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CFP: Night and Nocturnal Activities

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Seen on the Classicists list:

CALL FOR PAPERS

Nox erat: Night and Nocturnal Activities in the Ancient World

17th Annual Classics Graduate Student Colloquium

University of Virginia

March 23, 2012

From lovers’ trysts to covens of witches, from all-night parties to midnight raids, from dreams to insomnia, night in the ancient world is far from an empty darkness that merely marks the interval between sunset and sunrise. This colloquium aims to consider the characteristics and depictions of night both as mythological figure and temporal experience, while also exploring the social and cultural aspects of nighttime events. Professor Catherine Keane of Washington University in St. Louis will deliver the keynote address. We welcome submissions from diverse fields and disciplines. Possible areas of investigation include, but are not limited to:

– Night as a deity or personification depicted in literature and/or art

- Night as a social construction, e.g. as holy or unholy, as a time for transgressive

activities; the way that night affects conceptions of time

- Dreams, whether true or false, and inspiration that comes at night; poets,

philosophers, storytellers, and others who work through the night

- Religious aspects of night: for example, rites which only happen at night, incubation

- Nighttime activities such as symposia and paraclausithyra

- Practical advantages and disadvantages of night: night raids, banditry, intrigue

- Means of illuminating the night both natural and artificial: streetlamps,

constellations, the moon

- Night in similes and metaphors

- Transitions into and out of night at dusk and dawn; the false night which occurs

during eclipses and storms

Papers should be 15-20 minutes in length. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to Jennifer LaFleur (jll4x AT virginia.edu) by January 15, 2013.


The body snatchers: corpse and effect

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Mortsafes in Perthshire, Scotland. These metal contraptions were used to stop bodysnatchers digging up freshly buried corpses. Image: Wikimedia Commons

When you bury family members in a cemetery, you expect them to stay there. Not so 200 years ago, however, when body snatchers prowled the nation’s burial grounds looking for subjects. This lucrative cottage industry was driven by an acute shortage of bodies that were available for dissection by the growing number of medical students.

Now, a new book has amassed, for the first time, archaeological evidence for what happened to the corpses, from dissection and autopsy through to reburial and display. Many of the new findings have never been published before.

The book reveals how the macabre activities of the body snatchers helped to further the progress of medicine and science by improving understanding of how the human body worked.

University of Cambridge researcher Dr Piers Mitchell and colleagues from around the UK have assembled evidence from excavated human skeletal remains from the 1600s to the 1800s. The remains were buried close to workhouses, prisons, private anatomy schools and medical schools in Newcastle, Worcester, Oxford and sites in London.

The archaeological evidence provides a vivid image of what it must have been like to cut up a corpse in order to study its constituent parts.

Moreover, it shows how anatomy was a key area of scientific investigation 200 years ago. “Thanks to the discoveries of the early anatomists,” said Mitchell, from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, “we have come to move towards our modern knowledge of how organs work and what normal anatomy is all about.”

Some of the remains show evidence of amputations performed as training exercises, probably equipping students with the ability to perform the surgery in living individuals. In one instance, the same cadaver had had multiple amputations, as well as their skull and chest opened.

Criminals had undergone craniotomies

Skeletons of adolescent males, believed to be the remains of executed criminals, had undergone craniotomies to open up the skull to give access to the brain, middle ear and other structures of anatomical interest. Fine cut marks on some skulls showed where the muscles had been carefully peeled away from the bone.

The bones of dogs, rabbits, cats, cattle, horses, monkeys and even tortoises were also found. Many of the animal bones had saw cuts in the same position as those found in the human skeletons – highlighting the quest to understand comparative anatomy.

One skeleton had been decapitated through the spine with a saw, and several of the skeletons were incomplete, suggesting that dissected limbs were buried elsewhere.

The fact that different bodies were dissected by different medical students at different times means that the same parts of the same body weren’t always available to be recombined together,” said Mitchell. “So we may have a coffin of arms or a coffin of legs, or sometimes the upper part of the body would be present and the lower part of the body would be missing, and they would put material in there such as dissected animal bones or even rocks to balance out the coffin.”

Some anatomical specimens were preserved and retained for future reference, and form part of pathology collections that continue to be used for teaching medical students to the present day.

The book Anatomical Dissection in Enlightenment England and Beyond: autopsy, pathology and display provides unprecedented evidence of dissection and autopsy practices – and the economical use of corpses – as Mitchell explained: “The bodies were physically sawn up and divided, presumably so that different medical students could dissect different parts of the same body before it would have decomposed.”

Burke and Hare

Perhaps the most infamous providers of corpses to the medical establishment were Burke and Hare, two characters from Edinburgh who took the industry one stage further and murdered their victims to sell their corpses for dissection by the doctors teaching anatomy in the city. Their grisly occupation was exposed on 31 October, Halloween, 1828.

The execution of William Burke in the Lawnmarket, Edinburgh as depicted by a broadsheet in 1829. Image: Wikimedia Commons The execution of William Burke in the Lawnmarket, Edinburgh as depicted by a broadsheet in 1829. Image: Wikimedia Commons

This sent a signal out to the rest of the country,” said Mitchell. “It created a field change in attitudes as to what people should do with the bodies of the dead. Everyone decided what was more important was that the living got the best treatment from their doctors and that that was given a higher priority over the corpses of the dead.”

The result was the 1832 Anatomy Act, when it became legal for the corpses of those who died in poorhouses and hospitals who were not claimed by friends or relatives to be used by the private anatomical teaching institutes. “No-one needed to be dug up from the graves any more and the cemeteries could rest in peace,” added Mitchell.

Source: University of Cambridge

More Information

The research described here has been published in ‘Anatomical Dissection in Enlightenment England and Beyond: autopsy, pathology and display’ (2012), edited by Piers Mitchell, Ashgate Publishing Company.

Burke and Hare


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JOB: Roman History @ UArizona

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Seen on the Classics list:

The Department of Classics at the University of Arizona is seeking a highly qualified candidate for the position of Assistant Professor (non-tenure eligible). A non-tenure-eligible assistant professor is appointed initially for a one-year period. This appointment may be renewed an indefinite number of times subject to satisfactory annual performance evaluation. Promotion to non-tenure eligible associate professorship is possible after a minimum of three years of service in rank.

The candidate’s teaching strengths should focus on imperial Roman historians and imperial Roman culture. Ph.D. in Classics must be in hand by August 1, 2013.

This is a full-time benefits-eligible position that will start in fall 2013. Review of applications will begin on December 3, 2012, and continue until filled.

As an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer, the University of Arizona recognizes the power of a diverse community and encourages applications from individuals with varied experiences and backgrounds.

The University of Arizona is an EEO/AA – M/W/D/V Employer.

For information about the Department of Classics, please visit our website: http://classics.arizona.edu/

To apply, please visit the following site: www.uacareertrack.com/applicants/Central?quickFind=206319<http://www.uacareertrack.com/applicants/Central?quickFind=206319>


Also Seen: Ancient Greek Shaving (Female)

Megamiddens of South Africa

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On the coasts of South Africa are enormous mussel shell heaps, among the largest in the world, which were amassed over a period of 1200 years.

Closeup of Megamidden at Elands Bay
Closeup of Megamidden at Elands Bay. Photo by John Parkington...

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Social Media at the CAA2012: A Reflective Report

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Reviewed by Nicole Beale and Jessica Ogden. This review is open access.

Visualising the Guild Chapel, Stratford-upon-Avon: digital models as research tools in buildings archaeology by Kate Giles, Anthony Masinton1 and Geoff Arnott

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This article disseminates the results of a programme of detailed archaeological survey and archive research on one of Europe's most important surviving late-medieval Guild Chapels - that of the Holy Cross Guild, Stratford-upon-Avon (Warwickshire). Today the building is part of Stratford-upon-Avon's tourist trail, located directly opposite William Shakespeare's home, 'New Place', and visited by thousands of tourists every year. However, its archaeological and historical significance has been overlooked owing to the extensive restoration of the building in the 19th and 20th centuries. This destroyed evidence for an internationally significant scheme of wall paintings within the Chapel, paid for by the London Mayor and Stratford-upon-Avon merchant, Hugh Clopton, an important member of the Holy Cross Guild and the original builder of 'New Place'. The paintings also have an important connection with Stratford-upon-Avon's most famous son, William Shakespeare, whose father may have been involved in their destruction and removal during the 16th century.Research by a team of historical archaeologists and digital heritage specialists at the Department of Archaeology, University of York, has revealed the significance of the Guild Chapel through the creation of a digital model and textual paradata, which form the focus of this article. The project is ground-breaking in that it moves beyond the traditional use of digital models as virtual reconstructions of past buildings to use the model itself as a research tool through which the user can explore and validate the evidence for the scheme directly. This is achieved through the creation of a palimpsest of antiquarian drawings of the paintings, made as they were revealed during restoration works in the 19th and 20th centuries, and set within their 3-dimensional architectural context. The model allows the user to compare and contrast differences in the recording methods, iconographies and interpretations of the scheme. It is supported by the 'paradata' that forms the core of the article text, and which provides an innovative model for the analysis of the antiquarian records of the scheme, and their contextual meaning. The project reveals the Guild Chapel at Stratford-upon-Avon to be one of the finest examples of mercantile and guild patronage of the period, shedding important light on the patronage of ecclesiastical art on the eve of the Reformation, and revealing important connections between provincial guild architecture of Warwickshire and internationally significant schemes in London and Paris. It also provides a ground-breaking model of the ways in which digital heritage technologies can be harnessed not only by historical archaeology, but within the arts and humanities more widely.

A Possible Astronomical Alignment marking Seasonal Transitions at Listoghil, Sligo, Ireland by Padraig Meehan

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Listoghil, the central monument and focal point of the Carrowmore passage tomb complex close to Sligo in north-west Ireland, has been ruined, excavated and eventually partially restored. However, the chamber is preserved in its original position. I examine the hypothesis that Listoghil was deliberately aligned to mark seasonal transitions equivalent to astronomical cross-quarter days. The methods include a horizon survey, the isolation of directional features in the monument, and computer modelling of the monument and skyscape. Folklore and legends around seasonal transits, locally, in Ireland, and in many and varied (and independently arising) contexts at temperate latitudes of the world, are seen as information sources complementary to data gathering and observation.

Archaeology 2.0? Review of Archaeology 2.0: New Approaches to Communication and Collaboration[Web Book]

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Reviewed by Michael Shanks and Christopher Witmore. This review is open access.

Lucian, Lover of Lies 26

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A slightly spooky one for Halloween. The speaker is a doctor by the name of Antigonus.

ἐγὼ γὰρ οἶδά τινα μετὰ εἰκοστὴν ἡμέραν ἧς ἐτάφη ἀναστάντα, θεραπεύσας καὶ πρὸ τοῦ θανάτου καὶ ἐπεὶ ἀνέστη τὸν ἄνθρωπον.

I know of a man who came to life twenty days after he was buried; I was his doctor both before his death and after he came back to life.


Filed under: Lucian

Incipits and explicits in extant papyri?

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How would I discover if, among our collections of ancient papyri, we have the beginning or ends of some rolls?  It’s an interesting question, but my knowledge of instrumenta is too limited for me
to find them.  Has anyone any ideas?

For instance, surely some of the charred Herculaneum rolls preserve their colophons?

Quelques liens pour commencer avec LaTeX

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Depuis le début de mon travail de thèse, j’ai croisé à plusieurs reprises un logiciel de mise en page vanté pour la clarté du résultat obtenu. Ce logiciel a pour nom LaTeX. Malheureusement, il est assez difficile à prendre en main et un minimum de formation est nécessaire.

Heureusement il y a de nombreux sites consacrés à ce logiciel. Jusqu’à peu, ils s’adressaient surtout aux chercheurs en “sciences dures”, mais depuis peu LaTeX semble s’ouvrir aussi aux sciences humaines. Je vous propose aujourd’hui un petit panorama de lien utile pour qui voudrait se lancer.

Je commencerais par la nouveauté de la rentrée : un manuel sur LaTeX qui s’adresse spécifiquement aux chercheurs en sciences humaines. On le doit à Maïeul Rouquette. Il est disponible en format papier, mais surtout on peut le télécharger gratuitement. Après une rapide présentation du fonctionnement de LaTeX, qui ne diffère pas beaucoup de ce que l’on pourrait trouver dans n’importe quel manuel, suivent une partie consacrée à la bibliographie et une autre partie s’intéressant à des problématiques propres aux SHS : gestion de plusieurs langues, textes en parallèle, par exemple.

 

Sur l’intérêt de LaTeX pour les SHS :

La page de Josquin Debaz.

Celle de (C)(M).

Et l’exemple de LaTeX utilisé pour une thèse en SHS franco-vietnamienne.

 

Des sites plus généralistes :

Un wikibook.

Les explications des tuteurs en informatique de l’ENS.

Le site de Marc Baudouin.

Le Joli Manuel pour LaTeX.

 

Pour les problématique propre à l’usage de LaTeX avec la langue française :

LaTeX en français.

Gutemberg : groupe francophone des utilisateurs de TeX, LaTeX et logiciels compagnons.

 

Des problématiques propres aux SHS chez

Geekographie maieutique

Les fiches de Bébert

 

Sur les références croisés.

 

Enfin il est parfois nécessaire de transformer les résultats obtenus en pdf en document word. Pour ce faire, on peut utiliser ce site : PDF to word.

Jesus, the Grim Reaper?

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The depiction of a figure seated on a cloud and wielding a sickle in Revelation 14 is striking for several reasons. Is the figure supposed to be Jesus? If so, some may find it unsettling to imagine him taking on a role that is reminiscent of the Grim Reaper. And since it is Halloween, I thought I would comment on this point that came up in my Sunday school class this past Sunday, since it seems so appropriately seasonal.

(Then again, the personification of Death more characteristically wields a scythe, and so perhaps it will be the depiction of a figure who might be Jesus holding one of the two classic symbols of the Communist Party that some will find even more terrifying than “Jesus as the Grim Reaper” – especially in the run up to elections in the United States!)

But seriously, the depiction of this figure harvesting the earth – which presumably means taking human lives from the earth which are “ripe for the picking” – and throwing its “grapes” into the winepress of God’s wrath, so that an enormous river of blood flows for miles (and very deep, even if the bridles mentioned in the verse were on Shetland ponies) – is one of the most gruesome images in the Bible. Absolutely suitable for Halloween – but in its Biblical context, what do you make of it?

Another intriguing element in Revelation is the reference to “another angel” right after the mention of this “one like a son of man.” Does that suggest that this figure is also an angel? And if so, then is this the same “one like a son of man” that John describes seeing in chapter 1? Does the phrase here, as in Daniel 7, simply mean a figure that looks human, as opposed to the strange beasts sometimes depicted in apocalyptic visions, without anything being said about their nature?

The question of how various New Testament authors formulated their Christology, i.e. their understanding of who Jesus was and is, is one that I have a longstanding interest in (and you can read my thoughts on the matter in detail in my books The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context and John’s Apologetic Christology: Legitimation and Development in Johannine Christology.

Let me add that I felt torn between wanting to include an allusion to the famous Blue Oyster Cult song “”Don’t Fear the Reaper” in the title of this port, and the title I eventually went with. So what do you think? Does this post need more cowbell?

Tomb TT39 Puimre

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Jane Akshar and a guest have just visited this Theban noble's tomb to photograph the outside. See for photos and explanatory text:

http://luxor-news.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/tt39-puimre-or-puyemra.html

Jinn and Treasure in Palestine

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I might be a bit late noticing this, but a fantastic article appeared this summer in the 2012 volume of the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology: Salah Hussein Al-Houdalieh, “Archaeological Heritage and Spiritual Protection: Looting and Jinn in Palestine“.  As the title suggests, the article explores the role of jinni in the looting of antiquities in the contemporary Occupied Palestinian National Territories (OPNT). 

Al-Houdalieh argues that looting continues to have roots in economic dispossession, political instability, and religious teachings that might be understood to permit looting or, at least, to remove an significant moral stigma. The role of the jinn in looting practices in Palestine represents an apparently unique phenomenon and involves sometimes well-organized bands of looters collaborating with sheikhs (who are often simply local holy men) who can call up and wrangle jinni. These jinn tend to then speak through a possessed individual and lead the looter gang to a particular buried treasure or explain its location. The jinn evidently protect the treasure so getting their attention and bringing them under control is absolutely vital to get good directions where to conduct a rewarding excavation. However, as some of Al-Houdalieh’s informants explained, individual jinni can be duplicitous and tricky moving treasure even after excavations have begun or offering confusing directions.  The author points out that these powers tend to make excavations under the direction of jinn particular unprofitable and unsuccessful. What is striking, however, is that a significant number of looters continue to rely on jinn to aid in locating treasures. 

The notion that excavations with the aid of jinn are largely unsuccessful hints that the motivations for looting may not be as simple as material gain. As scholars have observed among archaeologists and other excavators who rely upon dreams to identify the location of buried treasure, the goal of excavating is often as much about affirming the presence of supernatural involvement in day-to-day life as it is finding particularly valuable objects. The tendency to see looting practices as being motivated by financial gain alone may speak more to the cultures who study looting and are invested in a capitalist worldview that cannot but monetize the perceived cultural value of antiquities. In places like Palestine where the value of antiquities depends on intellectual traditions and markets that exist outside their dominant cultural discourse, a direct relationship between excavation practice and material gain may be overstated.

It would appear that the lack of success experienced by looters who looked to jinn to guide them to treasure relates to an economic and epistemological system that does not coincide with prevailing Western ways of thinking. Like the practice of excavating without publishing that is rather more common in Eastern Mediterranean countries or following the guidance of dreams, Al-Houdalieh’s exploration of the role of jinn in looting in Palestine demonstrate the limits of archaeology’s universalizing claims of “scientifical” practices.


Roman Bioarchaeology Carnival XXII

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Roman skeleton news from the month of October, delivered just in time for Halloween!

Roman-era Finds

  • Rome. 18 October.  A man following a cat happened upon a previously unknown(?) catacomb underneath Rome near Via di Pietralata.  The underground burial chamber likely dates to the 1st century BC through the 2nd century AD.  Both cremations and inhumations seem to have been found.  No pictures that I could find.  I hope we'll hear more about this in coming months.
  • Rome. 19 October.  Investigations into the activity of tombaroli (tomb-raiders) in the Alban Hills led to the recovery of some ex-voto statues possibly dedicated to Juno.  In the tomb raiders' homes were also found some artifacts from Etruscan tombs.
  • Austria. 15 October.  Excavations for a road uncovered a child's grave dating to around the 1st century AD. It appears to have been an inhumation, as the presence of deciduous teeth is noted, and the grave looks like some kind of rock-cut tomb, interestingly enough.  
Roman-era child's grave found in Austria (credit)
  • England.  22 October.  Widening of a major road in Nottinghamshire has revealed a Late Iron Age / Early Roman settlement (1st c BC - 3rd c AD).  There are at least two human burials: one in a flexed position and one in an extended position, probably Iron and Roman age, respectively.  Some artifacts remained, but in general the graves were highly disturbed.
Iron Age flexed burial from Nottinghamshire (credit)
  • Macedonia.  September/October.  Archaeology Magazine has two nice features on graves from Scupi, Macedonia, dating from the Bronze Age through the Roman period.  The piece on the mass grave is particularly fascinating: at least 180 men were tossed into a large pit.  Most of them have evidence of trauma.  It's thought that they sustained injuries and died in the political upheaval during the 3rd-4th centuries AD.
Mass grave in Scupi, Macedonia, dating to 3rd-4th c AD (credit)
Post-Roman Finds
  • Vicenza. 16 October.  A skeleton dating to the Middle Ages was found in Vicenza, Italy.  It was apparently beheaded.  (Large picture available through link.  No evidence presented for the interpretation of decapitation rather than grave disturbance.)
New Techniques
Exhibits and Videos
  • TED-Ed has a cute little video written and narrated by Roman historian Ray Laurence called "A Glimpse of Teenage Life in Ancient Rome."  It's a day-in-the-life explanation and runs about 6 minutes.  Super cute.  Now if only Laurence would do one about teenage girls, older women, slaves, immigrants, and, well, people other than wealthy males.  The only visible people in this video are male (except the 7-year-old girl betrothed in marriage), and we know that females had much greater visibility than that, particularly upper-class ones.  It would be fantastic to see a series like this, each video focusing on a different age/sex/social class/ethnicity.
Still from Laurence's TED-Ed video
Stay tuned next month as I travel to Rome for a conference, a bit of cool research, and perhaps some thanatourism!

Stranger in These Parts After Action Report: Did We Learn Anything?

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(crossposted at Play the Past)

There are things you can do, and can’t do, to undergraduate students, I’ve discovered. Recently heard in class:

Math? You want us to do math? But… but… we’re history students!

This of course is my continuing digital antiquity class, ‘Cities and Countryside in the Ancient World’. I have them playing right now with maps and spatial data, trying to do some basic spatial analysis. Earlier in the year, to accustom folks to trying to think about ancient spaces with a suitably ancient mindset, I had the students do some readings, play ‘Stranger in These Parts‘ interactive fiction, and then explore the same territory using the ORBIS simulation of geographic space.

I had broken this assignment into three pieces. The first was a basic seminar discussion of the two articles, R. Ling’s 1990 article, Stranger in Town,  and Tim Ingold’s Temporality of Landscape. Then, play the IF. I ask the students to pay close attention as they played to the way they moved through the game, the things that were easy to do, the things that were difficult to do, and to reflect on their ignorance of the world as they played. The next week, ORBIS. After a few panicky emails, I sent around an email which read in part,

Look at the course objectives. Read Ingold and Ling from week 1. Play through the interactive fiction, paying attention to how you navigate space, and how space is represented. Play with Orbis, looking at the ways the connectivity of places – or the perception of closeness/farness – can change with the seasons, the mode of travel and so on (and note that mode of travel will correlate often with social class!). Reflect on all of this. How is space socially constructed?

Now, I had modeled in class how to interact with both the game and the simulation. I figured this would be a bit of an easy way into some of the more substantive issues of the course. I should’ve known better. This is what happened next. It sounded a bit like this:

Play a game? A game? But… but… we’re history students! We don’t know what you want us to write!

There was great resistance to the idea that playing the game could have some sort of valid pedagogical outcome, which came down to a very instrumental view of what education is about. Write the standard historical essay. Write the midterm. Write the final. Get grade. Repeat. The sheer fear of doing something other than writing a research essay meant that I had to throw my lesson plans out the window. To calm nerves, we had to play the game together, as a class, me running the computer, them suggesting things to try. By turning it into a collaborative game, it seemed to take some of the danger away – what if I play the game wrong? Students still had to write their own reflection pieces, but I discovered that I couldn’t push them to do the playing on their own, at least at first.

So was it worthwhile? The best results looked similar to what student A wrote:

[...]The ‘PlayFic’ interactive fiction (Graham: 2012) further emphasizes the fragmentary nature of travel and reminds the reader of the social interactions that would have been necessary for the ancient traveller in order to properly find their way amidst an absence of public transport, urban or international, and of regular signposting. This immersive fiction gives a practical experience of ancient travel and space to modern readers, and also attempts to impart the sense of noise, movement and business of cities and urban hubs. Far from the neat remove of ‘Orbis’, the IF conveys the messiness and overwhelming frustration of packed city-living and uncertain directionality in travel. No clear route may be chosen, but must instead be gleaned through socializing with others. Directions are had on an ad hoc basis. Travel on foot or by ox-cart are cross-over option features in both ‘Orbis’’ and ‘PlayFic’s’ journeys, highlighting popular means of transit in antiquity.

Ingold’s article, ‘The Temporality of Landscape’ (1993) gives a philosophical explanation between the concepts of landscape and environment, cityscape and taskscape, seeking to intelligize cityscape and landmarks through cultural/temporal perception. At the same time, Ingold echoes the blueprint for ancient travel as laid out in ‘Orbis’ and the IF: “In the landscape, the distance between two places, A and B, is experienced as a journey made, a bodily movement from one place to the other, and the gradually changing vistas along the route” (Ingold, 154:1993). As well, the connective importance of networks and crossed pathways is given consideration: “…the landscape is the world as it is known to those who dwell therein,  who inhabit its places and journey along the paths connecting them” (Ingold, 156:1993).

And sometimes, people got very much into the details. B, who was concerned more with ORBIS than the Interactive Fiction, wrote:

[...]The Roman world in the first half of the fifth century A.D. was plagued with invasions both before and during the reign of Attila the Hun, the scourge of God. The greatest problem that the Romans had with the Huns was that, even when they were not organized under Attila, they moved so quickly, in a time when long range communication moved only as fast as a messenger on a horse, that The Romans could not respond quickly enough. By the time they arrived, the Huns had already sacked and burned the countryside after simply riding past all Roman fortified locations. In the year 443, the Huns sacked the city of Philippopolis and Margus faster than the Romans could respond. If we use ORBIS, and place in the start city of, say, Apulum which is well into Hunnic territory in the 5th century, and place the destination in ORBIS as Philippopolis and place the speed at which the Huns would’ve ridden, ‘horse relay’, we can get an approximate duration of travel; in this case, 2.6 days in the month of July on the fastest route possible. Also, ORBIS shows the route taken by means of primary roads; this is also important because the Huns, who would’ve known very little of Roman Geography, would just have followed the roads straight from Apulum to Philippopolis. If we assume that a messanger from Philippopolis races to Constantinople on ‘horse relay’, it would take him 1.7 days to get there and then another 7.1 days for the army to March immediately from there to Philippopolis in order to save the city. Thus it would take approximately 9 days in order for the Romans to support the semi-defenseless city!

So did we learn anything? The majority of students came away with at least an idea that how we imagine space is at least as important as how space actually lays out, geographically speaking. The best students did what A & B did here, making far deeper connections. I certainly learned that the only way I’m going to get any traction for my playful approaches to history in these parts is to break everything into very small pieces, and to do as much of it collaboratively, in class room time, as possible. I need to ‘flip’ my classroom, leaving lectures to video and the hands-on stuff when I’m right there to guide, to reassure, to cajole, and to encourage.

It’s sad, in a way, that we as educators have beaten so much of the playfulness out of students that when encouraged to go play, the first instinct is to run back to the box.


New study investigates fate of the criminal corpse

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The Reward of Cruelty by William Hogarth

University of Leicester academics are joining forces with the University of Hertfordshire, to examine the fate of the corpses of executed criminals in a major new project.

Last man in Britian to be hung in a Gibbet - Tyne and Wear Museum. Last man in Britian to be hung in a Gibbet – Tyne and Wear Museum.

Between 1752 and 1832 the bodies of executed murderers were legally denied burial in consecrated ground. Instead they were donated for anatomical dissection or ‘hung in chains’ (displayed in a gibbet). This new research programme brings together scholars from archaeology, medical and criminal history, folklore, literature and philosophy to explore the ways that the dead body of the criminal could still remain a powerful object in it’s own right.

The 5-year project, supported by the Wellcome Trust with a grant of nearly a million pounds, uses the criminal corpse as a focal point from which the team can expand out to explore the many ways that human bodies were understood in the period between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, and how attitudes that took shape at that time continue to affect our ambivalent feelings about how the dead should be treated.

An opportunity to study the power of the body

Programme leader Professor Sarah Tarlow, of the University of Leicester, holding a skull which has been subject to post-mortem examination. Programme leader Professor Sarah Tarlow, of the University of Leicester, holding a skull which has been subject to post-mortem examination.

“This is a great opportunity to study the history of the body at a fascinating time,” said Professor Sarah Tarlow, an archaeologist at the University of Leicester and the leader of the team. “This is a key period in the development of modern medical knowledge, where the inside of the body was carefully explored and described by anatomists. At the same time it was generally believed that the touch of a hanged man’s hand could cure cancers of the neck, and that suicides should be buried with a stake through their bodies.”

The emotive power of  the dead body of the criminal was exploited by the State to enforce conformity with the law; they were exploited as sources of scientific medical knowledge; they gave meaning to places in the landscape, such as ‘Gibbet Hills’ or Hangman’s Rock.  At a popular level, their ghosts were believed to stalk the living and their bodies to be places of lurking malevolence which might threaten our comfortable lives  – as Frankenstein’s monster did.

Professor Peter King, of the University of Leicester’s Centre for English Local History, added: “We aim to look at the whole journey of the criminal body from sentencing to eventual disposal. Sentences passed were not always carried out; we want to find out what determined the eventual fate of the body. We need to locate the places where bodies were dissected and displayed – both when they were hung in chains and when bodies or body parts were preserved as curios or as part of scientific collections.”

Professor Owen Davies of the School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire, explained how the project will also explore the use of criminal corpses in the medical and magical cultures of Europe. “One of the fascinating areas we are researching is how corpses that, in one sense, emanated evil, were also thought to have powerful beneficial healing properties for the living: in short the criminal body was life giving,” he explains.

William Hogarth's The Reward of Cruelty (1751) showing a fanciful version of the dissection of a criminal (copyright: Wellcome Images) William Hogarth’s The Reward of Cruelty (1751) showing a fanciful version of the dissection of a criminal (copyright: Wellcome Images)
Below the print are these final words:
Behold the Villain’s dire disgrace! Not Death itself can end. He finds no peaceful Burial-Place, His breathless Corpse, no friend. Torn from the Root, that wicked Tongue,Which daily swore and curst! Those Eyeballs from their Sockets wrung, That glow’d with lawless Lust! His Heart expos’d to prying Eyes,To Pity has no claim; But, dreadful! from his Bones shall rise, His Monument of Shame.

A modern context

Philosopher Dr Floris Tomasini will work closely with the other team members to trace the history of some of our modern attitudes towards the dead body. “Why is there a public outcry when organs are retained by doctors after a death? Why do we attach so much importance to bringing the bodies of our war dead ‘home’?” asks Dr Tomasini. “These are important questions in moral philosophy, but they have deep historical roots. I am excited to be working in a new way with colleagues from other disciplines.”

The team will be producing a number of academic publications but will also be setting up a website to host an online exhibition and keep a blog of their findings as the project progresses.

Project website:  http://www.le.ac.uk/criminal-bodies

Source: University of Leicester


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[First posted in AWOL 29 October 2009. Most recently updated 31 October 2012]

AIGIS: elektronisk tidsskrift for klassiske studier i Norden
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Platonselskabet Oslo 2005
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AIGIS suppl. I: Festskrift for Chr. Gorm Tortzen.
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