Note there’s a great event this Saturday April 1 at 2:00 at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona:
Calling all Arizona friends who find archaeology and Native Americans intriguing, here’s a book event at the Poisoned Pen you will enjoy. Donis Casey interviews Mary Anna Evans about her archaeologist turned murder-solver and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma. For details The Poisoned Pen Website.
Here are some posts I enjoyed this week:
Neolithic rock art found in Egypt (a big leap back in time from what we usually think of as Egyptian) depicts a hunter with a bow, an ostrich and a dancer wearing an ostrich mask. No one until this find thought there was such early use of masks, so this is intriguing and also on the intrigue meter, later Egyptian masks are reserved for the dead. So what was that dancer doing or signifying, dancing around with an ostrich mask? I’d love to hear some guesses, fantastical, historical or hilarious. Click here for Archaeology Magazine “Neolithic Rock Art Found in Egypt”
A solution to the longstanding mystery of why the Clovis people and a number of iconic species (mammoth and saber-toothed tiger) disappeared from many sites across what is now the United States. It was alien intervention—well, an extraterrestrial impact. The platinum present at the archaeological sites tells the tale. An asteroid or comet hit and cooled the climate too far for survival. Click here for the Archaeology News Network “Discovery of widespread platinum may help solve Clovis people mystery”
Near where I live there’s a fascinating piece of history called Montezuma’s Castle. Montezuma had nothing to do with it and it isn’t a castle, but a series of connected dwellings high up on a cliff face lived in by ancestors of the Hopis, more or less. Given how inaccurately white settlers named it, it isn’t all that surprising that there’s been a major redo of the official 1930’s archaeological interpretation of this place which happened to contradict the Native American memory (from two separate tribes who weren’t exactly friends, no less). Turns out the Native American oral history appears to be right. The Apaches invaded, burned it and killed everyone. Not, as the 1930’s dig insisted, that the people left for some mysterious reason and much later, when abandoned, it burned. While I’m thinking mysterious disappearances offer romance, that story offers a much less common sense explanation, and it’s kind of amazing it lasted this long. Lucky for accuracy, charred plaster walls, cracked skulls and pottery can be dated so that evidence of habitation and the evidence of when the burning happened can be matched up enough to make an intelligent assumption that the events match the memories passed down by the tribes. Click here for Archaeology Magazine “Revisting Montezuma’s Castle”
Attila the Hun brought about or significantly contributed to the destruction of the Roman Empire, or at least that’s what’s traditionally said. Now there’s some intriguing evidence of how much more complex is the reality of invasions and marauding by foreigners. What the bones do tell us! Here again those chatty bones are filling in some surprising details. Huns sometimes turned into farmers and lived side by side with the Roman farmers, presumably not marauding and plundering while doing so. Ah, nuance. I find the idea of Romans as the peaceful ones hilarious, but that’s supposedly true for this episode in Roman history. For once, someone else was said to be more brutal and violent than Romans, except that the story of living peacefully and productively side by side turns out to be more true. History and great changes are so much more complicated and meandering than we like to think. People get along and then they don’t and then they do. Which maybe is a good reason to get along better. If the Romans and the Huns could get along, is there someone who has a solid excuse not to? Click here for Archaeology News Network “Tiller the Hun?”