Archives for December 2024

Sunday, December 22, 2024

There’s a wave coming. I feel it building. The earth isn’t quite shaking but there are trembles. Trembles of idiocy. A man who has no morals, scruples, ethics, or sense is going to be running our country soon. He has been aided and abetted by fools, cons, and the insidious greedy. They don’t care one wit about our country or its principles. 

I heard him say he ran on groceries. That prices of groceries were up. He then named items that were groceries. As if it was a contest where he was asked to name groceries. Eggs, bacon … This from a man whose running mate stood in front of a display of eggs and said $4 a dozen was too much, while the sign behind him said 2 dozen for $4. They have no idea, and they don’t care.

It seems Elon Musk will be running the country and Donald will be holding press conferences. The major plan seems to be to increase the debt, slash any programs that help people and give people like Elon a huge tax break. Or as one headline put it, “Elon’s tax cut will be paid with your Social Security and Medicare.”

Ah me. what to do? Well, go about your business, and … and what? I don’t know. It all seems so horrible. Not as horrible as if the reformed heroin addict and brain worm eaten tuna poisoned fool actually gets in charge of HHS, but pretty bad. But then again I saw the picture of Tiny Tim on crutches with the caption asking, “What’s a little Christmas without Polio”? I saw caption that in Michigan cases of some terrible disease are up like 1000% since they’ve stopped vaccinating people against it.

Do your own research!

Yeah. Right. Rupert Murdock and OAN will give it to you.

Speaking of OAN who wants to listen to Matt Gaetz? OMG.

After the High Renaissance came Mannerism. Think El Greco and many others. The colors were distorted, limbs elongated and twisted. Why? What happened? The realism of the High Renaissance could only go so far. Artists, and I’m guessing society, were looking for something new.

In 1907 when moving pictures came to Paris the artists of Montmartre realized they had to change. No longer would realistic portraits pay the bills. Fortunately, (or unfortunately depending on your point of view), there was a museum of African art. There were masks with one face but shown from two perspectives. One eye showed the face from the side and the other straight on. What? You thought Picasso came up with that idea all by himself?

If art follows and reflects our culture and society what will we see in the coming years?

If culture is what people say to one another and pass down from generation to generation what is being said?

If we are informed by quacks, fakes, and lies what happens to our society? If a lie travels faster than the truth what chance do we as a society have?

There are three examples from history that might be relevant:

Constantinople: Every time the church officials and the rich landowners came into power they passed laws that relieved them of paying taxes. The taxes then fell completely on the middle class. The middle class then left and literally, “took to the hills.” Constantinople stood as a bulwark against the Islamic forces. Time and time again they stopped them. Then came the cannon. A weapon they refused to pay for. The other side bought it and with it they shattered the mighty walls of that city. In Europe people were astonished. How could it have fallen? It never fell before? (Hint: you did nothing to support them!!!)

The 100 Years War – it ended due to exhaustion. Not by the two main adversaries but by everyone else who did the fighting and were dragged into it. Apparently, after round after round of one religious fanatic or the other coming into town and killing every one of the other belief, people had enough.

Mussolini or Basar al Assad: Bullies sometimes get their comeuppance. Not always, there are lots of examples of them dying while still in power: Stalin and Franco come to mind. What determines whether they stay of go is one of two things: an outside force or a uprising of the population.

How do societies fall into these messes and what are the remedies to not? Education seems critical to stopping it. Access to information seems another. Both are under attack in our country. Will we survive and be the nation we were? With over 50% of the population barely able to read at a grade school level and a majority of people listening only to propaganda the odds are not in our favor.

We can all do little things. Help out. Help to educate. Don’t let someone get mistreated. It is our job to speak up. To stand up when someone bullies another. to point out falsity whenever possible.

Gas is under $2.90 a gallon.

December 16, 2024

The trip has wrapped up. I’m back home. The first things I did when I got back were to drink water out of the tap and flush the toilet paper down the drain and not put it in the basket beside the porcelain throne. Ah me, America.

I way over packed for this trip. I was sick just before going and didn’t do a purge of my selected clothing. Rather, I threw everything into the bag. Big mistake. 

I was feeling okay a day or two before the trip and my sinus and chest congestion went completely away by day two. That only left my out of shape body to deal with. Because I had been sick before the trip I hadn’t done any conditioning. I have found if I do a series of exercises in the morning my back doesn’t hurt, and I did them. But then my hip joints ached. One of the women on the trip asked me if I had taken any ibuprofen. No, I had’t. She promptly gave me some of hers that she was carrying. I told her I had some back at the hotel. I discovered on my return that I had not one, but two bottles of the meds. 

Now here’s where it gets weird. I always carry the stuff in my medicine bag, but I never take it. You know, you might need it and you don’t want to waste it. Yeah, I know, Now. That’s crazy thinking, but hey. It’s what I was doing. In my mind, the last dot was connected for me with the simple question, “Do you have any ibuprofen?” And then I realized Oh that’s what it’s for!

I know it’s kind of crazy. No, it is crazy. But after years of therapy you can sometime figure this stuff out. And the hardest to unravel is the crazy stuff. Because to admit it is to tell the world, and who wants to look stupid? But now I realize, yeah, I’m willing to look stupid. Like when you were hanging out trying to look cool and someone asked, “Don’t you get it?” Of course you’d say, “Yeah.” Because you didn’t want to admit you had no idea (because you’d look stupid. Now? “NO.” 

So moving on. I took ibuprofen every morning before we started out and kept some with me, taking another round when my hip joints started to quietly yell.

My Oura ring had a step count goal of 8,000 steps a day. Most days I had reached that by 11 am. By the end of the day I was up to 14 or 15,000.

Yikes.

The purpose of the trip was to investigate and visit the sites of the Snake Kingdom. Snake in Mayan is the word “Kanul.” There’s a glyph for it. Typically, a snake face in  profile with fangs.

Earlier this year, I had given a talk to the folks at The Lifelong Learning Institute (LLI) about the Snake Kingdom. When I signed up to do that talk I was under the impression that the Snake Kingdom was at a site called El Mirador. This because of a TV show that claimed it to be so. Turns out most people don’t believe that to be the case, but it makes for a great TV episode title. 

Now I was stuck. I had a talk I was supposed to give about a Mayan kingdom that I really didn’t know much about. I did research and found that many of the archaeologists were also confused as to where the snake kingdom was. It was a Calakmul. No, it’s a site we’re not sure where, called Site Q. No, it started at a Dzibanche and moved. Maybe, to Calakmul; maybe Site Q; maybe somewhere else.

When I gave my talk I had it pretty well nailed down. I sent a note to Simon Martin. He was one of the authors of the book on Mayan kingship. He wrote back and said that it started at Dzibanche, went to Calakmul (probably) and then to a few other places and back to Dzibanche. And without any more evidence that’s where the question of the Snake Kingdom rests.

Well, guess what? Yeah. There’s another site. It is probably, maybe, where it all started. It’s called Ichkabal.

It’s a huge site. Why hasn’t this been mentioned much? Well, you see, ha-ha. It was recently discovered. Recent, being ten or twenty years ago, and there’s been some, but not a lot, of excavation and little has made it’s way into the literature. When I say little has been excavated that’s deceptive, because a lot has been done, but in proportion to the whole site it’s a small percentage. There’s a large plaza. that can hold I’d guess four football field, maybe six. On one side is a huge pyramid of which the top part has been cleaned up and restored. Consolidated is the term used by the archaeologists. The rest is still a giant earthen hill. 

Very typically Mayan pyramids have a set of stairs to a level area, the another set of stairs to another level area, and then a short set of stairs to the very top, which can’t be seen from the ground because the raised top platform is set back from the edge. This makes for fun (Not!) climbing. As you reach the second level you think you’ve made it to the top, only to discover there’s one more level to go.

It was the top most level that had been cleared and consolidated.

INAH, the official archaeological bureau for the Mexico has been working on The Mayan Railroad and that is a huge project, which will, and has, radically transformed the Yucatan. Ichkabal is one of those sites. The small road that used to access the site has been replaced with a modern thoroughfare, cutting the time to get to the site from our hotel from two and a half hours to one. 

It seems most of the effort at this time is to make sites accessible and cleaned up. To understand a site more deeply archaeologists need to tunnel into a pyramid to see what earlier structures were covered up. To my knowledge this has not happened here. But enough is known to say it was part of the 

Snake Kingdom and probably before any of the other sites. Therefore, this is where the Kanul kingdom started (at least, that’s the thinking now. Today. By David Stuart, who led our expedition. I’ll see what Simon believes (almost wrote Says, wouldn’t be prudent. “Simon Says” ! Get it? Nevermind.)

Our understanding of these kingdoms is now understood to be royal families that intermarry and fight amongst themselves. So the kingdom is not a place as much as it is a dynasty. At the time of the Snake Kingdom there was another powerful dynasty, The Mutul dynasty, which ruled out of Tikal. We now understand that the two engaged in warfare and marriage. Betrayal and switching sides. (Think Romeo and Juliette – the Capulet and the Montague families. Or the ancient Greek city/state organization. Or spaghetti westerns where the sleepy Mexican with the big sombrero found near the town’s plaza has a thing against the Roja family. And they are in a running argument with another family. Or Yellowstone. …)

We have come to understand that what we thought were place names, may well be, but perhaps they are dynastic families that are living at a particular place and then, in some instances, move to another place.

Then it all went away. The dynastic families no longer had stelae carved. No more inter marriages. No more counting of captives.

Why?

We just don’t know.

Maybe it was lack of water and famine. Maybe, the people serving the nobility got tired of it. We don’t know. It seems drought was a factor.

If the model of ancient Egypt is similar it might well be that the purpose of the king (or pharaoh) was to keep order and make sure the gods are satisfied and then the weather will be good for growing. But evidence shows there was a long drought in the Mayan region. if it’s a year or two the people can probably survive, but if it’s longer? Then the king must go. He’s not doing his job.

There are cases where the evidence suggests there was a revolt against the royals: Cancuen and Teotihuacan. Cancuen is a Mayan site where the bodies of the royals were found in a large rectangular pool. Teotihuacan, the place north of Mexico City which certainly played a huge factor in Mayan life shows evidence of its city center where the royals lived of being burned. It was burned but nowhere else. There seemed to be no external attack. It seemed to come from within. Maybe, something happened and the peasants had enough?

Archaeology tries to answer the age old question, “What happened?” We will never know for sure. 

But LIDAR has revealed that the Mayan civilization was much larger than anyone thought even a few years ago. The search for answers continues.

And I, and my alter ego Bryce Holliwell, will be on the trail.

for December 7, 2024

This was the first day visiting a site. I wanted to get something down before, like the stucco of the Maya it all gets washed away in my mind. As I write this it is the evening December 12th. So much has happened. My Oura ring has told me I have easily reached my step count goal every day.

Our first site was Xpubil. Not on the itinerary I had. In fact, many of the sites weren’t on my itinerary. We had to be nimble and switch as events warranted it. Yesterday, we failed to go to our second site because we couldn’t find a way to get to it, even though we knew where it was on the map.

The Mayan Railroad is being built and it is a huge project. Double tracks encircling much of the Yucatan. Every site that it visits is getting a new huge entrance and makeover.

In Calakmul, we were the first visitors to their new museum. The President of Mexico comes this weekend, but we saw it first.

Because David Stuart is our tour expert and is the world’s leading authority on the Mayan glyphs, and because everybody in the Mayan world of archaeology knows him, and because he’s the person who figured out their hieroglyphs – we get to see some pretty special things. Doors were opened to us that are typically closed to the public. David was asked on this tour to look at some recently discovered artifacts and to give his opinion as to what they were and what they meant. We were shown unpublished objects and in some cases not allowed to photograph them for fear that their existence would get out in the world before the official announcements. This is all par for the course for David. 

So let me reconstruct the tour so far, we have one more day to go and I’m not sure what site we will see. I can say this. It’s not the one on my itinerary. Or, if it is, what I heard is way different than what I see spelled.

Dec 7  – Xpubil

Dec 8  – Calakmul

Dec 9  – Calakmul

Dec 10 – Balamcú

            – Chicanna

Dec 11 – Hormiguero

            – Chakabakan (Caobas) – not foud

Dec 12 – Dzibanche

            – K’inichna

            – projects associated K’inichna but under construction

The two biggest sites, and best known, are Calakmul and Dzibanche. Dzibanche was known, but its size was not, until recent discoveries and LIDAR showed how huge it is. Much is still waiting to be uncovered there. Calakmul has been known since 1932. It has over 140 stelae (stone monoliths). Due to the poor quality of the limestone most are unreadable, but they nonetheless are impressive. Four or six will be standing in front of a temple. Many are square as opposed to rectangular and thus they seem more like soldiers. Silent sentinels standing guard for centuries. Tipping a bit and often in juxtaposition to one another. They remind me of the moai of Rapanui (Easter Island).

I am drawn back in my mind to early pictures of such stelae discovered in the early Twentieth Century and photographed with glass plate cameras in black and white. The stone lends itself to black and white because that is its primary coloring.

It was a biologist who was led to this place in `32. I wonder if he was as stunned as Henri Mouhot was when he first glanced upon Angkor almost one hundred years before?

By the 1930s the “Lost Cities” genre was fading perhaps as a literary genre, but it was alive and well in Hollywood. King Solomon’s Mines came out as a movie in 1937 based on H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 novel. (and then again as a movie in 1985. Haggard also did a story about the Maya, The People of The Mist.

The theme of lost civilizations and undiscovered cities has never really gone away. Not in books, or movies, or explorers’ hearts be they six or sixty.

Calakmul evokes that feeling for me. The silent sentinels – askew but standing. Battered by time but unbowed. The old soldiers still at their stations. Remembering the glory and awaiting its return.

Waiting. Quietly waiting.