Lewis Binford has Passed

Posted on April 24, 2011 by Carl Feagans

I rarely mention the passing of notable people on this blog. But I find that I have to make time and space for an archaeologist who’s been so influential on so many.

Lewis Binford, 79, passed away at his home in Kirksville, MO on April 11, 2011. Binford was one of the leading archaeologists of our time and, whether or not you agreed fully with his perspectives and theory, he is arguably one of the more influential archaeologists when it comes to shaping modern archaeology into a discipline of that is “a more scientific enterprise,” to quote David Meltzer of SMU.

I once described his seminal work, “Archaeology as Anthropology” on this blog, an article of his which was critical of the practice of merely cataloging data and hunting artifacts for museum display. Instead, Binford urged his fellow archaeologists to become scientists who were interested in discovering and describing the way people lived in antiquity and to do so using a scientific approach.

Binford’s ideas have many critics, some of whom I find to have valid criticisms and questions, but there’s no denying Binford got people talking.

If you talk to many archaeologists who have been around a few decades, you’ll here anecdotes about Binford. Some of them are amusing, some of them are even somewhat startling. One of the more curious that was relayed to me was that Lewis Binford was the inspiration behind the persona of Wilson, the next door neighbor to “Tim the Toolman” Taylor from the popular television sitcom, Home Improvement, and lent his name to the show’s fictional company “Binford Tools.”

I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I like the story.

There are a hundred reasons why Lewis Binford will not be forgotten. And a hundred more why he shouldn’t.

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Happy New Year

Posted on January 1, 2011 by Carl Feagans

01001000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01111001 00100000 01001110 01100101 01110111 00100000 01011001 01100101 01100001 01110010 00100001

http://home2.paulschou.net/tools/xlate/

http://69.57.190.74/~molecule/

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Atoms with consciousness; matter with curiosity.

Posted on December 31, 2010 by Carl Feagans

I don’t know if this poem even has a name, but it’s by Richard Feynman. He read it at his “The Value of Science” address to the National Academy of Science in 1955.

It’s always been a poem that’s had a lot of appeal to me over the years and I had the occasion to pull it back up from my notes where it has been collecting dust for too long. I thought I’d share it here.

There are the rushing waves
mountains of molecules
each stupidly minding its own business
trillions apart
yet forming white surf in unison.

Ages on ages before any eyes could see
year after year
thunderously pounding the shore as now.
For whom, for what?

On a dead planet
with no life to entertain.
Never at rest
tortured by energy
wasted prodigiously by the sun
poured into space.

A mite makes the sea roar.
Deep in the sea
all molecules repeat
the patterns of one another
till complex new ones are formed.

They make others like themselves
and a new dance starts.
Growing in size and complexity
living things
masses of atoms

DNA, protein
dancing a pattern ever more intricate.
Out of the cradle
onto dry land
here it is
standing:

atoms with consciousness;
matter with curiosity.
Stands at the sea,
wonders at wondering: I
a universe of atoms
an atom in the universe.

Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988). He is truly missed.

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2010: The Year in Pseudoarchaeology

Posted on December 28, 2010 by Carl Feagans

Compared to previous years, 2010 wasn’t really a productive one for the pseudoarchaeologists. Very little has been said about the Bosnian Pyramid, and rightfully so since it wasn’t a pyramid. The James Ossuary went back to the toilet it came from. The Jesus tomb was a bust, but made Simcha Jacobovici some money. And so on.

Still, there were a few pseudoarchaeological happenings in 2010 and here’s a summary:

Shroud of Turin
At the beginning of the year, in January, a Jewish death shroud was found in the Old City of Jerusalem that dates to around the time of Jesus. The significance is two-fold: it’s the first shroud found in Jerusalem and the textile is simple two-way weave. The find itself isn’t pseudoarchaeological, but it does have some ramifications on a long-held pseudoarchaeological find: the Shroud of Turin. The Turin shroud has been known for some time to be a 14th century hoax, with its ocher and vermillian (paint) facial image that is inconsistent with a cloth being wrapped around a skull. The real shroud, more recently discovered is nothing like the one purported to be that of Jesus. The Turin shroud has a complex weave, rather than the simpler, two-way weave. A complex weave is consistent with the 14th century, but evidence now shows the first century CE to have much simpler textiles.

Crucifixion Nail
In March, certain individuals claimed to have found a crucifixion nail of Jesus Christ. My skepticism surrounded the way in which the nail might be dated: it had no context and had been handled a lot. Sure enough, a few days later Bryn Walters of the Association for Roman Archaeology echoed my skeptical point of view in a bit more detail.

Noah’s Ark! Again!
A Chinese Christian cult discovered the lost boat of Noah. Yeah, not a year goes by that someone doesn’t discover Noah’s Ark. It’s a myth people! A story! Based on earlier flood tales like the brief story of Utnapishtim in Gilgamesh. Some of the Noachian myth are line-for-line copy. Gilgamesh was the earlier of the two, and didn’t purport to be fact. The Noachian tale has everything you would expect from a story borrowed from another culture: parts that are word-for-word the same, embellishments and hyperbole, and no basis in reality whatsoever. It’s amazing how people are so willing to spend money on “expeditions” that purport to bring back “proof” that no one ever gets to see. Amazing.

The Saint
Saint John the Baptist, a character in Christian mythology that may or may not have actually existed had his 15 minutes of pseudoarchaeological fame in August when officials in Bulgaria claimed to have discovered some of his remains in a small reliquary. Found under the basilica of an ancient monastary, this little alabaster box contained a few cranial, dental, and hand bones. Clearly motivated by religious and nationalist agendas, some Bulgarian officials rushed to the “holy relic” conclusion without any evidence. Since John the Baptist is alleged to have had his head separated from his body, the cranial section becoming a legendary trophy, one is left to wonder what contet might explain cranial and post-cranial bone if the claim were true.

Indiana Jones?
The Hollywood rumor mill buzzed about an Indiana Jones sequel. The last movie ended with space-aliens. How do you top that? Go to the Bermuda Triangle, apparently. If the make it, I’ll suspend disbelief for a couple of hours to enjoy the show… I doubt it will ever top The Last Crusade, however.

Pseudoarchaeological Vomit
Glenn Beck opened his mouth and spewed forth what can only be expected: nonsense. But for a change, he pretended to know something about archaeology! According to Beck, the Newark mounds in Ohio are measured differently in his reality than in everyone else’s. And Victorian era hoaxes are evidence that a lost tribe of Israel built the mounds and founded, apparently, the Mormon Church.

I did, however, just write a short rejoinder of sorts, in which I respond to a commenter who objected to my labeling the artifacts Beck discussed as “frauds” and “hoaxes.” I maintain their hoaxes, but it is possible they’re genuine artifacts.

“Biblical” Archaeology
Most of the pseudoarchaeology of 2010 centered around religious claims. Which is one of the reasons why I wrote, Why Biblical Archaeology So Very Often Equals Pseudo-archaeology. So-called theologians seek to “prove” through science their particular notions of god and why their particular scriptures are that god’s word. But, more often than not, these theologians (a questionable term in itself) resort to outright deception or poor science to support conclusions they already have. In the article linked above, I used Bryant Wood as an example where he uses shoddy science and deceptive data to arrive at dates more to his liking for Jericho.

I suspect the “biblical” archaeologists and their pseudoarchaeological methods were always there but found a shadow in the grand claims of the now much quieter significance-junkies and mystery-mongers like those who jumped on the Bosnian “pyramid” band wagon. Perhaps Michael Cremo, Hancock, and Osmanagic will return to regal us with new extraordinary claims that haven’t even the most ordinary of evidence to support them, putting all this religious pseudoscience back in its closet.

Yonaguni – It’s Just Rocks, Guys.
Still, even though I wrote the post in 2009, the Ruins of Yonaguni remain a hot topic in 2010, with a very active comment thread. It seems that there are those who will not be convinced that the geologic formations under the surface of the Yonaguni coast -that small island of Southern Japan- aren’t made by aliens, high-tech ancients, or [insert wild claim]. The rock formations were last above sea level prior to 10,000 years ago, so it’s possible they were walked on and even admired by humans in the area. But the geology under the sea exactly matches that above the surface, yet mystery-mongers and significance-junkies still insist it can’t happen in nature, this is an undersea city, etc. Never mind that were the megalithic structures formed by man an not nature, the caloric requirement would be so great that the earliest Joman people (14,000 – 5,000 BCE) would have needed an agricultural infrastructure that went way beyond the rudimentary, semi-sedentary Neolithic lifeway that presents itself in the archaeological record.

That’s all I’ve got this year. I’m looking forward to 2011. I can only imagine what pseudoarchaeological finds await us! But we should start a pool on the first claim of “Noah’s Ark Found” for 2011. I’m saying April 14th, 2011.

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The Newark Decalogue and Keystone Revisted

Posted on December 28, 2010 by Carl Feagans

Jim Goodman comments on my post, The Pseudoarchaeology of Glenn Beck, to point out the waste of his tax dollars on my education. Perhaps. But I doubt any of his tax money went to my tuition.

Still, his primary criticism surrounds a portion of that post which deals with some 19th century hoaxes used to promote a political agenda of the day, which is to say that there were many folks who were opposed to attributing the construction of the various mounds of the northeastern United States to the ancestors of Native Americans who lived there upon the arrival of European settlers. The mounds, they claimed, must have been built by ancient Europeans, therefore it was right to displace the Indians (i.e. Trail of Tears).

My chief disagreement was with Beck’s implication that there was somehow evidence that the “lost tribes of Israel” made their way to the Americas because of these artifacts. The “lost tribes” notion is one that Beck’s adopted religion of Mormonism believes.

The artifacts in question are primarily known as the “Decalogue” and “Key stone,” both inscribed with Hebrew script. The former includes a bas-relief of Moses (it reads in Hebrew square script, mosheh above the figure’s head) and an abbreviated version of the Ten Commandments from the Torah -the Decalogue- on the sides and back.

Beck’s implication in the video linked in the previous article was that these are artifacts suppressed by “mainstream archaeologists” and evidence of a much earlier presence of Israelites in America. Ironically, one of the purposes for the hoax in the 19th century was, in part, to justify our actions in stealing land from the Native inhabitants. Another part of it was that there existed a ethnocentric bias against Natives in that settlers of European descent couldn’t accept that they were capable of the technology or had the know-how to build the intricate mounds that exist in places like Newark, Ohio. Beck exhibits this same ethnocentric attitude even today in his show, but perhaps for somewhat different reasons.

The commenter, Jim Goodman, was, however, right to criticize my conclusions that the stones were forgeries. They’re hoaxes, but further investigation on my part reveals that they’re very likely the real thing.


Not having an expertise in ancient phonetic scripts, I had to rely on whatever information I could obtain from my university library or the internet on these stones. Most of the sources I was able to locate were either of the Glenn-Beck-America-is-the-Land-of-the-Lost-Tribes-of-Israel variety or of the aliens-are-among-us-variety. I remembered a Skeptical Inquirer article from years ago on the subject, but that issue has been long absent from my personal library. The author of that article eventually commented on my Beck-post, confirming what I remembered and linking to an article at Ohio Archaeology that sums it up.

Recently, however, a friend sent me a link to an article by Rochelle Altman, who is an expert on ancient phonetic scripts, in which she goes into great detail about the “…Newark Ritual Artifacts.”

Her explanations are convincing as well as her arguments, and I’m inclined to accept her conclusions that the artifacts themselves are genuine, Late-Medieval ritual objects. She bases this on the “stylistic features on the bas-relief sculpture [...] and the Late Medieval Hebrew base-script used for the consolidated grid font that appears in the inscriptions.” She goes on to say, “[t]he artifacts are authentic, if not what they were thought to be in the 19th century, and, unfortunately, even today.”

The likely source of the objects is a European settler, from whom these may have been stolen and subsequently deposited at the sites where they were located in the early 19th century. The Decalogue and Keystone may not be forgeries, as I stated in an earlier post, but they are certainly hoaxes when presented as artifactual evidence of an “ancient America” with ties to the “lost tribes of Israel” and the other mumbo-jumbo Glenn Beck was alluding to in his program.

I highly recommend Rochelle Altman’s article, “‘First, … recognize that it’s a penny’: Report on the ‘Newark’ Ritual Artifacts,” found at The Bible and Interpretation. I find that I have to thank Altman and my friend for setting me straight on this and I wish I would have found this article earlier. I find I must also offer some thanks to commenter Jim Goodman, though I was already thinking of writing a short article either by itself or a part of my annual round of of pseudoarchaeology (which will be published here in a day or so). I doubt, however, that I’ve fully satisfied Mr. Goodman: the Newark artifacts might not be fakes, but they are frauds in the manner by which they are being promoted.

The sad truth, pointed out by Altman, is that the true nature of these artifacts is being sidelined by nutters and skeptics alike (though she certainly didn’t say “nutters”).

EDIT (12/28/10): after a personal correspondence with Brad Lepper, I’m, again, back to wondering about the veracity of the artifacts. It is very suspect that a person who had a preconceived notion of how the mounds were built (David Wyrick thought the mound-builders were not the Natives that lived in the region and was digging to prove it) should find just the sort of artifact that could be used to show the site was not Hopewell.

It’s also convenient that the person who was able to translate it happened to be on-hand.

So, were these artifacts entirely fraudulent, created in the 19th century and planted as a means to confirm a conclusion about Native Americans that was popular among many? Or were these genuine artifacts, salted in the places Wyrick was to dig. It would be simpler to salt the site with genuine artifacts if they were available -not inconceivable given the number of European immigrants out nation had up to then. But, it’s also not inconceivable that the artifacts could have been created of locally quarried limestone, then salted at the site.

What Lepper and Altman agree on, however, is that this is not evidence of any “Lost Tribes of Israel” in the Americas.

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Lunar Eclipse on the Winter Solstice – 2010

Posted on December 21, 2010 by Carl Feagans

Here’s my very ad hoc image of the lunar eclipse from Dallas-Fort Worth, TX.

The Lunar Eclipse at around 1:15 am CST on 12/21/10. Shot with a Sony Cybershot 6.0 megapixels through one lens of an 8×12 Bushnell binoculars.

Okay… one last quick look then I’m off to bed!

Happy Solstice!

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Why is the Word ‘Science’ Not Good Enough for the AAA?

Posted on December 14, 2010 by Carl Feagans

I recently caught a New York Times article about this and thought I’d share just briefly.

The American Anthropological Association recently revised it’s Long Range Plan, removing all mention of the word “science” and replacing it with softer, feel-good terminology. Where the purpose in the Long Range Plan used to read, “to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects,” it now reads, “to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects.”

Huh? How is this better?

The word “science” was previously mentioned in the Long Range Plan of the AAA in three places. Now it is non-existent.

And there’s been some backlash. Boy howdy. Two blog articles that the AAA actually links to are Anthropology Without Science and No Science, Please. We’re Anthropologists. I’ve put a few more from just from Zemanta at the bottom.

So the AAA responded, but, to me, it’s every bit as wishy-washy as the decision they’re being criticized for.

In their response, the AAA board says, “[a]nthropology is a holistic and expansive discipline that covers the full breadth of human history and culture.  As such, it draws on the theories and methods of both the humanities and sciences.”

If by “holistic” they mean it makes use of all the natural sciences to examine and define human culture and history, then that’s fine. Why not simply say so? By why must it rely on or even draw upon the humanities? Just about any definition of “the humanities” you find expressly excludes “the sciences.” This is utter bollocks. The suggestion is that its okay to draw upon religious explanations and speculative post-modern critique to examine human culture past or present. If anything should be excluded and excised from the long-range plans of the AAA it should be this sort of non-scientific codswallop.

They go on to say, “[c]hanges to the AAA’s Long Range Plan have been taken out of context and blown out of proportion in recent media coverage.  In approving the changes, it was never the Board’s intention to signal a break with the scientific foundations of anthropology…” and they go on to cite their What is Anthropology? document as evidence of this.

But if it was “never the Board’s intention to signal a break with” science, why not simply just put back the word science in the Long Range Plan? A word that has far more utility and express intent than the probably post-modernist appeasement of weasel-wording they settled upon.

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Google for the Anthropology Student (Part II)

Posted on December 13, 2010 by Carl Feagans
Google Desktop running on Red Hat Linux.
Image via Wikipedia

Over a year ago, I wrote part one of this two-part (so far) series! I truly intended to write part II long before now, and I actually started it when Google first announced the ill-fated Google Wave. I was trying it out and working with a colleague to test the capabilities and usefulness of it for the student (and even professor) of anthropology when Google pulled the plug on it.

In part I, you’ll remember (if not, click the link, silly!) I talked about some of Google’s key apps: Gmail, Google Docs, Google Scholar, and Google Books. My most used is, without a doubt, Gmail. But my favorite is Google Books. I’m still amazed at the sheer utility of this part of Google. If you think I’m kidding, read the three paragraphs I wrote in Google for the Anthropology Student (Part I?) and then check out my Google Books Library. Browse a couple of the titles there. Some of these I actually own, but I turn to Google Books first to search their pages. Then I crack open the actual text and read from there. Sometimes I just read online.

Here are some other ways Google can enrich and streamline your academic experiences from the perspective of a graduate student of anthropology who is focusing on archaeology.

Google Desktop

About a year or so ago, I downloaded and installed Google Desktop on my main computer, which is a Linux box currently running Ubuntu 11.04. What’s cool about Google Desktop is that it indexes all my files. And I have a lot. If you’re like me, you’re a pack-rat for journal articles and PDF files gathered while researching papers and the like. I have them largely sorted in a subject oriented directory tree, but it can still be a challenge to search a thousand articles and ebooks in PDF for just the right keyword, author, or topic. That’s where Google Desktop comes in.

I tap both CTRL keys on my keyboard at the same time and up pops a little search bar. From there, I type in my search terms -inside quotes if I really want to be specific- and watch the top 6 or so results float to the surface and display in a drop-down box that I can click on. Or, I can click “Show results in a browser window” to see all the results in that familiar Google results format.

Google Desktop indexes web history, emails, media files, Open Office files, MS Office files, PDFs and HTML files. And you can choose to exclude any of these. You can set up the directories/folders you want searched and you can set it to automatically remove deleted files from the search results. Clicking on a result takes you straight to the file (or email, or whatever). Or you can click and use the same search terms on the web just like you normally would with Google.

Oh, and it works with Windows and Mac as well as Linux.
Google Calendar

I used to use Thunderbird and Evolution, and I still use Outlook at my job. But, if I could, I’d even ditch Outlook for Google Calendar and Gmail. Unfortunately, when I’m not a graduate student, I work for a major world bank and they have some strict rules about what applications get used how.

But, for all my non-work needs, definitely all of my academic needs, I use Google’s Calendar. I can save appointments, meetings, input my recurring class schedules, and sync it all with my desktop and many other devices. I still occasionally use Thunderbird to monitor a couple of non-Gmail pop addresses I have (like cfeagans AT ahotcupofjoe DOT net) and I can sync all my Google Calendar entries back and forth. I can also sync my Google Calendar with my Nokia e71, my Nokia tablet, my netbook, my wife’s laptop, and I can access it from just about any computer with internet access (except my work machine, which is hobbled by a very careful IT department).

Google Voice

Every student needs their digits. For voice calls to that special someone, SMS text messaging to that special someone else, ordering pizza, ringing up a parent for more textbook money (you bought the pizza, remember?), and so on.

But with all the new trends in cool cell phone tech that keeps coming out, who wants to be trapped to a single carrier? AT&T is the only place to get that iPhone but T-Mobile and Verizon do a better job with the Blackberry… Then there will be those times when the pizza and textbook money get stretched thin and you’re forced to go with a prepaid phone (but you tell yourself it’s still cool ’cause Jason Bourne used it). So how do you manage all the phone numbers?

With Google Voice, that’s how. I have a single phone number that I give out. That phone forwards to any and all of my other phones (work, home, whatever cell phone I happen to be on) either at the same time or at times I specify. I have an outgoing message on Google Voice and if I don’t pick up at one of the three phones that ring simultaneously, the caller can leave a message. Google Voice then transcodes the message from voice into text and emails it to me. I can then surreptitiously read the message on the Blackberry or Nokia that quietly vibrated in my pocket while in class and know right away that my wife wants me to pick up Chinese on the way home. Pei Wei here I come.

And you can send SMS messages from Google Voice as well. And dial the phone from your desktop or laptop. Who needs a land line? Give me DSL and WiFi and unplug it. Oh, and when you forgot to pay that silly student loan one month (or put it off to get the car fixed), you can put their automated calls on the blocked caller list. You can do the same with that ex-boyfriend who keeps bugging you for a second chance. Another cool feature is “Add a Note” to any call in your history. Very handy for making personal notes about the message or SMS conversation so you can go back and read some of the details or important information.

This is a phone number that you can keep forever (or so it seems so far).

Google Reader

One of my favorite Google Apps. I’ve tried other RSS readers out there, but this is hands-down the best, most useful. You can get to your Reader app just about where ever you can get Google. Even my work’s IT hasn’t restricted it yet (shhh…).

If you’ve never used an RSS Reader here’s what it does: nearly every blog and most other sites have RSS feeds. These are typically XML files that change over time as the content is updated. My blog has a feed, which you can click on in the sidebar. Unless you have a browser configured with a feed-reader, it’ll usually come up as a continuous block of very hard to read text, links and images. But, with a feed-reader, you can sort and manage these feeds in a very orderly, library like fashion. You can get news feeds like CNN and Google’s Top Headlines. You can get feeds for your favorite blogs (like mine, hopefully) and keep up with many blogs in a single, easy to manage space. And with Google Reader, you won’t have to worry about whether or not you’re on a particular machine or laptop. You can get it from any internet capable computer.

There are a lot of cool features in Google Reader, but the three that stand out for me are

  1. Starred Items – reader has the ability to star items as you browse (I like to do this when I see something I want to revisit or perhaps blog about) -you can click on “Starred Items” and see all of them in one spot;
  2. Shared Items: these are items you “share” among others who can see your Google profile; and
  3. Notes -here you can read notes you made about a particular feed entry. These notes are shareable as well and collected in one spot the way starred entries are.

There are a lot of other features that make Reader a useful and powerful tool too: tags, “like this,” nesting feeds in collapsible folders, sorting options for feeds, etc.

That’s it for part II of the (so far) two part series on Google for the Anthropology Student!

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When does vandalism become an archaeological feature?

Posted on November 23, 2010 by Carl Feagans

When it’s done in antiquity, of course.

Below are some photos of a particular kind of vandalism commonly referred to as “pilgrim gouges.” I’ve noticed these peculiar scoops of stone in various photos of columns, ashlar blocks, monuments and so on, but never really stopped to think about what they were.

Pilgrim Gouges Avenue of the Sphinxes

Image by Cammyjams

In hindsight, all the examples I can think of or locate on the net or in books, are within reach of people. Still, my first guesses included eroded palimpsests and some sort of vandalism in antiquity.

Palimpsests in this sort of context are places where one set of inscriptions or a bas relief is removed or plastered over to create a new set of inscriptions or a new bas relief. This wasn’t an uncommon practice in ancient Egypt -sometimes one ruler wanted to substitute his own name or beatitudes or perhaps curses of an enemy. Sometimes a bit of vandalism occurred in antiquity when a subsequent ruler was unhappy with a predecessor or if a new culture just simply had no regard for a much older one. There are monuments with graffiti etched by Greeks and Romans in Egypt and there are monuments around Europe and the Middle East that have bullet holes that could only have been deliberate vandalism.

But these curious little scoops and gouges in the stones of Egyptian monuments and reliefs are something different. One thing they seem to have in common is that they are typically vertical and that they are deeper in the center, as if scooped out. Pilgrims and believers in magic scraped the stone to remove a fine dust, which they collected and mixed in a drink. By scraping out a portion of the temple or monument, the pilgrim hoped to obtain some of the power through sympathetic magic. This practice occurred from about the time of the New Kingdom to around the 5th century CE.[1].”

What’s interesting about the practice is the frequency and distribution of the “gouging.” Deeper gouges indicate more attention spent at a particular gouge over time (a single gouge probably wasn’t produced by a single pilgrim at a single visit), as do more gouges at a particular spot. The sphinx above, for instance, has more, deeper gouges than it’s neighbor tot he right. Both of these have more than other neighboring sphinxes, and so on, suggesting that the first two, in particular the first, has more perceived power than the others.

Pilgrim Gouges on Ramses II's Treaty

Frequency & Distribution -not random

Or perhaps more accessibility. Gouging by pilgrims was not random and the distribution tended to be concentrated in certain areas such as “outer corners of buildings, hypostyle pillars, and certain hieroglyphs and divine faces on outside walls[1].” So while there was the concern of the object’s power, there was also an obvious concern of accessibility. The sphinx above may have been easier to scrape without being observed by those that might interfere (caretakers of the temple) or it might have been perceived as the more powerful of the sphinxes (i.e. its position in the line along the avenue). But it wasn’t always an image or a temple, which are obvious places to perceive power, but also writing. The gouges on the Ramses II‘s treaty with the Hittites above may be written on a temple wall, but the gouges themselves are grouped together in ways that suggest it wasn’t the wall or the temple that had the power, but the words of the inscriptions that resided there.

Pilgrim gouges are a fascinating topic. Anyone who’s visited Karnak or stared at photos of Karnak for hours as I have will probably have noticed them. I can’t believe I’ve never really questioned what they were or how they came to be until a few days ago! So my thanks for that bit of inquiry goes to a reader of my blog that had a question about them. I think she’ll agree the bit of research we each did was fun. She actually found the answers faster than I, pointing me in the right direction.

Thanks, L!

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References and Notes:
  1. Frankfurter, David (2000). Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance. Princeton University Press, pp. 51-52 [↩] [↩]
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Who Will Dig Our Bones if Apophis Hits?

Posted on November 5, 2010 by Carl Feagans
Apophis Symbol (Stargate).

Image via Wikipedia

Something that could very well make us all subjects of an archaeological dig is an asteroid impact. The very fate of the dinosaurs, which once ruled our planet up to about 65 Ma might some day be our own. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend Phil Plait’s Bad Universe, which, in its first episode, took a look at killer asteroids and the various ways we might deflect or prevent a potential extinction-level impact.

If you’re interested in modeling asteroid impacts, you can play around with an online simulation at Purdue University. You can input your own data: size of asteroid, composition, velocity, angle of approach, what sort of surface it impacts, etc. I chose Apophis, not so much because I have a particular fear of this one over any other, but because Apophis was the bad guy in Stargate SG-1. Love that show. Incidentally -and quite trivially- the archaeologist, Daniel Jackson, was played by actor Michael Shanks. Coincidentally, there is also a prominent archaeologist with the name Michael Shanks. Did I mention I’m a fan of Stargate?

In the simulation I ran of Apophis (the asteroid, not the Goa’uld), the Earth didn’t fare so well. Particularly the Eastern United States. A crater about 3.5 km in diameter and over 1 km deep was created 500 km from Dallas, TX somewhere towards northeastern Canada or Maine. Ejecta in the form of a fine dusting with occasional large fragments reached Dallas only 5.57 minutes after the impact.

Screenshot of Impact Earth!

Luckily, neither the Earth’s axis was not tilted and the orbit was not shifted to any noticeable degree. But the impact had the energy of 1,660 megatons of TNT. The average interval between impacts of this magnitude somewhere on Earth is somewhere around 50,000 years. The fireball, at over 500 km away, is well enough below the horizon that Dallas doesn’t suffer any ill effects, but we do get an air blast that arrives 25.3 minutes after impact, raising the wind velocity to about 6.21 mph and the blast can be heard to a level about as loud as heavy traffic. Long before that, however, somewhere around a minute and a half after the impact, an earthquake at 6.6 on the Richter Scale is felt 500 km away, but feeling like a passing truck hitting a pothole in the road nearby.

I suspect if I run the simulation again at 20 km instead of 500 km, the damage estimates would be different. I did. They were. People and buildings catching fire from the thermal radiation; a few people and buildings getting knocked down by the seismic effects; more people getting knocked down by the airblast; etc.

It ain’t pretty, but Apophis wouldn’t be an extinction-level event according to the simulation and the parameters I put in. Go check it out. Have fun. Destroy the world!

Another bit of Stargate trivia: in the show, another bad guy (Anubis) set an asteroid into motion that would collide with Earth. Luckily for us, the show’s heroes were able to put it in hyperspace for a few seconds to let it pass Earth up. I didn’t see Phil Plait try that method on his show!

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