Plague Lit
Posted: March 29, 2020 Filed under: books Leave a comment
Have only gotten through the introduction to this one, big daddy of ’em all. Am now on the cusp of chapter One (“I – Man The Hunter”).
Disease and parasitism play a pervasive role in all of life. A successful search for food on the part of one organism becomes for its host a nasty infection or disease. All animals depend on other living things for food, and human beings are no exception. Problems of finding food and the changing ways human communities have done so are familiar enough in economic histories. The problems of avoiding becoming food for some other organism are less familiar, largely because from very early times human beings ceased to have much to fear from large-bodied animal predators like lions or wolves. Nevertheless, one can properly think of most human lives as caught in a precarious equilibrium between the microparasitism of disease organisms and the macroparasitism of large-bodied predators, chief among which have been other human beings.
Later, when food production became a way of life for some human communities, a modulated macroparasitism became possible. A conquerer could seize food from those who produced it, and by consuming it himself become a parasite of a new sort on those who did the work… Early civilizations, in fact, were built upon the possibility of taking only a part of the harvest from subjected communities, leaving enough behind to allow the plundered community to survive indefinitely, year after year.
In 1685 he joined the rebel army of the Duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate son of Charles II… the revolt failed, but Defoe managed to escape unscathed and unidentified – riding to greet the new King William III and Queen Mary II in 1688, becoming a sort of informal adviser to them. Then things get rocky.
Defoe was already a prolific and well-known author by the time he wrote A Journal of the Plague Year. At the age of sixty-two he had had careers as a merchant, a spy, a political journalist, a religious and social satirist, a poet, a travel writer, an economist, an author of conduct books, and a novelist.
I have heard also of some, who on the Death of their Relations, have grown stupid with the insupportable Sorrow, and of one in particular; who was so absolutely overcome with the Pressure upon his Spirirts, that by Degrees, his Head sunk into his Body, so between his Shoulders, that the Crown of his Head was very little seen above the Bones of his Shoulders; and by Degrees, loseing both Voice and Sense, his Face looking forward, lay against his Collar-Bone; and cou’d not be kept up any otherwise, unless held up by the Hands of other People; and the poor Man never came to himself again, but languished near a Year in that Condition and Died
Anthony Burgess in his 1966 introduction, included in this edition:
This is what it reads like and is meant to read like – a rapid, colloquial, sometimes clumsy setting-down of reminiscences of a great historical event… in reality it is a rather cunning work of art, a confidence trick of the imagination.
OK here we go! The summer of 1348, ten young people flee Florence, go to the countryside, and tell one hundred stories, some of them funny, some of them sexy.
Trying to learn storytelling a few years ago, I dove into this one, but now I couldn’t find my copy. This book is impressive for the sheer number of storytelling twists and plots:
but this go, can’t say I found it all that compelling.
Not to put it down, this is obviously an incredible achievement.
At the end Boccaccio has an epilogue that’s like a pre-attack on any possible criticisms. Maybe more books should have that.
My favorite story remains the tenth story of the third day, about a virgin who is taught by a monk how to put the Devil back in Hell.
Don’t have a copy of this one in my house. It sounds good!
Joseph Grand: Joseph Grand is a fifty-year-old clerk for the city government. He is tall and thin. Poorly paid, he lives an austere life, but he is capable of deep affection. In his spare time, Grand polishes up his Latin, and he is also writing a book, but he is such a perfectionist that he continually rewrites the first sentence and can get no further.
Hope to get to it eventually, but right now looking for something more amusing.
When I remember this era, will surely associate the early period more with Tiger King on Netflix.
Spreading the virus
Posted: March 27, 2020 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
There’s a phenomenon on social media I’ve been meaning to discuss on Helytimes, but I don’t know how to bring it up without being guilty of what I’m talking about. Maybe it doesn’t matter. It’s this: sharing something that’s bad.
This is incredibly common on Twitter. It might be the main driving engine on Twitter. “Dunking on” stuff might be the most common category. of this. You see something you don’t like, or that’s bad, or wrong, and you make fun of it. But in doing so, you are also of course spreading it further. Here’s an example:
Here’s another one:
One more:
I don’t mean to pick on these people, these are all pretty innocent examples (and I’ve done the same or worse), but you see what I’m talking about. It’s when you go, look at this shit! It sucks!
And I’m like well maybe I wouldn’t have even seen the shit if you didn’t tell me about it.
Sometime around 2014 or so I heard someone point out that Twitter has outsized power because every journalist is on it. Non-stop. It almost just a chat room for journalists (and media people). Journalists are drawn to spread the news, good and bad. Spreading the news is their job and I hope their passion. But what if what you’re spreading is bad, or unhelpful?
Probably the answer is just to get off Twitter, but I’m addicted to the news. It’s very addicting! I’m trying to work on not spreading anything bad, even if it’s funny or entertaining or exciting or, maybe most tempting of all, outrageous.
cause a scene
Posted: March 26, 2020 Filed under: politics Leave a comment
You’re the Speaker of the House, you’re eighty years old, two trillion dollars on the line, and the problem is someone might “cause a scene.”
The idea of “causing a scene worth thinking about!
Diné
Posted: March 13, 2020 Filed under: America, language, native america Leave a comment
Sapir’s special focus among American languages was in the Athabaskan languages, a family which especially fascinated him. In a private letter, he wrote: “Dene is probably the son-of-a-bitchiest language in America to actually know…most fascinating of all languages ever invented.”
I’ve been doing some work to learn:
- how it was that Navajo got to be classified as an Athabaskan language and
- what linguistic evidence exists for the northern origins of the Navajo.
This is a good journey, but challenging.
Sometimes it leads me to stuff like this:
which: ok, how much can we trust these linguists? Are we sure we’re on solid ground here?
The big categorizing of native American languages was done by Albert Gallatin in the 1830s.
Could he have been wrong? People were wrong a lot back then.
Well, after looking it with an amateur’s enthusiasm, I feel more trusting.
I feel confident Navajo/Diné is connected to languages of what’s now Alaska, British Columbia, and nearby turf.
Navajo / Diné speakers can be understood by speakers of other Athabaskan languages, and most of the words in Navajo seem to have Athabaskan origin.
Edward Sapir wrote a paper about internal evidence within the Navajo language for a northern origin to this people.
Sapir was wrong* about some things, but no one seems to doubt he was a pretty serious linguist.
How about Michael E. Krauss?
After completing a dissertation on Gaelic languages Krauss arrived in Alaska in 1960 to teach French at the University of Alaska.
Krauss’ largest contribution to language documentation is his work on Eyak, which began in 1961. Eyak was then already the most endangered of the Alaskan languages, and Krauss’ work is all the more notable considering that it represents what today might be considered salvage linguistics. While some Eyak data had been previously available, they were overlooked by previous scholars, including Edward Sapir. However, Eyak proved to be a crucial missing link for historical linguistics, being equally closely related to neighboring Ahtna and to distant Navajo. With good Eyak data it became possible to establish the existence of the Athabaskan–Eyak–Tlingit language family, though phonological evidence for links to Haida remained elusive.
If anyone makes any progress on native American language classifications while under precautionary self-quarantine, let us know
* I’m just teasing poor Sapir here, I don’t think it’s fair to “blame” him exactly for the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” which maybe isn’t even wrong, and as far as I can tell it was Whorf not Sapir who misunderstood Hopi
fast and decisive adjustments
Posted: March 12, 2020 Filed under: America Since 1945, business Leave a comment
This struck home, read it in a Sequoia Capital memo someone Twittered.
Also in the category of: clear writing from people in the world of VC/tech financing, an anecdote retold by Morgan Housel
The Battle of Stalingrad was the largest battle in history. With it came equally superlative stories of how people dealt with risk.
One came in late 1942, when a German tank unit sat in reserve on grasslands outside the city. When tanks were desperately needed on the front lines, something happened that surprised everyone: Almost none of the them worked.
Out of 104 tanks in the unit, fewer than 20 were operable. Engineers quickly found the issue, which, if I didn’t read this in a reputable history book, would defy belief. Historian William Craig writes: “During the weeks of inactivity behind the front lines, field mice had nested inside the vehicles and eaten away insulation covering the electrical systems.”
The Germans had the most sophisticated equipment in the world. Yet there they were, defeated by mice.
Primary tensions
Posted: March 3, 2020 Filed under: America Since 1945, Kennedy-Nixon Leave a comment
It’s the night of the West Virginia primary, May 10, 1960. Candidate John Kennedy, and Ben Bradlee, then Washington Bureau chief for Newsweek, cut the tension by going to see a porno:
(You can see the trailer here, it does seem like soft stuff by our standards)
Good luck out there voters, I hope your favorite candidate wins!
Joe Biden on Meet The Press
Posted: March 1, 2020 Filed under: America Since 1945, news Leave a comment
Instead of their opinions and guesses, I wish political commentators would offer simple facts, observations, like: Joe Biden doesn’t complete about 23*% of the sentences his starts.
A typical example of a Biden not completed sentence is like half a statistic or something followed by “I mean look” and a jump to a new thought.
Starting a new sentence whenever you’re lost is probably a great tactic if you find you get confused, lose the thread, or make frequent meanderings into language territory you can’t always get out of.
I’m aware Joe Biden has struggled with a stutter, and respect his struggle with it, you can see that in this Meet The Press appearance, that may partially explain this fact but doesn’t make it not a fact.
As for Mike Pence’s on Meet The Press, the less said the better. Rare cheers for Chuck Todd for pinning him down on naming names of what specific Democrats are “politicizing” the crisis. Pence came up with “the New York Times” (referencing I believe Gail Collins’ column).
One thought I’ve had about politics is there’s a wide gap in how important people think politics is or should be. I get a sense that, say, young Bernie voters tend to think “this is life or death! Politics means people’s lives!” while among a Trump-type voter you often get a sense of “whatever, it’s a stupid puppet show.”
After the 2008 election, when I looked back on how much time I’d spent like refreshing blogs and stuff, I resolved not to get too sucked into like following the events and commentary, but it’s a great temptation.
*actually counted and tried to make a fair estimate, what is wrong with me.
The Man Who Skied Down Everest (1975)
Posted: February 22, 2020 Filed under: adventures, mountains Leave a comment
Was scanning a list of Oscar winners for best documentary features the other day, and came across this one. 1975’s winner. Free on Amazon Prime. Or the whole thing is on YouTube.
A beautiful film in many ways, maybe a little slow-paced for today’s documentary viewer. Wasn’t sure how I felt about the ethics of this expedition. It seemed, at its heart, a little pointless compared to the dangers it courted? Not just to the expedition members, but to the 700 paid Sherpas and other porters. But maybe I’m just looking for an excuse to justify why I haven’t skied down Everest. I’m no Yuchiro Miura, that’s for sure.
A surprising number of readers of Helytimes found their way here looking for lists of mountaineering movies. A category where even the bad ones are good.
Sipapu
Posted: February 20, 2020 Filed under: native america, New Mexico, skiing Leave a commentI was at the bar in Santa Fe, New Mexico watching the national college football championship game, eating nachos and drinking beer. A small place, the atmosphere was social, and the guy next to me got to talking about skiing. He mentioned a small mountain called Sipapu. They’d just had some fresh snow and he made it sound so good. “It’s real small.” “Almost a local’s only mountain.” “They have great blues.” The only thing I had to do the next day was have lunch at 1pm, so I thought well heck, why don’t I wake up early and drive up there?
So that’s what I did, I woke up and drove up there very early, up past Chimayo and Abiquiu, in the Kit Carson National Forest. The spot was small and nothing fancy, there’s nowhere to stay up there, renting skis was kind of a rickety procedure. But once you got going it was beautiful, the sky was clear and blue, warm and the snow was soft.
I tried out the portrait mode on my phone.
Mostly, I had the place to myself.
I didn’t think much about the name, Sipapu, although I liked it. I said it in my head, alone on the chairlift. Sipapu.
Later I was home I was looking through this book:
From the glossary:
Sipapu.
Fire as visual entertainment
Posted: February 19, 2020 Filed under: joshua tree Leave a comment
Been blessed to sit by some good fires in the last while.
The warmth and the draw of a campfire, we all know. A good fire is also a fun thing to watch, a visual entertainment as well.
Cahokia news
Posted: February 6, 2020 Filed under: archaeology, native america Leave a comment
Don’t get too excited by the headline over at Phys.org. What they really seem to have found is that people continued to live in the Cahokia region even after the big population center “collapsed” or sort of dwindled out.
I call your attention to this article because it highlights what I love about archaeology: the extremes of methodology. You read this and you’re like cool, new light on an ancient city. How did they find it out?
To collect the evidence, White and colleagues paddled out into Horseshoe Lake, which is adjacent to Cahokia Mounds State Historical Site, and dug up core samples of mud some 10 feet below the lakebed. By measuring concentrations of fecal stanols, they were able to gauge population changes from the Mississippian period through European contact.
These people are paddling out into a lake, dredging up mud, and testing it for human shit.
You know what? There are worse ways to spend an afternoon. There’s something so deeply funny and human about thinking that maybe in a thousand years or so some archaeologist will be studying your stool to find out what the hell you were up to.
Coaches, Super Bowl LIV
Posted: February 2, 2020 Filed under: America Since 1945, sports Leave a comment
Andy Reid, head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs football team, poses for a photo with leadership of the 139th Airlift Wing, Missouri Air National Guard, at the Chief’s training camp in St. Joseph, Mo., Aug. 14, 2018. The Chiefs hosted a military appreciation day on their final day of training. (U.S. Air National Guard photo by Master Sgt. Michael Crane)
Will you be doing a coaches profile for the Super Bowl this year, Helytimes, as you’ve done in the past?
I get asked this so much when I’m out.
To be honest, I can’t do it this year. Just haven’t had the free time and enthusiasm to study the biographies, food habits, and philosophies of the two coaches to give a true, honest effort.
I’d say from a quick skim I admire much about both Andy Reid and Kyle Shanahan.
(I like those shoes.)
Reid is from LA:
Born in Los Angeles, California, Reid attended John Marshall High School and worked as a vendor at Dodger Stadium as a teenager.
If I have to make a flash prediction it’s that Reid will put in the superior coaching effort and execute the better strategy, and the Chiefs will win the game as well as beat the current 1.5 Vegas spread.
(I will not be betting on it, I don’t think I have any edge, sports betting isn’t my thing. The only skin I put behind this prediction is my public reputation for sports predicting acumen (which I don’t value much)).
Enjoy the Super Bowl, everyone. Send us a picture of your favorite snack!
Daniel Vickers
Posted: February 1, 2020 Filed under: history, New England 3 Comments
source
Happened to turn on the TV the other day and Good Will Hunting was on. What a great movie. It’s a superhero movie.
We were right in the scene where Will backs up Ben Affleck and destroys a jerk who’s showing off his education.
One moment in this scene I’ve thought about more than necessary is when Will identifies the jerk (he’s listed as “Clark” on IMDb, played with precision by Scott William Winters) as “a first year grad student.” Given how much Clark knows about history, and his reading list, should we infer that Scott William Winters is a first year grad student in history?
WILL: See the sad thing about a guy like you is in about 50 years you’re gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you’re gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One, don’t do that. And two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin’ education you coulda got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the Public Library.
CLARK: Yeah, but I will have a degree, and you’ll be serving my kids fries at a drive-thru on our way to a skiing trip.
WILL: [smiles] Yeah, maybe. But at least I won’t be unoriginal.
It’s interesting that Clark’s brag is that Will will be “serving my kids fries on their way to a ski trip.” There are no doubt history professors living this way, but I do feel if that were your goal, becoming a grad student in academic history would be a harder way to go than like, business school or something?
Maybe that is part of the point Will is making about what a dope this guy is.
In their exchange, Will cites “Vickers, Work In Essex County.”
Had to look this one up, and boy, did I profit. I learned about Daniel Vickers, who sounds like an amazing man. From a Globe & Mail “I Remember” by Don Lepan:
Dr. Vickers went to Princeton for his PhD. It was there that he began what became his life’s work academically, but he found Princeton itself stiflingly elitist, and escaped as often as he could to Toronto or to New England towns such as Salem or Nantucket, Mass., where he would spend long hours poring over local records.
God that’s beautiful. Can you imagine sitting in Nantucket, poring over the records? (Yes).
This was followed in 2005 by Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail, in which Dr. Vickers challenged the long tradition of treating a young man’s decision to go to sea as an inherently momentous one, and the life of a seafarer as inherently exceptional; again through painstaking archival research, he demonstrated that that most young men who went to sea did so with a sense of inevitability – and that not until the late 19th century did seafaring life begin to seem exceptional. Maritime history was somewhat out of fashion with the general public when the book appeared and it sold less well than its publishers had hoped, but reviews of Dr. Vickers’s work by historians were again extraordinarily enthusiastic; the book was praised as “a masterly work” and “the most original American maritime history ever published.”
As with his first book, Dr. Vickers was aided greatly in his research by his wife, Christine.
Vickers taught at UCSD for awhile, but
the family found the suburban lifestyle and sunny consumerism of San Diego less congenial than the rocky insularity and dour humour of Newfoundland.
If you prefer Newfoundland to San Diego, come sit near me.
Wanted to share that with the Helytimes family. Have a good weekend everyone! I bet the picture of Daniel Vickers here will give you some cheer.
When I read about UK or USA politics
Posted: January 31, 2020 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics Leave a comment
sometimes I’m just like, haven’t we seen this before?
How Will You Measure Your Life?
Posted: January 27, 2020 Filed under: business, food Leave a comment
Some books give value just with their title. I’d say I think about the title of Clayton Christensen’s book about once every two weeks or so. Most of what’s in the book can be found in Christensen’s 2010 speech on that theme.
This theory addresses the third question I discuss with my students—how to live a life of integrity (stay out of jail). Unconsciously, we often employ the marginal cost doctrine in our personal lives when we choose between right and wrong. A voice in our head says, “Look, I know that as a general rule, most people shouldn’t do this. But in this particular extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s OK.” The marginal cost of doing something wrong “just this once” always seems alluringly low. It suckers you in, and you don’t ever look at where that path ultimately is headed and at the full costs that the choice entails. Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of “just this once.”
I also find myself often thinking of an anecdote about milkshake purchases Christensen describes in the book:
The company then enlisted the help of one of Christensen’s fellow researchers, who approached the situation by trying to deduce the “job” that customers were “hiring” a milkshake to do. First, he spent a full day in one of the chain’s restaurants, carefully documenting who was buying milkshakes, when they bought them, and whether they drank them on the premises. He discovered that 40 percent of the milkshakes were purchased first thing in the morning, by commuters who ordered them to go.
The next morning, he returned to the restaurant and interviewed customers who left with milkshake in hand, asking them what job they had hired the milkshake to do. Christensen details the findings in a recent teaching note, “Integrating Around the Job to be Done.”
“Most of them, it turned out, bought [the milkshake] to do a similar job,” he writes. “They faced a long, boring commute and needed something to keep that extra hand busy and to make the commute more interesting. They weren’t yet hungry, but knew that they’d be hungry by 10 a.m.; they wanted to consume something now that would stave off hunger until noon. And they faced constraints: They were in a hurry, they were wearing work clothes, and they had (at most) one free hand.”
The milkshake was hired in lieu of a bagel or doughnut because it was relatively tidy and appetite-quenching, and because trying to suck a thick liquid through a thin straw gave customers something to do with their boring commute.
Something illuminating about food as something to do.
Understanding the job to be done, the company could then respond by creating a morning milkshake that was even thicker (to last through a long commute) and more interesting (with chunks of fruit) than its predecessor. The chain could also respond to a separate job that customers needed milkshakes to do: serve as a special treat for young children—without making the parents wait a half hour as the children tried to work the milkshake through a straw. In that case, a different, thinner milkshake was in order.
In the book, Christensen also goes on about how parents have to say no very often, and a milkshake is a relatively easy “yes.”
The Wanderer’s Hávamál translated by Jackson Crawford
Posted: January 27, 2020 Filed under: advice, travel, words, writing Leave a comment
loving this one. Supposedly the words of Odin himself.
Even Odin gets sloppy sometimes.
Crawford includes the Old Norse, if you need that. I’m not up on my Old Norse, I’m way behind on my Arabic as it is, my French is déchet, my Spanish is worse, most of my Irish is forgotten, but it’s cool to look at some of these syllables.
The Supernova pictograph
Posted: January 22, 2020 Filed under: art history, New Mexico 2 Comments
Regular readers of this website will know I’ve expressed some reservations about whether the Peñasco Blanco pictograph actually depicts a supernova from the year 1054 AD. It’s an exciting theory. For background, here’s what Timothy Pauketat has to say about it in his excellent book on Cahokia:
On that morning, recorded by a Chinese astrologer as July 4, a brilliant new luminary appeared in the sky. It was a “guest star,” a supernova, a visitor in the constellation Taurus, visible today with a high-powered telescope as the Crab Nebula. One of only fifty supernovas ever recorded – only three in our own Milky Way galaxy* – this nuclear detonation was the last gasp of a dying star. The inaudible explosion discharged a billion times more energy than the small star had previously emitted, and that morning a brilliant beacon – four times brighter than Venus – appeared in the daylight adjacent to a crescent moon…
Whatever i might have meant to the native peoples, a New Mexican Mimbres valley potter commemorated the celestial event by painting a pot with a star ad the foot of a crescent-shaped rabbit, a representation of the rabbit many indigenous North Americans believed resided in the moon. Ancient rock art in Arizona also appears to illustrate the supernova, as do petrogylphs in Missouri, which show the moon and supernova astride rabbit tracks. And in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, a map of the night sky in July 1054 was painted on the sandstone cliffs above a palatial-sized, multi-story Great House called Peñasco Blanco, under construction at about the same time in the middle of the eleventh century. The pictograph shows the exploding star next to a crescent moon and a human hand, the later possibly representing a group of stars still known among Plains Indians today as the Hand constellation. Also in Chaco Canyon, construction began around this time on a massive new kiva, an underground ceremonial building, now called Casa Rinconada, just south of the largest Great House, Pueblo Bonito.
There was a “big bang” culturally in North America around 1000 AD, and it is interesting that around that same time, there were two supernovas, bright new stars in the sky.
Recently I had the opportunity to have a look at the so-called Supernova Pictograph in its location in Chaco Canyon, New Mex. Seeing it myself provoked some thought.
One observation is that there’s a huge amount of rock art in Chaco Canyon. I consider myself kind of a petroglyph enthusiast, but even for a passionate fan, there’s a lot. You’ll actually get pretty bored of looking at petroglyphs. Much of the rock art in the canyon is striking and weird.
Some of it feels pretty crude and amateur, or could be attributed to later visitors.
But the Super-Nova / Peñasco Blanco pictograph really stands out, both in vividness and in the drama of its location.
It’s almost upside down. Was it painted Sistine Chapel style?
The pictoglyph is on what I guess? could be a very old trail, that leads up from Chaco Wash to a mesa where the Peñasco Blanco “great house” sits. The Peñasco Blanco site is huge:
It was three stories tall and had 300 rooms. Construction had begun by the 900s, so before the appearance of the supernovas of the 1000s.
The structure was laid out with some thought to north-south alignment, as most Chaco sites seem to have been. To me it does suggest something like an astronomical theater:
On the day I was there I was the only person around, which is a spooky feeling.
The site reminded me of Irish monastic sites from the same era:
Certainly whoever was hanging around Peñasco Blanco was interested in the sky.
The park service is not shy about identifying this pictoglyph as depicting a super-nova:
Note the sign, bottom right. But I’m just not sure the evidence is there.
Krupp’s investigations have ultimately caused him to dismiss all of the connections between Southwest cave paintings and the Crab supernova. “I am certain that star-crescent combos have absolutely nothing to do with the 1054 A.D. event,” he said. While some may indeed be celestial symbols, “their meaning varies with culture and time.”
from a 2014 Scientific American piece, “‘Supernova’ Cave Art Myth Debunked,” by Clara Moskowitz.
On the other hand:
from a 1979 paper, “The 1054 Supernova and Native American Rock Art,” by Brandt, J. C. & Williamson, R. A. in the Journal for the History of Astronomy, Archaeoastronomy Supplement, Vol. 10, p.S1
There’s no way to reliably date a work like this. Chaco Canyon was occupied or had at least semi-frequent visitors around 1054 AD, and these visitors were absolutely interested in sky events. The dating of the pictograph is usually attributed to nearby pottery shards. You can still find ancient pottery lying around all over the place.
obviously reader I left this where I found it.
One thing is clear: if these people had a message they wanted to leave for us from one thousand plus years ago, it is “hand – crescent – star.”
A day before visiting this site I had lunch with a friend of mine who works on shooting lasers at rocks on Mars to determine their chemical makeup. We’re still OBSESSED with the sky!
Los Danzantes of Monte Alban
Posted: January 12, 2020 Filed under: UNESCO, Wonder Trail Leave a comment
Monte Alban is a pre-Columbian site near the present day Mexican city of Oaxaca. It thrived sometime between about 500 BCE and 500 CE.
One of the famed features of the site are some carvings called Los Danzantes, “the dancers”
That’s a fun interpretation! However, current thinking suggests that these aren’t, in fact, people having a cool time dancing, but captives being subjected to various horrible tortures. Having their genitals mutilated and so on. There are glyphs next to their heads, maybe their names, and the idea is the Monte Albanians were celebrating conquering and torturing the leaders of various rival towns.
That was the interpretation of Michael Coe anyway, one of the great Mesoamerican problem solvers. In this book:
it’s suggested that the Danzantes may have been connected to a war memorial:
Still, you have to account for the emphasis on the genital messed-upitude. Are we looking at a self-punishment that led to ritual visions, not unlike the Mayan case of Lady Xoc?
from wikicommons, photo by Michel Wai
Looking at the Danzantes, I wondered at an alternative explanation, if these are depictions of people suffering from a weird disease or plague of some kind. (I’m not the first to think of that).
Or maybe they’re up to some shamanic ritual. Here’s a whole paper by John F. Scott and W. P. Hewitt from 1978 looking into the mystery. Some possible explanations are explored:
It struck me looking at this photo that the Danzantes have a resemblance to the gravestones of early New England.
from Needhamhistory.org
These too will perhaps be mysterious and a subject of speculation when they are 1600 years old. They’re already pretty weird.
Los Danzantes is also the name of a highly regarded restaurant in Oaxaca and Mexico City:
Helytimes 
