Two Sundays

Another occupation I would've been far happier at than court reporting or teaching was archaeology.  I've spent the last two Sundays, otherwise a bit glum, following up some favorite interests and weaving some more of that tapestry which binds everything. 

The first Sunday afternoon, September 23rd, was spent with the Chachapoyas, relatively recent discoveries, and the Olmecs, both ancient mysteries.  Most exploration of the Chachapoya sites has been in the last decade or so, though the "Warriors of the Clouds," notably fair-skinned blonds whose present descendants have no European ancestry, flourished mainly between 850-1475 A.D. in the Amazonas area of northern Peru.  They lived on mountain tops, hence their nickname, Warriors of the Clouds, before the Inca, who later absorbed them, and had amazing mountaintop citadels, such as the huge Kuelap fortress that reminds me of the European equivalents like Mycenae in Greece or the castles in western Europe, the stone work like the Anasazis in New Mexico's Chaco Canyon.  (I've been to Agamemnon's fortress, Mycenae, and to Chaco Canyon.)  The Chachapoyas' cliff tombs with mummies especially reminded me of the many little Anasazi cave structures on the cliffs of our Southwestern buttes and canyons, such as I saw at National Bridges N.M., Mesa Verde, Canyon de Chelly, pueblos or storage structures in nearly impregnable caves.  (I spent several trips happily chasing down Anasazi sites such as Hovenweep and Lowry, Aztec and El Morro, the ancestral pueblo culture of 1-1300 A.D. roughly.  Note:  Modern pueblo cultures like the Hopi and Zuni dislike the Navajo name used by archaeologists, Anasazi meaning "ancient enemy.")  Of course, mummification was an Andean rite and is familiar from Egypt and other ancient civilizations.

The Olmec documentary was about their stunning giant head carvings, six to nine feet tall, five feet or so wide, 20-24 tons, individualistic enough to suggest commemorating great ball players or kings, their helmets taken as ball headgear like our football helmets.  The Olmecs (1250-400 B.C.) were already mysterious ancestors to the Aztecs, who named them, Olmec meaning "rubber people," for they lived in a rubber tree area, mainly Veracruz and Tabasco, and apparently invented rubber balls and the notorious ritual ball games of ancient Central American cultures, the victors becoming human sacrifices.  (Some ancient ballcourt sites are in Arizona such as at Wupatki.)  They were also the first of the highly sophisticated Central American astronomical cultures, including the Maya, as advanced as any in Europe or Asia. 

Aside from the artistry, the head feature that most fascinated me was that the huge basalt stones were somehow rafted 40-60 miles from the Tuxtla Mountains southeast to the major Olmec sites where they were then carved.  Of course, the most ancient of European monuments, my wallpaper, Stonehenge, has four-ton blue stones from the Welsh Preseli Mountains 240 miles away and 18-foot, 25-ton sarsen stones from  Marlborough Downs 20 miles away.  The date for the blue stone ferrying across the sea, up rivers, across land was c. 2150 B.C., the sarsen stones across land c. 2075 B.C.  (And Stonehenge is indisputably astronomical, built to register the midsummer sunrise, the midwinter sunset, and the most southerly and northerly moon risings.)  As archaeologists have tried to theorize, the only explanation for how such "sacred" tonnage was laboriously moved is rafts across water, amazing feats for those ancient times, and sledges or, more likely, a number of logs constantly shifted to provide a moving, rolling platform.  We shall never know the why beyond some apparently holy civic meaningful purpose.

The second Sunday, the 30th, I dozed through a long documentary about Helen of Troy being an actual person, which I already knew and you can too, if you read such a recent work as Barry Strauss's The Trojan War:  A New History.  It hasn't been that long since we've learned much more about the Hittites of Anatolia, ancient Turkey, who had an ally called Wilusa, which the Greeks called Wilion/Ilion, our Troy.  The huge library of Hittite correspondence, cuneiform tablets, with such as the Egyptian pharaohs, substantiate the Homeric epics and all those legends who refuse to die, from the blonde femme fatale, Helen, whose face poetically launched a thousand ships, to Achilles played by Brad Pitt to Agamemnon's fateful family with its psychological complexes (check out Orestes and Elektra) to Ulysses/Odysseus, wily inventor of the Trojan Horse, doomed to wander the Mediterranean.  A woman may have had something to do with that prototypical literary war, the first great European literature, but more likely it was strategic and economic, Troy sitting at the entrance to the Dardanelles, hence the Black Sea.  The documentary showed many of the relevant sites, which is why I watched it, having been to some of them in Greece and longing to see the others.

The other documentary was on King Arthur, not quite so historically provable but no less important for our legends and storytelling right down to our musicals Camelot and Spamalot.  Possibly a Celtic chieftan, this ideal Briton was largely created by medieval romances based on earlier tales, chivalric embroidery, as it were.  Such is the power of fiction.  It too featured photographic tours of sites such as Tintagel to Rosslyn Chapel of the recent Da Vinci Code notoriety.

Those were the better parts of the two Sunday afternoons.  Why I was glum will be the next entry.