Things that Didn’t Bother Oðinn

This week on the reading rest I have a book from 2009, Versatility in Versification. Multidisciplinary Approaches to Metrics, edited by Tonya Kim Dewey and Frog. I read one of the contributions.

Schulte, Michael. 2009. Early runic ‘metrical’ inscriptions—How metrical are they? In Tonya Kim Dewey and Frog (eds) Versification. Multidisciplinary Approaches to Metrics. [Berkeley Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics vol 74]. Peter Lang New York etc. Pp 3-22.

Poetry and intoxication go back a long way exploiting each other. Expression doesn’t bother intoxication as long as it is deviant, irrespective of ‘it’ being expression or intoxication. But to poetry, expression is everything. That’s why poetry, aided by its craftsmen, may use intoxication as a method finding its limits of expression—simultaneously defining a room of its own and an expression to go with it. In Norse mythology the myth about Oðinn and the scaldic mead is very much to the point. Favorably intoxicated, we write poetry that would have been fine were it not for the fact that the scaldic mead couldn’t be ushered into our world without partly being corrupted—divided as it happened into good and bad. This mead still intoxicates and makes us diligent poets, but those who have drunk from the bad, produce bad poetry. Most of us believe we know who drank what, but then again we might be intoxicated. Writing about Norse or Early Runic poetry one should bear this in mind.

 Michael Schulte’s (MS’s) article belongs to a genre so academic and serious that today it must be in need of a Latin label such as Timor Carminis—The Dread of Verse. It’s all in timor spreading between fear and awe. To most, even though they don’d remember the tale about the scaldic mead, verse may be anything between awfully good or dreadfully bad (however, not worse that the poetry of Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings) and we can live with it. But some take it upon them to defend a ‘high’ style of poetry as indeed Poetry, against everyday speech (MS p.4) lest Oðinn, or anyone awe-inspiring authorized to judge the quality of the scaldic mead, should find you short of understanding the limits of poetic flexibility when it comes to meter. Since poetry, owing to Timor Carminis, must be defended against gute Leute aber schlechte Musikanten—‘good people, but bad musicians’, metrical consciousness must not be introduced or reckoned with before we can be absolutely sure that strict and conventional formal rules of versification are followed—and understood.

Obsession with unintentional verse is typical of this academic genre because such expressions may look like perfectly acceptable more or less free verse, which cannot on formal or technical grounds be deemed either intentional or unintentional. This is the reason why MS’s subtitle – how metrical are they? reads: are they metric enough to my taste? Instead of speaking of Early Runic verse as a fluffy matter, at best a consensus-driven concept, resulting in an unspecific corpus of good and bad verse that didn’t bother Oðinn a bit, MS proclaims that in his article Early Runic inscriptions will be classed into groups (six as it were) and assessed in terms of their metrical features (MS p.4). In the end – but actually from the very beginning – this classification represents a ‘metrical state of indeterminacy’ (MS p.17) in which prehistoric man composes his expressions. Having read MS’s article 0ne understands that if prehistoric man had bothered to study Andreas Heusler’s Deutsche Versgeschichte—A History of German Verse (1925), indeterminacy would have not have existed.

Indeterminacy nevertheless, is hopeful, since it indicates that little by little prehistoric man evolves, stops being vague, pulls himself together and starts writing the ‘high’ style that to MS is a precondition for writing verse. Heusler, by the way, didn’t deny that less formal poetry, or poetry governed by melody or song were legitimate means of poetic expression. 

Nevertheless, MS (p. 17f) quotes Andreas Heusler, who has been with the author from the very beginning of the article (MS p.3), and goes on to say that he fully subscribes to Kari Ellen Gade’s doubts about the alliterative poetic status of the earliest inscriptions. Yet he seems unable to convey any doubts at all – in MS’s opinion they are not metric enough. Needless to say MS doesn’t doubt the existence of his six classes of indeterminate inscriptions. Doubting these classes is a matter of taste and that cannot be discussed. In Andreas Heusler’s work we don’t come across any six classes of indeterminate expressions. Heusler knows that there is a lot one must accepted when it comes to poetry.

 

MS’s critique is based on three criteria, i.e. lack of: (1) syllable-count; (2) quantity-sensitivity (see box above) and (3) the structural complexity of the alliterative scheme (MS p.3). The first criterion dismisses thousands of lines in epic and lyrical poems in which the long lines vary considerably without observing any strict patterns. None the less, there are usually more syllables in descriptive epic long lines than in those of direct poetic speech. The example from On the Reading Rest April 30, the episode containing Wealhtheow’s speech, is telling. The second criterion is somewhat esoteric and again dismisses a great number of lines for no apparent reason. The last criterion compares to arbitrariness, since when in essence, is structure and complexity—structural and complex enough? Naturally, MS points to the fact that alliterations feature in everyday speech and that there are complex alliterative patterns in prose. Such patterns are basic, a backdrop reflected in and reflecting poetry, but to MS basic is not enough and perhaps disqualifying (MS p.4). In the end metrical problems boil down to the fact that to MS’s mind Early Runic inscriptions are not, metrically speaking, strictly odd enough. Predictably MS finds no verses in these inscriptions.

The only specific reason why we discuss whether those who wrote Early Runic considered expressing themselves in some kind of meter, is to investigate whether or not some of the meters that we know from later Eddaic poems had forerunners—or to rephrase: was there a poetic commitment when the old fools of the Roman Iron Age were overthrown, (On the Reading Rest, Hogganvik) together with some of their rune stones, by the new elite who didn’t favour literacy. We need to know this in order to answer the following question in the affirmative: did the long lines and full lines, needed to construct Fornyrðislag and Lióðaháttr, exist before we read them in the Edda? If these two lines existed, they would have allowed Early Iron Age man to compose epic and lyric verse and develop the oral poetry behind the Eddaic poems.

If we can find these line patterns in Early Runic inscription as well as in the Poetic Edda or in epic poems, then that is sufficient to consider them examples of prosody. The affirmative answer is important because it indicates that upper class hall as an archeological phenomenon and formal poetry were contemporary. Probably poetry is much older, but being a mid-millennium hall owner with no access to formal poetry, with no scop in his hall, is comparable to a theater owner with no plays and no actors.

A long line must consist of two half lines each with two stressed syllables. Between the half lines there must be a caesura—a cut. This is a basic way of expressing oneself in Germanic languages and we meet it daily e.g. in newspapers. To The Independent on the www April 21 this structure came in handy at least three times:
Real men want to talk about sex – we need to start listening
Essex appeal: the only way is Amy Child
Still the caesura may not be a complete break and perhaps forced:
The Weatherman caught in a media storm (and easily come before or after in)
and exactly which syllables to stress is not always that clear either:
Real men want to talk about sex – we need to start listening
Real men want to talk about sex – we need to start listening.
Since meaning changes radically with the stress:
Real men want to talk about sex – we need to start listening
there is a prosodic point in marking out the stressed syllables. Conventionally that is done by alliteration, but alliterating on all four stressed syllables is considered heavy handed: Gibbon and Gareth, good-looking guys. Preferably therefore the fourth syllable should not alliterate and that makes: Gibbon and Gareth, good-looking friends a suitable long line. Alliteration on each side of the caesura is easy to hear and thus the pattern Susan and Gareth, good-looking friends is common, but even Gareth and Susan, good-looking friends often indicating two related expressions can be found because usually, having started with a stressed syllable, we expect alliteration in the first stressed syllable after the caesura. The number of unstressed syllables is not equally important although they must neither be too few nor too many.

Bearing this in mind there are several Early Runic long lines:

Ek Hlewagastiz Holtijaz     horna tawido      ´a a |a x       8+5     DR 12 †U [0]
Ek Wagigaz erilaz     Agilamundon                  ´x a |a x       7+5      N KJ69 U
Þrijoz dohtriz    dāliðun arbija*                         ´x a |a x      4+6      N KJ72 U
Fahiðu wil-ald     wigaz ek erilaz                        x a |a x       5+6      DR IK241,1 $U
ek Wiwaz after     Woðuriðe                                a x |a x       5+4      N KJ72 U
Wulþuþewaz     ni wajemariz                              a x |´a x     4+5       DR 7 $U
Hadulaikaz     ek Hagustaldaz                            a x |´a x     4+5       N KJ75 U
Wurte runoz     an walha kurne                          a x |´a x     4+5      DR IK184 U
witanda-halaiban     worahto [rūnō]z              a x |a x       6+5      N KJ72 U
Haha skaþi     haþu ligi                                         a x |a x      4+4       N KJ50 $U
____________________
* ð and þ can be taken to repesent voiced and unvoiced ’th’ – ’these’ and ’moth’.

Probably there are many more, but this sample is enough to show that long lines were composed, but also that the gentle alliterative pattern, a x |a x, in short lines, often with an optional upbeat, i.e. anacrusis, in the second half line, a x |´a x, was common. Short lines are common in the Poetic Edda too, but the gentle alliterative pattern (which is not), the length of the lines, the use of anacrusis and the lack of lines ending in a stressed one-syllable word (a x |a xꜝ) has nothing to do with development. These are stylistic choices perhaps related to the fact that the Early Runic lines are short inscriptions on objects rather than lines in long poems [1].

This said, some general linguistic differences between Early Runic and Eddaic long lines meet the eye. On average the syllable balance in the long lines is 4.5+4.4 in the Eddaic lines and 4.8+5.0 in the Early Runic. In balance they are thus rather similar. Nevertheless there is a difference in length of almost one syllable between the long lines, 8.9 and 9.8 syllables respectively. This is hardly the result of stylistic preference, inasmuch as it may conveniently be explained by the general change in Germanic languages in which between say 400 and 800 CE the number of syllables per word tends to drop. Early Runic with words such as daliðun, erilaz, fahiðu, halaiban, tawido, Wagigaz, witanda, worahto, in which the first volve tends to be long and the word accent grave, obviously has a more gentle character than Eddaic Norse where that kind of words is relatively speaking rare.

 

If we compare Early Runic prose, of which there is virtually nothing left, with long lines, we may argue that the latter try to restrict the number of syllables. Compared to one of the few pure-prose phrases Frarawadaz ana hahai is slaginas (U 877 U ) in which the stressed-unstressed syllable relation is 3:9, the typical long line relation, 4:5, indicates a long line composition that avoids unstressed syllables. In this stilistic endeavour, poetry is leading linguistic change and/or benefitting from it. Be this as it may, a conscious and gentle composition of long lines is typical of Early Runic compared to Eddaic lines. The meter is the same, the style differs but the outcome, Eddaic verse, is not surprising.

This brings us to the full line, i.e. a line with three stressed syllables. This too is a well-known structure implying that a statement, a composition otherwise running in fractions with two stressed syllables, is coming to an end. To The Independent on the www April 22 this structure came in handy: Tens of thousands of fun runners and amateur athletes set off in bright sunshine as the 32nd London Marathon got under way today. (end of paragraph). Probably, the most well-known example is Jane Austin’s ‘… …, must be in want of a wife’, which has a reasonable alliterative pattern, rather than ‘independent’ rhyme, helping the sentence to come to an end (2+2+3 stresses, end of paragraph).

 

A strophe in the Lióðaháttr comes to an end in this way and there is no point in looking for freestanding full lines, but well in finding the combination long line + full line.

A number of texts fit the pattern:
Haha skaþi     haþu ligi                       Ll     N KJ50 $U
wate hali hino horna*                          Fl
*There is no stress on ‘hino’ since the ‘i’ is short – a case of quantity-sensitivity, no less.

Þrijoz dohtriz    daliðun arbija          Ll     N KJ72 U
asijostez arbijane                                 Fl

Hadulaikaz     ek Hagustaldaz          Ll    N KJ75 U
hlaiwido mahu minino                       Fl

Although there are independent alliterations in the full line, there are also alliterative links from the long line to the full line. In some patterns these links are the only alliterative characteristic of the full line:

Wurte runoz     an walha kurne        Ll    DR IK184 U
Heldaz Kunimundiu                             Fl

ek Wiwaz after     Woðuriðe                    Ll    N KJ72 U
witanda-halaiban     worahto [rūnō]z  Ll
þez Woðuriðe staina                                  Fl

Binding from the long line to the full line in this way is most uncommon in the Poetic Edda, but nevertheless there are some ten examples out of c. 10,000 possible ones. This per mil is linked to the uneducated, e.g. serfs, and perhaps comic (probably old-fashioned) in their Eddaic irregularity.

This proto Lióðaháttr style ties in well with the gentleness of the long line patterns and it seems significant that the three examples that are straightforward Eddaic come from the western part of Norway and the roots of the Eddaic tradition. The stressed-unstressed relation in the full lines is 4:6, i.e. slightly less syllable-economic than in the long lines, but more economic than prose. Since full lines bring a poetic statement to an end, often in a kind of ritardando, this is expected.

One might write all kinds of verses in a smooth, heavy, bombastic, light or gentle non-prosaic style, and there is no reason to deny the poets of the fifth and six century CE the right to compose their lines and verses in their own write compared to later traditions, which they forego. Given second thoughts we may wonder how much oral poetry was never written down in the non-literacy centuries of the Pre Carolingian Iron Age when a new social elite established itself in Scandinavia.

NOTES
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[0] In Samnordisk runtextdatabas, which can be downloaded from http://www.runforum.nordiska.uu.se/samnord/ this and the following call numbers will lead to the inscriptions. If you look up the name of the inscription in the database you may continue to http://www.runenprojekt.uni-kiel.de/abfragen/standard/default_eng.htm where you will find more references under each name.

[1] Two Eddaic examples comparable to Early Runic long lines

VÖLUNDARKVIÐA
Ein nam þeira     Egil at verja,                                         a x │a x          4+5
fögr mær fira,     faðmi ljósum;                                       a a │a x          4+4
önnur var Svanhvít,     svanfjaðrar dró*,                     x a │a xꜝ         5+4
en in þriðja     þeira systir                                                x a │a x          4+4
varði hvítan     háls Völundar.                                        x a │a x          4+4
Sátu síðan     sjö vetr at þat                                            a a │a xꜝ         4+4
en inn átta     allan þráðu                                                a a │a x           4+4
en inn níunda     nauðr um skilði;                                 x a │a x           5+4
meyjar fýstusk     á myrkvan við,                                  a x │´a xꜝ       4+4
Alvitr unga,     örlög drýgja                                            a a │a x            4+4
Völuspá
Hljóðs bið ek allar     helgar kindir,                             a x │a x            5+4
meiri ok minni     mögu Heimdallar;                          a a │a x            5+5
viltu, at ek, Valföðr!     vel framtelja                            a a │a x            6+4
forn spjöll fíra,     þau er fremst um ma                     a a │´´a xꜝ      4+5
Ek man jötna     ár um borna,                                       a x │a x           4+4
þá er forðum     mik fœdda höfðu;                               x a │´a x         4+5
níu man ek heima,     níu íviði,                                     a x │a x           5+4
mjötvið mœran     fyr mold neðan                               a a │´a x         4+4
Ár var alda     þar er Ýmir bygði,                                  a a │´´a x       4+6
vara sandr né sær     né svalar unnir                      ´´a aꜝ │´a x        5+5
___________
*dró and so on indicates that the last stress is on the last one-syllable word.

 

The Poor Man’s Money in the Carolingian Iron Age

This week on the Reading Rest I have a book:

James Graham-Campbell, Søren M. Sindbæk and Gareth Williams (eds). Silver Economies, Monetisation and Society in Scandinavia, AD 800-1100. Aarhus University Press. 2011.

This is a conference publication and a good one too not least while it is a mixture of current ideas, and some old ones. The new perspectives dominate, but there are a number of problems that one would hope had general answers although the answers have a contextual basis only. To mention just one essential question: What is the relation in time between the date representing the minting of a coin and the one representing the day it was hoarded and eventually forgotten?

Far from being a comprehensive overview Silver Economies is a collection of mostly interesting contributions. Notwithstanding, I chose to comment upon a phenomenon that I happened to observe thirty odd years ago, when I was interested in coin weights and Oriental coins found on Gotland. The phenomenon was a simple one:

Early Oriental coins are slightly underweight compared to later coins.
Oriental coins are overrepresented among stray finds, i.e. coins probably lost while circulating rather than being hoarded.
When circulating coins, there is a general tendency to introduce lightweight and consequently early Oriental coins. Consequently, once again, one would tend to hoard surplus i.e. relatively speaking inactive coins i.e. fortune in relatively speaking younger and heavier coins.

One of the problems characterizing studies concerning the period in question is the old view upon the Viking Age as a leap from prehistory to history, from Heathendom to Christianity, from petty kingdoms to nation states. A period of progress, when a number of hitherto unknown and more advance cultural phenomena were introduced as part of the evolution of society, the Viking Age is supposed to be Viking and vigorous. Traditionally, monetization, i.e. understanding the principle of the nominal value and commensurability in a coin, and thus currency as being a legal or agreed upon tender, was one of the progresses embraced by barbarian Vikings, about to become civilized Christians. The idea of the brutally primitive Pagan becoming tolerably Christian is an old one, reflected already in Carolingian poetry commenting upon Danes and Northmen (cf. On the Reading Rest June 13^th 2011), but also in the odd 20^th century Viking Congress.

When it comes to the introduction of monetization in Scandinavia this Viking view has to be abandoned.

When the Roman Empire expanded northwards some coins started to reach Scandinavia. They were mostly silver or gold and few and far between. Silver and gold coins were valuable, but generally speaking uninteresting from a monetary point of view although they must have changed hands. The interesting coins, as it happens, are the ones with a negligible metal value, i.e. coins consisting mainly of copper.

These low-value coins have been known for years, but the use of metal detectors has added significantly to their number, especially in Denmark where the method is safely organized. Their distribution in Scandinavia meets the eye, because they are frequent in Central Scandinavia where there are no other Roman coins. Their chronological distribution is odd too, because they are sometimes very old, even 3^rd century BC. Their greatest quality, nevertheless, is the fact that they are often very uncommon types – the further inland the odder. Lastly, when found in inland hoards the time span represented by the coins may be several hundreds of years and the youngest coins in such a hoard may be an Ottoman copper coin [1]. Like old Oriental coins they don’t easily drop out of circulation.

Low-value Roman coins in Scandinavia

Antiquaries once had a tendency to see them as imported in modern times, but today there is little reason to believe that, not least why the distribution of these coins mirrors routes from inland to coastland Scandinavia and vice versa. The most frequented seems to have been the one stretching from the Stockholm area to Darlecarlia.

We cannot see the roads themselves, only places along the route where the coins were likely to be lost or hoarded.

Stockholm is the obvious import situation and transshipment area with small hoards on the islands, e.g. under the Parliament or from Djurgården and stray finds such as the one on the hillock where Historiska Museet stands today as well as further off in the outskirts of today’s city. The first stop along the route towards the inland is Stäket, a couple of stray finds at a typical communication point, or Väsby. The next is Sigtuna, hoard and stray finds, before we reach the Uppsala area. From these plains we proceed all the way to Darlecarlia where hoards and stray finds are plentiful.

Further north this coastland-inland pattern is even more obvious owing to communication along the rivers.

It stands to reason that the use of coins in the inland has something to do with the exploitation of the inland and the transshipment of goods bringing them further south. Likewise the simplest way of understanding this usage, within a restricted economy involving trappers and farmers, middleman or supercargo, is to suggest that the coins fulfill their purpose because they are uncommon and impossible to imitate in Scandinavia. Their value is negotiated in a market situation. This economy was probably limited: valuables such as fur against everyday commodities and clothes. The reason for such an economy is in all probability the fact that trappers cannot be expected to carry off their surplus in goods.

The point in all this is the fact that from the Early Iron Age and onwards Scandinavians understood the idea of monetization, of nominal coin value and of the self-regulating market. It was a limited market circulating goods. The nominal value of a coin was probably just ‘one’, and the real value negotiated.

But it was a market and it had nothing to do with the Viking Age. The Viking Age, as it happens, is just the enhancement during the Carolingian Iron Age of phenomena introduced during the Early Iron Age.

In Silver Economies, Monetisation and Society in Scandinavia, AD 800-1100, Birgitta Hårdh and Ingrid Gustin draw attention to the abovementioned facts about the circulating Oriental coins, they are old, in their cases on Viking Age market places such as Kaupang, Birka and Uppåkra where the expected relation to the hoards from Scania is pointed out by Birgitta Hårdh. The pattern disclosed by Hårdh and Gustin link in with the well-known fact that there is much more silver in Scandinavian than necessary to keep the market economy going. And obviously those who owned silver didn’t find it necessary to put their silver into circulation, creating inflation, in order to get hold of the goods on the market. Nominal circulation of coins and coins factions simply wasn’t big business. Predictably the weight of coins and coin fragments, even their accumulated weight, is negligible. That large amounts of silver changed hands at market places as well as on farms and in halls is obvious and so is the inflation when it comes to the value of beads and bronze (cf. Sindbæk’s article in Silver Economies, Fig.2.1.). By the way, there are early hoards of beards and simple jewelry belonging to the  5^th and 6^th century in Eketorps borg on Öland.

Ultimately, coins circulating on the market place originate with the large silver owners. They in their turn belong to landowning families mainly engaged in import and contractual distribution and redistribution of large amounts of bullion and jewelry outside the market place. Buying ships and arranging marriages, e.g. in order later on to inherit land, may be activities belonging to this sphere of economy. There is a limit to these transactions since, e.g. on insular Gotland, landowning families cannot avoid making fortunes of their silver. Obviously, these sliver owners must also have supplied the market place economy with small amounts of silver, successfully controlling inflation. Some of the silver goes back into their hoards, because ultimately they produce real values such as goods, and some enters into the surplus of those who sell on the market, e.g. craftwork or services. When we consider the small amount of silver, it seems likely that large owners of silver introduces only a very small fraction of their silver directly into the market place. They may of course buy on the market, but also supply their pit house dwellers, such as weavers and smiths, with silver coins for their products, before the farm owners bring cloth, combs and iron tools to the urban economy. Their pit house dwellers and farm hands on the other hand will benefit from the nominal market economy in places such as Kaupang and Birka and Uppåkra.

The Roman copper coins and the Oriental silver coins circulating in market economies during the first millennium AD suggest that in Scandinavia market economy was introduced in the periphery of the economy, not as a splendid mind-broadening innovation, but reluctantly and primarily as a result of the social stratification of society in which there is a need to satisfy a demand for commodities among the landless, such as trappers and pit house dwellers. This stratification and the number of landless were no doubt growing during the whole of the first millennium AD. When it comes to economy, the Carolingian Iron Age was a revival or a renaissance enhancing concepts and phenomena understood already in the Early Iron Age. As pointed out in Silver Economies, e.g. by Sindbæk, the dynamics of the urban networks in the Carolingian Iron Age were an instigating force also in Scandinavian economy. In order at least in part to explain the difference between the Roman and the Carolingian Iron Age we may in other words point the difference between two kinds of urbanism, the Colonial and stagnating Roman, and the Indigenous and dynamic Northwest European. The Vikings were but a symptom and a revival of an Early Iron Age Scandinavian phenomenon.

NOTES
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[1] Recently Inger Zachrisson has discussed and catalogued the Roman coins in Central Sweden with a view to Early Iron Age trade. Zachrisson, Inger. 2010 Vittnesbörd om pälshandel? Ett arkeologiskt perspektiv på romerska bronsmynt funna i norra Sverige. Fornvännen. Årg 105:187-202. (Summary in English).

Participant Observation of the Human Landscape

This week on the reading rest I have an essay, Et ensomt folk i Norden, at least 73 years old, by the Danish artist Emilie Demant. It was published in the liberal Danish newspaper Politiken (Dec 13 1938). I start by putting a translation into an endnote [1].

Emilie Demant

When humans manipulate the natural landscape e.g. to benefit economically from it, this primary landscape becomes a secondary, human, landscape. More or less, but always a little, a landscape civilised or marked by culture. Norwegian glaciers are a case in point and we are reminded of this not least this year when the settlement on Lendbreen between Lom and Skjåk in Breheimen National Park melted out of the ice. It was excavated with the utmost care and caution by the global warming slowly laying bare the fragile wooden objects used in the camp. It also revealed sticks planted in long lines on the glacier frightening and thus directing the reindeer into a timely death by the hunter’s bowshot. These lines, rather than the settlement, are the signs of the human landscape. Since Lendbreen proves that this tradition, living periodically on the ice, goes back 1700 years, Norwegian success exploring the Arctic and Antarctic doesn’t come as a surprise. Many of the finds from Lendbreen and Lomseggen ( http://www.oppland.no/Klimapark2469/Aktuelt/Jernalderleir-pa-breen–arkeologisk-sensasjon-/Funn-fra-Lendbreen/ ) are intriguing because they are objects, such as a bow, clothes, a horse shoe or a spade, that one would not without reason refrain from bringing back from the mountain. Instead they indicate that there were more valuable things to carry, i.e., fur, antlers, meat and so on. Landbreen was a zone of exploitation hunting wild reindeer during the summer. Exploiting inland Scandinavia was of paramount importance already during the Iron Age.

The High Mountains, Emilie Demant 1904

Emilie Demant tells us about the last of these mobile exploiters of inland Scandinavia as she experienced them, suppressed and colonized, in the beginning of the 20^th century. She sees them as remnants of the past and indeed as a people or a race, shaped by constants such as genetics (race), character and language. Still today many may agree with her, but it would seem to be more fruitful to understand the Sámi, as well as Scandinavians and Finns and Russians and others, as broadly speaking cultural phenomena. Be this as it may, the great value of her text is her non-colonial perspective. Instead of that, hers is participant observation. She understands the Sámi, who are Lapps to her, on the basis of sharing their daily life, which to the modern reader is the result of a historical process.

As it happens, she is one in an almost unknown row of observers who did not subscribe to the colonial perspective developing from the middle of the 19^th century and onwards. Mostly these observers were women and it was probably a woman who most consciously brought the method into academic anthropology after the Second World War. Eventually participant observation helped deconstructing colonialism.

Form Emilie Demant's sketchbook. 'Det er ikke morsomt Vivaikajärvi d. 1. Augt. 07. Det er ikke morsomt - 'It is no fun', refers to the head moulding seen in the sketch.

Certainly there were many more participant observers than I know about, but nevertheless this analytical sub-culture could have started with Georg August Wallin, from Åland, who managed to pose as a Muslim and understand the Muslims as indeed ordinary people like Finns and Swedes already in 1845 when Edward Lane was well into Orientalism. The vicar’s wife on Runö, a island in the Baltic, who did not share her husband’s colonial look at the islanders in the early 20th century went a step further because she did not pose as anything. She simply had a look at daily life.

The artist Emilie Demant’s understanding of the Sámi c. 1905-7 (1938) brought an anthropological perspective to the observations and finally Laura Bohannon’s participant observation of the Tiv in Nigeria (1950s) became a model of the post-war anthropological study [2].

In some ways their points of view are dated, but their perspective is not: subsistance, material and narrative culture, isolation and interaction shaped the people they observed and luckily the observers too. Identities are never constant, ethnicity and race, moreover, are the sad results of inadequate ‘covering’ historical analyses.

NOTES
____________________
[1] In 1983 the Museum in Skive published Emilie Demant Hatt – blade til en biografi ISBN 87-88126-01-3. In this publication the essay from Politiken was reprinted. My translation was done in a hurry, but the essay is interesting because it is genuinely favourable to the Sámi. I will improve the translation little by little.

A Lonely People in the North
Lappland! Mountains and empty snow expansions, the dark season, northern lights and midnight sun. There is shiver and lure in each of the words. In Lappland too Sweden has its huge iron mines. The railway, Gällivara-Kiruna-Narvik, brings abroad the iron ore, and travellers from abroad up into Lappland. The wastelands and the strange people are now accessible to groups of tourists. One can understand the many foreigners who travel there. It is astonishing that here in Scandinavia in our day and age one may still meet a people dressed in hides and pursuing reindeer nomadism, a people that speaks a language far from our own, lives in sunken huts or in movable tents. There is much to see for those who come from our commonplace civilization.

On the surface the life of the Lapps is splendid enough – indeed scenic and dazzeling – but nevertheless, their subsistence is not exactly a Sunday treat. The Lapps are a small people leading an ineffable hard daily life in harsh surroundings where no one else can or will. I speak here of those Lapps who are still nomads. With them I lived more than a year as one of their own. I was met with much mistrust. ‘Why do you want to live with us? Our life is so hard at the peasants wouldn’t even send their dogs with us’.

One must be Lapp to understand that it is more than a presumption that their way of living is troublesome and full of difficulties – indeed dangers. Bethink that the whole of the nomad’s estate is a flock of reindeer a herd of racing deer grazing large areas in wayless terrain. They are animals with the nature of a migrating bird, changing their abodes with the seasons. It is a deer, which never entres a byre. They accept no contiguity. Only a few are tamed – the draught animals. Taming a young strong male reindeer is laborious task probably resembling that of the cowboy breaking in a horse. But the Lapp doesn’t ride the reindeer, he’s is a tug-of-war with the reindeer. When the lasso sweeps down over the reindeer, that is about to be disciplined the fight strats. The lasso is several fathoms long, but the animal darts off and stretch the rope, then keeping a steady grip, following the reindeer and steadily shortening the rope is what matters. The captured reindeer thinks it is fighting for its life as if the wolf had it in its claws. Its eyes are wild and the thong hangs out. Man and reindeer falls down, they struggle in the snow above and below each other. The Lapp has lost his hat long ago and his long hair sticks to his sweaty face, and the hair of the reindeer flies around in torn off tufts. Both the Lapp and the reindeer groan, but they don’t scold each other, neither of them can afford it.

At long last  they are standing up in front of each other trembling after the furious fight watching each other’s slightest movement. Then the reindeer tries once again to escape, but the lasso is still in its place – and by the lasso the Lapp is fastened. There’s no way out – no way what so ever. The reideer id tired. The Lapp can draw the animal behind him even though it still capers. Naturally, a reindeer isn’t broken in after this fight alone, but the worst wildness has gone. And when it has been hitched after tame reindeer a few times you can come so close to it that you can train it to the packsaddle.

A move is always decided by the reindeer – either an area is grazed off or ice and snow prevents the animals from finding food.

Then the camp is moved to a new area where conditions are supposed to be better. The day we move there’s lots to do. Some go out to gather the herd and catch the draught reindeer. While that goes on the women are in a hurry packing up everything and sharpening the burdens. When the snow is not to be trusted we move with the draught reindeer. Everything must be prepared when the animals arrive because they cannot be kept waiting. The strength of the reindeer is very limited and they must eat and rest at certain hours that must not be passed. If a reindeer is overexerted to the point of exhaustion it dies in a few days. It is very harsh during a move with starved and overexerted animals to hitch off a fallen reindeer and leave it. It may be a beloved tame draught reindeer who cannot go any longer. It get up and staggers along after the others. The owner clenches his teeth – the two will never see each other again.

But when people and animals are cheerful and strong, then moving is an enjoyable experience, although a certain anxiety is preent in everybody – they know what’s at stake. The grown ups have enough to take care of – children and dogs get in the way. The dogs understand and keep away. The children don’t. They seldom see the reindeer and the presence of the herd exaggerates their activities. The bigger children walk around carefully marking the features of the animals and note who in the family they belong to, and with a lasso they try to catch the most domesticated. But they are stopped in their eagerness. Whatever you say, to the reindeer the lasso is an unpleasant experience and it cerates anxiety in the herd. The small children practice their best calling out to the dogs: ‘ci gouv huh!’. The dogs, however, do not listen to small children’s command words. But the grown-ups do. The children are hushed with a strong reprimand. The Lapps on the whole cannot stand unnecessary noise and commotion around themselves – perhaps this is due to the fear in the past of being spotted by robber bands.

Now everything is ready for moving, the last thing to do is loosening the tent canvass. It slides stiffly, rigid and sooty, down from the support of the ‘kåta’ and is swiftly folded in along its traditional folds. The tent rods are gathered in two bundles and placed, one on each side of the last draught reindeer, dragging along on the ground. It is always the same reindeer that carries the bars and it takes large turns around any obstacle while looking behind to see that everything is in order.

Off goes the ‘raid’, the long line of draught reindeer that carry everything the nomad owns, his personal estate, his house and small children. The last rods from the floor are placed on the abandoned hearth. When they have burnt out there is only a small round spot left of the Lapp’s home.

The moving is rapidly, ‘ the Lapp knows that darkness and mischief may soon come’. And he doesn’t want to be the last, ‘on him the evil falls.’

Such a moving in the early autumn brands itself for ever on the memory. We wandered to Paradise on top of the earth in the desolated high mountains. Beneath us a fire of colours. Down in the woods the trees stood like gold in blood. The sun followed us low fire red above the blue mountains at the horiziont.

The Lapps dress up when they move like this. The long rows of humans and reindeer are glooming in red. The large sky and the wide space tunes the colours to the purest harmony. And then there is the silence – a silence that stands as invisible columns into the sky. Lapps and reindeer walks soundlessly, we can hardly hear the steady creaking from the tendon in the reindeer’s legs. We are all silent. It may happen that one of the women slowly sings a verse from a psalm. The she holds her tongue. And the ‘raids’ are winding upwards in smooth lines. The sun has gone down but we walk in a sea of fire clouds. Then comes darkness. The fire clouds have die away and the stars appear, at the horizont the northern light starts to flash. So much beauty is almost impossible for a mortal to grasp. It is no wonder that the Lapps are deeply religious – they live so close to the heavenly sky. Their daily life nonetheless is hard enough.

There are no halcyon days for the reindeer’s herdsman – or a lapp dog. If the reindeer are nervous, catch the scent of wolves or storm advancing, the reindeer are like flying birds. The herdsmen and the dogs must run miles before they manage to gather and calm the animals. And the harder the weather, the harder the herding. The summer is short and not to be trusted. I have experienced frost and abundant snowfall in July. And even if the summer may be mild, the rest of the year is a battle with weather and terrain, fog, storms, snow and ice, darkness and biting frost.

The richest Lapp is he who toils the most. Feeble persons and the elderly just cannot look after the reindeer. Only young and swift legs can travel the dangerous tarrain. If the grassing is bad then the herdsmen and the dogs need to be unbelievably swift and diligent to keep the animals off the lands of other Lapps and away from the peasants’ small scattered haystacks. Even though such a trifle of hay looks rather unkempt, there is still enough for the peasants to demand indemnification from the Lapps.

Yet it must be admitted that reindeer husbandry can deteriorate in vast areas. When this goes on for several years, the Lapps are always accused of laziness. If the case was thoroughly investigated it would probably become apparent that there were other reasons for the distress. The people of the mountains are suppressed and harassed from all sides by laws and decrees. One deprives them of their lands but still thinks that they can sustain the nomadism and make the desolated mountains profitable. Their capacity to exploit the mountains it the reason why they are not totally squeezed to death as reindeer nomads. But one makes the people poor and poverty may weaken its character – even ours. One reproaches them of their drunkenness and because the trade with tourists. But is it so strange that Lapps without means, who have no reindeer to look after, tries to earn some cash from selling trifles to the tourists? And that a Lapp get drunk when on a summers day he is in the vicinity of a village, is hardly something to blame him for. At home he never drinks.

The people of the mountains are much criticized. Naturally they like others are no angels. Envy flowers by them as well as us. The quest for the limited grassing areas is too harsh and that is why their internal relations are often tense. Neighbour will grass off each other’s districts. And a Lapp who comes with many animals and finds the grassing spoiled by another man’s herd will see his reindeer die and in a short while he may sink down to live by a lake doing some miserable fishing or get a small allowance.

This is often the tragic backdrop for every small Lapp community visited by tourists.

The nomads are a hard-pressed people. In prehistory they travelled freely all over the northern part of Scandinavia. But they were always taxed. In the Middle Ages tax collectors went to Lapland to obtain the high-priced hides for the elegant furs of the Herrenvolk. And their old legends tell about brutal gangs of robber plundering and killing both Lapps and reindeer – ruoššacuddi they are called in the legends. And about the man-eating Scandinavian Stalo there are innumerable stories. Later the Lapps got rid of the robbers, but then came the regulations of the borders and in later days the disastrous restrictions of their freedom, their lands and their herds. Add to this that still today the Lapp is despised – and he knows it – and what’s more he feels he is treated unjustly. There is more status in being a common miner – organized and living in a sedentary community – than in being a ‘free son of the mountains’. Is it to be wondered at that the young Lapps seek employment in the mines when they no longer have reindeer, that is, no future in their own field. Bur who knows the nomads? Nobody! The Lapps live in great isolation. Hey are an outstanding race and neither peasants nor Herrenvolk want any real collaboration with them. Even of the mountain people dress and speak like those surrounding them, even if they adapt to their daily life, they will never be admitted among the settled. And the Lapps know. Their self esteem they can only live out among their own in the wild and among the reindeer. But when they come down from the high mountains into heavy air and meet the heftier people, they crumble, become insecure and lowly. He who approaches a unknown door and knocks doesn’t have the same confidence as he who shouts ‘Come in!’.

To the peasant there is a feeling of security in being a freeholder, to have a home of his own even if it is poor. It increases the feeling of being superior to have a ‘castle’, a place where you rule and feel protected. The Lapp has no castle, he is barely allowed to build a house like the others. When he takes down his tent and pack it for the moving, then he is homeless. He lives nowhere. He appears and disappears we know not where. In the eyes of the peasants he belongs to the layabouts.

When I lived with them, I became myself so much of a Lapp that I felt this inferiority in relation to the settled, although we only visited poor peasants. When we stood there after a trek with our bundles and many dogs out in the weather for some reason seeking accommodation on the farm, then there was not much self-esteem left. Yet, we were most often welcome since in our bundles we had excellent foodstuff for preparing a feast – a meal of meat and fat with a strong soup is a rarity among the peasant who mostly survive on sour milk, bread and a little fish.

The Lapps become isolated also because among them they speak a language others don’t understand. This always creates mistrust and a feeling of something mystic. Until lately, moreover, the Lapps were accused of sorcery. Old people will remember this even if today’s youth on both sides are laughing at old superstition. It’s important too that we do not befriend those to whom we do injustice. In their dealings with the Lapps, the peasants are always right. That’s the law.

The Lapps are like game, which prefers to hide, but when they venture to come forward they attract attention. Then they draw fire. Their critics give them hell.

Although the nomads’ life is tedious and difficult, they have their pleasures too. The young are young with few worries. The greatest happiness are the reindeer. ‘Renlykke’, Reindeer luck is a word with a deep meaning among the Lapps. They collect reindeer as we collect money. And their living fortune is their perpetual joy and they take a greater aesthetical pleasure in their animals than we take in looking at our savings book. The sight of a large reindeer herd on the move is a religious revelation so stupefying that we are silenced by it. It is also difficult for a Lapp to slaughter reindeer for the market. ‘Meat production’ is disagreeable to the nomad’s mind. In old times one would rather hunger a little than slaughter enough for the household. The Lapps love their animals more than peasants their cattle. They sing for the reindeer: ‘Silk breast, silk breast you rush like a sunbeam’. The Lapp’s way of singing, the jojk, is something completely different from what we understanding by song. A child got a vuoleh – a few words and a simple tune to go with them. That song escorted the whole life. If somebody wanted to speak about a person then one didn’t need to say the name singing the tune was enough for everybody to know who it was. You would jojk about everything: there were songs of slander, love songs, songs to the wolf, to the snow: ‘white snow – star flake’. The young man could jojk to his girlfriend: ‘living gold, living gold!’. In the old days the herdsmen would jojk in the night when they sat by each other while the reindeer rested. They taught each other melodies and collected new ones. And older Lapps at home in the tent (kota) often sang in the night.

Then the Lapps grew silent, old Christianity was merciless to ‘the pagan jojk’. The priests took the song from the mountain people, with which they expressed all movements in their souls. Now they sing what they have learnt in school.

In spite of everything that has changed the Lapps are nevertheless a remnant of prehistory – a lonely people in the North.
— *–

 [2] Georg August Wallin’s time in Egypt, where is view upon Arabs and Egyptians was formed, has been described by Sofia Häggman in her book Alldeles Hemlikt, Helsingfors 2011::411ff. Charlotta Hillerdal has touched upon the vicar’s wife, Adeleide Schantz, in People in Between, Uppsala 2009:185ff, and Laura Bohannon, has described her study of the Tiv in several books and articles. Her essay Sheakespeare in the Bush can be found at http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/picks-from-the-past/12476/shakespeare-in-the-bush

Archaeological Heritage Management—Part Two: The Archaeological Competence of the CAB

This week on the reading rest I have a short text, a comment by a civil servant at a County Administrative Board, a CAB. His comment is a note meant as feed-back to the authors of the first draft of the report ‘Riksväg 56’ (See On the Reading Rest, 17 October, 2011).

God in action expecting the elements to behave

 Now and again in days past, when power was invested in someone, there was a need to express or write down substantial rather than modal opinion. Thus, when God said: ‘let there be light’ he feared no disobedience on the part of the elements. They obeyed. Later on in end of late 6^th century CE one of God’s representatives, Pope Gregory the Great, who was a man of many parts, holdings and estates, had some problems with one of his vice deacons, a man called Peter, who looked after some of Gregory’s lands in Sicily. Peter was responsible for collecting taxes and dues among the tenants. The latter were obliged to pay in pure gold by weight. They used gold coins, solidi, when putting together their payments, because they had to, and because the stamp on a coin guaranteed that the gold was pure. I reality the coin weight, which ought to have been exactly 1/72^nd of a pound was a trifle lightwight and Peter would thus need to exert a little more than 72 solidi to obtain a pound of gold. Peter, as it happened, asked the tenants for no less than 73.5 solidi to make up a pound.

Gregory in a 17th c version writing a letter

Gregory, therefore, sat down and wrote to Peter pointing out that he mustn’t act in this way because the pound in question was not the heavy one, but the lighter one, i.e. the one from which 72 solidi are meant to be coined. In his polite and acute expressions almost bordering on irony Gregory conveys the obvious: if one takes out 73.5 solidi per pound then one would certainly swindle the tenants because in addition to one’s salary from Gregory, one could expect to put c. one solidus in one’s own pocket for each pound passed on into the system.Gregory urged Peter to stop and he concluded his letter thus: ‘Now you know what I want! See to it that you do it!’ Disobedience was not an option and arguing that 1/72^nd is just a trifle 1.38 percent on everybody’s taxes would not have helped Peter.

When the first version of the report on the pre-investigations for the new road 56, Stenålder längs nya riksvägen 56, (see On the Reading Rest, A Mesolithic Road Show: The System Killers, 17 October, 2011), was send in to the CAB one of its archaeologists sat down and read the manuscript carefully. The draft became dotted with notes in the margins and the main points were collected in a summary strongly suggesting a number of changes. The comments were intended for the authors [1]. In Swedish the comments look like this:

I have translated two sections because they concern the notorious Fig 4 that shows us the exponential growth of knowledge (see A Mesolithic Road Show):

‘Besides the below series of comments marked with bullets there are two things in the report which, as I see it, must be changed and/or clarified.

Firstly … …’

‘Secondly, I must express my doubts concerning the theory presented in Fig. 4. It is argued that ’a useful understanding’ of a site will be reached first when c. 100% of its space has been investigated. Does that mean that a pre-investigation of 1 or 50 percent amounts to almost the same? (something that is implied in Fig.4). In my opinion a useful understanding will commence instantly. ’What happened on the site’ must not be understood as equal to the testimony of the remaining material traces. What we can know about the events on a site is the result of interpretation, which is probably a hermeneutic process in which a growing amount of investigation/empirically retrieved data will make interpretation progress. This process of interpretation is also dependant on what we know from other sites. It is rather unclear where, in the range between less or more knowledge/understanding, we ought to situated investigation results comprising 1 percent of a site.  One must understand that the investigation of the other 99 percent will hardly raise the understanding by 99 percent, although a larger pre-investigation area would of course have caught more datable material, more constructions etc. A 100 percent investigation, moreover, is not equal to ’a complete comprehensible understanding of what happened on a site’, since on a site those events that did not leave any material traces are nevertheless part of an interpretation of the site. That means that an investigate space of 1 percent may be very useful. (Well, this was a lot of words, but as pointed out: In my opinion Fig. 4 is problematic.’

It is difficult not to agree, and not to see that this civil servant goes out of his way to give the authors qualified feed-back. However, believing knowledge, consistency and clarity to be the point, he doesn’t end his comments in the vein of Gregory the Great. Perhaps he should have done just that, since, as pointed out in A Mesolithic Road Show, Fig 4 in the definite version of the report, is central to the lenghtly discussion from which it ought to have been excluded. The authors did as they pleased – nothing!

This situation is all the more troublesome, when we consider that the civil servant has a PhD in Archaeology. That kind of competence is not common among CAB officers and in thhis case we may suspect that his training is one of the reasons why his comments stand out as sound and to the point. How come then that his advice is neglected? The answer is simple enough: there is a tendency among field archaeologists and report authors not to consider the CABs competent, not even when CAB officers are indeed competent and intellectually superior to the odd field archaeologist or report author.

In the present case it would seem that the civil servant was a most dutiful and considered Peter, however, with no Gregory to back him up.

*

Ultimately, there are two reasons for cases such as riksväg 56, and indeed generally speaking the present situation, in which the CABs are under-staffed to the disadvantage of their heritage management.

Firstly, the staffs are expected to be experts on all periods of prehistory in each County. Since there is an awful lot of expert knowledge to master, there is no way four or fewer persons can succeed.
Secondly, the staffs are overburdened with routine cases (surveys and pre-investigations) and thus given little, except their spare time, to keep up-to-date with the field of their interest. Consequently, in a knowledge-base trade constantly developing the archaeological source material, they lose competence and eventually the CAB’s are no longer respected. They become ‘desktop archaeologists’ in the belittling jargon of the field archaeologist.

This, nevertheless, needs not be the case and two or three decisions will remedy today’s truly appalling situation.

 The New Organizing of CAB investigations

(1) Prehistory didn’t happen in counties nor can it be properly understood in relation to moderns administrative units. CABs therefore ought to pool their resources when it comes to evaluating the archaeology of their administrative duties. Dividing the country into five archaeological regions, as sketched in the adjacent map, would seem reasonable. Since decisions in any given county must be based on more than an archaeological evaluation, decisions rest with the CAB in question.

Archaeological regions

(2) Creating regional offices for handling archaeological investigations related to heritage management and the supervision of final-excavations will give rise to a respected group of antiquaries with a high level of continuously growing competence when it comes to archaeology and heritage management.

(3) Since contract archaeology needs a greater research input, not least in order to make it less rigid and thus cheaper, it would be prolific if these five investigation offices were situated in towns combining archaeological university departments and CABs such as Umeå, Uppsala, Gothenburg, Kalmar and, the exception to prove the rule, Lund.

With a reformed Conservation Act (as sketched in  Archaeological Heritage Management Part One) and a new administrative structure to go with it, the archaeological market will work as well as markets can. Since all markets and their actors are driven by profit, they (rather than the tax payers, who, having been approached by the market, seek to minimize the profits of the entrepreneur) must pay also for the control of their performance.

The present half-measures are pathetic and they ought to be reformed. The reason for this is simple: if, partly for your own benefit, you want to exploit and/or develop society as indeed constructers and developers are aiming at, then your shall have to pay for it. If it doesn’t pay it’s not worth while.

 ________________________

NOTES
[1] The Principle of public access to official records, makes it possible for everyone to visit the County Administrative Board and check the case as I did 10 November 2011 in the afternoon.

Archaeological Heritage Management—Part One: The Reformed Heritage Conservation Act

This week on the reading rest I have a governmental report in the Departmental Series (Ds):

Ökad konkurrens på det uppdragsarkeologiska området – vissa ändringar i kulturminneslagen. Ds 2011:6 62 pp. Regeringskansliet, Kulturdepartementet. Stockholm. (Increased Competition in the Field of Contract Archaeology—Some Changes in the Heritage Conservation Act)

Publications in the Ds aren’t exactly blockbusters. That too goes for the report presently on the rest, Ds 2011:6, which can nevertheless be studies, albeit in Swedish only, at:

http://www.regeringen.se/download/18c66ec6.pdf?major=1&minor=161370&cn=attachmentPublDuplicator_0_
attachment

The Heritage Conservation Act can be studied, in English, at:

http://www.raa.se/cms/showdocument/documents/extern
webbplats/2009/september/kml_eng.pdf

In connection with Operation Desert Storm, American archaeologists drew up a list of sites that must not be targeted because of their cultural, historical value — their value for civilization as it were. This was a decent thing to do and the list became a means to protect these monuments from collateral damage during the operation. Although the exact number of listed sites is unknown it was hardly more than a thousand and that, consequently, makes the compilation a slightly naïve endeavour.

If namely the aim of the list was to protect the ancient monuments and remains in Iraq, then it ought to have contained c. one hundred thousand known sites or more, since in reality there are many more. Because the list was so short, it was in effect a list of something else, i.e. a shortlist of unique and completely indispensable sites when it comes to cultural heritage.  When collateral damage was nevertheless registered, it came as no surprise that the damage-winning monuments were highlights such as the Ziggurat in Ur. What else could they be?

This meant that the real problem with the list was the grading of monuments that followed from its very compilation: if a site is on the list, then it must be protected. If it is not on the list, we can do as we please. In effect, therefore, the list became a carte blanche for anyone who wanted to forget about all the everyday monuments that describe the long-term history of any country. The list therefore was the very first triumph of the victorious colonialism behind Operation Desert Storm, a victory that reduced the ancient monuments of Iraq to exactly the fraction deemed indispensable by the united colours of Pentagon and American Archaeology. Since ‘Mesopotamia’, the land currently occupied by Iraq, is ‘the cradle of civilization’ according to American experience, and since a lot of us consider ourselves civilized, the list was potentially a list of world heritage monuments, i.e. a list of the visible remains of our cradle. Don’t touch my Ziggurat, my Acropolis, my Forum or my Capitol hill.

According to the Department of Defense, Iraq under Saddam Hussein started to neglect the cradle and brought on everything that followed, since:

‘Until August 2, 1990 — the day Iraq invaded Kuwait, thus precipitating the 12-nation response in 1991 known as Operation Desert Storm — Iraq’s cultural property and cultural heritage resources (its museums, monuments, archives, religious sites and archaeological heritage) were among the most well managed in the world.’
http://www.cemml.colostate.edu/cultural/09476/chp04-11iraqenl.html

Not everybody could agree completely with the Department of Defense:  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=978050
In 2003 a list of 5000 ‘non-strikes’ list was suggested: http://www.meforum.org/609/museum-madness-in-baghdad
And in the event there was a report on the inevitable damages caused by the operations of the Second Gulf War on places such as Babylon, Uruk … … .
http://www.britishmuseum.org/PDF/Iraq%20Report_with%20images.pdf

In 2005 The Guardian published a leader (Saturday 15 January 2005 at 16.19 GMT) and a map on ’The damage wrought by the construction of an American military base in the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon ... ‘ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jan/15/iraq.guardianleaders

In Scandinavia we were not surprised because hundreds of years ago we invented governmental protection of ancient monuments, and the archaeology to go with it. We have already seen lists – arranging monuments in classes according to their heritage value – turned up-side down to become lists of demolition, protecting the most valuable classes only. The legislation behind this invention, i.e. a series of heritage conservation acts, is always built on the same principles: Because they are proof of our history and thus valuable to all of us, ancient monuments and remains, which are nevertheless threatened by different kinds of marauders, must be protected by law, and if necessary the law must be enforced. Because ancient monuments and remains are seen to have a value, and because some are more valuable, i.e. more memorable, than others, and because ancient monument and remains are more or less well-preserved, they must be defined and ranked accordingly.

Despite being protected, ancient monuments and remains may therefore become dispensable because of the greater good of the Nation such as building roads or invading Iraq. And rightly so, since building roads and fighting wars are significant cultural affairs that must ‘take place’, and the place they take and the remains they create and the monuments they erect must be preserved as our heritage – at least to a certain point.

In Scandinavian we have in other words prioritized for centuries and most people within the trade know that prioritizing is a matter of supporting some parts of the past and suppressing others. We understand this to be an expression of a political and ideological power once uniting the nation. Today priotitizing express of our freedom and democracy. And this doesn’t come as a surprise because archaeology, the discipline, has always been a matter of demonstrating power for the benefit of those who argue that the good heritage is theirs, as we do in Iraq or did in Sápmi. Archaeology as an academic discipline and profession was formalized and consequently financed on these grounds. Still, in many cases archaeology as a research topic works against the selfsame principle, trying to make the whole past and all monuments and remains interesting in their own right.

*

Owing to the usual procedure, Ds 2011:6 was referred to consideration according to a long list of interested parties and easily turned down by an overwhelming majority. Probably the Heritage Conservation Act will not be changed because of Ds 2011:6 [1].

That is a great pity! The act needs to be reformed. There are two reasons for this: (1) the Heritage Conservation Act has drifted away from its legislative foundation and (2) on average the archaeological competence in the County Administrative Boards (CABs) is too low. So, lets us sketch some points in a reformed act and a new administration:

THE REFORMED HERITAGE CONSERVATION ACT
(1) The reformed act aims at protection, but opens up for demolition based on scientific methods of documentation and interpretation described in public scientific reports and summaries. Part of the materiality of the ancient monument is kept and protected in stores houses, documentation and reports in archives at the expense of the community.

(2) Knowledge of ancient monuments and remains stems from ground-penetrating and non-ground-penetrating methods. On a number of national monuments and sites, specified as a national map of plots, ground-penetrating methods are prohibited, because the existence and spatial definition of these monuments and remains have already been demonstrated.

(3) On all other lands non-ground-penetrating survey and scientific needle-stick/test-pit  sampling may be carried out by authorized excavation companies with the permission of the landowner after the CAB has been notified. Within one month of the termination of the survey, and every month during a longer survey, a report must be sent in to the CAB. The purpose of the survey must be to establish the presence of ancient monuments and remains in the surveyed area. The life length of the report is ten years.

(4) Having established the presence of ancient monuments and remains, a limited use of ground penetrating methods may be employed by authorized companies with the permission of the landowner after the CAB has been notified. The purpose is twofold: (4:1) to delimit monuments and remains and (4:2) to give a preliminary description and interpretation of monuments and remains by means of a limited number of test pits. (4:3) Two month after the pre-investigation or every second month in connections with long-term pre-investigations, a report must be sent in to the CAB. Based on these ground-penetrating pre-investigations it must be described how the ancient monuments and remains in question should be completely excavated, documented, described and published in a scientifically correct way as well as summarized in a way accessible to the public. The purpose of the pre-investigation is to define the presence and absence of ancient monuments and remains. The life length of the report is ten years. (4:4) Based on documentation and reports the CAB will establish the presence and absence of ancient monuments and remains in need of protection or demand supplementary information in order to take this step.

(5) Based on these reports from survey and pre-investigation anyone with the necessary permissions and funds to develop an area containing delimited ancient monuments and remains may approach the CAB asking permission to excavate and document these monuments and remains in accordance with the description made in the report from the pre-investigation.

(6) The CAB may refuse, grant and/or negotiate and redefine the proposal demanding more information. If the proposal is granted the CAB must specify its cost for supervising the final excavations as well as the archival material, the reports and the publications. The costs for doing the job must be covered by the developer. The permission to carry out the final excavation according to the approved plan will be granted an authorized archaeological company contracted by the developer. Thus the developer pays the firm for excavations etc and the CAB for its official duties supervising the project.

This torso of a reformed heritage conservation act for the management of ancient monuments and remains, gives back two cardinal roles to the CAB. (1) The responsibility to judge the value of ancients monuments and remains in terms of cultural heritage; (2) the duty to judge the scientific and antiquarian qualities of the proposal for the removal of monuments and remains. The CAB should not be involved in estimating cost except for its own supervision which is part of its official duties.

In Sweden we spend between c. 250 billion SEK per year documenting surveying and excavating ancient monuments and remains that may lose their protection. We do so in order to keep society well-working and developing [2]. Each year the CABs resolve c. 1100 cases. Nine hundred of those concern survey and pre-investigations.

Cases resolved by the CABs. From the left to the right: surveys, pre-investigations, final investigations and 'combined decisions.'

With a reformed act, the CABs will instead resolve 200 cases concerning final excavations and work with supervision which will automatically update and educate its civil servants. The CAB will also have to consider the authorization of archaeological companies engaged in survey and/or pre-investigation and/or final investigation. They must, moreover, establish the map that shows presence and absence of ancient monuments and remains in need of protection. The greatest advantage to the CABs is lifting the economic decisions off their shoulders and allowing them to concentrate on the fundamental questions, i.e. those concerning protection and responsible removal of ancient monuments and remains.

For the developer the benefit will be measured in market-defined prices of the archaeological standard, in time saved and in the advantage of a planning process that will allow the developer more often to steer clear of ancient monuments and remains. Local authorities will be able to survey and pre-investigate development areas years in advance and save money from a closer and more rational cooperation with excavation firms.

There is just one problem left: What can be done when it comes to the under-staffed CABs? But that problem is so great that it shall have to wait at least a fortnight and appear as a blog entry in its own right.

NOTES

[1] A laconic summary may be found at http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/14082/a/177241

[2] Relevant statistics can be found at:
http://www.raa.se/cms/showdocument/documents/extern_webbplats/2011/maj/
remissvar_uppdragsark_bilaga_1_statistik.pdf

Translating Classics when Jocasta ’s Dead

This week On the Reading Rest I have a collection of  scholarly essays:

Classics and translation. Essays by D. S. Carne–Ross. Edited by Kenneth Haynes. Lewisburg. Bucknell University Press.ISBN 978-0-8387-5766-6.

And I read the first: Jocasta’s Divine Head: English with a Foreign Accent. (first published in Arion 1990, 3rd series Vol. 1 No. 1 Winter) Accessible also through JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/pss/20163447 A fair and favourable review of the whole collection, by Peter Green, can be found in Times Literary Supplement Sep 2, 2011.

At http://www.bu.edu/bostonia/winter-spring10/carne-ross/ there is a short description of Donald Carne-Ross’ life and academic career by Katie Kock. In the event, exporting DSC-R to the United States in 1959 stands out as a result of the post-war draining of the academic fields of Europe.

In 1964 I came to Athens by bus from Corinth. There were three of us on a tour and we had avoided Athens for well over a month. Among the very first things we did was going to the National Archaeological Museum directly to look at Cycladic and Archaic sculpture – to indulge in Pre-Classical Greece. One point in doing so was a wish to stand eye to eye with the inspiration behind a very disciplined form of Pre-World-War II modernism in Danish sculpture still alive in mid-20th century Denmark. Since we were Danes on an educational tour, more provincial Scandinavians than you would believe, this interest (and our avoiding Athens) wasn’t as odd as it may seem today. We wanted to see the foundation, the Greek mainland before past Acropolis and present Syntagma. As we had hoped and expected, there were subtle paragons of the modern in the Archaic and less subtle ones in the Cycladic, Proto-Cycladic being the most fascinating. In those days the construction of the term itself, ’Proto-Cycladic’, signified the abstract and modernistic essence of evolution. But even so, the subtle feeling of renaissance and modernity didn’t help; because here in Athens, instead of echoes of the past, it was the Henry Moore exhibition at Louisiana, north of Copenhagen, a couple of years earlier that stood out as modernism: radical sculpture forcing the voluptuous modern to expand and absorb the Proto-Cycladic as well as the past. In the early 60s this was mo(o)re and very ok!

The Danish sculptures are in the centre at the top is Jörgen Gudmundsen-Holmgreen's Stående mand from 1957, and at the bottom Gottfred Eickhoff's Siddende pige, der ordner sit hår, from 1961. The poster is from the Louisiana exhibition in the early 60s

It was easy to see the difference between the strength of Moore’s modernism and the faithful Danish sculptures. Although they were, once upon a time, at the roots of modern 20th century Europe, they were also sculptural translations of Archaic Greek into unobtrousive modern Danish. Nevertheless, they still have a calm insistence on the past and the artists knew that their chisels (in Eickhoff’s sculpture) marked out the foreign teeth in their mixture of creation and translations. They were sculptures of a renaissance when the end of History, post-war modernity, had just been announced.

The power-pointed charioteer and the ‘dead’ or slightly astonished original.

It was easy to see that the sculptural expressions of Ancient Greece had also come to an end. Once intended to look both dead as a mask and alive in the super-human sense of the eternally present posture, and the intense gaze of his inlaid eyes, the elevated Charioteer in the Delphi museum lost his controlled divine agency when he lost his eyes, arm, reins, chariot and horses, and became an aesthetic exhibit. And that insight too was the 60s.

There is a tragic beauty to DC-R’s essay because it aims in vain to reinvent the importance of history and Ancient Greek as late as 1990s when the whole defence line, compulsory Classics as the foundation for the Eurocentric super-power civilisation, had long ago vanished into the thin didactic air of modern grammar schools. And then again: when characters die in tragedies they sometimes have something melodramatic, quite a lot in fact, to say for themselves. That goes for DC-R too. But more important, his text is laced with learned references that sometimes stand out as slightly arbitrary or indeed frightfully learned. Meandering rather than coming to the point, the essay reminds one of the lamentations and ‘Bildung’ of a dying actor, acting a dying era already dead. This prolonged stage of learning, crowded with intellectual properties, is perhaps not what we would have expected from an essay with a title so ostentatiously measured: Jocasta’s Divine Head. English with a Foreign Accent rather than the gentle English with a Foreign Accent: Jocasta’s Divine Head. The measured title, but not the essay echoes ‘case closed’.

As it happens, DC-R makes a point of discussing the translation of this specific expression, ‘Jocasta’s divine head’, in Oedipus Rex. In passing he points out the astonishing forcefulness of Hölderlin’s noiminalizing German, (das) Gemeinsamschwesterliches used as an adjective describing Ismene’s head, and the weaknesses of plain modern English in another part of the play. Nonetheless, DC-R thinks that an English poet, e.g. himself had he been one, could have come to terms with the Greek usage of ‘head’.

There are nevertheless several head problems: (1) the head as pars pro toto has lost its power in English; (2) one must not let the rhyme ‘dead’ – ‘head’ be heard; (3) DC-R has difficulties accepting that the divine can die. Such problems/quasi problems undermine translation as well as the announcement of its death, p. 25f.. In the end, having argued all the way up to Ezra Pound, and not a step beyond into the modernism of a Henry Moore, DC-R acknowledges that Jocasta is probably dead. Still, he is not completely without hopes that she will ‘recover’ her divine head, p. 47. The scholar doth protest too much, methinks.

To less sensible and educated souls such as mine DC-R’s case is simple: Jocasta, a symbol of Ancient Greek poetry, having grasped the width, and seen the offspring, of her incestuous relation and intercourse with her son-lover-husband Oedipus (the English Poetry), i.e. seen some of the English she gave birth to in translated poems mixing Ancient Greek and Modern English, kills herself. This is tragic, but we all agree that among the ‘children’ – recalling Antigone, Eteocles, Polynices and Ismene – the result of mixing Ancient Greek poetry and English couldn’t always have been successful.

In the tragedy, Jocasta’s suicide must be announced and it is the task of the 2^nd messenger to do so. He thinks this fact can be expressed and understood by means of a series of just four words:  τέθνηκε θειον Іοκάστης κάρα, drawing attention to the facts that: Jocasta has a head, Jocasta’s head is divine and Jocasta ‘s dead; or as the messenger, who has seems to have an archaeologist’s interest in facts and material remains of the past, could have put in English:

2^nd messenger: dead divine Jocasta’s head.

If this pile or words is too staccato, pointless and close to the ‘dead-head’ rhyme, i.e. if it’s not ‘poesy’[1] enough, then we may add a little extra for meter’s sake:

2^nd messenger: Dead lies divine, Jocasta’s head.

This is a reasonably divided line, a syllable short, a word too long. And too iambic and anapaestic! But that, as Hopkins and Swinburne have long ago observed, is English for you [2]. The points, nevertheless, are there: (1) there’s no pars pro toto, if we don’t want it, just the head as a metaphor. (2) You need not hear the ‘dead’-‘head’ rhyme, if you don’t want to. (3) Obviously the divine may linger in the looks of someone dead, if you want it to.

The head of one of the Early Iron Age bog people, the Tollundmand

Once a useful creation, lost heritage is lost, and the line between creativity and translation always a fine one. Notwithstanding, translations without creativity tend to be sadly educational and creativity without translation nothing but original. There is no essence in today’s past.

In the Marvel universe,  on the other hand, they seem to know that somehow translation must always complement creativity. At least they never tire of recovering, reconstructing, aiding, transferring, keeping, restoring, duplicating, returning, sabotaging, re-retrieving and resurrecting – Jocasta’s head, bless ‘er:

Seeking inside information about the Avengers, the High Evolutionary recovered Jocasta’s parts and reconstructed her. She sent an emergency signal to the Avengers, who came to her aid. Again, Jocasta sacrificed her body to destroy the foe, this time preventing the detonation of a genetic bomb which would have altered mankind. However, Jocasta’s head survived the explosion, and her memories and personality remained intact, though dormant. The head was recovered by the Avengers who, unable to do anything with it, transferred her to the keeping of her friend, Machine Man. Working on restoring her, he was interrupted by one of the metal-devouring Termini and fled with Jocasta’s head. Both Machine Man and Jocasta were taken to a nearby factory belonging to Sunset Bain (Madam Menace), where Bain covertly duplicated Jocasta’s head and returned a sabotaged copy to Machine Man. The head was later stolen by Mechadoom and re-retrieved by Machine Man, who, unaware of Bain’s interference, was unable to resurrect Jocasta.

More on Marvel.com: http://marvel.com/universe/Jocasta#ixzz1aC4zayHm

NOTES

[1] It is a well-known fact that Water Rat, i.e. the Victorian poet in the Wind in the Willows, and a contemporary of one of DC-R’s favourites, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who despite his Archaic preferences had to confess the unpleasant feeling of an affinity of the mind with the ‘very great scoundrel’ Walt Whitman, a sentiment similar to Water Rat’s when he feels attached to Sea Rat — it is a well-known fact that Water Rat abhorred the way Toad, that most prolific writer of English verse in iambic and anapaestic meter, used the verb ‘to learn’:

The Toad, having finished his breakfast, picked up a stout stick and swung it vigorously, belabouring imaginary animals. `I’ll learn ’em to steal my house!’ he cried. `I’ll learn ’em, I’ll learn ’em!’
`Don’t say “learn ’em,” Toad,’ said the Rat, greatly shocked. `It’s not good English.’
`What are you always nagging at Toad for?’ inquired the Badger, rather peevishly. `What’s the matter with his English? It’s the same what I use myself, and if it’s good enough for me, it ought to be good enough for you!’
`I’m very sorry,’ said the Rat humbly. `Only I THINK it ought to be “teach ’em,” not “learn ’em.”‘
    `But we don’t WANT to teach ’em,’ replied the Badger. `We want to LEARN ’em–learn ’em, learn ’em! And what’s more, we’re going to DO it, too! 

So, you simply can’t use ‘poesy’, and don’t pronounce it like ‘cosy’, as an adjective. DC-R doesn’t like Victorian translations either.

 [2] DC-R quotes Swinburne, p. 38, but also a letter from Gerard Manley Hopkins, p.37, to Robert Bridges where iambic and anapaestic are similarly discussed, cf. Letters to Robert Bridges, (Letter XC 18 October 1882, see p. 156 f.).

A Mesolithic Road Show: The System Killers

This week on the reading rest I have an archaeological field report.

Björck, Niclas & Larsson Fredrik. 2011. Stenålder längs nya riksvägen 56. Sträckan Stringtorp Tärnsjö. UV rapport 2011:41. Arkeologiska förundersökningar. 178 pages. UV Mitt Hägersten.

This report can be downloaded as a PDF file on the from:http://www.raa.se/cms/showdocument/documents/extern_webbplats/
arkeologiuv/publikationer_uv/rapporter/uv_rapport/uvr2011_041.pdf

When the Ladykillers explain the economic effect of their coup to Mrs Wilberforce, their fragile landlady who has just exposed them and their deceitfulness, they define the loss to the public, i.e. the loss brought about by their robbery of a money transport belonging to an insurance company, as no more than a farthing on everyone’s insurance policies. That kind of trifle, in this case on every tax payer’s declaration, goes also for the report on the rest. Only when we figure out our cost in terms of our most basic needs, such as breathing, does cost become significant, since we may be required to hold our breath for an unpleasant while, dependant on our income, to cover the loss we, the tax payers, have had financing this report. We pay for the report instead of holding our breath, but we do hold it at little because, on the one hand this report is as daft as they come, and on the other, we paid for the project, didn’t we? Since we were taken advantage of we hold our breath to gain a little time and compose ourselves before we complain.
To begin with, because of language and redundancy. there is a waste of paper.

This is an example of the text:

And this is a test, rewriting and compressing it for the benefit of clarity:
Within the area of investigation was taken all together 74 phosphate tests (Fig. 14). The result gave a span from 0-91 phosphate degrees (P⁰) with an average value of 13.57 P⁰. The 74 phosphate tests spanned from 0 to 91 P⁰. Forty were below the average 13.57 P⁰.   34 of the 74 tests were on or above the average value, the other 40 consequently below the average value. The spatial distribution of these tests gave the opposite picture compared to the artefact distribution. The said distribution have been observed on several of those sites where phosphate mapping was being carried out , which makes it probable that it has its origin  in how traces of different activities have been organized on the sites. A circumstance that indicates that within Digerholmen there are subareas of different character. As expected on a site covering 5400 m², the distribution of quarts quarries, hearths, artefacts and phosphates suggest a heterogenic site (Figs 13 & 14).

True to the definition of ‘redundancy’, the crossed out italic sections are indeed ‘repetition of linguistic information inherent in the structure of the language’. There is no need for that, and if we venture to expand the contents of the section a little we can shortened it substantially  from 708 to 240 characters (the fat black text substituting the crossed-out text). Potentially, rephrasing may thus have saved us 65% of the text. Had we been more fortunate we would have read c. 40 pages rather than c. 125.

Since shortening is a pain killer rather than a cure it avoids the real problem, i.e. is the unconscious attitudes and lack of understanding hiding behind the text. This problem surfaces already at page 15 in a diagram intended to show us what knowledge production looks like during the excavation of a site – knowledge grows exponentially.

The fat line is the learning or knowledge curve. The X-axis represents the site and size of the excavation

In the diagram, by chance or mistake, more that 100 percent of a site is actually excavated and the amount, load or burden of knowledge produced in these non-existent 100+ percent square metres surpasses the amount produced during the excavation of the first 90 percent of a site. The prospect is frightening because there seems to be no redemption from exponential knnowledge growth.

Luckily, to most archaeologists no simple graph can shows how knowledge grows during an excavation and few would believe growth to be constant, let alone exponential. In fact, sensible archaeologists believe that now and then they get it wrong during their excavation. Often they are able to correct themselves, happily losing their initial and deficient knowledge. And some of the assumptions formed in the field may become wrong when the documentation is analyzed and new opinions formed at the archaeologist’s desk. Although being wrong  is commonplace when we explore the past, Niklas Björk and Fredrik Larsson (NB&FL) seem unfamiliar with this experience. They are as convinced as can be that they have been excavating shore bound Mesolithic sites (all sites are ‘settlements’, although, if that was the case, they are also landing places.  ‘Landing place’ [1] as it happens is not in their vocabulary). NB&FL knew what they were looking for before they started to excavate and they have chosen to overlook, minimize, obscure and explain away any indication that they have misunderstood anything.

In fact, with a minimum of understanding of a coastal cultural landscape they have proceeded to excavate a number of promising shores. Every bit of knowledge produced is thus exactly what they expected and precisely what they were looking for, even when they actually came upon something else. Before their time team started, they knew what they knew and afterwards they knew more or less the same. Since in reality their knowledge production has been a matter of reproducing their pre-understanding, they have learnt little from their excavations. In this respect their curve of knowledge production is horizontal rather than exponential.

The (red) level of pre-understanding compared to the (fat) proposed learning curve and the (blue) 100+ knowledge benefit

On their road show, the leaders of the NBFL time team thought that by means of any number of 14C-tests they could verify their central dogma: Mesolithic settlements are located on the beaches and shores of their day and age.

The team invested in no less than nine tests to prove themselves! Eight of these were not even remotely Mesolithic.

The singular Mesolithic date belonged to a piece of charcoal found among brittle-burned stones quite deep in layers on a beach 12 m from the shore. However, this Mesolithic date is late suggesting that when the wood was burned and the charcoal deposited, the beach was situated 100 metres or more east of the find spot and lower than the site. This means that the only Mesolithic ¹⁴C test speaks against the general model that guided the NBFL time team. The date suggests that the water (and the landing place) was nowhere near the site when Mesolithic man insisted on staying there.

Discrepancies threatening the dogma of the team’s pre-understanding are not discussed in the report. Instead we are told, opaquely, that in one case a date was obtained of the Mesolithic phase reflected in the artefacts (p. 104:2^nd col). Since the phrase refers to something as chronologically imprecise and besides the point as ‘the Mesolithic phase’ and phase-reflecting artefacts, we would expect that the phrasing was designed to obscure an important fact without actually lying. But given the present field-report lingo what reads like a half truth may actually be the whole truth – to the authors.

Given the importance of chronology and the costs for carbon-14 tests, the eight dates that are simply wrong must be commented upon. But instead of suggesting the obvious – contamination of Mesolithic sites by later intrusions – the authors (p. 104 f.) end up arguing that the likely is probably the unlikely. Of course they don’t deny that in the unlikely event of later visits to the sites these visits would have taken place in later times. In fact the authors circumstantially point out to us that ‘later’ in this case may mean a visit in periods such as ‘the latest part of the Bronze Age’, ‘the Migration Period’ or ‘the Early Middle Ages’. Blimey!

In the end NB&FL emphasise that the natural phenomenon: forest fire, is actually a most relevant explanation for five of the dates. This is a bold idea that makes a reader think and ask him- or herelf why forest fires were so very common in the first millennium CE compared to every other 500 year period: Was it the climate or was it the wind, was it grill parties gone wrong?

Obviously the authors’ discussion of the ¹⁴C-dates is a smokescreen of rubbish. In addition to some obvious later disturbancies, the dates demonstrate (1) that contrary to the author’s opinion there has been a considerable number of invisible contamination of the Mesolithic sites in later periods and they suggest (2) that contrary to the author’s opinion some Mesolithic settlements were not shore-bound.

Random sampling of ¹⁴C tests is always methodologically refreshing where convention reigns, and so is every sign of Mesolithic man going astray.

The negative learning curve

The report started out protesting an exponential learning curve. Soon, the reader understood that the curve was rather horizontal, eventually, close reading revealed it to be negative.

In the film, the lady killers killed off each other and mrs Wilberforce ended up with the lolly – just our tax payer’s luck to end up with nothing but an embarrassing report.

________
Notes
[1] Lately Kristin Ilves has written a number of articles on landing places and among other things presented a general model of the landing place as a social space. See:
Ilves, K. 2009. Discovering harbours? Reflection on the state and development of landing sites studies in the Baltic Sea region. Journal of Maritime Archaeology, Vol. 4, No. 2: 149-163 [DOI 10.1007/s11457-009-9050-5 Published online: 27 October 2009].
Ilves, K. & Darmark, K. 2010. Some Critical and Methodological Aspects of Shoreline Determination: Examples from the Baltic Sea Region. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 18: 147-165 [DOI 10.1007/s10816-010-9084-x Published online: 15 June 2010].
Ilves, K. 2011. Is there an archaeological potential for a sociology of landing places? Journal of Archaeology and Ancient History  2011 No 2:1-25. ISSN 2001-1199

The Curse of Uniquity

This week On the Reading Rest I have an article:

Williams, Howard; Rundkvist, Martin and Danielsson Arne. 2011. The Landscape of a Swedish Boat-Grave Cemetery. Landscapes (2010) I pp. 1-24.

A map of modern Asyut

Saturday morning, Asyut families visit the eternal homes of their ancestors and relatives. The cemetery is situated next to the rock containing prominent Pharaonic graves. On the modern grave houses there are numbers, arrows and directions leading you right in the narrow alleys off the main street.

In Asyut, contrary e.g. to Cairo, nobody lives permanently in graves, and the prime time-consuming reason for visiting is keeping them tidy – sweeping floors and courts with date palm leaves. But since going there and doing this takes a while and since the monuments are capacious, there is a point in bringing food and organize a picnic or perhaps an overnight stay. This doesn’t mean that religious rituals are forgotten, far from it. It just means that visiting the graves fuses family, society and religion in Upper Egypt [1].

The Roman town, situated safely above the high-water mark of the once flooding Nile, is still visible in the street plan, in a nowadays very souterrain bath and in the old desert road, Darb al-Arba’in, The Forty Days‘ Road, to the Kharga oasis and the Sudan. That road passes by the cemetery. Passing by sepulchres that occupy the foot and lower slopes of the mountain overlooking the town, means entering or leaving through a barrier separating the desert without life and the town of the living. Given the striking difference between the desert that runs all the way up to the Eastern flank of the cemetery and the fertile Nile Valley that takes over at its Western flank, the cemetery as a zone of transformation, is as cardinal as the city-of-the-dead metaphor.

Before entering or leaving Asyut we would have crossed the canals that irrigate the fields and make the transformation, when crossing, a matter ’pontification’ or ’bridge-making’ in the literal sense of the word. Today, forgetful of ancient traditions, nobody actually offers anything on the bridge.

In Asyut, therefore, the cemetery combines the two main kinds of Iron Age Scandinavian cemeteries: the ones defining a border or a zone of transgression and the ones mirroring the settlements. In Scandinavian Iron Age they are often but not necessarily separated. The latter are generally speaking later than the former, and not until the Roman Iron Age, especially the end of that period, do some graves start to resemble rooms. Roman influence cannot be ruled out.

Concepts, such as Border and Mirror are probably almost archetypical in connections with graves and they may well be something to look for in any cemetery.

Williams, Rundkvist and Danielsson (WRD) approach their cemetery the other way round. Having stated the unique character of the Skamby boat grave cemetery, by means of excavating one of the 21 graves visible to the naked eye, and knowing nothing about unmarked graves or the time depth of the cemetery, they set out to contextualize its centrality taking the equation ‘one cemeteryequals one settlement’ for granted. They start with the regional perspective presenting a next to arbitrary source material, i.e. village names with –stad as the second component. Then they zoom in on cemeteries and hill forts before they proceed to local rune stones. Eventually they end up on the grave-covered ridge at Skamby. On all levels, mapping a haphazard source material, distinction and essence link-in with place. Since we know so little about the actual places, the link is mostly hypothetical.

WRD make a number of relevant and some slightly irrelevant observations, but cursed by their quest for uniquity they end on a resounding ‘Really!’:

Hence, the landscape was a pivotal medium in the practice of boat-inhumation, allowing a local elite group to perform their identities and allegiances by distinctive and dynamic means (p. 20f.).

Really, what a swinging and liberal landscape, the Ostrogothic – very similar to the Asyut setting or by all means Saint Nicholas Churchyard in central Aberdeen – allowing all kinds of things to take place.

There is little to critisize in the authors’ conclusion  and yet it would seem that WRD may have missed some slightly less commonplace points.

Rune stones around the Skamby cemetry

From excavations carried out by W&R, we know that some time in or after  the 9^th century. a visitor placed a purse of 9^th century. gaming pieces on the wooden roof of the only excavated grave at Skamby. The precise date of the burial is unknown, but  coeval with, older or younger than the production date of the gaming pieces. Let us suggest at the cemetery was used in some way or other during the 9-10^th c.

Rune stones are meant to be seen and read, and thus by means of text and decoration, a rune stone combines two input rooms: (1) Social Network and (2) Place and conveys a message. A rune stone, therefore, makes up the central node in its area of influence[2]. In principle these areas are proportional to the number of stones at the node. Mapping rune stones this way discloses the area of subsistence related to the Skamby cemetery as indeed void of rune stones [3]. Not surprisingly, when it comes to rune stones, churches stand out as more important nodes than villages or farms.

Skamby and Å as elements in a hypothetical Early Iron Age manor landscape

The map also defines the position of Skamby as early-iron-age inasmuch as it is somewhat withdrawn from the coast and situated between a resource area, the woodlands to the Northeast, and a subsistence area, the open fields to the Southwest. Well-watered by streams and brooks they benefit pasture and haymaking. We can expect the cemetery to be a reflection of a settlement as well as a demarcation of a border between areas. Pointing out ‘the voyage’ on the ‘ridge wave’ by means of boat graves at the edge of the woodlands (sailing North to somewhere Home?) as far from the water as almost possible, is odd in an Early Iron Age perspective. Nevertheless, given the kenning way in which incompatible phenomena are mixed to give metaphoric meaning in Norse poetry during the Carolingian Iron Age, 750-1025 CE, the situation of the cemetery and its ‘grave-speak’ idiom could nevertheless be meaningful.

The large Roman Iron Age farm Missingen in Østfold* situated on the border between woodlands and arable lands, is a paragon of the prolific Early Iron Age situation.*Gro Anita Bårdseth, Norwegian Archaeological Review 2009:2, pp 146-58 with references.

The bay Slätbaken indicating the small pre-Medieval (Skamby-Å) Vikboland and the large Medieval (Söderköping-Stegeborg) Östergötland setting

As the rune stone distribution shows there is nothing Early Medieval in the position of Skamby and that should prompt us to explain why:

(1) Skamby belonged to the upper echelons of society in which traditional (commemorative) rune stones were less interesting.
(2) Skamby in the Carolingian Iron Age and Early Medieval Period was not settled by its owner. (We may suspect that stewards, the holders of an office rather than holders of land, are reluctant rune stone erectors).
(3) Skamby had already lost its importance and its land (and its landing-place at Å?) to farms less dominant such as the rune stone farms. Perhaps because Söderköping was about to become a fact and Slätbaken barraged at Stegeborg.

Local knowledge will eventually make Skamby unique, but until we know more, its landscape exhibits general qualities only. The site matters because it may have existed during the Carolingian Iron Age, despite the fact that it echoes Early Iron Age ideals and because it sports Late Iron Age mortuary metaphors. If Skamby represents a manor, then it is intriguing that its possible landing place at Å attracted rune stones and the first parish church. In a clear-cut Late Iron Age/Early Medieval landscape the powerful would have preferred to build their large farm, its cemetery, and perhaps its church, somewhere between their woods and their landing place.

Some more or less similar Early Iron Age large manorial landscapes survive as a form of centres – Kvåle in Sogndal (well into the Middle Ages), Gudme (as manors such as Broholm and Hesselagergård), Uppsala and Uppåkra (as the archdiocese of Uppsala and Lund respectively), Skamby, if there were ever a manor next to the cemetery, did not survive.

In Asyut, however, nothing could change the basic interplay between town, graves and landscape.

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[1] Upper Egypt Identity and Change, edited by Nicholas Hopkins and Reem Saad. American University in Cairo Press, Cairo New York 2004, is a splendid moder introduction to the more cognitive aspects of society in Upper Egypt. And Hans Alexander Winklers study Ghost Riders of Upper Egypt: A study of Spirit Possession (1936) translated and printed by American University in Cairo Press 2009, dives deep into unorthodox spiritual live in Upper Egypt.

[2] Please note that the landscape was a pivotal medium in the practice of rune stone erection, allowing a local elite group to perform their identities and allegiances by distinctive and dynamic means.

[3] WRD have mapped the rune stones from Å at the new church rather than the old, i.e. the ruin called Ring, where they belong. This blurs their picture a little.

In Death we Trust – Society as Burial Order

This week On the Reading Rest I have an article:

Borby Hansen, Birgitte. 2011. Kvinden fra Maglebjerg. En rig grav fra yngre romersk jernalder ved Næstved – The woman from Maglebjerg. A rich grave from the Late Roman Iron Age near Næstved. Aarbøger for nordisk oldkyndighed og historie (2008). Pp. 123-194.

In 1929, fictional Korsbæk, a sleepy provincial town in Central Zealand, was hit by the invisible hand of the market(1) . This spanking echoed the rhythm of its discoverer Adam Smith who pointed out to townsmen that:

It is not from the benevolence of the Butcher, the Brewer, or the Baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

It took the hand 21 years and the 24 epic episodes to shape the fictional harmony of what was then (1947) post-war Denmark at the brink of a new modernity protecting its citizens by freedom, equal rights and equal opportunities — a world apart from the malfunctioning semi-feudal patronus cliens society of 1929 by grace protecting but the few. Since the end of the television series in 1982 there has been a return to a less modern society also in Denmark.

In Danish archaeology of the Roman Iron Age (RIA) this return shows in a preference among some for an anti-modern, albeit glorified Late Roman Iron Age (LRIA) centring on Southeast Zealand. This wonderfully centralized LRIA society is made up by no less than six classes or ‘status layers’ defined by grave goods, but obviously modelled on a Roman classification fitting people into six top-down categories: senatores, equites, ingenui, peregrini, libertini and servi. This general hierarchic structure was adopted by Tacitus as a simple and convenient model for the classification of his Germani: nobiles, ingenui,  libertini, servi. These three systems, therefore, are communicating vessels:

Rome	senatores		equites		ingenui	peregrini	libertini	Servi*
Germania	nobiles				ingenui		libertini	servi
SE Zealand	Kings Status 1	Princes Status 2		Warlords Status 3	Warriors Status 4	Peasants Status 5	Freedmen/Serfs Status 6
Grave goods	Gold + Rare Roman Goods, RRG				Plain RG	Local Goods	No Goods
*Including foreigners.

The male dominance of the archaeological status system should not be taken literally, because luckily grave goods and women (the ones most often decked out in death) belong to families. This means that female graves are straightforward representations of royal families, princely families, warlord families and so on, rather than representations of women in their own right.

Tacitus, who must have been a little daft compared to contemporary Zealandish undertakers, had some difficulties classifying the upper classes. By means of a rigid control of the grave goods, the undertakers elegantly solve these problems with ounces of gold and the rarity of Roman objects.

In social terms Status 1 means supreme power and Status 6 no power at all. Since graves are situated in landscapes their distribution must in other words constitute the geography of power, because the powerful wants to be buried or bury their women where power is. The system beguiles its user: it is a self-fulfilling prophecy and lack of grave goods or indeed lack of graves doesn’t always equal lack of status, power or family.

The task Birgitte Borby Hansen (BBH) has set herself, is to fit the excavations at Maglebjerg and Jeshøj, in the outskirts of Næstved in Southern Zealand, into the above status model. The King lives at Himlingøje, one of his Zealand princes at Skovgårde, a warrior of his retinue at Brushøjgård (in the vicinity of Maglebjerg-Jeshøj) and his peasants at Maglebjerg or some other nearby cemeteries with no Roman grave goods. BBH’s article is part of a new development of the model, prompted by settlement investigations carried out on Zealand during the last two decades or so. Large excavations initiated by exploitation have indicated the link between graves and farms.

Earlier on, this link was difficult to establish, but since it has now become obvious it must be fitted into the model. The solution is axiomatic: those who lived and owned a farm next to a grave have the same status as the person buried in the grave.

The settlement at Maglebjerg-Jeshøj is situated on a gentle slope looking SSW. A small brook divides the settlement into an eastern and a western area. The best preserved houses, yellow squares with red outlines are above the graves (green square) and pits (red squares). Settlement activities started in the Bronze Age, permanent farms probably in the RIA. The settlement situation with a small LRIA cemetery is typical also of nearby Kærup.

BBH doesn’t attempt to prove the model, why prove the self-evident? she accepts it as truth and infers that the yet unknown farm of central power at Himlingøje, which according to the model must be royal, was ‘populated by progressive ambassadors with far-reaching Continental contacts’ (p. 157) in case we didn’t know. Her own case fits Status Group 5, the free peasants, and among those the woman from Maglebjerg belonged to one of the leading local farming families. According to the model such families should refer to the local aristocracy in its turn linked to the centre at Himlingøje. But the woman/family/community Maglebjerg-Jeshøj seems also to have had contacts with Northeast Germany, if we are to believe the ceramics in her grave (131 ff.). In this and other respects she seems to have had a soul sister/family/community in a grave in nearby Kærup. In this grave ceramics showed affinities to South-Eastern Jutland. These ‘ceramic contacts’ don’t seem to reflect a gift-giving system administrated by any important royal, princely or lordly centre, rather it would seem to indicate that people at Maglebjerg-Jeshøj and Kærup on Central Zealand were involved in their own networks. At first exogamy is only suggested, p. 133 but later on, begging the question, taken more or less for granted because of her high status (i.e. locally within Status Group 5, p.166), which in the first place was proved by her peculiar German cup. BBH doesn’t suggest model behaviour, e.g., that marriages within status layer five were arranged by layers four or three.

There are 18 14C-dates to date the settlement. There seems to have been six settlement periods. The grave belongs to the last, most intensive and longest settlement dated to the LRIA. The settlement pattern is similar to the Kærup settlement.

The grave from Maglebjerg, the focal point of the article, is probably surrounded by 7 inhumation graves with no grave goods and no extent skeletal remains, bones being badly preserved at the site. Small inhumation cemeteries without grave goods are known to exist within the area(2). Although BBH sees it as the possible fulfilment of the model six-layer status society, it is somewhat odd that in a small settlement area, a handful of farms on the gentle south-westerly slopes of Southern Zealand, seven out of eight buried were serfs (Status 6). It is equally odd that the eighth is the only, surprisingly prominent, representative of a Status five family, i.e. a locally dominant family on the Maglebjerg-Jeshøj slope. Did the seven ‘serf families’ dominate the community preventing its farmers from being buried according to their status? Were everybody buried as form of proportional pars pro toto? Were there seven slaves to every freeborn on small farms?

Since BBH has no intention to corroborate or criticize the model, arguments and questions such as these are irrelevant. And by the way, highly centralized and hierarchic and odd communities are known to exist, aren’t they?

BBH’s text happens to prove this in a most subtle way. Her endeavour, when it comes to fitting the grave goods into the material culture of the LRIA, is impressive and one of her successful methods, next to looking up parallels, has been collegial networking. Naturally BBH wants to thank her colleagues, as we should thank her for her diligence. Her acknowledgements are in end notes and it so happens that they reveal both networks and a hierarchy similar to the alleged prehistoric situation.

The pattern evolves in notes 1-12 and 24. By chance, there is indeed a non-numbered introduction to the notes and formal last one, note 25, but research-wise the notes are 24, similar to the 24 songs of an epic.

In these notes a person may be mentioned in several ways and together the persons referred to and the references make up a stratified pattern:

I   Many Thanks for many inspiring discussions, central to the article:
ULH³
II  Thanks for sharing detailed personal and expert knowledge:
ULH⁴; ULH¹⁰ ; SEA⁶
III Thanks for sharing expert archaeological knowledge:
PE⁷; PE¹²; PE+MBH⁸
IV Thanks for professional knowledge-sharing:
MBH⁹ LMC² HH²⁴
V  Mentioned for sharing knowledge:
EA⁵

In Danish archaeology, levels I-V signify top-down status: ULH is the mother of the status model and married to SEA. PE is an important archaeologist supportive of ULH. MBH is also important, but considerably more independent. LMC, HH and EA are honourable colleagues, EA nevertheless is more peripheral in this context, and a foreigner. In the present archaeological landscape Level I is central and Level V peripheral.

Since there is a world outside the walls of this well-structured Verona, there is also great appreciation for kindly colleagues and their knowledgeable comments, ideas and references. I in this case MH² and KÅS¹¹ are acknowledged. MH (Level II) represents German archaeology and ceramic expertise, i.e., another most important community. KÅS is a friendly figure in the kingdom of natural science.

Needless to say it is but old hat to find the organization of archaeology a paragon of its results and vice versa.

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(1) Everything on Korsbæk and the television series Matador:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matador_(TV_series)

(2) Kjær-Hansen Rolf. 1989. 106. Eksercerpladsen. Arkæologiske udgravninger i Danmark 1989. P.

132.

Can Prehistoric Man be Trusted?

This week On the Reading Rest I have an article:

Crumlin-Pedersen, Ole. 2011. Viking Age Iconography and the Square Sail. Maritime Archaeology Newsletter from Denmark, No 26, Summer 2011, pp. 12-16.

The porch of Nysätra Church. Bloom’s Day 2011. Photo Åsa Larsson.

The church porch at Nysätra, Uppland, reveals a Beowulfian detail that may or may not be relevant. From the poem we gather that King Hrothgar’s hall is kept together by an iron band preventing the walls of Heorot, the world’s most impressive mead hall, to fall down and out into Denmark when Beowulf and Grendel are fighting.  The staves of the curved wall are kept in place by the band in the same way as the staves of a barrel are kept together by a hoop[1]. Today, we like to think that supporting walls stand by themselves and consequently the Beowulfian solution appears primitive or ‘poetic’—a dream of Walter Mitty’s: a cooper’s apprentice who steps in to save the Iron Age master builder at a loss—or perhaps not. In theory one may infer that the band matches prehistoric ideas on the strength and mechanics of materials and it is thus a good idea if it works, but did it and could it? Is it symbolic and/or naturalistic? Can we trust prehistoric man to express himself in such a way that we understand him? Well, in Nysätra at least they did their best. The band is there. Ought we try it reconstructing Iron Age halls?

This question marks a classical stage in the art of archaeological reconstruction: To begin with we base ourselves on archaeological records, but quite soon the few descriptive prehistoric sources and possible historical echoes of a prehistoric reality must be taken into account – posing the above question marks this step. Surprisingly often we are prepared to combine the archaeological record and the historical echoes disregarding prehistoric descriptions. Or in the odd case, paying homage to Levi-Strauss’ concept of Inversion, to trust prehistoric descriptions blindly.

The psychology of the general situation is nothing but simple: As modern academics we are pleased to leave science and desktop, go practical and low-tech reviving among other things the ingenuity of techniques we thought were lost. Much to our satisfaction, we detect a number of marginalized craftsmen with a fund of sophisticated and helpful knowledge. Combining this knowledge and our strict interpretations, suggests that lost traditions were in reality not lost, but just a historical sequence of change, gradually falling into oblivion. And together we, academics and craftsmen, a brotherhood hitherto unknown to ourselves, have rescued technique and indeed History as palimpsest of events. Today the Landscape is our best beloved palimpsest metaphor because everything happens again and again in largely the same landscapes. To archaeologists, actions, the result of actions and painstaking documentation of actions, don’t lie, but other sources may indeed. In fact the loss of the ‘knowledge of the hand’ is at the heart of archaeological cultural criticism[2].

Nevertheless, aided by post-modern criticism, the ability of material culture, past and present, to err repeatedly and lie habitually and proceed rationally or irrationally as best it pleases, has become part and parcel of intellectual, if not popular insights.

Today, the past poses a problem since it has become post-modernized to fit the present society, and traditional archaeologists have lost their exclusive rights to point to the ingenuity of the practical, noble or savage past criticizing the present. Moreover, anti intellectualism, the vulgar companion escorting post modernism, has taken the lead and archaeologists who want their criticism of modern projects to succeed shall thus have to form alliances with moderate or nationalistic politicians, heritage management and journalists who defend traditional values.

In maritime archaeology, reconstruction is of paramount importance and public interest, and reconstructions a cardinal step forward in the late 20^th century. Because building is such a technique-centred occupation it is based on the interaction between archaeological documentation and historically documented and traditional craftsmanship, in themselves difficult to value. Habitually disregarding the somewhat ambiguous near-contemporary descriptions is cardinal to the trade, but in maritime archaeology at the beginning of the new millennium, inspired by post-modern critique, exactly this material was introduced into the art of reconstruction (reconstructing houses it happened in the 1980s). The critique pointed out that during the Carolingian Iron Age (CIA) and Early Middle Ages (EMA) different sails and thus sailing techniques were in use, because different sails can be seen in a number very different of depictions of rigged ships[3].

In the CIA or EMA, ships could be rigged in ways that would have reminded us of Nordlandsbåtar, fishing in Lofoten c. 1900, with high and narrow sails on tall masts. But they could also be rigged similarly to the ships on the Hedeby coins, i.e. with lowly and broad sails on shorter masts.

In this summer’s Newsletter Ole Crumlin-Pedersen (OC-P) sets out to refute the value of CIA and EMA depictions of ships. His arguments are in part the same as in 2005, stating that the boats illustrate mythological phenomena such as Nagelfar, Skiðblaðnir or the ‘Ship of Luck’, i.e. phenomena as surreal or fantastic or poetic as Sleipner with his eight legs[4]. This is not much of an argument since similar sails are depicted in very different contexts and contexts made meaningful by means of subtle maritime differences. Moreover, representations of myth need not be fantastic, they may as well be naturalistic or an ideogrammatic (hieroglyphic) representation of the real world. Even if we argue, as it has been done, that the Oseberg ship was built for rituals only, why not the unlikely Ship of Funeral eventually buried in the mound, this seems not to deprive it of its real-ship qualities.

OC-P’s second argument concerns the relation between realism, iconography, and aesthetics. Both his arguments are constructed to nullify the arguments in the article De gotlandske billedsten og rekonstruktionen af vikingeskibenes sejl – The Gotlandic Picture Stones and the Reconstruction of the Sails of the Viking Ships, by Ole Thirup Kastholm (OTK).

This theoretical discussion concerning the above relation is difficult to follow, but both OTK’s and OC-P’s arguments are nevertheless based mainly upon the authors’ notion of common sense. Perhaps one might say that they share the same theoretical problem, i.e. understanding how the expression of a figurative pattern balances between naturalistic and symbolic dimensions. Their quest for clarity is such that both find it an epistemological problem and a dilemma that ‘in monumental art a form of conservatism may prevail’ (an opinion quoted by OTK and probably embraced also by OC-P). Prevail! Well, not only in art, not only in monumentality, not only conservatism, not only a form, and not simply prevail.

Ironically the material under discussion was introduced, by OTK in the most traditional of journals, Aarbøger for nordisk oldkyndighed og historie, 2005 (2009), and thus a fine proof that a framework befitting the backlash-return of traditional archaeology, which loves simple revealing pictures from prehistory, lent itself to criticizing the scientific archaeology of shipbuilding techniques (founded on the law of Rationality, Progress and Development) from a post-modern angle. Needless to say such criticism cannot be expressed overtly in Aarbøger and properly not ostentatiously in an academic thesis supervised by Ulla Lund Hansen. OTK’s Aarbøger–version is thus model: A good overview and an investigation, firmly located in maritime as well as traditional archaeological practice, blurring the theoretical discussion nicely (iconography isn’t really that important), wrapping up its primary discussion on the proportions of the sails in an analysis of picture stones, eventually revealing the important archaeological issue:

During the last 20 years, the reconstruction of the five ships from Skuldelev has created the stereotype Viking ship. This must not be taken to mean that they are all the same – the unmatched quality of the original Skuldelev ships is indeed that they are widely different when it comes to origin and type representing 11^th century navigation in Scandinavia in a general way. On the contrary, it means that they have all been reconstructed based on the same fundamental idea, needless to say with regards to the growing competence among researchers at the drawing-table as well as the craftsmen involved. (OTK p 132, my translation)

This is classical post-modern critique, worthy of the 1970s, pointing out the self-fulfilling prophecies and the standardizing, simplifying and stereotype character of nomothetic research—and the Skuldelev ships are by no means the only stereotypes of contemporary Danish archaeology. This quotation is not a proper Aarbøger-preamble, not even forty years too late. In other journals, other countries or other disciplinary contexts voicing this critique may be of historical interest only, but in Maritime and Danish Archaeology OTK’s contribution, OC-P’s answer and the columns of Aarbøger and Newsletter make up the only possible road to emancipation and the end of traditional archaeology. Ninety percent of the contributions are ritual, covering-up their central messages.

So, can we trust prehistoric man? Trust him always to get it wrong drawing broad sails when she knows we know they are narrow? Or trust him deliberately to go for non-existing solutions, just to make this point, because people may otherwise believe the ships to be real. Believe her to draw a sharp divide between Myth and Reality. The answer is No! We can’t trust prehistoric man any longer. She has stopped being primitive and become us, writing meta-textual critical articles and critical answers[5].

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[1] This point is discussed in The Idea of the Good in Late Iron Age Society, 1998:42f. In Beowulf, bands, iron bands and bindings are effective, high-tech and magic.

[2] There are well-known mantras to this end, such as: ‘Modern man can walk the moon, but never weave the linen of King Tut’.

[3] OTK doesn’t argue for a shift of paradigm, replacing one sail with another. In the festschrift to Arne Emil Christensen, 2006, Klink og sejl, Vegard Heide, Eldar Heide (http://eldar-heide.net/) and Terje Planke in a trilogy of articles, did just that.

[4] There are very many metaphorical ships: the ark of faith, the ship of Good Nature, ship of death, the ship of Jesus Christ, the rulers frail bark (holding on to) the ship of the people, the Ship of State and the (ever renewed and puzzling) Ship of Theseus and so on—in short, a ship for any kind of weather.

[5] A meta text is a text about a text.  In reality OTK and OC-P write about the question ‘can we trust prehistoric man (to express himself in such a way that I understand him)?’ OTK’s and OC-P’s texts are thus ‘meta-textual’ because they comment upon this question without explicitly posing it.