Stone Pages Archaeo News podcast

It showed again in my Friday post: the majority of podcasts I listen to are history podcasts. And in this respect I am an omnivore - I like to listen to all history podcasts. I have no preference for any era or type of history. The reason is as simple as why I like maps: I like to be oriented. I like to know where I am, in space and in time.

Therefore I like to also keep an eye on blogs that summarize history news such as A Blog About History. And in the realm of archeology and ancient history there are the Stone Pages. The Stone Pages have a news rubric, as a blog, but also as a podcast Archaeo News (feed) The news is read by David Connolly in a very lively fashion. There seems to be an emphasis on news from the British Isles, but that may be on account of the available sources.

Archeo News is a very nice podcast to get updates on various tidbits in archeology findings as reported in the media and collected by the Stone Pages. Other than A Blog About History, Archaeo News does a little bit more than just repeating a central paragraph in the found news time. Connolly takes the presented findings and puts them in a quick historic perspective.

Mohammed Jabri - Simek 's Nachts uit 2005

De podcasts van Simek 's Nachts zijn podfaded en mijn pogingen om op het internet de files van het programma op te sporen zijn meestal mislukt. Een van de interviews waar nog wel eens naar gevraagd wordt is het dubbel interview dat Martin Simek in 2005 met Mohammed Jabri had. Op het internet archief vond ik de oude webpagina over deze confrontatie tussen Simek en Jabri.

Een confrontatie is het vooral in het eerste uur. Jabri wordt geleidelijk het gesprek steeds negatiever over 'Nederlanders' en verklaart met een superieure air van vanzelfsprekendheid dat zijn vriendin uiteraard een Marokkaanse is. Toch gaat het hier om Marrokkanen met een Nederlands paspoort en die in Nederland geboren, dan wel opgegroeid zijn en Simek meent daarom een valse tegenstelling te bespeuren en pint Jabri vast op de kwestie om het Nederlandse te definieren en aan te geven waarin hij dan niet Nederlands is. En waarom hij beter is. Wanneer Jabri dan vervalt in onduidelijke en ontwijkende cliches, kapt Simek hem kattig af en roept uit: "Ik verveel me met jou."

Dat het dan geen handgemeen wordt, verbaasde mij niet, maar de regie had het toch te kwaad. En achteraf leek dit interview mislukt. Niettemin kwamen Jabri en Simek tot een vergelijk: om nog een uur interview te doen en de ruzie uit te praten en om duidelijkheid te scheppen. Het resultaat is een zinderend en facinerend tweeluik waarvan het meer dan jammer is dat het is weggeraakt. Op indirecte wijze zijn deze en nog een paar andere files opgedoken, van podcast lusiteraars die ze bewaard hebben en bereid zijn te delen. Er is zelfs een Huffduffer feed.

The Friday portion for Anne is a Man

Every other Friday we clean our home and that means I get some six hours of pretty uninterrupted podcast listening done. Here I will give you an idea what I listened to this morning. Most of these podcasts will soon get a more extensive review.

MMW 5 - Revolution, Industry & Empire (UCSD) - I nearly missed out on the fact that this course is brought this semester. Professor Heidi Keller-Lapp is lecturing about world history between (roughly) 1750 and 1914 (feed). The goal is to show how in this period Europe came to dominate the world. This is a lecture course that one could listen to in conjunction with History 5 from Berkeley, History 1c from UCLA and European Civilization from Yale (see my post on Courses in Modern History) and get a very complete academic picture.

In Our Time (BBC) - This week's show about Ibn Khaldun. Very interesting as usual. I admire Melvyn Bragg's facility to get the job done in 40 minutes.

Europe from its Origins - A new history podcast I recently discovered (feed). This is a series on enhanced podcasts and vodcasts about the early history of Europe. Host Joe Hogarty gives a bit of a monotonous reading, but other than that does an impressive job in making the bridge between the Romans and the Middle Ages. Today I finished the fifth lecture in which he arrived at Charles Martell. Hogarty is the first to have taught me in such a clear fashion how the Western Roman world shifted to western Europe and gradually developed into the Europe we know from more familiar history - say the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Next I listened a bit to two lectures but eventually skipped them. The third lecture of the Berkeley Series about Human Rights and the Tenth lecture in the UCSD series about the Byzantine Empire.

Then I heard the fifth lecture in History 151c The peculiar modernity of Britain (Berkeley) which is a very interesting and entertaining series with Professor James Vernon (feed). This lecture among others dealt with the Indian Revolt of 1857 which made for some fine comparative material with two series by Professor Vinay Lal at UCLA. (see also review by DIY Scholar)

And if it had to be like that, the next lecture was by Lal The History of British India (UCLA) the lecture of last Tuesday (2 February). Here Lal arrives at what promises to be the most interesting part of his series: the colonialism with knowledge. This is also the subject of his doctorate. He will show how the British colonialized also by colonializing the realm of knowledge. And in many ways one may argue that until this day the colonialzed knowledge still rules, that is, in this world in which Britain is no longer a power and the Western hegemony is receding, the Western style science is still an unchallenged authority. I am sure Lal will arrive at this point as well.

Eventually I heard a bit of France Since 1871 (Yale) in which Professor John Merriman started a lecture about the French culture of drink. But then my time was up and I will have to continue later.

Indus Seal - World History in Objects

Didn't I just ask for more podcasts on the Indus Valley Civilization? (History of India - the search goes on; towards the end of the post) Here was yet another one. In the series A History of the World in 100 Objects (BBC) in the subsection about the first cities and states (4000-2000 BCE) there was an item from the Indus Valley: Indus Seal.

Add this to the few other references we have in podcast (see below) and the information is about as scarce and far apart as the data in the Indus Valley Civ itself. Nevertheless I am immensely fascinated by the Indus Valley and it appears I am not the only one. I guess any mystery civilization is mesmerizing, whether it is probably fictional like Atlantis, or whether it disappeared and its traces were discovered only now as with the Indus Valley Civ. Besides, when you know so little, all the more your imagination can add.

And here, I find, everybody who is fascinated appears to project into IVC what occupies him most. How factual is the assumption the IVC collapsed of climate change; or is that rather projection? How factual is the assumption that IVC was very rational and egalitarian? And when we make assumptions where the IVC people went, apart from factual, this may be very political. Does India have roots in IVC? Does Hinduism? Or do the Dravidians of South-India? Eventually all these projections tend to become political.

The IVC cities appear to have been vast and sophisticated. Their system of measures quite universal and accurate. The area they covered vast and this means probably a lot is still to be found. Among others, the script is in need of deciphering. We know the script from captions and seals, which offer little to go on. And although the script has been found as far as Mesopotamia, there is no Rosetta Stone, that is, no bilingual artifact. And so we are still left to conjecture and thus to our dreams, projections and wishful thinking.

More Indus Valley Civ:
The Story of India BBC,
History of India UCLA,
Podularity,
Engines of our Ingenuity,
David Kalivas World History.

More A World History in 100 Objects (in short: AHOW):
First AHOW Review.

Your opinion on a new look for Anne is a Man

I keep playing with the regular templates in order to find out if they can fit for the blog. Reader Gerald left a comment and recommended taking a stretched template with a header picture. Stretch in this respect means that the width of the blog is adapted to the size of your browser window. That seems like a fine idea, especially since all commenters on the fixed width example I showed previously complained the blog got too narrow.

So take a look here and let me know what you think. And if any of you have some idea how I can make the header picture to stretch as well, that would be great.

Three issues of Speaking of Faith

APM's Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett is a radio program and podcast that I do not listen to all the time, but I keep a close eye on whatever comes up in the feed. And then I try to to pick out issues that appeal to me most. And if I did not think to pick myself, it happens frequently that a reader of the blog alerts me to one of the SOF releases - as happened again recently.

I had already discarded the idea of listening to The Meaning of Intelligence even though the subject on intelligence and how ideas of intelligence are constructed have my interest. It seemed out of place in a show about faith, but than my reader rescued me. Of course, the construction of intelligence is about faith. We have placed faith in intelligence and a very specific kind of school-intelligence at that. Krista Tippett's guest Mike Rose tells of his research and uncovering of other kinds of intelligence and our inconsistent cultural appreciation of it. How can we be anti-intellectual and yet at the same time under-appreciate the practical skills, the handiwork and the amazing intelligence that comes with that and place our esteem and aspiration so singularly on the main stream intellectual academic intelligence? And what do we lose in the process?

Quite interesting were also two other recent issues that I listened through entirely. In Reflections of a former Islamist extremist Tippett spoke with Briton Ed Husain and how he struggled with his mixed Muslem and British identity and how this got him close to Islamism and made him recoil afterward. In Whale songs and Elephant love the guest was biologist Kate Payne who tells about the complexity of communication between large mammals and apart from reflecting this she also relates about her depression and how all of this meaningfully came together.

More Speaking of Faith:
Preserving Ojibwe,
The story and God,
Fragility and Humanity,
The Sunni-Shia divide and the future of Islam,
Wangari Maathai.