FaganTalk

Doing nothing, Franklin, and Global Warming

bfagan1200 — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:43:52 GMT

Yes, it's been a while. I got bogged down in manuscript revisions, then went on vacation and did nothing for ten days, which was absolutely wonderful. Now I'm back, trying to gather up the reins for what promises to be a very busy year. Anyhow, my apologies for the long silence. I have resolutely not been thinking about archaeology and the past for a few weeks, which was most refreshing. In fact, my greatest contribution to life today has been to wash two of the walls of our house, which were filthy. Now it's time to get down to the next big project.

Catching up with things, I came across a story about the Canadian Government sponsoring yet another search for Sir John Franklin's ships in the Arctic. Franklin perished aboard ship off King William Island in 1848. By then, his two ships, the Erebus and Terror, had been trapped in pack ice for two years. The survivors abandoned them, attempted to drag a ship's boat overland, and perished. In all, 129 men lost their lives in the tragedy. Numerous attempts have been made to locate the ships, so far without success. The Canadian forensic anthropologist Owen Beattie investigated some graves on King William Island in the 1980s and exhumed three burials, among them the well preserved body of Petty Officer John Torrington. Beattie believes that lead poisoning from canned foods may have been an important factor in many deaths.

Now the search for the ships is to resume, this time with the help not only of Inuit oral traditions that were recorded in 1923, to the effect that a deserted ship with numerous dead men aboard lay off the coast of King William Island, but with the very latest search technology. The expedition involves a Canadian icebreaker, sonar equipment, and several years of thorough search under official government sponsorship.

Why is Ottawa suddenly interested in a virtually forgotten tragedy? Because global warming has made much of the Northwest Passage more accessible in summer, there are good reasons for Canada to protect her sovereignty claims in the High Arctic. Oil, minerals, and natural gas are, as usual, the drivers in an area where Canada claims sovereignty and others, including the United States and Britain, dispute it. Until now, the Canadians have done little to maintain a strong presence in the north. Thanks to what is turning out to have been a convenient, but obviously regrettable, tragedy a century and a half ago, that's about to change.

Lofoten's rolling hills

bfagan1200 — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:44:07 GMT

My apologies for thesilence. I�ve been too busy bicycling to blog. The Lofotens were spectacularand we were blessed with superb weather on all but one of the six days. Onewore layers as protection against the fiendish cold winds, the bicyclist�scurse. Except for the headwinds, the riding was fabulous�windy roads androlling terrain�what our leaders euphemistically called �rolling hills� whenthey were often small mountains. The islands were once a remote place where codwere harvested in winter, dried in spring and early summer, and then exportedin a trade that goes back to medieval times. Gadus morhua was the Norse beef jerky: we tried it and I loved it.The fishing villages still exist, but have been sanitized by modernity. Theweather beaten fishing cabins have now become summer homes and hotels�we sleptin bunk beds in modernized cabins that were simple, yet adequate enough to cooka feast for eight people. Despite the modernization, the cod industry is stillaround you. Gone are the small double-ended boats of yesteryear, but woodendiesel powered fishing craft are still commonplace. Stark, empty cod racksstand on exposed outcrops, ready for next year�s catch. And several museumstell the story of cod fishing, with techniques that are almost unchanged frommedieval times-except for the boats. They are wonderful rummage warehouses ofsimple technologies that survived until the middle of the last century,sometimes even later. We were able to go behind the scenes at the restoredfishing village of Nusafjord, wherewe saw piles of equipment abandoned from earlier times, also stacks of cod fromthis year�s harvest waiting to be shipped out. Everywhere sticklike carcasses,light as feathers that you could throw across the room without damage, gradedaccording to criteria set up centuries ago. It�s heartening to see theexpertise of the past still being used today.

Off to the Arctic Circle . . .

bfagan1200 — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:44:14 GMT

The flight from LA toLondon seems interminable, especially if you�re used to the routine. Take off,a drink, dinner, try to sleep, a bleary-eyed breakfast an hour out of Heathrow,then jet lag to stagger creation. Sometimes the aftermath is almost surrealist.I remember landing years ago early one summer morning, renting a car, thendriving some two hours later down a narrow country land on a gorgeous June morning. The transition was so bizarre, so extreme, that I burst out laughing at the sheer joy of life. They say that travel wears thin with age and I tendto agree, having had a surfeit of business travel over the past year. But thereare magical moments and I hope this trip will have plenty of them.

A rare journey thisone, devoted to entirely to pleasure. Three days in England in Aldeburgh,Suffolk, on the East Coast, seeing friends and (trying) to overcome jet lag.Tomorrow will bring the pleasure of a highly technical conversation aboutweather helm in a Caledonia Yawl with a yacht designer friend and dinner withsome old African acquaintances of more years ago then I care to remember. Thenon to Oslo, and the highlight�5 � days bicycling in Norway�s Lofoten Islands,north of the Arctic Circle.

Why the LofotenIslands, people have asked? I�m tempted to respond with the classic �becausethey are there,� but the real reason I want to see them is because of cod. Someyears ago, I traveled extensively for my book Fish on Friday, but the one place I couldn�t get to was theLofotens. They were just too far off the beaten track and my research budgetwas limited. For centuries, the islands were a mainstay of the medieval codtrade. The Norse ate dried Lofoten cod on their journeys to Iceland andbeyond�the beef jerky of the day. The islanders caught thousands of fish fromopen boats in mid-winter and dried them on wooden racks in the cold spring sunand wind. They still catch cod and sell it abroad, even the fish heads, whichare delicacy in Nigeria. So there�s lots of cod racks to see, even if most ofthe drying is finished for this year. When I learned that Backroads, the Berkeley-basedbike touring company, run two trips a year to the islands, I grabbed at thechance to go.

So here I am inmid-Atlantic, wishing the flight was over, but excited that the adventure hasbegun. Only 1 hour 55 minutes to go until that most ghastly ofexperiences�Heathrow airport at 7.15am!

Abri Pataud

bfagan1200 — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:08:04 GMT

LesEyzies in southwestern France bills itself as the Capital of Prehistory, whichis hardly surprising, given the extraordinary diversity of late Ice Age sitesin the Vez�re river valley. But I would hardly describe the village itself asan attractive one, except for its setting, nestled under precipitous, riversidecliffs. The main street is a strip of restaurants, gift shops, and boasts ofpay parking (on weekdays). Of course, there�s the Les Eyzies Museum, which ismagnificent if you want an intensive education in Stone Age technology. There�salso a small store at the other end of the street where, if you are lucky, you�llfind a modern-day flintknapper in action and can buy a finely crafted Solutreanpoint, which the French describe elegantly as a laurel leaf, a feuille delaurier. Apart from the well-known caves like Font de Gaume and LesCombarelles, there�s also Abri Pataud, conveniently located on the main street.(And, by the way, you can always walk to the Cro-Magnon Hotel, enjoy a nicemeal, and visit the Cro-Magnon rockshelter behind the employees� houses. Allyou�ll see is a plaque, but you will have paid homage at the shrine . . . .).

AbiPataud is named after the Pataud family, who owned it until the late HallamMovius of Harvard University purchased the site in 1948. From 1958 to 1964, heexcavated the rockshelter in a series of long field seasons that set newstandards for cave excavation, using the Pataud toolshed as a workshop.Fortunately, the excavations are still open for the inquisitive visitor,complete with the network of iron pipes used as a permanent site recordingsystem. A visit to the dig with its closely packed layers and large bouldersfrom the roof is a quick education in the intricacies of excavation onCro-Magnon sites. Hearths appear as compressed, dark layers of charcoal. Flinttools protrude from the walls of the trenches, varying in density from onelayer to the next. Abri Pataud is a magnificent record of Aurignacian andGravettian occupation, spanning a long period between about 32,000 and 20,500years ago. Pataud was one of the first late Ice Age rockshelters to beradiocarbon dated thoroughly. Students are still analyzing the huge quantitiesof animal bones and stone tools found in the excavations. A generation of PhDshave come from the Movius excavations.

AbriPataud is well worth a visit, not only to see the dense sequence of narrowlayers and the museum with its ibex in low relief on the low ceiling, but alsoto ponder the staggering difficulties involved in deciphering life during thelate Ice Age. All credit to the French Government for opening the site tovisitors in 1990. More than any other site near Les Eyzies, it offers a glimpseinto life in one of the most densely occupied areas of Ice Age Europe when Homo sapiens in the form of theCro-Magnons was still a relatively newcomer, and, for some time, handfuls ofNeanderthals still lurked in remote valleys nearby.

Lascaux II

bfagan1200 — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 22:11:38 GMT

Life is full of dramaticcontrasts, none more fascinating than dealing with Indiana Jones one week andvisiting Les Eyzies in the Dordogne during the next. I spent three days there,surviving comfortably with my execrable French and visiting as many sites as Icould, including the excavation at Abri Pataud and Font de Gaume. The paintingsseemed more faded than they were when I was last there nearly years ago, whichgave a visit to Lascaux II a peculiar fascination.

I was lucky enoughto see the original in the late 1950s before it was closed to visitors�andrightly so, too. Now the tourist visits Lascaux II instead, a replica thatencompasses over 90% of the paintings in the cave. Situated only about 200meters (650 feet) from the original, the copy is, quite simply, a masterpiece,which has deservedly become a smash hit with tourists. It was pouring with rainthe day I visited. However, the tours, which you book ahead of time�it�s easyto do�were fully subscribed. The chambers are an exact copy of the originals,rock faces and all, are light softly, but give you a far better impression ofthe paintings than the originals. Why, I don�t know, but you seem to get abetter overall impression of the friezes of horses and huge bulls, the fearsomeBos primigenius, the aurochs. Therewas a sense of movement I had never noticed before, partly because my memoriesof the original visit have faded, but also because I looked at the paintings asa whole as a time. Was it better than the original. For 95% or more of visitors,I could say as good if not better, for they not only get a very accurateimpression of the original, but also feel good when they leave, as they havecontributed to the long-term preservation of what has quite rightly been calleda �Sistine Chapel� of Stone Age art. About the only people who really need tosee the original are rock art specialists, and even they should only go therewhen they have to.

Replicas aredefinitely an idea whose time has come�at Altamira and Niaux, and one wondersif the French will invest the money to create a replica of the Grotte deChauvet, once the study of it is complete. No tourist will ever set foot in thecave, but, judging from Lascaux, a Chauvet replica would be good investment.

By the way, if youwant to see a reconstituted aurochs, visit the Le Thon Cro-Magnon park, orexperience, depending on how you feel about it. There are a couple ofreconstructions of Cro-Magnon life and more Lascaux copies, but the big appealis the park with its animals that are close relatives to late Ice Age forms. Bos primigenius became extinct in Poland in 1627, butfortunately a close approximation of the breed has been bred�nice lookingbeasts with magnificent horns that are said to be fierce and lively. Theylooked like domestic oxen to me, but I wouldn�t like to get up close and personwith the adult male that stared at me! My respect for the Cro-Magnons (oranatomically modern humans if you prefer), rose many notches.

Indiana Jones - - - again

bfagan1200 — Tue, 20 May 2008 19:20:24 GMT

He's back! Nineteen years after the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones has returned in the adventure of the Crystal Skull. Fortunately, I'm no longer teaching: back in 1981, a kind of hysteria for archaeology gripped my students. I knew the Indiana Jones frenzy had assumed serious dimensions when students cameto my Introductory Archaeology course in fedora hats. I think they expected meto wield a bullwhip and wear a leather jacket as I lectured about buried citiesand golden sepulchers. Unfortunately, Indiana Jones would not fare well in thereal world of archaeology, where we talk about radiocarbon dates, potsherds, and settlement patterns. Most of those who wore the hats dropped out: presumably they are now real estate developers--or in jail. (Yes, dear reader, I do have some former students who are guests of the government.) Even today, after all these years, I sometimes sense that lecture audiences are looking at me appraisingly and weighing me against this most popular of Hollywood heroes. After a few minutes, I sense I'm found wanting. And when the Wall Street Journal asked me to write an essay about Indiana Jones as an archaeologist, I really wondered.

When the movies first appeared, there was the inevitable pontificating in archaeological circles about the appalling misconceptions that Indiana Jones gave the world about archaeology. Those who bloviated missed the point. As the Oxford archaeologist John Gowlett once remarked, looking for serious archaeology in these movies is like looking for serious physics in the Star Wars epics. The Indiana Jones movies have little or nothing to do with archaeology of any kind. They are good, old fashioned, and highly commercial, adventure stories revolving around quests for mythic artifacts, which are pure Hollywood entertainment, nothing more. And they're good entertainment at that, except for the Temple of Doom, which is a sophomoric romp. The closest we come to archaeological reality is with the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which revolves around a form of artifact that actually exists. There are about eight crystal skulls in museums and private hands, which are said to be of Aztec or Maya origin. In fact, all of them are modern forgeries. But, and this is probably why George Lucas chose them as an example, they are alleged to have occult powers. One skull in England is said to emit a blue light and to disable computer hard drives. They are the ideal heroes for a movie involving a quest for power and sacred artifacts, with a pleasing mixture of sci-fi and psychic powers, to say nothing of extraterrestrials, all of which appeals to George Lucas. I thoroughly enjoyed The Crystal Skull, especially the sword work and the library scene, where Indiana Jones memorably remarks to a student that archaeology is done outside libraries and quotes Gordon Childe almost as an aside. But serious archaeology, never. This is good solid entertainment, with a nice setup for a future younger Indiana Jones tied in at the end.

Anyone who thinks that the Indiana Jones movies demean archaeology needs to get a sense of proportion and, indeed, a life. The four films have done much to encourage interest in the past, and anyone who looks closer soon realizes that real world archaeology is something very different. Lucas and Spielberg are well aware of the importance of archaeology in today's world, which indeed has potential for entertainment, but a very different kind from that of the swashbuckling adventurer archaeologist of yesteryear. As for Harrison Ford, he is very serious about the need to study the past scientifically. Indeed, he has just been elected to the Board of the Archaeological Institute of America, which is a nice compliment both to Mr Ford and to archaeology itself.

So sit back and enjoy The Crystal Skull and don't worry about the archaeology. That's another world, and one that, on the whole, has benefited from Indiana Jones.

We navigate tricky waters

bfagan1200 — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:47:36 GMT

Anyone who writes for the general public is used to their work being used by others to further their various agendas. Over the years, I've suffered my fill, on such varied topics as the first Americans (where people wanted me to take sides), archaeological theory (ditto), the role of women in prehistory (my writing was interpreted as "somewhat androcentric", and, of course, climate change. My books on the latter have been used by opponents of anthropogenic global warming, by advocates of anthropogenic global warming, and by those who say we should just live with it. This I am used to, culminating in an op-ed piece I wrote for the New York Times some years ago during a heat wave, when I basically told people to relax and suffer through it, citing a well-known heat wave from the 1880s where people suffered even more. This, I said, was weather, not climate change. Furious e-mails descended on my head, from people who asked me why I had the temerity to suggest that a heat wave was not the direct cause of global warming.

All one can do is laugh, shrug one's shoulders, and move on. You'll never change peoples' minds if they believe passionately in something.

This has worked for me, until I wrote another op-ed article, this time for the Los Angeles Times last week on drought. This prompted a tirade from a certain Mark Cromer, senior writing fellow for "Californians for Population Stabilization," an anti-immigration organization. My article was about drought, but he accuses me of "an act of self-preservation" because I didn't mention the subject of population except in passing. Apparently I am"intellectually dishonest" because I say that adapting to the reality of prolonged drought is a potential solution without mentioning the problem of population growth. So this time I'm dragged into the immigration debate, when my article was about climate change, not population or immigration. Of course population growth is an important factor in the drought equation, that's a no-brainer, but the purpose of my article was to increase awareness of droughts a thousand years ago as possible signposts for a future when we are going to have to adapt to new water use practices--that's all. But quite what I want to preserve myself against, I don't know! Ah, people with agendas . . . .

What it all comes down to is people choosing to believe what they want to believe in and to hell with other peoples' integrity and motives. The only kind of self-preservation I am going to indulge in is a good laugh. It's flattering that archaeology is taken seriously as part of someone's political agenda!

At last something concrete

bfagan1200 — Fri, 09 May 2008 17:09:57 GMT

Our feces never lie--at least those from the past don't. . . .

The controversies over the First Americans continue to rage unabated, with little fresh archaeological evidence to nourish the flames, until the feces from Oregon came along. At last something new!

Dennis Jenkins, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon, explored the Paisley Caves in the Cascade Mountains in 2002 and 2003. He recovered a scattering of human coprolites, which preserved 14,000 year-old human protein and DNA. Six feces samples contained genetic material associated with native Americans and no other groups. Mitochondrial DNA from the coprolites links the people who visited the cave to two genetic groups of native Americans who arose between 14,000 and 18,000 years ago.

Unfortunately the scatter of coprolites were not associated with any artifacts or food remains, but if they are indeed human and the dates are reliable, then we have more clear evidence that humans entered the Americas before the Clovis occupation of some millennia later. This is interesting confirmation for a slowly accumulating but scanty body of archaeological evidence that places the first settlement of the Americas to at least as early as 14,000 years ago. Like all these things, more research is needed. But if this find is what they think it is, then a brief stop at cave in the Cascades was a momentous event for archaeology, indeed world history.

Consequences

bfagan1200 — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:50:48 GMT

The fall-out from appearing on The Daily Show is finally ebbing. I'm left with some violent dislikes. Among them are:

People who e-mail you, castigating you for being among those who believe that humanly caused global warming is a reality. Invariably they have agendas, accuse you of getting facts wrong or of faulty research, or are angry at a third party. Most of the time, they've only skimmed your book to see if you are on their side or not. And what they say is THE TRUTH!

People who assume that you are an expert on some esoteric aspect of science that will solve our warming problems. Such correspondents range from those who think that natural desalinization will work to those who are seeking someone (preferably me) to finance their esoteric machine that will solve all our warming problems.

Those who either send you, or offer to send you, their books or book length manuscripts on global warming whether you want them or not. Almost invariably, they're looking for validation, or, even worse, an endorsement or a publisher.

The anonymous correspondents who tell you have Sinned with a capital S, then refer you to the Gospels for salvation. These gentry are more common than you might think.

Finally, the invariably anonymous e-mailers who are just plain abusive. How dare I write about global warming?

All of this makes for an entertaining, if often pathetic, backdrop to an ongoing dialogue with those readers who, bless them, offer perspectives, references, news of ongoing research, and critical analysis. Such responses to The Great Warming keep me humble and maintain my sense of perspective.

Why does climate change attract such misdirected passion and so many tenaciously developed agendas? Probably because it's been politicized, which is inevitable up to a point--but the full force of national exposure has been sobering.

Robert Fagles

bfagan1200 — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 19:16:33 GMT

"Stirred now by the Muse, the bard launched out

in a fine blaze of song, starting at just the point

where the main Achaean force, setting their camps afire,

had boarded the oarswept ships an sailed for home

but famed Odysseus' men already crouched in hiding--

in the heart of Troy's assembly--dark in that horse

the Trojans dragged themselves to the city heights . . . .

I was luck enough to be introduced to Homer in the English equivalent of high school, by a teacher who lived and breathed the Iliad and Odyssey. We were required to read and translate 40 lines a day, which would have been a burden had not the teacher treated the epics as tales of adventure. I can't read the Greek any more, but I relish the translations, turning to them again and again for inspiration, for enjoyment, and for a vicarious journey through a legendary Greek world. There are translations galore, but the best of them are immortals--E.V.Rieu in colloquial prose, written soon after World War II, Owen Lattimore's wonderful rendition, and, most wonderful of all, Robert Fagles's masterpieces in luminous verse.

Fagles makes us realize with every line that Homer's tales were once sung by bards, who passed the epics from father to son, from one generation to the next. They must have tailored their performances to their audiences, well aware of the jokes and sly remarks that appealed to them, masters of drama and changing pace, of metaphor and telling pauses. You find the same qualities in a few university lectures, masters of their subject matter, devoted to convincing their captive audiences that meteorology, physics-- and Homer--have a special magic about them. Theirs is, alas, a dying art, kept alive by a devoted few.

Then the Iliad and the Odyssey were written down and some of the magic was lost, or was it? I was lucky enough to learn Homer from a teacher who recited the poems like the great stories they are, with passion and pathos, love and anger, bravery and cowardice, making the most of evocative descriptions. The original Greek is mellifluous and dramatic. English is another matter, but Fagles succeeded. Consider the ship that carried Odysseus to Ithaca:

"And the ship like a four-horse team careering down the plain,

all breaking as one with the whiplash cracking smartly,

leaping with hoofs high to run the course in no time . . . ."

It is as if we are there.

We know of the Greek Bronze Age, of Greece's remote past from archaeology as well as legend, the legends in Homer's poems. The archaeology is rarely spectacular, often really dry and specialized. Of course Homer is legend and not historical truth, but the great epics remind us that the past was as alive and human as we are, even if all we have from it is a legacy of dusty potsherds and crumbling shrines.

Robert Fagles translated Homer as part of a living past and we are immeasurably richer for his genius. He died last week, but the legacy that he left behind him, not only of Homer, but of the Aeneid, is a wonderful memorial.

We are much richer for his having been among us. He was a great Homeric bard.

Visiting Vancouver

bfagan1200 — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:38:59 GMT

Last week was the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) in Vancouver, one of my favorite cities anywhere. Temperatures were in the forties and we had both hail and wet snow. Nothing too severe; it was lovely to get away from the crowds and overheated rooms of the convention.

SAA was business as usual. It always is. Crowds of graduate students, professional archaeologists of all ages and occupations, many of them from across Canada and overseas, as well as the usual leavening of government officials. Nothing ever changes--the same exhibits with the usual players, the annual business meeting, a plenary session or two, excursions, and, above all, dozens of paper sessions, usually in crowded rooms and often poorly attended. One worthy institution is a round table lunch, where you can sit with a few others and discuss major issues. I went to a wonderful one, moderated by Professor Paul Mellars of Cambridge University, on the subject of modern humans, which developed into a fascinating discussion over genetics, migration routes, and the origins of bows and arrows. Good stuff! One really goes to these meetings for the networking with others, and that's invaluable.

For some reason, I find the SAA meeting depressing. Perhaps it's because so little changes from one year to the next. Or perhaps it's because one has a sense of slight complacency, of a comfortable world where little changes from one generation to the next and original ideas are in depressingly short supply. Much of SAA, but not all, seems to be archaeology stuck in a deep rut, where much of what happens is so specialized that few people really care about it. Or perhaps it's just me.

But the most depressing part of the meeting was the paper sessions. Such papers have become a kind of ritual for graduate students at all stages of their careers, but no one seems to care how good the general standard should be. I sampled about a dozen presentations over the two days I was at the convention. With one notable exception, they were appalling. The subject matter was usually obscure, often highly provisional, and, above all, presented poorly. Many of the people giving such 15 to 20-minute talks are the professors of the future (and some of them are already teaching). The exception was a young archaeologist,who knew her material thoroughly, used no notes, kept to time, was entertaining, and had bright, relevant visuals. She was a joy to listen to. Everyone else either put their notes on the screen, a gross misuse of PowerPoint or Keynote, or read their paper from a script, or both. Some never looked their audience in the eye! The delivery was either too faint, too monotone, or just plain sleep inducing. Most lost the attention of their audience in the first two minutes. There seemed to be an almost total lack of enthusiasm or passion, of fire in the belly. Is a lack of passion considered professional?

My sample was a tiny one, and perhaps misleading, but I was appalled and wondered why no one gives their students formal training in delivering oral presentations or lectures. It is largely a matter of practice.

The basic rules are simple:

Know your stuff so well that you only need notes for quotes and statistics, if then,

Never put your notes or main paints on the screen except when you need to emphasize a really major point, and even then very sparingly, and at the most once during the talk,

Vary your voice level, show enthusiasm, play on the audience and ENJOY yourself! If you do, your audience will.

And, lastly, keep scrupulously to time.

Many of the people at the conference never went to a single session because they found them boring. Alas, nothing will change as long as peoples' ways to meetings are paid if they deliver papers. But I would have thought that their professional pride would motivate them to do a first rate job, or at least learn how to do one. Nervousness is not an excuse, for adequate preparation and rehearsal readily overcomes this. And as for putting your notes on PowerPoint--that's a lazy person's way of giving a talk and just not acceptable.

I think I'll give the SAA meeting a miss next year.

The Daily Show

bfagan1200 — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:56:41 GMT

The Daily Show was a unique and memorable experience. . . . Ill never forget it.

I was scared and apprehensive before I got to New York, but by the time the process started I was more excited than terrified. A frantic re-reading of The Great Warming reminded me of some of the things I had said, especially facts and figures, but other than that I didn't prepare at all.

The process starts at 3, when you have a phone conversation with the very charming producer. She questioned me about the book, asked questions, then told me that she had no idea what Jon Stewart would ask me, which was not exactly reassuring!

A car picks you up at 5.15 and transports you to a warehouse-like building by the East River. You are greeted warmly and shown into a green room, which is reserved for guests, complete with a large flat screen TV. The producer introduces herself and tells you you must not tell jokes. That's their job. She was wonderful at putting you at your ease. At 5.40 I was in make up for a few minutes--just some powder to remove shininess on my forehead. At 5.50, Jon Stewart pops into the green room and shakes hands. He asks me two questions,. one funny, the other serious. Clearly, he was sizing me up and fortunately we "clicked." He was very friendly, which put me at ease, but I noticed his expressive eyes, which changed as he shifted from humor to serious issues. This, I realized, was the way he would cue me on stage.

And so it proved. We sat and watched the show through the second commercial break and had a good laugh, so much so that it was no big deal being led through the wings for one's appearance. The studio is quite small, with about 200 people in the audience in bleachers, who were noisy and enthusiastic, a marvelous backdrop. Then the interview, which lasted about 5 minutes. It was more of a conversation that an interview, for we looked into each other's eyes and ad-libbed. He took the questioning one way, I would steer it back, but in the end the chemistry was wonderful and I enjoyed every moment of it. You get so involved in the conversation that you become oblivious of the audience and anyone but Jon Stewart.

We could have gone on for a long time without effort, for I was mesmerized by his intelligence and ability to switch from being screamingly funny to deadly serious in seconds. It looked effortless, but was the result of intense preparation. He had read the book and zeroed in on the issues without hesitation.

It's easy to be mesmerized by celebrities, but this time I was not in awe, but truly seduced by an extraordinary interviewer. This is a truly remarkable human being I feel very privileged to have had this experience and will never forget it. And what was nice is that the audience appreciated it.

And to cap it all, Lesley, my wife, took charge of my wardrobe and ensured that I looked good. The adrenalin rush was with me for at least 12 hours afterward, and I am still in disbelief that I was on the Daily Show, just for a few minutes in the Big Time.

Elephants in the Climatic Room

bfagan1200 — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 10:53:56 GMT

Silent elephants in the climatic room. . . . On a book tour earlier this week, I was surprised how people reacted to this metaphor, which came from a memorable experience by the banks of the Zambezi River in Central Africa many years ago, when I walked into the midst of a herd of elephants. What I remember is just how quiet they were, and that's how I find so very characteristic of discussions about future droughts. If computer projections are to be believed--and they are very sophisticated these days and becoming more so--the world is in for a dose of drought on a scale we have never witnessed before. And this is something that we simply don't talk about except in rather general terms. In many ways, however, drought is a shorter-term problem than rising sea levels and warming, for we are likely to be exposed to much more severe aridity, especially in currently semi-arid parts of the world by 2150 to 2100. I think drought very much is a problem for the moment and not one that one wrestles with in the abstract as an issue for our great-grandchildren. Yet public awareness of the need for water conservation and the dangers of drought is still very muted, why is why I wish the elephants would make a little more noise.

I've just been reading about ancient Australia, in a new and thought-provoking book by Peter Hiscock, The Archaeology of Ancient Australia, which treats extensively of the responses of Aboriginal groups to arid environments. He stresses that beliefs and ritual were of vital importance in helping people adjust to climatic events, a subject we often neglected, and very much another silent elephant in climatic debates. Obviously, it's hard to reconstruct intangible beliefs from material objects, but in Australian rock art and the so-called Dreamtime, we have a potential archive of great value.

Off to New York for the Daily Show on Sunday. I alternate between excitement and sheer terror.

Stonehenge and other things

bfagan1200 — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 11:32:37 GMT

They're at it again with Stonehenge. You may recall that about three months ago the British Government announced that it would not proceed with an ambitious scheme to bury an adjoining major trunk road in a tunnel on the grounds of expense. The road, known locally as the A303, is already overburdened with traffic between London and a booming southwestern England. Now Tesco, the British grocery giant, has announced plans to build a huge warehouse distribution center at nearby Andover. When last I traveled between Los Angeles and Phoenix by road, I spent much of time overtaking Wal-Mart trucks traveling between distribution centers and stores. If the Tesco warehouse goes ahead, a torrent of large trucks will flow on to the A303 day-and-night, adding even more to the catastrophic overcrowding on this already overstressed highway. Stonehenge, an icon of Britain's long past, will suffer even more from noise and pollution. And quite apart from the serious economic issues--and make no mistake, they really are very important indeed--one continues to be amazed at the shortsightedness of government. Surely you must look at the future of Stonehenge from a long-term perspective, and not just as a matter of short-term budgeting. Can you imagine how much a scheme like this, or its still unplanned alternative, will cost in, say, ten years?

Archaeology is unimportant to many governments in the larger scheme of things, which is hardly surprising given a public raised on Indiana Jones, The Mummy, Lara Cruft, and now 10,000 B.C. The latter is a masterpiece of vapid disaster, thought up by the filmmaker Roland Emmerich, who brought us Independence Day. Saber-toothed tigers in 10,000 B.C.? Give us a break! But when it comes to Hollywood and entertainment, everything goes. This is, in the final analysis, popular entertainment in the genre of tacky 1950s epics which starred Victor Mature, or that perennial favorite, Kirk Douglas in The Vikings. Let's just hope that people are smart enough to realize that archaeology paints a very different picture of ancient times and of our forebears. I'm not holding my breath in a world where many people equate archaeology not with ancient people, but with dinosaurs.

I've just learned that I'm going on The Daily Show on March 17 to talk about The Great Warming. In my wildest dreams, I never thought I would ever appear on a national talk show, let alone Jon Stewart. Wow!

Lamont Doherty

bfagan1200 — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:16:20 GMT

I just returned from a visit to the Lamont-Doherty Earth Science Center, which is one of the most important institutions that studies climate change. Deep sea cores, ice borings, tree-rings--they work on almost everything with a strong multidisciplinary emphasis. Every Friday, they have a colloquium, which has run continually every academic year since the 1950s, but I suspect I am one of the few archaeologists ever to speak to it. About 150 people came--faculty, researchers, and students. I spoke about the Medieval Warm Period and drought, mainly stressing the opportunities for collaboration with archaeologists that lie ahead. It went down well, I think, but the main benefit for me was a chance to interact with a series of really heavy duty researchers, each world authorities on such topics as deep sea cores and El Ninos. By the end of the day, I was exhausted, but I had learned a tremendous amount. I was also very flattered by the kind words they said about my climate change books.

Tomorrow is publication day for The Great Warming, finally after months of editing, revision, copy edits, and proofs. In a way it's an anticlimax, for I basically closed the text nearly a year ago. But the memories of the research come cascading back as I talk about the warm centuries in lectures--visiting the University of Arizona tree-ring laboratory, the brilliant white light of the Far North, the moiae, the great ancestral statues of Easter Island gazing out at the endless ocean. Every book has its cherished memories, which is what makes them worth writing. And one meets so many nice, interesting people along the way. Now I am bracing myself--to use a ghastly media expression--for the usual onslaught of nitpickers and people who delight in finding errors on page 86, line 4... . But the reviews have been good so far.

Drought and climate change

bfagan1200 — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 20:12:59 GMT

I'm just back from a lightning trip to Barcelona, where I gave a keynote address to the Catalan Climate Change Conference. Apart from getting a nasty and long lasting cold, it was a wonderful experience. The all-day session was the culmination of a year-long planning process and involved about 550 people from cities, local governments, and non-profits in Catalonia concerned with long-term planning for climate change in the future. It was a wonderful experience to interact with people with a genuine, serious, and profound interest in planning for climatic change.

I spoke about the Medieval Warm Period and the worldwide droughts that occurred between A.D. 800 and 1200, and, as I did in the book, then talked about the implications of the warming of a thousand years ago for our present era of warming. Much of the lecture was about droughts ancient and projected for the future, which resonated strongly with my audience. Catalonia, like the rest of Spain, is deeply concerned about aridity indeed the area is in the midst of a multiyear drought. They are talking of shipping in water, which cannot be a permanent solution to the water shortage problem. Apparently, the situation is compounded by large numbers of illegal wells, which are drawing down an already stressed water table. Much of the discussion at the all-day session was about changing social attitudes toward climate change and about infrastructure needs. I was struck at how little mention there was of drought and water, which indeed seems to be the "silent elephant in the climatic room" here and elsewhere.

I don't think that many in the audience had thought of archaeology as anything more than a way of discovering ancient civilizations and analyzing human evolution. It seemed to be a real eye opener to them that the study of the remote past has important lessons for the challenges we face with climatic change now and in the future. We archaeologists don't get involved in discussions about climate change nearly as much as we should. Indeed, I'm struck when I talk to paleoclimatologists just how few of them ever think about the impact of climate change on people in the past. Even archaeologists themselves have still done little to study climate as a factor in the major developments of the past. This is something that is still little studied, although this is changing as we become ever more concerned about global warming, and ever more fine-grained climatic information comes to hand. Much of the concern in the Catalonia conference was with self-sustainability, which is something which archaeologists think about a lot of the time--but the wider audience is unaware of this.

What's exciting is that I seem to be lecturing to more and more totally non-archaeological audiences. Almost invariably, they are very excited about the potential of archaeology for better understanding human responses to climate change. We still have a lot to learn about the past which is relevant to today and tomorrow--provided we get away from the Indiana Jones image that Hollywood has unwittingly, and entertainingly, pinned upon us.

Moi - a Boasian?

bfagan1200 — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 10:35:43 GMT

Doing what I do in archaeology, I've become pretty immune to criticism, some of it valuable, some of it definitely out in left field. But occasionally one wonders where peoples' minds are, especially when they attribute some bizarre theoretical bias to one that bears no resemblance to reality.

Case in point--the Mystery of the Late Boasian . . .

Afriend of mine, who regards archaeology as a harmless pursuit, happened to find anentry about me in Wikipedia. Hee-mailed me to ask what the anonymous writer meant when he described me asbeing strongly criticized for being �a later member of the Boasian school, moreinterested in tracking objects on a grid than explaining similarities amongobjects found in various places.� I was also astounded to learn that I am acritic of non-traditional archaeology.

I appear to have sinned grievously in thewriter�s mind, and normally ignore these things, but I am curious. Can anyone tellme exactly what being a later member of the Boasian school means? Although I havehad the pleasure of meeting at least two people who studied under thislegendary anthropologist at Columbia, I�ve never read any of his work, indeedhave had no call to do so. And I think I�ve been far more critical of traditionalarchaeology than the non-traditional, perhaps more so than many of mycolleagues, witness some of my articles in Archaeology Magazine.

Strange are the ways of those who seem to read theoreticalapproaches and biasses into everything! If you write for the general public, you can ill afford to wear theoretical blinkers, for, after all, your primary goal is to tell an interesting, scientifically accurate story. And you're not going to get very far if you espouse putting artifacts on a grid or espousing some esoteric theory, which is of interest to half a dozen people or so, and is, in the final analysis, merely a researcher's way of formulating his or her data.

But Boas-- now that's really reaching back into antiquity....

One person., one moment . . .

bfagan1200 — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 10:07:02 GMT

Archaeology is usually an anonymous science, concerned more with general impressions of ancient societies rather than individuals and their daily round. Yes, we have Tutankhamun, the Maya Lord Pacal, and the Lords of Sipan, but they're the elite. It's very rarely that we are lucky enough to be able to peer into the lives of ordinary people, who lived out their lives far from the historical spotlight. The most famous of such individuals is, of course, the Bronze Age Ice Man, who was deep frozen high in the Alps over 5,000 years ago. Thanks to modern medical science, we know more about him than he did himself.

There are other, less spectacular discoveries, which also give us momentary glances into individual lives--an Australian Aborigine near what is now Sydney speared to death four centuries ago, and the fifteenth century mass burial of ghastly casualties from the Battle of Towton in northeast England, with its evidence of brutal, mass butchery, to mention only two examples. Then there's a humble collection of stone and bone artifacts from a 14,000 year-old hunting camp on the banks of the Jordan river, which tells a prosaic but fascinating tale . . .

Phillip Edwards of Le Trobe University was digging at the Wadi Hammah site, a camp used by Natufian people north of the Dead Sea soon after the end of the Ice Age. The Natufians--named after a site in Israel--are famous for their expertise with wild plant foods. Their descendants were some of the first farmers in the world. Expert foragers, the Natufians often lived at the same locations for prolonged periods of time, hunting gazelle and other animals and exploiting fall nut harvests. They also harvested stands of wild grasses with stone-bladed bone sickles. Excavating two large oval huts, Edwards uncovered a small concentration of artifacts lying on an earthen floor, so close together that they were probably carried in a hide bag or pouch. The only trace of the organic material that made up the bag was a thin layer of white sediment. The tools included an intact bone sickle, a carefully shaped piece of toolmaking stone used to fabricate small, thin blades, and 21 half-moon shaped small tools called "microliths" by archaeologists. These were mounted in arrows and on spears. The cache also included two polished pebbles and some perforated gazelle toe bones, whose purpose is a mystery.

The inhabitants of Wadi Hammah lived at a location where several ecological zones were within easy reach of their valley camp. Matthews believes that the small toolkit belonged to someone who spent his (or possibly her) days constantly on the move, with a small variety of important tools close to hand in a bag. Everything was portable and lightweight, ready for use at a moment's notice. Such simplicity is appropriate for a mobile lifeway, where everyone used only a small range of artifacts. How few? Judging from the San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa, who had a mere two dozen artifacts that were used by men or women, the Natufians, for all their dwelling in one place for prolonged intervals, also had a small toolkit, appropriate for people who spent much of their lives on the move.

I love discoveries like these, for they provide us with the all important, if transitory portraits of our remote forebears.

The Great Warming

bfagan1200 — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 16:28:26 GMT

"The peacocks danced at eventide", wrote the sixth-century Indian writer Subdandhu of the onset of the monsoon. The monsoon is much more than a matter of meteorology in India and Pakistan. The very fabric of human existence unfolds around two seasons--the wet and the dry. The wet season brings warm, moist conditions and heavy rain, carried by the monsoon winds blowing inland from the ocean. The other half of the year, the arid season, enjoys cool, dry air from the north. The coming of the monsoon is a highlight of the year to those who suffered through the buildup after the pleasant winter months--weeks of torrid heat. Colonel Edward Tennant of the British East India Company wrote in 1886: "The sly, instead of its brilliant blue, assumes the sullen tint of lead. . . . The days become overcast and hot, banks of clouds rise over the ocean to the west. . . . At last the sudden lightning flash among the hills, and shoot through the clouds that overhang the sea, and with a crash of thunder the monsoon bursts over the hungry land." My father was a civil servant in the British Raj in the Punjab during the 1920s. Even in his extreme old age, he could vividly recall the most epochal day of the year, when India became cold and grey, like distant England.

Generations of meteorologists have tried to forecast monsoons, notable among them Sir Gilbert Walker, a brilliant statistician with a passion for flutes and atmospheric pressure, who is remembered for his discovery of the Southern Oscillation, the driving force behind El Nino and its opposite cousin, La Nina. There is now fairly general Agreement that monsoon failures sometimes, but not invariably, coincide with El Nino conditions in the Pacific, as was the case with the terrible famine and monsoon failure of 1875-6, which killed tens of thousands and ravaged at least a third of Bengal. While much of India starved, the British Raj was busy exporting grain to the world market. Meanwhile, the Viceroy, the eccentric and erratic Lord Lytton, who happened to be Queen Victoria's favorite poet, was preoccupied with a gigantic durbar in Delhi, which included a week-long feast for 68,000 maharajahs and officials. An English journalist estimated that at least 100,000 rural farmers perished during the festivities, which were designed to be gaudy enough to impress the orientals". Lytton's shameful famine policy was one of laissez faire. The historian Mike Davis, whose book Late Victorian Holocausts should be required reading for every historian of the nineteenth century, estimates that at least 20-30 million tropical farmers perished during that century as a result of drought, famine, and famine-related diseases.

Agreed, we live in a much better connected world, but in many places like sub-Saharan Africa, the infrastructure is still as inadequate as it was a century ago, with no signs of improvement in sight. Ours is a world with many more million inhabitants, at least 250 million of them living on marginal lands for agriculture and stockbreeding. The Victorian casualties described by Davis will pall beside those of future droughts in a warming and increasingly arid tropical world--and yet we persist in squandering billions of dollars on pointless wars and petty nationalisms. Small wonder many futurists believe that the wars of future centuries will be fought over water. Will we ever contemplate making massive investments in future generations that do not involve immediate profit and political gratification? We may be forced to do so within our lifetimes.

Fashion, Climate, and the Norse

bfagan1200 — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 20:40:24 GMT

Sunset in the Greenland fjords

Greenland and Iceland have become fashionable meccas for archaeologists in recent years. Both are stable, welcoming places to work, even if field conditions are often arduous. As a result, we know a great deal more about the Greenland Norse than we did even a few years ago.

The Great Warming tells the story of interactions between the Inuit and the Norse on the western shores of the Davis Strait that separates Greenland from the Canadian Archipelago during the Medieval Warm Period. Part of this story revolves around the Inuit's hunger for iron, which they obtained from Melville Bay in northern Greenland, as well as from the Norse. I recount the ingenious theory of Olaf Envig, who believes the Norse recycled nails from their worn out ships and traded them to the Inuit for walrus ivory. Like so many archaeological theories, this one depends on intangibles, for we are unlikely to find the places where the Norse recycled their ships or where they built new ones--perhaps in Labrador, if Envig is to be believed.

Smoked herring were a staple of medieval Europe

But there's another fascinating point here. Conventional wisdom has it that the Norse abandoned their Greenland settlements in the face of rapidly deteriorating climatic and ice conditions in the north. The bitter cold made their traditional dairying economy impracticable, and they resisted any notion of adapting Inuit hunting methods, especially ice fishing in the dead of winter. But a new generation of research is raising questions about the climatic theory. One of the staples of the Greenland Norse economy was walrus ivory, which was much prized in Iceland and Europe. Ivory was the major tithe paid to Norway by the Greenland church, as were furs and falcons. Greenland was the outermost frontier of Medieval Europe, difficult of access even in the more benign times of the Warm Period. This made its communities extremely vulnerable to shifting fashions in Europe. For instance, the soft ivory of the African elephant was ideal for carving, so much so that elephant tusks were an important part of the Indian Ocean dhow trade between India and Africa for many centuries. During High Medieval times, African tusks became more readily available in Europe, far more so than walrus ivory, at a time when ivory was used less frequently for icons and other religious ornaments. The demand for walrus dried up rapidly in the face of the new, softer material.

The shifting needs of the new fashions would have rippled out along Atlantic trade routes within a few generations. A lessening demand for walrus ivory may have come at a time when the Greenland climate was deteriorating, placing further stress on remote communities that often suffered through harsh winters. The twelfth to fourteenth centuries also saw a dramatic explosion in the European fish trade, centered on herring and cod, as new trade routes replaced ancient Norse networks. The Norse communities in Greenland finally withered away in the face of intense cold and economic isolation. So to invoke climate alone as a cause of Norse abandonment is probably tool simplistic an explanation--research continues.