How old is the university? Old by most reckoning. The University of Bologna, the oldest official one, was founded in 1088. By a looser definition, it is even older. Plato founded his Academy in 387 BC. Of course, there were teachers with their own schools of advanced thought in ancient Greece still earlier. Pythagoras established his school at Croton about 530 BC. Before that?
We don’t know, but presumably ancient scribes learned their art in some systematic form; Babylonians must have had some organized means of passing along their relatively sophisticated observations of the heavens; and the builders of Stonehenge clearly possessed the sort of knowledge of solstices and other calendrical phenomena that implied rigorous training of successive generations of adepts.
The University of Stonehenge, however, went the way of Antioch College—but unlike Antioch it seems unlikely to resurrect itself.
The question occurred to me while looking at the row of punctured seashells on the front page of The New York Times “Arts” section. No, not some postmodernist conceptual show in a Chelsea gallery. These shells were punched out by some Cro Magnon jeweler living in Greece 33,000 to 35,000 years ago, to be “strung on a cord,” and worn to declare beauty, prestige, or power.
To cover the distance between those ancient beads and the modern university will require several steps. This is the first of three posts to close the necklace.
Bead Work
The Times story, “History That’s Written in Beads as well as in Words,” by Patricia Cohen, is really about “an unusual coalition of scholars” that is “trying to stage an intellectual coup.” The members of this coalition are trying to swing the pendulum back from the micro-history that currently dominates the academy to a much broader and more synthetic approach—one that recaptures the realm of human activities before the invention of writing.
It is a surprising story to read in the Times, which generally shines its sun on the fatuities of postmodern history. Cohen, however, makes some worrying observations, such as:
Three out of four historians, for example, specialize in the post-industrial era or the 20th century, the American Historical Association reports.
This has prompted a hardy band of dissenters in the discipline of history to start looking at “the long march of human existence” that is “being ignored.”
The immediate occasion of Cohen’s article is the publication of Deep History: the Architecture of Past and Present, edited by Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail (University of California Press). I hustled out and bought Deep History, and may have something to say about it once I’ve read it. But for the moment, I am taking my cue from Cohen and those seashells.
They come into the story like this. We of course lack written records for the Paleolithic, but that doesn’t mean we can’t reconstruct some important historical developments. Humans had been knocking out beads here and there for millennia years before the shell necklaces in question were made. But at that particular point, perforated shells took off. Cohen quotes the authors:
Relative to population size, after all, shell beads were perhaps being produced in the Upper Paleolithic at the rate iPhones are being manufactured today.
The profusion suggests a number of things, including wider trading networks, greater exchange, and virtuosity in handicrafts, but it also points to “political alliances” and economic activity. Beads “allowed ancient people to transform food surpluses, created by shifts in production, into commerce and political power.” They were, in that sense, precursors of money, “credit cards, bank notes, [and] gold coins.”