Alun Salt / Flickr

The Treasury of the Athenians at Delphi. Nothing to see here.

I’ve been kicking around an idea for a paper for a couple of years. Every so often Stephen Hawking will announce that contact with an extra-terrestrial civilisation would be a Very Bad Thing. Therefore silence, or as close to it as possible is a good idea. It’s not just Stephen Hawking, many other people agree. Hawking makes the point that contact from Europe to other regions hasn’t gone well for the natives since 1492. I think this is a better argument than “Aliens are scary”, but I think he’s using the wrong analogy. There is room for a paper that takes another view. There’s a couple of reasons I haven’t pushed on with it.

The main reason is that I’ve not been clear about where the paper could be published. Ok, Hawking hasn’t published his belief as a paper either, but he’s a famous physicist. Famous physicists are presumed not only to be experts on Physics, but all sciences, pseudosciences, etc. I can’t claim this expertise. If I’m going to say anything meaningful I should at least have it scrutinised. This is the second problem. It would be weird if my position were unequivocally correct, particularly as we have no data at all on extra-terrestrial contact — unless you consider the Mars nano-bacteria that were announced and then dismissed as a trial run. I could rely on reviewers to pick up obvious errors or blind spots, but there’s surely a better way to fix problems before submitting to a journal with some collaboration.

I am part of a group of people who were applying to have a blog hosted somewhere. I think that’s very likely to not happen. I’ve been quiet here, partly because of a broken arm and partly with a pile up of work that I need to sort through because it’s been delayed by my arm. It’s a shame because the site has a big audience, but maybe not too big a shame as this site has a quality audience. What I’m interested in now is if a collaborative or even massively collaborative paper could be written and how could it work.

Before even discussing tools there’s an issue over direction. As I said at the start, I think Stephen Hawking is wrong. You might think he’s right. He may even be right even if the method he got there was wrong. One of the inspirations for this approach is Timothy Gowers’ collaborative approach to solving mathematical problems. He pulled together a group of people to tackle a problem for a couple of years that he alone could not solve. The problem was solved in seven weeks by a method that came as a surprise to him. I can see how that can demonstrably work. In the case of this paper, the sample is zero, and the result is (expected to be) a counter-opinion. Without a reality check is it possible to write such a paper with open collaboration?

Alan Cann has used another method. He put up a paper for open peer review. I think it was a clever idea and I could do the same. My worry here is that some of the analogies will be outside my period and I think there could be very good and insightful comments from people who say, “No, you’ve got this wrong. You should be looking at…” In my opinion this makes the paper better and it’s worth author credit. If you give the person credit then to an extent you torpedo the claim that the paper is pre-reviewed because to some extent it’s self-reviewed.

I’m trying to think of a workable solution, and you’re welcome to tell me I’m wrong about this too.

I think I should put up the first draft of the paper, probably on Google Docs. I prefer DokuWiki, but leaving it open for comments and editing could leave it wrecked. For the people who leave substantial comments which can be positive or negative, but also indicate a direction to go forward with the paper, I offer co-authorship. I close the paper from public view and we write and re-write until it’s ready to go to a journal that’s either OA or happy to have an arXiv pre-print up. The gamble here is that enough people will see the call to review the first draft that it generates a sensible amount of feedback to improve it.

Ideally, I’d like to have a system that can re-used so that I can use it for general history or archaeology papers as well as odd ones like this. The reason for choosing this topic as the test subject is that it’s doesn’t matter that much to me if it gets massively delayed and it will very neatly highlight some areas where I am emphatically not an expert and that collaboration could be useful.

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• Source: Aobblog

The life led by the ancients was rude and illiterate; still, as will be readily seen, the observations they made were not less remarkable for ingenuity than are the theories of the present day. Kamoun Lab have reminded me via their Scoop It page have reminded me today is the day of the Robigalia, a Roman festival to protect the corn crop.

Read more at: aobblog.com

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• Source: Aobblog

I didn’t do modern history at school so my impression of the industrial revolution is largely a mish-mash of pop history and some misremembered Industrial Archaeology courses. What I do recall is that the emphasis in the Industrial Revolution is firmly on the Industrial side.

Read more at: aobblog.com

Sound at Stonehenge

I’m currently working with a group of bloggers on a site to be launched somewhere in the next few months. I’m not sure where yet. One of the features of the site is an informal rule that we won’t comment on news till at least seven days have passed from making the headlines. There’s a couple of reasons for this.

We’re all busy. Chasing the news is work and takes time. If we get stopped before we can finish it could be a while before we pick up the story again. In the meantime hot news has become old cold news and the key points have already been said a dozen times by everyone else. The post gets spiked and the time is wasted. Intentionally planning for a longer cycle changes how you approach a story and gives you not just the story to analyse but also the reaction too. In the case of the Stonehenge acoustics story the reaction is more interesting than the base story itself.

As a reminder Stephen Waller presented a talk at a meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver. In it he proposed that the design of Stonehenge was related to auditory interference patterns between the sound of two flutes being played. Andy Burnham points out the obvious problem in his comment.

“Waller rigged two flutes to an air pump so they played the same note continuously” OK, fine, so how on earth is this relevant to the practicalities of an ancient society? In order to get strong, static cancellations in the sound you would need equal and unvarying sound pressure levels from each instrument, and for the sources to be from the same two points in space. How precisely would two flute players do this in practice without an air pump? ie having to take breaths and carry on this trick for any length of time. This is utter nonsense.

Andy Burnham is pretty much gold in this thread. In reaction to the idea this sound could be achieved by circular breathing, he also adds:

I don’t thin circular breathing is the answer — it’s pretty difficult on low resistance wind instruments such as the flute. Didgeridoos and suchlike won’t exhibit this effect — you need a high frequency pure tone — as close to a sine wave as possible — ie a flute. Bagpipes wouldn’t work either, unless someone invented some sort of ‘flute bagpipes’. A reedy bagpipe sound is rich in harmonics. The harmonic frequencies from the two instruments won’t create standing wave cancellations in the same places in space as the fundamental tones, so you won’t get same strong cancellation effect. And as I said you also need two fixed amplitudes and closely fixed point sources for the effect to work.

Sound is a difficult subject for archaeologists. Flutes or pipes seem likely, as to drums, but the closest prehistoric musical instruments, that I know archaeologists have found, are lurs from Denmark. These date to around the 8th century BC and survived because they were bronze, not organic material like wood or bone. You can see them in the logo for Lurpak butter. It’s been a while since I’ve read about this, so I’d be surprised if there weren’t now something older known. There are a couple of candidates for bone flutes that are older, this is the most promising artefact, but I don’t know how widely accepted they are yet.

Even though there’s scant evidence for music in the Neolithic and Bronze Age British Isles, it’s an odd leap to say it didn’t exist. Music in some form seems to be a constant in human society, so this is where a minimalist approach breaks down. But it’s not just musical instruments that are missing. I suspect a lot of Stonehenge is missing too.
Bits of it have broken off and it’s easy to spot where stones were missing but refilling these gaps, as many reconstructions do, doesn’t go far enough for me. The stones are the skeleton of Stonehenge. We don’t know if they were the whole body. We do know that the skeleton was a lot of work. The hard sarsen stones are crafted like wood, with tenon and mortice joints. Archaeologists currently believe that the bluestones were transported from far Wales. In light of this what else would have been at a living Stonehenge?

If you visit places of worship in modern times, there’s a bit more than stone. There’s wooden seats, often decorated rather than plain. The walls are painted, windows often decorated. It’s not unusual to find holy books n plush velvet cushions and textiles dyed in striking colours drawing the eye here and there. We also know textiles were used in Neolithic and Bronze Age times. So after the thousands of man-hours shaping the stones, how likely is it that Gareth turned to Shane and said: “That’s that done. No point in wasting time decorating it with tartans or drapes. That’ll just be tedious and gaudy.”?

Once you add textiles into Stonehenge the acoustic and visual properties change. There are many arguments that “If you look out of this gap you can see this star,” but you can’t if Blodwyn’s nifty ethnic rug is in the way. As scientists archaeologists need a minimalist model of Stonehenge as a foundation to build on, but this minimalist model is an unfinished work. It’s a tool to build an idea of what Stonehenge looked like on. If you’re going to say that it’s the finished model and we don’t need textiles, then all reconstructions should show anyone there naked because there’s no evidence for the clothes people wore there either.

As Andy Burnham pointed out, Steven Waller’s approach misses the practical use of Stonehenge by ancient peoples, and in this case adding people into the past makes Waller’s proposal either unworkable or an astonishing Jenga tower of special pleading. It’s safe to say I’m unconvinced, but I’ve not been too impressed with some of the reactions to the story either. “Crank’ seemed a common opinion, If Steven Waller were a crank then by presenting his work at a scientific conference he’s still closer to professional practice than archaeologists who issue a press release now before a talk in a few months time.

In fact a browse of his website shows he’s not likely to be a crank, just terribly unaware of the differences in approach between US and UK prehistory.

The bulk of his work is on rock art at American petroglyph sites. The acoustics of rock art in the US is a new field, but producing some interesting results. Some archaeologists are finding archaeoacoustics much more intriguing than, to pick a random example, archaeoastronomy. But American prehistory is different to British prehistory. They have a richer rock art record, especially in the southwest. They also have ethnographic records and research that can help connect meaning to symbols. It’s not perfect, and I’d like to debunk one interpretation of a site this summer, but it’s very very different to the limited things we can say about rock art here. It means that Waller’s American work can rely on cultural information that we simply don’t have here. What is accepted by US archaeologists about US sites is extremely speculative when applied to UK sites.

Very few people have commented on work around archaeoacoustics in general in relation to this story. A few commenters have mentioned Deveraux’s work, but mainly the thrust has been this story must be debunked. I don’t think for a moment archaeologists have consciously decided the outsider must be expelled, but I wonder if an eagerness to portray this as nonsense indicates something more. Subconsciously does rejecting Waller as nonsense and the opposite of what you do mentally reaffirm that your own theories must therefore by default be sound reasoning?

For something more positive about how sound can be explored in archaeology, Alan Boyle has written an interesting piece on MSNBC’s Cosmic Log.

Achill-henge. Photo by Seequinn

It’s good to see Achill-henge being picked up by the BBC. This is a story that’s been around for a while. I think RTÉ’s video report is accessible worldwide. The BBC just has a webpage that’s an introduction to the story. You can also listen to the radio programme (worldwide I think) with the relevant segment at 6m04s.

It’s not a bad story, but from an archaeological point of view it misses the most interesting things. Firstly building this ertsatz archaeological site may have damaged a real site. Usually before construction there will be test digs to check the construction won’t destroy something of historical importance. Achill is an extremely sensitive archaeological site. There’s a long running field school there because it has such a rich archaeological record. If you’re a fan of prehistoric remains, it seems a bit mad to risk destroying one to make a copy.

The second thing is the template chosen for the site. It’s Stonehenge. It’s a shoddy Stonehenge as anyone who’s been there could tell you, but it’s clearly a ring of trilithons. You don’t get those in Ireland. There’s a romantic ideal that the prehistoric British Isles were all Celtic but, as we learn more about sites, it’s becoming clear that there are distinctive differences in traditions around the islands.

Tomnaverie Stone Circle. Photo by Cameron Diack

This is Tomnaverie Recumbent Stone Circle. The recumbent bit is the low stone in the middle, flanked by two tall stones. There’s plenty of stone circles like this around Aberdeenshire, but you don’t get so many of them anywhere else. There is a possible astronomical alignment. These circles tend to be set up so that the summer full moon appears to roll across the top of the recumbent stone every 18 years or so, due to the way the Moon’s orbit wobbles.

Drombeg Recumbent Stone Circle. Photo by Todd Slagter

This is Drombeg Recumbent Stone Circle. It’s compact and tidy, but the tallest stones are on the opposite side to the recumbent stone. This is more typical of Irish circles. The tall stones can be seen as a deliberate a portal for entry. The astronomical alignments are different for Irish circles. They tend to be facing south-westish and this could be an alignment to winter solstice sunset.

Even though they look similar, these stone circles could be telling us very different things about belief. If we trust the patterns emerging from studying groups of monuments, not just the ones we like, then they’re almost opposites. The key event in Scotland seems to happen with the Moon in summer. In Ireland they’re looking to the Sun in winter.

There’s an ongoing argument about whether summer sunrise or winter sunset was more important at Stonehenge. I favour winter sunset, but to some extent this is just as reflective of how you view prehistoric life as it is about the data. In addition there’s plenty of evidence showing that Stonehenge was repeatedly remodelled, including a possible shift from lunar to solar alignments.

In any event whatever the tradition was at Stonehenge it’s a massive leap to think what happened there was reflective of beliefs across the Irish Sea. Stonehenge is so embedded as an iconic brand for prehistoric archaeology in the British Isles, that British prehistory is now colonising perceptions of what a prehistoric Ireland would look like.

I don’t know to what extent that’s a good thing. Modern states are recent inventions, and some archaeologists will cringe at the idea of a prehistoric Ireland or UK. Recognising modern boundaries don’t apply to the past is a sensible feature. At the same time an appealing common past does risk losing some of what makes places locally distinctive.

Photos:
Achill-henge. Photo by Seequin. Licenced under a Creative Commons BY-NC licence.
Tomnaverie Stone Circle. Photo by Cameron Diack. Licenced under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence.
Drombeg Stone Circle. Photo by Todd Slagter. Licenced under a Creative Commons BY licence.

Road building on the Annapurna circuit, Nepal, surely a path to enlightenment? Photo by rpb1001.

I think I took my PhD at Leicester at almost exactly the right time — if you ignore the catastrophic downturn in education funding. The reason is I’ve had the opportunity to work with a few people who have been inspiringly innovative in their teaching. Derek Raine introduced me to Problem-Based Learning, when he built a new degree in Interdisciplinary Science around it. +A.J. Cann also help by letting me help out on some of his numeracy / study skills courses for Biological Sciences and that’s what he’s blogging about today at Of Schemes and Memes and on his own blog at Science of the Invisible.

I’m sure I’ve had plenty of study skills training but I don’t remember much of it. At its worst it was a part of the first year course teaching how to use various systems I might want to use in the third year. By which time the system might well have changed or else I would have forgotten it through lack of use. I don’t do well if I have do something in order to learn how to use a system. I work better if I learn how to use a system in order to do something else.

Alan Cann has a focus on how and why students want to learn something. To explain the difference, when I was taught I might be shown how to use PubMed. Fill in all the boxes and that’s a pass. In contrast Alan sets tasks that have a purpose and explains PubMed or Web of Knowledge are the easiest ways to get the information students need. The cleverest part is that this is wrapped up with social media icing.

Getting cohorts onto Google+ gets them thinking about privacy, but also makes communication online a more natural act. Students can build their own support structures. These become more important as the students move toward independent study later in their degree. Another clever thing working through social media does is it helps dissolve barriers between modules.

In my first degree what I learned in module A applied to module A. What I learned in Module B applied to Module B. I wasn’t making connections between the two. On Google+ the work their is for Alan’s module, but students discuss more than that. They’ll talk about other modules and make connections about why something puzzling is happening because we know from this module that this occurs so when you apply it to that lab experiment you should expect that and so on.

Another feature is that Alan doesn’t give the same course twice. He’ll drop what thinks doesn’t work and come up with something better. This shouldn’t be radical. I’ve been on countless courses as a post-grad that talk about the importance of reflection in teaching. Usually this reflection in the sense of “how can you better guide students along the path to enlightenment?” Alan and Derek have both taken the approach that questions if the path is right in the first place. Even if it’s basically sound, do we need all these wiggly detours to destinations no one visits anymore?

This post is a good entry point to some of what Alan is doing with teaching. Science of the Invisible is the place to go if you want to read more.

Photo: Road building on the Annapurna circuit, Nepal by rpb1001. Licenced under a Creative Commons BY-NC licence.

That doesn’t make sense I know. There are a lot of people who haven’t heard of Hevelius, but if you have heard of Hevelius, then the idea that people haven’t heard of him seems nonsense because his work is everywhere in astronomy.

Scutum in the Uranographia by Hevelius. Source: Wikipedia.

Everyone’s happy that most constellations are ancient, but what is less well-known is that not every star was in a constellation. There were gaps between constellations filled with faint and boring stars. These were called αμορφοι amorphoi or unformed stars by the Greeks. This is no good if you want to do science, because things like comets don’t stick to the interesting parts of the sky. That’s why mapping was so important in the Renaissance. In the case of Hevelius, his maps were so useful that he formed seven constellations that stay with us to this day.

I’ll admit constellations like Lacerta or Vulpecula aren’t famous constellations, but he was working with the haps between constellations. The fact that his charts were made of constellations visible in Europe shows he was working in a highly competitive space.

It’s easy to take this kind of work for granted. The output can be seen as an uncontested fact, but Thony’s post put’s Hevelius’s work into the context of its time including the often intense scientific rivalry between astronomer defending personal and national status.

The also shows that while with hindsight it seems obvious that telescopes would bring more accurate measurements, at any given time in history it’s not always obvious that new technology is The Next Big Thing, it could be a distraction or Expensive Dead End.

Loss of HMS Victory, 4 October 1744 by Peter Monamy

The HMS Victory (not that one) is set to be recovered according to the BBC and many other sites. You could say speed. Archaeology is an enormously inefficient of robbing graves. These days archaeologists can take years to study one barrow (an earth mound marking a burial) while in the 18th century aristocrats used to go on picnics and have the workmen open up one or two in an afternoon for gold.

There is a deeper reason.

Archaeologists are so slow because they want to say something about the people who live there. There’s a great Paul Bahn line: Archaeology is not about finding things, it’s about finding things out. Obviously finding things out is easier if you find artefacts with people and that’s why sudden disasters are great from an archaeological point of view.

It doesn’t stop a disaster site effectively being a grave. If you’re genuinely interested in finding out about people, it’s would be odd if you didn’t give a damn about their grave. Digging up a site is effectively destroying it.* If you’re going to do that you’ll want to go slowly and make sure that the story you can tell about this person’s life is a better memorial than the one he or she already has.

The news stories this weekend are all about finding the ship, along with a brief mention of the up to £500 million value of gold on board. What they don’t mention is that the UK government has sanctioned the recovery in exchange for 20% of that. Is the government more interested in the treasure, or has it developed a keen interest in archaeology so that, as Lord Lingfield says: “We hope it will give a unique insight into the world of the mid-18th century Royal Navy.”

The answer can be found in this story from October 2011 in the Daily Mail.

Odyssey said yesterday the UK government was ‘desperately looking for new sources of income’ and was urging it to find more British wrecks. It is also investigating HMS Sussex, lost off Gibraltar with 10 tons of gold in 1694, and HMS Victory, a precursor to Nelson’s flagship.

There are thousands of deserted medieval villages in the UK. In the 21st century the biggest defence any burials in them have have against feeding bankers is that the financial payoff of cracking them open is too low.

*Not hyperbolae. It’s recognised by professional archaeologists then if you dig up something it’s not going to be there for someone else to dig. +Kris Hirst collects quotes on her site, and a great one from Kent Flannery is: “Archeology is the only branch of anthropology where we kill our informants in the process of studying them.”

There’s a checklist from the Apollo XIII mission owned(?) by Jim Lovell. It’s an interesting puzzle from an astro-heritage point of view and something I’ve not given any thought to at all. In fact there’s two puzzles. One is legal ownership and the other is what heritage value does it have and neither question is connected much. The only connection I see is that if there is no heritage value then people won’t get worked up too much about the ownership.

Jim Lovell discovers he got back to Earth safely thanks to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Photo: NASA.

I get the impression NASA would have been within their rights to claim ownership, but if they allowed astronauts to keep mementos, then that’s their mistake. I’m surprised that a checklist with crucial calculations was discarded from a failed mission, but I don’t know the exact circumstances of how Jim Lovell got to keep it, but it seems NASA wasn’t that heritage aware at the time.

At the same time I don’t know what heritage value it has. Heritage value isn’t the same as historical or archaeological value. While the calculations are historically important, is the paper that holds them necessary to understand the history of the trip?

What I can see is that there’s a big emotional hit with the artefact. Seeing the authentic artefact puts you vicariously in a position of being in deep trouble in deep space. The emotional value is nothing to be sneered at. It’s part of being human and it’s going to play a part in discussions whether you directly address it or not. A sensible conclusion is going to have to deal with the emotional and experiential side of the checklist.

For those who think the answer is obvious, this is tax-payer funded material therefore the tax-payer owns it, here’s another puzzle. Suppose an Apollo astronaut gets paid to endorse Moon Juice a new fizzy sugar-laden drink. The only reason he is getting the job is because tax-payers funded him to go to the moon. Does that mean that the tax-payers should get the fee and not the astronaut? It’s not an exact analogy, this is a material artefact. Yet if it’s an artefact that was going to be discarded by NASA it wrong for an astronaut to own it, or is it a better solution that nobody owns it? Should Mitchell’s camera have been left on the Moon where no one could access it?

I don’t see an obvious answer that satisfies everyone. Another good piece by +Amy Shira Teitel.