One of the reasons I’m putting up more stuff recently is that it’s a spin-off from polishing the thesis. Reasonable questions would be: What do is Social Astronomy? and Why is that Archaeoastronomy and not History of Astronomy? The answers to both questions are connected.
Social Astronomy is the study of astronomy as used for social purposes. This fits very neatly with Archaeoastronomy which these days tends also to be referred to as Cultural Astronomy. In contrast History of Astronomy, especially in the ancient world, has tended to be the story of how Astronomy in its modern sense grew from ancient practices. An example of very good History of Astronomy in an ancient context would be James Evans’s book The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy. It’s a very good book covering the mathematical basis ancient astronomy and how people got progressively more accurate at predicting the movement of the planets. I think that’s going to be a defining work on ancient astronomy for a generation, but there’s still things it misses. The quest for accuracy is the underlying narrative of a lot of ancient astronomy books. It misses the factor that people, especially the ancient Greeks, might have also wanted and aimed for inaccurate astronomy. That is an odd claim, after all isn’t astronomy a science?
read more…
The Carnival of Space 106 is now online at Next Big Future.
Mark Steel has put some of his television and radio shows online. Ancient historians might e particularly interested in the Aristotle and Hannibal shows. Though they may also wish to cover their ears when he says that Xenophobia came from Xenophon.
Finally, C.A.Hoard & Associates will be putting up information on Digital technology in archaeology shortly. Nothing as yet, but it could be worth adding to your RSS feed if Digital Humanities are your thing.
Last week I put up a review of Ed Krupp’s Skywatchers, Shamans and Kings, which was a book about archaeoastronomy around the world. Next week or the week after, I hope, it’ll be Anthony Aveni’s People and the Sky, which is a book about the various uses people had for the sky using various examples from around the world. I’m also trying to get my hands on Giulio Magli’s new book, Mysteries and Discoveries of Archaeoastronomy. The subtitle is From Pre-history to Easter Island, which should be a hint that he looks at practices around the world, though he has a twist in the second half of the book. It’s an approach you could all World Archaeoastronomy.
Martin Rundkvist has said about Archaeology that it’s a heavily regionalised discipline. His view is that if all Japanese archaeology disappeared overnight, that really wouldn’t have much effect on Viking archaeology. While there may be similar interests like farming, building and burial, you don’t need to know about Japanese farming to understand Viking farming. In fact the difference in foodstuffs means that Japanese agricultural practice tells you nothing of use for Scandinavia. I’d certainly be very wary of a notion of World Archaeology (though I should note that others would certainly not, like a former university where I got an MPhil in the subject). I’m not sure what common theme could meaningfully tie Palaeolithic Europe, Mayan Guatemala and Modern Africa without being somewhat superficial. It raises the question: Does it make sense to pursue a World Archaeoastronomy view? Isn’t a book which draw on lunar markings on Palaeolithic bones, the Mayan Calendar and Mursi marking of time going to be equally shallow? How can you justify taking a global perspective?
read more…
This time in support of Simon Singh.
I thought quite a bit before putting this up. While I support Simon Singh, I have doubts about Sense About Science. Sense About Science is loosely connected with Spiked Online through Living Marxism, which seems to think Christopher Monckton is a credible speaker on climate change. The climate change debate is one of the major sources of pseudoscientific nonsense on the web, so it’s disappointing that Sense About Science has so little on the topic. In the end I signed because Jack of Kent is asking for signatures. It was a big help that George Monbiot and Nick Cohen, who are aware of the history of the group, signed. Even now I’m not comfortable with the title of the letter, which implies scientists might somehow be exempt from laws that apply to everyone else.
This is another reason why I’m wary of signing anything that gets passed along by a group. If you want to sign with honesty you need to look into exactly what you’re signing. Often there simply isn’t time to do that.
The latest edition of Four Stone Hearth, the Anthropology carnival, is online. It’s large. Very large. It’s made larger by the fact that Tim Jones has added some commentary so that it’s more that just a list of links. It includes more on Redydroxylation which is well worth looking at for another view on the new dating technique.
On review from Dec 2008, which first appeared on the dark site.
I could draw up quite a list of people who won’t like this book. Adam Stout purports to be an unapologetic relativist (more of that later). His history of archaeology in Britain, mainly in the inter-war period, comes from this position and is allied to his interest in alternative pasts such as druidry and earth mysteries. If you think the history of archaeology is primarily a story of how our knowledge of the past came to be more accurate, you’ll struggle with this. If you think the success of people such as OGS Crawford and Mortimer Wheeler was down to employing scientific methodology you’ll struggle with this. If you think the only sane response to modern druids is mockery you may struggle with this. I certainly disagree with a few of the author’s characterisations of archaeology. Despite (or even because?) of this it’s a challenging and engaging view of the development of archaeology.
The first point of difference between myself and Stout is a matter of how Political with a capital P archaeology is. I accept that archaeology is a political action, but so is going down to the shops to buy a loaf of bread. I might be reifying abstract ideologies and reinforcing economic roles in society, but if I want to critique those ideologies and roles, I don’t think I’d start by analysing my shopping list. Adam Stout starts with an account of writing against the backdrop of the Occupation of Iraq. He states that the cover story for May 2003 ‘PREHISTORIC WAR’ was cashing in on the war fever in the USA. It might, but as a counter-example I’ll offer a quote from the introduction to Whiteley and Hays-Gilpin’s new book:
A war is raging in the Middle East as you read this introduction or, at least, one is imminent and the world is on high alert. We can assert this with some certainty, regardless of the shelf life of this volume, because this condition has characterised the region for most of the last 1000 years.Whiteley and Hays-Gilpin 2008:11
I can’t say Archaeology magazine wasn’t using the war to boost sales. I suspect it wasn’t an openly cynical ploy to use the deaths of thousands of people as a sales drive. Equally I wouldn’t be surprised if someone wanted to put war in a historical perspective but didn’t think about what the upcoming event would mean for many people’s lives. It’s hard to say because if you want to publish on war when the USA isn’t either contemplating invading somewhere or else actually invading somewhere you have a very small window to aim for. One difference between us is, perhaps, that I think the interest in war reflected public opinion rather than led it. This matters because it shows how Stout works from the position that archaeologists are largely working in the service of the state. This is point of departure for most of the book, the creation of archaeological authority.
read more…
I’ve only seen the first half of The Secrets of Stonehenge. That looked to me like a reheated version of the National Geographic special from last year. Paul’s post has reminded me there is plenty of interest still to discuss about that.
Why Dr Who beats Einstein these days: Quentin Cooper thinks the stereotype of scientists is so deeply ingrained in public consciousness that if you look normal people don’t think you count as a scientist.
The epistemology of history as such may be parsed as the historicization of the public sphere.
Finally thanks go to the Guardian for lists Silence is the Enemy on their Best of the Web list at Comment is Free.
So far we have Twitter, Flickr and possibly Audioboo. We could add more services like delicious or Zotero in the future, but we’re getting messy. How can you pull them all together? The answer is Friendfeed. I found Friendfeed easier to understand than Twitter, but I’m told I’m in a minority, so I’ll try and take it slowly.
If you sign in to Friendfeed you can then sign in to all your other online services. Friendfeed then pulls together a page of the latest things you’ve been posting around the web. So in my case if I comment on AJCann’s weblog, which uses Disqus for comments, those comments will appear in my Friendfeed stream. That’s because I’ve told Friendfeed where to find my Disqus account. It’s a bit like a collation of what you do on the social side of the internet. Like a lot of social things it gets more interesting when you add people.
If you have a Friendfeed account you can go to my page, subscribe, and you’ll see what I’m up to on your page. Do that with several friends and it starts to look like the social web in one convenient location. You won’t just see our tweets, you’ll see photos, blog posts and many other things. You can also add unsupported sites if they have an RSS feed, because Friendfeed can read RSS. This is how Friendfeed knows what’s in my Cite-U-Like account, and when I get around to tackling Zotero properly to store my references, it’ll be able to handle that too.
On top of that, each entry on Friendfeed is open to be commented on or ‘liked’. Commenting is fairly obvious, but like is more ambiguous. If you ‘like’ something you’re merely drawing attention to it, so that other people following your stream can see it. For instance if Bora Zivkovic mentions a natural disaster, clicking ‘like’ just means that I think it’s important. Sadly the Friendfeed interface is poorly designed here, because if someone put up the message “OMG! An asteroid hit Essex and wiped out Basildon” and I thought it was important, my response would look like:
Alun liked this.You can add comments, like Twitter. You can also add links easily through a bookmarklet. You can also set up forums for discussion using the rooms or groups feature. One of the feeds I’ve added to the right is a list of what’s recently been added to the Archaeology group. Like Flickr, I would have thought it would be useful for a scholarly society, because you could make the feed public, but limit the ability to post and thus publicise your own work, to society members. Like Flickr, I’ve probably overlooked some very basic point about scholarly societies.
You can follow me at http://friendfeed.com/alun. If you sign up to the site leave your usename below and people will be able to follow you.
The more people blog on a subject, the less I feel like blogging about it. At best there’s nothing new I can add. At worst it’s following the herd rather than using your own voice. There’s certainly plenty of people blogging on this topic and I’m not particularly well-informed on subject. Silence is the Enemy is a campaign protest against the rape and abuse of women and girls in Liberia and around the world.
There are good reasons to join this particular herd. At the moment the campaign is mainly based in science blogs, It’s not a science issue, it’s a human issue. In my case visitors here tend to come from both the arts and sciences, so this is a way of helping spread the message. If you have a weblog of your own, your can add your voice and hopefully reach more people. Part of the campaign is to link to the Donate page of Médecins Sans Frontières, so there is one use there. The other is the publicity for other sites. This might alert in the cynic in you, so I’ll explain it shouldn’t.
The Intersection, On Becoming A Laboratory And Domestic Goddess, Aetiology, Bioephemera, Neurotopia, The Questionable Authority, DrugMonkey, and Adventure In Ethics And Science will be donating all revenue this month to Médecins Sans Frontières. If you’re cynical you might think they’re taking a small hit in earnings for plenty of publicity. In fact the balance is far, far more likely to be the other way round. These are all big blogs. The residual effect of any increase in readership after June will be tiny compared to the loss of income they take for the month. If this was about marketing there are much better ways to do it. Linking to these sites and asking people to visit will not be making a mug of you.
The campaign would also like to see this become a global issue. So what they’re doing is linking to this page, so you can contact your Congressman. This doesn’t sit well with the intention to make it a global issue. Readers in the UK would probably have more success at finding a local representative at TheyWorkForYou. People in other countries might want to link to their own governments. For the moment I’ll be holding off writing till I see if there’s a concrete proposal to make to an MP. I’m sure they’re against rape too, but it would be better to see something they could do rather than just agree it’s a Bad Thing. Hopefully something positive will come out of discussion.
Making a positive step is the biggest reason of all for supporting the campaign. Certainly there are many atrocities which have happened, but it doesn’t just need bad people to commit them. It also requires many other people to stand watching and say nothing. Silence is the Enemy is a very apt title. If something can be done to raise awareness of the actions in Africa, hopefully it will also get people asking what we can do to tackle sexual violence in the UK. To add your voice read Sheril Kirshenbaum’s post at the Intersection.
