Prior to writing my previous post about Jerome Eisenberg's conclusion that the Phaistos Disk is a recent forgery perpetrated by its excavator, Luigi Pernier, I unfortunately did not have access to the original article in Minerva magazine in which Dr. Eisenberg announced his findings (Eisenberg, Jerome M., 'The Phaistos Disk: one hundred year old hoax?', Minerva, July/August 2008, 9-24). Happily, once he found my post, Dr. Eisenberg commented on it and later sent me an electronic copy for my consideration. I can now report that while I previously thought I knew a lot about the disk, I now have a much better knowledge of the disk and the nature of the hoax claim. Unfortunately, I remain unconvinced, even though I admit that I do want to believe the hoax claim, but I think that the evidence from the sign-forms just isn't strong enough, that it relies on unproven visual similarities to too great a degree. Let me explain what I mean.

In the previous post, I focused on Eisenberg's evidence from a) the uniqueness of the artifact's manufacture, which is unlike the Linear A tablets; b) it uses 'movable type' of which no other example has ever been found; c) the idea that Luigi Pernier's rivalry with Arthur Evans would lead him to do this. In dealing with the first two, I pointed out that comparisons with the Linear A tablets aren't necessarily that useful if in fact the PD was part of a highly specialized text genre - i.e. it would be like using a monumental inscription to proclaim a handwritten note to be a forgery. Of course we don't know that it's part of such a genre, or indeed what genre it could have represented at all - hence the mystery.

The one thing I didn't focus on is the sign-forms or graphemes on the Disk. In fact, Eisenberg spends a good deal of his paper looking at resemblances between Phaistos signs and signs on other inscriptions from the ancient world in order to assert that the latter formed the models on which Pernier based his forgery. In particular, he aims to show that there are similarities between the Phaistos graphemes and authentic artifacts made much later, but that were known to 19th century archaeologists / epigraphers and thus could have been known to Pernier.

This is an unusual line of argument; it is in fact a sort of cousin to the standard techniques by which experts on scripts postulate cultural borrowings from one society to another. If we have a 10th century BC Phoenician inscription and a very early, 8th century BC Greek inscription that use many similar letter-forms, we make the reasonable inference (all right, it is more complex than this, but you get the idea) that the Phoenician script is ancestral to Greek. In particular this is the case because there is known cultural contact (e.g. trade) between the two societies, and more importantly, because there is not just a graphemic similarity but also a phonetic similarity - the signs don't just look the same but they have the same / similar sound-values. What Eisenberg is doing, effectively, is turning these resemblances on their heads. If there are similarities between the PD signs and known inscriptions from elsewhere, then those inscriptions may have acted as a model for the forger. If the inscriptions are later in date than the PD, Eisenberg argues, it is far likelier that these artifacts served as a model for the disk's forger than that the Disk script served as a model for the later artifacts. Similarly, if the PD shows influences from several different regional styles, this suggests that a forger just cobbled together signs from different inscriptions to make something really unique.

Now, the reason I'm unconvinced is that I just don't think the similarities bear up, and that even where they do they don't point unequivocally to a hoax. For instance, let's have a look at Phaistos sign 03:

Now, this is seen by Eisenberg as being modelled after an 18th Dynasty Egyptian wall painting (16th century BC) in which the figure, a Cretan captive is facing the other direction, has extensive facial features, has hair (long, flowing hair), and has a torso with arms. The only major similarity is the two circles on the face. But this seems to go directly against the notion of the Disk as a hoax; the time is right, the captive is Cretan, so the most parsimonious explanation is that they are both genuine representations of some sort of facial decoration (indeed, as Eisenberg suggests, it may be a Cretan 'double earring'). But, writing, "It was certainly derived from the wall painting", Eisenberg proceeds to write as if it is now a given that Pernier did, in fact, use this as a model for sign 03 (Eisenberg 2008: 17).

When we get to one of the more unusual characteristics of the Disk - the presence of five hand-incised dots on each side of the disk, and 'word-separating' vertical lines - I'm in my element, because these, Eisenberg sees as being modelled after the Cretan five dots = the numeral 50 and vertical bar = the numeral 100. This is dangerous territory though - dots and lines are ubiquitous in scripts and numerical systems. And are we really to believe that Pernier needed a model to think of the idea of adding bars and dots to a forgery? These are stylistic elements found in virtually any script worldwide, and are not indicative of anything. One of the real problems with the study of writing systems is the assertion of cultural relationships based on passing visual similarities, and one of the things that we do not yet know how to do well is to know how similar two graphemes must be before a claim of diffusion can be sustained. This is the same sort of reasoning used to argue for a hoax in this case, and ultimately its inclusion greatly weakens Eisenberg's argument, and made me look much more critically at the remainder of his claim.

But the heart of the issue is that Eisenberg is working at cross-purposes here. On the one hand, he wants us to believe that the Disk is so unique, so different from other inscriptions that it cannot possibly be genuine. On the other, he wants us to use evidence of similarities with known scripts as proof of 'forger's models'. While a hoax can, of course, be both unique and based on models, we're left with the impression that virtually any similarity or difference can be evidence of forgery, and that just isn't sound argumentation. So I'm not convinced. I do still think the idea is worthy of consideration, and I do think that it is worth trying a thermoluminescence test, not only because it can settle the hoax issue but also because it can resolve the question of the artifact's age even if it turns out to be genuine. In this respect, I believe that Eisenberg and I are in full agreement.

In conclusion I want to thank Dr. Eisenberg for sending me this paper, and also for inviting me to the upcoming International Conference on the Phaistos Disk, which unfortunately I am unable to attend due to my new work commitments. It does highlight however the real value of blogging as a means of social interaction and information exchange.

But of course the real question remains unanswered: should it be disk or disc?

Tags: anthropology, language

The Phaistos Disk is one of the more enigmatic and bizarre artifacts in the field of ancient writing systems. Found in Crete in 1908 by the archaeologist Luigi Pernier and associated archaeologically with the Minoan civilization (dating to roughly 1850 - 1600 BCE), it remains completely undeciphered and has no obvious connection either to the Minoan (Linear A) script or to any other known script, deciphered or otherwise. Now, a very notable claim has been made by the American art historian / art dealer Jerome Eisenberg, an expert on forgeries, that the Disk was in fact an elaborate hoax constructed by Pernier himself, which Eisenberg has published in his own magazine, Minerva (Eisenberg 2008).

I'm not an expert on Minoan writing by any means, but my scholarly focus lies heavily in the study of ancient scripts and the anthropology and archaeology of literacy. I use Yves Duhoux' hilariously entitled 'How not to decipher the Phaistos Disc' in my course on the anthropology of literacy (Duhoux 2000). Moreover, the century of scholarship on the Phaistos Disk is legendarily riddled with cranks, frauds, and loons, and as I have more than a passing interest in pseudoarchaeology, Phaistos-related material is of ongoing interest to me. Honestly, it would make a lot of things a whole lot simpler if we could just deny the disk's authenticity - but this is no ordinary hoaxbusting exercise, and the importance of the artifact demands that we give the claim close scrutiny.


Phaistos Disk, Side A. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Before we get to the Eisenberg claims, we need some context. So, firstly, what do we know about the PD?
- It is a fired clay disk, roughly 16 cm in diameter and 1-2 cm thick.
- It was found at a Minoan palace site at Phaistos in southern Crete.
- It appears to have been fired intentionally (with care) to produce a permanent record, whereas other Minoan documents were fired accidentally (e.g., when buildings were burned).
- Glyphs are stamped on both sides using distinct punches or stamps, not carved/incised into the clay.
- It has 241 signs in total, consisting of 45 distinct characters / glyphs. However, the total 'signary' (all the signs in the system) was probably greater, since some rare signs almost certainly do not appear in this particular text.
- The 'text' is divided into 61 sections of up to 5 characters apiece.
- The prior two facts suggest that it may have been a syllabic writing system, recording syllables rather than single phonemes; it has too many unique signs to be an alphabet but too few to be a logographic (word-signs) or some other sort of system. However, this does not rule out the possibility that it was not phonetic writing at all (e.g., if it was a calendar or a game).
- Because the signs in the centre are slightly compressed, it seems to have been written from the outside spiralling inward.
- Judging by the overlap in some signs, it was stamped/written from right to left, suggesting that that is how it was meant to be read.
- There is no useful resemblance of the glyphs to those of any other writing system in the Mediterranean or elsewhere, although it was found in close association with a Linear A (Minoan) tablet.
- Its date is established solely through its archaeological context, and while the early second millennium is the most likely period, it may date as late as 1400 BCE.

Now, on to Eisenberg's paper. The first thing worth noting is this is not a peer-reviewed academic venue, and the author is the founder, editor, and publisher of the magazine. A better analogy would be to think of it as editorial opinion. It also is not the result of any particular new research undertaken by Eisenberg or anyone else. In fact, as seen in the comments here, Dr. Eisenberg has been making this claim for nearly a decade, and there is no new evidence that demonstrates the likelihood that it was a forgery. Pernier, the artifact's excavator excavator, is labelled as a forger, not on the basis of any particular evidence, but has simply been ascribed motives (rightly or wrongly) that might lead him to falsify the document. So we don't have anything like the revelations in the early 1950s that debunked the Piltdown hoax on the basis of physical or chemical analysis; neither do we have the spectactular video evidence that revealed Fujimura Shinichi planting fake discoveries at his sites in the Japanese Paleolithic hoax in 2000 (Hudson 2005). It is a highly circumstantial case. It is nonetheless one that ought to be vetted seriously, both because it is plausible on its face and because Eisenberg has been responsible for several other (much more solid) hoax-busting episodes over the past few decades.

The starting point for Eisenberg's claim of a Phaistos 'hoax' is the uniqueness of the artifact, both the object itself and the writing on it. Given that no other examples of this form of writing have been found, it is striking (pun intended) that its creator would have made 45 distinct seals to stamp into the clay rather than simply incising the signs as necessary. No actual stamps/seals resembling the signs have been found, either, suggesting that this early instance of 'movable type' was used to create only one artifact, and then the process was abandoned entirely. In his popular Guns, Germs and Steel, the evolutionary biogeographer Jared Diamond (1997: 239-259) asserts that the PD was indeed a very early and remarkable example of movable type, but one that could not be exploited by the Minoans because in other respects their society lacked the technology and organizational expertise to develop it further. Eisenberg's perspective is different - he argues that the uniqueness of the artifact's medium suggests that it is a hoax, designed by Pernier to intrigue and mystify other scholars and to boost his own prominence, and that of Phaistos, in relation to his rivals (particularly Arthur Evans).

The PD is a singular artifact and a very short text, making it literally impossible to decipher unless more examples of the writing system are found. Yet John Chadwick, whose career was built upon his work with Michael Ventris in deciphering the Mycenaean Linear B script (Chadwick 1990), was plagued by purported Phaistos decipherers and purportedly received one new solution per month; there is a fairly thorough list of purported decipherments in this Wikipedia article. Basically, every remotely plausible script tradition has been claimed as an influence, and the disk itself has been asserted to be in languages ranging from Greek to Egyptian to Basque to Atlantean (!!!). Alternately, it has been suggested to be a game board, a calendrical document, or some sort of mystical text. Unless more documents in the same script are found, no one is going to be able to resolve the matter definitively. If it were confirmed to be a hoax, however, everyone could just stop looking. Eisenberg is suggesting, in effect, that the futility of the search rests in part on Pernier's ingenuity in creating such a mystery.

The crux of Eisenberg's argument, however, lies in the physical properties of the artifact: the fact that it was very carefully, intentionally fired, and that it has a very cleanly cut edge in comparison to other Minoan clay tablets, and here, he finds fault with Pernier. Because it is so different from other Minoan clay artifacts in this regard, this sends up a red flag for Eisenberg suggesting that its uniqueness may be due to Pernier's ignorance of these facts. The counterargument to this, however, would be that while Minoan clay tablets with Linear A writing are all economic documents not intended for long-term archiving, the PD, if ancient, is almost certainly of a very different textual genre and script tradition than these texts. This doesn't disprove the notion that it may be a hoax, but neither does it act as substantial confirmation. For instance, if the disk is a gaming board, a calendar, or a devotional inscription, its makers would have a good reason to fire the clay at the time of manufacture, and a potentially good reason to cut its edges so cleanly. It simply was not the same sort of text as the copious clay economic documents. We need to answer the question, "Could the Minoans have chosen to preserve some forms of information permanently and not others?"

One potential resolution to the mystery lies in its dating. The artifact has never undergone any sort of radiometric dating, and indeed for most of the past century could not have been dated except through archaeological context, as discussed above. However, thermoluminescence dating allows archaeologists to non-destructively determine the date when clay was fired, and if TL dating were used on the disk, one could find out if it was truly of ancient manufacture. Yet this test has not been permitted by the museum that holds it (in Heraklion, Crete), because, Eisenberg claims, "no Greek scholar or politician would dare to help 'destroy' such a national treasure". This is unfortunately true; museums are rarely open to this sort of inquiry, even from major scholars. Archaeology is frequently tied up in nationalistic fervor and institutional pride, and the failure to undertake a standard, well-accepted test will haunt the study of the Disk from now on, now that the claim has been made so publicly. Thus, I regard Eisenberg's public claim as a valuable stimulus, hopefully forcing the issue of the thermoluminescence dating. It would also be highly informative even if the PD proves to be ancient, because the TL could establish whether it was an early second millennium artifact (1800-1600 BCE) or more in the range of 1400 BCE.

Ultimately, this is suggestive, and I would not exactly be astonished if Eisenberg's claim were to be verified, and if the PD turned out to be a fake, but I cannot agree that the matter is now settled. Because literacy is not simply an 'on/off' phenomenon - we must deal with the possibility of different text genres, different media, and different purposes for writing - we can't use the Linear A clay economic documents to prove the disk's anomalous nature. A date from an independent lab would go a long way toward resolving my doubts. This would still leave the question of how it was done and by whom - remember that there is no direct evidence against Pernier. However, I for one look forward to this claim receiving greater attention over the next couple of years.

Chadwick, John. 1990. The decipherment of Linear B, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press.
Diamond, Jared. 1997. Guns, germs and steel: the fates of human societies, W.W. Norton.
Duhoux, Yves. 2000. 'How not to decipher the Phaistos Disc: a review article',American Journal of Archaeology, 104, 3, 697-700.
Eisenberg, Jerome M. 2008. 'The Phaistos Disk: one hundred year old hoax?', Minerva, July/August, 9-24.
Hudson, M.J. 2005. 'For the people, by the people: postwar Japanese archaeology and the Early Paleolithic hoax', Anthropological Science, 113, 2, 131-139.

Tags: anthropology, language

At long last I have uploaded the research reports onto the Stop: Toutes Directions site. I initiated this project in the winter term in my Methods course, during which I and 27 senior students spread out throughout a large portion of Montreal collecting data on stop signs, focusing particularly but not exclusively on the language of the sign text. For me, one of the fascinating things about Montreal, visually, is the diversity you see in signs in different regions; Montreal's stop signs are in many ways a microcosm of language politics in the city and more generally in the province of Quebec. This is particularly significant given the changes in Quebec's language laws and attitudes towards signs in different languages over the past thirty years. The sixteen reports on the site (plus three or four more that await further revisions from students) are really superlative work, and reflect countless hours of effort in class and beyond. I think we all came to despise the project just a little bit while it was ongoing, but I hope the finished product is worth it.

In addition to the reports, the site has a Google Map on the home page, with placemarks to points of interest on the Montreal 'signscape'. We have also published the entirety of our dataset, although I have little expectation that these will be of immediate use to anyone. If you have any interest in language ideology, material culture studies, contemporary archaeology, urban geography, Montreal, bilingualism, or related topics, I'm sure you'll find exploring the site to be rewarding. Still to come is my editorial introduction to the website, but that's not really necessary to appreciate the site. Eventually my hope is to turn some of these reports, along with some additional material written by me, into an edited academic volume; stay tuned for more on that front!

Tags: anthropology, language, teaching
Current Mood: accomplished

There's an interesting essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education online by Gary Olson, dean of the college of arts and sciences at Illinois State University, addressing the question of certifying online research. Olson argues persuasively that online research is not taken seriously enough, and that while peer-reviewed online journals have found acceptance as 'real' academic work for the purposes of hiring, tenure, and promotion, other forms of work such as databases, online bibliographies, and other Internet sites remain essentially unaccredited, and thus easily ignorable within the academic mainstream. His solution is for each discipline to create its own canonization process to accredit and review this material in a manner best suited to its disciplinary conventions.

I'm about as big an advocate for online research as you will find anywhere. In particular, I find it extremely valuable to use my senior seminars (and eventually, graduate courses) as launching pads for high-quality student work that would otherwise not see the light of day, as I have done in the Pseudoarchaeology Research Archive and the Dollarware Project. An extremely important part of academic professionalization derives from taking "finished" term work, editing/revising it, and then putting it out for the world to see. If you aren't interested in doing that (to some degree), then no matter how bright you are, you're not really interested in being a scholar, and it's better you should figure that out as a senior, or as a master's student. I'm also firmly convinced that 'even' undergraduates (at least, the very best senior undergraduates) are capable of producing work that is of quality equal to much peer-reviewed research, and that there is an unfair prejudice against this work when it is known in advance to have been written by very junior scholars.

One potential benefit of disciplinary accreditation is that both I and my students might benefit if these projects were 'officially' accredited. And believe me, if such a system existed, I would be at the head of the line, submitting online projects for consideration. One concern would be, however, that if accreditation is merely seen as something that Ph.D. holders should receive for their work, then we would end up in a situation where good work ends up just as marginalized as before. Obviously, the material is still out there; Olson's proposal is far closer to a 'publish-then-peer-review' model than the current 'peer-review-then-publish' model. But if what exists is perceived as being illegitimate, or controlled very narrowly by a small group of insiders within disciplinary societies, then what is created is a monstrosity in which these elite individuals hold power far greater than any journal editor or academic press.

In fact, the greatest challenge with the current model is that the people in charge of hiring/tenure/promotion are not part of a culture that considers these online publications to be legitimate. I'm not sure that an online peer-review/accreditation system will change that - tenure committees are free to denigrate or ignore all sorts of publications they consider to be second-rate, for instance. I understand the argument Olson is raising - that this gives deans, provosts, etc., information about the importance of a work to a discipline that they otherwise couldn't really have. But without a general cultural change within a discipline - for instance, physics has already shifted to a model where online publications are given considerable weight - I'm not sure that this does anything but shift the error from tenure committees to the disciplinary associations themselves.

I am very strongly in favour of Olson's proposed changes, in theory. In anthropology, this would pave the way for online site reports, field notes, photo journals, and other scholarship to receive critical attention, and to promote the publication of scholarship that otherwise might not be published because it's not perceived as beneficial to one's career. But the devil is in the details, as always, and what is needed is to continue to discuss these issues constructively to build a model.

Tags: academia, anthropology

Stonehenge is never really out of the news; in fact, it's probably the archaeological site that enjoys the most media exposure. Even so, it has been in the news quite a lot lately, what with the recent report of work by Mike Parker Pearson's Stonehenge Riverside Project, which has given us radiocarbon dates from burials excavated in the 1920s, suggesting that the site was used for burials from around 3000 BCE, several centuries earlier than previously thought and really quite early in the British Neolithic.

I must insist, however, that Parker Pearson's theory that Stonehenge stood in contrast to the much larger timber circle at Durrington Walls, is plausible at best but completely unproven. Based on an ethnographic analogy resulting from some earlier fieldwork he did in Madagascar, Parker Pearson has sought to revive structuralist archaeology with his contention that the two British sites were conceptually binary opposites, the stone of Stonehenge representing permanence and ancestry, with wood representing transience and impermanence. Okay, so far so good (though still 'not proven'). However, he goes on to assert that stone is not only ancestral but also male, while wood is (quoting PP himself) "soft and squishy, like women and babies." (1) At which point my inclination is to get out a Walloping Cod and suggest that he keep his structuralism to himself until he has archaeological evidence for all this.

But lost amidst all this highly-funded work is a new book by Anthony Johnson, Solving Stonehenge: The Key to an Ancient Enigma(Thames and Hudson, 2008), offering clues to the mathematical abilities of the builders of the monument. I haven't read the book (which isn't published for another week) , but an article in the Independent suggests that the geometrical knowledge of the builders was more considerable than previously believed (by some). I hadn't heard of Johnson before (despite having a very strong research interest in the prehistory of mathematical thought, and a secondary interest in the archaeology of megaliths). He appears to be a doctoral candidate at Oxford working on geophysical techniques in archaeological survey, but has not published before on Neolithic mathematics. One does need to be cautious when dealing with topics in ancient science, which are particularly prone to attracting the attention of pseudoarchaeologists, but I don't think that's what's going on here.

How, then, do we evaluate what an ancient monument can tell us about the mathematical abilities of its creators? The most important finding that Johnson is suggesting, from my perspective, is that other than the well-known solar alignments of the monument, no significant astronomical knowledge was employed in the orientation of the site. Rather, it was in geometry, and the creation of complex polygons using 'rope-and-peg' technology (making arcs and lines on the landscape using physical means), that the Stonehenge builders excelled, creating, over 1000+ years of the site's history, a palimpsest of complex polygons among the various features of the site. By 'experimental archaeology' I take it that Johnson used this technique himself to show that using modest technology and a modicum of geometrical knowledge about the relationship between circles and squares, the monument's shapes could have been constructed precisely. This is fascinating stuff, and gets us away from Alexander Thom's 'megalithic yard' and Gerald Hawkins' 'Neolithic computer' theories, both of which start from the assumption that astronomy was the function of the site.

My only major issue (prior to reading the book, which I'll have to do over the next few months) is Johnson's claim that "It shows the builders of Stonehenge had a sophisticated yet empirically derived knowledge of Pythagorean geometry 2000 years before Pythagoras", mostly because Pythagoras was essentially a fiction about whose work we know almost nothing, and because it suggests inappropriately to the untutored reader that in fact the Stonehenge builders had proven the Pythagorean theorem, which is not what is being claimed. It's not quite the same kind of error as asserting that sunflowers 'know' the Fibonacci sequence because their florets are arranged in such a pattern (okay ... no one actually claims that, as far as I know). The point is, though, that there is always a danger in inferring specific mathematical knowledge from the outcomes of processes such as the rope-and-peg technique. Similarly, while it is plausible that "this knowledge was regarded as a form of arcane wisdom or magic that conferred a privileged status on the elite who possessed it", we don't actually know who exactly controlled this knowledge (and how), whether in fact the engineers/surveyors/artisans involved were part of the (as-yet incipient) social elite at the site, whether that status changed at all over a millennium or more (almost certainly!), and whether in fact geometrical knowledge was perceived as 'magic' in any sense.

In my 'Prehistory of Language and Mind' seminar, I emphasize the real dangers in attempting to hermeneutically insert oneself into the minds of prehistoric individuals based on their material culture, a caution that is worth repeating here. This is particularly true in the case of megaliths, which archaeologists approach too often on the basis of intuition, faulty ethnographic analogies (I'm looking at you, Parker Pearson...) and wishful but unsupported thinking, as Jess Beck and I show in a forthcoming publication (2). All of which is fine when one is speculating idly, or creating one's own personalized or intuitive understanding of the past, but is pretty shoddy evidence-based scholarship. Accordingly, I'd insist that even Johnson's work (to which I am initially positively disposed, and whose use of experimental archaeology is a definite advantage here) needs to be treated with the utmost caution, due to the exceedingly high risk of erroneous interpretations of ancient scientific abilities.

(1) Caroline Alexander. 2008. If the stones could speak. National Geographic, June 2008, p. 50.
(2) Jess Beck and Stephen Chrisomalis. Landscape archaeology, paganism, and the interpretation of megaliths. Forthcoming in The Pomegranate.

ETA: Anthony Johnson himself has now commented on the post, noting that the quotation from the news article about Pythagoras does not actually reflect his words. The blog for his book can be found at Sarsen56.

Tags: anthropology, numerals

Geoff Pullum over at Language Log has been raising issues with purported 'animal language' news stories for several years now, with very good reason. In this case Pullum's post is on target, taking on a BBC report on an African grey parrot in Japan that was reunited with its owner after it said its owner's name and address, is a classic example of science journalism sensationalized. The notion that biologists, linguists, or random 'experts' agree that grey parrots have the cognitive capacity of a six-year-old human child is laughable at best. They (the experts) don't, and they (the parrots) don't.

I don't always agree with Pullum's reasoning or the extent of his arguments, however; I am cognizant that our species is an evolutionary cousin to apes that do possess considerable communicative capacities, and I try to remain equally cognizant of the fact that the definition of 'language' can be shifted to reaffirm one's prejudices about humanity's special place in the cosmos. An evolutionary perspective always takes account of the fact that our capacities came from somewhere and that the antecedents of language must also have been adaptive for some purpose. Unfortunately, several of the comments on the LL post seem to take the narrow perspective that animal communication can tell us very little about 'language', defined as 'human language' involving recursion, arbitrariness, 'discrete infinity', or whatever other feature is seen as necessary and sufficient to distinguish language from non-language. There is an ongoing turf war, unstated for the most part, between evolutionary and non-evolutionary perspectives on language, and one of the key battlegrounds is this debate (now decades old) about whether the comparative evidence tells us much. Don't get me wrong: I do think there is a substantial difference between human language and whatever it is that other animals do; I don't think that it is useful at all to borrow terms like 'grammar' and 'syntax' willy-nilly into nonhuman studies. Nevertheless, unless you want to be a linguistic creationist, the evolutionary evidence (and the comparison with nonhuman animals) must be part of theory-building and the redefinition of language.

For my part, and here I don my anthropologist hat, my concern is that so much attention seems to be paid to cetacean and bird communication, when in fact, if we are looking for comparative material, we ought to rely heavily on material from African apes and only lightly from our more distant evolutionary cousins. It seems to me almost as if, over the past five years or so, the apes have occupied a secondary role in animal communication debates in the popular press, which is a shame since I don't think it accurately reflects the state of the field.

Tags: anthropology, language, science

It figures that less than two months after I rescue forty years' worth of the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology from Bruce's office on the basis that it isn't archived online anywhere, JSTOR would release the archive of the full run of the JEA from 1914-2001. Now I have to decide whether it's worth keeping it all.

Tags: anthropology

curtana has alerted me to the most worthless piece of pseudo-historical, pseudo-archaeological, pseudo-linguistic bunk that I have seen in quite some time:

The Alphabet vs. the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image by Leonard Shlain. Shlain, a laparoscopic surgeon, published this book in 1998, and I am surprised that I had never heard of it, given its apparent wide popularity. Now, normally, if I were to do a book review, I would at least post an Amazon link to the book in question, since I do have an associates account. However, I have long promised myself that I would never review a book that I had not actually read. Full disclosure: Having looked at the book's website extensively, I have seen enough to realize that there is too little substance to make it worth my while reading the book itself. I also have a standing policy not to link to (and thereby potentially profit from) a book that I could not possibly recommend to any reader on any basis. So there you have it.

The book's central claim that "the process of learning alphabetic literacy rewired the human brain, with profound consequences for culture" is by no means original. It has a centuries-long history in Western thought and may be best-known to you through the work of the Canadian communication scholar, Marshall McLuhan (whose The Gutenberg Galaxy is a flawed classic, and not the best place to start in on the field). The claim is not preposterous on its face, but it is at best a hypothesis that needs analysis, and one that has received heavy criticism from anthropologists, communication scholars, historians, and others. But Shlain continues by arguing that:

literacy reinforced the brain's linear, abstract, predominantly masculine left hemisphere at the expense of the holistic, iconic feminine right one. This shift upset the balance between men and women initiating the disappearance of goddesses, the abhorrence of images, and, in literacy's early stages, the decline of women's political status. Patriarchy and misogyny followed.

Its novelty thus lies in linking a set of claims from literacy studies (many of which are very dubious) to the Mother Goddess theory best-known from the now outmoded, and thoroughly refuted, theories of the Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, and a minority of feminists, almost none of whom have advanced degrees in the fields under study, who have used her work to support a grand, ridiculous historical theory.

I have a very strong research interest in two intersecting fields in which this book could be categorized. My main research these days is on the social and cognitive archaeology of literacy and numeracy. I am working, for instance, on specifying the relationship between the earliest writing and other notations, such as numbering systems, in ancient civilizations. It is not at all preposterous to me that the development of new technologies for external representation could affect cognition in various ways, and in a seminar I taught this past fall on the anthropology of literacy, I defended this notion with considerable vigour, with the important caveat that it must be done well - which Shlain's book does not. This brings me to the other point of intersection, namely that I have a research and teaching interest in pseudoarchaeology: research that spuriously uses the methods and evidence of archaeology. Examples include: racialist archaeology, archaeological hoaxes, 'alien astronaut' theories, extreme long-range diffusionism, out-of-place artifacts, etc. And Shlain's book is pure pseudoarchaeology, make no mistake.

(If I may, I figure this may be as good a time as any to link to a project my students and I initiated: the Pseudoarchaeology Research Archive (PARA). PARA is primarily a compilation of the better student research conducted in my course, presented under a Creative Commons licence. Some of it is really tremendous and potentially publishable in peer-reviewed venues, so I am very pleased to present it to anyone who is interested. I expect to be receiving another 8-10 pieces of work over the course of the summer.)

If you manage to get through the homepage of Shlain's website (linked above) without being convinced that it is utter nonsense, I urge you to read this purported timeline of events supporting the author's thesis. It reads as a fantastic list of discredited, outmoded, and simply bizarre theories regarding history, archaeology, and linguistics, strung together into a semi-coherent argument. Virtually every point on this page is at best a half-truth. To wit:
- No serious paleoanthropologist since the 1980s believes the 'Man the Hunter / Woman the Gatherer' dichotomy in the form expressed; there is no evidence for it.
- The evidence for the lateralization of the brain is, at best, two million years too late, and definitely does not correspond in any simplistic way to the equally-incorrect "Males hunt and females nurture" perspective.
- There is absolutely no well-accepted evidence for the specific nature and areas of focus of any deities prior to the invention of writing. The notion that hunting societies have male hunting gods is plausible but entirely unconfirmed (and doesn't fit well with the ethnographic evidence from contemporary societies). "All early agrarian peoples begin to pray to an Earth Goddess responsible for the bountifulness of the land and fertility of the herds" is simply false.
- The notion that "Literacy depends on linear, sequential, abstract and reductionist ways of thinking - the same as hunting and killing" is unsubstantiated by any evidence.
- OK, I can't go on, so I will just provide you with a selection of the most ridiculous howlers from here on:

Greeks become the second literate culture.
New religion emerges based on the sayings of a gentle prophet named Jesus.
His oral teachings embody feminine values of Free Will, love, compassion, non-violence, and equality.
Taoism embodies feminine values: no attempt to control others, promotes Mother Nature as a guide.
Confucianism touts masculine values: structures patriarchal society, touts Father Culture.
Roman Empire achieves near universal alphabetic literacy rates due to the stability of Pax Romana, tutors from Greece, papyrus from Egypt and an easy to use Greek and Latin alphabet.
When stage of history re-illuminated in the 10th century, women enjoy high status.
Renaissance begins. Cult of the individual encourages male artists, male thinkers, and macho themes in art.
Witch craze breaks out only in those countries impacted by the printing press.
Estimates range that between 100,000 women to the millions were murdered during the witch-hunts. (!!!)
Russia, an oral society recently becomes literate in the 19th century.
Germany, the Fatherland, becomes susceptible to madness by oral technology.
Feminist movement of the 60s occurs in the first television generation.
Internet and WorldWideWeb based on feminine images of nets and webs. Iconic Revolution begins.

In essence, the argument is that image-making is feminine, peaceable, and egalitarian, whereas writing (especially the alphabet, and *especially* printing) is masculine, violent, and hierarchical. Other than a few periods of relative illiteracy, history is a long sequence of increasingly negative and masculine-oriented changes in social and technological aspects of literacy. Fortunately, things like the illiteracy of the "Dark Ages" encourage blessings like Mariolatry, and now the introduction of the Internet with its feminine web imagery opens us up to a new revolution. Let's forget the vital importance of writing for the education of women and the transmission of feminist ideals prior to TV. Let's forget the minuscule literacy rate in early modern Europe (and indeed in every premodern society) in comparison to today. Heck, let's forget that the Internet is a literate medium. The author has simply taken his own personal black-and-white view of what is good and evil in the world, attached it to a loose understanding of some historical events, and collated them into a neo-degenerationist narrative with the promise of salvation through imagery. Individually, many of the ideas have been considered, evaluated, and thoroughly discredited. Taken together, the result can only be a convoluted mishmash that leaves the reader wondering at the irony of the use of the very medium the author decries.

Tags: anthropology, books, language

At long last, over the past month, Arthur has mastered his colour words. For a while there, it was a bit odd that, despite having a very highly-developed vocabulary in some domains, his colour vocabulary was quite stunted. No longer.

His first (and favourite) colour was 'blue'. Just this week, in fact, he started saying 'favourite colour blue' as a three-word phrase, which is hopelessly cute. He learned 'blue' in October or November (roughly at 16-17 months), but for a couple months after that, it was really his only colour. After that, he learned 'orange', although that one was possibly a bit 'contaminated' by the fact that he learned the name for the fruit first. After that it was 'green' and 'purple', which he picked up reliably last month, and then over the past few weeks, 'red', 'yellow', 'white', 'black', 'pink', and is now well on his way toward 'grey' and 'brown'.

It's interesting that his first two colours, blue and orange, are complementary colours, but probably not conclusive. Similarly, his second pair of colours, green and purple, are pretty close to complementary - but again, this could well all be a big coincidence. More to the point, at no time did Arthur show any real evidence of mis-labelling colours that would suggest that he divided up the colour spectrum in a nonstandard way. During his 'blue' period (when that was his only word), if you asked him 'What colour is that apple?' (or whatever) he would inevitably say 'blue', but given that this was his only word that he associated with colours, that's not especially surprising. Things he spontaneously called blue actually were (and are) blue, not anything else.

As a cognitive anthropologist, I have a rather strong interest in colour terminology, which is a sort of cousin to the anthropological study of numbers as two different ways of describing domains of perceived reality. Nearly 40 years ago, the cognitive anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay published Basic Color Terms (Berkeley, 1969), which was a study of how different cultures divide up the colour spectrum into basic words (essentially, those that are one-word and common terms). While it was previously thought that there would be few patterns observable cross-culturally, they showed that in fact there were many such patterns. While this work has been criticized and refined, its basic conclusions have held up quite well over the years.

This very useful summary of research from 1998 describes one of Berlin and Kay's most striking findings, namely that languages are highly constrained in terms of what colour terms they have and in what order they are acquired:

The diachronic conclusion was that if languages are ordered according to numbers of basic color terms, the sequences of encodings of basic color terms are tightly constrained (the conception of successive steps as encodings was subsequently changed by Berlin and Kay). For example, if a language has two basic color terms (a "Stage I" language) those terms will encode black and white. If it has three ("Stage II"), those terms will encode black, white, and red. If it has four ("Stage III"), the terms will be for black, white, red, and either yellow or green. The entire sequence comprises seven stages and eleven basic color terms. (Hardin 1998)

Hardin's paper goes on to discuss attention studies conducted with prelinguistic infants that may map out some parallels, but Berlin and Kay are not claiming that their cognitive-linguistic study actually means that the underlying perception is affected (that is, no one thinks that speakers of Stage I languages are colour-blind), so I'm not sure how relevant that is. I don't know any study, however, of the developmental acquisition of colour words by infants, in terms of order of acquisition. If there is such work out there, it would be interesting to hear about it.

Based only on the anecdotal experiences of Arthur, however, the overlap between individual development and diachronic linguistic development would seem to be weak. While 'blue' is fairly early in the Berlin/Kay sequence, it always comes after red and one of yellow/green, and certainly after black and white. Orange is one of the last colour words acquired, being found only in Stage VII languages. Same with 'purple'. 'Red', 'black' and 'white' are all recent acquisitions on Arthur's part, whereas they are virtually universal among the world's languages.

Of course, mixed into all this is the fact that Arthur is a boy, and while we certainly didn't go out of our way to gender-stereotype our colours, the fact remains that lots of boy stuff is blue, so he's bound to have more experience with blue as a colour as a lad growing up in Canadian society. There is also the interesting (to me) question of how 'black' and 'white' really fit into this scheme - in particular, because the various colour-oriented toys, TV programmes, and other such things really focus on the colours of the rainbow. Black and white aren't really treated the same way, so we might suspect that they would be acquired somewhat later by most kids.

Really, all of this took place over a span of about five months at most (October - March), from roughly 16 to 21 months in our little boy's life, and now he has acquired a full range of words, more or less, and is using them with nearly 100% accuracy. If there is any correlation with the Berlin/Kay sequence (and as I say, I suspect that there isn't), it may only be observable in a brief window, since colours are one of those things acquired pretty early in most kids' vocabularies.

Tags: anthropology, arthur, language

I'm currently supervising a senior undergraduate in a reading course, dealing with a topic in the history of archaeology in the 1930s. I am looking for an interesting and readable book for her, on the topic of British intellectual life and scholarly activity in the 1930s. Especially appealing would be books that:

- have material of relevance to conservatism (but not necessarily fascism) among British intellectuals;
- focus specifically on Cambridge;
- deal with the relationship between the universities and the government during this period;
- focus on the social and/or life sciences.

Any suggestions would be most welcome.

(crossposted to askahistorian)

Tags: anthropology