Frosted Flake posted:

I’ve been taking classes on Late Antiquity for a few years and am thinking about pursuing a Master’s in the subject. It’s borderline obsessive now as I have most of a bookshelf on the subject.

I appreciate the work Cameron, Brown and Wickham have done examining the Late Roman economy, especially during The Crisis of The Third Century. One thing I haven’t been able to find is any kind of Marxist analysis of the period.

“Elites hoard wealth, refuse military service, take power away from the state” has been a narrative explaining Late Antique collapse of the Roman State since Gibbon, and Durant definitely touched on that as well. I think Matt Christman has been drawing parallels to that on Chapo Trap House lately too. However, for all of the work on the Gracchi as proto-Marxists, I can’t find anything on Late Antiquity.

Is there a good starting point for this?

Does anyone here have a Marxist framing for Late Antiquity?

Flavius Aetass posted:

Did eunuchs ever get revenge or otherwise cause any organized resistance against castration where it was a common thing?

i say swears online posted:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...MfdZH1regQ7ImYY

pro click

Frosted Flake posted:

I’ve been taking classes on Late Antiquity for a few years and am thinking about pursuing a Master’s in the subject. It’s borderline obsessive now as I have most of a bookshelf on the subject.

I appreciate the work Cameron, Brown and Wickham have done examining the Late Roman economy, especially during The Crisis of The Third Century. One thing I haven’t been able to find is any kind of Marxist analysis of the period.

“Elites hoard wealth, refuse military service, take power away from the state” has been a narrative explaining Late Antique collapse of the Roman State since Gibbon, and Durant definitely touched on that as well. I think Matt Christman has been drawing parallels to that on Chapo Trap House lately too. However, for all of the work on the Gracchi as proto-Marxists, I can’t find anything on Late Antiquity.

Is there a good starting point for this?

Does anyone here have a Marxist framing for Late Antiquity?

Ghostlight posted:

in the middle east it was much the same - more often than eunachs were highly privileged members of the court despite technically being of a very low social standing. like yeah, maybe you'd be a bit angry about having your junk chunked, but if it also lifted you out of poverty and put you right next to senior officials who could do with some guidance, or into the harem where juicy and lucrative information could be found then it's probably a better gig than getting yourself killed over it.
but also

they didn't have the balls to seek revenge.

twoday posted:

Marx wrote about feudalism and late antiquity saw the birth of that. This is a bit later but maybe still relevant:

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4105-marxism-and-the-middle-ages

Real hurthling! posted:

late antiquity got short shrift for 1400 years among historians until cameron blew it open in the 80s. the old guard of late antique historians are all still from that era of reaganomics afaik

ArmZ posted:

ArmZ posted:

Dalael posted:

I will never cease to be amazed by how much things can get covered in 2k years.

Real hurthling! posted:

a few feet or more of sediment per century is not uncommon depending on continued habitation of the site and geographic factors. basically human trash/sand/silt/crud of all kinds pile the gently caress up quickly

quote:

Fireball’s Airburst May Have Destroyed Ancient Syrian Village, Study Reveals

A study revealed that a fireball that produced a powerful explosion mid-air might have destroyed one of the first known farming villages in the world. The authors of the study based their claims on various samples taken from an excavation site.

The study focused on an ancient settlement known as Abu Hureyra, which was established around 13,000 years ago in northern Syria. Details of the study were presented in a paper previously published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The first inhabitants of Abu Hureyra were most likely hunter-gatherers who relied on natural resources from the land in order to survive. According to a previous study, a drought may have driven the early settlers into cultivating the grains they had previously collected in the wild, making them one of the first known farmers.

However, about 13,000 years ago, it seems the inhabitants of the village encountered a disastrous event, which left a layer of carbon over the remains of the village. According to scientists, this indicates that fires broke out in the area.

Excavations in the sites where Abu Hureyra once stood were first carried out in 1972 and 1973. Recently, a team of scientists re-analyzed the samples taken during the excavations.

Many of the samples collected during the excavations include melted iron, sulfur-rich objects and glass spheres that were formed by melting soil. According to the scientists, these types of materials are clear indicators of a catastrophic event that produced extremely high temperatures. They believe that such an event was caused by a space rock producing a powerful explosion in the sky.

Andrew Moor, an archaeologist from the Rochester Institute of Technology and the lead author of the study, explained what the inhabitants of Abu Hureyra experienced following the cosmic fireball’s airburst.

According to the archeologist, the blast from the mid-air explosion most likely incinerated the entire village.

“People who were in or near the village of Abu Hureyra at the time the airburst exploded would have seen an immense flash in the sky, equivalent to a nuclear explosion,” he told Space.com.

“A few seconds later, they would have been incinerated by the blast emanating from the airburst,” Moore continued. “The heat wave destroyed the village and everything in it, leaving a layer of burned material across the surface.”

twoday posted:

Everyone is always talking about sodomy, but no one ever talks about gommoramy. What is it? I want to try it.

twoday posted:

This is an excellent documentary about the massive and advanced pre-Columbian society that lived in the Amazon which historians have only recently begun to understand the scope of, and I highly reccomend that everyone watch it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Os-ujelkgw

and here is the documentary equivilent of 1491, with more about pre-Columbian society in North America:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whP9RL5huhE

also, 1493 was a really good book too, and if you liked 1491 you should definitely read 1493

quote:

Some Polynesians Carry DNA of Ancient Native Americans, New Study Finds

About 3,000 years ago, people on the eastern edge of Asia began sailing east, crossing thousands of miles of ocean to reach uninhabited islands. Their descendants, some 2,000 years later, invented the double-hulled canoe to travel even farther east, reaching places like Hawaii and Rapa Nui.

Archaeologists and anthropologists have long debated: Just how far did the Polynesians’ canoes take them? Did they make it all the way to the Americas?

The results of a new study suggest that they did. Today, people on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, and four other Polynesian islands carry small amounts of DNA inherited from people who lived in Colombia about 800 years ago. One explanation: Polynesians came to South America, and then took South Americans onto their boats to voyage back out to sea.

This new report bolsters work that archaeologists and anthropologists have been doing for years. Previous genetic studies had also hinted that people on Rapa Nui had some ancient South American ancestry. But the new study offers a more compelling case because the researchers looked at more than 800 people using a number of sophisticated new statistical tools.

“This is the most convincing evidence I’ve seen,” said Lars Fehren-Schmitz, an anthropological geneticist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the study.


The new study emerged from a decade-long project to create a map of the genetic diversity in modern Latin Americans. After Asians crossed the Bering Land Bridge 16,000 years ago, they spread across the Americas, reaching the southern tip of South America by 14,000 years ago.

Since then, the populations of Latin America have gained unique genetic mutations, which have gotten mixed as they interbred. When European colonists brought enslaved Africans to the region, the genetic landscape of Latin America changed yet again.

Andrés Moreno Estrada, a geneticist, and his wife, Karla Sandoval, an anthropologist, have worked with Indigenous populations in Latin America to understand their genetic make-up. Because most genetic studies are based on people of European ancestry, variants that could be medically important to other populations are often overlooked.

Last year, for example, Dr. Estrada, Dr. Sandoval and their colleagues published a study on asthma. They discovered mutations in a gene that put certain groups of Latin Americans at greater risk of developing the disease.

In 2013, Dr. Estrada and Dr. Sandoval started collaborating with Chilean scientists to study Rapa Nui. The island, which lies more than 2,100 miles west of Chile, was annexed by the country in 1888.

Dr. Estrada and Dr. Sandoval traveled to Rapa Nui and met with residents to describe their project. Eighty islanders eventually joined the research, curious to learn about their ancestry.

“They were interested to know if they really belonged to the Polynesian islands,” said Dr. Sandoval, who now works with Dr. Estrada at the National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity in Irapuato, Mexico.

In an earlier study on Rapa Nui, led by Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas of the University of Lausanne, researchers analyzed DNA from 27 islanders. They found evidence that the participants had a mixture of Polynesian and Native American ancestry.

Some of their Native American DNA appeared to have been inherited by recent immigrants from Chile. But other pieces were different, suggesting they originated from Native Americans many generations earlier.

To test that finding, Dr. Estrada, Dr. Sandoval and their colleagues compared the DNA of 809 people from Rapa Nui and other Polynesian islands, as well as in countries along the Pacific coast from Mexico to Chile.

The researchers found that most of the people on Rapa Nui had some recent Chilean forebears. From them, they inherited both Native American and European DNA.

But six people had no European ancestry at all. Their Native American ancestry had a different source: the Zenu population of Colombia. The scientists then found some of the same pieces of DNA in people on four other islands in eastern Polynesia.

“When I first saw that, I thought there was something going wrong and we needed to fix what we were doing,” said Alexander Ioannidis, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University and a co-author of the study. “So then we dove in deeper. It took awhile to really realize that this was real.”

The researchers were then able to estimate how long ago these Native American ancestors lived by measuring the size of the DNA fragments. Stretches of shared DNA get smaller with each passing generation.

The researchers found that all of the Zenu-like stretches of DNA in the Polynesians were roughly the same size. They estimated that they came from Zenu relatives who lived about eight centuries ago.

“It’s quite amazing that they can come up with this evidence for contact between these populations,” Dr. Malaspinas said.

Lisa Matisoo-Smith, a biological anthropologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand who was not involved in the new study, cautioned that the history of Polynesia is so complex that the new results might not reflect it accurately.

“Is it possible? Yes, it certainly is,” she said. But, she added, “I’m not convinced.”
ImageRocks filled with petroglyphs perch dangerously close to an eroding cliff at Orongo.
Rocks filled with petroglyphs perch dangerously close to an eroding cliff at Orongo.Credit...Josh Haner/The New York Times

Dr. Matisoo-Smith said the study would have been stronger had the researchers compared the Polynesians with other populations, such as people in mainland China. That would help rule out the possibility that what looks like Native American ancestry in Polynesia is actually just DNA inherited from the common ancestors of the two groups in Asia.

If the research holds up to further scrutiny, many experts said the best explanation would be that Polynesians came to South America and then took South Americans onto their boats to voyage back out to sea.

Dr. Malaspinas said that since Polynesians had already traveled so far across the Pacific, there was no reason to think they couldn’t go to South America. “This last step would have been easy for them,” she said.

Patrick Kirch, a University of Hawaii archaeologist, said that this scenario fit with other lines of evidence, including the food that Polynesians eat.

One important staple across Polynesia is the sweet potato, which originated in South America. Dr. Kirch and his colleagues have found remains of sweet potatoes centuries before Europeans arrived in the Pacific.

But the authors of the new paper emphasize another possibility: South Americans traveled on their own to a Polynesian island, where Polynesians sailing from the east encountered them.

Dr. Estrada argued the South Equatorial Current could easily carry boats away from the Pacific Coast of Colombia.

“It happens today,” he said. “We have many stories of fishermen in Mexico who have to get rescued by Japanese fishing boats.”

In their paper, Dr. Estrada and his colleagues draw parallels between this scenario and the claims of Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer who sailed on a raft in 1947 from South America to Polynesia. Mr. Heyerdahl championed the idea that Polynesia was settled by South Americans.

In an email, Haunani Kane, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Hawaii, criticized the scientists for championing such “outdated” ideas.

Dr. Kane has sailed thousands of miles in double-hulled canoes as the scientific coordinator of the Polynesian Navigation Society. She took issue with “the author’s assumption of the capabilities or lack thereof, of Pacific Island peoples to purposely migrate across the Pacific.”

Dr. Kirch also dismissed the castaway scenario. If South Americans wound up on the Marquesas Islands, they would have brought some things with them that archaeologists could have later uncovered. “There’s no evidence of that,” he said.

One way to settle this dispute might be to find DNA in the earliest human remains on islands in eastern Polynesia. A child of Polynesian and South American parents would have a clear genetic signature.

Ancient DNA from South America might help, too. Dr. Fehren-Schmitz has looked for Polynesian DNA in the ancient human remains in the Andes he has studied. “But I’ve never seen any trace,” he said.

It’s possible, Dr. Fehren-Schmitz said, that other places in South America would be better to look for lost Polynesians. It’s conceivable, for example, that some Polynesians who reached South America may have opted to live on the islands just off the coast.

One such place is Mocha Island, just off the coast of Chile. In 2010, Dr. Matisoo-Smith and Jose-Miguel Ramirez of the University of Valparaíso published a study on skulls that were unearthed on the island.

The skulls, she said, “looked very Polynesian in shape and form.”

Dreylad posted:

On the subject of agriculture, I think even in 1491 Mann notes that Andean societies were pretty unique because they developed in conditions that were pretty harsh to agriculture compared to the other cradles of early societies (Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia, China) and relied on shellfish and similiar aquaculture practices.

animist posted:

I do wonder if the existence of Andean states built on fishing instead of agriculture casts doubts on Scott's "agriculture causes states" theory though

Dreylad posted:

Scott's great. Thanks for the summary.

If I remember correctly, I don't even know if it casts doubt on it because the Andean fishing society also ended up being also dependent on agricultural goods raised at higher altitudes. I don't know if it started on the coast and then built its way up inland or multiple aqua/agriculture systems grew up interdependent on one another for survival.

What you're describing does sound kind of like the large-scale "gardening" that seemed to exist in the Amazons to some extent and the North-East of North America with large numbers of fruit and nut trees intentionally planted and harvested at regular intervals that supported a pretty sizable population of small villages. Similar intersection of a variety of ecosystems.

The whole Andean region, with its dry coasts and very steep terrain shouldn't have been a place for agricultural production, and yet the massive terraced fields and irrigation channels still exist in some places today. It's pretty incredible.

animist posted:

the Incas were so cool

Dreylad posted:

On the subject of agriculture, I think even in 1491 Mann notes that Andean societies were pretty unique because they developed in conditions that were pretty harsh to agriculture compared to the other cradles of early societies (Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia, China) and relied on shellfish and similiar aquaculture practices.