Gundestrup cauldron 1899 published engraving by J. Magnus Petersen from his 1891 pencil drawing
This will be the last of my regularly scheduled posts on this blog. Instead of one post per weekday, I will be posting only infrequently, and mainly about additions to my collection of early Celtic art (another one is on the way to me) and news about Tristan, the world's most famous coyote hybrid (coydog) whose main post now has 10,464 page views from all continents save for Antarctica, and is the number one result in quite a number of Google searches about coydogs. You can always enter your email address in the "Follow by Email" widget at the top of the left sidebar and Google will let you know when a new post appears. I will continue to reply to any comments I publish and will add any pictures of other coydogs that their owners would like to see here, and give any training tips that are requested.
Instead of writing this blog, my mornings will now be taken up with writing more books. Three are planned and there will probably be more to come. Foremost among these will be a major work on the Gundestrup cauldron. Vincent Megaw calls the cauldron "The most illustrated piece in all European prehistory" and yet there has never before been a very detailed and specific interdisciplinary study of it. My study will include art-historical and iconographic analyses that will reveal how the images are connected and the pattern of the syncretism between Greek and Celtic beliefs and mythology. It will also identify certain historical events that are symbolized in its iconography; present a much earlier dating for its manufacture and clearly show why, although it was made by Thracian silversmiths, their workshop was located in Italy. The book will appear as an ebook on Amazon, but I might publish paperback and/or hard cover editions as well. It is a project that has been far too long in the making and has already received very favorable comments in discussions I have had, such as this one from Professor Raimund Karl:
"This your theory about the Gundestrup cauldron date, origins & imagery I actually like quite a lot, and find quite convincing. I'd have to follow Vincent Megaw on this, it is definitely one of the most convincing theories about the origins & meanings of the Gundestrup cauldron I have seen so far! In fact, I may go even further and say that - without going through the other main theories again with a fine comb and comparing them to yours - it may even be the most convincing proposed so far!"
For more than three years I have been writing this blog. This is the 775th post and as of yesterday, its total word count is 673,253. That is the equivalent of about seven Ph.D. theses or eight mystery novels on average. My writing speed is about the same as that of Stephen King. This blog has been an interesting project and I am convinced that a regular writing schedule will completely eliminate "writer's block". Over time, it has seemed to me that the posts were writing themselves and I have just been the vehicle. It is has been said that the best way to learn anything is to write a book about it. I think that the same might be true for blogging. I have learned much and I hope that you have too.
Thank you for reading and for your support, and have an inspired life.
Hive Mind an emergent metaphor ants creating a cortex in the sugar jar. Photo and caption: Steve Jurvetson
Is "cultural heritage a neurosis? Not exactly: it is a weasel phrase that is passed as a meme. In its common applications, though, it is a neurosis and it has been used to create all manner of ills. It freezes cultural evolution into fixed moments of no change so we can say that it is as anti-evolutionary as creationism. Evolution favours change. We can see that clearly in the brain with pleasure-creating chemicals being created after new discoveries and experiences and these same chemicals being diminished by the repetition of the same event that caused them.
Freezing a point in cultural evolution has made the Athenian Acropolis look like the aftermath of a battleground. Everything that showed change has been removed and there is nothing that shows origins either. Most of history has been eradicated to isolate a single expression. It is more like a demonstration of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. We have location but no momentum.
Cultural heritage is said to belong to everyone, but when restrictions are placed on any personal ownership of it , it really belongs to no one apart from those who want to control. It is another expression of the Big Lie.
All of the great discoveries have been made by individuals, but the only individual in the hive is the queen and it is her job (in the case of bees) to make workers and drones. Physical, species, evolution can dispense with intelligence. take the example of the shark: a very efficient killing, eating and breeding machine. But we have evolved in a different direction since we lost our our big teeth and powerful jaws. The universe, itself, seems to be evolving and the latest thoughts in quantum physics are about the universe, itself, being conscious and evolving organic life to experience that consciousness. The evolution of microtubules in which quantum events can take place because their very small size restricts quantum decoherence gives support to this idea.
For the real discoverers within cultural studies (and this includes a great number of collectors who have populated the world's museums with the "raw material" for their thinking processes now, unfortunately. mostly isolated from view as you can only display so much), their subject is their vocation. I will leave you with what Jung says about vocation:
"Vocation, or the feeling of it, is not, however, the prerogative of great personalities; it is also appropriate to the small ones all the way down to the “midget” personalities, but as the size decreases the voice becomes more and more muffled and unconscious. It is as if the voice of the daemon within were moving further and further off, and spoke more rarely and more indistinctly. The smaller the personality, the dimmer and more unconscious it becomes, until finally it merges indistinguishably with the surrounding society, thus surrendering its own wholeness and dissolving into the wholeness of the group. In the place of the inner voice there is the voice of the group with its conventions, and vocation is replaced by collective necessities. But even in this unconscious social condition there are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices."
C. G. Jung, Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 17: Development of Personality (p. 176). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
Tomorrow, an important announcement to all the readers of this blog.
"¿De qué mal morirá?" (What will he die from?) Francisco Goya (1746–1828), Los Caprichos (40)
For the GroupThink chart, see section (i) in 31st August post Box D: Symptoms of Defective Decision Making 1. Incomplete survey of alternatives. 2. Incomplete survey of objectives. 3. Failure to examine risks of preferred choice. 4. Failure to reappraise rejected choices. 5. Poor information search. 6. Selective information bias. 7. Failure to contingency plan. Sometimes the treatment is worse than the complaint. Box D posits a relatively ordered situation and then reveals the manifestations of GroupThink which confound the result. In our situation, not only are the mechanics of cultural heritage misunderstood because it was engineered as newspeak, but the word culture is given the outdated nationalist meaning, and not even the also outdated ethnic meaning (as far as UNESCO is concerned, it is entirely up to the political leadership of any nation which ethnic groups are protected and which are neglected or even destroyed). We have seen how Celtic culture was defined from an outside perspective using criteria where "faulty" would be a compliment. For example, it was stated that as the British had round houses and the Gauls had rectangular houses the British were not Celts. It was not stated, however, that the traditions of these forms of houses pre-dated the La Tène Celtic cultures by thousands of years. But GroupThink creates gullibility and people bought it. So a common Celtic language was dismissed because language was said not to be a reliable gauge of culture, but house styles were! It got even stranger and there are actually people out there who believe that English was being spoken in Britain before the Romans arrived. All of these cultural definitions can be identified as 6. Selective information bias.
The subheading 2. Incomplete survey of objectives would be better placed as the first consideration in the subject of cultural heritage matters because various groups have different objectives and some of these actually have no bearing on culture except as a means to an end. For example, the United States memoranda of Understanding have the objective (to the State Department) of using cultural matters in order to gain political/economic advantages from other nations. The other party agrees to something which is not revealed to the American people and that is considered a state secret which has been held inviolate by the courts. The American people do not know if they get to set up more military bases in the partnering country or if it is a matter of Monsanto being allowed more freedoms there. Sometimes things leak out, though. A Memorandum of Understanding with Mexico, many years ago was signed so that Mexico would extend its contract with the U.S. to return stolen cars. The terms used in the formation of committees such as "stakeholders" also give an impression of a business bias to the proceedings, but business is just one part of any culture. It is one of a myriad cultural frames and these are often called cultures themselves e.g., "Hip-Hop culture". Sometimes, the business side is emphasized and called an industry. e.g., "the tourist industry". Often though, the larger picture of infrastructure is not well-considered and it has been noted that while tourist money can go to an attraction, when factors such as traffic problems are included, the benefits are not as good as they seemed. Without really knowing the specifics of 2, then 1. Incomplete survey of alternatives, could well follow cultural topics even when culture has nothing at all to do with the motive because it is just one means to the end. Thus, also, 3. Failure to examine risks of preferred choice and 4. Failure to reappraise rejected choices, could well omit some very important data as not only are the various visible options not examined properly, but there are possibly all sorts of other choices that are completely unknown except to a few who are not talking at all.
Subheadings 5. Poor information search, and6. Selective information bias, could be reversed as any information bias will lead to a poor information search. there is a great example of this with a cultural heritage GroupThink access to archives of photographs of antiquities which had been in the possession of dealers convicted of buying from tomb robbers. These archives are not accessible by auction houses and dealers and are used to force these business to return such objects to other nations and at the same time give ammunition for their critics to blame them for a lack of "due diligence". The word "entrapment" springs to mind, but the underlying motive is to bring suspicion to trade, because trade focuses on individual possession rather than state possession.
Finally, 7. Failure to contingency plan, must also recognize what actually might then happen if the the chosen plans go through. The view, however is so myopic that contingencies, in our topic, are to things that are also invisible. That will be part of my conclusion to this series which will start tomorrow.
For the GroupThink chart, see section (i) in 31st August post Box C3: Uniformity Pressures a) Self-censorship. b) Direct pressure. c) Mindguards. The solitary cormorant sits on a post with a chain connected to something. The gulls sit on posts with chains that go nowhere; the only thing connecting them is their sameness. They are interchangeable. I remember being fascinated by a solitary cormorant among all the gulls when I was small boy looking out from the top of a cliff on the south coast of England. It even appears in my novel. Perhaps it became my spirit-animal. Mind you, a cable is much stronger than a chain when it comes to reasoning.
Uniformity pressures connect cultural heritage protectionists and not only are their products generic, but the same words and phrases appear again and again. They are often weasel words, too; having no real meaning in their application, they cannot be refuted. This sort of thing comes out of, common, archaeological writing: words like status; display; trade; and ritual; terms that can be used whenever anyone cannot really analyse something. The dullness of uniformity feeds back to the culture as well: fixing it motionless in a bygone era where, as an encapsulated idea, it serves only the politician as an exemplar for often only self-serving motives. When cultures cannot change and borrow from each other, they become extinct.
a) Self-censorship. I remember being told about a lecture given about Celtic iconography where the speaker felt obliged to use the term "European Iron Age" instead of Celtic. It was obviously a painful thing for that speaker, partially, as its generality made it meaningless. Greece, too, was part of the European Iron Age. The Celts had no Muses and the Greeks no Morrigan. The use of iron never changed the spirit: It was matter, not mind. Without self-censorship, one could go against the group and might never again be invited to lecture in its halls.
b) Direct pressure. I ran into Euan MacKie at the 1999 Bournemouth meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists where I was scheduled to give a talk and I asked him about his, then, recent difficulties in having one of his papers rejected by the Prehistoric Society. It was done so not because there was anything wrong with its data, but because it was on Archaeoastronomy and they didn't believe in that. I told him that it might be interesting to hear them explain the roof-box at Newgrange without any reference to that subject. It's not so much that they never mentioned archaeoastronomy, its just that they only published things that were critical of its findings. A bit like the AIA never publishing a post 1970 antiquity that is in a private collection unless the paper is to warn against looting. At least, with the National Enquirer, you know (or should do) that its content is nonsense.
c) Mindguards. These are the self-appointed members of the group who protect the group from any ideas that might be contrary to its dictates. I often criticize collectors or dealers who lump all archaeologist together based on the utterances of such people, but whenever I give examples of bad or mediocre archaeology, any of these mindguards who do mention what I have said attempt to convince their followers that I am against archaeology and/or archaeologists in general. Actually, I hold a few archaeologists in very high regard, just as I hold a few collectors and dealers in very high regard. At the top of any subject of interest there are only a few who add a lot to our understanding, but it takes a very large pool to create that few and if you limit its numbers, you will diminish understanding. You mostly find mindguards in the blogosphere. They never provide anything original and they are interchangeable, differing only in the style of their rhetoric.
For the GroupThink chart, see section (i) in 31st August post Box C2: Symptoms of GroupThink a) Collective rationalization. b) Stereotypes of outgroups. The classic example of GroupThink is the Salem witch trials and "witch hunt" has become a common phrase in describing examples of collective rationalization combined with the stereotyping of outgroups. You can find many associations between the Salem witch trials and GroupThink on the web, a good example being The Salem Witch Trials GroupThink at its worst which is on a blog run by three social psychologists.
We cannot say that such things are over, and today, ISIS is doing the same thing within a different cultural setting. In fact, condemnations of the actions of ISIS restricted to the destruction of cultural monuments and the alleged income from selling antiquities and coins is being used to fuel another GroupThink movement populated mainly by archaeologists but including supporters from other professions which uses "cultural heritage" as its theme by which to condemn collectors, metal detectorists and dealers. Of course, the latter group are not executing anyone and their methods include misinformation and sweeping generalities; cyber-bullying through blogs and social media like Twitter and Facebook; complaining about their perceived enemies to their employers and the professional/cultural organizations to which they belong and so on. Some of their victims try to do the same thing back to them, but most come to realize that ignoring them completely is the best strategy. As the internet saying goes: "Do not feed the trolls".
When I was doing voluntary work in cult awareness in the early seventies, a common practice in Scientology was to steal books and documents criticizing Scientology from public and university libraries; to gather any useful information on politicians that could be used to threaten them should they condemn Scientology. The most publicized case concerning the harassment of anyone criticizing Scientology was what was done to Paulette Cooper.
Collective rationalization and stereotyping outgroups forms a feedback loop which pushes the group to ever-increasing escalation in their methods. While we think that Salem was totally evil, to the minds of those people who were executing suspected witches, killing was justified because of the greater evil they saw as the devil. This justification is very common in GroupThink to this day, as it is in a lot of violent criminal behavior. Sometimes, perpetrators of such behavior even become paranoid and imagine they are being hunted down.
Another justification is frequently seen among more "moderate" critics of collectors, detectorists, and dealers where they do not engage in crazy behavior themselves, but provide non-critical links on their blogs and web sites to those who do engage in such. One blogger I know of removes excerpts from hate blogs when they are too extreme and replaces such with another excerpt which is less obviously hate-mongering. After a while, though, this selective quotation becomes obvious to most.
At its most innocuous level, the public, itself, is sometimes stereotyped by archaeologists:
"Most individuals in the general public find it extremely difficult to develop their ideas about an alternative past in relation to the data from the past. They are excited by Von Daniken and films such as One Million Years B.C. and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and they develop their personal views about what the past must have been like, but they are kept at a distance from archaeological artifacts by glass cases, systems analyses and the jargon of social theory. When they do manage to gain some access to an immediately experienced past, they are often directly confronted by the archaeological establishment, or else their views are studiously ignored."
Ian Hodder, Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p.163.
It is ironic indeed, that later, Harrison Ford, the star of Raiders of the Lost Ark and other "Indiana Jones" movies was elected to the board of the Archaeological Institute of America, one of the two main American archaeological associations which, in their journals, forbid the publication of any ancient object that violates this regulation:
"Refuse to participate in the trade in undocumented antiquities and refrain from activities that give sanction, directly or indirectly, to that trade, and to the valuation of such artifacts through authentication, acquisition, publication, or exhibition. Undocumented antiquities are those that are not documented as belonging to a public or private collection before December 30, 1970, when the AIA Council endorsed the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property"
unless that object is being used to condemn the practice of archaeological looting. So much for objective artifact classification in those journals. You will never see, for example, a classificatory paper on British Celtic coins or antiquities in their publications because a vast number of such objects have been found and recorded by metal detectorists and this activity started in the early seventies. Of course, the India Jones movie plots are all set prior to 1970 so they can be sanctioned.
Hodder's quote separates knowing archaeologists from a public who believes that aliens from outer space built the pyramids and so forth. In actual fact, a large segment of the public, knows quite a lot about archaeological sites and antiquities and laughs at the lack of understanding they often see in archaeological journals and reports on archaeological sites in the press. The idea that a young person armed only with a Ph.D is automatically an expert and that a private collector after decades of experience resulting in a standard work on the subject is a "pseudoarchaeologist" who can be lumped with von Däniken is very bizarre. If you read the linked Wikipedia article on pseudoarchaeology and have been paying attention to this blog series and its linked papers, you will see that much of what is blamed on so-called "pseudoarchaeology" is practiced by academic and professional archaeology, itself. For example, the religious nature of archaeological practices as with Raimund Karl's Every Sherd is Sacred, and most certainly archaeology's political influences. Fortunately, Cornelius Holtorf is quoted at the end to inject a little sanity.
I do have a book planned on the explanation of the freakier aspects of fringe archaeology in modern times and it will include an analysis of Barry Fell's strange theories and why a Harvard professor of invertebrate zoology would suddenly part company with scientific practices. All I can say about it now is that that many who believe that the remedy is more education are actually the main cause of it.
I will continue on Monday. Have a cult-free weekend.
For the GroupThink chart, see section (i) in 31st August post Box C: Symptoms of GroupThink C2. Closed Mindedness. Unlike most governmental, military, or business occurrences of GroupThink, archaeology has some extra dimensions. As a discipline, it is far more theory-laden than other disciplines, even theoretical physics, because it not only follows various general philosophies but adds a number of its own. Of all of its homegrown theories, context is the most idiosyncratic. Instead of using context in its normal, English language, definition, which would be a very sensible thing to do, it picks at its central point, the archaeological site. What is found within the archaeological site are designated as objects, but the site itself is only so designated when a number of related sites are included in any study. Then, it is commonplace for archaeologist to make the claim that an object without the association of the other objects at an archaeological site loses a great deal of its information. However, when the focus is the archaeological site, that information is primarily about the site and not so much about the cultural content of any object within it.
This is easily demonstrable with all of the cultural property laws which define ownership according to where an object was excavated. Thus a Greek pot in the U.S. that was known to have been discovered in Italy but was made in Athens, if "repatriated", goes back to Italy. Ask yourself where Greek culture is best expressed: Greece or Italy? If the same pot was discovered for sale in the U.S. under suspicious circumstances and the find spot was unknown then it could be repatriated to Greece. The term "cultural property" is illiterate. It is really "national property".
Furthermore "culture" is anchored in time and is recognized as its objects being the property of the people currently occupying that modern country. The Elgin Marbles were allowed to leave Athens under the authority of the Ottoman Empire which had occupied Athens between 1458 and 1830 when the Ottomans relinquished their control of the country. Elgin took possession of the marbles in 1801. Yet, quite often, while saying that cultural objects are the "cultural heritage" of the people in the modern nation where the find spots are now located the people are not free to own them. As they belong to "everybody" the state looks after them for the people. In any practical sense, they are state-owned and many of them are not on display for the people to see, and if they want to put a picture of one of them on a T-shirt, its copyright is owned by the State and the State charges its people to depict their own property. The loophole is that a photograph of an object is the copyright of the photographer and only work-for --hire photographers might be allowed to photograph such objects in some jurisdictions. If a photograph is taken by an independent photographer it can then become that photographer's intellectual property (other than in Egypt, apparently). Data, however, is internationally uncopyrightable. So the description of an object does not belong to the author, but the visual image does belong to the photographer unless he is paid by someone else to create the photograph. Many of these laws are in a state of flux, of course. Images of two dimensional objects of a certain age are considered to be public domain, but most often sculpture are not included because they can be photographed "artistically:" from different angles. Bas-reliefs and coins, etc. are a grey area as they can only be properly photographed from the front, just like a painting. I also remember the Museum of London prohibiting people from drawing any of their exhibits. Like Egypt, the ownership of an image of a work of art is now the property of its owner.
The cultural content of any object also slips in importance to its material content contexts:
"Right from the beginning our position was clear: not until much more was known about the Gundestrup cauldron itself and its material aspects, so to say, would it be sensible to consider such intricate points as age, origin(s) and cultural setting(s) of this unique artefact."
Yet many of these considerations are about the environment of the find and materials that might well be much more recent than the cauldron in its original form by way of being additions, repairs, replacement parts etc. A good example being the beeswax backing of the plates. The real cultural content of the cauldron being both the art and the iconography. Its geographical origins as an object, are considered to be Thracian as the workmanship is certainly in the native Thracian style. It is still not understood by archaeology in general that artists followed markets rather than that their clients went to visit them, or obtained the object through "trade". In some cases, this is well-known. for example a great number of eastern Greek artisans moved to Etruscan Italy (which was already quite a cosmopolitan centre) to escape from the Persian domination of Asia Minor. Much of the genesis of early Celtic art owes much to the styles of such people that they brought with them. In Britain, trade is dismissed by Martyn Jope for the arrival of Early Celtic art there because of the lack of continental examplars and he says that it arrived in the hands and minds of artists trained in continental workshops. The Witham shield, for example contains southern Italian workmanship. There are a number of objects of Etruscan and/or Italian origin that have been found in bogs in Denmark, including the same bog where the cauldron was found. In my forthcoming book on the subject I will not only give very strong evidence for its manufacture in northern Italy by immigrant Thracian craftsmen, but will also fully interpret the iconography as a unified theme with Dionysian and Celtic syncretism expressed in Thracian styles using many Italian models. I will also tie this into the recorded history of ancient Italy and identify the various cultural groups involved in events that are symbolized on the cauldron, a record of such objects leaving Italy, and the date of the cauldron estimated to within about twenty years in the first half of the third century BC, but proven to be within a range of about 90 years. None of this could be determined by using the scientific methods deemed most important in the above paper and the correct results could not even follow from such evidence. Vincent Megaw thought my ideas were "better than most" and Raimund Karl, after I discussed them in depth with him, said:
"This your theory about the Gundestrup cauldron date, origins & imagery I actually like quite a lot, and find quite convincing. I'd have to follow Vincent Megaw on this, it is definitely one of the most convincing theories about the origins & meanings of the Gundestrup cauldron I have seen so far! In fact, I may go even further and say that - without going through the other main theories again with a fine comb and comparing them to yours - it may even be the most convincing proposed so far!" (Celtic-L)
But don't worry, Ray and I still have lots of disagreements about related matters so these topics are still very viable. As he says: "ends are usually "dead ends".
While some of the evidence is fairly obscure, a lot of it will seem very obvious to anyone reading it and perhaps they will wonder why none of it was even considered before. I can answer that quite easily: in most archaeological studies materialism is favored far higher than any other factors. Trade is preferred over migrating artisans because the material proofs of the latter are mostly unobtainable: objects can be seen to have moved more easily than people. Art-historical matters are treated with suspicion by many archaeologist as "subjective"and were largely abandoned before art-historical methods became far more objective and mathematically provable (through evolutionary cladistics utilizing overlapping features of many design elements), and of course, mythology is still widely believed, by archaeology to be "primitive science" instead of human psychology-based metaphor. We also have to consider that many archaeologists come to that subject because of their materialistic psychology, the same factor that separates Newtonian, classical, physics from quantum physics (where many even doubt the existence of the material in the extreme microcosm).
Theories, academic house-styles, and cliques often define sub-groups within archaeology, but how they manage to remain cohesive will be introduced in tomorrow's post which will be on C2a) Collective rationalization, and C2b) Stereotypes of outgroups in the chart.
For the GroupThink chart, see section (i) in 31st August post Box C: Symptoms of GroupThink C1. Overestimation of Group. a) illusion of invulnerability b) belief in morality These two subsections have to be dealt with together with any suzerainty assumed by archaeology over "cultural heritage" but first we have to backtrack a little and remember that culture is an ever-changing thing and that cultures interact with one another and that the information passes in both directions. Moreover, these interactions are initiated by individuals for a wide variety of personal reasons. A couple of examples are when someone in one group arranges a marriage for one of their sons or daughters with someone in another group. This can produce a greater state of allegiance between the two families for economic reasons and/or for protection. When a number of such associations are made between families either of the cultures might decide to cement formal agreements between the cultures. Another example is when two groups with differing religious beliefs are in a position of sharing other relationships (familial, social, economic). A natural outcome is the realization of metaphors as the expression of unique religious histories and the societies gradually become blended, at first through the syncretistic adoption of elements of each religion, and then a greater ability to abstract and symbolize. Ecumenical movements are not just a modern phenomenon but go back in time at least as far as the Neolithic. Euan MacKie has seen stone alignments at Maes Howe in the Orkneys that reflect the same festival times as much later Celtic festivals. A segment of archaeology believes that Neolithic stone alignments had a purely scientific purpose and the paper speaks much of this including:
"The origin of the idea of “prehistoric science” almost certainly lies in Gerald Hawkins’ Stonehenge Decoded (1965) which, perhaps unwittingly, fostered the idea that this famous site was used as a “Stone Age computer” to keep the calendar in order and to predict eclipses. The author also has to take some of the blame; the title of his book—Science and Society in Prehistoric Britain (MacKie 1977) obviously perpetuated the myth and was ill chosen. By contrast, Colin Renfrew’s Before Civilisation (1973) had a chapter in which he summarized Alexander Thom’s basic discoveries but set them firmly within the real world of simple societies as traces of the religious activities of a professional priesthood of the kind that could be expected to emerge in the chiefdom type of social organization. If everyone the author included had paid more attention to Renfrew’s scenario, the mutual incomprehension that now exists between orthodox British archaeology and archaeoastronomy might not now be as basic as it is."
Rather than leaving this situation as an odd phenomenon where one view has been adopted and the other neglected by some sort of happenstance, we really should examine it in its psychological context. We often see projected upon the past the mindset of an archaeological GroupThink. The reason that the religious aspect was neglected was that the assumption of archaeology being scientific was projected on to the material itself. Too often in archaeology, religious matters are gathered together under the term "ritual" and no further analysis is given. We see also, a very large percentage of archaeologists (and scientists) who profess to be atheists rather than agnostics (as might be more expected from people who believe in the importance of proofs). Atheism is a belief in itself and might be expressed as the "religion of materialism". Science took this wrong turn in the seventeenth century and in physics the universe started to consist of everything but Man. In the twentieth century, Einstein was the first physicist who brought Man back into a major theory in the role as "observer" but could not bring himself to go as far as quantum physics where Man becomes an integral part of the Universe. In the Copenhagen interpretation, the observer actually changes reality in the collapse of the wave function, but there is another segment which believes in the contrary many worlds theory where one thing changes or does not change in this universe, but the opposite happens as well and creates a new universe. In other words when we open the box and see Schrödinger's cat is dead, another universe then exists where the cat is alive. The reason for the other theory, I believe, is that some people cannot part with materialism enough to envision a state where a cat is both alive and dead at the same time. Remember it is not a matter of us not knowing whether the cat is alive or dead before we open the box, it is that either event is not realized until we observe it and that includes a situation whereby we open the box and another instrument in the box has recorded that the cat actually died some time before we opened the box. This time was part of the potential, but it did not become a reality before the box was opened. Before we opened the box, the cat was both alive and dead as a potential. Of course, this is a symbolic event as the cat is very much larger than an electron or photon and thus decoherence will occur and we will not get any quantum phenomenon.
The funny thing is that an idea might not contain any mass, energy or space, or if it does, the amounts might be minuscule enough to at least severely limit decoherence (We don't know what an idea is, we can only see it registering in the brain and an idea is as much part of the physical brain as a T.V. script is part of the physical television. No matter how carefully we take apart the television set, we will never find the script).
In order to maintain and proliferate an idea we have to place great importance on faith and this becomes much easier to do when we create a group to do it. The group develops a greater sense of invulnerability (there is safety in numbers), and it enforces its belief in the creation of fixed morals which, when formalized and studied, become ethics. So strong is the resulting coherence that its members project this to everyone outside of the group. This, in turn, often cannot form itself into a version of the many worlds theory because we are all stuck in a single universe and it cannot take part in a quantum effect because of decoherence (many different ideas are also subject to decoherence in their own part of the universe). The solution that nature takes normally is to embrace such decoherence in the form of syncretism which severely reduces its illusions of materiality. To maintain the group it is not only necessary to overestimate the group (size and importance), in order to express invulnerability, and to cement the group together through the creation ofmorals, it is also necessary to isolate the group from external forces which would bring about decoherence.
I will deal with the methods of this attempt to isolate tomorrow, but you can already see why "cultural heritage" is greatly concerned with fixing cultures and preventing their natural evolution through the psychological projection of GroupThink onto what is being observed. Within this isolation, nothing is allowed to change, even when such actions actually destroy cultures as cultures can only persist and avoid entropy by the reception of new ideas. The same is true in the evolution of ideas. I will leave you for now with a quote in preparation for tomorrow's post:
"The goal of these predators is to close your mind to new ideas. You can see this in public discussions, when people argue on different sides of a controversial issue. In such discussions the focus of the participants is never on learning something new, but on protecting their personal bias. Max Planck, the founder of quantum physics, has described this phenomenon. “A new scientific truth,” he wrote, “does normally not prevail in the way that its opponents become convinced and declare that they have learned something, but rather because its opponents eventually die out, and the following generation is familiar with the truth from the outset.”
Lothar Schäfer, Infinite Potential: What Quantum Physics Reveals About How We Should Live (Kindle Locations 256-261). Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony. Kindle Edition.
For the GroupThink chart, see section (i) in 31st August post Box C: Symptoms of GroupThink C1. Overestimation of Group. As this series focuses on archaeology's role in cultural heritage matters I thought it would be a good idea to see some numbers on the archaeology profession within the general field of cultural occupations. Being in Canada and thus more familiar and influenced with aspects of culture here, I decided to pick Canadian statistics. I wanted to find out how many archaeologists there here and how that profession stacked up in comparison with other cultural professions in the country. A Statistical Profile of Artists and Cultural Workers in Canada (Based on the 2011 National Household Survey and the Labour Force Survey) seemed a good place to start. Searching the page, though, there was no mention of archaeology or archaeologists at all. The closest I got was "Cultural occupations related to libraries, archives, and heritage." and under that heading were two categories:
A341 Library, archive, museum, and art gallery managers.
F112 Technical occupations related to museums and art galleries
I love irony and it dawned on me that by deciding to search in that document I had overestimated the importance of archaeology in cultural matters. After a little more searching I found out that archaeology is not considered a cultural profession at all and is listed under social sciences. Archaeology's overestimation of its role in cultural heritage seemed to be working on me!
I finally found archaeology's slot in a Canadian Government document: "Other Professional Occupations in Social Science, n.e.c." with the sub-heading: Unit "Group 4169. Skill Type: Occupations in Social Science, Education, Government Service and Religion.". Under "Examples of Occupational Titles" (alphabetically listed) were:
anthropologist
archaeologist
criminologist
geographer
gerontologist
historian
linguist
political scientist
psychometrician
psychometrist
sociologist
The situation did not look for anyone considering a career in archaeology. In the general category where the above professions are included, the report stated:
"Most university programs leading to this occupation attract many more candidates than the labour market can absorb. An illustration of this fact is that the employment situation for graduates of these programs, except for criminology, is much worse than for the average graduate, according to the provincial government Relance survey data: a lower placement rate, much higher unemployment rate, much lower salary, very small proportion of graduates working in a field related to their studies, twice as many graduates who continue their studies than graduates with other degrees, etc. In addition, only a small minority of graduates of these programs are in this occupation. The universities train an average of 1800 graduates of bachelor's and master's degrees every year, while it is estimated that the total annual needs in this occupation are less than 50 (see Statistics). Even if the jobs in other occupations related to this training are added, which include teaching jobs, in 2011 barely 20% of graduates with bachelor's degrees, and about three quarters of those with a master's degree considered their job in 2013 to be related to their field of study. Nevertheless, the employment situation for people with a master's degree in this field is better than for those with a bachelor's degree, but they are still clearly worse off than the average graduate with a master's degree. It is unlikely that the poor labour market outlook for graduates in these programs will improve over the next few years."
With 1800 graduates and the need for 50 jobs, less than 3% of students (about 50 of them) graduating in any year were going to find the sort of job they were looking for. They would mainly have to settle for something "related".
There were no statistics for archaeology and criminology was the only category where there was some specificity, probably because it said, earlier: "Actually, job prospects for criminologists are good and job prospects for other specializations have not been determined." Going into the details, things did not look so rosy:
"The situation for graduates of criminology programs is similar to that of all university graduates in general. However, between 2001 and 2011, barely 10% of bachelor's and master's graduates in criminology worked as criminologists a year and a half after graduation. They worked in a variety of occupations, mainly in the social sciences. More than half of them held positions as community and social service workers (see 4212) or probation or parole officers (see 4155). Therefore, it seems that to hold a position in this occupation, candidates must first acquire experience in positions related to criminology."
Perhaps this explains the recent academic interest in "Cultural Heritage Crimes" and its resulting university courses. So in these matters, the overestimation of the group archaeology in "cultural heritage" is a veritable necessity for personal employment motives. Underestimating its importance would seem to be practically impossible.
For the GroupThink chart, see section (i) in Wednesday's post. Boxes B1: Structural faults and B2: Provocative context, cont'd. Any classification parameter is subjective and several identifiable groups are involved in the subject of restrictions of cultural property. Those of them who believe that the world's "cultural heritage" belongs to the collective, but not individual "everyone" include some archaeologists, politicians, legal professionals, journalists, all UNESCO people and all of these groups followers and supporters. The motives of each can be different as can the relationships between analytical thought and the transmission of unthinking memes. In this series, though, archaeological objects are emphasized and thus the core group consists of some archaeologists or those who quote them. Not every archaeologist is a member of this group although the group always takes criticisms as being against archaeology, itself, and not their subset. This is merely a PR trick. Sometimes, they label themselves as "Cultural heritage conservationists", and less often, "Cultural heritage preservationists". Neither term is accurate, as conservationists are mostly people who restore objects and/or prevent future decay, or people who protect things or creatures from destruction (such as by development) or danger of extinction, and preservationists are mostly people who protect ideas or interests (such as barber shop quartets, or jazz). There is an adoption of terminology, again, for PR purposes. As I am mostly dealing with archaeological objects (using archaeology in its broadest sense of objects from the distant past and not just as objects from an archaeological site),
I think that the least inflammatory term for this group would be private collection critics. It is commonplace to use the term "anti-collecting" but that actually refers to it in its instrumental sense: if you make restrictions too severe, it will collapse the market as there is only a very small percentage of archaeological objects where you can track the chain of ownership earlier than 1970. Most archaeological objects are not listed with the names of former owners unless they are from an important collection and the name of that collector adds to their value and considerations of the objects worthiness. Many archaeological objects are sold as bulk lots with little description at all, and before the internet and digital cameras, most were not even illustrated in sales catalogues as the expense of doing so was often greater than the profit on their sale. So the term anti-collecting can be refuted by "we are not against private collecting, and are just demanding due diligence. again, this is a PR trick as, in reality, due diligence is reckoned by the degree of expense in comparison to the value of the object or project. No judge would expect a thousand dollars or a months work be devoted to something worth $500.
When I was in business, I turned down projects from large companies when they were contracting them out because they did not want to run the risk of legal liability. One such project was editorial work on a railway's maintenance manuals. They did not want us to rewrite them to make them efficient, they just wanted us to "tidy them up a bit". I did produce a series of dam repair diagrams, though, but I did not change the company design and just made them more legible. One engineer told me that one of my diagrams was wrong, so I showed him the original and he realized that it was just so badly drawn in the original that the mistake was not obvious. Another engineer criticized my digital emergency evacuation maps because they were "artistic" and to his mind, that meant inaccurate. He changed his mind when I showed him with a transparent overlay of a government map that the maps were accurate to a single pixel (and these were very large files printed at the equivalent of 300 dpi). We had one employee whose main job was to proof-read the maps: a young Vietnamese man, Tan, with the most amazing visual acuity and spacial perception I have ever encountered. When my assistant, Natasha, received one of her first maps for correction she looked at her mistakes and was about ready to fall on her sword until my wife showed her one of my maps where Tan had just finished circling my mistakes! These maps, by the way, were very expensive as you can well imagine. Diligence does not come cheap. I think that some private collection critics live in a magical world where things can just happen at no cost. Being against any sort of commercialism, and having no experience in business, they are poorly qualified to pontificate about such matters. Thankfully, they do not have to keep society running.
We can see that the features listed in Box B2 are mostly inapplicable to private collection critics as their statements are mostly a matter of belief or are received as memes and no real analysis is even taking place. what we have instead is actually religious faith without the benefit of metaphor use. In other words, a materialistic and historicism-dependent religion akin to religious fundamentalism. When such people refer to ISIS, it is the destruction and theft of objects that upset them most, and not the loss of life and livelihood that has created the large numbers of refugees, Thus, subsistence (or survival) looting is downplayed because in that scenario, and by their own emphasis, collectors are contributing to refugee survival. Thus there might be some private feeling about B2: Moral Dilemmas, but the evidence is not apparent. More apparent is B2: Low self esteem due to recent failures because of the realization that many "looted" antiquities are really tourist fakes. This has resulted in a lessening of coverage about the market of smuggled antiquities in recent months. The greatest religious animosity you see is between fundamentalist religious groups and they not only inflame hostility, but from a quantum intelligence perspective are the actual cause of it. Two objects that are of like charge will repel each other.The advantage in this case, goes to ISIS as they are intentional terrorists. Conflict and opposition are their means to other ends. B2: Excessive complexity, seems not to be represented at all. this is because of the prevalence of memes which are passed on with little variation.
A dominant meme which everyone who looks into these matters encounters is "disappear into private collections". I used the following Google search terms to discover the number of instances but restricted it to where "archaeology" was a component to reduce such things as paintings, manuscripts and so on:
It got 647 hits and the first one, I am pleased to see, is my own criticism of the term. Changing "disappear" into "vanish" received only 141 results. There can be many different ways to word the meme: changing "disappear" into "disappeared" got 594. and I was surprised to see that "disappearing" got the most at 885. without the Boolean expression of quotation marks but including "disappear*" the results in a staggering 6,600,000 results but by the tenth page, other topics start to enter the results. I decided to check the internet results against a Google Books ngram and found that using the term "disappearing" got no results at all so I just used "disappear":
You will notice that the majority of instances are after the 1970 UNESCO convention and the only much earlier peak (I did not include) was around 1920 and its results were about paintings. For my next experiment, I chose to emphasize how minor the terms really are in comparison with "Collection of Miss". I picked this because important collections of unmarried women are really in the minority and I wanted the other terms to show up as well. I also extended the search back to 1900. Here is the result:
It seems that things disappear into private collections far less than they are said to do, because all of these authors used various records of the things in question: auction records; museums collections of former private collections and so forth. I suspect that where things have disappeared most often are within the archaeological storage facilities that Raimund Karl speaks about in his paper Every sherd is sacred: Compulsive Hoarding in Archaeology, which in part, inspired this series.
Have a revelatory weekend and a pleasant Labour day (if you celebrate such) and I'll be back with more on Tuesday.
"The Cruel Practices of Prince Rupert" 1643 English Civil War propaganda pamphlet
For the GroupThink chart, see section (i) in yesterday's post. Boxes B1: Structural faults and B2: Provocative context. These two boxes work in combination.
B1. Insulation of group: While there are many groups that are involved in the cultural heritage situation the apex position is occupied by UNESCO and within the sub-heading of "cultural property" it works with states to both limit the export of cultural property and to have such property returned to those states. Although such property can consist of non-archaeological items such as books and manuscripts, paintings and so on, the main topic I am dealing with here is archaeological material in its broadest definition; material objects from a relatively distant past that have, at some point, been either excavated from the ground or removed from above ground monuments. In some cases, these object were taken from their original locations many hundreds of years ago. For example, a vast number of Italian objects were excavated and moved to museums and collections under the authority of the Renaissance Pope Leo X Medici who encouraged the archaeological interests of the artist Raphael. The Renaissance was the main starting point of private collecting as well.
Going back a few decades, and in general, both archaeology and museums were on the same side against private collecting. Before that, the conflict was far less extreme and I can remember when the British Museum released a number of duplicates which, under the discretion of its staff, could be given to young visitors to the museum who showed an interest in archaeological subjects. This was done in order to further their interests. It was also a small museum employee who encouraged my interest in ancient coins and antiquities and connected me with others who had the same interests.
B1 Lack of tradition of impartial leadership:
Recently, though, museums have also been under the critical eye of archaeologists supporting the UNESCO aims, and this has generated further groups such as legal specialists and academic departments which focus on cultural property crimes. The states which ratify the UNESCO conventions about cultural property protection (although often more interested in its political applications) also hold authority over foreign archaeologists excavating in their country, so this becomes a very strong incentive for archaeologists to side with them. Museums, too, are now often complying with these states and in return, the larger ones, are getting permissions to show exhibits on loan from these same states. Smaller museums in less populated areas just cannot afford to mount such exhibitions so the idea that world cultural heritage belongs to all, is limited to people in large cities, and because of the efforts instigated in the main by many archaeologists, taken away from collectors who might live far from such cultural centres. Museums, who are mostly interested in getting people through the doors (in order to either receive box office receipts or government money to operate) are less interested in providing free images for less wealthy people in rural areas to be able to see and make use of. There are important exceptions, though. The British Museum and some other large museums in other countries have very good records online that can be accessed by anyone, anywhere. This is not the case, though, in most countries where archaeology is a major tourist attraction as I have satirized on this blog in Scrooge McHawass' money bin.
B1 lack of norms for methodological procedures As archaeology has a vested interest in the UNESCO conventions, its PR instigators knowingly spread misinformation through its network of sub-groups such as the press who are always willing to bow to popular misconceptions because "popular" equals subscriptions and advertising revenue; the legal professions, and academic departments where it presents profitable avenues for specialization. I have spoken of evolution and how subsequent generations preserve gene-like changes (even including memes) that become a functioning part of future developments even when the original causes are gone. These can generate false actions because the organism or group is not only no longer affected by the original situation but has no conscious awareness of its purpose. Thus evolution rewards a pro-survival new action with pleasure. Tens of thousands of years later, a person places their first bet on a blackjack game at a casino and wins. The pleasure is so great that they continue to visit the casino and play more blackjack. Sometimes they win and sometimes they lose. Over time, the casino wins because that is how the game and betting is designed. Whenever they win, however, the pleasure is not as great as it was the first time because they are now in a very different social state than their distant ancestors and originality has succumbed, to a very considerable degree, to agreement and "being normal". Evolution's wires have become crossed. Winning is now the thing, not doing something original. They have confused the source of the evolutionary reward. Now, a few of these (now addicted) gamblers will seek ways to win more often and learn how to count cards to give themselves an advantage over the casino. After all, card counting is not illegal. It is, however "illicit" according to the casino, and the casino has the right to refuse service to them if they are caught.
So archaeologists in league with the aims of UNESCO and who are part of a group who benefits from doing so has already inherited some of the corruption of foreign states who use archaeology for population mind-control (as is shown in Archaeology Under Dictatorship as a spectrum not just restricted to dictatorships but present to a lesser degree in all states). This inheritance manifests itself in further illicit but not illegal actions where the mind control component is passed on to the public in the form of memes. Curiously, the word "illicit" is favoured far more than the word "illegal". In essence, it has become a typical "Freudian slip" which can also then become another meme even where there is no unconscious reverberation after it has been passed on. The Wikipedia entry on Freudian slips reveals this secondary state under the heading of exceptions.
There are a vast number of examples of archaeologist subterfuge I could use, but I will just give you an example of one of the big ones:
This comes from an academic legal specialist and is on the site of the blog of another academic legal specialist. Here's a fun project for you: identify the blogger. It is not at the top of the page. Perhaps it is at the bottom, so scroll down. You will notice that every time you do that, or type (on Windows) control/end, more posts will appear to scroll through. how many times do you have to do that to realize that it is a blog and who its author is? A Google search for anything on that run of posts will not go to the specific post but to the very long run of continuous posts. You will have to use your browser's search to get you the title I gave above. It's annoying and "illicit" by internet mores, but it's not illegal.
Next, take a look at the verity of the statement that is made. I have selected just a couple of links with excerpts:
There are differences in the two because of the sources used and times accessed and because of the lists classification parameters, but you can see where the truth is and the use of "drugs and firearms" in the first quote is deliberately orchestrated to produce a meme.
For the next few parts I will present an analysis with examples for each of the boxes in the flow chart above. While the chart is about GroupThink, the groups are not always organized and it is possible for one or more individuals to be working away from the direct influence of a large institutional group yet demonstrating certain influences from such groups. Only hierarchical and economic factors of the large group are absent with the individual or small group of followers. Additionally, a large group can exist with no formal group arrangement other than a shared philosophy and the transference of certain memes.
Box A: Decision Makers (Cohesive Group) At the top of this hierarchy is UNESCO with its cultural property conventions framed within purely nationalistic advantages. None of these bestow any benefits to any cultural groups within the national borders that are contrary to the policies and attitudes of the government of that nation, even if the government is engaging in genocidal practices. Furthermore, while any convention has a date attached to it, it does not come into force in any country until it is ratified by that country and made subject to its laws. Such laws can also vary, country to country, for the same convention. This is not just in matters of punishments for violating these laws but sometimes the laws can change the application of the articles of the convention to better fit other existing laws. Cultural heritage protectionists almost always use the term "illicit" and refer to to the date of the convention, itself and not "illegal" and the date of its legal implementation. Of course, no one can be charged with an offence that was committed any time before the law existed that made such acts illegal. Such subterfuge, which is using the word "illicit" not in a legal sense but according to the mores of the group which might be very different from that of other groups, is the first rung on the ladder of a gradual increase in misleading and false information given in order to sway public opinion toward the groups ideals. These include memes and weasel phrases which have no real meaning or are just false. The psychology is always the same: dishonesty is used "for a greater good". Even forgery can be praised as it adversely effects the "enemy groups" of art and collectible dealers and collectors, themselves. In a very extreme case, one archaeologist publicly compared the activities of the Ancient Coins for Education (ACE) non-profit charitable organization which provides free ancient coins that are donated by dealers and collectors for schools and which awards prizes for student's historical essays to "drug-pushing". Yet, in the same breath, cultural heritage is said to belong to all people. As far as I can see, the reason for such condemnation is that donations to schools from coin dealers goes against the image of dealers that the group is trying to create in the mind of the public. While school museums are condemned, public museums are only attacked when parts of their collections have no chain of ownership that can be tracked back to before laws were in place prohibiting their export from the source country. In actual criminal law outside of police states it is up to the prosecution to prove guilt and not up to the defence to prove innocence. Innocence is presumed.
We also have to include evolution when thinking about UNESCO. It was founded with the stated belief in eugenics (Julian Huxley) and in a single world government. I have a personal interest in the former as I brought the problem of Alberta's eugenics law which justified the sexual sterilization of people with psychological problems, to the attention of Peter Lougheed, who, as the Premier of Alberta, eventually had that law overturned and its victims financially compensated. It was the largest compensation package ever paid out by the Alberta Government to its wronged citizens. Even though evolution never stands still, elements of former characteristics remain through those subsequent changes.
Below UNESCO comes a great number of local public institutions and academic organizations, and in the case of the latter, some "art-crimes" courses are created which further the aims of UNESCO and they use all of the techniques I have mentioned here.
