Celtic martial arts

About 1000 BC, an Indo-European culture began developing in Central Europe. It origin were near the headwaters of the Rhine, Rhone and Danube rivers, and it soon began expanding outward in all directions.

The Celts in these times had a great mastery of close quarter fighting and weaponry.  The Celts were notable in wrestling system. Roman writings describe Celtic life, including armed and unarmed combat, and note that Celtic festivals included wrestling.

At least two variants of these forms of wrestling still exist: Cornish wrestling and Breton wrestling.

In Scotland, surviving martial practices include single-stick, backhold wrestling, piping and dancing.

Piping and dancing may seem a strange type of martial activity, but the classical music of the Highland pipe consists of praise music for the ancient clan chiefs. The tunes instructed warriors to come to the chief, inspired the clans before and during battle and served as laments.

Archaeology has uncovered, on the scabbards of Celtic swords and other precious items, engraving that date back to the 4th century BC. These engravings depict subjects involved in close combat, including Greeks practicing their combat method of Pankration.
Celtic martial arts

Ancient Greek agriculture

Around 6000 BC people from eastern Mediterranean regions settled in eastern Greece. In the earliest times, Greek people probably hunted for meat and gathered wild plants for food.

As time passed, they began to raise their own animals and to plant seeds for crops. Ancient Greeks learned how to irrigate crops. Even with these advances, farming was hard in Greece. The economy of ancient Greek depended heavily on its agriculture. In fact, 90 percent of the men in Greece were farmers.

Landholdings in Attica were relatively modest in size, and worked for the most part by small, independent farmers.

Some smaller farmers could not afford slaves and just managed to scrape a living for their families. If there was a crop failure, poor families could not usually survive and would have to work for their landowners on larger estates or seek work in the city.
Because there was little water barley became the main cereal of ancient Greece. Olives and grapes also grew well in the land. Some lives were eaten but most were pressed to obtain oil for cooking and lighting, or for export to sell or barter for other goods. They used grapes to make wine.

During the years of the tyrants in Greece (650-500 BC) one Athenian ruler, Pisistratus, helped smaller farmers by creating a state loan fund and injecting more money into the scheme in later years by placing a tax of about 5 percent on agricultural products, the first known direct taxation of citizens.
Ancient Greek agriculture

Mummifying the dead

The term mummy is used to describe a naturally or artificially preserved body in which desiccation of the tissue has enabled it to resist putrefaction.

The skin is dry, leathery and rusty-brown in color and adheres closely to the bones. The odor is more like that of old cheese than that of a decomposed body.

There are examples of such bodies in several countries, although originally mummy (derived from an Arabic or Persian world mumia, meaning ‘bitumen’ or ‘pitch’) was only used to describe the artificially preserved bodies from Egypt.

Egyptian believed that, after they died, people would go on a journey to an afterlife where they would be born again. To make sure this second life happened, the Egyptians thought it was essential that the dead person’s body was preserved.

Mummification occurs in bodies buried in shallow graves in the dry, sandy soils of Rajputana, Sind and Baluchistan, where evaporation of the body fluids is more rapid owing to hot, dry winds prevailing in the summer season.

In the Atacama desert of Peru and Chile, natural mummification can be unintentional or intentional and is aided by the extreme environmental conditions of this region, which dehydrate the corpse minimizing decomposition.
Mummifying the dead

Anthropology and Archeology

Early investigations suffered from the problems that were common to all scientific fields in 19th century.

Their measurements were crude at best, and their knowledge of human anatomy and physiology was limited. But with each new discovery, another piece was added to the puzzle.

Anthropologist became more aware of the relationships between human beings and other animals.

They began to understand some of the obvious differences among human populations: they learn how physical features like skin color or how hair type or even height and general body structure were tied in with the environments in which people had lived for very long period.

Without evidence of past, there could be no anthropology. The evidence was provided by archeology.

Although in the nineteenth century archeology was not considered a branch of anthropology, its subject matter was of crucial important to physical anthropologists. Archaeologists are concerned primarily with prehistory – the period of human existence prior to the keeping of written records or historical accounts.

Their aim is to reconstruct the origins and spread of culture by examining any remains of past societies that we are fortunate enough to find.

Although archeology is best known for its dramatic discoveries of ancient cities, and the “great” civilizations of the past, it also provides us with vast amount of information about ancient people and their customs.
Anthropology and Archeology