Smithsonian: December 2021 by Smithsonian Enterprises

Native Americans whose lives depend on Alaska wildlife

The legacy of the “angel of the battleﬁeld,” Clara Barton

The pungent rise and fall of a true blue heritage cheese

D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 1 • S M I T H S O N I A N M A G.C O M

Copper and the King How new archaeological evidence from 3,000-year-old mines relates to the Bible’s account of Solomon

How do you recycle CO2 to make stronger concrete? CARBON CURED CONCRETE PATENT NO. US 10,894,743 B2

Concrete is the most used man-made material on earth.1 But before it can be used, it must ﬁrst be cured. We’ve developed a new curing method, storing up to 200kg of CO2 in every ton of cement. Making it as strong as regular concrete in 3 days instead of 28, for faster, more efﬁcient construction. If the whole precast concrete industry switched to our technology, we could recycle up to 246 million tons of CO2 a year2,3 – equivalent to removing emissions from 53 million cars.4 See how we continue innovating for a better future at

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Source: Global Cement and Concrete Association Annual global cement production in 2019: 4.1 billion tons. Source: IEA. Precast industry is 30% of total. Sources: The Business Research Company & Fortune Business Insights. 4 Typical passenger vehicle emits around 4.6 metric tons of CO2 per year. Source: EPA. 2 3

How do you lower the carbon footprint of a moving truck? MOBILE CARBON CAPTURE PATENT NO. US 9,486,733 B2

Over a third of all transport CO2 emissions come from road freight.1 We’ve captured up to 40% of the CO2 from a truck’s exhaust in recent lab tests, storing it safely on board to ofﬂoad later for reuse or to store deep underground. If every heavy-duty truck in the world had our technology, we could reduce CO2 emissions by up to 473 million tons a year2 – equivalent to planting 80 billion new trees.3 See how we continue innovating for a better future at

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IEA (2017), The Future of Trucks, IEA, Paris IEA (2020) CO2 emissions from heavy-duty vehicles in the Sustainable Development Scenario, 2000–2030 3 One young tree absorbs 5.9kg CO2 per year. Source: Urban Forestry Network. 2

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Vol. 52 | No. 08

December 2021

features

Calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge are a crucial habitat for an astonishing migratory herd of 200,000 animals and the Gwich’in people who rely on them Photographs by Peter Mather Text by Eva Holland

After years of precision construction and computer modeling, an engineer and archer in Oregon who wields a powerful footbow aims to set a world shooting record in the remote Nevada desert Photographs by Erin Trieb Text by Patrick Cooke

Quest for Copper

An Israeli archaeologist digging in the Arava Desert makes the case for an industrious, previously ignored society that coincides with the biblical account of King Solomon by Matti Friedman

In France, makers of Roquefort cheese are singing the blues over waning sales. Yet tradition and law demand they never cut corners in their time-honored production process by Joshua Levine

P E T E R M AT H E R ; KOT RY N A Z U K AU S K A I T E ( D E TA I L)

Keeping Faith in Caribou Country

The Long Mile

Reign of Terroir

Brennan Firth, who lives in Arctic Village, Alaska, pauses while on a caribou hunt. He is originally from the Gwich’in community of Fort McPherson in the Northwest Territories.

prologue

04 Discussion

09 American Icon: Clara Barton

88 Ask Smithsonian You’ve got questions. We’ve got experts

• Civil War caregivers 13

Art: A portraitist ahead of her time

Technology: The quaint history of deepfakes

06 Institutional Knowledge by Lonnie G. Bunch III

• Fooled ya! 22 Cheer: A Christmas gift from Louis Armstrong 24 National Treasure: Northrop’s T-38 Talon 26 Crossword: Our monthly puzzle Cover: Illustration of King Solomon in copper by Bill Mayer. December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 3

discussion MAGAZINE

TWITTER: @SmithsonianMag INSTAGRAM: @smithsonianmagazine FACEBOOK: smithsonianmagazine

better versions of ourselves. . . .” I’ve always thought space exploration was only about technology and ﬁguring out ways to do things we’ve never done before, but it seems that without human empathy and compassion at the foundation, any attempts at colonization will surely fail. — Karin Spiezia | Whitestone, New York

When I was younger, the idea of traveling to Mars was exciting. But now I believe that we are not ready to inhabit other planets until we learn how to make the best of this one.

“Without human empathy. . . attempts at colonization will fail.” World War II Hero Please ask Steven Spielberg to bring “The Righteous Deﬁance of Aristides de Sousa Mendes” to the big screen. What a magniﬁcent person Sousa Mendes was. In tragic times, the best and worst of humanity rises to the top and sinks to the bottom. — D J W | Smithsonianmag.com

Well Read “New Chapter” was fabulous and inspiring! I love the innovation and trend-setting of the Memphis Public Library system. What a shining example for others to follow. Kudos to Keenon McCloy and her staﬀ and volunteers. May this spur on libraries in many other cities and states to broaden their services and conceive new ideas to serve and educate their communities. — Diane Busch | North Canton, Ohio

The Red Planet The most striking phrase in “Welcome to Mars” for me was, “If living together on Mars can make us into

C O N TA C T US

Smithsonian thanks you for your subscription, which supports the Smithsonian Institution’s unique mission to explore the natural world, celebrate the arts and connect Americans to their history.

— Marileta Robinson | Milanville, Pennsylvania

Something Fishy As an environmental scientist and a registered nurse, I enjoyed reading about preserving culture and honoring a culture through food (“The Sauce Detectives”). As a society we are all about bonding over food and culture. With the pandemic there is no better time to experiment with new and old sauces and the food that we cook. Bringing back a lost period of history is amazing. — Jamie Smith | Cave Creek, Arizona

King of America King George III wasn’t quite the monster he was portrayed to be (“In Defense of King George”). However, several things still taint his legacy. For one, he didn’t exactly bring an end to slavery in the British Empire, despite acknowledging its evils and the hypocrisy of slavery. Also, it was at his insistence that Britain ﬁght to keep the American colonies, prolonging the Revolutionary War. To his credit, though, he acknowledged Washington’s virtue of not clinging to power, and he did seem to respect his limitations as a constitutional monarch. We should take the good and the bad into account when judging historical ﬁgures, as they are often far more complex than their critics and supporters make them out to be. — John Paul Wilson | Facebook SUBSCRIPTIONS: (800) 766-2149 P.O. BOX 8504, BIG SANDY, TX 75755. CALL 1-800-766-2149, OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES: (903) 636-1113.

Send letters to LettersEd@si.edu or to Letters, Smithsonian, MRC 513, P.O. Box 37012, Washington, D.C. 20013. Include a telephone number and address. Letters may be edited for clarity or space. Because of the high volume of mail we receive, we cannot respond to all letters. Send queries about the Smithsonian Institution to info@si.edu or to OVS, Public Inquiry Mail Service, P.O. Box 37012, Washington, D.C. 20013.

4 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

City with many faces

www.infozagreb.hr #VisitZagreb #LoveZagreb

Experience the Magic of Christmas in Zagreb WINTRY WONDERLANDS are an essential backdrop to any Christmas carol (and Christmas dream), but in Zagreb each December they come to life as the city welcomes the season with excitement and enthusiasm. Imagine costumed performers and vendors selling spiced wine on every corner and lights twinkling with magic in every window. The crisp air is perfumed with the scent of sweet Croatian treats fresh out of the oven and entertainment for the whole family abounds. AT ADVENT ON ZRINJEVAC , 220 Christmas trees twinkle at once as traditional Croatian de orations adorn windows and market stalls. Ice skating rinks pop up all over the city and kids of all ages twirl around with steaming cups of hot cocoa. Of course, Christmas and shopping go hand in hand, and in Zagreb that means visiting markets filled with local artisans, many of which connect back to the rich history of Christmas celebrations all over Croatia. Snacks are never in short supply with sweet

and savory strudels. Undoubtedly one of Europe’s most exciting food cities, Zagreb’s gastronomy scene features a delightful mix of innovative, modern dishes and classic, hearty Croatian fare that can be found in abundance at the city’s numerous restaurants. ZAGREB is a magical city at every time of year. In the fall, Artpuncture brings together some of the most exciting artists working in Europe today. With springtime comes the Festival of Lights, where evenings are devoted to taking in light shows and the days are filled with events like Floraart, which celebrates the flowers of the season. Warm Zagreb summers play host to the Zagreb Classic, a music and culture festival that gets the whole city dancing in King Tomislav Square. At Christmas, though, Zagreb becomes a true winter wonderland, and what’s extra-special this year is that through streaming programs and even augmented reality, you don’t have to leave home to experience its magic. •

institutional knowledge

A House Full of Ideas ONE OF SMITHSONIAN’S MOST STORIED BUILDINGS IS REOPENING WITH AN EYE TOWARD HUMANITY’S MANY POTENTIAL FUTURES

Aidan Bean installs Suchi Reddy’s AIbased artwork, “me + you,” in the central rotunda of the Arts and Industries Building.

HE MUSEUM of the past must be set

aside, reconstructed, transformed . . . into a nursery of living thoughts,” George Brown Goode, the first curator of the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building (AIB), wrote in 1889. “It should be a house full of ideas.” AIB opened in 1881 as the first United States National Museum with a radical new philosophy. Museums could do more than research and showcase; they could teach and inspire as well. Thousands flocked to the Mall’s newest building to see firsthand the inventions that were changing the world: the electric light bulb, the steam locomotive, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. AIB pioneered many of the Smithsonian features we now consider essential: descriptive labels to explain what people saw, new ways of organizing displays to tell stories, and even “living animal” collections (an initiative that would eventually grow into the National Zoo). By the time I worked as a curator at the National Museum of American History, AIB was serving even younger audiences: My daughter attended preschool in the build-

6 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

ing that had once housed the Star-Spangled Banner and the Spirit of St. Louis. This November, after being closed for nearly two decades, AIB has temporarily reopened to the public with the launch of a new exhibition, “Futures.” The building-wide exhibit exemplifies the notion that the Smithsonian has always been a forward-looking institution. Continuing AIB’s long legacy of creativity and innovation, “Futures” features art installations, technology debuts, interactive experiences and ideas that preview humanity’s many potential futures. The exhibition doesn’t claim to predict what will happen, but rather asks visitors to engage with a range of possibilities—and, most important, to craft those possibilities themselves. Audiences can design future cities alongside an artificial intelligence architect, watch clean drinking water get harvested from the air, see clothes get washed in a wetland, or experience robot-guided meditation. Debuting in the central rotunda, “me + you,” Suchi Reddy’s AI-based installation, invites visitors to share their own future visions to help shape a two-story column of color and light. “Futures” is turning AIB into the hub of ideas—inventive, intriguing, ingenious—that Goode envisioned. As the Smithsonian reflects on 175 years of service, “Futures” reminds me that the best museums are as much about today and tomorrow as they are about yesterday. And as we plan and strategize for the years to come, the exhibition represents the Smithsonian’s purpose going forward: to spark discovery, empower creativity and inspire wonder.

Portrait illustration by Jurell Cayetano

A LYS SA S C H U K A R ; I L LU STAT I O N S O U R C E : M I C H A E L BA R N ES / S M I T H S O N I A N I N ST I T U T I O N A R C H I V ES

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prologue

T H E PAST I S

By Kate Bolick

Illustration by Mari Fouz

A M E R I CA N I C O N

ALAMY

The Caregiver

Two hundred years after her birth, the famously intrepid Clara Barton’s pioneering commitment to public health has only become more crucial December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 9

prologue A M E R I CA N I C O N

ALF A CENTURY BEFORE she founded the American Red Cross, Clara Barton had her first nursing experience at age 11, when her older brother fell off a barn roof. For nearly two years she remained at his bedside, applying leeches and dispensing medicine. He made a full recovery from serious cranial trauma. Born on Christmas Day 200 years ago, in North Oxford, Massachusetts, Clara was a timid child. “In the earlier years of my life I remember nothing but fear,” she wrote in her 1907 autobiography. But her brothers trained her to be “a superb rider and a crack shot with a revolver,” writes historian S.C. Gwynne, and soon she longed to be a soldier. Instead, she began teaching school when she was 17 and eventually founded schools of her own, one in her home state and another in New Jersey, then moved to Washington, D.C. to work as a clerk at the U.S. Patent Office, where she was one of the few women on staff. The week after the Civil War broke out in April 1861, Barton began nursing Union soldiers at an improvised camp inside the U.S. Capitol in the Senate chamber, and soon took her skills to the front lines. At the Battle of Antietam, where thousands of lives were lost in the war’s bloodiest day, she was giving water to a soldier when a bullet tore through her sleeve, killing him. She also accepted a young man’s plea to extract a bullet from his face. “I do not think a surgeon would have pronounced it a scientific operation,” she later wrote, “but that it was successful I dared to hope from the gratitude of the patient.” A surgeon who was also tending to the wounded that day coined her famous epithet in a letter to his family: “In my feeble estimation, General

B.F. Tillinghast, an American Red Cross supporter, with Barton and Russian Adm. Nikolai Kaznakoff in St. Petersburg, Russia, during an International Red Cross conference in June 1902.

[George B.] McClellan, with all his laurels, sinks into insignificance beside the true heroine of the age, the angel of the battlefield.” Barton subsequently tended to hundreds of wounded in Virginia, Maryland and South Carolina. Barton also worked to improve the fortunes of formerly enslaved people, drafting them as nurses in battlefield hospitals and teaching them to read. Near the end of the war, President Abraham Lincoln approved her proposal to open the Missing Soldiers Office, where she identified 22,000 Union servicemen who had died in captivity and notified their families. She also launched a lecture tour, delivering more than 200 speeches throughout the Northeast and Midwest about her war experiences to raise money for relief efforts. A tiny woman, just five feet tall, in lace collars and crinolines, she shared platforms with Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and Sojourner Truth. In December 1868, she lost her voice, and her doctor advised her to take a break from lecturing and travel to Europe. She first encountered and began volunteering for the International Red Cross in Switzerland in September 1869.

MCCLELLAN, WITH ALL HIS LAURELS, SINKS INTO INSIGNIFICANCE BESIDE THE TRUE HEROINE OF THE AGE.

10 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

A M E R I CA N R E D C R OS S ; I STO C K ( D E TA I L)

Her time there was a revelation. She was awed by “the work of these Red Cross societies in the field, accomplishing in four months under their systematic organization what we failed to accomplish in four years without it,” she later said. As she began petitioning the U.S. government to recognize a domestic chapter of the international organization, she showed the same resolve that had driven her work on the battlefield. President Rutherford B. Hayes turned her down in 1877, but Barton had spent the past five years building national support for the agency and wasn’t about to take no for an answer. In May of 1881, with Hayes out of office, she established the Red Cross on her own with a small staff. Four months later, forest fires tore through Michigan, leaving 500 dead and thousands more homeless. Without waiting for federal recognition, Barton used the new agency to issue appeals for help nationwide, raising enough money, food and supplies to aid 14,000 survivors. The Red Cross was officially

incorporated in Washington, D.C. the next month. Barton led the agency for the next 23 years, aiding countless victims of ﬂoods, hurricanes, tidal waves and typhoid fever, as well as those wounded in the Spanish-American War. She died of pneumonia in April 1912 at the age of 90, three days before her agency rushed to aid survivors of the Titanic. Barton remains celebrated worldwide, and even in outer space: A crater on Venus bears her name. Along with her vision and courage, it is her deep commitment to helping the weak and disadvantaged that continues to resonate. This fall, it was reported that 700,000 Americans had died from Covid-19—a death toll virtually identical to that of the Civil War, and over a much shorter span of time. Were it not for the health care workers who devote their lives to others, that number would be unimaginably higher. In September, the Pennsylvania State Nurses Association released a video calling for more caregivers. Its title: “The Next Clara Barton.”

DOROTHEA DIX

MARY ANN BICKERDYKE

AT THE START OF THE

war, the only official Army nurses were men. Dix, a schoolteacher and ﬁery prison reformer in Massachusetts, traveled to Washington in April 1861 on a mission to change that. Soon she was recruiting the Union’s new legion of female nurses, bringing more than 3,000 to the Union cause.

KNOWN AS THE

“Cyclone in Calico,” she oversaw the construction of 300 ﬁeld hospitals. When one person complained about the stubborn nurse to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, he rose to her defense, saying he couldn’t intercede because she outranked him.

Medic! WOMEN WHO SHATTERED NORMS TO NURSE THE WOUNDED DURING THE CIVIL WAR By Ted Scheinman

HARRIET TUBMAN

L I B R A RY O F C O N G R ES S ( 4 )

BORN INTO SLAVERY

in Maryland, Tubman began working as a Union nurse in 1862 at the request of Massachusetts Gov. John Andrew, serving in the ﬁeld from South Carolina to Florida and at hospitals in Virginia. She led troops during a South Carolina raid that liberated more than 700 enslaved people. And she served as a spy.

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT THE AUTHOR DID A

turn as a nurse at the Union Hospital in Washington, D.C. in 1862 and 1863 before she contracted typhoid and had to step away from caregiving. These experiences informed her ﬁrst critical success, Hospital Sketches, published in 1863, as well as her most famous novel, Little Women, published in 1868. December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 11

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prologue A RT

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B E YO N D R E A L I S M

Raw and affecting portraits of rural life in the early 20th century were strikingly modern

H ED _ 3 H provid ED L I N Emolupta volorio nsen pDek_3 rol og ue Sequaerae ART qCa uep otim lia nda m nis p ed ute no nseq ua te v ent. on nihil 7.5 x 7.5 susua volm up,taam et, et ium recta ta sitenis m o lupta ta ius, seIq p iet omni s q ui s ute q uib usa qsiuid ta tec t torp os m , so r enia erum q uua pisci tet ut id q ue excep ta i l l ores ui do lut ut q uo d m o m o ssi v o lupta te perisq u sidelliq eq ui ute l a b or a d eum ita os na t ilita tio re, o dit, o m nia ev erup t iistisit e. torp q uosafug excep qtaua s itur, l l orese rere, a lia epe ria tio r enia erum q uunt m o diq ui ute l a b or a d a tecum q uosaenest e. ut o disto ta t. Ihicid m o dit delecti o dit et fa cerio etur, v o lo ren eum no st dig nihita t a litia tur a liq ue ea q ua tem do lo rum Ris eo sa m us ra e. M a g nim e nia tur a ut.

digeni dendaernate liquatisin pre re vitat

ER CAREER LASTED only a decade, but Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) painted more than 500 canvases, including moody landscapes, wry self-portraits and careful studies of children, old people and the residents of a local poorhouse. She approached even her humblest subjects with a rare respect, says Ingrid Pfeiffer, curator of a new retrospective at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, on view until February. “She gave value to each person she painted,” Pfeiffer says. Yet her intense, unsentimental depictions of rural people held little appeal to art buyers at the end of the Victorian era. Indeed, during her life Modersohn-Becker, whose upper-middle-class Bremen family encouraged her artistic education in London, Berlin and Paris, sold just four paintings. It was only after she died at 31, from complications of childbirth, that her work began to find an audience. Today, she is regarded as a pioneer of the artistic movement that would become known as Expressionism, with a style that was years ahead of her contemporaries. “I am still an incomplete person and should so like to become someone,” she wrote. “Then again, I also feel that whoever thinks of me as incomplete needn’t really bother to look in my direction.”

Half-Length Portrait of a Peasant, His Head Resting on His Right Hand, oil tempera on cardboard, c. 1903. The artist created the work at an art colony in Germany.

December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 13

prologue

Pictures That Deceive Today’s video hoaxes can be downright ugly. But imagemakers have been fooling viewers from the beginning

14 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

By Clive Thompson

Illustration by Kotryna Zukauskaite

WO YEARS AGO, Noelle Martin discovered someone had made a “deepfake” video about her. Martin is a 26-year-old Australian law graduate who has lobbied governments and corporations to take action against the online harassment of women. Now, someone on the internet had decided to attack her via a technique that uses artiﬁcial intelligence to swap one person’s face onto another’s body. Experts studying this phenomenon have found that well over 90 percent of deepfake videos involve faces swapped into pornographic scenes—the vast majority being women,

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16 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

Left, a 1902 image of Gen. Ulysses Grant made from three photos. Right: Mumler’s photo of Mary Todd Lincoln with her husband’s “ghost.”

Law. It’s an unsettling moment, where our ability to discern what’s real feels newly imperiled. In fact, these anxieties echo the earliest days of photography. Then, as now, through cutting-edge fakery, major public ﬁgures were counterfeited, and questions emerged about whether a powerful new technology made it impossible to trust what you saw. IN ONE SENSE, photo manipulation began as soon as photography did. Early image-capturing technologies were crude—images had no color, and slow shutter speeds washed out details, such that skies, for example, appeared “ghastly, lifeless,” one photographer complained. So photographers from the get-go were working hard to alter images. They would paint on colors, or enhance details by drawing on an image with ink and paint. They quickly hit upon the technique of composites: To make gorgeous seascapes, the French photographer Gustave Le Gray would take photos of wave-swept oceans and splice in separate photos of clouds, even reusing the same clouds in diﬀerent photos. In 1857, the photographer George Washington Wilson created faux group shots of high society by taking individual photos of subjects, cutting out their images and assembling them into a crowd, then photographing the resulting collage. Viewers were fooled. “I had numerous inquiries as to when and where all these people had been collected and photographed,” Wilson’s gallerist said. Photographers found the manipulations exciting, a new artistic technique. “I think they were just like anyone experimenting with a new art—there’s a certain amount of just, isn’t it cool we could do this?”

L I B R A RY O F C O N G R ES S ; T H E G E T T Y

most often celebrities but also politicians, activists or non-famous women. That’s what someone had done with Martin. The video, she figured, was an attempt to get her to stop her advocacy work by shaming her. “It was absolutely weaponized,” she told me recently. When she saw the video circulating online, she felt a stab of fury: “The audacity of these people to do that to me,” she said. She also couldn’t help wondering: Would people who saw it actually believe it was her? Deepfake videos present an unsettling new phase in the evolution of media. Manipulating video used to be wildly expensive, the province of special-effects masters. But new AI technology has made it much easier. Indeed, one commonly used piece of software for doing it—which uses a “deep learning” form of artificial intelligence, hence the “deep” in deepfakes—was released anonymously online for free in 2018. In December 2020, Sensity, a fraud-detection firm, found 85,047 deepfake videos circulating online, a number that had been roughly doubling every six months; there are now likely hundreds of thousands in existence. Some are harmless—Nicolas Cage’s face swapped into scenes from movies he wasn’t in, say. But “the majority of deepfakes created by experts are malicious,” says Giorgio Patrini, Sensity’s CEO. Many observers worry that deepfakes could become a major threat in politics, used to humiliate political figures and advocates like Martin or even make them appear to say things they never said. “What it could do to diplomacy and democracy— we’re holding our breath,” says Danielle Citron, professor of law at the University of Virginia School of

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prologue

says Peter Manseau, curator of American religious history at the National Museum of American History and an expert on early photo manipulation. Commercial portrait firms employed legions of women as touch-up artists, softening wrinkles and reshaping features in the 19th century’s forerunners to Instagram filters. “Anyone who went into a portrait studio would most likely be asked, ‘Would you like us to touch this up for you, and, you know, make your nose smaller?’” says Mia Fineman, photography curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and author of Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop. Fakery soon entered politics, as photographers tried to generate patriotic or stirring imagery. To create a “photo” of Ulysses S. Grant with his troops, photographer Levin Corbin Handy pasted Grant’s head onto the body of another man, then pasted that composite onto a picture of Confederate prisoners of war. There were even meme-like parodies. When false rumors flew that Confederate President Jefferson Davis had sought to escape capture in 1865 by wearing a woman’s petticoats, photographers gleefully produced composite photos that plastered his head onto an image of a woman. Did the public know these images were fake? Historians aren’t sure. Even if they did know, it’s not clear they cared. Photography was not yet seen as a true document of reality. “There was no understanding that an image should be objective,” Manseau says. But photo manipulation caused particularly hot debate in one field: “spirit photography.” Amid the spiritualism movement after the Civil War, many bereaved Americans became convinced they could communicate with departed loved ones. They held séances, urging the dead to rap on tables or to speak to them through mediums. Photographers claimed they could capture images of the dead. In the United States, the most famous spiritualist deepfaker was Boston’s William Mumler, who in 1862 began creating pictures that appeared to show live human subjects accompanied by translucent ghosts. Many of SEE MORE EXAMPLES of the Cottingley fairy photographs at Smithsonianmag.com/hoaxes 18 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

Top, a notorious 1920 fairy photo by the girls from Cottingley. Above, Jefferson Davis in women’s clothing in a fake by brothers George and William Slee.

Mumler’s subjects excitedly proclaimed he’d photographed one of their dead relatives. “What joy to the troubled heart,” as Mumler wrote in a promotional pamphlet, “to know that our friends who have passed away can return.” But debate raged. Skeptical photographers suspected Mumler’s pictures were mere double exposures—two negatives exposed onto a single photo sheet, with the “ghost” exposed only partially, to make it translucent. Yet when a few skeptics accompanied him into the darkroom, they couldn’t deduce how he was pulling it off. Even so, in 1869, New York’s city marshal charged Mumler with fraud after a reporter lodged a complaint at City Hall, and the ensuing trial made explosive headlines: “The Science of the World Against Spiritualist Theory,” the New York Herald proclaimed. The city even brought in showman P.T. Barnum to testify against Mumler; Barnum showed the court a faked spirit photograph he’d staged of himself, to demonstrate how readily such fakery could be done. Still, after more than a month of trial, the judge let Mumler go free, saying the prosecution hadn’t proved that “trick and deception has been practiced by the prisoner.” Manseau—who wrote The Apparitionists, a 2017 book about Mumler’s trial— can’t be sure how many people believed that spirit photos were real. He thinks many took them seriously, but not literally: The photos gave comfort, and that was enough. Post-trial, Mumler still took the occasional spirit photograph. His most famous was one of Mary Todd Lincoln next to a translucent image of her assassinated husband. “It was a real consolation to her to have this image,” Manseau notes, though it’s unclear whether Mary Todd truly believed it was Lincoln’s ghost. Arthur Conan Doyle, the famous creator of Sherlock Holmes, became an adherent of spirit photography, despite having made his fortune writing tales about ruthlessly empirical deductions. In 1920, he was outright duped by a pair of girls in Cottingley, England, who faked a set of five photos that purported to show cavorting fairies. Conan Doyle published the pictures in the Strand magazine, and in a 1921 book, The Coming of the Fairies, he rhapsodized about the images: “What joy is in the complete abandon of their little graceful figures.”

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prologue T EC H N O LO GY

HOW MANY OF US will be gulled in the same way today by deepfake videos? On the one hand, experts say, we might be less easily duped because we’re more savvy about image manipulation, regularly using smartphone and computer apps to tweak our own pictures and videos. But video deepfakes are still novel, and we haven’t yet learned to suss out whether a face has been swapped. To protect those targeted by hostile deepfakes—again, for now, mostly women—legal scholars like Mary Anne Franks at the University of Miami are proposing laws to criminalize “digital forgeries,” or deepfakes that would appear authentic to a reasonable person. Non-malevolent uses, like satire or comedy, would remain legal, Franks says. Granted, she adds, such laws against forgeries are only “a blunt tool.” Indeed, the people who make pornographic deepfakes often aren’t trying to fool anyone. Many openly revel in the fact that they’re using a fake to humiliate a female celebrity. Deepfakes are not yet common in politics, possibly because they still require more technical skill than merchants of political misinfo typically possess. But in three to five years, says Hany Farid, an expert on digital images at the University of California at Berkeley, you’ll be able to create realistic deepfakes on your iPhone; rudimentary ones are already possible. Deepfakes may also become a new canvas for artists. Stephanie Lepp, one video artist, recently created “Deep Reckonings”: surprisingly realistic videos of public figures regretting their actions, including an uncannily believable Mark Zuckerberg apologizing for Facebook’s alleged promotion of “hateful propagandists” and “ethnic violence.” When Lepp posted them, she explicitly marked the videos as deepfakes, but viewers said it was still thought-provoking to see these figures wrestle with their public impact, however fictitiously. For Lepp, deepfakes are a tool to help imagine a different, better world. They can evoke “that pathway to the future we aspire to,” she tells me. Sometimes only a fake can express our truest desires.

20 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

DROWNED SORROW Hippolyte Bayard claimed to invent photography, but after fellow Frenchman Louis Daguerre snagged a patent, in 1839, Bayard showed his anguish by staging the ﬁrst known fake photograph: Bayard’s body, supposedly after his suicide by drowning. In fact, he lived until 1887.

HOT AIR In 1933, Betty Archer convinced English publisher William Heinemann to release a book of remarkable photographs supposedly taken by her husband during World War I—and earned $20,000. Not until 1984 did Smithsonian archivists discover that Archer’s husband, a former U.S. Air Force pilot who made props and scenery for movies, had staged the action using model planes.

Faking It A CROPPED HISTORY OF VISUAL HOAXES By Ted Scheinman

CREATURE FEATURE This widely distributed 1934 “evidence” of the Loch Ness Monster was created as a prank by Robert Kenneth Wilson and friends during a ﬁshing trip in Scotland. In 1975, the son of one of the conspirators admitted the photograph was no more than a toy set adrift in the water.

GHOST IN THE MACHINE Hubert Provand claimed in 1936 to have photographed “the Brown Lady,” a spirit said to haunt Raynham Hall in Norfolk, England. Many viewers saw it as proof that ghosts are real. In 1984, it was revealed as a mere composite of two photographs.

W I K I C O M M O N S ; C O U RT ESY N O B E L N U M I S M AT I CS P T Y LT D. ; W I K I C O M M O N S (2)

Still, the public was becoming more familiar with the tricks of composite photography. “Poor Sherlock Holmes—Hopelessly Crazy?” ran one 1922 headline about Conan Doyle. “He did get pilloried, and it didn’t help his career,” says Andrew Lycett, author of The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes. “But he didn’t really care.” The author went to his grave believing those photos of fairies and spirits were real.

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prologue CHEER

By Danny Freedman

SATC H M O A N D SA N TA

A jazz legend’s ﬁnal recording

strong,” the voice resounds, “talking to all the kids from all over the world at Christmastime.” With that, the trumpeter and singer tucks into a lyrical, buoyant reading of “The Night Before Christmas.” He hews to the words but makes them his own in a voice that glitters with joy. When the 69-year-old describes Santa’s “little round belly / that shook when he laughed like a bowl of jelly,” he breaks into a wheezy giggle that sounds like a truck rumbling to life at a green light. The poem, first published in 1823, would be Armstrong’s final commercial recording. Armstrong taped it on February 26, 1971, on a reel-to-reel recorder at his home in Queens, New York, during his last spell of good health. Four days later, he began an ill-advised two-week gig at the Waldorf Astoria that was followed by two heart attacks, one of them just two days after his final Waldorf show. On July 6, Armstrong died in his sleep, reportedly from heart failure. The recording was distributed that holiday season by cigarette-maker Lorillard, which pressed it onto a million 45-rpm records as giveaways for anyone who bought a carton of cigarettes. Despite its undeniable charms, the track is not a Yuletide staple and has gotten little attention in biographies, where scholars have been busy on other questions; all have struggled to take the full measure of Armstrong. First, he was the brash young genius who redefined jazz; then, in middle age, 22 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

a humble colossus who lived to entertain but was stung by jazz purists and some in the Black community who accused him of “buﬀoonery” at the expense of art and activism. Later, at 63, he bumped the Beatles from No. 1 in 1964 with his version of the show tune “Hello, Dolly!” But “The Night Before Christmas” shows how his unique expressiveness reached beyond music. “Armstrong had one voice, he had one style,” whether blown, spoken or written, says Ricky Riccardi, the author of two Armstrong biographies and director of research collections at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens. “All of his ways of telling a story feature this same kind of totally swinging voice.” Though a few monologues appear on his studio albums, the Christmas poem is a closer kin to the homespun readings that pepper some 700 reels of tape that Armstrong recorded for himself. Amid taped conversations and trumpet noodling, there’s a heartfelt 1958 recitation of the Gettysburg Address. These tapes, Riccardi says, show that Armstrong’s stage presence was actually just his natural presence, rich with sincerity and a sense of delight. In that way, the Christmas recording makes for an accidental but ﬁtting coda to his life. It’s a track that Riccardi calls “one last gift” from Armstrong, even though it doesn’t involve a single musical note. Only a voice, warming the silence around it.

“Bless whoever it was who came up with the idea,” jazz historian Dan Morgenstern says in a Smithsonian interview about Armstrong’s rendition of the holiday chestnut.

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prologue N AT I O N A L T R E AS U R E

By Maggie Shipstead

Faster Than Sound of molestation in a cart carrying spools of thread. Some adults saw her potential. One woman hired a 10-year-old Bessie to work in her beauty shop. By 15, Bessie was a skilled hairdresser working in Montgomery, Alabama, where she bought herself a Model T. Bessie also kept a secret: She’d had a baby at 14 and was married for a few years to the father, a man named Cochran, whose name she took. Her son lived with her parents and died as a child. When a determination to reinvent herself led her to New York City in 1929, she changed her name from Bessie to Jackie and also claimed to be an orphan. At 23, she got a job at Antoine’s salon at Saks Fifth Avenue; in the winters she drove south to work at Antoine’s Florida outpost. At a 1932 dinner in Miami, she was seated next to a financier and industrialist named Floyd Odlum. He was smitten—and married. Still, they began a relationship. Odlum encouraged her interest in learning to fly; her talent soon became obvious. “Flying got into my soul instantly,” she wrote. Odlum also financed her dream of starting a cosmetics business, which thrived. After Odlum divorced, they married, and his devotion votio never seemed to waver until his de death in 1976. Cochran began racing in 1934 and Coc steadily racked up flying trophies, steadi broke records and, during World War II, organized the training of female org pilots to transport warplanes in the United Kingdom Kingdo and the United States. Not everyone was a fan. Cochran could be and demanding. Wealthy arrogant, abrasive abrasi Odlum, she traveled with heaps thanks to Odl of luggage and an jewelry and was impossibly with her household staff. But she exacting wit commanded respect, attaining national fame as a fearless and extraordinarily skilled pilot. She and Chuck Yeager, the famed military ace and test pilot, became friends. Each was the lo type to push an aircraft until t

N AUGUST 24, 1961, a jet streaked over the desert near Edwards Air Force Base. Fast planes were not unusual in that stretch of sky over Southern California, but women pilots were. In the cockpit of Northrop’s new two-seat, twin-engine supersonic trainer, the T-38 Talon, was Jacqueline Cochran. And the 55-yearold pilot was on a mission: reclaim her status as the fastest woman alive. Eight years before, she had averaged 653 miles per hour over a 100-kilometer (62-mile) course urse in an F-86 Sabre, setting a world speed record and d becoming the ﬁrst woman to break the sound barrier. But the French test pilot Jacqueline Auriol soon bested her record, by 63 miles es per hour. Could the T-38 help the seasoned racer get it back? Cochran was born Bessie Pitt-man in a Florida Panhandle lummber town and lived with her parents and four siblings in a series of ramshackle houses. “It was bleak and bitter and harsh,” Jackie wrote of herr childhood. “But it taught me indendependence and the necessity of fending ending for myself.” Freedom had its horrors: orrors: As an 8-year-old working 12-hour shifts hifts in a cotton mill, she would hide from the constant threat 24 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021 021

L E F T: M A R K AV I N O / N AS M ; R I G H T: JA M ES WA L K E R / N AS M

When the spirited Jackie Cochran piloted this jet, she broke all kinds of barriers

Photograph by James Walker

FROM THE SMITHSONIAN N AT I O N A L A I R A N D S PAC E MUSEUM

Above, the T-38 Talon that Cochran ﬂew, pictured before its recent restoration. Left, the Talon’s swept wings. The plane will be on view at the National Air and Space Museum in fall 2022.

prologue

Don’t Be Puzzled

Cochran in one of three P-51B Mustangs she owned, June 1947.

YOU CAN FIND EIGHT ANSWERS IN THESE PAGES By Sam Ezersky 1

N AS M

alarms blared and red lights flashed—and then to keep right on pushing. The T-38 Talon was created to train a new generation of pilots, who would go on to fly a wide variety of aircraft, from supersonic fighters like the F-15 Eagle to subsonic bombers like the B-52. Between 1961 and 1972, almost 1,200 T-38s were produced, and more than 72,000 American pilots trained in them. The T-38 also became a trainer for astronauts; during the space shuttle era, it escorted the returning shuttle on its approach for landing. The jet was brand-new when Cochran persuaded Northrop to lend her one. Yeager trained her on it for several weeks before she began her record attempts and was flying as her wingman that day in August 1961, when she averaged 844.20 miles per hour over a straightaway, besting Auriol’s record by 129 miles per hour. Over the next seven weeks, Cochran set seven more records in the Talon, including one for absolute altitude at 56,071 feet and another for speed over a 100-kilometer closed course. “She flew one of the most perfect runs that has ever been flown,” Yeager later wrote of that feat. Jackie Cochran’s fastest flight came in June 1964 at the age of 58 in an F-104G Starfighter that she pushed to 1,429 miles per hour, exceeding Mach 2 and setting a new record for a female pilot. She died in 1980, age 74. The plane etched on her gravestone in Indio, California, has the unmistakable swept wings and glass cockpit of a T-38 Talon. SEE MORE PHOTOGRAPHS of the T-38 Talon at Smithsonianmag.com/cochran 26 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

Across 1 “___ party time!” 4 Hardly an amateur 7 Restaurant water choice 8 Home of the ancient Israeli mines studied by Erez Ben-Yosef 11 One of football’s Manning brothers 12 Working together 14 Pat ___, actor who played Mr. Miyagi 16 Sin that sounds like its middle letters 17 Treating with friendliness 19 Clara Barton’s ﬁrst occupation 22 Herb garden plants 24 With 31-Down, arrow-shooting equipment for record distances 28 Full of sass 30 Denizen of the Arctic’s Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit 32 Opposite of “nay” 33 Set of beliefs 34 ___ Xing 35 Make some clothing ﬁxes, maybe 36 They have their standards: Abbr.

See the solution on Page 82.

Down 1 Thingy 2 Aircraft used by Jacqueline Cochran to set eight world records 3 ___ photography, an early form of deepfaking 4 School bake sale grp. 5 Bat mitzvah or quinceañera 6 Sign of things to come 9 ___ system (built-in auto feature) 10 Comedian Schumer 12 Really bothered 13 Musician with a famed reading of “The Night Before Christmas,” familiarly 15 Winter driving hazard 18 “Stop it, I’m blushing!” 20 Bird that can’t ﬂy 21 Enter again, as a password 23 The Lacaune, for Roquefort cheese 24 Org. whose employees are paid to watch TV? 25 Implement used in regattas 26 Mined ﬁnds 27 Big name in laundry detergent 29 When tripled, “You get the idea” 31 See 24-Across

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28 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

photographs by P e t e r M a t h e r

... text by E v a H o l l a n d

CARIBOU COUNTRY To m o s t A m e r i c a n s , t h e Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the subject of an intense policy c o n t r o v e r s y . To t h e G w i c h ’ i n p e o p l e , i t ’s h o m e ... December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 29

Porcupine caribou, named for a river within their range, can trek 3,000 miles in a year to reach their calving grounds north of the Brooks Range.

N T H E G W I C H ’ I N L A N G UAG E ,

t h e r e ’s a n a m e f o r t h e a r e a just north of the Brooks

Range, the mountains that run along the nor thern rim of Alaska and

...

divide the densely forested interior PREVIOUS SPREAD

Jeffrey Peter, of Old Crow, Yukon, cleans a caribou hide during an autumn hunt. When camping, the hide is used as a mattress; at home, it’s clothing.

from the spare Arctic coast. Where the land flattens out into low-lying tundra before meeting the Beaufort S e a i s I i z h i k G w a t s ’a n G w a n d a i i Goodlit, or “the sacred place where l i f e b e g i n s .”

The name honors the role this 1.5-million-acre swath of Arctic coastal plain plays as the primary calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou, a herd of more than 200,000 animals. This crucial habitat is where tens of thousands of pregnant cows migrate each year to give birth. The calving grounds, which lie within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, offer sustenance and partial shelter from predation during the herd’s most vulnerable season, before the cows and their shakylegged new offspring begin their annual migrations. The herd travels as many as 3,000 miles within a huge expanse of Alaska, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories before returning to the coastal plain each spring. They have no typical migration route, but are guided by snowfall and weather, and must ford whitewater rivers along the way. It’s a dangerous journey, and when deep mountain snows delay the migration, fewer of the calves survive. The caribou are at the heart of the wild food web in this ... part of the world. Ruminants whose four stomachs transform Daniel Tritt at the tough, tenacious ground plants of the tundra into mushome with his children in Arctic cle, they, in turn, support bears, wolves, wolverines, golden Village. Many eagles and all the other predators and scavengers of the reGwich’in people learn to hunt as gion, right down to the clouds of biting insects. And they are children, and often take their central to the lives and culture of the Gwich’in people. first caribou at Traditionally, the animal provided not just food but an age 11 or 12. array of goods: hide clothing, antler arrow points, bone

December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 31

32 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

Isiah Boyle, with dog Wesley, at the hunting camp of Gwich’in elder Sarah James, left. Caribou meat is a staple of the Gwich’in diet.

...

December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 33

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

A L A S K A

D I G I TA L V ECTO R M A P S

awls, sinew ﬁshnets and much more. And d while today the Gwich’in have little need to store water in n a caribou stomach or bladder, they still eat everything from rom the animal’s backstrap to its bone marrow and brains. It is “our number one diet,” says Trimble imble Gilbert, a Gwich’in elder in Arctic Village, a community nity of about 180 people in the southern foothills of the Brooks Range. The village is bounded to the north and west by the silty, snaking, fast-moving Chandalar River. Its modest, brightly painted homes spread out between numerous lakes and low hills.

“One feels one has lived, and seen some of the world

Inside any home in the community you’re likely to find a pair of binoculars or a spotting scope sitting in the front window, so residents can spot caribou silhouettes as they break the horizon near town. Subsistence hunting is still a major part of daily life here, and many boys make their first kill at age 11 or 12. The community’s most successful hunters provide for everyone, bringing in not only caribou but also moose, waterfowl, fish and more. Gilbert can’t remember how old he was when he hunted his first caribou. The memory has faded over the more than 70 years and countless hunts since. He hunted with his father all the time, he says, and he taught his three sons in turn. They taught their children, and, a few years ago, his great-granddaughter, Jewels Gilbert, took a caribou, too. Of the roughly 7,000 Gwich’in people, only a few hundred live in traditional communities such as Arctic Village, its U.S. neighbor Venetie and the Canadian community of Old Crow. Most have moved to larger towns and cities in Alaska, northern Canada and elsewhere. In the villages, most of which are not reachable by road, it’s still possible

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline runs from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. Many Gwich’in fear that development inside ANWR would endanger caribou herds.

...

Gwich’in trapper Brittany Hollandsworth with a wolverine pelt. The animal’s durable, moisturewicking fur is prized for lining the hoods on winter parkas.

...

u n s p o i l e d , a s i t w a s i n t e n d e d p e o p l e s h o u l d s e e i t .” December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 35

36 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

Arctic Village, also known as Vashraii K’oo, lies along the border of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The village was permanently settled around 1900.

...

December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 37

to live with limited involvement in the cash economy—to hunt for a living. But even those settlements represent a major shift from the nomadism of just a few generations ago. When Gilbert travels, to Fairbanks, say, 230 miles to the southeast, he gets antsy for home. “It’s good for me for four or ﬁve days,” he says. “And then I’ve got to have my own food.” Since the 1980s, the coastal plain has gone by other names—“the 1002 area” or “the 1002 lands,” as designated in the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which set it apart from the rest of ANWR. While most of the refuge was fully protected from oil and gas exploration, the law left open the possibility that development inside the 1002 area could be permitted in the future. In the decades since, it has become the focus of heated

debate. Proponents of development argue that it can be done without harming wildlife. “We have a lot of mitigation measures and practices in place” to protect the caribou, says Kara Moriarty, president and CEO of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association. And industry has raised the standard of living for Inupiat communities along the coast, some of whom support exploration in the coastal plain. But many Gwich’in who live oﬀ the land, along with conservationists and environmental scientists, argue that roads, drill rigs, pipelines and other infrastructure would drive the caribou away from their calving grounds and trigger a population decline that would, by extension, upset the balance of the wider ecosystem and upend the Gwich’in way of life. Mike Suitor, a Yukon government caribou biologist, says

... Jewels Gilbert after an April hunt. Her greatgrandfather, Trimble Gilbert, serves as Arctic Village’s traditional chief and its priest; he also plays a mean ﬁddle.

Many fear industry will endanger caribou. “From a s

38 SMITHSONIAN | Monthtk 0000

Allan Tritt, age 82, cracks a caribou leg bone to harvest bone marrow, a delicacy. In Arctic Village, Tritt’s home is a hub of communal activity.

...

a s c i e n c e s t a n d p o i n t , I t h i n k t h e r i s k s a r e t o o g r e a t .”

Ahtsin Erick, Allan Tritt’s great-granddaughter, snacks on a caribou rib while waiting for her parents on their ATV outside Tritt’s house.

...

December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 39

William Sam with a portrait of his grandfather, Moses Sam. The elder Sam was a beloved Gwich’in leader famed for his skill as a carpenter, ﬁsherman and trapper.

...

40 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

that we can’t predict with certainty how the caribou would fare. “What this is about is risk. From a science standpoint, I think the risks are too great.” The battle over whether to allow this type of development has waxed and waned. In 2017, the Trump administration moved to open the 1002 area to oil drilling, and later auctioned oﬀ several land-leases; in 2021, the Biden administration suspended them. What can get lost in news coverage of the debate is the wonder of the refuge itself. It’s a place where the rivers run cold and fast to an ocean that is frozen for more than half the year, and where wild cranberries ripen with the ﬁrst late-summer frosts. In the 1950s, the National Park Service sent Lowell Sumner, an ecologist and research biologist, to assess the area. “One feels one has lived, and seen some of the world unspoiled, as it was intended people should see it,” he wrote. Polar bears dig their dens here, wolves roam freely, and for hundreds of miles cottongrass blooms and sways under the midnight sun. BYLINES Although Gilbert worries Peter Mather’s about his community’s future, photographic essay on Arctic about the loss of its traditionwolverines was al lifestyle and especially the featured in Smithsonian’s danger to the caribou if oil and March 2020 issue. gas drilling is permitted, he’s The Whitehorse, also hopeful. “We’ve lived in Yukon-based writer Eva Holland this country for the last 10,000 is the author, most recently, of Nerve: years, with our bare hands,” he Adventures in the Science of Fear. says. “And we’re still here.”

An oil rig in Deadhorse, Alaska. Ninety-ﬁve percent of the Arctic coastal plain is already open to industry; the rest contains the calving grounds.

... December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 41

Carved by industrious miners thousands of years ago, countless shafts wend through the desert of the Timna Valley.

QUEST COPPE for

42 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

BENEATH A DESERT IN N ISRAEL, ARCHAEOLOGISTS ARE UNEARTHING NEARTHING ASTONISHING NEW EVIDENCE ENCE OF AN ADVANCED SOCIETY IN THE HE TIME OF THE BIBLICAL SOLOMON OMON

PER

by Matti Friedman

photographs by Yadid Levy

IF YOU STA ND ON ONE OF THE OU TCROPPINGS OF THE TIMNA VALLEY, THE MOST SALIENT FACT OF THE PLACE IS EMPTINESS. HERE IN THE HEAT-BLASTED FLATLANDS OF THE ARAVA DESERT, OFF A LONELY ROAD IN SOUTHERN ISRAEL, IT SEEMS THERE’S NOTHING BUT STARK CLIFFS AND ROCK FORMATIONS ALL THE WAY TO THE JAGGED RED WALL OF THE EDOMITE MOUNTAINS ACROSS THE JORDANIAN BORDER. AND YET THE LONGER YOU SPEND IN THE TIMNA BARRENS, THE MORE HUMAN FINGERPRINTS YOU BEGIN TO SEE. SCRATCHES ON A CLIFF FACE TURN OUT TO BE, ON CLOSER INVESTIGATION, 3,200-YEAR-OLD HIEROGLYPHICS. ON A BOULDER ARE THE OUTLINES OF GHOSTLY CHARIOTS. A TUNNEL VANISHES INTO A HILLSIDE, THE WALLS MARKED WITH THE ENERGETIC STRIKES ISRAEL

OF BRONZE CHISELS. THERE WERE ONCE PEOPLE HERE, AND THEY

AREA OF DETAIL

STILL BE SEEN BENEATH YOUR FEET, IN THE GREENISH HUE OF PEBBLES OR THE EMERALD STREAK ACROSS THE SIDE OF A CAVE. When the Israeli archaeologist Erez Ben-Yosef arrived at the ancient copper mines of Timna, in 2009, he was 30 years old. The site wasn’t on Israel’s archaeological A-list, or even its B-list. It wasn’t the Jerusalem of Jesus, or the famous citadel of Masada, where Jewish rebels committed suicide rather than surrender to Rome. It was the kind of place unimportant enough to be entrusted to someone with fresh credentials and no experience leading a dig. At the time, Ben-Yosef wasn’t interested in the Bible. His field was paleomagnetism, the investigation of changes in the earth’s magnetic field over time, and specifically the mysterious “spike” of the tenth century B.C., when magnetism leapt higher than at any time in history for reasons that are not entirely understood. With that in mind, Ben-Yosef and his colleagues from the University of California, San Diego unpacked their shovels and brushes at the foot of a sandstone cliff and started digging. They began to extract pieces of organic material—charcoal, a few seeds, 44 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

EGYPT

A r a v a

TIMNA VALLEY

Eilat

JOR DA N

Aqaba

5 MI.

B R I D G E M A N I M AG ES ; M A P : G U I L B E RT GAT ES

D e s e r t

WERE LOOKING FOR SOMETHING. TRACES OF THE TREASURE CAN

A rock formation known as Solomon’s Pillars. The discovery of a 13th-century B.C. Egyptian temple at the base of the cliffs upended historians’ understanding of the site. A 19th-century engraving of King Solomon, famously rich in precious metals. The Bible describes his temple as adorned with features of copper and gold.

11 items all told—and dispatched them to a lab at Oxford University for carbon-14 dating. They didn’t expect any surprises. The site had already been conclusively dated by an earlier expedition that had uncovered the ruins of a temple dedicated to an Egyptian goddess, linking the site to the empire of the pharaohs, the great power to the south. This conclusion was so ﬁrmly established that the local tourism board, in an attempt to draw visitors to this remote location, had put up kitschy statues in “walk like an Egyptian” poses. But when Ben-Yosef got the results back from Oxford they showed something else—and so began the latest revolution in the story of Timna. The ongoing excavation is now one of the most fascinating in a country renowned for its archaeology. Far from any city, ancient or modern, Timna is illuminating the time of the Hebrew Bible—and showing just how

much can be found in a place that seems, at ﬁrst glance, like nowhere.

ON THE AFTERNOON of March 30, 1934, a dozen men

stopped their camels and camped in the Arava Desert. At the time, the country was ruled by the British. The leader of the expedition was Nelson Glueck, an archaeologist from Cincinnati, Ohio, later renowned as a man of both science and religion. In the 1960s, he would be on the cover of Time magazine and, as a rabbi, deliver the benediction at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. Glueck’s expedition had been riding for 11 days, surveying the wastes between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. Glueck’s guide was a local Bedouin chief, Sheikh Audeh ibn Jad, who struck the American archaeologist December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 45

At Timna, miners extracted copper from green veins of malachite and chalcocite. The deposits, in sandstone throughout the valley and below ground, are still visible today. Black slag, a byproduct of copper smelting, which separates the precious metal from molten ore. The slag still litters the ancient smelting sites. 46 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

THOSE ARE OF “L I T T L E FA I T H W H O S E E K . . . T O VA L I D AT E [ T H E BIBLE’S] R ELIGIOUS TEACHINGS

D M I T R I K ES S E L / T H E L I F E P I CT U R E C O L L ECT I O N / S H U T T E RSTO C K

A N D SPI R I T UA L I N SIGH T S .”

as a nearly biblical figure. “In name, which reflects that of the tribe of Gad, and in appearance, he could have been one of the Israelite chieftains who had journeyed with Moses and the children of Israel,” Glueck wrote in his book about the adventure, Rivers in the Desert. The group slept on the ground covered in their robes and ate unleavened bread, like Israelites fleeing Egypt. Strewn about were piles of black slag, fist-size chunks left over from extracting copper from ore in furnaces. The site, Glueck wrote in his original report from 1935, was no less than “the largest and richest copper mining and smelting center in the entire ‘Arabah.’ ” It had been abandoned for millennia, but for Glueck it sprang to life. An expert on ancient pottery, Glueck picked up sherds that were lying around and dated them back 3,000 years, to one of the most storied points of biblical history: the time of Solomon, King David’s son, renowned for his wealth and wisdom. According to the Hebrew Bible, Solomon’s kingdom stretched from Syria in the north to the Red Sea in the south, uniting the fractious Israelite tribes and serving as the high-water mark of Jewish power in the ancient world. And if the archaeologist’s dating of the sherds was correct, he knew exactly where he was standing: King Solomon’s Mines. If that phrase gives you a jolt of excitement, as we can presume it did Glueck, it is because of the British writer H. Rider Haggard, whose 1885 novel King Solomon’s Mines was a sensation. The book is set not in

The archaeologist Nelson Glueck in 1965. His 1934 expedition ﬁrst linked Timna’s copper mines with King Solomon, but researchers later disputed his theory as fanciful.

The ruins of an Egyptian temple near Solomon’s Pillars. Archaeologists have found thousands of cultic artifacts, including many depictions of the cow-eared goddess Hathor.

the Holy Land but in the fictional African kingdom of Kukuanaland. The protagonist is the adventurer Allan Quatermain, whose search for the mines leads him to the African interior and into a cathedral-size cavern, where he finds a trove of diamonds as large as eggs and gold ingots stamped with Hebrew letters. After much peril, including a near-drowning in a subterranean river, Quatermain lives to tell the tale. The colonialist politics and ethnic stereotypes of King Solomon’s Mines wouldn’t cut it today, but the story entranced generations of readers and was eventually adapted for the screen no fewer than five times, from a 1919 silent version to a 2004 TV miniseries with Patrick Swayze. For kids of the 1980s, like me, the memorable version is from 1985, with the newly minted star Sharon Stone in the role of the expedition’s blond and breathy damsel in distress, wearing a khaki outfit whose designer seemed oddly unconcerned with protecting her from scratches or malarial mosquitoes. There was also a guy who played Quatermain, but for some reason he made less of an impression. In the Bible, King Solomon is said to have been rich in precious metals, and to have used vast quantities of copper for features of his Jerusalem temple, such as the “molten sea,” a giant basin that rested on the backs of 12 metal oxen. But the phrase “King Solomon’s mines” actually appears nowhere in the Bible. It was coined by the novelist. Glueck, like many archaeologists then and now, had a bit of the novelist in him, which might be necessary in a profession that requires you to imagine a majestic temple based on what a normal observer would swear was just a pile of rocks. He knew that most people are attracted less to ruins than to the stories we tell about them, whether about ancient Rome or Machu Picchu. In the Holy Land, interest in archaeology is especially intense because so many of our most potent stories are set here. The biblical chronicles describe numerous battles between the polity that ruled this area, the kingdom of Edom, and the Israelites, who lived to the north. Glueck theorized that captives from those wars were sent to these mines. One natural acropolis with the remains of a wall gave him “the impression of being also a prison camp, where the drafted laborers were forcibly retained.” He called the outcropping Slaves’ Hill, a name it retains to this day. Proving or disproving the Bible, Glueck said, was a fool’s errand. “Those people are essentially of little faith who seek through archaeological corroboration of historical source materials in the Bible to validate its religious teachings and spiritual insights,” he wrote in Rivers in the Desert, and he probably should have left it there. Instead, he continued: “As a matter of fact, however, it may be categorically stated that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a Biblical reference.” In other words, archaeology didn’t December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 47

have to prove the Bible’s account of history, but it did prove it, or at least never disproved it—and he himself, he wrote with pride, had “discovered Solomon’s copper mines.” The identification stuck for 30 years, until Beno Rothenberg, who’d once been Glueck’s assistant and photographer, returned in the 1950s at the head of his own archaeological expedition. A generation had passed, but enthusiastic biblical literalism was still the rule. In those days the famous Israeli archaeologist and military hero Yigael Yadin was uncovering what he identified as Solomon’s imperial construction works at ancient cities like Gezer and Hatzor, proving, Yadin said, the existence of the united Israelite monarchy known from the Bible and dated to around 1000 B.C. But fashions were beginning to change. While Glueck had identified black slag left over from copper smelting (as had the Welsh explorer John Petherick nearly a century before him), it was Rothenberg who found the actual copper mines—warrens of twisting galleries and some 9,000 vertical shafts sunk into the ground, visible from the air like polka dots. The ancient miners toiled underground to harvest the greenish ore from rich veins around the edge of the valley, chiseling it from the rock and hauling it to the surface. At the mouth of the shaft, workers loaded the ore onto donkeys or their own backs and bore it to the charcoal-burning furnaces, knee-high clay urns attached to bellows that sent up plumes of smoke from the center of the mining complex. When the smelters smashed the furnace and the molten slag flowed out, what remained were precious lumps of copper. In 1969, Rothenberg and his crew began to excavate near a towering rock formation known as Solomon’s Pillars—ironic, because the structure they uncovered ended up destroying the site’s ostensible connection to the biblical king. Here they found an Egyptian temple, complete with hieroglyphic inscriptions, a text from the Book of the Dead, cat figurines and a carved face of Hathor, the Egyptian goddess, with dark-rimmed eyes and a mysterious half-smile. Not only did the temple have nothing to do with King Solomon or Israelites, it predated Solomon’s kingdom by centuries—assuming such a kingdom ever existed.

IF YOU WERE A RISING YOUNG archaeologist in the 1970s, you were skeptical of stories about Jewish kings. The ascendant critical school in biblical scholarship, sometimes known by the general name “minimalism,” was making a strong case that there was no united Israelite monarchy around 1000 B.C.—this was a ﬁction composed by writers working under Judean kings perhaps three centuries later. The new generation of archaeologists argued that the Israelites of 1000 B.C. were little more than Bedouin tribes, and

48 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

Diana Medellin, an archaeological conservator, collects samples on Slaves’ Hill, a central copper smelting site active around 1000 B.C.

In addition to analyzing the soil, Medellin buries bits of modern fabric to observe how they degrade over time.

David and Solomon, if there were such people, weren’t more than local sheikhs. This was part of a more general movement in archaeology worldwide, away from romantic stories and toward a more technical approach that sought to look dispassionately at physical remains. In biblical archaeology, the best-known expression of this school’s thinking for a general audience is probably The Bible Unearthed, a 2001 book by the Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, of Tel Aviv University, and the American scholar Neil Asher Silberman. Archaeology, the authors wrote, “has produced a stunning, almost encyclopedic knowledge of the material conditions, languages, societies, and historical developments of the centuries during which the traditions of ancient Israel gradually crystallized.” Armed with this interpretative power, archaeologists could now scientiﬁcally evaluate the truth of biblical stories. An organized kingdom such as David’s and Solomon’s would have left signiﬁcant settlements and buildings—but in Judea at the relevant time, the authors wrote, there were no such buildings at all, or any evidence of writing. In fact, most of the saga contained in the Bible, including stories about the “glorious empire of David and Solomon,” was less a historical chronicle than “a brilliant product of the human imagination.”

cataclysm that hit the ancient world in the 12th century B.C., perhaps because of a devastating drought. This was the same crisis that saw the end of the Hittite Empire, the famed fall of Troy, and the destruction of kingdoms in Cyprus and throughout modern-day Greece. Accordingly, the mines weren’t even active at the time Solomon was said to exist. Mining resumed only a millennium later, after the rise of Rome. “There is no factual and, as a matter of fact, no ancient written literary evidence of the existence of ‘King Solomon’s Mines,’ ” Rothenberg wrote.

THAT WAS THE STORY of Timna when Erez

Erez Ben-Yosef, who leads the Timna excavation, is a self-described agnostic when it comes to biblical history. So his ﬁndings have been a surprise even to him.

At Timna, then, there would be no more talk of Solomon. The real mines were reinterpreted as an Egyptian enterprise, perhaps the one mentioned in a papyrus describing the reign of Ramses III in the 12th century B.C.: “I sent forth my messengers to the country of Atika, to the great copper mines which are in this place,” the pharaoh says, describing a pile of ingots he had placed under a balcony to be viewed by the people, “like wonders.” The new theory held that the mines were shut down after Egypt’s empire collapsed in the civilizational

Ben-Yosef showed up in 2009. He had spent the previous few years excavating at another copper mine, at Faynan, on the other side of the Jordanian border, at a dig run by the University of California, San Diego and Jordan’s Department of Antiquities. Ben-Yosef, 43, now teaches at Tel Aviv University. He speaks quietly, with the air of a careful observer. One of our meetings took place shortly after he’d returned from a meditation retreat at which he said nothing for ten days. He has no religious affiliation and describes himself as indifferent to the historical accuracy of the Bible. He didn’t come here to prove a point, but to listen to what the place could tell him. “The mere interaction with remains left by people who lived long ago teaches us about who we are as humans and about the essence of the human experience,” he told me. “It’s like reading a work of literature or a book of poetry. It’s not just about what happened in 900 B.C.” The dig quickly took an unexpected turn. Having assumed they were working at an Egyptian site, Ben-Yosef and his team were taken aback by the carbon-dating results of their first samples: around 1000 B.C. The next batches came back with the same date. At that time the Egyptians were long gone and the mine was supposed to be defunct—and it was the time of David and Solomon, according to biblical chronology. “For a moment we thought there might be a mistake in the carbon dating,” Ben-Yosef recalled. “But then we began to see that there was a different story here than the one we knew.” Accommodating himself to the same considerations that would have guided the ancient mining schedule, Ben-Yosef comes to dig with his team in the winter, when the scorching heat subsides. The team includes scientists trying to understand the ancient metallurgical arts employed here and others analyzing what the workers ate and wore. They’re December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 49

A natural sandstone formation known as the Mushroom. The landmark is surrounded by ancient smelting sites.

50 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 51

helped by the remarkable preservation of organic materials in the dry heat, such as dates, shriveled but intact, found 3,000 years after they were picked. When I visited the mines, Diana Medellin, an archaeological conservator, was conducting soil tests to determine how fabric deteriorates in the ground over time. Back at the labs in Tel Aviv, another scholar was analyzing chunks of the charcoal used to fuel the smelting furnaces, trying to trace the depletion of local trees, acacia and white broom, which forced the smelters to bring in wood from farther away. A few years ago the team produced one of those rare archaeology stories that migrates into pop culture: The bones of domesticated camels, they found, appear in the layers at Timna only after 930 B.C., suggesting that the animals were first introduced in the region at that time. The Bible, however, describes camels many centuries earlier, in the time of the Patriarchs—possibly an anachronism inserted by authors working much later. The story was picked up by Gawker (“The Whole Bible Thing Is B.S. Because of Camel Bones, Says Science”) and made it into the CBS sitcom “The Big Bang Theory” when Sheldon, a scientist, considers using the finding to challenge his mother’s Christian faith. In the past decade, Ben-Yosef and his team have rewritten the site’s biography. They say a mining expedition from Egypt was indeed here first, which explained the hieroglyphics and the temple. But the mines actually became most active after the Egyptians left, during the power vacuum created by the collapse of the regional empires. A power vacuum is good for scrappy local players, and it’s precisely in this period that the Bible places Solomon’s united Israelite monarchy and, crucially, its neighbor to the south, Edom. The elusive Edomites dominated the reddish mountains and plateaus around the mines. In Hebrew and other Semitic languages, their name literally means “red.” Not much is known about them. They first appear in a few ancient Egyptian records that characterize them, according to the scholar John Bartlett in his authoritative 1989 work Edom and the Edomites, “as bellicose by nature, but also as tent-dwellers, with cattle and other possessions, able to travel to Egypt when necessity arose.” They seem to have been herdsmen, farmers and raiders. Unfortunately for the Edomites, most of what we do know comes from the texts composed by their rivals, the Israelites, who saw them as symbols of treachery, if also as blood relations: the father of the Edomites, the Bible records, was no less than redheaded Esau, the twin brother of the Hebrew patriarch Jacob, later renamed Israel. With the Egyptian empire out of the picture by 1000 B.C., and no record of Israelite activity nearby, “The most logical candidate for the society that operated the mines is Edom,” says Ben-Yosef. But archaeologists had found so few ruins that many doubted the existence of any kingdom here at the time in question. 52 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

There were no fortified cities, no palaces, not even anything that could be called a town. The Edom of Solomon’s time, many suspected, was another fiction dreamed up by later authors. But the dig at the Faynan copper mines, which were also active around 1000 B.C., was already producing evidence for an organized Edomite kingdom, such as advanced metallurgical tools and debris. At Timna, too, the sophistication of the people was obvious, in the remains of intense industry that can still be seen strewn around Slaves’ Hill: the tons of slag, the sherds of ceramic smelting furnaces and the tuyères, discarded clay nozzles of the leather bellows, which the smelter, on his knees, would have pumped to fuel the flames. These relics are 3,000 years old, but today you can simply bend down and pick them up, as if the workers left last week. (In an animal pen off to one corner, you can also, if so inclined, run your fingers through 3,000-year-old donkey droppings.) The smelters honed their technology as decades passed, first using iron ore for flux, the material added to the furnace to assist in copper extraction, then moving to the more efficient manganese, which they also mined nearby.

WITH NO RECORD OF ISRAELITE ACTIVITY NEARBY, “THE MOST LOGICAL CANDIDATE FOR THE SOCIETY THAT OPERATED THE MINES IS EDOM.”

Recovered fabrics, probably from clothing. Plant and animal dyes yield clues to the miners’ technology, social hierarchy, agriculture and economy.

Naama Sukenik, of the Israel Antiquities Authority, examines fragments of 3,000-yearold red-and-blue striped clothing recovered from the slag heaps.

A clay tuyère, or nozzle, that was used to direct air from the bellows into the furnace.

LOW E R L E F T: DA F N A GA Z I T / I S R A E L A N T I Q U I T I ES AU T H O R I T Y

Charcoal from smelting furnaces at Timna. Such organic artifacts have led researchers to revise the site’s date to the time of King Solomon.

Wool dating to c. 1000 B.C. The rare “royal purple” dye, derived from sea snails, suggests the smelters were wealthy and engaged in distant trade.

December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 53

The archaeologists found the bones of ﬁsh from, astonishingly, the Mediterranean, a trek of more than 100 miles across the desert. The skilled craftsmen at the furnaces got better food than the menial workers toiling in the mine shafts: delicacies such as pistachios, lentils, almonds and grapes, all of which were hauled in from afar. A key discovery emerged in a Jerusalem lab run by Naama Sukenik, an expert in organic materials with the Israel Antiquities Authority. When excavators sifting through the slag heaps at Timna sent her tiny red-and-blue textile fragments, Sukenik and her colleagues thought the quality of the weave and dye suggested Roman aristocracy. But carbon-14 dating placed these fragments, too, around 1000 B.C., when the mines were at their height and Rome was a mere village. In 2019, Sukenik and her collaborators at Bar-Ilan University, working a hunch, dissolved samples from a tiny clump of pinkish wool found on Slaves’ Hill in a chemical solution and analyzed them using a high-performance liquid chromatography device, which separates a substance into its constituent parts. She was looking for two telltale molecules: monobromoindigotin and dibromoindigotin. Even when the machine conﬁrmed their presence, she wasn’t sure

“THIS WAS A HETEROGENEOUS SOCIETY THAT INCLUDED AN ELITE,” SUKENIK TOLD ME. AND THAT ELITE MAY WELL HAVE INCLUDED THE

she was seeing right. The color was none other than royal purple, the most expensive dye in the ancient world. Known as argaman in the Hebrew Bible, and associated with royalty and priesthood, the dye was manufactured on the Mediterranean coast in a complex process involving the glands of sea snails. People who wore royal purple were wealthy and plugged into the trade networks around the Mediterranean. If anyone was still picturing disorganized or unsophisticated nomads, they now stopped. “This was a heterogeneous society that included an elite,” Sukenik told me. And that elite may well have included the copper smelters, who transformed rock into precious metal using a technique that may have seemed like a kind of magic. More pieces of the puzzle appeared in the form of copper artifacts from seemingly unrelated digs elsewhere. In the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, Greece, a 2016 analysis of three-legged cauldrons revealed that the metal came from the mines in the Arava Desert, 900 miles away. And an Israeli study published this year found that several statuettes from The Timna Egyptian palaces and temples from the same formation known period, such as a small sculpture of Pharaoh as the Arches. The book of Psusennes I unearthed in a burial complex Deuteronomy at Tanis, were also made from Arava copper. describes Israel as a land “out of The Edomites were shipping their product whose hills you can dig copper.” across the ancient world. 54 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

CREDIT TK HERE

COPPER SMELTERS.

R I G H T: E L I E P OS N E R / T H E I S R A E L M U S E U M , J E R U SA L E M

CREDIT TK HERE

It stands to reason, then, that a neighboring kingdom would make use of the same source—that the mines could have supplied King Solomon, even if these weren’t exactly “King Solomon’s mines.” Perhaps Nelson Glueck wasn’t far oﬀ the mark after all. But did Solomon’s kingdom even exist, and can archaeology help us ﬁnd out? Even at its height, Timna was never more than a remote and marginal outpost. But it’s on these central questions that Ben-Yosef’s expedition has made its most provocative contribution.

LOOKING AT THE MATERIALS and data he was collecting, Ben-Yosef faced what we might call the Timna dilemma. What the archaeologists had found was striking. But perhaps more striking was what no one had found: a town, a palace, a cemetery or homes of any kind. And yet Ben-Yosef’s findings left no doubt that the people operating the mines were advanced, wealthy and organized. What was going on? Having started out interested in paleomagnetism, Ben-Yosef stumbled into the emotionally charged field of biblical archaeology. His academic position was at Tel Aviv University, the bastion of the critical approach whose adherents are skeptical of the Bible’s historical accuracy. (On the other side, in this simplified breakdown, are the “conservatives” or “maximalists” associated with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who claim to have identified grand structures from the time of the united Israelite monarchy, supporting the biblical narrative.) Israel Finkelstein, of The Bible Unearthed fame, was a towering figure with an office down the hall from Ben-Yosef, who was still junior faculty. The younger scholar had to tread carefully. He formulated his ideas over several years, and published them only after he got tenure. Archaeologists, he observed, work with objects that last centuries or millennia, primarily stone structures, and with the types of waste that accumulate in permanent settlements and survive over time. As a result, identifying an advanced society depends on the presence of such remains: the grander the buildings, the more advanced the society must have been. The rival schools of biblical archaeologists were split over whether the united Israelite kingdom was fact or fiction, arguing vehemently about whether certain ruins should be dated close to 1000 B.C. or later. But they agreed that the primary point was the existence or non-existence of buildings. They differed on the answer, in other words, but shared a faith in their ability to settle the question. Further complicating matters, Ben-Yosef thought, was an old assumption he called the “Bedouin bias.” Beginning in the 1800s, biblical archaeologists met Arab tribesmen around the Ottoman Middle East, like Audeh ibn A funerary Jad, Nelson Glueck’s guide. The figurine of archaeologists concluded that anPharaoh Psusennes I cient nomads must have been simcast from ilar, not only in dress and behavior Arava copper. He ruled Egypt but in their resistance to central during the 11th C O N T I N U E D O N PAG E 8 4

century B.C.

December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 55

56 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

IN DOGGED PURSUIT OF AN EXOTIC WORLD RECORD, AN ENGINEER HEADS TO THE DESERT TO SHOOT AN ARROW FARTHER THAN ANYONE EVER

■ ph ot

ra ph s by

E ■

ri n

P a

tr ic k C o o ke

N AN ANCIENT WHITE SALT FLAT, 30 miles south of

Nevada’s Route 50—“The Loneliest Road in America”—a man is looking up into a blue sky. His head is wrapped in a makeshift keffiyeh scarf to protect him from the sun. In a few moments he will lie down on his back. Between his upraised legs he will cradle a contraption akin to a medieval crossbow, and point it at an angle of roughly 40 degrees in the direction of a hazy mountaintop some four miles away. He is preparing to shoot arrows out into the thin desert air, one of which he hopes will break archery’s worldwide distance record of 2,028 yards, or 268 yards beyond the one-mile mark. “This is about to get interesting,” he says with a nervous laugh. Alan Case, a bemused engineer and designer from Beaverton, Oregon, has spent the past 15 years chasing that distance record, which was set in 1971 by an archer named Harry Drake. The champion used a muscle-powered device called a footbow, similar to the one Case is warming up with this morning 6,100 feet above sea level at Smith Creek Dry Lake. It is nearly 50 years to the day that Drake set the record. At 55 years old, Case is Drake’s age at the time. “After about four or five practice shots I start to have fun,” Case says. Despite the heat, one might assume that archery fans would be thronging to the desert to witness such a milestone. Yet there are no crowds. Footbow archery, or “flight shooting” or “flight archery,” has no following. Once popular, distance shooting in America waned when it was believed that an arrow had been shot as far as it could go. A handful of archers around the world, though, imagined there might still be records to set. But where do you find a space wide and empty enough to practice and compete? Beaches are windy and often full of people. Arrows get lost in flora-filled parks—also full of people. In the United Kingdom, they’ve tried competing on airfields. There’s another reason for the lack of popularity: the equipment. You can’t just buy a footbow at a sporting goods store. Building your own and tuning it precisely is onerous. “This guy is unbelievably committed to getting this done,” says James Martin, standing alongside a worktable Case has set up next to his minivan on the flats. “It’s astonishing. He works year-round every evening computer-modeling ways to get more energy into the arrow.” Inside Case’s van are tools, spare parts, a sleeping bag, food wrappers

Poised on a Nevada salt ﬂat, Alan Case, one of the world’s top practitioners of ﬂight shooting, aims his custom-built bow, which requires so much strength to draw he must use his legs. 58 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

B R I D G E M A N I M AG ES

PREVIOUS SPREAD

Champion ﬂight shooter Harry Drake reportedly once said that success depended 10 percent on the bow—and 90 percent on the arrow.

Among history’s greatest archers were the Turks, as in this 15thcentury picture. By then they’d succeeded in ﬁring an arrow some 900 yards.

Case, at right, holds a footbow while James Martin, a physicist who is also a ﬂight shooter, stands with a more conventional longbow he uses for practice.

Vast, dry and with good visibility, this patch of central Nevada also suits the long-distance archer because of what it lacks: people and trees.

“IT’S ASTONISHING. HE WORKS YEARROUND COMPUTERMODELING WAYS TO GET MORE ENERGY INTO THE ARROW.”

and his family dog, Buddy. Roughly 15 friends and family members have caravanned here to erect a pop-up tent amid the alkaline hummocks and spiny shrubs. They are also putting in place an electronic distance-measuring device of the type highway surveyors use. It will compute the winning shot to within one centimeter from the firing line over a mile away. The gregarious Martin, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, is also a distance shooter, and holds records using specialized hard-to-draw bows made for him by Case. Like many archers, he has a bone-crushing handshake. He is something of a Boswell to the reserved Case whom he has known for several years. To shoot an arrow the length of more than 20 football fields defies traditional notions of archery, says Martin, beginning a staccato tutorial. “What is a bow? There’s the longbow like the English used to shoot, a D-shaped design, very simple thing. Those shoot the least far. Then there are recurve bows with curved tips that create more energy than the longbow. Those shoot farther so that’s another category. Last are compound bows. Those have confusing-looking pulleys and multiple cables.” He continues. “Bows are classified by how hard they are to draw back. So if it takes 35 pounds of force to pull it back, that’s a 35 draw-weight bow—or 35 weight class. Then there’s a 50-pound class and a 70-pound class—70 pounds of draw weight would be a very heavy hunting bow. People hunt grizzly bears with them. Last is the unlimited class where anything goes. The most extreme stuff. That’s what we do and why we’re here today.” CASE’S FOOTBOW is not only the hardest to shoot, but also the most unpredictable and dangerous. It requires an archer to place his feet in stirrups and push outward with his legs while straining to pull back on the bowstring with his hands, creating a draw weight of up to 325 pounds. That’s a tremendous amount of brute force to launch an arrow that weighs little more than a couple of pencils at up to 800 feet per second, roughly the same speed as a .45-caliber bullet. If a bow limb breaks—he has broken more than 40 of them—the entire apparatus seeks the quickest way to dissipate its tremendous energy. Archers call it “blowing up.” “I’ve had some mishaps with the bow,” says Case. Actually, he clarifies, “a whole lot of mishaps. It plays in the mind a bit.” Footbow “arrows” are perhaps the most fickle variables in a long shot, and they compound the sport’s danger. Case produces a metal coffer he calls his “jewel box.” Inside are perhaps 20 arrows of various lengths— as short as 8 inches, not longer than 13 inches—some for practice, some for competition. They appear quite different from the Paiute Indian arrows that Pony Express riders once dodged along the nearby mail trail in the 1860s. These resemble slender knitting needles. To build one, Case starts out with an ultralight carbon

60 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

Case builds his precision archery equipment in his home workshop in Beaverton, Oregon, making some measurements down to a thousandth of an inch.

“My dad was a cabinetmaker,” says Case. “He made my ﬁrst bow out of laminated wood and formica. We used to shoot it at the school playground.”

Case at work in the shop where he spends time on many nights and weekends. “I don’t watch a lot of TV,” the engineer says.

You might think arrows painted in ﬂuorescent colors would be easier to ﬁnd in the desert. But a black shaft shows up better against the whitish surface.

December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 61

ARCHERS “SOMETIMES DEVELOP SOMETHING CALLED TARGET PANIC. I TRY TO THINK DIFFERENTLY. IF I JUST TELL MYSELF IT’S MY JOB, I’LL DO OKAY.”

62 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

Martin prepares to launch an arrow during a practice session. He holds a distance record in the unlimited draw-weight class for longbows.

Blood marks the spot where an arrow slipped past a shield and pierced Case’s foot, breaking a bone. His wife, Arlene, attends to the athlete.

During his practice shot, Case speculates, the arrow snagged on part of the bowstring and ricocheted off the bow itself. “A sequence of unlikely events,” he would say.

The archer immediately after the mishap. “Everything was working,” he said at the time. “I’m so angry I didn’t even get the chance.”

December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 63

“ I DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED. IT’S CRAZY. I WAS STARTING TO FEEL GOOD. JUST KEEPING IT ON THE TARGET.”

The day after his injury, Case documented a practice arrow he had ﬁred successfully during his warm-up. It ﬂew 1,823 yards and 10 inches— more than a mile.

Notes from a 2015 competition Case took part in include the serial number of each arrow, the distance ﬂown and glitches, such as “String broke.”

fiber rod and carefully fashions it into a let go. It takes years sometimes to get BYLINES over it. I try to think differently. If I just streamlined shape, often using model tell myself it’s my job, I’ll do okay.” rocketry software as a guide. He then apPreviously for Smithsonian, Case decides to take another practice plies a stainless steel tip and a nock, the Erin Trieb shot, increasing the pull weight. Soon grooved end that fits on the bowstring. photographed interpreters who some members of the caravan will drive A serial number is etched on each worked for the U.S. in Afghanistan. out and begin looking for his arrows. shaft. Instead of feathers, the traditionFinding an eight-inch black carbon rod al fletching at the rear end of an arrow, Patrick Cooke is a writer and editor against the white flats and a backdrop of Case uses fragments from a safety razor in Washington, D.C. His last shimmering mirages is nearly impossible blade. “The blades are hard to find,” he bylined article for for the untrained eye. “You have to know says. Longer arrows are more forgiving the magazine was about horology. how to look for an arrow,” says Martin. “It than shorter, but neither is dependably hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s out there.” stable, and if one goes awry on launch In the merciless heat, Case lies down on his shootit can come back at the archer with a vengeance. ing blanket. The wind cups of his portable weather This morning, Case has been shooting practice arstation are nearly still, although dust devils are visirows, pulling the bowstring back little by little, limble in the distant west. The onlookers, their legs and bering up for the big shot that will occur in the cooler evening. He is confident, partly because he’s certain shoes covered in white dust, stop what they are doing he has already beaten the record, just not to the sat- and fall silent. He pushes outward on the bow with his feet, struggling to aim, strains to pull back on the isfaction of the official USA Archery rules book. bowstring, then releases. The competition today is a solo affair—Case verIt is perhaps best that the archer’s next utterance sus history, with no other competitor or official on be forever lost on the desert wind, but it consists of hand to witness the feat, which is supposed to be equal parts pain, surprise and intense anger. In a documented and attested to by Case and his retinue. split second his arrow has bored itself deep into the The only person who can psyche him out before the top of his right foot and shattered a bone. He reaches official shot is himself. I ask Case if he ever gets the down and pulls out the carbon rod, and with it comes yips—a subtle but disabling mental attack that afa rush of blood. Alan Case’s quest for the official title flicts golfers when they putt. “If I think about it too much I get nervous,” he says. “It’s weird. [Archers] is ended, for now. sometimes develop something called target panic. It starts when they maybe think too much about hitBULLS BUCK COWBOYS. Mountaineers miss handting the target, and the pressure. It builds up and it holds. Surfers wipe out. The next morning I visit gets so bad sometimes they just start to pull and they Case in his small room at the Cozy Mountain Motel in nearby—by Nevada standards—Austin (pop. 113). Doctors 111 miles away in Fallon had patched him up. His new crutches lean in the corner and his foot is elevated. He is surprisingly good-natured. “I don’t know what happened,” he says. “It’s crazy. I was starting to feel good. Just keeping it on the target.” Ever the scientist, he calculates that the entire incident probably lasted no more than 0.005 of a second. “It doesn’t take much to deflect an arrow, but it takes a lot to stop one head-on.” He vows to be back. I remind him of a historical fact he already knows well: The last great culture to prize long-distance archers were the Turks in the beginning of the 15th century. Some of the best were said to achieve shots up to 900 yards. The most revered champions earned mezils, elaborate stone monuments memorializing their winning shots. There’s little doubt Case will earn his mezil, even if it’s only a line in a record book; the caravanners found one of his practice arrows at over a mile. Next season the humidity will again be low in the desert, the winds still and the salt flats porous enough to plant arrows. For now, Harry Drake’s record stands. It hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s out there. December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 65

To make true Roquefort cheese, the law requires that it must be produced from local ingredients and ripen for months in a cave in southern France.

66 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

Reignof Terroir RICH, POWERFUL AND ECCENTRIC, ROQUEFORT IS STILL THE KING OF CHEESES. But for

how much longer?

by Joshua Levine

photographs by Tomas van Houtryve

December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 67

Roquefort’s aroma, not loved by all, is critical to Jacky Carles, cellar master for Roquefort Société, who checks a batch in a company cave.

HE ROADS ON THE BARE PLATEAU

The Larzac is a hard, rocky place “where neither grapevine nor grain of wheat grows,” according to an ancient royal decree, but the region possesses a pearl of immense value. Since the 15th century, the town of Roquefort and the pastures on the Larzac hold a monopoly on the fabrication of Roquefort cheese. A Roquefort from anyplace else is not just an abomination, it’s a crime. From late November to early July, some 770,000 68 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

Lacaunes on and around the Larzac plateau get milked twice a day, at 6 a.m. and 5 p.m. The cheese factory then has a maximum of 24 hours to start the process of turning the raw, unpasteurized milk into disks of blue-veined Roquefort. Hence the milk tankers speeding on back roads. Merely saying the word Roquefort provokes various reactions. A fair number of people will pantomime their opinion by holding their nose and roll-

TO M AS VA N H O U T RY V E , V I I AG E N CY

of La Causse du Larzac get twisty as they wind down the gorges that cut through this lonely corner of south-central France. We learned to be extra cautious behind the wheel, and not just because of the hairpin turns. You could never tell when a big steel-bodied tanker truck would come barreling around a curve. Where were these trucks going in such a hurry, and who could need so much oil? There is almost no industry around here, or indeed much of anything at all. Soon enough, however, we discovered that the tankers of Larzac aren’t carrying oil. They are ﬁlled with sheep’s milk. And not just any sheep’s milk but that of the Lacaune: the only breed whose milk can be used to produce the local cheese.

Paris

E C N A R F

S C I E N C E P H OTO L I B R A RY

Roquefort-sur-Soulzon

ing their eyes, or worse. I know such detractors personally, and their minds are unlikely to change. In fairness, Roquefort really is stinky. That’s the whole point of infecting an otherwise bland mound of sheep’s-milk curds with Penicillium roqueforti, the mold that runs through it in gloriously fetid blue-green veins. Medieval chronicles relate that the Emperor Charlemagne, returning from Spain, was served a piece of Roquefort at an abbey in the South of France. He understandably set about cutting out the blue mold. The

bishop politely informed him he was throwing away the best part. Each year thereafter, two cartloads of Roquefort were dispatched to Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle. The mold gives Roquefort a sharp tang that livens up the high-butterfat creaminess of the sheep’s milk. Slather it on buttered dark bread—yes, butter and cheese together; trust the French on this one— with, if you like, a little pâte de coing, a traditional quince jelly often paired with cheese, to add a note of sweetness, and you get a joyful blast of contrasting flavors. Melt it with some cream and pour it over a grilled steak. Or just smear it on a Ritz cracker. That works too. Laurent Dubois is a maître fromager, a cheese master, and a meilleur ouvrier de France, an honor bestowed by the government on the country’s elite artisans. One of Dubois’ four cheese stores isn’t far from where I live in Paris, so I walked over one day to get his opinion. “In my store, Roquefort is essential—a foundational product. Roquefort has the particularity of combining force and elegance,” Dubois told me in his tiny office above the shop in the 15th arrondissement. “The sheep’s milk gives it gentleness, and the mold gives it power and character.” When Dubois first opened his shop, in 1996, he needed a signature product that would set him apart from competing cheese stores. (Paris has no shortage of them.) He hit upon a kind of Roquefort layer cake, with layers of cheese and pâte de coing. It helped put him on the map, and after trying a slice, I could see why. Roquefort is the roi des fromages, the king of cheeses, Diderot and d’Alembert, heroes of the French Enlightenment, December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 69

said in the late 18th century. It sits high up in the culinary pantheon of France. At Christmastime, it joins costly delicacies like oysters and foie gras as standard components of a proper holiday feast. Its prestige in this land of food snobs is unassailable. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, said Shakespeare. The king of cheese is in trouble. Over the past dozen years, sales of Roquefort cheese have fallen 15 percent, to 16,000 tons in 2020. The people who love it are growing ever grayer, and French parents are no longer bringing up their young to appreciate a taste that any normal child instinctively finds yucky (god knows, mine does). It takes training and persistence to overcome a natural human instinct to avoid food that, let’s face it, is spoiled, albeit in a tightly controlled and highly refined manner. “Habits change,” says Mélanie Reversat, who speaks for the confederation that represents the entire Roquefort ecosystem, from shepherds to cheesemakers to the affineurs, who monitor the moldy cheese as it ripens in dank caves. “There’s no more cheese plate after the meal. Cheese with a lot of character has lost its place, and we’re having a hard time getting younger consumers. Most of our consumers are over 50 years old, and our big challenge is getting into households with young parents.” The way the makers of Roquefort are meeting that challenge has stirred up a hornet’s nest, in and around Roquefort and throughout France. Hidden behind a debate about cheese is a debate about values—French cheese and French values, which are not unrelated. “This is not a luminous moment for Roquefort,” says the historian Sylvie Vabre, author of a book that tracks the cheese’s ascendance. “It’s a village where everybody knows each other, but where everybody isn’t going in the same direction. It’s a little like the old Serge Gainsbourg song, “Je t’aime . . . moi non plus”—literally, “I love you, me neither,” a common French way of expressing a love-hate relationship. “It’s hard to be optimistic right now.” FIRST-TIME VISITORS to Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, which in non-Covid times gets a steady stream of cheese pilgrims, may be disappointed. It is perhaps too harsh to say the town is utterly devoid of charm. Let’s just say that when you picture an idyllic French village perched on a cliffside where they produce one of the wonders of the food world, this is not it. There’s basically one street running through it. Squat, plaster-walled houses line the main drag. The church is newish and unexceptional. Of quaint cafés and homey bistros there are few. We saw almost no one walking about when we rolled up on a cloudy November afternoon. The town felt empty, and that’s because it is. The population, never very large, has dwindled over the years, and only around 600 souls are left living there now.

70 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

“ THE R AW MILK IS WHAT CARRIES THE IDENTITY OF THE SOIL. You can’t

destroy the microorganisms PRESENT IN

THE MILK. THEY’RE VERY IMPORTANT.”

But the surface was never what Roquefort is about anyway. Roquefort’s reason for being comes from what lies beneath it. A long time ago—somewhere between a few million years and 20,000 years ago, it is hard to be more precise—a section of the great limestone plateau of Les Causses, about a mile and a half wide, broke oﬀ and tumbled down. This is the rocky saddle known as the Combalou, in whose shadow Roquefort sits today. Subsequent rumblings and shiftings broke up the limestone structure and created a series of caves that extend deep beneath the town. More important, these caves are shot through with ducts that channel the warmer air from outside

Only the Lacaune breed of sheep supplies milk for Roquefort cheese, and the animals must be raised within about 60 miles of the nominal town.

to the cool heart of the cave. These fleurines, as the natural airways are called in French, are the unsung geological heroes of Roquefort. In a sense, they sustain the entire cheesemaking enterprise by maintaining humidity in the caves at 95 to 98 percent and temperature between 46 and 54 degrees Fahrenheit. “This is the reason Roquefort is the only place you can make this cheese,” says Delphine Carles as she shows me big wheels of Carles Roquefort ripening in the caves underneath an empty house. She points out a little wooden door in the rock that opens onto a fleurine. You regulate the airflow by opening and closing the door. It sounds primitive, but to do it December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 71

right, you’ve got to feel the temperature and moisture in the air. Mastering it takes years. Carles’ grandfather François started the business in 1927, but the family has always lived in the village of Saint-Aﬀrique, about six miles away. Who would want to live in Roquefort? she wonders. “The enormous rock of Combalou completely hides the sun, and there isn’t even a butcher shop. Roquefort is for work,” says Carles. There is a hokey fable to explain how Roquefort cheese came to be, and the fact that no one really takes the story seriously doesn’t keep it from getting told. Once upon a time, a young shepherd on his lunch break brought his chunk of white cheese and 72 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

Geology is destiny in Roquefortsur-Soulzon. The town rests against the Combalou, an outcropping of limestone plateau riddled with caves.

jug of wine to the Roquefort caves. But before he sat down to eat, he spied a comely shepherdess and gave chase, forgetting all about the lunch he left behind. Returning several months later (months? really?), he found his old cheese mottled with blue-green veins of Penicillium roqueforti. Of course, he ate it anyway. The whole future of Roquefort depended on it. Even without the shepherd story, we know that Roquefort cheese is very old, although we don’t really know how old. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History of A.D. 79, praised “cheese from Gaul.” The fact that he doesn’t speciﬁcally mention either Roquefort or mold has not stopped certain people from citing Pliny as an early adopter.

It is beyond argument, however, that by the early 15th century, Roquefort-sur-Soulzon was well established as a cheesemaking hub. King Charles VI of France conferred monopoly rights on the townspeople in 1411 (in other Roquefort-related legislation that year, local creditors seeking payment for overdue debts were required to seize the furniture before they could seize the cheese). In 1666, the Parliament of Toulouse fortiﬁed Roquefort’s legal standing by making sellers of counterfeit Roquefort cheese liable for punishment. Roquefort’s modern legal standing dates to 1925, when it became the ﬁrst cheese to qualify as an appellation d’origine contrôlée, a “controlled designation of origin,” or AOC. There are now more than 40 AOC French cheeses, not to mention other AOC agricultural products strongly tied to the place they come

from, including hundreds of wines, such as Bordeaux and Champagne, but also lentils from Puy, chicken from Bresse and butter from Charentes-Poitou. In spirit, AOC status is a modern extension of Charles VI’s sanctions of 1411. In practice, it is more complicated than that. In exchange for its protected status, an AOC product must conform to a rigid and highly codified set of rules regarding ingredients, including where they come from and how they are used. Here are a few of the rules for Roquefort cheese: The milk must come only from Lacaune sheep in six French départements, or districts, within roughly a 60-mile radius of Roquefort; the sheep must get three-quarters of their food on the farm where they pasture; the milk cannot be stockpiled for more than 24 hours; the addition of rennet—the enzymes that help milk coagulate into cheese— must take place at a temperature between 82 and 93 degrees Fahrenheit. And on and on, covering every stage in the cheesemaking process. There is no wiggle room. The village of Réquista on the Larzac plateau lies about an hour’s drive from Roquefort-sur-Soulzon. You can tell what goes on here from the bronze statue of a Lacaune ewe nursing a little lamb outside the town hall. At La Poulenque, a farm outside of town, there were 550 adult Lacaunes and 210 lambs when I visited. The milking season had only just begun—the lambs are “under the mother” until mid-October, as they say in French. The Lacaune is not the adorable, fluffy kind of sheep you count on a sleepless night. It’s a tough, sinewy, mallet-headed breed with very little wool. It is well adapted to the austere conditions on the Larzac plateau (which, thanks to the Lacaunes, enjoys Unesco World Heritage status). The Lacaune doesn’t even produce that much milk compared with other breeds of sheep, and only a fraction of BYLINES what comes out of a cow. But the milk that the breed does produce Contributor is rich in butterfat and protein, Joshua Levine lives in Paris and and it is expensive. A cow will last wrote for the magazine about yield perhaps 10,000 liters of milk the new Nero. a year at a price of around 4 cents Tomas van per liter. A Lacaune will give you Houtryve is an acclaimed only 300 liters for around $1.40 photographer per liter, or some 35 times the price of whose latest book is Lines and cow’s milk. This alone helps explain Lineage, about the Southwest. why Roquefort is luxury cheese. It was late-afternoon milking time at La Poulenque, and the troop was being herded toward a kind of milking carousel. As each ewe clambered up (they all seemed to know the drill and required no coaxing), a suction hose was attached to each of her teats and around she went, exiting empty when the carousel had made its full circle. The quantity of milk is measured: At the beginning of the season, each ewe yields about three liters a day, but the volume falls to a liter a day as the season wears on. Jérôme Faramond owns La Poulenque along with four of his relatives, and he’s also head of the Roquefort Confederation. December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 73

Faramond wasn’t raised on a farm. He comes from Montpellier, a big town in the South of France, but his sister and brother-in-law brought him into the Lacaune operation. “I love being a paysan,” says Faramond. It simply means peasant in French, but Faramond makes it a proud identity. “It’s a hard way to make a living. There are wolves on Larzac, and they’re terrifying—it’s traumatic to come upon a lamb with its throat torn open. I’m not against the wolves, but it’s clear the wolves are against us.” For Faramond, the payoff is special. “I always knew I wanted to raise sheep, but to do it for Roquefort! That’s what gets me up in the morning and helps me shine. Raising sheep to make yogurt is really not the same thing at all.” Not long after the afternoon milking finished, a big steel tanker truck pulled in, filled up at the milk pump and sped off to the dairy. In 1930, there were 800 or so dairies around Roquefort—almost every village in the region had its own. Like every other industry, the business of making Roquefort cheese has consolidated. Today there are only eight dairies. The process has modernized, too. The Vernières Frères dairy in Villefranchede-Panat looks more like a hospital than a rural cheese mill. Workers in white rubber boots, white coveralls and hairnets transfer the white sheep’s milk to big stainless steel vats. The milk gets tested first to make sure it’s not treated with antibiotics, which are forbidden, and next for staphylococcus, E. coli, salmonella and two other bacteria contaminants. Milk with even traces of such bacteria cannot be used in Roquefort, which by definition cannot be pasteurized. Instead, such milk is diverted, heated to kill offending bacteria and used to make other cheeses, like Ossau-Iraty. In the United States, most cheese is pasteurized, precisely to kill microbes. The downside is that you can’t kill the bacteria without also killing some of the taste, not to mention the goût du terroir—the distinctive flavors of the local soil for which the French have an almost mystical reverence. Roquefort fairly oozes this goût du terroir. “The raw milk is what carries the identity of the soil,” says Dubois, the cheese master. “You can’t destroy the micro-organisms present in the milk. They’re very important.” A word about raw-milk cheese in general. Many people worry that raw-milk cheese is a kind of edible petri dish of contagion and disease, a dangerous delicacy not unlike Japanese fugu, the poisonous blowfish, which, if not prepared expertly, can kill you. If that were true, though, half of France would have been wiped off the map long ago. Some of France’s favorite cheeses, such as Brie, Camembert and Reblochon, are made with the raw, untreated milk of sheep, cows or goats. Yet making cheese from raw milk demands maniacal oversight and care. Without it, bad things can indeed happen. For instance, in 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigated a multi-state outbreak of listeriosis—an infection caused by the bacteria Listeria monocytogenes. The source was traced to raw-milk cheese made by Vulto Creamery in Walton, New York. Eight people were 74 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

Cheese expert and merchant Laurent Dubois in Paris in one of his four shops. He established his reputation with a dish combining Roquefort and quince jelly.

Activist and politician José Bové is worried that blander, increasingly popular versions of French blue cheese threaten Roquefort’s integrity.

hospitalized, and two of them died, one in Vermont and one in Connecticut. In a lawsuit after the accident, the owner, Johannes Vulto, acknowledged that he didn’t really understand or pay much attention to the strictures of raw-milk cheesemaking. Vulto Creamery was shut down the following year. It is diﬃcult to imagine anything like this occurring with Roquefort. Everything about the way it is made is engineered to ensure that it can’t. Roquefort cheese is an odd amalgam of ﬁnger-in-the-wind artisanal know-how and state-of-the-art industrial microbiology.

THE CHURCH LOOKED ASK ANCE AT CHEESE.

It was putrefaction on a plate, CORRUPTING BOTH

BODY AND SOUL. “CHEESE WAS TR ANSGRESSIVE.”

THE LABORATORIES of Roquefort Société, by

far the biggest of the seven brands of Roquefort cheese, are housed in what had been an ugly abandoned building. After suiting up in scrubs and hairnets, we were led down through a series of staircases to a warren of clean rooms, deep in the caves, ﬁve or six levels below the surface, where we passed rows of cheese scientists hunched over microscopes. It felt like one of those secret weapons labs in the movies, hidden deep underground to avoid detection by enemy planes.

This is where Roquefort Société produces, analyzes and stores its stock of the all-important mold. The scientists we observed carry out 80 separate analyses through each stage of Roquefort’s passage from raw milk to cheese. Along the walls, steel cabinets housed rows of test tubes, each one containing bits of sourdough. Spores of Penicillium roqueforti, a fungus that grows spontaneously on bread and many other things, are added to the test tubes. The spores “eat” the dough for eight to ten weeks. The resulting mold is taken to the dairy and added directly to 5,000 liters of raw milk soon after it arrives from the farm. The milk curds are then separated, left to drain, and formed into loosely packed loaves. Each loaf is between 3.3 and 4.1 inches thick and weighs between 5.5 and 6.4 pounds. The loaf is then pricked with 40 holes—not 39 and not 41. This gives the penicillium enough air to extend its gorgeous greenish veins throughout the cheese. Along the way, coarse salt is rubbed all over—two times, five days apart—to stop the mold from reaching the surface. This makes Roquefort intensely salty. Ten days later, the cylindrical, white loaves are moved to the caves, where they finish ripening in the dank air of the Combalou. As the fungus grows, it gives off heat. It is the cellar master’s ineffable art to make sure the air quality remains constant by opening a fleurine door here, closing another there. In Société’s vast cave network, that job falls to Jacky Carles (no relation to Delphine Carles). It’s a big job. “The fleurines are the lungs of Roquefort. If they block, we die!” declares Carles, an imposing character with the commanding voice of someone who knows he has one of Roquefort’s marquee jobs. In all, it takes about three months to make a loaf of Roquefort cheese, start to finish. That’s a lucky thing for Americans. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires that December 2021 | SMITHSONIAN 75

any imported raw-milk cheese must be more than 60 days old. So Roquefort gets to enter the United States, while younger raw-milk cheeses like Brie or Camembert do not. (The rogue versions of those cheese varieties sold in the States are made from pasteurized milk, and are, according to French statute, not only shameful but illegal.) The world is full of diﬀerent kinds of blue cheese, from Stilton in England to Gorgonzola in Italy to Cabrales in Spain to Danish Blue in Denmark. The makers of such cheeses all do more or less the same thing—inject living mold into bland cheese to enhance the ﬂavor. A preference for one or the other is purely 76 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

Wheels of cheese at Roquefort Société. People in this part of France have been producing pungent blue cheese for about 1,100 years.

a matter of taste. But Laurent Dubois argues that the French are distinct. “Technologically, France is way out front when it comes to raw-milk cheese,” says Dubois. “Other countries are more hesitant: They’re frightened of it, they have problems, they have accidents. We have the savoir faire, and we’ve had it for a long time now.” The development of this savoir faire is what made France a nation of cheese eaters in the first place. Throughout most of French history, cheese was mostly consumed melted in cooked food. It had an iffy reputation. Doctors warned against eating it. Women were advised to stay away from it. The church looked askance at it, despite a tradition of monastic cheesemaking. It was putrefaction on a plate, corrupting both body and soul. “Cheese was transgressive,” says the historian Sylvie Vabre. The church’s disapproval was catnip for the anti-clerical luminaries of the Enlightenment, who took up the cause of cheese along with liberty and sexual freedom. And what was true for cheese in general went double for Roquefort. Roquefort was sexy. When Casanova needed a pick-me-up, he favored a glass of Chambertin and a bite of Roquefort. “An excellent restorative for love,” he wrote. Its history is as much about the march of capitalism as it is about the making of cheese. In 1842, 15 Roquefort producers joined forces to form the Société des Caves et des Producteurs Réunis de Roquefort, or the Société des Caves for short. At a time when most cheeses were known and eaten only in the regions where they were made, Société took Roquefort first to all of France, then out into the world. (Americans have been eating Société Roquefort since the 1860s.) Société advertised nationally. It built railroads. It listed on the stock exchange. It made the name Roquefort synonymous with French cheese in faraway places where few people had even tasted it. Since 1992, Société des Caves has belonged to Lactalis, a multinational owned by France’s Besnier family—the world’s largest dairy products group. You can’t miss Société’s somber headquarters in Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, topped with the green and white logo familiar to nearly everyone in France. Société alone produces 70 percent of all Roquefort cheese.

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Two years ago, France’s second-largest dairy group, Savencia Fromage & Dairy, bought Roquefort’s second-largest producer, Fromageries Papillon. Of Roquefort’s seven producers, four are now big industrial concerns. Among them, they hold most of the market. The three remaining “artisanal” producers, including Carles, account for only around 5 percent of Roquefort sales. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Even a connoisseur like Laurent Dubois believes that a product as technically demanding as Roquefort needs the scientiﬁc brain trust of “big cheese” behind it. It has always been thus. “Industrial capitalists have been at the wheel in Roquefort since the 19th century,” says Vabre. For her part, Delphine Carles says she can live happily with her 1.28 percent market share. Moreover, everybody, big and small, is compelled to follow the same strict rules—the cahier des charges—that make sure no corners get cut during production. What is really bothering some people is the way Lactalis and Savencia have responded to the steady erosion of Roquefort’s popularity. The leading blue cheese in France today is called Saint Agur. Savencia makes it with pasteurized cow’s milk. Saint Agur was created to give people what they like best about Roquefort—the high-butterfat creaminess—while downplaying what they like least, the sharp tang and the heavy salt content. It is a wolf in a Lacaune sheep’s clothing, and it has taken a big bite out of Roquefort, says Faramond. “They came from nowhere to 10,000 tons!” he says, sounding a little stunned. Saint Agur’s success was not lost on Lactalis. In 2019, Société des Caves introduced a cheese called Bleu de Brebis made from pasteurized sheep’s milk. It too went heavy on the creaminess and lighter on the bite and salt. And, mischievously, the Bleu de Brebis’ packaging carries the same oval Société logo you see on a package of Roquefort, except without the word Roquefort. At best, it’s confusing. At worst, say its many critics, it diverts Roquefort buyers toward a cheaper cheese that goes down easier. “To make Bleu de Brebis in the Roquefort region—that’s pushing it,” says Dubois. “I would imagine it’s a bit tough for the local milk producers 78 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

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to swallow.” Not altogether, says Faramond. “It’s no secret we sell less and less Roquefort every year. We sheep farmers feel that with Brebis, at least we can sell our milk for something.” Anne Julia Goutte runs the group that oversees the 27 Lactalis cheeses that adhere to the strict regulations set forth by the AOP, which is the European Union equivalent of the French AOC. The AOP group is based out of Société’s headquarters, and Goutte has lived in Roquefort-sur-Soulzon for 15 years. For Goutte, the market tells you what it wants, and the market’s message here is unambiguous. “We’re facing a structural decline. Around 60 percent of the people who buy our Roquefort are over 50 years old. Bleu de Brebis is not positioned against Roquefort, it’s positioned against Saint Agur,” she argues. “Roquefort remains our priority and we’re absolutely not giving up on it. No one can reproach us for that!” I tried both of the new kinder, gentler cheeses. Both are inoﬀensive, but neither leaves much of an impression either. The verdict in our strongly pro-Roquefort household: très meh. “It’s a general dumbing down,” says Véronique Richez-Lerouge, who heads a cheese advocacy group called the Fromages de Terroirs Association. “You impoverish taste with an industrial product, and people get used to it and ultimately end up thinking it’s good. For me, a cheese that you can’t remember ten minutes after eating it is a bad cheese. I remember some cheeses I ate 30 years ago!” Bleu de Brebis made a lot of people mad. In France, they don’t take this sort of thing lying down. Protests were organized. Lawsuits were ﬁled. José Bové got involved. Bové is known throughout France as a kind of peasant Pancho Villa, complete with a bushy bandito mustache. For years he has been attacking big agri-business and agitating for the integrity of the terroir against all manner of modern accommodations. In 1999, the EU barred imports of U.S. beef injected with growth hormones. The United States retaliated by levying punitive import duties on Roquefort cheese (because everybody knows its name and where it comes from, Roquefort often ends up taking it on the chin during trade disputes). On August 12, 80 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

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1999, some 300 angry shepherds, organized by Bové, dismantled a McDonald’s under construction in the town of Millau, near Roquefort. Supporters passed around Roquefort sandwiches. This made Bové’s reputation as a ﬁrebrand, and later helped him win election to the European Parliament. “The big industrialists only bought into AOP cheeses so they could break the cahier des charges, by oﬀering industrial products that resemble them,” says Bové. “Bleu de Brebis is following the same strategy.” Bové told me he’s making headway getting a ruling that would force Bleu de Brebis to change its packaging, so at least it wouldn’t mislead consumers into thinking they were buying the company’s Roquefort. But he concedes that new packaging won’t do much to stop people from turning away from Roquefort’s strong taste. Bové’s solution is unsurprising, given his generally pugnacious approach. “I think we’ve got to take another look at the cahier des charges—to make them even tougher,” says Bové. To an American, all this fuss might look overblown and even a little silly. The market is doing exactly what it was meant to do. Everybody ends up with the kind of cheese they want, at least for today. The future will have to take care of itself. What’s wrong with that? That’s not how many people in France see the matter. Markets are one thing, but something precious, something whose value comes from far back and extends well beyond its popularity, something like Roquefort cheese, that’s quite another thing. If the two clash—well, sometimes you have to pick a side. Answers from Page 26. 1

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King Solomon C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 55

authority and to the kind of cooperative efforts required for logistical projects such as building large, permanent settlements. But Ben-Yosef wondered why nomads 3,000 years ago would necessarily have been the same as modern Bedouin. There were other models for nomadic societies, such as the Mongols, who were organized and disciplined enough to conquer much of the known world. Perhaps the Edomites, Ben-Yosef speculated, simply moved around with the seasons, preferring tents to permanent homes and rendering themselves “archaeologically invisible.” Invisible, that is, but for one fluke: Their kingdom happened to be sitting on a copper deposit. If they hadn’t run a mine, leaving traces of debris in the shafts and slag heaps, we’d have no physical evidence that they ever existed. Their mining operation, in Ben-Yosef’s interpretation, reveals the workings of an advanced society, despite the absence of permanent structures. That’s a significant conclusion in itself, but it becomes even more significant in biblical archaeology, because if that’s true of Edom, it can also be true of the united monarchy of Israel. Biblical skeptics point out that there are no significant structures corresponding to the time in question. But one plausible explanation could be that most Israelites simply lived in tents, because they were a nation of nomads. In fact, that is how the Bible describes them—as a tribal alliance moving out of the desert and into the land of Canaan, settling down only over time. (This is sometimes obscured in Bible translations. In the Book of Kings, for example, after the Israelites celebrated Solomon’s dedication of the Jerusalem Temple, some English versions record that they “went to their homes, joyful and glad.” What the Hebrew actually says is they went to their “tents.”) These Israelites could have been wealthy, organized and semi-nomadic, like the “invisible” Edomites. Finding nothing, in other 84 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

words, didn’t mean there was nothing. Archaeology was simply not going to be able to find out. In 2019, Ben-Yosef explained his theory in a paper, “The Architectural Bias in Current Biblical Archaeology,” in a journal of biblical studies, Vetus Testamentum. He followed up with a version for a general audience in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, stirring up the contentious little world of biblical archaeology. Israel Finkelstein, the best-known scholar of the critical school, published a response in the journal Antiguo Oriente this year, disputing the identification of the people at the mines as Edomites, dismissing some of Ben-Yosef’s ideas as “not new” and others for “deficiencies” in interpretation. The same issue carried an equally detailed defense from Ben-Yosef. The veteran Israeli archaeologist Aren Maeir, of A reconstruction Bar-Ilan University, who has spent the last 25 years of a smelting furnace with belleading the excavation at the Philistine city of Gath lows. Ore placed (the hometown, according to the Bible, of Goliath), in the charcoal-burning and who isn’t identified with either school, told me chamber disinthat Ben-Yosef’s findings made a convincing case tegrates. Molten slag drains out; that a nomadic people could achieve a high level copper remains. of social and political complexity. He also agreed with Ben-Yosef’s identification of this society as Edom. Still, he cautioned against applying Ben-Yosef’s conclusions too broadly in order to make a case for the accuracy of the biblical narrative. “Because scholars have supposedly not paid enough attention to nomads and have over-emphasized architecture, that doesn’t mean the united kingdom of David and Solomon was a large kingdom—there’s simply no evidence of that on any level, not just the level of architecture.” Nonetheless, he praised Ben-Yosef’s fieldwork as “a very good excavation.” Thomas Levy, of the University of California, San Diego, one of two chief archaeologists at the Edomite copper mine at Faynan, praised the Timna excavation for providing “a beautiful picture of an Iron Age industrial landscape extending over hundreds of square kilometers.” Levy conceded that both mining operations were on the fringes of the biblical action. “And yet,” he said, “the work gives us a new set of hard data to interrogate ancient Israel, from the near periphery of ancient Israel. That’s exciting, and it’s where people haven’t been looking.” But a visitor walking through the eerie formations of the Timna Valley, past the dark tunnel mouths and the enigmatic etchings, is forced to accept the limits of what we can see even when we are looking carefully. We like to think that any mystery will yield in the end: We just have to dig deeper, or build a bigger magnifying glass. But there is much that BYLINES will always remain invisible. The JerusalemWhat Ben-Yosef has produced isn’t an argubased journalist Matti Friedman ment for or against the historical accuracy of the is the author, most Bible but a critique of his own profession. Archaerecently, of Spies of No Country: ology, he argues, has overstated its authority. EnSecret Lives at the Birth of Israel. tire kingdoms could exist under our noses, and archaeologists would never find a trace. Timna Yadid Levy last photographed is an anomaly that throws into relief the limits the vineyards of Israel’s Negev of what we can know. The treasure of the ancient desert for Smithsonian. mines, it turns out, is humility.

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Smithsonian (ISSN 0037-7333) is published monthly (except for a January/February issue and a July/August issue) by Smithsonian Enterprises, 600 Maryland Ave. S.W., Suite 6001, Washington, D.C. and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Smithsonian Customer Service, P.O. Box 8504, Big Sandy, TX 75755-8504. Printed in the USA. Canadian Publication Agreement No. 40043911. Canadian return address: Asendia USA, P.O. Box 1051, Fort Erie, ON L2A 6C7. We may occasionally publish extra issues. ©Smithsonian Institution 2021. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Editorial offices are at MRC 513, P.O. Box 37012, Washington, D.C. 20013. Advertising and circulation offices are at 420 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10170 (212-916-1300). Memberships: All subscribers to Smithsonian are members of the Smithsonian Institution. Ninety-nine percent of the dues is designated for magazine subscriptions. Back Issue: To purchase a back issue, please call or email James Babcock at 212-916-1323 or babcockj@si.edu. Back issue price is $7 (U.S. funds). Mailing Lists: From time to time we make our subscriber list available to companies that sell goods and services we believe would interest our readers. If you would rather not receive this information, please send your current mailing label, or an exact copy, to: Smithsonian Customer Service, P.O. Box 8504, Big Sandy, TX 75755-8504. Subscription Service: Should you wish to change your address or order new subscriptions, you can do so by writing Smithsonian Customer Service, P.O. Box 8504, Big Sandy, TX 75755-8504, or by calling 1-800-766-2149 (outside of the U.S., call 1-903-636-1113).

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Statement of ownership, management and circulation (required by 39 U.S.C. 3685) of Smithsonian published monthly with combined Jan/Feb and Jul/Aug issues by Smithsonian Enterprises, MRC 513, Washington, D.C., 20013-7012 for October 1, 2021. General business offices of the publisher are located at 420 Lexington Avenue, Suite 2335, New York, N.Y., 10170-1845. Name and address of publisher is Amy Wilkins, 420 Lexington Avenue, Suite 2335, New York, N.Y., 10170-1845. Name and address of editors are Debra Rosenberg and Terry Monmaney, Smithsonian Magazine, MRC 513, Washington, D.C., 20013-7012. Owner is Smithsonian Institution, 1000 Jefferson Drive S.W., Washington, D.C. 20560. Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: None. The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for Federal income tax purposes have not changed during the preceding 12 months. The average number of copies of each issue during the preceding 12 months are: a) Total number of copies 1,588,877; b) Paid Circulation (by mail and outside the mail): (1) Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541: 1,401,140; (2) Mailed In-County Paid Subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541: 0; (3) Paid distribution outside the mails including sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors, counter sales and other paid distribution outside USPS: 6,401; (4) Paid distribution by other classes of mail through USPS: 0; (c) Total paid distribution: 1,407,541. d) Free or nominal rate distribution (by mail and outside the mail): (1) Free or nominal rate outside-county copies included on PS Form 3541: 163,155; (2) free or nominal rate in-county copies included on PS Form 3541: 0; (3) free or nominal rate copies mailed at other classes through the USPS: 0; (4) free or nominal rate distribution outside the mail: 3,929. Total free or nominal rate distribution: 167,084. Total distribution: 1,574,625. Copies not distributed: 14,252. Total: 1,588,877. Percent paid 89.39%. Paid electronic copies: 32,821. Total paid print copies and paid electronic copies: 1,440,362. Total print distribution and paid electronic copies: 1,607,446. Percent paid (both print and electronic copies): 89.61%. The actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date are: a) Total number of copies printed: 1,591,471; b) Paid Circulation (by mail and outside the mail): (1) Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541: 1,390,601; (2)Mailed In-County Paid Subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541: 0; (3) Paid distribution outside the mails including sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors, counter sales and other paid distribution outside USPS: 6,235; (4) Paid distribution by other classes of mail through USPS: 0; (c) Total paid distribution: 1,396,836. d) Free or nominal rate distribution (by mail and outside the mail): (1) Free or nominal rate outside-county copies included on PS Form 3541: 175,594; (2) free or nominal rate in-county copies included on PS Form 3541: 0; (3) free or nominal rate copies mailed at other classes through the USPS: 0; (4) free or nominal rate distribution outside the mail: 4,014. Total free or nominal rate distribution: 179,608. Total distribution: 1,576,444. Copies not distributed: 15,027. Total: 1,591,471, Percent paid 88.61%. Paid electronic copies: 32,426. Total paid print copies and paid electronic copies: 1,429,262. Total print distribution and paid electronic copies: 1,608,870. Percent paid (both print and electronic copies) 88.84%. I certify that all information furnished is true and complete. (Signed) Ed Dequina, Vice President Smithsonian Media and Corporate Finance, Smithsonian Enterprises

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THE U.S. MILITARY began naming advanced weapons systems, as well as helicopters, after Native nations early in the second half of the 20th century. Ostensibly, it was done as a tribute to the valor and “warrior spirit” of Native Americans. However, it was done with neither the involvement nor agreement of tribes and many felt it perpetuated a simplistic 19th-century notion of Native Americans. Today, the military not only consults with Native groups and seeks their approval before using their names, but also in doing so acknowledges the many sacriﬁces and contributions Native Americans have made serving in the U.S. armed services.

— Cécile Ganteaume, co-curator of the “Americans” exhibition, National Museum of the American Indian

Q: How would Earth be affected if we had more than one moon? — Darrel Riesterer | Kiel, Wisconsin EVEN A SMALL MOON traveling inside the orbit of

Q: Why are more fruits and ﬂowers red,

orange or yellow than blue?

our current one would have a gravitational effect on Earth’s tides, flooding the coastal cities where a large percentage of humans live. A bigger moon would cause bigger floods, submerging even more land. The two moons would also affect each other. Earth’s gravity causes tides on the Moon, flexing or stretching the lunar ground. A second moon could amplify this small effect, contributing to stronger moonquakes. The biggest calamity would be if the two moons migrated into each other. Large fragments could find their way to Earth, causing an extinction-level event. — Thomas Watters, senior scientist,

— Robert L. Morrison | Poughkeepsie, New York

National Air and Space Museum

Q: How can sharks have such a high concentration of mercury and still be alive?

HERE IS ACTUALLY no true blue pig-

— Michael Anderson | Fort Kent, Maine

ment in nature. A pigment creates color by absorbing certain wavelengths of light and reflecting others. Chlorophyll makes plants look green, carotene makes them look red or orange, and xanthophyll makes them look yellow. Plants make fruits and flowers look blue by shifting acidity levels, adding molecules or mixing pigments. Even then, it’s rare to see a blue plant with no reddish tint: A blueberry is slightly purple. So why do plants go blue? Most likely to attract specific pollinators—blue is highly visible to bees. — Rose Gulledge, museum specialist, Department of Botany, National Museum of Natural History

Q: Why do military helicopters have Native American names? — Eli Cash | New York City 88 SMITHSONIAN | December 2021

Submit your queries at Smithsonianmag .com/ask

MERCURY AND OTHER toxins are present in the blood and organs of not only sharks, but also other aquatic species. The concentration of such elements increases along the food chain, with those at the top having higher amounts than those at the bottom. Because many sharks are apex predators, they have especially high concentrations of mercury—they obtain it from their prey, which have obtained it from their own food sources. But despite the fact that sharks accumulate so much mercury, they seem to be immune to its harmful eﬀects. Studies suggest that sharks have some physiological mechanism that protects them from mercury poisoning, but it’s not yet clear what that mechanism might be.

— Catalina Pimiento, research associate, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Illustration by Marilyn Foehrenbach

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Smithsonian: December 2021

Articles inside

Cheer: A Christmas gift from Louis Armstrong

National Treasure: Northrop’s T-38 Talon

Technology: The quaint history of deepfakes • Fooled ya!

American Icon: Clara Barton

Art: A portraitist ahead of her time

Discussion

Institutional Knowledge