Legend of Lost City Spurs Exploration, Debate | Ciudad Blanca. Deep in the dense rain forests of Honduras, a glittering white city sits in ruins, waiting for discovery. The inhabitants there once ate off plates of gold; the metropolis was, perhaps, the birthplace of a god. A recent high-tech survey of the region by air reveals possible pyramids and other structures. Has the lost city of Ciudad Blanca been found? Or did it ever exist at all? Probably not, according to archaeologists and anthropologists, who generally agree there was once something in the eastern Honduras rain forest — though likely not a city of mythical wealth and luxury. In fact, the legend of this ancient city may be a relatively new one, said John Hoopes, an archaeologist and specialist in southern Central American cultures at the University of Kansas. "I think the media is contributing to the growth of a legend," Hoopes, who was not involved in the ruins' discovery, told LiveScience.
A lost city, or simply a myth? Exploration and preservation "It is a concern," he said. Lise Balk King: The Everlasting Fantasy of Native Americans. While everyone is focused on Johnny Depp's Tonto, debating the merits of donning "red face" in order to "... give some hope to kids on the reservations," the President of the United States has quietly continued his reparative work on the broken U.S. Federal Indian Policy to nary an audience. The timing couldn't be more ironic, or telling, about how we choose as a nation to frame Native America. It is so much easier to add our $12 to the coffers of Disney and Depp in order to enter the debate about our fantastical American history. What we really could, and should, be doing is paying attention to the real life and work being done to address our own historic holocaust. "This land is our land, this land is your land"? This land was their land, and how we choose to continue this sentimentalist view, and therefore keep our moral distance from responsibility, is right out of a Hollywood escapist fantasy.
So, what does this mean to you, Depp-loving American? History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places | Smithsonian. Gold of the Indies. European Expansion "The quantity of gold they have is endless …" —Marco Polo During the earliest years of European expansion onto the American continents, the search for gold was one of the driving factors in the exploration and colonization of the vast lands.
The existence of the two great continents was unknown in Europe until the fateful day in October 1492 when Christopher Columbus landed on an "island in the Indies," having miscalculated the circumference of the globe by about 25 percent. Columbus, a master mariner then in the service of Spain, and an avid reader, was searching for Cipangu (Japan), the island of "endless gold," about which he had read with great excitement in Marco Polo's Travels.
Convinced that fabled Cipangu was not far from the small island on which he had landed, Columbus went ashore and, unfurling royal standards, claimed it for his sponsors, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain—thereby initiating what would become the vast Spanish empire in America. The Inca Empire's Strange Economy. Please Subscribe to 3QD If you would like to make a one time donation in any amount, please do so by clicking the "Pay Now" button below.
You may use any credit or debit card and do NOT need to join Paypal. The editors of 3QD put in hundreds of hours of effort each month into finding the daily links and poem, putting out the Monday Magazine, administering the Quark Prizes, arranging the DAG-3QD Peace and Justice Symposia, and doing the massive amount of behind-the-scenes work which goes into running the site. If you value what we do, please help us to pay our editors very modest salaries for their time and cover our other costs by subscribing above. We are extremely grateful for the generous support of our loyal readers. Thank you! 3QD on Facebook 3QD on Twitter 3QD by RSS Feed 3QD by Daily Email Recent Comments Powered by Disqus Miscellany Design and Photo Credits The original site was designed by Mikko Hyppönen and deployed by Henrik Rydberg. The Inca Empire's Strange Economy Analee Newitz in io9: Chachapoyas sarcophagi discovered in Amazonas, Peru.
Posted by TANNAmericas, ArchaeoHeritage, Archaeology, Breakingnews, Peru, South America5:00 PM Archaeologists working in the Amazonas region of Peru have discovered 35 sarcophagi belonging to the Chachapoyas culture. Peru21 reports that the find was made this past July with the help of a super long zoom camera. In September, researchers were able to reach the site to confirm the find and discovered that the sarcophagi were only about 70 centimeters tall on average. Researchers believe that the group of sarcophagi may constitute a cemetery in which only children were buried.
According to Peru21, the burial site is unique in that the sarcophagi were buried facing west, which is unusual for Chachapoyas cemeteries. Manuel Cabañas López of the regional Ministry of Exterior Commerce and Tourism told press “Because of the magnitude of the find, we’re dealing with a discovery that is unique in the world, which should be protected and integrated into the touristic circuit.” African Mask/Masquerade: More Than Meets the Eye.
African Mask/Masquerade: More Than Meets the Eye January 25-September 14, 2014 People often think of African masks as wooden face coverings that hang on museum walls. Within their original communities, however, African masks performed in full costume to serve many vital functions. Music, song and dance are essential to their effectiveness. The diversity of creative expression of African masks and masquerades is unparalleled. To highlight a group of generous recent gifts and Museum purchases, this show brings together dynamic works of art from western and central Africa, including several masquerades in full costume. The Black Israelites Think Whites Are Possessed by the Devil. Photos by Conor Lamb In case you missed it, neo-Nazis were supposed to take New York City, and much of America, by storm on March 15.
It was all part of a scheme hatched on the white-supremacist chat rooms of Stormfront. They called for a national “white man's March.” Unsurprisingly, the planned nationwide protest ended up being a complete dud. I know, because I spent the day scouring Manhattan looking for fascists. They were no shows at Grand Army Plaza near Central Park, where they had planned to congregate.
But that's not to say I didn’t find racists on March 15; they just weren’t white. If you live in a major American city, you may have encountered a variation of the scene I witnessed: men who look like they've wandered off the set of an all–African American production of Jesus Christ Superstar, soapboxing on the street corner to puzzled passersby. Their garments read “Israelites United in Christ” in a font that looked as if it had been borrowed from a poster for Disney's Aladdin. Cnqmdi: my thought process during ... Mapping Inca Times in Subterranean Cusco. Cusco’s rooftops (Photo courtesy of Kenneth Moore/flickr) Peru’s culture ministry has announced a new subterranean mapping initiative that will allow archaeologists to explore pre-Columbian Cusco without picking up any shovels, the AFP reported. In the 16th century, Spanish conquistadors invaded the magnificent Inca capital, razed its buildings, and symbolically constructed their own homes, cathedrals, and municipal buildings atop the ruins.
“The historic center of Cusco is like an overlay of several skins, you lift a stone and you find amazing vestiges of earlier cultures,” Ricardo Ruiz Caro, a culture ministry spokesperson, said. Travel to the city today, and you can sleep in a 17th-century mansion built on a pre-Hispanic foundation or wander through a monastery constructed above the Inca temple of Qurikancha. Cusco is built on many civilizations and some of these layers are obvious from street level, like the Inca masonry here with a Spanish Colonial structure above.
H/t ArtDaily. Aztec Death Whistle. Africa defies Rome' at The British Museum. Find out how this iconic bronze head of Rome’s first emperor Augustus became a symbol of African resistance in the ancient royal city of Meroë, in northern Sudan. When the Meroë Head was excavated in 1910, it caused an immediate sensation. It is remarkably well preserved and only survived because in antiquity it was ritually buried far from the borders of the Roman Empire. In this display you will come face to face with this potent symbol of Rome’s authority, and see how grains of sand, fused to the corroded surface of the bronze, still hint at its dramatic fate. Augustus became sole ruler in 27 BC, after a civil war that followed Julius Caesar’s assassination. The Meroë Head must have been created soon after. Further to the south, in what is now northern Sudan, lay Kush, a powerful African kingdom with its capital at Meroë.
Mysterious pre-Columbian spheres on show in Costa Rican capital. The mysterious pre-Columbian spheres and other objects from an area in southern Costa Rica declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO can now be seen at in an exhibition in San Jose. The National Museum of Costa Rica opened a show this week entitled "Diquis: World Heritage Site," which presents stone spheres and other objects from four pre-Columbian indigenous settlements near the town of Osa in the southern province of Puntarenas.
"This exhibition helps us understand their cultural development. It's important to realize there were societies with a very complex organization at the political, cultural and religious levels," the museum curator, Adrian Badilla, told Efe. The show includes 67 pre-Columbian objects in stone, ceramic, gold, bone and shell that reveal the creativity and craftsmanship of inhabitants of the Diquis Delta. "The exhibition tries to show how the spheres are related to other objects including the architecture of homes and other structures," the archaeologist said.
Cartography: The true true size of Africa. LAST month Kai Krause, a computer-graphics guru, caused a stir with a map entitled "The True Size of Africa", which showed the outlines of other countries crammed into the outline of the African continent. His aim was to make "a small contribution in the fight against rampant Immappancy"—in particular, the fact that most people do not realise how much the ubiquitous Mercator projection distorts the relative sizes of countries.
A sphere cannot be represented on a flat plane without distortion, which means all map projections distort in one way or another. Some projections show areas accurately but distort distances or scales, for example; others preserve the shapes of countries but misrepresent their areas. You can read all the gory details on Wikipedia. Gerardus Mercator's projection, published in 1569, was immediately useful because it depicts a line of constant bearing as a straight line, which is handy for marine navigation.
Ancient dogs in the Americas yields insights into human, dog migration. A new study suggests that dogs may have first successfully migrated to the Americas only about 10,000 years ago, thousands of years after the first human migrants crossed a land bridge from Siberia to North America. The study looked at the genetic characteristics of 84 individual dogs from more than a dozen sites in North and South America, and is the largest analysis so far of ancient dogs in the Americas. The findings appear in the Journal of Human Evolution. Unlike their wild wolf predecessors, ancient dogs learned to tolerate human company and generally benefited from the association: They gained access to new food sources, enjoyed the safety of human encampments and, eventually, traveled the world with their two-legged masters.
Dogs also were pressed into service as beasts of burden, and sometimes were served as food, particularly on special occasions. The new study also focused on mitochondrial DNA, but included a much larger sample of dogs than had been analyzed before. Aztec app brings historic Mexico codex into the digital age. A 16th century document considered one of the most important primary sources on the Aztecs of pre-Columbian Mexico went digital Thursday with a new app that aims to spur research and discussion. The Codex Mendoza is a 1542 illustrated report ordered by Spanish viceroy Antonio de Mendoza that details sources of riches, Aztec expansion and territorial tributes, and chronicles daily life and social dynamics. The new interactive codex lets users page through the virtual document, mouse-over the old Spanish text for translations into English or modern Spanish, click on images for richer explanations and explore maps of the area.
Presented by Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, the digital codex is available free both on the Internet and through Apple's App Store as a 1.02-gigabyte app. "Never before had these tools been used to amplify understanding of a document of these characteristics," said Ernesto Miranda, the institute's director of academic innovation. Said, Bhabha and Post-Colonial Criticism | Cult.
I really found this lecture quite interesting, if only because it provided me with a starting point to understanding post-colonial criticism. Fry puts forward, among other things, that Said’s writing regarding Orientalism represents, what he calls, “phase one” of post-colonial criticism, structuralism, and that Bhabha’s theorizing regarding ambivalence and hybridity marks “phase two”, deconstruction. I realise that Fry is obviously simplifying matters in order to provide a quick overview of post-colonial criticism, which is indeed a very complex and diverse field of study. However, I find he does provide a good introduction to these two thinkers, by providing backgroud information and discussing their influences, for example.
(Fry explains that Said was influenced by the writing of Gramsci and Foucault; whereas Bhabha was influenced by, and was very much writing in response to, Hegel). Like this: Like Loading... Black Skin, White Masks - Frantz Fanon. Cabeza masculina de Palenque - unknown - Google Cultural Institute. Beyond Voodoo: Defying Expectations of Haitian Art. Jean-Ulrick Désert, “Constellations de la Déesse / Ciel au-dessus de Port-au-Prince” (2012) (all photos courtesy the Grand Palais unless otherwise noted) PARIS — Winter has been kind to art lovers in Paris. The gorgeously renovated Musée Picasso has reopened, and the city is alive with a number of top-shelf exhibitions. Over at the Grand Palais alone, crowds queue to see shows of Hokusai and Nikide Saint Phalle, but it is Haiti: Two Centuries of Artistic Creation that offers a particularly exciting feast of work to savor. Bringing together over 160 pieces and covering some 200 years’ worth of output by Haitian artists — at home or in the diaspora — the show is loosely organized around four guiding themes and beautifully set in a single, giant gallery that allows visitors considerable flexibility in how they choose to construct their experience of the exhibit.
Haiti has ambitions beyond what its title suggests, however. Sebastien Jean, “Attaque” (2013) Abusing the Marquis de Sade. Researchers use isotopic analysis to explore ancient Peruvian life. The hormonal basis of affiliation and competition among hunters in Bolivian Amazon. Jungle festivals led to first Mayan cities - science-in-society - 23 March 2015. Uniao Do Vegetal Church In New Mexico Opens Up To NPR. “Redskins” Is a Racial Slur Dating Back to 1755. Native American Zodiac Signs | Native American Encyclopedia.
New Evidence Unearthed for the Origins of the Maya. Anthropology, Footnoted: Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday—Vol. 1, No. 2—The Appendix. Bellette and Yarico: Working Women in the Colonial West Indies—The Appendix. Antiquities dealer Leonardo Patterson arrested in Spain | Anonymous Swiss Collector. Native masks are not art. Hopi Katsinam Auction in Paris: A Conversation with the Auctioneer - ICTMN.com. May I Enter. Last Call Indian. Said, Bhabha and Post-Colonial Criticism | Cult. Black Skin, White Masks - Frantz Fanon. America, a Personification (ca. 1590) Sitting at the Thrones of Nigerian Kings. Archaeological research conducted at three sites occupied by the Mochicas. In Mainstream Museums, Confronting Colonialism While Curating Native American Art.
More on Name on Mayan King Pakal's tomb decoded. Cahuachi Sanctuary is bigger than Chan Chan, says archaeologist. Comparing the Afterlives of Peruvian and Egyptian Mummies. Black America, please stop appropriating African clothing and tribal marks. — THOSE PEOPLE — Medium. National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City exhibits the enigmatic Calakmul mask. Claiming What’s Ours — THOSE PEOPLE — Medium. Django unchained is the help. History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places. Polynesian DNA mysteriously shows up in a Brazilian tribe. Statues also die. Maya Censer Stands | Kimbell Art Museum.
Walmart destroys the cultural heritage of Mexico. Vatican uncovers 'first Western painting of Native Americans' Postcolonialism and Authenticity | Methods of Advanced Literary Studies. History In Pictures sur Twitter : "Bet you didn't realise just how huge Africa is...