̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - war

How do we protect doctors, media and NGOs in war? - a time to discuss

zs332 — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 18:02:21 +0000

Dr Saleyha Ahsan explores why journalists and medics are now increasingly seen as targets in warzones and what can potentially be done to support them.

Opinion: ̽��ֱ��challenges faced by doctors and nurses in conflict zones

Anonymous — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 15:34:40 +0000

Quite aside from the deadly and disorienting consequences for Ukraine’s citizens, Russia’s invasion places unique pressure on its doctors and nurses.

Cardiac arrests, caesareans and appendectomies are now often accompanied by injuries that should be relatively rare: gunshot and shrapnel wounds, third-degree burns, double or triple amputations, loss of sight, brain and spinal cord injuries. Were chemical weapons to ever be deployed, one can add blistering, convulsions and muscle paralysis. Then there are decisions unimaginable to many of us but unavoidable when resources are scarce: who will live and who will not.

With advance notice, medical staff can stock up on vast blood supplies, platelet-rich plasma and refrigerators. They can hone the specialist skills required for resuscitating and then repairing what war destroys. During the long war in Afghanistan, for example, military medical staff from allied forces underwent rigorous training before deployment. British surgeons and anaesthetists were required to complete a five-day military operational surgical training course at the Royal College of Surgeons where they practised damage control surgery on human cadavers, deliberately “wounded” to mimic typical injuries sustained during war.

From London, they’d move to an old aeroplane hanger outside the ancient English cathedral city of York to reappear, as if by magic, in a replica of Camp Bastion field hospital in Helmand province, Afghanistan. Here, they relied on actual amputees and theatrical makeup artists to reenact the patient journey from a helicopter to an intensive care unit. Even the thumping of an approaching Chinook was played over the sound system as doctors and nurses rolled up their sleeves.

Given the speed at which the conflict is advancing, Ukraine’s doctors make do instead with a 12-hour online equivalent designed and run by Dr David Nott and Dr Henry Marsh. Nott has 30 years’ experience working in conflict and disaster zones as a general and vascular surgeon and, through his David Nott Foundation, offers lifesaving treatment for victims by better equipping local doctors who care for them.

Unseen injuries

Other challenges facing doctors and nurses are more subtle, longer lasting, and more personal. War can be deeply traumatising, even for doctors and nurses not in the line of fire, meaning that rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are often as high for medical staff as for those at immediate risk of injury or death.

Until recently, the causes of PTSD were not well understood. We now know more about the extent to which cultural expectations, professional role identity, and organisational protocol (or formal rules) can exacerbate feelings of senselessness, futility, and surreality, and threaten people’s existential grounding.

This is because these contexts can trigger and amplify repeated experiences of senselessness (or the inability to justify war and its consequences), of futility (or the inability for medics to live up to their own expectations of “making a difference” as “compassion fatigue” sets in), and of surreality (or the inability to reconcile the absurdities of war with “life as normal”).

Senselessness, futility and surreality characterise the experience of war for many who are exposed to it. And when these experiences are sustained, they can dislocate a person’s sense of what they consider “meaningful”, “good” and “normal” to the point where they become an existential threat. They are war’s invisible injuries.

To compensate for this sense of dislocation, doctors and nurses have been observed to resort to innovative coping strategies. For example, they will refrain from publicly criticising the war effort for fear of hurting morale. They avoid emotional engagement by not attending funerals. They use humour to deflect and manage constant exposure to the cruelty of war. They establish enclaves of normality by importing home comforts (for example, in Camp Bastion, doctors organised Friday night pizzas and Sunday morning pancakes). They create improvised spaces in which to temporarily withdraw from war and catch up on Netflix. They grow flowers in the most uninhabitable spaces.

Sadly, the unintended consequence of this is often that it makes war even more surreal and cruel and the ability to help turn the tide more difficult.

Under circumstances such as those facing doctors and nurses in Ukraine today, the best prevention may be to accept that war is ugly, indiscriminate and savage. It is also a reminder of what is lost and what we must now work hard to preserve and repair.

This article is republished from ̽��ֱ��Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Professor Mark de Rond from Cambridge Judge Business School outlines some of the unique pressures faced by doctors and nurses in Ukraine, in this piece originally published in ̽��ֱ��Conversation.

Ministry of Defense of Ukraine

Patient being treated in a Kharkiv hospital during a 2015 military operation

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-ShareAlike

Pop-up mints and coins made from prayers

amb206 — Mon, 04 Dec 2017 09:38:48 +0000

We’re used to the kind of circular coins that jangle in your pocket. But this one is lozenge-shaped and features a crude impression of a castle on its face. Its edges are sharp.

A silver shilling piece, it was made in 1648 during the bloody siege of Pontefract Castle. Today it’s one of 80 examples of currency on display at the Fitzwilliam Museum. ̽��ֱ��temporary exhibition – Currencies of Conflict – is thought to be the first dedicated exclusively to emergency money.

̽��ֱ��focus is on coinage that reflects the turmoil of the English Civil War. But the exhibition also sets these coins within a wider context of 2,500 years of history and features some rarely shown items from the Fitzwilliam’s outstanding collection.

Between 1644 and 1649, the Royalist stronghold of Pontefract Castle was besieged three times by the Parliamentary forces led by Oliver Cromwell. Royalists loyal to King Charles 1 also held out at Carlisle, Newark and Scarborough Castles. All eventually fell to the Parliamentarians.

Examples of siege coinage from all four castles appear in the display. These coins were made by craftsmen working within the fortress walls, using metal obtained from melting down objects requisitioned from the occupants of the castle and town.

People, and especially soldiers, had to be paid to ensure their continued loyalty. “We don’t know how many emergency coins were made during these sieges but a contemporary journal entry from Carlisle suggests that £323 of shilling pieces were struck from requisitioned plate. They show how a micro-economy developed during times of siege,” said curator Richard Kelleher.

Although the quality and weight of the silver, and (rarely) gold, was generally good, the manufacture was often much less sophisticated. In temporary mints, pieces of metal were stamped with ‘dies’ of varied workmanship, from the crude designs at Carlisle to the accomplished work of the Newark engraver.

“In the emergency conditions of a siege, coins were sometimes diamond-shaped or hexagonal as these shapes were easier to cut to specific weights than conventionally minted coins which required the specialist machinery of the mint,” said Kelleher.

In the medieval period, numerous mints operated across England but by 1558 there was only one royal mint and it was in the Tower of London. During the Civil War, Charles I moved his court to Oxford, establishing a mint in the city. A stunning gold ‘triple unite’ (a coin worth £3 – one of the largest value coins ever minted) is an example of the fine workmanship of the Oxford mint.

On its face it shows a finely executed bust of the king holding a sword and olive branch, while the reverse carries the Oxford Declaration: " ̽��ֱ��Protestant religion, the laws of England, and the liberty of Parliament." Another rare coin from Oxford is a silver pound coin weighing more than 120g showing the king riding a horse over the arms of his defeated enemies.

Also displayed is a silver medal, made during the short Protectorate headed by Oliver Cromwell. It commemorates the Battle of Dunbar of 1650 when Cromwell’s forces defeated an army loyal to Charles II. Its face shows the bust of Cromwell with battle scenes in the background, while the reverse shows the interior view of Parliament with the speaker sitting in the centre.

̽��ֱ��earliest piece in the exhibition is an electrum coin dating from the 6th century BC. It originates from the kingdom of Lydia (western Turkey) and depicts a lion and a bull in combat. ̽��ֱ��earliest reference to coinage in the literature records a payment in coin by the Lydian king for a military purpose.

A Hungarian medal, commemorating the recapture of Budapest, provides a snapshot of a famous siege in progress. ̽��ֱ��walls are surrounded by cavalry and infantry complete with the machinery of siege warfare – artillery pieces – which have breached the walls.

This medal was also used as a vehicle for propaganda. ̽��ֱ��reverse carries the image of the Imperial eagle (representing the Habsburg Empire) defending its nest from an attacking dragon which represents the threat of the Ottoman Empire.

Much less elaborate are examples of coins made in circumstances when precious metals were in short supply. A 16th-century Dutch token is made from compressed prayer books and a piece from occupied Ghent in the First World War is made of card.

Extremely vulnerable to damp, these coins’ survival is little short of miraculous. During the siege of Leiden the mayor requisitioned all metal, including coins, for the manufacture of weapons and ammunition. In return, citizens were given token coins made from hymnals, prayer books and bibles.

Bringing the narrative of currency and conflict into the 20th century are paper currencies of the Second World War. Britain and its American allies issued currency for liberated areas of Italy and France, and for occupied Germany.

̽��ֱ��temporary exhibition Currencies of Conflict: siege and emergency money from antiquity to WWII continues at the Fitzwilliam Museum until 23 February 2018. Admission is free.

Inset images: England, Charles 1 (1625-49) silver shilling siege piece, 1645, Carlisle; England, Charles 1 (1625-49) gold triple unite, 1643, struck at Oxford; Commonwealth (1649-60), silver medal of 1650 commemorating the Battle of Dunbar; Lydia, Croesus (561-546 BC), Gold stater. Foreparts of bull and lion facing each other; Leopold I (1658-1705) silver medal, 'Budapest defended 1686' by GF Nurnberger; Netherlands, Leiden, paper siege of 5 stuivers, 1574; Germany, Allied Military Currency, 1 mark, 1944.

In the tumultuous upheaval of the English Civil War, Royalist castles under siege used ‘pop-up’ mints to make coins to pay their soldiers. A unique display at the Fitzwilliam Museum tells the centuries-old story of emergency currency made from gold, silver and compressed prayer books.

Emergency coins show how a micro-economy developed during times of siege.

Richard Kelleher

Fitzwilliam Museum

England, Charles I (1625-49) lozenge-shaped silver shilling siege piece, 1648, Pontefract

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Stolen World War Two letters help author uncover the hidden lives of army wives

sjr81 — Fri, 09 Sep 2016 09:38:42 +0000

Army Wives by Midge Gillies, Academic Director for Creative Writing at the Institute of Continuing Education (ICE), uses first-hand accounts, diaries and letters to piece together some of the extraordinary stories of servicemen’s wives through history – from Crimea to the war in Afghanistan.

Exploring all aspects of army life across the centuries; from the impact of life-changing injuries to séances, public memorials and death in foreign fields, Army Wives seeks to understand the singular experience of what it means for women to be part of the ‘army family’.

But it is perhaps the wartime letters of Diana Carnegie to her husband James which provide the most personal, colourful and touching accounts of a life wedded to both the soldier she loved, and the uncertain life of a military wife.

“I wanted a distinctive voice that took me beyond the familiar stories of bombing, blackouts and barrage balloons of the Second World War,” said Gillies. “Then I read a piece in ̽��ֱ��Telegraph about a cache of letters being sold at auction which provided an uncensored account of the war that wasn’t available in Pathe newsreels: Diana talked about couples having sex outside Buckingham Palace on VE Day and ‘getting tiddly’ on the way to hear a speech by Ernest Bevin.”

However, Gillies’ joy at outbidding her rivals at auction for the letters was short-lived when the auction house phoned her to reveal that although the letters were sold in good faith, they had in fact been stolen as part of a house burglary more than a decade earlier, and that she should expect a call from Kent Constabulary.

Sophie Carnegie, one of Diana’s two surviving daughters, only learnt about the letters’ reappearance a day after the auction, thanks to a chance phone conversation with someone who mentioned the Telegraph piece in passing. Sophie and her twin sister Charlotte both realised the letters must have come from a chest stolen when their parents’ house was burgled after Diana Carnegie’s death in 1998.

“Fortunately, the family were delighted I wanted to write about their parents and would help me as much as they could,” added Gillies. It didn’t take long to see that this was rich material. Diana wrote about the Home Guard and her fears of invasion right up until the terror of the V1 bombs and, finally, the agony of waiting for her husband to be demobbed at the war’s end. Her voice was witty, sassy and vivid – I liked her immediately.”

As well as Carnegie’s letters, Gillies visited and spoke with around 30 current and former army wives, as well as visiting archives across the UK in a sometimes difficult search for the voices of the women who were both left behind – or made the arduous journey to the front lines with their husbands.

Although it seems incredible today, the wives of British soldiers fighting in the Crimea were among the last of many to witness battle at close quarters; travelling with their husbands or sometimes stowing away on board Royal Navy ships in an effort not to be parted. Army wives, especially those married to lower-ranking men, often suffered terrible hardships and lived in squalor alongside their husbands, spending years in distant parts of the Empire, or accompanying their husbands from one seat of unrest to the other.

When a regiment was ordered abroad, a certain number of places were allocated for the wives of ordinary soldiers. In 1800, six women per 100 were allowed to go with their husbands. When soldiers began to travel further afield this rose to 12 per 100 men in India, China and New South Wales, and by the 1870s it was one in eight soldiers.

̽��ֱ��wives drew lots to determine who would accompany their husbands in a tense and very public ritual that was usually left to the very last minute to avoid the risk of desertion if a man found his wife was to be left behind.

“This most cruel of lucky dips took place either in a room into which the wives filed in order of their husbands’ rank, or sometimes, at the very dock where the soldiers’ ship was waiting,” added Gillies. “This led to harrowing scenes in which distraught wives waited to find out their fate; the wrong scrap of paper or the wrong-coloured pebble meant they may not see their husband for several years – if ever again.”

In her book, Gillies recounts the experience of 24-year-old Nell Butler who followed husband Michael, a private in the 95th Derbyshire, to Crimea aboard troop ships and 20-mile-a-day marches. Watching from a ship as a major battle commenced, Nell pleaded to be allowed ashore to search for Michael after fearing he must have been injured in the fierce fighting.

Once ashore, Nell trudged her way to Balaklava where she searched hospital ships and was mistaken for a nurse; being called into action to hold a soldier’s hand as his leg was amputated without anesthetic. Despite fainting, she earned herself a nursing role, tearing up her petticoats as makeshift bandages to treat the most appalling battlefield injuries.

Eventually, she found the badly-injured Michael and accompanied him to a hospital 300 miles away where she is thought to have served under Florence Nightingale in the hellish conditions that because synonymous with the conflict and the reforms of battlefield medicine and surgery.

Not that conditions for soldiers and their wives were markedly better at home. Army Wives reveals how overcrowding, poor hygiene, and a lack of basic cleaning facilities meant that diseases such as typhoid and tuberculosis were often rife, and their toll catastrophic.

In 1864 there was an outbreak of scarlet fever among army children at Aldershot and between 1865-1874, 120 children living in huts on Woolwich Common died of the same disease or diphtheria, at a much higher rate than in the civilian population.

Disease was by no means confined to home barracks. Husbands returning from service abroad often brought unwanted gifts back to their wives. ̽��ֱ��steady supply of prostitutes to army camps led to one estimate, in the middle of the 19th century, that around one quarter of the British Army had VD.

Rates for infection remained high in India, rising to 438 admissions per 1,000 men in 1890-93, double the rate for the British Army at home, and almost six times the German Army. This was partly why more wives were allowed to follow their husbands to the subcontinent.

In the 20th century, two world wars produced new generations of army wives and widows who lived through separation, injury and the deaths of husbands by forging friendships that lasted into peacetime. More recently, the Cold War and the war on terror has produced a new breed of more independent women who have supported their loved ones through an evolving landscape of combat operations.

“While the roles, expectations and the day-to-day lives of army wives may have altered over time, there were constant recurring themes as I wrote the book,” added Gillies. “Accommodation has always been a bone of contention and the state of army housing remains a real cause for concern today.

“Likewise, although communication is a lot easier than the days of letters and telegrams, our era of instant communication brings with it its own problems when husbands in difficult and demanding situations are available on a daily basis via Facebook or Skype to hear that Jonny isn’t doing his homework or that the washing machine is on the blink when there is nothing they can do about it from such a distance.”

̽��ֱ��strain is evident in divorce rates for soldiers and their wives. ̽��ֱ��figure remains much higher than that for couples in civilian life. So many army wives put their career second to become, effectively, a single mum for the time their husbands are deployed. Likewise, they often face the strain of uprooting their lives, and the children’s lives, time and again for new postings in the UK and overseas.

“ ̽��ֱ��lot of an army wife is waiting, being there to support and almost being gagged in a sense,” said Gillies. “A lot of the wives I spoke to seemed inhibited about speaking to me either because they feared getting their husbands into trouble, or because of their fears about the war on terror after the death of Fusilier Lee Rigby.

“But on the plus side, the friendship networks they develop are fantastic and for those who throw themselves into the life, the experience can be a great one. There was a real sense of service among many of the wives I spoke to – even if their lives can sometimes be very lonely and unpredictable.”

Gillies was also struck by the importance that couples still place on letters. Lyrics for the song, Wherever you are, which was written as a result of Gareth Malone’s TV programme, ̽��ֱ��Choir: Military Wives (2011) and which reached Number One, was based on letters and poems. For army families the letter is still king – even if it is delivered electronically before being printed out as an “e-bluey”. While the rest of us have abandoned letters in favour of texts and other forms of electronic communication the Army should provide rich pickings for future historians.

A stolen chest of letters – penned by an army wife to her husband on the battlefields of the Second World War – has helped a Cambridge academic and biographer trace the history of the women behind the men in uniform.

Diana talked about couples having sex outside Buckingham Palace on VE Day and ‘getting tiddly’.

Midge Gillies

Carnegie Estate

Diana Carnegie with her husband James and her children Charlotte, Sue and Sophie

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike

Have we misunderstood post-traumatic stress disorder?

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 14:08:30 +0000

It’s long been assumed that war-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) stems from how well a person copes psychologically with exposure to violence or the threat of violence. A new study, published in the Academy of Management Journal, finds that this is only half the story, however.

̽��ֱ��researchers behind the study say that the context through which war is experienced – based on a person’s cultural, professional and organisational background – may be equally important in determining how warfare can be traumatic for some and not for others.

̽��ֱ��research focused on military doctors in Afghanistan, and found that the “dissonance” between what the medics experienced on the ground and their values as dedicated professionals resulted in “senselessness, futility and surreality” – factors that can lead to PTSD and other mental health problems.

“This understanding of the connection between PTSD and the context of those who suffer from it could change the way mental health experts analyse, prevent and manage psychological injury from warfare,” said Mark de Rond of ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Judge Business School, who co-authored the study with Jaco Lok of the ̽��ֱ�� of New South Wales Business School in Australia.

“ ̽��ֱ��study highlights the urgent and serious nature of dealing with PTSD – beyond the very real impact on many veterans, to others who work in the theatre of war, such as medical personnel,” says Lok.

Between 20 and 30 per cent of the 2.7 million US troops sent to Iraq or Afghanistan between 2001 and 2011 returned with some form of psychological injury, says the US Department of Veterans Affairs, while the British charity Combat Stress reported a four-fold increase in former service personnel seeking help for mental disorders in the past 20 years. In 2013, a former commander of Australian forces in the Middle East warned of a “large wave of sadness coming our way.”

̽��ֱ��new study is based on fieldwork by de Rond, Reader in Strategy & Organisation at Cambridge Judge Business School, who was “embedded” with a team of military surgeons at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan for six weeks in 2011 – and includes tales both harrowing and tragi-comic.

“ ̽��ֱ��doctors I was embedded with were known as Rear Located Medics, who don’t have a combat role, so they have less reason to fear for their lives than frontline personnel,” says de Rond. “Studying this group was an excellent way to look beyond psychological reaction to the horrors of warfare in order to also analyse contextual elements that lead to PTSD.”

For example, the Camp Bastion army medics were particularly disturbed by rules of the camp’s small 50-bed field hospital that required the quick transfer of badly mutilated children (often double amputees due to Improvised Explosive Devices encountered while playing) and other Afghan civilians to inferior local hospitals, often within 48 hours, to make way for new battlefield casualties. This was a specific, local organisational requirement.

“(It was) difficult for them to come terms with rules, practices and experiences on the ground that appeared contradictory to their purpose and values, thus amplifying feelings of senselessness,” the study says.

As an example of the surreal hopelessness faced by the medics, the study relates a conversation between two medics: “They talked about the frustration of bringing a stable, anesthetised patient over to some hospital only to be met by an empty van, having to hand over a wired-up patient to someone with no equipment at all.”

This practice tore at the fabric of their professional purpose and responsibility and highlighted the contrast between the medics’ actual experience in a warfare setting with their professional expectations as doctors – a life of “the meaningful, the good and the normal.”

̽��ֱ��doctors’ real names are not used, but the study instead substitutes the names of characters such as “Trapper,” “Hawkeye” and “Potter” from the hit TV show “M*A*S*H”. Among de Rond’s field notes chronicled in the study, some incidents seem like they could have come out of the “M*A*S*H” gallows-humour playbook:

“One of the theatre nurses told me of an experience over Easter weekend, when a double amputee had come in… One of his legs had come off, and (the nurse) was asked to please take it to the mortuary (and from there to the incinerator). As he crossed the ambulance bay carrying a yellow (container) with a leg, he ran into the Commanding Officer and a TNC (Travel Nurse Corps) nurse walking the other way, dressed in bunny ears and carrying Easter eggs.”

Such a contrast “between the human gravity of the situation on the one hand, and the casual nature of everyday rituals and routines on the other” can have a very disorienting effect, the study says.

When such disorientation is sustained over time, it can also permanently damage the ability of everyday rituals and routines to provide a sense of meaning and predictability to life back home. This may be one important reason why many war veterans find it so difficult to adjust back to home life.

Camp Bastion, which was constructed in 2005 and handed over to Afghan forces in 2014, was the largest British overseas military camp since World War II, accommodating 32,000 people. ̽��ֱ��field hospital was staffed by mostly British and American doctors, with some Danes and Estonians, many of them “battle-hardened” by previous deployments to other war zones such as Bosnia and Sierra Leone.

Reference:
Mark de Rond and Jaco Lok. ‘Some things can never be unseen: the role of context in psychological injury at war.’ Academy of Management Journal (2016). DOI: 10.5465/amj.2015.0681

Adapted from a Cambridge Judge Business School press release.

In understanding war-related post-traumatic stress disorder, a person’s cultural and professional context is just as important as how they cope with witnessing wartime events, which could change the way mental health experts analyse, prevent and manage psychological injury from warfare.

This understanding of the connection between PTSD and the context of those who suffer from it could change the way mental health experts analyse, prevent and manage psychological injury from warfare.

Mark de Rond

Defence Images

Soldiers Patrolling in Afghanistan

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-ShareAlike

Arms and the man: how a culture of warfare shapes masculinity

amb206 — Thu, 31 Mar 2016 11:10:05 +0000

Brawls tend to take a familiar pattern. Verbal insults are traded and physical violence erupts. Something like this happened in the graveyard of a church in Florence on 30 March 1561. It began when a man named Niccolo di Piero Parenti called another man, Piero di Domenico, un asino (an ass). Both men soon drew their swords. Two others joined the fray – and Piero was wounded (his big toe was badly cut) leaving him unable to walk properly.

A remarkably detailed report of this encounter between a pair of hot-headed Florentines appear in the annals of the Otto di Guardia e Balia, records kept by the magistrates responsible for overseeing criminal affairs and law enforcement in Tuscany under the Medici, the dynasty which ruled this domain for close to three centuries.

Few scholars have investigated the archives of the Otto di Guardia which represent a vast and under explored historical source. But in 2015 Victoria Bartels, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History, spent two months studying these hand-written records. It was an undertaking that required not just a grasp of 16th century Italian but the determination to track down the meanings of dozens of obscure or archaic terms – from verbal jibes to items of armour. She was amused to discover that the insult poltrone translates as ‘armchair’ and means something akin to slob.

Bartels’ research into the usage of weaponry in Renaissance Florence forms one strand of a dissertation in which she will explore the relationship between men and armour (as well as martial fashion trends) in the 16th century. Her quest to understand more about the ways in which men used these items as masculine signifiers during this period takes her on a voyage into art, literature and archival documents that have survived more than 400 years of history.

Late Renaissance Italian culture was characterised by warfare. ̽��ֱ��so-called Italian Wars involved much of Europe and a preoccupation with armed struggle and violence was reflected in pastimes (such as jousting) and in male deportment and dress. Weapons (like those drawn in the graveyard in March 1561) were prohibited in 16th century Florence in order to maintain peace. But exceptions could be made and the contents of the Otto di Guardia archives suggest that many were.

As well as holding records of thousands of incidents of violence, the Otto archives also contain a huge collection of letters called suppliche (supplications) that petition the Duke for exonerations, sentence reductions, or the granting of certain privileges. Among these documents are numerous letters in which men wrote to ask the Otto for permission to wear or carry, in public, weapons that were banned.

Speaking today, at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Boston, Bartels will show for the first time how these letters shine a light on the ways in which Renaissance men used weapons and armour in their daily lives to promote a masculine image – and how entrenched the notion of honour was in early modern society. ̽��ֱ��supplications are rich in information not only about what offensive and defensive arms men sought to wear but where in town they wished to go and how they wanted to be seen.

“ ̽��ֱ��supplications are very specific in what they set out – and these details are what make them so valuable. In order to be given permission to bear arms a man had to specify with some precision what items he wanted to carry, when he wanted to be able to carry them, and why. ̽��ֱ��letters include a plea from a Portuguese priest who asks for permission to carry a dagger, and his man servant to carry a sword, for protection against a rowdy group of farmers and youths who are demanding his removal from a small parish church,” says Bartels.

“As a historian interested in the cultural history of arms and armour, it’s fascinating to hold in my hands letters that describe a whole range of situations and discuss both the usage and significance of these objects. ̽��ֱ��accounts written by notaries follow a template of sorts. However, each story is tailored to the individual behind the request. Although the level of detail varies, these documents provide historical information that we might not otherwise encounter. Every piece of material included, or withheld for that matter, assists us in our quest to understand period norms.”

Successful supplicants were awarded licenses by the Otto. Bartels’ research in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze led to the discovery of one such license – a copy of a document issued in March 1557. ̽��ֱ��license in question was granted to a painter called Maestro Giovanni Fiammingo Pittore. It gives his address and age (35 years) and describes his appearance (“black hair, black bushy beard, white in the face, medium stature”) and gives him permission to carry “an armed jacket, sword, and dagger”.

It is interesting that Maestro Giovanni was a painter and, as such, attuned to the powerful symbolism of arms and armour. ̽��ֱ��irony of portraying civilians equipped for combat was not lost on another artist. In 1584 Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo wrote that “merchants and bankers who have never seen a drawn sword and who should probably appear with quill pens behind their ears, their gowns about them and their day-books in front of them, have themselves painted in armour holding generals’ batons” (translation by Carolyn Springer).

Portraits and inventories reveal how a culture of warfare, tied up with notions of chivalry revived from earlier times, permeated deep into the male psyche and into male fashion – especially among the elite. An inventory of the guardaroba (wardrobe) of Lorenzo de’ Medici, as shown by Mario Scalini, itemised various pieces of armour including the de facto ruler of Florence’s leg armour that he wore around the city for decorative purposes.

Jousts, melees, and other tournament games were fabulous excuses for donning steel. ̽��ֱ��author Antonio Bendinelli recorded a tournament held in 1574 for Don Juan of Austria. Bartels says: “He discussed the appearance of each contestant over a span of 45 pages, commenting on the colour and material of their armour, clothing, and plumes. In contrast, he summed up the actual joust in just 20 lines, as historians Richard and Juliet Barker have pointed out.”

Looking manly, and impressing the opposite sex, meant adopting a martial style. ̽��ֱ��celebrated Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini suggested that cavaliers wore mail armour to impress women and, in 1538, the artist himself is recorded as possessing an entire wardrobe of mail. However, being perceived as overly militaristic also had its drawbacks. In Baldassare Castiglione’s ̽��ֱ��Book of the Courtier (1528), a female character explains to a surly, overly militaristic man: "I should think that since you aren't at war at the moment and you are not engaged in fighting, it would be a good thing if you were to have yourself well greased and stowed away in a cupboard with all your fighting equipment, so that you avoid getting rustier than you are already."

For statesmen, the consequences of going without armour could be deadly. In 1476 a grim fate befell the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, who was assassinated in one of the city’s churches. “We know from a courtier’s account that the Duke had decided against wearing his corazina [upper body armour] the morning of his death because it made him look portly,” says Bartels. “His decision was a revealingly human, but fatal, trade-off between form and function. His desire to look slim and dashing in public may have cost him his life.”

16th-century notions of gender welded manhood and masculinity with arms and armour. In a letter written in 1572, Antonio Serguidi noted that Duke Cosimo I wept with pride when he saw his youngest son Giovanni kitted out in armour, and holding a pike and mace. ̽��ֱ��putting on of armour was a mark of adulthood – and, perhaps, was a rite of passage with no return. ̽��ֱ��showy masculinity of martial dress, however, trod a delicate line along a sliding scale – with restraint at one end and acts of violence at the other.

Citing the scholars Lyndal Roper and John Tosh, Bartels suggests that a man’s level of manliness was never fixed but existed in a state of flux. “Violence, albeit in appropriate circumstances, appears to have been one method of demonstrating one’s masculinity. Yet to receive the benefits of this cultural capital, violent acts had to be performed publically under socially agreed terms, and especially in front of other men,” she says.

“Arms and armour seem to have been visible manifestations of this concept. Even if men didn’t fight, the objects they carried made it look as though they would and likely influenced their comportment and behaviour. Today we see these items in static museum displays – but to those who saw them worn their potentially lethal function was never in doubt. However, these same objects simultaneously conjured up notions of civility and chivalry, making the symbolism of arms and armour somewhat contradictory, similar to the period’s understanding of masculinity itself.”

̽��ֱ��gaining and defence of honour – whether for an individual, for family or for state – was the ultimate goal of the Renaissance man. ̽��ֱ��Otto di Guardia’s archives in Florence reveal that Niccolo, who engaged in a brawl with Piero almost exactly 455 years ago, was the only person to be charged with a crime. He was ordered to pay a fine for the insulting word he used and for the injury to his opponent’s foot. Though others joined the fracas, they were let off.

As Bartels explains: “Niccolo was convicted because he sullied the honour of Piero. As seen in other parts of Europe at this time, the authorities were sympathetic to fighters who were provoked by the spewing of verbal insults.”

Victoria Bartels will give her talk, ‘Men of Steel‘, today at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Boston. She is contributing to a session called ‘Encountering the Renaissance, Honoring Gary Radke III: Regulating and Shaping Gender and Sexuality’.

Inset images: Titian, Portrait of Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, 1536-38 (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence); Parrying dagger with scabbard, Italy or Germany, ca. 1590 (Wallace Collection).

̽��ֱ��trappings of violence were embedded into the culture of 16th century Europe. Victoria Bartels, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History, has conducted research in a Florentine archive to show how, even at a time when the bearing of arms was prohibited, men negotiated ways to sport their daggers and swords in public.

Violence, albeit in appropriate circumstances, appears to have been one method of demonstrating one’s masculinity. Yet to receive the benefits of this cultural capital, violent acts had to be performed publically under socially agreed terms, and especially in front of other men.

Victoria Bartels

Left: Giovanni Battista Moroni, Portrait of a Gentleman with His Helmet on a Column, ca. 1555-56. Middle: Giovanni Battista Moroni, ̽��ֱ��Gentlemen in Pink, 1560, Palazzo Moroni, Bergamo. Right: Moretto da Brescia, Portrait of a Man, 1526, Oil on canvas.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Evidence of a prehistoric massacre extends the history of warfare

fpjl2 — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 17:35:21 +0000

̽��ֱ��fossilised bones of a group of prehistoric hunter-gatherers who were massacred around 10,000 years ago have been unearthed 30km west of Lake Turkana, Kenya, at a place called Nataruk.

Researchers from Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies (LCHES) found the partial remains of 27 individuals, including at least eight women and six children.

Twelve skeletons were in a relatively complete state, and ten of these showed clear signs of a violent death: including extreme blunt-force trauma to crania and cheekbones, broken hands, knees and ribs, arrow lesions to the neck, and stone projectile tips lodged in the skull and thorax of two men.

Several of the skeletons were found face down; most had severe cranial fractures. Among the in situ skeletons, at least five showed “sharp-force trauma”, some suggestive of arrow wounds. Four were discovered in a position indicating their hands had probably been bound, including a woman in the last stages of pregnancy. Foetal bones were uncovered.

̽��ֱ��bodies were not buried. Some had fallen into a lagoon that has long since dried; the bones preserved in sediment.

̽��ֱ��findings suggest these hunter-gatherers, perhaps members of an extended family, were attacked and killed by a rival group of prehistoric foragers. Researchers believe it is the earliest scientifically-dated historical evidence of human conflict – an ancient precursor to what we call warfare.

̽��ֱ��origins of warfare are controversial: whether the capacity for organised violence occurs deep in the evolutionary history of our species, or is a symptom of the idea of ownership that came with the settling of land and agriculture.

̽��ֱ��Nataruk massacre is the earliest record of inter-group violence among prehistoric hunter-gatherers who were largely nomadic. ̽��ֱ��only comparable evidence, discovered in Sudan in the 1960s, is undated, although often quoted as of similar age. It consists of cemetery burials, suggesting a settled lifestyle.

“ ̽��ֱ��deaths at Nataruk are testimony to the antiquity of inter-group violence and war,” said Dr Marta Mirazón Lahr, from Cambridge’s LCHES, who directs the ERC-funded IN-AFRICA Project and led the Nataruk study, published today in the journal Nature.

“These human remains record the intentional killing of a small band of foragers with no deliberate burial, and provide unique evidence that warfare was part of the repertoire of inter-group relations among some prehistoric hunter-gatherers,” she said.

̽��ֱ��site was first discovered in 2012. Following careful excavation, the researchers used radiocarbon and other dating techniques on the skeletons – as well as on samples of shell and sediment surrounding the remains – to place Nataruk in time. They estimate the event occurred between 9,500 to 10,500 years ago, around the start of the Holocene: the geological epoch that followed the last Ice Age.

Now scrubland, 10,000 years ago the area around Nataruk was a fertile lakeshore sustaining a substantial population of hunter-gatherers. ̽��ֱ��site would have been the edge of a lagoon near the shores of a much larger Lake Turkana, likely covered in marshland and bordered by forest and wooded corridors.

This lagoon-side location may have been an ideal place for prehistoric foragers to inhabit, with easy access to drinking water and fishing – and consequently, perhaps, a location coveted by others. ̽��ֱ��presence of pottery suggests the storage of foraged food.

“ ̽��ֱ��Nataruk massacre may have resulted from an attempt to seize resources – territory, women, children, food stored in pots – whose value was similar to those of later food-producing agricultural societies, among whom violent attacks on settlements became part of life,” said Mirazón Lahr.

“This would extend the history of the same underlying socio-economic conditions that characterise other instances of early warfare: a more settled, materially richer way of life. However, Nataruk may simply be evidence of a standard antagonistic response to an encounter between two social groups at that time.”

Click on images to enlarge

Antagonism between hunter-gatherer groups in recent history often resulted in men being killed, with women and children subsumed into the victorious group. At Nataruk, however, it seems few, if any, were spared.

Of the 27 individuals recorded, 21 were adults: eight males, eight females, and five unknown. Partial remains of six children were found co-mingled or in close proximity to the remains of four adult women and of two fragmentary adults of unknown sex.

No children were found near or with any of the men. All except one of the juvenile remains are children under the age of six; the exception is a young teenager, aged 12-15 years dentally, but whose bones are noticeably small for his or her age.

Ten skeletons show evidence of major lesions likely to have been immediately lethal. As well as five – possibly six – cases of trauma associated with arrow wounds, five cases of extreme blunt-force to the head can be seen, possibly caused by a wooden club. Other recorded traumas include fractured knees, hands and ribs.

Three artefacts were found within two of the bodies, likely the remains of arrow or spear tips. Two of these are made from obsidian: a black volcanic rock easily worked to razor-like sharpness. “Obsidian is rare in other late Stone Age sites of this area in West Turkana, which may suggest that the two groups confronted at Nataruk had different home ranges,” said Mirazón Lahr.

One adult male skeleton had an obsidian ‘bladelet’ still embedded in his skull. It didn’t perforate the bone, but another lesion suggests a second weapon did, crushing the entire right-front part of the head and face. “ ̽��ֱ��man appears to have been hit in the head by at least two projectiles and in the knees by a blunt instrument, falling face down into the lagoon’s shallow water,” said Mirazón Lahr.

Another adult male took two blows to the head – one above the right eye, the other on the left side of the skull – both crushing his skull at the point of impact, causing it to crack in different directions.

̽��ֱ��remains of a six-to-nine month-old foetus were recovered from within the abdominal cavity of one of the women, who was discovered in an unusual sitting position – her broken knees protruding from the earth were all Mirazón Lahr and colleagues could see when they found her. ̽��ֱ��position of the body suggests that her hands and feet may have been bound.

The Nataruk remains are now housed at the Turkana Basin Institute, Turkwell Station, for the National Museums of Kenya.

While we will never know why these people were so violently killed, Nataruk is one of the clearest cases of inter-group violence among prehistoric hunter-gatherers, says Mirazón Lahr, and evidence for the presence of small-scale warfare among foraging societies.

For study co-author Professor Robert Foley, also from Cambridge’s LCHES, the findings at Nataruk are an echo of human violence as ancient, perhaps, as the altruism that has led us to be the most cooperative species on the planet.

“I’ve no doubt it is in our biology to be aggressive and lethal, just as it is to be deeply caring and loving. A lot of what we understand about human evolutionary biology suggests these are two sides of the same coin,” Foley said.

Skeletal remains of a group of foragers massacred around 10,000 years ago on the shores of a lagoon is unique evidence of a violent encounter between clashing groups of ancient hunter-gatherers, and suggests the “presence of warfare” in late Stone Age foraging societies.

̽��ֱ��deaths at Nataruk are testimony to the antiquity of inter-group violence and war

Marta Mirazón Lahr

Left: Skull of a man found lying prone in the lagoons sediments. ̽��ֱ��skull has multiple lesions consistent with wounds from a blunt implement. Right: ̽��ֱ��skull in situ.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Opinion: Finding a hunter-gatherer massacre scene that may change history of human warfare

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 13:09:24 +0000

̽��ֱ��area surrounding Lake Turkana in Kenya was lush and fertile 10,000 years ago, with thousands of animals – including elephants, giraffes and zebras – roaming around alongside groups of hunter gatherers. But it also had a dark side. We have discovered the oldest known case of violence between two groups of hunter gatherers took place there, with ten excavated skeletons showing evidence of having been killed with both sharp and blunt weapons.

̽��ֱ��findings, published in Nature, are important because they challenge our understanding of the roots of conflict and suggest warfare may have a much older history than many researchers believe.

Shocking finding

Our journey started in 2012, when Pedro Ebeya, one of our Turkana field assistants, reported seeing fragments of human bones on the surface at Nataruk. Located just south of Lake Turkana, Nataruk is today a barren desert, but 10,000 years ago was a temporary camp set up by a band of hunter-gatherers next to a lagoon. I led a team of researchers, as part of the In-Africa project, which has been working in the area since 2009. We excavated the remains of 27 people – six young children, one teenager and 20 adults. Twelve of these – both men and women – were found as they had died, unburied, and later covered by the shallow water of the lagoon.

Ten of the 12 skeletons show lesions caused by violence to the parts of the body most commonly involved in cases of violence. These include one where the projectile was still embedded in the side of the skull; two cases of sharp-force trauma to the neck; seven cases of blunt and/or sharp-force trauma to the head; two cases of blunt-force trauma to the knees and one to the ribs. There were also two cases of fractures to the hands, possibly caused while parrying a blow.

There must have at least three types of weapons involved in these murders – projectiles (stoned-tipped as well as sharpened arrows), something similar to a club, and something close to a wooden handle with hafted sharp-stone blades that caused deep cuts. Two individuals have no lesions in the preserved parts of the skeleton, but the position of their hands suggests they may have been bound, including a young woman who was heavily pregnant at the time.

Me and my colleague, Justus Edung, during the excavations. Credit: Robert Foley

We dated the remains and the site to between 10,500 and 9,500 years ago, making them the earliest scientifically dated case of a conflict between two groups of hunter-gatherers. Stones in the weapons include obsidian, a rare stone in the Nataruk area, suggesting the attackers came from a different place.

̽��ֱ��(pre)history of warfare

Today we think of warfare, or inter-group conflict, as something that happens when one group of people wants the territory, resources or power held by another. But prehistoric societies were usually small groups of nomads moving from place to place – meaning they didn’t own land or have significant possessions. They typically didn’t have strong social hierarchies either. Therefore, many scholars have argued that warfare must have emerged after farming and more complex political systems arose.

Man with an obsidian bladelet embedded into the left side of his skull, and a projectile lesion (possibly of a sharpened arrow shaft) on the right side of the skull. Marta Mirazon Lahr

Naturuk therefore challenges our views about what the causes of conflict are. It is possible that human prehistoric societies simply responded antagonistically to chance encounters with another group. But this is not what seems to have happened at Nataruk. ̽��ֱ��group which attacked was carrying weapons that would not normally be carried while hunting and fishing. In addition, the lesions show that clubs of at least two sizes were used, making it likely that more than one of the attackers were carrying them.

̽��ֱ��fact that the attack combined long-distance weapons such as arrows and close-proximity weaponry such as clubs suggests they planned the attack. Also, there are other, but isolated, examples of violent trauma in this area from this period in time – one discovered in the 1970s about 20km north of Nataruk, and two discovered by our project at a nearby site. All three involved projectiles, one of the hallmarks of inter-group conflict. Two of the projectiles found embedded in the bones at Nataruk and in two of the other cases were made of obsidian. This tells us that such attacks happened multiple times, and were part of the life of the hunter-gatherer communities at the time.

So why were the people of Nataruk attacked? We have to conclude that they had valuable resources that were worth fighting for – water, meat, fish, nuts, or indeed women and children. This suggests that two of the conditions associated with warfare among settled societies – territory and resources – were probably common among these hunter-gatherers, and that we have underestimated their role so far.

Evolution is about survival, and our species is no different from others in this respect. ̽��ֱ��injuries suffered by the people of Nataruk are merciless and shocking, but no different from those suffered in wars throughout much of our history – sadly even today. It may be human nature, but we should not forget that extraordinary acts of altruism, compassion and caring are also unique parts of who we are.

Marta Mirazon Lahr, Reader in Human Evolutionary Biology & Director of the Duckworth Collection, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Marta Mirazon Lahr (Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies) discusses the discovery, made by her and her team, of the oldest known case of violence between two groups of hunter gatherers.

Image by Marta Mirazon Lahr, enhanced by Fabio Lahr

Skull of a man with multiple lesions on the side, probably caused by a club.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes