Did they check whether the clay of the mace is a narrow shell around a vibranium core?
Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2KJxdvckEk
British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down
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Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down
#82This reminds me of a tour I was once on, by one of the resident archaeologists in the open-air museum in Biskupin, Poland. It's the site of an iron age fortified settlement and there is both ongoing archaeological excavation and a reconstruction of sections of the settlement for visitors. Anyway, the archaeologist showed me a shallow elongated oval wooden vessel with a slight depression in it, that had been on displa…
Even objects correctly identified as being used for religious rituals are often still derived from practical objects, whether cups, spoons, etc, or ritualized weapons. Few objects are purely religious in their derivation.
Sometimes the distinction between ritual and practical use is absolute, i.e "the sacred chalice shall only be used for services", or sometimes sacred vs. profane is distinguished by timing, or the incanting of particular verses.
In general, we have an overly dualistic view ("it is one or the other") of of the sacred and profane as pertains to ancient objects, perhaps influenced by the dualities pervasive in Western philosophical systems.
Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down
#83Man, archeology is hard , but this one, with all the upside-down writing, is a bit of a face-palm. My favorite examples in archeology is the Chaco Canyon Cultures. If you are in the western US, have a 4 wheel drive car, and a free few days, I'd go no where else. Those people are an astonishing mystery. You know how with some places, going on the journey is kinda the point? Sometimes with archeology, that's kinda true…
I'm amazed that the words "factory" or "warehouse" never appear once in that article, because that's kind of what the floor plan looks like at first glance.
As far as anyone can tell (which isn't very far) those circular pits were used as 'kivas'. They held some sort of semi-religious significance, but what sort is nearly unknown. Some Puebloans use the kiva as a simple sweat-lodge, some use it as a 'sprouting house' for initial crop growth, some use the kiva as a church-like ceremony building, some use it as a giant drum (really). Since most of the Puebloans came to Chaco Canyon in it's heyday and had interactions there, it's very strange that they all then evolved to have different uses for such a special place. The Santa Ana Puebloan People think that there is a sipapu, or 'world navel', just off to the western side of that North-South dividing wall, so there's that as well. An interesting thing is that the Puebloans all met at Chaco, that is fairly well understood, but genetic studies show that they did not interact enough to mate and have children with the other groups. Despite the annual interactions, they remained distinct peoples.
Acoustic studies of the kiva pits show that giant drums, beaten with the feet, had resonances that may have interacted with canyon walls too. But the largest kiva in existence at Chetro Ketl, perfectly south of Pueblo Bonito, is no where near the canyon walls and the size of the kiva makes the resonance in the far sub-sonic for human hearing. In the kiva at Chetro Ketl, there is also evidence of layers of burn sand and dust going down many meters into the ground. There's at least a dozen PhD theses waiting in that dirt.
Also, the layout of Pueblo Bonito is only the first few stories of the building. For preservation, they have buried the lower stories of the pueblo. When you look at the full design plan, it makes zero sense. The mostly rectangular rooms have doors that lead to all kinds of weird places. There are nearly no hearths, and the rooms would have been in total darkness, as little evidence is found of suit on what remains of the roofs (lots of destruction has taken place, so who knows in the end).
We do have evidence from the oldest parts of Pueblo Bonito (the Pueblo was built in stages over about 300 years), that near total darkness was the norm. Skeletons of macaques (yes, from the Yucatan!) show severe deformities associated with lack of sunlight. Also, pottery shards have cacao residue on them from other parts of Central America. The oldest part of Pueblo Bonito is also the only part that has burial of human remains. There, 4 people (likely some form of sub-priest) were interned above 2 other people (likely higher priest-like persons), one of whom likely died of leg wounds just before burial, all in the structure and above the ground level at the time. Coincidentally, half of all the turquoise ever discovered via archeology was found with these 6 people. That's a LOT of turquoise. No other bodies have ever been discovered in the Canyon and very little 'trash' is in the Canyon as well.
Sorry for the ramble. But Chaco really is a place of questions, not answers. It's very unique in the world for this reason and well worth the visit and deep-dives into it.
Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down
#84A fired-clay headed mace? I'm the daft one now, but how does this work? What fired-clay is sturdy enough to whack someone with more than once? Clearly there is some, but if someone can point to a modern example I might know I will get over this disbelief more easily.
You're probably thinking about pottery. Think about bricks and glasses.
The word "brickbat" refers to a piece of brick used as a weapon. In modern times, since bricks are small and guns exist, it is likely describing half of a broken building or paving brick, thrown at a line of police with plastic riot shields. In ancient times, it could have been a literal brick on a literal bat.
Imagine how durable a wooden baseball bat is. It's a pretty decent weapon on its own, but if you whack anything harder than flesh with it, you might damage it. So you soak the wood, coat the end with clay, inscribe a two-page treatise on how your enemies are total bastards and they just suck so much, and put it in the kiln. Now you have a hard and brittle brick-ceramic surface, over a softer but more durable wooden core. The composite weapon is superior to an all-brick club, which would snap off at the shaft whenever you hit someone with it, and a wooden club, which would split with the grain if you hit something hard with too much force. The brick coating keeps the wood from splitting. The wood core keeps the brick head from shattering.
The modern example is tightly wrapping a baseball bat with a coil of barbed wire or baling wire. The tensile strength of the wire keeps the bat from splitting. Ceramic technology has advanced a lot since the bronze age, too. The auto-glass windshield on your car is a sandwich of hard glass and soft plastic, that is at once clear enough to see through, hard enough to deflect flying debris without scratching, and durable enough to sometimes also deflect hard objects without cracking. In addition, if it does break, it doesn't turn itself into sharp knives that could cut you.
The ancients used wood (and leather) the way we now use plastic. If you sandwich wood and brick, it's not as good as sandwiching glass and plastic, but it's the same concept.
Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down
#85Man, archeology is hard , but this one, with all the upside-down writing, is a bit of a face-palm. My favorite examples in archeology is the Chaco Canyon Cultures. If you are in the western US, have a 4 wheel drive car, and a free few days, I'd go no where else. Those people are an astonishing mystery. You know how with some places, going on the journey is kinda the point? Sometimes with archeology, that's kinda true…
My impression (largely drawn from Ken Burns' series on the national parks and visits to Taos Pueblo) is that the ancient inhabitants of Chaco canyon are the ancestors of the present-day Pueblo people who live to the south in the Rio Grande valley.
Yes! They are, sort-of.
Most Puebloan peoples seemed to have gathered at Chaco a few times a year, during the heyday. There is some evidence of continuous habitation at Chaco, but not as many as you'd expect. To me, an interesting thing is that the Puebloan peoples do not share genetic markers that would indicate that Chaco was used as a place to mix and mingle the bloodlines, so to speak. It's very strange that the young people would not 'notice' each other in the large gatherings every year. Also, the kivas have very different usages in the different tribes, despite their near universal religious significance in all the tribes. Some are used as sweat-lodge type structures, some are sprouting houses for crops, some have foot powered drums in them, etc.
So despite the common heritage, each tribe of Puebloan peoples is still very distinct, even genetically. Again, Chaco is a place of questions, not answers. The closer you look, the stranger it gets.
Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was so inspired by that video when I first saw it that I built my own Ur board. I prefer the 4 2-sided dice approach to the single 4-sided die, because the normal distribution of values allows for slightly more strategy. We also house ruled that rolling a 0 gave you a reroll token. Oh, and it is a genuinely fun game.
> 2-sided dice I wasn't sure if this was an allusion to a coin flip. Turns out there are actual 2 sided die though. https://boingboing.net/2015/10/01/how-do-you-design-2-sided-...
You can make most oddly-sided dice as barrel forms (a.k.a. "long dice"). Take a cylinder of uniform density, and grind the ends down to cones, at an angle such that they cannot be a stable result. Now plane off the required number of stable surfaces at equal intervals around the barrel, and scribe its value on the opposite side. (Or for even-numbered sides, you can also construct it as an antiprism, capped by pyramids.)
If one cone has finger-grips added, the die can also be spun like a top. These are teetotums. A dreidel is essentially a teetotum d4.
For a d2, you add two parallel planes to represent the two stable results, and unstable-angled planes on the sides so that the die will always roll from them onto one of the stable planes on any flat, level surface. Or you can just curve the two sides, such that they meet at a point.
You can even make a (nontrivial) fair d1 with a clever arrangement of planes on the barrel. When rolled, the fair d1 will always come to rest on the same face, without being unbalanced, because all other planar faces are angled to roll the die to an adjacent face. I can't recall if dice of this type are dependent on being rolled in Earth gravity or not, but it seemed like they were dependent on angle of repose in some way.
Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless they're biologists. Then it's for mating displays.
With non-human animals, though, aren't there much fewer possibilities than with humans? Most animals don't have the kind of food surpluses humans have, and so have can't afford to spend energy on things that aren't hunting or gathering food, fighting over territory, or reproducing. So if an animal is doing something prominently that isn't hunting or fighting or mating or raising young and others are watching but not…
I was thinking of extinct animals. (Maybe I should have said "paleontologists".) Whenever there's a structure or physical feature in a fossil whose purpose we can't identify, the default assumption is "it was probably used for mating displays." Sometimes further study (or comparison to extant species) comes up with a more practical use later. It's all hypothetical, of course, but so is "religious purposes." :)
Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 2-sided dice I wasn't sure if this was an allusion to a coin flip. Turns out there are actual 2 sided die though. https://boingboing.net/2015/10/01/how-do-you-design-2-sided-...
You can make most oddly-sided dice as barrel forms (a.k.a. "long dice"). Take a cylinder of uniform density, and grind the ends down to cones, at an angle such that they cannot be a stable result. Now plane off the required number of stable surfaces at equal intervals around the barrel, and scribe its value on the opposite side. (Or for even-numbered sides, you can also construct it as an antiprism, capped by pyramid…
Thankyou.
I'm not sure I've come across so many new words outside of a science paper that I didn't understand :S .
What would be the use case for a d1 ?
Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down
#89This reminds me of a tour I was once on, by one of the resident archaeologists in the open-air museum in Biskupin, Poland. It's the site of an iron age fortified settlement and there is both ongoing archaeological excavation and a reconstruction of sections of the settlement for visitors. Anyway, the archaeologist showed me a shallow elongated oval wooden vessel with a slight depression in it, that had been on displa…
I've always been curious how many items thought to have religious or societal significance are more in reality "yeah that's a backscratcher, yeah that's a dildo, yeah that's the equivalent of the 7th grade shop ceramics project that ancient Emo-Grok made, yeah that's just a random rock a bored prisoner carved as he slipped into madness".
Re: British Museum realises 'vase' is in fact an ancient mace-head upside down
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't think it's hard to understand, it's just the plague of consumerism IMO. It's not consumerism it's specialisation: with the advance of sedentarisation and techno-industrial might, we can afford to go beyond one tool doing a bit of everything not very well (e.g. shave and punch holes and cut food and …) and instead use plenty of tools which do one job very efficiently or conveniently.
Strange that tech seems to be moving in the opposite direction, with single-purpose devices like MP3 players, GPS devices and cameras being consolidated into phones.
Personal electronics perhaps. I'd argue there are more specialty hand and power tools than ever before though.