Karksi Castle and the Vicious Circle of Conquest

Science published this article by Andrew Curry in November on new techniques being used to study the impact of colonization in Europe during the Northern Crusades, around 1200-1400 CE. Essentially, he's reinforced the idea that history repeats itself. This article tells a story about a prehistoric (i.e. without written records) peoples whose cultural traditions and way of life were replaced by colonizers, who at the same time decimated the landscape. As Alex Brown, a University of Reading paleobotanist in the UK says: 

“In the Iron Age, you have woodland. When you get to the 14th or 15th centuries, a century after the arrival of the Teutonic Knights, you're dealing with significant cleared landscape,” Brown says. “You can see the impact of the appearance of the Order and the scale of resources required to construct castles and maintain them.”

From cut marks on animal bones, we find evidence of new technologies. From the garbage pits of Karksi Castle, we find a transplanted culture. Can we transplant our recent experiences as humans onto these transplants? Possibly. It's not hard to assume that a sudden change in the way of life of Estonia's indigenous inhabitants isn't really a coincidence with new arrivals; especially when the cultural descendants of those invaders later colonized a large part of the world under the banner of the White Man's Burden.

Curry alludes to this repetitive nature of our history by concluding, "It might even be possible to turn the clock 1000 years further back, to look at how the Northern Crusades compare to the expansion of the Roman Empire." This pattern begs the question of what archaeologists a thousand years in the future might discover about our turn-of-the-millenium lifestyle. How will our eventual replacement by a "more advanced empire" be measured?

More exciting is the idea that we're only measuring changes that occurred within the last thousand years. The Catholic Church that ruled during those Crusades is still around today--but it took 600+ years to even begin to understand the impact that such a sudden upheaval can have. But since we started studying our own history, the technology we use has advanced exponentially. Perhaps next time we won't repeat our old mistakes.

The Meaning of Stone

Ramilisonina, a native Madagascar archaeologist, compared the sacred "ancestor stones" of Madagascar to the megaliths of Stonehenge, Bluestonehenge, and Woodhenge erected in Neolithic England. He and Mike Parker Pearson have come together to propose a theory analogous of the more recent Malagasy ancestor worship to explain these mystery stones erected 9,200 km apart. Blogger Brian John questioned that comparison, skeptical of transposing one modern-day belief system to an ancient one.

A dramatic moment at Stonehenge (source)

MPP and Ramilisonina are not wrong to propose this theory for the purpose of the henges. MPP has found cremated remains at the site that could possibly be from a single dynasty. So, logically, it could very well have been a sacred place for the dead. Ramilisonina seems confident that similar forms indicate a similar function—this is where I split from MPP/R and agree with Brian John. That analogy is probably too far.

But while John is right in describing the comparison between belief systems a "grave mistake" (pun intended?), his criticism of MPP for imposing a sacred meaning on the stones is too far. It seems that the majority of belief systems we've encountered as anthropologists do indeed include an afterlife, so the discovery of massive man-made structures and human remains together naturally elicit a sacred connotation. If there are some massive structures containing human remains that are not "the domain of the dead," I'd love to research them. But for now, I'd place my bets on MPP.

The Malagasy "ancestor stones" (source)

Without written records or a time machine, it's impossible to know for sure what the function of England's monoliths were. Ramilisonina may be a little ambitious in claiming a universality of ancestor worship at monoliths, considering the ancestors of the Malagasy and the henge erectors probably shared their last common ancestor tens of thousands of years ago. But I don't think he and MPP are too far off the dot.

Introductions...

So this is my introductory entry.

First things first: I grew up in Seattle, and I was obsessed with anthropology for years without actually knowing what it was. It started with the Discovery and History Channels, and more recently BBC Documentaries. My high school Japanese teacher also worked on a few archaeological digs in Japan, and would tell us stories about all the cool artifacts he found.

Speaking of Japanese, the character for "death" in Japanese is 死, read as shi (pronounced "she"), and is made up of two radicals (parts of a character that contains meaning about the word). The first radical is death, 歹, and the next is ... spoon, 匕. I'm not sure where the connection between death and spoons comes from, but it would be fascinating to find out. Before I actually looked into this, I thought it was a combination of three radicals, the first being that straight line at the top that would logically signify something buried underground (there are other characters with that sort of meaning). But it's not. Interesting.

Besides anthropology, I also have a passion for linguistics and languages (which are not really the same thing). I'm sort of pursuing a minor in linguistics, though it may just end up as more of a lots-and-lots-of-electives-in-linguistics thing. I'm semi-fluent in Japanese, and have also dabbled in French and Lushootseed, the Coast Salish language of the Puget Sound area Native Americans (First Nations is a Canadian term). If anthropology doesn't pan out, I'd really want to do work with language revitalization. There's a ton of environmental and cultural knowledge embedded in the languages of aboriginal peoples, and losing that insight would be tragic.

In short, there are a lot of areas in all disciplines that interest me, and I'm excited to be taking Archaeology of Death at UVic. I think it'll broaden my understanding of cross-cultural funerary rituals, and I'm especially interested in learning about how the artifacts found in these burials translate into knowledge about the people who buried them and how they thought about death. Most people say the universe makes them feel small and insignificant, and that's basically how I feel about anthropology. The more I learn, the more I realize that the time I spend here and alive is small and insignificant in comparison to the 200,000 year lifespan of Homo sapiens.