More on Pre-Settlement Norse Outposts in Iceland

Work has continued at Stöð, a Norse site in eastern Iceland that I wrote about two years ago. This site was founded around 800 AD, 75 years before the famous first settlement of the island. The excavator of Stöð, Bjarni Einarsson, thinks the site was a seasonal camp, occupied by people who came from Norway to work a couple of months in the summer fishing and catching seals and then went home. Such camps are well known from northern Norway and a camp in Iceland makes perfect sense; after all, people wouldn't have loaded their families into ships and moved to Iceland without having good knowledge of the land.

The discoveries on the site now include two longhouses, one on top of the other, as shown in the photograph above. The larger one is 103 feet (31 m) long, the largest yet found in Iceland dating to before AD 1000. This is the earlier of the two, dating to around 800, so if this was a camp it was a large one sponsored by an important Jarl. Around AD 870 the larger house was torn down and a smaller one built on the same site; this might represent the transition from a large band of men staying seasonally to a farm occupied by one household.

This is quite remarkable, because first settlements have in general been very hard for archaeologists to find or verify: hardly anything has been found at the Roanoke Island settlement or the possible Viking sites in Canada, and as yet there is no trace of the Basque whalers who are known to have visited New England in the 1500s. To find such a rich, well-dated site that might be one of the first Viking settlements in Iceland is amazing.

The Spanish Inquisition and the Effectiveness of Torture

Trigger warning: evil. If you prefer to keep your mind on pleasant things today, read something else.

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When I was in graduate school, I knew people into scoffing at the "black myth" of the Spanish Inquisition. It wasn't really so bad, they said; they had real standards of evidence and proper procedures, unlike some of the witch hunting courts in Germany or England; most people had no fear of the inquisitors and some people openly laughed at them. 

That all depends, I think, on what you mean by "bad." To me the Inquisition reeks of evil because I regard the persecution of people for what they believe as a horrible evil no matter how carefully the judges proceed and how hard they tried to reach the truth. They burned people alive for believing wrongly about invisible things, and that I do not forgive.

But they kept wonderful records, which makes their career of persecution a boon for social historians. If you want to learn about, for example, secret Judaism in Spain or Spanish America between 1492 and 1750, the records of the Inquisition are by far your best source. Consider the torture of Pedro Rodrıguez Saz in Mexico City on 16 May 1596: 

Once he was naked, and his arms were tied, he was admonished to tell the truth. He said that he had already told it and that witnesses who testified against him had testified falsely. His arms were ordered to be tied tightly, and he was admonished to tell the truth and the minister ordered the first turn of the cord. He complained loudly. He said: “Help me Lord, Jesus Christ, help me, I am here because of false witnesses.” Another turn of the cord was ordered and he said: “Oh Christians! I will tell the truth! I beg for mercy! I will tell the truth!” The official who administered the torture was ordered to leave. 

He said: “It is true that, starting six to seven years ago, Luis de Carvajal started keeping the Laws of Moses.” He was told to confess the truth clearly and openly, to satisfy this Holy Office, for the salvation of his soul. He said: “About seven years ago, when Diego Henríquez, brother in law of Manuel de Lucena, and son of Beatriz Henrıquez, La Payba, was arrested by the Holy Office, Manuel de Lucena taught me the Law of Moses, telling me that the Lord had promised to send a great prophet who will save the people. And that Jesus Christ was not the true God, but only God, who was in the highest heaven, will save the world. This God has a great day that the Jews call their Great Feast, on which they celebrate and fast. On this Great Day of the Lord, I was there with Manuel de Lucena, his wife Catalina Henríquez, Clara Henríquez, her daughter Justa Mendez, Leonor Díaz, and a man called Juan Rodrıguez. I don’t remember whether Constanca Rodrıguez was there. We fasted and celebrated in Mexico City at the house of Manuel de Lucena, near the workplace of Juan Álvarez, in observance of the Law of Moses. I and the rest of the people I have listed, we danced and we celebrated, we wore festive clothing. We did not eat all day long until night, when I went to eat at my house, which is the house of Phelipe Nuñez, where I stayed, and I ate in the company of Phelipe Nuñez and his wife Phelipa López. We ate fish, garbanzos, eggs, and fruit. That’s all that happened on the Great Day of the Lord.

This comes from a fascinatingly awful article I stumbled across yesterday, "The Cost of Torture: Evidence from the Spanish Inquisition" by Ron E. Hassner, published in Security Studies.  This begins with a chilling sentence:

The study of interrogational torture has made significant strides in recent years.

Hassner goes on to say that the reason the study of torture has not made more progress is the lack of good data. While entities like the UN HCR and Human Rights Watch have tried to compile statistics, their results are biased in many ways and probably do not represent a real sample of torture in any particular program. Hence, the records of the Spanish Inquisition:

The archives of the Spanish Inquisition provide a detailed historical source of quantitative and qualitative information about interrogational torture. The inquisition tortured brutally and systematically, willing to torment all who it deemed as withholding evidence.

As Hassner says, the Inquisition had centuries of experience and built up a strong institutional knowledge base about how and when torture was effective. Hassner's article is based on two sets of records, a single manuscript that records 1,046 cases from the tribunal in Toledo between 1575 and 1610,  and the investigation of a network of Jews in Mexico in 1596 to 1601.

Of the 1046 suspects in the Toledo manuscript, 123 were tortured. It is important to note that the Inquisition did not immediately put suspects to torture, but did all they could to build up a detailed case before even bringing the suspect before an Inquisitor. The Inquisition generally had no interest in extracting false confessions; their goal was not to trap particular individuals so much as to wind up networks of secret Jews, Muslims, and Protestants, and for that they needed accurate information. This is quite different from the witch hunts going on at the same time, trials in which people were routinely tortured until they confessed to completely impossible things. The Inquisition did not use torture to fish for new information, because they believed that any such data would be unreliable; they were looking for confirmation of what they had already been told. The Inquisition proceeded slowly, taking years if necessary to build up a detailed case. The Inquisitors also understood very well the problem of leading questions, which could get the suspect to tell them "what they wanted to hear." Their usual method was, in fact, to ask no questions at all. 

Imagine: a suspect is arrested and taken to prison, never told anything about the charges against him or her, kept in a cell for days or weeks or months, then brought before a panel of judges who simply say, "Tell us the truth." If the suspect says nothing, he or she goes back to prison. This could go on for years. Eventually, if they had learned enough from other sources, the inquisitors might decide to torture the suspect, again without asking any questions.  The inquisitors were forbidden to draw blood, and they usually inflicted pain by having the suspect's arms twisted with ropes or by a sort of water boarding. The very tough could bear this, and often did, but some suspects who held out for years of imprisonment did break quickly and confess. In the Toledo sample, 29% of those put to torture confessed, and in every case their confessions corresponded closely enough with what the court already knew to lead to a conviction.

By comparison:

The methods of the Inquisition stand in stark contrast to American torture policy. In the aftermath of 9/11, US interrogators quickly formed an interrogational torture program to prevent additional mass terror attacks and dismantle the al Qaeda network. US interrogators tortured rashly, amateurishly, and haphazardly. Amateurs carried out interrogation sessions without bureaucratic oversight or strictly delimited procedures, and the sessions did not lead to an accumulation of organizational expertise. Rather than torturing those believed to withhold crucial information, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) personnel tortured terrorist leaders who had “blood on their hands.” Culpability, not utility, determined who would be tortured. This was hot-blooded torture and it failed, by and large.

According to Hassner, experienced inquisitors would have scoffed at the "ticking bomb" scenario used by some Americans to justify torture. They believed that torture was not a reliable way to extract new information, and that it did not work quickly. It could produce valuable information, but only if it was used systematically and patiently alongside other investigations.

It makes me queasy to dwell on these things, but I feel like we have to. If decent people refuse to learn about how torture has been used and the problems with any information so acquired, we may again end up at the mercy of sinister people who claim that what they are doing is essential to protect us. 

The Dance of the Conquest: Post Cortez Maya Art

Back in 2003, workers restoring a 16th-century house in Chajul, Guatemala uncovered a series of remarkable wall paintings. They have since been conserved, and just recently a detailed study has published. This was a Maya area, and Maya language and traditions are still strong there.

The paintings include European items and therefore date to after contact with the Spanish; the authors of the new study say they were made over an extended time, beginning soon after the conquest and perhaps extending as late as the 1700s. They are unusual in coming from a private house. Most surviving paintings of the period are in churches, and therefore presumably more under the control of the authorities and the church.

Combining scholarly knowledge of other art from the early colonial period with the insights of local Ixil Maya informants, the investigators conclude that these depict dances. The informants named two dances in particular that they thought were depicted, the Baile de la Conquista (Dance of the Conquest), or the Baile de los Moros y Cristianos (Dance of the Moors and Christians). They also suggested that one panel depicts a dance that no longer survives, which people are calling a Lost Dance; apparently the church banned several dances for theological reasons now obscure.

The Dance of the Conquest, as you might imagine, depicts the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. According to what I have found tonight, this may have been developed already in the 16th century by savvy priests as a way to convey the European version of events to those who did not understand Spanish. However, some articles suggest it may have later evolved into forms that were much darker and more critical of the conquistadors.

The Dance of the Moors and the Christians depicts the Spanish reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from the Muslims, the key event of Spanish history as it was understood until recently. It boggles the mind to think of Maya dancers in those costumes acting out events in Iberian history of which they can have had only the vaguest idea, and yet such a dance definitely existed and survived into the 20th century.

Most of the Maya dances that were developed under Spanish auspices were religious, depicting the life of Jesus and the like. Interesting that the owner of this houses had no interest in those, but preferred secular tales of war and conquest.

What a delightful little window into things one knew nothing about.

Falerii Novi

Ground-penetrating radar map of Falerii Novi, town about 30 miles north of Rome that prospered during the Roman Republic. The scanned area measures 30.5 hectares, or 75 acres. Big image with lots of detail, via The History Blog.

Closing the Olaf Palme Case

In 1986, Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme was assassinated, shot in the back as he walked down a quiet street in Stockholm. The inability of the police to find the killer spawned myriad conspiracy theories, many of them connected to the Cold War. Palme was a socialist who regularly criticized US foreign policy, so some people thought the CIA got him. But he also criticized the Soviets, so others thought the KGB did it because Palme showed that a much more humane socialism was possible. Palme especially liked to criticize South Africa, so some people thought that either the South African government  killed him, or the gold barons, or just some cranky Boers. Palme also had many domestic enemies.

The police have just announced that they think they know who did it: a Swede named Stig Engstrom, who killed himself in 2000. Engstrom was an unhappy loner and a bit of a right-wing nut, and he had previously been figured as the likely killer by an investigative reporter a few years ago. The police say they did not rely on the reporter's work, so this looks like independent investigations arriving at the same end point.

It's a disappointment to conspiracy buffs, but the police did allow that they can't rule out a conspiracy behind Engstrom; after all if there were other conspirators they had years to cover their tracks. But the police say they did not find any evidence that Engstrom had accomplices.

I still find it weird that in 1986 the Prime Minister of Sweden had no security. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could get back to that sort of world?

The Badianus Manuscript: America's oldest Herbal

The Spanish conquest of Mexico happened so fast that nobody had time to think about what sort of regime or society would emerge afterwards. It would be Catholic, of course, but other than that the Spanish did not agree about anything, and the native aristocracy remained powerful enough for decades to exert their own views.

Church of Santa Cruz, only surviving remnant of the college

The College of Santa Cruz, founded by the Franciscans in Mexico City in 1536, is a good case of how these conflicts played out. The purpose of the college was to train Aztecs from elite families to be Catholic priests. The college had two Spanish Franciscans as teachers, aided by a native assistant, and several dozen sons of elite Aztec families attended. They were taught Spanish, Latin, theology, and "grammar," that is, the basics of Latin literature and composition. But other forces, led by the Dominicans, opposed this whole plan; they kept the school from ever receiving adequate funding and in 1555 banned any native from becoming a priest. By then, our sources say, the school was already a ruin. During its brief life, however, the school did manage to train dozens of Aztec men. One of its instructors was Bernardino de Sahagún, who published several books on the Aztecs and the Nahuatl language and also the famous General History of the Indies, an immense project on which he was helped by students at Santa Cruz.

One of the most notable graduates of Santa Cruz was Martin de la Cruz. De la Cruz wrote, in Nahualt, the manuscript that was then translated into Latin by Juan Badiano as Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis, the first work to document Native American knowledge of plants. Badiano's autograph copy ended up in the Vatican Library, where it languished in obscurity for 400 years. The Vatican Library was infamous until recent times for its habit of hiding important, potentially controversial books under boring titles that nobody would ever ask for, and then sometimes of being unable to find them if they were asked for. Anyway hardly anyone had read this book until 1929 when an American named Charles Clark arrived from the Smithsonian searching for early Latin American manuscripts. With backing from Vice President and Smithsonian board member Charles Dawes, Clark was able to get the Vatican to let him photograph and then publish the manuscript, something almost unheard of in those days.

The Spanish were very interested in Native plants and their properties. In the letter Cortes wrote to Emperor Charles V describing his conquest of Mexico, he mentioned that the market district of Tenochitlan included "a street of herb sellers where there are all manner of roots and medicinal plants that are found in the land. There are houses as it were of apothecaries where they sell medicines made from those herbs both for drinking and for use as ointments and salves." Valuable plants were one of the things Europeans were seeking around the world, and of course cacao, tobacco, corn, potatoes, hot peppers, and other American plants ended up being worth many times more than all the gold in the world.

So plant lore was big business in 1552, when someone got de la Cruz to write this manuscript and then paid Badiano to translate it. The Latin version was written on fine parchment and bound in velvet. It is one of the purest sources for Aztec thinking about the natural world, written by a knowledgeable native in his own language.

Cacao

It describes, among many other things, giving patients hypnotic preparations of datura before surgery, which is pretty much what was done to me when they operated on my wrist. Plants are listed for treating bleeding, skin rashes, headaches, colds, wounds, and so on, including those great stables of pre-modern medicine, laxatives and purgatives. Some of these plants are still used by folk healers in Mexico for the same purposes described by de la Cruz, showing strong continuity within the oral culture.

Anyway I can't recall having heard of this manuscript or its authors until this week, and I got excited about it and wanted to share.

Serjilla: Dead City

In northwestern Syria are more than a hundred ghost town collectively known as the Dead Cities. They date to between 400 and 700 AD. The best preserved is Serjilla.

These seem to have been ordinary farming towns where some folks got rich after the fall of Carthage to the Vandals cut off supplies of olive oil from the western Mediterranean, leading to an olive oil boom in Syria.

That explains their rise, but their fall is more mysterious. There are no signs of violence, nor any record that the conquering Arabs did much damage. Some speak of changes in trade routes, but these towns were within two day's journey of Aleppo, which remained a great city throughout the Middle Ages, so I am not sure why that would be relevant. Did changes in the weather render the land less valuable?

I have no idea, and so far as I can tell, nobody else really knows either. So a little mystery, a whole rural district that prospered for two centuries and then faded away, leaving these splendid ruins.

Town plan.

Some authorities identify this as a tavern others an an Andron, a meeting place for men.

The town had public baths, which were a lot less common in 500 AD than they had been 200 years earlier, so the elite were a traditional bunch.

But they were of course Christian; this is the church.

So far as I can tell, this place has so far survived Syria's Civil War unscathed. May it long endure.

Driving Hadrian's Wall

Hadrian's Wall, a magnificent monument of Roman power and wealth that happens to stretch  across a beautiful and fascinating stretch of Britain; a perfect spot for a bit of historical tourism. We begin our journey at Carlisle, a small city near the western end of the Wall. Carlisle was founded by the Romans as Luguvalium around 78 AD, two generations before the Wall was built in AD 122, and has a long and exciting history. The Roman fort here was the base of a cavalry force and no doubt saw much action over the centuries defending the empire against perfidious barbarians.

Then in the late 300s the Romans gave up and moved on. So far as archaeologists can tell, the Roman fort was still occupied throughout the dark times of Roman withdrawal and Anglo-Saxon invasion. In the 500s a kingdom called Rheged emerged in this part of Britain, and its king's primary seat may well have been at Carlisle. Then the Saxons took the spot, and then the Vikings took it from them, and then the Scots held it for a while. In 1092 William Rufus, the Conqueror's son, came here, drove out the Scots, and built a castle on top of the Roman fort that over the centuries evolved into the Carlisle Castle you can see today.

The castle was besieged at least six times, most spectacularly in 1315, when small English force led by Andrew Harclay defended it against Robert the Bruce's army, hurling Scottish scaling ladders down from the walls. The museum here covers this whole history, including an array of Roman artifacts. Among the things you can see are these carvings, made in the 1400s by either prisoners or guards.

Carlisle also has a medieval cathedral and other interesting stuff.

Heading east out of Carlyle we find the visible remains of the wall before we leave the suburbs. We're going to follow this amazing Ordnance Survey Map of the Wall, published in 1964.

East of Carlisle the Wall runs along the crest of this ridge, providing some of the most spectacular views.

The Wall is only 84 miles (136 km) long, so to make a long day of this drive we're going to have to take some detours. Our first is to Lanercost Priory. (Notice the Stanegate in the lower right corner. This means "stone street" in the old northern dialect, and this was the Roman Road that paralleled the Wall, allowing for rapid movement of troops along it.)

This spectacular ruin was built in the late 1200s and survived numerous Scottish incursions.

Built into the priory wall is a stone marking a dedication by the Legion VI Victrix, taken from some  fort along the Wall.

Continuing east we come to the first of the Wall's great archaeological sites, Vindolanda. As at Carlisle, the first fort here was built during the conquest, circa AD 85, and only later made part of the Wall's defensive system.

Aerial view showing the fort and the vicus, the town outside the walls.

Vindolanda is best known because parts of the site sank over time into the mire, where deposits up to 25 feet (6 m) deep preserved an amazing array of Roman gear in leather, wood, cloth, and other perishable materials. The writing tablets, which preserve bits of arcana like invitations to birthday parties and job recommendations, are especially wonderful.

Just up the road from Vindolanda is Housesteads or Verovicium, another wonderful Roman fort, but if you are having Roman fort fatigue it's ok to move on.

Housesteads did produce one of my favorite Roman artifacts, this carving of the mysterious "Three Hooded Ones."

Continuing east we take another detour to visit Aydon Castle, a beautiful medieval manor house. (Notice the red line of Deere Street, one of the great Roman roads of Britain.)

There was a timber hall here in the 12th century, belong to people with names like fitzGilbert and de Umfraville. In 1293 it was purchased by Hugh de Reymes; he and his son Robert built the castle. They were wealhty merchants from Suffolk in the process of transitioning into the landed gentry. But they soon fell on hard times, which is is why few improvements were made to the property until the 17th century. The castle was taken by the Scotts in 1315 and again in 1346, but was not severely damaged.

Moving east through rough country we come to a series of forts. At Brocoloitia there is a small temple of Mithras,

and at Chesters there is this museum.

Continuing on our way we pass the spot where a modern stone cross marks the site of the Battle of Heavenfield, described in the Venerable Bede's history, where Oswald of Northumbria won a decisive victory over a Welsh force led by Cadwallon of Gwynedd, in AD 631.

Sometime in the afternoon we enter the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, which grew up around the Wall's eastern end. In the center of town is the keep of the castle, which is actually one of the best preserved Norman castles in Britain.

There is of course a museum in Newcastle and lots of Roman stuff, but we're going to push on. a few miles east. While the Wall originally ended in Newcastle, this was found to leave easy crossings over the Tyne undefended, so 5 years later the Wall was extended eastward to the new fortress of Segedunum.

You can walk the walls of the fort here and tour one more museum, which holds among other things this famous Roman toilet seat.

And then back into Newcastle for dinner and bed, the ringing of ancient swords, the songs of bards, and the chanting of monks filling our tired minds.