Exhibit Preview: COME FACE TO FACE WITH THE LARGEST EXHIBITION OF MUMMIES AND RELATED ARTIFACTS EVER ASSEMBLED

Mummies of the World, the largest exhibition of mummies and related artifacts ever assembled, presents a never-before-seen collection of naturally and intentionally preserved mummies.  This compelling collection, presented with reverence and dignity, includes ancient mummies and important artifacts from Asia, Oceania, South America, Europe, as well as ancient Egypt, dating as far back as 6,500 years.

Embark on a journey into the extraordinary world of mummies and mummification.  Through modern science, engaging interactives and multi-media exhibits, the exhibition reveals how the scientific study of mummies provides a window into the lives of ancient people from every region of the world, offering unprecedented insights into past cultures and civilization.

Wow! What a very cool exhibit! I visited this exhibit at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia a few months ago.  Some of the mummies were insanely well preserved. I was most fascinated with the South American mummies. Several of them still had hair, in fact one still had braids. The ‘tattooed woman’, a 13th century mummy from Peru, had many visible tattoos on her body and the clothing she wore was in great condition and still brightly colored. It is a great collection of mummies (even animals) from around the world, most being from South America, Egypt, and Eastern Europe.  The exhibit also includes CT scans of mummies in an attempt to conduct comprehensive, but noninvasive, research. I recommend going to see it if you get the opportunity.

The exhibition Mummies of the World began with a mysterious and rare find of 20 human mummies hidden in the basement of the Reiss-Engelhorn Museums in Mannheim, Germany in 2004.  The mummies, which once belonged to artist Gabriel von Max (1840–1915) were thought to have been destroyed or lost during World War II.  This startling discovery prompted the most important research project ever undertaken with regard to mummies.  Without documentation explaining who they were, where they were from or why they were collected, an international team of scientists from many disciplines studied the mummies.  Their studies and research, known as the German Mummy Project, is the largest mummy research project in the world.  The results of their research and studies are presented in the Mummies of the World exhibition, made possible through the collaboration of 21 world-renowned museums, organizations and collections from seven countries.

Below are photos of several mummies in the exhibit that really amazed me due to their preservation.

The Detmold Child is a Peruvian child mummy in a remarkable state of preservation, radiocarbon dated to 4504 – 4457 B.C. It is on loan from the Lippisches Landesmuseum in Detmold, Germany.

The mummified remains of a decorated howler monkey from Argentina wearing a feathered skirt and headdress. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

The mummified remains of Johannes Orlovitz, one of the Vac mummies. The Orlovits family was with a group of mummies found in 1994 in a forgotten church crypt in Vac, Hungary. (AP Photo/Adam Lau)

13th century woman still bearing a full head of hair and tattoos around her mouth and breasts, was discovered in the desert of Peru.

An adult male mummy from the Pre-Columbian Atacama Desert in present-day Chile. (AP Photo/Adam Lau)

The Egyptian cat mummy dated to the Ptolemic period, and show how Egyptian cats were ritually embalmed in a lengthy process using salt and various resins. (The Deutsches Museum, Munich, Germany)

For more information about the exhibit and mummies on display visit http://www.mummiesoftheworld.com/

The people of the Andaman Islands were also the subject of a short paper I wrote almost two years ago. The topic is quite different than the article posted above about human rights violations, nevertheless, combined they illustrate that anthropologists are desperately needed in the Andaman Islands. Aboriginal peoples need representatives to fight for their human rights and cultures and languages need recording before they too sadly may disappear.

Culture Dies When Language Dies

March 3, 2010

Last month a culture died, and so did 85 year old Boa Senior. Boa lived in the Indian Andaman Islands and

Boa Senior - Source: BBC

was the last woman alive to speak the Bo language. This language was significant to the world because it is thought to have originated in Africa and could possibly be over 70,000 years old. According to linguist Anvita Abbi, it may be one of the last remnants of pre-Neolithic languages. Abbi also said that as a result to Boa Senior’s death that “India had lost an irreplaceable part of its heritage.” The inhabitants of the Andaman Islands are thought to be some of the original inhabitants of India itself.

This is a dramatic case. Not only was the language lost, but so was the people itself. Boa Senior was all there was left in the world of her people, and now they are all gone. Quite often when languages die, the people themselves do not. However, it can be argued that when a language dies so does a great deal of the culture behind it. A language is unique to a people, and it ties them together. Why is it that Americans feel a stronger connection to England than to Germany when an estimated 40 million Americans have German ancestors (this is more than the number of people who claim English ancestry)? I believe it is language. My German ancestors that came to America adopted the English language and with it they forgot about their German culture. Another example of this takes place in Ireland. Everyone speaks English there now, but many strive to hang on to their Gaelic tongue. Irish culture is different from English culture, but they are becoming closer together everyday. I really believe this is because of language. Many Americans view most of Canada as an extension of the United States. However, not Quebec. The French Canadians of Quebec fight very hard to keep French the dominant language in the province while surrounded by the rest of English speaking Canada. The French language is part of the unique cultural heritage of Quebec, if they lose that, they’ll just be Canadians.

We express ourselves through language. Since English is native to me, I usually try to find the words in that language to express myself. However, us English speakers usually have to borrow words from other cultures because we just don’t quite have the right word to match an idea. ‘Déjà vu’, it is a feeling that is almost unexplainable. We’ve borrowed the French term that somehow just makes sense to us. Another great descriptive word that we have borrowed is ‘abyss’ from Sumerian. In English we would have to use multiple words such as bottomless, endless, void, darkness, loneliness, hopelessness to describe everything that we gather from just one simple borrowed word.

Language ties all of a culture’s many facets together. When a language dies, most times a new culture has taken hold on a people. Quite often there are remnants of that culture left behind and blended into another culture, such as ancient Sumeria’s culture, but it just isn’t the same. Celtic culture is not the same today as it once was. The English transmitted their language to Ireland, now the Irish feel much more connected culturally to the English than to their Celtic ancestors (some would argue this statement, but most would agree that Irish society has been transforming despite resistance). Most Irish have to learn Gaelic in College to be able to read old poems and stories. Not being able to read a story from your own culture surely is a perfect example of how when a language does, so does a big part of culture.

Alastair Lawson. “Last speaker of ancient language of Bo dies in India.” BBC News. 4 Feb. 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8498534.stm  - There is a clip of Boa Senior’s voice on this page!

Quick update:

• I graduate from Millersville University with my bachelors in anthropology in May.
• I’ve been busy applying for graduate schools lately. *fingers crossed* It may be several months before I know which direction I’m going to take.
• I moved in Philadelphia in December. I love it here!

The story started off fast paced and continued to stay that way throughout the entire book. I think a lot of authors would have dragged some of the scenes out longer. And I thought just the opposite of the ending. Once the main characters survived death the book should have ended, and it would have been a great ending.  Instead Koontz devoted several pages to making sure the book had a happy ending and so we could feel all warm and fuzzy inside after such a scary story. The ending was awful. The book has 12 chapters, I suggest you only read 11 of them.

I would read another Koontz book, any suggestions?

An example of Plato's Greek writings

Official University of Manchester Press Release:

Plato was the Einstein of Greece’s Golden Age and his work founded Western culture and science. Dr Jay Kennedy’s findings are set to revolutionise the history of the origins of Western thought.

Dr Kennedy, whose findings are published in the leading US journal Apeiron, reveals that Plato used a regular pattern of symbols, inherited from the ancient followers of Pythagoras, to give his books a musical structure. A century earlier, Pythagoras had declared that the planets and stars made an inaudible music, a ‘harmony of the spheres’. Plato imitated this hidden music in his books.

The hidden codes show that Plato anticipated the Scientific Revolution 2,000 years before Isaac Newton, discovering its most important idea – the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. The decoded messages also open up a surprising way to unite science and religion. The awe and beauty we feel in nature, Plato says, shows that it is divine; discovering the scientific order of nature is getting closer to God. This could transform today’s culture wars between science and religion.

“Plato’s books played a major role in founding Western culture but they are mysterious and end in riddles,” Dr Kennedy, at Manchester’s Faculty of Life Sciences explains.

“In antiquity, many of his followers said the books contained hidden layers of meaning and secret codes, but this was rejected by modern scholars.

Dr. Kennedy

“It is a long and exciting story, but basically I cracked the code. I have shown rigorously that the books do contain codes and symbols and that unraveling them reveals the hidden philosophy of Plato.

“This is a true discovery, not simply reinterpretation.”

This will transform the early history of Western thought, and especially the histories of ancient science, mathematics, music, and philosophy.

Dr Kennedy spent five years studying Plato’s writing and found that in his best-known work the Republic he placed clusters of words related to music after each twelfth of the text – at one-twelfth, two-twelfths, etc. This regular pattern represented the twelve notes of a Greek musical scale. Some notes were harmonic, others dissonant. At the locations of the harmonic notes he described sounds associated with love or laughter, while the locations of dissonant notes were marked with screeching sounds or war or death. This musical code was key to cracking Plato’s entire symbolic system.

Dr Kennedy, a researcher in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, says: “As we read his books, our emotions follow the ups and downs of a musical scale. Plato plays his readers like musical instruments.”

However Plato did not design his secret patterns purely for pleasure – it was for his own safety. Plato’s ideas were a dangerous threat to Greek religion. He said that mathematical laws and not the gods controlled the universe. Plato’s own teacher had been executed for heresy. Secrecy was normal in ancient times, especially for esoteric and religious knowledge, but for Plato it was a matter of life and death. Encoding his ideas in secret patterns was the only way to be safe.

Plato led a dramatic and fascinating life. Born four centuries before Christ, when Sparta defeated plague-ravaged Athens, he wrote 30 books and founded the world’s first university, called the Academy. He was a feminist, allowing women to study at the Academy, the first great defender of romantic love (as opposed to marriages arranged for political or financial reasons) and defended homosexuality in his books. In addition, he was captured by pirates and sold into slavery before being ransomed by friends.

Dr Kennedy explains: “Plato’s importance cannot be overstated. He shifted humanity from a warrior society to a wisdom society. Today our heroes are Einstein and Shakespeare – and not knights in shining armour – because of him.”

Over the years Dr Kennedy carefully peeled back layer after symbolic layer, sharing each step in lectures in Manchester and with experts in the UK and US.

He recalls: “There was no Rosetta Stone. To announce a result like this I needed rigorous, independent proofs based on crystal-clear evidence.

“The result was amazing – it was like opening a tomb and finding new set of gospels written by Jesus Christ himself.

“Plato is smiling. He sent us a time capsule.”

Dr Kennedy’s findings are not only surprising and important; they overthrow conventional wisdom on Plato. Modern historians have always denied that there were codes; now Dr Kennedy has proved otherwise.

He adds: “This is the beginning of something big. It will take a generation to work out the implications. All 2,000 pages contain undetected symbols.”

The paper ‘Plato’s forms, Pythagorean Mathematics, and Stichometry’ is available here.

On July 3rd NPR aired an interview with University of Manchester’s Jay Kennedy. There were several quotes from Dr. Kennedy regarding his interpretation of the data that I’d like to share:

“The Pythagoreans realized that when we hear beauty and music, when we hear notes harmonizing, that’s because the notes have simple ratios, like 1:2 or 3:4,” Kennedy explains. “So the beauty of music is direct perception of the mathematical order underlying the world. They worshipped that mathematics.”

“Plato’s philosophy shows us one way to combine science and religion,” Kennedy says. “The culture wars we’re having today — about evolution for example — see science and religion as two polarized opposites. Plato’s hidden philosophy shows us that he combined an emphasis on mathematics with an emphasis upon beauty, music, art and divinity. The founder of western culture, in fact wanted us to combine science and religion.”

For more information visit Dr. Jay Kennedy’s website.

Sources: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=5894

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128288987&sc=fb&cc=fp

There is a very important point that Craig Lee brought up in a recorded interview about the importance of organic remains. This is a topic that I did not bring up in my last post but Lee’s comment is so important that I am driven to post again about these ice patch discoveries.

Ninety-five percent of the archaeological record that we usually base our interpretations on is comprised of chip stone artifacts, ground stone artifacts, maybe old hearths, which is a fire pit, or rock rings that would have been used to stabilize a house, so we really have to base our understanding about ancient times on these inorganic materials. But ice patches are giving us this window into organic technology that we just don’t get in other environments.

Craig Lee, University of Colorado at Boulder holding 10,000 atlatl dart. Photo: Casey A. Cass/University of Colorado

These discoveries are incredibly important because we may find artifacts that we’ve never seen before or have only few examples of due to their organic components. Dry climates with little precipitation have been known to preserve organic materials. An example would be a preserved wicker basket found in a dry cave. Most organic materials like wood and clothing would not have been preserved in a North American climate such as Canada or the northern United States experiences. It is rare to find organic artifacts preserved in this region. This type of archaeology needs to be supported. As I posted last week, once exposed to the environment these artifacts need to be removed from the soil because they will not survive long.

View video interview with Craig Lee

Source: http://www.colorado.edu/news/r/6f01e0cf192c909927c88da29caafdd8.html

Picoult is a master of drawing the reader in. I also found the story interesting because it takes place where I live in central Pennsylvania. An unwed Amish teenager gives birth to a baby alone in a barn. The next day the baby is found dead and the mother is charged with its murder. The story leads the reader through Amish customs and lifestyle to show the affect that this type of pregnancy has on the community. The story was very good; however, I thought the ending was predictable. Although the book doesn’t specifically say, it’s implied that there wasn’t actually a murder and that the baby died of a natural cause, but the person who covered up the death was predictable.  I take this into account when comparing it with The Pact which had a very surprising ending.

Although the underlying ghost story running throughout the book is really intriguing to me, it felt out of place. Picoult tries to build multi-dimensional characters and stories, but in Plain Truth the integration of these layers is a bit rough.

The Moai of Easter Island are monolithic human figures commonly believed to be carved between 500 and 1000 years ago. There are roughly 887 Moai statues found, most of which have rather disproportional head to body ratio. These figures are huge, on average standing over 13 feet tall and weighing over 14 tons, they make quite the presence on the island. Hundreds of these Moai statues are still unfinished at the quarry site. Obviously, this is a good starting point to figure out how the statues were built and then transported. Like Stonehenge and other monolithic sites, the transportation and construction techniques are debated. After all, the architects did not leave behind written records of the construction. Even the construction of the pyramids of Egypt, built by a culture that did leave a great deal of written record, is debated.

Ideas about how the Moai were transported include efforts using ropes, wooden sleds, wooden rollers, or by a rocking process. Many Moai lay on their sides along the road. The main theory is that this was the road used for movement of the figures and that the Moai found toppled over were merely abandoned during transportation. For a long time this seemed like an acceptable theory based on the evidence. However, with 21st century technology we are able to go back and analyze archaeological sites and this often leads to new discoveries. University College London and the University of Manchester have recently used new geophysical surveying equipment on Easter Island and determined that each of these so called abandoned Moai were actually propped on platforms, just the same as the other upright Moai, and had just fallen from the platforms over time.

The UCL and U. Manchester study has concluded that the roads were not built to transport the Moai but rather for ceremonial purposes. University of Manchester’s Dr. Colin Richards says in regard to the road system:

“they lead – from different parts of the island – to the Rano Raraku volcano where the Moai were quarried. Volcano cones were considered as points of entry to the underworld and mythical origin land Hawaiki. Hence, Rano Ranaku was not just a quarry but a sacred centre of the island.”

The shape of these roads is concave in shape, obviously making it difficult to transport large objects using human energy. Dr. Sue Hamilton of University College London further explains why they came to the conclusion about the use of the roads.

“It all makes sense: the moai face the people walking towards the volcano. The statues are more frequent the closer they are to the volcano – which has to be way of signifying the increasing levels of importance.”

Based on the evidence, I would agree that the roads were ceremonial. However, does this absolutely disprove that the same roads were used to transport the Moai? “The truth of the matter is, we will never know how the statues were moved,” said Dr Richards of U. Manchester. I find it surprising that he would make such a definitive statement. After all, the original evidence of the fallen Moai indicated that they had been abandoned during transportation. It took 60 years for Dr. Richards to find new evidence to argue the contrary. There are many things we do not know. Sometimes it is acceptable to say ‘we may never know’. But never in regards to history should be say “we will never know.” In another 60 years we might have uncovered something on Easter Island to completely change what we know about their culture.

If you are interested in current research check out the Easter Island Statue Project.

Sources:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/easter/civilization/giants.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-05/uom-eid051210.php

I apologize for my lack of posts over the past several months.  The only thing that matters is that I’m back!

The results have been extraordinary. Andrews and his team have found 2400-year-old spear throwing tools, a 1000 year-old ground squirrel snare, and bows and arrows dating back 850 years…”The implements are truly amazing. There are wooden arrows and dart shafts so fine you can’t believe someone sat down with a stone and made them.”

Tom Andrews of the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife, NT Canada

This has become a race against time. The ice continues to melt, and if artifacts are exposed and not removed from the ground within a few years they would be destroyed either by being trampled by caribou or dissolving in the acidic soils.  Tom Andrews, who was the lead archaeologist on the International Polar Year Ice Patch Study, says this has now become and “ethical obligation to collect these artifacts as they are exposed.”  I couldn’t agree with this statement more.  It is an ethical duty to study those who came before us so that they might live on forever.

Source: Arctic Institute of North America