WWXD

One of the great but secret pleasures in life is living with a library in the next room.

Late at night, when you finish one book and starting looking for the next, and you're not sure what you're in the mood for, you have a wonderful selection from which to choose. With a little luck, you can always find something to put you to sleep.

That is how, last night, I curled up with Miguel de Unamuno's Amor y Pedagogía, which I pulled off the shelf because I thought it was about amor y pedagogía. Not so much, as it turns out, but I found a jewel in it nonetheless. In the prologue he writes, "No sabemos que haya escritor a quien aborrezca más que a éste [Moratín], no siendo a Jenofonte. ¿Qué habrá hecho Jenofonte?

"Sí, ésta es la cuestión: ¿qué le habrá hecho Jenofonte?"

Although I'm not a classicist, I do love the idea of asking oneself, "What would Xenophon do?" Hence the title of the post.

I had found myself searching for a new book because I had unexpectedly finished the last surprising jewel I plucked off my shelves: Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell's 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon by Edward Dolnick. Good story, well researched, and supplemented by some thoughtful commentary that explorers might find interesting. I suppose that if you're an explorer, you could ask yourself, "What would Powell do?" but it doesn't have the same ring.

In between Dolnick and Unamuno, I studied a bit of matrix algebra, which was fun, but after a certain hour I find I cannot concentrate enough to fruitfully read math.

To be fair, I didn't spend the weekend in light reading or in contemplating the immortality of the crab. I spent 15 to 20 hours working this weekend, first on the permit request for this summer's fieldwork and then on a monograph I hope to send out soon. Probably not what Xenophon would have done.

The Golden Ratio in Ancient Maya Settlement Patterns

According to a very interesting article that just appeared in the Journal of Archaeological Science, the ancient Maya apparently used the Golden Ratio, phi, in their architectural layouts. Phi (φ) is the natural constant that arises when the ratio of two measurements is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two original measurements. It is an irrational number close to 1.618.... James Doyle, the author of the article, found that the plaza encompassed by a Late Preclassic E-Group at El Palmar, Guatemala, is a Golden Rectangle, that is, a rectangle in which the lengths of the sides exhibit the Golden Ratio.

Diagram of the Golden Ratio (from Wikipedia).

It should be noted that Margarita Martínez de Sobral previously suggested that the ancient Mesoamerican peoples employed the Golden Ratio in their art and architecture. She pointed to the proportions of Lintel 25 from Yaxchilan, but she offered few architectural examples of the principle. Martínez de Sobral also discussed several other interesting geometric constructions that may be observed in ancient Mesoamerican art and architecture.

I hope that Doyle's article inspires further research into this interesting aspect of ancient mathematics and aesthetics.

References

Doyle, James A. (2013). Early Maya geometric planning conventions at El Palmar, Guatemala. Journal of Archaeological Science 40:793-798. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2012.08.006.

Martínez de Sobral, Margarita (2000) Geometría Mesoamericana. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

 

EVERYONE is blogging

One of my students (thanks, Travis!) sent me this link to the U.S. government's announcement, on its blog, that the world is not ending on December 21, 2012. Good to know the government is on the case, but for me the most fascinating thing is to discover that the United States government actually has a blog. With open commenting! Many of the posts look interesting, so I was surprised to see the unusually large number of comments on the 2012 post. The number currently stands at 148, while most of the other posts just have a few. I scrolled through several pages of blog posts, and the second highest number of comments I saw was 6. So, the level of 2012 hysteria really is high.

Quote of the day from Nature

“It’s a suspiciously round number,” says Linda Vigilant....

Callaway, Ewen (2012). "Studies slow the human DNA clock." Nature 489: 343-344.

Actually, this news article is very interesting. It asserts that the rate of DNA mutation is really half that of earlier estimates. The much slower rate of mutation means that dates for divergence of lineages are really twice as old as previously believed. The new "DNA clock" dates match archaeological chronologies significantly better than the old ones.

Pictures of the lesula, the new species of monkey, courtesy of Kate Detwiler

 Fabulous drawing of the lesula by Kimio Honda. You don't often see scientific illustration taken to such artistic heights.

 Georgette with her lesula. Photo by John Hart.

 

Adult lesula. Photo by Maurice Emetshu.

 Juvenile lesulas. Photo by John Hart.

 Captive lesula. Photo by John Hart.

Lesula with marantaceae. Photo by John Hart.

New Species of Monkey Found in the Congo, by my Neighbor

Exciting discovery of a cute and charismatic new species of monkey, Cercopithecus lomamiensis sp. nov. This doesn't happen every day.

Here's a link to the article in PLoS ONE:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0044271

Kate Detwiler, the corresponding author, sits in the office next to mine. I helped her gear up for the trip to the Congo, but the courage it took was all her own. I don't know if I'd go.

If you're not sure whether you want to plow through the peer-reviewed article, here's a link to a National Geographic article about the discovery.

David Stuart's Review of "Cracking the Egyptian Code"

David Stuart has charmingly reviewed Andrew Robinson's Cracking the Egyptian Code: The Revolutionary Life of Jean-François Champollion in the Wall Street Journal. Evidently, when Champollion made his breakthrough, he cried out, "Je tiens mon affaire!" Google translates this as "I want my business," which seems like a strange thing for an epigrapher to yell.

Notwithstanding, sounds like a good book.

The Proper Term of Venery for Archaeologists

I was recently flipping through the pages of James Lipton's famous An Exaltation of Larks, and I noticed that the venereal term for archaeologists, "an entrenchment," was quite possibility the weakest of all the thousands listed in that charming book. If you're not sure what a term of venery is, look at the title of the book. Some are familiar and sound today mundane:

a school of fish,
a gaggle of geese, and
a pride of lions.

But there are thousands of them, some ancient, others new, and many clever, quaint, or colorful.

A parliament of owls,
a murder of crows,
a party of jays, and
a crash of rhinoceroses.

You get the idea. At their best, they use synecdoche to parody a notorious or comical attribute of the thing to which they refer. A "wince of dentists" is one of my favorites.

Lipton made a game out of inventing them. He proposed many himself and publicized others contributed by friends or correspondents. One whom he credited was Ian Graham, the famous Maya archaeologist and founding editor of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, published by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard. 

As I will be going to the University graduation ceremony in my regalia tomorrow, I looked over the terms related to students:

An unemployment of graduates hardly seems funny at the moment, but the antiquity of the phrase may bring comfort to some, knowing that many generations have survived similar tribulations.

A vale of graduates is gentler, but how many today will understand the joke?

I'll be entering final grades for the semester tomorrow too, so "a failing of students" is a bit too literal.

These are touchingly true:

A fortitude of graduate students,
A doggedness of doctoral candidates, and
An angst of dissertations.

But, returning to the ostensible purpose of this post, I like "a tribe of anthropologists" and "a stratum of geologists" but "an entrenchment of archaeologists" is weak and labored.

Here are my suggestions:

A trench of archaeologists (better).
A trowel of archaeologists (doesn't sound like a quantity).
A typology of archaeologists (by far the most logical, but will not make sense to the layman).
A seriation of archaeologists (too technical?).
A debitage of archaeologists (too obscure and not mellifluous).
An assemblage of archaeologists (but the connection will not be obvious to the non-specialist).
A dust of archaeologists (my favorite).

My experience suggests that a "diarrhea of archaeologists" would be accurate but unappealing. Let's keep it clean.

Here are some other suggestions for anthropology:

a theory of anthropologists,
a kindred of anthropologists,
a clan (or lineage) of anthropologists (too obvious?).

Some new ones:

A shatter of lithic analysts.

A crack of flintknappers. 

A temper of ceramicists. Or a paste of ceramicists. Or, of course, a sherd of ceramic analysts

A skeleton of bioarchaeologists. Also, a "phalanx" but that could be applied to many occupations, including, most obviously, soldiers.

A bloom of paleoethnobotanists. (Not to be confused with a bloom of algae!)
How about "a flotation of paleoethnobotanists" or "a light fraction of paleoethnobotanists"?

I like "a menagerie of zooarchaeologists" but it seems heavy-handed.

Please comment on those you like best or suggest your own!

New Book: The Ancient Maya of Mexico hits the streets and newstands

The Ancient Maya of Mexico: Reinterpreting the Past of the Northern Maya Lowlands, edited by Geoffrey Braswell, is now available from the publisher, Equinox, and of course, like everything in the universe, from Amazon.

The volume emerged from symposia in honor of our doctoral dissertation advisor, E. Wyllys Andrews V. Congratulations to Geoff for producing such a handsome and intellectually distinguished volume.

Thanks for everything, Will!

Megafauna Extinction Caused by Overhunting

In last Friday's issue of Science, there's an article about the demise of the megafauna in Australia. Here's the reference:

Rule, Susan, Barry W. Brook, Simon G. Haberle, Chris S. M. Turney, A. Peter Kershaw, and Christopher N. Johnson (2012). The Aftermath of Megafaunal Extinction: Ecosystem Transformation in Pleistocene Australia. Science 335:1483-1486.

In case you didn't know, I should mention that, like the Americas, Australia had megafauna during the Pleistocene, but instead of mammoths, mastadons, camels, horses, dire wolves, and sabre-toothed tigers, down under they had giant marsupials, such as things resembling huge kangaroos and giant wombats. As in the Americas, the Australian megafauna disappeared near the end of the Pleistocene, and in both places there is a scientific debate about the cause of these massive extinctions. The usual suspects are either climate change and over-hunting by the first human populations, although in North America there has also been a recent flurry of interest surrounding the unlikely hypothesis that a meteor impact caused the die-off. What makes the debate tricky in North America in particular is that humans seem to have arrived (granted that the archaeological dates of the event leave a lot to be desired) at a time of rapid climate change. Therefore, distinguishing between the two causes is difficult because of the chronological overlap. In Australia, the situation is different because human arrived much earlier, well over 40,000 years ago, although (again, like in the Americas) there has also been plenty of dissension about the precise date.

The new article in Science contributes significantly to the Australian debate. The authors studied two cores, analyzing charcoal, pollen, and spores of the Sporormiella fungus. The charcoal told them about the changing regime of fires, the pollen provided information about the vegetation, and the spores, which grew primarily in the dung of the megafauna, allowed them to pinpoint their extinction. The spores disappeared about 41,000 years ago, about the same time that the megafauna are believed to have died out based on a variety a paleontological evidence.

(The use of spores from a fungus growing on the dung may seem like a crazy way to study the megafauna, but it's not novel; it's done in North America too. I once talked to a paleoethnobotanist who was studying plant remains from mammoth dung recovered in the Mid-Atlantic states. I asked her about her sample sizes, and she said something like, "It's not a problem. Their coprolites are huge. We have a warehouse full of poop." I guess when a mammoth took a dump, it created quite a pile. Now imagine herds of them slowly pooping their way across the continent. The dung becomes an ecosystem.)

The importance of the recent article in Science is that the researchers can show, through a high resolution chronological analysis, that the vegetation changes and increased burning came after the extinction, not before, and therefore they were evidently responses to the extinction rather than being related to its cause. Moreover, at the time of the extinction in Australia, they found no evidence of significant climate change. It occurred instead during a period relative climatic stasis. And of course the same megafauna had previously survived much more severe episodes of climate change.

The study adds to the growing evidence that human over-hunting caused the extinction of megafauna in several parts of the world. (New Zealand is another example.) This was probably the case in the Americas as well.