This weekly feature is a place to discuss new developments in fields of history and archaeology. This can be newly discovered documents and archaeological sites, recent publications, documents that have just become publicly available through digitization or the opening of archives, and new theories and interpretations.
So, what's new this week?
Things have gone a bit berserk with the new Sappho fragments this week. The blogosphere has been wildly throwing accusations at the papyrologist, Dirk Obbink, that he's fallen for a hoax, or that he's a "no-questions-asking looter-financing Philistine" -- sometimes both at once, in an impressive display of inconsistency. The first is wrong; the second is a very selective knee-jerk reaction from people wanting to jump on a bandwagon. The flames have been fuelled, however, by the fact that the Oxford papyrology centre has taken Obbink's preprint offline.
Up-front, here's my perspective on things.
And an important point: for the record, there are many circumstances in which selling, buying, and collecting papyri is perfectly legal and legitimate, even if the find doesn't come from a properly documented archaeological dig. "Without provenance" does not imply that the person who owns it now is a looter or supporting looters: it is much more probable that the find was on the market several decades ago. Demanding more details ahead of the formal publication feels very much to me like a presumption of bad faith. (I am guilty of that presumption too, in at least one of my previous posts. I regret that now, after seeing the mess that has happened.)
That said, here's a timeline of what's been happening:
13 Jan.: after a seminar at which the new fragments were presented, Vincent Hunink (Latinist; Nijmegen, Netherlands) puts online a Dutch translation of the first new fragment, and adds the note, "Ik kan NIET garanderen dat de Griekse tekst authentiek is" ("I can NOT guarantee that the Greek text is authentic").
15 Jan.: Jona Lendering (a fairly well-known internet figure in the field) writes in his blog about the discovery of the poems, doubts their authenticity (while admitting that the papyrus is in the same handwriting as another ancient papyrus), wants radiocarbon tests, and compares the situation to the doubt over the "Gospel of Jesus' wife". (Incidentally, I gather the gospel's authenticity is doubted mainly by people who don't know much about papyrology, but I don't know much about that subject and would be happy to be corrected.)
28 Jan.: Greek Reporter gives the first English-language report on the discovery. They state that Obbink thinks the papyrus probably came from Oxyrhynchus. I suspect this is inaccurate reporting: they must have seen Oxyrhynchus cited as an example of a site where such things are typically found. Certainly Obbink's preprint contains no such suggestion. (Incidentally, the picture used on this article has been widely disseminated as though it were a photo of the papyrus. It isn't.)
29 Jan.: Steve Dodson gives an English translation of the first fragment.
29 Jan.: Oxford's papyrology centre sets up a discussion page for the new Sappho poems. For the first few days this mostly consists of people who are having difficulty with the Aeolic dialect and are asking for help with the Greek.
29 Jan.: a very foolish blog post by Paul Barford presumes bad faith in everything, accusing Obbink of being a Brit (which he isn't) as one of his crimes, and calling him a "no-questions-asking looter-financing Philistine". He also seems to think the fact that a non-specialist can't understand everything in Obbink's article shows that it's the article that's dishonest ("Dr Obbink notes that the fragment he discusses was in the same handwriting as something called 'P. GC. inv. 105', but what that piece of papyrological jargon means for the context of discovery I could not say"). All of this would be laughable if not for the fact that other bloggers have been citing Barford's idiocy approvingly and unironically.
30 Jan.: Tim Whitmarsh (Roman-era Greek literature; Oxford) provides a translation of the first fragment in The Guardian and the Huffington Post UK.
31 Jan.: Oxford's papyrology centre takes Obbink's preprint offline.
1 Feb.: Douglas Boin (Roman religion; Georgetown, Washington DC) tweets, "Doesn't it look like we kinda all chucked our own ethics to publicize #Sappho?" (No kidding.)
2 Feb.: Justin Walsh (Greco-Roman art; Chapman Univ., SoCal) tweets his suspicion that the papyrus is a fake.
3 Feb.: Adrian Murdoch wonders about provenance, and again compares the situation to the "scandal" of the Gospel of Jesus' wife, i.e. implying that the papyrus is a modern fake. David Gill (archaeological heritage; University Campus Suffolk, Ipswich) also wonders about provenance in the blog Looting Matters, but in a civil and non-accusatory fashion. Francesca Tronchin (ancient Mediterranean visual culture; Rhodes College, Tennessee) states that Obbink, ZPE, et al. should reveal the owner of the papyrus "to clear up any questions regarding the illict trade in antiquities and archaeological looting".
3 Feb.: Walsh and Tronchin pop up on the Oxford discussion page, along with Caroline Schroeder (late antique sexuality and Egyptian monasticism; University of the Pacific, California) to demand that Obbink produce information on provenance RIGHT NOW, before publication.
3 Feb., late evening Tennessee time: Tronchin sets up a timeline about the provenance accusations that are by now being tweeted and reblogged all over the place.
4 Feb.: back on the Oxford discussion page, Enrico Prodi (Hellenist; Oxford) and Alexander Nikolaev (Hellenist; Boston U) suggest that waiting a few weeks for further announcements might saner than making accusations of hoaxes or illegal looting. Justin Walsh continues to claim that there is "absolutely no assurance so far that the text is even authentically ancient".
5 Feb.: Obbink publishes an article in the TLS giving assurances about its "documented legal provenance" and passing various authenticity tests including spectral analysis and carbon dating.
This was all a foolish overreaction. Of course we could do with knowing more; but that's what the publication process is.
When a news source says "private collector" it does arouse curiosity, but assuming bad faith and illegitimacy when nothing has even been published is... well you judge for yourself. Insisting on verifiability is one thing; demanding to know everything RIGHT NOW is an accusation. Dimitri Nakassis at Toronto has unwisely compared the situation to when ZPE published an anonymously edited, unauthorised text of the Derveni papyrus in 1982; but the situation isn't analogous. There was never any question about the provenance of the Derveni papyrus: there, the problem was that the curator of the papyrus refused to allow anyone to publish it for several decades.
I could go on, but these accusations don't deserve still more attention. In closing, here's a couple of other possible reasons why Oxford took down the preprint, and they're both more likely than "looters"/"it's a fake".
I'll close by agreeing with the following note from Alexander Nikolaev:
if this text is a fake, the forger must have been an outstanding papyrologist with vast knowledge of papyri- and ink-preparation technology; a brilliant paleographer; his or her knowledge of Greek dialectology must be staggering; and of course the villain in question would have to be second to few as far as their expertise in the corpus of Lesbian poets is concerned.
Edit: only just saw Obbink's piece in the TLS. Edit 2: moderated a bit of unjust language.
A site was found in Las Ventanas just south of Zacatecas that was occupied during the Mixton War (1540-1541) in what is modern day Jalisco. It's interesting because the archaeologists that have been working on the site believe that mainly women, children, and the elderly lived there while the able-bodied men were off fighting the Spanish. What the article doesn't tell you is that because of the Mixton War the Spanish effectively wiped out the Caxcan ethnic group from the area leaving nothing but settlement names that points how closely related Caxcan was to Nahuatl. But since there are no native speakers and no one made a dictionary prior to the rebellion we will probably never know when the language split from other Uto-Aztecan groups which is very unfortunate because it could offer insight in the Epi-Classic migration patterns in Mesoamerica.
Well, not as impressive as the storm over the Sappho fragments, but in my odd little corner of history, I recently found out I have only the second reported example of an early 1910's high voltage porcelain insulator. It was rather surprising, and made me actually dust and clean the damn thing.
It's two days old but there's this article that I found while doing my usual rounds at ANN.
Whenever I am on a dig it's always an exciting thing to find rodent runs as they can lead to a trove of small artefacts that had been taken down with the animal. Consequently, the bunnies in the previously noted article dug out the projectile points themselves while they were creating their burrows.
On a semi-related note, I feel that Donovan Webster wrote something similar in his work Aftermath: the Remnants of War where the fauna of France continually unearth shells from WWI and WWII.
Always astounding to hear that animals can be archaeologists as well.