Easter Island: Mysteries of a Lost World; The Search for Alfred the Great

Easter Island: Mysteries of a Lost World was a one-off 90 minute documentary about the history of Easter Island presented by Jago Cooper. The canonical story about the Easter Island culture is that they became so obsessed with building the Moai statues that they cut down all the trees to move them around, at which point the soil promptly eroded away and the culture collapsed due to being unable to grow food. Violence, destruction of statues and cannibalism followed. There’s then a moral lesson drawn about what we, the modern global society, should learn about using up all your resources.

The thesis of Cooper’s programme is that when you actually examine the evidence it’s clear that the traditional story is wrong. Over the course of the programme Cooper talked to several experts in the history and archaeology of Rapa Nui (the proper name for Easter Island and it’s people) both from Rapa Nui and from other countries. The experts didn’t always agree on the details (most notably about the date of arrival of people on Rapa Nui) but the overall picture was clear. Easter Island is the last inhabited place on Earth to become inhabited, somewhere between 100AD and 1200AD. As the Polynesians spread out into the Pacific Ocean they had a standard method of colonising new islands. A group would go out in boats looking for new lands, and when they found something suitable they’d take note of where they were then plant some yams and return home. A larger colonisation group would then set out with all the amenities they’d need to set up a self-sustaining society, and by the time they got there they would have yams to eat. Rapa Nui was the last island found in this eastward migration, and because it’s so far from any other land it became isolated after it was settled. From whenever that was till the arrival of the first Dutch ship in 1722 AD the Rapa Nui people believed themselves to be the only people in the world, and the island was the only land in the world surrounded by an endless sea.

Rapa Nui was forested when the islanders arrived, and did become deforested over the next several centuries. However, this wasn’t anything to do with moving statues and wasn’t even a catastrophe. Cooper told us that the statues are more likely to’ve been moved by “walking” them using ropes, rather than pulled on wooden runners. And even if they were using wood to move their statues, it wouldn’t’ve needed that many trees. One of the experts interviewed had done the calculations – he knew how many trees could’ve grown on the land, how many trees you’d need to cut down to move a single statue a particular distance, how many statues had moved how far. And it was an insignificant number of trees to move all the statues using wood, as compared with the starting number.

Instead of being the results of foolish disaster it’s much more likely that the trees were cleared to create space to grow crops just as is the case in other places around the world. The Rapa Nui people used several methods to keep the soil thus exposed both there and fertile. One things they did was to use rocks to cover the fields in a technique called “stone mulching” (I didn’t quite understand how this worked beyond the obvious idea that the rocks stopped the soil from blowing away – wouldn’t it also stop plants from germinating?). There is also evidence that they landscaped areas so as to collect and channel water – the only fresh water on the island comes from rain – and they planted trees in the damper areas generated by this. And they planted some crops (like banana trees) in caverns where the roofs had fallen in – shaded and out of the wind.

When the first ships arrived, on Easter Day 1722, they found a vibrant and healthy society – which was rather surprised to find it wasn’t alone in the world. That visit was brief, and amicable. When the next ships arrived, about 50 years later, they found a much reduced population and notably that the Moai statues were toppled over. What had changed? The traditional story involves civil war and cannibalism, but there’s no archaeological evidence for that at all. Instead Cooper said the most plausible explanation is that European diseases caused a severe drop in population in this previously isolated society. I think he said that 90% of the population is thought to’ve died – and so of course you have societal changes, that’s a very traumatic event. The statues show signs of being deliberately lowered to hide their faces. One possible explanation is that the honoured ancestors who were supposed to protect them had failed so were toppled. Another is that the Rapa Nui wanted to hide what had happened to their people from the ancestors, so this was a way of covering their eyes. Society was still basically healthy, however, as shown by the evolution of new rituals (like the birdman cult).

And then the European powers did what they did so often – many of the natives were taken off as slaves to work in South America. Those who remained were forced to live in only one small part of the island and poorly treated, while the rest was given over to intensive sheep farming. This use of the land is what caused the soil and the ecosystem to become as poor as it is today. At one point in the 19th Century there were only 36 families on Rapa Nui who had children – and all the native Rapa Nui people today are descended from these people. The culture has only survived in fragments from oral histories written down in the early 1900s – these same fragments are what started the modern fascination with Easter Island. The modern Rapa Nui are fiercely proud of their island, and its history, and are trying to get independence from Chile (their current political rulers).

This was a fascinating programme, well worth watching. Cooper does get a little carried away with how perfect life was before the Europeans arrived, but I think that’s partly to highlight the contrast between the traditional story about the island and what the evidence tells us.

Another one-off programme that we watched this week was The Search for Alfred the Great. This was presented by Neil Oliver and followed the recent attempts to find the bones of King Alfred. The structure of the programme was three intertwined strands – a biography of Alfred, the history of his bones after his death and the scientific examination of the bones we have.

The biography of Alfred didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know – we’ve recently watched Michael Wood’s series about Alfred and his heirs (post) which covered the subject in more depth. The history of Alfred’s bones was new to me, however. His body has been moved at least twice since his original burial. These initial two moves are well documented – he was buried first in the Old Minister at Winchester. Then after completion of the New Minister (that he himself set in motion) he was reburied there. After the Norman Conquest there was another rebuilding of the church (to its current form) and the monks associated with the first New Minister were moved to somewhere else – Alfred was reburied in their new abbey. After the dissolution of the monasteries during the Reformation the story of Alfred’s bones gets more murky – they stayed buried as the abbey was demolished around the graves and were forgotten to some extent. When the area was redeveloped into a prison in the 18th Century the convicts doing the ground breaking for foundations discovered sepulchres and bones – the valuable bits were sold, the bones were scattered. But an antiquarian did write about it, and about how these might’ve been Alfred & his family’s tombs. Later a Victorian claimed to have re-found and re-dug up these bones – eventually those were bought by a local church which re-interred the bones in the churchyard with a note that they were probably Alfred. This Victorian is the dodgy link in the evidence chain.

And this is where the modern analysis comes in. The bones from the churchyard were exhumed and analysed using modern techniques. I was a little surprised when near the end of the programme the carbon dating all came back as “too recent” – the 5 skeletons in the grave dated between 1100 AD and 1500 AD. Surprised because I thought I’d read that they’d found something plausible. All became clear shortly afterwards when Oliver moved on to talk about a modern partial excavation of the disturbed abbey site. This had turned up a few bits of human bone but funding had run out before proper analysis was done. Carbon dating on a fragment of a man’s pelvis indicated a date of ~900 AD, so the right era. There is nothing to say if it’s Alfred or not, but it’s possible. The main take home message is that it is likely worth excavating the rest of the site properly so see what else might be found (if anything).

An interesting programme. And well done to Oliver and the other people involved in making it for making a programme that was still worth watching even tho the central question wasn’t answered!

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 2 of Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures – series presented by Richard Fortey looking at three mass extinction events and showing us modern examples of the species that survived them.

Episode 2 of Pilgrimage with Simon Reeve – a programme about the history of (Christian) pilgrimage, pilgrimage sites and the modern incarnation of it.

Episode 1 of Baroque! From St Peter’s to St Paul’s – gloriously over the top series about Baroque art and architecture, presented by Waldemar Januszczak.

The Making of the Modern Arab World: Episode 4

The fourth and final episode of Tarek Osman’s Making of the Modern Arab World covered the 10 years leading up to the events of the Arab Spring in 2011. Osman drew out three strands that he felt were important in that decade. One of these is the growing population of the Arab countries. Osman said he’s 38, and in his lifetime the population of Egypt has doubled. Two thirds of the country is under the age of 25. The available jobs and opportunities for these young people haven’t kept up with the growth of the population, and that has had a large impact on the way people see the future (both their own and the country’s). Osman talked to an activist who said she felt that Egyptian society was stuck, like being stuck in a traffic jam.

Another strand of events leading up to the Arab Spring was that the authoritarian leaders of these nominally democratic republics were all getting old. And instead of these being a point where the people could hope for change, it became clear that they were grooming their sons to lead after their deaths. Osman said that when Hafez Al-Assad’s son took power in 2000 at first the general population thought this might bring change – Bashar Al-Assad being young and educated in Britain, perhaps he would be less authoritarian. But it quickly became clear this was not the case, and that meant people in other countries in the region didn’t even have hope that things would change when their own leaders passed away. And this added to the sense of almost insult at the overt handing down of power to sons rather than any pretence at democracy.

Information, and access to it, was the final strand of this narrative. This has two facets – the first of these is that the regimes lost control of the information that their citizens could access. The rise of the internet, and with it the rise of globally accessible media, meant that the general populace was much more aware of what was going on in other countries. And that people could communicate, and organise, much more effectively. Osman talked to an activist who would organise protests on facebook, with 70,000 people who followed his facebook page – you can’t get that sort of reach with more conventional organisation.

The other facet of this strand is the lack of information that the regime had. Osman talked about how Mubarak and the other leaders over time became more set in their ways, and more isolated from the general populace. They weren’t concerned with what the general public thought – dismissing them as unimportant. Osman didn’t say this outright, but I think he was saying that the centre of these regimes didn’t even know they’d lost control of what information their people were seeing. A couple of different civil servants from the Mubarak regime talked about how Mubarak wasn’t interested in change nor was he interested in planning ahead. One said that he had tried to suggest change in the education system to keep up with the demands of modern global society, but that Mubarak wasn’t interested. Another anecdote was that when talking about trying to fix future problems Mubarak’s attitude was that there was enough to do to fix the problems of today, so why add more problems. Whereas the civil servant felt that if you looked at tomorrow as well you might solve today’s problems a different way.

These strands all came together in the actual events of the Arab Spring – where one man’s suicidal protest in Tunisia was seen by other disaffected young people across the whole region, instead of being covered up by the regime. And once seen they could react, and act. The results of the Tunisian uprising then inspired other country’s in turn. Osman ended the programme on a bittersweet note – he talked to a woman who’d taken part in the Egyptian protests that drove out Mubarak. She reminisced about how it felt like they had risen up and become free and made something better. And she hoped perhaps one day her country would manage to sustain that.

The series as a whole has been interesting. However, for all it says in the title it’s a history of the whole of the modern Arab world the focus is firmly on Egypt. Not that surprising, as that’s Osman’s country. It was definitely interesting hearing the history from an Egyptian perspective, rather than an outsider perspective.

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“Vanished” Kat Richardson

Vanished is the fourth book in Kat Richardson’s Greywalker series – I’m getting these out of the library so sadly I skipped over book 3 because the library don’t have it. I don’t think this’ll be a long post – I’m not sure how much I can say about this book while staying spoiler free. When I started reading the series I thought they were going to be very episodic monster-of-the-week stuff, but this one (and perhaps the last one too, I don’t know) is much more concerned with series arc. And my initial criticism of the protagonist, Harper Blaine, feeling in the first book like she came out of nowhere is even more off base than I thought with the last book! Here we get to meet some of her family, and other figures from her past, and we find out both why she’s kinda bad at interpersonal relationships and something about why she’s a Greywalker.

I like that Richardson is pulling in things other than the typical urban fantasy critters. The main focus is the ghosts rather than the vampires, and there are other beings from other mythologies – notably a golem, and a statue of Sekhmet which the goddess speaks through at least once. You can probably guess I was pleased to read that bit, I do have a fondness for Sekhmet – and I think Richardson got the right feel for a goddess who is both a protective deity and a personification of rage. She also works in some Ancient Egyptian vampires – not sure here if she took some known piece of Egyptian mythology and reworked it or if it was an invention of her own. What I liked was that they were both vampires and yet a bit different – having cultural and mythological variety in even the creatures that are well worn tropes of urban fantasy makes the whole world feel more fleshed out and solid.

Time to see if the library has book 5, I think 🙂

“Plantagenet England 1225-1360” Michael Prestwich (Part 7)

The next chapter in this book is another diversion from the chronological survey – the second of three. The first one dealt with England’s relations with the Welsh (post), and this one will look at English-Scottish relations during the period. The final one is in a couple of chapters time and will deal with Anglo-French relations … clearly the theme of these is War, the England of this period did not play nice with others.

Scotland

Conflict with Scotland stretched across the reigns of all three Edwards – starting in 1296. It can be split into phases that roughly correlate with the different Edwards – first success for the English under Edward I, then defeat under Edward II followed by success under Edward III. In the late 1330s the Anglo-Scottish conflict gets tangled up with the Anglo-French one. Prestwich says that the conflict didn’t come out of a growing sense of hostility between the two countries, the relationship was cordial despite some tensions. The Scottish establishment formed much the same sort of structure as the English one (unlike the Welsh one), and the political situation there was stable. There was intermarriage between the two monarchies, and the Scottish Kings also held lands in England. This created a situation similar to that between England and France, in this case the Scottish Kings owed the English King homage for their English lands, but it was a less tense situation. Prestwich suggests that’s because the Scottish Kings were longer lived, so the homage paying happened less frequently. Importantly for the conflict discussed in this chapter the Scottish were very clear that homage was only owed for their English lands, and the Scottish King was not subordinate to the English one. There was however a weak precedent created by Henry III of the English Kings having some right to interference in Scottish politics and the Scottish succession. Henry had helped ensure the stability of Scotland during Alexander III’s minority.

Edward I took this weak precedent and when opportunity presented itself he ran with it. When Alexander III died in 1286 his only direct line heir was his 3 year old granddaughter, Margaret of Norway. Edward I took advantage of this situation by marrying his son Edward II to her – there was a treaty “guaranteeing” that Scotland remained separate after this marriage, but Edward I was probably going to ignore this. However that point was soon moot, Margaret of Norway died in Orkney in 1290. While this was the death knell for Edward I’s hope of gaining the Scottish crown for his son peacefully, it did present an opportunity to both meddle in the succession and set himself up as overlord of Scotland. There were no more direct line heirs to Alexander III so there was a choice between 14 heirs with varying (and disputed) degrees of right to the throne. Edward I was invited to adjudicate the choice of new monarch – and he took advantage of this to manipulate the succession in favour of a candidate willing to treat him as overlord. John Balliol fit this criteria well, and was willing after he gained the Scottish crown to appease the English & to do homage to Edward I for Scotland as well as his English lands. Unsurprisingly he’s gone down in history as ineffectual.

When war broke out between England and France in 1294 there was a coup against the pro-English Balliol and the new regime (a council of 12) allied with the French (and refused a feudal summons to fight for Edward I). Edward reacted to this with a campaign against the Scottish which was successful, but this was not to last. In 1297 William Wallace enters the story with the campaigns he lead against the English. Wallace was a knight who had risen to a leadership position, and his initial raids into England were very successful – halted only by the weather, not by Edward I’s troops who were away fighting in Flanders. Edward’s response was four campaigns against the Scottish over the next 5 years. The first of these, in 1298, was such a defeat for Wallace’s Scottish forces that it was the last time they met the English in battle proper until Bannockburn in 1314. Edward’s campaigns were characterised by overwhelming force and troop numbers – after 1298 the Scottish made raids and fought smaller engagements but kept out of the way of the main English force. Towards the end of this period various Scottish nobles (including Robert Bruce) were coming over to the English side – the best way to preserve their estates now it looked like the English had the upper hand. The ordinary people were generally hostile to the English (in contrast to the situation in the earlier Welsh campaigns) and Edward I tried (but mostly didn’t succeed) to win them over. This popular support is part of what underlay the success of Wallace’s initial campaign.

Politics and relations with France were very important for how this phase of the Scottish war played out. The flashpoint for it was the alliance of Scotland and France, and the great successes for Edward I came after he’d come to terms with the French in 1303. Part of the peace negotiations were about France no longer supporting Scotland, and after that was agreed the Scottish had no international support. In 1304 the Scottish regime surrendered. Edward I now treated Scotland as a part of his land, sidestepping the issue of the crown of Scotland entirely. Unsurprisingly this peace didn’t last long – in 1306 Robert Bruce had become disillusioned with his treatment by the English. He murdered John Comyn (who’d surrendered to the English) and was crowned King of Scotland. This rebellion against the English was a gamble, and Prestwich points out that it nearly failed. In fact it was the death of Edward I in 1307 that stopped it from being a disaster for the Scots.

And now we’re in phase 2 of the war – lead by the ineffectual Edward II (see the last chapter of the book (post) for Prestwich’s damning opinion of this king). Events after this show how the character of the king was important in determining the course of the war. The 1307 campaign against the Scots was abandoned, and nothing further done till 1310. By this stage Bruce has managed to stabilise and solidify his hold on the Scottish throne. After a desultory English campaign in Scotland in 1310 Bruce was secure enough to start taking the fight to the English, conducting wide ranging raids on the north of England. The stage was set for the next big English campaign in Scotland – in 1314 Edward II gathered a significant force to reinforce the siege of Stirling Castle. The Scottish in effect chose the battlefield at Bannockburn, and chose it well for their infantry forces to be superior to the English cavalry. There was much bickering about precedence and prestige amongst the English commanders, which didn’t help the situation for the English any. The battle was a resounding defeat for the English, who rather went home with their tails between their legs. The Scottish raiding of the north intensified, pushing as far south as Yorkshire. Edward II lead a few more campaigns but they failed to achieve anything, and were again characterised by poor relations and communication between the various bits of the command structure. In 1323 the then Earl of Carlisle negotiated a peace with the Scottish – somewhat against the King’s wishes and far too favourable to the Scottish for Edward II’s tastes. After the Earl of Carlisle was executed for treason a different truce was negotiated – notably not acknowledging Bruce as King of Scotland.

This peace wasn’t to last. In 1327 phase 3 of the war kicked off – the Scots took advantage of the political confusion in England and set out to annex Northumberland. Isabella & Mortimer assembled an army and marched north. It wasn’t a terribly effective campaign, and the peace negotiated in 1328 favoured the Scottish: amongst other things Scotland would be recognised by the English crown as fully independent. Notably this peace included no provision for the English nobles who had claims on lands in Scotland – these men became known as the Disinherited and they kicked off the war again in 1332 with a private invasion of Scotland. These men included the son of John Balliol, who had himself crowned King of Scotland. Edward Balliol was soon in trouble against the Scottish and so he called in help from Edward III, promising him the south of Scotland as his own, as well as promising to pay homage and acknowledge Edward III as his overlord. The war followed much the same patterns as before. Big English campaigns that didn’t do very much, and lots and lots of Scottish raiding. The Scots were firmly in the ascendency – but there was a turning point in 1346 when David II of Scotland (Robert Bruce’s son) was captured by the English. With their King in custody the Scots had to negotiate with the English. This took 10 years before agreement was reached (and more warring in the meantime) and the peace negotiated here lasts out past the scope of this book (which is covering history up to 1360).

Having talked about the chronology of the war Prestwich now turns to some themes that run throughout the conflict. The first of these is land and patronage. Many English and Scottish nobles held lands on both sides of the border, and during the peaceful 13th Century this promoted stability. Once war actually broke out in 1297 the reverse was true. Some nobles fought with the ruler of the “other” country, as that best served their interests. Some changed sides as it seemed to suit their needs. The English and Scottish Kings would disinherit some of these nobles, and give their lands to more trustworthy men, which only served to increase resentment and a sense of personal grievance to fuel the war.

One of the strands running through the whole of this part of the book is the changing organisation of the army from a fairly standard feudal army to the army that was capable of great victories against the French in the Hundred Years War. This doesn’t actually much interest me – when reading about history I’m more interested in the intersect between the personal and the political, and in how people lived (which will be covered in the next part of this book after the chronological section). So in brief, Prestwich lays out here how the army and how tactics changed over the years of war with the Scots. And I think his thesis is that this was the crucible that forged the army into a more effective fighting force, learning from the difficulties and disasters of this war.

And Prestwich finishes with a look at the human cost of the war. First he looks at the fighting men – those whose deaths would be mentioned in records, and those who needed ransomed. While many ordinary men were killed it was notable that very few nobles died. English captured by the Scottish tended to be ransomed as per the normal rules of war; Scottish (in particular nobles) captured by the English in the early stages of the war were often executed. Prestwich notes that this highlights both the different attitudes of the two sides, and that this lead to increased resentment and grievance as the war progressed. At first the English regarded the Scottish as rebels, so not subject to the rules of war, whereas the Scottish saw themselves as fighting a normal war between two sovereign and independent realms.

The collateral damage inflicted on the north of England during this period was huge. It wasn’t all caused by the Scots either, English knights also took advantage of the breakdown of law & order to extort protection money from towns and villages and to destroy the lands of those who didn’t comply. Some people did prosper from the war – mostly due to the high turnover in the holders of titles as families were removed from power due to political disagreement or death. But for the majority of the north this was a catastrophe of enormous proportions. Records written for the purposes of taxation both secular and ecclesiastical show massive drops in value of property and estates across the whole region. For instance in 1318 Northumberland isn’t even included in the valuations for ecclesiastical taxes – there’s not sufficient income in the area to be worth the time to figure out what is owed. At the same time all valuations in Carlisle are at half what they were before the war. By 1319 the northern counties are exempt from lay taxation, and this extends as far south as Lancashire.

All told the brutality of the English regime in executing prisoners and the destructive raiding by the Scottish on northern England together served to harden the attitudes of both nations into hostility to each other. With many future repercussions.

Tangents to follow up on: I really don’t know as much about Scottish history as I should.

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January 2014 in Review

This is an index and summary of the things I’ve talked about over the last month. Links for multi-post subjects go to the first post (even if it’s before this month), you can follow the internal navigation links from there. (TV shows without full posts will not be linked, but will be listed.)

Books

Fiction

“Against a Dark Background” Iain M. Banks. Part of Read All the Fiction, space opera & swashbuckling adventure Banks style. Kept.

“Carnival” Elizabeth Bear. Part of Read All the Fiction, Bear’s take on the eco/feminist science fiction sub-genre. Kept.

“Mage’s Blood” David Hair. Disappointing secondary world fantasy, with cliched and clumsy world building. Library book.

“A Canticle for Leibowitz” Walter M. Miller, Jr. Library book. One of the classic SF novels, a post-apocalyptic future history.

Total: 4

Non-Fiction

“Plantagenet England 1225-1360” Michael Prestwich. Part of the New Oxford History of England.

Total: 1

Films

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug – Bilbo and the Dwarves make it into the dragon’s hoard.

Total: 1

Photos

Camoflage?.

Pear Tree?.

Sense of Scale.

Total: 3

Radio

The Making of the Modern Arab World. Four part Radio 4 series about the modern history of the Middle East.

Total: 1

Reflections

2013 Roundup: Fiction Books.

2013 Roundup: Non-Fiction Books.

2013 Roundup: Ancient History TV.

2013 Roundup: Modern History TV.

2013 Roundup: Other TV.

2013 Roundup: Photos, Trips, Museums and Concerts.

2013 Roundup: Everything Else.

Current Projects.

Total: 8

Television

Fiction

Doctor Who: The Time of the Doctor.

Total: 1

Non-Fiction

2013: Moments in Time – a roundup of 2013, this time of the main news stories of the year shown through the photos that illustrated them. And some discussion of the changing nature of these photos (and the rise of social media’s importance in news).

The Art of the Vikings – part of the Secret Knowledge series, Janina Ramirez talks about Viking art (in a surprisingly amateur looking programme).

BBC 4 Sessions: The Christmas Session – recorded for Christmas 2011 I think, this featured various folk artists including the Unthanks and was a lot of fun. We watched it on Christmas Day.

The Brain: A Secret History – Michael Mosley series about brains, minds and experimental psychology. We never managed to record episode 1 but we decided to watch the other two anyway.

Byzantium: A Tale of Three Cities – history of Byzantium aka Constantinople aka Istanbul presented by Simon Sebag Montefiore.

Calf’s Head and Coffee: The Golden Age of English Food. Disappointing programme about Restoration era English food that couldn’t work out if it was about the history or about the food, and ended up falling short with both aspects.

Charlie Brooker’s 2013 Wipe – round up of the big events of 2013 presented by Charlie Brooker (and segments from others, which I felt worked less well).

Egypt’s Golden Empire – a three part series on one of the Sky documentary channels that we watched at J’s parents’ house. I confess I wasn’t always paying that much attention, but what I did watch seemed like a rather good and thorough overview of the New Kingdom period of Ancient Egypt.

Jool’s Annual Hootenanny – music and chat from Jools Holland and his guests (and audience). It’s our tradition for welcoming in the New Year when we’re at home – Jools on the telly and whisky to drink. Not the best one there’s ever been, but we still had fun heckling.

Pilgrimage with Simon Reeve – a programme about the history of (Christian) pilgrimage, pilgrimage sites and the modern incarnation of it.

Planet Ant: Life Inside the Colony – a bit like the series The Burrowers that we watched a while ago but about leafcutter ants not cute fluffy bunnies etc. An ants nest was reconstructed in a lab and science is being done on it (and we got told how the nest worked and about the ants biology etc).

Rise of the Continents – series about the geology of the continents and how that’s shaped them and their wildlife (and us) presented by Iain Stewart.

Sacred Wonders of Britain – Neil Oliver visits several sacred sites in Britain dating from prehistoric times through to the Reformation.

Shipwrecks: Britain’s Sunken History – Sam Willis talking about shipwrecks around Britain or involving British ships, their impact on history and our culture.

Strange Days: Cold War Britain – series about Britain and British culture during the Cold War, presented by Dominic Sandbrook.

Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures – series presented by Richard Fortey looking at three mass extinction events and showing us modern examples of the species that survived them.

Treasures of Ancient Egypt – Alastair Sooke looking at pieces of art from the whole sweep of Ancient Egyptian history.

Tudor Monastery Farm – part re-enactment, part documentary about what life would be like living on and running a farm in 1500.

Total: 18

Whimsy

A Review of the New Hamlet, Seen this Recent Afternoon – creative writing assignment for the Hamlet course on Future Learn. A piece purporting to be a review of Hamlet by an Elizabethan seeing it for the first time.

Total: 1

Treasures of Ancient Egypt (Ep 3); Sacred Wonders of Britain; Tudor Monastery Farm; The Brain: A Secret History

The third and final episode of Treasures of Ancient Egypt covered the period from Ramesses II through to Cleopatra. In terms of the history of the period this can be seen as a long slow decline from the height of New Kingdom power through several foreign dynasties to the annexing of Egypt by the Roman Empire. Alastair Sooke’s thesis was that in terms of the art this was a new dawn – fuelled in part by foreign Pharaohs’ desires to be more Egyptian than the Egyptians, and during times of self-rule by a renewed sense of national pride and connection with their history.

This pieces he looked at were again a mix of iconic objects we all know about, and other less well known objects. This time there were several temples – starting with the temple at Abu Simbel, and later showing us the temple of Horus at Edfu and the temple at Dendera. One of the threads he used to hold the programme together was the gradual introduction of more realism to the art – for instance he looked at the art under the Nubian Pharaohs, and pointed out how the faces were much more lifelike. And this is taken further under the Ptolemies when there is some merging between the naturalistic Greek style and the more stylised Egyptian art. One of the places he took us to illustrate this was a tomb chapel that had the traditional layout and scene types that one would expect, but the figures were drawn in a much more lifelike fashion and looked almost Greek.

The interludes with modern artists were particularly good this week. I liked the chance to see how faience and faience shabtis were made. Faience shabtis as a group were one of his treasures, the first mass produced art in the world. The expert from UCL that he talked to about this first showed him some of the shabtis in the Petrie Museum, and then showed him how he made his own shabti inspired art. The other modern artist was a graffiti artist in Cairo who has taken inspiration from both the official iconography of ancient Egypt (like the Pharaoh smiting his enemies scenes) and from the ostraca found at Deir el Medina. Inspired by the latter he paints topsy-turvy scenes with the cat & mouse instead of people. His art also had a political twist – and he talked about how the same was true for the ancient Egyptians.

This has been a very good series. Although there were a few over simplified pieces of history Sooke generally did a good job of providing enough historical info for context without turning it into a history lesson. As I’m often approaching the objects from a perspective of learning about the history that produced them it was interesting to have someone talk about them as art in their own right. I thought the mix of objects chosen was good too. The “obvious” iconic pieces were there (but looked at from a fresh perspective) and there were several less obvious pieces so the whole thing didn’t feel like we’d seen it all before. At first I was dubious about the bits where Sooke talked to modern artists, but some of the later segments of that sort were really cool.

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We finished three other serieses this week, so I shall try & keep my commentary brief! The first of these was Sacred Wonders of Britain – a Neil Oliver series that looked at sacred places in Britain from earliest prehistory through to the Reformation. This is quite a large sweep of time, and I thought the last episode was the weakest of the three. In part because it didn’t feel like it was quite Oliver’s thing, being history not archaeology, and in part because they were having to take account of the fact that Christianity is a current faith. As always with a programme presented by Oliver I thought he went too far off into flights of fancy at times – taking the expert opinion of “maybe” and turning it into a long imagined story of how it “was”.

However, criticisms aside I do like his programmes overall and this series was no exception. There were a lot of places shown that I’d not heard of or seen before which was cool to see. I was particularly struck by the prehistoric flint mine which at first didn’t seem like it was a particularly good candidate for sacred. But as the archaeologists pointed out there was plenty of flint available on the surface in the very same location of the same quality as that from the mines. There were several tools left behind in the mines which didn’t seem in poor condition, and the few skeletons that have been found (in cave ins) were of young people on the cusp of adulthood. Taking all of that together they think it might’ve been some sort of rite of passage.

Another series we finished was Tudor Monastery Farm. This was part re-enactment and part documentary, presented by Ruth Goodman, Peter Ginn and Tom Pinfold. It’s part of a collection of serieses called SOMETHING Farm, each taking a different period of history and telling us about farming during that time, we’ve previously watched Wartime Farm (post). This was the first of these serieses that Tom Pinfold had been in – in the previous ones the third presenter was Alex Langlands – and sadly I didn’t think he had much on screen chemistry with anyone. From a quick look around the BBC website it seems he’s pretty new to being a presenter, so perhaps he’ll improve as he relaxes into the job.

There were 6 episodes in the regular series covering the whole year of farming and life as it would have been in the year 1500, and one special afterwards which looked at Christmas festivities. They’d picked this year as it was pre-Reformation and post-Wars of the Roses. So it was a peaceful, settled era and the people still observed all the Catholic rites. The farm type they were recreating was a farm owned by a monastery, but worked by prosperous lay people. One of the key themes of the series was that farming in this period was beginning to change – more and more the tenant farmers were growing grain and raising animals to sell as well as to feed themselves and give to the monastery. One of the things I like about these serieses is that the re-enactment portion of it really shows how things worked – like how you build a fence if you’re a Tudor farmer – and the documentary side of it fills in the little details you wouldn’t get just by looking at it (which woods you choose and how you get them, in the case of the fence).

Because this was about such a long ago period of time they didn’t just cover farming. There were, of course, a lot of details about everyday life (like clothes, or how they cooked). And they also covered more specialist things like how to make a stained glass window, how you mined and purified lead, how salt was produced, how they made fireworks and so on. All in all a rather good series 🙂

And we also finished up what we had recorded of The Brain: A Secret History – we were missing the first of the three episodes. It was a series about how the brain works and how we found out about it, presented by Michael Mosley. Of the two episodes we watched one dealt with emotions, and the other with mapping bits of the brain to functions. The emotions one was at times hard to watch as the sorts of experiments done to figure out how emotions work were generally not very nice – like frightening a young child to see if phobias could be induced (they can), or shutting up baby monkeys in too-small isolation cages to see what effect that has on their adult psyches (a bad effect). The other episode had more “wow, that’s weird” moments and less trauma – however it had a lot of footage from somebody’s brain surgery which I was too squeamish to look at (yeah, I’m a wimp).

So at times difficult to watch for a variety of reasons (and I think from the clips in the intro segment we missed the most disturbing episode) – but it was an interesting couple of programmes. There were a lot of “neat facts” about how our brains work, and the ethical quagmires of how one does experiments to find these out were well explained.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 1 of Survivors: Nature’s Indestructible Creatures – series presented by Richard Fortey looking at three mass extinction events and showing us modern examples of the species that survived them.

Episode 1 of Pilgrimage with Simon Reeve – a programme about the history of (Christian) pilgrimage, pilgrimage sites and the modern incarnation of it.

Current Projects

I thought I would complement my look back at the blog posts I wrote last year with a list of my ongoing or planned projects – some of which generate posts here, some of which don’t. The stalled and planned sections of the list aren’t really comprehensive, they’re more the things on my mind at the moment out of the great sea of possibilities.

This blog: Ongoing. First on the list, as it probably takes up most of my project related time. I’ve got a few things left on my to-do list for how the site functions and looks, but mostly I’m at the stage of just keeping on writing.

Read All the Fiction: Ongoing. This has gone slower than I expected, but the only way to speed it up would be to stop reading anything else and that would be a shame.

Chapter by Chapter: Ongoing. I’m not sure if I’ve slowed down my reading of non-fiction too much by doing this, but I’m definitely getting more out of the books I’m reading by doing it this way so I think it works out OK.

Listening to all our music: Ongoing. I’ve known for a while that I’ve completely lost track of what music we own and what we don’t – we have around 27,500 tracks by around 2700 different artists, so there’s a lot of stuff there. And J buys most of it so it’s not like I remember why I chose something from the name of it because I didn’t do the choosing. So I’m listening through in alphabetical order (by artist, and machine alphabetised). I was writing about it on facebook & G+ but I stopped because I was struggling to come up with new things to say, so I figured it must be getting boring. Still listening tho, and I’m up to An in the alphabet so there’s a long way to go yet!

Courses on Future Learn: Ongoing. I occasionally look at Open University courses, wondering about something humanities based as that’s where my interests are these days but they’re pretty expensive for a whim. So I decided I should look for free alternatives and found Future Learn. I signed up for a course on Hamlet that started a couple of weeks ago, and so far it’s been interesting and different. I’ve signed up for another couple of courses (one on more Shakespeare, one on Richard III’s era of English history) that are going to run later in the year. So far so good, but I’m not yet sure if it’s going to end up taking too much of my time away from other things.

Photography: Ongoing. I’ve a huge backlog of photos that need to be processed from various trips, so I feel a little dissatisfied with this. And it would be nice if I could get myself to the point where my blog photo of the week was a photo I’d actually taken that week. I also have some more arty sub-projects under this that haven’t really gone anywhere.

Genealogy: Ongoing. I have been looking into mine & J’s family history off and on for years now – I think I’ve still only scratched the surface of what’s possible to find out, there are whole branches I’ve not even touched. I have a database and also paper copies of most of the info in the database, but I’m not that fond of the machine generated reports from the programme I’m using (Gramps). I either need to learn python and write some “better” reports or I need to figure out a consistent style and then write them myself. But then that takes away from doing the research, so I normally put off thinking about it. The last few months of last year I’d got good at ring fencing some time to work on this each week, but that’s slipped again – I think I need to shake up my to-do lists in general and add projects to defined periods. And I need to do a bit of project planning for this in a written down fashion.

Weather Data: Stalled. I have about 30 years of data that first me & my brother and later my parents have gathered of the weather at my parents’ house. It’s not professional quality data (obviously), and I’m not even sure it’s entirely internally consistent (changing thermometers across the period for instance), but it’s still potentially interesting. I have entered some of it into the computer (a year, perhaps?) and I have a perl script that does some basic analysis and graph generation from the data. Realistically I don’t have time for this right now, but I think the first step needs to be to write up a proper to-do list. I know I need to design the webpages for the output and also think carefully about what analysis I can do and how I should display that. I also need to do the data entry. Data’s not going anywhere tho, so it’s on hold for now.

Embroidery: Stalled, oh so very stalled. I’ve got two pieces of embroidery in an unfinished state and I don’t think I’ve done any sewing in over 5 years. I do enjoy it when I do it, but it’s pretty low down the list of my priorities.

Learning to play the bass: Stalled. We have a bass guitar, we have Rocksmith for the PS3 – I just need to ring fence some time to practice every week (preferably every day but once a week would be a start).

Reading Shakespeare: Planned. I have a copy of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, as published by the RSC, and I’m aware that really I only know the plays that were in our copy of Lambs Tales from Shakespeare that I read as a child. So I know a few plots, and would like to get to know the rest. I have a vague plan of reading through each play and writing a post about each scene or act. This is unlikely to get off the ground in the near future, and would be best left till after I’ve done the Future Learn course on Shakespeare and his world, which will hopefully give me more insight into the plays.

Crusader Kings II Stories: Planned. The game Crusader Kings II is a mix of roleplay and strategy with a medieval history base. I have a plan of one day using a play through of the game to generate the plot for a series of little stories, but have never got round to starting it.

I suspect I’m not using my time optimally at the moment – a sit down with my calendar and my to-do lists and re-shuffling things might help with that. I’m very much a creature of habit, so if I can set up some routines where I get round to doing things on a more regular basis then I’ll get more done of everything.

I’m also half-looking for a project that gives me an excuse to buy a notebook (or two or …), I always lust after the Paper Blanks ones when I go into Waterstones or Smiths because they have such gorgeous covers. The only project with a “lab book” is the genealogy one and that’s both utilitarian and is less than half used, so it’s not providing me with an excuse for a book. But I don’t need any more projects 😉

2013 Roundup: Everything Else

This is the final part of my roundup of 2013 blog posts – I’ve managed to get it all done before January is over, which feels like a victory of sorts 🙂 There are a few categories on the sidebar that aren’t covered here. Admin is mostly indexes for each month, rather dull and somewhat recursive to index the indexes, so I haven’t. The others had no posts last year, some of which are rather surprising, some of which are not. I’ve played a lot of computer games over the last year, but apparently not written about anything – I should change that this year. We’ve not done any proper long walks with geocaching for ages, so that category is also empty. I also haven’t read any papers, nor have I done anything that fits in the Sport category (which exists to hold the photos of the Tour of Britain that I took in 2012 (post). And Whimsy is a new category this year for a piece of creative writing for the Shakespeare course I’m doing on Future Learn.

Films

As you can tell, I don’t really see many films.

Radio

Most Sunday mornings we listen to a radio programme while we eat breakfast, most of these are from the In Our Time series. This covers a wide range of topics, and each episode has 3 experts in the field that’s being discussed sharing lay-person level explanations of the current state of knowledge in the field. They’re pretty much always fascinating. We’ve also listened to a couple of series about current affairs in the Middle East, which provide a historical perspective for the situation.

I’m not sure I can pick a favourite – I’ve just spent a while looking at the list of titles and for pretty much all of them I’ve thought “oh, that one was really good”. An interesting note is that my write up of the one about Japan’s Sakoku period got picked up by a site called OMG Facts so I think it’s been the most read post on my blog.

  • Absolute Zero. In Our Time episode about absolute zero, both what it is and the history of the scientists trying to achieve it in the laboratory.
  • The Amazons. In Our Time episode about the Amazons of Greek myth.
  • Bertrand Russell. In Our Time episode about the life & work of Bertrand Russell.
  • The Borgias. In Our Time episode about the Borgia family in Renaissance Italy.
  • The Book of Common Prayer. In Our Time episode about the history & contents of the Book of Common Prayer.
  • Comets. In Our Time episode about comets.
  • The Corn Laws. In Our Time episode about the Corn Laws of the early 19th Century.
  • Crystallography. In Our Time episode about x-ray crystallography.
  • The Cult of Mithras. In Our Time episode about the Roman cult of Mithras.
  • Epicureanism. In Our Time episode about the philosophy of Epicurus.
  • Exoplanets. In Our Time episode about planets in other solar systems to our own.
  • Galen. In Our Time episode about Galen, the 2nd Century AD Greek physician.
  • Gnosticism. In Our Time episode about Gnosticism.
  • Ice Ages. In Our Time episode about ice ages.
  • Icelandic Sagas. In Our Time episode about Icelandic Sagas.
  • Japan’s Sakoku Period. In Our Time episode about the period of Japan’s history where it pursued a policy of isolation from the rest of the world.
  • The Mamluks. In Our Time episode about the Mamluks, who were a slave army who ruled Egypt between the 13th & 16th Centuries AD.
  • The Making of the Modern Arab World. Four part Radio 4 series about the modern history of the Middle East.
  • Le Morte d’Arthur. In Our Time episode about Malory’s version of the Arthurian legend.
  • Pascal. In Our Time episode about the life & work of Blaise Pascal.
  • Pitt-Rivers. In Our Time episode about Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers, the man whose collection forms the basis of the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford.
  • The Putney Debates. In Our Time episode about the context of & discussions in the Putney Debates (held in 1647 after the end of the first part of the Civil Wars).
  • Queen Zenobia. In Our Time episode about the Palmyran Queen who rebelled against Rome & founded a short-lived empire in the Middle East around 270AD.
  • Relativity. In Our Time episode about Einstein’s theories of relativity.
  • Romulus and Remus. In Our Time episode about Rome’s founding myth.
  • Shahnameh of Ferdowsi. In Our Time episode about the epic Persian poem the Shahnameh.
  • South Sea Bubble. In Our Time episode about the South Sea Bubble.
  • Turkey: The New Ottomans. A three part series putting modern Turkey in a historical context, and looking at its relationships with the Arab World & the West.
  • The Upanishads. In Our Time episode about one of the groups of sacred texts of the Hindu religion.
  • The War of 1812. In Our Time episode about the war between Britain & the US which started in 1812.
  • Water. In Our Time episode about the chemical nature of water.

Reflections

Reflections is the category where I put articles that aren’t just about one thing, but are instead me reflecting on a group of posts or things. In 2013 that only includes the two posts I wrote about the books I read while I was reading those filed on my bookshelf under A.

Talks

Most of the talks we go to are at the Essex Egyptology Group meetings, so there is a strong Egyptian flavour to this section. There are also a couple of trips organised by the EEG, and one talk from a British Museum Members’ Open Evening (which is the sole non-Egyptian one here). I think my absolute favourite was Diane Johnson’s talk about meteoric iron in Ancient Egypt because it was a subject I knew nothing about before and the electron microscopy of the iron beads was particularly interesting. But they were all interesting talks.