ANIMAL ABUSE AMIDST DEVELOPMENT DELIRIUM AT XPARK TAIWAN

03/06/2021

by Enbion Micah Aan

語言:
English /// 中文
Photo Credit: Enbion Micah Aan

THE BUSINESS of wild marine animal exhibitions and performances in aquariums always requires the kidnapping, torture, imprisonment, and abuse of animals. In terms of exhibitions, obviously, animals need to be captured first in order to be held in captivity. In the case of performances, unlike domesticated animals, it is practically impossible to train wild animals to perform without abusing them. This fact has been well-documented, and popular documentaries such as Blackfish have made significant strides in informing the public of such abuses. Though many aquariums do make the point of highlighting their efforts in conservation, this is usually just for show—after all, there would be no marine animals on display if they did not acquire animals by capturing them in the wild or breeding them in captivity.

PHOTO CREDIT: ENBION MICAH AAN

To be fair, Xpark is honest in the sense that they do not claim such lofty goals in conservation. Instead, Xpark simply wants to offer a “parallel universe” experience for its visitors. Unlike most aquariums whose standard tactic is using conservation as a front, oftentimes as a way to get public funding, Xpark is quite honest in its disregard for animal welfare and conservation in not wishing to provide a comfortable environment for its resident animals. Instead, Xpark emphasizes the animals’ “Tenacity of Existence” and wants its captive animals to adapt to the artificial environment that the aquarium has created for its spectacle: “Presenting the mystery of creatures keep adapting themselves in order [to] fit into the environment with performance….” In a time that awareness around animal welfare is on the rise globally, this honest admission for its disregard is actually quite stunning.

That Xpark is located in Qingpu (青埔), a formerly rural area of Taoyuan, reflects typical trends in Taiwanese urban development. Instead of spending money to develop the area organically and to improve existing infrastructure in densely populated areas, municipalities have the tendency to build transportation hubs away from city centers, gentrifying formerly rural areas and in the process, creating a theme-park-like area for shopping malls and attractions such as Xpark. Xpark, along with the Landmark Plaza, Cozzi Blue (part of the Cathay Hospitality Management), and Shin Kong Cinemas, is conveniently accessible by the High-Speed Rail and the Airport Line, not to mention that there is an outlet shopping mall and Ikea nearby.

PHOTO CREDIT: ENBION MICAH AAN

Arguably, this sort of development benefits the city by bringing in corporate investment, increasing tax revenues, and creating jobs for the locals. Moreover, possibly because of Taoyuan’s close proximity to Taipei (Qingpu is only 20 minutes away from Taipei Station), due to newly established train lines linking Taoyuan directly to Taipei, and because of various development projects, Taoyuan has seen an increase in its population, leading all major cities, while by contrast, Taipei has seen a population decline. As a result, the real estate market in Taoyuan is booming. By economic data alone, one could argue that the development of Taoyuan, particularly in Qingpu, has been a success.

However, as with other cases of urban planning of this type, such developments almost always increase income inequality and sacrifice many local citizens’ interests, housing affordability, and many other non-tangible human needs. In fact, in past years, many locals protested the government’s plan to expand the area around the Taoyuan International Airport. And the jobs that development brings in tend to be low earning jobs. For example, Xpark offers the low monthly salary of 28,500 NT for a full-time position). Moreover, there are obvious problems with development away from densely populated areas, relocating needed resources away from where people actually live in hopes of luring new residents and corporate investments. Unfortunately, in contemporary Taiwan, any criticism against development is considered heresy, since development is so sacrosanct that it’s as if Mazu decrees a booming real estate market as a basis for human existence.

PHOTO CREDIT: ENBION MICAH AAN

It is in the context of this very exuberance of development that Xpark plays an important role. Xpark is the Taiwanese counterpart of Yokohama Hakkeijima Inc., itself a subsidiary of the Seibu Group, a multi-billion-dollar holding company that almost did not survive the scandal that resulted from the revelation of financial fraud by its founder in the early 2000s and needed Cerberus Capital Management’s 100 billion yen investment in 2006 in order to restructure into its current corporate form.

Seibu Group is no stranger to the Taiwanese market—its railroad subsidiary is a sister railway to the Taiwan Railways Association, and it also has two hotels in Taiwan—one in Taipei, and the other in Chiayi. In its development of Xpark, Yokohama Hakkeijima Inc partnered up with another multi-billion-dollar corporation, the Cathay Life Insurance (國泰人壽), and invested 718 million US dollars in the project. Cheng Wen-san (鄭文燦), the mayor of Taoyuan, visited the head of the Yokohama Hakkeijima Inc in 2017, and remains a strong supporter of Xpark.

PHOTO CREDIT: ENBION MICAH AAN

Through a “public-private partnership”, the Taoyuan Government has facilitated the construction of the park. The government also fast-tracked Xpark’s permit, shortening the evaluation period to only one month, according to information released by a press conference held by animal protection organizations—and most unusually, assigned what would normally be a public road to corporate control, including the sidewalks alongside the road. Possibly because of this close partnership, an official from Taoyuan’s Animal Protection Bureau showed up uninvited to defend Xpark at the press conference, claiming that the government found no problems through regular inspection, despite the clear evidence otherwise presented at the press conference.

That the Taoyuan mayor is a major figure in the DPP and has been speculated to be a frontrunner for its next presidential candidate perhaps may explain why the DPP did not send a representative to the animal welfare press conference about the mistreatment of animals in Xpark, organized by the Taiwan Animal Equality Association, Taiwan Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and AnimalSkies on February 23, 2021. The other major parties, the KMT, the NPP, and the TPP all sent representatives in support of animal welfare. This is, however, not exclusively a DPP problem, as one should expect that the politicians from other parties, particularly the KMT, once in a position of power, would not hesitate to neglect animal welfare issues when it comes at the expense of development, noting how the KMT and the DPP have switched sides on the issue of American meat imports in the past.



Map from the Land Administration. The orange area on the map includes a road that is under private control. The photograph is what the road looks like. It includes trees, sidewalks, traffic signs, street lights, and traffic lights yet Xpark can claim this as part of its property

As a matter of fact, the demands made by the animal rights groups at the press conference were actually very modest (the petition is here)—all they ask for is for Xpark to adhere to well-established international welfare standards, such as the standards established by the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA) and the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries. According to EAZA, for example, the space provided for seals in Xpark is less than half of what is recommended. Dr. Heather Rally of the People for the Ethical Treatment also identified stereotypical behavior of seals at Xpark in the form of pattern swimming. Such stereotypical behavior should be expected given the limited space and the donut-shapes tank design that allows visitors to see the seals at all times but reserves no hiding place for the seals to rest.

Other than seals, a sting ray’s tail was so badly injured that a fish was seen eating it, and there have many other documented instances of injuries to sharks and penguins and other abnormal behavior by animals at Xpark. Furthermore, Xpark claims animal performances are “natural”, but it is well-documented wild animals are almost always treated in an abusive manner in order to coerce performance.

PROTESTERS AT XPARK. PHOTO CREDIT: ENBION MICAH AAN

Perhaps out of frustration and embarrassment that a 718-million-USD investment could not meet very minimum standards for aquariums and bolstered by the fact that Xpark is financed and backed by two powerful multinational, multi-billion-dollar corporations and a powerful DPP mayor, Xpark’s immediate reaction to activists and animal rights organizations were threatening lawsuits.

In October 2020, reports started to surface that animals in XPark are often seen injured, and the management’s immediate reaction was issuing a public statement and threatening lawsuits. In its statement, Xpark practically threatened any netizens who voiced their concerns online: “Xpark also emphasized that…in regards to all kinds of unwarranted accusations, such as behaviors that cause harm to business, legal actions will be taken”. On December 28th, 2020, a couple of activists went to Xpark in protest. After the protest, the demonstrators were asked to stay at Xpark for the police. The Xpark staff was at first friendly, but as soon as the police showed up, an Xpark manager threatened lawsuits for income loss (經營損失) and reputation damages (名譽損害) against these individuals as well.

PHOTO CREDIT: ENBION MICAH AAN

I have experienced legal threats by Xpark myself. On February 27, 2021, I went to Xpark to observe a protest, and upon arrival, I was immediately threatened with a lawsuit for standing around, taking pictures of the protest, which took place outside of Xpark. The experience felt almost surreal—after about 10 years of documenting street protests, I was threatened by a multi-billion-dollar company for photographing a relatively mild protest of some ten people holding up signs and shouting slogans.

Of course, I yelled back, “Sue me!”.

ENBION MICAH AAN

Taiwan's top court to rule on indigenous hunting rights

Issued on: 09/03/2021 - 10:40

Tama Talum, centre, has fought a long legal battle to protect indigenous hunting rights SAM YEH AFP

Tama Talum prosecution - Wikipedia

Taipei (AFP)

Taiwan's top court will rule on whether the island's current hunting regulations breach the constitutional rights of indigenous tribes in a long-running legal saga that is reaching its landmark conclusion.

The hearing, which began on Tuesday, centres around a member of the Bunun tribe who was arrested in 2013 for killing a deer and goat on land near his village in southern Taitung county.

Tama Talum, 62, said he was following tribal customs and was hunting the animals as food for his mother who was used to eating wild game.

The prosecution went up to the Supreme Court which upheld Talum's conviction and jail term of three years and six months for possessing an illegal weapon and hunting protected species.

That ruling sparked anger among Taiwan's aboriginal communities and the Supreme Court then made the highly unusual move of asking the Constitutional Court to make its own ruling.

Hunting was once a core way of life for Taiwan's indigenous people who -- much like the native populations in Australia and the Americas -- were decimated by waves of immigration and have faced a long history of discrimination.

Under current laws, indigenous hunters are only allowed to use homemade guns -- something they argue are dangerous and cause injuries -- and hunt on festival days.

The Constitutional Court has now been asked to rule whether indigenous hunters should be exempted from those laws and will give its decision later.

"We hunters follow the wisdom of our ancestors when going to the mountains to hunt... it's a realisation of co-existence and co-prosperity with all animals in nature," Talum told the court via an interpreter on Tuesday.

- First people -

Icyang Parod, Taiwan's minister of indigenous affairs, welcomed the court hearing.

"We think there can be a balance between the ecological equilibrium and the aboriginal hunting culture," he told reporters.

Outside the Constitutional court on Tuesday indigenous activists lit a traditional smoke signal ceremony as they and supporters chanted: "Hunters are innocent, the laws violates the constitution."

Taiwan's multiple indigenous tribes led a comparatively uninterrupted life for thousands of years before immigrants first began arriving from the Chinese mainland in the 17th century.

They are an Austronesian people -- their languages, cultures and traditions far more closely linked to populations in South East Asia and the Pacific than the Chinese mainland.

They now make up only two percent of Taiwan's 23 million population and remain highly marginalised, with wages lower than the national average, a higher rate of unemployment and poorer health indicators.

In 2016, President Tsai Ing-wen -- Taiwan's first leader with some indigenous heritage -- delivered a landmark apology for how the island's governments had treated aboriginal communities.

Indigenous activists welcomed the apology but say there are still core issues of dispute -- particularly the loss of ancestral land rights.

Much of that land is now designated national park, leading to clashes over hunting, fishing and foraging in areas where permits are needed.

© 2021 AFP

INDIGENOUS ACTIVISTS HOLD OVERNIGHT PROTEST BEFORE COUNCIL OF GRAND JUSTICE HEARING ON TAMA TALUM CASE

03/09/2021

by Brian Hioe

語言:
English
Photo Credit: Daniel Yo-Ling Chen

INDIGENOUS ACTIVISTS held an overnight sleep-in outside of the Judicial Yuan yesterday night, with a hearing by the Council of Grand Justices scheduled to take place on the Tama Talum case today. During the overnight sleep-in, talks were held outside of the Judicial Yuan and live-streamed for the duration of the night. This was followed by traditional ceremonies held this morning outside of the Judicial Yuan at 8 AM, with plants burned to produce smoke and offerings of rice wine, betel nut, and miscanthus. After the ceremony, Indigenous activists escorted Talum into the building. Demonstrators also protested in support of Talum last week.

PHOTO CREDIT: BRIAN HIOE

Among the participant groups in the demonstration were the Indigenous Youth Front, LIMA, the Pangcah Amis Guardian Alliance, and Pisaodo’an, along with Bunun community members and elders. The appeal to the Council of Grand Justices was filed by Pan Zhi-qiang of the Puyuma, a traditional protector of the Lijia community. The overnight sleep-in was a rare all-night protest, which have become increasingly uncommon in the years since the 2014 Sunflower Movement. It should also be noted that the Tama Talum case has now dragged on for close to a decade.

Tama Talum, a Bunun man thought to be around 61-years-old at present, was arrested in 2013 after hunting wild game for his elderly mother. Because of the fact that Talum’s mother was in her nineties, Talum sought to hunt food for her to eat because she was used to eating wild game and because store-bought meat, such as pork, made her sick. Talum’s full name in Bunun is Talum Suqluman, but referring to someone by the name of their father is a sign of respect in Bunun. Because Talum’s father’s name was Tama, this why Talum is known as Tama Talum in most reporting on the case. Talum is also known by his Chinese-language name of Wang Guang-lu.

Talum’s hunting caused him to run afoul of the Controlling Guns, Ammunition and Knives Act after shooting a Formosan serow and Reeve’s muntjac. While Indigenous are permitted to hunt using firearms, they are only permitted to use handmade rifles. This resulted in a jail sentence of three years and two months in jail for illegal firearm possession and a jail sentence of seven months, as well as a 70,000 NT fine, being handed down to Talum.

PHOTO CREDIT: BRIAN HIOE

Though scheduled to start his jail term in December 2015, Talum refused to turn himself into police, stating that he would wait for police to arrest him at his home and accompany his elderly mother in the meantime. In anticipation of arrest, Talum asked his daughter to return home to take care of his mother, and reportedly even inquired as to whether he would be able to bring his mother to jail, to continue caring for her.

Following an extraordinary appeal by Prosecutor-General Yen Da-ho, this resulted in Talum not being arrested and remaining free pending an appeal. The trial against Talum was later suspended in 2017. Representatives of organizations such as the Legal Aid Foundation were critical of the heavy sentence originally faced by Talum, with Chen Cai-Yi of the Legal Aid Foundation stating that “the ruling of this case was even more serious than that of a murder case.”

Indigenous rights groups have emphasized that the case violated the traditional culture of indigenous, seeing as hunting is part of traditional Bunun culture, and enforcement of the law sometimes comes down against indigenous for seeking to practice their traditional culture.

PHOTO CREDIT: BRIAN HIOE

At the same time, in the early years of the Tsai administration, Indigenous activists frequently accused the Tsai administration of failing to take action regarding the Tama Talum case, much as how the Tsai administration’s apology to Taiwanese Indigenous on behalf of the ROC government was criticized as shallow in consideration of the Tsai administration’s failure to restore Indigenous traditional territories in private hands.

The sentencing against Tama Talum took place shortly before the January 2016 presidential elections that put Tsai in power, with Tsai even mentioning the case as an example of the injustices facing Taiwanese Indigenous during the third presidential debate between her and Eric Chu of the KMT. After Talum contracted a case of pneumonia that put him in the Intensive Care Unit in October 2016, during which Talum was unconscious for close to two weeks, this resulted in protests calling for Tsai to pardon him. Various petitions in support of Talum have been launched over the years, including recently.

The Tama Talum case points to a constellation of issues facing Taiwanese Indigenous. Despite legal provisions protecting traditional Indigenous hunting rights, the application of such laws are often haphazard and legal absurdities such as Indigenous being forced to use handmade weapons instead of modern firearms to hunt remain on the books, despite the fact that handmade weapons can misfire dangerously.

PHOTO CREDIT: BRIAN HIOE

Otherwise, Indigenous traditional practices variously run up against the juridical practices of the ROC state, or the state has been slow to act on legal protections promised to Indigenous. Indeed, it should not be surprising that a settler colonial state has little interest in protecting the rights of the Indigenous that it displaced—another way of looking at the issue is to consider discrimination against Taiwanese Indigenous as written into the fabric of ROC law. Although laws were changed in 2004 to allow Indigenous to hunt for cultural purposes, what these changes would be were not announced until 2012. The specifics of the law still conflicted with Indigenous practices, and what constituted hunting for personal purposes allowed under the Indigenous Basic Act could be murky territory.

Indigenous groups have sought to emphasize that hunting is a traditional part of Indigenous culture protected by law. Against criticisms that Indigenous hunting practices threaten endangered species, Indigenous activists have sought to highlight that Indigenous practices conserve natural ecology.

PHOTO CREDIT: BRIAN HIOE

It should be noted there have been other cases of Indigenous hunters arrested for practicing their hunting rights in past years, including arrests of Puyuma and Truku hunters in 2015 during the initial wave of attention regarding the Talum case. None of these cases became a cause celebre in the manner of the Talum case, but they gesture toward the larger issue at hand.

Indigenous groups have sought to organize around the issue. The National Aboriginal Hunter Conference has been held annually since 2018, with 130 representatives from 26 Indigenous communities issuing the Taiwan Aboriginal Hunter Declaration in 2020. The declaration emphasized that Indigenous would seek to maintain traditional cultural practices, contribute to the sustainability of the natural environment, and try to obtain the right to use regular firearms while hunting. Indigenous groups have also experimented with using cell phone apps to register kills and hunter’s associations have been formed for the same purpose.

PHOTO CREDIT: DANIEL YO-LING CHEN

After the end of the traditional ceremony, Indigenous groups traveled to Soochow University to watch the proceedings of the hearing by livestream. A number of arguments sought to highlight that Indigenous hunting practices would not lead to any ecological imbalance, as argued by Icyang Parod, Minister of the Council of Indigenous Peoples, and Control Yuan member Kao Yung-cheng.

The majority of arguments today at the hearing tended toward arguing for a constitutional reinterpretation regarding the issue of Indigenous hunting, though the National Police Agency took the opposite stance by arguing that the existing laws were sufficient to protect Indigenous hunting rights and that there was no need for an interpretation. Furthermore, National Police Agency representatives defended the present restriction of Indigenous to using homemade firearms for hunting, arguing that because homemade firearms are frontloading, stating this was more “safe” but seemingly implying that this would prevent their use for committing crimes. Indigenous advocates stated that Indigenous cultures forbid maltreatment of animals, as a result of which the use of modern guns would be more pain-free. 

Some debate ensued regarding whether Indigenous hunters should apply ahead of time before hunting, with Lin Hua-qing of the Council of Agriculture stating that hunting applications could be used to avoid hunting animals are in mating season. Arguments against this were that applying for hunting beforehand would go against traditional hunting practices in which hunters do not know what they will hunt beforehand. Tama Talum defended his hunting as part of his adherence to traditional culture, since this was carried out to care for his mother. 

The Council of Grand Justices will announce its decision on the arguments it heard at the hearing today next month.

BRIAN HIOE

Brian Hioe is one of the founding editors of New Bloom. He is a freelance writer on social movements and politics, as well as a translator. A New York native and Taiwanese-American, he has an MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and graduated from New York University with majors in History, East Asian Studies, and English Literature. He was Democracy and Human Rights Service Fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy from 2017 to 2018.

Indigenous Activists Hold Overnight Protest Before Council of Grand Justice Hearing on Tama Talum Case | New Bloom Magazine

THE LUWIANS: STUDIES ON AN ANATOLIAN CIVILIZATION

August 2016
Idil Journal of Art and Language 5(24)
DOI: 10.7816/idil-05-24-01
Authors:

Eberhard Zangger
Luwian Studies


Serdal Mutlu


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References (34)

Abstract
A catalogue of Middle and Late Bronze Age sites in western Asia Minor is currently established in the framework of a project supported by the University of Zurich. By the end of 2016, information about at least 340 sites will be available online and thus accessible to researchers and the general public. The sites are systematically registered for the first time and brought into context with rivers, lakes, arable floodplains, ore deposits, and trade routes. The sites’ coordinates have been entered into a Geographic Information System to analyze human-landscape interrelations. These settlements provide evidence that western Asia Minor was densely inhabited during the 2nd millennium BCE. A network of petty states and cities existed between the Mycenaean civilization on mainland Greece and the Hittite civilization in central Anatolia.

The Luwian Civilization - The Missing Link in the Aegean Bronze Age

• May 2016

• Publisher: Ege Yayinlari
• ISBN: 9786059680110

• Project: Middle and Late Bronze Age Settlements in Western Asia Minor

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303183224_The_Luwian_Civilization_-_The_Missing_Link_in_the_Aegean_Bronze_Age

E ZANGGER AT ACADEMIA.EDU

https://luwianstudies.academia.edu/EZangger

Read more: How World War Zero wrecked three Bronze Age civilisations

Luwians, Anatolia and the Bronze Age Collapse ~ Dr. Zangger ...

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31:49

In this lecture we interview Dr. Zangger the President of Luwian Studies.We dive into the ancient world ...

Feb. 15, 2020 · Uploaded by Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages

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Luwian Studies is an independent, private, non-profit foundation based in ... Presented by Dr. Eberhard Zangger, President of the Board of Luwian Studies. CC.

OCTOBR 9, 2017

Luwian hieroglyphic inscription explains the end of the Bronze Age
by Luwian Studies

Luwian Hieroglyphic inscription by the Great King of Mira, Kupanta-Kurunta, composed at about 1180 BC. Credit: Luwian Studies

An interdisciplinary team of Swiss and Dutch archaeologists today announced the rediscovery of a 29-meter-long Luwian hieroglyphic inscription that describes the events at the end of the Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean. One of the greatest puzzles of Mediterranean archeology can thus be plausibly solved.


The 35-cm tall limestone frieze was found back in 1878 in the village of Beyköy, approximately 34 kilometers north of Afyonkarahisar in modern Turkey. It bears the longest known hieroglyphic inscription from the Bronze Age. Soon after local peasants retrieved the stones from the ground, the French archeologist Georges Perrot was able to carefully copy the inscription. However, the villagers subsequently used the stones as building material for the foundation of their mosque.

From about 1950 onwards, Luwian hieroglyphs could be read. At the time, a Turkish/US-American team of experts was established to translate this and other inscriptions that during the 19th century had made their way into the collections of the Ottoman Empire. However, the publication was delayed again and again. Ultimately, around 1985, all the researchers involved in the project had died. Copies of these inscriptions resurfaced recently in the estate of the English prehistorian James Mellaart, who died in 2012. In June 2017, Mellaart's son Alan handed over this part of the legacy to the Swiss geoarcheologist Dr. Eberhard Zangger, president of the Luwian Studies foundation, to edit and publish the material in due course.

The academic publication of the inscription will appear in December 2017 in the Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society – TALANTA. Among other things, Zangger and the Dutch linguist and expert in Luwian language and script, Dr. Fred Woudhuizen, will present a transcription, a translation, a detailed commentary, and the remarkable research history of the find.

The inscription and a summary of its contents also appear in a book by Eberhard Zangger that is being published in Germany today: Die Luwier und der Trojanische Krieg – Eine Forschungsgeschichte. According to Zangger, the inscription was commissioned by Kupanta-Kurunta, the Great King of Mira, a Late Bronze Age state in western Asia Minor. When Kupanta-Kurunta had reinforced his realm, just before 1190 BC, he ordered his armies to storm toward the east against the vassal states of the Hittites. After successful conquests on land, the united forces of western Asia Minor also formed a fleet and invaded a number of coastal cities (whose names are given) in the south and southeast of Asia Minor, as well as in Syria and Palestine. Four great princes commanded the naval forces, among them Muksus from the Troad, the region of ancient Troy. The Luwians from western Asia Minor advanced all the way to the borders of Egypt, and even built a fortress at Ashkelon in southern Palestine.

According to this inscription, the Luwians from western Asia Minor contributed decisively to the so-called Sea Peoples' invasions – and thus to the end of the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean.


Explore furtherIsraeli archaeologists find inscription of name from Bible

More information: For more information, see www.luwianstudies.org\

Provided by Luwian Studies

The Luwians of Western Anatolia: Their Neighbours and Predecessors

Fred C. Woudhuizen, The Luwians of Western Anatolia: Their Neighbours and Predecessors. Oxford: Archeopress, 2018. iv, 162. ISBN 9781784918279 £26.00 (pb).

Review by
Naoíse Mac Sweeney, University of Leicester. n.macsweeney@leicester.ac.uk

Table of Contents

This book was written as a follow-up to Eberhard Zangger’s The Luwian Civilization (2016, Zero Books). Zangger set out to establish the Luwian-speakers of Anatolia as a ‘lost’ civilization of the Bronze Age; Woudhuizen uses historical linguistics to locate the Luwians in western Anatolia. Yet as a sequel (the book is explicitly framed as such on p.1), Woudhuizen’s book has been somewhat overtaken by events following the publication of the original Zangger volume. The arguments put forward within its slim covers can only be assessed within the wider context of the book’s publication — for which, see the latter part of this review.

The book begins by covering some well-established topics (Chapters 1 and 2) before moving to the more controversial claims of Woudhuizen’s central argument (Chapters 3-5), including a reprinted publication of an inscription widely considered to be a forgery (Chapter 6), and finally addresses a wide range of different issues more loosely linked to this central argument (Chapters 7-10).

The first chapter charts the distribution of Luwian place names in the Aegean and Anatolia, and presents the standard argument that such toponyms are survivals from an early, pre-Greek language that must have once been spoken in the region. Chapter 2 turns to the historical geography of western Anatolia, making a series of identifications between Hittite and later Greek toponyms (e.g. Milawata sounds like Miletos, and Samurna sounds like Smyrna). The identifications proposed here are mostly well attested, and have been more fully discussed elsewhere.1

In Chapter 3, Woudhuizen moves into more controversial territory, arguing that the hieroglyphic Luwian script was developed in western Anatolia towards the end of the Early Bronze Age. In support of his argument, he offers readings of several short inscriptions found on seals. Seal legends are also the focus of Chapter 4, which additionally includes a new reading of the inscriptions on the famous silver stag rhyton (Metropolitan Museum of Art 1989.281.10), challenging the conventional reading by Hawkins (pp. 67-73). This chapter argues that these legends provide evidence for a ‘great kingdom’ called Assuwa located in Luwian western Anatolia, whose powers extended into the Aegean and even onto the Greek mainland.

Chapter 5 moves forward in time into the Late Bronze Age and the period when the ‘great kingdom’ was conquered by the Hittites. The chapter briefly surveys textual evidence for Hittite rule in western Anatolia, making no reference to the wealth of archaeological evidence.2 Chapter 6 presents a particularly long and controversial inscription which Woudhuizen claims belongs to this period — the Beyköy inscription. As mentioned above, this inscription is now widely held to be a forgery.

The final four chapters of the book spin off into a range of different directions, covering the following topics in rapid succession: the Aegean activities of the pharaoh Amenhotep III; the radical reinterpretation of several well-known Hittite texts; a highly controversial claim to have deciphered the Phaistos Disc; an attempt to provide a grammatical reconstruction of the original language represented by the hieroglyphic Luwian script; an argument that the Trojans were ethnically distinct from the Luwians instead of ‘Thraco-Phrygian descent’ (p. 130); and finally that the pre-Luwian inhabitants of the region were the Pelasgians.

Readers familiar with the controversy surrounding Zangger and Woudhuizen may want to skip the next two paragraphs, but for others this book requires some contextualisation. Zangger’s book on the Luwians appeared in 2016 to great fanfare in the media, focusing on the claims that: a) Zangger had discovered a hitherto-unknown ancient civilization, and b) the Luwians were dramatically wiped out at the end of the Bronze Age by ‘World War Zero’. These claims were immediately discredited by specialists in the field, who pointed out that the ‘Luwians’ had been the focus of academic study for decades, and also that the collapses at the end of the Bronze Age were neither caused purely by war nor resulted in the disappearance of the Luwian language.3 It seems likely that the media attention lavished on the book owed more to its sensationalist claims and to Zangger’s expertise as a professional publicist, rather than to its rigour or accuracy.

The controversy was to continue. In 2017, Zangger collaborated with Woudhuizen to publish the text of a new hieroglyphic Luwian inscription known as ‘Beyköy 2’. The inscription itself was said to have been lost or destroyed, but Zangger and Woudhuizen produced their text using drawings they had discovered amongst the papers of the archaeologist James Mellaart (1925-2012). The inscription was rapidly identified as a forgery by leading scholars of Luwian including David Hawkins and Mark Weeden, and Zangger distanced himself from the inscription early in 2018, citing Mellaart’s previous record of falsifying discoveries.4 In contrast, Woudhuizen continues to argue for the authenticity of the Beyköy inscription, the text of which is reprinted in Chapter 6 of this book (with only limited discussion).

Two central pillars on which this book rests had therefore already been knocked askew before its publication in 2018 — the idea of the Luwians as a ‘lost great civilization’, and the Beyköy inscription. Although Woudhuizen seems keen to stick to his guns on both counts, it is difficult to see how this position can be maintained in the face of mounting evidence and arguments marshalled by leading scholars in the field. The wilder claims made in this book (e.g. that the Phaistos Disc is in Luwian, p. 111; that the Theban Kadmos was granted rule over islands by the king of Assuwa, but that he could only maintain control by having Assuwan henchmen, p. 65) do little to encourage confidence, nor does the refusal to engage with mainstream academic scholarship.

Notes

1. See chapters by Matsumura and Weedon; Günel; and Gander, all in Weedon and Ullman (eds) 2017. Hittite Landscape and Geography (Leiden: Brill).

2. For this evidence, e.g. Dedeoğlu, F. and E. Abay 2014, “Beycesultan Höyük Excavation Project: New Archaeological Evidence from Late Bronze Age Layers”, Arkeoloji Dergisi 17: 1-39; Glatz, C. 2009, “Empire as Network: Spheres of Material Interaction in Late Bronze Age Anatolia,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 28: 127-141; Luke, C., C. H. Roosevelt, P.J. Cobb, and Ç. Çilingiroğlu 2015, “Composing Communities: Chalcolithic through Iron Age Survey Ceramics in the Marmara Lake Basin, Western Turkey,” Journal of Field Archaeology 40.4: 428-449; Mac Sweeney, N. 2010, “Hittites and Arzawans: a view from western Anatolia”, Anatolian Studies 60: 7-24.

3. See, for example, this short but damning piece by Eric Cline at Rogueclassicism.

4. Luwian Studies.

A Bronze Age queen was buried wearing a priceless silver crown

HUMANS 11 March 2021
By Michael Marshall  

A selection of grave goods from La Almoloya, an ancient site in Spain

J.A. Soldevilla/Arqueoecologia Social Mediterrània Research Group, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

A Bronze Age society in what is now Spain may have been ruled by women, at least some of the time. Archaeologists have found the bones of a woman buried with a silver diadem – or crown – and other riches under the remains of a building that seems to have been used for political meetings.

The woman lived in a society that has been dubbed El Argar – the name of the first archaeological site preserving evidence of the culture, which was excavated in the 1880s by engineer-turned-archaeologist Luis Siret and his brother Henri.

The Argaric culture, which dominated what is now south-east Spain between around 2200 and 1550 BC, became famous following the Sirets’s discovery. But the Spanish civil war (1936 – 1939) and ensuing military dictatorship saw research grind to a halt for many decades, says Roberto Risch at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain.

Risch and his colleagues have been excavating an Argaric site called La Almoloya for several years. The ancient building they found there seems to have had some kind of governmental purpose, perhaps serving as a palace or a form of parliament.

“It’s a building with a hall where 50 to 55 people could be sitting listening to each other, or to someone explaining something,” says Risch. There is no evidence of food and no clear-cut religious artefacts, so it doesn’t look like a home or a temple.

Buried in a very large, ovoid jar under the floor of the hall, the team found the bodies of a woman and a man. Both had a multitude of funerary goods, suggesting they were eminent in Argaric society, says co-author Cristina Rihuete Herrada, also at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. DNA analysis shows they weren’t related, but they may have been married: both were immediate relatives of a baby girl buried under a nearby building, who may have been their daughter.

Most of the funerary items, including the most spectacular ones, were found on the woman. She was wearing a silver diadem on her head, two silver earplug piercings and two silver bracelets. As a result, the team believes she was the ruler.

Explore key Neanderthal and Palaeolithic sites: On a Discovery Tour of France

It has long been suspected that women had leadership roles in Argaric culture, says Rihuete Herrada. Four silver diadems have previously been found buried with Argaric women, although it wasn’t clear whether the women were rulers rather than important religious figures. But this is the first time a woman buried with such riches has been found in a building more clearly used for governing.


The man was buried with a dagger and had injuries consistent with a life of horse riding, as well as a long-healed skull injury. This suggests he may have been a warrior.

Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2021.8

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2270827-a-bronze-age-queen-was-buried-wearing-a-priceless-silver-crown/#ixzz6ooMJ1yc6

US Set to Send $11B in International Aid in Latest COVID Bill

By Katherine Gypson
March 10, 2021 VOA

FILE - A doctor uses a stethoscope to listen to the breathing of a patient confirmed to have COVID-19 at the Fann university hospital in Dakar, Senegal, May 13, 2020.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed $11 billion in foreign aid Wednesday as part of the massive $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. The move is just the beginning of the U.S. international response to the coronavirus pandemic, former aid officials told lawmakers.

“The gap still remains,” Rajiv Shah, a former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development and currently president of the Rockefeller Foundation, said during a House panel hearing Wednesday.

“In order for the U.S. to lead the world in filling that gap,” he added, “we will likely both have to do more to bring together multilateral partners through the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other institutions where we can use our voice.”

Experts had pushed for the American Rescue Plan to contain as much as $20 billion in foreign aid.

“This was a tricky issue, getting that $11 billion in there, but it’s an acknowledgement of a few things,” said J. Stephen Morrison, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and director of its Global Health Policy Center.

“It’s an acknowledgement that fixing COVID within the United States’ boundaries and getting out from underneath the pandemic — reopening society, reopening the economy — will only be successful if it is done universally around the world, that we cannot be thinking as if it were some isolated islands,” he said.

FILE - A worker pulls a cart of coronavirus aid items being prepared for shipment, at a World Health Organization facility, part of the International Humanitarian City, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, March 5, 2020.

Some aid recipients

Morrison said the $11 billion includes support for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which has taken on the fight against the coronavirus in many low-income countries. Money also will go to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s health preparedness programming.

The United States has provided $2 billion out of a planned $4 billion to COVAX, a global alliance providing COVID-19 vaccines to at-risk populations in 92 mid- and low-income countries, according to a USAID press release. The COVAX program runs separately from Russian and Chinese efforts to win the vaccine diplomacy race by distributing their own shots.

Republican Representative Nicole Malliotakis said it was crucial to counter Chinese influence in the coronavirus aid sphere by ensuring the aid in the American Rescue Plan and other U.S. development programs is “clearly branded as a gift from the American people, United States, as the most generous nation in the world.”

The American Rescue Plan is the fifth coronavirus relief package passed by Congress in the past year to address the economic and health impact of the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease. It is not clear if U.S. lawmakers will pass another aid package given concerns about the massive amount of spending to date.

Shah, however, said it was clear that the United States and other wealthy nations would need to work together to address the crisis in the developing world.

“There will be the need for much greater assistance in a coordinated global economic recovery,” he said at Wednesday's hearing. “It is true that developing countries and emerging economies have been hit hard by the pandemic. And it is also true that while we have done 20% to 30% of GDP [gross domestic product] and fiscal and monetary responses across wealthier nations, emerging markets have done 6% and developing countries have done less than 2%.”

Subcommittee Chairman Joaquin Castro, a Democrat, warned that global poverty rates have risen for the first time in decades during the pandemic.

The bulk of the American Rescue Plan funds a massive anti-poverty program within the United States. Experts estimate that the relief bill’s impact on the American economy will cause the global economy to grow by as much as 1 percent.

President Joe Biden is expected to sign that bill into law by the end of this week.

plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. 

Analysis of Chilling Massacre Site Unearthed in Croatia Points to a 'Random Killing'

MINDY WEISBERGER, LIVE SCIENCE
11 MARCH 2021


Blunt force injuries in boy (l) and young woman (r) (M. Novak/Institute for Anthropological Research)

HUMANS

Around 6,200 years ago, 41 people in what is now Croatia were killed and buried in a mass grave, and members of their own community may have murdered them, according to new analysis of the remains.

Adult men and women were among the dead, but ages in the group ranged from 2 years old to 50 years old, and about half of the skeletons belonged to children.

Many of the killing blows were strikes to the skull that landed from behind, and there were no marks on the arm bones that indicated the victims tried to defend themselves from their attackers, scientists reported in a new study.

Genetic analysis showed that about 70 percent of the deceased were not closely related to other victims, but all shared common ancestry.

Researchers suspect that the massacre may have been prompted by a sudden population boom or shift in climate conditions that depleted resources and led to indiscriminate mass murder.

Related: 25 grisly archaeological discoveries

The grave was discovered in 2007, when a man who lived in a small village in the hills of Potočani, Croatia, was digging a foundation for a garage, and heavy rains exposed a pit holding dozens of skeletons.

Archaeologists with the University of Zagreb happened to be conducting a survey nearby, and they were able to start investigating the mass grave on the day it was discovered, said Mario Novak, lead author of the new study and head of the Laboratory for Evolutionary Anthropology and Bioarchaeology at the Institute for Anthropological Research in Zagreb, Croatia.

The pit is small, measuring about 6.5 feet (2 meters) in diameter and 3 feet (1 m) deep, and at least 41 bodies had been unceremoniously dumped there.

At first, the archaeologists thought that the remains were modern, either from World War II or the Croatian War of Independence in the 1990s, Novak told Live Science. But there were no contemporary objects in the pit – just fragments of pottery that looked to be prehistoric.

And when researchers inspected the victims' teeth, they found no dental fillings. Radiocarbon dating of bones, soil and pottery fragments confirmed the age of the burial, dating it to around 4200 BCE.

The researchers identified 21 of the victims as children between the ages of 2 years and 17 years old, and 20 as adults between 18 years and 50 years old; 21 of the dead were male and 20 were female.

(Novak et al, 2021, PLOS One)
Above: The Potočani mass burial, with the upper layers of the pit showing numerous commingled skeletons. 

Just random killing

But how did they end up buried together? For the new study, Novak and his colleagues sampled DNA from remains and analyzed the bones of 38 individuals. When the researchers inspected the bodies, they found that most had at least one traumatic injury at the back of the skull, and some skulls had as many as four punctures.

Mass graves in medieval Europe frequently contained people of all ages and sexes who succumbed to the Black Death, but the victims in the Potočani pit died by violence, not of infectious disease, Novak explained.

"The only plausible scenario was a massacre," he said.

Distribution of men and women, and of adults and children, was roughly equal, and there were no wounds to their limbs or faces, so they likely weren't killed in a skirmish during combat.

It is unknown if the victims were restrained or otherwise incapable of defending themselves – "if someone attacks you with a club or a sword, you reflexively raise up your forearm to protect the head," which would have left at least some remains with cut marks on the arm bones, Novak said. "But we didn't see any facial injuries, and no defensive injuries whatsoever."

(M. Novak/Institute for Anthropological Research)

Above: Three penetrating injuries on the right side of the skull of a young adult female from Potočani.

Genetic data showed that only 11 of the victims were close relatives, so the massacre wasn't targeting a specific family group. Neither did it look like a planned discriminatory killing, in which foes tended to murder older men while taking women captive.

"In this case, it was just random killing, without any concern for sex and age," Novak said.

A Neolithic death pit that was recently described in Spain also held a jumble of skeletons – male and female, young and old. DNA showed that the victims were recent arrivals to the region, so they may have been slaughtered by locals protecting their territory, Live Science previously reported.

But genetic evidence from the site in Potočani indicated that even though most of the dead weren't closely related, they shared common ancestry. This means that they weren't newcomers; rather, they came from a local population that was homogeneous and stable, "so we can exclude that this massacre was associated with the influx of new immigrants," Novak said.

The most likely explanation is one that archaeologists and climatologists have suggested for other ancient massacre sites in Germany and Austria dating to about 5,000 years ago, in which adults and children were also killed indiscriminately and thrown into shallow mass graves.

In those scenarios, prolonged climate change that caused flooding or droughts – perhaps combined with an unexpected population boom – could have led to squabbles over precious resources.

And in Potočani, one of those struggles turned deadly.

"By studying such ancient massacres, we might try to get a glimpse into the psychology of these people, and maybe try to prevent similar events today," Novak said.

"We have evidence of ancient massacres going back to 10,000 years ago, at least. Today, we also have modern massacres – the only thing that's changed is we now have more efficient means and weapons to do such things. But I don't think human nature or human psychology has changed much."

The findings were published online March 10 in the journal PLOS One.

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Photos: 5,000-year-old Neolithic figurine

This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.