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Nevada Rock Art

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When we were vis­it­ing my mom in Nevada last month, one of the activ­i­ties she arranged for us to do was to take a guided tour of Grimes Point Archae­o­log­i­cal Area. Grimes Point lies about an hour an a half east of Car­son City, near the town of Fal­lon. For much of the last 10,000 years, a lake existed in the area — mak­ing it an attrac­tive place for native peo­ples to set­tle. Fluc­tu­at­ing water lev­els resulted in mul­ti­ple dis­tinct areas and lay­ers of occu­pa­tion. Today, the site sits sort of out in the mid­dle of nowhere, with no siz­able body of water in the imme­di­ate vicinity.

Pet­ro­glyphs

Grimes Point has two main draws: Hid­den Cave and the Pet­ro­glyph Trail. Hid­den Cave is only open a cou­ple of times a month, so we’ll have to do that on another trip. The Pet­ro­glyph Trail is always open, but we had a spe­cial guided tour. I’ve seen pet­ro­glyphs in a num­ber of places in Ari­zona and New Mex­ico, but never in as high a con­cen­tra­tion as there is at Grimes Point. Just about every siz­able rock had some sort of rock art on it, and many were prac­ti­cally cov­ered. Some of the old­est pet­ro­glyphs (roughly 8,000 years old, I think) have been almost entirely reclaimed by the desert, and are only vis­i­ble from cer­tain van­tage points or in cer­tain light. (Most pet­ro­glyphs in the Amer­i­can South­west are cre­ated by scrap­ing the dark patina — known as ‘desert var­nish’ — off of rocks. The ‘var­nish’ is rede­posited over time, mean­ing that the old­est glyphs are now almost the some color as the sur­round­ing rock.)

We saw quite a range of iconog­ra­phy and tech­niques. Some of the ear­li­est carv­ings are deep snake-like grooves and lit­tle round depres­sions known as ‘cupules.’ Later work ranges from seem­ingly abstract geo­met­ric sym­bol and designs to things that are more obvi­ously rep­re­sen­ta­tional: ani­mals, peo­ple, and the like. Some motifs are sim­i­lar to glyphs at Pet­ro­glyph National Mon­u­ment and oth­ers I’ve seen, but the style is com­pletely dif­fer­ent (as one would expect from dif­fer­ent cul­tures liv­ing in sim­i­lar but dis­tant areas). One par­tic­u­lar exam­ple is the spi­ral — a motif the seems to be pretty com­mon across the south­west. Spi­rals I’d seen before have very thin lines, lots of rota­tions, and are quite com­pact. The one spi­ral we saw at Grimes Point was con­structed from a very wide line that only makes two-and-a-half or three rotations.

I took lots of pho­tos on our walk, many of them attempts to cap­ture the same glyphs from dif­fer­ent angles. I cut the col­lec­tion down quite a bit, and posted 22 pic­tures in a gallery. Click any of the pho­tos above to view the whole set.

Hands on the Past

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Hands On The Past
By C.W. Ceram
Schocken Books, 1973

This book is a col­lec­tion of excerpts from the writ­ings of pio­neer archae­ol­o­gists from the eigh­teenth, nine­teenth, and early twen­ti­eth cen­turies. It includes such mile­stones as Schliemann’s exca­va­tions at Troy, Champollion’s deci­pher­ing of Egypt­ian hiero­glyphs, Bingham’s dis­cov­ery of Machu Pic­chu, and Carter’s open­ing of the tomb of Tutanhka­men. This is but a small sam­ple of the more than sixty excerpts cov­er­ing major archae­o­log­i­cal dis­cov­er­ies in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South and Cen­tral Amer­ica. The writ­ings are fas­ci­nat­ing for their main con­tent, but also for what they reveal about the evo­lu­tion from wealthy relic-hunting anti­quar­i­ans to method­i­cal, sci­en­tific, and schol­arly archaeologists.

The style, qual­ity of writ­ing, and intended audi­ence vary from piece to piece — some are quite easy to read and under­stand, while oth­ers are intended for schol­ars of a par­tic­u­lar spe­cialty and era. For the lat­ter type, ref­er­ence mate­ri­als such as his­tor­i­cal atlases are quite help­ful. In many cases, there seem to have been maps, dia­grams, or other illus­tra­tory mate­r­ial present in the orig­i­nal texts which have not been repro­duced here. Ceram would have done well to either remove ref­er­ences to plates and fig­ures, or to actu­ally include those ref­er­enced in the excerpts. This edit­ing mis­step aside, I found this to be a fas­ci­nat­ing — although at times dif­fi­cult — read.

The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen

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Discovery Of The Tomb Of Tutankhamen
By Carter, Howard, A. C. Mace
Dover Pub­li­ca­tions, 1977

This account of the dis­cov­ery of the tomb of Tutankhamen was writ­ten fol­low­ing the first sea­son of exca­va­tion by Howard Carter and his team. As a result, it is a snap­shot of the pro­cess­ing of the tomb in progress; the con­tents of the entry­way and antecham­ber have been cat­a­loged, processed, and removed, but work has not yet begun on the annex, store­room, or sepul­chral hall. The mummy itself still lies within its stone sar­coph­a­gus, inside mul­ti­ple lev­els of sealed shrines.

Carter’s account strikes a good bal­ance between describ­ing the beauty of the arti­facts and explain­ing their his­toric and sci­en­tific sig­nif­i­cance. Sim­i­larly, he writes about his own con­flict­ing feel­ings: the eager­ness of dis­cov­ery ver­sus the method­i­cal demands of sci­ence. For­tu­nately sci­ence wins in every case.

In addi­tion to pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion about Tutankhamen’s tomb, Carter gives us a good pic­ture of the state of archae­ol­ogy in the early 20th cen­tury. He describes many of the tech­niques used for exca­va­tion, record­ing, cat­a­loging, and preser­va­tion. He also talks about the rela­tion­ships between him, his core staff, and the hired dig­gers. This was still the era in which locals were hired as grunts. The way they were treated and regarded would be regarded as racist today. How­ever, Carter (by his own account) seems to have treated them fairly. He was also not the sort of archae­ol­o­gist who sat in the shade with a cool drink, wait­ing for an impor­tant find. He — as well as his patron, Lord Carnar­von, when he was on site — was inti­mately involved in most of the dirty work.

Carter wrote two more vol­umes as his work on the tomb pro­gressed. I’ll have to get my hands on them, and read about the rest of the tomb’s trea­sures, includ­ing Tutankhamen himself.