Ancient Mesopotamian cities crumbled to dust

Many times I have been asked this question: How do archaeologists find the ancient cities? The should rather be: How can one who is not absolutely blind have any trouble whatsoever in choosing the right spot? Cities are all around.Every mound of dirt is a city. I have yet to find a place in the land of Iraq, except in the newly formed delta, on which one can stand and not see two or three cities outlined on the horizon. - Edward Chiera (They wrote on clay,1938)  

As Chiera explains: the land that is now called Iraq is all washed down from the mountains in the north by the Tigris and the Euphrates. This means that a) the land is flat and b) there are no rocks. Out of necessity clay was the prime material used by the ancient cultures (Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian) here living. Fired clay lasts very well as clay tablets show but it takes a lot of resources to bake them so for most practical uses, like building houses, clay was dried in the sun, which makes it usable but not durable. After thousands of years all those houses built on top of crumbled houses created large mounds that in our own time could easily pass for ordinary hills. 

 

Strange Berlin 2nd hand bookshop grid map

In a TV documentary on Hendrik Lenstra, the Dutch mathematician, the man travels to Berlin to deliver the Euler lecture. His main concern in Berlin however seems to be to visit as many 2nd hand bookshops he can (he collects old book because they smell better than modern ones). He prepares his visit carefully by plotting shops on a map to find those hotshots where there are several shops in close proximity. They way he does this puzzles me though. As a mere mortal I would find all shops on a topographic map. Lenstra has a different technique: he creates a grid matching the Letters and Numbers from the map register (shop one in E13, shop two in F8 and so on) and then draws lines to connect the E and 13. The result, to me, looks a bit confusing.

Mehinaku cartography [mapping the Xingu]

The Mehinaku are an indigenous Amazonian  people living in Xingu park. In his 1977 book 'The Mehinaku: The Drama of Daily Life in a Brazilian Indian Village' Thomas Gregor writes about them as if they were actors acting out their part. If life is a performance the village is a stage: "The Mehinaku village and its environs are a theatre for the enactment of everyday social relationships... The layout of the village and the architecture of the houses are simultaneously a spatial representation of Mehinaku social organization and a traffic pattern for the flow of information and interaction." If you say so! The images gives us something of everything: the village as a allusion to the cosmos, the mental map, the cognitive map, a cartoon and an areal picture.  We are always happy when can store up on some more ethnocartographic imagery. Click to Enlarge.  

"A Mehinaku view of everyday village life. When Amairi painted this he occasionally stopped to chuckle over his characterization of a particular villager."

Yanomami forage trails / ethnocartography of reticular space

"Ethnogeography and Resource use among the Yanomami" looks at the hunting and forage trails used by a Brazilian Yanomami village. It argues that space to the Yanomami is organized reticular and not concentric and zonal. Reticular? I've looked it up for you, it means: "1) Resembling a net in form; netlike. 2) Marked by complexity; intricate." I'm not entirely sure what the observations that the Yanomami use different systems of pathways adds to the table of forage psychogeography. Maybe it is a way of showing that paths connects places without laying claim to the space it traverses?

The spatial patterns of the Yanomami’s use of forest natural resources have traditionally been described or represented by anthropologists as concentric zones of exploitation (gardening, hunting, and gathering) outlined by approximate contours. Three types of concentric zones are usually distinguished: one close to the collective house, which includes the gardens, one for daily hunting, gathering, and harvesting, and, finally, one for long-distance collective hunting expeditions (hwenimu) and wild fruit gathering (waimi huu, yanomoa˜i-). This anthropological “zonal model,” which lacks any indigenous cultural recognition, projects onto Yanomami productive activities an ethnocentric conception of successive “rings” of decreasing degrees of resource exploitation similar to the classic agricultural model proposed
by J. H. von Thunen.

The methodology we adopted, allowing a fine-grained record of the Yanomami’s exploitation of natural resources, enabled us to produce a very different spatial model, this time structured by the collective knowledge and use of a web of identified forest paths (principal and secondary) tying together notable sites labeled by toponyms (hunting and gathering camps, former habitation and garden sites, groves of fruit trees, geographic features, and so on). In Yanomami cultural cartography, this complex network of paths and places is, moreover, closely interwoven with the intricate branching of the hydrographic network (made up of named rivers and streams), which constitutes another primary spatial reference.

From this new perspective, the Yanomami ethnogeographic organization of space appears to be reticular—structured by a crisscrossing network of sites (points) and routes (lines)—rather than zonal. By taking into account this emic structuring of space based on networks, as opposed to the conventional etic perspective in anthropology and geography, we aim to contribute toward a spatial model of tropical-forest resource use through data that are both quantitatively more precise and qualitatively more compatible with Yanomami social practices and cultural concepts.

Foragers land use, with maps

Characterization of a foraging subsistence-settlement system (San).

Characterization of a collector subsistence-settlement system (eskimo).

An old Eskimo man was asked how he would summarize his life; he thought for a moment and said, "Willow smoke and dogs' tails: when we camp it's all willow smoke, and when we move all you see is dogs' tails wagging in front of you. Eskimo life is half of each."

The forage psychogeographer takes away two things from Lewis Binford's 'Willow Smoke and Dogs' Tails: Hunter-Archaeological Site Formation' (1980). Namely: a differentiation of  lifestyles between foragers (for example: the San) and collectors (for example: Eskimo) and the different land-uses associated with them.

In contrast to foragers, collectors are characterized by (1) the storage of food for at least part of the year and (2) logistically organized food-procurement parties. The latter situation has direct "site" implications in that special task groups may leave a residential location and establish a field camp or a station from which food-procurement operations may be planned and executed.

For foragers, I recognized two types of site, the residential base and the location. Collectors generate at least three additional types of sites by virtue of the logistical character of their procurement strategies. These I have designated the field camp, the station, and the cache. A field camp is a temporary operational center for a task group. It is where a task group sleeps, eats, and otherwise maintains itself while away from the residential base. Field camps may be expected to be further differentiated according to the nature of the target resources, so we may expect sheep hunting field camps, caribou-hunting field camps, fishing field camps, etc.

'Nature' does not exist for everyone

Achuar map of their territory.

In an interview with Phillipe Descola (earlier, earlier, earlier), published in the Tipiti journal, comes the following quote that is good to have on record as it explains how Descola came to see during his fieldwork with the Achuar that nature does not exist:

...what really made me marvel was the realization that, although the Achuar certainly recognized certain discontinuities between humans and non-humans, these discontinuities were radically different from our own. And this was a bit surprising in an expected way, but also in an unexpected one. I was expecting this because I’d read, of course, not only the South American ethnography, but also Tylor, Frazer, Durkheim and a few others pioneers of our discipline whose work was entirely devoted to resolve this bizarre scandal, that some people appear not to make distinctions between humans and non-humans. So, I was prepared to find that. I was prepared to find it at the level of, as we would say at the time, ‘representations’ at the level of ways of thinking about life. But I had no way of understanding how people would actually live with this idea and put it into practice, or really experience the world in this fashion. And this is the discovery. No? It’s not only what people say; their whole way of life revolved around the fact that they didn’t make a distinction between nature and society.

Every Postman Pat is a cartographer too

Yesterday I worked a little extra, delivering the scarce Monday post for a number of postcodes areas that on a normal day would be divided up in 4 or 5 individual rounds. I'd never walked any of these rounds before, but I know all the streets well and some of them were right next to the street that I live in. But as the post covered quite a large part of the neighbourhood the more experienced colleague at the depot drew me a map from memory to explain the route. I don't know if it's clear if you don't know the place but this is a wonderful example of how deep knowledge of a terrain is part of the job. The mental cartographic skills involved are extraordinary: it plots the most efficient route (the product of years of experience), frames the area using the railway and the roundabout,  points out landmarks and key addresses, shows the street grid with rare accuracy and completely ignores all the bits of information that I didn't need. The street in the middle almost crosses the street left of it at a 180 degree angle, but you wouldn't see it here. The dozen streets in between are missing too. Conceptually this map has the clarity of the London Tube map. Big up to Pat!

Aboriginal water map

The above image is a Bindibu/Pintupi map of desert waterholes carved on a spear thrower. It's reproduced by I.A.E. Bayly in "Review of how indigenous people managed for water in desert regions of Australia" (1999, PDF-link). Despite what the title might suggest this is a Mouth Watering account in the Ray Mears Galore category of non-technological intelligence and endurance. The map is a sneak peek into the impressive combination of skill, knowledge, tradition and adaptation that allowed the Pintupi to live in the harshest desert of Oz.

 The ability of Australian indigenous people to survive in the desert regions where rainfall is low (3,000 mm pa), has long excited the popular imagination. Most of the early European explorers expressed awe and wonder at the extraordinary ability of Aborigines to survive in what they regarded as hostile if not “impossible” regions. So great was the respect of early explorers for the water-locating ability of Aborigines that several of them felt obliged to adopt the extreme and ethically-repugnant measure of depriving Aborigines of their liberty and forcing them to find water. After being deserted by some Aborigines in the Gibson Desert in 1897, Wells (1899) wrote “I then regretted not having chained one of the tribe [a practice adopted by him in December 1896], in spite of my promise to the contrary, for without a [Black] guide in such country one is almost powerless”. Reading today about incidents such as this serves as a timely reminder that there has been a strong and unfortunate tendency not to give proper recognition to the key importance of Aboriginal knowledge in the exploration and development of Australia. 

and 

Thomson (1962), in a narrative of the Bindibu Expedition of 1957, described how he spent several weeks with Aborigines in what is probably the most formidable of all the Australian deserts - the Great Sandy Desert, Western Australia. Just before parting company with these people he was given a very generous gift; a tutorial about their desert waters and a priceless “map” to assist their location. It is worthwhile reproducing Thomson’s account of this episode as follows:

“Just before we left, the old men recited to me the names of more than fifty waters - wells, rockholes and claypans - including those that I have described in this narrative; this, in an area that the early explorers believed to be almost waterless, and where all but a few were, in 1957, still unknown to the white man. And on the eve of our going, Tjappanongo produced spear-throwers, on the backs of which were designs deeply incised, more or less geometric in form. Sometimes with a stick, or with his finger, he would point to each well or rock hole in turn and recite its name, waiting for me to repeat it after him. Each time, the group of old men listened intently and grunted in approval “Eh!” - or repeated the name again and listened once more. This process continued with the name of each water until they were satisfied with my pronunciation, when they would pass on to the next. I realized that here was the most important discovery of the expedition - that what Tjappanongo and the old men had shown me was really a map, highly conventionalized, like the works on a “message” or “letter” stick of the Aborigines, of the waters of the vast terrain over which the Bindibu hunted.”

The forest made human: the legacy of trail trees

Trail trees (or signal trees or thong trees) are trees "modified by the American Aboriginal peoples in order to signify trails, campsites, or special locations (water supply, food, safety, etc.). Often these were oak saplings that are given a unique bend, usually pointed in the direction of the point of interest." The scope and spread of these trees seems to be a recent discovery and a certain hesitance to affirm them as man-made abounds. There is a (or has been, the site is dated) fabulous project attempting to map the location of all known trees and the trails they collectively mark in order to confirm them as human artefacts rather than flukes of nature.

The locals know their way through the forest and I guess that these trees are meant for travellers and visitors. How wonderful it must be to have travelled for days through high forest, alone and out of reach of humanity and then to suddenly cross the path of a signal tree pointing you into the direction of a human settlement. These trees are historic artefacts and this humanising effect is even larger today. Now the forest is empty and the old ways have disappeared: the trail tree is a reminder of what has been, a melancholic marker, not the promising announcement of being welcomed by friends and family. 

An earlier post on wayfinding in the Amazon.

A map showing the location of signal trees and the trail they create. Wish it was bigger!