cafecuriosity

Cancer's Delayed Fuze

If anyone doubts how history continues to haunt us, you only have to consider the fate of the tropical Isla de Vieques off Puerto Rico. Twenty one miles long and 5 miles wide, it was once part of the Spanish Virgin Islands. In 1948 the U.S. navy arrived and nicked 70% of the island. In 1977 the Navy scuttled the hulk of the former USS Killen, a WWII Fletcher class destroyer. The Killen had been used as a guided missile target ship from 1961 - 1969. Indeed the area was used as a What wasn't well known was the Killen was also a target in Operation Hardtack a series of nuclear bomb tests carried out in the Pacific in 1958.

Fingerprints on History

 The electronic age is going to be hell for historians. Paper records have a reassuring physicality and a surprising ability to endure, despite damp, fire and dusty neglect. Nor are they subject to capricious changes in industry formatting standards. Barack Obama's battle with bureaucracy to retain his Blackberry is well known. He is America's first truly digital President. While his speeches may be recorded for posterity, and the commentariate's take on his policy may live on thanks to YouTube, the digital divide poses problems of its own.

Mighty Oak Falls

Is this an echo of the UK finance sector? A 250-year-old Lucombe oak toppled over last weekend and died of old age. First planted in the 1760's by William Lucombe, the oak was the centerpiece of Phear Park in Exmouth. With a mighty girth of 26ft (rivalling some banker's expense accounts), it was the biggest of its kind in the world. The echoes of the finance sector do not end there, East Devon district gardeners now have to clean up the mess and decide what to do with the shattered trunk! Like the banking foiasco, the size of the problem dwarfs the human scale! All is not lost however acorns from the oak were collected last year. One of the oak's germinated protegy may yet replace it. If only the banking sector proves to be as easy to revive! Image: APEX, www.exmouthjournal.co.uk

History's Fingerprints

I finished reading 'Now Is Gone' by Geoff Livingston while I was enjoying a couple of days holiday in Brittany. On reflecting on the rise of new media, it occurred to me that much of the online commentariate is very much anchored in the here and now. I wonder how well it will perform over time. Time is one thing you get a feeling for in places like Brittany. My friends' stone cottage came complete with a 300 year old stone tower once used by the Knights Templar as a way station for pilgrims. On the coast, you can still see coastal gun emplacements dating back to WWII complete with communication trenches and underground ammunition bunkers. One gun battery was an old Napoleonic emplacement which had simply been reinforced and updated by the Germans - an alternate sense of continuity to the pretty coastal villages and manicured fields. The sense of past informing the present was reinforced by a news snippet I read about the discovery of the body of an Australian soldier from the First World War in Belgium. The long-lost soldier still held his rifle in his hands and is thought to be one of twenty soldiers from the 3rd Division who went missing during the Battle of Messines on June 7th, 1917. I wonder how well the emerging online news and commentary industry will view its links with its own long tail of history?

Sailing the Briny Deep

Poor Ferdinand Magellan! You'd think having captained the first circumnavigation of the Earth (1519-22) discovering Guam and reaching The Philippines in the process, he would be forgiven for overshooting Indonesia's Spice islands by a mere 1,500 miles! Now through a combination of computer modeling and historical data, two researchers have fingered El Nino as the invisible hand guiding Magellan's voyage of discovery. The researchers hypothesised Magellan sailed around Cape Horn and into the remnants of an El Nino event. While the drought typically associated with El Nino events may have devastated island food supplies prompting Magellan to sail north, its prevailing northerly winds and current, combined with benign weather made for easy sailing. If correct, this would be the earliest record of an El Nino climate event.

Still on things nautical, a former MIT undergraduate student took time out from her dual majors in nuclear and mechanical engineering to mess about with a replica of the large ocean going rafts which plied the seas between Chile and western Mexico over a thousand years ago. A strong pre-Columbian connection between the Andean and Mesoamerican civilizations emerged from analysis of the metallurgy used in producing silver and copper goods, as well as the trade in the prized spondylus shell beads. Now detailed computer analysis of the replica's seaworthiness, handling and cargo capacity demonstrate the feasibility of ancient oceanic trade routes. At 10-30 tons capacity, the rafts could make the six to eight week voyage during the trade wind window (the rafts couldn't sail again the wind). The MIT paper is the first to use advanced marine engineering analysis to identify the design parameters of ancient water craft - quite a stretch from nuclear engineering!

http://news.ncsu.edu/news/2008/05/wmsfitzpatrickmagellan.php   http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/raft-tt0319.html   Image: 1. Ferdinand Magellan, Wikipedia, 2. Magellan's voyage of discovery, www.oceansatlas.com 2. MIT students aboard the replica raft, Dinna Coveney, MIT, 3. Early 17th Century sketch of native raft, Joris von Spilbergen

Serendipity Locates Ancient Alexandria

Alexander the Great usually scores the public kudos for founding the Egyptian city of Alexandria around 331 BC. However, archaeologists acknowledge the city of Rhakotis was there before Alexander rode into town. Now Jean-Daniel Stanley a geoarchaeologist specialising in Nile delta sedimentation and its impact on subsidence and sea level rise has produced definitive proof that Rhakotis preceded Alexander by 700 years!

Stanley sank a series of core samples into Alexandria harbour in 2001 in an effort to understand how Greek and Roman Alexandria came to be underwater. Those core samples produced some unexpected results. Firstly, up popped igneous rock pebbles. These rocks originated far upriver in Middle and Upper Egyptian quarries and were not brought down by the Nile. Next, pottery fragments dating back to 940 BC surfaced. These were shown to be locally fired and typical of pottery in the region around that time, rather than having been imported. Final confirmation came in the form of rising lead levels in the sediments prior to Alexander's arrival. The Greeks used a lot lead in their cities.

There Stanley had it, radiocarbon dates, pottery shards and increased concentrations of lead - all indicating habitation long before Alexander founded his city! This was the first hard evidence that Rhakotis was more than just a fishing village which had struggled along for centuries.

http://www.si.edu/opa/InsideResearch/articles/V19_Alexandria.html   Image: 1. Diver encounters a stone sculpture of the god Hapi while surveying Alexandria's harbour, Smithsonian 2. Preparing to drill a core sample in Alexandria harbour, Juan Daniel Stanley, 3. Artists impression of Alexandria 2,000 years ago, IEASM team in Bernard and Goddio

Passing the Bravo Test

In 1954, The United States staged the Bravo atom bomb test. At 15 megatonnes it was most powerful American atom bomb, of the 23 tested there from 1946 - 58. The blast vapourised three islands, raised water temperatures to 55,000 degrees, shook islands 200km away and left a crater 2 km wide and 73 meters deep.

Earlier, the Able and Baker atomic bomb tests in 1946 had left a fleet of ships (including Admiral Yamamoto's flagship of the Japanese attack on Pear Harbour, the Nagano) sunk on the bottom of the Bikini lagoon.

Now, fifty years after the Bravo test, marine biologists have dived Bikini atoll including the awesome Bravo crater and were astonished by huge branching corals 8 meters high, coral colonies with 30 cm thick trunks and in places over 80% coral cover. Less exciting was the pronounced absence of 42 species mostly fragile lagoon types, many probably now extinct due to the radioactivity and smothering effect of the fine sediments generated by the blast. Bikini's recovery is being helped by the nearby Rongelap Atoll. Rongelap lies upstream from Bikini and is the world's atoll. While Rongelap wasn't the site of any atom tests, it was extensively contaminated by drifts of radioactive ash. Ironically, Bikini Atoll is part of a campaign to have the northern Marshall Islands Atoll World heritage listed, craters, sunken fleet and all!

http://www.coralcoe.org.au/news_stories/bikini.html   Image: 1. Bravo test blast, U.S. Air Force, 2. Bravo hydrogen bomb test crater, Matt Harris, 3 Map of nuclear fleet of Bikini Atoll, Jeffery Sasha David, 4 & 5. Logoon corals ARC Centre of Excellence in Coral Studies

A Matter of Perspective

We're often called upon to assess organizational cultures. All too often however, our view depends on our point of observation. Its a matter of perspective.  For years, the popular view of archaeology centers on mysterious objects from our past being wrenched from the soil. Putting those individual finds in context is harder than its looks. Think about the challenge of piecing together an understanding of our major cities 2000 year hence. Even in Egypt, surely one of the worlds most excavated regions; whole cities lurk underground, waiting to be uncovered. Archaeologists have been experimenting with alternative approaches to perspective. The Regional Settlement Pattern Survey involves walking the landscape systematically looking for traces of past occupation. Applied effectively, it holds out the prospect of an integrated view of drifts in patterns of settlement over the centuries. Piloted in Shandong province, China, the methodology led to a significant shift in how the Yellow Valley culture developed. Maybe we all need to do more 'walking the fields' when it comes to understanding organizational culture.

PS. China lovers and supporters of contact theory will be intrigued by a report from the University of Haifa on the discovery of Chinese pottery in Acre  the gateway for European pilgrims to the Holy Land.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-03/fm-ias030308.php   http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-03/uoh-eoc030408.php   Image: 1. Scientists walk through tea fields in southeast Shandong, The Field Museum, 2. A pit dating to the Western Zhou period 1046-771BC 3. Objects being recovered dating to the Longshan period 2600-1900BC 4. Pottery from Acre, Howard Smithline, Israel Antiquities Authority

Nuking A Conspiracy Theory

There is no sense of proportion to human obsession or to the relentless search by academia for funding. This also applies to the scientific method which leaves no stone unturned when conducting an experiment. Now ever since he died, conspiracy theories have swirled around Napoleon's early demise. The most popular theory cast Napoleon as the victim of arsenic poisoning. Now Italy's National Institute of Nuclear Physics claims to have ruled out arsenic poisoning - and all they had to do was to borrow a small nuclear reactor, plus find four samples of Napoleon's hair taken at different times during his life, together with hair samples from his son the King of Rome and the Empress Josephine! This involved coordinating three museums and two universities. The researchers also tested 10 hair samples from living people. The results? There were no differences in arsenic levels between Napoleon's boyhood samples and samples taken after Napoleon's death. Looks like Napoleon's guard on Saint Helena were innocent after all. Oh and it seems that at the beginning of the 19th Century people absorbed arsenic at levels which would be considered toxic today. The Good Old Days weren't so good after all! http://www.infn.it/indexen.php   Image: Hair samples about to undergo neutron activation in the nuclear reactor in Pavia, Instituto Nazional di Fisica Nucleare

The Symmetry of History

Historical events have an odd way of coming together in an act of seeming symmetry. My ex-wife's cousin March 2008 saw the 70th anniversary of Austria's 'Anschluss' with Hitler's Germany. While many commentators focused on the willing role of Austrians in Hitler's 'Final Solution', fittingly, the final word came from Austrian archaeologists from the University of Vienna who announced their discovery of the earliest evidence of Jewish habitation in Austria. Poignantly, the evidence proved to be a child's amulet inscribed with a Jewish prayer in a Roman burial dating to the 3rd Century CE. The prayer, written in Greek reads, 'Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one.' Somehow that seems more touching than the torrent of media coverage.   http://public.univie.ac.at/index.php?id=6576&no_cache=1&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=5294&tx_ttnews[backPid]=6088&cHash=7ae2ec5731  Image: 1. Jews are forced to scrub anti-German fascit slogans from a Vienn footpath, 2. A 2.2 centimeter gold scroll dating to 3rd Century CE.University of Vienna, Institute of Prehistory and Early History