Archaeology

[Kinslaughterer]

Maya 'War Crimes Scene' Uncovered
Archeologists say bones and other items indicate a massacre that was key to the civilization's fall.

By Thomas H. Maugh II, Times Staff Writer

Archeologists excavating the ruined Guatemalan city of Cancuen have stumbled across the remains of what they believe is one of the pivotal events in the collapse of the Maya civilization — the desperate defense of the once-great trading center and the ritual execution of at least 45 members of its royal court.

An enemy as yet unknown not only wiped out the royal dynasty about AD 800, but systematically eliminated religious and cultural artifacts — in effect, killing the city and leaving it abandoned to the elements, according to new research announced Wednesday.

The archeological team found dozens of remarkably preserved skeletons piled in mass graves, as well as other artifacts, indicating what the lead researcher described as "a war crimes scene."

After the siege of Cancuen, cities in the western Maya lowlands in what is now Guatemala were abandoned, most within 20 to 30 years, the researchers said. The displaced populations moved to the east and north, where they eventually depleted local resources and faded away.

"This was a critical historical moment, like the assassination of [Austrian] Archduke [Franz] Ferdinand [which triggered] World War I," said archeologist Arthur A. Demarest of Vanderbilt University, whose team discovered the charnel house this summer. "It set off the domino of Classic Maya collapse."

Added archeologist David Freidel of Southern Methodist University, "This is an effort not to try to subordinate the royal court to an overlord, but to absolutely wipe it out. It's a remarkable and very poignant example of the kind of violence that marks the collapse of the Maya civilization."

It might have been a nobles' revolt, a peasants' revolt or an outside attack, said Freidel, who was not involved in the discovery. "We just don't know."

But the city's occupants clearly were aware of the impending disaster. Demarest and his team found a system of hastily constructed and unfinished stone and wooden palisades that they say showed a desperate attempt to defend Cancuen.

Spearheads scattered throughout the city, abandoned construction sites and skeletons with markings of spear and ax wounds bear witness to the intensity of the battle and the finality of the defeat.

"Clearly, these defenses failed," Demarest said.

The Maya dominated Central America for more than 1,500 years, from well before the birth of Christ to late in the first millennium. They established a complex network of kingdoms dominated by "holy lords," building large cities with palaces and pyramids in the region, reaching their peak from AD 300 to 900.

Then, they disappeared.

The mysterious nature of that collapse has captivated at least two generations of scholars, provoking theories including environmental despoliation, drought and vicious warfare. Even the time frame is the subject of debate, with some arguing for a sudden collapse within a few years and others for a prolonged disintegration over 2 1/2 centuries.

The new discovery "supports Demarest's view that the Classic Maya civilization collapsed by endemic warfare," said archeologist Heather McKillop of Louisiana State University.

"The massacre is one of those rare events in archeology where an event is frozen in time," she added.

The site of Cancuen, at the headwaters of the Pasion River, has been known for more than a century, but it was generally regarded as an insignificant outpost until five years ago, when Demarest's team discovered a 170-room, three-story palace sprawling over an area the size of six football fields.

The palace was surrounded by workshops for jade, obsidian, pyrite and other precious goods.

Excavations in the last five years showed it was an unusually wealthy city because of its ability to supply other cities throughout the empire with trade goods used by the upper classes to signify authority — necessary for maintaining their position.

The city's kings maintained their position over four centuries through treaties, intermarriages and diplomatic missions without engaging in warfare. "They were not the greatest or most powerful dynasty, but they were the cleverest," Demarest said.

The dynasty reached its peak during the 50-year reign of Taj Chan Ahk. His son, Kan Maax, reigned for only about five years before the attack that ended the city's existence.

Demarest's team was finishing its dig for the summer when Guatemalan archeologists Sylvia Alvarado and Tomas Barrientos, tracing a system of water channels through the city, stumbled on a 90-square-yard cistern, filled with mud, directly in front of the palace.

When they began digging in it, Demarest said, they found "bones, bones, bones and more bones … more bones than I have ever seen."

Bones tend to degrade quickly in the jungle, but the mud helped preserve these.

"This is the strangest … find I have ever made," he said.

With his team's season nearly finished and the rainy season approaching, Demarest called on the Forensic Anthropological Foundation of Guatemala for assistance. Formed in 1996 after the signing of the Guatemalan Peace Accords, the foundation excavated the mass graves of thousands of Guatemalan villagers killed in civil war. It has also been sent to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Rwanda and Afghanistan to investigate other massacres for war crimes trials.

"This was a war crimes scene," said Demarest, whose excavation was funded by the National Geographic Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Under the direction of Guatemalan archeologists Fredy Peccerelli and Jose Suasnevar — both former students of Demarest — the team found the remains of 31 people in the cistern. The bodies were those of men, women and children, including two pregnant women.

Subsequent excavations revealed the bodies of Kan Maax and his queen in a nearby shallow grave and a dozen other nobles in a grave north of the palace. Their identities were established by their jewelry, headdresses and other artifacts.

Some of the nobles may have been wounded or killed in the defense of the city, but most were executed by spear thrusts to the throat, "a quick way to kill someone," Demarest said.

After they were dead, the bodies were ritually dismembered and thrown into the cistern or graves along with the clothes they were wearing, ceremonial headdresses, jewelry and other artifacts.

"These were incredibly precious things" like jades, jaguar-fang necklaces and Pacific Coast shells, Demarest said.

The invaders also went through the city and chipped the faces off monuments, ritually "killing" them, he added. "They were not only terminating the dynasty, they were terminating the entire site."

[Avatar]

Just saw this on the Nat Geo. Site and was on the way to post it here.

--A

[Kinslaughterer]

The Sunday Times - Britain



The Sunday Times November 20, 2005

Scientists show we’ve been losing face for 10,000 years
Jonathan Leake, Science Editor



THE human face is shrinking. Research into people’s appearance over the past 10,000 years has found that our ancestors’ heads and faces were up to 30% larger than now.
Changes in diet are thought to be the main cause. The switch to softer, farmed foods means that jawbones, teeth, skulls and muscles do not need to be as strong as in the past.



The shrinkage has been blamed for a surge in dental problems caused by crooked or overlapping teeth.

“Over the past 10,000 years there has been a trend toward rounder skulls with smaller faces and jaws,” said Clark Spencer Larsen, professor of anthropology at Ohio State University.

“This began with the rise in farming and the increasing use of cooking, which began around 10,000 years ago.”

His conclusions are based on measurements from thousands of teeth, jawbones, skulls and other bones collected from prehistoric sites around the world.

Skulls from the site of a 9,000-year-old city in Turkey — thought to be the world’s oldest — show that the faces of city-dwellers had already begun to shrink compared with contemporaries who had not settled down.

Details will be reported at a forthcoming conference on the global history of health. Larsen will suggest that a typical human of 10,000 years ago would have had a much heavier build overall because of the hard work needed to gather food and stay alive.

He said: “Many men then would have had the shape of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s head while women might have looked more like Camilla [the Duchess of Cornwall]. By contrast, Tony Blair and George Bush are good examples of the more delicate modern form.”

Other studies are confirming Larsen’s findings. George Armelagos, professor of anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, has made extensive measurements on people from Nubia in modern Egypt and Sudan to see how their appearance has changed.

He found that the top of the head, or cranial vault, had grown higher and more rounded, a pattern also seen in human remains found at sites in other parts of the world.

Charles Loring Brace, professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, said: “Human faces are shrinking by 1%-2% every 1,000 years.

“What’s more, we are growing less teeth. Ten thousand years ago everyone grew wisdom teeth but now only half of us get them, and other teeth like the lateral incisors have become much smaller. This is evolution in action.”

Softer food may not be the only cause. Some scientists blame sexual selection — the preference of prehistoric people for partners with smaller faces.

Dr Simon Hillson, of the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, has studied humans living from 26,000 years ago to about 8,000 years ago. He measured 15,000 prehistoric teeth, jaws and skulls collected by museums around the world and found the same pattern of shrinking faces.

He said: “The presumption is that people must have chosen mates with smaller, shorter faces — but quite why this would be is less clear.”

[Prebe]

He said: “The presumption is that people must have chosen mates with smaller, shorter faces — but quite why this would be is less clear.”

Neoteny?

[Avatar]

Damn, saw a brief article in the paper about a guy casting doubt on the bird-dinosaur link, but can't find it on-line.

Apparently published in morphology journal, his experiments with decomposing collagen produced same effect (visually) as the apparent fossilised feathers. Suggests the feathers actually collagen imprint.

Anybody seen this?

--A

[Kinslaughterer]

Researchers to look into Victorian historical 'truths'

Polly Curtis, education correspondent
Friday November 25, 2005


Cambridge academics have scored a £1m grant to find out how much the Victorians reinvented history.
Classicists, historians, philosophers and English researchers at the university will team up to decipher how pre-Victorian history has been "filtered" through Victorian eyes to see whether there is room to reinterpret everything from the debauchery of the Middle Ages to the glamour of ancient Egypt.

The University of Cambridge team has been awarded more than £1m by the Leverhulme Trust to undertake the five-year research project starting next autumn.

"The Victorian era has been chosen by the team because the 19th-century is when history really started to matter, and to affect the lives of people in all parts of society. It was a time of extraordinary change," said Mary Beard, a professor of classics. "New pasts were created and old ones abandoned."

The Victorian era saw an explosion in investigation and understanding of ancient societies and human history. There were new theories and discoveries, from the Origin of Species to the uncovering of the biblical city of Nineveh which shed fresh light on history. The Victorians also came up with new methods of understanding it: museums, archaeological digs and displays of model dinosaurs, and much more. All this, the researchers argue, meant a shift in the interpretation of history.

"This project promises to have a significant impact on modern debates, from the role of 'heritage' to ideas of citizenship and multiculturalism. The British have been wrestling with these ideas for 150 years and we can learn from what the Victorians thought," said Professor Beard.

Some variations in historical interpretations that the academics will be looking at include:

· The were two principal discoveries of ancient Egyptian remains, in 1880 and then 1920. Each led to completely different interpretations about what life in ancient Egypt was like.

In 1880 when the Victorians discovered Tutankhamun's predecessor Akhenaten, they interpreted their findings to show that the Egyptians were conservative - they emphasised how they rejected the old gods and discovered one god, as well as values of truth and beauty, respectability and honour. It was some contrast to the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in the 1920s which led to a glamorous reinvention of Egypt as glittery and exotic and brutal, like something out of a Hollywood film.

· Or what about Merry England? The Victorians had quite vicious debates about whether the 16th century was "the Merrie England of Good Queen Bess", a continuous round of feasting and carousing and patriotism and harmony, or a grim period of religious intolerance and dictatorship and grinding poverty.

· Then there were debates about Greece and Rome. As early as the 1860s, some Victorian liberals were arguing that too much respect for Greece and Rome was positively anti-democratic, and that the compulsory teaching of Greek and Latin ought to be eliminated at grammar schools or even at Oxbridge. Modern languages such as French should be viewed as the proper foundation for a liberal education, some advocated. But others thought the Greeks were the fathers of democracy. Some thought the Greeks had prefigured Christianity, others that they were pagan and godless, others still (covertly) liked the paganism and godlessness and even (still more covertly!) celebrated the homoeroticism and naked emotionalism of certain aspects of classical Greek culture.

[Avatar]

It is the victors who write the songs that become history.

--Avatar

[Variol Farseer]

It is the victors who write the songs that become history.

--Avatar

An oft-repeated untruth, often cited to justify ignorance of history or the wilful telling of lies about historical facts. If all history is the lies of the winners, are we not justified in telling our own lies — as long as we win?

It would be far more accurate to say that it is the writers of songs who write the songs, and the relationship between winning and writing is one of mere chance. Poets and historians have no special virtue that enables them to win battles and wars. Often their writings live on after both they and the causes they championed are dead, while the propaganda of the winners fails to outlast the struggle itself. And several great historians took up the pen only when the defeat of their own side gave them the leisure to write and the incapacity to defend themselves in any other way.

If anyone wants a demonstration of this thesis, I shall supply, on request, a list of important historical episodes of which the most influential histories were written by the losers. But I warn you, it won't be a short list.

[Avatar]

Nice to see you around Variol Farseer. How about an excerpt from your list instead, just to give me a feel for it. You know, some of the more important examples.

However, regardless of the lasting power of such histories or otherwise, I'm sure you won't dispute that those who are victorious usually offer their version of events, suitably justifiable, as the official one?

That's perhaps not to say that it lasts for all eternity, indeed, I'd guess otherwise because eventually it will be questioned, and the longer the time that it was accepted, the more surely it will be questioned.

Perhaps I'm biased by the evidence of a very revisionist history having being taught in my country (and to me) for 40 odd years.

It wasn't so much about the willful telling of lies about historical "facts" as the idea that whatever is presented as "the way things were" should be taken carefully and in context, not to mention with a grain of salt. The "santisation" of official versions is by no means uncommon, not even today.

--Avatar

[Kinslaughterer]

Radar pinpoints tomb of King Edward the Confessor
By Jonathan Petre, Religion Correspondent
(Filed: 02/12/2005)

The ancient tomb of Edward the Confessor, one of the most revered of British saints, has been discovered under Westminster Abbey 1,000 years after his birth.

The original burial chamber of the Anglo-Saxon king, who died in 1066, months before the invasion of William the Conqueror, was revealed by archaeologists using the latest radar technology.



The existence of a number of royal tombs dating back to the 13th and 14th century was also discovered beneath the abbey, the venue for nearly all coronations since 1066.

The forgotten, sub-terranean chambers were located during conservation work on the abbey's medieval Cosmati mosaic pavement around the high altar.

Dr Warwick Rodwell, the abbey's consultant archaeologist, said the find was "extraordinarily exciting".

Until now archaeologists had assumed that the original tomb of Edward the Confessor was near the present high altar, because medieval records referred to him being buried there. It has now emerged, however, that the position of the altar was moved by Henry III in the mid 13th century. The archaeologists have located the original tomb 10 feet behind the present altar, under the shrine built by Henry III in 1269, which still contains the remains of the saint.

"We have never been able to locate the original tomb of Edward until now," said Dr Rodwell. "The Victorians tried to find out more about what tombs were under here, but they simply did not have the technology to do it. The mystery around the location of the crypt has been running for many years. Every day brings new insights and new facts." Dr Rodwell said an archaeological team had been examining the construction of the Cosmati pavement, which dates from 1268, using a very high-frequency radar to a depth of about 20 inches. The power of the radar was intensified to examine deeper sections of the pavement.

"Little did we expect that, by using a lower frequency radar, we would find chambers, vaults and foundations of such fascinating historical interest and dating back to the very founding of the abbey, over a millennium ago," said Dr Rodwell.

There are no plans to excavate the tomb because any such work would destroy the medieval pavement.

The discovery, made in October, has delighted the abbey as it has been marking Edward the Confessor's anniversary with a series of events.

Although not among the better known kings - his reign was relatively peaceful - his presence in British history has endured.

The principal royal crown is still called St Edward's crown, and the Coronation Chair is sometimes called St Edward's chair, even though both were made long after his death.

The son of Ethelred the Unready and Emma, the daughter of Richard I of Normandy, his family was exiled to Normandy after the Danish invasion of 1013 and he was largely educated there.

When his half brother, Hardecanute, died in 1042, he was acclaimed king. On his death he was succeeded by Harold, who was killed at the Battle of Hastings nine months later.

Edward's reputation for sanctity grew after the Norman conquest, and he was canonised by Pope Alexander III in 1161.

Edward was patron saint of England for more than four centuries, until 1415 when he was replaced by St George.

The archaeological team is now preparing further investigations to establish the purpose, history and content of the main tomb and the other chambers, graves and coffins they have found.

The Dean of Westminster, the Very Rev Wesley Carr, said: "It is another reminder of how abbey history and humanity are packed together."

[Prebe]

The son of Ethelred the Unready and Emma, the daughter of Richard I of Normandy, his family was exiled to Normandy after the Danish invasion of 1013 and he was largely educated there.

Not so strange that we threw his ass out of there. His father (Ethelred) did after all in 1002 slaughter the Danes that were there in the most unpleassant fashion: women were burried in the ground with their breast sticking out, painted with broth and hordes of wild dogs were unleashed upon them.

[The Laughing Man]

In 1002, he ordered the massacre of all Danes in England to eliminate potential treachery.

looks like you were asking for it.

[Prebe]

Nah

[The Laughing Man]

Not being an able soldier, Ethelred defended the country against increasingly rapacious Viking raids from the 980s onwards by diplomatic alliance with the duke of Normandy in 991 (he later married the duke's daughter Emma) and by buying off renewed attacks by the Danes with money levied through a tax called the Danegeld. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1006 was dismissive: 'in spite of it all, the Danish army went about as it pleased'. By 1012, 48,000 pounds of silver was being paid in Danegeld to Danes camped in London.

taking bribes?

[Prebe]

Nope, extorsion . We were areal bunch of bastards weren't we?

[The Laughing Man]

no more than any others in history Prebe. BTW, I love Beowolf and Thor!

oh yea, and the Bikini Teams!

[Kinslaughterer]

I once knew the craziest Dane....Paw Jorgenson. He's not a relative of yours is he Prebe?

[Prebe]

Sorry Kins, no relation. Although the name is rather unususal, and I think I have heard it before. Is he renowned for anything?

[Sunbaneglasses]

Every year when my grandparents plow their garden,they uncover at least a few arrow heads,and one time while hiking by a creek about a mile from my house I found a rock that was worked into a shape with a large ball like end,a indention all the way around the middle with a small ball shaped end(found under a bluff)The best I can tell it has to be some sort of tool used to pound things,the roundness and symmetry of both ends is amazing!Any idea what it is?

[Kinslaughterer]

Sounds like an worn axe head. If the middle is thinner it was probably centrally hafted. It was double sided and grounded to shape. You can actually cut down trees about as easy with a stone axe as you can a metal axe (assuming it is well made).