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Review of Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History, by William T. Taylor (2024)

Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History is an ambitious project that sets out to present a narrative of human-horse interactions in every corner of the globe from the deep evolutionary past to the twenty-first century. The result is a lucid survey drawing on fresh archaeological research—including some by the author—as well as interdisciplinary insights from oral history, linguistics, and veterinary medicine. The book is a pleasure to read and beautifully presented, with delightful in-text illustrations and 20 full-color plates. Blending erudition and accessibility, Taylor demonstrates the absolute centrality of horses to human cultures, economies, and technologies, as access to horses and expertise in horsemanship repeatedly shifted geopolitical balances on the broadest scale. Though one study cannot exhaust the interpretive potential of this material, Hoof Beats is an indispensable guide to the contours of the human past as they were drawn through contact with horses.

The book is divided into four parts, each referred to as a ‘beat.’ Beat One is dedicated to early connections between horses and people before domestication. Ancestral equids first evolved in North America approximately four million years ago and spread to Eurasia by the Bering land bridge. North American equids did not survive the warm conditions of the early Holocene, so our first evidence for interactions with hominins comes from the eastern hemisphere. According to archaeological remains of slaughtered animals in their grassland habitats, our ancestors were preeminent hunters of equids, including early horses and a separate lineage of donkeys and related animals. Taylor’s own research focuses on the domestication of horses, and he skillfully guides readers through the archaeological debate about when and where this first happened. He explains that research on domestication is not “a search for any particular trait or behavior but instead…a deep dive into the relationship between humans and animals and how it has changed over time.”[1] This relationship is clearly perceived by pathological changes or damage to a horse’s skeleton caused by bridles, mouthpieces, or the direct impact of a rider’s body.

Drawing of horse anatomy with parts signaled by numbers — *A compend of equine anatomy and physiology (1896). Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Beat Two begins with an analysis of donkeys as the first domesticated equids. Taylor shows that evidence for their domestication can be found in early dynastic Egypt, where the “vertebral deformation” of donkey skeletons along with iconography depicting the animals hitched to carts suggests that they were widely used.[2] The cart and later the chariot spread throughout the Near East by donkeys and their hemione relatives. New research shows that this technology was eventually applied to domesticated horses in the early second millennium BCE by the Sintashta culture, along the border of what is now Russia and Kazakhstan. Burials including horses, chariots, and the world’s oldest bridles and bits provide conclusive proof of horse domestication and use in transport. The chapter shows how horse-drawn chariots spread rapidly across Eurasia in just a few centuries while also revolutionizing pastoral life in the steppes, encouraging greater mobility and larger herds. Especially in the Mediterranean world, horse-drawn chariots became the key to political and military power.

In Beat Three, Taylor describes the shift to horseback riding, a practice likely pioneered around 1000 BCE in what is now the Xinjiang Province of China. Evidence for riding in the area comes from whips, saddle pads, and notably “the world’s oldest trousers,” uniquely suitable for sitting astride a horse.[3] Though Taylor considers mounted riding across African and Eurasian societies in this section, the real protagonists are steppe cultures, especially from Inner Asia. People of the steppes drove “technological progress,” developing the frame saddle, stirrups, and curb bits.[4] They were well positioned to dominate the supply of horses, which were always in demand by surrounding civilizations. Taylor’s insights on the crucial role of horses and climate changes in the extraordinary success of steppe empires—from the Xiongnu to the Mongols—serve as much-needed context for the radical impact of these supposedly marginal societies.

Grave Figures of Horses and Camels, Anonymous, ca. 650 – ca. 750
Source: Rijksmuseum

Finally, Beat Four explores the global expansion of horses and horsemanship. Many Eurasian societies developed shipbuilding technologies to transport horses by water, leading to herds in Japan, Iceland, and beyond. Taylor is particularly interested in the “return” of horses to their distant homeland with the advent of European colonization in the Americas.[5] He demonstrates that archaeology can modify historical timelines for the spread of horses and their adoption by Indigenous societies. More importantly, in the Great Plains and elsewhere, he argues that “the rapid emergence of strong relationships between people and horses disrupted the trajectory of European colonialism and helped sustain the sovereignty of Indigenous nations deep into the modern era.”[6] This section concludes with a brief discussion of the fate of horses in the industrializing world—a story of intensified labor and, finally, marginalization.

Book cover of Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History

Taylor is a skilled writer and a superb science educator. Hoof Beats can serve as a kind of primer in archaeological research methods for non-specialists. No region of the world remains untouched by his judicious treatment, making the book an excellent reference text and catalyst for further research. His incorporation of interdisciplinary material is impressive, but it is worth noting that he does not engage with critical animal studies (CAS) or historiographical approaches to animals.[7] This is understandable considering his disciplinary expertise and the goals of his project, but readers could be excused for coming away from his work with the assumption that horses exist for humans. Indeed, while Taylor proposes a relational model for human-horse history early in the book, his narrative actually prioritizes the human use (and, to a lesser degree, care) of horses. It would be worthwhile to flip Taylor’s perspective by taking a non-anthropocentric stance. For example, what can archaeology and veterinary medicine tell us about the quality of life for domesticated horses across time and space, whose skeletal remains seem to tell a constant tale of over-exertion and bodily harm? Taylor concludes his book by gesturing to the lessons for our modern world from the more sustainable, “golden age of horse transport.”[8] But for horses, this was clearly no golden age. Perhaps there are other lessons to be learned from this history.

Hannah McClain is a third-year PhD student in UT Austin’s Department of History. She studies early modern Europe with a regional focus on the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

[1] Hoof Beats, 31. Italics in the original.

[2] Hoof Beats, 65.

[3] Hoof Beats, 113.

[4] Hoof Beats, 150.

[5] Hoof Beats, 180.

[6] Hoof Beats, 193.

[7] Readers interested in these alternative approaches can begin with Erica Fudge’s theoretical and methodological reflections in “A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals,” in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 3-13.

[8] Hoof Beats, 219.

IHS Talk: Climate and Soil: An Environmental History of the Maya

The Late Holocene history of the ancient Maya world provides a microcosm of the Early Anthropocene. Much of the region today is tropical forest or recently deforested, but from 3,000 to 400 years ago Maya cities, farms, roads, reservoirs, and fields altered most of this region. Although a literate society, the written record provides little for environmental history; thus we can turn to climate and soil records. Climate played some role in periods of instability and stability and perhaps the Maya themselves caused some climate change. Indeed, ancient Maya climate change provides our clearest comparison with the modern Anthropocene because the ancient Maya also experienced sea level rise and climate drying like the contemporary world. But we are still—and may always be— uncertain about attribution of climate change to Maya history because of the imperfections in proxy data and the many unknowns about Maya adaptation and unrelated cultural changes. Soil tells us much more than climate about the Maya. The soil record from geoscience and archaeology provides direct evidence of human responses or lack of responses at times that correlate with other changes. Some responses of Maya Civilization that show up in soil studies were positive long-term impacts on the built environment, like wetland field systems, terraces, and other practices that enriched soils and ecosystems. The soil also indicates negative impacts like erosion and eutrophication, both playing out again today. But the Maya Classical period—with its peak human population and land use intensity— experienced less soil erosion, perhaps due to soil conservation. All of this study is still in its infancy because of the proliferation of lidar imagery that is providing a much better footprint of the impacts and infrastructure of the ancient Maya on their tropical forest.

Dr. Timothy Beach, holds a C.B. Smith, Sr. Centennial Chair and directs the Beach-Butzer Soils and Geoarchaeology Lab in Geography at the University of Texas at Austin. For twenty-one years, he taught at Georgetown University, where he held the Cinco Hermanos Chair and was Professor of Geography and Geoscience and Director of the Science, Technology, and International Affairs and Environmental Studies Programs. He has conducted field research on soils, geomorphology, paleoecology, wetlands, and geoarchaeology in the Corn Belt of the United States, the original corn belt of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, the Mediterranean in Syria, Turkey, and Italy, and some other places. His work earned funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, USAID, The University of Texas at Austin, and Georgetown University. His field studies have been the bases for more than one hundred peer-reviewed articles and chapters and hundreds of scientific presentations around the world, including at the Vatican in 2017. Most of his publications were on long-term environmental change, soils and geomorphology, paleoclimate, and geoarchaeology in the Maya world. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and awarded Guggenheim and Dumbarton Oaks Fellowships, the G.K. Gilbert Award in Geomorphology, Georgetown University’s Distinguished Research Award in 2010, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service’s Faculty of the Year for Teaching Excellence in 2014, the Carl O Sauer Award in 2017, and the CSU Chico Alumni of the Year in 2018.

Secrets of the Crypt

by Carolyn Pouncy

Everyone loves to be proven right, but novelists don’t often expect it—especially five hundred years after the period where their books are set. After all, that’s half the fun of writing and reading fiction: filling in the gaps left by the historical record. So to have a set of novels that explore the relationship between Russians and Tatars in the sixteenth century twice intersect with contemporary developments is surprising.

The first conjunction, as I wrote on this blog last summer, involved the publication of my Winged Horse in the same month that Vladimir Putin decided to annex Crimea. That might be considered a historical accident. The second overlap is quite different: as I discovered not long ago, twenty-first-century science supports my imaginary past in a remarkable way.

First, a brief review of the history. After Grand Prince Vasily III died late in 1533, the situation in Russia deteriorated fast. The hand-picked council of guardians Vasily appointed was pushed aside within months by his widow, Elena Glinskaya. Despite threats from without and within, Elena maintained a shaky hold on power until her sudden death in April 1538 left the country under the nominal authority of her seven-year-old son, the future Ivan the Terrible. Several aristocratic clans, most notably the Shuisky and Belsky princely families, battled to control the young grand prince until 1547, when he married and was crowned as Russia’s first tsar.

Grand Prince Vasilii III of Moscow and Elena Glinskaia, 1526. Public domain (created before 1916) via Wikimedia Commons

Grand Prince Vasily III of Moscow and Elena Glinskaya, 1526 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Because Elena was no more than thirty when she died, the gossips had a field day speculating about the cause of her death. Even before that, Elena’s morals, or lack thereof, had attracted considerable attention, inside and outside Muscovy. Rumors included assertions that her chief adviser, Ivan Telepnev, had fathered her two sons during her husband’s lifetime, that he retained his status as her lover after Vasily’s demise, and that she had hired Sami shamans to ensure successful pregnancies with these children of questionable heritage.

Once Elena usurped a role normally reserved for men, the hostile whispers intensified. The campaign that she and Telepnev waged against her two brothers-in-law and her uncle Mikhail fed the flames, especially after the brothers-in-law and uncle died in captivity between August 1536 and December 1537. A mere four months passed between the death, reputedly by starvation, of the younger brother-in-law and Elena’s demise.

The favorite story about her death involved her having been poisoned by the Shuisky clan, whose leader Vasily promptly clapped Telepnev in irons and within three months had married a cousin of the young grand prince, a classic power move that indicated possible self-positioning for a grab at the throne. But there has never been concrete evidence that a murder took place. When a group of twentieth-century scientists excavated the bodies of Elena and other royal figures—including Ivan the Terrible’s first wife, Anastasia, also rumored to have died from poison—they found high levels of dangerous substances such as mercury and arsenic. But because mercury was used in medicines at the time and arsenic in cosmetics, the scientists refused to confirm the poisoning hypothesis.

As a historian, I hesitate to charge actual historical figures with a crime without clear proof of guilt, even in a novel and five centuries after the fact. Nevertheless, in the absence of evidence novelists do get to invent plausible explanations, so long as they confess their sins at the end. And nothing spices up a novel faster than romance and murder. So in The Shattered Drum (Legends of the Five Directions 5: Center) I invented an elaborate plot that played on all the rumors about Elena’s affair with Telepnev, her death, and the clan politics surrounding it, then assigned the implementation to a trio of fictional characters representing the opposing sides. The novel came out last summer, and I chalked it up as complete and moved on to the next, which incorporates another recent discovery: spy chambers in what was then the outermost wall surrounding Moscow.

<Image: Elena Glinskaya: Forensic facial reconstruction by S. Nikitin, 1999. By Shakko CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons>

Elena Glinskaya: Forensic facial reconstruction by S. Nikitin, 1999 (photo credit: Shakko CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

Then I learned that the story was not, in fact, over. A group of Kremlin Museum scientists has re-exhumed the bodies of the various grand princesses once buried in the Ascension Cathedral in the Kremlin. They published their results, almost all of which are fascinating when disentangled from the minutiae of archaeological recording—especially in reference to Elena Glinskaya.

Most notably, the plot point that I considered the most outrageous—that Elena not only had an affair with Telepnev but became pregnant with his child, a scandalous development for a woman whose husband had died four years before—turns out to be well within the realm of possibility. The contemporary scientists discovered that, as noted above, Elena’s bones contained high levels of mercury and arsenic. In addition, they found formations in her skull that suggested she had ingested poisonous mushrooms. But her bones also contained unusually low levels of iron, which the scientists attributed to her having suffered a massive hemorrhage not long before her death—probably in childbirth. Indeed, two infant bones were found in her sarcophagus: the tibia of a newborn or infant not more than two months old, and the other an upper jawbone of a six-month-old.

There were other strange objects in the sarcophagus: broken pottery and the bones of pigs and cattle. The scientists didn’t explain these, anymore than they explained the presence of bones from two infants. But they did conclude, quite emphatically, that Elena died of mercury poisoning and that not long before she died she bore a child—fathered, they assume, by Ivan Telepnev. They don’t identify the culprits in her murder, but if we apply the principle of cui bono (who benefits), it doesn’t look good for the Shuisky clan.

It’s a cliché to say that truth is stranger than fiction, but clichés become clichés for a reason. I like to think my solution is a little more elegant, although you’ll have to read the novel to find out what that is. But the astonishing part is to discover that something I’d written off as pure invention has a basis in truth after all.

And oh yes, the scientists think Anastasia died of mercury poisoning as well. Maybe I’ll write that novel, too, one day. But if I do, I’ll be very careful about what I make up.

Originally posted as “Person or Persons Unknown,” on the Blog of the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia (December 19, 2018).

Carolyn Pouncy, the managing editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, writes fiction set in sixteenth-century Russia under the pen name C. P. Lesley.

New Digital Technologies Bring Ancient Roman Villas to Life

By John R. Clarke

If Poppaea, the purported owner of the grand Roman villa that has come to light near Pompeii, were to walk into her slaves’ quarters today, she would think the gods had enchanted it. What are these banks of red flashing lights and strangely-dressed men and women manipulating words and pictures on magical tablets? It’s the Oplontis Project team, using digital technology to reanimate her Villa, which was buried in ash on August 24, AD 79, when the Mount Vesuvius volcano erupted near Pompeii.

Oplontis Villa A, north façade and garden after replanting in 2010. Photo by John Clarke. ©The Oplontis Project

Italian excavations between 1964 and 1984 uncovered 99 of the villa’s spaces, including over forty exquisitely-decorated rooms, four large gardens, and a 61-meter swimming pool. After a hiatus of more than 20 years and on the invitation of the Italian Ministry of Culture, I assembled a team of experts to excavate, study, and publish Poppaea’s Villa (officially known as Villa A at Oplontis, Torre Annunziata, Italy), a UNESCO World Heritage site. The high-speed internet and multiple computers that would astonish Poppaea are only a small part of the arsenal of digital technologies that are bringing her villa to life.

Aerial view of site with superimposed plan of actual and hypothetical remains. Drawing Timothy Liddell. ©The Oplontis Project

Given the many unanswered questions about what had been excavated, the Oplontis Project chose not to attempt to bring to light the estimated forty rooms that still remain under a nearby military complex, but rather to study fully what was there. This meant conducting the first excavations beneath the AD 79 level to learn about earlier phases of the villa and to carry out geological surveys to understand its relation to the surrounding land- and sea-scape. It also meant dealing with thousands of orphaned fragments, combing archives to track the procedures used to recreate the villa, and analyzing the chemistry of everything from ancient carbonized wood, to the pigments used in the frescoes, to the marble used throughout the Villa.

To address these challenges in the most efficient way, we adopted three digital strategies: the born-digital e-book for publication; a flexible database to collect and share resources; and a navigable 3D model to record the actual and reconstructed states of the Villa.

In light of the limitations of print publication, we chose the most successful scholarly publisher of digital e-books, the American Council of Learned Societies Humanities E-book series. Their ambitious e-books typically have excellent finding tools and hyperlinks to a myriad of electronic media, including archive repositories, databases, and films. Our book, Oplontis: Villa A (“Of Poppaea”) at Torre Annunziata, Italy is now available for free on-line.

The Oplontis Project database developed parallel to the ACLS e-book; indeed some of the contributors to the e-book began work on their chapters by building their part of the database. For this reason it includes all of the categories of research we are doing, including the decoration of all surfaces, the architecture, excavations, archival materials, and photographs. In this sample page from category 1, Wall and Ceiling Decorations, we see the east wall of the atrium, the top part of the catalogue description, written by Regina Gee, and a thumbnail image of the wall.

Clicking on the thumbnail we get a screen showing the actual-state photograph taken by project photographer Paul Bardagjy in 2009. From here we can link to scores of archival photographs of this wall, including details of the wall when it was in better shape.

Oplontis, atrium 5, east wall. Photo Paul Bardagjy. ©The Oplontis Project

One of the archival photos linked to this wall recently came into our hands from a private collector in the town of Torre Annunziata. It shows what the atrium looked like when Princess Margaret of England visited the Villa in 1973—years before it was open to the public.

Oplontis, atrium 5. Visit of Princess Margaret and entourage 14 August 1973. Courtesy the Vincenzo Marasco Archive. ©The Oplontis Project

Notice that the Princess is shooting photos—and also notice the leftover fragments lying on the floor. A yet earlier photograph, from the Wilhelmina Jashemski Archive, shows what the wall behind the royal group looked like at the time of excavation, around 1968: it was in a state of collapse. The wall paintings a tourist sees today were literally salvaged from the debris, consolidated with reinforced concrete backings, and re-hung on a wall made from modern materials.

Oplontis, atrium 5, east wall. Photo the Wilhelmina Jashemski Archive, 1968_45_24. © The University of Maryland

As this historical photo shows, when excavations began on the west wall of the atrium in 1966, it was miraculously standing to the level of the architrave (Fig. 7).

Oplontis, atrium 5, west wall, at beginning of excavations. Photo courtesy the Soprintendenza Archaeologica di Pompei, De Francisis Archive, dia 9.392

After reconstruction, it was clear that the top part of this wall had succumbed to the blast of the pyoclastic flow, displacing fragments of its upper zone. When we located the fragments piled on the floors of several storage areas (transformed today into our laboratories), we had the basis for reconstructing an Ionic second story, which you can see below.

Oplontis, atrium 5, west wall. Reconstruction by Martin Blazeby, King’s Vizualisation Lab. © King’s College London

As one sees it today, the modern roof is some three meters too low. The 3D model allows us to reconstruct the interior of this and all the other spaces of the Villa, finding homes for the many fragments of painted and stucco decoration (over 3,000 in all) that were left over when funds ran out.

Oplontis, atrium 5, west wall. Screenshot from 3D model with modern roof. ©The Oplontis Project

Not only have we been able to put fresco fragments into their context through digital means, we have also reconstructed whole rooms. A case in point is the transformation of a seemingly featureless space into the most lavishly decorated reception room in the Villa.

Oplontis, diaeta 78, actual state. Screenshot from 3D model. ©The Oplontis Project

The process of reconstructing room 78 started with my discovery of a cryptic note in the excavation daybooks for 1974 mentioning that excavators had found a series of impressions of wood panels in the hardened volcanic ash. This is a kind of wall revetment never before attested in antiquity. What of the floors and wainscoting, stripped of their marble in antiquity? Simon Barker closely studied tiny fragments of marble residue, identifying the range of expensive marbles used in that one space and reconstructing the patterns on the floor and walls. Architect Timothy Liddell put all of this data into a 3D environment to provide a stunning—and unprecedented—visualization of this opulent room, a unique testimony to the tastes of super-wealthy patrons like Poppaea.

Oplontis, diaeta 78. Digital reconstruction. Timothy Liddell and Simon Barker. ©The Oplontis Project

All of these room reconstructions are in the process of being integrated into a 3D model of the whole site. In its current beta version, the 3D model gives a user unlimited access to the entire 100 x 200 meter site, the same access available to the Oplontis Project team under the terms of its collaboration with the Archaeological Superintendency of Pompeii.

Finally, exciting new geological research has revealed the ancient setting of the Villa. There was one clue, partially explored in the Oplontis Project’s first excavation: a stairway descending from the slaves’ quarters to a tunnel, filled with hardened volcanic ash. Using Ground-Penetrating-Radar, we found anomalies on the south of the Sarno Canal suggesting that the tunnel ended in a stairway leading down some 9 meters. But it was not until geologist Giovanni Di Maio sunk a series of cores between 15 and 30 meters below the modern surface, that we knew that the Villa stood perched on a 14-meter cliff above its own private harbor. In the section, we see that the volcanic material to the north of the Villa, beneath the modern town, also accumulated over the parts pushed over the cliff by the force of the pyroclastic flows.

Oplontis, Villa A. North-south section showing Villa on cliff above sea. Digital rendering. ©Giovanni Di Maio

The remains of other Roman villas that Di Maio has documented remind us of Strabo’s description of the villas and cultivated estates that stretched along the entire rim of the Bay of Naples like one continuous city.

Several features distinguish our 3D model from other similar archaeological initiatives. Since it is based on a first-person shooter gaming engine, Unity©, the user can navigate every space at will—unlike the determined paths of most models. The user can also toggle between actual and restored states, change the lighting systems, and meet other avatars. Most important for its use as a scholarly resource is the fact that by pressing the “Query” button, a researcher can directly access the database for the feature on the screen—whether a wall painting, or the finds in one of our 20 trenches, or the results of isotopic analysis of the marble of one of the 19 sculptures found in the gardens.

Oplontis, view southeast corner of pool and diaeta 78, with several sculptures reset in place. Photo Stanley Jashemski 1978_2_27. ©The Wilhelmina Jashemski Archive, The University of Maryland

The original excavations of Villa A at Torre Annunziata aimed to make it into a living museum that the public could visit. This meant creating a new building that looked ancient. Walls had to be rebuilt and colonnades had to be reconstructed to support modern concrete beams, new tile roofs, and reconsolidated fresco fragments. In the process of building this living museum, the pieces of the puzzle that didn’t fit were simply ignored. Today, with digital means, we have put many of those puzzle-pieces back into the Villa.

The 3D model, linked with the database will allow us, and future generations, to find material easily by clicking on find-spots; scholars will be able to share in our work and even add to the information in our database. The model complements the e- book and because the ACLS has graciously offered to make the Oplontis Project publications open access, scholars and laypersons worldwide can benefit from the work of our 42 contributors, coming from wide range of scientific and humanistic disciplines.

A longer version of this article was originally published in Apollo: The International Art Magazine (February 2014), 48-53.

The Oplontis Project

John R. Clarke and Nayla K. Muntasser, Oplontis: Villa A (“Of Poppaea”) at Torre Annunziata, Italy (e-book)

Top image: Oplontis, oecus 15, reconstruction of west wall from fragments, overlay on portion of east wall. Reconstruction by Timothy Liddell. ©The Oplontis Project

UNESCO Designates Costa Rica’s Ancient Stone Balls a World Heritage Site

by Emily Jo Cureton

Costa Rica’s iconic stone spheres have been recognized for their value to World Heritage by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), bringing more international attention to the southern region’s mysterious past, as well as its contentious future.

No one knows who made a single one of the pre-Columbian stone spheres, let alone why more than 300 were sculpted to near geometric perfection more than 1,000 years ago. Like Stonehenge and Easter Island, the petrospheres have piqued archaeological inquiry and fantastical supposition since the first examples were unearthed by banana plantation workers in the mid-19th century.

Ranging in size from a child’s fist to a wrecking ball, some arrangements suggest that the spheres aligned with the stars or served as monumental compasses. Local lore has it that they were the playthings of a god hell-bent on controlling the weather, still other theories contend they make perfect instruments for ancient alien air traffic control. The truth is, no one really knows what the original sculptors had in mind or even exactly when they lived.

A Costa Rican stone sphere at the Museo Nacional in San José (Wikipedia/user: User:matanya)

A Costa Rican stone sphere at the Museo Nacional in San José (by Connor Lee via Wikipedia user: WAvegetarian)

The endurance of mystery may be just another reason for Las Bolas to join UNESCO’s elite list of sites thought to exemplify human heritage, so often defined by desperately wanting to know, rather than actually knowing. Officially, the qualifying criteria for the sphere sites is that they “bear a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living or has disappeared.”

(With La Sele’s historic upset advance to the quarter finals of the World Cup, I can bear witness to the fact that ball-centrist culture has anything but disappeared.)

The stone balls of yore were probably hand-carved by ancestors of the Boruca, Téribe and Guaymi peoples in Southern Costa Rica. Some believe ancients formed the rocks by dissolving them with a plant-based potion, though many scholars refute this. The exact timeline of production is also a point of debate. Unlike organic materials, rock cannot be carbon-dated. The ages are based on associated materials, usually sediments and pottery shards found at the installation site, which indicated that they could have been made during an 1,800 year period. (For some perspective: that’s considerably longer than the Spanish Monarchy has even existed).

Stone spheres at the Museo Nacional in San José (Wikipedia/user: User: Axxis10)

Some of the bolas are thought to weigh more than 15 tons. Others have been pocketed and used as mantle decorations. The UNESCO listing only applies to balls with a diameter of 70 cm or larger and its unclear how or if it will affect the many spheres that have been removed from Costa Rica. Of more than 300 recorded petrospheres found in the southern region about a dozen remain in their original context, according to an educated estimate by John W. Hoopes, an archaeologist whose research contributed to the UNESCO listing.

“The main that this listing does is draw worldwide global attention to this site and others. The conservation of the site is ultimately the responsibility of the country in which its found,” Hoopes said via Skype.

Most if not all “in situ” spheres left are at the four locations recognized as international patrimony by UNESCO this week: Finca 6, Batamba, El Silencio and Grijalba 2. A new museum at Finca 6, a former banana plantation, gives the public a chance to the spheres as they were originally arranged.

An ancient stone sphere in a new context at Plaza Democracia in San José, Costa Rica. Of more than 300 known spheres, all but a dozen or so have been moved from their original locations in the southern zone (Photo by Emily Jo Cureton)

The rampant damage and dispersion of the spheres began after United Fruit Company workers uncovered the first examples while clearing banana fields in 1940. Since then many spheres have been rolled into gullies and ravines. Others were burned and cracked by fire when land was cleared for plantations and farms. Still others were dynamited, or sent to faraway lands and used as prized lawn ornaments. Paris has one, so does Harvard. Some were stolen, others sold to the highest bidder. The predominate human impulses upon encountering these testimonies to human heritage seem to be: a) dig it up, b) roll it away or c) blow it up and hope gold falls out. (It doesn’t).

The solid rock used to make most of the spheres came from the Talamanca Mountains and was probably naturally flooded to the lowlands down the Térraba River to the Diquís valley, where boulders would have been collected and transported upwards of 50 miles to some installation sites. Today the Diquís valley is the planned site for the largest hydro-electric project ever in Central America, a dam on the Superior General River between Buenos Aires, Osa, and Pérez Zeledón. In the works for more than 40years, construction began in 2009, but was stalled in 2011 by a lawsuit over indigenous rights and remains delayed by the construction of an associated pipeline. The El Diquís project would flood 6815 ha (27 sq mi) to create 631 megawatts of power for 1 million consumers, according to the Institute for Costan Rican Electricity ICE. It would inundate protected indigenous territories, displacing at least 1,500 people and “irremediably affecting” 150 archaeological sites, according to an impact summary by the University of Costa Rica.

This essay was originally posted on the website of the Academia Tica Spanish Language School in Costa Rica.

For more about the World Heritage site designation, check out this article en español.

Emily Jo Cureton is an artist and writer who graduated from UT Austin with Honors in History and now lives in Costa Rica. You can see more of her work on her website.

Visitors of the Nile: The New Archive (No. 13)

By Charley S. Binkow

For centuries Egypt has inspired awe in the West. From Napoleon to Anderson Cooper, westerners have found an intrinsic fascination with Egypt’s rich culture, history, art, and politics. Since they first arrived, Egypt’s visitors have tried to capture its incredible landscape and document its complex beauty. The Travelers in the Middle East Archive gives us a comprehensive collection of what these visitors saw and what they chose to record one hundred years ago.

Postcard entitled, “Egypt – Native Women” (Lehnert & Landrock Egypt – Native Women (81) (n.d.).
From Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA). http://hdl.handle.net/1911/5521)

Between the late 19^th and early 20^th century, explorers took photos, stenciled pictures, and documented all they could see in the Nile Valley. And while these travelers captured grandiose or exceptional images for their catalogues, they were also fascinated with the real, day-to-day life of Egyptians. In this collection, we can see what these explorers saw as noteworthy, what they wanted the world to see, and how they portrayed Egyptian life. This archive is just as much, if not more, about those who documented Egypt as it is about the Egyptians themselves.

Postcard entitled, "Entrance to an Old Native House," 1906 (Lekegian, G. Entrance to an Old Native House (1906). From Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA). http://hdl.handle.net/1911/20913)

Postcard entitled, “Entrance to an Old Native House,” 1906 (Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA). http://hdl.handle.net/1911/20913)

The archive has assembled these primary sources and divided its massive collection into thematic subjects. One can peruse Art & Artifacts, History & Politics, and a lot more with exceptional ease. There are beautiful pictures, high quality photographs, and vivid paintings that bring the land to life. I especially like the photographs of the Egyptians doing daily routines, such as women carrying pots or boys and girls on the street. And while there are some stunning portraits of foreign dignitaries, like the British general Sir Reginald Wingate, the best images are of the people whose individual lives often don’t make it into the history books. This collection shows the workers, the poor, and people in mourning. Historians can access photos portraying how ordinary people lived—what they wore, how they walked, who they associated with. But they can also better understand the Westerners who visited. Was the land more than a spectacle to them? What do the drawings say about their creators?

Photograph of Egyptian boys and girls walking down a road, 1911 (Sladen, Douglas Egyptian Boys And Girls. (1911). From Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA). http://hdl.handle.net/1911/21592)

Photograph of Egyptian boys and girls walking down a road, 1911 (Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA). http://hdl.handle.net/1911/21592)

In addition to the pictures, the archive has digitized certain key writings. My favorite is E.W. Lane’s An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians from 1836. Just skimming through the pages brings a whole new world to life. You can read about the Egyptian process of child naming, their various beliefs, and their relationships between religion and law. The preface is a worthy read by itself—especially Lane’s account of the serpent eaters!

This archive is incredibly rich and rewarding, filled with a gold mine of primary documents. Click around and discover Egypt for yourself. The more you traverse the website, the more you’ll want to.

The latest from The New Archive:

A database that preserves the sounds of 1920s New York City

And the American Civil War, as drawn by Harper’s Weekly

Making History: Christopher Heaney

Interview by Jen Eckel

We begin our series with an interview with Christopher Heaney.

Christopher Heaney is a Harrington Doctoral Fellow in the History Graduate program at the University of Texas at Austin. After graduating from Yale University with a B.A. in Latin American Studies, he worked in journalism for several years, including a life-changing stint at the oral history project StoryCorps.

In the fall of 2005, a Fulbright Fellowship took him to Peru to continue his undergraduate research on the explorer Hiram Bingham and the excavation of Machu Picchu. The year of research in Cuzco and Lima produced articles for The New Republic and Legal Affairs Magazine, and an Op-Ed for the New York Times, and, ultimately, Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones, and the Search for Machu Picchu (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), his first book.

At UT, Heaney studies the history of archaeology and indigenous peoples in the Americas, particularly Peru, knowledge production in the Atlantic World, museum-building, race and nation-building, and grave-robbing, the world’s second-oldest profession.

In the interview, Christopher tells us about how he stumbled upon Hiram Bingham, the subject of his undergraduate thesis and first book, and how he combined his love of archaelogy and history to become a historian of Latin American history.

Learn more about Christopher Heaney and his work by visiting his website.

You may also like:

This recent National Public Radio story about the recent legal battle between Yale University and the Peru government, featuring comments from Christopher Heaney.

“Not Like Baghdad” – The Looting and Protection of Egypt’s Treasures

by Christopher Heaney

This weekend, as Cairo’s protestors struck their tents and tidied up Tahrir Square, a clean-up operation of another sort was underway nearby: in the Egyptian Museum, home to King Tutankhamen and countless other archaeological treasures.

The museum had haunted the protests since they began in late January. In the first few days of the unrest that toppled President Hosni Mubarak on Friday, newspapers were quick to note that a group of looters had broken through a skylight, apparently searching for gold. Although Tut’s famous mask was thankfully under lock-and-key, the intruders knocked over or damaged approximately 70 artifacts. In one of the many exciting turns of the last several weeks, however, Egyptian neighborhood patrols surrounded the museum and caught the would-be thieves.

“I’m standing here to defend and to protect our national treasure,” one man told the AP. “We are not like Baghdad!” shouted another. The looting of Iraq’s National Museum in 2003 was on every observer’s mind.

The Egyptian military arrived soon after, took the looters into custody and made the museum a base of operations. Just outside, Tahrir Square became the protests’ center. It seemed to be a victory for Egypt’s people and its military.

“If Cairo museum and the pyramids are safe, Egypt will be safe,” said Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s Minister of Antiquities, The National Geographic reported. “Inspectors, young archaeologists, and administrators, are calling me from sites and museums all over Egypt to tell me that they will give their life to protect our antiquities,” he further claimed. Countless political cartoonists, meanwhile, depicted a sphinx-like Mubarak losing his nose, or tumbling from the pyramids.

On Saturday, however, Hawass revealed that not all in the house of Tut was as well as he had claimed. Confirming what many Egyptologists suspected, Hawass reported that 18 objects have disappeared, including two gilded statues of the boy pharaoh, as well as an image of Nefertiti. A Twitter campaign is now calling for Hawass’s investigation, and a march for his resignation is apparently being planned for Wednesday.

Before commentators perpetuate the inevitable comparisons to the National Museum of Iraq, it is worth remembering the difference in scale – upwards of 15,000 artifacts lost in 2003. But, more importantly, Egypt has a long and complicated history of the protection of ruins and artifacts. In times of transition, that history is felt keenly. For millennia, new governments in Egypt – dynastic, foreign and national – have had to re-build the country’s monuments and mummies, often aware that the rest of the world was waiting to collect the pieces.

Of Strongmen and Mummy Powder

Egypt’s fear of such loss is as ancient as the pyramids. Egyptians of the Old Kingdom, the third millennium BCE, spent much effort protecting their monuments and tombs from the malice of future regimes. Pharaohs built “dummy chambers” to hide their mummies and nobles engraved their statues with bawdy warnings such as: “Whosoever should deface my statue and put his name on it … let Emil, the lord of this statue and Shamasg tear out his genitals and drain out his semen. Let them not give him any heir.”

Millennia later, Arab, Mamluk and Ottoman rule saw a healthy trade in books that claimed to reveal the treasures of forgotten tombs. Digging up mummies proved more profitable, however. To feed European hunger for “Oriental” secrets and medicine, traders shipped the ancient dead to Italy, where they were bought and sold as mumia – ground-up mummy — used as a medicine and sometimes as a color in painting. Antiquarianism during the Renaissance and Enlightenment again made Egypt an object of desire. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, he brought along a bumptious team of French savants who sketched ruins and collected artifacts for the Louvre. France capitulated to England, however, and the British Museum got the vast majority of Napoleon’s spoils, including the famed Rosetta Stone. (The French savants, for their part, first threatened to throw it all in the sea, rather than turn the prize over to their enemies.)

In 1835, Egyptian authorities established the Antiquities Service of Egypt to staunch rampant looting by locals and Europeans like “The Great Belzoni,” a former circus strongman from Venice who hauled out busts and obelisks by the ton – a tale laid out in rollicking, lacerating form by archaeologist Brian Fagan in The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists and Archaeologists in Egypt. Under the system that developed, only scientific experts could excavate and half of the artifacts they found would stay in Egypt – a system called “partage.”

As in all archaeologically-rich regions, however, enforcement proved hard. Locals continued looting to supply growing tourist demand, British archaeologists saved key artifacts for their patrons, and French and Egyptian employees of the Antiquities Service sold pieces from the museum on weekends. Egyptian train conductors used mummies for fuel, Mark Twain claimed. Somewhat hypocritically, Europeans and Americans cast the dysfunction of Egypt’s antiquity system as a further rationale for England and France’s informal rule: if Egyptians couldn’t protect the treasures of their past, the logic went, they weren’t ready to govern themselves.

National Foundations

Yet this wasn’t the entire story. Kept out of Egyptology by the British, Egypt’s Muslim intellectuals engaged in an Arab humanism ignored by history until only recently. They found work in the Cairo Museum – opened in 1902 – and led the study of Coptic and Islamic architecture and art. “It is not fitting for us to remain in ignorance of our country or neglect the monuments of our ancestors,” Egyptian scholar Alu Mubarak wrote in 1887, as quoted by Donald Malcolm Reid in Whose Pharaohs?: Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. “For what our ancestors have left behind stirs in us the desire to follow in their footsteps, and to produce for our times what they produced for theirs; to strive to be useful even as they strove.”

When the country achieved independence in February 1922, nationalists used Cairo’s Museum and foreign archaeologists to debate continuing British influence. In November of that year, American Howard Carter, funded by England’s Lord Carnavon, made his famed discovery of King Tut’s tomb. In the media circus that followed, newly independent Egyptians protested that the English and American team was being too secretive and perhaps moving artifacts to England and New York. Egypt eliminated the “partage” system and claimed all excavated objects, to Carter’s lasting fury.

Foreigners still loomed large over the next half-century of research, but in the years after Hosni Mubarak took power in 1981, the Egyptian Museum and its flamboyant spokesman, Zahi Hawass, oversaw a period of national consolidation. Seen as a cultural hero by some and a one-man showboat by others, Hawass focused world attention on Egypt’s past with a series of blockbuster discoveries, profitable traveling exhibits, and noisy campaigns for the return of the country’s artifacts from American and European museums. In some cases, he was successful. In November 2010, the Metropolitan Museum agreed to return its share of treasures that Howard Carter had stolen from the young pharoah’s tomb (as former Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving had claimed in his 1978 book, Tutankhamun: The Untold Story).

A New Start?

To use a metaphor as old as Tut, will Mubarak’s fall, and the museum’s loss of 18 objects, now shake Hawass’s own dynasty? As in past transitions, the politics of archaeology are running hot. Hawass has confirmed outside claims that looters broke into another deposit of artifacts in Egypt’s south; further losses are sure to emerge. Hawass’s affiliations with Mubarak may also cause him problems. While protestors assailed the administration in the streets, Mubarak promoted Hawass to his cabinet. Like their fellow Egyptians in Tahrir Square, the Cairo Museum’s employees are demanding higher wages and less corruption. Meanwhile, human rights advocates say that the army has detained and abused protestors either behind the museum or inside the museum itself.

Although an investigation of the Museum break-in should proceed, it is too soon to call for Hawass’s resignation. As Ian Parker of the New Yorker recently noted, Hawass is too central to Egypt’s antiquity system to lose during the transition. More importantly, it would be unfair to blame the losses on the protests themselves or to claim that Egypt’s museums have “failed.” It has been speculated that Mubarak’s secret police themselves – perhaps working with the museum’s guards – may have been behind the museum’s robbery. Hawass has vehemently denied the charge, but it provokes the question: no matter the identity of the looters, for whom were they collecting? The 18 stolen pieces were true treasures, suggesting, like the looting of Baghdad’s museum, that the job was done to fulfill the “wishlist” of a private collector, perhaps foreign.

The robbery of the Egyptian Museum and the loss of other objects from archaeological deposits around Egypt is a reminder of the shared responsibility of cultural patrimony. The protection of monuments and mummies like Egypt’s requires vigilance, not only from Egypt’s people but also from the international community whose collectors have made looting lucrative for centuries.

As the behavior of the heroic neighborhood patrols who detained the looters attests, Egypt seems to be holding up its side of the bargain. It’s a small comfort, but perhaps the theft of only 18 of the museum’s objects is a victory, given past losses. It’s time that the rest of us do the same, respecting just what Cairo’s museum and its history represent to the Egyptian people. A former Arab diplomat has characterized the last month as “Facebook meets the Egyptian Museum.” As we read newspapers online and scrutinize photos of celebrations in Tahrir Square, we should cheer the fact that Cairo’s museum, and the history it represents, is literally that victory’s background.

Sources: The pharaoh’s ancient curse is cited in Z. Bahrani, “Assault and Abduction: The Fate of the Royal Image in the Ancient Near East,” Art History 18 (1995).

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