It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.--Patrick Rothfuss
A federal judge Wednesday ordered San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman to pay for damage to a closed southern Utah canyon caused during an illegal ATV protest ride.
“Lyman and Monticello City Councilman Monte Wells were hit with a $95,955.61 bill for assessing and repairing riparian areas and archeological sites in Recapture Canyon. The two men were earlier convicted of conspiring to organize and lead at least 32 others over a road that is off limits to motorized vehicles.”
Good. I think it would be utterly ridiculous if the organizers were not hit with a variety of NEPA and ARPA fines.
If you’re not familiar with the case, this is what happened: four men, including the San Juan County Commissioner, organized a protest against BLM management and general federal management of land in Utah, and rode atvs through a restricted/closed area. They drove over a number of archaeological sites and re-vegetation areas.
Most of what we know about Mayan civilization relates to kings, queens and their elaborate temples. To understand what life was like for the 99 percent, one researcher turned to ancient animal bones stored at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
Ashley Sharpe, a doctoral student at the museum on the University of Florida campus, says the picture researchers have painted of the Maya people isn’t broad enough.
“When you think about the Romans and the Greeks, we know a lot about all of the different social classes — from the Caesars down to the commoners — but although there were tens of thousands of middle-class and lower-income Maya in big cities, we still don’t know much about the everyday lives of most people.”
More complex political and economic systems
For the first time in Maya archaeology research, 22,000 animal remains at the museum, one of the largest collections of its kind outside of Central America, were used as clues about life in the Maya lower classes. The bones revealed that the civilization known for its art and astronomy also had political and economic systems that were more complex than previously thought – systems similar to modern societies. The details are described in a new study in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.
“We looked at how the Maya acquired and distributed animal resources in order to learn more about the economy and how the royal, elite and lower classes interacted,” said Sharpe, who has either lived in or made frequent trips to the Maya region since 2008. “It turns out, the Maya states and classes were not all homogenous. They had complicated systems in place for trade relations, distribution of food and access to species, which varied among the cities and social classes much like they do today.”
Sharpe and co-author Kitty Emery, Florida Museum associate curator of environmental archaeology, examined the animal remains recovered from the ruins of three Maya city-states, including the famous site of Aguateca that was burned after a surprise enemy attack which resulted in a level of preservation similar to the Roman ruins of Pompeii.
Sharpe traced the movement of animals and their resources from trade partners to Aguateca and the capitals of Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan. She also followed the flow of resources between royalty, the rich and the poor at the capital cities and to the less powerful surrounding villages.
“The Maya used animals for things like hides, tools, jewellery and musical instruments, but they were also vitally important as emblems of status, royalty and the symbolic world of the gods, and thus often were prime resources jealously guarded by the rich and powerful,” Emery said.
West Acropolis of Yaxchilan located on the bank of the Usumacinta River in what is now the state of Chiapas, Mexico.
Middle ranks used widest variety of animals
Surprisingly, however, study researchers found that middle-ranking elites used the widest variety of animals. Royalty and other high-ranking elites focused on a select group of symbolic and prestigious animals like jaguars and crocodiles, Sharpe said.
“We had expected that the elites would have the highest diversity but that was not the case,” she said. “The elites ate animals that were considered delicacies, sort of the way people in our own upper class eat things like caviar, but the rest of us think it’s kind of gross.”
Sharpe said poor villagers mostly ate fish and shellfish from rivers near their homes. However, both the poor and middle-elite classes living at the capitals kept a wider variety of animals for themselves than they shared with the surrounding villages, particularly more species from deep inside forests and from the ocean, which was 50 to 100 miles away. At Aguateca, more than 100 miles from the nearest coast, thousands of marine shells were found covering the floors of ancient households and craft workshops.
“These people didn’t have pack animals like in the Old World where they had horses and donkeys to carry goods,” Sharpe said. “They were literally carrying things on their backs from the sea. They did have rivers to help with transportation, but not a lot of rivers, and on land they also had the jungle to contend with.”
Photo of Altar 4 at Piedras Negras by Teoberto Maler, published in 1901. The site is located on the north bank of the Usumacinta River in the Petén department of Guatemala.
Regulation of hunting and fishing
At Yaxchilan, more than half of the skeletons found were deer, suggesting residents primarily relied on nearby forests, including the deer that fed on their corn fields. However, much like in medieval Britain, there is evidence the Maya may have regulated hunting and fishing, creating more of a divide in access to animal resources among the classes, Sharpe said. At each of the three cities, elites, middle and lower classes all had access to different types of species, both imported marine resources as well as animals that could be obtained from nearby forests and rivers, she said.
The differences in predominate species, such as marine animals and deer, show the city-states likely had different trade partners, which Sharpe said makes sense because we know there were, at times, hostilities between the cities. The differences could also point to unique cultural identities, she said. For example, the residents of Aguateca were known for their jewellery made from shells.
“This is the first time we’re seeing this sort of evidence for what the middle and lower classes were doing,” Sharpe said.
Archaeologists have been working amid dense jungle to understand how the many Maya city-states functioned since the early 20th century. They have raised questions about how states cooperated, or didn’t, with one another, how much control and interaction state capitals had with their subordinate villages, and how the various social classes differed, Sharpe said.
Sharpe and Emery decided to analyse animal bones to begin answering these questions because animal resources played such a vital role in the politics and economy of the Late Classic Maya civilization (A.D. 500-900), Emery said. But buried beneath the jungle floor in Guatemala are enough mysteries to fill Sharpe’s entire career.
“It almost doesn’t matter where you dig in the jungle near these centres, you hit paved limestone floor. It gives you the sense that at one time, the entire place was deforested and it was a massive city,” she said. “When you travel to these capitals, you drive over unexcavated mounds that were once people’s houses — people we know little or nothing about.“
Location: UCL Institute of Archaeology & Gordon Square Gardens
“The Institute’s contribution to the Council of British Archaeology’s Festival of Archaeology will take place on Saturday 13 June from 12pm-5pm
The ‘World Archaeology Festival: Passport to the Past’ will involve lots of activities taking place in Gordon Square and in the Institute of Archaeology building for families and all members of the public.
Tours of the Institute’s world-renowned collections and object handling-sessions will be available while archaeologically-related activities for adults and children alike will also be on offer as well as displays of experimental archaeological techniques.
Please do save the date and come along to participate in the event. All activities are drop-in, there is no need to book and all are welcome!”
How Iraqi friar Najeeb Michaeel saved ancient Christian manuscripts from Islamic State
PARIS (AFP).- Bullets whistled overhead, a black Islamic State flag flapping in the distance, but all Friar Najeeb Michaeel could think of as he fled the jihadists was how to save hundreds of ancient Iraqi manuscripts in his possession.
"You are going to get us killed with your archives," Michaeel’s assistant Watheq Qassab grumbled as he struggled to carry six boxes of the documents dated between the 13th and 19th century across the border from Iraq into Kurdistan in August last year.
The Roman Catholic Dominican Order arrived in Iraq in the 13th century, and set up a permanent church in the second city of Mosul in 1750.
Michaeel first smuggled his precious library out of Mosul to Qaraqosh — Iraq’s largest Christian town — during an Islamist insurgency in 2008 which saw thousands of Christians flee the city. Read more.
Drones are letting scientists study the Nubian pyramids from a new perspective
Drone cameras are now so commonplace that we often see them used in extreme sports videos and YouTube pranks, but they have many scientific uses as well.
National Geographic engineer Alan Turchik flew a quadcopter drone over Sudan to get a bird’s-eye view of the famous Nubian pyramids, a series of structures built during the 2,000-year reign of the Kushite civilization.
In addition to using drones to get a more accurate perspective of the site’s layout, archaeologists are using a remote-controlled robot to reach previously inaccessible caves nearby. Read more.
New technology allows archaeologists to easily map excavation sites in 3D
Mapping archaeological digs takes plenty of time and a lot of measuring, photographing, drawing and note taking. Now, most of this work can be done with a technique called photogrammetry.
Photogrammetry is a method that uses two dimensional images of an archaeological find to construct a 3D model.
You don’t need and special glasses or advanced equipment to use make use of this new technique. Together with precise measurements of the excavation, photogrammetry can create a complete detailed map of an archaeological excavation site.
“This is still a very new technique,” say archaeologists Raymond Sauvage and Fredrik Skoglund of NTNU University Museum.
Photogrammetry is in many ways much more precise than older, more time-consuming methods. Read more.
Hahaha! After writing a double major undergraduate thesis and a graduate school thesis, as well as hundreds of history and archaeology papers, this particularly hi-larious.
Yup. Undergraduate archaeology thesis was basically this. Spent 12 hours in the library? That's great! What have you got to show for it? Oh. Well. That's nice, I guess.
I’m just very confused by all the people who rt’d this from me on twitter and added ‘for when you’re pissed off enough to carve it into stone’. I… it’s clay? you used a stylus to press letter sounds into it, it’s no more work than writing with a pencil.
While the angry customer would probably have gotten his scribe to do this, I am really amused by the image of a guy furiously stabbing his stylus into the clay and all his marks being angry and uneven.
The really fun part is that this isn’t the only complaint about this particular guy. Ea-nasir is well known to historians due to the dozens of surviving documents complaining about his shady business practices, spanning everything from household goods to real estate speculation to second-hand clothing. He’s literally gone down in history for being such a colossal asshole.
When Native actors working on an Adam Sandler western objected to the film’s racially-offensive humor, they were told they could leave. So they did.
Approximately a dozen Native actors and actresses, as well as the Native cultural advisor, left the set of Adam Sandler’s newest film production,The Ridiculous Six, on Wednesday. The actors, who were primarily from the Navajo nation, left the set after the satirical western’s script repeatedly insulted native women and elders and grossly misrepresented Apache culture.
The examples of disrespect included Native women’s names such as Beaver’s Breath and No Bra, an actress portraying an Apache woman squatting and urinating while smoking a peace pipe, and feathers inappropriately positioned on a teepee.
The film, which is said to be a spoof of The Magnificent Sevenand was written by Adam Sandler and his frequent collaborator Tim Herlihy, is currently under production by Happy Madison Productions for a Netflix-only release. The movie will star Adam Sandler, Nick Nolte, Steve Buscemi, Dan Aykroyd, Jon Lovitz and Vanilla Ice.
Among the actors who walked off the set were Navajo Nation tribal members Loren Anthony, who is also the lead singer of the metal band Bloodline, and film student Allison Young. Anthony says that though he understands the movie is a comedy, the portrayal of the Apache was severely negligent and the insults to women were more than enough reason to walk off the set.
“There were about a dozen of us who walked off the set,” said Anthony, who told ICTMN he had initially refused to do the movie. He then agreed to take the job when producers informed him they had hired a cultural consultant and efforts would be made for tasteful representation of Natives.
“I was asked a long time ago to do some work on this and I wasn’t down for it. Then they told me it was going to be a comedy, but it would not be racist. So I agreed to it but on Monday things started getting weird on the set,” he said.
Anthony says he was first insulted that the movie costumes that were supposed to portray Apache were significantly incorrect and that the jokes seemed to get progressively worse.
“We were supposed to be Apache, but it was really stereotypical and we did not look Apache at all. We looked more like Comanche,” he said. “One thing that really offended a lot of people was that there was a female character called Beaver’s breath. One character says ‘Hey, Beaver’s Breath.’ And the Native woman says, ‘How did you know my name?’”
“They just treated us as if we should just be on the side. When we did speak with the main director, he was trying to say the disrespect was not intentional and this was a comedy.”
“The producers just told us, ‘If you guys are so sensitive, you should leave.’” —Alison Young
Allison Young, Navajo, a former film student from Dartmouth, was also offended by the stereotypes portrayed and the outright disrespect paid to her and others by the director and producers.
“When I began doing this film, I had an uneasy feeling inside of me and I felt so conflicted,” she said. “I talked to a former instructor at Dartmouth and he told me to take this as finally experiencing stereotyping first hand. We talked to the producers about our concerns. They just told us, ‘If you guys are so sensitive, you should leave.’ I was just standing there and got emotional and teary-eyed. I didn’t want to cry but the feeling just came over me. This is supposed to be a comedy that makes you laugh. A film like this should not make someone feel this way.”
“Nothing has changed,” said Young. “We are still just Hollywood Indians.”
Goldie Tom also shared her frustrations with ICTMN. “I felt this was all really disrespectful,” she said. “Our costumes did not portray Apache people. The consultant, Bruce spoke to the crew and told them we should not have braids and chokers and he was very disappointed. He asked to speak with Adam Sandler. We talked to the producers about other things in the script and they said ‘It’s in the script and we are not going to change it.’ Overall, we were just treated disrespectfully, the spoke down to us and treated everyone with strong tones.”
74-year old David Hill, Choctaw, a member of the American Indian Movement, also left the set. “They were being disrespectful,” he said. “They were bringing up those same old arguments that Dan Snyder uses in defending the Redskins. But let me tell you, our dignity is not for sale. It is a real shame because a lot of people probably stay because they need a job.”
Hill also mentioned that the producers called back the consultant as well as other native actors to their departure from the set on Wednesday.
“I hope they will listen to us,” Hill said. “We understand this is a comedy, we understand this is humor, but we won’t tolerate disrespect. I told the director if he had talked to a native woman the way they were talked to in this movie—I said I would knock his ass out.”
“This isn’t my first rodeo, if someone doesn’t speak up, no one will.”
Neither Adam Sandler nor anyone for Happy Madison Productions responded to our attempts in reaching out to them for comment.
A revival of pre-Inca water technology in the mountains of the Andes is set to keep taps flowing in the drought-affected Peruvian capital, Lima. Grouting ancient canals, it turns out, is a far cheaper solution to the city’s water crisis than building a new desalination plant.
Lima is one of the world’s largest desert cities and relies for water on rivers that flow out of the Andes. But those rivers diminish to a trickle during a long dry season, leaving the population of almost 9 million with intermittent water supplies.
Now the city’s water utility company, Sedapal, has decided to invest in conservation projects in the Andes to keep the rivers flowing and taps running. And researchers have discovered that the most cost-effective way is to revive a system of ancient stone canals, known locally as amunas, that were built in the Andes by the Wari culture between AD 500 and 1000, centuries before the rise of the Incas. Read more.
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