Category Archives: History

Starting Simple

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These small spouted cups are documented in Rebay-Salisbury et al. The one on the left is one of the cups documented in Dunne et al. as having contained ruminant milk. It was found in Grave 80 (of a child under age 6) of the Dietfurt-Tennisplatz site, dated to c 800 to 600 BCE. On the right is a cup found in a settlement context, in Regensburg-Harting, dated to c 1200 to 800 BCE. It is described as “contaminated, low level of lipids.” Both the originals reside in the Historisches Museum Regensburg.

The Dietfurt cup is completely round from the top, but I ended up making it in an oval shape. I ended up making the Regensburg-Harting cup in a slightly fatter, spherical shape (it is described as “lemon shaped”), with 3 feet. I couldn’t tell from the photo whether it had 3 or 4, and I go back and forth on whether I screwed up. Still, these little cuties crack me up with their exaggerated duck faces.

I did a little burnishing on these, just to smooth out the surfaces a bit. Both were started as pinch pots, which I think is the most likely technique for making cups of this size (easy to work in the palm of one’s hand). I made the straws by rolling some clay and, after it set up, using a coring tool to take out the middle. This could have been done with a thick needle or wire, especially with such a short straw.

My earthenware adaptations of the Bronze Age Dietfurt and Regensburg-Harting cups, made using a pinch-pot technique and coring tool for the straws. These are made using Standard 104 earthenware and were bisque fired and not glazed.

Exploring Sippy Cups for Children from the Bronze Age

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In 2019, a group published a paper showing that cups found in Bronze Age children’s graves had contained ruminant milk, demonstrating that children were likely being given at least supplemental nutrition of animal milk. These are graves with children in them, so it’s possible that they were receiving milk as part of an attempt to kept them fed while ill (and indeed anyone might receive such easily consumed calories on “bed rest”). But some of these children-associated cups were particularly whimsical, having little legs or even animal heads. Admittedly, the cups that had residue analyzed were fairly pedestrian “bottle” cups:

Dietfurt biberons, approximately 800 to 600 BCE, buried with infants

But other cups, particularly a set of older cups from Vösendorf in Austria, were thoroughly delightful:

Not surprisingly, many editors chose to use the Vösendorf photos for lay-audience media about the discovery.

This sent me down a little rabbit hole about these ancient finds – discovered both in excavations of settlements and as grave goods, in varying shapes and sizes, some more like little animal models, and some simple vessels with spouts or “straws” on them. So I’ve decided to start replicating them.

Pottery in Bronze Age Europe was earthenware fired a single time in pits or in simple, only modestly insulated kilns. The potters in that place and era did not have the high-efficiency kilns already being used to vitrify stoneware and glaze it in the Far East. They used burnishing and polishing to process the surfaces of their pottery, although it would not have been as water-tight as modern glazed pottery.

Pottery in this place and era tended to have a distinctive brown color or to be burnished with a blackening material, like graphite, or painted. I don’t have easy access to brown low-fire clay, so rather than stain red clay, I’m just going ahead and use the red clay as is as I explore these shapes, trying to stay close to the single-fire process, first with electric kilns at the local pottery studio and ultimately, I hope, advancing to pit-firing.

I am fortunate that the same group that published the 2019 Nature paper has collected information about feeding vessels likely used with children, including assembling a wonderful table of extant finds listing their context and sizes, publishing it in 2021 in Feeding Babies at the Beginnings of Urbanization in Central Europe. Stay tuned as I work my way through these shapes. (And beyond!)

Paul Ford Builds It

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And almost 2000 people show up immediately.

If you are respectful of others, you will be welcomed, and people will be excited to see your web pages and to meet you. This is not a special characteristic of tilde.club; this is a basic characteristic of decent humans that somehow has become atypical on the Internet.

I got online in 1992, and this piece is making me so nostalgic, even though everything about what he made sounds distinctly nicer than most of what I encountered then. Wait, is that what nostalgia is? Being suffused with a sense of what the good old days could have been if they actually had been good?

Happy International Women’s Day!

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Perspective can be tough to get, especially on our own behavior. We know that “seeing the big picture” or “getting an aerial view” is important to deep understanding, that we need to get some distance. It’s much easier to give someone else good advice than to follow it ourselves (even when our ability to give good advice comes directly from needing it).

It’s true for group behavior, too. The conventions, the little in-jokes, the “way we’ve always done it” – these can be harmful to individuals, but if the group is homogeneous enough, the pressure to refrain from pointing it out can be just as strong as the negative experiences themselves.


From a booklet intended to help wartime supervisors bring women into the workplace, from the Records of the War Manpower Commission.

When women went to work to support the war effort, they entered an environment few of them had ever seen, supervised by people who barely recognized where they were coming from. These pages, along with 2 other spreads at the National Archives, Southeast Region, give us a look into a booklet to help those supervisors get the best work out of these mysterious new employees.


This is good advice for all managers of any employees.

The presentation has all the hallmarks of a startlingly condescending piece, but the words tell a different story. Women are cooperative, patient, teachable. It may seem ridiculous that any of those things needed to be said, especially at a time when women were expected to be agreeable, long-suffering, and obedient, but the language is certainly more respectful than those cultural expectations. And the guidelines themselves are remarkable for what they really are: just plain good advice about welcoming new employees and managing them effectively.


This IS people management.

As minority interests of all kinds receive more attention, we see over and over again that familiarity goes a long way, that seeing the old, established ways through the lens of the people who had no say in them brings harmful behavior into focus and creates the potential for a better experience for all. Men benefit just as much as women from respectful treatment in the workplace, arguably more because they still have advantages there as well!

People don’t like change, and they often can’t stand the idea that someone ‘has it easier’ because of a classification difference. Fostering the understanding that they don’t have it easier – quite the contrary – is probably a lost cause, but we don’t really need a “who has it worst” contest at work, anyway. Workplace practices that proactively and supportively resolve issues that get in the way of actually getting the work done put the emphasis where it belongs: on the work getting done.


We can do it!

 

Thing-a-day 18: Beginning of the End

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So sighs a friend of mine upon discovering this page from LIFE Magazine in 1938:

It was quoted extensively in an “on this date” piece in the Lock Haven (Penn.) Express, in 1967:

1-Piece Swim Suit Hit Shore 30 Years Ago

NEW YORK (AP) — Amid dire predictions of moral perdition, the topless bathing suit bit American beaches just thirty years ago this month. The furor was not to be believed. The city fathers of Atlantic City, N.J., home of the Miss America contest, said they would never tolerate such an obscenity on their strands. Across the country there were outraged howls. Bare bosoms? Belly buttons? And worse, Hairy bosoms and stomachs? Because the guardians of public morals were talking about men swimming in just trunks.

Until 1937, the men of America had been swimming in one- piece or two-piece knit bathing suits with more material above the belt than below. Most of the trunk parts had skirts over them, moreover. Like the topless fad for females, the mens’ craze originated on the French Riviera, spread to California and then insinuated its way to the East Coast. Life Magazine commented then that “in the more inhibited East a male costume consisting solely of trunks was, until just recently, cause for arrest on almost all public beaches and raised eyebrows on many a private one.” It wasn’t until the next year that Long Island’s Long Beach allowed men to air their chests and Atlantic City held off until the outbreak of World War

Bathing suit manufacturers complained that there was little chance for originality in design — just plain black knit trunks with a white canvas belt. The next year in its July 18, 1938, issue Life showed pictures with such captions as “trunks do little for faulty posture,” “hairy chests are becoming public,” “trunks should be privately fixed,” and “trunks should be worn high.” Atlantic City, and other hoi* outs, have long since lost their battle: The bathing suit manufacturers have discovered Heeding Madras, boxing trunks, Bermuda shorts, cabana suits and a great many other changes on the black knit trunks they thought were the limit. Will the topless fad for women spread as fast and the objections sound as silly so soon?

Yeah, so, that’s kind of a no on that last thing, although that fad remains popular in Europe and on private beaches of the West Coast — the same places this fad began!

Thing-a-day 16: Knights and Snails

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The British Library posted a wonderful group of images of marginalia featuring knights facing off against snails, almost all from the 14th century.


Knight v Snail II: Battle in the Margins (from the Gorleston Psalter, England (Suffolk), 1310-1324, Add MS 49622, f. 193v. More at Knight v Snail.

Got Medieval also touched on this subject some time before, but with fewer illustrations, and at pre-Gébelin Tarot History, Michael Hurst explored it (mainly about halfway down).

Smithsonian also took it up, gathering a couple of these and other references, and Homo Ludditus expanded on the subject, adding a few more. Strange and wonderful.