Rachel Howard

British painter Rachel Howard, born 1969, has been playing around with oil paint, applying multiple layers to canvases and then removing some. She has also been playing with the boundary between abstraction and figural work, which I think has been fertile ground for her. The stuff of hers I saw before didn't do much for me, but I like some of these very much. Her new show is called Northern Echo, but I can't find that this means anything. Above, Insomnia, 2013

Interior, 2013.

Detail from Spit and Whisper, 2013.

And one oil sketch on paper, Drawing for Women in Love, 2013.

Milk Pan

Mid 1700s, with elaborate slip decoration. From the Parker-Harris Pottery site in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

Houses, Jiangyin, China

By Kacper Kowalski. Shortlisted entry in the Contemporary Issues category of the 2014 Sony world photography competition.

Today's Most Hopeful Sentence

The most partisan Congress in anybody’s memory may actually come together to go easier on nonviolent drug offenders.

-Dave Weigel, here

The Black Death and European Genes

The Black Death of the fourteenth century killed at least a quarter of Europeans; then Yersinia pestis hung around for 250 years, killing millions more over the centuries in regularly returning plagues. This ought to have given anyone with genetic resistance to the plague a great selective advantage.

To find the traces of the Black Death in European genes, Romanian immunologist Mihai Netea hit on a very clever scheme. The Roma or gypsy people emigrated from northern India to Romania around a thousand years ago, but never interbred much with the locals. Netea reasoned that any way the Roma are genetically more similar to other Europeans than to the people of northern India must represent selection that happened to them in Europe over the past thousand years.

With the help of evolutionary biologist Jaume Bertranpetit in Barcelona and others, Netea studied 196,000 spots on the genomes of 100 Roma living in Romania, 100 non-Roma Romanians, and 500 people from northern India. They found 20 genes for which the Roma and other Romanian forms are similar to each other but very different from the forms found in India:

Those genes included one for skin pigmentation, one involved in inflammation, and one associated with susceptibility to autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. But the ones Netea and Bertranpetit were most excited about were a cluster of three immune system genes found on chromosome 4. These genes code for toll-like receptors, proteins which latch on to harmful bacteria in the body and launch a defensive response. “We knew they must be important for host defense,” Netea says.

What events in history might have favored these versions of the genes in gypsies and Romanians, but not in Indians? Netea and his colleagues tested the ability of the toll-like receptors to react to Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that caused the Black Death. They found that the strength of the immune response varied depending on the exact sequence of the toll-like receptor genes.

Netea and Bertranpetit propose that the Roma and European Romanians came to have the same versions of these immune system genes because of the evolutionary pressure exerted by Y. pestis. Other Europeans, whose ancestors also faced and survived the Black Death, carried similar changes in the toll-like receptor genes. But people from China and Africa—two other places the Black Death did not reach—did not have these changes.

A remarkable piece of research, opening up all sorts of interesting avenues.

What if our susceptibility to Rheumatoid arthritis was part of our defense against the plague?

A Roman Balsamarium from Kent

Found by an amateur collector in 2012, this little copper alloy vase is 5 cm (2 1/2 inches) tall. Perhaps made in Gaul in the 3rd century CE, the relief shows a Bacchic scene. This is from the wonderful website of the British Portable Antiquities Scheme.

The Portable Antiquities Scheme is the right way for countries to control the digging up of their archaeological treasures, as opposed to the punitive nonsense they have in Italy. The way it works is that if you find something valuable on your property you report it to the government. If they want it, they have the right to buy it from you for a price they set, but which is supposed to reflect market value. If they don't want it, you get clear title. Either way they photograph the object and record where it was found; information on 920,000 objects is now on the PAS website.

Conservative Catholics in a Liberal Society

Patrick Deneen on America's Catholic "radicals":

The “radical” school rejects the view that Catholicism and liberal democracy are fundamentally compatible. Rather, liberalism cannot be understood to be merely neutral and ultimately tolerant toward (and even potentially benefitting from) Catholicism. Rather, liberalism is premised on a contrary view of human nature (and even a competing theology) to Catholicism. Liberalism holds that human beings are essentially separate, sovereign selves who will cooperate based upon grounds of utility. According to this view, liberalism is not a “shell” philosophy that allows a thousand flowers to bloom. Rather, liberalism is constituted by a substantive set of philosophical commitments that are deeply contrary to the basic beliefs of Catholicism, among which are the belief that we are by nature relational, social and political creatures; that social units like the family, community and Church are “natural,” not merely the result of individuals contracting temporary arrangements; that liberty is not a condition in which we experience the absence of constraint, but the exercise of self-limitation; and that both the “social” realm and the economic realm must be governed by a thick set of moral norms, above all, self-limitation and virtue.

I actually agree that liberalism is fundamentally in conflict with orthodox Catholicism. (And certain branches of Protestantism, Judaism and Islam, too.) Liberalism is the political expression of the Kantian Enlightenment; Kant said that when people needed their society or their church to tell them what to think, they were still children, and could become fully mature only by deciding everything for themselves. Children should be raised, not to believe anything in particular, but to be able to choose their own beliefs. This is anathema to religious conservatives, who hold that some ideas are divine and others satanic, and you absolutely ought to raise your children to believe the divine ones.

Liberalism teaches that people who hold radically different philosophies can share the same society. But if that is to happen, society must be very loose and lax about many things. Liberals talk on and on about "tolerance" because living next door to people who hold different beliefs requires it; if we can't be respectful of each other most of the time, a liberal society can't work. Liberalism also tends to be wishy-washy about truth, because if one person's beliefs are true than somebody else's must be false, and if you think about that too much the next thing you know you're rioting and burning their synagogues.

But, I ask you, what other sort of society could we have in a nation of 300 million people from a thousand backgrounds? The powerful community feeling that makes surrendering some of your freedom worthwhile for many is just not possible for America. If being among fellow believers and feeling at one with them is your thing, join a monastery. Or a cult, or some other sort of small, semi-isolated community. A liberal state has room for that, as long as you are respectful of your neighbors.

I would take issue with the notion that liberals deny this:

that social units like the family, community and Church are “natural,” not merely the result of individuals contracting temporary arrangements; that liberty is not a condition in which we experience the absence of constraint, but the exercise of self-limitation

I believe all of this, and so have millions of other liberals; the Founding Fathers certainly did. Families just are natural, whatever anybody thinks. Where I part company with Catholic radicals is that I think families can "naturally" take many different forms, from stern Old Testament patriarchy to Victorian sentimentality. That people are naturally social seems indisputable. And as for self-restraint, nobody ever wrote more eloquently on the necessity for free people to discipline themselves than Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton. They all praised self-control and condemned "license;" indeed they believed that a free society could survive only among people who practiced a high degree of self-control. I would say that I believe in freedom partly because I trust people to control themselves, most of the time.

I also believe in truth, as do millions of other defenders of liberal society. But I recognize that in a pluralistic world, shouting at each other about the nature of God is pointless, tiresome and potentially dangerous, and I have better things to do.

Today's Venetian Palace: the Ca' D'oro

I was just lent a glorious book, Venetian Palaces, with text by Alvise Zorzi and photographs by Paolo Marton (1990). As I peruse the wonders it holds, I will be posting about some of them, starting with the Ca' Doro.

The Ca' D'oro may the most famous of Venice's private gothic pallaces. It was built between 1428 and 1430 for the Contarini family, who provided Venice with eight Doges between 1043 and 1676. The architects of the Ca d'Oro were Giovanni Bon and his son Bartolomeo Bon. The facade, on the grand canal, still looks much the way it did in the fifteenth century.

The details were carved by Matteo Raverti, the most famous stonemason of the day.

The courtyard and the interior were heavily altered in the nineteenth century by a series of non-Contarini owners, most particularly the ballerina Marie Taglioni, who tore down the original staircase.

But then the palazzo was bought by a famous art collector, Baron Giorgio Franchetti, who restored it in quite a remarkable way. Franchetti himself helped to lay the opus sectile floor.

He hunted down fragments from the demolished staircase and rebuilt it as closely as possible to its original appearance.

Franchetti donated his palace and art collection to the state at his death in 1922, and it has been a public museum ever since.

View of the Grand Canal from the piano nobile, which is what Italians call the main public room on the second floor of the palazzo. What an amazing place.

Teaching and Research

As we always suspected:

In a comprehensive analysis of data on more than half a million professors, the education experts John Hattie and Herbert Marsh found that “the relationship between teaching and research is zero.” In all fields and all kinds of colleges, there was little connection between research productivity and teaching ratings by students and peers.

Metal Detecting in Stalingrad

Russia also has metal detector enthusiasts. But whereas in Britain and France they look for lost Roman or Viking treasures, in Russia they look for the dead from World War II.

Seventy years to the day after the battle that changed the course of the Second World War came to its bloody climax, the earth of Stalingrad is still giving up its dead. . . .

Mr Deryabkin, a 38-year-old project manager at a tobacco factory, goes out with other volunteers every weekend to search for the remains of Soviet soldiers in the wheat fields and broken steppe to the west of the city, from where the Germans advanced. His group alone finds 200 bodies a year. Clothes have long since rotted away, but helmets, weapons and bones remain.

Some servicemen carried a small plastic capsule containing their details on a scrap of paper. Not long ago, Mr Deryabkin found just such a capsule on a soldier who had been shot dead through his helmet. "If am I killed, please tell my wife and parents," the young man had scrawled on his ID note. Miraculously, Mr Deryabkin tracked down the man's 97-year-old wife, and his remains were moved to a cemetery. If the volunteers are lucky, Mr Deryabkin said, they find other personal effects with the bones: an aluminum spoon, or a plate with a soldier's name carved on the back.

More Combat = More Pain

This chart comes from the latest report of the U.S. Army's Mental Health Advisory Team. It shows their research confirms what soldiers have always said, that the more combat they experience, the worse the mental trouble. in cast you were wondering, a "combat experience" means

1. Threats (IED Exploded Near You) 
2. Fighting (Shooting at Enemy) 
3. Killing (Responsible for Death of Combatant)
4. Death (Member of Unit Became Casualty)

Knowing this, how can we possibly send young men out to fight again after their 20th such experience?

Flying Snakes

Images of the flying paradise snake, Chrysopelea paradisi. Native to southeast Asia, they glide between trees much like flying squirrels. More at Livescience.

Living Better, Working Less

The Congressional Budget Office thinks health care reform will lead to people working less:

The ACA will tend to reduce [workforce] participation, with the largest impact stemming from new subsidies that reduce the cost of health insurance purchased through exchanges. Specifically, by providing subsidies that decline with rising income (and increase with falling income) and by making some people financially better off, the ACA will create an incentive for some people to choose to work less. . . . The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in business’ demand for labor, so it will appear almost entirely as a reduction in labor force participation and in hours worked relative to what have occurred otherwise rather than as an increase in unemployment (that is, more workers seeking, but not finding jobs) or underemployment (such as part-time workers who would prefer to work more hours per week).

Matthew Yglesias explains the effect like this:

John is 59, has had a good career as a mechanical engineer, has saved pretty diligently his whole life, and also has a chronic heart condition. He's got the cash to retire early, but he's not yet eligible for Medicare. So he needs to keep working more than he wants to for a few more years. Or at least he would have if not for the Affordable Care Act, which makes it feasible for him to buy insurance on the private market and get a jump start on his fishing plans. . . . Obamacare will kill jobs in the same way that Social Security kills jobs. By making it easier for people in certain circumstances to get by without a job.

Whether you think that is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of taste, but it is a very different matter from "Obamacare kills 2 million jobs."

A Novice Shaman in Mongolia

Photo by Carolyn Drake, From National Geographic.

Where did I put that treaty?

Next time you are scouring the house for a missing document that you really should have kept closer track of, consider this story:

Stanislav Shushkevich, the former leader of Belarus, told The Daily Telegraph that the Belavezha Accords — the agreement which sounded the death knell of the USSR in 1991 – had disappeared from state archives. The accords were signed by Mr Shushkevich, Russia’s president Boris Yeltsin and Ukraine’s president Leonid Kravchuk in a hunting lodge in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha nature reserve in western Belarus. It has often been rumoured that the trio were under the influence of alcohol at the time they signed the document which brought down the vast Soviet empire, although Mr Shushkevich has since denied they were drunk.

In a telephone interview, the former Belarus leader said he had requested to see the original document as he prepared to write his memoirs. “The last time I saw it was when I put my signature on it,” said Mr Shushkevich. “I wrote to the foreign ministry where it should be archived but they sent a polite reply saying they don’t have a copy in Belarusian. And then it transpired that they don’t have the original in Russian either. It’s not there.”

The story is from last year,but I just discovered it, and so far as I can tell the accords have not resurfaced.

A Harappan Seal from Rajasthan

The Archaeological Survey of India has been digging at Karanpura in Rajasthan, a site that is outside the accepted boundaries of the Harappan or Indus Valley civilization (2600-1900 BCE). But they are finding evidence that it was occupied in that period, and they just released this picture of a classic Harappan seal from the site.

If Not Meritocracy, What?

Lately I've been reading some conservative essays on the problems with meritocracy. Jeremy Beer, for example, blames meritocracy for the death of small towns, and therefore for the decline of small town values; for the collapse of family life among the poor; and for the arrogance and entitlement of elites, whose belief that they earned every penny by their own great merit leads them increasingly toward libertarianism. Rod Dreher bemoans the worship of intellect and drive among elites both left and right and wonders why we can't have an "aristocracy of virtue." Ross Douthat accuses the American elite -- especially liberals, but not only liberals -- of not seeing how their insistence on personal freedom has made life much worse for those at the bottom.

All of these "crunchy cons" draw inspiration from poet/novelist/activist Wendell Berry. Berry is an environmentalist and anti-war crusader, but he is also conservative in the truest sense of the word, a man devoted to conserving small-town life, old-fashioned farming, and a slow, careful approach to any sort of change. Berry loathes the busy life of ambitious city people struggling their way to the top, which he thinks is death to the “living integrity of creatures, places, communities, cultures, and human souls.” He also hates the message we give to young people, that they can achieve anything if only they work hard enough and travel far enough:

Young people are told, “You can be anything you want to be.” Every student is given to understand that he or she is being prepared for “leadership.” All of this is a lie. You can’t be everything you want to be; nobody can. Everybody can’t be a leader; not everybody even wants to be. And these lies are not innocent. They lead to disappointment. They lead good young people to think that if they have an ordinary job, if they work with their hands, if they are farmers or housewives or mechanics or carpenters, they are no good.

The fear that meritocracy leads mainly to disappointment is an old one; Jeremy Beer cites several examples going back to the eighteenth century. If you are told often enough that your future is entirely in your own hands, and that people rise or fall entirely by their own merits, then failure to achieve great things becomes a black cloud you cannot escape. If the world is fair, and you are not at the top, then you are clearly not one of the top people. And if you do succeed, then you obviously are a supremely excellent person who gets no more than you deserve, and taking some of your money to help the stupid slackers at the bottom is just highway robbery.

Driving across America, Jeremy Beer passed through wrecked towns and decided that our meritocratic education system was a big part of the problem:

Indeed, with regard to higher education, we might think of meritocracy as the equivalent of the practice of strip-mining. For the meritocratic system is a method that uses impersonal technology (e.g., the SAT) to help us identify valuable natural resources (bright kids), and then pitilessly removes them from their ecological contexts (local communities), never to return them, thus creating cultural landscapes just as ravaged as the denuded mountainsides of Kentucky coal country.

This image of towns strip-mined of young talent strikes me deeply. All my readers know that I also wonder about the effects of meritocracy, some of which seem to me quite bad. But what is the alternative? Wendell Berry writes lyrically about peasant agriculture, but that is hardly a realistic vision for a world of seven billion people. Douthat and Dreher think we need more religion, and have sought answers in conservative Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy; Dreher also left the coastal city where he became a successful journalist and moved back to St. Francisville, Louisiana where he grew up. Jeremy Beer is equally focused on localism; he wants us all to stay where we grew up, or move back there if we left, and then for our children to "be educated and formed in such a manner" that leaving home "is comparatively unattractive and unusual."

To that I say that if I had somehow been bullied into staying in Rolla, Missouri, where I went to high school, my life would have been a bitter, blasted ruin. The only goal I could imagine in those days was to get far away. It may well be that our mobility, our rootlessness, our constant striving for success, our black brooding over our failures, are somehow at the root of our problems finding meaning, purpose and happiness in life. But any change we might make toward limiting human freedom would ruin somebody's life, and that is a high price to pay for a theory of virtue.

Dreher and Douthat both want our culture -- whatever that is, and wherever it might be found -- to work harder at teaching virtue and convincing poor people that the way to live well is to work hard, get married, obey the law and generally follow the middle-class script. After all, that is what successful middle class people do. I find all of this absurd; these people know nothing about history. The aristocratic, localized systems of the Old World had many virtues, but they survived only by violent oppression, and even then only because of extremely slow social and economic change. The industrial revolution blasted all those systems out of existence. In some places this happened peacefully; in others the old elite tried to resist (Russia, China, the Confederacy) and got shot for their trouble. Cultural disapproval not backed up by savage repression is just not very effective. Americans today are simply not willing to treat a woman who gives birth out of wedlock with Victorian savagery, nor to shun a whole family because of one black sheep. We won't run offenders against our morals out of town on a rail -- which is not a metaphor but an actual way of punishing social deviants much practiced in the sort of tight-knit communities these men claim to love. A little paternalistic nudging won't change how Americans act.

I also don't understand what we are supposed to do to keep small towns economically viable -- or old industrial cities, for that matter. People leave home because they can't find work. How are we going to force global businesses to keep their factories and offices open in the places we want to preserve? That would require a system of business regulation so draconian and all-encompassing that even I find the thought intolerable, and I don't know what self-proclaimed conservatives think could be done. As for an alternative to meritocracy, what would that be? Random hiring? How would we go about bringing back aristocracy even if we wanted to?

Going backwards is not the answer. We are stuck with the world we have -- a global economy, a meritocratic system, vast personal freedom. If we are to have meaningful lives, we are must find them within the world as it is. Nostalgia for small-town life won't save us. After all, a big part of what Berry and his admirers like about that past world is the acceptance of limits. They want people to stay within the confines of the world they were born in rather than fleeing it for somewhere else or making poorly thought-out attempts to change everything. If we are going to be happy in our world, we have to take the same approach: accept its limits, find our place within it, adapt our lives to its rhythms. Like Taoist sages, we must flow like water over the rocks of our own troubled times.

Today's Baffling Image, or, the Weirdest Animal in the Bronze Age

Behold the strangest pet in all of Bronze Age art. At least I think this is Bronze Age art; I have been having terrible trouble tracking this image to its source. I found on it first on this page about the citadel of Metsamor in Armenia, a site occupied from the Neolithic into the Middle Ages. I thought perhaps that it was some object in the Metsamor museum, but no luck finding it on the museum's site or any tourist's account of visiting the museum. I found it again on this page about the civilization of Urartu, a Bronze Age kingdom in roughly that same part of the world.

So I fear it must remain a mystery. But what a wonderfully weird image it is.

Heroin is Back, thanks to OxyContin

Some scary numbers:

The government's substance abuse survey found that from 2007 to 2012, the number of heroin users in the U.S. rose from 373,000 to 669,000. In 2010, there were 38,329 drug overdose deaths in the U.S., a 102% increase since 1999. The cause is not far to seek:

Public health professionals have known for nearly a decade that a new cohort of heroin users was in the making as the prescription drug epidemic spread. This is a matter of pure economics. Prescription dope isn’t cheap. In Philadelphia, an 80 milligram OxyContin pill will cost you $40. "Oxys" are safe in that the potency is predictable. Pills usually trade in safer parts of town than the North Philadelphia heroin corners where bullets can fly at any moment and the Narc Squad is always on the prowl. You pay a premium for upscale product, though; for the same amount of money, you could get four bags of heroin that are just as potent. Eventually, heavy users run out of money for pills and seek out cheaper powders.

Actually you can get heroin in New York right now for $6 a bag. Plus there have been some modest efforts to crack down on the illegal OxyContin trade, such as identifying and cutting off doctors whose practices have become pill mills, and this has hurt the supply a little. So addicts are moving on to heroin by the hundreds of thousands.

Boulder Trouble

On January 23, two huge boulders came rolling down a mountain in Ronchi di Termeno, in northern Italy. The first crashed through the barn of this farmhouse and rolled on out into the vineyard.

The second was headed straight for the house, but stopped just short.

So what might have been a total disaster ended up being a partial one. More pictures here.

Failure is always an Option

Clay Shirky responds to reports that Federal health care executives answered warnings by engineers that healthcare.gov would not be ready on launch day by saying “failure is not an option”:

The idea that “failure is not an option” is a fantasy version of how non-engineers should motivate engineers. That sentiment was invented by a screenwriter, riffing on an after-the-fact observation about Apollo 13; no one said it at the time. (If you ever say it, wash your mouth out with soap. If anyone ever says it to you, run.) Even NASA’s vaunted moonshot, so often referred to as the best of government innovation, tested with dozens of unmanned missions first, several of which failed outright.

Failure is always an option. Engineers work as hard as they do because they understand the risk of failure. And for anything it might have meant in its screenplay version, here that sentiment means the opposite; the unnamed executives were saying “Addressing the possibility of failure is not an option.”

The Rich Get Richer, Part N

The Times reports that businessmen are talking like left-wing academics these days, retooling their strategies around selling to the rich because the middle class has no money to spend:

In response to the upward shift in spending, PricewaterhouseCoopers clients like big stores and restaurants are chasing richer customers with a wider offering of high-end goods and services, or focusing on rock-bottom prices to attract the expanding ranks of penny-pinching consumers. “As a retailer or restaurant chain, if you’re not at the really high level or the low level, that’s a tough place to be,” Mr. Maxwell said. “You don’t want to be stuck in the middle.”

Since the crash, things have only gotten worse:

The current recovery has been driven almost entirely by the upper crust, according to Mr. Fazzari and Mr. Cynamon. Since 2009, the year the recession ended, inflation-adjusted spending by this top echelon has risen 17 percent, compared with just 1 percent among the bottom 95 percent.

The chart at the top of the post shows the percentage of overall consumer spending by the top 5 percent of earners; they now account for 38% of all consumer spending in America. And this does not bode well for the economic future:

While spending among the most affluent consumers has managed to propel the economy forward, the sharpening divide is worrying, Mr. Fazzari said. “It’s going to be hard to maintain strong economic growth with such a large proportion of the population falling behind,” he said. “We might be able to muddle along — but can we really recover?”

Meanwhile, one of our two political parties is still focused on creating more of this same kind of “growth” by cutting taxes on the rich and cutting spending on everyone else.

Bronze in 4700 BCE; or, the Metalsmiths of Pločnik, Technology, and Social Change

The Bronze Age, as everybody knows, began in the Middle East around 3300 BCE. You can look it up.

So what is one to make of claims coming out of southeastern Europe of real bronze -- alloys of copper and tin -- made as early as 4700 BCE? I think these discoveries are an interesting lesson in the complex relationship between new technology and cultural change.

The early bronze artifacts recently discovered at Pločnik in Serbia were ornaments, a ring and a piece of foil. They were not tools or weapons. This is characteristic of the "copper age" cultures of Europe, such as the Cucuteni culture of Romania and the Vinča culture of the upper Danube, of which Pločnik is part. These copper age cultures are quite fascinating. They had sizable towns with impressive walls and produced remarkable pottery and numerous other art forms, like these figurines of women in fancy dresses. They had quite a bit of skill with metal. But they were still effectively in the stone age.

Consider the famous "golden man" burial from Varna in Bulgaria, dating to around 4200 BCE.  Once you get past wondering about the gold penis sheath you will notice that most of the metal objects are ornamental, while the useful ones -- the ax heads, for example -- are mostly stone. Copper ax heads are known from this culture -- Oetzi the "ice man" was carrying one -- as are a few other tools like chisels and spear heads. But for all these purposes copper is no better than stone, and generally it is worse. If you tried to cut down a large tree with a copper ax you would have to sharpen it so often it would be half gone by the time you finished.

Bronze is a different proposition. Properly made bronze axes are quite hard and strong; bronze swords are formidable weapons. An army armed and armored with bronze would have a decisive advantage over one equipped only with stone or copper weapons.

And this is what makes the finds from Pločnik interesting. Pločnik is one of the larger copper age towns, measuring 120 hectares or nearly 300 acres. It was occupied between 5400 and 4700 BCE. Excavations have been going on for years.

The findings suggest an advanced division of labor and organization. Houses had stoves, there were special holes for trash, and the dead were buried in a tidy necropolis. People slept on woollen mats and fur, made clothes of wool, flax and leather, and kept animals. The community was especially fond of children. Artefacts include toys such as animals and rattles of clay, and small, clumsily crafted pots apparently made by children at playtime.

The metal workshop in the town was unearthed in 2007, but the full analysis has only recently been published:

"These latest findings show that the Vinča culture was from the very beginning a metallurgical culture," said archaeologist Dusan Sljivar of Serbia’s National Museum. "They knew how to find minerals, to transport them and melt them into tools." The metal workshop in Pločnik was a room of some 25 square meters, with walls built out of wood coated with clay. The furnace, built on the outside of the room, featured earthen pipe-like air vents with hundreds of tiny holes in them and a prototype chimney to ensure air goes into the furnace to feed the fire and smoke comes out safely. Sljivar said the early metal workers very likely experimented with colorful minerals that caught their eye – blue azurite, bright green malachite and red cuprite, all containing copper – as evidenced by malachite traces found on the inside of a pot.

So these people had, by 4700 BCE, all the knowledge necessary to create a real Bronze Age technology. Notice that they built up this knowledge by messing around with different brightly-colored rocks and seeing what happened when they put them in the smelter. This is the only way such knowledge could be obtained, and it shows again that technological progress often requires that people be given the time and financial support to mess around until they come up with something. The metal smiths must have been supported by the elite that dominated these towns, whose status is shown in burials like the one from Varna.

But after developing this awesome technology, the people of Pločnik used it for making different kinds of ornaments. The elite used bronze to reinforce their social status through new kinds of display. They did not use it to make their army stronger or the lives of their woodworkers easier. As British archaeologist Colin Renfrew once wrote, ‘early copper does not produce anything useful at all.’

Having mastered bronze technology and made little use of it, they then forgot it. This is the other fascinating thing about the metal technology of the European copper age; after 4000 BCE it disappeared, and so far as we know metal tools were not made in this area again until after 2500 BCE, when mature bronze technology was re-introduced from the Middle East. It strikes me that when a whole people can forget how to do something, they have not really incorporated that knowledge into the routines of their culture.

Technology creates social or economic change only when somebody chooses to deploy it on a large scale. For some technologies, such as the bow and arrow, the investment needed was small and every man could choose for himself whether to take up the bow. But for something that required a large investment, like water mills or bronze smelting, this was a political decision that could only be made by a whole community or its leaders. Often they said no. In most past societies, the power to invest in a new technology resided with a narrow elite, and if they did not see any gain for themselves in making that investment, they did not do it. Thus the Romans could build sophisticated water mills but built few; from the point of view of their elite, this would only put some of their slaves out of work, so why bother? They did not start building mills like the one at Barbegal in France (above) on a large scale until the troubles of the fifth century, when they began to experience labor shortages, and even then they built very few compared to the astonishing proliferation of mills in the Middle Ages.

Not everyone who knew how to make bronze was part of the Bronze Age. The Bronze Age began only after Middle Eastern city states decided to make bronze on a massive scale and systematically replace their stone weapons and cutting tools with metal. Only then did trade in copper and tin re-arrange whole economies; only then did the improved technology have real impacts on the productivity of workers or the deadliness of soldiers. Only then can we speak of a Bronze Age. The mere existence of bronze changed nothing.

Alepotrypa Cave

Alepotrypa Cave was discovered in 1958 by a Greek villager. Everyone in the village agrees that it was found because a dog followed a fox down a hole and then the owner followed the dog -- hence the name, which means "foxhole" -- but since everybody says it was his own father or grandfather who did this, outsiders are skeptical. Still, somebody discovered it. And it was immediately brought to the attention of archaeologists because the whole place is full of human bones.

The cave is more than 1000 meters long and up to 200 meters wide; the main chamber is 60 meters (200 feet) tall. It holds a lake where Jacques Cousteau once scuba-dived, hoping to film the discovery of yet more bones.

Serious archaeological excavations began in 1970. The cave was occupied in the Late Neolithic, 5000 to 3300 BCE. Besides the bones, numerous artifacts have been found, of the sorts usually found on domestic sites: pottery, obsidian tools, some copper and silver. After decades of work, the nature of the site remains controversial. In just an hour of reading I have managed to find multiple contradictory claims about what this represents.

The longtime excavator of the caves, Giorgos Papathanassopoulos, believes that the pottery was not made in the cave but brought from elsewhere, in fact from several elsewheres. He thinks the diversity of the pottery means the cave was a place of pilgrimage. He thinks the bones represent special people brought from throughout the region to be buried in this special place, which he thinks inspired Greek notions of Hades. This last bit about Hades is nonsense, since everything about the Greek notion of Hades can be replicated in other cultures around the world, but it seems to have landed the site in a lot of newspapers back in 2012. There is certainly plenty of evidence of rituals taking place in the cave, including deposits of dis-articulated bones and large fire pits, and there may be something to the notion that it served as a cult center for a wider community during at least part of its history.

But other archaeologists think the cave was an ordinary domestic site.

Archaeological investigations during the 1970s produced evidence that there was habitation of both the interior, but also of the wider cave area. Its lateral niches formed the living quarters of Neolithic families and hearths, radially defined by stones, small ovens and storage pits dug on the floor of the cave chambers, seem to have served the whole community. The study of animal bones and charred fruit indicates that animal husbandry, hunting and fishing were the main sources of diet. The practice of farming was limited since the immediate natural environment did not particularly favour its development. Among the activities of the inhabitants, pottery manufacture (vases with painted decoration, storage vases), jewellery making of bone and Spondylus sea-shell and metallurgy were carried out.

The bones have been carefully studied by Anastasia Papathanasiou, who thinks they represent a typical sample from an ordinary Neolithic community:

The Alepotrypa sample comes from primary and secondary burials as well as scattered bone, and consists of a minimum number of 161 individuals. It includes equal proportions of adults and subadults and males and females, is characterized by high child mortality, and falls within the range of other Neolithic sites in terms of age profiles and stature. The most frequent pathological conditions observed in this population are: 1) anemic conditions (cribra orbitalia and porotic hyperostosis), mild or healed in manifestation, most probably of nutritional origin, resulting from a poor diet focused on terrestrial resources such as domesticated cereals; 2) osteoarthritis and musculoskeletal stress markers, indicative of increased physical activity and heavy workloads; and 3) elevated prevalence of healed, depressed cranial fractures, serving as evidence of violent, nonlethal confrontations. 

Some of the bones had been burned, others not; some burials were single, others in groups. The cranial fractures are interesting. They were found on nine of the 61 reasonably intact skulls, which is a high percentage and indicates a violent society. On the other hand they are not especially serious; they are the sort of wound given by a baseball bat rather than a stone mace. Here's a theory for all you headline writers out there: neolithic Greeks settled their disputes by facing off against each other with wooden clubs until one or the other man was knocked down. To do this they journeyed to the spectacular cave and walked far back into the dark, holding their duels on the edge of the Sacred Lake of Judgment. . . . Perhaps this is not as spectacular as "Killer Cave May Have Inspired Myth of Hades," but at least my theory has a small chance of being true.

It all ended around 3200 BCE, when the entrance collapsed, probably during an earthquake. All the accounts say that people were trapped inside or killed by the collapse, but I haven't actually seen any evidence of that. The collapse certainly preserved all of this intact by sealing the cave off from the world for 5,000 years.

Mount Sinabung Kills

Indonesia's Mount Sinabung has been erupting off and on since 2010, and in November the government ordered the evacuation of 30,000 people living near the volcano. Last week things settled down, and Friday they allowed 14,000 people to return home. Then, kablooie. The volcano spewed forth a deadly cloud of hot ash and killed 14 people, sending thousands fleeing. The pictures look like Armageddon.

Over-Hyping the Keystone Pipeline

Sometime in the next decade, President Obama will decide whether to approve the Keystone Pipeline. This is intended to bring oil from central Canada, much of which comes from tar sands, to the US. Activists on both sides of this issue have taken all sorts of dramatic stands -- viz., some Republicans in Congress have suggested making approval of the pipeline a condition for raising the debt limit. But is it really that important?

The State Department has released their Environmental Impact Statement on the project, and it concludes that the impact on greenhouse emissions would be small:

The new State Department report concludes that the process used for producing the oil — by extracting what are called tar sands or oil sands from the Alberta forest — creates about 17 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than traditional oil. But the report concludes that this heavily polluting oil will still be brought to market. Energy companies are already moving the oil out of Canada by rail.

“At the end of the day, there’s a consensus among most energy experts that the oil will get shipped to market no matter what,” said Robert McNally, an energy consultant who was a senior energy and economic adviser to President George W. Bush. “It’s less important than I think it was perceived to be a year ago, both politically and on oil markets.” The new State Department analysis took into account the growing global demand for oil and the rapidly growing practice of moving oil by rail in areas where pipelines have not been built. “Given the anticipated outlook of oil prices and the cost of development, no single project will likely affect the rate of extraction,” said a senior State Department official.

And if the oil is going to market anyway, using pipelines saves energy compared to trains and reduces the risk of accidents.

Environmentalists really ought to be focusing on the President's proposed regulation of CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants. Phasing out coal-generated electricity would have an impact a thousand times greater than blocking one pipeline. And one person who understands this is the President:

Privately, people close to Mr. Obama say that although he is committed to building a climate legacy, he does not see the pipeline as a central part of that effort. Instead, the president is moving forward with a set of Environmental Protection Agency regulations on coal-fired power plants, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

I suggest a strategy of approving the pipeline and then using the resulting hubbub as cover for quietly releasing the final power plant regs.

New York in Winter

Pigeons huddled on a steaming manhole cover in Central Park, by Damon Winter. More here.

Gaochang

Gaochang was an oasis city in western China, one of a string along the Silk Road as it skirted the northern edge of the Taklamakan Desert. These days it is a tourist stop, popular in part because it is at the eastern end of the desert, allowing visitors from China to see something of the Silk Road without having to cross hundreds of miles of grim wasteland.

The city was founded in the first century CE by Juchi people, natives to the region. It first fell under Chinese control in 327 CE, and from then on it alternated between rule by China and various nomad empires.

In 850 it became the capital of the Uighur kingdom of Qocho (alias Chotscho, Khocho, or Qočo). It remained under Uighur control until it became part of the Mongol empire in 1209. Under the Uighurs it was a cultural crossroads, and remains of Buddhist stupas,

Nestorian churches,

and Manichaean shrines can still be seen there.

It was sacked by the Mongols in 1318 and thereafter declined, disappearing by the seventeenth century. Above, Uighur princesses.