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you WISH you were eating sweet mulberries from a stranger’s overgrown tree at twilight in a silent neighborhood

why is this getting notes. i was just bragging about my evening it was meant to be like a 2-3 note post with nothing but likes from mutuals

Politely, you did post something quiet and sweet on the yearning website

ok that one’s on me

this is a poem. To me.

Yesterday I almost cried because my baby cousin ran up to my grandmother and was like. “Ha! Buhbuh ba ha.” And she said okay you want to show me something? And he led her over to the garden patch and crouched down and pointed at rocks and plants and was like. “Ah. Habah ba ah” as she listened attentively.

And I was like that happened 1,000 years ago. Probably 10,000 years ago. Maybe 100,000. The youngest human in a group went to the oldest one and said to the best of their ability “come see.” And the adult went.

this is such a beautiful post it doesn't need my dumb addition, but i can't fit this in the tags. at the archaeological site Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic there are a bunch of really really fascinating finds and I'm only going to tell you about one tiny detail of one of the most interesting sites in the world.

at this settlement 20-30,000 years ago there lived a person who appears to have been a sort of sorcerer-grandmother-ceramics artist and her workshop was preserved very well in the sedimentary layers. her hut where she had her kilns was full of little sculptures of animals and people that seem to have been made to explode in the kiln on purpose, we're not sure why but nevermind. the relevant detail is that when you sculpt something with your hands and then fire it, your fingerprints can be preserved in the surface of the clay forever, so we have fingerprints of ancient ceramics artists that have survived for tens of thousands of years. and one of the major artifacts from Dolni Vestonice has a fingerprint on it that is so small it could only have belonged to a child

so this shaman-grandmother-sculptor, who was buried with her pet fox by the way, had children running through her workshop and touching everything she made while she was at her mysterious work of creating the world's oldest ceramics, none of which appear to be bowls, bottles, pots, or any "useful" items at all, but rather a collection of animal and human and sometimes anthropomorphic figures, some of which appear to be self portraits. exactly the same as sandersstudios' grandmother being led to the garden by an excited baby. we've all been the same for 30,000 years.

ancient humans were also just some guy, if you got a baby from 60,000 BC and raised him in the 21st century he’d just be another teen boy named logan who tech decks off your arm

this boy from tom björklund’s art WOULD own a minecraft creeper plushy

YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ok ok ok I’m so sorry but I HAVE to talk about this

there’s something so loving about what tom björklund does and just- fuck I’m foaming at the mouth here

facial reconstruction isn’t a new concept (see the Kennewick Man/Patrick Stewart incident) but it’s difficult to find people that are truly good at it! genuinely there is a big gap in this field because there just aren’t a lot of people who do it professionally!

facial reconstruction, especially from bone or bone fragments, is such a fascinating intersection of art and science, and a tremendous amount of care is put into determining what these people might have looked like.

with that said, it’s VERY easy to screw it up

configuring muscle attachments and fat distribution is genuinely *very* difficult to do, and when you do it badly, you get this (pictured above). by adding too much muscle, they gave this 600 year old man a VERY interesting jawline (notice that the bottom of the chin doesn’t match up with the bone at all!) and they *really* made him look older than he was. would you believe me if I said that he was estimated to only be 46 years old?

basically I’m just REALLY excited about Tom Björklund’s art because it’s amazing work, just from an anthropology perspective

just look at this!!!

facial reconstructions aren’t just an artsy thing that you can just say “oh, that’s cool!” to

by giving these people faces, even if they aren’t always accurate, we open the doors for the average person to connect with the past at a very human level. sure, looking at bones is cool, but looking at art of someone that lived thousands of years ago is *incredible*

looking at a picture of a boy that lived thousands of years ago and thinking “yeah, he would’ve loved Minecraft” is EXACTLY the reaction that these pieces are meant to elicit

there are very few ancient artifacts that make me more emotional than roman tombstones that thank the reader for stopping by and wish them well. there's simply something so sweet and gentle to me about imagining a traveler stopping along the road to read someone's final dedication and being sent away with the blessings of a thankful ghost

marcus caecilius: good luck and good health to you. sleep without a care.

me:

I love the idea of dead gods. Not in the sense of “hey i killed something supernaturally strong” but in the sense of “i killed it and it’s still a god.” It is still worshipped. prayers are still answered. miracles are performed in its name, even as it lies pierced by a thousand swords and burning with chemical fire. even as it drifts through vacuum, decapitated and bleeding molten rock. in cosmic spite of being shot through each eye and hurled into a plasma reactor, it still radiates the power of the divine in a way that primitive death cannot smother. the nature of godchild is not so simple as to be tied to the mortality, or immortality, of any living being.

In science that's called a whalefall :)

This stuffed bird was sealed in the frozen barrows of Pazyryk, Siberia, for more than two millennia, where a unique microclimate enabled it to be preserved. The permafrost ice lense formation that sits just beneath the barrows provides an insulating layer, preventing the soil from heating during the summer and allowing it to quickly freeze during the winter; these conditions produce a separate microclimate within the stone walls of the barrows themselves, thereby aiding in preservation.

This is just one of the many well-preserved artifacts that have been found at Pazyryk. These artifacts are attributed to the Scythian/Altaic cultures.

Source:

And a similar artifact from the same collection:

Credit to SixteenSeveredHands on Reddit for locating the source. Check out their post for further information!

They forget to mention that the industrialist also eventually caught all the fish severely depleting and eventually destroying the balanced ecosystem.

and that the industrialist had to create a market for the fish by advertising.

ID: An excerpt from “Timeless Simplicity” by John Lane that reads, The industrialist was horrified to find the fisherman lying beside his boat, smoking a pipe. “Why aren’t you fishing?” asked the industrialist. “Because I’ve caught enough fish for the day.” “Why don’t you catch some more?” “What would I do with them?” “Earn more money. Then you could have a motor fixed to your boat and go into deeper waters and catch more fish. That would bring you money to buy nylon nets, so more fish, more money. Soon you would have enough to buy two boats, even a fleet of boats, then you could be rich like me.” “What would I do then?” “Then you could sit back and enjoy life.” “What do you think I’m doing now?” / end ID

This reminds me of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s descriptions of Indigenous harvesting & fishing practices that looked like laziness to colonizers (extra paragraph breaks added by me for accessibility):

‘ Early colonists on Turtle Island were stunned by the plenitude they found here, attributing the richness to the bounty of nature.

Settlers in the Great Lakes wrote in their journals about the extraordinary abundance of wild rice harvested by Native peoples; in just a few days, they could fill their canoes with enough rice to last all year.

But the settlers were puzzled by the fact that, as one of them wrote, “the savages stopped gathering long before all the rice was harvested.” She observed that “the rice harvest starts with a ceremony of thanksgiving and prayers for good weather for the next four days. They will harvest dawn till dusk for the prescribed four days and then stop, often leaving much rice to stand unreaped. This rice, they say, is not for them but for the Thunders. Nothing will compel them to continue, therefore much goes to waste.”

The settlers took this as certain evidence of laziness and lack of industry on the part of the heathens. They did not understand how indigenous land-care practices might contribute to the wealth they encountered.

I once met an engineering student visiting from Europe who told me excitedly about going ricing in Minnesota with his friend’s Ojibwe family. He was eager to experience a bit of Native American culture. They were on the lake by dawn and all day long they poled through the rice beds, knocking the ripe seed into the canoe. “It didn’t take long to collect quite a bit,” he reported, “but it’s not very efficient. At least half of the rice just falls in the water and they didn’t seem to care. It’s wasted.”

As a gesture of thanks to his hosts, a traditional ricing family, he offered to design a grain capture system that could be attached to the gunwales of their canoes. He sketched it out for them, showing how his technique could get 85 percent more rice. His hosts listened respectfully, then said, “Yes, we could get more that way. But it’s got to seed itself for next year. And what we leave behind is not wasted. You know, we’re not the only ones who like rice. Do you think the ducks would stop here if we took it all?” Our teachings tell us to never take more than half. ’

I have a lot of feelings on how indigenous groups who didn’t build permanent structures like cities aren’t seen as being as sophisticated as ones who built large cities, without accounting for the fact that maybe it’s in our values systems to leave as light of a footprint as possible and it’s important that our structures are easily taken down or fade with the passage of time because it’s easier on the landscape, but ya know.

This made me think of the story one of my Coast Salish acquaintances tells of how her family would travel from the Puget Sound up Mt. Rainier every year and, sure, following herds but also they had berry bushes and trees and prairies (with camas is the one she always talks about but I’m sure other foods) that were in the care of specific families so they also followed the plants through the year. They cultivated and cared for them, not just coming to gather and move on to the unknown. They came back and to the same places, the same plants and trees every year.

I think a lot of people mistake what a huge connection that is to land and territory. They hear “nomadic” and dismiss it without realizing. It doesnt mean you dont have roots in the area. It means your roots are so ingrained in the area outsiders dont even see them there.

!!!!!

I’m actually writing about this right now, this old human concept I think of as caretaker agriculture

I tell the story of a group of prehistoric nomads that do little things as they pass along a regular route – fell a tree to let the berry bushes get more light, pull out a few kinds of shrubs and burn all those seeds so there’s less competition, dig a shallow trench from the beaver pond to the low meadow. Uproot the trees that only bear a little fruit and leave the over achievers to propagate. Little things as they pass each year, until their route becomes a luscious garden in an orchard of plenty; which, btw, is what colonizers describe finding in parts of the Americas, and in other places around the world.

They take similar care of with the herd they follow. They know the members of the herd very well. The herd has a bull these last few years that is especially caring and protective, keeps the calves safe and doesn’t cause disturbances among the cows, so they will be hunting mostly young bulls that want to challenge him for a few seasons, let such a great old bull father as many calves as possible. In past seasons they hunted cows that that have ignored their calves to ruinous results or started trouble among the herd. In the spring and summer they almost do not hunt at all among the beasts they follow, letting the herd have its calves and raise them. Anyway, that is a time when there is much available for humans to eat. When they pass through the wolves’ territory, they sacrifice two or three large adults and leave them, so the calves are not preyed on, saving maybe ten young lives. Old Ursa on the hill can have whatever she takes, who wants to stop her? She usually only takes one or two in any case, and she’s fresh out of hibernation with cubs to feed. Her father was a menace and in the old days they would sacrifice one and leave it just to keep him from coming too near. In the winter, there is less food for humans and less food for the herd. Hunting among the herd at this time helps ensure those that remain have plenty to eat during the scarcity of the coldest months. And after all, many more calves have reached adulthood under the care of the people than would have otherwise, the herd can spare some now. No one comes close to starvation this way, humans and herd beasts alike come through the winter in good health.

Anyway, yeah, caretaker agriculture is an amazing and ancient agriculture technique that is in many ways greater and more impressive than having farms and ranches, and something colonizing cultures never really recognized as even existing.

shit man this got me emotional

You ever think about how unified humanity is by just everyday experiences? Tudor peasants had hangnails, nobles in the Qin dynasty had favorite foods, workers in the 1700s liked seeing flowers growing in pavement cracks, a cook in medieval Iran teared up cutting onions, a mom in 1300 told her son not to get grass stains on his clothes, some girl in the past loved staying up late to see the sun rise.

there are scriptures all over the world painstakingly crafted hundreds of years ago with paw prints and spelling mistakes or drawings covering up mistakes. a bunch of teenage girls 2000 years ago gathered to walk around their hometown, getting fast food and laughing with their friends. two friends shared blankets before people lived in houses. a mother ran a fine comb through her child’s hair and told it to stop squirming sometime in the 1000s. there are covered up sewing mistakes in couture dresses from the 1800s, some poor roman burnt their food so well past recognition that they just buried the entire pot. there are broken dishes hidden in gardens of people no one even remembers anymore

children eleven thousand years ago enjoyed jumping around in puddles made from the footprints of a giant sloth. children loved muddy puddles so long ago there were still megafauna alive

There’s a record of an emperor of Japan in the 9th century talking about his cat - how pretty it is, and how it stalks birds and curls up in a circle and meows mournfully for company and escaped its collar. All completely normal ordinary cat things. And then it ends with him saying “it is superior to all other cats”. I am delighted to be united across 1200 years with this fellow cat owner with exactly the same feelings about his cat that I have about mine.

Learning that certain things that you thought were widely accepted at the time actually had a lot of pushback kind of shakes up your perception of the world a little.

Like for example when a lot of people in the 1400s and 1500s read the Malleus Maleficarum, basically the book that set off the trend of witch trials in Europe, they knew it was bad and even called it unethical. And before 1400 most people in Europe didn’t even believe that witches existed. Because most Christians before the 1400s didn’t even believe that magic existed. Because “magic” was thought to come from pagan gods, and, you will note, most monotheists don’t believe that other gods exist. So witches weren’t even something that people thought about.

And when Christopher Columbus was off committing crimes against humanity a bunch of people were like “Hey, this guy is committing crimes against humanity. Someone stop him.” And eventually they did, even if they did stop him far too late. He was fired from his position as governor. He was arrested and banished from Spain. And there were people, both native South Americans and Spaniards, who actively opposed the colonization efforts while they were happening.

The book How to Plan a Crusade goes into detail about how much propaganda and recruiting efforts were needed for each crusade because people didn’t just abandon their lives and ride off into the desert without incentive or convincing, and even then plenty of people thought it was a waste of manpower or (often rightfully!) considered crusaders to be bandits not to be trusted.

When I was growing up in Virginia it was heavily implied that the abolitionist movement was a fringe thing in some Northern states up until just before the Civil war, but no. Apparently it was so large that when Jefferson bought the Louisiana territories there was a push by abolitionist lawmakers to immediately end slavery and provide all freedmen the means to found their own communities in the new territories as a form of reparations, since one of the southern arguments for the continuation of slavery was basically “Well, we’ve treated them so poorly that if we freed them then the damage we did to race relations is so great that coexistence is impossible.”

there have always been, in past times as today, a range of people in every society, some of whom were even then fighting for a more just and compassionate accord with their fellow man and some of whom let their greeds and hatreds rule them to the worst allowable excesses. the goal of classics and history education is to teach you enough context to discern between the two, not only in the past but in the present

The fact that dogs like music and prefer it over silence gets me. I imagine their ancestors thousands of years ago wanting to be near the music and the warm fires and the scraps of food the humans provided, being afraid of it just as much as they wanted it. Grey wolves just in the tree line listing and watching, chin on their paw as dogs do now. Maybe they got bold and howled along. Some went back to the forest to sing their own songs and some moved forth into the warmth and sat by the fire and became dogs.

@trustmeimageographer reblogged your post and added:

They drastically increase peasant food security and social autonomy.

The main staple of medieval agriculture was grain–wheat, barley, oats, or rye. All that grain has to be harvested in a relatively short window, about a week or two. It has to be cut down (scythed), and stored in the field in a safe and effective way (stooked); then it has to be brought to a barn and vigorously beaten (threshed) to separate the grain from the stalks and the seed husks. It can be stored for a few weeks or months in this form before it spoils or loses nutritional value. 

Then it has to be ground into flour. In the earlier middle ages, peasants could grind their own flour by hand using small querns, but landlords had realized that if they wanted to get more money out of their peasants, it was more effective for the entire village to have one large mill that everyone used. Peasants had to pay a fee to have their flour ground–and it might say something that there are practically no depictions of millers in medieval English literature in which the miller is not a corrupt thief. 

Then the flour has to be processed to make most of its nutrients edible to humans, which ideally involves yeast–either it’s made into bread which takes hours to make every time (and often involves paying to use the village’s communal bread oven) and spoils within a few days, or it’s made into weak ale, which takes several weeks to make, but can keep for several months. 

Potatoes, in comparison…

Potatoes have considerably more nutrients and calories than any similar crop available in medieval Europe–they beat turnips, carrots, parsnips, beets, or anything else all to heck. I don’t know if they beat wheat out for calories per acre, but practically…

When you dig a potato out of the ground (which you can do at any time within a span of several months), you can bury it in the ashes of a fire for an hour, or you can boil it in water for 20 minutes.

Then you eat it. Boom. Done. (I mean, if you’re not fussy, you could even eat them raw.)

You store the ones you don’t want right now in a root cellar and plant some of them in the spring to get between a fivefold and tenfold return on your crop.

Potatoes don’t just feed you–they free you. Grain-based agriculture relies on lots of people working together to get the work done in a very short length of time. It relies on common infrastructure that is outside the individual peasant’s control. The grain has to be brought to several different locations to be processed, and it can be seized or taxed at any of those points. It’s very open to exploitation.

TW: Genocide The Irish Potato Famine happened because the English colonizers of Ireland demanded rents and taxes that were paid in grain, and it ended up that you didn’t really get to keep much of the grain you grew. So the Irish farmed wheat in fields to pay the English, and then went home and ate potatoes from their gardens. And then, because they were eating only one specific breed of potatoes, a blight came through and wiped all their potatoes out, and then they starved. So English narratives about the potato famine tended to say “Oh yes, potato blight, very tragic,” and ignore the whole “The English were taking all the grain” aspect, but the subtext here is: Potatoes are much harder to tax or steal than grain.

So… yeah. I realize it’s very counterproductive to explain to everybody why I’m always like “OMG POTATO NO” when I wish I could just chill out and not care about this. But the social implications of the humble potato are rather dramatic.

#very cool! #reference #this is why taxes on china were collected in rice too #for the same grain reasons #bc the peasants just ate yams which were quick and easy to grow #but rice is backbreaking excruciating work that keeps the peasant population under control #and requires a collectivity and organization that the bureaucratic state can provide #ESPECIALLY since you need irrigation for rice even more than you do for wheat and stuff #and irrigation planning and upkeep is a huge part of a local bureaucratic official’s duties in ancient china #i had no idea about the miller stuff in medieval times that’s very fascinating #there’s a lot to be said for how monks were healthier #bc they got to grow vegetables #and they were allowed economic autonomy as a result #but there’s another essay for that (x)

I’m a little curious tho, how does just seeds from the grain go bad?

Like if they lose their nutritional value so quickly how do they get planted the next year?

Part of how medieval farmers avoided the problem of grain spoilage over the winter was to plant their grain crop in the late autumn, and let it start growing over the winter. Then they’d sow again in early spring. The winter crop might get blighted by the cold, or it might come up early; the spring crop might not sprout as much and would take longer, but it might help you out if your winter crop failed. They were kind of hedging their bets in an imperfect system.

Faster causes of of grain spoilage are visibly “something has ruined this grain”–insects, molds, or vermin get in at the grain, so your grain is much more likely to be eaten, pooped on, or rotten when you take it out of storage. 

If you can get grain to survive those quicker methods, eventually grain can spoil simply by being exposed to air. After a few months the oil inside it oxidizes, which destroys a lot of its nutrients. You might get it to sprout six months later, but it’s a lot less nutritious if you eat it, and if you grow it the plants will get less of a head start before they have to rely on their root system to bring in nutrients from the soil.

Very occasionally, archeologists turn up ancient seeds that still sprout, but those seeds are usually exceptionally well preserved–for example, sealed in a jar in a tomb that was undisturbed for thousands of years and magically it never got hot or wet enough to spoil. But you can’t store large amounts of grain like that, partly because the simple existence of large amounts of grain will attract pests that will spoil it. The ones that survive are the one-in-a-million cases.

My absolute favourite under-acknowledged agricultural hazard is self-heating and thermal runaways.

If a plant isn’t actively growing it is, in fact, decomposing - the speed at which it’s doing that depends on things like external temperature, moisture, etc and can be anywhere from very slow to very fast.

Stuff that is decomposing produces heat.

Grain is an amazing insulator, so all of that heat gets trapped in the middle of the bin.

High heat encourages more decomp. Which produces more heat. Which produces more decomp. Which, eventually, can lead to a thermal runaway, in which the grain passes its ignition point and begins to smolder. (And if you’re really unlucky, that can spark a dust explosion.)

This is one of the reasons that grain farmers are Very Concerned about moisture content - high moisture content means faster decomposition, and thus faster spoilage but also the risk of your grain bin blowing up. Modern farmers carefully control the moisture content and air circulation of their stored grain to maximize quality and shelf life, while avoiding inconvenient explosions.

I don’t know that medieval farmers ever would have produced enough grain to be at risk of thermal runaway - but there are hazards to storing large amounts of grain even aside from pests and loss of nutritional value.

Adding to this only that, from the POV of a fantasy writer attempting to deal realistically with much of the above ( and a culture that I’ve decided does not have the potato), it’s really handy that the culture in question has a lot of magic users.  :)  …And very committed “corn kings”.

Big mood for me these days:

Absolutely

After Delilah fell to the assassin Daud, her magic was lost and the Coven scattered. I made a new life in Karnaca. Then I heard her whispering from the Void, leading me to the Duke, who heard those same whispers. Together we worked to bring Delilah back into the world, changing the Empire from the home of Aramis Stilton, three years ago. Across the Isles, all of us who’d been with her at Brigmore and before, we felt the magic return. Others joined; new faces, new blood. Now, Delilah is immortal, forever. She holds Dunwall and we’ve turned to corrupting the Oracular Order. The Overseers take guidance from their prothetic sisters and soon we’ll influence their dreams and visions.

Virtual Tourism in Karnaca - 6

The Royal Conservatory

You can tell when someone’s frame of reference for “normal people” is more “people at the church sponsored ice cream social” and less “people on the bus”

the people in the notes saying “people on the bus aren’t normal” are the people this post is talking about.

I took the bus for three years when I lived in Honolulu and haven't lived anywhere with even usable public transit since, but in those three years I had dozens of utterly bizarre experiences that were also Perfectly Normal. This is because the human condition is vast and also Very fucking Weird.

Kid one the bus next to me whose backpack starts moving and it turns out he's got three chickens and a painted turtle he caught in there? This is Perfectly Normal. Humans have been catching small game and transporting it home in whatever they had since we invented bags to put chickens and turtles in.

I traded him three king-size snickers bars I had on me for the turtle because I vaguely remembered that many freshwater turtles were toxic to eat (incorrectly, as it turns out, but this was when I still had a Nokia Brick that lived a blissful, internet-free existence), and didn't want him accidentally poisoning his family, but didn't want to just. Steal his hard-won turtle. This is Perfectly Normal. Humans have been cautious about poisons, looking out for strangers kids and bartering shit since before we were technically humans, probably.

Having acquired a turtle, I now needed to transport the turtle to the on-campus pond that effectively served as an Invasive Freshwater Turtle Containment Zone, but did not have a bag that could adequately contain him so I had to sit the rest of that bus ride, at the station and all through the next bus ride holding the turtle like the world's angriest hamburger. Multiple people were curious about and delighted with the turtle. This is Perfectly Normal. Humans love an animal, especially one that is capable of appearing grumpy, and hands are for holding things.

By the time I got back to Campus, the anthropology and child psychology building that the Invasive Turtle Containment Pond was in had closed, so I had to figure out how to climb the tree over the wall and get down off the roof while holding The World's Angriest And Sharpest Hamburger. I eventually ended up having to briefly shove the turtle into by bra to get up to the initial branch and off the roof without breaking an ankle. This is Perfectly Normal. Humans are, as a species, a bunch of barely-evolved arboreal frugivores and really good at Tree Physics, and I don't know a single titty-having bitch out there that hasn't used their bra as Emergency Pockets at least once, if not daily.

I released the turtle into the Turtle Containment Pond and then had to solve the problem of getting back OUT of the locked building, but Nokia Brick never loses a signal or drops a call (including that time I accidentally dropped it off a 13-story building in the middle of a call to my parents and the damn thing BOUNCED but kept the line open. I miss that phone every day.) and while campus security has been carefully trained to not let people IN to places without proper ID and a call to someone inside, they assume that if you got locked in somewhere, that you got in by legitimate means and not Lemur Shenanigans, so i just called them, apologized that I'd been working late with headphones on and didn't realize I'd been locked in. This is Perfectly Normal, people have been lying to cops since laws were invented, and will continue to do so because all cops are bastards.

Anyway, everyone should have access to good public transportation because freedom of movement is a human right and meeting a broad spectrum of humanity is good for your mental health and spiritual welfare.