Nudity is Only Skin-Deep

I grew up eating a lot of food traditional to my Canadian ancestors. We rarely purchased pre-made baked goods, and my mother baked almost everything from scratch. My family were gatherer/hunters, and much of our food came from our farm or from the wilds. I grew up cooking on wood stoves and over campfires with wood we gathered with our dog or pony teams, so I suspect my understanding of foods differs from that of people from urban, western upbringings. I was once used to cooking and baking in the ways my ancestors did over the past couple of hundred years. Although I now cook with modern implements I find the food tastes quite similar as long as I'm using comparable ingredients.

A while back, I picked up a copy of Dorothy Duncan's Nothing More Comforting: Canada's Heritage Food. It contains a variety of recipes similar to the ones I grew up with. I chose a recipe for honey bread because I had all of the ingredients in my larder already. This recipe was first published in 1896 in Fanny Merritt Farmer's The Boston Cooking School Cook Book. It was only about this time that honey was first listed as an ingredient in recipe books. Before that time, honey was served as an accompaniment to scones, tea, and such.

The recipe is as follows:

2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ginger
1/2 cup strained honey
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 cup milk

Mix and sift dry ingredients. Add others. Beat thoroughly. Bake in loaf or bread stick pans in moderate oven, 350*F. Makes 1 loaf.

These would have been staple ingredients in a Canadian larder around the turn of the 20th century, available from the local grocer. The fresh ingredients such as honey, eggs, and milk, were produced on many farms, and flour was available from grain mills.

If you're familiar with baking, you may notice that a cooking time isn't listed. Neither does it say if the pan should be greased or powdered. I made the guess that I should cook it for about 45 minutes, as that's about how long it takes a gingerbread loaf to cook. I also lightly greased the loaf pan with butter.

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Long before archaeology was ever called archaeology, there were people going around searching for historical artefacts. In particular, people sought out holy relics. A holy relic is a part of a venerated person, or a piece of an artefact associated with that person. Although many of the relics are fake (it's been said there were enough splinters of the True Cross to build an armada), these fakes were still items of import. In medieval Christianity, "the physical remains of saints and holy figures were considered an essential part of the faith, offering a powerful connection with Heaven" (1). Pilgrimages to holy relics were vital, and could be used as Indulgences to cut down on time languishing in Purgatory. The most important relics of all were the ones associated with Jesus Christ. Since he was believed to have physically ascended to Heaven, the opportunities to retrieve a piece of Jesus were slim, and limited to hair, blood, fingernail clippings, or his foreskin.

At one point in history, there were a reported eighteen foreskins of Christ floating around Europe. Barring some loaves-and-fishes-style miracles, it is obvious these can't have been real. Even if the foreskin of baby Jesus had been saved, such a tiny scrap of organic matter should have rotted away while he was still an infant.

Regardless, the relic(s), called the Holy Prepuce, got around. Determining the veracity of these relics was vital, and specialists arose. The most common testing method was a taste test. "A properly trained physician chosen by the local priest would chew the shriveled leather...to determine whether it was wholly or partly human" (2). When Pope Innocent III was called upon to pass judgement on the authenticity of one Holy Prepuce, he demurred (3). I can't say I blame him.

One such Holy Prepuce was personally delivered by an angel to Austrian nun Agnes Blannbekin in the thirteenth century (4).

"Crying and with compassion, she began to think about the foreskin of Christ, where it may be located [after the Resurrection]. And behold, soon she felt with the greatest sweetness on her tongue a little piece of skin alike the skin in an egg, which she swallowed. After she had swallowed it, she again felt the little skin on her tongue with sweetness as before, and again she swallowed it. And this happened to her about a hundred times. And when she felt it so frequently, she was tempted to touch it with her finger. And when she wanted to do so, that little skin went down her throat on its own. And it was told to her that the foreskin was resurrected with the Lord on the day of resurrection. And so great was the sweetness of tasting that little skin that she felt in all [her] limbs and parts of the limbs a sweet transformation" (5).

Since people have been making dick jokes for thousands of years, much to the displeasure of the Catholic Church, the topic of the holy foreskin was a source of ribaldry. By 1900, they'd had enough of it, and it was decreed that talking about Holy Prepuce was an offense punishable by excommunication.

By the twentieth century, there was only one known holy foreskin, anyhow. It resided in Calcata, Italy. "For more than four centuries, the 'Holy Prepuce' had been the city's treasure, kept behind bronze doors over the altar in the Church of the Most Holy Name of Jesus. It was displayed every year on Jan. 1, the Feast of the Holy Circumcision", finally vanishing in 1983 (6).

Where did this relic end up? There are numerous speculations. Considering the fate of an earlier Holy Prepuce was transmogrification into the rings of Saturn (7), the hypothesis that it was reclaimed by the Vatican is quite reasonable (8).



( Works cited )

In August of 2012, the search for Richard III's remains began, and on the very first day of the dig, his body was discovered underneath a car park in Grey Friars, Leicester (1). I've kept half an eye on this story for a while. Richard III is a fascinating character, and the eponymous play is one of my favourite works by Shakespeare.

The story just became even more interesting for me. An article in Culture24, Richard III DNA tests to reveal hair, eyes and diseases of the King, shows that the genomes of Richard III and one of his proven descendants will soon be mapped. Richard III is lumped in with a Spanish hunter gatherer, a Greenlandic Inuit, some Neanderthals, a Denisovan, and Otzi the Iceman as an elite group of historical/prehistorical figures whose genomes have been studied (2). The story gains publicity because Richard III is a character who captures people's imaginations, because his ignoble resting place beneath a car park seems so anticlimactic, and because the Human Genome Project is a new and exciting area of scientific research.

The article emphasizes the role of DNA in our sense of identity, and how understanding the king's genetics gives us a snapshot of disease and heredity in the fifteenth century. The article, however, is brief and does not go into any real depth. As a result, it raises more questions than it answers. Just how prevalent is genome mapping in archaeology? The Human Genome Project was launched in 1990 (3). How soon afterwards until it was used as an archaeological method? A cursory internet search for genome mapping and archaeology reveals a wide range of results, and they're not all related to human remains. There are plenty of articles which discuss genome mapping in molecular archaeology (eg. Molecular archaeology of the Escherichia coli genome (4)), as well as other studies of ecofacts versus human remains and artefacts (eg. Plant genome archaeology: evidence for conserved ancestral chromosome segments in dicotyledonous plant species (5)).

The article also raises questions about the other people listed whose genomes have been mapped. It contains no links to these studies, which seems like an obvious oversight. Fortunately, another online search reveals more information. I discovered that just as there is a Human Genome Project, there is a Neanderthal Genome Project. You can even search through the data at The Neandertal Genome (6). I learned that Denisovans, a lesser-known peer to Neanderthals and prehistoric humans, may be the first non-Neanderthal archaic humans to be sequenced (7). The genome mapping of the ancient Inuit in Greenland "provides evidence for a migration from Siberia into the New World some 5,500 years ago, independent of that giving rise to the modern Native Americans and Inuit" (8). The study of Otzi the Iceman's cellular mitochondria reveals mutations no longer present in our population, suggesting he belonged to a now-extinct group (9). Lastly, the study of the Spanish hunter-gatherer may help explain why prehistoric hunter-gatherers could coexist with farmers for thousands of years before disappearing (10). This is just a tiny cross-selection of the extant information on these people.

The archaeological data recovered through genetics studies is vast. I never would have suspected that a reviled British king would be the one to demonstrate this to me.

( Works Cited )

This was my first attempt at making a webcast, and my last assignment for my archaeology course. The video's a bit clunky, but I hope you find the story interesting. If my video editing skills were better, there'd be much more audio. I did all the photography and videography here.

I have decided to research three very different forms of corpse deposition for my archaeology homework: ( Tibetan sky burial, the self-mummification of the Sokushinbutsu, and space burial )