Notes on books I'm reading, podcasts I'm following, music production, digital art, food, and more.
I haven't had much motivation to post here as of late. The election is only a small part of it - just had too much going on in life, and have been losing interest in keeping up with this blog as a writing exercise. I'm still reading (1491 and other books), making music, and being social, but seasonal depression has been creeping in and between 40 hours of work and the rest of life, writing is taking a back seat as a hobby for now. But for the few people who read this blog, I thought I may as well offer a road map of future posts. Not all of these will be written and posted, and there's no particular order or target date; it'll happen when it happens. But here are some ideas I've been thinking about...
As part of an intermission between my last book and 1491, Vivi will be sharing some tasty family recipes. This one is for buckwheat blini, a classic Eastern European pancake similar to crepes in thickness and texture. Blini are widely enjoyed throughout Ukraine, Russia, and elsewhere in the Slavic world. Blini are commonly served with toppings both savory (smetana, cheese, cold cuts, butter, vegetable spreads, ground meats, salmon, even caviar) and sweet (varenye and similar jams/jellies, tvorog, fresh or cooked fruit, syrup, and more) Buckwheat is not the only flour used for blini (wheat and rye are common as well), but it's a popular one, and lends a delightfully rich, toasty, and nutty flavor to the blini. Here, I present to you my family's blini recipe.
Serve hot and fresh with toppings of your choice. 🇺🇦 💖
David Anthony takes us through the endless Eurasian steppe on an archeological adventure to explain the origins of the Indo-European peoples who would come to settle and dominate a stretch of the Old World spanning from the Atlantic coast of Iberia, through Europe, into Anatolia and much of the Near East, and vast swaths of Asia up to the Urals and south into northern India.
He delves into remarkable detail on archeological findings (paired with linguistic reconstructions) of the Yamnaya horizon and its numerous daughter cultures, highlighting aspects of materials, burial practices, weaponry, jewelry, tools, and countless other artifacts, drawing fascinating conclusions about what these findings said about the cultures that lived there. It is this level of detail that makes his analyses so compelling - although the writing becomes dense at times, once Anthony has introduced the reader to one type of analysis, it gets easier to follow as he generalizes it to multiple cultures later in the book (for instance, his analysis of kurgan burial styles).
Anthony also does a good job illustrating cause-and-effect relationships and how they manifest in the archeological record (for instance, evidence of the transformative effects of wagon building, horse domestication, bronze smelting, etc. on societies, and how societies that adopted these innovations pressured and changed their neighbors in turn). References to Holocene climate changes as a driver of societal change/migrations were also appreciated. I especially appreciated his discussion of social and ritual practices, which helped bring these cultures to life in a way that can feel more relatable vs. discussion purely of economic and industrial aspects
Lastly, I appreciate when Anthony includes qualifiers and caveats about what the evidence can't explain, or the limitations of what the record reveals. Highly specific and detailed claims come with highly specific scopes, and I appreciate that he doesn't fall into the pitfall of "grand history" explanations that try to offer One or Two Big Milestones That Changed Everything and Apply to All Cultures.
The only minor nitpicks I had were a few geographical oversights (we don't hear much about the Indo-Iranians who pushed further south into the Indian subcontinent, or about Europeans from the Westernmost parts of the continent, beyond the Corded-Ware culture in present-day Poland/East Germany). But considering the massive scope of the book, it's understandable that he couldn't touch on every single Indo-European daughter culture. I sometimes wish there were a bit more exploration of the languages potentially spoken by the daughter cultures, but by his own admission, Anthony is not a linguist and so he may have been treading carefully in a less familiar field. Finally, his prose is on the drier and denser side for a book aimed at (educated) lay audiences, but given the scale of the topic and the rigor with which he is treating it, it's not a major mark against him.
Overall, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language is an outstanding dive into Proto-Indo-European history, and I hope that I can find similar books on other early world cultures. ★★★★.5 (4.5).
I'd like to sincerely thank everyone who's been reading and following along with me. It's been a pleasure to share what I've learned with y'all and a wonderful chance to practice my note taking and summarization skills. My next read will be 1491:New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus followed by Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism, and I look forward to sharing my reading with yinz again real soon.
Next we move onto the Sintashta culture, a culture of the Southern Urals notable for deploying advanced bronze metallurgy on an unprecedented scale. Every house had ovens, forges, slag, and copper, along with some of the oldest chariot remnants known, whole horse sacrifices, and bronze weapons dating 2100-1800 BCE. Some of the graves are remarkably similar to rituals described in the Vedic Rig Veda—a tantalizing link between the Sintashta and the peoples who would become the earliest Vedic cultures of Northern India. Graves often contained wounded or dismembered men. Sintashta settlements were also heavily walled and fortified, which, together with the metallurgy and chariots, suggests a major expansion of warfare in this area.
Around the Aral Sea was another pair of cultures: the Kelteminar and Botai-Tersek. These were pastoral gatherers, who were sedentary, but did hunt bison, boards, and camels, fished, and gathered apricots and pomegranates. This group was displaced by Sintashta migrants, possibly due to climates becoming cooler and more arid, and concurrently we see these Aral cultures adopting many Sintashta traits (metallurgy, walled settlements, etc.). Finally, we see signs of greatly increased trade with the Near East and Mesopotamia—likely from these cultures seeking copper. The centralization and early statecraft seen with increasingly large, fortified, and specialized settlements may have been from a positive feedback loop due to increased warfare made possible by advancements in chariotmaking and metallurgy.
Finally, there is discussion of the Srubnaya culture, a southern neighbor of the Sintashta, who traded turquoise, tin, pottery, blades, mirrors, and beautiful silver and gold artifacts and figures all throughout the Near East, including contacts with Mesopotamian states like Akkadia and Elam. Srubnaya (and similar cultures collectively called “Bactria-Margiana Area Cultures”) artifacts have been found as far west as Syria, reflecting the rapid expansion of trade between the steppe and the Middle/Near East around 2100-1800 BCE. These artifacts were also found up north in the steppes, illustrating that the BMAC had become a valuable conduit for trade throughout Central Asia.
There is so much (much) more to discuss in Anthony's work; there is honestly enough material for another four blog posts of similar length and depth. However, in the interest of brevity and time, we will leave off here and proceed to our conclusion.
At last we pick up from the Yamnaya incursions into Tripolye territory mentioned in part three. Anthony offers one possible explanation for the outcome of these incursions—a lord and client/vassal relationship (from here referred to as the Usatovo culture), in which Yamnaya steppe cultures became chieftains/high status leaders whose burial practices were emulated by their subject peoples (perhaps to cement the social hierarchy that the Yamnaya culture had built), while Tripolye artisans continued to produce the materials and artifacts (wool clothing, cereal farming, glassworking, etc.) albeit with Yamnaya flourishes (best seen in pottery, which was a mix of Tripolye base designs with Yamnaya decoration).
There were even clay sculptures painted red, but with non-ochre (iron oxide) pigments, as hematite was not readily available around the lower Danube, another sign of cultural syncretism (ochre-painted items are a hallmark of Yamnaya culture; the newcomers sought to replicate these items with unfamiliar pigments). There were also cannabis seeds—again, not native to the area, but likely brought over by Yamnaya migrants.
In particular, Usatovo sites had three different sized kurgans. The largest housed only adult men with various ornate jewelry and pottery (perhaps a nobieman/patrician class, as the skeletons show no signs of battle injuries), the mid sized had metal weaponry (warriors and kin), and the smallest was not a kurgan at all, and housed men, women, and children alike, with few ornate artifacts. One last item of note. Graves were often marked with wagon wheels and wolf-themed jewelry, stelae, and belts—consistent with a reconstructed PIE myth in which new warriors were initiated by launching cattle raids into neighboring territory, dressed in wolf-themed attire, as if mimicking packs of wolves on the hunt.
I'm nearing the end of David Anthony's excellent work. I'm still putting together my future blog posts about it (probably two more plus maybe a concluding post), but in the meantime, I wanted to solicit recommendations for my next read. You can vote in the poll below.
I've been reading through Luxemburg's Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy and Bernstein's Evolutionary Socialism to try to articulate some thoughts on how Revisionism may have played out in Russia during its revolutionary period, and whether it would've been successful at advancing socialism in Russia over the long-term. As I'm fairly new to exploring Marxist philosophy, please bear with me if I misinterpret or otherwise make any mistakes. These are early and loosely organized thoughts that will be part of a series in which I try to summarize and offer my take on the many different leftist factions and movements vying for power before, during, and after Russia's revolutions.
My very tentative thoughts are that reformism and non-vanguard approaches would've probably enabled a more stable foundation for Russian leftism long-term, in the sense that:
With further reading I'm also seeing that Luxemburg and Bernstein were at odds in many respects, with Luxemburg seeing Bernstein as excessively revisionist himself, but I'm still parsing their differences.
So why did the Bolsheviks specifically did so well given the apparent advantages of Revisionism? From my perspective, it is because tsarist autocracy kept a tight grip on Russia until the very last minute. The exceptionally reactionary, stubborn, and outright incompetent rule of Nicholas I and II (especially the latter's complete refusal to cede any power to the Duma) prevented any of the institutions of liberalism from taking root at all. By the time the tsar finally abdicated in the February Revolution, the Russian State had already effectively collapsed under the strain of war. The Provisional Government inherited a smoldering ruin of a country, with a populace facing profound starvation, sickness, and general human suffering; Kerensky made it even worse by launching a disaster of an offensive when his first priority should've been to make peace as soon as possible and to deliver emergency aid to the populace by any means necessary. Under such dire conditions, a fast, radical, centralized, charismatic, and decisive vanguard will thrive. Hence, Bolshevik victory and control of Russian leftism post 1917.
In a scenario where things go even slightly better for Russia (Alexander II isn't assassinated and his successors allow liberal reforms, Nicholas II actually cedes significant power to the Duma and 1905 Constitution, Kerensky pulls the Russian Republic out of the war early and treats the suffering of his people with the urgency it deserved, etc.)... I think that's where the revisionists would have the most success.
In this book, anthropologist David W. Anthony discusses the origin of Indo-European peoples from the Pontic-Caspian steppe and their language and culture. He describes how they migrated into Europe and interacted with the prior population there and explains the archeological and linguistic evidence that grants us valuable insight into how these ancient peoples lived, as well as the limitations of our knowledge and any unanswered questions. In particular, Anthony focuses on how Indo-Europeans domesticated the horse, invented the wheel, and developed advanced bronze metallurgy, and how these technologies enabled sweeping social and political changes in IE society.
I'll be writing a series of posts that summarizes what I've read as I progress through the book, offering notes and commentary.
I'm about a quarter of the way through and still taking in/processing the information covered in the book, but so far I've really enjoyed the use of comparative linguistics to a) narrow down the "original homeland" of Proto-Indo-European speakers based on reconstructed environmental words, and b) make predictions about their culture based on vocabulary and comparing it to archaeological evidence.
There is also some interesting discussion on the nature of cultural, ecological, and linguistic divides and how they don't always correlate (several peoples can share cultural traits but have very different languages, while the reverse - divergent ancient cultures sharing a language - is much rarer). Interestingly, the most conclusive information about ancient peoples' cultures and languages often comes from ecological borders - in areas of transition between different biomes, peoples on either side of the boundary will develop especially strong differences between each other, and this manifests in markedly different artifacts (pottery, house styles, etc.) right on either side of the border.
I'm currently reading through a chapter that describes how early Anatolian farmers migrating to Greece/the Balkans and up into the Pontic steppe interacted with existing forager peoples and how this contact manifests in local archaeology.
About 1/3rd done, and I'm currently reading about horse domestication. There are several clues archeologists have used (such as gender/age/size distribution of slaughtered horses, used to distinguish wild herd hunting from pasture-raised horses), but the keystone has been bit wear on horse teeth.
Bitting leaves beveled wear on specific teeth from the horse chewing on the bit - metal bits wear more, but even older bits made with softer material will erode enamel. Researchers compared horse teeth from different dig sites to modern horses that had been bitted for varying amounts of time, and, were able to pinpoint where and when different steppe societies domesticated horses based on the observed enamel erosion + carbon dating of the samples.
Halfway through the book! It's a meaty read at 568 pages, but getting through it. I'll probably pick something lighter for my next read.
We're now discussing how "Old Europe" (the pre Indo-European cultures present before ~3400 BCE) gave way to Indo-Europeans. The author talks about how the combo of horse domestication and the invention (or possibly import from Mesopotamia via the Caucasus) of wagons around 3400 BCE enabled pastoral people of the Yamnaya Horizon to grow the number and territory of their herds.
This territorial expansion led to greater conflicts between neighbors about grazing land and greater stratification of wealth as some people accumulated much larger animal/land amounts. We see this change reflected in a greater disparity of wealth buried with people in cemeteries - a reliable hallmark of status was metal tools, jewelry, and artifacts (bronze, gold, silver, etc.) in graves. The author also hypothesizes that these new territorial conflicts spurred development of the Proto-Indo-European language, as a sort of common "trade/negotiation" language among Yamnaya peoples.
Movement of Yamnaya peoples from the Pontic Steppe westward into Europe may have been spurred in part by climactic cooling and drying, leading pastoralists to seek warmer and wetter territories in the west, and so we see Yamnaya-type sites mixing in and eventually replacing Tripolye sites (a classic Old Europe culture centered around the Danube) after 3000 BCE.
Even within the Yamnaya we see differences West to East. Western Yamnaya near the Dnieper River were more agrarian and sedentary, cultivating small cereal crop plots around relatively large settlements along with the usual cattle ranching. Lots of cattle - this is about the time when lactase persistence evolved in Scandinavia and rapidly spread south, enabling many more people to consume dairy regularly. Eastern Yamnaya in the Don-Volga Basin had more horses and sheep, and seemed to do more fishing and hunting.
Western Yamnaya also appeared to be more matriarchal than Easterners based on archeological findings. Evidently, the more patriarchal Eastern Yamnaya won out in linguistic influence, as PIE has lots of specific words for patrilineal relationships, but not as many for matrilineal ones.
There's also a brief digression about the Afanasievo culture - a group of Yamnaya migrants who journeyed all the way east across the Kazakh steppe to end up near the Altai Mountains. This is the opposite of pretty much all other Indo-Europeans, and no one really knows why they traveled that way. This group was the ancestors of the Tocharians, an Indo-European culture that lived in the Tarim Basin around 400-1200 CE, a Western outlier in a region otherwise dominated by Turkic, Mongolic, and Sinitic peoples.
Fun fact: many Chinese languages may have borrowed their word for "honey" from a Tocharian language (Tocharian B's mit, which came from PIE médʰu) . Mandarin mi is likely cognate with English mead, French miel, and Russian мёд (mjod).
In which Vivi explains the purpose of this blog.
I read a lot. I am not particularly good at retaining what I read. This blog is a way for me take notes on my readings, share them with the world, and make recommendations for neat books that I think other folks might enjoy.
What will I post about? Read on below.
As mentioned above, I want to share what I read with other people.
I tend to read a lot of non-fiction. Most of it concerns history, but I'll dip into other topics as well.
I make electronic music. Mainly atmospheric D&B, jungle, and other breakbeat music. I'll post about what I'm making, share production tips and tutorials, and snippets of work in progress.
I also make digital art in Blender. Usually for music cover art.
Lastly...what exactly is a Неохотная Энаричка (Njeohotnaya Enarichka)?
The Anarya belonged to the most powerful Scythian aristocracy. They were born male, but wore women's clothing,[6] performed women's jobs, spoke like women,[9] and were believed by the Scythians to be inherently different from other males and that their androgyny was of divine origin; according to indigenous Scythian shamanic traditions, the Anarya were considered "transformed" shamans who changed their sex, which characterised them as being the most powerful shamans, due to which they inspired fear and were thus accordingly given special respect in Scythian society, and the Scythians ascribed their androgyny to a "female disease" causing sexual impotency.
To be неохотная is to be reluctant. Although the Scythians are not related to the later Slavs who inhabited the Pontic Steppe, Slavs did not really have a "third gender" tradition (or really any cultural accomodation of transness), and so I look back to the nearest culture that did. I take a sort of reluctant pride in being a trans woman from a notoriously conservative culture.