2023-11-03

Going Old School

Recently it became clear that the dining room floor needed to be replaced. My wife and I decided that when we replaced the floor firstly, it must look good and secondly, it should only need doing again in a century or so.

As ever, if you want something durable, go back to the past. Our gas furnace is three decades old and regarded as an ancient horror by service technicians. However that furnace is only the back-up to a wood stove that would have been immediately familiar to an ancient Roman. That wood stove is scheduled to pack in some time around AD 2150. Likewise we used to get through a Teflon type frying pan every three years. Now we use an old-fashioned cast-iron pan that, with proper care, is basically indestructible. You get the idea.

So for a durable floor we decided on solid hardwood planks. Inquiries (it's a small town) found us a maple floor from an old house. The planks had been taken up after water damage and have spent the 21st century drying out in someone's basement. The way you persuade somewhat warped planks to fit seamlessly together is you don't nail from the top but at an angle through the side. If you do this always from the same direction, row after row, the wood slowly bends back into shape from the pressure.

So that's what we have been doing for the past month. The result is a rather handsome-looking floor, laid in the manner that such floors have been laid for millennia. The main difference is that, rather than painfully hammering in the nails by hand, we used a powerful pneumatic nailer. Old-school is great, but need not be taken too far.

2023-10-03

Ivory Towers and Stone Balls

For some time academics have wondered about the carved stone balls found in neolithic settlements such as Skara Brae in the Orkneys. Various ideas have been suggested – that they are totemic symbols, that they are passed from hand to hand to show the speaker at a meeting, that they indicate possession of the thing that they are placed upon, and so on.

Which is one of the things about academics – they need more exposure to the real world.

When I first saw those 'mysterious' stone balls, I thought 'Oh, cheese mould blanks' and did not realize that no-one else had considered this. I have family in the Tatry mountains of Poland where traditional cheeses of similar shapes are still made (albeit with wooden moulds).

At Skara Brae the process would have worked like this. Make your master copy from carved stone, then bake clay around it in two halves. Remove the carved stone to make more moulds and fill the two baked clay mould halves with cheese curds and compress. Afterwards dip the pressed cheese in hot whey and finally smoke it. We still do this at home for fancy mozzarellas, albeit using purchased moulds.

Even if this was not the purpose of the carved stone balls, you could certainly make pretty cheese with the things even today. But see for yourself – look up 'Oscypek' and 'Skara Brae stone balls' and note the similarities. Also note that all these stone balls are carved in such a way that clay mould halves would come off easily after baking.

Food for thought ...

2023-09-04

Smoke and mirrors

It has been a tough summer in British Columbia. My home province has been devastated by wildfires that have destroyed hundreds of homes and thousands of hectares of forest.

One aspect of being a historian is that one grows accustomed to teasing out the bias from reports. As a result it seems to me that, as well as the smell of burning wood which fills the air hereabouts, there is also a powerful whiff of BS on the airwaves.

Official pronouncements in the media repeatedly lay the blame for the devastating wildfires on climate change – something which is not exclusively the fault of provincial or federal government. Yet apart from a cooler climate in the past there were three major factors preventing today's destructive fires. Firstly, there was a lot of old growth in the forest. A tree with a two-meter trunk is very hard to burn. Secondly the forest was mixed, with harder-to-burn deciduous trees such as birch and aspen sharing space with highly inflammable larch and pine.

Finally local tribes were in the habit of burning off undergrowth in the autumn which removed the primary fuel for fire starting. This autumnal clearance also encouraged the growth of Adler which is hard to burn. Over the past century - purely in the interest of profit - the government has allowed the extensive logging of old growth and removes 'commercially valueless' trees from the forest by spraying aspen and birch with herbicide. It uproots the Adler and has made illegal fall fires which clear the undergrowth.

In short, having short-sightedly made the interior of the province into a perfect fire-trap, the powers-that-be are now blaming the climate. I doubt history will let them off that lightly.

2023-08-05

The Reading List

One of the things about being an ancient historian is that you get to read – a lot. Almost everyone in my profession has a large and growing pile of books on their 'to read' list. There's a massive outpouring of books from academia, which is not helped by the fact that some people are required by the conditions of their grant to publish their research. This leads to the need to sort the wheat from the chaff and it's not always easy. One of the most fascinating theses I've ever read was about Anglo-Saxon Buckets. But even after sorting a lot of worthy books go unread.

There is also a massive corpus of ancient texts to get through. Everyone knows of Tacitus and Cicero, but what about Bacchylides, Columella and over a hundred others? It does not help that some of the really obscure texts are not in translation, so reading them involves doing the job oneself.

Because it is not possible to read everything, some historians choose only to read modern research, while others, such as myself tend to ignore the modern stuff and concentrate on material written at least sixteen hundred years ago. So you get a historian whose knowledge of an ancient writer such as say, Appian, is based on what Smith says about what Syme says about Appian. That historian has hardly glanced at the original text of Appian because there's so much modern stuff about. Or you get historians such as myself who have read the entire corpus, but almost nothing from later eras, and so missed a number of potentially valuable insights along the way.

I console myself that a lot of modern ancient history gets old really fast. No-one is really interested in the racist blather produced by many late 19th century historians, and the Marxist theorizing of the 1960 is looking pretty dated. One has to wonder if modern preoccupations will eventually go the same way. Tacitus and Cicero, on the other hand never go out of fashion.

2023-07-04

Clima mutatur, nos et mutamur in illa

'The climate changes, and we are changed by the climate'

One of the things I have noticed from studying the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire is that the reasons given for the Fall tend to reflect the contemporary preoccupations of society at the time. So you find Gibbon during the Enlightenment deciding that the main factor was Christianity. In the nineteenth century it was because of 'decadence' particularly homosexuality. (Despite the fact that a by-now Christian empire was a lot less decadent than when it was flourishing under Nero).

Then in the early 20th century it was because the Roman empire was flooded with 'inferior races' who diluted the pure Roman stock. Now in the early 21st century, it seems that climate change was responsible. So I examined this thesis with considerable scepticism, not least because I am informed by pundits in the media that climate usually changes over millennia and the current rapid warming in the 21st century is unprecedented.

Actually those pundits are wrong. Climate can change quite rapidly. It's now been established that there were major fluctuations in climate both at the end of the Roman Republic and the end of the Roman empire. What really made me think climate has to be taken seriously is a people called the Garamantes. These were a north African civilization whose entire existence was a losing battle against the increasing desertification of the Sahara. Then there are Mesopotamian cities such as Ur which stand today in arid badlands that were once fertile fields of grain.

The moral of the story from a historian's viewpoint is that - for whatever reason - climate change does happen, and can happen relatively fast. Societies either adapt of die.