(Untitled)

[mendaciloquent]

Spring creeps, early this year, though no doubt with even earlier springs to come.

It's odd, planting an ochard in the face of climate change: I plant trees that don't thrive here, not quite yet, but will thrive, after much devastation has already struck elsewhere. It's forward-thinking, in a way, but also feels dirty, resigned, calculating. Not

Comments

[benicek]

I’ve maybe reached the opposite conclusion in reading up on Late Antiquity and Romano-British archaeology. I’m living in the north-western corner of what used to be an administrative entity that stretched from Scotland as far as Morocco and Syria, and had a common religion and language. People, even common soldiers and small traders, spent their careers moving all over it. Later it was transformed by multiple different linguistic and political groups moving into and across it. Medieval and early modern Europe was highly mobile too. Cities like London or Amsterdam sucked in migrants from all over. It was impossible that they did not, because city death rates far outstripped birth rates. Present day Europe with all its borders, contrived ‘national’ languages and increasing number of states, seems to be regressing into immobility, not the other way round.

But then yes, people also stay put on their bits of land. So many people in my small town have the same surname, Batchelor, or had mothers or grandmothers with this surname. They are not sure how far back they go, but it’s probably before the railway went through here and stimulated its growth from a small village.

[mendaciloquent]

Well, two thoughts on that...

The first is that yes, as a species, we (or at least some of us) do get around. Recently I was reading an article about obsidian finds in the New Siberian Islands. These spots are impossibly far north, in a place that is inhospitable enough today to discourage any real settlement, and must have been unimaginably difficult to live in during the Ice Age -- which is when these finds date to. The interesting thing is that the obsidian was from what is now China. They estimate that the trade goods must have passed hands many, many times to make it that far north -- though communities of people and languages now lost, at a time when humanity's presence on the ground was astonishingly thin. And yet even here people moved.

And yet -- the effort it took to do so, the means by which they moved -- was still connected to "place" in ways difficult to imagine today. Indeed even the burials of Bronze Age nomads paid conspicuous attention to place -- landmarks to note on their passages, or to anchor ritual gatherings, and so on. The sheer effort and risk one undertook in long-distance travel meant that "places" were never really interchangeable. In some ways the magnitude of place and distance was amplified, if anything, for those who chose to move between them.

And the second point -- which almost goes without saying -- is that relocation even during the height of Roman cosmopolitanism was limited to a small fraction of the population. It certainly did happen, perhaps more than people realize, but the vast majority of people lived their entire lives in close proximity to the birthplace of their direct (and even very distant) ancestors. Even the great "migrations" and "invasions" of people in narrative history did not seem to involve the actual movement of persons on any large scale.

And yet to get back to my first point, which I don't wish to diminish too much by my second, you are right in that trade and travel is as an essential part of us as anything -- an aspect of ourselves which we couldn't seem to do without even when the obstacles to movement were seemingly insurmountable.