One sits behind one’s desk
This week an agreement was reached on a treaty banning cluster munitions. See Cluster Munition Coalition: http://www.stopclustermunitions.org/ and Human Rights Watch: http://www.hrw.org/doc/?t=arms_clusterbombs. Being a pessimist — as far as the future of our society and our world is concerned – I don’t think this means that cluster munitions will soon be a thing of the past, and if that happens, it will be because we have come up with some new and at least as lethal.
Cluster bombs have been banned because of their impact on civilian populations (as battle field weapons they are a huge success, denying space to one’s enemy: always an essential part of strategy). A cluster bomb opens on descend and releases up to 200 ‘bomblets’ (‘air dispensed submunitions’: for some technical stuff, refer to http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/cluster.htm). Up to 5% of these bomblets are duds: unexploded they litter the landscape and kill or main for a long time afterwards (often children, who think these are toys). “Drop today, kill tomorrow” as it was put in a Mennonite condemnation of cluster bombs. One can compare the landmine problem.
Terrible of course. But I had to think of something equally terrible: the mind conceiving of the cluster munition. Someone figuring out how every small canister (one type of submunition) descending on an individual parachute will turn into a small fragmentation bomb, disintegrating on impact and spraying at least 300 bits of steel in every direction. Not 100 or 200 bits of steel, but at least 300. Of explosive charges intended to maim rather than kill. Dead people are merely dead, maimed people are a burden on the enemy. You go to the office in the morning, get your fill of coffee, open your laptop, sharpen your pencil. You stare pensively out of the window at the sun slowly peircing the morning haze above the treetops, think of your loved ones at home, take a deep breath, and then you start working on the design of a real good cluster bomb.
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Blasko Gabric for president
In a BBC special report titled “What happened to Yugoslavia?” there is a short interview with Blasko Gabric, the man who runs the theme park (well, a very large word for a couple of billboards in a meadow) Yugoland. Hear and see the man at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7416069.stm. Being asked what he liked about the old Yugoslavia, Blasko Gabric says: “the peace, we had the peace, we had brotherhood; they said it was artificial brotherhood unity. I said, I like artificial brotherhood unity, hundred times more than the war between brothers”. Nice man, sensible ideas. That is why he is in a meadow with some lousy billboards.
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To build a fire
In a pre-press release, The Journal of Human Evolution has made available online an article by Victoria Wobber, Brian Hare, and Richard Wrangham, titled “Great apes prefer cooked food”.
Below I quote the abstract that can be found at www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00472484 (go to: articles in the press). You can buy the whole article for PDF-download, if your library does not provide access.
“The cooking hypothesis proposes that a diet of cooked food was responsible for diverse morphological and behavioral changes in human evolution. However, it does not predict whether a preference for cooked food evolved before or after the control of fire. This question is important because the greater the preference shown by a raw-food-eating hominid for the properties present in cooked food, the more easily cooking should have been adopted following the control of fire. Here we use great apes to model food preferences by Paleolithic hominids. We conducted preference tests with various plant and animal foods to determine whether great apes prefer food items raw or cooked. We found that several populations of captive apes tended to prefer their food cooked, though with important exceptions. These results suggest that Paleolithic hominids would likewise have spontaneously preferred cooked food to raw, exapting [sic] a pre-existing preference for high-quality, easily chewed foods onto these cooked items. The results, therefore, challenge the hypothesis that the control of fire preceded cooking by a significant period.”
This is intriguing: what did hominids do to provide their growing brain with energy? Start hunting and eat meat. But the primatologist Richard Wrangham says that hominids also started cooking maybe some 2 million years ago. There are remains of fires dated to 1,8 million years ago, but these are much debated: are they the traces of accidental fires or true fire places? Usually, the use of fire by human beings is supposed to have started only 250.000 years ago. And a lot of speculation about human development has been connected to the human conquest of fire. Amongst it an evolving preference for cooked food. If we have to move that momentous conquest of fire far back in time, the cooking of food will move with it. If the preference for cooked food of the great apes, especially chimps, is something to go by, cooking and the use of fire may have evolved to satisfy human craving for easily digestible food, and not the other way round. For me as an ancient historian 250.000 years is already a time span almost impossible to grasp, and it does not really make a difference whether something is dated to 20.000, 200.000 or 2.000.000 years ago. But methodologically, this debate is VERY interesting indeed.
Filed under: Archaeology, History | Leave a Comment
Continuity of worship
Underneath the church of Elst, Holland, which dates to the 15th century, there have been found the remains of a 8th-century church and of two Roman temples , dated to the 1st and 2nd c. A.D. It has always been thought that the 8th-c. church was built on what was considered at the time, and had been considered for centuries before, a sacred spot. I even told my students as much, when I organized a trip to Elst to see the temple remains. But I should have thought somewhat harder about the actual evidence. Archaeologists of the Free University of Amsterdam have now published a new excavation report which shows that the area was uninhabited between the 3rd and 7th c. They have also discovered a 8th-c. text in which it is stated that the church has been built, or is to be built, on top of the remains of a Roman army camp. Not only is there a centuries long gap in occupation, also when re-occupation takes place, temple remains need not be recognized as such! So much for continuity. There has been an incredible amount of work done in recent years on sacred space, sacred topography of complete landscapes, lieux de memoire and so on and so forth. But this simple example of Elst shows that we should be careful to presuppose long-term continuity. If there is no clear evidence to support any such presupposition, hesitate and think again.
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Eleven elderly women were burned alive in Kenya because they were suspected of being witches. See the BBC news report: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7413268.stm. Typical for Africa, you say? Where believe in magic lingers on? Certainly many of the news reports on this sad occurrence carried overtones of “Darkest Africa”.
In France some 15 graves are desecrated every day (!) by Satanists and other self-proclaimed adherents of the dark arts (now disconcertingly in league with Neo-Nazis: the Goths have surely lost their innocence). This might teach us two things: the world is not a very happy place to live in for many African villagers or for French youngsters; and the susceptibility to supernatural beliefs is as strong as always.
Filed under: General, History, Religion | 1 Comment
Surrealist, to be sure
Sotheby auctioned a hand-written copy of Andre Breton’s Manifeste du Surrealisme for 3,6 million euros. The auction house had valued the 21-page manuscript at 200.000 to 500.000 euros.
This is all SO ironic, considering the anti-establishment, especially anti-art-etablishment, character of the surrealist movement. Once again, it has been shown that money perverts all original thought. The only appropriate thing would have been to take the manuscript by a corner, light a match and burn the bloody thing right in the middle of the auction room. Preferably after the bidding had ended. Imagine the gasps of the audience seeing something worth 3,6 million euros (or rather something that one could exchange for that amount, provided some idiot would be willing to part with the money), going up in smoke. A surrealist performance!
And we would still have the text, because that is something you can have for free — as any true surrealist would like to have it. French: http://www.wikilivres.info/wiki/index.php/Manifeste_du_surr%C3%A9alisme, and an English translation: http://www.screensite.org/courses/Jbutler/T340/SurManifesto/ManifestoOfSurrealism.htm. Read it and if you have never read it before, be ready to be surprized. Over 80 years old, still anarchic — but of course Sotheby is not into anarchy, unless one can put an estimate on it.
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PVV shows racist face
The Dutch right-wing party PVV, whose leader Wilders drew international attention with his anti-Koran movie Fitna (the stupidity of which was so glaring that even a majority of Muslims did not waste their anger on that, in spite of the insults), now shows its true face: they protested against the commemoration of North-African soldiers who died fighting for Dutch freedom in WW II (as did the 12 Moroccan soldiers buried in Kapelle, Zeeland, who were killed in action in May 1940, fighting in a French expeditionary force). Of course the PVV is right to say that the role played by soldiers from Africa was very small in the Netherlands (not so elsewhere!) and that stressing that role is politically correct policy making. But I have never heard the PVV attack the countless other instances in which history is misrepresented in whatever way. Only now that there are North-Africans involved, does the PVV find itself constrained to defend the ‘truth’. I can see nothing but racism there.
Read about this item on the PVV website (In Dutch), and shudder: http://www.pvv.nl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1037&Itemid=6. The way they phrase their misgivings is sickening: “Would D-Day not have been a success without allochtonous soldiers?”, or even worse: “Would the allies have won the Battle of Arnhem when those who migrated into Holland [sic!] had not taken part?”. Misrepresentation! Look who’s talking.
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Caesar surfaces, or did he?
There are now hundreds of references on the web to the discovery of a supposed bust of Julius Caesar, announced two days ago. Most of these are variants on the text distributed by the Associated Press. In fact, the bust was found between September and October 2007 in the River Rhone by divers of the Département des recherches archéologiques subaquatiques et sous-marines (DRASSM) of the university of Marseille, together with other pieces of Roman statuary and architectural members: a marble statue of Neptune, 1.80 meters high, dated to the early 3rd c. A.D., two bronze statues of about 70 cm high, one of Marsyas, the other a Victory, a limestone lion on a base, a Corinthian capital and fragments of other capitals, columns, two stelai and an altar.
For a fairly large size image of the bust: http://cozop.com/og/le_buste_decouvert_de_jules_cesar.
Truly a remarkable find, as it was put in a statement by the French Minster of Culture, Christine Abanel. But of course, the find, however remarkable, would never have created such a stirr without this talk about the bust of Caesar. And not just any bust, but the oldest depiction of Caesar known, put up in Arles in 46 B.C. and thrown into the river after his assassination, when this portrait became too hot to handle — in the reconstruction by archaeologist Luc Long, quoted by Agence France Presse. But is this true? On first seeing a picture of the bust, it did not look like Caesar to me. If it is a unique image from a stage in Caesar’s career from which we have no other images, what do we compare this portrait to? It is not labelled, nor is there a note to tell us when it ended up in the river and why. How did it come to be associated with this 3rd-c. A.D. Neptune? Was this is favourite spot for dumping statues? (further finds are expected in a summer 2008 diving campaign). Questions, questions.
Amidst all the fanfare I came to think I was the only one to doubt the identification, but no, there is still some common sense about: see Mary Beard’s weblog: http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2008/05/the-face-of-jul.html.
Filed under: Archaeology, History, Rome | Leave a Comment
Extinct is for ever
The BBC World Service today quoted the Living Planet Index of the WWF and the Zoological Society of London as saying that between a quarter and a third of the world’s wildlife has been lost since 1970. Well within my life time, so the speed at which this is happening is truly staggering. The losses are so enormous that I can see them with my own eyes.
It is a single species, humans, who are destroying about 1% of all other species every year. The report calls this one of the “great extinction episodes” in the Earth’s history. Nobody seems very upset, but then they do not realize that humans will not survive on their own, in a world bereft of other animals. For the BBC story, go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7403989.stm.
Information on the Living Planet Index and more at: http://www.panda.org/news_facts/publications/living_planet_report/living_planet_index/index.cfm
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History destroyed
Amidst sad news coming in about the destruction of human settlements in Birma and China, with enormous loss of life, today is commemorated the annihilation of the inner city of Rotterdam, not by the forces of nature, but by enemy action. German bombers wiped the heart of Rotterdam off the map in 15 minutes time. Other Dutch towns would suffer the same fate if resistance continued: Holland capitulated.
For Rotterdam this came too late, and the city has been looking for its lost heart ever since — as expressed in the incredibly moving statue by Ossip Zadkine, Lost City, that for me sums up Rotterdam’s plight better than any words. But nevertheless we do need words and pictures to remind us of what happened in May 1940, and there is an impressive website that has rich offerings. For a Dutch and an English version, visit
Rotterdam was the town of my father and of his father. The town they knew has gone up in smoke. Rotterdam Municipal Archives have done their very best to insure that its history and the history of the attempt to erase its history survive.
Good pictures of Zadkine’s statue: http://byfiles.storage.live.com/y1ps42J-5NwjZSpbkXbDW42l0GTQzIaNrmTvL4-4yD8WIKtjsAMONykLshXnzTRvCaLnEDHS8HhyJs or http://www.erasmuspc.com/index.php?id=18291&type=article.
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