You might have seen a new type of ancient human on the news recently, nicknamed, affectionately, ‘the hobbit’ (not because they were taking the ring to Mordor, but because of their rather diminutive stature).
If you didn’t, here’s the news in brief: a team of scientists went digging for the first Australians and instead found a completely new (and tiny) ancient human. Since then they’ve been trying to work out what happened to these small ancestors of ours.
To share their findings, some of the scientists involved in understanding ‘the hobbit’ have put together a 4 week free online course to explain how the discovery unfolded…
The course has been created with FutureLearn and will take you inside the world of this new species, giving you a run through modern scientific archaeological techniques along the way.
Here’s what’s on the syllabus:
Week 1 — Human Origins and Introduction to Archaeology
Learn about where you, me and everyone came from — before getting onto the moment ‘the hobbit’ was discovered.
Week 2 — Archaeological Methods: In the Cave
You think a festival is bad? Get to grips with how science translates in somewhere without electricity or water.
Week 3 — Archaeological Science: In the Lab
Understand what happens once all the archaeological finds are delicately hauled back to the lab.
Week 4 — Future Directions
‘The Hobbit’, despite it’s size, is having a big impact in the world of archaeology — find out exactly what this little ancient human might mean for the story of our origins.
Intrigued? Join the course today — it started this week, and you’re not too late to join.
Jess Weeks is a copywriter at FutureLearn. She has never conducted ground-breaking science in a cave, or discovered a new species, but there’s still time.
Over on iTunes, you can find a short course (8 lectures in total) on the age-old mystery: How did Hannibal and his elephants cross the Alps during the Second Punic War? The course was presented by archeologist Patrick Hunt in the Continuing Studies program at Stanford University, back in 2007. Here’s the description for the course:
Hannibal is a name that evoked fear among the ancient Romans for decades. His courage, cunning and intrepid march across the dangerous Alps in 218 BCE with his army and war elephants make for some of the most exciting passages found in ancient historical texts written by Polybius, Livy, and Appian. And they continue to inspire historians and archaeologists today. The mystery of his exact route is still a topic of debate, one that has consumed Patrick Hunt (Director of Stanford’s Alpine Archaeology Project) for more than a decade. This course examines Hannibal’s childhood and his young soldierly exploits in Spain. Then it follows him over the Pyrenees and into Gaul, the Alps, Italy, and beyond, examining his victories over the Romans, his brilliance as a military strategist, and his legacy after the Punic Wars. Along the way, students will learn about archaeologists’ efforts to retrace Hannibal’s journey through the Alps and the cutting-edge methods that they are using. Hunt has been on foot over every major Alpine pass and has now determined the most probable sites where archaeological evidence can be found to help solve the mystery.
If you live in the San Francisco Bay Are, you’ll definitely want to check out the courses offered by Stanford Continuing Studies (where I also happen to work). The program also regularly offers online courses, for students living anywhere on this planet.
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It’s fair to say that every period which has celebrated the literature of antiquity has held epic Roman poet Virgil in extremely high regard, and that was never more the case than during the early Christian and medieval eras. Born in 70 B.C.—writes Clyde Pharr in the introduction to his scholarly Latin text—“Vergil was ardently admired even in his own day, and his fame continued to increase with the passing centuries. Under the later Roman Empire the reverence for his works reached the point where the Sortes Virgilianae came into vogue; that is, the Aeneid was opened at random, and the first line on which the eyes fell was taken as an omen of good or evil.”
This cult of Virgil only grew until “a great circle of legends and stories of miracles gathered around his name, and the Vergil of history was transformed into the Vergil of magic.” The spelling of his name also transformed from Vergil to Virgil, “thus associating the great poet with the magic or prophetic wand, virgo.” Pharr quotes from J.S. Tunison’s Master Virgil, a study of the poet “as he seemed in the Middle Ages”:
The medieval world looked upon him as a poet of prophetic insight, who contained within himself all the potentialities of wisdom. He was called the Poet, as if no other existed; the Roman, as if the ideal of the commonwealth were embodied in him; the Perfect in Style, with whom no other writer could be compared; the Philosopher, who grasped the ideas of all things…
Virgil, after all, acted as the wise guide through the Inferno for late medieval poet Dante, who was accorded a similar degree of reverence in the early modern period.
We should keep the cult of Virgil, and of his epic poem The Aeneid, in mind as we survey the text you see represented here—an illuminated manuscript from Rome created sometime around the year 400 (view the full, digitized manuscript here). Beginning at the end of another great epic—The Iliad—Virgil’s long poem connects the world of Homer to his own through Aeneas and his companions, Trojan refugees and mythical founders of Rome. It is somewhat ironic that the Christian world came to venerate the poem for centuries—claiming that Virgil predicted the birth of Christ—since the Roman poet’s purpose, writes Pharr, was “to see effected… a revival of faith in the old-time religion”—the old-time pagan religion, that is.
But the careful preservation of this ancient manuscript, some 1,600 years old, testifies to the Catholic church’s profound respect for Virgil. “Known as the Vergilius Vaticanus,” writes Hyperallergic, it’s one of the world’s oldest versions of the Latin epic poem, and you can browse it for free online” at Digita Vatica, a nonprofit affiliated with the Vatican Library.
Written by a single master scribe in rustic capitals, an ancient Roman calligraphic script, and illustrated by three different painters, Vergilius Vaticanus is one of only three illuminated manuscripts of classic literature. Granulated gold, applied with a brush, highlights meticulously colored images of famous scenes from the poem: Creusa as she tries to keep her husband Aeneas from going into battle; the islands of the Cyclades and the city of Pergamea destroyed by pestilence and drought; Dido on her funeral pyre, speaking her final soliloquy.
Hyperallergic describes the painstaking care a Tokyo-based firm took in digitizing the fragile text. Digita Vaticana is currently in the midst of scanning its entire collection of 80,000 delicate, ancient manuscripts, a process expected to take 15 years and cost 50 million euros.
Should you wish to contribute to the effort, you can make a donation to the project. The first 200 donors willing and able to fork over at least 500 euros (currently about $533), will receive a printed reproduction of the Vergilius Vaticanus, sure to impress the classics lovers in your life. Should you wish to read the Aeneid in its original language, a true undertaking of love, you can’t go wrong with Pharr’s excellent scholarly text of the first six books (or see an online Latin text here). If you’d rather skip the genuinely difficult and laborious translation, you can always read John Dryden’s translation free online.
People have spoken for decades, and with great certainty, of the impending death of print. But even here into the 21st century, presses continue to run around the world, putting out books and periodicals of all different shapes, sizes, and print runs. The technology has endured so well in part because it has had so long to evolve. Everyone knows that printing began with something called the Gutenberg Press, and many know that Gutenberg himself (Johannes, a German blacksmith) unveiled his invention in 1440, introducing movable type to the world. Ten years later came the Gutenberg Bible, the first major book printed using it, still considered among the most beautiful books ever mass-produced.
But how did the Gutenberg press actually work? In the video above, you can watch a demonstration of “the most complete and functioning Gutenberg Press in the world” at the Crandall Historical Printing Museum in Provo, Utah. While it certainly marked a vast improvement in efficiency over the hand-copying used to make books before, it still required no small amount of labor on the part of an entire staff specially trained to apply the ink, square up the paper, and turn a not-that-easy-to-turn lever. The guide, who’s clearly put in the years mastering his routine, has both clear explanations and plenty of corny jokes at hand throughout the process.
One can hardly overstate the importance of the machine we see in action here, which facilitated the spread of ideas all around Europe and the world and turned the book into what no less a technophile than Stephen Fry calls “the building block of our civilization.” He says that in an episode of the BBC series The Medieval Mind in which he explores the world of Gutenberg printing in even greater depth. We’ve grown so accustomed to the near-instantaneous transfer of information over the internet that dealing with print can feel like a hassle. I myself just recently resented having to buy a printer for work reasons, even though its sheer speed and clarity would have seemed like a miracle to Gutenberg, whose invention — and the labor of the countless skilled workers who operated it — set in motion the developments that let us spread ideas so impossibly fast on sites like this today.
Drawing of William S. Burroughs by Nathan Gelgud/The Paris Review
America’s political circus will soon roll through Cleveland and then Philadelphia–the sites of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. And, not without some merit, there’s concern that the carnivals could turn violent, as happened in 1968, when Chicago’s mayor Richard Daley, backed by 23,000 police and National Guardsmen, assaulted protesters in the streets. A federal report later called it a display of “unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence.”
This week, that tumultuous ’68 convention is being commemorated in a comic over at The Paris Review. Issued in daily installments by illustrator Nathan Gelgud, the comic–simply titled “Unconventional”–looks at the writers, artists, and demonstrators who attended the convention.Part 1 features poet, singer, activist Ed Sanders. Part 2 puts Jean Genet center stage (who knew he was there?). Part 3 focuses on Norman Mailer, who was always ready for a fight. Part 4 gives us the inimitable William S. Burroughs, and Part 5, Terry Southern. You can follow the series here.
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When you learn that Soviet music-lovers bootleged Western rock, pop, jazz, and more on the surfaces of discarded x‑ray plates, you can’t help but want to learn a bit about it. We posted about that curious Cold War phenomenon back in 2014, but much more material on this culture of “bone music” has emerged in the years since, including Stephen Coates and Paul Heartfield’s book X‑Ray Audio: The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone. They also put together the fourteen-minute companion documentary above, featuring conversations with some of the actual participants in this forbidden musical scene which lasted roughly from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, when tape recorders came around and the censors loosened up.
“This is a truly fascinating subject that seems to captivate people by combining pain and suffering reflected in the X‑rays with the pleasure of listening to music,” writes filmmaker and photographer Michael Dzierza, who produced the short video above on Coates and Hartfield’s work with x‑ray audio in which they discuss the origins of their fascination with this illicit medium and how that fascination turned into a subject for a long-term multimedia research project.
The world of bone music also became the highly suitable subject for an episode of Fugitive Waves, the podcast by radio producers the Kitchen Sisters on “lost recordings and shards of sound, along with new tales from remarkable people around the world — people with a mission, a purpose, a story to tell”:
The Soviets who made it possible for their fellow citizens to enjoy the sounds they craved — whether music forbidden for its foreign origin or music performed by musicians hailing from U.S.S.R. countries but deemed insufficiently loyal to the regime — certainly had a mission, purpose, and story to tell, and their efforts have left as cultural artifacts some of the more fascinating lost recordings and shards of sound in recent history. Now that almost everyone in the developed world takes for granted their 21st-century ability to share high-fidelity music more or less instantly, it can restore a measure of gratitude to learn more about these medical records turned musical records, passed in dark alleys between one trenchcoat to another under the ever-present threat of imprisonment. The vinyl revival has happened; could an x‑ray audio revival be on its way?
“What really matters is what you like, not what you are like,” says the narrator of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. “It’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently.” That master English social novelist of the late 20th century made a point with which Jane Austen, the master English social novelist in the early 19th century, may well have agreed. Hornby, like his character, loves and collects music, even into this 21st century when the very definition of a music collection has expanded into unrecognizability. Jane Austen did as well, though collecting music in her day meant something else again: collecting sheet music.
“The Pride and Prejudice author, who also played piano and sang, copied music by hand into personal albums and collected sheet music,” says the BBC about Austen’s personal music collection, part of the Austen family music library now digitized by the University of Southampton’s Hartley Library and made available at the Internet Archive. The article quotes project leader and professor of music Jeanice Brooks as saying these 18 albums of music (the bound kind, not the kind over which High Fidelity’s London thirtysomethings obsess) could not just help explain the “musical environment that fed the novelist’s imagination” and led to novels “full of musical scenes,” but provide a “unique glimpse of the musical life of an extended gentry family in the years around 1800.”
If, as a university spokesman says, a 19th-century sheet music collection reflects the personality of its owner “just as a digital music collection on a mobile phone or MP3 device would today,” what does Jane Austen’s say about her? The items in the collection identified as belonging to Austen herself include one volume containing “two songs from Dalayrac’s Les deux Savoyards, one song, and the ‘Savage Dance,’ ” another containing “Juvenile Songs & Lessons” for “for young beginners who don’t know enough to practise,” and another, according to the BBC, containing “the traditional Welsh song Nos Galan, better known today as Christmas song ‘Deck the Halls.’ ”
Not quite a does-she-like-the-Beatles-or-does-she-like-the-Stones situation, certainly. But Internet Archive allows you to flip at your leisure through these albums, all of them once kept in the Austen family home and some or all once handled by Austen herself, which ought to provide a satisfaction for many of the countless fans always seeking to get a little closer to the writer whose books they’ve read and reread so enjoyably. Some of them have no doubt drawn the inspiration from her work to start writing themselves, composing stories in her style. Those who go so far as to copy out pieces of her beloved prose in their own hand, can now try not just writing the words she wrote, but playing the notes she played as well.
Nearly every Western youth subculture in existence eventually gets its own Hollywood film. Like most such films, 1993’s Swing Kids—which tells the story of jazz-loving German youth during the rise of the Third Reich—managed to be both inaccurate and critically reviled. Roger Ebert hated the film’s celebration of “a very small footnote to a very large historical event,” and compared the Swing Kids to “Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned.” Ebert’s reaction is uncharacteristic of him; he writes critically of the film, but he also seemed to find its subject—the kids themselves—repellant.
The review prompts us to ask: Were these kids—dubbed Swingjugend by the Nazis—participating in a revolutionary act of cultural resistance, or were they no more than typical, naive teenagers who preferred to “listen to big bands than enlist in the military”? (After all, writes Ebert, “who wouldn’t?”) But the question about the Swing Kids’ political motivations may be less relevant than one about whether their pursuit of a carefree, jazz-scored lifestyle under Nazism constitutes a “small footnote” in history. Should we know and care about the Swing Kids, and if so, why?
A German site called Swingstyle compiles information about the subculture and admits that “the real Swing Kids were politically unsophisticated.” Despite being seen as a “youth problem” by Nazi authorities, they “actually cared little for contesting official policies toward Jews or other matters. They just wanted to have fun at a dark time in their country’s history, and avoid the war if possible.” Or, rather, most of them wanted to avoid joining the Hitler Youth, mandated for all young people in 1939: “We must remember the age of most swing kids was between 12 and 16 or 17.”
But as you can see in the short documentary clip at the top, the Swing Kids’ resistance to the by-now familiarly disturbing, paramilitary regimentation of German young people (see above), was in its way a radical act. “Their casual, fun-loving attitude made a mockery of Nazi control,” the documentary narrator says. They embraced what was “considered ‘degenerate music’ by Nazi ideology,” writes MessyNChic, “because it was often performed by black and Jewish musicians and promoted free love.”
We cannot assume the Swing Kids’ love of the music extended to a love for the people who made it. It’s more so the case that the Swing Kids “admired the British and American way of life,” and the free-spiritedness universally represented at the time by jazz in American and British films and records, to which German youth had some limited access. But in their battle for “self-determination and freedom,” informal groups like the Edelweiss Pirates, the Traveling Dudes, and the Navajos resisted subordination into a homogenized Aryan mass—the mechanism by which Hitler turned ordinary Germans into loyal abettors of mass murder.
Through fashion and music, the Swing Kid clubs—like the rockers or punks of the U.S. and U.K. in later decades—formed in conscious resistance to social and political conformity. The Navajos wrote the following song, for example:
Hitler’s dictates make us small, we’re yet bound in chains. But one day we’ll again walk tall, no chain can us restrain. For hard are our fists, Yes! And knives at our wrists, for youth to be free, Navajos lay siege.
The references to violence weren’t purely symbolic. Swing Kid gangs fought Hitler Youth in the streets. Some Swing Kids, writes MessyNChic, became known for “tagging public walls with anti-Nazi slogans like ‘Down with Hitler!’ and ‘Medals for Murder!’. Throwing bricks through windows and sabotaging cars of Nazi officials… raiding military bases… derailing trains… even planning to blow up the Gestapo HQ in Cologne.” And as the educational site Music and the Holocaust documents, the Gestapo fought back “with special cruelty” against Swing Boys and Swing Girls.
In Hamburg, Swing Kids “had to endure discriminating interrogations, torture and detention.” They landed in youth concentration camps, and adult and Jewish “swing members… were deported” to death camps in Bergen-Belson, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and elsewhere. MessyNChic claims that “a file compiled by the Gestapo is said to have contained more than 3,000 names [of Swing Kids] already by the end of the 1930’s in Cologne alone. In terms of numbers, that would mean these youths represented a much larger resistance potential than any other opposition group in Germany made up by adults.”
Again, none of this organized resistance constituted an explicit political program. “The Swing Kids themselves never intended to have any political effects,” writes Swingstyle, “they did not understand politics” and “they turned their backs on the reality around them: the Jewish roundups, the death camps and the steady stream of manpower reserves disappearing into the cauldrons of Russia and France.” Swing was a means of escapism and identification with the more relaxed, permissive “paradises” of America and Britain.
Like teenagers living under any regime, Swing Kids were mainly motivated by sex and the search for a good time. But perhaps the anarchic strength of their most primal instincts made these young people some of the most effective resistance fighters against the Nazi obsession with purity and order. Their lives—choreographed to the tunes of Count Basie and Benny Goodman—were “in complete opposition to the perceived National Socialist concept of youth,” concludes Swingstyle: “To the extent that the Swing Kids assumed American ideals of personal freedom, relaxed living, and appreciation of the ‘lower races’… they were a grave threat to the upside-down philosophy of Nazism that sought to insulate Germany from the rest of the world.”
Their embrace of an international, racially-mixed culture—jazz—was itself a radical political act in Nazi Germany, even if they had no theoretical concepts of what that embrace meant for the future of their country. And their violent rejection of the Hitler Youth makes them even more compelling. It seems to me that the Swing Kids do indeed deserve a celebratory place in history—and maybe they deserve a better film as well.
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