Tag: history

Rome’s Lost Empire

Sarah Parcak is an archaeologist who uses satellite imagery to identify previously unknown ancient sites that might be worth excavating. We’ve seen her in a couple of programmes about Ancient Egypt, because she’s discovered the probable sites of several new pyramids as well as some towns. Rome’s Lost Empire was presented by Dan Snow and showed us the sites Parcak found when she used her technology to investigate the Roman Empire.

I’ll start with my criticism of the programme & get that out of the way – it felt more like a Discovery Channel programme than a BBC one. The narration by Snow was full of superlatives – everything was the most important whatever, or the best or the biggest. And they were setting out on a journey to solve a mystery! Which would revolutionise Roman archaeology and history forever! And now we have proof that this was the best something in the history of somethings! Which is … not a style I’m particularly fond of in documentaries. Particularly because every time someone announces that “this evidence proves X” I immediately start coming up with explanations Y, Z, α etc that might also fit the data. What’s wrong with a sober assessment of the probable explanation, with appropriate caveats and reservations. And it was unexpected, as I’ve not had that problem with previous programmes that Snow has presented. He did have some good lines tho, and the less bombastic stuff was good.

So we were treated to a mystery to be solved – how did Rome control such a large empire with such a relatively small army of professional soldiers (~300,000)? And this was the thread that tied together their investigation of four different areas of the Roman Empire – Rome’s main harbour (Portus), an army encampment in Transylvania, the area around Petra in Jordan and the North African Wall. I don’t think they really came to any conclusions, but it provided a lens through which to look at each area.

They also wove the programme together by splitting up the stuff about Portus and spreading it throughout the whole programme. I’m going to talk about it all at once though, as that’s easier. This was the area where Parcak had the most trouble with her technology as the site of the harbour is pretty close to the current airport, and those bits not under runways are pretty populated. However she did manage to find indications of three new sites. The first of these was probably a canal – it was previously known that there were canals between the River Tiber & the harbour, this is the first evidence of one that ran from the other bank of the river up to Rome itself. Which would be a great help in both getting ships to Rome fast (on a straight line path rather than the winding river) and in managing traffic flow on the waterways to Rome. The second of her potential sites was an oval shape, positioned in the land near the waterways & harbour proper – this was the right size & shape to be an amphitheatre, providing entertainment to the people who lived and worked there. And the third was potentially the base of the Portus Lighthouse, which is known of but has never been found. If they can excavate that and confirm it then that’s a pretty exciting discovery.

The Portus segments also showed us some of the excavation work that is going on there. They had some pretty neat CGI to show us what the buildings they’re finding would look like superimposed on the actual landscape (with Snow, Parcak & the archaeologists they’re talking to standing there in front of them too – it looks pretty real). The harbour and its buildings were build not just for functionality but also to impress. So this was part of how Rome exerted control – by looking like it should be in charge.

The first of the non-Portus segments was about a site in Transylvania. When the Romans conquered Transylvania they first had to start by crossing the River Danube at a point where it’s about a mile across and has treacherous currents. So being the engineers they are, they built a bridge – it took two years, and as Snow pointed out, the psychological impact of this bridge being inexorably extended across the river to allow the Roman army to invade must’ve been considerable. Once conquered Transylvania had to be pacified, and there have been remains of Roman forts found in the dense forest of the region. They went to one of these, which is reasonably small – it would’ve been able to house about 1500 troops. Parcak then went up in a plane to use a technology called LIDAR to generate a map of what the landscape of the area around this fort looked like under the trees – I didn’t really understand the description of LIDAR, I think it’s a bit like RADAR but with lasers and somehow they can subtract the reflections from the trees and just look at the reflections from the ground. This allowed Parcak to identify what looked like a wider fortification around the known one, capable of housing a great number more troops on a temporary basis. They then trekked through the forest to see if it was really there (it was). That bit was a little amusing – they set off walking in a line, a couple of local archaeologists, Snow, Parcak … and a man with a gun. I guess the local wildlife is still pretty wild. Anyway, this segment illustrated conquering and controlling by armed force.

The next section was about Petra, and of course we were treated to them riding through the well known bit. The surrounding area is more desert like (now) and so Parcak’s tech worked well – she identified several square sites that looked to the eye of the local archaeologist as if they were potentially farmsteads. So they went out to visit one to have a preliminary look at the sorts of pottery you could find. This mean we had an amusing bit with Snow (a historian, not archaeologist) saying the sort of things we all think about how the ability of archaeologists to date pottery just from small fragments is astonishing & faintly magical. And then we saw Parcak and the other archaeologist confidently pick up a handful of broken bits of pot & say this was definitely occupied during Roman times 🙂 This segment was illustrating “conquering” an area not using military force – Petra was not only agriculturally rich in ancient times, but was also on the trade routes from the Arabian peninsula into the rest of the world and rich from charging tolls. Effectively the Romans extended their protection and help with enforcing the tariffs in return for a cut of the proceeds, and so everyone was happy.

And the last segment was about the North African Wall – which ran along the edge of the fertile North African plains to protect this farmland from the nomadic tribes to the south. This (like Hadrian’s Wall) wasn’t a hard & fast boundary that no-one was allowed to cross, instead it was permeable and allowed traders and civilians to go to & fro whilst providing a barrier to opportunistic raiders. The local archaeologist they met up with in Tunisia took them to see a part of the wall, and they discussed how hard it was for him to find where the forts that he knew must be there were in what is now a trackless desert area. Parcak’s imaging allowed her to pinpoint 30 or so square sites that looked like they might be fortifications and so they drove out to one. It had clearly been dug over by locals at some point, but one of the deep holes left showed them that there were centuries of occupation (and again pottery told them this was during the Roman era).

So while I took exception with the language of “we’ve proved X, we’ve solved mystery Y”, this programme did show us how Parcak’s imaging technology had provided four teams of archaeologists with new, potentially exciting sites to excavate. And they wouldn’t’ve discovered them anywhere near as fast by searching the old fashioned way by driving or walking over the land.

In Our Time: The Cult of Mithras

The cult of Mithras was one of several cults that sprang up in the Roman Empire during the 1st Century AD. It was a mystery cult and so what we know of it now comes from archaeological evidence and the writings of people who were not members. The experts who discussed it on In Our Time were Greg Woolf (University of St Andrews), Almut Hintze (SOAS, University of London) and John North (Institute of Classical Studies, University of London).

The historical origins of the Mithras cult aren’t clear – back in the late 19th Century it was thought that the cult had a direct connection to Zoroastrianism, mostly because there is a Zoroastrian god called Mithra. But more recent scholarship suggests that the connection isn’t particularly direct – it’s more like the Romans took the name & some very basic idea of the worship of Mithra and then reinvented it completely for their own cult. (Which meant it felt a little like Hintze was invited to the programme based on a faulty understanding, as she’s a Professor of Zoroastrianism – she did have other things to contribute, but I felt like she got unfairly cut off a few times.) Other cults that sprang up at the same time had similar types of origins, although possibly had closer links to their parent religion – things like the Roman Isis cult, or a Demeter cult. And of course Christianity can be seen as another of these – Pauline Christianity is partly a reinterpretation of Judaism for Gentiles.

The literary sources of information about the Mithras cult are pretty slim – a lot of it is written by Christians who are trying to show how their religion is a real one, and this Mithras nonsense is a work of the devil. That was apparently a mainstream Christian opinion during the first couple of centuries after Christ, that the devil had started up all these other cults so that the truth of Christianity would be obscured by competing cults. And later in the 4th & 5th centuries Christians were involved in the destruction of Mithraic temples (as part of a wider movement of the destruction of pagan temples).

The archaeology tells us more about the iconography & so on of the cult, but as I said at the start it was a mystery cult and so the iconography is not explained. One of the images that is present in nearly all excavated temples is of Mithras killing a bull, while a dog & a serpent lap up the blood and a scorpion & a raven are also involved in the killing. Hintze pointed out that this is very different from the Zoroastrian Mithra in the level of violence protrayed – whilst there is a Zoroastrian myth that death entered the world with the killing of a bull, it’s the force of evil who does the killing in Zoroastrianism and doesn’t come with so much violence. Whereas in the Mithras cult it’s the god doing this, and it’s a violent scene – still possibly having to do with creation of the cosmos in some fashion. Other scenes include some sort of story for how the bull ends up in the cave where it is killed (although these are not always in the same order which seems odd if they are a sacred narrative). And a meal that Sol & Mithras eat together.

The temples themselves represent a cave – the cave that the bull was killed in. And there are indications that the gathered worshippers (20-40 of them) ate a communal meal. There is also from one temple some recent evidence that there may’ve been some sort of ritual meal for non-initiates around the outskirts of the temple. But by the way this was presented on the programme it seems this is still very much a conjecture based on a single data point.

Another archaeological source for the cult are the dedicatory inscriptions from members of the cult. These are all from men, and as there are a few thousand of these (I think they said) this seems to suggest that there were no women members of the cult. They are also all from the middling sort of people – not poor, not rich. And are primarily members of the military or the bureaucratic hierarchy.

It seems that the cult had seven levels of initiate, the lowest ones were called ravens & the highest paters (fathers). One of the middle levels was called a leo (lion) and from some of the texts & inscriptions this seems to be the “normal” level of an initiate. There could only be one pater per temple, and when there were too many worshippers a new temple would be built. I think they have depictions of the initiation ceremonies for progressing up the levels & it seems that these were fairly brutal. Presumably they also involved transfer of the sacred knowledge, but we don’t have any record of this.

Towards the end of the programme they had a little segment doing a compare & contrast with Christianity, because that has always been one of the things that’s brought up when discussing Mithraism in a modern context. They talked about how the 25th December was supposed to be significant in the Mithras cult, but it seems this was based on a single calendar and it’s not even clear that that’s what the calendar meant! That’s the one I’d heard before, that Mithras’ birthday was the same as Christ’s but that doesn’t appear to be true. They also discussed how Christianity was actually more similar to the Demeter & Isis cult than it was to the Mithras cult – there’s no death & resurrection in the Mithras mythology (that we know of) for instance. And in the Mithras cult your position in the secular hierarchy was often reflected in your position in the initiate hierarchy – which is again not the case with Christianity.

When I set out to write this I wasn’t sure how much I was going to remember, but it seems the answer is “quite a lot” 🙂

Ice Age Art: A Culture Show Special; Rome: A History of the Eternal City

There is an exhibition that’s just started at the British Museum about Ice Age Art and to tie in with this there was a Culture Show special covering both the exhibition and Ice Age art in general. The presenter was Andrew Graham-Dixon – we’ve watched a few of his programmes before including something about the art of Spain, and also something about the Treasures of Heaven exhibition at the British Museum a couple of years ago.

The two themes of the programme were firstly an emphasis on just how old all of these objects are, and secondly how these people were people just like us and much more sophisticated than the stereotype of a “prehistoric caveman” would lead us to expect. The programme looked at these themes by showing us some of the objects in the British Museum exhibition (and talking to the curators etc about them) and by showing us some of the cave paintings – particularly some in Northern Spain.

There was also a segment of the programme where Graham-Dixon met with an experimental archaeologist who makes replicas of some of these objects using the same techniques and types of tools that the originals were made with. I found this particularly fascinating, and it was astonishing how long it took – he was saying that the smaller pieces took about 80 hours each, but a larger piece might take on the order of 400 hours or more. He (and several of the other people interviewed) was saying that the time it took together with the skill & artistic talent shown in the pieces we’ve found imply that being an artist was a specialised profession in the hunter-gatherer societies of the time.

And they were also saying that art was clearly important to these societies – you don’t put that much effort and resources into something you don’t think much of. Perhaps it tied into their religion(s) – in particular the female figures seem to be biased towards representations of fertility, which might have religious significance. Perhaps it was also a means of communicating between groups of people, or over time – the subjects of the art are normally the natural world, the animals that they would hunt and that they shared their environment with. And in a world where people were significantly outnumbered by animals, and where they depended so much on the environment around them for survival, close observation of nature would be a necessity and showing each other what they’d seen would be important. This then shows up in the art – the detail & life-like rendering of animals in some of the pieces is astonishing.

On the subject of people being outnumbered by animals – at one point Graham-Dixon said that the population living outside Africa during this era was something like 100,000, less than the medieval population of Paris. And if the numbers of people are astonishingly small, the time spans are astonishingly large. The range of dates for cave-paintings or objects are from 40,000 years ago to 13,000 years ago – the whole of “history” is small compared to that. And these objects are as ancient to the ancient Greeks as they are to us, to all intents and purposes.

I’m looking forward to seeing the exhibition at the British Museum even more after seeing this programme 🙂

In an attempt to clear some stuff of our PVR (which is why we’ve had a bonus TV night or two this weekend in addition to our normal Wednesday night) we started watching one of the series we’ve got recorded in HD. Rome: A History of the Eternal City is a look at the history of Rome from a religious perspective, presented by Simon Sebag Montefiore who we’ve previously seen present a programme on Jerusalem. This first episode covered ancient Rome from foundation through to just before the conversion of the Empire to Christianity – a large amount of ground to cover in an hour!

The programme opened with some scenes from modern Christian Rome – the crowds coming to watch a statue of the Virgin Mary being paraded around the city first by boat and later through the streets. Montefiore then pointed out that this pageantry had roots in pagan Rome, and explained that Rome has always been a sacred city. He then went on to re-tell the Roman foundation myth – the story of Romulus and Remus, twins who were suckled by a she-wolf after they were abandoned at birth. As adults they were to found a city, but fell out over where it should be sited – both saw omens from the gods indicating that their preferred site was the favoured one. The dispute was only resolved when Romulus killed his brother, and founded the city of Rome on the Palatine hill. The archaeological and historical evidence is that Rome grew out of the union of villages in this region, but from very early in its history it was a sacred area. The dead could not be buried inside the walls of Rome, and soldiers could not bear arms there. This sacredness extended even below ground, and Montefiore visited the sewer that had existed since ancient times (and is still part of the sewer system today). This originally drained the Forum, which flooded frequently, and also symbolised the purification of the city. There were rituals about washing things away in the sewers, including the body of at least one Emperor.

We then had a (fairly brisk) trot through the history of ancient Rome, with an emphasis on how the secular and the religious intertwined. He talked about how the priesthood influenced decisions during the early period when Rome was a monarchy – we got a demonstration of how the omens were read in the liver of a sheep (this being a modern sheep the liver wasn’t particularly blemished, I imagine a less healthy sheep would give more interesting (but less good) omens). Even once Rome was a republic many of the same religious ideas were still present – that the city was sacred, and that they had some divine right to conquer. The Senate even finished off a temple planned during the reign of the last King – it was a replacement of secular power that didn’t affect the religious life of the city. The Romans worshipped many gods & goddesses & would incorporate foreign ones into their worship. The programme noted in particular the Magna Mater, originally a foreign goddess, whose worship & priesthood was brought to the city after omens suggested that she was the only way to save the city from Hannibal during the Second Punic War. The arrival of the Magna Mater was in a ceremony very reminiscent of the modern day procession of the Virgin Mary that the programme opened with.

At the point where the Republic turned into an Empire there were also changes to the religious landscape. Over his reign Augustus gradually set up the Imperial cult – partly by deifying Julius Caesar, and then adding “son of a god” to his own titles. And by setting up altars around the city which emphasised the divinity of the Imperial family, and encouraged people to make sacrifices to him. This was alongside the other gods & goddesses, but still served to help the political elevation of the Emperor as sole ruler.

An interesting programme, although I think that many of the details have escaped me – in part because it covered so much in just an hour.

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Richard III: The King in the Car Park

For TV night this week we watched the documentary about the finding of Richard III’s remains that was aired on Monday evening on Channel 4. It was presented by someone I didn’t really recognise – Simon Farnaby – who turns out to be a comedian who does the Horrible Histories programmes (which I haven’t watched, but know about). The format of the programme was that Farnaby & a camera crew showed up at key moments of the excavation and subsequent analysis of the skeleton & so we got to see what happened & what they discovered as it happened. There were also segments of the programme where Farnaby told us about the relevant history.

The project to excavate the car park in Leicester where the remains were found started with Phillipa Langley & the Richard III Society who did the preliminary work of figuring out where to dig, and funded the dig. So Langley was also present at all the key moments, and a fair amount of attention was paid to her (and her fellow society members’) reactions to what was discovered. Which I felt was overdone – she was quite clearly a nut, and was over-emotional at all possible moments. I would’ve preferred a bit more about the science behind the identification & a bit less of looking at some woman break down in tears seeing the skeleton of a man who’d been dead 500 years.

So, Richard III is the last king before the Tudors at the end period of the Wars of the Roses. He took the throne after his brother Edward IV died – usurping it from Edward IV’s son. Edward IV’s sons were locked up in the Tower of London and subsequently were not seen again, the Tudors claim Richard III killed them and various partisans of Richard’s right down to the modern day say that this is a lie put about for propaganda purposes. Richard only reigned for about 2 years, before he was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. The victor at this battle was Henry Tudor, who then took the throne as Henry VII. Obviously his and his descendants’ regime had good reason to cast Richard III as a terrible despot who deserved to be overthrown (but contemporary accounts suggest he was better liked than that), and also had good reason to insist that the Princes in the Tower were dead (as their claim to the throne would be better than Henry’s). The image of Richard III that’s come down to us via Shakespeare of a hunchbacked, murdering tyrant therefore needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. And the Richard III Society is devoted to the idea that he had no physical deformities, was a wise etc etc ruler & didn’t murder anyone. There was a segment of the programme that showed Farnaby talking to various of the society members on skype or something like that, and they were all very passionately saying things like “he would have nothing to gain from murdering the princes” and so on. Which made me roll my eyes somewhat, it has to be said. Of course there was probably some carefully chosen editing going on here – the programme did seem keen to play up the “aren’t these people weird?” theme. Perhaps to an unkind degree.

Langley & her fellow society members might’ve been nuts, but they were nuts that had done their homework. One of the legends surrounding the death of Richard III was that his body had been chucked in the river, but this was a later invention by a writer who’d visited the wrong church & found no signs of the grave so made something up to explain it. Langley had tracked down (with help from historians) more contemporary sources which said he had been buried in Greyfriars Church in Leicester, and she also tracked down where (geographically) that church had once been. And then we had another of the more “nutty woo-woo” bits, as she told us how she’d gone there and stood in the car park that was now there and stood at the parking bay labelled with an R and “felt something”.

So the Richard III Society raised the money (over £10,000) to fund an excavation by Leicester University to see if they could find the bones of Richard III. They double checked the info, and started by digging three trenches in the car park. The first thing they found, in the first trench, right under the letter R were human bones. The rest of the archaeological evidence (which mapped out where the church was) subsequently showed that these were a likely candidate for the bones of the very man they were looking for! I was a little annoyed that the woo-woo had lucked out 😉 But it was good for the excavation because the slim chance had actually paid off – it’s the sort of thing you couldn’t put in a story because no-one would believe the coincidence.

These bones were then properly excavated (with a slip-up of damaging the skull :/ but only that one slip-up) and taken off to Leicester University for analysis. Another more nutty bit was Langley’s insistence that the box containing the bones be transported drapped in the standard of Richard III. But anyway, once at the university they were subjected to all sorts of analysis. The first thing we were told about was the analysis of a piece of metal found near the spine – unfortunately this turned out to be a Roman nail that just happened to be in the soil there.

They also CT scanned the bones & could do quite a bit of analysis from that. The first, most striking, thing was that he did have a curvature of the spine – which was very upsetting for Langley. But this scoliosis seems to’ve been in the same plane as the torso and was probably not particularly visible when he was clothed. Maybe one of his shoulders would’ve been a bit raised, but not by much. And definitely no withered arm. So this shows us that the later Tudor propaganda about the deformities – hunchback, withered arm – was based on a kernel of truth and then exaggerated to fit the purposes of the Tudors. (Bear in mind that at this time any deformity would be seen as a punishment from God, and to indicate something about your moral character.) One other notable thing about the skeleton is that he seemed to have quite feminine features to his bone structure – more gracile than the average male and some particular features of the pelvis were towards the feminine end of the spectrum.

They could also see the causes of death from the bones. The notable wounds included a hole in the top of the skull made by a dagger pounded down through it and a blow that had sliced off a piece of the skull to an extent that would’ve exposed the brain. Clearly these were not survivable wounds (even with modern medicine) – tho it can’t be determined which one was the one that killed him as both happened at or very soon after death. They also said that there was a wound on his pelvis that had occurred after death – a knife thrust through the buttocks. These wounds fit the contemporary stories about how Richard had died – surrounded in the melee fighting and killed then, and subsequently his body was found and carried to Henry VII tied over a horse (for display to prove he was truly dead before he was buried). The buttock wound might well have occurred while he was tied over this horse.

They also carbon dated the bones. The first estimate came out a bit early (by about 50 years) but they then said that given he was a part of the elite he’d’ve had a diet rich in marine food. This would change the estimate, and the range of the new one covered the right date.

And they did the DNA testing, to see if it was an acceptable match of a known descendant of one of Richard III’s sisters. I was disappointed with this bit of the programme because it didn’t actually give us any details, just said that the “the DNA was a match”. Er, right, not much info there. Couldn’t we’ve cut some of the weepy woman stuff & talked a bit about what testing they did? I found more from the Leicester University website for the project – it seems they looked at the mitochondrial DNA extracted from the bones and compared it to two descendants in an unbroken maternal line from Anne Neville (Richard’s sister). A somewhat simplified explanation of this – mitochondria are the bits in a cell that provide the cell with energy, and once upon a time they were free living bacteria that now live in symbiosis inside other cells. This means that they still have some vestigial remains of their own DNA, which is distinct from the DNA of the main cell. Mitochondria are always inherited from one’s mother – they are present in the egg cell pre-fertilisation. So if you look at markers in the mitochondrial DNA then people who share a common maternal ancestor will share those markers (barring mutation, which is a relatively rare occurrence). So when they looked at the markers of the two maternal line descendants of Richard’s mother (via his sister) and compared it to the mitochondrial DNA extracted from the bones they found that the markers were the same. Interestingly the website also mentions that the three samples share a particularly rare form of one of markers, making it even more convincing that these are relatives in the maternal line (i.e. this gets even less likely to be a case of coincidence).

The website also mentions looking at the paternal line (i.e. looking at Y-chromosome markers that are only passed down from father to son) but then it just says that this is harder because it’s more clear-cut who someone’s mother is (as birth generally takes place in front of witnesses particularly at that level of society), but it’s harder to be sure who the father is (as conception happens in private and may not be accurately reported). So I guess that didn’t pan out with any of the putative direct male line descendants (of Richard’s father).

So each piece of evidence they showed isn’t completely convincing in itself. But taken all together it seems that this is extremely likely to be Richard III’s skeleton. He died at the right time, in the right way, he had the right sort of physical deformities, he was buried in the right place and he is of the right maternal line. Which is pretty awesome 🙂

They also did a reconstruction of his face from the skull, but I kept wondering about confirmation bias – it turned out to look quite like the portraits, and how much of that is because consciously or unconsciously any time there was a choice the one that made it look more like the portraits was chosen? This bit also drew the somewhat daft observation from Langley that “this wasn’t the face of a tyrant” – I’m not sure you can really say anything about his personality from a model of a computer reconstruction of a long dead man.

Overall I enjoyed this programme, even if I felt they could’ve cut quite a bit of Langley’s emotions and replaced it with the science. Farnaby was a good presenter – he narrated it with a sense of humour (unsurprisingly for a comedian) but this wasn’t at the expense of presenting the actual information.

Lost Kingdoms of South America; In Search of Medieval Britain

The second episode of Lost Kingdoms of South America is about the Tiwanaku people, who lived in what is now Bolivia between about 500AD to about 1100AD. The main area they lived in is a large plateau in the Andes over 3500 metres above sea level. Cooper opened the programme by visiting some modern subsistence farmers in the area & showing us how difficult life can be on the plateau. The Tiwanaku people started out near a large lake on the plateau (Lake Titicaca) – this lake creates a slightly warmer micro-climate, and the soil near the lake is more fertile than elsewhere. The Tiwanaku increased the area where they were able to farm by using networks of channels between raised fields to irrigate the soil using the meltwater from the mountains.

The main archaeological site for the Tiwanaku people is a vast temple complex (over 5 square kilometres in area) called Tiwanaku – which means “stone at the centre”. This was constructed using massive stones brought across the lake, and made into walls for ritual areas & carved with faces of ancestors and gods. The religion of the people was about gathering together to make offerings to the gods controlling the environment, so that they would have successful harvests etc. Cooper went to a modern Bolivian “start of the growing season” festival, which was nominally Christian (in that it happened partly in a church, and people brought banners of Christ crucified with them) but also derived from the ancestral festivals of the people (and involved all the surrounding people in the area coming together and having a party). As with the Chachapoya this appears to’ve been a civilisation where there wasn’t such a strict hierarchy as we’re used to – there’s no indication of kings or leaders as such, no memorials to a single person. Instead the social bonds were formed at these festivals & a combination of close ties to the rest of the people and friendly competition is what drives the larger scale projects that require collaboration.

The rituals of the Tiwanaku people appear to’ve involved beer, and hallucinogens – the statues left at the site of Tiwanaku are normally of a person holding a beer cup in one hand and a snuff pipe (their drug paraphenalia) in the other. The archaeologist Cooper was talking to told us that the temple would originally have been painted in bright colours, and the people wore very bright coloured clothes which would add to the hallucinogenic experience. They also probably involved sacrifice – modern Bolivians will still sometimes sacrifice llamas at their festivals. There also appears to be evidence that at least on some occasions there was human sacrifice. However, I wasn’t entirely convinced by that segment of the programme – what they told us about was based on one single skeleton discovered buried at the Tiwanaku site of an individual who’d been hit over the back of the head. Perhaps this was a sacrifice, but without any other evidence how do you know it’s not just a murder? Presumably there was other evidence we just weren’t shown.

The beer cups are a distinctive shape with distinctive patterns, and as the Tiwanaku culture spread and met other cultures you can see those cultures adopt the beer cups & other trappings of the Tiwanaku lifestyle. Including head deformation! The Tiwanaku people wrapped the heads of babies to elongate the skull, or sometimes added boards to the wrappings to flatten the skull. The expansion of the Tiwanaku was presented as peaceful & involving bonding with people over a beer – but again I wasn’t entirely convinced by the evidence we were shown (not saying it doesn’t exist, just the way it was covered in the programme wasn’t convincing).

The Tiwanaku as a large “state” with a common culture appears to have collapsed around 1100AD, not through conquest but through a change in the climate locally that reduced the amount of meltwater for the irrigation of their fields leading to poor harvests. Eventually the Tiwanaku temple complex was abandoned. It was later discovered by the Spanish, and stones from it were used to build churches nearby (bizarrely including re-purposing statues as “St. Peter” and “St. Paul”). More recently Bolivian people have been reclaiming their past to some degree – including performing rituals at the Tiwanaku site. (But not deforming their babies’ skulls into elongated shapes …)

Somehow I got to the end of this particular episode & felt a bit like we were being given the “best side” of the Tiwanaku – even if it did touch on human sacrifice etc. It felt a lot like they were being set up as these chilled out stoned beer drinkers who just want to be friends, maaan. And I just don’t quite believe in 600 years of hippy peace & love with no conflict even as they spread to take-over a large territory. Maybe that just says more about me than about them, tho 😉

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We’d started watching quite late in the evening, so didn’t have time for another hour long programme – instead we watched another episode of In Search of Medieval Britain where Alixe Bovey goes round the country looking at places on the 14th Century map called the Gough Map. This episode was about Scotland. It was quite funny looking at the shape it was given on the map – as Bovey said clearly the map maker didn’t actually know anything first hand or accurate about Scotland. None of the geography was right, but she still managed to go & visit a few relevant places. Particularly entertaining was the segment on wolves – apparently the best way to escape a wolf, according to a medieval Bestiary, is to take all your clothes off (to reveal your sinfulness) and stand on top of the discarded clothing banging two rocks together (to summon the apostles). This will so scare the incarnation of the devil (which is, after all, what a wolf is) that it will turn tail & run away. I hope no-one actually tried that 😉

She also visited the oldest cathedral in Scotland (in Glasgow), a herb garden (complete with herbalist), Stirling, the Isle of May (controlled access to the fishing ports at the south-east of Scotland, a very important part of the Scottish economy of the time), and a safe house in the border region where the border people would protect themselves from raiders. Or base themselves once they’d become raiders …

I do wish we’d managed to record more than two of these 🙁

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In Our Time: Shahnameh of Ferdowsi

The Shahnameh is an epic poem, twice as long as the Odyssey & the Iliad put together, written in 10th Century AD Persia about Persian history. It took its author, Ferdowsi, 30 years to write and is still regarded today as one of the important pieces of Persian literature. The experts who discussed it on In Our Time were Narguess Farzad (University of London), Charles Melville (University of Cambridge) and Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis (British Museum). The two women are Iranian, and particularly towards the end of the programme were very enthusiastic about how important this poem is to Iran & to the cultural identity of the Iranian people.

At the time it was written it was a few centuries after Persia had been conquered by the Muslim Arabs at a time when the Caliphate was no longer a strong force across the Islamic Empire. The Persian people had kept oral traditions of their culture, and their own language, and during this period there was a reassertion of Persian culture. Ferdowsi was writing as part of this cultural movement & he was setting out to retell pre-existing prose records & oral tradition as poetry because he believed this would be easier to remember. So it was a self-conscious effort at writing something for posterity. It’s written in early modern Persian, so is still understandable today even if somewhat archaic. The format is rhyming couplets, and a specific meter – I think they said it was 11 syllables, a pause, 11 more syllables for each line, and the middles and the ends of the lines in a couplet rhyme. I’m not sure if that means it’s A: A, A: A, B: B, B: B or if it means it’s A: B, A: B, C: D, C: D (if you see what I mean). They said he was a very good poet and within the strict meter he uses the feel of the language to fit the things he’s writing about. So battles have words that feel short and energetic, but scenes like banquets are more flowing words.

The poem is split into three parts – myths, legends & history. The myths are what we might think of as pre-history – the first people (cave dwellers), the coming of gods, that sort of thing. The legends are the stories of heroes, and of early kings and early battles (and these may or may not’ve happened, but certainly didn’t happen like they’re told). And the history is the stories of the Kings of the Sassanid Empire – which runs from around 200AD to the Islamic conquest of Persia in about 650AD. This is accurate in the sense that the right kings are named in the right order, but it’s not really telling you about what happened when, it’s more of a manual for “how to be a good Persian King”. There are lots of dialogues where the wise advisor tells the new King how to rule – reminds me a bit of Ancient Egyptian literature which has a whole genre of that sort of thing.

After it was written it wasn’t all that popular at first – it must’ve survived, and been copied around because it’s referred to in other literature. But it comes into its own once the Mongols conquer Persia, as a way of Persianising the new rulers and of showing what it means to be Persian. Since then it’s occupied a central role in Persian education & culture – they were saying that it’s taught in schools and that even people without formal schooling would learn sections of the poem.

Prehistoric Autopsy; Lost Kingdoms of South America

The last episode of Prehistoric Autopsy was about Lucy – one of the most famous fossils of our ancestors (and the only individual (as opposed to species) I’d actually heard about before this series). She was a member of the species Australopithecus afarensis and lived a little over 3 million years ago. She was discovered in the early 70s, and at 40% complete was one of the most complete specimens of a hominid from that era.

This programme felt like there was a bit more padding than the other two – not quite as much to tell us about, partly because there’re fewer fossils available to figure things out from. But there was still quite a lot 🙂 From the bones that do exist (both Lucy’s and others) they can tell that this species was bipedal & walked upright – even tho they don’t have the foot bones they can see the shape of the knee joints and the pelvis. This is corroborated by data from some preserved footprints, that are presumed to be Australopithecus afarensis because that was the only primate species that’s been found in that area at that time. Experts have analysed the shape of these footprints and compared it to both human and chimpanzee footprints in similar material. The Australopithecus afarensis footprints are much more like the human ones – they have a non-opposable big toe, and the pressure patterns (like deep heel prints) are similar to human ones.

They also showed us the pelvis bones of chimps, humans & Australopithecus afarensis – you can see the difference between the chimp one & the other two really clearly. But the differences between the Homo sapiens one & Australopithecus afarensis one are much subtler. The scientist Roberts was talking to also pointed out that you can see changes in the birth canal – Australopithecus afarensis would’ve found it harder to give birth than a chimpanzee because the canal is not as wide, due to the demands bipedalism puts on the shape. But not as hard as a modern human – the brain size of Australopithecus afarensis is still pretty small, only a little bigger than that of a chimp, so the fit would not be as tight nor would it require quite as much changing of position from the baby on the way out.

Australopithecus afarensis may’ve used tools. This was a pretty controversial piece of evidence – and Roberts & McGavin didn’t agree on how plausible they thought it was. And it was nice to see how that was presented – there wasn’t a feel of some fake monolithic “the opinion of the scientists”, it was presented in a much more true to reality way. Some scientists think this, others aren’t convinced, everyone’s interested in seeing more evidence. Actually the whole series has done well on this front, they took great care to tell you about the caveats and where the evidence was slim. Lots of “we think because of reasons” and less “we know”.

Anyway, back to the tools – there’s an animal bone, found in the same context as a juvenile Australopithecus afarensis, which has two parallel grooves on it. In the grooves are fragments of hard igneous rock (as opposed to the sandstone that was encasing all the bones). This may be evidence that Australopithecus afarensis used sharp rocks to butcher meat (in some crude sense). But it may also have been due to accidental trampling of a dead animal that drove a stone against the bone. Given chimps use tools like twigs, it wouldn’t be that surprising if Australopithecus afarensis did – but really there needs to be more evidence than a single bone.

They also had a segment on how Lucy might’ve communicated – which was probably via facial expressions as well as vocalisations, because pretty much all primates do that. To illustrate this they showed us a little bit about some new research starting on Japanese Macaques, which has the eventual goal of seeing how many different facial expressions they can tell apart (and I think they have hopes of figuring out what they mean, not sure how though).

The model they built looked really good, as all of them have. They said at the end of the programme that the models were going out touring museums round the country, but when I looked it up we’d missed all the dates (because we time-shifted the programme by 3 months). A shame 🙁 Although apparently the exhibition was aimed at kids, so maybe it’d’ve been a bit shallow. There also doesn’t seem to be a tie-in book for the series, another shame – I’d’ve bought it 🙂 I did find another Alice Roberts book on Human Evolution, so if I like the book of hers we have (when I get to it) then I’ll pick that up.

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Having finished up Wartime Farm last week we started on a new series – this time something that we’re only time-shifting by a couple of weeks. The series is Lost Kingdoms of South America, which is clearly inspired by the previous BBC series called Lost Kingdoms of Africa. The primary difference between the two series (as well as which continent they’re on) is the presenter – the African one was presented by Gus Casely-Hayford, who is an art historian whose family come from Ghana. The presenter for this current series is Jago Cooper, who is an archaeologist who specialises in South American cultures but not (as far as wikipedia tells me) from South America. So that gives a slightly different tone to the programmes (not better or worse, just a different perspective).

This first episode was about the Chachapoya people of Peru. Who I must confess I’d never heard of before watching it (although it became clear I should’ve at least known the name). A good start – because I’d sort of assumed we were going to get first the Aztecs, then the Incas then perhaps the Mayans, you know all the peoples we’ve all heard of before. Instead we got an intriguing people whose society really wasn’t the same as our expectations for the place & time.

The Chachapoya lived in the north of Peru, in the Andes, from about 400AD until around the time the Europeans arrived on the scene. The name we use is the Incan name for them & it translates as the Cloud People because of their high altitude villages & towns. Cooper interviewed an archaeologist in Lima who said she thought only about 5% of their sites have been properly excavated, if that. So there’s a lot still to find out.

One of the themes of the programme was that when thinking about these people we really need to take our Western preconceptions and throw them away before we can understand them. For instance the first thing we think is “but why did they live so high?” – because that’s the altitude that was best for cultivation of maize & potatoes. They lived where they could grow their food, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do. And why did they live somewhere so remote? It wasn’t remote for them – both because the people were more willing to travel further between settlements, and because the rivers and the geography of the Andes at that point combined to funnel trade from the Amazon Basin to the Pacific Coast through the lands of the Chachapoya. So not remote, but on a busy trade route. Cooper showed us some artifacts found in Chachapoya sites that included things like feathers from birds only found in the rain forest in Brazil.

Early in their culture they buried their dead up in caves on mountain cliff-faces. These were astonishing – Cooper needed the help of modern equipment and experienced mountaineers to get to these caves where the bones lay. But the floors of the caves were worn through repeated visits, so this didn’t seem to be a case of burying your dead somewhere out of the way. Later they mummified their dead – and this is why I feel I should’ve heard of them, because I knew there were Peruvian mummies, I just didn’t know which culture made them. Which is poor, really – but now I do 🙂 These mummies weren’t like the Egyptian ones which were buried & left to last out eternity in their tomb. These mummies were carried around from place to place in bags, and sometimes taken out & displayed in some fashion. A very different relationship with the dead.

Another difference in their society from what we might expect is that they don’t appear to have had a hierarchy – the Spanish had referred to this in writing from the time they arrived in South America, but there’s also evidence for it in the archaeology. The villages that’ve been investigated don’t seem to have elite housing – all the housing is the same sort of shape & size. I wasn’t entirely clear how they can tell that the one larger building most villages have is a ceremonial site & not an elite site, but they were clear that this was the case. There are also no signs of elite burials – all the dead that have been found are treated in the same. This is pretty unusual for a human society.

They also don’t seem to’ve been bloodthirsty in the way that the Aztecs & the Incas are – no human sacrifice was mentioned, nor ritual bloodletting. And in another difference from the “canonical” South American civilisation story they were conquered & dispersed by the Inca before the Spanish arrived. The Spanish actually allied with the Chachapoya to fight against the Inca. Although the Europeans did deal the final blows to the Chachapoya way of life – both through converting them to Christianity, and via the diseases they brought with them.

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“China: The World’s Oldest Civilisation Revealed” John Makeham (Part 4)

Partition and Conflict: The Period of Division

This is a short chapter, just 18 pages, and probably I should’ve read it right after the last one & done a post about the two together. But then again, it covers another 400 years from about 200AD through to about 600AD. And about half a thousand different names and kingdoms (some exaggeration for effect here 😉 ). So it was a bit confusing.

Orientation dates: Diocletian became Emperor of Rome in 284AD. Constantine became Emperor in 306AD, and called the Council of Nicea in 325AD. The Visigoths sacked Rome in 410AD. The Anglo-Saxons migrate into (or invade) Britain over the period between 400AD and 600AD. The Merovingians ruled Francia from 481AD through to 687AD. Muhammed was born around 570AD and Islam was founded in 610AD.

So this 400 year period is actually the equivalent of one of the Ancient Egyptian Intermediate Periods – the country is divided, and ruled over by different kings or emperors in different bits. But there is still a high degree of cultural continuity within the area as a whole and across the time period. I admit I was a bit surprised by the length of this period between unified Chinas – I’d somehow assumed that once it was unified back in 221BC the core pretty much stayed that way except for brief periods thereafter.

I found the writing for this section quite confusing, and even as I’m flicking back over it to write this post I’m sometimes struggling to figure out quite who did what when & what the country afterwards (or before) was called.

The Three Kingdoms

The beginning of the end for the Han was in 189AD when a civil war broke out that would eventually lead to the division of the Empire into three parts (the “Three Kingdoms”). A general called Dong Zhuo entered the capital city, Luoyang, and took charge of the two sons of the recently deceased Emperor. Instead of supporting the new Emperor (the elder son) he replaced him with the younger son who “ruled” for 30 years under the thumb of Dong Zhou and later Cao Cao & his offspring. This line eventually took the title Emperor around 220AD. The kingdom they ruled over was in the north of China and called Wei.

In the south of China there ended up two kingdoms – which I think derive from the “loyal rebels” who originally supported the new Emperor of the Han Dynasty back in 189AD. But I’m not quite sure. In the south east was the kingdom of Wu, ruled over by Shu Quan & descendants (who didn’t claim to be Emperors until 229AD). And in the south west (including modern Sichuan) was the kingdom of Shu Han ruled over by Liu Bei and descendants (Emperors shortly after 220AD) – these guys claimed descent from the Former Han so I think were trying to set themselves up as more legitimate than the others.

This period of Chinese history is apparently often represented in art and storytelling – particularly famous is “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” which is a novel by Luo Guanzhong, written around the 14th Century. The book also makes the point that the period in question was culturally rich and splendid, including a poet (Cao Zhi, son of Cao Cao) who is still recognised as one of China’s greatest poets.

The Two Jin Dynasties

Next there was a brief period of unity before it all dissolved into chaos again. Sima Yi murdered Cao Shuang in 249AD and took over the kingdom of Wei. His grandson succeeded in conquering Shu Han in 266AD and set himself up as the Emperor of a new Dynasty – the Jin. He conquered the Wu in 280AD and all looked set for a newly unified China to continue in serenity.

Unfortunately his son & heir was mentally incompetant (that’s exactly what the book said – no details as to what they meant though) and when he came to the throne in 290AD the whole thing started to collapse. Infighting between consort families eventually lead to the War of the Eight Princes and the Jin Dynasty lost control of the north of China in 316AD. That’s the end of the Western Jin.

The Eastern Jin keep control of the south of China for another hundred years. It didn’t sound like it was a particularly peaceful or settled period – lots of refugees from the north causing friction with local warlords. And eventually the Jin ruler actually hands over power to the start of the Liu Song Dynasty out of a feeling that the Mandate of Heaven has passed from the Jin.

As an aside – I’m wondering if the naming of Dynasties as Western then Eastern is linked in Chinese somehow to Former/Later or Early/Late. Linguistically I mean. This particular pair seem to have no connection to a west->east movement of power (unlike, say, the Zhou much earlier whose capital did shift over time).

Chicken Headed Ewers
This is the time of the chicken headed ewers!

The Sixteen Kingdoms

While the Eastern Jin were ruling the south the north was split into several different kingdoms which rose & fell during the 4th & 5th Centuries. To add to any confusion one might have about this period of Chinese history they have also mostly taken names from earlier Chinese kingdoms of the Warring States period – like Zhao or Qin. A way of legitimising themselves, perhaps? Which might be particularly important for these kingdoms because they were mostly ruled by members of the Five Barbarian Peoples – who were descended from the peoples to the north of China.

These peoples were not actually barbarians, the word is just the epithet used by the Chinese to describe the non-Chinese (and therefore perceived as uncivilised) that neighboured them. And despite this period sometimes being called “The Barbarian Invasions” they mostly didn’t invade either. They’d often been co-inhabiting the northern region of the empire alongside the “native” Chinese, and becoming assimilated into their culture. The exception is one of the last of the groups to appear on the scene – these are the Särbi, and they were nomadic herders who are the ancestors of the Mongols. A branch of these (the Tagbatch) would eventually re-unite northern China around the end of the 4th Century.

The Southern and Northern Dynasties

We’re now entering the last hundred years of this period between unified Chinas. In the south between 420AD & 581AD there are a series of short-lived dynasties starting with the Liu Song who were handed power by the last of the Jin. Each seems to come to power in a military coup then not long out-last their founder. In the north the Tagbatch rule the whole area for quite some time first from a northern city called Pingcheng, then moving south. Then a civil war breaks out around 525AD – this war destroys the capital city Luoyang. Eventually the Sui dynasty rise up from the Wei valley area and re-unite northern China before setting their sights on the conquest of the south.

Again the book makes the point that despite the political turmoil this is a time of growth and cultural achievement. New maritime traderoutes between the Eastern Jin in the south of China & Japan, South-East Asia and India lead to great economic growth and the rise of what might be called the middle class (my phrasing, not the book’s) – wealthy merchants and tradespeople, who didn’t have the political power or social status of the aristocrats but certainly were a large part of keeping the country solvent. Poetry became cemented as one of the central parts of Chinese culture during this time – this is when it became expected that an upper class gentleman would be able to write poetry as a matter of course. Mentioned in passing a couple of times was that Buddhism and Daoism started to spread to a degree to rival Confucianism, I’d’ve liked more discussion of this but perhaps it will be revisited later in the book.

Tangents to follow up on: The various peoples to the north of China who form the Sixteen Kingdoms, what their history is before & after this time.

Whew. I’ve ended up writing quite a lot about what was covered so briskly in the book. But on the plus side, I think I’ve got it put into some order in my head now, which is after all the purpose of writing an essay about it 🙂

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In Our Time: The Borgias

The Borgias have a bit of a reputation – poisoning, murder, incest & all sorts of bad behaviour. And particularly shocking in a family that includes two Popes! The experts who discussed this on In Our Time were Evelyn Welch (Queen Mary, University of London), Catherine Fletcher (University of Sheffield) and Christine Shaw (Swansea University).

The programme started with a brief run-down of the salacious details of the “Black Legend” (much as I did just now, but they did it with a quote). Then they moved on to set the Borgia family in context with a description of Italy in the fifteenth century – unlike today it wasn’t a single unified state, instead there were several different states on the peninsula. Some were city states ruled by aristocracy, some were republican city states, other areas were kingdoms (like the Kingdom of Naples), and there were also the papacy. The political interactions of all these various states, and of the families that ruled them were complex and sometimes the rivalries were so bitter that states would rather invite in foreigners than be ruled by a neighbouring state. The papacy had only relatively recently returned to Italy & to Rome, and so was in the process of establishing itself (in temporal terms) in the network of relationships. The Pope held a lot of lands within Italy, including the Kingdom of Naples.

The Borgias enter the story with Alphonso Borgia who came with the King of Aragon when he conquered Naples, as a secretary & lawyer. He was then made a Cardinal, and became Pope as a compromise candidate when there was stalemate between the two leading candidates. Once he became Pope he did the traditional papal thing of making a nephew or two into Cardinals. They were saying on the programme that this nepotism (the word is derived from the Italian for nephew) was fairly standard – that there were really two sorts of Cardinals, those that were respected theologians or churchmen, and those that were there to be part of the government for the Pope’s temporal domains. And promoting your own family to these positions would give you some men on whose loyalty you could count.

So Rodrigo Borgia is one of these new Cardinals and he stayed a Cardinal under several popes for thirty-something years, gaining experience and power as he did so. The experts were saying that he was a very politically savvy man. He was elected as Pope in 1492 and took the name Pope Alexander VI – he’s the (in)famous Borgia Pope. Here’s where in the programme we had the first debunking of a popular legend – he is generally said to have bribed his way to the papacy, but the experts were keen to point out that bribery isn’t quite the right way to describe it. Yes, his various bishoprics were handed out to various Cardinals etc after he became Pope but this was the standard way that things were done. And obviously people who were on good terms with him would be more likely to get given these, but it wasn’t that he systematically went out to gain votes by promising people rewards. Any of the candidates for the papacy would’ve given out their bishoprics to allies after they got the office.

Rodrigo had several children, eight I think they said, and particularly doted on the eldest four (who all had the same mother). These included Cesare Borgia and Lucrezia Borgia who are the other main subjects of the salacious legends. They said on the programme that it wasn’t particularly shocking that a Pope had children – but he did raise eyebrows by actually having children whilst he was Pope and by legitimising his children.

They talked about how the generally politically astute Rodrigo had a blindspot when it came to his children. He was trying to ensure the survival of his dynasty after his death and granted Cesare a lot of lands that had belonged to the Pope, which unsurprisingly didn’t particularly go down well. Rodrigo was effectively trying to sweep aside all of the delicate alliances & networks of relationships that existed in Italy and to install his son in a fiefdom of his own. He also once left Lucrezia to handle the papal correspondence whilst he was away from Rome – shocking because women weren’t even supposed to be in the Vatican, let alone be in a position of responsibility. This helped fuel rumours of indecent relations between father & daughter.

When they came to discuss the rumours and legends they were fairly unanimous that most of it was made up by enemies of the Borgias either at the time or after one of Rodrigo’s main rivals had succeeded him as Pope. There probably was one orgy, but there is no evidence of poisoning or of incest. The incest rumours in particular are probably due to someone who would have a distinct bias against the Borgias – Lucrezia’s first husband. At the time the rumours start Rodrigo is trying engineer his daughter’s divorce (because he wants an alliance with someone more useful), and is trying to get the chap to sign off on an annulment on the grounds that he was incapable of consumating the marriage. Which the soon-to-be-ex-husband isn’t particularly happy about, so he’s spreading rumours about how rather than him being impotent it’s more that Rodrigo wants Lucrezia for himself.

However it is likely that the talk of murders was true – some of them at least. But this is not confined to the Borgia family, and it’s worth remembering that not only were the politics of the time fairly cut-throat in general but also the whole period is a time of war. The King of France is marching his armies through Italy (at, I think, the request of some states that are hoping he’ll back them against other states – that whole thing where the internal rivalries are stronger than the external). There’s definitely evidence that Lucrezia’s second husband was murdered on the orders of the Borgia. And perhaps one of the Borgia sons was murdered by Cesare – but there are several other candidates for his murderer. However, Shaw made the point that the Borgias seem to’ve been particularly feared as a family that you shouldn’t cross, and even Rodrigo seems to’ve thought that Cesare overreacted when he felt he’d been insulted. So they certainly weren’t a nice family.

They talked a bit about the later lives of Cesare & Lucrezia – Cesare basically declined from power & ended up dying in some minor conflict in Navarre. Lucrezia died in childbirth at the age of 39, and at that point had a reputation for piety & good business sense – not what you’d think if you believed the stories told about her now.

So the take home message was that the Black Legend of all the evil doings of the Borgias was pretty much propaganda. They weren’t nice people by any means, but they weren’t unusual for a ruling family of the time.

Prehistoric Autopsy; Wartime Farm

The second episode of Prehistoric Autopsy was all about Homo erectus, and they were building a model of Nariokotome Boy. This is a 1.5 million year old near complete Homo erectus skeleton & the most complete one ever found. They started off with context, again – Homo erectus only died out relatively recently, but was around for 2 million years, which is the longest of any human species. It’s also one of the first hominids that can be thought of as human, and we and all the other ones that were around in the recent (geologically speaking) past are descended from them. They also lived outside Africa, and were the first hominids to do so.

Homo erectus co-existed with several different hominid species over time – they talked in detail about one, Paranthropus boisei. The skull they showed had a massive jaw, a skull ridge and very flared cheekbones to fit the chewing muscles behind. A diet of particularly solid things seems plausible, like nuts and seeds. As well as that sort of food there’s evidence of wear from grasses on their teeth.

They showed us research into the climate over the time period – I loved this bit, there’s just something so neat about being able to find out what the world was like so long ago with such a simple concept. They do it using samples taken of the sediment on the ocean floor. It’s laid down layer upon layer over time, and you can look at things like the sort of mud it is and the sorts of plant seeds/pollen you find in it to build up an idea of what the weather and landscape was like on nearby continents. We got shown a particular example of a core where you could see a colour change in the mud from top (~5000 years ago) to bottom (~10,000 years ago), and told us that the changes correspond to a change in the nearby climate (East Africa, if I remember right) from wetter to more dry. Over the 2 million years that Homo erectus existed the climate seems to’ve undergone lots of swings between hotter & colder or wetter & dryer conditions and they speculate that why Homo erectus survived and the other hominids didn’t is that Homo erectus was more adaptable.

And that they were more adaptable because of their bigger brains and because of the different way they interacted with the environment around them. There’s evidence that Homo erectus used fire, and they cooked their food (at least at the end of the time period, I wasn’t clear if there was no evidence from earlier on or if they hadn’t done the analysis (yet)). Their tools are more sophisticated than earlier hominid tools – instead of just breaking rocks for a sharp edge their tools are carefully shaped and show evidence of being planned and involving skill to make. So Homo erectus seems to’ve had the cognitive ability to shape the environment to suit themselves, rather than put up with the environment they find themselves in. There’s also evidence that they took care of older members of their groups – a skull has been found where the individual lost their teeth a few years before death, and quite clearly wouldn’t’ve survived without help.

Because of the model building the programme also spent some time discussing the probable physique of Nariokotome Boy. Homo erectus show many adaptions for running, and were probably lean and hairless (to the extent that modern humans are hairless, I mean). Because of the lack of hair they’d’ve had dark skins to protect themselves from the UV of the African sun – and this limited their spread north, they don’t seem to’ve got the low melanin mutation that permitted us to live in more northern climates. Also in this section they showed us evidence that Homo erectus may’ve suffered from tuberculosis, which is astonishing – it is a disease that we get from cattle originally, and was assumed to’ve become a human disease only more recently when modern humans started living in close proximity to cattle because they’d become herders. The marks and signs on the Homo erectus skull they were looking at (not Nariokotome Boy, another one) were very similar to the ones on a modern human who’d died of TB, so seemed convincing evidence. Which raises all sorts of interesting questions.

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We also watched the last episode of Wartime Farm, which unsurprisingly covered 1945 and the immediate aftermath of the war, as well as wrapping up with a “what we’ve learnt” segment. So they were mostly concentrating on the fact that once the war was won, that didn’t mean life returned to how it had been pre-war – not only did people still need fed, but in some ways the situation was even more precarious because Britain was close to bankrupt and couldn’t afford to import food yet the fields were becoming less fertile due to a lack of manure and from being over-farmed. They also talked about the celebrations that people had (and the thing they dramatised was a firework elephant, which was awesome 😀 ). And they harvested the wheat crop they’d spent the year growing, using a brand new combine harvester (well, 70 year old one …).

This was a good series, although I’ve struggled to write more than a paragraph per episode. I’m not quite sure why, but I guess partly because there was a lot of “look at how we did things” which isn’t easy to transform into text. I did feel that they spread it all too thin, perhaps they couldn’t do it half the number of episodes, but I do think they could’ve cut it down a bit. The format of half-dramatising, half-telling still feels like it shouldn’t’ve worked, but they pulled it off very well.

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