The Towers of Ras Al-Khaima

Interesting article on an archaeological survey in Ras Al-Khaima, one of the smaller of the United Arab Emirates, aimed at recording the location of these towers. These towers date to any time from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century and were maintained until around World War II. Each coastal settlement had one, for defense against raids by desert Bedouin or the troops of other Emirates.

The Smallest Exoplanet Yet

The count of planets identified around other stars has passed 500, and NASA's Kepler spacecraft has found the smallest yet, only 1.4 times earth's diameter and 4.6 times its mass. But Kepler 10-b orbits very close to its star and the surface temperature is likely around 2500 degrees.

The astronomers who announced the discovery seem to be saying that pinning down this planet's characteristics was very difficult and depended on its star being extremely stable. I wonder if this means that Kepler's stated goal, to find planets like earth, will turn out to be elusive.

The Trouble with Law School

The NY Times reports this week on the backlash against law school. Thousands of people who have gone deeply into debt to get law degrees now find that they cannot get employment as lawyers, and therefore cannot pay off their student loans, and they are angry about it. Part of this is the result of the lousy economy, and some of these people may get legal jobs when conditions improve.

But there are some real problems with legal education in America. As the Times explains, many universities have opened law schools as profit centers, banking on the widespread belief that all lawyers make lots of money. They encourage potential students with bogus statistics on how many of their graduates get legal jobs and how much money they make. Some of the numbers the Times reports are shocking, e.g., several mediocre law schools that claim their average graduate earns a starting salary of $160,000 a year, the same number cited by Yale and Harvard. But even as law school tuition soars, the number of law students continues to grow:

Job openings for lawyers have plunged, but law schools are not dialing back enrollment. About 43,000 J.D.’s were handed out in 2009, 11 percent more than a decade earlier, and the number of law schools keeps rising — nine new ones in the last 10 years, and five more seeking approval to open in the future.

Apparently, there is no shortage of 22-year-olds who think that law school is the perfect place to wait out a lousy economy and the gasoline that fuels this system — federally backed student loans — is still widely available. But the legal market has always been obsessed with academic credentials, and today, few students except those with strong grade-point averages at top national and regional schools can expect a come-hither from a deep-pocketed firm. Nearly everyone else is in for a struggle. Which is why many law school professors privately are appalled by what they describe as a huge and continuing transfer of wealth, from students short on cash to richly salaried academics. Or perhaps this is more like a game of three-card monte, with law schools flipping the aces and a long line of eager players, most wagering borrowed cash, in a contest that few of them can win.

I fear that no amount of bad news about the struggles of recent law school grads will change any of this. The reason I foresee a continuing flood of young people into law schools is that law school offers a predictable path to a good job. It is the predictability that, I think, is key. In our society you graduate from college with a degree in something vague that may or may not qualify you to do all sorts of things, but how do you translate that into a professional job? That's mostly up to you. I have parlayed my history Ph.D. into a good job at a decent salary, but the process was so convoluted that I would have trouble even explaining it to a young person who wanted to replicate it, and it depended crucially on my impressing people who were in a position to promote me. It also took quite a while, and I worked for two years and several summers as a poorly paid archaeological excavator and supervisor. I first earned an adult wage at 30. This has been the path of many of my friends as well, who have eventually landed managerial jobs after years of confusion in cheap apartments.

Not surprisingly, many 22-year-olds dread this uncertainty and are looking, instead, for a clearly laid-out career ladder, especially one that promises to use their brains and lead them to prestige and money. The law beckons. They follow.

The Weirdest Idea

To me this is the strangest part of Jared Loughner's twisted worldview; and yet it seems he adopted it from others:

But Mr. Loughner also posits in his Web postings the idea that the government is seeking to control people through rules and structure of grammar and language.

This is similar to the position of David Wynn Miller, 62, a former tool-and-die welder from Milwaukee who describes himself as a “Plenipotentiary-judge” seeking to correct, through a mathematical formula, what he sees as the erroneous and manipulative use of grammar and language worldwide. The Southern Poverty Law Center considers Mr. Miller a conspiracy theorist, some of whose positions have been adopted by militias in general.

“The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar,” Mr. Loughner said in a video. He also defiantly asserted, “You control your English grammar structure.”

Mr. Miller, in an interview, said the argument sounded familiar. “He’s probably been on my Web site, which has been up for about 11 years,” Mr. Miller said. “The government does control the schools, and the schools determine the grammar and language we use. And then it is all reinforced by newspapers, magazines, TV, radio and everything we do in society.”

Resist brainwashing: say "ain't" and smite the establishment. Or something.

My Thoughts on the Arizona Shooting

Some people are crazy, and there isn't much we can do about it.

Signs That the Recession is Over

The basketball guys were talking about the stock market today, the first time that has happened in at least three years.

Austin: a City with Character

Home safe, with no snow troubles. Here are a few pictures I took during my last walk around downtown this morning:

Is this art, or a practical joke?

What business do you suppose the company on top of the sign is in?

And we know these people are in real estate, but what kind?

So Long, Austin

I'm flying home this afternoon. It has been a good trip but I am ready to be home now, and I hope the snow doesn't push that off even further.

Thoughts on Listening to People Talk

I spent the day listening to archaeologists talk about their work, and I come away dismayed by the dismal standard of public speaking in our society. There are, I think, two reasons for this. First, our educational system no longer stresses speaking, and second, we are too polite. The standard of speaking was much higher 150 years ago because they made an effort to teach people rhetoric, and because lousy speakers were booed and bombarded with whatever missiles were handy. I think we should bring both of these things back. We should make all college students practice speaking, and when people at a venue like an archaeological conference mumble incomprehensible statistics at the lower threshold of audibility, we should throw overripe plums.

Conferences always inspire these thoughts in me. I still go because among archaeologists conference papers are an important mode of communication. Archaeologists are terrible at publishing their work, so often a conference is the only way to hear about what other people are digging up. I learned a lot today. Alas, a process that ought to be pleasant -- learning about archaeology through narrated slide shows -- is rendered exquisitely painful by presentations that great on every nerve from the ears to the toes.

It occurs to me that this problem may be worse in archaeology than in most academic fields, because at a conference about Roman history or Renaissance poetry most of the speakers will be professors. Academics, whatever their personal failings (disorganization, obsession with statistics, weakness for political ax grinding, general mousiness) have much experience at speaking to an audience. Archaeological businessmen and Department of Transportation bureaucrats have none. It shows.

A Day in Austin, Part 3: Music

Austin bills itself the "Live Music Capital of the World," and I didn't want to leave town without seeing any. I asked my local connections where to go and they said, "It doesn't matter." So last night around 8 I walked out of the hotel and into the club district. I went first into a pub where a bluesman with an acoustic guitar was singing and blowing the harmonica, mostly old standards from the 50s and 60s. He was pretty good, but I was in the mood for something rowdier so after half an hour I headed out into the night. In truth, the density of live entertainment in this little district is amazing. Within four blocks along 5th and 6th Streets and the streets in between there must be at least 30 clubs featuring live music, and at 9 o'clock on a Thursday somebody was playing in half of them. The doors were wide open on this warm January night, so I just wandered around and listened until I found something that sounded good. Barkers were in the doors of the bars shouting, "No Cover! Two-fifty beers!" Blues was the dominant form, and rhythm & blues, shading into country rock, but there was also jazz and at least one hard rocking band. I listened for a few minutes to a blues trio, guys on drums and bass and a skinny white woman singing and playing keyboards, and another time to one of those bluesy rock bands with three skinny white guys playing and a fat black woman singing. (Do they hang out together after the show?) Then I heard something that made my ears perk up and slid into a classic, narrow dive bar. Two young guys were playing guitars, one accoustic and the other electric. They were both pudgy, but the guy on the electric looked presentable enough. The other guy was fat and double-chinned and wearing an old ball cap with a faded logo advertising something I didn't recognize, and a sort of stupid, staring look in his eyes. He looked like a mechanic you would be afraid to leave your car with. But they could play. It's been a long time since I heard two guys put out that much energy and make that much noise. They had a sort of Marshall Tucker-Charlie Daniels sound, and they did a great version of "Can't You See" that had a bunch of 50-year-old men up stomping and singing along. Their "Street Corner Girl" was nearly as good. I stayed until they finished, around 11, tipped them and went home happy.

The high ratio of entertainers to audience was great for me but must be hard on the players sometimes. I got great seats in both bars I went into, since there were only about 25 people listening to the bluesman and maybe 30 listening to the country rock guys. Without the energy that comes from a crowd it was up to the performers to create everything. The bluesman seemed to be feeling the lack, and he made some half-hearted attempts to get people more involved. They two young guys just played like this is what they do for fun, audience or no, and that worked much better. Without cover they can't be paid much (if anything), so I put money in all the tip jars. Since I listened to a whole evening of music for the price of two beers, I could afford it.

Satan and Roofless on Trial

Last month I wrote about the sad case of Yard Sale, a homeless man apparently beaten to death by two acquaintances known as Satan and Roofless, and his girlfriend Lucy Obarzanek. Now court proceedings have begun against the two alleged killers, and Bill McKelway of the Richmond Times Dispatch has more on the story:

A beating fueled by alcohol and anger apparently ended the life of a quixotic homeless man who rode the rails and died in the back of a burned-out Volkswagen bus.

In a hearing Tuesday that barely brushed the surface of the complex life of Robert Edward Dyck, who was known by the nickname Yard Sale, a Henrico County detective laid out how the man apparently died covered in pine tags and boards in the back of a bus. . . .

Satan and Roofless, who said they just wanted to scare Yard Sale, covered his unconscious body with wood to keep him warm. They are facing ten years in prison on manslaughter charges.

Dyck, 37, a former standout high school football player whose family lives in the West, has been homeless for years. He and Obarzanek traveled from New York to Richmond and had been camping out with other train jumpers near the Acca train yard near Hamilton Street. . . .

Watching the proceedings yesterday were two women who said they have known Gase for years and traveled the rails with him. They described as a gentle person who would never strike out at anyone without provocation.

"He'd had the name Satan since he was a kid growing up on the streets alone," said Abby Easley, a street artist, musician and train jumper whose work is visible online. "You wouldn't think that sort of thing happens in the world today, but it does."

"We're his only family. You could call me his daughter and Abby his wife," said Helen Moody, who throughout the hearing yesterday comforted Easley as the two stared at the backs of their handcuffed friends in court.

An obituary for Yard Sale in his hometown newspaper (Albuquerque, New Mexico) sums up his life like this:

His obituary sums up a difficult but hardly joyless past: "He seemed to enjoy living life to the fullest and doing it on his own terms."

Cuts at the Pentagon

As I had hoped, the President is using all the heat over the budget as a cover to make cuts in military spending. We'll have to see if the self-proclaimed deficit hawks in the House go along:

The White House has ordered the Pentagon to squeeze almost all growth from its spending over the next five years, which will require eventually shrinking the Army and Marine Corps and seeking controversial increases in the fees paid by for retired, working-age veterans for their health insurance, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday.

A Day in Austin, Part 2: Art

I was in an art gallery mood today, and I decided to give myself the one day tour of the Austin arts scene. By the time I had finished gawking at the fountain it was after 10 and the Blanton Museum of Art was open, so I wandered in. This was a pleasant experience, especially since Thursday turns out to be free day. They have a nice little collection of Greek vases, which was a surprise to me, and rooms full of second rate European works from the 14th to 18th centuries. There were a few nice things, and I especially liked this 17th-century portrait they attribute to the Circle of Simon Vouet. I suppose that since this is attributed to Vouet's circle rather than the master himself it is considered a lesser work, but all I can say to that is, we should all have such talented friends.

In the modern section there was the inevitable enormous gallery full of very large abstract works. I liked a piece by Alfred Jensen called Mayan Temple, but by far the finest work in the room is Franz Kline’s Black and White No. 2 (1960):


This the museum has used to make their logo, combining it with a photograph of the Congress Avenue Bridge. In the absence of a scanner I supply this paltry duplication of what I think is a great work of design:

In another gallery there was a temporary installation – sadly, photography was not allowed – of some contemporary Mexican works. One was a room-sized, um, thing, featuring hanging drapes, several hundred thigh bones from large cows, a swimming pool full of brightly polished pennies lit to look like gold, and a floor-to-ceiling stack of communion wafers. Some kind of protest against the Jesuit missions and their role in oppressing the Indians, I gather. It was kind of cool, actually, and it made me think that in Mexico the ancient artistic traditions are alive and well: just like their ancestors at Teotihuacan, contemporary Mexican artists are still playing with bones and gold.

Then I left the UT campus and wandered back south, passing the capitol on the other side and avoiding the vast wasteland of parking garages. On my way through downtown I popped into two galleries selling works by local artists and saw some charming things. I was headed for an arts district on the south side of the lake, and I had planned to search out a quaint, artsy café for lunch. But as I passed the office towers of downtown I saw this trailer in the corner of a parking lot, advertising Turf-n-Surf Poboys. Thinking I would never find anything more authentically local than this trailer, I stopped and ordered a blackened shrimp Poboy that only cost $8 but ranks among the top five sandwiches of my life. The people who run the place look like extras from Horror in the Bayou but they made my sandwich with exquisite shrimp, wonderful whole wheat bread, baby lettuce, and tomatoes that tasted like July.

Across the Congress Avenue Bridge – which crosses something called Lady Bird Lake, a wide spot in the Colorado River (no, not that Colorado River, another one) – and on toward what a friend called “the fun part of town.” My destination was Yard Dog Folk Art, which I had read about online. This is a nice little gallery in the midst of a cluster of shops selling Mexican folk art and other interesting things. Honestly I didn’t love any of the art at Yard Dog, but some of it was interesting, and I did some shopping in the surrounding stores.

And then back to the hotel, with weary feet.

A Day in Austin

Austin, looking north across the sadly batless Congress Avenue Bridge

Today was my day to explore. I started from the hotel around 9, heading north, grabbing a scone and an extremely strong coffee from a coffee shop where two young guys were playing Stratego at a little table while a dozen people over 55 sipped and read the news. Eating my scone on a public bench, I looked across the street and noticed a statue of a woman with a cannon that I just had to investigate. This turned out to be a memorial to Angelina Eberly, a local heroine. In 1842, President Sam Houston of then independent Texas decided that Austin was not a safe place for the capital and tried it to have it moved to (of course) Houston. Voted down, he tried to accomplish the move by force, sending a detachment of soldiers to seize the state records and carry them off:

When an innkeeper named Angelina Eberly noticed the men loading their wagons, she rushed to the corner that is now 6th and Congress and fired the town cannon, blowing a hole in the land office building and rousing the populace. The citizens chased down Houston’s men, recovered the archives, and gave them to Mrs. Eberly for safekeeping.

In your eye, Houston

From there I walked to the state capitol, a grand building with a fine collection of war memorials.

I particularly like this sentiment:

Which is on this monument to the heroes of the Alamo. Now there’s a lesson in the vagaries of war for you, in which a mad blunder led to a terrible defeat that Texans ever since have found to be an immense source of pride, inspiring them to numerous victories. Sometimes you win by losing. Behind the Alamo memorial in the photo is one of the series of Confederate monuments, a rather nice one to Terry’s Texas Rangers. The main Confederate monument features a ringing endorsement of secession, beginning:

DIED FOR STATE RIGHTS GUARANTEED UNDER THE CONSTITUTION

Slavery goes unmentioned, of course.

Then I walked from the capitol to the University of Texas. I had hoped to pass through a nice little district of book stores and t-shirt shops like one often finds at the edge of college campuses, but instead I traversed three blocks of parking garages.

Once I got into the center of the UT campus, I did find some nice quadrangles and buildings, all watched over by the looming tower that made me think of sniper rifles.

And then I found this marvelous fountain.


There is no explanatory sign, but the legend on the sculpture says COLUMBIA MDCCCCXVIII, so I suppose it commemorates the end of World War I. But why do the tritons have devil horns and pointed ears?


And what’s with this soldier standing guard, wearing only a loin cloth and a doughboy helmet, with a feathered shield on his left arm and a ludicrously oversized sword, like something from Mortal Kombat? The mind boggles.

In Austin

Since we are the richest civilization in the history of the world, why do we force ourselves to pass through a dim, semi-subterranean monument to concrete ugliness like this every time we leave an airport? Below, the view from my motel room window.

Cresap's Fort

I am speaking in Austin about one of my recent discoveries, a frontier fort built around 1740 by famously cantankerous Marylander Thomas Cresap. Cresap was an agent for the Calvert family in their dispute with the Penns over the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania. (This is the dispute that was eventually settled by the Mason-Dixon survey.) Cresap's job was to stake out claims in disputed territory and attract tenants to them, while discouraging people who got their warrants from the Penns. This led to violence that contemporaries half-jokingly called "Cresap's War," making Cresap one of that select band of men who have their own wars. After a truce was reached in that conflict Cresap lighted out for the frontier. After a brief stay near Antietam he eventually staked his claim on the Potomac near modern Oldtown. Oldtown takes its name from the Old Shawnee Town, which had been abandoned about a decade before Cresap settled there. Cresap's house became one of the best known posts on the frontier, frequented by Iroquois warriors, Shawnee hunters, white traders, land speculators, and anyone else who passed by. A young George Washington left this description of his stay at Cresap's in 1747:

Wednesday 23d. Rain’d till about two oClock & Clear’d when we were agreeably surpris’d at the sight of thirty odd Indians coming from War with only one Scalp. We had some Liquor with us of which we gave them Part it elevating there Spirits put them in the Humour of Dauncing of whom we had a War Daunce. There Manner of Dauncing is as follows Viz. They clear a Large Circle & make a great Fire in the Middle then seats themselves around it the Speaker makes a grand Speech telling them in what Manner they are to Daunce after he has finish’d the best Dauncer Jumps up as one awaked out of a Sleep & Runs & Jumps about the Ring in a most comicle Manner he is followd by the Rest then begins there Musicians to Play the Musick is a Pot half of Water with a Deerskin Streched over it as tight as it can & a goard with some Shott in it to Rattle & a Piece of an horses Tail tied to it to make it look fine the one keeps Rattling and the other Drumming all the While the others is Dauncing.

When the French and Indian War broke out in 1753, Cresap "fortified" his post, which probably means he built a wooden palisade around it. Many of the neighbors used the fort as a refuge during Indian raids, and Cresap's sons formed a militia company. In 1755 half of General Braddock's army marched through on their way to disaster, and one of the British officers left this description of Cresap:

May 8th. Ferried over the River into Maryland; and March’d to Mr. Jackson’s, 8 Miles from Mr. Coxs’s where we found a Maryland Company encamped in a fine Situation on the Banks of the Potomack; with clear’d ground about it; there lives Colonel Cressop, a Rattle Snake, Colonel and a D – d Rascal; calls himself a Frontiersman, being nearest the Ohio; he had a summons sometimes since from the French to retire from his Settlement, which they claim as their property, but he refused it like a man of Spirit; This place is the Track of Indian Warriours, when going to War, either to the No’ward, or So’ward. He hath built a little Fort round his House, and is resolved to keep his Ground. We got plenty of Provisions. &ca. General arrived with Captains Orme and Morris, with Secretary Shirley and a Company of light Horse for his Guard, under the Command of Capt. Stewart, the General lay at the Colonels.

After Braddock's defeat French irregulars and their Indian allies swarmed along the frontier, attacking hundreds of homes and emptying whole districts of British settlers; for a while Cresap's fort was the westernmost outpost of British power.

After the war the frontier moved on westward, Cresap's eldest son built a fine stone house, and the fort was abandoned. Since this is such a famous site, there have been many efforts to find it, and it has been placed in at least three different spots. There is even a historical marker at one of those spots. Alas, it is the wrong spot; one of the others, as we showed last spring, is the actual site of the fort. Above and below are some of the artifacts we found there.

Off to Austin

I am flying off to Austin, Texas today to give a paper at the annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. It is always exciting to go someplace I have never been, and I am looking forward to exploring Austin. Alas, I gather that the bats don't fly at this time of year, so I won't get to experience that little wonder. But I am sure there are other things to do.

Customized Tobacco Pipes from Jamestown

To have a house full of things with your own name or initials stamped onto them -- or embroidered into them, or painted in the plaster, or whatever -- was one of the top status symbols of the 17th century. I once excavated a whole pit full of wine bottles all stamped with AA, the initials of Arthur Allen, owner of the plantation.

Now the archaeologists at Jamestown have found a cache of broken tobacco pipes stamped with some of the famous names from the first years of the colony:

Archeologists at Jamestown have unearthed a trove of tobacco pipes personalized for a who's who of early 17th century colonial and British elites, underscoring the importance of tobacco to North America's first permanent English settlement.

The white clay pipes — actually, castoffs likely rejected during manufacturing — were crafted between 1608 and 1610 and bear the names of English politicians, social leaders, explorers, officers of the Virginia Company that financed the settlement and governors of the Virginia colony. Archeologists also found equipment used to make the pipes.

Researchers believe the pipes recovered from a well in James Fort were made to impress investors and the political elite with the financial viability of the settlement. They are likely the rejects that failed to survive the ceramic firing process in a kiln.

The find comprises more than 100 pipes or fragments. More than a dozen are stamped with diamond shapes and inscribed with the names or initials of luminaries including explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, who dispatched the colonists to the territory he named Virginia. He also is credited with popularizing tobacco in England and is said to have smoked a pipe just before being executed for treason in 1618.

Other names include Capt. Samuel Argall, a major Virginia Company investor and governor of Virginia; Sir Charles Howard, Lord High Admiral of England; and Earl of Southampton Henry Wriothesley, a Virginia Company official who was also William Shakespeare's major patron.

Imagine the thrill of digging something from the ground stamped with the name of Sir Walter Raleigh. Sometimes archaeology connects to the past in a direct and dramatic way.

Still Scamming on Wall Street

So Goldman Sachs, riding high again after we saved them from the collapse of their effort to turn sub-prime mortgages into a vast profit engine, is back at the forefront of Wall Street skullduggery. They have done a deal with Facebook, investing about $250 million of their own money in a way that values the privately held company at $50 billion. Now why would they do this? Not because they think it is a good investment. Honestly, would anybody be surprised if a visitor from ten years in the future showed up and said Facebook no longer exists in his world? Not I. No, Goldman Sachs is going this so they can make fat fees by persuading other insider fatcats to invest in Facebook on the same terms. And it will probably work. A lot of that money that was washing around the world ten yeas ago, its owners so desperate for investment opportunities that they decided to lend it to homeowners who were not likely to pay it back, is washing around again. Since there don't seem to be any good ideas about where to invest it, the bad ideas are back and riding high.

Bolsa Familia

Brazil used to be the most economically unequal country in the world, with the biggest divide between rich and poor. Now it is the country where that gap is shrinking the fastest. This has several causes, including the industrialization of the country and the growth of middle-class professions like banking and engineering. But what is raising the incomes of the poorest Brazilians is a government program called Bolsa Familia, the family grant. Other countries have tried similar programs, but Brazil's is the biggest ever. Tina Rosenberg:

The program, called Bolsa Familia (Family Grant) in Brazil, goes by different names in different places. In Mexico, where it first began on a national scale and has been equally successful at reducing poverty, it is Oportunidades. The generic term for the program is conditional cash transfers. The idea is to give regular payments to poor families, in the form of cash or electronic transfers into their bank accounts, if they meet certain requirements. The requirements vary, but many countries employ those used by Mexico: families must keep their children in school and go for regular medical checkups, and mom must attend workshops on subjects like nutrition or disease prevention. The payments almost always go to women, as they are the most likely to spend the money on their families. The elegant idea behind conditional cash transfers is to combat poverty today while breaking the cycle of poverty for tomorrow.

As I said, the program seems to be reducing poverty in Brazil. Americans who read Rosenberg's description are likely to cringe, though, because it brings up all the ugly debates we have had over the past 50 years about "welfare dependency" and the like. I should note that when it was introduced, Aid to Families with Dependent Children -- AFDC, our old welfare program -- also helped to reduce poverty, and federal housing aid did, too. The American experience seems to show, though, that this approach can only help so much, and even that help comes at a cost. I have read several major pieces from liberal newspapers like the NY Times and the old Washington Post about people who grew up on welfare and whose only important skill was knowing how to work the welfare bureaucracy, and no liberal I know would point to the old housing projects of the 70s as a model of how to help poor people or make the world better.

I think, though, that the limits on who could get AFDC were a big part of its problem. First, it was largely limited to unwed mothers, and if that was not the sole reason marriage rates fell in poor neighborhoods it can't have helped. Second, all the hurdles we set up to keep people from abusing the system only encouraged certain people to become welfare experts, and to refrain from taking jobs or opening bank accounts that would hurt their welfare eligibility. The Mexican and Brazilian programs pay money to married people with low-paying jobs. By using the income per family member as the only criterion for who can apply, they make the system more honest and reduce its impact on people's behavior. In the United States we have shifted much of our "welfare" spending to what we call the Earned Income Tax Credit, a sort of negative income tax that helps only people who actually have jobs, and I think this is an excellent idea. (The EITC is under attack from Republicans now, but one of its original backers was a governor of California named Ronald Reagan.) I believe that in the US today the "war on drugs," our crazy prison system, and our screwed-up health care system are bigger obstacles to reducing poverty than our welfare policies.

John McDermott

I just discovered this wonderful gallery of images of Asia by John McDermott. With a whole series on the trees of Angkor Wat. Marvelous.

The Ruins of Detroit

At the Guardian, a slide show of Detroit's ruined buildings. Above, the 1928 United Aritsts' Theater. Below, the St. Christopher House, a former public library.

Hare Hammock

Hare Hammock is an archaeological site in northwestern Florida that includes a large burial mound of the Weeden Island culture, which dates to around 500 to 800 AD. These and many other ceramic vessels were removed from the mound when it was excavated in the early 20th century. The effigy in the second picture is one of many artifacts that make me think there has to have been regular contact between the southeastern US and Mesoamerica, but since there are no Mexican artifacts in Florida, this is hard to prove.

The Weeden Island people were one of those Indian groups that had two material cultures, one for daily use and one purely for ritual. So if you dig at a Weeden Island settlement, as I have -- on Weeden Island, no less -- you find nothing like these beautiful objects. Instead you find sherds of some stuff that looks like asphalt and gets my vote for the ugliest pottery ever made, along with roughly made stone tools and lots of flakes. All the burial mounds that weren't looted before 1960 are now protected, so neither I nor anyone else of my generation will pull anything like these wondrous artifacts from the ground.

Christmas Presents

Clara on her new bike.

Ben with the Nerf gun arsenal.

And the new bay window, which Lisa and I gave to each other.

Horse in the Blue Afternoon

Woodblock print by Tadashi Nakayama, 1991.

The Rain of Blackbirds

Certain myths seem more plausible in the light of this story from the Associated Press:

BEEBE, Ark. – Wildlife officials are trying to determine what caused more than 1,000 blackbirds to die and fall from the sky over an Arkansas town. Arkansas and Fish Commission said Saturday that it began receiving reports about the dead birds about 11:30 p.m. the previous night. The birds fell over a 1-mile area of Beebe, and an aerial survey indicated that no other dead birds were found outside of that area.

Commission ornithologist Karen Rowe said the birds showed physical trauma, and she speculated that "the flock could have been hit by lightning or high-altitude hail."

The commission said that New Year's Eve revelers shooting off fireworks in the area could have startled the birds from their roost and caused them to die from stress.

Robby King, a wildlife officer for the agency, collected about 65 dead birds, which will be sent for testing to the state Livestock and Poultry Commission lab and the National Wildlife Health Center lab in Madison, Wis.

Rowe said that similar events have occurred elsewhere and that test results "usually were inconclusive." She said she doubted the birds were poisoned.

Surviving Modern Life

Freedom is the great blessing of modern life and also our greatest peril. We are free as no other people before to think our own thoughts, choose our own careers, pick a "lifestyle" that suits us, and find our own meaning and purpose. But these things are not always easy to do.

This week David Brooks reviews a book by two academic philosophers, Hubert Dreyfus of Berkeley and Sean Dorrance Kelly of Harvard, called All Things Shining. After a tour of the western tradition, Dreyfus and Dorrance look into the problem of life in the age of freedom. Brooks summarizes:

For the past hundred years or so, we have lived in a secular age. That does not mean that people aren’t religious. It means there is no shared set of values we all absorb as preconscious assumptions. In our world, individuals have to find or create their own meaning.

This, Dreyfus and Kelly argue, has led to a pervasive sadness. Individuals are usually not capable of creating their own lives from the ground up. So modern life is marked by frequent feelings of indecision and anxiety. People often lack the foundations upon which to make the most important choices.

As Brooks notes, this ignores the millions of people who still belong to traditional religious sects; one of the phenomena of the modern era has been the rise of hyper-traditional religious forms that go out of their way to reject the freedom modernity affords. But for the secular among us, this is a good summary. I also think Brooks is mistaken to put too much emphasis on the religious side. In a traditional society it is not just a theory of the universe that people receive from their parents, but a way of life: a mode of working, the structure of a typical day, a kind of house and a way of arranging space within it, and so on. Even deeply religious moderns face many more choices than most people did in the ancient world.

Besides the need to make many choices, another problem faced by secular moderns is finding a way to escape from the everyday world. For reasons we cannot yet explain, most humans come equipped with a longing for transcendent experiences. As much as we throw ourselves into daily life we cannot escape the desire for something more, something different, something that lifts us beyond ourselves and makes us feel connected to a greater all. Modern people who do not feel this transcendent belonging in religious ceremonies have gone looking for it in other places. Especially in sports:

Spiritually unmoored, many people nonetheless experience intense elevation during the magical moments that sport often affords. Dreyfus and Kelly mention the mood that swept through the crowd at Yankee Stadium when Lou Gehrig delivered his “Luckiest Man Alive” speech, or the mood that swept through Wimbledon as Roger Federer completed one of his greatest matches.

The most real things in life, they write, well up and take us over. They call this experience “whooshing up.” We get whooshed up at a sports arena, at a political rally or even at magical moments while woodworking or walking through nature.

I like this analysis of our sports obsession, which applies equally to rock concerts and the like. It certainly fits into the same paradigm of collective experience as public religious experiences, and "whooshing up" is a nicely neutral description of the high people get from a big victory by a team the identify with. Of course, it is hardly original, but then few good ideas are. I think Brooks is right that sports and music fandom are central to modern life: "The activities often dismissed as mere diversions are actually central." But I think this is too glib:

Real life is more about serial whooshes than coherent meaning.

Moments of transcendence are only part of life, and we need the everyday world of work, family, and friendships just as much. A life that is no more than a string of whooshes would strike most of us as unserious and empty.

I would also say that I am not sure people in past societies were any happier than we are. If they were supported by stronger social structures and more sure of their place in the world, they also had less freedom and much more real physical suffering. For many of them religion was a less important source of ecstatic moments than war or other extreme violence. Every period of human life has its blessings and its torments, and I think is is narcissistic to assume that our problems are worse than other people's.

The Sarcastic Product Review

At Amazon you can review a product without actually buying it, and it seems there are people who spend their spare time searching the site for strange-looking products and posting sarcastic reviews. Cracked has an amusing collection.

The Battle of Towton, 1461

The Battle of Towton in 1461 was the biggest battle in the Wars of the Roses. At least 50,000 men participated, some say 75,000, and contemporaries said 28,000 men were killed. Whatever the numbers, it was certainly a big and bloody affair, and it allowed the Yorkist Edward IV to seize the throne from his Lancastrian cousins.

The Economist has a great article on the archaeology being done at the battlefield, especially the analysis of 40 skeletons from a mass grave nearby:

The men whose skeletons were unearthed at Towton were a diverse lot. Their ages at time of death ranged widely. It is easier to be precise about younger individuals, thanks to the predictable ways in which teeth develop and bones fuse during a person’s adolescence and 20s. The youngest occupants of the mass grave were around 17 years old; the oldest, Towton 16, was around 50. Their stature varies greatly, too. The men’s height ranges from 1.5-1.8 metres (just under five feet to just under six feet), with the older men, almost certainly experienced soldiers, being the tallest.

This physical diversity is unsurprising, given the disparate types of men who took the battlefield that day. Yet as a group the Towton men are a reminder that images of the medieval male as a homunculus with rotten teeth are well wide of the mark. The average medieval man stood 1.71 metres tall—just four centimetres shorter than a modern Englishman. “It is only in the Victorian era that people started to get very stunted,” says Mr Knüsel. Their health was generally good. Dietary isotopes from their knee-bones show that they ate pretty healthily. Sugar was not widely available at that time, so their teeth were strong, too.

Laid out on a laboratory bench in the University of Bradford’s archaeology department, the biggest of the soldiers still look burly (though their bones, without any collagen in them, are incredibly light to handle). They seem to have led active lives. Bone grows in response to strenuous muscular activity, particularly if exercise starts in childhood. For instance, the serving arm of a professional tennis player has as much as a third more bone in it than his non-dominant arm.

Some of the Towton men display the same type of unusual bone density. But it is distributed in a very unmodern way: their upper-arm bones are very well-developed towards the right shoulder and the left elbow. The medieval longbow, which placed huge stress on both the drawing arm and the arm that held the bow steady, may have been responsible. Towton 16 has something known as an avulsion fracture to his left elbow, a condition first clinically identified among young baseball players in America. This injury occurs only in adolescence, when the bones in the arm have not yet fully fused, and may have been caused by attempts to practise with an adult longbow. In 1420s England the teenage Towton 16 was suffering from Little Leaguer’s Elbow.

Fascinating stuff.

Happy 2011

Happy New Year, everyone.

I, of course, was asleep long before midnight, so my first sight of 2011 came on this sunny morning, in the midst of a little warm spell that sent yesterday's temperature above 50. That meant that Clara and Thomas could ride their new bikes, which was nice, and it should be nice again today before rain comes in this afternoon.

I look forward to the new year with interest. I will be teaching at Hood College again this spring, a course called Celts to Vikings that focuses on the northern European barbarians in the early middle ages. I taught this class there before, four years ago, and very much enjoyed it. This year I have recast it to avoid anything I just taught in my medieval survey class, leaving time to delve deeper into the sort of obscurities I love: druidic theology, pagan attitudes toward death, the cult of the severed head, the law of feud, whether Merlin and Arthur were real people, and similar things. We will be reading Irish legends, the lives of Celtic saints, Welsh bardic poetry, Anglo-Saxon elegies, Viking sagas, bits of Caesar and Tacitus that deal with the Celts and Germans, and Latin chronicles from the 8th and 9th centuries.

At my real job I will be finishing up a project I have been working on for seven years, our archaeological and historical study of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Park. The park runs along the Potomac River for 160 miles, from Washington to Cumberland, Maryland. This has been a wonderful project and I am sad that fieldwork is over. But it will be satisfying to finish our reports and wrap up all the good work we have done. Even better, I get to write a 40,000-word account of the archaeology in the park for sale to the public, and I am very excited about that.

My eldest graduates from high school in the spring -- it is to be hoped, anyway -- and confronts a future to which he has given not a single thought. This should be interesting. Then my daughter enters her senior year, and since she has ambitious plans for college we will enter into the role of nervous parents and fret over how much to get involved in her applications and how much advice to give about college choices.

Sometime in the midst of this I plan to finish the first draft of my novel -- wish me luck with that -- plant my garden, watch my young children grow, and celebrate 20 years of marriage.