Sticks and Stones and Mammoth Bones
I am once again writing a book on a short deadline. Unlike Heroines of Mercy Street, it is not a book that the Marginalia will have any interest in. My friends and family will feel no need to buy or read it.* I won't post the cover here.** There will be no interviews, guest posts, articles in Time.com, speaking gigs. And yet it is a useful book on a topic in which I've long been interested: a history of architecture for kids.
When I was kid myself, I poured over a similar book time and again. It was part of a series that came with a set of encyclopedias. The books are long gone. I can't remember the title of the series. But I see them clearly in my mind. I remember how they caught my imagination. If I can evoke the same sense of wonder/delight/curiosity in even one kid, this book will be a success as far as I'm concerned.
At the moment, I'm working on the way the shelters built by early humans developed into vernacular architecture--structures built from local materials by local craftsmen in local traditions. The kind of architecture that needs no architect.
The earliest shelters of all, built by nomadic hunters long before we learned to farm, are pretty fascinating. Sometimes early humans took advantage of the natural shelter provided by caves and rock ledges. More often they made camp near water and built temporary shelters from the materials at hand.*** The oldest known example of such a camp is the Terra Amata site near Nice, France--built some 300,000 years ago. (Yes--that is three hundred thousand. No extra zeroes floating around.) The shelters in the camp were more than just hides thrown over some sticks. They dug out a foundation, built a palisade wall of brushwood and set roof supports down the center. The final result was about the size of a mobile home. Even more amazing, there is evidence that they came back year after year and built new huts on the old foundations, kindling the fires in the prior year's ashes. These were not just huts. They were homes.
Humans built shelters on the same basic design for hundreds of thousands of years. One variation in particular caught my imagination: Between 30,000 and 18,000 years ago,**** a culture of mammoth hunters lived in what is now the Ukraine. The region was largely tundra and wood was scarce. The mammoth hunters built huts for a semi-permanent winter camp using framework of mammoth bones instead of wood. Each hut took several hundred mammoth bones--no small feat, even if, as some archaeologists speculate, they gathered bones of animals that had died natural deaths. (Does anyone else get an image of bones scattered across the tundra like litter from a giants' picnic?)
This recreation at Tokyo's National Museum of Nature and Science is much creepier than the one in my imagination.
The moral of the story for me? Humans are ingenious.
*Though My Own True Love is reading the chapters as I produce them: finding the errors, pointing out the things that don't make sense, asking the tough questions. He is the best.
**Unless it turns out to be too cool not to share.
***Because caves weren't always available and they weren't always safe. No one wants to share lodging with a cave bear or other wild predator.
****Practically yesterday compared to the site at Terra Amata
Image courtesy of Momotarou2012, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24773798
Social Science or Humanities? It’s a Conundrum.
Several weeks ago, this question appeared in my email:
The history department at MSU is part of the College of Social Science with Social Work. Yesterday a colleague said she thought it should be in Humanities. I'm curious what you think.
As it turns out, this is something I've spent some time thinking about over the last 30 years.* History is also part of the Social Science Division at the University of Chicago, where I did my graduate work, along with anthropology, economics, political science, psychology and sociology. As someone who worked primarily with sources from literature and the visual arts,** it never felt like a good fit. Today, as a historian-storyteller, I feel more strongly than ever that history belongs with the humanities. My historian friends who use lots of statistical data disagree.
I throw the question out to you, Gentle Readers: History: social science or humanities?
*Actually, now that I stop and count, it's been 36 years. Eeep!
**Though I did build a nifty spreadsheet and perform some statistical analysis regarding the number of Orientalist works in exhibits at the Royal Society in London and the Paris Salon over the course of the nineteenth century--a task that consumed far more time than the final results warranted.
Florence Nightingale Does the Math*
Florence Nightingale is best known for her heroic efforts in the Crimean War,** where she threw open windows, scrubbed filthy floors and equally filthy men,*** bullied doctors and officers on the spot, fought with the British Army's military director, and saved lives.
She returned home a heroine. Victorian Britain loved to celebrate a celebrity. Nightingale was the recipient of hundreds of poems extolling the Lady with a Lamp. Opportunists printed her picture on souvenirs of every kind: including pottery figurines, lace mats, prints, and paper bags. If Bobblehead dolls had existed at the time, she'd have been Bobbled for sure.
At first Nightingale tried to keep a low-profile. She even traveled home under the unimaginative pseudonym of Miss Smith. She soon came to realize that she could use her celebrity to effect change. With the help of Queen Victoria, who was one of her biggest fans, she convinced the government to set up a Royal Commission to study the health of the army.
One of the lesser known facts about Nightingale is that she was a STEM girl. As a child she loved organizing data. She catalogued her shell collection with precisely drawn tables and lists. When her parents took her and her sisters on a tour of Europe, she collected population statistics . Later she studied mathematics with a personal tutor--not a normal choice for a young woman at the time. She once claimed that she found the sight of a long column of numbers "perfectly reviving."
Rather than leaving the question of the army's health to the Royal Commission, Nightingale analyzed the army data herself, working with leading statistician William Farr and sanitation expert John Sutherland of the Sanitary Commission. She reached the conclusion that 16,000 of the 18,000 deaths in the Crimean War were the result of preventable diseases.
Nightingale knew that her love for the clarity of numerical tables is not shared by all. She decided to present her data in a revolutionary way: statistical graphics. **** Her "rose diagram", a variation on the modern pie chart, presented her figures in a dramatic and easily understood form.
She went on to spearhead other reform campaigns, using a combination of statistical analysis and expert advice. She prepared by reading the best information available, collecting her own information if good studies didn't exist, interviewing experts, and testing her recommended changes before releasing her results. The "Lady with the Lamp" gained a new nickname, "the passionate statistician".
Florence Nightingale: founder of modern nursing, social reformer, grandmother of the info-graphic.
*With a hat tip to long-time blog reader Sam Guard, who reminded me of this part of the story.
**Publicized by the indefatigable William Howard Russell
***Or more accurately, caused others to scrub.
**** Farr thought it was a bad idea: "You complain that your report would be dry. The dryer the better. Statistics should be the dryest of all reading."