To be called out on your ignorance

Yesterday I went to a writing workshop with Australian writer Gillian Polack that I might talk about more in a different blogpost. In this one, I would like to focus mainly on one thing she said that has left me feeling a bit uncomfortable all day that I seriously feel I need to comment on. It might make a lot of people uncomfortable, but since Miss Fisher fans in general seems very open-minded I hope you can at least hear me out and reflect on it before you start trolling me.

A lot of fans hang out in a certain chat forum where we discuss just about everything. Most of us there are from The US and Europe and not from Australia. This is important because it plays into why I react so much to this.

Yesterday I learned that Australian readers are used to different types of characters and writing styles to European and American ones. I think it is important to realise that Phryne is actually written into this tradition (probably in the beginning not really intended for non-Australian ones either) by an Australian author. What Gillian Polack also said yesterday, was that, if Australian authors are to be sure to make it outside of Australia, they needs to tone down their "australianess" to please Americans and Europeans (which are the biggest markets for Australian literature outside of Australia).

During discussions among (mostly) American and European fans the differences in Phryne's book and TV persona often comes up. Book-Phryne is shallow, serious and a little spoiled, while TV-Phryne is exuberant, kind and feeling.What has been bothering me all day is not other fans's opinion on the books as much as that I have not seen any comment about the "strangeness" people feel in regard to the books's writing and characters might be attributed to different cultural preferences in fiction. This is, to be honest, rather typical reactions coming from Americans and Europeans to something that is out of their familiar area too.

I really do get the strangeness, I also think the books a bit weird at times. This post is made mostly because I have kind of been called out on my ignorance and it has made me uncomfortable all day. Even more in light of the changes that were made to the characters for the TV show and I wonder how much that really was because of a want to have it work better in other countries than Australia.

I guess Australia can be seen as part of Western culture. What the whole issue really shows is that even if we are all thinking of it as homogenous, we are still quite different. I also wonder what in Swedish litarture that others find strange and if a clue is to be found in the remakes of films Hollywood does.

Vere Gordon Childe - Phryne's archaeologist friend?

Today is the one year anniversary of this blog, my digital baby. And in what better way can I celebrate than write a post about two of my favourite subjects: Phryne Fisher and archaeology. The former was actually the subject of the first real blog post I wrote on this blog, a couple of days after the introductory one.

My view on Phryne has changed a little as I have had more time to think about her as a character, but since I started the books I have also started to gain new knowledge about her, so I think an update is needed. However, this post will not be so much about her character as it will be about a mentioning of a friend of hers in the book version of Blood and Circuses. We do not get to know much about this friend other than it is a man and he is an archaeologist who have been bitten by a lion.

Phryne had been told that the moment before the prey was seized by the predator, it went limp. It ceased to fear or care. An archaeologist friend had talked about the moment when a lion's teeth had closed on his shoulder. Dreamy he had said. The world had ceased to matter. The last mercy, he had said to creatures destined to be dinner was that they went down sweetly and gently to death, reconciled to their place on the menu.

~ Kerry Greenwood, Blood and Circuses

As an archaeologist myself, I have been wondering about her archaeologist friend and I think I have found a male archaeologist, contemporary with Phryne, that would fit quite well even if I have no clue if he was ever bitten by a lion.

V. Gordon Childe

His name is Vere Gordon Childe and he is viewed as one of the most prominent archaeologists of his generation. He was born in Sydney in Australia in 1892, but througout most of his career he lived in Great Britain.

Childe came to study classics at the University of Sydney, before moving to England to study Classical archaeology at the University of Oxford. During his time at Oxford he became a socialist, active in the campaign against the First World War which he saw as coerced by imperialists and which hurt the European workers.

In 1917, he returned to Australia, but due to his socialist engagement, he could not find work in academia and engaged himself in the Australian Labor Party. However, working for them, he became critical towards their politics and took another step to the left on the political scale and engaged himself in the left political movement called Industrial Workers of the World.

Childe emigrated to London again in 1921 where he got work as a librarian at the Royal Anthropological Institute and he also travelled the European continent and brought home the notion of culture from German archaeology to British archaeology. In his book The Danube in Prehistory from 1929, he defined it as:

We find certain types of remains - pots, implements, ornaments, burial rites and house forms - constantly recurring together. Such a complex of associated traits we shall call a "cultural group" or just a "culture". We assume that such a complex is the material expression of what today we would call "a people".

How the notion of culture has been used and is still used (both implicitly and explicitly) in archaeology is a subject I love to discuss and I do think Childe's definition still has more relevance for how archaeologists treat the concept today than contemporary archaeologists in general would like to admit. To express my thoughts on the subject would make up at least ten other posts. One thing about his archaeological influence do I need to clarify though.

There are three major theoretical paradigm that usually come up in archaeological publications and classes and Childe sort of has a foot in all three of them. I will here use a lot of -isms that might be tricky to understand if you are not used to an academic language. In those cases, I have linked to the Wikipedia articles about them. If you have any questions about it, please feel free to ask in a comment or on the link post for this entry.

• Chronologically, the first one is usually call Culture-historical Archaeology, Culture Archaeology or simply Traditional -archaeology. This paradigm has a less explicitly defined theoretical base than the later two, but in short the foundation can be found in evolutionism and diffusionism. The notion of culture (pretty much as it was defined by Childe in the quote above) was central to understand the archaeological material. Bruce G Trigger in his book A History of Archaeological Thought (2006) divides up this paradigm between one earlier he calls Evolutionary archaeology and the later Culture-historical archaeology, but most archaeologists do not seem to make the same distinction and the Culture-historical archaeology is very much based on evolutionism also.
• Because of the misuse of Culture-historical Archaeology in Nazi-Germany, archaeology went into a crisis after the Second World War and came out of it by combining a positivistic philosophical theory with a functionalistic view on society and culture into what is normally called Processual Archaeology or New Archaeology. American archaeologist Lewis Binford is normally considered to be the founder, but Childe actually did "experiment" with a functionalistic approach to archaeology before him.
• Postprocessual Archaeology is the newest of the three major theoretical paradigm in archaeology and does not only contain one single theoretical approach but many, for example structuralism, post-structuralism, hermeneutics, gender theory and marxism. The main thing they have in common is their critic of the rigid positivistic approach of New Archaeology and even here you can glimpse the influence from Childe. He turned to marxism to help him in his studies of European prehistory shortly after his first trip to the Soviet Union in 1935.

This is only a short account of Childe's contribution to archaeology. Describing it all would make this entry far too long, like I said above. Therefore I have decided to focus on his personal life.

In 1927, he became Abercromby Professor of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh and took an interest in the Neolithic period on the Orkney Islands. He did some excavations there, the most famous one of the Neolithic village Skara Brae between 1928 and 1930. From 1947 to 1957 he also worked as director of the Institute of Archaeology, London and together with Stuart Piggott and Grahame Clarke he founded The Prehistoric Society.

Upon retiring, he moved home to his native Australia, where he settled down in Blue Mountains for awhile before commiting suicide there in 1957.

Kerry Greenwood uses real life aviator Herbert Hinkler in Ruddy Gore so she is not opposed to the idea of using real life people in a fictional setting. It is, however, very much unclear if Greenwood even knows about Childe (even though he is one of the more influential archaeologists, he might not be known outside of the field). Considering his nationality, where he was active and when, however, I think it is a possibiltiy that Phryne would actually know him.

As I have said before, I am not so found of the comparisson between Phryne and Indiana Jones and to be honest I think the annonced title of the upcoming Miss Fisher film, The Crypt of Tears to fit much better with the latter than the former (which worries me immensely, but I still hope my worries to be unjustified!), if you see Phryne's archaeologist friend as Childe, they do, in fact, have something in common. After all, I have long thought "Indy" might have read too much of Childe's work and he is mentioned by him in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull from 2008.

Edit 27 April 2017: Someone on Facebook made me aware of the fact that the person who was bitten by lion that was referenced in Blood and Circuses was none other than David Livingstone ("I presume.") (1813-1873) and linked to this article about the incident. However, he was not really an archaeologists, mostly considered to be an explorer and missionary.





References

• Bjørnar Olsen 2003. Från ting till text. Teoretiska perspektiv i arkeologisk forskning. svensk översättning: Sven-Erik Torhell, Lund
• Bruce G. Trigger 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought, Cambridge
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._Gordon_Childe 

Photo of Childe was borrowed from here.

Treasures of Ancient Egypt

"We cannot find our future if we forget our past."

~ Alaa Awad, modern Egyptian artist

I have been watching this three part documentary called Treasures of Ancient Egypt where art lover Alastair Sooke discover ancient Egypt through 30 art pieces and what he finds is very intriguing.

At a first glance, ancient Egyptian art seems schematic and static and everything is supposed to be the same over thousands and thousands of years. Sooke, however, finds that there are a lot of things that interupts the static and schematic pictures, making them full of life. Some art pieces also goes more or less against the schematic style. I loved the so called ostraka Sooke finds in the worker's village Deir-el-Medina. They are much more free-styled and a lot of them are also parodies on the official style.

As someone who has studied colonialism/imperialism/cultural meating for awhile I do not really see it as strange that the invaders in Egypt after the New Kingdom tried portraying themselves as Egyptian, but also incorporating their own style, creating a hybrid. This is something I have tackled before, here and here but it might be time for a recap. To me, we are thinking too biologically about the concept of culture, one of the many things we have not been able to shake from modern imperialism of the last two centuries. It is extremely seldom that invaders go in and force their own culture on the colonized groups. This is an idea sprung from imperialism during the last two centuries and only one form out of many types of colonialism. Everyone of them were about power, but not everyone of them has been as devestating as imperialism during the last 200 years. Sooke says that maybe the Greek dynasty, the Ptolemies were not so powerful so they could introduce Greek culture into Egypt. I, however, would rather say that they were smart. They seem to have a much better understanding of cultures and how they interact than we do today. By using history and the old expressions of power in Egypt, they legitimized their right to rule over the Egyptians. They sought to build on the sense of eternity and stability presented in ancient Egyptian art, but like all cultures do as they adopt new traits, they interpreted it through their own cultural logic. This is why we actually can see some Greek influences in Egyptian art from this time. It really is like Egyptian artist Alaa Awad said to Sooke and which I qouted in the beginning. We all must look to the history to find our future.


Picture was borrowed here.

Some thoughts about Cultural Heritage

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

~ George Orwell, 1984

Monument of the Vendel Age boat burials in
Vendel, Uppland

This blog post might be containing quite a lot of rambling. I read an interview with the Swedish riksantikvarie (National Antiquarian) Lars Amréus, about the usage of the Cultural Heritage in Sweden. It is a topic I think about daily in my work. Therefore I thought I should shared with you some of my thoughts on the matter. The interview is in Swedish, but I intend to write this post in English as always. The focus will be mainly on Sweden though, since that is the cultural heritage I have most of my experiences from both as a professional archaeologist and as a visitor to different cultural heritage sites throughout my home country. All the photos except the last one in this entry are taken by me on trips to more or less famous cultural heritage sites throughout Sweden.

Gamla Uppsala, Uppland

To define the term cultural heritage is not as easy as one might think. The definition varies a lot between people and also throughout time. A general definition would probably be that it involves everything that humans have shaped throughout time but which in turn also shape us. It can be buildings, places and other types of milieus, but also traditions, crafts, artefacts, folklore, music, literature, art and oral stories. The common thread between all these categories is the stories they can tell about us both in the present and in the past.

Stern of the Vasa ship

Contrary to popular beliefs, a cultural heritage is never static nor is it powerless. It can be extremely political and be used both to include and exclude. The traditional view of a nationalistic cultural heritage has been seriously questioned and challenged in recent years. Recently even more so, due to the uprising of racism in many countries throughout the world, not least in Europe.

I have talked about my view on the term culture in many previous entries to this blog (most notably in this and this) and I don't intend to repeat myself too much in this one. However I want to state that my definition of the term culture is that it is entirely a social construction. It is never finished and it is under continous negotiations. It has all to do with what is socially acceptable in different social contexts.

St Olof's church ruin,
Sigtuna, Uppland

The traditional view of cultural heritage is just as much a product of the Romantic nationalism of the 19th century as the term culture and also the Nation state. The thought of a monocultural nation with one collective culture and history has been strong since then and is still fundamental in our view of the world. In its construction, the museums's (and bascially also the rest of the cultural heritage research) main task was to reflect this monoculturalism.

In my entry about the Stone Age I talked about how European encounters with other social groups through the Western colonialization of the last few centuries pretty much created the whole time period. Analogies was used to the contemporary "hunter-gatherer" societies to show that they belonged to a stage of development the European countries had left behind a long time ago. Just like the Stone Age was created based on a focus of difference, so was the Nation state created through focusing of what it was not.

Rune stone U161, Risbyle
Uppland

The creation of a glorious past was a very important part of the nation building process and therefore ancient monuments (in Sweden for example the mounds of Gamla Uppsala, seen in the second picture in this entry, or the rune stone like the one in the picture to the left) became important.

However, this perspective was very excluding. It excluded certain groups of people (in Sweden for example the Samis) but also parts of the past that was not glorious at all. For example, the Age of the Swedish Empire (Stormaktstiden) during the 17th and the 18th centuries was portrayed as bellicose, heroic and not least masculine. One did not talk about the rather catastrophic results of those war and values: Sweden itself was about to destruct due to the wars and a lot of people, both in Sweden and abroad, suffered greatly because of them. (Sweden would totally have been destroyed if it had not been for the women, but that is a story for another time.)

This is not so much a thing of the past either. We still tend to view our history through "romantic nationalistic glasses". To take the example of the Age of the Swedish Empire again, the Swedish newspaper Expressen as late as last year had a magazine about Sweden's "bloody history" in which one could read:

"Karl XII ärvde en stormakt från pappa Karl XI och de andra lyckosamma regenterna från 1600-talets krigiska epok." (Karl XII inherited a super power from his father Karl XI and the other successful rulers of the bellicose epoch of the 17th century.)

I didn't really know what to think about this quote and the fact that they this summer had a similar magazine devoted to the Swedish war kings made me realise even more how important investments in public outreach really is.

Microlithic flint blade, dated to the
Mesolithic that I found at Kanaljorden,
Motala, Östergötland in 2013

Not everything is bad though. Another Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter had a series of articles about the skull collection of Anders and Gustaf Retzius last year. This is actually really what I think we need to talk about more. Not many Swedes today know that Sweden sort of invented scientific racism (Statens rasbiologiska institut opened in Uppsala in 1922, the first of its kind in the world) This also at the same time as we had the Folkhemmet ideology which managed to be both open and including (the part mainly focused upon) and racist and elitist (the part mainly forgotten)...

There is another example, which might sound even more strange and I realised just how strange it is that we emphasize it because I went to a show by the American ventriloquist Jeff Dunham in Copenhagen a couple of years ago.

He came directly from Stockholm where he had visited one of the major tourist attraction of the Swedish capital and by far the most visited museum of the country: the Vasa museum.

Vasa is a Swedish warship (The stern of it can be seen on the second picture in this entry.) which is mostly famous because it sank after barely having left the harbour in Stockholm on its first journey in 1628 and because it was salvaged 1956-61.

The DC-3, Flygvapenmuseum, Linköping

In his show, Jeff Dunham joked about the fact that the Vasa ship is really a big failure and why do we make a museum of a failure? It really got me to realise that the Vasa museum is kind of brilliant just because of that. It is something that went totally wrong, but still we are proud of it. We really should be proud of both our tragedies and our triumphs. They both make us part of who we are and I think it is really important that our cultural heritage actually portrays both.

Why do we need a cultural heritage then? Well, I think mostly because it seems like a basic instinct inside of us all to seek our history, but also to be able to orientate ourself in time as well as in place wherever we are really. The important thing is that it needs to be including. We need to focus more on what makes our own cultural heritage similar to anyone else's than differences.

Last, but not least I want to show you a photo I found on Tumblr called “Globalization is beautiful sometimes”. It was taken in the Stockholm underground by Ninni Andersson in 2015.

The girls seem different at first, but once you start to really look at them they have very much in common all the same: they have the same colours in red and black, they sit in a similar manner and they both are looking at their phones. I find the picture to be a beautiful illustration that we all are both different and similar at the same time.

PS. Om Ninni Andersson eller någon av flickorna på bilden ser detta: Det är en underbar bild! Jag hoppas det är okej att jag lånade den. Tack!

About chess - or the other inspiration for my view on culture

Not much is known
Of early days of chess
Beyond a fairly vague report
That fifteen hundred years ago
Two princes fought, though brothers
For a Hindu throne

~ Chess, Story of Chess

The Eddan Queen
Photo: Historiska museet i Lund

I read a blog post from 2014 on the blog of the contract archaeological company then called Riksantikvarieämbetets uppdragsverksamhet (Now Arkeologerna.). It was about a chess piece from the 13th century turning up at the excavation of the Eddan block in Linköping in Östergötland, Sweden. Therefore I think it would be perfect opportunity to tell you about the history of chess and why I think it is perfect for understanding both how cultures interact and what the game can tell us about early Medieval Europe. In many ways it is a continuation of the entry I made a while ago about the Sami hat.

My grandfather taught me to play chess when I was five. Even though the blog post about the Eddan Queen is very imformative, there are some problems with it. For example it uses a direct translation to Swedish of the English names of the pieces and I will tell you why I find this problematic later on in this post, but first som back story.

Chess originated in India and is said to have been spread to Europe via the Arabs in the early Middle Ages. The oldest known written sources of the game and its rules is Versus de scachis dating to c. AD 1000. The blog post about the Eddan Queen says that it probably came to Scandinavia during the 12th century. However, as always with written sources, I think there are reasons to be cautious saying this dates the first use of the game in either Europe or Scandinavia. It might have been used for quite some time before that, just that no one had thought about writing it all down.

Part of the Lewis chess set.
Photo: National Museums Scotland

The Silk Road was, after all, very important to the Vikings and they tended to pick up whatever they liked and brought back home to use it as their own. An indication of when the game was first introduced in Sweden, might the name of the pieces actually provide wherefore I found it sad to see that a direct translation of the English names was used in the blog post about the Eddan Queen.

Like so often when different cultures interact and pick something up from one another, changes need to be made to accommodate the new social context. This also happened to the chess set. In the blog post about the Eddan Queen, it was explained that the army of the Indian and Arabic game turned into representations of the social classes in the European feudalistic society. I, myself, would actually not say that that was really the case.

The Medieval army of the European countries actually did consist of both kings, pawns, knights and bishops and sometimes even women (like queens). However, there were ceveral changes in the pieces collection anyway. The king kept his title, but his advisor, the vizier of the Indian/Arabic version turned into a queen. In Swedish she is normally known as Dam (direct translation: Lady). The battle elephant turned into a bishop in the English version of the game. In Sweden those same pieces are known as Löpare (direct translation: Runner) and the horses where never turned into knights as in the English version. The name normally used in the Swedish version is an older term for horse: Springare. In the Indian/Arabic chess, there were also two wagons that became castles in English and Torn (towers) in Swedish and also the foot soldiers turned into pawns (This is actually the only piece that can be directly translated in Swedish: Bönder.).

Why is this so important to me? Because chess is actually an excellent way to see how far Christianity had spread throughout Europe and which of the "classical social classes" of the Medieval period that had been established at the time the game was introduced.

More stilistic chess pieces

England seems to have already had an established medieval society with knights, kings and queens and the Church seems to have had much more influence there as evident by the bishop's name, than it had in Swede, when the game was introduced there. The names of the pieces reflect this.

The rules of the games also changed when it came to Europe, giving the new queen a much more active role in the games. Today she is the most valuable and piece.

But how about the Arabs? Did they find a need to change the game from its Indian roots? Yes, they did. The older, more naturalistic pieces contradicted the Quran's prohibition of portraying humans and animals. Because of this, the game pieces were transformed to more abstract versions. Today you can find them both while looking for chess sets.

King in a set of game pieces for Hnefatafl
from burial BJ750, Hemlanden Birka, Björkö, Mälaren, Sweden
Photo by SHM 2001-09-26

Another board game that seems to have been popular among the Vikings is Hnefatafl and I just have to show you the one to the left from Birka since I think the pieces are so beautiful. Game pieces turn up in elite Viking burials from time to time. There are some similarities to Chess with both being played on a checkered board and both have the purpose of defending a special piece called "king" which, just like in chess is actually pretty weak. An interesting aspect considering both games illustrates Medieval power structures...


Pictures were borrowed from here, here and here and here.

A Sami hat and how it affected my view of culture

Photo by Elisabeth Eriksson, Nordiska museet

I have not posted in awhile due to a deadline of a grad school application on Monday (August 1st 2016). My PhD project involve Viking colonialism and therefore the concept of culture is at its center. It has a long tradition in archaeology and has from time to time been slightly misused, but more on that later, because first I want to tell you a little story.

The hat in the photo above is part of the Sami exhibition Sápmi at Nordiska museet (Nordic Museum) in Stockholm and it had a great influence on my view of cultural interactions. It is a traditional Samish hat intended to be borne by a little girl and it dates to the 1930's (or maybe 1940's, I do not remember the exact date the guide told us.). It is traditional in every way, but an older lady taking the same tour as myself seemed really surprised by the images from Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) in the front. She claimed it was not Sami, but the tour guide informed her that the Sami people did not live in any kind of vacuum either in the 1930's or today. They are just as much a part of the modern world as anyone else and like we are influenced by other cultures, so are they.

I had been influenced by Postcolonial Theory before this incident, so I was used to the hybrid concept of culture that they talk about, but I think this was the time when I realised how to define the term and also how it probably is best to view it.

The concept of culture as we know it today is actually to a greater extent a product of European imperialism and the foundation of the nation state in the 19th century. The archaeologist Bruce G. Trigger has made a very good overview both on the origin and development of the concept in his book A History of Archaeological Thought (2nd edition 2006, Cambride) which I found to be fruitful both for archaeologists and others. With time it was combined with Charles Darwin's theories about evolution given the concept a biological foundation. The borders of a culture was also equalled to the borders of a Nation State proclaiming its origin in a homogenous, biological entity (or a race). The biological evolution shown by Darwin was also used as model for cultural evolution and they were classified in a hierarchical structure from simple to complex (Of course with Western cultures on top!). (In a post from about a month ago I discussed how this imperialistic perspective also has shaped our view of the Stone Age.) This "biological" definition of culture has really had some terrible consequences throughout the last 200 years and I think it is about time that we talked about this issue.

What most people do not know is that Sweden was actually sort of "the inventor" of Scientific Racism as a academic discipline. The first institute in the world was opened in Uppsala in 1922 and was then spread across the world, not least to Nazi-Germany. So it has had really terrible consequences indeed...

Back to the Sami children's hat from the photo above. It is one of those artefacts that really can show us how cultures interact. It is made according to Sami tradition, but its use of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs makes it unique because it shows how traditions changes in the meeting with influences from some place else. Snow White was a popular children's movie when it first came out in 1937 just as any Disney film of today is. Therefore it should not be so surprising that even a Sami girl has seen it and probably liked it (Why would the maker otherwise include it in the hat?). To me it shows that cultures is much better seen as entirely social. I think it is ongoing negotiations of what works socially in different settings. Anything that carries a social value will be picked up and only the phenomena that looses their social value will disappear. It gives us a much more flexible and open-minded view of cultures which hopefully will not cause any trouble for anyone in the future.

And on that note: To me the biggest problem with Snow White on the Sami hat is that Snow White seems to be much smaller than the dwarfs...


Photo from http://digitaltmuseum.se/011023761482?query=m%C3%B6ssa%20samisk&pos=7