My book award

Viking houses in Aarhus, Denmark

Model of early Viking Aros

I am in Aarhus, Denmark for a 3-day conference on early cities. Papers are focusing on cities and methods for studying cities, particularly for the Viking era, Medieval Europe, the late Near East, and the East African coast. I had a couple of hours free before the sessions started, so I visited the Viking Museum in downtown Aarhus. This is a gem of a museum that marks the spot where some Viking houses and deposits were excavated several years ago. It is a small self-guided museum in the basement of a modern building.

Reconstructed plank road

Aarhus, called Aros in the Viking era, was an important craft and trading center. The site was fortified, and then the fortifications were expanded by King Harald Bluetooth in the tenth century. I posted about Harald Bluetooth and his planned circular structures previously.  He founded a church, in the plaza here, and eventually the Cathedral was built in its place. Inside the fortification wall ran a plank road. The archaeologists recovered several of the planks intact, and a portion of the plank road is reconstructed in the museum. You can still see the cart tracks in the original boards, and they are shown in the reconstruction.

House outlines drawn on the floor.

Pit house with skeleton, reconstructed

Pit house excavation with skeleton

One of the things I like best about this museum is that the locations of the excavated houses are shown drawn on the floor.  There were several rectangular pit houses here. In one, a skeleton was excavated in the middle of the floor. This find is reconstructed in the museum.

Urban houselot in Viking Aros

The museum has a painted reconstruction of an urban houselot from the Viking period. Notice the yard around the house, something shown in the town model at the top here (Soren Sindbaek, Viking archaeology specialist and co-organizer of the conference, thinks that the houses in the model may be shown with a more regular layout of the town than actually existed). These houses showed evidence of regular domestic activities, as well as several kinds of craft production. People produced craft goods in their homes,; dedicated workshops separate from houses were a later development.

Runestone from Aros

The museum also shows some nice carvings found in Aarhus (although not at this particular excavation). The runestone says, "Toke Smith raised this stone
after Trolle Goodman's son, who gave him gold and redemption." Was old Toke an ancestor of mine? I love these old runestones. I was impressed at the numbers of them spread over the landscape, still standing, when Cindy and I visited Uppsala a few years ago.

Carving of Loki

There is also a small carved stone with an image of the Norse god Loki. Harald Bluetooth introduced Christianity to Denmark, and Viking carving show both indigenous and Christian images and messages.

The Aarhus cathedral

The museum is just across the street from the Aarhus Cathedral. The church has very nice centuries-old paintings preserved, and it is full of large old gravestones. I could not resist taking a photo of a gravestone that must mark the burial of an archaeologist or a bioarchaeologist.

Grave stone in the cathedral

We took a break from the conference sessions today to make a trip down to the Moesgaard Museum, just south of Aarhus. This is a fantastic museum of anthropology and archaeology, focusing on the Danish past.. The building is brand-new, with a large gently sloping roof planted in grass. Kids were sledding down the hill - that is, the roof of the museum - today. The exhibits on the Iron Age, the Viking period, and the bog-people exhibits are first-rate. There are some innovative features in this museum; its well worth a visit .

I have really enjoyed Aarhus: the conference, the museums, and people, and the food. Thank you to the conference organizers, Rubina Raja and Soren Sindbaek. They direct the "Centre for Urban Network Evolutions" at Aarhus University.

Unsung heroes in the distant past

unsung hero (n) : one who created positive change in history by improving the lives of others, and has yet to be recognized for his or her actions.

I have been wondering lately whether the phrase "unsung heroes" might be appropriate to describe the common people of the distant past. They were important for posterity, yet we don't know their names and they rarely get much credit. Historians long concentrated on kings, generals, and other important people, while archaeologists focused on tombs, temples, palaces, and pyramids. But with the development of the fields of "social history" and "household archaeology," those of us who work on the past now have methods and concepts to study  the lives of everyday people. Farmers, weavers, merchants, soldiers, builders, midwives, shopkeepers, bureaucrats -- all the people who kept society going in the distant past.

Most of my career has been dedicated to excavating the places where the Aztec common people lived and worked, and to the reconstruction of their lives and the wider society of which they were part. After decades of writing technical articles and reports (and a textbook), I decided a few years ago to try and make sense of my excavations in a way that people who are not archaeologists could understand and appreciate. I initially thought this would just involve writing in clear prose, but a writing coach and my agent convinced me that I really needed to restructure the way I write. And my rewriting and restructuring led me to re-think the story of the Aztec farmers whose lives I was reconstructing.

Aztec women making tortillas. Drawing by Kagan McLeod.

A visit to the Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes in Fort Scott, Kansas, got me thinking about this concept of unsung heroes. My daughter Heather is the Director of Economic Development for the City of Fort Scott, and during a visit she took Cindy and me to the Milken Center. This is a fascinating and unique educational resource center and museum. It got its start after a National History Day project led by local high school teacher, Norm Conard, uncovered the life of Irene Sendler. Sendler, a Catholic, was a Polish social worker who saved several thousand Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II. Her story was almost unknown until it was discovered and documented by three Kansas high school kids working on a project with Norm. The excellent and moving book, Life in a Jar: The Irene Sendler Project, by Jack Mayer, tells the story of the Kansas project, as well as Irene Sendler's life and activities (this is a great read!).


Norm Conard won a teaching award from by the Milken Family Foundation, and conversations between Norm and Lowell Milken led to the establishment of the Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes in Fort Scott. The center has exhibits on the lives of Irene Sendler and many other unsung heroes, all documented by students' history projects. The center offers fellowships, grants, and workshops for teachers and students, and promotes the study of unsung heroes. Here is their definition (from the Center's website):

unsung hero (n) : one who created positive change in history by improving the lives of others, and has yet to be recognized for his or her actions

This concept, which focuses on identifiable people form the recent past, does not precisely describe the common people of antiquity. But the idea got me thinking about those Aztec farmers in a new way, as unsung heroes of a different kind. Here is a passage from my book (At Home with the Aztecs: An Archaeologist Uncovers their Daily Life, due in early 2016):

Aztec commoners were the people who carried ancient Mesoamerican cultural traditions into the Spanish colonial period, and their descendants transmitted this tradition through the subsequent centuries. When we order tacos and beans at a Mexican restaurant today, we can thank Aztec peasants more than their noble overlords. The basic elements of Mesoamerican cuisine (and many other traits, from language to myth to house construction) have been preserved across the Spanish conquest only because the peasants continued their traditional lives and practices. Their noble overlords, in contrast, did everything they could to act like Spaniards, from eating wheat bread to speaking Spanish to riding horses. Aztec farmers and other commoners are the unsung heroes of their culture, the ones responsible for carrying it into the Spanish colonial period and on up to the present.  (chapter 1)

Lowell Milken, Norm Conard, and staff at the Center

But I think the usefulness of the unsung heroes concept goes farther than this. My Aztec peasants, for example, were heroes not just for preserving the Mesoamerican cultural past, but for doing the work to build and support their communities and their society. While they had to obey kings, contribute labor to state projects, and pay rent to noble landlords, these ancient farmers had a fair degree of autonomy and self-determination in their lives. If we find value in the Aztec or Mesoamerican past today--and I think we can--I would attribute this less to the kings and nobles and more to the common people. These were the true unsung heroes of the distant past.

(note: What got me thinking about all this tonight was a request for an interview from a student doing a National History Day project!).

Monumental archaeology and social archaeology in ancient cities

House excavations at Izapa, University at Albany (from Wade 2014)

The journal Science just published a nice "Newsfocus" article about how archaeologists working on cities in Mesoamerica are focusing more on households these days and less on the big monuments. The article is:

House at Mayapan

Wade, Lizzie  (2014)  Beyond the Temples: Turning Their Backs on Spectacular Monuments, Archaeologists are Studying Ordinary Households to Uncover the Daily Rhythms of Long-Lost Cities. Science 344:684-686.

Wade talks about the ancient cities of Teotihuacan, Mayapan, and Izapa, quoting the leading archaeologists working at these sites about their research. I am quoted a couple of times, in reference to definitions and concepts of urbanism.

It is good to see non-monumental archaeology featured in such a prominent place. In some of my publications (e.g., Smith 2012) I've used the terms social archaeology and monumental archaeology for the  two major kinds of research on ancient cities and complex societies. Archaeologists following the monumental approach excavate pyramids, temples, palaces, and other elite-related contexts. Those of us who pursue social archaeology excavate houses, workshops, and agricultural fields, or we  map sites and make surface collections, all in order to reconstruct society from the bottom up. We want to learn about ancient households, their activities, their social conditions, and how these things changed through time.

Apartment compound at Teotihuacan

To really understand any ancient city, we need information from both the monumental and social archaeology approaches. But since the monumental approach has a history of several centuries, and social archaeology only goes back a few decades, the monumental side is far ahead of the social side. For this reason it is important for archaeologists to focus on households, neighborhoods, and social processes so that we can catch up with the results on temples, palaces, and tombs.

(( TECHNICAL INTERLUDE:  Although I like the phrase "social archaeology" to describe research on households and social processes (especially non-elite contexts), I tend to avoid using the term when talking to fellow archaeologists. Why? Because the phrase was hijacked by postmodern archaeologists who take a non-scientific approach to the past. They emphasize interpretation over explanation of the past; they focus on detailed studies of individual contexts with little comparison or generalization; and they would rather speculate about "meanings" in the past than test hypotheses about economic phenomena. This group founded a journal called "The Journal of Social Archaeology," and the term is now associated with an approach that I dislike greatly! ))

Here is one the many contrasts between monumental and social archaeology: the timing of the moment of archaeological discovery (this paragraph is taken from my new book, At Home with the Aztecs, currently in search of a publisher). In the monumental approach, the major finds come during fieldwork: things like the opening of a tomb or the discovery of a new hieroglyphic inscription. But when excavating the trash-heaps of ancient peasant farmers--as in the social approach--excitement rarely reveals itself in the field. The houses are similar and the middens all look pretty much the same. The important discoveries come later, in the laboratory stage of research, once we have washed, classified, analyzed, and quantified the artifacts.

Here is just one example, from my excavations of Aztec commoner houses. We identified a couple of whistles during excavation. One or two were whole, and the excavators cleaned out the dirt and started blowing the whistles. (Hear what one sounds like, on my Calixtlahuaca blog). But it wasn't until we had gone through thousands of big bags of potsherds that it became clear that just about every commoner household had one or more musical instruments: whistles, flutes, rattles, and small bells were the most common, with a few drums and trumpets here and there. It turns out that music was important in these homes, perhaps for domestic rituals, or perhaps for monthly public ceremonies. But if we hadn't screened all the dirt, and looked carefully at every single bag of sherds, we would have missed these musical instruments, mainly because most were broken fragments.
 

Flute pieces from commoner houses at an Aztec city (Yautepec)

The discovery of the prevalence of these objects in commoner houses was a real breakthrough that changed ideas about Aztec music, and about Aztec households. Music had been assumed to be an activity of priests and elites, and experts had initially scoffed at the idea that I had excavated lots of these things from commoner trash heaps. This discovery came not in the field, but in the lab, and only after several seasons of painstaking study of tiny fragmentary artifacts.


As someone who has dedicated my career to social archaeology (the scientific kind, not the postmodern kind!), it is great to see a nice write-up in the journal Science.

Aztec rock band (from Sahagun, Florentine Codex)

Note the two kinds of drum and two kinds of rattle in this Aztec band. The flute and trumpet players have evidently stepped out for a smoke.