of China.  To name a few.  I guess if you have sufficient motivation and building materials, not to mention large amounts of cheap and/or slave labor, there's not much you can't do.

But the whole thing in this case is rather sad, really.  The seawall ultimately failed; as the Tenth Doctor said, in the iconic (and tragic) episode of Doctor Who "The Waters of Mars," "Water is patient, Adelaide.  Water just waits.  Wears down the cliff tops, the mountains.  The whole of the world.  Water always wins."

It certainly did in this case.  The sea level rise between fourteen and five thousand years ago flooded the entirety of Doggerland, which used to connect Britain to mainland Europe but now lies at the bottom of the North Sea, and the Gulf of Carpentaria, which now separates Australia from New Guinea.  It's unsurprising that changes of this magnitude would stick around in the cultural consciousness -- and get worked into folk tales and legends.

So while the story of the wicked Princess Dahut and virtuous (if ruthless) Saint Winwaloe and the magical horse is certainly made up, the flooding of the city of Ys might have a basis in fact.  Further indication that when indigenous people tell us what happened in the past, maybe we should pay better attention.

And to stay in the same mood, let's indulge in a little more Debussy, shall we?  How about his orchestral work, The Sea?  That seems a fitting way to end this discussion, doesn't it?

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

Burning down the house

It's always thin ice to make too many assumptions about why our distant ancestors did what they did.

Most of the time, all we have is the traces of what they made to go by, and that only gets you so far.  Imagine some future archaeologist got a hold of some of the artifacts from our civilization.  These kinds of remains are always fragmentary; like fossilization, the preservation of human-made objects is largely a matter of chance, and the vast majority of them don't survive.  So... suppose a future archaeologist found a bent, rusted hand-cranked can opener.

What would (s)he make of that?

Unless there was the fortuitous survival of a can of beans nearby, they might never figure out what it was used for.

So it would very likely be placed in a museum with a card saying "Probably used in rituals."

I'm not meaning to cast aspersions on the archaeologists, here.  To their credit, they are unhesitating in saying "we're not sure" -- something every good scientist should be willing to do.  We humans are just endlessly curious, and we want solutions to mysteries.  Leaving the question open might be the most honest thing for a skeptic to do, but it's also profoundly unsatisfying.

Especially when we have lots of evidence.  Like, for example, the strange case of the "Burned House Horizon" -- the layers of accumulated archaeological evidence (horizons) in a large part of eastern Europe showing evidence of entire settlements being repeatedly burned to the ground.

For over two and a half millennia.

The earliest evidence we have of the practice is from the the Starčevo–Körös–Criş Culture, which spanned from what is now Serbia all the way to eastern Bulgaria, and dates to around 5,900 B.C.E.  The latest is from the Cucuteni-Trypillian Culture, which is found from Romania to western Ukraine, in 3,200 B.C.E.  How the behavior spread is uncertain -- whether one culture learned it from the other, or one culture descended from the other, is unknown.  Unfortunately, it's usually impossible to differentiate between cultural (learned) transmission and genetic transmission, barring (even more) fortuitous survival of adequate human remains from which to extract DNA.

So we don't know how it spread, or why.  Some anthropologists believe that it didn't spread as a behavior; there are a few who claim the Burned House Horizon is simply preserving a record of accidental house fires, tribal violence, or both.

A lot of others disagree, however.  Mirjana Stevanović of the University of California - Berkeley, writing in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, makes a persuasive argument that a simple house fire of a wattle-and-daub, thatched-roof structure -- whether accidental or deliberately set -- wouldn't cause temperatures sufficient to produce the kind of vitrification of clay that is seen all through the Burned House Horizon.  In fact, Stevanović, along with archaeologists Arthur Bankoff and Frederick Winter, actually built a house using the techniques known to have been utilized by cultures in Neolithic eastern Europe, then burned it down:

[Image credit: Stevanović et al., 1997]

They found the only way they could get the clay to vitrify was to pile up enormous amounts of brush, straw, and other burnables against the foundation of the house.

In other words, the houses seem to have been burned deliberately, and regularly, by their owners.  But why?

Hypotheses vary from the practical to the bizarre.  Some suggest that it was a way of destroying the habitats of disease-carrying pests during the regular epidemics our forebears were prey to.  Others think that because wattle-and-daub structures eventually become dilapidated, it was a way of getting rid of them so their owners could rebuild -- using the convenient fired clay bricks produced by the burning.  Some have even suggested that it was a religious ritual they've called domicide -- the symbolic killing of the houses in an entire settlement, followed by another cycle of "birth."  (The adherents of this model point out that in the Cucuteni-Trypillian Culture, the one we know the most about, the complete burning of houses in a settlement happened on average every 75-80 years -- back then, pretty much the upper bound of a human lifespan.  Coincidence?)

The thing is, though, all we have is the evidence, which amounts to 2,500 years' worth of burned rubble, distributed over a (very) wide geographical region.  The reason why this happened could be any of the above, or a combination, or one thing during one period and something else during another, or an entirely different reason we haven't yet dreamed up.  It's a puzzle.

But then, so is much of our history.  If you're interested in the past, you have to get used to that.  Even during periods when there were written records, the sad fact is that a great many of those documents didn't survive to the present, and whatever was contained within them is gone forever.  But in non-literate cultures, we have even less -- just broken remnants of what they did.

Why they did these things, and in fact who those people were, will always remain in the realm of informed speculation.

So that's this morning's rather unsatisfying conclusion.  Burned houses, ancient cultures, and the persistence of mystery.  It's the way of things in science, though, isn't it?  As Richard Feynman put it, "I would rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned."

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

Mysterious mosaic

I've mentioned before how much I love a good mystery, and there's a hell of a good one underneath the town of Margate, Kent, England.

It's called the "Shell Grotto."  It consists of a set of steps, framed by an arch, leading down into a serpentine passageway through the chalk bedrock.  Then there's a room called the "Rotunda," with a circular arched dome over walls arranged in an equilateral triangle.  This leads into a winding underground tunnel about two and a half meters high by twenty-one meters long ending in a five-by-six meter rectangular space that's been nicknamed the "Altar Chamber."

The entire thing is lined by mosaics made out of seashells.

4.6 million of them.

Looking up into the Rotunda [Image is in the Public Domain]

The mosaic designs are constructed from the shells of mussels, cockles, whelks, limpets, scallops, and oysters, all relatively common in nearby bays.  They feature patterns appearing to be stylized suns and stars, floral motifs, and some purely geometric or abstract designs.

A detail from one of the mosaics [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Emőke Dénes, Shell Grotto, Margate, Kent 3 - 2011.09.17, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The Shell Grotto was discovered when the entrance was stumbled upon in 1835, and immediately became a sensation.  The West Kent Advertiser newspaper wrote the following in 1838 (which also should have taken first place in the Run-On-Sentence of the Year Contest):

Belle Vue cottage, a detached residence, has been lately been purchased by a gentleman, who, having occasion for some alterations, directed the workmen to excavate some few feet, during which operation the work was impeded a large stone, the gentleman being immediately called to the spot, directed a minute examination, which led to the discovery of an extensive grotto, completely studded with shells in curious devices, most elaborately worked up, extending an immense distance in serpentine walks, alcoves, and lanes, the whole forming one of the most curious and interesting sights that can possibly conceived, and must have been executed by torch light; we understand the proprietor intends shortly to open the whole for exhibition, at small charge for admission.

No one in the area had any memory of who had built it and why, so this opened up the floodgates for speculation.  Historian Algernon Robertson Goddard, writing in 1903, listed the possibilities as follows:

• a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century rich person's "folly"
• a prehistoric calendar
• a meeting place for "sea witches" (whoever those might be)
• something connected to the Knights Templar

This last one made me snort-laugh, because there's a general rule that if there's something mysterious and you want to make it more mysterious, throw in the Templars.  Umberto Eco riffed on this theme in his brilliant, labyrinthine novel Foucault's Pendulum, when he had his character Jacopo Belbo explaining to the main character (Casaubon) the difference between cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics:

A lunatic is easily recognized.  He is a moron who doesn't know the ropes.  The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it may be.  The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn't concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits.  For him, everything proves everything else.  The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy.  You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.

Be that as it may, we still don't know who built the Shell Grotto.  There are also extensive shell mosaics that were created by the Romans and the Phoenicians, but the archways in the Rotunda have impressed archaeologists as being more consistent with those used in twelfth-century Gothic cathedrals (although not nearly as large, obviously), and therefore not nearly old enough to be Roman or Phoenician in origin.  It seems like the simplest thing to do would be to carbon date one of the shell fragments -- mollusk shells are largely calcium carbonate, so it should be possible -- but the site is under private ownership, and to my knowledge no one has done that yet.

So the Shell Grotto remains mysterious.  It certainly represents an enormous amount of skill and dedication, whoever created it; just cutting a tunnel that long through chalk bedrock would take extensive and back-breaking labor, not to mention then hauling over four million shells there and somehow getting them to adhere to the walls in beautiful and flowing artistic patterns.  It's open for visits from the public, and next time I'm in England I'd love to check it out.  Just another reason to travel to a country I love -- as if I needed another one.

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

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.

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

Good friends

It's a point I've made before, but it's worth saying again: we queer folks are not "pushing our lifestyle in other people's faces" simply because we'd like (1) some acknowledgement that we exist, and (2) the same rights and respect that everyone else gets automatically.

In the current regime here in the United States there are places of employment where people in same-sex relationships aren't allowed to display photographs of their partners, or even mention them.  "It's okay, I guess, as long as no one knows who you actually are," is the general gist.  There seems to be a real fear that just being around openly queer people will cause straight men and women to switch teams.  But really -- do you honestly think that's how all this works?  I mean, think about it.  Some one hundred percent straight guy finds out his coworker is gay, and suddenly gets this dazed look on his face and says, "I shall go out and kiss a man immediately"?  Seriously?

After all, it's not like it works the other way, is it?  As a teenager I was exposed to dozens, probably hundreds, of books, movies, and television shows depicting couples in straight relationships, and not a single one about queer people, and I turned out queer anyhow.  Funny thing, that.

Almost like it's inborn and hardwired, or something.

The result of this mindset is that we not only have to deal with out-and-out homophobia, but a whole array of attitudes that don't wish us active harm, but just would prefer it if we were invisible.  Take, for example, the article about a monument built by Alexander the Great for his lover Hephaestion I just stumbled on a couple of days ago.

There, I said it, didn't I?  They were lovers.  Alexander was either gay or bisexual, and he was deeply in love with Hephaestion.  They were described as "one soul inhabiting two bodies" by Aristotle, who knew both men well.  Their relationship was compared more than once to that of Achilles and Patroclus, which is not exactly a chaste allusion.  Plutarch recounts that they paid a visit to the tombs of the two Greek heroes, where Alexander garlanded Achilles's tomb and Hephaestion Patroclus's -- then ran a race, naked, in their honor.

Totally straight behavior, that, right?

Of course right.

Then there's the incident -- also related by Plutarch -- where Alexander allowed Hephaestion to read something he'd written but wanted to remain secret, and to symbolize this touched his signet ring to Hephaestion's lips.  The moment has been depicted many times in art:

Alexander Touches His Ring to Hephaestion's Mouth by Johann Heinrich Tischbein (1781) [Image is in the Public Domain]

When Hephaestion died suddenly of what was probably typhus in Ecbatana (now in Iran) in 324 B.C.E., Alexander was inconsolable.  The historian Arrian says that upon seeing Hephaestion dead, Alexander "flung himself on the body of his friend and lay there nearly all day long in tears, and refused to be parted from him until he was dragged away by force by his companions."

Oh, what good friends they were.

Alexander commissioned a massive tomb in Hephaestion's honor at Amphipolis in Macedonia -- the Kastas Tomb -- which is the subject of the article I linked above.  [Nota bene: Alexander didn't live to see it completed; he died himself the following year of uncertain causes.]  The tomb is filled with symbolic representations of the spiritual and physical bonds of love, and the hope for being reunited in the afterlife.

Despite all this, when the two were depicted as lovers in the 2004 film Alexander, there was an outcry that "Oliver Stone turned Alexander the Great gay!" and how dare they depict this heroic figure as perhaps having same-sex attraction.  It's apparently hard for some people to imagine that a guy could be a brilliant king and military leader, and still be queer. 

What's striking, though, is that there's a much more subtle aspect of this, beyond the predictable snarling from the overt homophobes.  What I noticed about the archaeology article was that never once was it explicitly mentioned that Alexander and Hephaestion might have had a sexual relationship.  Throughout, they're referred to as "friends" or "confidants" or "companions;" the closest the writer comes is saying that they clearly had a "strong emotional bond" and that the tomb is a "tribute to love and loyalty."

Why the hell are they afraid of saying it?  I mean, if you want to err on the side of caution, at least admit that it was possible.

Apparently even that is a bridge too far.

It's all part and parcel of the "don't ask, don't tell" mentality, isn't it?  "We're fine as long as we can pretend you queer people don't exist and never have."  Well, allow me to point out that this, too, is homophobia.  I spent decades in the closet out of fear and shame from this kind of thinking.  And, straight readers, if you don't think this is damaging, I want you to imagine what it would be like if your employer told you that you must never mention you are in an opposite-sex relationship.  Oh, it's fine, as long as no one knows.  Don't bring your spouse or significant other to the company picnic, don't be seen holding hands in public, don't have a photograph of you as a couple on your desk.

Now imagine if your government was saying the same thing.

Yes, I know that there are places in the world that have it much worse, where being openly queer can get you imprisoned, tortured, or executed.  But we here in the west need to keep in mind that there are ways to oppress people that are subtler and more insidious.  How is this sort of thing any different from putting Jews, Romani, and Blacks (just to name three of many groups this has happened to) in a position where they feel like they have to hide who they are in order to "pass?"

If you think that's wrong, then so is this.

I'm out publicly, so it's far too late for me to hide even if I wanted to.  But honestly -- I wouldn't go back to being invisible even if I could.  All those terrified years did a lot of damage to me emotionally, damage I doubt I'll ever completely heal from (and that's not even counting the regrets over the richer, more honest life I could have had).  To make it clear, I'm not unhappy where I am today; despite all I've been through, I've arrived at a good place.

I just wish I'd had a happier past, is all.

And I will continue to speak out against this kind of straightwashing.  Because it not only is an inaccurate view of history, but does damage to queer people right now.  I've often wondered if there had been honest, positive depictions of LGBTQ+ people in the fiction and nonfiction I read as a teen, maybe I'd have come out as bi when I realized it (age fifteen or so) rather than hiding for another forty years.  Maybe I still wouldn't have, I dunno; southern Louisiana in the seventies wasn't exactly a congenial place for people who were different, and I'm honestly not a very brave person.

But if by speaking out, I can help other people who are still in the closet -- well, don't expect me to shut up.  It's the least I can do after maintaining my own personal silence for four very long decades.

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

Wanderlust

Maybe it's because I'm fundamentally a home body, but I find it really hard to understand what could have driven our distant ancestors to head out into uncharted territory -- no GPS to guide them, no guarantee of safety, no knowledge of what they might meet along the way.

A couple of years ago I wrote a piece about the extraordinary island-hopping accomplished by the ancient Polynesians -- going from one tiny speck of land to another, crossing thousands of kilometers of trackless ocean in dugout canoes.  We don't know what motivated them, whether it was lack of resources on their home islands, being driven away by warfare, or simple curiosity.  But whatever it was, it took no small amount of skill, courage, and willingness to accept risk.

The wanderings of the ancestral Polynesians, though, are hardly the only example of ancient humans' capacity for launching out into the unknown.  Two papers this week look at other examples of our forebears' wanderlust -- still, of course, leaving unanswered the questions about why they felt impelled to leave home and safety for an uncertain destination.

The first, which appeared in PLOS-One, looks at the similarity of culture between Bronze-Age Denmark and southwestern Norway, and considers whether the inhabitants of Denmark took a longer (but, presumably, safer) seven-hundred-kilometer route, crossing the Strait of Kattegat into southern Sweden and then hugging the coast until they reached Norway, or the much shorter (but riskier) hundred-kilometer crossing over open ocean to go there directly.

While the direct route was more dangerous, it seems likely that's what they did.  If they'd skirted along the coastline, you'd expect there to be more similarity in archaeological sites along the way, in the seaside areas of southern Sweden.  There's not.  It appears that they really did launch off in paddle-driven boats across the stormy seas between Denmark and Norway, four thousand years ago.

"These new agent-based simulations, applied with boat performance data of a Scandinavian Bronze Age type boat," the authors write, "demonstrate regular open sea crossings of the Skagerrak, including some fifty kilometers of no visible land, likely commenced by 2300 B.C.E., as indicated by archaeological evidence."

Considering people twice as far back in time, a paper this week in Nature describes evidence that seafarers from what is now Italy crossed a hundred kilometers of ocean to reach the island of Malta.  A cave in Latnija, in the northern Mellieħa region of Malta, has bones of animals that show distinct signs of butchering and cooking -- and have been dated to 8,500 years ago.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Frank Vincentz, Malta - Mellieħa - Triq il-Latnija - Paradise Bay 05 ies, CC BY-SA 3.0]

"We found abundant evidence for a range of wild animals, including Red Deer, long thought to have gone extinct by this point in time," said Eleanor Scerri, of the University of Malta, who was the paper's lead author.  "They were hunting and cooking these deer alongside tortoises and birds, including some that were extremely large and extinct today...  The results add a thousand years to Maltese prehistory and force a re-evaluation of the seafaring abilities of Europe's last hunter-gatherers, as well as their connections and ecosystem impacts."

What always strikes me about this sort of thing is wondering not only what fueled their wanderlust, but how they even knew there was an island out there to head to.  I know that patterns of clouds can tell seafarers they're nearing land, but still -- to launch off into the open ocean, hoping for the best, and trusting that there's safe landing out there somewhere still seems to me to be somewhere between brave and utterly foolhardy.

I guess my ancestors were made of sterner stuff than me.  I'm okay with that.  Being a bit of a coward has its advantages.  As Steven Wright put it, "Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines."

So if y'all want to, you can take off in your dugout canoes for parts unknown, but I'm gonna stay right here where it's (relatively) safe.  I suppose it's a good thing our forebears had the courage they did, because it's how we got here.  And I hope they wouldn't be too embarrassed by my preference for sitting on my ass drinking coffee with cream and sugar rather than spending weeks at sea nibbling on dried meat and hardtack and hoping like hell those clouds over there mean there's dry land ahead.

Chacun à son goût, y'know?

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

The letter and the labyrinth

A year and a half or so ago I wrote a piece about some of the biblical apocrypha -- books and epistles and letters and whatnot that didn't make the cut to be part of the canonical Bible when the whole thing was hashed out at the Council of Rome (382 C.E.), the Synod of Hippo (393 C.E.), and the Synod of Carthage (397 C.E.), after which the Bible had something close to its current form.  (As I mention in the post, the idea that canon was established at the Council of Nicaea in 325 is a commonly-held misconception; Nicaea had nothing to do with decisions about what was scripture and what wasn't, but was about the nature of the Trinity and how to determine the date for Easter.)

What's interesting is that even since all of the late-fourth-century wrangling by the church fathers, there hasn't been an end to what is Holy Writ and what should be written out, because new documents keep popping up.  The most famous are the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered between 1946 and 1956 in the Qumran Caves near Ein Feshkha in the West Bank; those, although they were certainly a fantastic historical and archaeological discovery, didn't much affect religious belief, because they were mostly composed either of (1) canonical Old Testament books, (2) writings that we already knew about but had been declared non-canonical apocrypha (like the supremely weird Books of Enoch), or (3) descriptions of religious and secular law.

Sometimes, though, a document is discovered that leave both the historians and the devout scrambling for an explanation.  And that brings us to the "Mystic Gospel of Mark."

You ready for a tangled tale?

Back in 1958, an American historian named Morton Smith was poring through some old manuscripts at the Monastery of Mar Saba, and found a handwritten Greek text appended to the end of a seventeenth-century printed edition of the writings of Ignatius of Antioch.  Smith identified the text as an eighteenth-century copy of a letter from the theologian Clement of Alexandria (150 - 215 C.E.), which made reference to the Gospel of Mark -- not the standard version, but a longer, "secret" gospel (τοῦ Μάρκου τὸ μυστικὸν εὐαγγέλιον).

Smith hand-transcribed the document, then requested (and was approved) to take the original to the Greek Orthodox Library in Jerusalem.  Despite Smith writing a paper on the discovery in 1960, little attention was given to the document; as far as we know, only three other scholars ever set eyes on it, the religious historians David Flusser, Shlomo Pines, and Guy Stroumsa.  Stroumsa, who saw it in 1976, appears to be the last person who gave the manuscript a close look.  Smith took photographs of the pages in question, but the document itself mysteriously disappeared some time between then and 1990 and hasn't been seen since.

One of Smith's photographs of the alleged "Mystic Gospel of Mark" document [Image is in the Public Domain]

The putative Clement of Alexandria letter included two passages that occur nowhere in the current Gospel of Mark, but were supposedly from the longer "Mystic Gospel."  One passage is much lengthier than the other; and it's that one that caused a furor, especially given how Morton Smith translated and interpreted it.  Here's Smith's translation:

And they come into Bethany.  And a certain woman whose brother had died was there.  And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and says to him, "Son of David, have mercy on me."  But the disciples rebuked her.  And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway a great cry was heard from the tomb.  And going near Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb.  And straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand.  But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him.  And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich.  And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing only a linen cloth over his naked body.  And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God.  And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan.

So yeah.  Smith interpreted the naked young man "remaining with Jesus that night" to mean that not only did Jesus condone homosexuality, he participated in it.

You can see why that turned some heads.

Whether this interpretation alone was the cause, historians immediately started claiming the whole thing was a forgery.  Quentin Quesnell stopped just short of accusing Smith outright, but said that the "hypothetical forger matched Smith's apparent ability, opportunity, and motivation" (Vigiliae Christianae, vol. 71, no. 4, pp. 353–378).  Stephen Carlson went even further, as you might surmise by the title of his book on the subject -- The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark -- and points out that a 1910 catalogue of the holdings of the Mar Saba Monastery Library doesn't list the book where Smith allegedly found the document, and from that (and the book's later mysterious disappearance) Carlson concludes that Smith forged the letter, then made sure the original vanished so that modern hoax-detection techniques such as ink analysis wouldn't reveal what he'd done.  Jacob Neusner, a historian specializing in ancient Judaism, called it "the forgery of the century."

Not everyone is so sure, though.  There are a good number of historians who point out that the photographs of the document (which still exist) demonstrate a sure hand at writing eighteenth-century Greek calligraphy, and further, that the writing style and word choice is completely consistent with known writings of Clement of Alexandria.  Producing such a close match, they say, would have been beyond Morton Smith's knowledge, skill, and ability.  New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, in his book Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, writes, "It is true that a modern forgery would be an amazing feat.  For this to be forged, someone would have had to imitate an eighteenth-century Greek style of handwriting and to produce a document that is so much like Clement that it fools experts who spend their lives analyzing Clement, which quotes a previously lost passage from Mark that is so much like Mark that it fools experts who spend their lives analyzing Mark.  If this is forged, it is one of the greatest works of scholarship of the twentieth century, by someone who put an uncanny amount of work into it."

And the historians are still arguing about this.  One of those impossible questions to settle, as far as I can see, given that the original document is AWOL, whether by accident or design.  Responses by scholars and interested laypeople vary from "it was a hoax from beginning to end, and Smith did it" to "the letter isn't authentic but was an earlier forgery, and Smith got fooled but was acting in good faith" to "the letter was an authentic transcription from Clement, but the passages weren't actually by the Evangelist Mark" to "okay, they're by Mark, but the gay Jesus passage is being mistranslated or misinterpreted" to "yay!  Gay Jesus FTW!"

It's hard to escape the conclusion that everyone's taking this and finding ways to use it to support whatever it was they already believed.

The problem here is that the evidence we actually have is somewhere beyond thin -- a photograph of an eighteenth-century transcription (for which the original is lost) of a third-century letter (for which the original is even loster, if it ever existed in the first place) of some extra passages for a Gospel that a even lot of the devout think wasn't itself written until at least three decades after Jesus's death.  So from that, you can conclude damn near anything you want.

I mean, I love archaeology and history, but really.

So that's our excursion into the labyrinth of biblical scholarship.  Me, I think I'll move on to something I can be more sure about, like quantum physics.  At least there, the whole concept of the Uncertainty Principle has a clear definition.

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