stuff 'n other stuff

Over on my other blog, I’ve been writing about how postal services, or more accurately, the letter handling service, is in terminal decline.

The universal letter service was one of the great nineteenth century inventions, and in the case of Britain (and Ireland) played a major role in keeping families in contact before email and skype.

It was the same service that allowed Wallace to write to Darwin about evolution, and for people to send home letters about the strange sights and sounds that they had seen. In short it was part of the social glue of the Victorian and Edwardian British Empire.

The postal service enabled a whole range of activities for example it allowed people to order books by mail, play chess by correspondence with people half a world away, and even get their favourite newspaper from home, even if it was two months late.

It was one of the key components, along with the railway, the steamship, and the telegraph that turned the world from something very eighteenth century to something that was recognisably modern.

And of course what we are talking about is increased and increasingly reliable communication.

In the days of the sailing ship, people effectively dropped off the face of the earth. Ships took as long as they did to get somewhere, and sending letters home was equally erratic, the services were simply not predictable.

Come the steamship and the railway, suddenly it was predictable – the predictability being what allowed Cook’s to operate, by making it simple to organise travel – train to Dover, packet boat to Boulogne, train to Marseille, ship to Alexandria, train to Port Said, etc.

And with that predictability the world changed. Punctuality became a virtue. People started using pocket watches, and scheduling meetings. All because we could now say where we would be next Tuesday with a degree of certainty …

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I’ve previously written about coins as evidence of contact. The ABC today has an interesting report on the use of beads by Maccassar fishermen to buy access to trepang beds of the coast of Arnhem land from the local population.

The interesting thing about these beads is that they are not South East Asian in origin and were either of Dutch, Czech or Venetian manufacture and have been found in eighteenth century sediment deposits.

Which of course is interesting as while Janszoon attempted to land in Australia as early as 1606, there was no sustained attempt at European settlement until 1788. In other words we can say fairly confidently that they have come as a result of trade, and that the Macassar fishermen must have acquired them from Dutch or Portugese spice traders and then traded them on …

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I went to Sydney yesterday – it was a work thing – a meeting about the state of play about data citation.

It was valuable, not in the least because of the opportunity to network – one problem about being based in Canberra is that the university data management community is passing small and there’s no real forum to calibrate where you are against your peers.

The formal trip report is available online as a pdf, but what I’m intending in this post is the value add stuff.

Getting there

The meeting was at the old locomotive works in Redfern. This is a set of old railway workshops converted to a conference centre and offices. When I last went there the place still smelled like a workshop and there were people still taking apart machinery in part of the building. Now that’s gone and the building is purely an office cum conference centre, although it, or smething similar, would also make a really good performance space.

A nice feature is that they have left some of the old panel presses as features and a reminder of the building’s industrial past.

However I’m getting ahead of myself. To get there I flew Virgin, which I havn’t done for a few years as Qantas has had a near monopoly of the Canberra Sysdeny route – while there were Virgin flights there were only a few and at inconvenient times. Now they have more flights in the morning and evening and competitive prices. Service is the usual happy-smiley Virgin service, but they are trying really hard – on the way down they handed out coffee that tasted of something and breakfast muffins to thos that wanted them, and on the way back it was distinctly adult fare – zaa’tar and salsa with wine or beer available if you wanted them. The White wine was a reasonable no name sauvingnon blanc in a plastic airline bottle, but no worse than the house wine in the airport bar.

Once in Sydney, it was onto the train. The advantage of the Locomotive Works as a venue is that it is right next to Redfern station. The trains in Sydney are under new management and they were noticably cleaner and shinier than previously, and equally efficient. I did manage to get lost in Central Station – the last time I did this the Eedfern T4 train came in on one of the surface lines, but unbeknownst to me they’d moved the T4 platform to a new platform, #25 in an underground section underneath the station – once I worked that out it was simple and easy to find.

My confusion came about because there is a mismatch between the signage and the travel information on Sydney trains website and is probably just a glitch due to the change of management, with the website referring to the T4 line and the signage referring to the Eastern Suburbs line. If you lived in Sydney you’d know they were the same thing, but I don’t so I didn’t.

Technology

I took my seven inch tablet as a note taker, which worked really well until the battery started running low half way through the meeting. While I had my power supply with me, there was a shortage of handy power points so I resorted to the alternative technology – a decent notebook and pen.

Sydney airport has free wifi, albeit with a failrly tedious signin procedure which involves having to click past various ads to get a connection. On the way down I had half an hour to spare so I used it to check my email and suchlike.

On the way back I discovered that Virgin provide stand up desks with power points at the gates so I used one of these to transcribe my notes while waiting for the flight back while recharging my tablet, and then used the airports free wifi to save my notes to google drive as a markdown file for further editing and cleanup.

There was no wifi available at the meeting, or more accurately there was but they weren’t handing out logins. Initially I thought this was a bit mean but as the day wore on I warmed to the idea. No distractions, no urge to check email or twitter, and just concentraing on the discussion. As there was no wi-fi I turned it into an opportunity and turned it off to save my battery.

The meeting

I’d describe it as quietly gratifying. As far as calibrating where we were I’d say we are up with the best of them if not quite so formally structured.

The networking and social chat was useful as it showed that I wasn’t off on a tangent – a lot of people were thinking about similar things as regards integrated search, researcher identification and data citation (and impact) as we were. It also gave let me explain our use of bagit as an archival format, and out work using fido and tika to extract and save the technical metadata.

Clearly there’s a push around altmetrics and data and I clearly have some more reading to do …

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Like many people, I’ve always had a soft spot for the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry – I even had a poster of them on my wall as a student many years ago.

I loved the vividness of the colours and the representations of medieval life. I’m sure I’m not unique, I’ve always found illustrations fascinating as something that tells us about daily life.

One thing I didn’t notice until someone pointed it  out over the weekend is that in the picture for February, two of the people warming themselves by the fire are quite clearly not wearing any underwear.

This of course raises two, possibly three questions:

• Did medieval French peasants typically wear undergarments?
• Was it normal for people to expose themselves to each other in a home setting?
• Is the artist having us on?

The answer to the first questing is that we don’t know. We have evidence from various ribald stories such as the Fabliaux suggesting that women typically did not. For men we have rather less evidence although I have seen an illustration elsewhere of peasants in winter in which one of the peasants is wearing a tunic slightly too short for him …

There is also the hypothesis from the department of interesting and odd ideas that the rise of the printing industry in the fifteenth century was dependent on a source of good quality paper. In medieval times good quality paper was made from linen rags, and these only became readily available when people started wearing more undergarments, as the paper was in fact made from worn out medieval underclothing, and as such the rise of the paper industry is tied to the increase in the standard of living and quality of clothing in late medieval times.

And while analogy is dangerous, we do know that in other robe wearing societies such as rural Morocco, men tended not to wear undergarments, or at least they didn’t until fairly recently.

As for sitting companionably round the fire with ones’s bits dangling, they may or they may not – we have no evidence either way – which leads to the third question – was this a bit of whimsy?

And the answer is, of course it could have been – the artist could have perhaps seen people inadvertently exposing themselves, in much the same way as sometimes happens in summer when the person in front of us is unloading their supermarket trolley – and decide to put it in as a little joke at the expense of the peasantry.

There is of course a more serious point here.

People tend not to write about the mundane and everyday things, especially in a society where literacy is the preserve of the elite. When they do, such as Seneca’s letter about the baths in Rome the are often trying to be witty and clever, like whoever drew the February illustration in Les Tres Riches Heures, and while there may be a kernel of truth, separating fact from fiction can be difficult.

And in consequence we know very little of the everyday lives of people – and personally I’ve always found everyday lives more interesting that those of knichtis, potestatis and prelatis to quote Dunbar.

After we move into the early modern period it of course becomes easier to understand more of the lives of ordinary people, mostly because the development of printing made the production of cheap news sheets, ballad sheets and the like possible, and these were often illustrated with basic woodcuts which show us something of daily life …

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A friend recently commented on my post on Cosmas Indicopleusetes to the effect that the coin evidence suggested that the contacts between Byzantium and India were slight.

My own view about these things is rather more nuanced these days.

There was undoubtedly a significant trade in spices between Rome and what is now Kerala and Sri Lanka before roughly 700AD.

This involved Somali and other African traders as middlemen and the majority of the trade was probably indirect. The presence of coins and pottery shows that there was trade involving individuals who had contact with the late Roman and Byzantine world.

As well as the St Thomas Christians, there were small ancient Jewish communities in South Asia, and there is even a small black community.

The latter is quite interesting, especially given the murals in the palace ruins at Sigiriya that depict black concubines. Likewise there is a substantial moslem community in Galle that arrived prior to the Dutch, and have never integrated into the Sinhala Buddhist minority.

Even though it is a politically sensitive topic, the presence of pre Islamic Christian remains in the Gulf states and Iran also shows that there were substantial Christian communities involved in the trade and probably pilgrimage. These support networks would have allowed adventurous individuals from the west to reach India and Sri Lanka, just as in early modern times Ralph Fitch reached Chiang Mai, and Robert Shirley, James I’s ambassador to the Shah of Persia encountered Thomas Coryat in the Iranian desert walking from Constantinople to Gujarat.

After 700 AD, the rise of Islam probably made the Gulf route more difficult and while the spice route via Somalia continued the increasing impoverishment of Byzantium reduced the market and the degree of engagement. Clearly there was some engagement, even as as far away as England, Aldhelm knew of pepper, which comes only from Kerala, but most if not all trade was via intermediaries..

The coin evidence, which is virtually non-existent after late antique time does not help us – coins were treated as a way of transporting gold and silver, not necessarily of presence – just as when travelling in third world countries I carry some US dollars and Euros as I know I can always find someone to exchange them.

One thing that struck me when I was recently in Sri Lanka is just how much early modern Dutch and Portuguese small change had been found. We know of course the history of colonialism and why  this would be so. At the same time no coin hoards from rome or Byzantium have been found suggesting that there was not a substantial direct presence, and the coins and pottery turned up by accident.

So, my view is that some adventurous individuals did go there from Rome and Byzantium, but that the majority of the links were indirect and probably via the monsoonal trade route from East Africa.

There is an obvious contrast with the situation in South America, where there is zero evidence of contact between the indigenous polities and the cultures of Europe before 1492. Even in areas such as the Pacific NorthWest where one might expect a trickle on effect in terms of useful items of material culture, such as fish-hooks and other useful tools there is little or no evidence of contact with the outside world before the arrival of Russian fur trappers in the eighteenth century.

Of course material culture is not everything, for example we know that the Yolngu were trading sea cucumbers with Maccassan fishermen as early as the fifteenth century, however there is little material evidence for this trade, purely because neither culture made extensive use of items that would survive the climate of Arnhem land.

Archaeologists have tended to focus on coins, as they tend to be reasonably indestructible, reasonably easy to lose, and have an explicit provenance.

However there tends to be a bit of a tendency to over extrapolate the discovery of coins where they shouldn’t into evidence of contact. This neglects the role of coins as portable wealth, and also the human love of shiny things – people will hang onto an unusual or exotic piece as a lucky coin or a talisman as in the recent discovery of a Roman coin in China – for there to be evidence of contact there has to be a decent quantity of them, not just the odd outlier.

And while the outliers make good copy as in the Kilwa coins mystery, they are just that – outliers and not indicators of trade or substantial contact.

Roman style pottery has been found in Bali – it’s not inconceivable that it got there as a result of trade, it does not however mean that someone called Quintus was strolling along Kuta beach 1800 years ago – he might have, but there is no evidence to suggest a substantial presence on the back of the spice trade.

So, while the presence of material objects can indicate that there was contact, items such as coins which represent portable wealth can easily be handed on as part of an indirect trade operation where I give you some money, you give the money to a man with a boat who hires a crew, sails to Sri Lanka and brings back my cinnamon. You pocket a profit, as does the boat owner. The cinnamon merchant is happy to take your gold as it can be melted down and reused in a way more useful to him.

In fact when thinking about coins we really need coins that indicate evidence of presence and here we are talking about reasonable quantities of low value items, such as the vast number of VoC duits found in Sri Lanka – if we didn’t know from the historical records and the VoC forts, we could guess at a substantial presence due to the amount of small change used to pay soldiers and the like

[update 27/11/2013]

Rebecca Barley. from the University of Birmingham in the UK has just posted an online review of the presence of late Roman copper coins in South India. It’s particularly interesting in the light of my arguement above that the real indicator of presence is a substantial quantity of low value currency – and this would seem to suggest a substantial Roman trading presence in the general area of Karur in Tamil Nadu, at least in the third and fourth centuries AD.

One of the things I find quite fascinating about my trying to graph the relationships among the movers and shakers of the mid seventeenth century is the degree of happenstance and coincidence.

For example, Thomas Herbert, who was appointed by Parliament to act as Charles Stuart’s personal secretary during his detention on the Isle of Wight and in Hurst Castle, and who was present at his execution in 1649, was also the first person to write about cuneiform in English, having traveled to Persia in the mid 1620’s with Robert Shirley and Dodmore Cotton.

England was of course seeking new sources of wealth at the time to rival Spain’s conquests in the new world and also to break the Dutch stranglehold on the spice trade.

And herein lies a tale. By the 1580’s Spanish rule in South America was a fact of life. The last major Inca rebellion had failed. At the same time privateers such as Drake and Raleigh were preying on Spanish ships, and Drake had managed to penetrate the Straits of Magellan.  This was of great concern to Spain which was worried that the English would seek to establish a permanent presence on the Pacific coast of Latin America.

Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa,  someone who seems little known to the English speaking world, was appointed Governor of the Straits of Magellan and was ordered by Philip ii to mount an expedition to fortify the Strait of Magellan as a defence against English incursions.

This he did, establishing two settlements, both of which later failed. On his way back from Latin America, Sarmiento de Gamboa was captured by Walter Raleigh and taken to England where we was imprisoned for a while.

During his imprisonment, he had a conversation with Elizabeth I, in Latin, their only mutual language. As far as I am aware no record of the conversation exists, but the interesting part of the story is that Sarmiento de Gamboa was more than just another would be conquistador. An explorer and adventurer in his own right, voyaging as far into the Pacific  as the Solomon Islands,  he was also the author of the ‘History of the Incas’ the first comprehensive account in any European language of the Spanish conquest of the Inca polity it Peru.

One can only wonder what Sarmiento de Gamboa and Elizabeth talked about and what role it had in Elizabeth’s encouragement of the various merchant adventurer companies …

[update: I’ve just come across an English literature research paper that argues that the imagery in the Tempest may be inspired by an English translation of Sarmiento de Gamboa’s journals, which is interesting as it suggests that the translation was in circulation in London at the time, more interestingly, it also suggests that Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spymaster, had de Gamboa’s journals translated – suggesting that Walsingham at least was well aware of  Sarmiento de Gamboa’s value]

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As I’ve said elsewhere, I’ve been spending a little time with the English Civil Wars to teach myself some social network analysis. While I was researching something else entirely I came across such an example of the term Ranter being used in a sorry tale of sex and vicarages in the late 1640’s.

Towards the end of the civil wars, an itinerant preacher called Thomas Webb (or Webbe) appeared in Langley Burrell in the depths of rural England. Langley Burrell was without a priest, as the previous incumbent had been purged by Parliament.

Webb took to the community and the community took to him such that they invited him to become their pastor. What the community did not know was that Webb had previously been on trial for heresy and for advancing the idea that there should be no ecclesiatical or governmental authority between a person and their god. How radical he was we don’t know. During the civil wars there was an outbreak of radical sects all usually lumped together as Ranters. They encompassed everything from groups who believed people should worship naked to people who simply believed they should be free to form their own church – not unlike the house church movement today.

Shortly after Thomas Webb became the pastor of Langley Burrell, his wife died. Thomas then went on to have an affair with Mary White, the wife of Henry White, the lord of the manor in whose gift the living of the parish was. We don’t know what the relative ages of all three were as the parish records have disappeared, but we do know that Webb was in his mid twenties when all this happened.

So far so normal. Probably this was not the first time nor the last time such a thing had happened, especially in an age where men of property quite often had wives significantly younger than themselves. Certainly none of the sources we have suggest that Henry White attempted to remove Thomas Webb – something he could have done quite easily by bringing charges of immoral behaviour against him. In fact he seems to have acquieseced in the matter allowing Webb to move into his house.

Thomas also married again, this time to a local girl, and when his wife reproached him for his affair with Mary White he encouraged other men of the parish to seduce his wife – essentially putting her in a position where she could not bring a charge of adultery (a capital charge at the time) without having to admit her own misdemeanours.

Thomas is also said to have engaged in a homosexual affair with one John Organ, who is described as a man-wife, suggesting perhaps that the relationship was more than just casual. Thomas Webb later encouraged John Organ to go off and become an itinerant preacher – which is not as strange as it seems in the context of the time – it was one of the few vaguely respectable options open in the late 1640’s to people of unconventional views and no ready skills.

The story of Thomas Webb and Mary White would ordinarilly have simply remained a sorry tale of sexual misbehaviour in a small isolated community.

We only know of the story because Webb was brought court again for his radical views but never prosecuted – instead his own parishoners appear to have had enough of him and drove him out, only for him to reappear four or five years later in London to be charged with adultery, and the court case made reference to his time at Langley Burrell and his radical views.

Edward Stokes, one of the investigating magistrates wrote a polemic denouncing Webb and his radical views. By this time in the early 1650’s the radical phase of the Civil Wars was over and there was a determined effort by the new Puritan government to establish a ‘new normal’ which included the purging of more radical groups.

But there is another question – did the Ranters exist as a defined sect, or were they a made up catch all used to blacken people of unconventional views or inclinations.

One problem is that one of our major sources about the Ranters was a polemical work by Thomas Edwards, written in part to decry some of the extreme activities of pro-Leveller factions in the Army. It is truly a work tabloid sensationalism and like tabloid journalism there may be a germ of truth in the story, but much is either made up or exaggerated

Certainly Thomas Webbe appears to have had some connection with Abiezer Coppe, another known extreme preacher who also advocated free love or at least open and equal relationships between men and women.

Undoubtedly Webbe was a charismatic individual who exploited his role for his own gratification. He may, like Coppe, have had radical ideas about how society works, he may have been more than a little mad. He may well also have held pro-Leveller beliefs.

Coppe and Webbe were real people. They almost certainly had shockingly radical beliefs for their time. However we cannot say if they ware part of a wider movement or simply individuals who were used to blacken by implication other less colourful radicals

I’ve written before about fox sighting in the Canberra suburbs, but this morning’s was a beauty, near Inkster Street a young dog fox legging it across Sulwood Drive and off into the Mount Taylor nature reserve.

The interesting thing is that the fox was coming from an area of suburban housing suggesting that it had been foraging in the suburbs, either bin diving, looking for people with chooks in their back yard, or indeed cat and dog food left out.

It fits very well with my hypothesis that the reserves between the suburbs are providing a refuge for not only kangaroos but also foxes, and unlike foxes out in the country these foxes have become quite urbanised, in the same was you see in the UK and Ireland …

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Ella Maillart, about whom I’ve written in the past was one the giants of pre world war two travel, travelling across Xianjaing with Peter Fleming and driving with Annemarie Schwarzenbach from Switzerland to Afghanistan on the eve of world war two.

Schwarzenbach captured the journey in her lyrical impressionistic book ’All the Ways are Open’, Maillart in her rather more factual ‘Cruel Way’.

Maillart’s book has been out of print for a number of years, although still findable through AbeBooks, and Schwarzenbach’s account was republished in 2011.

However Maillart’s book has been recently republished by the University of Chicago press both as a paperback and as an e-book – and for the interested Inside Story, the Australian political and literary weekly has a long review of the new edition …

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I’ve previously written about Aboriginal contacts with what is now Indonesia and the Kilwa coins problem as well as about African contacts with Sri Lanka – the two are related – essentially we can show that there were East African trading links with Sri Lanka well before the Kilwa state in East Africa, and this could provide a path for the Kilwa coins to reach Indonesia by way of trade.

Over the weekend I happened across an article from the Jakarta Post on how Chinese coins had been used in the Indonesian archipeleago for several hundred years in the abasence of any local currency.

It seems more than possible that any Kilwa coins that ended up in Java or whereever could just have joined the pool of circulating coins as small change, just as VoC duits joined the pool of currency.

This isn’t quite as wild an idea as it sounds. The Australian 5, 10 and 20c coins are still the same size and weight as their British antecedents, the sixpence, shilling and florin. Before New Zealand downsized their coinage, it wasn’t at all uncommon to get NZ coins in your change along with the occasional pre-downsizing British or Irish 5p or 10p coin, and even more rarely coins from Fiji or Malaysia which were the same size and weight. Everyone was happy to accept the coins despite their different origins and face values, especially given the coins low purchasing power.

Since NZ downsized their coinage non Australian coins have all but disappeared out of the circulating pool of currency, and we no longer get exotica in our small change.

The other thing about coins is that they are long lived. When I was a child before the currency went decimal, it wasn’t that unusual to get worn and battered Queen Victoria pennies and half pennies in your change – in a society where coins were not used in daily transactions one could imagine them staying in circulation for a couple of hundred years.

Putting this all together one could build a scenario where plausibly Kilwa coins could have entered the pool of circulating currency in Java, and ended up mixing with considerably newere VoC duits. The puzzle is of course why no Chinese coins in the mix if they come from a single shipwreck …

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