Nevada Rock Art

September 21, 2008 4 comments
Grimes Point

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.)

Cupules

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

November 2, 2006 Reply
Hands on the past Hands on the past pio­neer archae­ol­o­gists tell their own storyC. W. Ceram
Knopf 1966World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

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

November 25, 2005 1 comment
The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen The Dis­cov­ery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen Carter, Howard
Dover Pub­li­ca­tions 1977World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

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.

Mission San Luis

June 28, 2005 3 comments
Apalachee Com­mu­nity House

This week­end, I decided to go visit Mis­sion San Luis. The site is only a cou­ple of miles from the FSU cam­pus, but I some­how hadn’t made it there before. Since the offi­cial Mis­sion San Luis web­site seems to be com­pletely dead at the moment, I shall pro­vide a very brief his­tory of the site:

1633: Span­ish Fran­cis­can fri­ars come to live among the Apalachee peo­ple.
1647: Non-Christian Apalachee revolt, killing Spaniards and burn­ing churches.
1656: The fri­ars and Apalachee attatched to Mis­sion San Luis move to what is now Tal­la­has­see. San Luis becomes the provin­cial cap­i­tal.
1704: Fear­ing raids by the British, the inhab­i­tants of Mis­sion San Luis burn the struc­tures and flee.
1983: The site of Mis­sion San Luis is pur­chased by the State of Florida. Archae­o­log­i­cal research and site recon­struc­tion begin.

The Mis­sion site seems to be very well man­aged. The visitor’s cen­ter and museum, while small, is very well done. In addi­tion to dis­play­ing and inter­pret­ing arti­facts, there are excel­lent dia­grams, recon­struc­tions, and inter­pre­ta­tions of the archae­o­log­i­cal work itself. One cool thing is a set of slid­ing glass panes that let you over­lay var­i­ous stages of exca­va­tion — and the asso­ci­ated data — on a plan view of the site. There are also recre­ations of two dig units in pro­file (as if you were stand­ing in the pit, look­ing at the wall), that show impor­tant fea­tures as well as some arti­facts in situ.

The site itself is also quite impres­sive. Com­plete recon­struc­tions have been done of the church, fri­ary, Apalachee com­mu­nity house (above), and a small Span­ish dwelling. The build­ings are fur­nished and appointed based on con­tem­po­rary accounts and records of what was removed from the orig­i­nal build­ings before they were burned. Exca­va­tion of the small Span­ish fort has recently been com­pleted, and appar­ently recon­struc­tion of that is in the works. There must be some good money com­ing in from pri­vate donors to fund all this work. Admis­sion to the site is free, and I can’t imag­ine that the state funds it this well. I’d wanted to ask about fund­ing at the visitor’s cen­ter, but it was closed by the time I thought of ask­ing. I wish more archae­o­log­i­cal sites could get this kind of support.

Guidon­ian Hand

I found some­thing very inter­est­ing on one of the inte­rior walls of the fri­ary — the painted hand at right. Sadly, there was no accom­pa­ny­ing expla­na­tion, and the visitor’s cen­ter was already closed when I dis­cov­ered it. Each joint of the hand is assigned a num­ber, and what appear to be solfege (do, re, mi, etc.) syl­la­bles. There are also lit­tle snip­pets of shape-note nota­tion next to the hand. I’ve never encoun­tered any­thing like this in my music stud­ies. Can any­one (musi­col­o­gists — hint, hint) tell me any­thing about this diagram?

Update: My dad iden­ti­fied this as a Guidon­ian hand, after Guido d’Arrezzo, an 11th cen­tury musi­cian and teacher. I remem­ber talk­ing about Guido in music his­tory, but have no rec­ol­lec­tion of this dia­gram. I’ll have to see if I can find an expla­na­tion some­where. Also, I real­ized there’s no scale in the pho­to­graph — the hand is prob­a­bly 4–5 feet tall.

Pseudoscience

June 22, 2005 1 comment

I’ve spent much of today watch­ing over an empty or nearly empty com­puter lab. It’s between sum­mer school ses­sions, so there are hardly any FSU stu­dents around. The hordes of high school­ers here for sum­mer music camp is a dif­fer­ent story — but, they don’t get to use the lab.

As I’ve been sit­ting here, dur­ing my own shift and while cov­er­ing those of two of my cowork­ers, I’ve done a vari­ety of things to amuse myself: play­ing Text Twist, surf­ing the web, talk­ing to Jen­nie, and read­ing. My cur­rent book, as some of you have prob­a­bly noticed in my side­bar, is enti­tled “Colum­bus Was Last: From 200,000 B.C. to 1492, A Hereti­cal His­tory of Who Was First,” by Patrick Huyghe.

Warn­ing: from this point on, I’m going to get nerdy.

Huyghe starts out with the true dis­cov­er­ers of Amer­ica: the peo­ples we now refer to as Native Amer­i­cans. Funny how that works, huh? The book talks all about Beringia, the once extant land bridge between Siberia and Alaska that has long been assumed to be the point of entry for early humans trav­el­ing from Asia. It also exam­ines evi­dence of entry by coastal sea travel. Huyghe then goes on to dis­cuss archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence that chal­lenges the old arrival date (ca. 11,500 years BP) of humans on this con­ti­nent.
This is where he started to lose me. Some of the evi­dence he presents is fairly com­pelling (but still con­tro­ver­sial), such as exca­va­tions at Monte Verde in Chile and the Mead­ow­croft rock­shel­ter in Penn­syl­va­nia. These sites seem to push human arrival back a few thou­sand years from the pre­vi­ously accepted date. As I was read­ing about these, I started doing rudi­men­tary online fact-checking. From what I was able to find (admit­tedly, not in any­thing so reli­able as peer-reviewed jour­nals), Huyghe is pretty much right on the mark. He tends, how­ever, to empha­size the more fan­tas­tic and con­tro­ver­sial dates and evi­dence — some­thing I bet the archae­ol­o­gists them­selves would hes­i­tate to do. But then, he starts talk­ing about Cal­ico Lake, a site in the Mojave Desert in Cal­i­for­nia. This site has been (he admits, not com­pletely reli­ably) dated to 200,000–300,000 years BP. How­ever, the only arti­facts the site has pro­duced are pieces of rock that some argue are prim­i­tive stone tools, and oth­ers argue are just pieces of rock. It’s very obvi­ous, how­ever, that Mr. Huyghe wants to believe.

The next chap­ter dis­cusses sim­i­lar­i­ties between pot­tery in Ecuador and Japan approx­i­mately 5,000 years BP. Huyghe makes good argu­ments of mor­pho­log­i­cal sim­i­lar­i­ties and the fea­si­bil­ity (based on weather and cur­rents) of a sea jour­ney from Japan to Ecuador with the Japan­ese mar­itime tech­nol­ogy of the period. But again, he grav­i­tates towards the more fan­tas­tic expla­na­tions with­out offer­ing much in the way of alter­nate the­o­ries. The next topic is sup­posed Chi­nese explo­ration — delib­er­ate, methodic explo­ration — of North Amer­ica about 4000 years BP. The evi­dence here seems quite weak and cir­cum­stan­tial. The inter­pre­tive stretches remind me very much of Gavin Menzies’s book 1421: The Year China Dis­cov­ered Amer­ica, which makes sim­i­larly dubi­ous claims for a more recent Chi­nese land­ing in America.

It’s at this point in my inter­net fact-checking that I decide to get some facts on Mr. Huyghe. His bio on the book jacket is suit­ably vague, call­ing him only a “free­lance sci­ence writer” and list­ing some of the pub­li­ca­tions for which he has writ­ten — no list of other pub­li­ca­tions. So, I went to Ama­zon. Now I under­stand why he seems so dearly to want to believe even the least well-supported the­o­ries. I present to you rep­re­sen­ta­tive selec­tions from the oeu­vre of Patrick Huyghe, cour­tesy of Amazon:

•The Field Guide to Lake Mon­sters, Sea Ser­pents, and Other Mys­tery Denizens of the Deep
•The Field Guide To UFOs: A Clas­si­fi­ca­tion Of Var­i­ous Uniden­ti­fied Aer­ial Phe­nom­ena Based On Eye­wit­ness Accounts
•The Field Guide to Big­foot, Yeti and Other Mys­tery Pri­mates World­wide
•The Field Guide to Ghost and Other Appari­tions
•Swamp Gas Times: My Two Decades on the UFO Beat

That’s it. His cred­i­bil­ity is gone. In my mind, he is now irrev­o­ca­bly assigned to the ranks of Erich von Daniken and Gra­ham Han­cock. These are the guys you see on the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel espous­ing the notion that early civ­i­liza­tions (ie: ancient Egypt and var­i­ous Mesoamer­i­can cul­tures) couldn’t pos­si­bly have built their great tem­ples and mon­u­ments with­out help from aliens or Atlanteans (who came from Mars, any­way). Every time I’m brows­ing the his­tory sec­tion of a book­store and I see one of their books, I’m over­come by a cold rage and the desire to cre­ate a sep­a­rate “Crack­pot” shelf for their benefit.

So, I’m going to fin­ish the book, even if I scoff the whole way through it. I’ve never delib­er­ately failed to fin­ish a book. Besides, he can’t butcher Leif Eric­s­son and the Viking voy­ages to New­found­land, can he? Can he?

The Lost Fleet

April 11, 2005 Reply
The Lost Fleet The Lost Fleet The Dis­cov­ery of a Sunken Armada from the Golden Age of PiracyBarry Clif­ford
William Mor­row 2002World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Inter­est­ing both for the modern-day dis­cov­ery of ship­wrecks and the his­tor­i­cal accounts of pirates. How­ever, the two parts don’t fit together extremely well. They are related, but only occa­sion­ally explic­itly connected.