Category: Archaeology

Tolkien as translator: the anthropology of Middle-Earth

[Author’s note: Sorry for the great delay in posting! I promise that I am not dead, and neither is this blog – I’ve been involved in an ethnographic project since, well, the day after my last post here, and while it doesn’t end for another two weeks, I thought I might check in, just in case anyone is still reading. Expect a flurry of posts to come in late August once I regain my bearings.]

Several months ago, the Tolkien Studies on the Web blog reported that the Maya epigraphist / linguist / archaeologist Marc Zender, who is a lecturer at Harvard, is currently offering (and presumably is nearly concluded?) a summer course entitled, ‘Tolkien as translator: Language, culture, and society in Middle-Earth‘. It looks like a really fascinating approach, from a scholar whose work on Maya hieroglyphic writing will doubtless provide many interesting parallels and contrasts with Middle-earth.

Tolkienophilia is often associated with medieval historians (and no, I haven’t forgotten about that list of sources on medieval anthropology), understandably given that the man was one of the great Anglo-Saxon scholars of the last century, but I’ve always felt a kinship with Tolkien from an anthropological perspective, despite any number of rather unsightly issues of class, race, and gender that exist within his oeuvre. His incredible focus on language, his deep concern with genealogy and kinship, and the foundational roles of myth and history in his worldbuilding, were what first attracted me to Tolkien’s writing, and still do.

There is no question that, even though I’ve hardly read any of his actual scholarship (and wouldn’t understand it if I could), Tolkien has been one of the more important scholarly influences on my work as well. One of my good friends (an archaeologist) once described me as a philologist in the style of Tolkien, and while that’s not actually true, I see what he means. I was about two hours away from leading a seminar discussion on the Elvish tengwar script (as well as other fictional writing systems) as part of a course on the anthropology of writing and literacy. That was the day Bruce Trigger died, and I cancelled class that day, and never taught the topic since.

Digital analysis of epigraphic Greek hands

Some very interesting multidisciplinary work is coming out of the intersection of computer science and classical epigraphy. A set of techniques relating to image processing have been applied to classical Greek inscriptions in order to establish the different ‘hands’ in which Greek inscriptions were written (Panagopoulos et al 2009; Tracy and Papaodysseus 2009; see also the news article here). Given 24 high-quality images of classical inscriptions, but no other information about the artifacts whatsoever, the researchers calculated ideal forms for each letter in each inscription, and then analysed the letters from each pair of inscriptions, in order to test statistically the hypothesis that the inscriptions were made by the same writer. The results show 100% agreement with the opinion of Stephen Tracy, the epigraphist associated with the study (who selected the inscriptions but had nothing to do with the image analysis), and apparently with several other epigraphists. Four of the 24 inscriptions were in fact halves of the same inscription, and in both these cases the identification of the writer was correct.

It remains to be seen how widely this technique can be applied; the Greek classical inscriptions are highly regular and the signs are not normally ligatured to one another, while a cursive script would present significantly greater difficulties. It also doesn’t prove that these were written by six individuals – for instance, if two individuals wrote at the same place and the same time in statistically indistinguishable ways, they would be grouped together. This method has equalled expert opinion on a limited corpus, and confirmed these experts’ analysis, but it has not exceeded it. Ideally we would like to be able to apply this to texts in known hands and then to use this to identify the hand of inscriptions whose authorship is completely unknown, or controversial. If in a larger test, it took a batch of inscriptions and put inscriptions thought to be the work of one writer into two different groups, that would not be a refutation of the method – it could in fact suggest that the method is more capable than the epigraphists! While more testing is necessary, this could well prove to be a major advance, not only in Greek epigraphy but in the analysis of all sorts of ancient and modern scripts.

References
Panagopoulos, Michail, Constantin Papaodysseus, Panayiotis Rousopoulos, Dimitra Dafi, and Stephen Tracy. 2009. Automatic Writer Identification of Ancient Greek Inscriptions. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on 31, no. 8: 1404-1414.
Tracy, S. V., and C. Papaodysseus. 2009. The Study of Hands on Greek Inscriptions: The Need for a Digital Approach. American Journal of Archaeology 113, no. 1: 99-102.

Cherokee petroglyphs?

My attention has been drawn to a recent article in the New York Times by John Noble Wilford, describing a purported cave inscription in the Cherokee script from Kentucky. If confirmed as accurate, this would be the oldest dated text in Cherokee, and almost certainly would have to be in Sequoyah’s hand or one of the earliest script learners. I’m on vacation right now and don’t have access to all the resources I’d normally have to do a detailed analysis, but here are a few principles to keep in mind as you read the article:

– The photo you see with the ‘characters’ has been highlighted in white in a way that would not be acceptable practice among epigraphers, due to the risk of misreading. We have no way of knowing with any certainty where the boundaries between different characters are.

– The dating is entirely on the basis of a portion of the inscription not shown, which apparently reads either 1808 or 1818 in Western (Arabic) numerals. But we don’t have any knowledge of whether Sequoyah (George Gist) had any knowledge of how to form Arabic numeral dates at this early period. And the fact that we can’t decide, apparently, if the third character is a 0 or a 1, even though the first character is apparently evident as a 1, suggests a problem with the paleography that should make us very wary of the validity of the finding.

– The inscription is not a text in the sense of something that could be deciphered; rather, the signs are a hodgepodge of Cherokee-like syllabic symbols. Kenneth Tankersley, the archaeologist who is making the assertion, argues that this was a sort of practice text, an ABC of the Cherokee syllabary. But this claim raises a warning flag for me – it raises the evidentiary bar needed to conclude that this is, in fact, Cherokee writing rather than some petroglyphs (or natural lines in rock, or a combination of the two) that can be seen to resemble some Cherokee signs post facto by modern scholars. It also makes me wonder why the early design of glyphs would be taking place bye engraving stone (a difficult medium) rather than something easier to work with.

– Even if the signs are (proto-)Cherokee syllabics, and even if the number 1808 or 1818 is written on it, this does not establish that this was the date of the inscription. The number could have a non-calendrical meaning. The number could have been inscribed at a different time from the other characters. The number could in fact have been written at any time in order to give the inscription an earlier date (for purposes of deception or otherwise).

– There are purportedly 15 identifiable Cherokee characters, but there are also many other characters in the cave that do not resemble Cherokee characters. We would need to know a great deal more about the entire sign-inventory before we could conclude that the resemblances were sufficient to identify them as early Cherokee signs.

– Janine Scancarelli, an expert on Cherokee syllabics who is quoted in the article, does not in fact comment on the validity of the interpretation, but simply describes what is known about the resemblance of Cherokee symbols to other symbol systems.

– There is no peer-reviewed research yet on this finding (although I’m hoping that some of you who were at the SAAs this year saw the talk).

Now I’m not saying at all that this is a hoax or fraud. We certainly don’t have any evidence of that. But we also don’t have any good evidence to convince me that this site is radically different from other petroglyphic sites from the 18th and 19th centuries, and certainly not that we have a dated instance of a proto-Cherokee inscription. I’m looking forward to more information coming to light on this very interesting find, nonetheless.

Handbookery

Here are a couple of new publications of which I am very proud and which may be of interest to you. I’ve included them both lest the publishers involved think I’m playing favourites!

Chrisomalis, Stephen. 2008. The cognitive and cultural foundations of numbers. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics, Eleanor Robson and Jacqueline Stedall, eds., pp. 495-517. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Numbers are represented and manipulated through three distinct but interrelated techniques: numeral words, computational technologies, and numerical notation systems. Each of these has potential consequences for its users’ numerical cognition, but these consequences must be understood in terms of the functions and uses of each technique, not merely their formal structure. Most societies use numerical notation only to represent numbers, and have a variety of other techniques for performing arithmetic. The current Western practice of pen-and-paper arithmetic is anomalous historically. The transmission, adoption, and extinction of numerical systems thus depends primarily the social and economic context in which cultural contacts occur, and only minimally on their perceived efficiency for arithmetic.

Chrisomalis, Stephen. 2009. The origins and co-evolution of literacy and numeracy. IN The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy, David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance, eds, pp. 59-74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

While number concepts are panhuman, numerical notation emerged independently only in state societies with significant social inequality and social needs beyond those of face-to-face interaction, and in particular with the development of written texts. This survey of seven ancient civilizations demonstrates that, although written numerals tend to develop alongside the first writing, the specific functions for which writing and numerals co-evolve are cross-culturally variable. A narrowly functionalistic approach that generalizes the Mesopotamian case to all early civilizations and proposes that numerals always emerge for accounting and bookkeeping is empirically inadequate. An alternate theory is proposed that regards the emergence of writing and numerical notation as an outgrowth of elite interests relating to social control, but leaving unspecified the particular domains of social life over which those elites use to control non-elites. Numerical notation is a special-purpose representational system that, in its simplest form, unstructured tallying, is a precursor to written communication, and which persists and expands as a parallel notation in literate contexts.

Stopdate

I’ve just made a number of revisions to the Stop: Toutes Directions website, adding a bunch more placemarks to the Google map with interesting anecdotes and discussion of some really neat conceptual issues. Check it out! I’ve also uploaded our entire dataset for those masochistic enough to love to play with someone else’s data.

If you’re interested in the subject, you should also check out a pair of new posts by Lars over at The Blogaeological Record (part 1, part 2) where he details some recent GIS analysis he’s been doing on our dataset, looking at the relationship between the language of sign texts and the language spoken by residents of different areas. It turns out that the percentage of English speakers in a census tract correlates well with the percentage of bilingual ARRET/STOP signs in that district, a finding I had suspected but had not been confirmed until now. The way he has visualized the data has also already led me to a New and Even More Interesting Finding (TM) … but that will have to wait.