#now we just have archeological based reconstructions

[dresshistorynerd]

Hey, I noticed that in one of your posts you showed an Iron Age Finnish woman's dress. Would you happen to have a good idea of what Finnish men were wearing in that era? The information on it seems sparse. I do have a relevant book that I'm about to look through, but I'd like to hear your insight too!

Hi! Thanks for the question (and sorry for the slow answer), I do love Finnish Iron Age clothing so it's always my pleasure to write about it. I've been wanting to do a deep dive into this for a long while, so maybe I'll do at some point a post about women's dress too.

Unfortunately no one has good idea of the Finnish Iron Age men's dress (and if you find any book or other source that claims otherwise, do not trust it), since there's much fewer archaeological finds of men's dress than women's dress. The most accepted theory on why the textiles of women's dress survived surprisingly well is because of the bronze ornamentation commonly sewn into especially the fine women's dresses of the era. The bronze protected them from decomposing fully. Presumably men's dresses were not decorated similarly then. There are some finds though and we can piece together at least some kind of vague picture.

I will be discussing the period from Viking Age to Crusade Age in Finland. Viking Age is often defined to cover 800s to mid-1000s and the Finnish Crusade Age started right after the Viking Age and ended in the end of 1200s, where the Finnish Medieval era begins. Crusade Age refers to the period where mostly Swedish (also German) crusaders in the span of couple of centuries conquered lands of the Baltic-Finnic pagans. The crusades of this period targeted pagans all over eastern Baltic Sea, including Baltic-Finnic Karelians, Livonians and Estonians, and Baltic peoples, and the Scandinavia too, where Sámi people were targeted. After that the Finland and Sápmi were colonized by Norse people and stayed that way untill Finland was transferred under Russian rule, but to this day Sápmi still stays under colonial rule, including Finnish colonial rule. The current Finland was very multicultural area, mostly populated by Finno-Ugric peoples, including Sámi people, Karelians and various Finnish peoples.

It's important to understand that even just Finnish peoples where not homogeneous, but had distinct, yet of course strongly related cultures. These were Finns (suomalaiset) (yes most people we now call Finns were not in fact called that) in the coast of southwestern and western Finland, Tavastians (hämäläiset) in central-western lake-Finland and Savonians (savolaiset) in central-eastern lake-Finland. This means we can't mix findings from all over Finland to reconstruct a dress without evidencing that all the elements were actually used in one place. These three tribes had broadly similar base for their clothes, but distinctive jewelry and detailing. The big divide was and has always been between eastern and western Finnish peoples. This is because western Finnish people were in close contact through the sea with Norse people and southern Baltic-Finnic peoples, while eastern Finnish people, Savonians mostly, were influenced a lot by their proximity with Karelians. Another dividing factor was the very different environmental conditions between western and eastern Finland. The Finnish coast especially in west is very flat and fertile land, while the lake area, especially in eastern Finland is very rocky, hilly and quite infertile. The main way it effected clothing differences was that western Finland being more wealthy had more elaborate clothing. Tavastians in both occasions fall quite in between, but they tended to be more in the western cultural camp.

My most important sources are a study by a doctor of cultural anthropology, Jenny Kangasvuo, Savon historia I (Savonian history) digitized and open sourced here and the digitized archeological collection of Finnish Heratage Agency. They are all in Finnish so not very useful for most people unfortunately.

Finnish Men's Dress in Viking and Crusader Ages

The basic garments men wore were broadly similar as women. They wore a shift/shirt, knee or above-knee length dress, cloak, belt, shoes and some kind of headwear. Wool was used most commonly, though the shirt would sometimes be linen too. Even evidence of silk has been found in some western Finland graves. I would assume that would be from a dress of some great man, who traveled to gain riches, possibly with vikings. Embroidery and decoration with metals was a typical feature of the whole Eastern Baltic Sea area. In Finland during this period bronze was the most common decorative metal, but silver was used too. Decorative elements were usually woven with small bronze spirals into all kinds of patterns. Here's examples from the reconstructed Ravattula's dress (Finns) used by women.

Shirt

The shirt (in Finnish shift of both women and men was called shirt) was basically a long shirt or under dress. We can assume it was similar to those of women's except shorter since the dress men wore was shorter too. They were made from wool or linen, I would assume wool was used in winter and linen in summer, when linen was even available. The neckline had a cut and closed with a bronze brooch. Horseshoe brooch was common. The first one is a quite typical bronze horseshoe brooch with a bit of ornamentation from Salo (Finns). The second one is from Tuukkala, (Savonians), it has exceptional ornate detailing and is uncommonly silver, not bronze. The third picture has two quite uniquely ornamented horseshoe brooches, first from Köyliö (Finns), second from Kurikka (Finns).

Legwear and footwear

Very little of men's legwear has survived and it's unclear weather men wore pants or separate pant legs, leg wraps or perhaps long socks. Evidence of strings decorated with bronze spirals and tablet woven band has been found in leg area of men's graves. This could mean that they wore either leg wraps, long sock or some sort of pant legs that needed to be secured with string or band under knee. Women used strings and tablet woven tape to secure leg wraps and socks, which I think supports that theory. Sometimes both bronze decorated string and tablet woven band was found in the leg area, which would still be explained by this theory, since it was common to decorate the ends of the bands with bronze decorated strings. Here's an example of sock bands just like that from the earlier mentioned reconstruction of the Ravattula's women's dress. Since men's dress was shorter, I think it would make sense if they still wore some kind of pants or separate pant legs with socks or leg wraps like that.

However, the strings and bands could have also been part of the shoes. Everyone probably wore similar shoes - laced leather shoes with a bit of pointed end. They might have been short or ankle length and the lacing was done with either leather cord or tablet woven band, which would also explain the findings. Socks or feet wraps would have been used in them, and straw or wool could be added as filling for warmth. Here's a pair of traditional Izhorian shoes from Estonia from early 1900s, and a pair of traditional Sámi shoes. The designs were likely roughly similar in Viking and Crusader Ages, though obviously more simple, and it's probable that Finnish shoes very something like that too. Here's a 1893 drawing of what findings of shoe material from Korpiselkä (Savonian or Karelian) might have looked like. Considering the quality of archaeology of that time, copious amounts of salt should be applied. And finally as a fourth picture there's reconstruction shoes from Ravattula's dress.

These are not necessarily mutually exclusive theories. The lacing of the shoe could have been laced up the leg and used also to secure either sock or leg wrapping, or they could have been separately secured in ankle and knee respectively.

In some graves twill fabric has been found in the leg area. It could be part of pants or for example leg wrapping, which was often made of twill. One theory about pants is that they were similar as some findings in Sweden, where fairly tight pants made of twill were secured at the hem with buttons similar to cuff studs. These kinds of cuff stud buttons are quite a common find in Finland and some have been found in men's graves close to legs.

Dress

Again there's not much findings of dresses, but a little more perhaps. It was usually from wool. The shape was either a tunic or an open coat. In Karelia there's findings of men's dress suggesting tunics thicker than women's dresses and made from sarka, a type of broadcloth. On the other hand, in Masku (Finns) they found buttons in a row on top of the torso, which suggest a coat closed with buttons. The first picture is a drawing of the grave find. Similary coak closing amounts of buttons have also been found in other places in western Finland. This suggests that Finns and probably Tavastians too wore long coats buttoned to the waist and Savonians wore tunic of Karelian influence. Below there's couple of version of what might this western Finnish men's coat dress could've looked like. The first is an imagined version of the coat based on the Masku grave finds, second is just as imagined version based on Eura (also Finns) grave finds.

Take these "reconstructions" with a strong dose of salt. These are more artistic reconstructions than scientific, since there's not enough material and too much guesswork needs to be done. And because we can see in the Masku grave drawing right here that the other deceased has a large buckle to (probably) close the shirt (to be fair, it could for a cloak too), like was typical, I find it implausible that the coat neckline would be small and round covering the buckle. If you make a decorated big buckle, I assume you want to show it. I would find a v-neckline more probable. It's also easier to make without wasting expensive fabric.

The buttons are interesting. There were what you would imagine - your typical buttons made of bronze like seen in the first artifact from Hattula (Tavastians). But then there was silver jingle bells used as buttons, found for example in both Masku and Eura graves, Eura findings pictured below.

It's possible, even probable I'd say, that the hemlines of men's dresses were finished with tablet weaving patterns, like women's dresses. Also I would assume the pattern of the men's dress (and shirt) was mostly similar to the women's underdress/shirt patterns. So here's couple of different reconstruction patterns for women's dress. Different historians have made different interpretations of the patterns, so it's very much undecided what it really was like.

Belt

This is likely the most ornamental part of men's dress. They could be made out of leather or tablet woven band. And there's another east-west cultural divide here. Karelian belts were made out of leather, were usually 1,5-2,5 cm wide, decorated with iron or bronze studs and had a buckle made out of iron or bronze. These types of belts have been found in Savonia too, for example in Tuukkala grave find, which you can find very cool pictures of in this photo documentation of the dig in pages 173-175. In western Finland a "hela" belt was the common style. I don't think there's a world for hela in English. It's a sort of decorative lamella, small metallic plate (not necessarily square but often so) attached to fabric or leather with studs or sewing. Hela belt came from the Permians of Kama river, who were one of the many Finno-Ugric peoples who used to populate much of European side of Russia. Karelians lived closer to Permians, so you might think Permians would influence eastern Finland more, but my theory is that the costal Finns, who frequently joined viking crews and at least were in close contact with merchants including vikings, who would travel along the eastern route through the eastern European rivers, where they could go all the way to Kama river or at least meet traveling Permians. Here's yet another Finnish source more on the Finno-Ugric people around Kama river.

Anyway, hela belt was made of leather and filled with small decorated lamellas, often in square shape, but various other shapes too, like animal ornamentation. In this period hela belt helas were bronze. First image is a nice full set of hela belt metal pieces found in Pirkanmaa (Finns). Second is an older example, right before Viking Era, from Vaasa, costal settlement, (Finns), depicting a very Permian style. The third one is a lion hela found separately in Pälkäne (Tavastians). They are also found in Tuukkala, showing that both eastern and western cultural influences were present there at the same time.

Another western Finnish belt type for men had intricate tassels decorated with bronze spirals hanging on the waist at the end of the belt. They could be made out of leather or tablet woven band. First image depicts a reconstruction of such tassel. Belts in east and west would have strap dividers to hang straps for things like purse, knife and sword. The first picture above has couple of those, but the second picture below has two more of them in more detail in the middle of the picture. These finds are from Lieto (Finns).

Cloak

Like women's cloak, men's cloak was woolen and either a square or trapezoid. Cloak is yet another east-west divide. In western Finland men's cloaks have embroidery with bronze spirals. They in fact appeared earlier in men's cloaks (in 900s) than in women's cloaks (1100s). They were also a little different in men's cloaks. The spirals and the patterns themselves were bigger and the fastening thread itself was also used for the pattern creation, unlike in women's dresses, where the thread was mostly covered. In eastern Finland there has been no finds of bronze decorations in men's cloaks, mostly only cloak brooches have been left of them. Unsurprisinly same applies to Karelia. This also means there's very little fabric left too. There's one exception. In Tuukkala (Savonians) they found a piece of fabric probably from men's cloak, though it could be from a men's dress too. It was striped, with possibly white or brown base and wide stripes of red, blue and yellow. So perhaps eastern Finnish cloak was not non-decorated, but the decoration was in the fabric pattern. Unfortunately it's hard to know how common fabric like that was, when so little of it is left.

Accessories

It's safe to assume men too wore some type of headwear, but none of those has survived. It probably means it was entirely made out of fabric whatever it was. Some type of hat or cap was certainly used in cold weather at the very least. Tablet woven headband was also possible option for not too cold weather.

In Tuukkala there was couple of interesting jewelry finds too. Two graves had a necklace type mostly found in Karelia. It was birchbark tape covered with nettle fabric and had square helas sewn into it. There were also more typical Finnish necklaces made of beads and bronze spirals.

Razors have also been found with men in their burials, so we can assume shaven faces or at least trimmed beards and moustaces were fashionable.

[luigra]

Occasionally I& still think about some of the Hermitcraft fanseasons I&'ve made. Most notably Season HC, the HC, of course, standing for HillsCrafted. Have I& talked about Season HillsCrafted already? Like it's just principally interesting to consider what two hermits would do if they spent a season basing together, and we aren't thinking of this more?

For Season HC the idea was that they would decide on an Archeology theme, since the season supposedly took place in that update, and so Joe and Xb would build a reconstruction of what they think an ancient city would look like.

Now, okay, I& actually put in a lot of thought into this idea and can give some reasoning and elaboration on this. So both Joe and Xb have based with other people for an entire season before. As Joe stated before, he enjoys doing a lot of research for a megabase project, and you can tell that his absolute passion is making hyper-accurate replicas. So the idea was that he was going to take some actual real archeological site and copy the layout of it from real measurements. However this season would be an interesting opportunity for him to show some creativity in how to then interpret the ruins he works with!

As for Xb, well he already has tendencies both to base in existing game structures AND he enjoys giving his megabases some lore, so while later on Joe would change all the layout, the two of them would pick one of Minecraft's ancient ruins to start at, and then Xb would get an opportunity to worldbuild how the ancient civilization they're reconstructing lived.

Overall I& am still so invested in this whole idea and I& kinda wanna develop more thoughts on what the rest of the hermits would be doing, but Season HillsCrafted is just too good of a name so it would still have a focus on my& babygirls. Please send your own fanseason speculations as well

[samwebsteruniblog]

Mapping the World

-Research

Im really interested in exploring this project for the possibilities of exploring a range of topics and then documenting them using maps as the median. I also enjoy typography briefs especially as this is also very open in the experimentation going forward and means I can create something exciting and hopefully unique. I really like this brief for the idea of taking something potentially forgotten or unexplored and turning it into something different that shows the audience and educates them.

- 3D Maps

- Old Historic Maps

- Illustrated maps, These maps show a huge level of detail and a great way to show real places. If I was to go down this route I would have to encorporate a lot of typography to fit the brief.

After the first tutorial we discussed potential ideas and routes to explore I now just have to do further research into the subject and explore potential themes to map. Im still interested in doing something true crime related however I will have to look at other examples so that the work doesn't become insensitive. My main interest is exploring something that hasn't been recorded on a map I think that would create a final product that becomes eye opening.

We spoke creating an editorial final piece so I will also research into different routes here to see if anything inspires me. There is a ton of different spaces that haven't been mapped out physical or not. If I was to go down the true crime route I would need to understand forensic science in more detail to make a successful piece.

Some potential ideas to explore,

Archeology

Evolution

Reservations

Natural changes

Map of things we don't notice

Archeology

This is a really interesting subject, its historical it's also not been thoroughly explored with maps, it could be used to create a journey of the past and present mapping the route or decay that these fossils or historic sites went on over the years. It is quite an open subject that I could through myself into any time and explore that period. This would be really interesting to recreate. Theres also a ton of different ways I could show this journey. However I think Typography is where I will try and focus so that if I want to I can submit my design. 

I looked at a few sources that would make good topics to base my project off, and existing maps or reconstructions of this subject.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/archaeology

https://factsanddetails.com/world/cat56/sub407/entry-6368.html

My worry about this as I do love the opportunities of exploring ancient history I also think the project will be more reconstruction heavy mapping out buildings compared to now would be really difficult to do without actually visiting these sites and having a solid starting point.

Evolution

This relates closely to the idea of exploring science but it also could become something that shows the evolution of a place or something not biological. I could explore the changes of technology and how much it's taken over in our modern world. I think this would also be really interesting. However I do want to chose an idea or theme that really excites me so I can fully enjoy myself and enjoy the lengthy research that this project needs for a successful outcome.

I looked briefly at some articles exploring different types of evolution.

https://study.com/academy/lesson/forms-patterns-of-evolutionary-change.html#:~:text=The%20four%20types%20of%20evolution,%2C%20parallel%20evolution%2C%20and%20coevolution.

https://www.sparknotes.com/biology/evolution/patternsofevolution/section1/

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190207-technology-in-deep-time-how-it-evolves-alongside-us

The reason I'm not set on this idea is because I feel like this outcome is always going to lean towards a timeline where as I really want to explore more of a journey through a type of tracking or recollection.

True Crime 

I am going to explore this idea in more detail because I believe the foundation for something really fascinating that everyone enjoys. True crime is something we all love because of shock value. The psychology behind this is ‘True crime dramas give us an insight into our culture and norms as well as our anxieties and values. By watching true crime dramas, we unlock our natural desire to solve puzzles and mysteries and get to speculate as to why criminals may act the way they do.’ This is why murder mysterious and thrillers are so widely successful. I will have to do a lot more research to make sense of how to create something that doesn't glorify these potential criminal actions but sets it out in a way that educates and explores a certain type of crime. There is a ton of material that does this successfully while still holding up a level of class. We are all obsessed with such topics portrayed in films, board games and books, so I think creating a map or small collection of real life events breaking down the journey or series of events would be really fascinating. 

 Though these aren't all true crime they do show our obsession over the topic. Some examples of books that do this successfully are,

‘In My Dreams I Hold a Knife’ A book that tells its stories in duel time following 6 friends exploring their separate paths and how these interlink for better or for worse.

‘The Talented Mr Ripley’ This murder mystery shows how an obsession can turn deadly. This has also been turned into a film again showing the love we collectively share for this genre.

‘Sherlock Holmes’ Again with multiple film/tv adaptions, this detective is a cultural classic

Board games that focus on this theme,

‘Detective: City of Angels’ this noir set in the 1940s explores mystery inspired by classic detective stories.

‘Cludo’ The more widely known murder mystery that allows players 8+ to indulge in becoming a detective.

The list of films is constantly growing a few honourable mentions would be,

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile (2019)

No Man of God (2021)

The Frozen Ground (2013)

These portrays don't always glorify the subject but I think they do get close to pushing the boundaries. After exploring these a bit further I can see that even the theme of true crime is so open with a range of potential outcomes that explore mapping. It could become a game map, crime statistic map in certain parts of the world, a map that explore fantasy events, a map that retells events, etc.

I think the aesthetic of a theme like this is what would have to be done sensitively as the subject matter is very accepted however if I was to exaggerate or potentially under play real situations the outcome would hurt.

Looking deeper into the psychology of true crime shows a variety of benefits or affects on the consumer. These are; Because it helps us feel prepared, Because there might be an evolutionary benefit, Because we’re trying to solve the mystery, Because we like to be scared … in a controlled way. This fascination is definitely flushed out to explore I could potential explore the psychology behind it as well creating something that openly educates on that fascination would help make the outcome less glorified.

I also really like the idea of this genre actually inspiring a new generation of law enforcement. ‘While there is the possibility of fictionalised narratives setting unrealistic expectations and communicating misconceptions about roles in the criminal justice system and the police, there are also plenty of positive reasons why crime dramas could inspire the audience to take a wider interest in this field.’  There is also studies that believe true crime is addicting, it's also been proven that a higher percentage of women indulge in these gritty stories.

Forensic science is a big part of bringing these to life so its something I need to get a deeper understanding for and hopefully find some inspiration on the direction to take my project. I will also have to explore what element of crime I would like to map out and portray. 

Forensic Science 

After looking at a few sources I can see the level of professionalism with all details being accounted for and examined. These sources mainly explored violent crimes where as It would also be good to get some insight on other crimes that include more of a journey.

‘Indeed, the ultimate objective of crime scene investigators and of forensic scientists is aligned: to help enact justice by gathering and analysing evidence, then presenting that evidence in court (either as an expert witness or via attorneys) in order to uncover the truth.’

‘A crime scene investigator is often one of the first professionals at the scene of a crime (after first responders), tasked with examining the location and gathering evidence relevant to the investigation, including photographs and physical evidence.’ If I was to go down this route I could include other media as part of the project alongside something typographical.

https://www.forensicsciencesimplified.org/csi/how.html

https://www.forensicscolleges.com/blog/resources/csi-vs-forensic-science

Potential crimes to map

I also looked at a range of articles and events that could be used in this project. Im leaning towards some bank robberies or heists because I think that doing something more gritty would potentially undermine the actual work and I want to make it more mysterious/intriguing than shocking.

When researching bank robberies I was blown away by how often these occur this would be great to include in the final outcome with some facts or figures relating to bank robberies to make the piece more educational.

This site shows all the statistics of bank robberies in the US, it has a ton of different variables accounted for and gives a lot of information that would be very valuable in this project.

https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/violent-crime/bank-robbery

‘The FBI has had a primary role in bank robbery investigations since the 1930s, when John Dillinger and his gang were robbing banks and capturing the public’s attention. In 1934, it became a federal crime to rob any national bank or state member bank of the Federal Reserve System. The law soon expanded to include bank burglary, larceny, and similar crimes, with jurisdiction delegated to the FBI.’

Looking at successful heist would be really interesting to try and let the viewer figure out where they went and where the police messed up etc.

However, despite the frequency, it's rare that would-be bandits make off with much more than a few thousand bucks before getting swiftly apprehended. Of course, there are exceptions. These expectations are what interest me the most with this idea.

https://www.thrillist.com/culture/most-successful-bank-robberies-of-all-time-biggest-heists-in-history

https://www.treehugger.com/unsolved-heists-history-4864043

Some other sources I looked at where youtube which shows successful getaways. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHNjZZQ4w-4&ab_channel=WFAA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eLWS9KC9_U&ab_channel=FOX10News

Artists who explore working with Maps 

Map Portraits by Matthew Cusick,

Head Sculpture by Nikki Rosato,

Maps, Reorganized by Armelle Caron,

Illustrated maps by Caroline Harper,

Julie Mehretu,

[amer-ainu]

by Chetanya Robinson | December 9th, 2020 Visitors to the Duwamish Longhouse and Cultural Center in West Seattle have to navigate poor sidewalks and a treacherous stretch of West Marginal Way that lacks a crosswalk and pedestrian signal.

“People go up and down West Marginal Way at 60 miles an hour — it’s like a freeway,” said Jolene Haas, director of the Longhouse.

Visiting the Longhouse might become safer next year. The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) will build a temporary pedestrian crossing by the Longhouse in summer 2021, followed by a permanent one a year later. The department will also build a new sidewalk — meeting Americans with Disabilities Act accessibility requirements — and fill a gap in the biking trail there.

“I was delighted,” Haas said of the new improvements, which the Duwamish have long requested. “We just never thought this was going to happen in a million years.”

The Longhouse, which was constructed in 2009 from Western red cedar with traditional Salish architecture, is the centerpiece of the Duwamish tribe’s efforts to survive culturally and economically. It includes cultural objects, a space for performances and a kitchen for preparing traditional foods. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, it hosted regular events, educational programs for children and walking tours of the history, geology and biology of the Duwamish river. Limited tours are still available.

The Longhouse stands across the street from an archeological village site and the Duwamish river. “We’re so happy to be here, to be close to the river and close to one of our sacred sites,” Haas said. “There isn’t any other place we’d want to be. But we just feel like the city should help us create equal access and safe access to getting here.”

The hazardous traffic along West Marginal Way has created financial barriers for the Duwamish. “People don’t want to rent our facility or come here for a workshop, because the access to get here is so difficult,” Haas said. “Then how are we supposed to survive in this economy and in this city?”

In March, the city closed the West Seattle bridge after an inspection found alarming cracks. As traffic was diverted toward other bridges, it increased along West Marginal Way. SDOT lowered the speed limit on the road to 30 miles per hour in May and installed radar feedback signs in September to control speeding.

Ironically, the bridge closure probably ensured the crosswalk and other projects were funded and installed more quickly.

The Longhouse pedestrian safety improvements — the sidewalk, crosswalk and bike lane — already had $1.25 million in funding for planning and design from the 2020 budget. With the closure of the bridge, it became important to quickly mitigate the impacts of detouring traffic along West Marginal Way, said Dawn Schellenberg, spokesperson for SDOT, in an email.

“It’s sort of a glass-half-full outcome of the bridge closure,” said Councilmember Lisa Herbold, who represents West Seattle. “This year, we leveraged the fact that we have this crisis with the bridge closure to get the city to fully fund the project.”

Herbold has supported the Duwamish tribe’s efforts to get a crosswalk built for years, starting when she worked as a staffer for Councilmember Nick Licata. She lives nearby and has frequently visited. “You go to a meeting at the Longhouse and have to cross that crazy road,” she said.

It’s taken so long to build the crosswalk and implement other improvements, Herbold said, because of the City Council’s lack of “prioritization around the need.”

According to Schellenberg of SDOT: “Unfortunately, up until recently, a lack of funding for these improvements in that location did not make it feasible for us to provide them.”

That didn’t stop the Duwamish from advocating for the improvements, including recently seeking funding through SDOT’s Your Voice, Your Choice participatory budgeting process for street improvements. The tribe’s proposal received wide community support in West Seattle.

SDOT has narrowed traffic into one lane on either side of the Longhouse and installed paint and posts. But at first, the city said there wasn’t enough funding for the crosswalk, and the industrial location was a challenge, Haas said.

“It wasn’t going anywhere, so we basically held everyone’s feet to the fire,” she said.

After the bridge closure, Haas feared the Longhouse safety program would get pushed aside, and she joined the West Seattle Bridge Task Force to keep the project alive.

In the end, the project was fully funded through SDOT’s Reconnect West Seattle, which is intended to mitigate the impacts of detour traffic in Duwamish Valley neighborhoods.

SDOT will build a temporary pedestrian crossing signal by the Longhouse in summer 2021, followed by a permanent one the next year. The permanent crossing will take a year because it requires reconstructing the BNSF rail crossing at that location, and the company needs “a long lead time” to review designs, according to SDOT.

In spring 2021, SDOT will install a new asphalt sidewalk on the west side of West Marginal Way where there’s now an overgrown path.

SDOT will also build out 0.4 miles of biking trailway to create a full path for cyclists getting to the Longhouse. The department is considering design options for the southbound curb lane, which extends from the existing Duwamish Trail Crossing signal to the Longhouse, and will have discussions with the public and stakeholders about options.

Haas is happy the pedestrian safety projects will soon become reality. Next, she hopes King County Metro will create a bus stop near the Longhouse; the closest one is about a mile away. “That would just be, to us, a dream come true,” she said.

“With the billions of dollars that’s being dumped into the city by all the tourists that come here, they can’t get on a bus and get here,” Haas said. “So we’re sort of being left out in the cold, we feel.”

The Longhouse receives an estimated 10,000 visitors per year on average, and Haas wants to make it easier for more people to visit.

“There’s no other place in the city of Seattle that represents the first people of Seattle but this longhouse, and tells our story,” Haas said in reference to Duwamish representation. “I just feel like people should have access to get here.”

A bigger dream in sight

An even bigger dream for the Duwamish is the possibility that the new Joe Biden presidential administration will grant them federal recognition.

In 1855, tribal leaders in western Washington, including Duwamish and Suquamish leader (and Seattle’s namesake) Chief Si’ahl, signed the Treaty of Point Elliott. In signing the treaty, the Duwamish gave up their homeland of most of King County in return for a reservation and fishing and hunting rights. Several Washington tribes were granted land and federal recognition as sovereign tribal nations, but not the Duwamish.

Federal recognition would allow the tribe to create their own laws, be exempt from taxes, and receive services from the federal government, like healthcare and subsidized housing.

The tribe has pursued federal recognition since 1977, which it almost received in the last days of Bill Clinton’s administration, but then President George W. Bush swiftly took it away because of a technicality based on stricter criteria from 1978, which have since been updated twice.

Haas believes there’s a greater chance it could happen under a Democratic administration, and the tribe is preparing to petition the Biden administration. That said, the tribe had high hopes for recognition under President Barack Obama, and it never happened.

“We always have hope,” Haas said. “It’s never going to be over for us until we are granted our rights under the treaty that the tribe signed.”

[sciencespies]

How Ancient DNA Unearths Corn's A-Maize-ing History

https://sciencespies.com/nature/how-ancient-dna-unearths-corns-a-maize-ing-history/

How Ancient DNA Unearths Corn's A-Maize-ing History

Smithsonian Voices National Museum of Natural History

How Ancient DNA Unearths Corn’s A-maize-ing History

December 14th, 2020, 3:00PM / BY

Erin Malsbury

Sequencing entire genomes from ancient tissues helps researchers reveal the evolutionary and domestication histories of species. (Thomas Harper, The Pennsylvania State University)

In the early 2000s, archeologists began excavating a rock shelter in the highlands of southwestern Honduras that stored thousands of maize cobs and other plant remains from up to 11,000 years ago. Scientists use these dried plants to learn about the diets, land-use and trading patterns of ancient communities.

After years of excavations, radiocarbon dating and more traditional archaeological studies, researchers are now turning to ancient DNA to provide more detail to their insights than has ever before been possible.

In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists used DNA from 2,000-year-old corn cobs to reveal that people reintroduced improved varieties of domesticated maize into Central America from South America thousands of years ago. Archeologists knew that domesticated maize traveled south, but these genomes provide the first evidence of the trade moving both directions.

Researchers at the Smithsonian and around the world are just beginning to tap into the potential of ancient DNA. This study shows how the relatively recent ability to extract whole genomes from ancient material opens the door for new types of research questions and breathes new life into old samples, whether from fieldwork or forgotten corners of museum collections.

Cobbling together DNA

DNA, packed tightly into each of our cells, holds the code for life. The complex molecule is shaped like a twisting ladder. Each rung is made up of two complementary molecules, called a base pair. As humans, we have around three billion base pairs that make up our DNA. The order of these base pairs determines our genes, and the DNA sequence in its entirety, with all the molecules in the correct position, is called a genome. Whole genomes provide scientists with detailed data about organisms, but the process of acquiring that information is time sensitive.

“In every cell, DNA is always being bombarded with chemical and physical damage,” said lead author Logan Kistler, curator of archeobotany and acheogenomics at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “In live cells, it’s easily repaired. But after an organism dies, those processes that patch things up stop functioning.” As a result, DNA begins breaking down into smaller and smaller fragments until it disappears entirely. This decomposition poses the greatest challenge for scientists trying to sequence entire genomes from old or poorly-preserved tissue.

Researchers wear protective suits and work in sterile conditions in the ancient DNA lab to prevent contamination. (James DiLoreto, Smithsonian)

“You have to take these really, really small pieces of DNA — the length of the alphabet in some cases – and try to stitch them back together to make even a 1000 piece long fragment,” said Melissa Hawkins, a curator of mammals at the Smithsonian who works with ancient DNA. “It’s like trying to put a book back together by having five words at a time and trying to find where those words overlap.”

This laborious process prevented researchers from sequencing whole genomes from ancient DNA until around 2008, when a new way to sequence DNA became available. Since then, the technology and the ability to reconstruct ancient DNA sequences has grown rapidly.

Ancient DNA still proves challenging to work with, however. Kistler and colleagues collected 30 maize cobs from the thousands in the El Gigante rock shelter in Honduras. The material ranged in age from around 2,000 to around 4,000 years old. Of the 30 cobs that the researchers tried to extract DNA from, only three of the 2,000-year-old samples provided enough to stitch together whole genomes. A few others provided shorter snippets of DNA, but most of the cobs didn’t have any usable genetic material left after thousands of years.

The second biggest problem researchers face when working with ancient DNA is contamination. “Everything living is a DNA factory,” said Kistler. When working with samples that are thousands of years old, the researchers take extra precautions to avoid mixing modern DNA into their samples. They don sterilized suits and work in an air-tight, positive-pressure lab designed specifically for working with ancient DNA.

A-maize-ing possibilities

The ability to sequence whole genomes from thousands of years ago has allowed researchers to ask questions they couldn’t think of answering using individual genes or smaller DNA fragments.

“A whole genome is comprised of several hundred ancestral genomes, so it’s sort of a time capsule of the entire population,” said Kistler. For important staple crops like maize, this means researchers can study the genes associated with domestication and determine when and how people changed it over time. And knowing what communities were doing with crops provides insight into other parts of life, such as land-use and trading.

“Whole genome sequencing of ancient materials is revolutionizing our understanding of the past,” said co-lead author Douglas Kennett from the University of California, Santa Barbara. The authors dug into the whole genome for information about how maize domestication occurred and where it spread.

The cobs from 4,000 years ago and before did not have enough genetic material left for researchers to produce genomes. (Thomas Harper, The Pennsylvania State University)

Before their results, it was widely assumed that maize was mostly flowing southward. They were surprised to learn that improved maize varieties were also reintroduced northward from South America. “We could only know this through whole genome sequencing,” said Kennett. Next, the scientists plan to pinpoint more specific dates for the movement of maize and connect its history to broader societal changes in the pre-colonial Americas.

Growing applications

The same technological advances that made Kistler and Kennett’s maize study possible have also created new uses for museum specimens. Scientists use ancient genomes to study how humans influenced plant and animal population sizes over time, species diversity and how closely related organisms are to each other. They even expect to discover new species hiding in plain sight.

“Sometimes, species are really hard to tell apart just by looking at them,” said Hawkins. “There is so much more that we don’t know.” To make extracting and sequencing DNA from older museum specimens easier, the Smithsonian is in the process of building a historic DNA lab. This space, separate from the ancient DNA lab, will allow researchers to focus on older collections with tissue quality that falls between ancient samples from archeological sites and freshly frozen material.

The ancient DNA lab at the Smithsonian takes several precautions to preserve existing DNA and prevent contamination. (James DiLoreto, Smithsonian)

“It’s really amazing that we have the opportunity to learn from samples that have already been here for 100 years,” said Hawkins. “We’ve unlocked all these museum collections, and we can do so many more things with them now than anyone had a clue was possible even 15 years ago.”

Related stories: Our Thanksgiving Menu has Lost a Few Crops Scientists to Read DNA of All Eukaryotes in 10 Years Safety Suit Up: New Clean Room Allows Scientists to Study Fragile Ancient DNA

Erin Malsbury is an intern in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s Office of Communications and Public Affairs. Her writing has appeared in Science, Eos, Mongabay and the Mercury News, among others. Erin recently graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz with an MS in science communication. She also holds a BS in ecology and a BA in anthropology from the University of Georgia. You can find her at erinmalsbury.com.

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[tanadrin]

The Vault

[Attention conservation notice: 6800 words, SF]

The car trundled uneasily over the stony road toward the dig site. Idalrea was a bleak landscape at the best of times: glacier-scoured barrens, lowlands inundated by cold seas, here and there thin expanses of soil in which mosses and bits of grass could occasionally thrive, and, of course, all of this under the unremitting polar sun. It should be hotter, Mazal thought. He always expected Idalrea in the summertime to be warm, and perhaps further inland, away from the moderating effect of the polar currents, it was. But here, even in the sheltered fjords of the northern isles, it was cool and overcast, a perpetual pale gloom. He remembered something vague from a book once, about evolution. They had arisen here, not in the isles, but to the south, in the sheltered place between Idalrea’s mountains and the coast. No wonder most of their species had sailed the world’s oceans in search of new homes in the millennia since. There was little to love in this gray land.

Of course, it could just have been that Mazal was in a bad mood. The car had a roof, but no sides, and he was cold and miserable, and the bouncing up and down was starting to make him feel sick. He looked over at the driver, one of Asala’s students.

“How much longer?” he asked.

“We’re just about there. Over this next rise, you’ll see it.”

Mazal did his best to stay calm. To keep his expectations measured, reasonable. He had dreamed of a day like this since he was a young man, since his earliest days as a botanist. And while he had always tried to couch his theories in the most cautious terms, to present only the narrowest and most thoroughly justified conclusions in the papers he published, he had to admit to himself that he nonetheless still nursed the wild, youthful dreams of those early years. He still hoped for some firsthand evidence of what he knew in his heart to be true--but he could wait.

The car climbed a low hill, a shoulder of a low moraine that abutted a stony outcropping, and turned a corner. Suddenly the view up the beach toward the head of the fjord was laid bare, and Mazal could see at the far end small figures in brightly-colored jackets moving around the beach. The gray rocky sides of the hills swept down almost to the water’s edge here, and where they met up ahead there was an immense pile of rock.

“There, you see it?” his driver said. “That’s the dig site. The door is just there, where the boulders are.”

Mazal leaned forward and peered through the dirty windshield. “I just see some people standing around,” he said.

“You’ll see it when we get closer, then.”

There was a hard bump as they went over some rocks, and Mazal gripped the side of his seat tightly.

“So are you the geologist?” the driver asked.

“What?” 

“The geologist. Professor Asala said we’d be getting someone from the geology department down here in a few weeks. You’re just earlier than we expected, is all.”

“No, I’m not a geologist,” Mazal said, a little irritated. “I’m a botanist. An agronomist, by training.”

“What, like you study farms?”

Mazal sighed. “Yes. Something like that.”

“Oh.”

There was a short, awkward silence.

“What are you doing here, then?”

Mazal laughed a short, low laugh. “I don’t know yet. I expect Professor Asala will tell me soon enough.”

It was true. It was a long, long way to come for something that did not, on its surface, appear to have anything to do with botany. Asala was a biologist herself, originally, and sometimes a friend--sometimes a rival--from long ago. But she had taken a turn toward archeology later in her career, and paleontology, and as far as Mazal knew, was happy enough to leave genetics and her impatient, late-night arguments with Mazal far behind. Then, he got a message from her.

The message had arrived when Mazal was in the Deserts with his students, on the ninth day of a genetic surveying trip that was supposed to last four weeks. It said simply: “Come to Bilaik’s Fall at once,” it said. And, “You were right about everything.” That was all. But it was enough for Mazal to call for an airlift to the coast, at considerable expense to himself, and then to arrange a flight south. It could only be about one thing, one argument, the only real argument he had ever had with her, the one that had contained everything she admired about him and that also infuriated her. It was, really, a question of time.

Every year, Mazal had a new crop of incoming students sit down in one of his classrooms, and every year he would stand up in front of them, and project a series of images on the big white screen in the front of the room. Two, or three, or sometimes four plants--roots, stems, leaves, fruit, flowers--side by side. And he would ask his students, what do these have in common?

This year, it had been an eager young man who had responded at once. “They’re all closely related,” he said. “Different versions of the same tree.”

“Correct,” Mazal said. “You wouldn’t know it to look at it, but each of these plants is in fact part of the same species; they’re just ordinary apple trees. Not hybrids, not genetically modified. The apple tree is very widely distributed, and different farmers in different countries have, over time, developed varieties better-suited to the local climate, or to whatever use they intend to put their apple crop. As you might do with any food crop, or any kind of livestock, or even decorative plants like garden flowers.”

“Which one is the original one?” a student sitting a row or two back asked.

Mazal smiled. The question anticipated the next point he wanted to bring up. “The one on the far right,” he said. “Found only in a single valley on the Gaderun coast. It is very nearly extinct. Alas, the wild plant seems to have evolved for cooler, wetter conditions than now prevail in the region; it is only its more specialized offspring that survive, although they flourish in many different regions.”

He brought up a new image.

“Now look at these,” Mazal said. Closeups of the heads of stalks of wheat. He pointed to the one on the left. “This is a large-kerneled grain, with a slightly shiny outer covering. A tetraploid strain--it has double the amount of chromosomes its ancestor had. This one, here, is single-grain, an ordinary diploid species, with hard outer husks. And this one, one of the most commonly cultivated grains in the world, is hexaploid. Rather uniquely, each of its three sets of chromosomes seems to come from a different ancestor; it is a remarkable example of hybridization.

“This class will be about genetics, so let me ask you a genetics-based question: if I asked you how you might go about figuring out which of these was the original species, how would you do it? Obviously, the hybrid is out.”

“So are the polyploids,” the eager student at the front said.

“Yes, so are the polyploids.” He touched another button; a dozen new species appeared on the screen.

“These are a selection of diploid varieties. There are many more. How would you go about sorting them?”

“The most common one?” someone suggested.

“All that means is that it grows well, or that people like the taste. No, that has nothing to do with it. What else?”

“Compare it to wild varieties?”

“You could do that, if you had any wild wheat to compare it with. As it happens, we don’t. Whatever grass wheat originally derives from is now extinct.”

“Then compare them to each other,” a woman in the back said.

“Go on.”

“Find out what genes are common across all of them. Find out what genes are common to one or two or three. Try to group them together. Create a taxonomy.”

“Yes. Yes, that would work quite nicely,” Mazal said. He flipped to the next slide. A tree-shaped diagram. “This, as it happens, is a reconstruction of the taxonomy of diploid species of wheat. There is some fussing about the margins with the details; plants can hybridize, which can create problems for creating clean family trees. Can you think of any other use for a diagram like this?”

Quiet. It went on long enough a couple of students started shifting in their seats.

“Find out… how old they are?” the woman in the back said tentatively.

“How might you do that?”

“Well… developing new varieties of a plant takes time. You would have to, I don’t know, guess how long. Try to judge how many differences in the genome accumulate over how long. I guess it would be easier in wild plants, since people aren’t constantly trying to breed different strains.”

“Indeed. And genetic chronology is used to great effect in the study of non-domesticated organisms as well. It is not a precise method of measurement; sudden environmental change can drive rapid bursts of diversification in nature just as the intentional creation of new breeds of plants or animals can among domesticated species. But rough approximate bounds can be given. It is those that are my particular area of research.”

The next slide was a map of the world.

“As it happens, genetics and cladistics are not the only line of evidence we have to rely on. Geographical distribution can indeed be of some help, as long as we take care to make sure we are comparing more basal varieties rather than less. It was just such a technique that helped an earlier generation of botanist track down the wild apple, deep in Deserts no one had ever settled.

“A conundrum arises with wheat, however, one I think you will all appreciate. We have no wild variety to study, nor even any good candidates. The most basal strains are all rather similar to one another genetically, and it’s not clear which came first, if, indeed, any did. One or two show startling adaptations that we struggle to explain from an evolutionary standpoint: for instance, a species naturally resistant to certain phosphonic-acid-based herbicides which only entered common use about forty years ago. One strain, found only on a small island in the Garral Sea, and which is otherwise genetically unremarkable, glows in the dark. No convincing explanation for this adaptation has been advanced.

“That leaves us only the technique of genetic chronology, to at least attempt to determine when these species diverged.”

“When did they?” another young woman asked.

Mazal smiled a small half-smile. He reached over and switched off the projector, and walked slowly to the podium. He leaned against it for a second, gathering his thoughts.

“This is where I must be honest with you all,” Mazal said. “I have, as you are no doubt aware, a bit of a reputation both in this college and in my field, as someone with rather… unorthodox ideas. My methods are not the problem. My methods are all strictly by the book, and I go only where they take me. Unfortunately, they have, in the past, led me to conclusions others have regarded as absurd or impossible; and where they have concluded that therefore the methods we rely on must in some way be faulty, I have, instead, preferred to ask: what if they are not?”

Mazal folded his arms and looked at his class intently.

“I will, so long as you are taking one of my classes, endeavor to make sure you learn the skills and information necessary to excel in your chosen area of study. I will, without reservation, present to you scientific consensus and refrain from injecting my own heterodox opinion--unless asked. And I shall most certainly highlight that my own conclusions are not shared by the majority. This is not because I do not have faith in them; it is because I would be doing you all a disservice to pretend that my perspective is the only correct one. With that rather elaborate caveat, I will now answer the question I was just asked.

“The orthodox answer is this: we do not know. Genetic chronology methods are uncertain at best, and due to the fact that some easily hybridized species have convoluted genetic histories, and that among plants more horizontal gene transfer is always a possibility than among animals, some families, like that of wheat, cannot have their genetic histories clearly reconstructed from the evidence we currently have available. If you encounter an exam question on this topic in six months, that is the answer you will be expected to give.

“If, however, you use the formulae and the other lines of evidence normally pursued for this kind of reconstruction, you arrive at a rather remarkable conclusion: that wheat was domesticated about five hundred thousand years ago. You will no doubt object that our species did not exist five hundred thousand years ago; nevermind build cities, conduct agriculture, or domesticate crops. To which my response would be, as it has ever been: yes. The only possible answer, then, is that it is not our species that did the domestication.”

The reaction that year was very subdued. Some students were amused by the provocative argument. More than a few were skeptical. No one, of course, took it at face value. Mazal, they all knew, had crazy ideas. Mazal believed in aliens. If Mazal weren’t a well-respected geneticist, with dozens of solid accomplishments under his belt, they’d have shipped him off to the loony bin ages ago; but his crazy was confined, his crazy could be controlled, and set aside when it had to be. He could be trusted to teach the undergraduates, anyway. And that was the compromise Mazal had always made with himself: he would yield. When confronted, he would back down. But it had taken its toll on him over the years. So when Asala had said, “You were right,” what else could he do? He set a course for Idalrea. As fast as he could possibly go.

The car came to a halt in front of a knot of tents, temporary structures, and big earthmoving machines, all the normal signs of intense paleontological activity. Mazal had seen Asala’s travel pictures before; this was nothing new. What was new, was the soldiers. They were doing their best to be unobtrusive, carrying only pistols, hiding their uniforms under dull windbreakers. But they still stuck out. He looked over at his driver. She motioned to Mazal to wait; as soon as they saw the car, two of the soldiers had started walking nonchalantly over to them.

They greeted the woman with a nod, and one of them asked Mazal for his ID in as friendly a tone as he could manage. Mazal took it out.

“You’re Dr. Asala’s friend?” the man said.

Mazal nodded.

“Very good. She told us you were coming. Right this way, sir.”

Mazal followed them through the camp, to the place where the rubble-covered slope met the beach. Between two great boulders there was a deep, dark cleft; the passage of many feet had worn a path leading into it, and the soldiers stopped just outside. One of them took out a radio and spoke into it.

“Dr. Mazal is here. Can someone come out and meet him?”

There was a scratchy, indistinct response that apparently made sense to him; a few minutes later, the graying head of Asala emerged from the crevasse. When she saw Mazal, she smiled.

“You made it,” she said.

“I did,” Mazal replied. “Now, would you kindly explain what I’m doing here?” He eyed the soldiers on either side of him.

“Oh, don’t mind them,” Asala said hurriedly. She waved him forward, toward the crevasse. “I think someone in the government got spooked when we mentioned what we’d found. They’re just here to keep an eye on things.”

“I thought you dug up bones for a living?” Mazal said.

“Yes. And sometimes, I find other things.”

“Has this happened before?”

“Well… no, not exactly. Come on, come on. You’ll be glad you came, I promise.”

Mazal followed Asala tentatively; as they moved underneath the rocks, he realized that the summer sun outside had made it seem darker than it was. Someone had strung some lights along the floor, illuminating the mouth of a large cave. More light shone from inside, and cables snaked out to a generator humming away by the entrance. Asala strode confidently forward, and Mazal followed.

“The whole coast is dotted with caves like these,” she said. “We’re pretty far south, but we’re not so far from the Basseron Islands, the place where our species probably first evolved. So we were here looking for bones, early tools, anything that would tell us more about our place in the tree of life, about what sort of hominids might be our closest ancestors.” Beyond the entrance was a large chamber that seemed to branch off in several directions. Only one was lit up, though, and that was the way Asala went.

“Yes,” Mazal said. “I’ve read that that’s a rather persistent mystery in your field.”

“Quite. One I’ve always been interested in. But the genetics angle bore no fruit, so I had to get my hands dirty.”

“So you’ve said. Why am I here?”

“Because,” Asala said, “I think we’ve finally found something. Not the answer, maybe, but an answer. An important one. And I think it’s one that backs up something you’ve been saying for years.”

“You don’t mean my work on drought-resistant potatoes, do you?” Mazal said dryly.

Asala laughed. “No. I mean the one we used to fight about.”

“What was you said when we were still students? You’d never heard such a stupid idea in your life before?”

“Something along those lines, anyway. I don’t think I was that harsh.”

“You were pretty harsh, as I recall.”

“And you were always so sensitive.”

If he were a younger man, Mazal might have been offended; instead he rolled his eyes.

“Anyway,” Asala said. “We’d been exploring caves along the coast. We found this one six weeks ago, and we were pretty excited. There was some evidence of fire-building near the entrance, something that might have been the remains of cave paintings. We thought we’d do some digging around, to see if we could find any stone tools or animal remains that looked like they’d been butchered. Maybe some bones, if we were lucky. We did find some. Watch your head.”

They ducked through a low passage in the back of the chamber, coming into a small, roughly cylindrical room. It might have been cut by the passage of water, or hewn very patiently by many hands working over many years, but the thing in the middle stopped Mazal short. Dirt from the cave floor had been dug away, and a perfect, rectangular hole revealed beneath it. A hatch.

“The difficult was this,” Asala said. “We carbon-dated the bones. They’re about fifty thousand years old. Definitely some ancient cousins of ours. But they were found in the dirt six inches above that. Which means, that hunk of metal you’re staring at is older than that.”

Mazal wanted to laugh. “And older than any city or any known civilization on the planet.”

Asala nodded. “Unless the historians are really holding out on us.”

Mazal squatted down to peer at the hatch more closely.

“Is this steel?”

“No,” Asala said. “We’re not sure what it is. It looks like metal, but it might not be. We haven’t sampled it yet, but it seems to be some kind of high-strength alloy or advanced metamaterial. I have an engineer acquaintance coming to look at it.”

“So you haven’t opened it?”

“What? Of course we have. There’s a button.”

Asala reached down and pressed something in the dirt; there was a metallic clang, and the hatch swung open. There was more light below; Mazal could see a ladder.

“Come on,” Asala said. “Down you go.”

Mazal began to clamber down rather warily. “You know,” he said as he climbed, “the bones could have been moved. This could be a hundred-year-old bunker from the Polar Wars. Or somebody’s idea of a practical joke.”

“We thought about that,” Asala said, “because we’re not idiots.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean--”

“No, I get it. Don’t worry. You’ve always been cautious, in your own way. You want to exclude all the mundane possibilities. Well, look, nothing in this life is certain. But if it is a hoax, or a secret cult hideout or something, it’s one that’s had every inch of dirt on top of it carefully arranged to look as authentically old as possible. It has had more dirt and bones and even some dessicated ancient plant seeds that corroborate reconstructions of the local climate from tens of thousands of years in the past scattered down the first hundred feet or so of hallway.”

They reached the bottom; Mazal could indeed see that the floor of the corridor here was rather dirty; someone had carefully marked out survey grids all down its length, and a very narrow footpath had been cleared down the middle.

“Watch your step, by the way,” Asala said. “You never know, we might have missed something. This way. So yes, it might be a hoax. A very, very good hoax. One that involves some dedicated conlanging, no less.” She pointed out something on the side of the corridor, barely visible in the rust and the darkness. Definitely letters, letters that Mazal could not read.

“They’re all over the place down here. Other things, too. What might have been books once. Also carbon-dated, by the way.”

There was a feeling in Mazal’s arms and shoulders and chest that he had not felt in a long time. A feeling like electricity, or pure heat. A feeling of ridiculous, childlike excitement. He did his best to ignore it. They continued down the hallway; after only a few dozen meters, the floor became merely rusted, here and there exposing small patches of bare rock. Whatever this place was, most of it was subject to ordinary decay.

“How big is it?” Mazal asked.

“Not sure. Some cave-ins have blocked of some parts. There’s a lower passage that’s flooded. A shaft that was probably an elevator once, but a lot of the ancient machinery is either non-functional or rusted into a single giant lump.”

“Not all of it?”

“Not all of it. To your left.”

They turned, and the corridor began to slope gently downward. Mazal could hear voices ahead; the corridor opened into a large, round room, the size of a lecture theater. Lights had been set up on stands, to illuminate the walls, which were covered in intricate figures and dense markings. People were milling around, taking photographs, making notes. At the far side of the room was a single immense monolith, with a surface that seemed to have been polished to a shine. Mazal inhaled sharply.

“Gods above and below,” he said quietly. “What is all this?”

Asala smiled. “Something intended to last. It’s built out of the same stuff as the hatch.”

Mazal walked over to the wall to get a closer look. The markings were clearly writing of some kind. He had no idea what. He ran his fingers over the surface. They were deeply engraved. Geometrically precise letters. Intended to be read. But by whom?

“Come here,” Asala said. Mazal followed her to a section of the wall that was recessed slightly, with different markings than the rest. She put her hand on one, and pressed; the wall slid slowly to the side, revealing a high, narrow passage behind it. She stepped just inside, and pulled something out, handing it to Mazal.

“Careful,” she said. “It’s very cold.”

She was right; Mazal had to grip it in the ends of his jacket sleeves to hold it. He turned it over in his hand. It was a long, thin metal plate, the length of his forearm and perhaps three fingers wide. On one end, etched into it, was an image of a plant: the head of a stalk of wheat. Beside it, a series of small pictures he didn’t recognize. And in holes, down the length of the plate, small glass vials, deeply set into the metal. Inside them were seeds.

“Seeds of wheat,” Mazal said.

“Not just wheat, if the pictures are anything to go by. Other crops, too. Soy. Rice. Some fruits. And what look like genetic samples from animals. It’s like a library.”

“A library that’s fifty thousand years old?”

“Much older than that, if we’re right. Some of the illustrations on these walls are star charts. Mazal, this place could he hundreds of thousands of years old.”

Mazal leaned against the wall, his mind spinning.

“You probably can’t germinate the seeds after all this time,” he said to himself. “But if they’ve been kept cold enough, dry enough… you could sequence their DNA. You could recover the species. If they’re unknown species. Ancient cultivars. Oh, goodness.”

“Mazal!” Asala said. “Don’t you understand what this means?”

“What?”

“You were right, you idiot! There were people on this planet before… well, before people! Before our kind of people, anyway! They built this place. I don’t know why. Maybe some kind of safeguard against disaster. It didn’t work, if that’s what it was. But you were right!”

Mazal smiled. “Yes, I was, wasn’t I? My wife will be so happy.”

Asala laughed. “You should be gloating right now.”

“I’ll do that later,” Mazal said. “I want to know everything first. Everything you’ve found out.”

“Asala!” someone called from the far end of the room.

“I promise you, Mazal, I will be happy to share. Let me take care of this, and we’ll go up. I can show you the notes and video we’ve taken so far.”

Mazal nodded, still leaning against the wall for support. Asala went to go see what the fuss was about.

After a few minutes, he felt like he could stand again; his limbs still felt weak, like a rush of adrenaline had just worn off, but he couldn’t stay still. He paced back in forth in front of the walls, trying to will some sudden understanding to leap out at him. Finally, he came to the monolith in the middle; he ran his hand over the surface. Smooth and cold, like everything else. He bent down to examine where it met the floor; only the tiniest crack showed. The same near the wall; it seemed to pass back, into whatever lay behind it. He went around to the other side. That was curious; there was a depression there, a little niche he couldn’t see inside of. He looked back over his shoulder; Asala was talking energetically to two young men. He shrugged, and stuck his hand in the hole, feeling around.

The sides were smooth, but the bottom was slightly rough. There was something there, and with his fingertips he could trace out five troughs, radiating from a central depression. Like a handprint. He pressed his hand into the hand-shaped hole, expecting nothing. He nearly fell over with shock when a cool blue light shone from within. He jumped back, and looked up at the monolith.

Nothing happened. Well, that was a relief. He turned and walked quickly over to Asala. She was saying something to her colleagues about work schedules; then when she saw Mazal, she paused.

“Mazal, what’s that? Over your shoulder.”

Mazal turned around. “What’s what?”

“I could swear--is something different with the pillar?”

“The pillar?”

“That’s what we’ve been calling the big metal thing. No idea what it is. I thought for a second it was moving.”

“That’s odd.”

Then there was a noise like an enormous machine stirring to life, and the monolith--the pillar--lurched forward. Mazal yelped; someone dropped something. As they stood there entirely uncertain about what to do, the smooth metal surface opened in a hundred places, unfolding like a flower; inside, surrounded by the same blue glow, was an immense figure.

It was held nearly in the standing position by the cradle it lay in. It was at least twice as tall as Mazal; its body nearly hairless, its limbs long and delicate; but the hair on its head was dark, and shot through with gray like his own, and something in the cast of its features was still recognizable to him. And was it Mazal’s imagination, or was it… breathing? After a moment, everything was still again, and the light faded; and Asala turned to the two men.

“Go get a doctor,” she said. “And find Kolek. Now! Go now!” They scurried off. Mazal and Asala approached the figure slowly; when its eyes opened, they froze. They were brown, and bright; and they looked from Mazal to Asala and back; and then the figure moved--and collapsed, gasping, to the floor. Asala rushed forward to help it stand. It looked up at her and spoke in a deep, rolling voice, words that Mazal could not understand. He approached more cautiously, and laid his hand on the giant’s shoulder.

“Erm… it will be ok. You’re safe,” he said, in what he hoped was a soothing tone. “You are in Idalrea. Underground. But everything is fine. I think.”

The giant spoke again; but all Mazal could do was shrug. It reached up with a hand, and touched him on the back of the neck; Mazal felt a sudden, sharp pain go through his head, and he fell to his knees.

“Mazal! Are you all right?” Asala said.

The pain passed as quickly as it had come; and then the giant spoke to them in their own language.

“Forgive me,” he said. “That is a dangerous technique. But I wanted to tell you--I mean you no harm. You are safe.”

“Funny,” Mazal said. “I was about to say the same. You--you understand us now?”

The giant nodded.

“I am Mazal. This is Asala. Do you know where you are?”

“Yes,” the giant said. “I recognize this place. Though a great deal of time seems to have passed. Tell me, are the glaciers gone? Have the seas swallowed all our cities? Is anyone left besides me?”

Asala looked at Mazal nervously. Mazal felt as though an immense weight of time was suddenly bearing down on him; as though he was staring into the darkness of the deepest sea. You old fool, he thought to himself. Did you ever really think about what it would mean, if we were the second, the inheritors, the after-race? Did you ever think about the ghosts that we left behind?

“You are… perhaps alone. We do not know of any others like you. We did not know of you, until you… appeared before us.”

The giant nodded. “The sarcophagus was not a technology my people had much affection for. My willingness to endure it was considered strange by many. Tell me, how long has it been?”

Asala shifted nervously. “We don’t know,” she said. “We didn’t know this place existed until a few weeks ago. We have only just begun to study it. Perhaps you could tell us what you remember from before?”

The giant nodded. “It was winter. The skies were dark. It was so bitterly cold. We took several days to cross the ice, until we came to land. This continent we called Antarctica. Most of it still covered in ice. A desert, hidden beneath a glacier. We descended until we came to the vault; the others with me, they had some records they wished to add to it, in case our people returned. In case the danger passed, and they could begin to rebuild. I did not have so much faith. I wished to remain behind. So I did. I thought… in truth, I thought I was choosing death. But I was afraid to die; and better, I thought, to lie down with the hope, one day, of resurrection, than simply to throw myself into the sea. I did not really think this day would ever come.”

“Your people built this place?”

“It is one of several. Three in the south, two in the north. A place of records. A place to keep the seeds of life, if we should ever be able to bring back what was lost.”

“The records are intact,” Asala said. “You succeeded.”

Tears formed in the giant’s eyes. “If the records are intact, then we failed.” He shifted to a sitting position, and leaned back against his sarcophagus. “My people never came.”

Mazal did not know what to do; he sat down next to the giant and laid his small, hair-covered hand on the giant’s bare palm.

“What were your people called?”

“We had many tongues. In my own, we were called human.”

“We--in our tongue--we call ourselves the Padirek.”

“Padirek. Yes. I would have known you under another name. How long ago, I wonder.”

“If the glaciers still covered Idalrea,” Asala said, “many hundreds of thousands of years.”

The giant--the human--nodded. “That would make sense.” He sighed. “Even then, I think, we knew that we were doomed.”

“What happened?” Mazal asked.

“Many things. But most of all, the world changed around us. The side effects of our technologies--the exuberance of our collective youth, I suppose--came far more swiftly than we anticipated. By the time we marshaled the determination to confront that change, we could not stop it. Only hope to alleviate the worst of its consequences. The ice was beginning to melt here even then. The glaciers were retreating. They had vanished almost everywhere else; this was one of the last places cold enough to keep the vault, at least for a few hundred years. If the glaciers are gone, then so are the cities of my people.”

“Forgive me, but I thought… I have long speculated, anyway, that there once existed a people on this world with very advances sciences,” Mazal said. “Knowledge of genetics among them. Your people, they must have been. I am surprised that so powerful a people as yours could not adapt.”

“Are you?” the human said. “We tried. Some of us. Some of us preferred to hide away in their arcologies. Others, I heard, sought the stars. We had lost so much by then already. The seas were rising, our farmlands were drying out, so many kinds of bird and beast vanishing around us… many simply preferred to let our people dwindle away. To go quietly.”

“Why would they ever choose that?”

The human smiled. “You did not see the Earth in her younger days, Mazal. You did not see the green plains of Africa, where my people were born. You did not see the shining cities of the east, or the great engines we built to work our will, and you did not see us lose all these things, as the deserts came, and the seas rose, and life became harder, year after year. By the time I lay myself down here, our world had been diminishing for a long, long time. Long before I was born. I suppose… I suppose we all felt like the world had grown old. That our time was done.”

“But… but that can’t be,” Mazal said. “It isn’t. At all. The world is young. The universe is young. There is so much to build, to see, to do…”

The human touched Mazal’s cheek. “You have no idea how much joy it gives me to know that you feel that way. I said I knew your people once. When I was a young man, I visited the colonies on the Antarctic Peninsula. The place that was a refuge for one group of scientists working on their hope for the future. A new hominid. A new kind of mind in the world--one very like us, but, they hoped, perhaps with fewer of our faults, and more of our virtues. None of them expected to see their work bear fruit. Perhaps it never did, while our people still lived. Perhaps it was only thousands of generations later that the work they began bore fruit. Or perhaps it was only nature, and not them, responsible for your birth. But you live! You are here, speaking to me! And you still hope, and you still dream, as we once did. I hope that you do so forever. Ah!”

The human seemed to contort momentarily with pain. After a few seconds the agony passed, and his body slowly relaxed.

“Are you all right?” Asala said. “I sent for a doctor. Perhaps he can help, I don’t know.”

“Perhaps,” the human said. “There is a reason that the others shunned the sarcophagus. I think I was not one of the lucky ones.”

“Don’t worry,” Mazal said. “You’ll be all right. We’ll make sure of it. You have no idea what it means to me, to have wondered for so long if there was another people that was first… and now to meet one of you.”

“What makes you think we were first?”

“Weren’t you?”

“God no. Oh, perhaps we built the first cities. I don’t know. But we weren’t the first users-of-tools. We weren’t the first masters-of-fire. We weren’t the first hunters, or the first speakers-of-words.”

“Who was first?”

“We had cousins. You had cousins. Older kinds of human. The ones of the Neander. The Upright Ones. The Cunning.”

“These are your names for them?”

“Yes. Something like them, anyway. Your tongue… is very different from mine.”

“There is so much we can learn from you,” Asala said. “If you are willing to teach us.”

“I am afraid that will not be possible,” the human said.

“I know your world is gone,” Mazal said. “I know… I know this is a very hard grief for you. I can’t imagine what it’s like, to wake up after all this time and know that everyone you ever loved, everything you ever valued, is so… forgotten. But our people would welcome you, if you wished to live among us. Not just for what you can teach us. Not just for what you represent. We know what loss is like, even if we do not know yours.”

“You are kind, little Padirek,” the human said. “And I would happily share the legacy of my people with one like you, but I am afraid--ah!”

The human cried out this time, louder, and bent over double; when the pain passed, he spoke with ragged breath.

“I am afraid,” he said, “that my time is short. That it was only ever my fate to be a ghost in your world.”

Now Mazal’s eyes began to fill with tears; he took the human’s hand in his, and gripped it tightly.

“Help is coming,” he said. “Very soon. You are not a ghost. You are a man who lives and breathes, who has lost much, but who may yet gain many things. There is no grief above or below the sky so immense, that it precludes joy forever. Not even grief for a whole world. Even if we are the only legacy of your people, your people did not live in vain. I promise you that. I will show you. I will show you what we have done while you have slept. I will show you the great city, which sits above the immense falls, whose streets are filled with rainbows. I will show you the university where I work, where we study the earth and the stars and the secrets of life. I will show you our libraries, our paintings, our poetry. If we are your children, then these are your legacy, too.”

“Don’t cry, Mazal,” the human said. “Not for me. You don’t understand--you don’t know what this means to me. I thought the world would be silent, when we were gone. I thought--ahh! I’m sorry. But it doesn’t matter.” He leaned back, and closed his eyes; his breaths were now short and ragged. Mazal worried he could no longer talk over the pain; but after a moment, he spoke again.

“There may be other testimonies besides this place. Look in the mountains to the south. And on the Moon. And perhaps the planet beyond. More records of who we were--of what we did--than one man. I hope they are still there. I hope you find the answers you are looking for in them.”

“We will seek them out together,” Mazal said quietly.

“Yes,” the human said. He began to breathe more slowly; Mazal reached up and wiped the thin film of sweat from his brow.

It was only a few minutes ents later that they heard voices from further up the corridor; then the sounds of many feet, running their way. But the human was still; and when Mazal released his hand, it fell limply to the floor.

[slaaneshfic]

Conclusions and sorrow

I've nearly finished editing the three books. I'm slightly overdue with submission, but it is what it is.

Underpinning most of my PhD research has been my ongoing relationship with the two elderly Staffordshire bull terriers that my partner and I adopted right at the start of it, around Christmas 2016.

It is with overwhelming heartbeat that yesterday, after I visit from the mobile vet, we discovered that Lea has a late stage inoperable growth. The vets are returning tomorrow and we will be saying goodbye to lea. I don't have the words yet to address the feeling of loss, or the anxiety of this ongoing 48 where I with lea at every moment to make sure she is as comfortable as possible. it's a lot. And I need to keep writing things in order to occupy my mind. So this is a draft (since edited, but that's in InDesign files I can't access from my phone) of the potential lines beyond the PhD, including the thing I worked on for a year regarding dogs, but couldn't emotionally deal with even prior to this last illness.

I could not have done this research without my relationship with Buster and Lea. The concept of care which I've addressed is as much drawn from this relationship as it is from Sedgwick. How to care for someone across the lines of different bodies and senses and desires. The concept of play as emergent collaboration equally comes from learning to play with dogs who had suffered neglect at the hands of their original owners, and then a year recovering in the noisy RSPCA kennels before they were well enough to be rehomed. I love you lea.

Conclusions and exits.

The structure and methodology of this PhD Output consisting of three approaches to a central area of art practice, and within each approach multiple overlapping attempts through the various documents, turns the issue of a conclusion into a challenge. 

Rather than attempt to draw books and documents toward a unifying conclusion, erasing the differences between then, I have offered conclusions in the documents individually. Some of these are clearly labeled as such, some are more demonstrative, and some left as provocations. 

Throughout the three books are indications of where future paths could proceed. For continuation of creative research and the application of concepts developed, these indications are generally placed at the end of documents.  Paths which are more tangential, or areas where the research could be reinforced through engaging with a separate discipline or practitioner appear in endnotes. 

In place of some kind of ending for the PhD Output as whole I will raise three of the avenues of future research not already mentioned in individual documents, that will be pursued at its end. All of these examples incorporate work already commenced, that for practical reasons has not been addressed in documents.

The Incomplete Object.

Archeologist Chantal Conneller has produced a large amount of research focused Star Carr, a Mesolithic site in Yorkshire (Conneller, 2004, 2011; Little et al., 2016; Milner, Conneller, & Taylor, 2018a, 2018b). In particular, Conneller has provided a framework for examining some of the objects recovered from the site, and through this reassess the historic inhabitants of the area’s relationship to animals and objects. The objects, twentyone of which were found during the site’s excavation by Professor J.G.D. Clark between 1949 and 1951, consist of the “uppermost part of the skull of a red deer, with the antlers still attached” and are referred to as “antler frontlets” (Conneller, 2004, p. 37). In offering an interpretation for the frontlet’s use, Clark “suggested they could have been used either as hunting aids, to permit hunters to stalk animals at close range without being seen, or as headgear in ritual dances” (Conneller, 2004, p. 37). This interpretation resulted in an impasse between a “‘functional’ and a ‘ritual’ analogy” and has according to Conneller, meant that “in the intervening 50 years they have been ignored” (Conneller, 2004, p. 37).

Conneller’s research breaches the impasse of an animal derived object needing to be either functional or ritual by use of philosopher Gilles Deleze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari’s work in “A Thousand Plateaus” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Firstly, Conneller outlines how in Deleuze and Guattari, “animals come to be seen [...] as an assemblage composed of a number of ways of perceiving and acting in the word” (Conneller, 2004, p. 44). In this view, animals are not singular fixed entities, and the objects derived from them are therefore not limited to being symbolic of the animal whole or else be understood only as practical material. Animals are here understood as collection of “affects” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 253), and the objects derived from them convey those Affects to the user in a manner which outside of the binary of ritual and functional. From this point Conneller proceeds to “examine the specific ways in which different things are seen to modify or extend the capacities of people in particular contexts” (Conneller, 2004, p. 51), bridging Deleuze and Guattari to theorist Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges” which replaces a fixed epistemological view with “webs of differential positioning” (D. Haraway, 1988, p. 590). The use of animal objects becomes simultaneously a process of taking on capacities as well as the ethical/epistemological/affective engagement with the world from another position.  

These observations from archeology are useful not because they set some historic precedent for how art should function, but because they articulate processes which are important to art from another perspective. In the documents in this PhD Output which examine artworks I have consciously treated both the processes deployed by the artist and those of her characters in the same manner. In the art I am interested in, things are not easily split between the practical and the ritual but form processes across these lines to perform different things. 

Finally, when I contacted Conneller in 2019 she was continuing to examine the frontlets of Star Carr in terms of how they function as “unfinished things”. Conneller has already observed that the frontlets were “broken up as a source of raw material” (Conneller, 2004, p. 46), but is now considering how this occurred concurrently with their uses. A framework for considering art objects which do not reach a fixed state, but are continually re-worked, and drawn from while being used is relevant to a number of documents in this PhD Output. It is relevant to the analysis of artist Tai Shani’s works (SHANI, 2019) which undergo edits between redeployments, or the ongoing work “sidekick” (Price, 2013) by Elizabeth Price. Going forward, I would consider how unfinished things connects to the writing practice of William Burruoghs both through the “cut-up” technique to “cut oneself out of language” (Hassan, 1963, p. 9), and the process whereby his novels were re-edited in subsequent editions. Burroughs is also relevant to the other side of unfinished things whereby these things are not just refined, but are a source of material for future things. I am also interested in the process by which computer software is updated via “patches” (Fisher, 2019) as another model for an unfinished thing.

I’m interested in the political implications of objects which refuse the linear transition from raw material to finished commodity, but is instead part of processes which cross that distinction. To borrow the image from Karl Marx’s Capital Vol. 1 (Marx, 1981), what would it mean for “coat” to remain functioning as “ten yards of linen”, to be always in a process of being woven/unwoven/rewoven into different forms? I feel there is something here to be pursued via the concepts of Incomplete Provocations, and the improvisations and departures which are centred in Tabletop Role Playing Games. 

Divination Storytelling

The second exit is far more practical and straightforward. During my research I have used and developed methods for creating parts of narratives based on sortation systems such as card decks and dice rolls. In 2018 I produced an artwork entitled “The Sodden Gates of Vulnerability” which borrowed a mechanic used in multiple games whereby the space in which play takes places is procedurally generated. A hypothetical example of this mechanic would be a game which takes place in a derelict spaceship, the interior rooms and corridors of which is represented with cardboard tiles. When the players reach the exit of one room, a new random room tile is placed at the exit from the first, so the spaceship is configured, and unpredictable, with each subsequent playthrough. In The Sodden Gates of Vulnerability I combined some of the lore from Games Workshop’s derelict spaceship exploration game “Space Hulk” (Games Workshop, 1999) with their subsequently released rules for randomly generated spaceships (Hunt, 2013), to randomly generate prompts for a narrative built from a fictionalised version of my own past. 

As a result of the cessation symptoms I was experiencing while coming off antidepressants I found memories returning that medication use had suppressed. In addition, there were physical cessation symptoms which mnemonically triggered some often confused memories of spaces in the town centre of Luton where I spent my teens, frequently from times in the early hours of the morning after leaving a club or a party. I reconstructed these fragmented memories, and the bodily feelings which connected them to the present, and any emergent feelings and noted them down as prompts on index cards. Some memories were so abstract as to not describe a place but just a sensation, or an action. These abstract memories, combined with some other images and thoughts were written up in a list and labeled 1-20.

The Sodden Gates of Vulnerability was produced as a single take spoken performance to microphone. It began with a short reflection on the different ways in which physical geography and brain chemistry are both modulated by chemicals. After this I shuffled and dealt an index card, describing the derelict spaceship/ 4am Luton Town Centre space it represented in the manner of Games Master setting a scene for players of a Role Playing Game. I then rolled a 20 sided dice and used the corresponding entry from the list as a prompt for what the player (the audience to whom the work is addressed) did in traversing this space. A partial transcription of one room follows;

“You stagger out of the thickening fog into the area where escaping heat from the many times kicked in door makes a dim pocket at the edge of the street. Banging on the door that feels like it should have given in by now and it is finally opened by someone inside. You roll in, and so does the fog, and the door opener is already turning the corner ahead into the living room so you guess you will follow them, remembering to shut the door behind you.

The living room is thick with dust and hair and ash over the brown carpet and old sofas. No one has their feet on the floor, all bunched up to keep warm or to manage some symptoms of intake.

You just want to buy, but that isn't how this is going to work out. It never does.

Everything slips. Someone makes you take a music cassette and in lock-eyed intensity tells you why you will like it and when you will die.

A man takes you to one side and rapidly ages while sharing with you a one sided conversation about how he has lived his life. He has little ears like fins and catfish whiskers and it's clear from the way he holds and interacts with the portable stereo he cradles that he has a relationship with Fabio and Grooverider which is both more beastially physical and more vapourusly transcendental than you will ever understand.

You slip out and it's dawn and you have the cassette and you don't think you bought anything but now do not think you need anything so maybe you bought it and weren't paying attention during intake or maybe someone else was in charge of your body.

You roll out with the fog and luckily town is down hill but my god you would never be able to find this place again and my god you would probably never want to because all those people would want to check how closely you been following their advice on how to live.

Oh yeah the plot twist is you're a rabbit”.

Going forward, I would like to explore the mechanics of procedural narrative based on sortation systems, both as an improvised Rendition, and as material which is subsequently cut up and deployed in other ways, possibly as a development of Diagramatics. I’m looking into how I might produce these works for a platform like YouTube, possible using a split screen where half the image shows the face that speaks, and half shows the sortation system such as tarot-style cards.

Dog Mod

Running throughout all three books of this PhD Output are dogs. When I started this PhD in 2016, I soon afterward began living with Lea and Buster, two elderly Staffordshire Bull Terriers. The importance of this relationship to the research is something I have attempted, and failed, to articulate on many occasions in the last three years. As much as the majority of the documents in this PhD Output are underpinned by a desire to understand my own trans* non-binary gender identity, they are also a response to learning about what Deleuze and Guattari would call dog affects, as well as negotiating my emotions towards Lea and Buster particually during the sadly increasing points where they have become unwell. 

In mid 2019 I sketched an outline for what I called the “Dog Mod”. In the language of games, a mod is something added to the game which alters part or all of its systems in some way. Mods are often produced by a third party, and can range from something which simply adds some different functionality (such as the campaign generator for Space Hulk referenced in the previous section) or completely reorientate the system, such as the mod “DayZ” that reconfigures military sim “ARMA” into a zombie survival game and spawned an entire genre of video games (Davison, 2014).

The aim of Dog Mod was to produce a document which could provide a means to reconfigure the rest of the PhD Output through its unspoken focus, dogs. Dog Mod is something I decided was both conceptually and emotionally too overwhelming for me to be able to complete in time for submission, but I remains as a point of departure for my future research. It connects the Becoming-Animal of Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Stark & Roffe, 2015), philosopher Patricia MacCormack’s expansion of this into animal rights discourse in the Ahuman (MacCormack, 2014), with other ideas around, animals, play and care (Chen, 2012; D. J. Haraway, 2016; Massumi, 2014; Vint, 2008). 

Bibliography

Anckorn, J. E. (2019, October 24). Does The Dog Die?: A Not-At-All Comprehensive Guide to Stephen King’s Canines. Retrieved 26 November 2019, from We Are the Mutants website: https://wearethemutants.com/2019/10/24/does-the-dog-die-a-not-at-all-comprehensive-guide-to-stephen-kings-canines/

Chen, M. (2012). Animacies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Conneller, C. (2004). Becoming Deer: Corporeal Transformations at Star Carr. Archaeological Dialogues, 11(1), 37–56. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203804001357

Conneller, C. (2011). An archaeology of materials: Substantial transformations in early prehistoric Europe. New York: Routledge.

Davison, P. (2014, April 30). Bohemia Interactive Tells the Story of Arma and DayZ. Retrieved 30 December 2019, from USgamer website: https://www.usgamer.net/articles/bohemia-interactive-tells-the-story-of-arma-and-dayz

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Fisher, T. (2019, December 17). What Are Software Patches? Retrieved 30 December 2019, from Lifewire website: https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-a-patch-2625960

Games Workshop. (1999). Space Hulk Rule Book (4th Edition). Nottingham: Games Workshop.

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hassan, I. (1963). The Subtracting Machine: The Work of William Burroughs. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 6(1), 4–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.1963.10689760

Hunt, C. A. T. (2013). Campaign Generator Geotiles. Games Workshop.

Little, A., Elliott, B., Conneller, C., Pomstra, D., Evans, A. A., Fitton, L. C., … Milner, N. (2016). Technological Analysis of the World’s Earliest Shamanic Costume: A Multi-Scalar, Experimental Study of a Red Deer Headdress from the Early Holocene Site of Star Carr, North Yorkshire, UK. PLOS ONE, 11(4), e0152136. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0152136

MacCormack, P. (2014). The Animal Catalyst: Towards Ahuman Theory. A&C Black.

Marx, K. (1981). Capital: A critique of political economy (B. Fowkes & D. Fernbach, Trans.). London ; New York, N.Y: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review.

Massumi, B. (2014). What animals teach us about politics. Durham: Duke University Press.

Milner, N., Conneller, C., & Taylor, B. (Eds.). (2018a). Star Carr Volume I: A Persistent Place in a Changing World. https://doi.org/10.22599/book1

Milner, N., Conneller, C., & Taylor, B. (Eds.). (2018b). Star Carr Volume II: Studies in Technology, Subsistence and Environment. https://doi.org/10.22599/book2

Price, E. (2013). Sidekick. In K. Macleod, Thinking Through Art: Reflections on Art as Research (1st ed., pp. 122–132). https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203819869

SHANI, T. (2019). OUR FATAL MAGIC. London: STRANGE ATTRACTOR PRESS.

Stark, H., & Roffe, J. (Eds.). (2015). Deleuze and the non/human. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Vint, S. (2008). ‘The Animals in That Country’: Science Fiction and Animal Studies. Science Fiction Studies, 35(2), 177–188.

[panamagreg]

As many of you know we had extensive travel plans for most of March and again in April and May. On March 4th we left Panama for Israel. Our journey to Israel was very uneventful with the threat of the pandemic still minimal. Our first sign of any concern was as we were leaving the Tucuman International Airport in Panama City. The government of Panama was in the airport checking the temperatures of arriving passengers. We felt that this was a strong indication that the government here was doing due diligence to keep its citizens safe against the threat of the virus. Our flight took us to Madrid where we connected to Tel Aviv. We saw no other attempt at other airports to do any due diligence in attempt to protect travelers and population.

Once in Tel Aviv we spent a day awaiting the arrival of the others in our tour group. On our free day in Tel Aviv we explored the Museum of the Jewish People and the Ben Gurion home. Ben Gurion is the modern founder of the State of Israel.  His home was donated to the State upon his death and it is preserved as it had been during his life. His libraries, awards, memorabilia, and pictures from his life were amazing and it helped us to understand the current Israel. Israel is, in every way imaginable, a first world country with excellent infrastructure, military, medicine, and technology. They are very dependent on tourism. Our day ended with a trip to the Carmel Market where the vendors were very busy and the streets were full of tourists and locals buying fruits, spices, vegetables and just about anything else you can imagine. The following morning the remainder of our tour group arrived from the United States and we set out to explore the awesome country of Israel.

The Vibrant Colorful Market

The Vibrant Colorful Market

The Vibrant Colorful Market

Our tour was an awesome group of individuals put together by Mesu Andrews who is an author of Biblical fiction. Among the group were four authors (including myself), three ministers, a professional photographer, and twenty other people who were the perfect mix of inquiring minds. We felt totally blessed to find ourselves among such an incredible group of people. Our guide was Israeli and she had a wealth of information about every place we visited. As the tour progressed she tweaked the itinerary so that we could see the most of her beautiful country should the tour need to be cut short by travel restrictions imposed by the Corona Virus.

Jen and I with our awesome guide Hedva

Our group gathered at the Temple Mount

On our first day we went north from Tel Aviv to Caesarea, where King Herod built a magnificent Roman seaport. This is where Peter baptized the Roman centurion Cornelius, the first gentile convert to Christianity. (Acts 10: 1-8) it was from this port that Paul set sail to preach in communities all over the Mediterranean, and where he was later imprisoned for two years and made his powerful speech before Felix, Festus and King Agrippa (Acts 24-26). From Caesarea we continued along the coast north to Mt. Carmel for a breathtaking view of the Jezreel Valley from the spot where Elijah (1 Kings 18: 16-45) challenged the prophets of Baal. We then drove through the lush valley to Megiddo, the strategic city in biblical history and biblical Armageddon (Rev 16:16). Our last stop of the day was at Nazareth Village. This was a recreation of the original village in the center of Nazareth. The original village would have had a population of about 200 people. It is in the center of modern day Nazareth which has a population of about 65,000.

Colleseum at Caesarea

Waterfront at Caesarea

Caesarea

Nazareth Village

Farmer at Nazareth Village

The weaver woman at Nazareth Village

From Nazareth we continued to the Sea of Galilee where we stayed in a magnificent resort on the bank of the Sea. We enjoyed the sunrise and had a nice breakfast with our group. Following breakfast we travelled to the Mount of the Beatitudes (Matthew 5-7) where we worshiped together. This amazing group never once gave up on faith, which is what I attribute to the fact that we all remained healthy for the entire time in Israel. After our time at the Mount of the Beatitudes we travelled to the dock where we boarded “The Ancient Galilee Boat”. We enjoyed a wonderful ride out across the Sea of Galilee with a captain who was inspiring beyond belief. He led us in singing some contemporary Christian songs. The time here was much too short. Once back at the dock we were able to visit a place where a boat was recently excavated from the shore of the Sea of Galilee. This boat is Carbon dated to the 1st century. It could have been used by Christ. We then traveled to Tabgha the site of the stone where Christ performed the miracle multiplication of the loaves and fishes (Matthew 14: 13-21). There is a chapel here built on the foundation of the original church. The Chapel is built over the rock where The risen Jesus fed his disciples after a miraculous catch and gave Peter his commission to “feed my sheep” (John 21: 1-25). After our amazing morning we spent the afternoon at Capharnaum. We visited the Synagogue where Jesus based his 18-month Galilean ministry. We stood within the foundations of the synagogue where he preached and healed. We saw the house of Peter’s family where Jesus stayed. Our day concluded with a traditional Israeli dinner and sunset over the Galilean Sea.

Day three started with a visit to the village of Mary Magdalene, Magdala. It is a beautiful geologic excavation site. We saw where archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a 1st century synagogue and a Byzantine Monastery. After leaving Magdala we traveled on to Bethsaida which is described in (Mark 8:22-26) as the town where Jesus met a blind man seeking healing. Jesus led the man outside town before healing him and asked him not to return to the town, nor inform the people of the town, after his sight was restored. The next stop was Dan where we explored a couple of unbelievable excavation sites. The first archeological site we saw dates back almost 3000 years to the time of Abraham. It was discovered in the 1980’s (Genesis 14:14). After that we visited the actual excavated gate that Abraham entered as he first journeyed through the Promised Land. We climbed up to the altar where it is believed King Jeroboam placed one of the golden calves to make idol sacrifices (Kings 1:25-28). Our last adventure of the day was Banias Spring, one of the sources of the Jordan River. Caesarea Philippi is a center of Roman might and pagan worship in Jesus’ time where He challenged his disciples then and now, “Who do men and do you say that I am?” The archeological site of Philip’s Castle was the home of Salome and Herodias. Our day took us to the far northern border of Israel near Mt. Hermon and the borders Syria and Lebanon. We had dinner on the journey back to our resort.

One of the sources of The Jordan River

Chapel at Magdala

Chapel at Magdala

Excavated Gate from the time of Abraham

Excavation site at Magdala

Chapel in Magdala

Chapel in Magdala

After a restful night sleep we enjoyed breakfast and loaded up the bus for our journey south to the Dead Sea. The days are long and every minute is filled with adventure. The ride south gave us a little time to relax and anticipate what the day would bring. Our first stop was along the Jordan river at a site where people go to be baptized. The shop at the site was closed. This was the first place we encountered closed due to the Virus. The shop sells the baptismal gowns worn by those being baptized. Several from our group were baptized by two of the ministers who we travelled with. Jen was in the group baptized and she was truly inspired by the experience. Those who were baptized wore their swim suit in place of the traditional  gown. After leaving the bank of the Jordan we headed south toward Qumran. This is where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found about 80 years ago. The terrain on the drive south was more like I expected. It went from lush green to desert. After leaving Qumran we traveled on south to the Ein Gedi oasis. which lies in the middle of the desert. This is the place where David hid in caves and spared the life of King Saul (1 Sam. 23:29 & 1 Sam. 24: 1-22). Following our hike through the oasis we again continued south to the Dead Sea where we checked in for the night at the Dead Sea Spa and Resort.

Jen and I in the Ein Gedi Oasis

Ein Gedi

Ein Gedi

Ein Gedi

Day five and we started out by exploring Masada which was one of our most amazing experiences so far. King Herod had it built using excess to all imagination. When you look at my pictures notice the black lines. From the black lines and down is what was excavated in tact. Above the black lines has been reconstructed. After an exhausting tour of Masada we traveled back to our resort where we all took the afternoon to enjoy the Dead Sea. Jen got herself all covered in black Dead Sea mud. We all swam and enjoyed the time. The water has so much salt that you can barely keep your feet grounded.

Masada

Dead Sea Scrolls (recreation)

Ready to swim in The Dead Sea

Masada

Sunrise at the Dead Sea

Masada

Masada

Terrace at Masada

Inside Masada looking out to the Dead Sea

Masada

Cave where some of the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered

Masasda

Day six we headed to Jerusalem. The tour guide was concerned with the future of our tour because the government had closed the borders and the airport to incoming tourists and asked that all travelers prepare to leave as soon as possible. This was almost laughable as our flights had already started being canceled. The tour company was exploring the possibility of still going to Jordan. Our guide’s concern caused us to take an alternate route from The Dead Sea to Jerusalem to avoid the possibility of road blocks.  This gave us a look at Israel that few tourist experience. The moment we arrived in Jerusalem our driver took us straight to the Mount of Olives. Soon after that we made the Palm Sunday walk from the Mount of Olives to the Garden of Gethsemane and Church of all Nations (Church of Agony). After that we went by bus to Old Jerusalem. From the Jaffa Gate where our hotel was located we walked to Temple Mount. The beautiful Golden Dome is atop a mosque. It is controlled by the Muslims and we were required to cover arms, legs and shoulders for women and legs for men. We were able to visit the Eastern Gate which is also known as the Golden Gate. This gate has been sealed for many years. Christians believe that it is to be the entrance of Christ upon his return (Ezekiel 44: 1-2). We then were allowed a few minutes at the Western Wall. This is considered the holiest site in the Jewish world. For the first time in my life I put on a yarmulke and spent a few moments at the wall in silent prayer and reflection.  We then settled comfortably into our room at the Gloria Hotel inside the wall of Old Town Jerusalem. This was to be our home for 4 nights. Due to travel concerns related to Corona Virus our tour company canceled the Jordan portion of our trip. That moved up the departure date of several people traveling with us. Jen and I were supposed to continue on to Athens, Greece after Jordan then on to a Greek isle cruise. Given the fact that the worst possible place to be during a virus crisis is a cruise, Jen and I cancelled everything after Jerusalem. Everything from that point was dependent on getting flights changed. Nobody on the tour was letting that affect our visit to Jerusalem.

The Golden Dome

The Western Wall

The Western Wall

Walls of Old Jerusalem

Church of the Nations on The Mount of Olives

A View of New Jerusalem

Day seven was spent exploring Jerusalem. Our first adventure of the day was a walk under the Temple Mount through the Western Wall Tunnels giving us a close-up glimpse into the past. The next place we visited was Yad Vashem. It was difficult to understand the extreme brutality that was inflicted on the Jewish People during the Holocaust. There is no room in this world for antisemitism. This visit was a sad and somber moment in our time in Jerusalem. Over 1.5 million of the 6 million Jews exterminated during the Holocaust were children. The most moving exhibit and the most visited place in Israel is the Children’s Memorial at Yad Vashem. Out of respect no photography was allowed inside the museum. Later in the afternoon we visited the High Priest Caiaphas’s House where Jesus was taken before crucifixion. For dinner we enjoyed an invitation from a Jewish family for an authentic Shabbat celebration in their home.

The Eternal Flame at The Holocaust Museum

Entry to The Childrens Memorial

Yad Vashem

Our first stop on morning eight we found a sign on the Cathedral of St. James indicating it was closed due to the Corona Virus. The people in Israel are really fearful of the virus. The government was continuing to ask that all visitors leave the country. We had flights scheduled but the airlines kept changing things. All the people in our tour group were in the same boat. We were committed to continue seeing the sights until the airlines can get us home. After we left the monastery at the Church of St. James we enjoyed a nice walk that took us through the Zion Gate and led to David’s Tomb and on to the Upper Room. The location of the Upper Room is believed to be constructed on the site where Jesus held the Last Supper. A little further we found the church that was built on the site where it is believed Jesus went to visit His grandmother. We wandered through the Via Dolorosa and the streets of Shuk on our way to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. From there our group visited the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and The Golgotha And The Empty Garden Tomb. Our eighth night dinner was at the Jerusalem YMCA. Built in the early 1900’s the place was nothing short of amazing. The tourists were starting to leave at an alarming rate which improved our enjoyment of this Holy City. The bad news of the day was that one leg of our trip home has been canceled again. The hotels and stores in Israel were preparing to close their doors the following week with no new tourists arriving. We were all praying for the people there and others worldwide who would lose their jobs and income from the Corona Virus. The good news was that we were assured that we would be accommodated should we find ourselves trapped there.

On the morning of day nine we met to discuss the future of our tour. The State of Israel Ministry of Tourism closed all tourist sites in Israel, limited people gathering to less than 10, closed most of the restaurants, and asked that we stay in our hotel rooms. Our hotel told us that they would be closing the following morning. Our tour operator made arrangements for accommodations for us in Tel Aviv until we could get flights out. We were working on getting flights home. The God we serve is able to deliver (Daniel 3:37). We were advised to take the last day in Jerusalem to explore in small groups and perhaps do some shopping. Jen and I walked the ramparts on top of the wall of the Old City in both directions from the Jaffa Gate that morning. We got some amazing pictures and had an awesome experience. The streets and market are almost void of tourists. We did do a little shopping and the vendors appreciated the opportunity to make a little money before closing down.

We must remember this

Strategy Meeting

The Empty Tomb

On our last day in Jerusalem five people from our group decided to take an opportunity to climb to the hotel roof for some sunrise pictures. The sunrise was amazing and we were all a little choked up about having to leave this incredible place. After breakfast we started back by bus to Tel Aviv. The tour guide was with us but we were asked to put as much distance between us on the bus as possible. They also asked that we discontinue wearing our name tags in a effort to look less like a tour group. The tour operator made arrangements for all of us to stay in a hotel in Tel Aviv until we could leave Israel. The Corona Virus had caused all of the rest of our adventures to be cancelled. We had to say good bye to our wonderful tour guide Hedva and our driver Akmed when we were delivered to our hotel just a block from the beach of the Mediterranean Sea. Some emotional moments were shared when we parted ways. Thank you, Hedva for sharing your unbelievable knowledge and wisdom with us over those two weeks. Our group all remained very healthy and we spent three nights at the hotel  where they tried to get us to stay in our rooms and served us breakfast and dinner at the hotel to keep us close. Most of us did go out exploring a little each day in small groups. Our tour operator was very responsive to our needs. We all felt blessed to have had this awesome adventure. No one can deny that the memories and friendships are lifelong. By Thursday all 27 of us had confirmed reservations out of Israel.

Sunrise in Jerusalem

Goodbye Hedva

Exploring the Rampart

During one of our bonus days in Tel Aviv Jen and I walked down to the port of Jaffa. This is where Simon the Tanner lived and story of Jonah and the whale. There are some other sites from Jesus time but we were at a disadvantage without a guide. We got some great pictures along the beach promenade during our walk but found that really nothing was open. We made it back to the hotel before the rain started. On another day we walked to the Carmel Market. When we arrived in Israel 2 weeks earlier we could hardly navigate through the place. It was a beautiful, colorful and vibrant market. When we returned we were the only tourists. It is becoming more and more apparent that the locals for the most part want us to leave. We would be gone already if we could have gotten flights. Our flights were still scheduled to depart the following day. Every person was praying that there would be no further delays or complications. The hotel was awesome with us. They were frustrated that we wanted to congregate because the Ministry of Tourism was making surprise visits and giving fines to businesses that did not close and allowed customers to be closer than two meters apart. They served us breakfast and dinner every day and made us sit two to a table.

Jaffa

Promenade on the Mediterranean Sea at Tel Aviv

Beautiful Building on the Promenade

On Thursday our shuttle picked us up and delivered us to the airport. Those of us traveling back to Panama left before the others. The others were on two different flights to the United States and they traveled home without any problems. We however flew to London where we were to overnight and continue to Miami the following day with a connection into Panama City. We had an early flight from London to Miami. The 10 hour flight to Miami went fine except while we were on the plane our flight to Panama was cancelled. We learned of the cancellation when we checked the departure board at Miami. We went to the Copa ticket counter to learn that there were 300 people waiting for 160 seats on the only flight left for the day. We found a hotel and made a reservation for the next day. They gave us little hope that the flight the next day was going to go. When we settled into our hotel we ordered dinner for delivery and made a back-up plan for travel the next day. It was our back-up plan that ended up getting us home with only a day to spare before the International Airport at Panama closed to all international travelers.

As residents of Panama we were allowed to travel home, but all others were refused entry to the country. When we exited the plane we were screened and our temperature was taken. Those travelling on connecting flights were sent on their way and once we were screened we were advised that we would be required to stay in our home for 14 days quarantine. The only reason we would be allowed out was to go for groceries, and only one of us would be allowed to do that. The airport was nearly empty and customs and immigration took a very short time. Our driver picked us up and we took off for Coronado. The driver advised us that we would need to produce utility bills or something to show we lived in Coronado to pass through the check points. We all get our bills by email here so that was not a problem. The trip normally takes about 90 minutes, but even with nobody on the road it took us almost 4 hours to get home. There were 2 check points where they took all of our temperatures and verified that we had reason to travel into the interior of Panama (home). After a quick stop for some fruit along the road and a McDonalds drive-thru we got safely home before dark. We have learned that breaking quarantine could result in a fine between $50,000 and $100,000 so we will be home for the next several days. I made our grocery store run and some friends and neighbors have dropped by with some goodies. Other than that the only thing to do now is order delivery if we decide not to cook.

Domino’s Tel Aviv isn’t the same

Life here in quarantine is not a whole lot different than what others are facing. Earlier this week, Panama’s president ordered a 22 hour per day curfew.  Everyone is allowed to go out during a 2 hour widow of time only for essential needs, like groceries and pharmacy. The time a person is allowed out is based on the number on their Cedula, with foreign residents allowed out based on their passport number. We feel fortunate to be here where the incidence of the virus is much lower than the rest of the world. If the world wants to beat this virus, everyone should just stay home and order takeout!

I have wrote one of the longest posts to date and have had a very difficult time with the pictures. I have to think that the internet is partly to blame. With everybody home taxing the internet capacity, my band width is definitely affected. I am spending hours putting more than 800 pictures into a presentation. With any luck I may be able to share it in the near future.  Let me know if that may be something that is of interest.

Blessings from quarantine in Panama,

Greg and Jen

  Travel in a Corona Virus World As many of you know we had extensive travel plans for most of March and again in April and May.

[superkrispypeanutstudentstu-blog]

The Regulation Of Attraction And The Bizarre And Wacky World Of Metaphysics By John Peace

The land of the Greeks has a historical past that prolonged for greater than 5000 years. The bargaining is as widespread in Athens as in some other a part of the world. Being an archipelago nation with loads of beaches inside its territory, it is extremely probably that you'll have to use the ferries to explore it more. Every of the favored nations in this continent, every year, has a substantial inhabitants of vacationers visiting because of their culinary attraction. The coast of Greece brings 1000's of visitors every year. But, in the course of this chaos you'll find peaceable places such as the Acropolis, even though it is filled with tourists. That is additionally identified for its Sea Garden Park or Morska Gradina where you can find a variety of vegetation and flowers. The opportunities to discover historic Greek tradition are limitless and a stay in Greece as a travel nurse will yield ample time to get to know this excellent nation and its pleasant folks. As a consequence, an individual from another country all in favour of shopping for property in Greece will need to get hold of what is known as a "pink slip" for wire transfers of money from abroad. • A Schengen visa might in all probability be another good choice, as it contains a lot of the European nations and you would enter those countries on a single stamp visa, besides the U.Okay. and some other nations, which aren't yet on that visa. Amongst his different motivational talking engagements, seminars and private teaching of athletes each well-known and just getting began, Hoddle is currently coaching 2012 Olympic candidate Jenny Brogdon, the former College of Oregon star high jumper who was the Pac-10 runner-up. Festivals like Pentecost Monday, Nafplio Competition, Ancient Olympia Worldwide Pageant, Assumption, Ohi Day, Miaoulia Festival, Nafplio Pageant, Athens International Movie Festival, Second Day of Christmas, Epiphany, Apokreo, Clean Monday, Greek Independence Day and more are the largest celebrations that you can get pleasure from within the Greek capital. However as quickly as plainly the idea for these gadgets fade out, chances are high you are going to transfer to the opposite sorts of presents, present certificates as such. It was as a result of, ladies were prohibited to point out any elements of their skin or show their body shape. Oregano, regardless of of its reputation in Greece, Italy and other Mediterranean international locations, was nearly unknown within the US till after the World War II when troopers introduced dwelling the "pizza taste". The European countries are merely adjusting sooner because they've been shoveling the goodies into the general public trough for longer, and with more shovels. Flame seedless grape, the second most popular seedless grape, compared to Thompson's seedless, deep pink in coloration, spherical with a pleasant crunch and a sweet-tart style steadiness. Head to Paradise Beach Bar, located proper on the beach between the palm bushes. Symi city is where virtually all the lodging is discovered, since in its heyday within the nineteenth century, when Symi grew wealthy on the proceeds of shipbuilding and sponge-diving, the Symiots constructed their imposing three-storey homes nearly exclusively within the town. When we talk about Holiday packages to Greece, you get a very good opportunity of visiting all vacationer points of interest. Luxurious motels have even come up with the novelty plan of creating non-public infinity pools hooked up to the room with beautiful view of the sea and the seaside space. Estimate vary as to how many people truly communicate the Greek language and is anywhere from 15 to 21 million people. In Delphi museum, visitors can see many historical statues. The thought of getting the picture as your idea in giving your presents gives them at the identical time a singular treasure, and it would not dent your pocketbooks as properly. The town of Marsala, inhabitants roughly eighty thousand, was the most important Carthaginian base in Sicily throughout its wars towards Greece and Rome. You might or might not be aware of the decline in artwork training in the last 70 years. Though not as well known they provide a lot to travelers seeking to join with locals while learning the tradition of Greece and avoiding areas overcrowded with vacationer. In addition, to Albania and Kosovo, Albanian can also be spoke in Italy, the Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, Greece, Turkey, and by immigrant communities in lots of nations all through Europe, as well as in communities in Egypt, Russia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, and Australia. Only a few thousand years ago, rainforests covered about 12% of the worlds land surface, round 15.5 million km2, (6 million sq miles). Later I used that reality in "The Bourne Determine." When certainly one of my characters wished to get away, he joined the boat folks in the Caribbean. Because of the harsh economic local weather in past years many emigrated from their Greek homeland all around the world to countries as numerous as Australia, South Africa, Argentina, North America and many others. It is all the time really useful journey to Greece not as tourist; it is higher to decorate alike local people not like foreigners. Greek civilization developed on a rocky, mountainous peninsula that juts onto the Mediterranean Sea from southeastern Europe, and on the Islands in the close by sea. You possibly can take ferry boat rides to nearby islands reminiscent of Tilos and Symi. And while it appears to contradict Einstein's particular relativity, which says nothing can travel quicker than mild, it's extra doubtless that entanglement challenges our ideas of what distance and time actually mean. Finally, for the snowboarding lovers, keep in mind that mainly in Spain and Italy you'll have the chance of nice skiing alternatives, Cruise lovers will get their greatest in Greece touring across the islands, or just taking a Mediterranean cruise that can discover the three countries and even Turkey in the identical bundle. We began up a dialog which got underway with the usual assortment of who, what and the place points. Greece has a surface space of more than 130 thousand square kilometers with the Greek Islands being a couple of quarter of this area. Economists have been warning us about this disaster for years, and their warnings have gone largely unheeded. Even people with infected cystic acne ought to strive thyme oil for 1-2 weeks, 2 instances a day. It has no beaches, but does have lovable rocky coves where tourists get pleasure from snorkeling. Except you might be planning to go and discover the outskirts, attempt to keep away from cabs and rental automobiles as the visitors of the town will eat lots of your time sitting like a duck within the taxi. Additional east in Plaka, the Monument of Lysikrates was built by an 'angel' who funded the play that gained prime prize in 334 BC. It later passed into the hands of Capuchin friars who hosted Lord Byron; one other Lord, Elgin needed to take the monument to London but was thwarted this time by the friars. Certainly, to make the most of an overused time period - when it comes to real estate, Greece is hot. As soon as one is immersed in a Scorching Tub and as you begin to enjoy the warm spa water, it causes two very beneficial physiological occasions to take place in your physique. This place may be, to a sure extent, used for an academic journey together with your kids at the toes of nature at its greatest. In the future we went to the Athinas Avenue food market, which was fairly an expertise. It has good roads on the northern side and many archaeological sites to go to and enjoy. These are simply few of the popular the explanation why individuals journey. No matter season you choose, there are greater than sufficient sights to supply a great European holiday. cheap hotels gloucester A pair of denims, just a few t-shirts, a superb looking comfortable carrying shoe and one other pair of comfy footwear must be taken in the bag for snug movement. In Belguim there is, of course, the well-known Spa the place where the very phrase "Spa" comes from then in England you may have Bath so aptly named. We will start with arguably the most surprising one, the Museo Nazionale della Magna Grecia (The National Museum of Higher Greece), a vital archeological museum. Bushes can live to an age of roughly 60 years and develop to about 60 feet tall at maturity. In these exhausting occasions of global meltdown and inflation, spending capacity of individuals has witnessed a pointy nostril-dive. Consider historic Rome, Greece, Modern day China, America. Since taking snapshots are part on the celebration of each event, you may make use of it. You may have these snapshots digitally imaged and print them afterwards. Bloomingdales is renowned for its all-day Sunday parties held often all year long. Now what's the one thing that these Scorching Spring Spas from the past do not have - it is of course an electric Air Blower (in spite of everything in days of previous electrical energy had not been discovered) which is usually fitted on many modern day spas. It was reconstructed nicely over one hundred years ago by individuals who didn't know what they had been doing. The white walnut tree is the most cold hardy of all walnut trees, rising vigorously in zones three-9. There are a number of exceptional panels of the Parthenon frieze that Lord Elgin forgot, and the air pollution-scarred Caryatids. The individuals of every plain and island formed an independent neighborhood known as a metropolis-state. There are numerous good Greek journey guides accessible to detail the quite a few sites to visit. While volley ball and tanning are standard by day, sundowners and impromptu seaside events are on from early evening to properly previous midnight. Close to the primary sq. is the medieval Santa Maria della Isola church and monastery, remodeled in Gothic type and touched up a bit after an earthquake slightly over one hundred years ago. An olive tree replaces the unique in the western court of the temple. Before you visit to any vacation spot, you will need to at all times perceive the transport system of your respective place and regardless whether or not town is from Asia, Europe, Americas or every other part of the world, transport have its limitations and you must respect the gravity of their frequency and availability. Located on a high mountain that is round one hundred fifty meters in height, the Acropolis, or the excessive City, is positioned in the heart of the Greek capital. There are several necessary steps that should be taken to organize, however probably the most vital issues to do to prepare for the coming despair is to begin storing food. You possibly can actually witness some of the most historic sites in your entire world and get a feel for what the powerful Historical Greece was like. It seems that, these hidden positions, has saved them natural and delightful, as a result of the bus with tourist can hardly reach these spots.

[iconem]

Discovering the land of Nineveh: an interview with Daniele Morandi Bonacossi (3/3)

Estimated reading time: 6 min.  Lien vers la version française | Versione italiana

In this third part of the interview with Daniele Morandi Bonacossi, director of the “Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project (LoNAP)”, we will see why new technologies and in particular digitization can be considered an essential tool for modern archeology! 

link to the second part | lien vers la deuxième partie | seconda parte

What do you think of the technologies used by Iconem, but more generally of digital technologies in archeology?

We live in a time of economic-political tensions, especially in the Middle East. Digital archeology plays an essential role in rebuilding archaeological sites destroyed by war barbarians. So parallel to the aspect of usability, I also think there is the historical value to be crucial! For example..

..the reconstruction of the arc of the temple of Bel in Palmira. Communication through digital and virtual technologies really becomes a crucial tool to make archeology sustainable. It allows not only to reconstruct and document the findings with the outmost precision, but also to communicate in a very effective and dynamic way the results obtained, through the 3D. Digital is now a protagonist in our work... and an essential resource to exploit.

“Communication through digital and virtual technologies really becomes a crucial tool to make archeology sustainable.”

How do you imagine archeology in the future?

I think archeology is already a science of the future, and in the field of humanistic disciplines, it is abler than anything else to communicate and to create synergies between different knowledge. Modern archaeological research on the field is strongly interdisciplinary. The archaeologist has to be able to communicate between fields of complementary knowledge and to ask the specialists the right questions. You have to know how to coordinate and communicate with multidisciplinary research groups: architects, restorers, detectors, photographers, geomorphologists, archeo-zoologs, archaeo-botans, and of course, experts in digital archeology! 

Nowadays, one of the central field of archeology, in an era where resources are less, and we depend on – declining-  public research funds, it is very important to communicate in the right way and to make it clear to the community why it is important to invest in archeology. And here's where digital archeology comes into play!

“.. archeology is already a science of the future.. abler than anything else to communicate and to create synergies between different knowledge” 

How do you exploit the potential of digital technologies in your work?

Digital reconstructions and virtual visits may seem like a technological dream, but they are now the practice. I was telling just before about our study of the channel network and carved reliefs on the mountains by the Assyrian King Sennacherib..

Thanks to the digital technologies based on the use of drones, laser scanners and photogrammetry, we will be able for the first time to document these rock reliefs with very high precision and to rebuild them digitally.

We will make this cultural heritage accessible through the creation of an archaeological park, which will also include a tourist center where you can make a virtual tour before you can view the sites directly on the field. Visitors will see how the channel system was in the VIII-VII sec. and then compare it with real archaeological remains!

Which site would you like to see completely rebuilt in 3D?

It's hard to choose, especially because many sites would be perfect for digital reconstruction. But one or two sites in particular would be two beautiful tests for a reconstruction with 3D models: the site of Nineveh and Nimrud. 

“ Here, then, the creation of portals for digital archeology would take on a very significant meaning, even in the dissemination of knowledge.”

Old capitals of the Assyrian kingdom, in northern Iraq, have been the protagonists of the first archaeological excavations since the mid-1800s. These are monumental sites, of which today we know a lot, thanks to excavations that lasted more than a century and a half! Although monumental, they were built in raw bricks, which did not allow total preservation: they are therefore hardly accessible to a non-authorized audience. Here, then, the creation of portals for digital archeology would take on a very significant meaning, even in the dissemination of knowledge. In this regard, I am involved in the construction of an international archaeological exhibition on the capital of the Assyrian Empire, Nineveh, which will be held in October 2017 at the Leiden National Archaeological Museum in Leiden, which will focus on digital reconstructions ...

Images: courtesy of Terradininive.com

[tanadrin]

Harpesson

(reposted b/c I apparently deleted the original at some point)

NALEFOR, PARSENOR; IN THE 363RD MILLENIUM SINCE THE EXILE BEGAN

Harpesson sat in the front row of the empty lecture hall and fretted. In her nine years in university, fretting was something she had become quite good at. The familiar, if not quite comfortable sensation of low-level panic. She turned her tablet over nervously in her hands, and sometimes she got up to pace. Then she would sit down again, and smooth her senior scholar’s robes, trying to force herself to relax. But invariably, she would find herself up and pacing again.

It was only the biggest day of her academic career so far, the examination for tesarate, the culmination of three years of postgraduate research on top of the year she had spent on her senior scholarship. If her thesis was found to be a significant contribution to the advancement of her field–History, Technological Archeology, one of the most prestigious departments in the entire university–she would be wearing tesar’s robes before the afternoon. If she failed–well, it wasn’t the end of the world. But it felt like it would be. It wouldn’t be unusual, even. The Sovereign and Unreformed University of Parsenor at Pelehante was hands-down the most prestigious institution in the system, and a history tesarate wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. But she really, really did not want to fail. She dropped her tablet.

“Shit.” The vulgarity hung in the cavernous space of the empty lecture hall. She picked up her tablet and flopped back down in her chair. The choice of venue was not helping her nerves. There was an engineering conference or something taking up all the seminar rooms in the history department, so they’d moved her presentation at the last minute to the biggest and most intimidating room in the pylon. Tall columns rose against the walls, long and narrow arcs of steel that joined in a vaulted ceiling, at a precipitous height, as though to dwarf anybody who had the temerity to stand in the front of the chamber. The entire back wall was a massive delta-shaped window which offered an impressive view of the basaltic plains of Nalefor. Just on the horizon was the low outline of the Expedition Hills, which marked the edge of the Great Crater. It was a striking image, but barren. Nalefor’s atmosphere was tenuous, barely distinguishable from a vacuum, and the surface was scoured by radiation. Not a good place to go for a walk, even in a spacesuit. High above the horizon was the massive disk of Nalefor’s primary, the gas giant Pelehante. Its upper cloud layers were stripes of tan and white, its disk waxing gibbous in the sunlight. Harpesson sighed, and sank even deeper into her chair.

The sound of one of the hall’s side doors opening made her bolt upright. Two tall, gray-haired academics came in. The first was Wunai, chief of the history department. Her specialty was technological archeology, and she looked severe in her dark tesar’s robes. Harpesson felt her palms begin to sweat. The second was the more genial-looking Gunasi Ar, one of the history professors. She wasn’t sure which specialty. There was supposed to be a third, Harpesson knew. They usually got three examiners, one who knew your subject inside and out, one who could see how your understanding of your specialty integrated with your understanding of your general field, and one for any interdisciplinary considerations. Harpesson was worried about that last one. She had had to do some work on diachronic linguistics for her thesis, and she had heard a rumor that the third examiner was going to be —

The door opened and a man strode in. Harpesson’s stomach sank. He looked younger than both Gunasi and Wunai; he had dark hair, almost black, and a smooth, nearly wrinkleless face. In reality, he was by far the oldest person in the room. Harpesson knew him by reputation: he was Yizhad Girvát, a cyborg with excellent facial prostheses, linguistics professor, and notorious hardass. He nodded to Wunai and Gunasi as he came in, but didn’t acknowledge the panicking eulesar in the front row. When the examiners had dispensed with the pro forma small talk, Wunai touched a button on her tablet, causing a bench and three seats to rise from the stage of the lecture hall. The tesars took their places. Harpesson got to her feet unsteadily.

You can do this, Harp, she said to herself. Focus. You know this shit like the back of your hand. Just focus. She took a deep breath, and felt her anxiety fall away. The time for worry was over. A calm confidence took its place.

“Are you ready to start?” Wunai asked. Gunasi flashed a maternal smile. Harpesson cracked her neck.

“Let’s do this,” she said.

Gunasi chuckled. Harpesson had always liked the old Ar most, out of all the history tesars. It was good to have a friend on the board of examiners. She glanced at Girvát. His face was utterly impassive. Well, it could be worse. Maybe.

“Very well.” Wunai touched the interface to start the official record. “Eule Harpesson has indicated she is ready to begin. Therefore, let it be known that the examination of Eule Harpesson for tesarate in history has begun. Eulesar, we have all looked over your thesis. Would you prefer to begin with the presentation, or the questioning?”

“We can start with the questioning, Department Chief,” Harpesson said. Wunai nodded.

“So,” Wunai said. “Your thesis was on the computing technology of the Yunamo diaspora, particularly as it related to astronomy and navigation, yes?” Harpesson nodded. “In your introduction, you make the argument that the Yunamo systems design evinces a lack of distinction between the two functions. Elaborate.”

Harpesson cleared her throat. “Well, ah, I’m really just following Faradign’s appraisal of the functional nature of astronomy in diaspora technology, so far as that goes. He pretty firmly established that in contrary to, you know, system-based societies like Parsenor, astronomy is much more than a scientific or theoretical pursuit. It’s actually intrinsic to survival, and that importance causes it to transcend the normal social dynamics of science.”

“We are aware of Faradign’s work,” Gunasi said. Gently, though, like he just wanted her to get to the point. She could do that.

“Well, Faradign compares it to the engineering-rituals in that respect, as you know, which I think is flawed, since we’re talking about something that, though essentially pragmatic, still operates over the time-frame of millennia, or many millennia. It’s not just ritualized practice, it’s elevated to revelation, or sacred scripture–because there has to be a long-term perspective maintained, and that’s the only cognitive toolkit the diasporas really have at their disposal.” Harpesson could feel herself at risk of a digression – but fuck it, it was an interesting topic, even if it wasn’t directly relevant to her thesis. “So what you see with astronomy in the diaspora is — repeatedly, in completely distinct cultures, ones with no contact at all between them — a kind of religious attitude toward astronomy, but one meshed with the scientific method. It’s a blend of the two, which you don’t find anywhere in system cultures. And the important thing is, navigation is the flip side of the same coin. It’s, like, the priesthood. The initiates to the mysteries of astronomy.” Harpesson continued, giving as quick an overview as she could of the Yunamo sources she was using for that comparison: the personified stars, the myths of the constellations, which shifted and evolved as the stars themselves did in the wake of the Yunamo’s journeys; the astronomer-epics, and the theological differences which had led to the Great Betrayal, and the schismatic Faithless turning aside on the Yunamo’s journey, who eventually made their way to Parsenor, centuries ago, summoned by the faros of Vannecor. For a little extra zest, she even skated quickly over comparable frameworks from some of the other diasporas in Parsenor’s history. Wunai looked pleased at the end. It was Gunasi’s turn to ask a question.

“Talk to me about your methodology, with regard to systems analysis.” Harpesson shifted nervously.

 “Can you get a little more specific, please?” she asked.

“Reconstruction of partially-attested systems, use of abandoned file formats, that sort of thing.”

 Harpesson took a deep breath, then launched into her spiel on programming language cladistics, cross-cultural approaches to programming frameworks, and heritable computer design. This was by far her strongest subject–her parents were both computer scientists, who had passed on their love of obscure systems and ancient file formats to her, and that plus her interest in history had made technological archeology basically the perfect fit for her.

She kept going until she saw that Gunasi had heard more than enough to satisfy, then started wrapping things up. “I mean, in some respects it resembles the study of natural languages” — glance at Girvát, still nothing — ”but of course programming languages are constructed, and systems have to be considered. I suppose they most resemble constructed languages in that respect, but over long periods of time, groups of programming methodologies emerge with common features that you can group into something like metalanguages, which evolve with respect to one another in a way which is conducive to comparative study, like natural languages. Though of course these second-order phenomena are much more unstable over similar time periods, especially compared to natural languages that change very slowly in diaspora societies.” Gunasi sat back, evidently pleased. Harpesson allowed herself a mental fist pump. Girvát’s turn now, though. She braced herself.

“If you don’t mind, te-Gunas and te-Wunai,” Girvát said, “I’m most curious about the plate fragment you describe in chapter seven.”

Harpesson smiled. This was her secret weapon; if this didn’t impress Girvát, the man was unimpressable. “A curious artifact indeed,” she said. “Titanium with a platinum coating, nearly the size of a full-grown adult, and a fragment of a larger piece still. Engraved with a complex millimeter-scale pattern. It comes directly from the private collection of a man whose grandmother was one of the faithless Yunamo. The legends surrounding the plate indicate it once had a practical function, a long time ago; but the sojourners had quite forgotten whatever that function was, long before it reached Parsenor. It looked like an encoding scheme, so I ran a comparison with known Yunamo file formats, and found something likely-looking in the neighborhood of image compression. But the format was a variant, and it took me a few months to write a program capable of reading the data.”

Gunasi nodded. “Very impressive, Eule Harpesson. What did you find?”

Harpesson glanced at Girvát. Still nothing. She plunged onward. “In short, it was part of a star chart, encoded on a metal plate, maybe as a backup in case of catastrophic systems failure, or perhaps as an icon in its own right. So I pulled up astrometrics for various points along the path of the Yunamo diaspora, based on the records of the faithless, and I found this.” She touched a button on her tablet. The window of the lecture hall went opaque, and an image was projected onto it. It was a stylized star chart beside a more realistically rendered starfield. The chart showed each star as a different polygon based on its stellar classification–except for one star near the middle, which was a circle. The same star, barely visible, was circled in the rendering.

“It was confusing, at first,” said Harpesson. “The matching image is incredibly ancient, predating even the oldest of the Yunamo records–that view is what the distant ancestors of the Yunamo would have seen more than ten thousand years ago, roughly coeval with the Gaharrin or the Essemaian diasporas of Parsenor’s own history. There was nothing in the image to indicate why this star was special. Maybe it was obvious to the people who made the file, but not to their descendants. So I combed through the ancillary data, which pointed to a couple other ancient file-fragments on the same system. I found a copy of that in the university archives.” She tapped her tablet again, and a block of text appeared below the other image, with a section highlighted.

“This, te-Girvát, I think is why they asked you to be here. That’s a copy of a copy of a transcription of a file annotation, referencing the star chart, but in a language that antedates the file by a good three or four thousand years. Perhaps the chartmaker could read that language, or perhaps he was copying an older image that included the same note. In any case, I had to do some linguistic detective work. Once I established the language was related to several Yunamo daughter-languages, I was able to reconstructed what it said, I think fairly accurately, based on the vocabulary alone.” She tapped another button, and more text appeared, this time in clear Toltó. She watched Girvát’s face as he read it.

Absolute galactice coordinates 134:577.7 K-class star, 0.78 solar masses Periodic transit interval 16.9 million seconds Approximate radius 5000 km

Girvát’s brow furrowed, and he picked up his tablet and began tapping away at it. Harpesson smiled to herself. It wasn’t much, but it was a reaction. Hopefully the right one. She continued with her presentation, though Girvát seemed only to be half-paying attention. “In any case, the relevancy to that chapter is what the artifact revealed both about file formats and programming languages. The tablet-language — we’re tentatively going with ‘Old Digital Yunamo’ for now — seems to be the lexical basis for a few of the more important high-level Yunamo programming languages, particularly the Latter Astrometric Software group. It seems long after the terminology the languages use had become entirely opaque, these programming languages were maintained to ensure compatability with old navigation equipment. The study also proved illuminating in that–”

Girvát held up his hand. Harpesson froze. “Eule Harpesson,” he said slowly, “did you ever think to ask why the ancient Yunamo felt the need to maintain compatability with old star-charts and navigation equipment, even after they left the region of the galaxy for which those charts had been designed?”

Harpesson shook her head. This could not be going anywhere good.

“Did you examine other archived Yunamo files — logs, records, literature, computer games — to attempt to ascertain the significance of the K-class star the recovered chart marks?”

She shook her head again.

“Did you examine the other archived Yunamo files–logs, records, literature, computer games, personal journals–to attempt to ascertain the significance of the K-class star in question?”

“No,” said Harpesson. “Of course not. That would have been way outside my–”

“Your area of interest?” Girvát asked. Harpesson nodded. “Sometimes, Eule Harpesson, we ought to pursue these things no matter where they lead, even if it takes us ‘way outside’ our area of interest. Did you even discuss this chapter with your thesis advisor?”

Harpesson shook her head. She had done that chapter on her own. It wasn’t like she had a good reason for that, except it was peripheral to the rest of her thesis, and she wanted to surprise te-Ina with it. He had an interest in old star charts. She wished she could fall through the floor. She had no idea why Girvát was giving her the third degree. The other two examiners were staring at him, so clearly she wasn’t the only one. Girvát stood up.

“Eule Harpesson, step forward!”

Wunai opened her mouth to speak, but Girvát just stared at her. Perhaps out of surprise more than anything else, Wunai retreated. Harpesson took a nervous step forward toward the tesars’ bench, then another.

“By my authority as a senior master of this university,” Girvát intoned, ”I hereby declare you te-Harpes within these walls, examined and found proficient in the field of History, Diaspora Studies, and te-Harpes within these walls, examined and found proficient in the field of Science, Astronomy with a Specialization in Exoplanetary Science. I will leave it to the good tesars of your department to determine whether you have qualified as proficient in History, Technological Archeology, but if I may offer my input, te-Wunai, I recommend that te-Harpes be made a tesar thereof immediately.”

Wunai’s mouth hung slightly open, and one eyebrow was raised in surprise; Gunasi had begun to sputter.

“Now hold on a minute, Yizhad,” she said. “Her work is excellent, but we have barely begun our examination – and you are a master of linguistics, not of astronomy or history!”

“According to the ancient regulations of the university, any master may declare a qualified eulesar a master in his or her own subject, or any subject to which the eulesar makes a self-evidently groundbreaking contribution,” said Girvát calmly. “And if you take my advice, Department Chief, not only will you make te-Harpes a tesar of technological archeology, you will make her a professor as well.”

Wunai’s other eyebrow shot up. “We don’t have the funding–”

“Then get the funding, te-Wunai,” said Girvat. “Because te-Harpes has just made the most important contribution to that field, and to a half-dozen others, in the history of this university.”

“You have really got to explain yourself at some point,” said Wunai calmly.

“And we should make our humanities students sit in on astronomy lectures from time to time,” Girvát muttered. He pressed a button on his tablet, and Harpesson’s presentation disappeared from the projection. It was replaced by a diagram of a yellow-orange star, with a band of space around it highlighted in blue.

“A K-class star of 0.78 solar masses,” he said, “has about 40% solar luminosity and a surface temperature of about 5,100 Kelvin. Or so a few quick calculations inform me. And an orbital period of 16.9 million seconds puts a putative terrestrial planet right in its sun’s habitable zone.”

Gunasi and Wunai shifted in their seats. “An interesting discovery, te-Girvát,” said Gunasi, “and doubtless a feather in Eule Harpesson’s cap—”

“Te-Harpes,” Girvát interjected.

“Um. Yes, te-Harpes’ cap, but I still don’t see...”

Girvat pressed another button. Harpesson’s presentation reappeared. He scrolled through the transcript of the file annotation, to a point just beyond the one Harpesson translated. “If te-Harpes’ reconstruction is accurate–and it appears to be excellent” – at this, he looked at Harpesson and smiled. He actually smiled. Harpesson felt like she was going to pass out from the shock. She had never seen Girvát smile at anything – “then the word right there, right next to ‘transit’ is ‘diatomic oxygen.’”

Wunai looked like she’d been struck, Gunasi’s face was pale. Harpesson was bewildered, and she had the feeling whatever was happening had completely gotten away from her.

Wunai stood up. “We should be able to locate the star on Parsenor-local charts and make our own telescopic survey. I doubt the transit will be visible from Parsenor, but we still might be able to confirm the presence of planets. I imagine the university will want to send robotic probes first, but if the Yunamo did indeed reach this world... a manned expedition will be inevitable. Peleho only knows what they’ve...” She trailed off, then turned to Harpesson.

“Te-Harpes! No... that won’t do. Senior master Harpesson!”

Harpesson had a sudden sense of vertigo. She was pretty sure she had just set the land speed record for ascent through the university’s academic ranks, and she still had no idea what was going on. She managed a small, quiet “Yes?”

“This is your achievement, however accidental it may be. A great deal will have to be planned and discussed. It may be years before this discovery begins to bear fruit directly. But I think I speak for the entire tesarate of the university when I say this discovery is, first and foremost, your triumph. If you wish to lead a manned expedition – well, I imagine it would require extensive cyberization, at least, and a long period in cold sleep... and other costs. Many diasporas have come to Parsenor, but we have never attempted one of our own.”

Harpesson was shaking her head violently before Wunai finished. “No no no,” she said, “I get sick just on interplanetary shuttles–I don’t... what’s going–”

Wunai turned to Gunasi before she could finish. “Te-Gunas, if you would be so kind as to upgrade te-Harpes’ key and permissions, and show her to her new office” -  Wunai glanced at Harpesson – ”and maybe get a stiff drink in her, too. I need to contact the Provost.”

Girvát held up his tablet. “I’ve already called a meeting of the tesarate for this evening. See if the Provost can’t get in touch with some heads of state while you’re at it.” Wunai nodded, and swept out of the lecture hall.

“Just a moment, te-Harpes,” said Gunasi. “I’ll go and fetch your tesar’s robes.” The old Ar rose, and followed Wunai out.

Harpesson stood in the middle of the room for a long moment, now empty except for her and Girvát, who was calmly typing away on his tablet.

“E-excuse me,” she said. “What’s going on? What’s the big deal? What the... what the hell just happened to me?” She threw her tablet down on the floor. “Oxygen, sure great, it’s rare and hard to extract. Planet full of it, good news! Planet many light years away, bad news!”

Girvát stopped typing, and looked up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Lifelong habit of theatrics. I forgot you don’t have a planetary science background, and I should have explained.

“Diatomic oxygen is rare in nature. Oxygen is highly reactive, and doesn’t persist long in planetary atmospheres because of its reactivity. There are only a few classes of chemical reaction which are liable to produce large, detectable quantities of it, of the sort you might notice in a planet’s atmosphere, if you were looking very carefully at the spectrum of emissions of the parent star, when the planet passed in front of it. For the Yunamo stargazers to have seen any at all, the planet in question would have had a considerable amount. That was why they took such an interest in that world; why the data about its location in the sky became a sacred icon to their ancestors, and why they focused their entire civilization, for hundreds of generations, on the goal of reaching that distant star. And that was why, even when the faithless of the Yunamo turned aside on their voyage and forgot their purpose, and eventually wound their way to Parsenor, even when they had all but forgotten the promises of their scripture and the rituals of old, the sign of that planet remained embedded in the heart of their archives.

“That world represents everything our species has been seeking since we began to wander among the stars — since Earth was lost to us, long ago. That world is habitable. That world has life.”