Brian Sparks, Bath House at Pompeii

 

Photographer with a ton of Italy images on his Flickr.

Bluegrass Archaeology

Tyler Childers, "Banded Clovis"

Links 19 March 2021

Multi-tool made of etched steel, Nuremberg, Germany, c. 1580 AD 

When a sea slug head gets tired of its body, it can cast off the whole body and grow a new one.

Scott Alexander reviews the science on depression and synapse creation in the brain.

Interesting profile of mathematician and educator Sarah Hart, who says "I am pathologically interested in everything." Me, too. (New York Times)

Matt Devine explains how a Non-Fungible Token representing ownership of a work of digital art could sell for $69 million: "NFTs are a new form of tradable ostentation rather than a new form of tradable ownership."

Long take-down of Edward Said's Orientalism, a book that was all the rage when I was in graduate school and which I have always despised.

The Russians tried to interfere in the US presidential election, had no effect. (New York Times)

Melissa Rein Lively narrates, in remarkably frank fashion, the descent into QAnon-enabled madness that ended with her destroying a display of masks at Target in a viral video. 

Intelligent commentary on the discovery, in Peru, of a Paleoindian woman buried with hunting implements and how this relates to the "Man the Hunter" narrative.

A Chinese resort composed of fake "tree houses." Individually kind of cool but when you see them in a row they scream in wordless horror about the commodification of everything you ever dreamed might be wonderful.

Thirty-minute video laying out the new interpretation of the Antikythera Mechanism – quite amazing. And you thought prime factoring was some useless nonsense you had to learn in middle school.

Not everyone in the US sees race the way woke activists do. Consider the Virginia police officers who danced with protesters at a Black Lives Matter rally but then ended up storming the Capitol on January 6. (New York Times)

Are there any progressive heroes in the past? Feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gillman analyzed with great perception the woes of middle class white women, and the experience of depression, but was an anti-immigrant racist and eugenicist. Many progressive stars of that era, the people who fought Jim Crow, broke up the industrial trusts, founded the National Park Service, etc. had at least a strong interest in eugenics.

Pretty intelligent discussion of how Theodore Seuss Geisel could have written explicitly anti-racist books but also drawn racist pictures. 

When did the Anthropocene, the era when humans decisively impacted the earth's planetary systems, begin? Agriculture? Industrialization? Nuclear explosions?

Since 1980, the average horsepower of new cars sold in the US has risen from 100 to 212. All that power burns billions of gallons of gasoline and puts millions of extra tons of CO2 in the air.

Kate Baer is the best-selling poet in America and an Instagram star. She takes perfectly ordinary words about the ambivalence of motherhood, arranges them like poems, takes a photo of the page and posts it. There is no rhythm, precious little imagery. It's almost anti-art. People love it. If you want a sample, just search "Kate Baer poems" and click on the images tag. But it's more interesting under the heading of "what people really want" than anything to do with poetry.

Ophelie Tricherau's solar system embroidery.

Among the companies that have boomed in the pandemic: Märklin model trains. (New York Times)

Interesting podcast interview with the authors of a new analysis of Biden's win, called Lucky. They think that without the pandemic, Trump would have won, and they say Biden's political team also believes this. Also interesting on the three days from the South Carolina primary to Super Tuesday when Biden effectively sewed up the nomination; among other things, Obama was actively working the phones, persuading other candidates to drop out and endorse Biden.

Leon Wieseltier is Ready to Fight for Liberalism

It is time, says Wieseltier, to stand up aggressively for freedom, rights, diversity, and all the other things that liberalism means:

In an alarming number of countries and cultures, some of which have experienced a liberal order and some of which have not, the liberal idea is being furiously slandered. The description of liberalism as an evil may be the greatest lie of our exceedingly mendacious time. . . .

Intellectually, I am a warmonger. I confess to a lust for battle. It cannot be otherwise, since my enemies, the enemies of liberalism, also have a lust for battle, and they have launched their attack. It comes at us from all sides. In some ways we have been re-enacting the 1930s, and one of them is in the consensus among the right and the left, among the regressive populists and the progressive populists, that the liberals are the villains.

The ultras can live happily with each other; they need each other; they thrive off each other. They share the revolutionary mentality, the excitement of apocalyptic feeling. Together, therefore, they must band together to destroy the anti-apocalyptics in their midst—the ones who worry about the means as well as the ends; who would rather repair institutions than destroy them; who remember the long history of venalities and atrocities committed in the pursuit of justice; who abhor mobs; who insist that authenticity must answer to morality; who despise simple explanations and worldviews that can be captured in slogans and flags; who dread redemptions and redeemers. Now all those convictions, all the great principles that constitute the liberal tradition, every single one of them, must be defended. After everything that liberalism endured and survived, after the unimaginably savage assaults of fascism and communism, we must steadfastly fight for it all over again, and we must begin again at the beginning. Many of our current opponents are the heirs of liberalism’s older enemies, and we, too, must keep the faith of our fathers—not because it is ours, but because ethically and philosophically we can justify it.

The authoritarians of the right and the left are correct: the liberals do indeed stand in their way. We understand the populist temptation too well, and we recall its consequences too vividly, to be left alone. The crowds and their leaders are seeking the re-enchantment of politics, but we long ago championed the disenchantment of politics. We treasure our disillusion, and cultivate it as the beginning of wisdom. There are thrills that no longer attract us; indeed, that repel us. We believe in historical patience—not indifference, but patience—because we have observed that in politics immediate gratification often takes the form of a crime. If we run the risk of complacency, the radicals run the risk of ferocity. No ideology that gained political power (even an anti-ideological ideology such as liberalism) has ever had perfectly clean hands—but liberalism has always included a scruple, a body of values and laws, about its own abuses and the duty to remedy them. The progressives and the regressives, by contrast, are not distinguished by an inclination to introspection. They cherish their anger and they make room for hatred. Should one hate injustice? Always. But the progressives and the regressives do not only hate injustice; they also hate whole classes of people. . . .

Liberalism’s momentous blunder was to regard itself as inevitable, as the historically ordained climax of a centuries-long campaign for progress, as the last word. We should know better by now—and here too, in America, in the debris of our forty-fifth president. The liberal conception of the person asks too much of the person ever to go uncontested. It chooses not to leave the person as it finds him, embedded in legacies and givens. It is a dis-embedding movement, a challenging ethic of criticism, though not necessarily a destructive one. It demands of ordinary men and women a degree of skill with complexity and a degree of forbearance with human affairs. While it is wary of revolution, it extols change. It proposes to mingle continuity with discontinuity, which has the effect that the people whose lives it betters it also rattles. How could such a philosophy and such a politics not provoke a retort? The catastrophes of modern history—the genocides of fascism and communism—were all such retorts. Liberals should be proud to be known by their enemies. But this we know for sure: there is no rest for us.  

Nathan Myhrvold's Snowflake Photos

The former chief technology officer of Microsoft has lately been dreaming up hi-tech ways to photograph snowflakes in all their glory.

Three Enslaved Men in the American Revolution

Mount Vernon has a nice web page up showing, with three examples, the different ways enslaved people reacted to the American Revolution. In the North, the Revolution led to the phasing out of slavery for everyone, and in the Deep South to its intensification. In the middle was a muddle: slavery endured, but many people became free, and many more expected that they would become free soon. Thus at Mount Vernon in that time the future seemed open and uncertain, and people responded to war, freedom and slavery thinking their choices might have a big impact on their lives and fates.

The Loyal Servant

George Washington's most famous slave was William Lee. Washington bought Lee in 1768 when Lee was about 18 and immediately assigned him to household duties, so he must already have had some experience in that type of work. Lee was a mulatto and had come from an estate of the famous Lee family, so most likely he was the child of one of the white Lees and therefore Washington's cousin by marriage.

Lee travelled with Washington wherever the future president went, including the Ohio Valley. He was a skilled horseman and accompanied Washington on fox hunts, galloping wildly after the hounds. In 1775 he went to war with newly minted General Washington and served as his valet throughout the war. He appears in the background of at least two portraits of Washington, holding his horse; he must have been a ubiquitous presence, so that artists who imagined Washington imagined Lee standing a few paces away. Since Washington as a matter of policy never spoke about his private life, the general's fans constantly badgered Lee for personal details, and he learned how to doll out just enough to keep his questioners intrigued without angering his boss, becoming a famous character. In 1784 he married Margaret Thomas, a free woman who had also worked as a servant in the Washington household. 

When Lee was nearly crippled by a leg injury Washington paid for him to see the top physicians in Philadelphia and be fitted with a metal leg brace that allowed him to walk again. He was not able to resume his old duties, though, so he became Mount Vernon's shoemaker. He was freed on Washington's death in 1799 and remained at Mount Vernon until his death in 1810. According to other veterans who came by Mount Vernon and reminisced about the war, in his last years Lee drank heavily.

The Patriot Spy

James Lafayette was born a slave of the Armistead family and was raised as a companion to William Armistead, Jr., learning to read and write English and French. When the Revolution broke out James tried to enlist in the Continental Army, but Washington had just decided that only white men could serve. (That changed later when they ran short of soldiers.) So instead James joined the Marquis de Lafayette's force of European volunteers – no doubt speaking French helped him there. When the British under Cornwallis entered Virginia in 1781, James presented himself to them as an agent who could assist with his great knowledge of Virginia. Once in their good graces he began passing intelligence to the revolutionaries about British dispositions around Yorktown.

In 1783 the Virginia legislature passed a law granting freedom to all enslaved men who had served the Patriot cause. At first James was denied the benefit of this law because he served as a spy, not a soldier. In 1787 the Marquis de Lafayette wrote to the Virginia government on Lafayette's behalf, and he was freed. He took the name Lafayette to show his appreciation for this gesture. We next hear of him in the 1820s, when he was living on a 40-acre farm near Richmond, collecting his military pension. Not a bad life, but perhaps less than a well-educated war hero might have expected. The French Lafayette made a famous tour of America in 1824 and James went to hear him speak. The Frenchman recognized James in to crowd, called him to the podium and embraced him, a gesture reported throughout America.

The British Soldier

In 1781 the British warship Savage sailed up the Potomac River, and dozens of enslaved people fled to join the British cause. This included 17 people from Mount Vernon, out of about 330 slaves on the estate. During 1780-1781, about 4,500 enslaved people escaped to the British, out of a total enslaved population in Virginia of roughly 250,000. 

One of those who fled Mount Vernon was Harry Washington. Washington was 40 years old and worked in the Mount Vernon stables. After he joined the British he worked in various capacities, including digging fortifications around Charleston, South Carolina, but he never fought in a battle.

At the end of the war, Washington was one of the roughly 3,000 black Americans taken by the British to Nova Scotia. Washington had a tough time there and he joined a large group petitioning to be taken to Africa. In 1791 he was one of 1,200 former American slaves who made the journey to Sierra Leone. There he complained about mistreatment by the British leaders of the colony and in 1800 he was tried for insurrection and banished. That was his last appearance in the records.

Fate

The differences between these men's lives are striking, but so, too, is the underlying reality that their choices were harshly limited by their race and the slavery they were born into. The Revolution birthed a new nation, but it is open to question how many people got what they wanted from it. White Americans showed their frustration with a series of armed rebellions against taxation and terrible economic times. African Americans had to endure continued slavery and exclusion, mocked by all that talk of freedom. The thousands who did become free began building their own institutions outside white control – churches, schools, communities – where they could feel fully human, something many of their compatriots were trying hard to deny them. There are many fascinating stories African American life in this period but very few with what feels like a happy ending.

Rijkuo-Maja: a Sámi Shamaness

When asked about their societies, people have a habit of answering in terms of norms rather than realities. Thus, when missionaries asked Sámi people in northern Scandinavia about their old religion, they said that only men could be shamans, or noaidi in their language. In fact they described what sometimes seem like two separate religions for men and women. Each sex had their own gods and spirits, their own rites, and their own holy places. There was for example a holy mountain that women were forbidden to go within a mile of. 

So the missionaries wrote down, "only men can be noaidi." Like, say, a contemporary American might write, "with us women and men are completely equal."

Actually, though, there are several famous female noaidi whose names and stories have been passed down to us. Around the world we often see that women take on formerly male roles when the men all leave for work in the city or on the railroads, and in those cases we can't take the roles of women in recent times as good indications of what used to be. But this is not what we are seeing in Scandinavia, since Norse texts speak of Sámi sorceresses in the Middle Ages.

Sámi drum

Male shamans used drums in their performances and spoke of "riding" their drums into the other lands to seek out wisdom. The drums were surrounded by taboos, one of which was that women were not allowed to touch them. Some observers said that while women could do some noaidi magic, they were still forbidden to touch or use drums.

But that, it turns out, wasn't true either. Neil Price:

The most famous of these individuals was Rijkuo-Maja of Arvidsjaur (c. 1660-1757), about whom stories are still in active circulation. She was a woman of considerable wealth, her prosperity deriving from ownership of an immense reindeer herd which she was said to control through her abilities as a noaidi . . . She seems to have practiced the same broad range of rituals as a male noaidi.

Tradition suggests that she was a devotee of the thunder god, to whom she sacrificed specially-chosen reindeer bulls by burying them alive at a marshy place called Askmyren or 'thunder-bog.' At this bog, she also made sacrifices on bird platforms [raised platforms on which meat was placed for eagles or ravens], and after her death when her land passed into other ownership, it was known as the 'thunder mark.'

Ethnographer Bo Lundmark says that "Rijkuo" means "rich" in the local Sámi dialect, so her name could be rendered as "Rich Maja."

When a Saami woman in the area wanted to show how wealthy she was, she often did this by wearing several frocks on top of each other, so that the shortest would be on the outside, the second shortest next and soon. Rijkuo-Maja apparently wore five.

One of the fascinating things to me about the Sámi tradition is that by the time anyone thought to study their religion they had been in contact with Norwegians and Swedes for a thousand years, passing ideas back and forth. The thunder god worshipped by Rijkuo-Maja was called Horagallus or "Thor man" and she marked the reindeer chosen for sacrifice by clipping their ears, just as Swedish herders put ownership marks on their cattle. Neil Price:

Rijkuo-Maja is recorded as having stood in the shallows of a lake to work magic for producing a thunder storm, presumably linked to her patron and this case for the purpose of dousing a fire which threatened the reindeer pastures. Two items of her equipment are of special interest here. She used a head-covering of some kind, mentioned in some sources as a lijnie or veil and in others as a skudnjaa, a 'sleeping rug.' . . . Rijkuo-Maja's storm ritual involved not only drumming but splashing the lake water and whistling. 

One account has her striking the water with a 'stick with brass trimmings,' which sounds a lot like the wands used by medieval Norse seeresses. Besides these rituals she also used her drum for gathering her reindeer herd every morning.

Rijkuo-Maja had a special relationship with both domestic and wild animals. According to tales recorded in the 1920s, 

she employed only one shepherd despite the size of the herd, and could pick out individual deer at a great distance; there are other traditions recording that 'she knew her deer in a special way.' Several records show that this relationship was widely believed to have continued after her death. When Rijkuo-Maja's family disobeyed her wishes for a non-Christian burial, within a few years the reindeer herd had either scattered irretrievably or been killed in drift ice, as she herself had prophesied if her instructions were not heeded. One informant mentions that she did not need dogs because the wolves were in her service – a strange suggestion given the traditional Sami antipathy to these animals. She seems also to have adopted an unusual role in relation to the other animals in her home tract, placing both wild creatures and edible birds 'under her protection.' If hunters nevertheless killed animals in the area against her wishes, she compelled them to sacrificed their prey before a great pine tree, with a human face carved in its bark.

Those trees were common sites of ritual activity in the Sámi lands, but unfortunately I can't find a picture of one.

Rijkuo-Maja seems to have bene especially associated with birds, with the raven, eagle and bench-jay being specially noted as among the creatures the she 'protected' in her reindeer pasture.

The bench jay was commonly seen as a potential spirit helper for noaidis, like wrens in western Europe.

Sámi diagram of reindeer herding, c. 1900

One thing that comes clearly out of these stories is the close relationship between the religious and magical traditions of the Sámi and the physical realities of their land and culture. Their religion was rooted in particular places they knew well, and in the kind of places (mountains, lakes, marshes) where they spent their time. The powers they cared about were those that impacted their lives: the weather, the fertility of the reindeer. You could tell a spiritually powerful person because she or he was blessed by the world, with many reindeer and other signs of wealth. 

All of the pagan traditions were like this, rooted in one place and society, speaking its truths. One of the truths of the Sámi was their extreme political fragmentation, and another was the deep division between the men's and women's ritual spheres. They had norms, but they had nobody to enforce them, and a man who tried to dictate to women about women's affairs might just be laughed at. So if a woman wanted to pick up a drum and speak to the spirits she damn well could. If she was successful, she would earn great respect. And she might, like Rijkuo-Maja, be remembered 200 years later as a great and powerful person.

Based on Bo Lundmark, Rijkuo-Maja and Silbo-Gåmmoe: towards the Question of Female Shamanism in the Saami Area (1987) and Neil Price, The Viking Way:  Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia (2019)

Links 12 March 2021

Charles Burchfield, Wood Lillies, 1944

Layers of London, online digital map that allows you to overlay maps of different periods to see how the city has changed. They have a ton of maps, and if you are busy you should be warned that this is a major potential distraction.

Mystery stone-lined tunnel accidentally discovered in Wales. Part of medieval abbey? Or an 18th-century ironworks?

Petrified tree with branches and roots, 60 feet tall, 17-20 million years old, found on Lesbos.

Dunnotar Castle and the Pictish Hill Fort at Dunnicaer in a 3 minute 30 second video.

Harvard is hiring a post-doc to help with mammoth de-extinction.

Among the several thousand provisions in the stimulus bill is a little change that will discourage for-profit colleges from harassing veterans. (New York Times) Veterans groups have been pushing this for a decade but it took a giant omnium gatherum like the stimulus bill to get it slipped through.

Nicholas Kristof on the transformation of Bangladesh, which in the 1970s was pretty much synonymous with "Third World Disaster Zone" but is now thriving, thanks largely to universal education and a major investment in poor women (New York Times)

Matt Yglesias uses the Dr. Seuss brouhaha to attack America's absurd copyright laws. Life of the author plus 70 years is ridiculous.

Dr. Robert White's quest to transplant a human head, giving the patient an entirely new body (Washington Post)

Renaissance breastplate and helmet stolen from the Louvre in 1983 spotted at estate auction, seized by police.

Phrenology is back: facial recognition software has been trained to guess your party affiliation with 72% accuracy.

A route to socialism you might not have considered: what if one giant investment firm owned so much of so many companies that it started pushing them to work together for the good of all? "BlackRock is actually calling drug companies and telling them to cooperate to find a cure without worrying about credit or patents or profits."

Related: "in the near future roughly twelve individuals will have practical power over the majority of U.S. public companies."

US military thinking about a potential conflict with China over Taiwan; war games in 2018 and 2019 showed China winning such a war. 

A surviving "birth girdle" from late medieval England.

Mapping the holy wells of Northern Ireland.

Leigh Stein follows a lot of spiritual "self care" gurus on Instagram but is unsatisfied and wonders about joining a church. (New York Times)

Tesla is installing huge batteries all over the country, including a major new site in Texas, intended to help stabilize ERCOT's grid. Energy storage is now the fastest growing part of the company.

The rise of ironclad warships in the mid 19th century, an international perspective.

Private cities in India and China.

Who can translate woke poetry?

Review of a new, unexpurgated version of the diaries of Chips Cannon, who was a "a snobbish, sexually voracious Tory who revered Hitler" and eventually left his heiress wife for their male gardener. The diaries are full, it seems, of observations like this, penned after a visit to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin: 

It is curious the division of racial mentality, and it reduces itself to a question of sex; all people, whether male or female, who are attracted by men and force are pro-German. The ‘softies’ like Hubert Duggan, who make a cult of female-worship, are pro-French. Duff Cooper, who adores women to an almost insane pitch, and is always trying to rape them in taxis etc, is immeasurably pro-French. Sometimes I wonder whether he is not also a bit pro-war?

Napoleonic Reforms and Future Economic Growth

The Consequences of Radical Reform: the French Revolution is a 2009 paper by economist Daron Acemoglu and three colleagues.

The French Revolution of 1789 had a momentous impact on neighboring countries. The French Revolutionary armies during the 1790s and later under Napoleon invaded and controlled large parts of Europe. Together with invasion came various radical institutional changes. French invasion removed the legal and economic barriers that had protected the nobility, clergy, guilds, and urban oligarchies and established the principle of equality before the law. The evidence suggests that areas that were occupied by the French and that underwent radical institutional reform experienced more rapid urbanization and economic growth, especially after 1850. There is no evidence of a negative effect of French invasion. Our interpretation is that the Revolution destroyed (the institutional underpinnings of) the power of oligarchies and elites opposed to economic change; combined with the arrival of new economic and industrial opportunities in the second half of the 19th century, this helped pave the way for future economic growth. The evidence does not provide any support for several other views, most notably, that evolved institutions are inherently superior to those 'designed'; that institutions must be 'appropriate' and cannot be 'transplanted'; and that the civil code and other French institutions have adverse economic effects.

This paper has been very much discussed over the past decade, mostly at the theoretical level of designed systems imposed from the outside vs. locally evolved "organic systems." 

On the one hand, I applaud economists for seeking out actual historical data rather than just looking at models. On the other, I doubt the available data really answers this question. First, their main method of measuring economic growth is urbanization. Which is not absurd, industrialization in the 19th century (and thus economic growth) was strongly associated with the growth of cities. But it is not a very precise measure. Second, the growth they focus on took place mainly after 1850. Seems to me like a lot might have happened between Napoleon and 1850.

But let's suppose this is right, and sweeping away guilds, oligarchical elites like the Regents of Holland, and any remaining manorial dues did prepare the way for economic growth fifty years later. How did that work?

Well, for one thing, guilds set up minimum wages and other protections for industrial workers that were abolished across much of Europe. Plus they attempted to create or maintain some degree of equality among the masters, preventing anyone from getting much richer than the others. The result of abolishing the guilds was a more pure form of capitalism, with the pluses and minuses that entails.

Second, the old arrangements of European agriculture, especially gleaning rights and the existence of common pastures and woodlots, allowed very poor people to eke out a living in rural areas. What happened across much of Europe was that the loss of common lands, the right to gather firewood, and so on made it impossible for those people to hang on. In other places, like Scotland, they were evicted or bought out and had to go. So a lot of people who had been very unproductive peasants left their land and moved to places where their labor was much more productive. Sometimes that was America or Australia, but more often it was a nearby city. Therefore manufacturers who had recently been liberated from guild rules found it easier to hire workers in the places where more people had been driven off the land, leading to industrialization in Scotland and the Rhineland. The process was presumably not very happy for the peasants. Whose descendants, remember, had to wait 50 years to feel the benefits.

But my real complaint is that it makes no sense to me to isolate the arrival of the Civil Code from all the other extraordinary stuff that happened in 19th-century Europe. Nineteenth-century Europe was a quite remarkable place and time in human history. It experienced enormous population growth (250%), the industrial revolution, a very long period of comparative peace, vast social changes, etc., etc. This was in no sense a normal time in history.

Are there any normal times in history?

Anyway I am not impressed that this study says anything in general about solutions "imposed from the outside" vs. "grew up organically." The answer to that question is "it depends."

First Blooms

How to Exclude Everyone

The world we live in:

The beauty and personal-care company Unilever said on Tuesday that it would no longer use the word “normal” on its products or in its advertising, after a study revealed that it makes most people feel excluded. 

You have to love a society in which most people feel abnormal.

The Flying Yachts of the America's Cup

The 2021 America's Cup is being held in New Zealand. The "boats" this year are a new class called AC75: monohulled, with soft rather than rigid sails, and of course hydrofoils. One distinctive feature is that when the wind is strong enough they can all lift one of the two paired foils into the air to reduce drag.

Team New Zealand says their machine can hit 50 knots (56 mph or 91 kph).

Truly remarkable devices, but a long way from "sailing" as it was once done. This is about the future, not the past.

CNN video here.

Dothraki Hordes vs. Actual Hordes, or, Human Societies as Multi-Species Communities

Mongolian archer on a steppes pony, 1895

One of my favorite bloggers, Unmitigated Pedantry, has put up a multi-post series on the way the Dothraki are portrayed in Game of Thrones. He has many complaints, but I want to focus on one: how few animals appear in either the books or the TV series.

Khal Drogo's horde on the move appears like this. One horse per person, and no other animals.

Whereas an actual Mongolian community looked more like this. There would be five to eight horses per adult, plus hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of sheep.

George R.R. Martin actually says that the Dothraki incorporate ideas from both Eurasian steppes peoples and Indians of the Great Plains. But that doesn't help much, since Lakota, Comanche, etc. also had many more horses than people.

Even when going on a raid, Mongol warriors typically took along 5 horses each. This was partly because their horses were small –see the picture at the top – and tired out quickly when carrying a man. They were small because they had to subsist entirely on grass; the larger horses bred in settled regions have to be fed grain. The humans also depended on their horses in other ways. While on a raid Mongols liked to take along at least two lactating mares; two mares produced enough milk that a warrior could live off it for two weeks with no other food.

Thinking about this, it dawned on me that what I always thought of as a human community, whether Mongol or Comanche, was actually a multi-species community in which humans were very much outnumbered by other animals. And this has been true in many different cultures.

The traditional communities I know the most about were medieval villages in northern Europe and plantations in 17th-century Virginia. In both, humans were by far the minority among the large mammals. One Virginia inventory I happen to have on my desk, from 1752, lists nine horses, four colts, 30 sheep, 14 swine, eight cows, five calves, and 13 "small cattle." If I am reading this right, the farm had four human inhabitants, who were thus outnumbered 20 to 1. That's without getting into dogs and cats, which were ubiquitous but for obscure reasons were never listed on estate inventories.

We shouldn't single out Game of Thrones for not getting this right; after all there are lots of recreated medieval village that look like this. Nice thatched roofs, but something important is missing.

As in this still from an "educational" video. These folks would have gone hungry trying to subsist off two chickens.

And it wasn't just peasants. I recently read a scholarly article about Norse kingship that said the objects most associated with royalty in our sources are animals, especially hawks, horses, and herds of cattle. I mean, anybody could have a crown knocked together, but if you had a mews full of goshawks and a pasture full of champion milkers, you were the boss.

One of the ways my life differs from those of my ancestors was that they lived very intimately with livestock – lots of livestock. Their lives were deeply intertwined with their animals; how well they lived depended on how well their animals thrived. So they cared a great deal about their animals and would go to much effort and expense to treat their illnesses and so on. Of course, they also ate their animals. It's a relationship I find difficult to understand, and which of course continues for farm folk in our own time. Think about how we encourage 4-H kids to throw their hearts into raising a lamb or pig that is sold for slaughter after judging.

But that has been the human way for many people across much of history. We lived with animals in intense, mutually dependent relationships, knowing them better than we knew all but a few people, but also eating their flesh and wearing their skins.

When we recreate the past without animals, and the feelings people had toward them, we miss a great deal of human life.

Meanwhile in Catonsville

So, the cat. You have to imagine him scrabbling at the window, his little claws scratching across the glass, yowling the whole time. Not sure what this was about, but this is my home office space, so it was a bit of a distraction.

And not just once but repeatedly. If I could see something happening outside I might understand better. but I don't. This is the cat my wife just brought home one day.

So, there's a thing about having several children. A while ago I got a birthday-related request for a hummingbird cake, except not with cream cheese frosting. I agreed. But this generated a chorus of complaints from the pro-cream cheese frosting faction. So I said, ok, I'll just do one layer with cream cheese frosting and one with buttercream and not put them together. No, they said, having the alternating layers of cake and frosting is half the point! You see the result.

My son Ben, now 18, poses by a break in the Patapsco mill race created by a small stream.

I demonstrate my manly lack of fear of bigfoot.

Thursday Ben came home from a walk in the woods bubbling about frogs. He stumbled across a pond full of them, he said, all splashing around and singing their little hearts out. I had to work, cursed be that hated word, so I could not go straight down. By the time I arrived Friday afternoon things had settled down a lot. You can see that this "pond" is actually just a segment of the mill race.

I did see several frogs and hear them singing all around me, but these masses of frog eggs show that I was late for the main event.

On the way back I ran into our old friend the mostly white deer, now nearly grown. I have to think that if we had any predators this young lady wouldn't have lived nearly this long.

The beavers also made it through the winter. In this picture you can see the little dam they built, two sections on either side of the island.

Spent time in the garden this sunny weekend, cleaning up from the winter. Lots of little green plants coming up. I just ordered a new rose bush and some other plants, and I can't wait to get my hands into the dirt.

The Viking Sorceress of Fyrkat

Fyrkat Grave 4 by Thorhallur Thrainsson

Those of us interested in past beliefs about magic do a lot of hoping and wishing. Like, it's true this text was written two centuries after the events it describes, but maybe it is based on earlier sources or a strong oral tradition. Or, yes, there are other possibilities, but isn't the most likely explanation that this body was a victim of human sacrifice?

But sometimes the evidence is pretty much irrefutable, and can say with very little doubt that we are reading about or looking at an actual witch or wizard, someone who was deeply learned in an ancient, arcane tradition. One of those cases is the woman I will call the Sorceress of Fyrkat, although technically she is the occupant of Fyrkat Grave 4.

Fyrkat was one of the fortresses built by the kings of Denmark, probably around 980 AD. There are at least two other nearly identical fortresses from the Viking age, and two other possible ones. The best guess is that kings had them built as part of preparation for a major campaign. In this case the king would have been Harald Bluetooth, and the campaign was his successful war to regain southern Jutland from the German emperors. Note that Harald Bluetooth had by this time converted to Christianity and required all of his followers to do likewise.

The street that ran out Fyrkat's northeast gate led to a graveyard. Outside the gate the street was raised on a wooden walkway supported by posts, and the graves were laid out neatly along its sides. One of the graves held a woman of exalted status and very strong magical associations. She wore a blue dress with accents of red and embroidery in gold thread. Over it was a linen garment that has been seen in various ways; the Danish National Museum interprets it as you see here, as a shawl so thin as to be nearly transparent. This would have been a highly stylish get-up at the time, just like those worn by noble women in the German empire. Rich Norse women usually held their attire together with a lot of fancy pins and brooches, but this tailored dress needed no such fasteners. She was laid in the bed of a wagon. Wagons like this were standard coffins for high status women in this age, showing that while alive they did not have to walk but were driven everywhere.

She was not buried with a huge quantity of grave goods, but the select items placed with her tell a remarkable story. Near her head was this box brooch, which was filled with what seems to be white lead makeup. This is highly unusual for the Viking world, and the substance was probably imported from the Mediterranean.

On her second toes were two silver toe rings, of which these are replicas. These are the only toe rings known from the whole Norse world and they probably came from the Middle East or Central Asia.

Near her feet was this bronze cup, also probably from the Middle East. This is a more standard object for a rich Norse or Anglo-Saxon burial; Byzantine or Arab bronze and brass ewers, bowls, and so on seem to have been common luxury items in the north.

A group of objects was concentrated around her waist. They are thought to have been suspended from her belt, as shown here in a drawing by Hayo Vierck. There is a knife, its sheath bound with silver, and a slate whetstone. Since Vikings and Anglo-Saxons had a thing for fancy whetstones, which we often find in graves or other ceremonial contexts, we should probably imagine that a sacrifice was preceded by a dramatic sharpening of the killing instrument. (Imagine this act accompanied by chanting and drumming, as the tension builds.) Item 5 in the drawing is a guess about the origin of numerous tiny pieces of thin glass, which may represent a small ampule of this type. This was a common form of protective amulet in the classical world and their use continued into Christian times, when they were filled with water used to wash saints' tombs. Item 2 is a hypothesized bag that contained a pile of henbane seeds. Henbane can give you strong hallucinations, and it is one of the plants most commonly associated with magic in northern Europe.

Item 3 is this "duck's feet" pendant, probably from Russia. Only one other example is known from the Norse world, from another grave that might be a queen.

Item 4 is this chair-shaped amulet. These are one of the items most strongly associated with Norse magic, known only from the graves of women suspected of being seers or sorcerers. They probably represent the "high seat" on which a völva sat to make her prophecies, as described in several Norse sources.

You may be wondering why I haven't called Fyrkat 4 a völva, since that is how modern writers usually refer to Norse magical women or prophetesses. But the Old Norse terminology of magic and magical practitioners is one of those topics that, once you dive into it deeply, you wish you hadn't. There are several terms that all shifted meaning over the centuries. It is quite possible that this woman considered völva such an unbearable insult that she would have had her men cut your tongue out for calling her one, before prophesying ruin for your whole family. (Like "witch.") So it is safer to avoid Norse terms altogether and use something generic and English. Incidentally you may think you know why a Norse wise woman was called a völva, which looks like an evocation of feminine mystery. Really it means "staff bearer". Which brings me to the other incontrovertibly magical item from Fyrkat 4, a badly corroded iron staff or wand with bronze fittings.

About thirty of these are known; this image is from the British Museum. Some of them, like these, have ornamentation that sets them apart, but others look pretty much exactly like cooking spits. And indeed some of them may have been cooking spits, although in burials they are associated with fey women. So likely they were used for a different purpose.

The chest at the feet of Fyrkat 4 was old and had been repaired multiple times with different sorts of wood, which is an odd detail. It contained mostly clothing, of which all that survived was a quantity of gold and silver thread. So very fancy clothes. There also a set of the standard objects buried with Viking women: shears, a spindle whorl, another whetstone.

The Fyrkat sorceress must have been a formidable woman. Rich, she spent much of her money on exotic goods from far away, favoring in particular fashions that had not been adopted by her peers. And she was, in an allegedly Christian kingdom, a devotee of an ancient magical tradition.

Bronze bowl from Fyrkat 4, Item 1 above

That tradition had many elements. The best known and probably central was prophesying. The sagas tell us that seers regularly traveled through the Norse lands, calling at each prominent farm. There they were lavishly welcomed and they and their followers provided with a feast. They presided over a ritual that involved chanting and, in pre-Christian times, animal sacrifice. They then dressed up in an elaborate costume –was this when the Fyrkat sorceress painted her face white? – took their place on a chair atop a platform and prophesied what the year would bring for the household. According to our sources, they usually provided good news. Again according to our sources, they could be bribed, and would issue better prophecies for those who fed them better. This same accusation was of course made about oracles in the ancient world and is still made about modern shamans, often by other shamans, so this debate seems to be part and parcel of the whole business of prophesying.

The "Pagan Lady" from Peel Castle, Isle of Man, Viking Sorceress buried with a Swan's Wing. By Thorhallur Thrainsson.

Notice that the saga sources say little about the seeress going into trance or ecstasy. But henbane is no trivial drug, and anyone who took enough might go very far indeed past the rational state. Plus ecstasy of one kind or another is almost universally part of the prophetic tradition. So I think we should imagine that Norse seeresses at least sometimes drugged themselves into a trance state to seek answers to pressing questions. One thing we have learned from modern shamans is that they are capable of working in multiple modes, giving pat answers to standard questions – yeah, sure, you'll have a great harvest, what are we eating? – while also drugging or otherwise driving themselves into very dangerous trance states when confronted with a real crisis.

I have also refrained from calling Fyrkat 4 a seeress, which is how the Danish National Museum titles her. I did this because the Norse magical tradition also included other elements besides prophecy, among them the standard repertoire of cunning folk: healing, finding lost objects, making protective amulets, and so on. They were also said to summon storms and curse their enemies to death. I assume that the Fyrkat sorceress engaged at least in healing, and it is fun to imagine that sometimes King Harald sent his bishop away and asked his sorceress to curse his enemies or seek a vision of how his upcoming wars might go.

The "Staff Wielder" or "Weapon Dancer" figurine from Birka in Sweden

Much of this material comes from Neil Price, The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia.