Two Thousand Infants Sold to Russia for Human Sacrifice May 30, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Ancient, Medieval, Modern, Prehistoric
***Dedicated to Wade who sent the relevant passage in***
The custom of burying infant children in the foundations of new buildings was well established in prehistoric, ancient and even (gulp) medieval times. The bigger and more important a building the more likely it was to a have a tot dropped in the cement. It is pretty ghastly but there you are… Humans are pretty ghastly: no news there.
The custom while not universal seems to have been used through much of Euro-Asia-Africa and large parts of the Americas. Presumably the dried cats in walls that Beach has publicised with a certain abandon in the past are an updated version of this? A sacrifice to ‘ground’ the building and assuage the gods of earthquakes, floods and other misfortunes.
Beach has come across infant burial reports from all over the world and from many different time periods. However, yesterday he ran across this extraordinary piece about the nineteenth-century China to Russia railway.
As the Siberian Railway approached the northern boundaries of the Chinese Empire and surveys were made for its extension through Manchuria to the sea, great excitement was produced in Pekin (sic) by the rumor that the Russian minister had applied to the Empress of China for two thousand children to be buried in the roadbed under the rails in order to strengthen it. Some years ago, in rebuilding a large bridge, which had been swept away several times by inundations in the Yarkand, eight children, purchased from poor people at a high price, were immured alive in the foundations. As the new bridge was firmly reconstructed out of excellent materials, it has hitherto withstood the force of the strongest floods, a result which the Chinese attribute, not to the solid masonry, but to the propitiation of the river god by an offering of infants.
The ‘rumor’ can probably be brushed gently to one side, though it says a lot about nineteenth-century China that such a rumour could grow to maturity: or is this just Russians barbarizing the Chinese with tall tales?
More difficult to deal with is the whole question of the bridge in Yarkand. Beach would bet a substantial amount of money that eight children were not bought from their parents and that they were not built into the bridge. But tradition, depravity and superstition – a particularly hellish threesome - are such that he would not bet his house (which has he hopes not skeletal remains in the foundations).
Can anyone add anything to the tradition of the children in the Yarkand bridge? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
(Apologies for all those unanswered emails but Little Miss B been very ill the last four days and this has coincided with a period of manic work chez Mrs B.)
Irish Giants: Prehistoric and Otherwise February 7, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern, Prehistoric
Beach stumbled the other day on this passage from the Dublin Freeman’s Journal, August 1812.
‘It is not a little surprising, considering our veneration for Irish antiquities, that no notice should be taken of the skeleton recently disinterred at Leixlip. This extraordinary monument of gigantic human stature was found by two laborers in Leixlip churchyard on Friday, the 10th [?difficult to read] ult., when making a kind of sewer, near the Salmon leap, for conveying water, by Mr. Haigh’s orders. It appears to have belonged to a man of not less than ten feet in height. It is believed to be the same mentioned by Keating, Phelim O’Tool, buried in Leixlip churchyard, near the Salmon leap, 1,252 years ago. In the same place was found to be a large finger ring of pure gold. There was no inscription or characters of any kind upon it, a circumstance to be lamented, as it might throw a clear light upon this interesting subject. Our correspondent saw one of the teeth, which was as large as an ordinary forefinger.’
We have seen before in these pages the confusion of fossils with humans. Then there is too the danger of expectation: there was apparently a legend of a medieval giant in this part of the world. As one sage commentator put it thinking of Irish giants more generally.
Often, when opening a ‘Giant’s Grave’, workmen have drawn attention to the great size of the human bones which they disinterred, when in reality the bones had formed the framework of a man of but medium stature. The minds of the searchers were imbued with the idea that the bones must of necessity be of superhuman size, for were they not found in a ‘Giant’s Grave’? In the same way the judgment of an antiquary may, insensibly to himself, be biased by his own imagination regarding some preconceived theory. A distinguished writer on archaeology has observed: ‘There is no failing to which antiquarian observers seem more liable than seeing too much’.
Perhaps something similar happened in Leixlip and before things could be contained a report had made its way into the not particularly scientific pages of the Freeman’s Journal? Or could ‘it’ have been real? Well, Robert Wadlow reached almost nine feet and and he certainly didn’t have teeth as big as an ‘ordinary forefinger’.
Another great and much better known giant story also comes from Ireland: the perhaps even more famous picture heads this post.
Pre-eminent among the most extraordinary articles ever held by a railway company is the fossilized Irish giant, which is at this moment lying at the London and North-Western Railway Company’s Broad-street goods depot, and a photograph of which is reproduced here. This monstrous figure is reputed to have been dug up by a Mr. Dyer whilst prospecting for iron ore in Co. Antrim. The principal measurements are: Entire length, 12ft. 2in.; girth of chest, 6ft. 6.5.in.; and length of arms, 4ft. 6 in. There are six toes on the right foot. The gross weight is 2 tons 15 cwt.; so that it took half a dozen men and a powerful crane to place this article of lost property in position for the Strand Magazine artist. Dyer, after showing the giant in Dublin, came to England with his queer find and exhibited it in Liverpool and Manchester at sixpence a head, attracting scientific men as well as gaping sightseers. Business increased and the showman induced a man named Kershaw to purchase a share in the concern. In 1876, Dyer sent this giant from Manchester to London by rail; the sum of £4 2s. 6d. being charged for carriage by the company, but never paid. Evidently Kershaw knew nothing of the removal of the ‘show’, for when he discovered it he followed in hot haste, and, through a firm of London solicitors, moved the Court of Chancery to issue an order restraining the company from parting with the giant, until the action between Dyer and himself to determine the ownership was disposed of. The action was never brought to an issue.
What most delicious nonsense. Beach loves the way that the iron prospector (from Country Antrim!) turned impresario. What happened to the body? Drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Then just to round off this giant post a nice story recalling the superstitious venality of the Irish peasant in the nineteenth century.
Near the village of Cliffoney are the remains of a ‘Giant’s Grave’, presenting no feature of interest. No inducement could prevail on the tenant to allow of an excavation. He and his father before him, he stated, refused to do so, although ‘untold gold’ had been offered. However, some few days afterwards, having occasion to verily the compass bearings of the monument, a return to the spot has necessitated, when it became evident that, in the interval, the grave had been dug out to a great depth. In short, the suspicious yokel, imagining that the contemplated search was for a crock of gold, had determined to retain the treasure for himself.
***
11/2/12: PJT has some good giant material here: Your Irish giant reminds me of the Cardiff giant, an infamous American ‘petrified man’: The world seems to be awash with giant bones, if YouTube is to be believed: Nothing fakey or photoshopped in this presentation–no sirree. 
‘ Thanks PJ!
29 March 2012: MacMac writes in with this brilliant piece: The Irish Giant is an enigmatic character to be sure. But the creator of the Giant, and the back story associated, would test the fancies of Munchhausen. I can also address for you the fate of the body. I have researched for several years an Australian petrified giant displayed to the public of Sydney in May 1889. He was known as the “Marble Man of Orange”. His creator was one Guiseppe F. Sala. In tracing his exploits, I discovered that Sala under the pseudonym Salle was in fact one of the carvers of the original Cardiff Giant. He was not the originator of that hoax, the honour of which belongs to George Hull, who intended to lampoon religious zealots faith in the literalness of the Biblical “there were giants in the earth”. Sala confessed his part in 1902, and Hull named him that year just prior to his own death. Sala was one of two stone carvers engaged in Chicago and kept on site with “buckets of beer” so that they wouldn’t wander off for a drink and give the game away. Having observed the success of the 1869 Cardiff Giant in gathering coin from the curious, Sala moved to Troy NY where gainful employ as a monumental sculptor (the Clock Tower in Buffalo NJ is adorned with his statues) soon gave way to a hoaxing of his own with a “petrified man” in New Hampshire. I’ve traced his (and his sons) exploits through at least six more hoaxes, including the Irish Giant (see below) and the Australian Marble Man, and even a second Marble Man after debts forced the sale of the first. If you would indulge me, rather than re-write the episode, I’ve lifted from an earlier draft article of mine (with footnotes) not as yet having found a publisher. I hope you find some amusement in the story. “Back in 1876, New York had been scandalised by the exhumation and abduction of the body of the recently deceased retail magnate Alexander T. Stewart. While ransoms had been sought for return of the body, accusations levelled and rumours floated, the corpse had still not been found by 1879. In August of that year, Guiseppe Sala put in a clandestine appearance before one Judge Hilton with a confession to a tale of treachery involving international grave robbing, petrifications and a New York femme fatale.[35] Sala claimed that towards the end of his time in Troy [1876], he had fallen in with a gang of three men and a woman of “rare beauty” and “notorious past”, both banker and controller of the gang. Sala had bragged to the woman of knowing the secret of petrifying bodies, seeming to imply he could turn old or fresh corpses to stone. Soon Sala found himself discussing schemes of substituting petrifications for buried celebrities, or “resurrecting” bodies for a ransom. For a sum, Sala then embarked with the gang for London with no less an intention than digging up the body of the infamous American traitor Benedict Arnold and ransoming the body. The local police confounded their plans, and Sala with two members of the gang departed for Ireland. Sala traveled there with another stone-cutter named Dye or Dyer, and another gang member named E. J. Ford, whose father had been Superintendent of the Poor back in Troy county.[36] An initial scheme once in Ireland was to disinter a statue to be secreted on the property of the Earl of Leitrim that would be exhibited as “the true St Patrick”. This idea quickly gave way to another equally audacious. In May 1876, Sala carved a limestone colossus at the coastal village of Green Isle, located about 10 miles north of Belfast and 2 miles from Carrickfargus. The body was secreted away on a farm owned by an accomplice named Coleman located close to the Giant’s Causeway. In June, the figure was unearthed in County Antrim and claimed, to the great astonishment of the Irish who flocked to the site, as the petrified body of none less than the mythical Irish Giant, Finn MacCoul. With due apologies to purists of the Feanna myth cycles, MacCoul will forever be mainly associated with the more populist legend involving the creation of the Giant’s Causeway. This story goes that the geological feature was created by the hurling of rock’s at a rival Scottish giant Fergus during a legendary feud. With the close association by geography, the claimed petrified body was also known as the “Causeway Giant”. [37] The giant was a sensation at first, and was attended by a throng of sightseers intent on viewing the 12 foot 2 inch [3.7 metres] high figure with the heroically non-petite 6 ft 6 inch [2 metres] chest, weighing in at over 2 ton (2.03 tonnes) and with six toes upon one foot.[38] The gang appeared not to have heard of the legends of an entire “petrified city” beneath the waves of Lough Neagh just a few miles south of their chosen location, or they could have swollen the petrified population.[39] Sala claimed that he departed Ireland at the end of May 1876 just before the “discovery”. After a successful exhibit in the area local to the find, the “Irish Giant” was taken by Dye or Dyer to Dublin, thence to Liverpool and Manchester with viewing at 6 pence per head [40]. An interest in the Giant was sold to a local entrepreneur named Kershaw, and the giant shipped to London. The strangest item in left luggage history was occasionally reported upon in local papers through the years. The Strand of 1895 claimed it had been abandoned by Dyer without Kershaw’s knowledge, and ownership was disputed in the courts. Sala’s story instead was that suspicion had been aroused concerning the Giant’s genuineness and the police had prevented further exhibition until this was resolved. The Irish Giant’s unfitting demise in the 1940s was noted recently in Fortean Times, which reported that the body—cleverly nicknamed “Patrick”—had apparently been used to fill a WWII bomb crater [see Fortean Times 217:72]. RIP Patrick the Causeway Giant. Sala went on to tell Judge Hilton that on the return to New York the gang soon plotted robbing A.T.Stewart’s body from its vault. The idea developed over several more meetings almost up to the actual event, but when Sala demanded more money to play his part in the scheme, the lady banker cooled his involvement.[41] Sala’s accusations against Ford and others soon quietened when he was paid a small stipend and travelled to Troy with detectives to point out accomplices. On arrival there, Sala claimed the money was not sufficient to betray the culprits, fearing reprisals. Judge Hilton and his detectives lost patience, and the grave robbing tale eventually appeared to be little other than a false lead.[42] Stewart’s remains were never recovered. [35] New York Times, 14 August 1879, p. 2 [36] New York Times, 15 August 1879, p. 5 [37] The Galveston Daily News, 2 January 1878, col G [38] The Strand Magazine, December 1895, pp. 646-647. The Leeds Mercury,1 June 1876, p. 2. [39] See James Joyce, Ullyses. It is an Irish superstition based on frequent discovery of petrified wood [known locally as “petrified potatoes”] along the shore. See Buckland, W., ‘On the Occurrence of Nodules [called Petrified Potatoes] found on the Shores of Lough Neagh in Ireland’, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 1846, v. 2, issue.1-2, pp. 103-104. [40] Liverpool Mercury, 8 July 1876; Fortean Times 215:75 [41] New York Times, 14 August 1879, p. 2 [42] New York Times, 15 August 1879, p. 5; Fanebust, W., The Missing Corpse: Grave Robbing a Gilded Age Tycoon, 2005.’ We are in awe of Mac Mac!
Don’t Play with Fire (in Scotland)! November 29, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in : Medieval, Modern, Prehistoric
In prehistoric times early humans – or, depending on which chronologies you follow, man’s ancestors – were not able to create fire but harvested it from natural conflagrations. Even in more recent times – ask any scout who has ever had to start a fire without matches on a camping trip – the creation of fire was a labour. Not surprisingly then a series of beliefs and taboos built up around fire-making and, above all, fire sharing. These beliefs – that might be for all we know be Neolithic in origin – survived surprisingly late in some rural quarters. The following three accounts all come from nineteenth-century Scotland: they relate – though precise dates are lacking – to the period c. 1850-1880. To share fire, it transpires, was a potentially risky business on the other side ofthe border a little over a century ago.
1) (290) At Craigmillar, near Edinburgh, a woman, not long ago, refused to give a neighbour a bit of peat to light her fire, because she was supposed to be uncanny. The old woman muttered, as she turned away, that her churlish neighbour might yet repent of her unkindness. This speech the other repeated to her husband on his return from work, whereupon he went straight to the old woman’s house, and gave her a sharp cut on the forehead, for which he was duly called to account, and pleaded his belief that scoring the witch above the breath would destroy her glamour [magic].
2) [I]n Ross-shire, an old beldame repaired to a neighbour’s house with this intent [taking fire]. There was only a child of eight years old at home, but she was thoroughly acquainted with the popular superstition, and stoutly refused the applicant tinder, match, or lighted stick. When the old woman had departed, the girl fetched two friends, who straightway followed her home, to find there a blazing fire and a boiling, pot. ‘See you’, exclaimed the lassie, ‘gin the cailliach had gotten the kindling, my father would not get a herring this year’.
3) A poor tinker’s wife walked one morning into a house in Applecross – this was as late as July, 1868 – and snatched alive peat from the hearth to kindle her own fire. Before she had gone any distance, she was observed, and the gudewife sped after her, overtook her, and snatched away her prize. To a stranger who remonstrated with her for the unkindness, the gudewife exclaimed, ‘Do you think I am to allow my cow to be dried up? If I allowed her to carry away the fire, I would not have a drop of milk to-night to wet the bairns’ mouths.’ And she flung the peat into a pail of water in order to undo the evil charm so far as possible.
Any other unusual fire beliefs surviving this late? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
***
31 Dec 2011: Jon K: ‘I’ve just read your post on fire superstitions and have one for the pot. It was a common practice for those in out Northern climes to keep a fire burning in the hearth all year round. In some communities they would smother the fire on Beltane/ Bealltainn and relight it using a brand from the bonfire. Quite evocative! Naturally, many superstitions and customs were generated by such a focal point. Preamble aside, there’s an inn in Dartmoor that has kept their fire burning for centuries. Somehow, local tradition holds the belief that the devil was tricked and remains trapped beneath the hearth. Should the fire ever be extinguished, Old Nick will will spring forth and make merry mischief with the world again. Unfortunately, the great winds of 1987 flooded the inn and the fire was doused. It later re-opened and, as far as I remember, continues to keep the fire going; whether civic duty or a good draw for the tourists is anyone’s guess. This legend exists in another pub on the N Yorkshire moors. Alas, I have to leave for work and can’t provide the names of either despite having visited the Dartmoor one.’ Thanks Jon!
_
Cave Art Cobblers? July 6, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in : Prehistoric
Cave art has always been plagued by accusations of fakery or exaggeration: the fate of any discipline that lacks coordinates. So the original discovery of palaeolithic wall art at Altamira in 1879 by Don Marcelino de Sautuola (or rather his daughter Maria – another post another day) was universally decried as a hoax or an embarrassing misunderstanding at the time. It was not until further discoveries at Dordogne in 1901 – naturally, life being a sod, discoveries that took place after Don Marcelino’s death – that prehistorians began to take Altamira seriously. Then for an unhealthy dose of exaggeration just open any modern book on palaeolithic art with their interesting but unsubstantiated fantasies about Flintstone shamans…
In all this bickering and bitching one image though is sacrosanct: the sorcerer of Trois-Frères in southern France. Discovered in 1914 the cave art at Trois-Frères is admittedly Johnny-come lately stuff, dating back perhaps to a mere 13000 BC, nothing when compared to the extraordinary art work at Chauvet that dates back more than 30000 years and that might be the oldest surviving painting in the world.
But even with these minor qualifications there is something bewitching about the strange antlered figure. Beach was, many years ago, gifted a copy by an undergraduate and considers the picture so sacred that he won’t even hang it up in his study. Instead, every so often he unrolls the beast and just stares at the hybrid secret with its ill-proportioned antlers, the slanting face, the clearly human feet and the strange, floppy penis. So much of our past crumbles upon examination. What a relief that here at the beginning of European ‘history’ we have one simple fact, one representative glimpse of man’s long escape from the seasons.
Or do we?
Today Beach stumbled on this photo of the Sorcerer and almost choked on his elevensies. The ‘original’, that is the one known to the world and pictured at the head of the post, was sketched by Henri Breuil (obit 1861) in the 1920s. The charcoal lines may have faded since then, they might not come out well in photography but even so… Where are the antlers? And is that a phallus?
HB’s honesty is unquestionable but it looks very much as if his passion might have got the better of him.
So is this really caveman cobblers? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com Beachcombing has already relegated his copy of the Sorcerer to the top and difficult to reach shelf: no more ecstatic unrolling for him, sigh…
***
Jack reminds Beachcombing of perhaps an even earlier sorcerer, though in reality no one knows what is being portrayed, ‘the Venus of Chauvet’ (another post, another day). The consensus is that we are looking at a patch of pubic hair and another sorcerer. Beach should add that the picture appears on a rock outcrop. Thanks Jack!
8 July 2011: SY writes in, ‘Ronald Hutton claims that ‘the figure drawn by Breuil is not the same as the one actually painted on the cave wall’ and that Breuil was fitting his drawing around some of his own prejudices about hunting magic: source, naturally, Wikipedia!’ However, Beach also got an email from renowned wanw expert Jean Clottes author of the brilliant Cave Art and the important Shamans of Prehistory who writes in to assuage RH’s and Beachcombing’s apprehensions. After some basic corrections of fact all now integrated (paleolithic for neolithic, Dordogne not the Pyrenees, and 1914 not 1911 for the Trois-Frères) JC gets down to business: ‘the photo of the Sorcerer you refer to is truncated at the top (which is why you cannot see the antlers: in any case, the antlers were engraved and are as a consequence far more difficult to photograph than the painted lines)’. JC’s opinion on the quality of Breuil’s tracing is emphatic: ‘Breuil’s tracing is quite honest and admitted by all specialists who have seen the so-called Sorcerer in the cave (I have seen it myself perhaps 20 times over the years (last time about one month ago) and I can assure you that it is quite well preserved and genuine!’ JC also notes in passing that in Les Trois-Frères ‘there is another image of a hybrid creature (a man standing with human legs, but with a big tail and the head of a bison, playing some musical instrument, probably a nose-flute) and that in a cave called Gabillou (in the Dordogne), there is another mythical creature quite similar (bison head with horns, tail, human arm and leg) right at the end of the cave (see its photo in J. Clottes, Cave Art, Phaidon, p. 129)’. Thanks to SY for the Ronald Hutton quotation and thanks to Professor Clottes for giving Beach his sorcerer back!!!!
10 July 2011: Ronald Hutton kindly wrote in on this point, ‘My point about the figure was that none of the experts in period to whom I had spoken (until Professor Clottes intervened) could agree exactly on what details in Breuil’s iconic portrait were actually present in the original. Professor Clottes is actually the very first whom I have encountered to vouch for the lot. As the Breuil representation was so clear and so constantly reproduced, this raised interesting questions in my mind about the nature of scholarly orthodoxies. My intervention was only to invite specialists to check the original more closely and reach an agreement over it: which does not yet seem to have happened.’ Thanks Prof Hutton!
From Ox Carts to Railways May 2, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern, Prehistoric
Archaeologists love the idea of continuity, the notion that little really changes, that from generation to generation, though the forms, languages and professions of faith may alter, the substance remains the same.
Historians are, generally speaking, the opposite. They fixate on change and have little patience with the archaeological fraternity – Beachcombing wrote for many years about a period in which historians are the prisoners of archaeologists so he speaks with almost pathological bitterness here.
However, every so often around the fringes of civilisations even hardened sceptics like Beachcombing have to admit that there are remarkable examples of fossils being passed down from generation to generation.
One example that Beachcombing has enjoyed in the last few days has been the measurements of ancient ox carts in Euro-Asia and their relation to modern railway gauges.
Prehistoric ox-carts had gauges of between 1.30 and 1.60 metres with an average of about 1.45 m. In part the physics of cart construction constrained size, but this remarkable consistency over a mere thirty centimetres suggests that there were local, if not continent-wide conventions that were followed.
Certainly even into the industrial age there were strong regional conventions in different corners of Europe.
The great Stuart Piggott (36) – Beachcombing’s kind of archaeologist – recorded speaking to an elderly farmer in the early part of the twentieth century who had moved, in the 1880s, from the south-west of Britain to Lincolnshire and who had been obliged to add about 25 centimetres to his carts’ gauge so that they would fit into the Lincolnshire ruts.
Curiously one of these conventions crossed from prehistoric carts to the railways.
When George Stephenson built the Stockton to Darlington railway in 1825 he adopted the local Durham cart gauge of about 1.42 cm that Parliament then adjusted upwards by a centimetre in 1828.
Most railways around the world today run on that Parliament-dictated gauge of 1.43.5, essentially the tracks of the ancient carts of Europe and near Asia stretching back long before literacy, wine-making, monotheism and other boorish novelties…
Beachcombing simply doesn’t have the background in railways to know whether Stephenson’s choice was an example of an inventor caught in the thrall of tradition – think of the ordering of letters on keyboards.
Or whether, instead, there were good mechanical reasons for conforming.
Would a railway with a 1.90 gauge have made sense in the early nineteenth century? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
***
19 May 2011: Invisible was first with a comment: ‘Speaking of the spirit of continuity in history, your post on the ox carts reminded me of a conversation I had with the Master Wheelwright John Boag at Colonial Williamsburg. He said that the materials used in the parts of a spoked wheel have been very consistent, tracing back to Celtic times. The hub is made of elm (which has an interlocking grain so it won’t split). The spokes are made of ash. The fellies (curved bits forming the actually wheel) are carved of oak. He had explanations about the properties of these woods which made each of them ideal for their purpose (elm is the only one I remember specifically). So not so much continuity perhaps as perfect utility. I won’t go into the notion that two of the woods are “sacred” woods (and where is the “bitter thorn” in the oak-and-ash lineup?). If you want more information, The Deane Shop, as the wheelwright shop is known, is on Facebook. Here’s a past interview with John Boag.‘ Then came Kate with memories of hols in the Levant: About 20 years ago on a trip to Israel, I noticed the stepping stones across the streets in Old Jerusalem. The most recent upgrade had probably been done by the Romans and the placement of the stones corresponded to the width of chariots and ox carts. The two outside stones for the wider ox carts and the two inner ones for the chariots. I’m sure this placement occurred in other Roman cities. It stayed in my mind, as an example of Roman engineering.’ On this subject there seems to be some modern myths – three emails on this – about Caesar setting the gauge: though of course the measurements predate him… Then, finally, looks like the title should really be from Ox Carts to Space Travel. LouisK writes in: ‘After reading your post on railway gauges, I was reminded of a story I read about the spaceshuttle having some spec constraints because of railway width.’ Thanks Invisible and Kate and Louis.
Vedic History and the Myth of the Golden Age April 17, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in : Actualite, Ancient, Prehistoric
Note that Beachcombing has shifted website: you should have been redirected to www.strangehistory.net Feed takers and subscribers will need to update. Teething problems means that there will be half an hour of down time today as Raoul wrestles with the cosmos and those bastards at google.
*** The following post is dedicated to Chris F. who got Beachcombing thinking about this today***
Every so often when Beachcombing writes a post, pastes a text in, finds an inane photograph and presses ‘publish’ there comes the click. It is a noise that means he has just stepped on a pressure bomb and that his next step is going to lead to dissolution: or, in blogging terms, thirty furious emails before breakfast. Certainly, today will be no exception but, as he has woken up at four am with the Vedic myth of the golden age running around and around in his head like a disco beat, he’s going to press ‘publish’ and, in the nicest possible way, be damned.
Conventional prehistory – to which conformist Beachcombing will lazily subscribe until something better comes along – claims that humanity evolved from the primates on an obscure timetable that saw the ‘aquatic monkey’ pushed out of Sub-Saharan Africa from where it colonised the world. C. 8000 BC (give or take a couple of millennium) humanity then took up farming and from there began the escape from the seasons, mankind’s expert and sometimes degrading manipulation of the environment.
Next step?
Alpha Centauri, of course.
However, before we make it to the stars, there are several alternative histories out there that need to be taken into account. Take, for instance, Vedic history, a system made famous/notorious by Michael Cremo, (co-)author of the cult books Forbidden Archaeology and Human Devolution: A Vedic Alternative to Darwin’s Theory.
MC and his allies reject evolution, claiming that humanity has been on the earth for millions if not billions of years. They reject any conventional evolution within society too. Rather there are millennia-long cycles that take humanity in and out of golden ages and dark ages where consciousness rises to extraordinary heights or falls into troughs before the wheel turns again.
Apparently the last trough was c. 500 AD: poor old Cassiodorus, no wonder his Latin was so bad.
Given that this Vedic system is such a radical departure from text-book prehistory there is necessarily something of the conspiracy theory about Vedic history. Mainstream archaeology, Vedics argue, refuses to accept anomalous data pointing to earlier human origins and hence masks knowledge.
Anyone who knows anything, meanwhile, about archaeologists can imagine what tenured professors have to say about Michael Cremo et alii: the fact that MC discovered the Bhagavad Gita at a Grateful Dead concert (really!) is often noted in unpleasant tones.
Beyond the tedium of personal attacks it is only right though for conventional sorts to ask for the material evidence for all these past advanced civilisations, which, allegedly, had mastered flight, computing, navigation and other marvels. Here, after all, it is not enough to point to difficult-to-date buildings or those one-volt batteries (another post another day) from Babylonia. Where is all the ephemera from the distant human past: Beachcombing has never found a satisfactory Vedic answer to this drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com? Certainly, we’ll leave behind a mother-lode of junk for our descendants to find in a thousand or, being unrealistically ambitious, a million years.
Then there are the Vedic golden ages and dark ages. So the following paragraph comes from an interesting Vedic or Vedic-style article by Walter Cruttenden that gave Beachcombing his sleepless night.
Giorgio de Santillana, former professor of the history of science at MIT, tells us that most ancient cultures believed consciousness and history were not linear but cyclical, rising and falling over long periods of time. In their landmark work, Hamlet’s Mill, de Santillana and coauthor Hertha von Dechend show that the myth and folklore of more than thirty ancient cultures spoke of a vast cycle of time encompassing alternating dark and golden ages moving with the precession of the equinox. Plato called this vast cycle the Great Year. Although the idea of a great cycle linked to the slow precession of the equinox was common to numerous cultures before the Christian era, most of us were taught that such a view is a fairytale, that there was no ‘golden age’. An increasing body of new astronomical and archaeological evidence, however, suggests that this cycle may have a basis in fact. More importantly, understanding the cycle provides insight into civilization’s direction at this time as well as the view that consciousness may be expanding at an exponential rate in the not-too-distant future.
Of course, just because a number of mythic systems claim something does not mean that ‘something’ really happened. Myths come out of human needs and if they mediate facts or past experience they do so because those facts match needs. Forget the vast cycles of the Vedics. Civilisations read their own recent past in terms of cycles of success and failure. Individuals do so as well: we are encouraged by the childhood, adulthood, second childhood of our dim existences. The belief in cycles and golden age and dark ages are hardwired. If one wants to be esoteric perhaps there are great cycles in the cosmos, but the chances are that these straddle the existence and fortunes of any given species. Seen in this light belief in the Vedic cycle is to civilisations what Beachcombing would say that belief in reincarnation is for the individual: a refusal to let go…
The Meson del Fierro April 15, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern, Prehistoric
The Meson del Fierro was a huge piece of iron in the depths of the Chaco in the badlands of South America (modern Argentina). Eighteenth-century estimates claimed that it weighed about fifteen tons. And, in 1783, Michael Rubin de Celis, A Spanish naval official who had approached the lump of ore with some two hundred men simply could not understand how it had got there: it was half in and half out of the soil unconnected to any other geological feature.
(58-59*) Either this mass was produced on the spot where it lies, or it was conveyed hither by human art, or cast hither by an operation of nature. And whence, by whom or how, could it be conveyed hither, as there are no iron mines within hundreds of leagues, nor remembrance that any have been worked in the kingdom? It could be of no value since it could not be used; and why bring it into a country the most uninhabitable of all the Chaco, from the want of water? Besides how could so heavy a mass be conveyed, the Indians never having known the use of wheel carriage. The mass, therefore, must have been the effect of some volcanic explosion.
Of course, there were no volcanoes in the area…
The meteorite – for so it was – had actually been ‘cast hither by an operation of nature’. Though it is interesting that Rubin de Celis did not consider the possibility that it had come from outside the atmosphere. It was, after all, only at the very end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century – the generation after his visit – that science accepted the possibility that ‘rocks could fall from the sky’, an idea that had been widely ridiculed through the earlier part of the 1700s.
In fact, the region had been hit by a huge iron meteorite that had broken up above the ground c. 2500 B.C.: one modern find, El Chaco (pictured), weighs over thirty tons! Nor was Rubin de Celis the first European surveyor of this particular lump. Previous expeditions had visited the spot in 1779, 1774 and interestingly in 1576 when one Capitan Hernan Mexia de Miraval brought eight soldiers to this visitor from outer space.
What Beachcombing finds most interesting about the find is that there seems to have been a memory among the local population of the meteorite fall: or some extraordinary deduction, a deduction that was quite beyond the Spaniards. The local name for the area Piguem Nonralta was translated into Spanish as Campo del Cielo (‘Field of Heaven’) suggestive as it is of a meteorite explosion.
Then the locals told Hernan Mexia de Miraval that the metal had come from the sky many years previously. If, again we discount a remarkable deduction on the part of the locals, that memory had been passed through about four thousand years. it is an nice example of how the historians’ formula – one that Beachcombing often tells his students – that events can only be remembered orally for three to four generations is suspect.
Any other episodes from the history of meteorites? The Wold Cottage will come another day: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Eden in the Persian Gulf March 30, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in : Ancient, Prehistoric
Beachcombing finds himself on the train hurtling through the early morning. He cannot then do the necessary research into an unusual theory he just ran across, though he throws it out there for anyone who might be interested or opinionated. The theory is described by Colin Tudge in Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers (1998) (p. 37) – a short book that has proved well worth the read.
‘An American scholar, Juris Zarins of the University of Missouri, has suggested that the flooding of the Persian Gulf and the subsequent events underpin the story of the Garden of Eden, so beautifully recorded in Genesis; and I find this thesis eminently plausible. Of course it has often been suggested that the end of Eden represents a folk memory of hunting and gathering, when life was easy. But Zarins is far more specific. He points out that Genesis (2:10-14) meticulously describes where Eden was:
And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold;
And the gold of that land is good there is bdellium and the onyx stone.
And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole of Ethiopia.
And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth towards the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.
Zarins now does a little geographical speculation. Havillah is in the south-west of Mesopotamia: gold was indeed mined there, and the aromatic resin bdellium can still be found. The Pison could be the present-day Wadi Batin, which is now a wadi – a dried river bed. ‘Ethiopia’ is probably a mistranslation, and more than likely refers to an area of south-east Mesopotamia, in which case Gihon could be the present-day Karun. The Karun has now been dammed but at one time it carried most of the sediment out of the highlands of Iran to form the delta of the modern Persian Gulf. Hiddekel is the Tigris, and the Euphrates is the Euphrates. Trace these four rivers back and they converge at a spot that now lies several kilometers off shore in the Persian Gulf.
As we have seen, 8,000 years ago a great deal of the Persian Gulf was still dry land. This great, flat, bountiful plain was not hypothetical. It was real and glorious and remembered. Of course, Genesis was probably written about 1500 BC and the events that are being remembered probably occurred about 4,500 years before that, so the memory is indeed ancient.’
Colin Tudge then scratches his head about whether these kinds of memories can actually last this long and concludes that perhaps they can. Beachcombing is not so sure, but has come across similar alleged oral memories spanning millennia (many other posts, many other days). Beachcombing has been able, while riding on the 5.45 to check a few websites but has not found the reference to the original Zarins article or piece that supposedly dates back to 1988 – CT doesn’t give it. Have any bizarrists out there a copy or a reference? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com The Persian Gulf is also a location for Atlantis (but where isn’t?) – perhaps Plato’s fantasy was built on top of a Semitic paradise!
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4 April 2011: Invisible has dug up an article/interview with Professor Zarins that goes into considerable detail. KMH meanwhile writes in: ‘Ethiopia as a translation for ‘Cush’ is inappropriate for this stage in history before the sons of Cush and the other sons of Ham supposedly migrated to the south and west. after the fall of Babylon. Another plausible theory about the Garden of Eden is that all the four rivers issuing out of it flowed south toward the Persian Gulf (at least temporarily – the two missing rivers may have ultimately become tributaries to the Tigris or Euphrates). This would give a location somewhere in Turkey. Of course, this is what the Turks teach in their public schools. Some identify the land of Dilmun with the Garden of Eden and wind up with a location in Armenia, etc. thanks Invisible and KMH!
Vikings Vikinged in Dorset UK March 29, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in : Medieval, Prehistoric
Beachcombing has sometimes confessed in this place that he is not a great fan of the Vikings. Indeed, say ‘Viking’ to your average medievalist and they will get lyrical about sturdy boats and trips to Greenland. Beachcombing, on the other hand, sees burnt monastic libraries, lines of children being brought to slavery in the fiords and a couple of kings whose chests have been opened to the elements, just for the hell of it. It gives Beachcombing some satisfaction then to know that every so often the locals got one up on the Norse pirates.
Beachcombing is referring to the pile of skulls that was found in the summer of 2009 at Ridgeway Hill near Weymouth (Dorset) in the UK. The find – as most important early medieval discoveries – was a chance one. A ‘relief road’ that friend of archaeologically-minded historians everywhere uncovered a pile of forty eight skulls and fifty one headless bodies in a Roman-age quarry.
Here was what, in a later age, would be known as a ‘war crime’.
However, before our tear ducts open in sympathy these were unquestionably invaders. All but a handful of elder ring leaders were young males, from late teens to early twenties. They had no possessions buried with them. But testing on the teeth of a handful – the magic they can now do… – suggested that the victims had come from Scandinavia. Indeed, one had grown up in the Arctic Circle!
Given that the atrocity dates to the tenth century when the English Kingdom of Wessex was almost overrun by Viking warriors, it is reasonable to assume that these were some of the rare Vikings who found themselves on the losing side in that dismal century. Payback for Maldon and other disgraces of those years.
The place of killing was probably some way from the place of capture: it was on the parish line and close to some prehistoric barrows, a place beloved of executioners as Beachcombing established only last week. This hints that they had been marched after capture to be killed or that they had been captured conveniently close to an execution site.
Nor will their last moments have been happy ones. Their lack of clothes suggest that they had been stripped naked. And there are ‘grim’ marks on their body suggesting abuse and pain. The head shots were rarely clean: blunt swords and axes taking several blows to end the lives of the prisoners. In one case a victim’s hands had been cut, suggesting that he reached up to stop the blade descending. Given that some were only sixteen Beachcombing can muster up a modicum of sympathy.
Then when it was all over the bodies and heads – minus three presumably taken for display purposes – were dumped in the old Roman quarry Beachcombing referred to above: there was no question of burial with respect.
Beachcombing is fascinated at the way that early medieval historians generally avoid the implications of violence in their period. Faced by such appalling details as this though there can be no question that life for a Dark Ager, perhaps particularly the warriors was, often, bittersweet (ahem).
For a description of a Viking execution Beachcombing has put up a post that may be worth reading.
Beachcombing is always interested in slaughter in the archaeological record: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com He has a file full of British examples but would love some from further afield.
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6 July 2011: Round Judith writes in with a link to the Guardian and further work on this mass burial in Dorset. Before the article disappears behind the pay wall, Beach will excerpt some of it: ‘The fashion for dental bling goes back 1,000 years, according to a new discovery by archaeologists. Long before contemporary trends for gold dental caps or teeth inlaid with diamonds became popular, young Viking warriors were having patterns filed into their teeth… The front teeth [in the grave] have horizontal lines that were so neatly filed, archaeologists believe it must have been done by a skilled craftsman rather than by their owners, and the process undoubtedly would have been excruciating. David Score, of Oxford Archaeology, the unit which has been studying the bones since they were discovered in a pit near Weymouth in 2009, said: ‘It’s difficult to say how painful the process of filing teeth may have been, but it wouldn’t have been a pleasant experience. The purpose behind filed teeth remains unclear but as we know these men were warriors, it may have been to frighten opponents in battle or to show their status as a great fighter.’’
22 Feb 2012: Invisible write in with an update from a BBC piece: ‘Dr Britt Baillie, from the University of Cambridge, said she believed the killings could have taken place during the reign of Aethelred the Unready. Following a series of Viking attacks he had ordered all Danish men living in England to be killed on 13 November, St Brice’s Day in 1002. The killings which ensued became known as the St Brice’s Day massacre. Remains have been found in Oxford and it is thought that massacres also took place in London, Bristol and Gloucester. However, Dr Baille said in some respects the killings at Ridgeway Hill were unique. Unlike the frenzied mob attack that took place at Oxford, all the men were murdered methodically and beheaded in an unusual fashion from the front. The Cambridge academic said she believed the skeletons belonged to a group of Viking killers who modelled themselves on a legendary group of mercenaries. They were the Jomsvikings, founded by Harald Bluetooth and based at Jomsborg on the Baltic coast.’ Thanks Invisible and notional thanks to the BBC!
Capital Punishment and Prehistoric Burials March 19, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in : Medieval, Prehistoric
**Beachcombing dedicates the following post to JKM who brought up this fascinating subject in an email**
You are a member of the minor nobility in some part of northern Europe found guilty of murder in the fifteenth century. After the capital sentence is passed you are thrown in the back of a cart and driven out to the local place of reckoning. However, as you are also interested in history you can’t help but wonder at the spot that has been chosen: for curiously, you are pulled to the top of a local tumulus where a nice-looking gentleman in a black mask is nursing something metallic and shining. You are just thinking about the possibility of a paper on ‘Prehistoric Barrows as Execution Sites’ (naturally in Latin) and imagining loud hurrahs from antiquarian circles, perhaps a knighthood and a place in the royal academy, when the priest, begins to mutter the offices of the dead and you remember why you are there…
Incredible as it may seem, there is a serious point behind this fantasy, which has been haunting Beachcombing all morning (the fantasy that is not the ‘point’). Many Europeans dispatched by the axe or the gallows in the Middle Ages and, indeed, in more recent times were executed on prehistoric barrows out beyond the village or the town where they had been sentenced or, in more baroque justice systems, near where the crime had been committed.
Research into this peculiar phenomenon has been fragmented geographically: because establishing where executions took place depends on a lot of spade work involving maps, placenames, archaeology (real spades) and textual references. But it would be, by now, uncontroversial to say that the custom was followed throughout Northern Europe from Scandinavia, to Germany, in the Lowlands and in England (think of the Walkington Wold Burials). Indeed, the whole ‘Germanic’ portion of Europe seems to have subscribed: though not apparently the Celtic fringes?
So why did our ancestors choose Prehistoric barrows to kill and display felons?
It is a nice question and a number of solutions have been dreamt up: Beachcombing enumerates them here from the least dramatic (1) to the most extraordinary (3).
(1) Prehistoric barrows typically stand in visible locations, often near routes or even crossroads, and, of course, are elevated. Executioners also demanded visibility, especially for the display of the body, and so the barrows were pragmatically reused.
(2) The prehistoric barrows that survived often lay on boundaries between settlements. The boundary place was a natural location for killing partly for reasons of visibility – two communities could enjoy the ‘lesson’, but also because these were liminal areas away from community life: the criminal had not only been killed by his neighbours but cast out of human society into the twilight where the fairies and demons dwelt.
(3) Prehistoric barrows sometimes included sacrifices and therefore the custom of medieval execution was an updated Christian form of sacrifice.
Beachcombing is reminded of similar debates about medieval meeting places outside settlements, meeting places that were often close to boundaries and likewise on elevated ground. Here too there have been arguments about whether the reasoning was purely pragmatic or whether there were ancestral memories of earlier customs, though all that jazz about liminal zones is a bit less convincing in the context of Dark Age talk shops.
Much as Beachcombing loves examples of bizarre continuity through the centuries – and the idea of bodies being displayed in the nineteenth century mimicking Neolithic killings is splendid, he personally would go no further than (2) and then only with reservations; the landscape and the barrows being reinterpreted by those who dwelt around them.
Any striking records of sacrifice or killing being associated with barrows? Drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
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19 March 2011: KMH makes an important point about the hollow nature of barrows. And, of course, many medieval executed bodies have been found in these hollows, often overlaying the original Neolithic body. ‘I favor the notion that barrows were a place where death was meted out, either for sacrifice or as a penalty for breaking the law. It is efficient to centralize the bloodletting around a publicly visible location such as a barrow. If the barrows had some hollow space in the interior and were used in ancient times as tombs then there might be an additional reason for ancient killing activities at the top – the bod(ies) might be entombed directly below, thus eliminating any need for further transportation. Continuing the custom would present no problem for Christianity other than the grounds for taking a life.’ Thanks KMH!
29 March 2011: Two more thought provoking emails. First from Cory P who brings an unexpected New World perspective to all this. ‘Having at one time lived about a mile away from the crossroads of Gallows Hill in the northeastern part of Bucks County, PA, I was struck by your entry on the association between executions and ancient barrows in northern Europe. The US Geological survey lists 11 towns, hills, and cemeteries in the eastern US with the Gallows Hill name, most of them in New England. They include a Gallows Hill Burying Ground in Litchfield, CT — an interesting redundancy, since the name Litchfield itself means a burying ground. This might suggest that the original intention was merely to carry out executions on elevated locations which would thus serve as a constant warning to potential malefactors. Or you might be right that the barrow association was deliberate, in which case the American colonists would have simply been doing their best to carry on the tradition in the absence of any actual barrows. Certainly a number of the hills in and around that part of Bucks County have a somewhat ‘spooky’ reputation, ranging from one popularly known as Ghost Mountain to one which the Pennsylvania Germans called Hexenkopf and where witches were said to gather on Walpurgisnacht.’ Then if this wasn’t fascinating enough Jonathan Jarrett over at A Corner of Tenth Century Europe offers the following: ‘Executions at barrows rang immediate bells as last term I set myself the mission of reading the final Sutton Hoo site report, and as you may or may not be aware the mounds were, post-conversion we can be pretty sure since they themselves span the conversion period, used as an execution site. My personal feeling is that by executing criminals (or whatever category one who was so dispatched fell into then) at such places they were condemning them to the demons as which Christianity had recast the pagan gods, and that there was no inherent conflict in believing that such supernatural powers continued to associate with the burials of pagans, though now ‘correctly’ identified by the learning of the Church. If you transgressed the Christian community’s limits enough, and churchyard burial was forbidden to you, this was the alternative… Interestingly, they found some empty pits in the execution cemeteries (though it’s hard to be sure because of what the soil there does to meat) and that suggests to me that some people were somehow saved from the final ignominy of damnation-by-burial and dragged off to be put somewhere nicer. I may be thinking too binarily however: the most recent work on such matters emphasises that conversion did not just switch off older practices, and that burial at older cemeteries alongside presumed pagans continued with apparently-Christian burials. Sutton Hoo, however, is a fairly special case. I wrote a long and rather morbid post, including some pictures of the bodies (which are one of the bizarrer things even you may have seen). All a bit earlier than you’re talking about, but probably more plausible as an explanation than continuing human sacrifice… Thanks Jonathan and Cory P!!
