Mike (Pearson) has sent a couple of pictures of the Shackleton hut - Nimrod. He was talking about the archaeological questions of its conservation the other week. More importantly, about how his research into the expedition’s Polar Theater revealed much of the nature of such scientific expeditions. [Link]

The BBC is reporting what looks like another publicity scam

Fascination with the Holy Grail has lasted for centuries, and now the Bletchley Park code-breakers have joined the hunt. But what is it that’s made the grail the definition of something humans are always searching for but never actually finding?

Could an obscure inscription on a 250-year-old monument in a Staffordshire garden point the way to the Holy Grail - the jewelled chalice reportedly used by Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper?

That is one theory entertained by Richard Kemp, the general manager of Lord Lichfield’s Shugborough estate in Staffs.

Kemp has called in world-renowned code-breakers to try to decipher a cryptic message carved into the Shepherd’s Monument on the Lichfield estate.

The monument, built around 1748, features an image of one of Nicholas Poussin’s paintings, and beneath it the letters “D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.

[Link]

As Brendan O’Neill puts it

The Grail - because it is mysterious and has always belonged in the realms of the imagination - is a marvellous focus for the new genre of ‘imagined history’, the idea that all history as taught and recorded is a vast cover-up. Once this kind of idea becomes current, particularly with the internet, it acquires a life of its own - regardless of whether it has any basis in reality.

Again we have here a classic and modernist narrative of overlooked clues, microfragments to be decoded by an inspired forensic imagination in pursuit of the truth that is out there but has been covered up by the state, the church, or ignorance, or by superstition. And at the heart - the artifact, mysterious and possessed of aura, veritable witness of history itself.

It is Dan Brown’s Da Vinci code.

I like the association with the internet’s new media - microfragments in a sea of noise and triviality - and all with lives of their own as we track them down in pursuit of ourselves.

All in all - profoundly archaeological.

More media archaeology - not sure why it has taken me so long to come across the Dead Media Project.

This is how Bruce Sterling and Richard Kadrey put it in their modest proposal

Think of it this way. How long will it be before the much-touted World Wide Web interface is itself a dead medium? And what will become of all those billions of thoughts, words, images and expressions poured onto the Internet? Won’t they vanish just like the vile lacquered smoke from a burning pile of junked Victrolas? As a net.person, doesn’t this stark realization fill you with a certain deep misgiving, a peculiarly postmodern remorse, an almost Heian Japanese sense of the pathos of lost things? If it doesn’t, why doesn’t it? It ought to.

Speaking of dead media and mono no aware – what about those little poems that Lady Murasaki used to write and stick inside cleft sticks? To be carried by foot- messager to the bamboo-shrouded estate of some lucky admirer after a night’s erotic tryst? That was a medium. That medium was very alive once, a mainstay of one of the most artistically advanced cultures on earth. And isn’t it dead? What are we doing today that is the functional equivalent of the cleft sticks of Murasaki Shikibu, the world’s first novelist? If we ignore her historical experience, how will we learn from our own?

Listen to the following, all you digital hipsters. This is Jaqueline Goddard speaking in January 1995. Jacqueline was born in 1911, and she was one of the 20th century’s great icons of bohemian femininity. Man Ray photographed her in Paris in 1930, and if we can manage it without being sued by the Juliet Man Ray Trust, we’re gonna put brother Man Ray’s knock-you-down-and-stomp-you- gorgeous image of Jacqueline up on our vaporware Website someday. She may be the patron saint of this effort.

Jacqueline testifies: “After a day of work, the artists wanted to get away from their studios, and get away from what they were creating. They all met in the cafes to argue about this and that, to discuss their work, politics and philosophy…. We went to the bar of La Coupole. Bob, the barman, was a terrible nice chap… As there was no telephone in those days everybody used him to leave messages. At the Dome we also had a little place behind the door for messages. The telephone was the death of Montparnasse.”

“The telephone was the death of Montparnasse.” Mull that Surrealist testimony over a little while, all you cafe-society modemites …

Hobbits locked away as scientists argue - Science - www.theage.com.au

It has been a plague of archaeological research since the beginnings of the discipline in the eighteenth century, and a contemporary scandal, though few speak out about it.

So I hear that the hobbit hominid remains have been locked away by a palaeontologist in Jakarta - Teuku Jacob of Gadjah Mada University. He apparently won’t let anyone look at the bones.

Sounds crackpot, but it is actually standard practice in many archaeology communities. Finds are considered the intellectual property of the archaeologist who dug them up (though I don’t know what claim Teuku Jacob has on homo floresiensis). Trouble is that many never get round to publishing what they hang on to, and even take the information they have about a site and its finds to the grave with them.

The scandal is this attitude of ownership, but also the amount of archaeological information that is locked away and effectively lost. Museums across the world are full of stuff that has suffered this fate. Maybe even the majority of stuff in museums is like this.

related comment - [Link] [Link] [Link]

John Hooper in the Guardian reviews the “Colours of White” exhibition at the Vatican museums, Rome (until January 31) - Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | The ancients: now available in colour.

For hundreds of years, Caligula’s handsome, marble face has stared out at a fascinated world. Now situated at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek museum in Copenhagen, the celebrated first-century bust of this cruel young Roman emperor is made repellent, yet intriguing, not so much by his petulantly downturned mouth as by the blank, staring eyes chiselled from marble by an unknown sculptor.

It comes as a shock to be confronted with an exact replica with unthreatening hazel eyes. Add garish pink skin and glossy brown hair, and the new painted version of Caligula’s bust looks as if it might once have been used to model hats in thewindow of a men’s outfitters.

It is always worth reminding ourselves that the pale marble image of the ancient world is entirely false and comes from the kind of Classical aestheticism we find in the likes of Winckelmann’s art criticism (or rather adulation of Greek form). And it is still rife.

Robert Cook’s painted plaster cast of the Peplos Kore (Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge)

More fantasy archaeology in the news.

Robert Sarmast has modelled underwater topographic data and sees the remains of a city.

Sarmast’s Atlantis

This underwater geology has been well researched and is understood as volcanic activity ([Link] [Link]).

But the pictures have far more rhetorical force.

As does Sarmast’s own story of the rogue amateur who refuses to accept conventional wisdom, risks reputation and livelihood to pusue his enlightened dream of solving one of the supposed great mysteries of myth and history. It is Schliemann again. Down to the dependence upon private wealth (not Sarmast’s own it would seem) in the pursuit of the dream - the individual against state and academe.

[Link - Robert Sarmast Biography]

Michael Herzfeld was talking today about ethnography, about the centrality of comparison. His latest work is to compare Greece with Italy with Thailand.

Michael Herzfeld at Stanford today

Many anthropologists have become anxious about the comparative method, because comparing one society with another with the aim of understanding each through general properties of society and culture has usually involved judgement - setting one over another - more and less advanced, whatever. The old opposition between a nomothetic and idiographic social science (anthropology versus history, for example) is between one that sets up laws (generalizations) and the other that writes about individual cases. The legal reference in the etymology is appropriate - judgement of truth, worth, and value is involved.

Michael’s “Anthropology through the Looking Glass” had greatly interested me when I was writing my book about Classical Archaeology. My focus was on how Classical archaeologists of Graeco-Roman antiquity operated in their excavations, surveys, travels, writing. It explains a lot about the stories they tell. His book compared the discipline of anthropology with the modern Greek state. Both were nineteenth century inventions and both were designed to deal with the boundaries between the western European nation states and other cultures - primitive and other compared with the European imperial powers, antecedent in the case of classical Greece, awkward Balkan hybrid of east and west in the case of the newly reconstructed Greek state. For me this was a very interesting way of thinking - setting a discipline alongside a state - because they both dealt with borders. My own point - what a refreshing way to think about ancient Greece - not so much an historical reality as something classicists have invented to deal with their own border issues.

While anthropological comparison may involve the old colonial obsession with us and them, comparison is clearly also a necessity - an epistemological necessity. You can’t just immerse yourself in another culture, efface yourself and get to know it in its own terms. Just as archaeologists cannot simply bury themselves in the past. There is always the anthropologist, having arrived from somewhere else, struggling to adapt and understand, translating - comparing. This was the essence of Michael’s point about ethnography. The anthropologist was there and can report and claim insight and knowledge, at least ask to be heard.

Though he didn’t put it this way, Michael was making an argument for the performative chracter of fieldwork - knowledge building through the body, communication, translation and expression of the anthropologist (see me just the other day on Mike Pearson - [Link]). The anthropologist owes it to the community being studied to stand up for them. Michael wants anthropologists to stand up for the weak against the strong.

I would add that it is the act of witnessing that implies an ethical responsibility to the people the anthropologist gets to know. An obligation to keep the record straight, especially as anthropologists and archaeologists do work at the margins, on the borders, where things can be awkward and unclear, where identities are often in doubt, negotiations occur, where conspiracies are made.

One of my interests is the way we use databases to organise and administer the collections that are at the core of our archaeological lives. (And have played a crucial role in state society since ancient Mesopotamia.)

Databases - sounds dull and tedious? Have a look then at a new exhibition at the Banff Center - Database Imaginary - a suite of works exploring the intersection of everyday experience and databases.

Databases drive culture. 33 artists take us on an imaginative and subversive ride. The artists presented in Database Imaginary use databases to comment on their uses and to imagine unknown uses. The term database was only coined in the 1970s with the rise of automated office procedures, but the 23 projects in this exhibition - which includes wooden sculptures, movies and telephone user-generated guides to the local area - deploy databases in imaginative ways to comment on everyday life in the 21st century. Using newly inflected forms of visual display arising from computerized databases, the works seem to raise questions about authorship, agency, audience participation, control and identity.

I like “How I Learned”, by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy.

They asked the question, “what would you know about the world if the only thing you saw were episodes of Kung Fu?”. They exhaustively catalogued all the individual shots from all of the episodes of the 1970s television show Kung Fu and recompiled the shots according to genres (see the arist’s statement for a complete listing - [Link]). The clips are exhibited on over 100 CDs which are colour-coded and from which the viewer can choose to watch lessons about “Nature and Society”, “Religion”, “Capitalism” and “Filmmaking”. Within these groupings, one can select discs with titles such as “How I learned to complain about my job” and “How to walk ceremoniously” among dozens of other categories.

The art of accountancy in ancient Egypt

The BBC is airing some views about the causes of war and policy in the Middle East. UK | Magazine | Do democracies fight each other?

When outlining his vision for peace in the Middle East, President George Bush said “democracies don’t go to war with each other”. Is it true?

The president’s comments echoed those made in the 1994 State of the Union address by his predecessor Bill Clinton.

They share a belief that the solution to ending war is the spread of democracy.

But does history support them?

Rudolf Rummel was interviewed for Peace Magazine in 1999 [Link]. He is a political scientist who has done a great deal of comparative and statistical analysis into was and insitutional violence - his book Power kills: democracy as a method of nonviolence (1997) argues this point that democracies don’t fight each other.

Now, some statistics. If one defines an international war as any military engagements in which 1,000 or more were killed, then 353 pairs of nations (e.g., Germany vs. USSR) engaged in such wars between 1816-1991. None were between two democracies, 155 pairs involved a democracy and a nondemocrcy, and 198 involved two nondemocracies fighting each other. The average length of war between states was 35 months, average battle deaths was 15,069.

For the years 1946-1986, when there were the most democracies and thus the hardest test of the proposition that democracies do not make war on each other, there were over this period 45 states that had a democratic regime; 109 that did not. There were thus 6,876 state dyads (e.g., Bolivia-Chile), of which 990 were democratic-democratic dyads, none of which fought each other. Thirty-two nondemocratic dyads engaged in war. Thus the probability of any dyad engaging in war between 1946 and 1986 was 32/6876 = .0047; of not engaging in war is .9953. Now, what is the probability of the 990 dyads not engaging in war during this period? Using the binomial theorem, it is .9953 to the 990th power = .0099, or rounded off .01. This is highly significant. The odds of this lack of war between democracies being by chance is virtually 100 to 1.

From - America, Pakistan, and the limits of militarism Steve Coll Asma Jahangir - openDemocracy

Thomas Schwartz and Kiron Skinner of Stanford’s Hoover Institution begged to differ in an article in the Hoover Digest [Link]

It is dogma too in the corridors of power, where it drives the Clinton Doctrine of peace and security through a crusade for democracy. “The best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace,” the president has said, “is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere. Democracies don’t attack each other.”

The idea, “democratic pacifism”, is not new. Its academic champions venerate a two-hundred-year-old essay, “Perpetual Peace”, by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Enthusiasm grew in the 1980s, in part from some brilliant Kant-revival pieces by geopolitical theorist Michael Doyle, more from the worldwide outbreak of democracy.

Criticism of democratic pacifism is not new either. In Federalist 6, Alexander Hamilton attacked “the paradox of perpetual peace” as wrong and dangerous - wrong because it is naive about popular passions, dangerous because quack nostrums steal attention from real remedies. In a “republic”, Kant thought, a majority would refuse to bear the cost of aggressive war. Hamilton saw, on the contrary, that majorities can be as belligerent as monarchs, clamoring for war not forced by foes.

I agree.

War, the body politic and democracy featured in my latest lecture in the Origins series tonight. I am spending 10 evenings this term tracing the genealogy of modernity back through the last 45,000 years.

This is what I have to offer on the origins of war.

War arrives in the late third meillenium in the Near East and then in Europe when a new and gendered Bronze Age class ideology of the warrior (brilliantly dealt with in Kristian Kristiansen and Thomas Larsson’s forthcoming book “The Long Journey: Symbolic Transmission and Social Transformation in Bronze Age Europe”) is combined with monarchic sovereignty, and the administrative and management technologies of Mumford’s megamachine (a key factor also in Michael Mann’s historical sociology of power).

It became quite clear to me when I was researching the early Greek city states - they could not be explianed by some historical quirk of ancient Greek genius that managed to invent western urbanism and civilization. What I found happening in the likes of the precocious state of Corinth was a reconfiguration of the experiences and pleasures of different male subcultures in new architectures and urban spaces, new lifestyles - displays of new material wealth and political extension out from the local polity (traded goods and connection abroad). The invention of the ancient Greek body politic (and later democracy) was about the way different groups of men defined themselves through the way they ate, walked down the street, fought together on a field outside the city on a summer afternoon, talked in political assembly. And yes, this was about class, property, law, sovereignty - and war.

Pericles of Athens - champion of democracy in the Athenian Empire of the 5th Century BCE

Back then to democracy. It is, as ever, a matter of definitions and categories. What constitutes a democracy? It is a form of the body politic deeply indebted to the bronze age legacy of the warrior elite. Athenian democracy of the fifth century has so often been held up as a paradigm of direct and egalitarian democracy - direct rule of the demos, the people. But, of course, the demos were only a minority of male adult citizens, a propertied citizen militia, an extended oligarchy. The Athenian Empire, extension of a league of independent city states opposed to an eastern Perisan threat, instituted democracy wherever it could, with brutal efficacy, not hesitating to apply ruthless rationality in justifying the massacre of whole populations for the sake of the democratic state. They also used the profit of imperial democracy to build the Acropolis and invent western culture - a heroic cultural achievement.

Genealogically war and the democratic body politic have the same origins. Which is not to say that it always has to be so. We do, after all, learn from history - nothing has to continue to happen as it always has. Why? Precisely because it has already happened before.

This is the irony of counterfactual history. [Link].

A new blog devoted to remix and sampling - Media trips

Here’s an entry of theirs from October 20 -

Check out the newly posted projects at the recently launched online exhibition Digital Recycling at The Stunned Net Art Open 2004, where one person’s trash is another’s treasure trove:

What’s more, you can participate by uploading or downloading all kinds of files, images, music, texts. My favorite tagline? The Dump is The Message:

Digitalrecycling aims to build a community of people who use discarded information as their medium. Users may log on to the “digitalrecycling operating system” and either upload or download their own or other peoples’ digital trash. “The point is not to deny privacy, but to rethink property.”

Thanks to Troels (Myrup) for spotting this one.