The partition of Ireland, ca. 999,997,987 BC

I have just begun reading The Origins of the Irish, which uses archaeology, geology, and linguistics to trace the beginnings of the people who would one day give the world Luke Kelly and Ronnie Drew.

The author (J.P. Mallory) and publisher (Thames & Hudson) begin their narrative in the deepest geological past, but the editing displays a delightful awareness of recent politics and history. The sub-section on the billion-year-old split of the earth's then single land mass is headed "Partition," for instance.

The next subsection, about the coming together of the two land masses that now form roughly the island's northwestern and southeastern halves is headed "The unification of Ireland."

No other headings that I can find display similar cheek, though I suspect that some observers of the Ireland of recent decades could have fun with "Age of dinosaurs."

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

(Im)personal

One thing I like about Barry Cunliffe's popular-science writing is that he does not open his prefaces, introductions, or first chapters with a personal anecdote. He does not, in other words condescend to the reader (and, not incidentally, amplify his own importance) with some forced or touching incident of doubtful relevance to the matter at hand.

That's not to say Cunliffe effaces his personality. Rather, he expresses it through his enthusiasm for his subject. Britain Begins and now Europe Between the Oceans leave me with an impression of Cunliffe's lively intelligence as well as awe and fascination with the range and depth of European geography, archaeology, and history.

Cunliffe's books led me to a book by another author on a related subject that opens with a long anecdote whose point is debatable. The anecdote would make a charming inclusion in a memoir of My Summers in Wales, but its relevance to the subject — population genetics — is questionable.

That's the preface. In the main body of the book, the text abounds with clearlys and significantlys and to summarizes, sure signs that the author lacks confidence in his ability to tell a story so feels he must keep repeating it.

I learned early in my career as a copy editor that even the most cack-handed word-butcher can produce elegant, affecting prose when writing personal memoir. Good writers can make the leap, bringing the freshness and natural flow of memoir to their exploration of other subjects. Cunliffe can; his inferior follower cannot, so I wish he'd stuck to the first until he could master the second. (Of course, with the advent of the god-awful coinage journaling, personal writing may have turned to crap, too.)

A few tips for would-be science writers who feel they must relate to the reader: Don't talk about your long-ago summers. Stay away from crusty but beloved aunts or grandfathers. And never, ever mention idylls, Welsh or otherwise.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Unmitigated Cunliffe

Relaxing in the corporate-affiliated café of a chain bookstore, having lined up with people ordering 24-ounce ventis.

I'm here browsing more Barry Cunliffe, whose book Britain Begins continues to offer a stimulating, plausible account of the peopling of Great Britain. Among the results of the population movements are those great Neolithic monuments I love to visit. (Call me old-fashioned, but part of me feels the world has been going straight to hell since the onset of the Bronze Age.) A summary chronology: Barrows came first, then passage graves, then the circular "henges," one of which you might know. Historical context only enhances the monuments' power to inspire awe. I now half-expect to visit examples in the Orkneys for next year's pre- or post-Crimefest trip.

Cunliffe also redeems himself for his earlier misuse of mitigate with this entertaining passage:

"The basis of subsistence was now much broader and much more reassuring than in past times, when survival depended on unmitigated reindeer eked out by horse meat."

I don't know about you, but I find unmitigated reindeer beguiling, not least for the images it conjures of Neolithic children complaining: "Reindeer again? This stuff sucks!" Cunliffe's correct use of eke out is a bonus.

All is forgiven, professor.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Goddamnit! plus thoughts on Barry Cunliffe

Barry Cunliffe is a wide-ranging scholar, an eminent archaeologist, a stimulating thinker, and a fluent and engaging writer. But he (or his editors) doesn't know what mitigate means. Here's a sentence from Britain Begins, his history of the peopling of Britain and Ireland, boldface mine:

"A genetically conditioned predisposition to be mobile is, however, balanced by a sense of territoriality which mitigates against wandering."

I knew a professor at the Univerity of Pennsylvania who similarly misused mitigate for militate. Mitigate means to ease, mollify, or alleviate: A nip of schnapps mitigated the surgery's painful aftereffects. Militate means to have an effect, to weigh (against), or, loosely, to conspire or work (against): His insistence on correct word usage militates against the possibility that he will ever be promoted. Militate takes a preposition (against). Mitigate does not.

I don't know what Cunliffe's copy editor was doing the day that sentence came across his or her desk. Dreaming of citizen journalism, self-publishing, and the benefits of overthrowing gatekeepers, maybe.

Cunliffe, meanwhile, is even more impressive than I thought. I'd known of his work on the big-picture issue of population origins, but he's also a nuts-and-bolts archaeologist. I have just learned that he was involved in excavating Fishbourne Roman Palace in England, one of the most moving, because most human, of all Roman remains. This knowledge mitigates, if only slightly, my annoyance at his book's misuse of a word.

*

What misuses of words have driven you nuts in your reading?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

How the new imperils the ancient in Portugal

(Almendres cromlech; photos by your humble blogkeeper)

Stonehenge is the Xerox of Neolithic monuments; guides to and promoters of every other such monument compare theirs to Stonehenge, usually to note that theirs is thousands of years older.

The Almendres cromlech, a group of ninety-five standing stones outside Évora, is about 7,000 years old, predating Stonehenge by 2,000 years, our guide told us this morning, and he's no Portuguese chauvinist. In fact, he said, Portugal does a bad job of protecting the ancient monuments in which the country's southwest is so rich and of educating the public about the monuments.

The three we saw today [the cromlech, its accompanying menhir (left), and the Great Dolmen of Zambujeiro] lack the most basic facilities. There are no visitors' centers, no explanatory plaques, no trash cans or bathrooms. No postcard sellers, no bookstores, nothing to let visitors know they are in the company of anything but what locals, ignorant of the monuments' origins, traditionally called "castles of the Moors."

The dolmen (right), in fact, a high-end burial chamber from late in the Neolithic age, about 2,000 years younger than the cromlech, has been stripped of the earth that covered it, subjected to a series of half-arsed recovery efforts, and left in such danger of collapse that it looks like a row of dominoes about to tumble, or like a mouth full of horribly misfit teeth.

Back to Stonehenge. The British, our guide said, are the models for archaeological preservation and education. In Portugal, he said, appeals to history fall on deaf ears that hang off the head of mercenary politicians, and some of the most important monuments are in private hands, which bars UNESCO from stepping in and declaring the area a World Heritage Site.

Portugal's rich landowners are greedy and uneducated, he said, and the local people, loath to give up their traditional ways of life, resist the idea of rebuilding their local economies around tourism. So, in the end, I'd say I learned at least as much about contemporary Portugal as I did about its Neolithic predecessors.

The guide was an eloquent spokesman for public archaeology, and that's the cause to which he and the group of which he is part devote themselves. The group is called Ebora Megalithica, and I hope you'll join me in reading up on the group and, above all, on the wonderful landscape and history it seeks to protect.

(Read Detectives Beyond Borders' thoughts on some Bronze Age monuments.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011