Cormorants and Mayapples

Spent Friday back on the Potomac, a day made interesting by two signs of progressing Spring.

Down on the river, something was clearly happening. At least a hundred cormorants were swarming the half mile or so of river I could see from my vantage point. Here you can see four resting in a tree and one floating on the river beyond.

They were all over the river because the shad were running. Shad (Alosa sapidissima) is eastern North America's main anadromous fish, that is, they spend most of their lives in the ocean but return to fresh water to breed. They were a vital food source for Indians and a key economic support for the early British colonies. 

The swarms of cormorants were amazing. Overfishing, dams, and polution nearly ended the shad migration in the Potomac by 1970, but since then they have been coming back, and it is great to see.

And then when I took a lunchtime walk I found that the mayapples are blooming.

The blooming of mayapples is one of those events that is wonderful mainly because it lasts such a short time, and is so unpredictable, that you are unlikely to see it. It's been at least a decade since I last enjoyed it.

So to most people mayapple flowers are sort of a myth, and mayapples just boring forest plants that other people tell you are amazing when they bloom. In fact just two weeks ago somebody pointed to a mayapple plant growing near our site and said, "They tell me those bloom." They do!

Following the mayapples up a little creek called Donaldson Run I blundered into this concrete dam. I think this had something to do with the quarrying that took place all along this stretch of river from the 1890s to World War II. (The Pentagon was built with stone from around here.)

So it ended up being a pretty good day.

Helen Rountree and E. Randolph Turner III, "Before and after Jamestown: Virginia's Powhatans and Their Predecessors"

Helen Rountree (born 1944) has long been the leading historian of Virginia's Indians. She turned a girlhood obsession with Pocahontas into a successful academic career, writing several books about the people she calls Powhatans. The books she wrote herself cover the period from European contact to the present, and she has also teamed with archaeologists to write two others that take the story back in time.

Before and After Jamestown (2002) is a popular book written at a pretty basic level, but it is full of good information. It is particularly strong on how we know what we know about the Indians of 1607. The sources are: English narratives, especially those of John Smith, William Strachey, and (three generations later) Robert Beverly; archaeology; ethnographic comparison with other Native American communities; and "living history," i.e., modern attempts to re-create past technologies. Rountree makes no use of supposed Native "traditions" until a much later period, when she refers to oral histories recorded in the late 1800s to reconstruct the movements of tribal communities in the reservation era. Rountree is a fan of the English narratives, and while she thinks they misunderstood much, she generally defers to specific claims they made.

For example, John Smith tells us that Powhatan (the person) received the English seated among a dozen of his wives, who were all decked out in their finery. Historians of a feminist bent have challenged this, asserting that the women Smith saw must really have been the Women's Council. But none of our sources mention that Virginia Indians ever had women's councils on the Iroquois model, and even among the Iroquois women's councils had nothing to do with receiving foreign ambassadors, which was entirely managed by the men. Rountree follows Smith's version.

When it comes to archaeology, Rountree is also – how to put this? – pro Eurocentric scholarship. She makes much use of evidence that comes from excavating human burials, including demographic data  and chemical analysis that can document diets and movement between regions. Some modern Indians regard information gleaned from looting graves the way others see the work of Nazi scientists, and think it should never be cited. Virginia's Indian communities have until recently been officially on board with Rountree's approach, and have insisted only on reburial of remains after study. One of the biggest Indian events in Virginia in my lifetime was the reburial of the skeletons from the Great Neck Site in Virginia Beach. I think this probably stems in part from the struggles Virginia's Indians have gone through to establish their identity as Indians, which has made them value historical information over purity. I have the sense, though, that this is changing, and younger generations of Native leaders will try to block any excavation of Indian graves.

Rountree participated for decades in living history programs, introducing generations of her students to Indian basketry, ceramics, house-building, and so on. Some participants in these programs have gotten good enough at the tasks involved to give us real data on how long things like weaving reed mats or stitching shell beads to deerskin actually took. The answer is always some version of "a long time." Certain moderns like to fantasize that more primitive peoples lived laid-back, lazy lives, but this was not true of North American Indians. At least two Indian men are recorded as bragging that they were at home wherever they went, since their houses could be put up in a few hours. But that few hours only covers the assembly of the house. The preparation of the materials could take months, especially in areas where the roofing was reed mats. One of John Smith's famous observations was that forests around Indian villages had been completely stripped of small trees and downed branches, so you could gallop a horse through them unhindered. That was done by women collecting firewood, and it means that after a village had been in place for a few years the women had to travel miles to find fuel for the fires they kept constantly burning.

Rountree has a good eye for issues that are interesting in both the scholarly and general senses. She devotes quite a few pages in Before and After Jamestown to the great difference between men's and women's lives. She has the same impression I have, that certain Indians considered men and women to be separate species that had to come together to make babies but otherwise avoided each other. We have descriptions of Indian women treating their husbands as little more than sources of meat and hides, and mocking or even divorcing them if they failed to provide enough. As for the men, when they entered adulthood they went through a rite that comes down to us under the name of Huskanaw. This was a verion of the standard Woodland Indian initiation rite, in which adolescent boys were taken into the woods and made to hallucinate through some combination of hunger, thirst, pain, exhaustion, and drugs. In the Powhatan version they were supposed to imagine themselves being reborn and emerging with everything they learned in their childhoods forgotten. They even had to be retaught to eat and drink. It's hard to know how seriously to take that claim, but William Strachey wrote it down, so Rountree and I both believe some Indian told him that. Anyway the newborn young men were supposed to forget all childish things and everything else about the years they spent in the company of their mothers.

Randy Turner's contribution to Before and After Jamestown uses archaeology to extend the story back to around 900 AD, when Virginia Indians took up growing corn and beans. This section is pretty thin, because, honestly, what archaeology tells us about Indian life is pretty thin. We have the outlines of their houses, quite a lot of their pottery, enough animal bones to confirm what John Smith wrote about their diets, and thousands of stone arrowheads. Virginia has the worst kind of soil (acidic) and climate (alternately wet and dry, cold and hot) for preservation of anything else. We have next to no art, and all of what we do have was preserved by being taken to Britain. (Like the deerskin cloak above, to which hundreds of small shells were stitched; the Ashmolean calls it Powhatan's Mantle.) We know the Indians made cloaks covered with feathers, but none survive from this part of the world. We know they made music, but we have none of their instruments. 

That leaves us with the burials. From them we learn that Virginia's Indians had a harsh age pyramid, with many people dying young and very few living past 50. We learn that they traded for copper from the Great Lakes region and used it to make ornaments. We learn that they had several different ways of treating the dead, which is honestly one of North American archaeology's more puzzling discoveries. Every Indian a white man ever asked said, "Among my people we treat the dead like this," without any qualifications about different approaches for different kinds of people, but the archaeology shows this was not so.

It is humbling for an archaeologist to consider that there is more information in any one of the three main English accounts of Powhatan life than we have ever been able to learn or could learn by any technology we have or could imagine. 

What archaeology can do is push the story very far back in time. So far as we can tell, after AD 900 Indians in eastern North America were living in pretty much the way that Smith and Strachey described. They were also ethnically the same people, speaking similar languages. Which is why Turner and Rountree started their book at that time. Rountree in particular has been a great advocate for Virginia's Indians, which had led to her being made an honorary member of two tribes, which I think is yet another reason why she chose this framework of dates.

Because so far as archaeologists can tell, the cultures that formed across the eastern seaboard when Central American agriculture arrived – the triad of corns, beans, and squash – were not ancient. Before that Indians practiced a limited sort of agriculture with native North American plants such as sumpweed and sunflowers, but without corn their lives seem to have been quite different. Tracing the story back 10,000 years we can see people living as hunters and gatherers with low population densities, a world Powhatan people would have found very strange.

Linguistics also tells a story. The Powhatans spoke Algonquian languages that anthropologists are pretty certain came from the Great Lakes region within the past 2,000 years. The archaeology points to c. 500-700 AD as the most likely time. And this is, after the issues of burials, the place where scholars and Indians have lately come into the most stubborn conflicts. After having been shoved out of one place after another, many Indians have taken to insisting that their peoples have lived in their current homelands "forever." For eastern North America, this is not true. Archaeology tells a story of repeated migrations and replacements going back thousands of years. As in Europe and Asia, the spread of agriculture seems to have been accompanied by large scale migrations and conflicts. Of course that never means total replacement, and the Indians who lived in Virginia presumably had some genes from people who had lived in the region 5,000 years ago. But archaeologists don't do "forever."

By starting in AD 900 Turner and Rountree avoided all this controversy. Which is fine, their book is about the Powhatan people, who can't really be said to have existed before then. As I said, as a book about the ethnography and history Virginia's Indians it is very fine. It is also highly accessible, even for students, which is a real achievement. So if you are curious about that time and place I recommend it. I wonder, though, if the historical consensus represented by this book can long endure, or if it exists even in the 2020s. The agendas of Indian activists and people who want to science the past have lately been moving ever farther apart, and I expect that will continue.

A Trip to New York

Thursday I rode the train up to New York City for a meeting about a big project in which I have a small role. My journey started at the BWI train station.

Farewell Baltimore.

At high speed through the land of chemical plants around the Delaware River.

Hello Philadelphia.

Arrival in New York at the new Moynihan Train Hall, which is way nicer than the welcome you used to get from Amtrak.

Ah, Midtown.

Actually I had two meetings. First was a pre-meeting meeting in our corporate offices, which are right by Penn Station. But that only took ten minutes, leaving me nearly two hours to kill before the main meeting. So I took a walk. 

The sort of thing you see on the street in New York, a photographer taking pictures of a girl doing ballet in the street.

I walked from up 7th Avenue, past the center of the worldwide liberal conspiracy,

To Central Park. Which was 24 blocks, but I was tense about the upcoming meeting and walking fast.

The playground just inside the park was completely empty on a rainy Thursday.

I think those new towers are what they call Billionaire's Row

Then back to my office to meet the rest of our team and ride the Subway out to Queens for the main meeting. But our subway stop was right across the street from All Faiths Cemetery, a huge place founded in 1852 with 588,000 "permanent residents." So after the meeting I said my goodbyes and went off exploring.

Interesting group of recent Chinese graves.

Awesome, athough photographs can't do justice to the feeling of walking through a cemetery on a rainy day.

And then the three hour ride back home to Catonsville. An amazing, tiring day.

Links 19 April 2024

Thomas Maybank, The Court of Faerie,  1906

Detailed look at how three works of art came to be made, from Adam Moss's new book, The Work of Art.

The 17th-century garden maze at Bufalini Castle in Italy re-opens after years of closure, looks amazing.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons closes a women's prison in California that was notorious for the sexual abuse of inmates; four new wardens in four years had been unable to halt the abuse. Sometimes organizations get so corrupt that there isn't anything to do but shut them down. (As with the Camden police.)

Interesting glimpse of a US Marine strategy called "Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations," involving drones, fighter jets, and small Pacific islands.

Update on the progress of 3D-printed houses; still not cheaper than balloon framing.

Via Marginal Revolutions, an article describing the astonishing gains in the production of strawberries via selective breeding and other techniques. Of course for a while they were kind of tasteless but I find that in recent years the strawberries in my grocery store have been pretty good. (I used to grow my own, so I know what they're supposed to taste like.)

How a sophisticated attempt to hack millions of computers was exposed almost by accident.

Murder rates are falling in US cities, back to the levels before the pandemic or even lower. Still puzzles me that the pandemic led to a surge in murders in the first place, especially since it was mainly concentrated in certain urban neighborhoods.

The crazy house of Isaiah Robertson, who called himself the second coming of the prophet Isaiah and said God guided his hands to make his art. The Kohler Foundation recently put up money for conservation.

Interesting NY Times feature on how argeli is grown in Nepal for use in Japanese banknotes; Japanese people love their paper money, and it is paper made from argeli bark that gives their bills their crisp heft. Shorter version at the Times of India, and a story on the same topic at Global Voices.

Solid, balanced review at Vox of the evidence on social media and teen mental health.

Just to show that obsessing about politicians' clothes isn't pure sexism, here's a NY Times feature on how Joe Biden – always a natty dresser – "dresses young." This presumably costs a lot, since the White House refuses to comment on where the president gets his clothes. And did you notice that the blue tone Biden favors for suits matches the blue in the American flag? Nerds like me think politics is about policy ideas, but pros like Biden know its really about how you look with flags behind you.

Interview with David Dunning on the Dunning-Kruger Effect. 

The social lives of viruses.

More on those alleged mafia-style Neolithic human sacrifices.

Spitalfields Life visits the roof of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, amazing graffiti.

Historically Taiwan has recorded an increase in births of at least 10% in each Year of the Dragon, the most auspicious year to be born; but not even that helped this past year, when births still fell by 6.1%. 

Maryland teenager, who has already spent time in a psychiatric facility, is arrested after writing a 129-page "fictional memoir" about his school shooting. The police called it a "plan."

During Iran's missile and drone attack on Israel, the US Navy finally got to use its 20-year-old anti-ballistic missile interceptor, the SM-3, and it worked fine. Relatively old-fashioned weapons like ballistic missiles and subsonic cruise missiles could only hurt a US carrier group if they were launched in overwhelming numbers. Which explains China's focus on hypersonic weapons. Honestly I have the impression that a lot of warfare in the near future is going to be countries throwing huged piles of money (in the form of attack missiles or interceptors) at each other to see who runs out or blinks first. The Navy recently said it has used a billion dollars worth of weapons this year shooting down missiles and drones in the Middle East. 

Noah Smith admits he was wrong about missile defense, which he wrote many times was an expensive boondoggle. In a new essay he asks why he and so many others were wrong; basically, the people who knew how good the weapons were getting couldn't talk about them, leaving the field to loudmouth outside critics.

The Telegraph says our global conflicts are part of one "world war," very much like Tom Friedman's take here. (Brief summary of Friedman's position here.)

A drone pilot is the US Marines' "Aviator of the Year."

Article at Foreign Affairs (free when I checked) on the failed peace negotiations that took place early in the Ukraine war. Shashank Joshi summarizes: "Russia continued to make new & unacceptable demands that would have turned Ukraine into a weak & undefensible vassal state." Also, they discussed security guarantees from western states that had not ever been mentioned to those states.

Population Peaks

Via Birth Gauge on Twitter/X, a map showing when each US county peaked in population. Dark blue means the population is still rising. 

Lots of people have left the plains.

You have to love Nassau County in western Long Island, where the population would be booming if it were legal to build any kind of housing there.

The Prepper Dream

Stephen Marche in the NY Times:

When I attended prepper conventions as research for my book, I found their visions of a collapsed American Republic suspiciously attractive: It’s a world where everybody grows his own food, gathers with family by candlelight, defends his property against various unpredictable threats and relies on his wits. Their preferred scenario resembled, more than anything, a sort of postapocalyptic “Little House on the Prairie.”

I think this fantasy lies behind a lot of apocalyptic thinking; people want our system to fall because they imagine it would fall into a rural idyll rather than a real post-industrial wasteland.

The First Hot Day

I was back on the Potomac today for what turned out to be our first hot day of the year, 88 degrees (31 C).

It seemed like I could feel green leaves bursting out all around me.

I was startled by these pinkish new oak leaves.

I was not feeling so great after an exciting weekend meeting with a kidney stone, but I did take one pleasant walk. Besides the garter snake I saw an Osprey very close, and then three pairs of crows squabbling over territory.

Every time I read that wisteria is a destructive invasive species I find myself wishing that all our problems were this pretty.

And then back in my neighborhood, the season of pink trees.

Today's Place to Daydream about: Bologna

Bologna has had a rough history.

Founded by Etruscans, it was conquered by Gauls, then Romans. The Goths sacked it when they conquered Italy, and during Justinian's reconquest of Italy they sacked it again. Tradition records that after those slaughters the city had to be refounded by a certain Bishop Petronius, who also founded the Basilica of St. Stephen and is still the city's patron saint.

Then it was sacked by the Lombards, then by Charlemagne's Franks. Charlemagne attached the city to the papacy, which ruled it for a significant part of the time from then down to 1868.

Factional fighting in Bologna, from a 14th-century chronicle

But that didn't make the city's existence peaceful. It was caught up in wars between Popes and Emperors and developed stubborn Guelf and Ghibbeline factions that fought each other and regularly betrayed the city to their favored outside power. 

The leading families of each faction built the crazy towers that defined its image in the Renaissance.

Bologna was also fought over during the Napoleonic Wars and the wars of Italian independence, and during World War II big parts were bombed to rubble. After WW II it became known as the Red City because it was dominated by the communists; Italy had Western Europe's largest Communist Party in those days partly because while many Italians hated the fascists, the communists were the only ones who actually fought them.

The University

Yet, and this is an important point, the city nonetheless thrived, especially in the high Middle Ages. The university claims to have been founded in 1088, making it the oldest in the world. It was for centuries Europe's leading center for the study of Roman law.  

Across the 1100s and 1200s the economy boomed. One result of the medieval boom was the famous sanctuary of the Madonna of San Luca, the construction of which began in 1193. It sits on a hill 1000 feet (300m) above the town, and the climb is a famous walk. It is now surrounded by a 17th-century collonade with 666 arches, which puzzles me, but then I freely confess that I know nothing about 17th-century Catholicism.

Map of the city in 1575, installed in the Pope's dining room in Rome

Construction of the current Basilica began in 1390. It was paid for by the townspeople in defiance of the Pope; the first stone bore the communal coat of arms. But it turned out that the city's leaders dreamed bigger than their purses could reach, and the unfinished shell was shut up for a century; it was not formally opened until the 1700s.

The Basilica holds several works by Michelangelo, including a famous image of Saint Petronius.

Bologna is particarly proud of its many porticoes; the local tourist authority has helpfully laid out a walking tour to help you sample them.

The 18th-century Villa Spada has a famous garden.

Bologna is not high on the list of Italian cities people want to visit, but I have always been intrigued.