First Flowers of Spring

I don't know these folks manage to grow crocuses; deer eat mine down to the ground as fast as they can grow, and I never see a flower. But I was thrilled to see these today.

A Strange Iron Age Ritual

Interesting find on top of a rocky hill in northern Germany: The hill, known as Feldstein, if made of porphyry shot through with veins of quartz. Last year a metal detectorist found two iron axes lying in a cleft in the rock. Beneath them was a hollow that had been cut into the rock, then filled.

The analysis of these materials has allowed specialists to reconstruct the sequence of actions that took place at that point more than two millennia ago, sometime between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC. According to Dr. Zeiler, the sequence began with the opening of a small cavity in the rock to extract the quartz embedded within it, a task that required considerable effort given the hardness of the material and the exposure of the location to harsh weather conditions.

Once the quartz had been obtained, it was processed immediately on the stone slab itself, using the crusher to reduce it to fragments only a few millimeters in diameter. Once this operation was completed, the cavity was refilled with the crushed quartz and with the very tools used in the process, that is, the slab and the crusher. Finally, on the leveled surface of the sealed pit, the two iron axes were deposited in the arrangement that the detectorist was able to observe millennia later.

But wht does it mean? Is the quartz being interpreted as some kind of magical substanced? By extracting and crushing it, did the performer of the rite hope to release and use its power? Were the quartz veins, maybe, the blood of the earth? So that the earth's power is being invoked?

Honestly this is one of the weirder rites I have come across in my career.

Chimpanzees and Crystals.

There is archaeological evidence that people have been into crystals for hundreds of thousands of years. So some researchers gave crystals to chimpanzees and discovered that they love them too. 

NY Times:

For the first experiment, the researchers used two pedestals that were installed in the chimps’ yards. On one, they placed a multifaceted quartz crystal that stood about a foot tall, and on the other, a sandstone rock of similar dimensions. (Dr. García-Ruiz named this experiment “The Monolith.”)

The chimps went crystal cuckoo. In one yard, they repeatedly approached the monolith until the alpha female, Manuela, wrenched it off its pedestal. After that, the crystal rarely left the troop’s sight, while they largely ignored the sandstone rock. One video shows a 50-year-old male chimp named Yvan carrying it while he climbs and eats cabbage, passing it between his hands and feet with great panache.

In the other yard, the experiment was cut short after a chimpanzee named Sandy immediately grabbed both items from their pedestals and brought them into the dormitories, where human caretakers don’t generally go. . . .

For the second experiment, researchers set out piles of pebbles in the gardens, with a few small crystals incorporated into each. The chimpanzees immediately sorted the crystals out of the piles.

Then they carried them in their mouths, turned them in the light and held them up to their eyes like old-timey prospectors.

Xeroxed and then Scanned Photo of a Cache of Crystals

I find this completely unsurprising. The human attraction to bright, shiny rocks, especially when they have interesting geometries, seems very primal to me, something so old as to defy any assignment of "meaning." Archaeologists are used to finding caches of crystals in all sorts of places; the one in the photo above was found buried next to the foundation of a house on the Manassas battlefield, probably built around 1870. The occuants were free African Americans, and an interest in in crystals seems to be a habit their ancestors brought from Africa. But they were far from the only ones to have such interests; I know of a cache of crystals hidden in the coffin of a wealthy white woman buried around 1920. Notice the stone point that was included in the collection above; this is also a common habit around the world, and many folks have been interested in the stone tools shaped by their distant ancestors.

We love bright, shiny, interestingly shaped things, and always have.

Chaturmukha Dharana Vihara

Chaturmukha Dharana Vihara is an extraordinary Jain temple in the hills of Rajastan. It was constructed in the 1400s to honor Adinath, the first Tirthankar – great master, exalted teacher, or some such epithet – of the present descending half-cycle. So, in case you were wondering why things are so rough these days, it might just be that we are in the descending half of the cosmic cycle. 

And yet what a building! Pretty good for people in a world doomed to decline and decay.

The richness of the carving is simply astonishing.

Each of the hundreds of pillars is unique.

Sculptural details. The being with five bodies represents the five elements. (Earth, fire, water, air, and ether or heaven)

Famous rendering of the Kalpavriksha, a mythical wish-granting tree that my sources say symbolized divine abundance.

Elephant.

Truly an amazing place.

Links 6 March 2026

Etruscan funerary urn, alabaster, c. 400 BC

Wonderful Aztec offering uncovered at the Templo Mayor in Mexico City.

The savagery and guilt of being a surgeon.

Geologists are learning more about the climate of the earth during the Snowball Earth phase, c. 717-658 million years ago.

Board and pieces of an ancient board game found in Russian burial mound.

At London's fan museum. (The kind you use to fan yourself, or make eyes across the theater.)

Dream incubation – using cues of setting, ritual, and so on to produce targeted dreams – is ancient. But now we were moving on to newer methods for guiding the sleeping mind.

I've seen another raft of posts lately about people feeling invisible, so this week's past post is Not Being Seen from 2022.

Thread on Twitter/X with some data showing that as people get better off they grow MORE frustrated with their conditions.

Studying residues in ceramic pots used by some European hunter-gatherers – they learned this from Neolithic farmers – to learn about the use of food plants in ancient Europe (article, news story)

How liberal are you? Quiz from 1964. I scored 69%, "mostly liberal." My negative answers were mostly about rights to things that cost money. It struck me that in the age of social media free speech debates are so different that the language here doesn't fit contemporary issues very well. Does your right to free speech mean that a private company like Meta or X has to publish your weird ideas?

Fascinating interview with psychoanalyst Adam Phillips about big themes in life, very meaningful to me right now.

Lovely little house with a garden terrace in Tokyo.

An argument that by testing people's sense of smell we could identify some neurological and other conditions.

Interview with Mary Gaitskill. Like many fiction writers of mine or earlier generations, she is baffled by the moralism of young Americans.

LLMs are so far failing at creating interesting D&D puzzles or scenarios. (Ethan Mollick on Twitter/X) Well, that's one way I am still their superior. 

The plan of a pro-housing candidate running for governor of California. Vague on some key points but then I guess most voters don't want a detailed description of building code reform. But I do!

Tracing the origin of a Roman erotic mosaic looted from Italy by a Nazi officer.

US officials say Russia is providing Iran with targeting data to help them strike American assets. (Twitter/X). Could this finally sour Trump on Putin?

Some of my Favorite Historical Names

Shakkanakku, Akkadian governor of Mari, c. 2250 BC

Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon

Demosthenes, Greek orator; it means "strength of the people"

Marcus Valerius Corvus, Roman general; he was awarded the cognomen Corvus (="Raven") after his first great victory

Vercingetorix, Gaulic leader who opposed Julius Caesar; it is a nomme de guerre that means something like "Captain of Heroes."

Maximus Thrax, late Roman Emperor

Ingvar Far-Traveller, Swedish Viking who led a mercenary army to the Caspian Sea

Un the Deep-Minded, noted Viking matriarch

Athelstan the Glorious, Anglo-Saxon king

Nell Ruemonger, obscure Englishwoman of the 1300s who appeared in a legal case I happened to read; I stole this name for The Raven and the Crown.

Hup the Fiddler, another name from a medieval English court roll.

Buzzleswat, likewise

Chagatai, son of Genghis Khan

Semiramide degli Appiani, Florentine noblewoman who marred a Medici in 1482

Desiderius Erasmus, Christian humanist

Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, the alchemist and natural philosopher better known as Paracelsus

Safely-On-High Snat, Puritan settler in Massachusetts

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Crazy Horse, Sioux spiritual leader.

Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, Louisiana politican and Confederate general

Themistocles Zammit, Greek archaeologist

Others? Have to be real people, not fictional.

Young and Single

Chrstine Emba in the NY Times:

Multiple studies show that young people aren’t dating, having sex or forming partnerships. A recent survey of young adults from the Institute for Family Studies and Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute found that only 30 percent of its respondents were actively dating, despite about half of them indicating that they were interested in finding a relationship. They cited a lack of confidence in what the researchers termed “dating efficacy”: Fewer than 40 percent believed themselves to be attractive to potential partners or felt comfortable discussing their feelings with them. Only around a quarter felt confident in approaching a potential partner or in their ability to stay positive after a dating setback — a rejection, a bad date or a breakup. If trends continue, one in three adults currently in their 20s will never marry, contributing to an epidemic of loneliness that is already generationally acute. 

I have observed despair about "dating efficacy" in some of the younger people I know. I hear, "why bother, it doesn't work, the other sex just isn't interested in relationships."

Strange days, when many people seem to view dating or sex as an impossible moral and logistical quandary, but endless porn is always seconds away.

A Classical Anglerfish

This small terracotta statue (12 cm long) depicts a deep sea anglerfish. Its provenance is obscure; it can only be traced back to about 2000, when it was listed in a private collection. The seller dates it to the 4th century BC, not sure on what basis. If so it most likely came from southern Italy, where they had a thing for the anglerfish motif, painting it onto pottery "fish plates" and so on.

Classical Art in the MFA, Boston

Diadem with a Hercules Knot, c. 200 to 150 BC

Oil flask (lekythos) with the hunter Kephalos and his dog, attributed to the Pan Painter, about 470 B.C. 

Bust of a bearded man, c. 170 AD

Mourner, Boeotia, c. 575 BC

Five litra-piece of Syracuse with head of Philistis, struck under Hieron II, 274–216 B.C.

Tiny gold plaque showing a woman-bee hybrid, c. 650 BC

Amphora showing a departing warrior, 5th century BC

Ring and oval bezel with two bulls flanking a tree Early Aegean, HelladicBronze Age, Late Helladic IIB–IIIA Periodabout 1600–1300 B.C.

Things Happening in the Middle East

Successful Iranian attacks against oil infrastructure are multiplying: here, here, here, here, here

Oil prices are rising and stock prices are bouncing around. (NY Times, CNBC)

Seems clear that neither the US nor our Gulf allies have enough cheap ways to shoot down drones, leading us to shoot $4 million Patriot interceptors at $100,000 drones. We have programs to create better anti-drone defenses, and I have written about them here, but we don't seem to have procured them in anything like the numbers needed for such a war. 

Riots in Bahrain as the Shi'ite majority protests their country's involvement in the war against Iran. Did anybody plan for this?

Turns out that the FBI agents Kash Patel recently purged for investigating Trump's document dump at Mar-a-Lago were from an elite counter-terrorism group called CI-12 with expertise in Iran. 

Trump says in the same post that 1) US weapons stockpiles are sufficient, and 2) they are depleted because Biden sent too many weapons to Ukraine. 

Three US F-15 fighters were shot down by Kuwaiti air defense. The pilots survived.

I see floundering men drowning in their own foolish hubris.

The "Plan"

I've been trying to withhold judgment, because it seems that the Trump administration actually did have a plan for Venezuela. But the signs concerning any Iran plan are not promising. The NY Times:

In a brief telephone interview with The New York Times, Mr. Trump offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.

Among the options he suggested was an outcome similar to what he engineered in Venezuela, in which only the top leader was removed during an American military strike and much of the rest of the government remained in place, but newly willing to work pragmatically with the United States. . . .

During the roughly six-minute call, Mr. Trump said he had “three very good choices” about who could lead Iran, although he declined to name them. Earlier on Sunday, Iran’s top national security official, Ali Larijani, said that an interim committee would run the country until a successor to the supreme leader was chosen. . . .

When pressed on his plans for a transition of power, Mr. Trump said he hoped Iran’s elite military forces — including hardened officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who have held substantial influence and profited from the existing regime — would simply turn over their weapons to the Iranian populace. “They would really surrender to the people, if you think about it,” he said.

It was those same security forces — in particular, the Basij, which organizes local militia — that opened fire on street protesters in January and killed thousands.

Then he offered a very different model of what the transition of power in Iran might look like, referring repeatedly to his experience in Venezuela after he ordered a Delta Force team to seize Mr. Maduro.

“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” Mr. Trump said. . . . “Everybody’s kept their job except for two people,” Mr. Trump said of the outcome in Venezuela.

He was vague on the question of who should be in the top ruling position in Iran after the ayatollah’s death, or even who should decide. At first, when asked whom he wanted to lead Iran, he said, “I have three very good choices.” He added: “I won’t be revealing them now. Let’s get the job done first.”

But then he described a scenario in which the Iranian people would overthrow the existing government. “That’s going to be up to them about whether or not they do,” Mr. Trump said. “They’ve been talking about it for years so now they’ll obviously have an opportunity.” That would, of course, be the opposite of the Venezuela model that he had said minutes earlier he wanted to replicate.

Not encouraging. Trump says we have the weapons for four or five weeks of aerial attack. What happens in five weeks when the battered government is still in place? We're talking about a regime with thousands of determined guerrilla fighters who have been skirmishing with the US for decades. They are not likely to go quietly. So far as I can see, the only remotely plausible outcomes are 1) the regime remains in place, either chastened or with renewed fervor, and 2) we install a new regime that is then embroiled in civil war with surviving elements of the old, just like in Iraq.

Grim.

The Gospels of John of Troppau

Wonderfully weird manuscript, completed around 1368.

Today's Place to Dream about: Lake Tamblingan, Bali

Today my thoughts wander to Indonesia, to an old volcano on Bali that contains three caldera lakes: Lake Tamblingan, Lake Buyan and Lake Bratan. Lake Tamblingan is the smallest but it seems to be the one most visited by tourists. The elevation is just over 1000 meters, or 3300 feet, so it is pleasantly cool.

Lots of amazing photos.

But the real draw of the place is the temples, the oldest of which dates to around 900 AD.

All are still active, except when they are flooded, which happens when the water in the lake is high.

Details.

We have the first signs of spring here, the first green leaves and the first robins, but it is stillmostly winter and Lake Tamblingan seems like it would be a great place to be.