Of Ph.D.s, scrolls, and cats

The big hurdle that made me stop updating the blog is over. I got my Ph.D. in December. But I'm not over research burnout (I've had it for a few years now...), and there's no immediate need for me to continue making myself miserable pushing it, so it's going to be a good while before I start making regular or in-depth posts here again. And career research is going to take priority over fun research when I'm able to do research again until I have at least one paper accepted. But I've amassed a few books in the meantime that I'm going to scour for topics and information, and also still have travelogues from my trip to Inner Mongolia to post.

I've been making little forays into getting active in the SCA again. I've been to a few events and local group meetings. I've attended a couple kingdom heraldry meetings and occasionally commented on KLOIs on OSCAR. At some point I'd like to take on vacant and will-be-vacant heraldry and A&S officer positions in my barony and canton, but I'm having to be very, very mindful of how much responsibility I shoulder. Now that the dissertation's done, I can actually work on healing from all the burnout, anxiety, and depression it caused. I agreed to be a local officer in my union because it was needed (and this is a bargaining year...), but that meant delaying being an SCA officer again. Which is fine. It will happen. All the self care I'm doing is paying off and I'm much happier than I was in December, though I still have a ways to go before I can operate at near-full capacity again.

I took on a scroll assignment (Caid does all scrolls by request; very different from Calontir's AoAs-as-preprints system). I found a calligraphic hand from the right time and place for the person, taught myself to make it, then made the scroll from start to finish....then my cat stepped on it while the ink was still wet.

Stupid cat...

And it isn't even obvious pawprints, so I can't just shrug and say "it's period!" (even though it is). It just looks like I've smudged it. It's on bristol board so I don't think I can scrape it well (and it turns out I made a typo in the final draft that wasn't in the rough drafts anyway, so bleh). It was frustrating and I was still in the midst of dissertation frustration with some upsetting parallels, so I put it down for a while. When I finally felt like picking it back up...I finished the calligraphy and the cat immediately hopped up on the table and it. *headdesk* But I'm bound and determined to get it done in time for summer coronation. I think I may lock the cat away while I'm working and before the ink dries this time.

A Kickstarter Project You Might Want to Back, Plus General Update

The woman I took an amazing class on kaftans from at Dragon*Con a few years back is writing a book on kaftan design. I just found out about the Kickstarter she's running for it. Only three days left!

Late last year, I got a job in and moved to Caid. Have been to an event and hung out with people a couple times and I think I'm going to very much enjoy this canton/barony (Mons Draconis in Dreiburgen). Graduation has been delayed. Again. At least I got the defense behind me... I'll be graduating in December come hell or high water, and hopefully my sanity will start creeping back in then.
But I'm kind of sick of research at the moment. Have been for quite some time, actually. This dissertation has been slowly killing me... I don't know how long after I finish I'll be willing to start up persona research again. Might be immediately, might be a few months, but the unfortunately-long hiatus from posts that aren't just links to news on other sites will definitely be over sometime next year.

Blocking Cookies

I just saw a notice that EU laws require Blogger to tell people that they use Google Analytics and AdSense. It's not something I can block on my blog, but if you don't like them, you can block them yourself with a script filter. I use NoScript, which is a script filter for Firefox. I've used it for years and don't get viruses anymore. The only downside is that you have to allow pages you want to see and that gets tedious when a page needs multiple scripts to run properly, but you aren't sure which ones they are. That happens most for pages with pictures embedded from elsewhere or videos.

Life Update and Nomad Games

My last Ph.D year continues to be insanely busy. I have no time to attend SCA events and when I take a break from work, I need to actually give my brain a rest, not do a different type of research. I haven't even felt like picking up the book I mentioned in the last post. When I've read anything, it's been a fantasy novel that lets me immerse myself in someone else's world for a bit.
It won't let up anytime soon. I'm fully expecting it to continue until graduation (and beyond, as I continue my thus far unsuccessful job search). Which means I won't be completing my Persona A&S Challenge by the deadline set by the organizer, though I may still be able to do it by the time the SCA's actual 50th birthday rolls around a year later. It also means I won't be doing any persona research for quite some time (or posting those very belated posts from my travels).

But I did run across one thing today that I'm sad I didn't know about before and wanted to share.
http://worldnomadgames.com/en/

Quick Update

I am working on the next few posts. I have quite a few I want to get out! I still have a couple from my Europe trip, plus now a quick archeology news share and updates based on some of the books I've been reading while on planes, trains, and buses in both Europe and the paleo dig in Wyoming. I've just been getting more work stuff square away, but my goal is to get one out by tomorrow afternoon.
Also, I've made a last-minute decision to go to Cattle Raids this weekend. Anyone want to meet up? I think I'll load the Roman re-enactor videos (complete with cavalry and horseback archery!) back onto my camera and take it, so you can get a sneak peak if you find me. :) I'll be wearing some...uh...totally non-period lime green Thai pants...'cause I ruined my only pair of period pants trying to resize them...-_-* At least they're linen?

Blog news (good this time!)

Hello everyone! Many, many apologies for the extended hiatus. GPA comes before SCA, as they say, though in my case it was partially school and partially career stuff eating up all my time and energy. But now the semester's over, I've had time to rest and recuperate, and I'm able to doing SCA stuff again. I'm expecting to go back to the once a month frequency I kept before. I don't foresee doing any long posts anytime soon because I do still have quite a bit of paleo research and writing to do.
I'm heading to Thailand for some of that research in a couple days. I may have limited internet access until mid-January, so I've already written and scheduled the first one of the new year to come out while I'm away. See you on the 10th!

Still too much mundane stuff to deal with

  HIATUS IS CONTINUING TO LATE DECEMBER
  Mid-November has come and gone and I still haven't posted. If you don't care why, you can stop reading or skip to the end (there's nothing Sarmatian or SCA in this post). If you want an explanation, here it is:

   I've unfortunately had more work than I expected when I set the date. I've had to reformat and resubmit a paper several times now for different journals. I was expecting it to be in review all semester, but the first journal rejected it straightaway as "nothing against the paper, but it's inappropriate for this journal; submit it to a paleo journal instead". Which was crap because that journal publishes paleo papers all the time. One of its top three downloads last year was a paleo paper on a group with no living relatives. It's published a description of a single specimen in a group with no living relatives. Unfortunately, there's a not-insignificant portion of neontologists who have it out for paleontology, and I suspect the editor who was assigned to my paper may be one of them.
  The second was also rejected as not right for the journal's focus, but that time it made sense. I really only tried there because I was in the middle of finishing things before two close deadlines and it didn't require a ton of reformatting.
  The third was sent back by a technical editor because I missed a bunch of the formatting changes, so I'm currently working on that so I can resubmit it to that journal. At the same time, I'm playing massive catch-up on both the grading I've gotten behind on and my gross anatomy class. My grade is uncomfortably low because it's not the sort of class you can take and not spend oodles of time studying- but unfortunately I've had to spend all my time writing a massive grant proposal so I can go do research in Europe and Asia next summer and fall, reformatting and resubmitting the paper so I can tell the grant committee that no, really, I am trying to get a paper published on the work I did with the money you gave me before, and doing research and making a poster for the academic meeting a month ago. Which left me with no time to do anything else. With rare exception, I even cut out all the things I do for fun at the beginning of the semester- no dance class, no video games, no arts & crafts, no SCA, no birding, no Pathfinder... It's royally sucked and I'll be glad when it's over...so long as I can pull my grade up in anatomy.

  My anatomy final is December 19th. I'll probably want to take a few days to rest and recuperate before diving into SCA research. We aren't going anywhere or having visitors for Christmas, so that won't keep me from doing research. But it does take quite some time to research and write each of these posts. My goal is to get one out before the end of the year. If I'm feeling motivated, maybe it will be two.

Not Dead Fred

I'm still here. I've been kept very busy with mundane research and prepping for a hafla that happened this past weekend. I meant to write posts during that time and just haven't had the time/inclination to complete one. I've tried a couple times and haven't felt like the result is post-worthy. Honestly, it's a bit more stress than I want to deal with right now. I'd really like to get even a small something out, but I really need to finish these two paleo papers posthaste. So this is a belated hiatus announcement. Unless the Sarmatian bug bites me between now and then, expect me to be back in late August.
EDIT: Make that mid-November. I'm going to be in a constant state of busy and stressed until then.

On rude behavior (and a bit about the Jassic people)

I'm making a brief mid-hiatus appearance to say- I've had a visit from a troll. Which means I'm a real blogger now! Look on the bright side of things, right?

I recently received a comment from someone which I unfortunately felt a need to delete. The gist of the comment was, "I'm Alan and you don't know what you're talking about, so stop." (Which means about as much as if I had said "I'm an academic and you don't know what you're talking about, so stop.", which is not much of anything. It's misleading and leaves too much to be said.) That's it. No correcting any perceived mistakes. And some cursing, which was the sole reason I deleted it. I did not make the settings on this blog "adults only" and have no intention of doing so. Strong cursing will not be tolerated and any comment containing it will be deleted posthaste.
I suspect the commenter is someone who followed a share of one of my posts made by a Hungarian on Facebook. There were comments on some of his other posts by someone who also said he was Alan and the Hungarian doesn't know what he's talking about. The Hungarian had uploaded a video to a song (in Hungarian?) which, based on other comments, must have mentioned the Jassic people of Hungary, who are descended from Sarmatians (likely the Iazyges/Jazyges, considering the name and location). The human genographic project provides an independent line of evidence in the form of haplotypes traceable back to the Sarmatians' homeland showing up in a village in Hungary. Spencer Wells, one of the head researchers for the project, gave a talk at my university last semester and mentioned that briefly. He didn't actually say "Jassic" or "Sarmatian", but I knew exactly what he was talking about and looked it up later to confirm. I may have audibly squeed. It's a really cool project; I highly recommend you browse through their findings. Maybe even contribute your own DNA if you can afford to. :) The research is largely funded by people buying the kits, which is why they're so pricy. In short, there's plenty of evidence for the Jassic people being of Sarmatian descent- DNA, their now-dead language, and our knowledge of their history all point toward it.

But back to the topic at hand- The Commenter's reason for objection had a bit of a racist ring to it. Maybe not quite what you normally think of when you hear the word racist- more like a desperate need to be special and unique, as his people haven't exactly been treated fairly in recent history. He also seemed to think the video implied that the Magyars were of Sarmatian descent (which they aren't and which other commenters said it didn't imply).

So if you're reading this, Commenter, being rude and confrontational will get you nowhere.  There are people interested in Ossetians and Alans who aren't of your ethnicity- that's a compliment and a testament to your rich cultural heritage. I'm not sure why you aren't happy that others recognize that and want to know more. If you know something I don't, please do tell me and tell me where I went wrong. Simply saying "I'm right, you're wrong" is not conducive to learning.

Hiatus and Queen's Prize

This is overdue, but considering how busy I've been and will continue to be for the next month, I should officially declare a hiatus to be ended in mid November.

A couple quick notes, though- My husband and I both entered Queen's Prize last month. It's a kingdom-level A&S "competition". It's specifically for novice-level (though you can request to be judged at intermediate level, which I did). The competition aspect is less emphasized than it is in Kingdom A&S. I entered the Chinese dumplings I taught a class on at Lilies and my husband entered a Sarmatian-related thing which I'll write about once the hiatus is over.
I finally got to see the Big Book of Emblazons in person. Everyone really seems to be enjoying it! And as a thank you for making it and doing other heraldry service, Their Majesties made me a Torse! The Torse is the AoA-level service award in Calontir. :)

Hiatus

It seems I've taken an unintentional hiatus in my efforts to focus on school. It's comprehensive exams season, so I think it's probably best that I make the hiatus official. I will be posting the results of the tamga class at Bellewode come the end of March, but after that the hiatus will resume until late April.
EDIT: I had forgotten about some posts I wrote ahead of time and scheduled for April. Three of them will be showing up during my hiatus from real-time blogging, so as far as you guys are concerned, it ends at the end of March.

Literature review: Sulimirski's "The Sarmatians", with some notes on research style

   In 1970, T. Sulimirski published a book called The Sarmatians. This was the first time anyone had tried to collect what was known about the Sarmatians into one place. It was a fantastic achievement combining ancient texts, archeological data, and the knowledge of cultural anthropologists, resulting in a volume filled with a wealth of information.

   This book is a fantastic resource for finding out about grave goods and burial styles at different places and times. A large portion of the book is devoted to this given that they're a major source of information on the Sarmatians. It has some wonderful plates of various goods which someone in the SCA could find quite handy

Another thing prominent in this book is following the various Sarmatian tribes geographically and politically. He records where you could find each of the major tribes throughout the course of their history, why they moved, how they interacted with their neighbors, and when they eventually left or were absorbed into the cultures they were living among. To this end, his most famous figure is a diagram of tribe location and activity through time and space. It's kind of hard to read, but I've included it below for your perusal.

   Like any academic subject, knowledge about the Sarmatians changes over time, and over 40 years have passed since he wrote his book. This means that some of the information found therein is flat out wrong. That doesn't mean Sulimirski did a poor job (it was quite the contrary, actually)- he was working with the information available at the time.

   When I'm researching a new subject, I like to do it one of two ways: 1) Read literature reviews (like Sulimirski) first, and 2) read older papers before newer papers. This does several things. Reading the general syntheses before the specific papers gives me an overall sense of the subject. I can quickly get the gist of the subject as a whole and decide which to study in more detail first rather than wading through specific article after specific article feeling like my knowledge base is growing very slowly.

   Reading older papers first has a pro and a con- The con is that I will have wrong ideas at the start simply because of the nature of the thing. The pro is that I get a better sense of the history of the subject in addition to the subject itself (i.e., how ideas have changed over time, why, who was resistant to things commonly accepted, who drove the new paradigms...). I'm not going to talk shop with people until I've caught up to modern day literature or give any workshops or talks at events (Except for the Alans in Gaul lecture at St. Denys' Day because of the timing. I am going to skip forward in the literature in this instance so I don't say anything wrong.), but I feel like understanding the history behind it gives you a better grasp of it.

   I didn't say it in these exact words before- but you're learning the same way by proxy. If anything I say conflicts between posts, assume the newer one is right.

   I don't know enough yet to list off which information in the book has been overturned, but I can tell you one thing which is wrong- the idea that Eurasians had a matriarchal society in the Stone Age. This comes up because Sarmatian women (early on, at least), are sometimes found buried with weapons. The extrapolation from this is that Sarmatians maintained the matriarchal influence for longer than other cultures.

...The problem is that the whole"prehistoric matriarchal societies which became corrupted into a patriarchal one" is based on conjecture and feminism, not fact. Many people don't think to look into the idea's origins- especially when it sounds like the way they want the world to be. Modern scholars don't accept it. There might be a few hangers-ons (I don't know; in general, I don't read cultural anthropology journals), but that doesn't make it a viable hypothesis (There are a few paleontologists who refuse to accept that birds are dinosaurs despite the overwhelming evidence. We call them the Flat Earth Society.).

I get the impression that Sulimirski either accepted it or was open to the idea of it being correct. Sarmatian women did have more freedom than the Greeks, who told us about the Sarmatians and other cultures in their world; but the Greeks were strongly patriarchal, so any deviation from that in one of the barbaric societies (barbarian meaning "not Greek") was astonishing and disgusting to them, and therefore worth noting because, in their eyes, it made them look more civilized than those crazy people that let their women do what they want. Even women in the Middle East used to have more freedom (this was mentioned in the "SCA Silk Road Persona" panel I went to at Dragon*Con this past weekend). A shift from more egalitarian to patriarchal, rather than matriarchal to patriarchal, is all that's needed to explain it. Assuming an extreme is unnecessary when a simpler explanation will suffice.

   On the other end of things, Sulimirski does acknowledge that  just because you find a bow and arrows in a female grave doesn't mean she spent her entire life as a warrior. She could have been a hunter while the men were away on a raid or at war.

   All this being said, I still recommend this book to anyone interested in a Sarmatian persona. Even if some of the cultural anthropology is incorrect, there is still good information on what sort of artifacts you find among different tribes, time, and places. I've gotten several project ideas after reading this book and found several more lines of research to pursue.

Sulimirski, T., 1970,  The Sarmatians, vol. 73 of Ancient Peoples and Places, Praeger Publishers, Inc.

Updates on old posts

I've been reading through T. Sulimirski's The Sarmatians, which was the first instance of current Sarmatian research being gathered into one place. I found a handful of new Sarmatian names in it which I have added to the Personal Names post:
Abeacus
Amage (old name, new instance at a later time?)
Eunones
Galatus
Sauromates
Spaldines
Tasius
Zosines
In looking for more information on these people, I ran across catalogues of coins minted in Bosporus which bore Bosporan kings of Sarmatian descent with Iranian (Sarmatian) names, which gave me even more names to include:
Asander
Aspurgus (old name, new spelling)
Eupator
Inithimeus
Pharsanzes
Rhadamsades
Rhescuporis, Rheskuporis
Synges
Teiranes
Thothorses, Theothorses

I've also added these references to the reference list.
Additionally, Sulimirski's book is so important that I will be writing a post devoted solely to reviewing it once I finish reading it.

Sulimirski, T., 1970,  The Sarmatians, vol. 73 of Ancient Peoples and Places, Praeger Publishers, Inc.

http://www.wildwinds.com/#

http://www.forumancientcoins.com/ 

Hiatus

Between getting married, moving, planning fall recruitment, and wrapping up some paleo research, my life is about to get very busy. I'm taking a small hiatus from blogging and will return no later than mid-September. It will probably be earlier, but I would rather overestimate than underestimate.

List: Books and Articles

 *This post is being updated. Formatting and will be fixed and all my currently cited references added.*
   
 This is a list of books, articles, and the like which have information relevant to someone with a Sarmatian persona. 

  I use a color-coded system to indicate the reliability of the source. 

• Blue means the source is good and information it contains is up-to-date.  
• Yellow means the source, while useful, needs context. It may contain some inaccurate information, but be historically important. It could also be written in such a way that it could easily be misinterpreted by someone looking to recreate a Sarmatian persona.  
• Red means the source is not to be trusted. It could be largely out-of-date, not widely accepted, or pure conjecture.  
• White is reserved for those sources written before the modern age. Keep in mind that just because something is "written by the ancients" does not mean it's informed. Consider reading a scholarly discourse which gives it context as well.  
• Purple means I haven't read it through yet and can't comment on it.

Articles:

Books:

Alemany, A.,  2000, Sources on the Alans: A Critical Compilation, Brill Academic Publishers

 

Bachrach, B., 1973, A History of the Alans in the West: From their First Appearance in the Sources of Classical Antiquity Through the Early Middle Ages, University of Minnesota Press, pp. 161.

Brzezinski, R., and Mielczarek, M., 2002, Men-at-Arms: The Sarmatians 600BC-450AD, Osprey publishing.

Bury, J.B. 1923, History of the Later Roman Empire. Macmillan & Co. Ltd.

Colarusa, J., 2002, Nart Sagas From the Caucasus, Princeton University Press, pp. 552.

Davis-Kimball, J., and Behan, M., 2002, Warrior Women: An Archaeologist's Search for History's Hidden Heroines, Warner Books, pp. 268. 

 

Kohler, K., Die Trachten der VölKer in Bild und Schnitt:

Harmatta, J, 1970, Studies in the History and Language of the Sarmatians, Acta antique et archaeologica Tomus XIII.

 

McEvedy, C., 2002, The New Penguin Atlas of Ancient History, the Penguin Group, pp. 128.

 

From The Land of the Scythians: Ancient Treasures from the Museums of the U.S.S.R., 3000 B.C. - 100 B.C. (Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Volume XXXII, Number 5, 1975)
 

 

Sulimirski, T., 1970,  The Sarmatians, vol. 73 of Ancient Peoples and Places, Praeger Publishers, Inc.

 

Zgusta, L, Die Personennamen griechischer Städte der nördlichen Schwarzmeerküste: Die ethnischen Verhältnisse, namentlich das Verhältnis der Skythen und Sarmaten, im Lichte der Namenforschung (Československá akademie ved. Monografie orientálního ústavu 16 ). Praha : Nakladatelstvi československé Akademie Ved, 1955.

Ancient texts:

Chronica Galla of 452

Herodian, The History of the Roman Empire from the Death of Marcus Aurelius to the Ascension of  Gordian III

Jordanes, The Origins and Deeds of the Goths.

Polyaenus, Stratagems of War.

Websites with artifact catalogues:

http://www.forumancientcoins.com/

http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/fcgi-bin/db2www/quickSearch.mac/gallery?selLang=English&tmCond=sarmatian&Go.x=9&Go.y=12

http://wildwinds.com/coins/greece/i.html

Who am I? (Modern) and more about this blog

 I'm originally from North Carolina and moved to Iowa for grad school. This past year was the first one in the Ph.D. program there. I'm a vertebrate paleontology student. I'm currently working on SCA stuff and wedding planning in between writing up some of my research, so updates will be sparse.

So now that you know where I'm coming from, you can guess why, as I mentioned in my first post, I will be including references in my posts about Sarmatians. As a scientist, I reference any facts and supposition I state that were not my own discovery. It's an incredibly useful way to write and I get frustrated when I look things up on the internet and am expected to take things as true when I have no idea who wrote it, where they got their information, and how reliable they are. That's why I'm making this blog. I want others interested in this culture to be able to feel at least semi-confident that they can trust what they read here.

In science, there's a system of peer review. The system has its own flaws, but it also has the advantage that only occasionally do crackpot ideas get through to publication. Blogs aren't peer reviewed, so this is where you come in. If you come upon something related to Sarmatians which I haven't discussed, a book or article not on my book list,  have a different interpretation, or disagree with something I said, please discuss it in the comments or contact me in some other manner (especially if you actually study this subject as a career!).

What is this blog?

Hello everyone!

I'm Lady Aritê gunê Akasa. I'm a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) residing in the Shire of Shadowdale in the Kingdom of Calontir. I've chosen a little-known culture for my persona- Sarmatian- and have decided to be rather serious about it. There's precious little information out there directly useful for someone who wants to recreate a Sarmatian persona without having prior experience combing academic literature or knowing some key words that filter out the junk and repeats on Google searches. There are, however, plenty of journal articles which haven't been transcribed into a medium more likely to be read by the general public.

And thus, the reason for this blog. Here, I will write down and discuss everything I learn about the Sarmatians from reading books and articles and perusing the more reputable-looking sites on the web. Unlike a lot of the sites I've found, I will be giving references whenever possible so you don't have to just take my word for it that I know what I'm talking about (and so you can go read the originals yourself, if you so desire).

 That being said, I'm not going to limit myself to only Sarmatian-related posts. It's the primary purpose  of this blog, but the secondary purpose is to discuss my overall experience in the SCA.

 So if you're interested in the Sarmatians (or even other steppe nomads), I'm making this blog for you. Given that this is the hobby of a busy grad student, I won't have an update schedule and posting will be sporadic (typically a couple times a month). I highly encourage you to subscribe to the feed,  e-mail updates, or Google Friend Connect so you don't need to check for them (or forget about this blog!). And if you know anyone who might be interested, please spread the word. If you're also a SCAdian with a Sarmatian persona, please let me know you exist! I'd love to discuss our findings with each other. :)