The AP reports that the civil war in Syria has led to extensive looting of the country's significant archaeological heritage, with UNESCO expressing concern. The European Union has provided funding (€2.5 million!) to combat the looting and trafficking. A related report from Reuters says that UNESCO also thanked "Hollywood" (probably referring to George Clooney) for raising awareness about threats to cultural heritage through the new movie "The Monuments Men."
Thursday, February 6, 2014
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Archaeology Writing Competition
This just arrived via the SAA Public Archaeology Interest listserv.
As archaeologists, we write for each other in journal articles, book chapters, monographs, and other forums, using language that makes sense to fellow members of the profession. Yet the results of archaeological discovery and analysis are important and deserve the widest possible audience: archaeology has momentous findings to report, and for the periods before written history stands as the only source of evidence we have for the human condition.
We believe that archaeology is worthy of a better level of writing, one that is accessible and exciting to non-specialists, but at the same time avoids excessive simplification, speculation, mystification, or romanticization. Some of the most effective writing in this vein has appeared not in professional venues, but in publications with a far wider readership. As just one example, we would cite Elif Batuman’s article in The New Yorker Magazine (December 19, 2011) on the Göbekli Tepe site in Turkey, and the many fundamental questions it raises about religion, technology, and human social evolution.
We therefore propose a competition for new archaeological writing, which anyone may enter. We invite the submission of accessible and engaging articles, accompanied by a single illustration and with no scholarly apparatus, that showcase any aspect of archaeology of potential interest to a wide readership. As an incentive, we offer a prize of $5,000 to the winner. The prize-winning article, together with those by eight to ten other meritorious entries, will be published in Spring 2015 in a volume of the Joukowsky Institute Publication series (published and distributed by Oxbow Books).
For more information about this competition, and to view the rules, please go to:
http://proteus.brown.edu/archforthepeoplecompetition/Home
Questions concerning the competition should be directed to Prof. John Cherry (john_cherry@brown.edu) and Prof. Felipe Rojas (felipe_rojas@brown.edu).
___________________________________________________________________________________
This sounds like a great idea. Archaeologists are notoriously officious, stodgy writers who delight in a convoluted obscurantism. (Think of Binford!) Of course, there are outstanding exceptions, such as, most famously, Kent Flannery, who is not merely funny, but also a gifted and powerful essayist.
I often wonder how it is that archaeologists, who are blessed with the most fascinating work, manage, by dint of nearly superhuman labor, to make the field so unbearably boring. I mean, really, just think about what we so often do. You struggle through the jungle or desert, find a lost city, maybe the capital of an ancient kingdom, and then what do you do? Very slowly dig an obsessively square hole, spend a thousand hours measuring little chips of rock, and then publish an unreadable article full of arcane statistics about the distribution or geometry of the chips. At least, that 's what I do. There's got to be something wrong with this!
Kudos to the Joukowsky Institute for trying to do something about it.
As an aside, I love Batuman's writing, but I didn't think the Göbekli Tepe article was her best.
Archaeology for the People:
The Joukowsky Institute Competition
As archaeologists, we write for each other in journal articles, book chapters, monographs, and other forums, using language that makes sense to fellow members of the profession. Yet the results of archaeological discovery and analysis are important and deserve the widest possible audience: archaeology has momentous findings to report, and for the periods before written history stands as the only source of evidence we have for the human condition.
We believe that archaeology is worthy of a better level of writing, one that is accessible and exciting to non-specialists, but at the same time avoids excessive simplification, speculation, mystification, or romanticization. Some of the most effective writing in this vein has appeared not in professional venues, but in publications with a far wider readership. As just one example, we would cite Elif Batuman’s article in The New Yorker Magazine (December 19, 2011) on the Göbekli Tepe site in Turkey, and the many fundamental questions it raises about religion, technology, and human social evolution.
We therefore propose a competition for new archaeological writing, which anyone may enter. We invite the submission of accessible and engaging articles, accompanied by a single illustration and with no scholarly apparatus, that showcase any aspect of archaeology of potential interest to a wide readership. As an incentive, we offer a prize of $5,000 to the winner. The prize-winning article, together with those by eight to ten other meritorious entries, will be published in Spring 2015 in a volume of the Joukowsky Institute Publication series (published and distributed by Oxbow Books).
For more information about this competition, and to view the rules, please go to:
http://proteus.brown.edu/archforthepeoplecompetition/Home
Questions concerning the competition should be directed to Prof. John Cherry (john_cherry@brown.edu) and Prof. Felipe Rojas (felipe_rojas@brown.edu).
___________________________________________________________________________________
This sounds like a great idea. Archaeologists are notoriously officious, stodgy writers who delight in a convoluted obscurantism. (Think of Binford!) Of course, there are outstanding exceptions, such as, most famously, Kent Flannery, who is not merely funny, but also a gifted and powerful essayist.
I often wonder how it is that archaeologists, who are blessed with the most fascinating work, manage, by dint of nearly superhuman labor, to make the field so unbearably boring. I mean, really, just think about what we so often do. You struggle through the jungle or desert, find a lost city, maybe the capital of an ancient kingdom, and then what do you do? Very slowly dig an obsessively square hole, spend a thousand hours measuring little chips of rock, and then publish an unreadable article full of arcane statistics about the distribution or geometry of the chips. At least, that 's what I do. There's got to be something wrong with this!
Kudos to the Joukowsky Institute for trying to do something about it.
As an aside, I love Batuman's writing, but I didn't think the Göbekli Tepe article was her best.
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
"Being venules I was mensa head in the Chronicle"
What Siri thought my wife said the first time she used it on her new iPhone.
Friday, January 3, 2014
Quadrantid meteor shower
Yet again I was irresistibly drawn to try to view another meteor shower. I've been trying diligently to view the main meteor showers for a couple of years now, but with very little luck. The last several times, it's been cloudy or raining. This time it was cool, clear, and crisp, with only a few clouds and no mosquitoes. So, a little after midnight, I got into the car and drove for about 45 minutes, north and west till I was in the agricultural zone between West Palm Beach and Lake Okeechobee. It's fairly dark out there, though there is still some light pollution in the east, where the large urban zone lies. I found the alleged radiant point, a little below and west of Ursa Major. I lay on the hood of the car in the dark, listening to a constant cacophony of distant dog barks, human screams, and horse whinnies, underlain by soft gurgles and plops from the nearby canal that I imagined were probably from alligators watching me.
In an hour, I saw one meteor.
I got home after 3: 00 a.m.
In an hour, I saw one meteor.
I got home after 3: 00 a.m.
Hunter-gatherers forage using Lévy walks!
Finally! Some anthropologists strapped GPS units to hunter-gatherers and then downloaded the data to analyze the geometry of their hunting and foraging movements (Raichlen et al. 2013).
The test subjects were from the Hadza of Tanzania.
I've been wondering when someone would do this ever since my colleagues and I proposed that human foragers used Lévy flights to forage (Brown et al. 2007)
There are many interesting tidbits in the article, but the main result was that a large plurality--nearly half--of their hunting or foraging trips were, mathematically, Lévy walks (related to Lévy flights). Lévy walks are patterns of movements in which the step lengths are power-law distributed. For each data set (that is, the GPS trace of a trip), the authors fit the data to six models: a power law, a truncated power law, a single exponential, and three composite exponential functions. The large plurality of Lévy walks were those that best fit power laws or truncated power laws. The fitting was done using the ever popular maximum likelihood estimation procedures proposed by Clauset, Shalizi, and Newman (2009). The explanation of how they collected and processed the GPS data was eminently clear, which I appreciate because I have quite a bit of GPS data that I would like to analyze in a similar fashion.
The results are interesting because Lévy walks (or flights) are the most efficient random search patterns for scare targets. Whether this behavior evolved over thousands or millions of years, or whether it has developed as a heuristic, or whether it is a fully conscious methodical strategy is an open question, but it shows that human foragers forage as many other animals do.The Lévy walk movement certainly has implications for optimal foraging models. It may also offer an explanation for fractal patterns of archaeological sites because the turning points of a Lévy walk form a fractal.
Finally, I found it interesting that women, who mostly collect, walked much more Lévy-ly than their men, who hunted much more.
References cited
Brown, Clifford T., Larry S. Liebovitch, and Rachel Glendon (2007). Lévy Flights in Dobe Ju/’hoansi Foraging Patterns. Human Ecology Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 129-138.
Clauset, A., R. C. Shalizi, and M. E. J. Newman. 2009. Power-law distributions in empirical data. SIAM Review 51(4):661-703.
Raichlen, David A., Brian M. Wood, Adam D. Gordon, Audax Z. P. Mabulla, Frank W. Marlowe,
and Herman Pontzer (2013). Evidence of Lévy walk foraging patterns in human hunter–gatherers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Early Edition. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1318616111.
The test subjects were from the Hadza of Tanzania.
I've been wondering when someone would do this ever since my colleagues and I proposed that human foragers used Lévy flights to forage (Brown et al. 2007)
There are many interesting tidbits in the article, but the main result was that a large plurality--nearly half--of their hunting or foraging trips were, mathematically, Lévy walks (related to Lévy flights). Lévy walks are patterns of movements in which the step lengths are power-law distributed. For each data set (that is, the GPS trace of a trip), the authors fit the data to six models: a power law, a truncated power law, a single exponential, and three composite exponential functions. The large plurality of Lévy walks were those that best fit power laws or truncated power laws. The fitting was done using the ever popular maximum likelihood estimation procedures proposed by Clauset, Shalizi, and Newman (2009). The explanation of how they collected and processed the GPS data was eminently clear, which I appreciate because I have quite a bit of GPS data that I would like to analyze in a similar fashion.
The results are interesting because Lévy walks (or flights) are the most efficient random search patterns for scare targets. Whether this behavior evolved over thousands or millions of years, or whether it has developed as a heuristic, or whether it is a fully conscious methodical strategy is an open question, but it shows that human foragers forage as many other animals do.The Lévy walk movement certainly has implications for optimal foraging models. It may also offer an explanation for fractal patterns of archaeological sites because the turning points of a Lévy walk form a fractal.
Finally, I found it interesting that women, who mostly collect, walked much more Lévy-ly than their men, who hunted much more.
References cited
Brown, Clifford T., Larry S. Liebovitch, and Rachel Glendon (2007). Lévy Flights in Dobe Ju/’hoansi Foraging Patterns. Human Ecology Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 129-138.
Clauset, A., R. C. Shalizi, and M. E. J. Newman. 2009. Power-law distributions in empirical data. SIAM Review 51(4):661-703.
Raichlen, David A., Brian M. Wood, Adam D. Gordon, Audax Z. P. Mabulla, Frank W. Marlowe,
and Herman Pontzer (2013). Evidence of Lévy walk foraging patterns in human hunter–gatherers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Early Edition. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1318616111.
Saturday, December 28, 2013
Fractal Porn!?
Say what? Who would have guessed? Before you start pondering the erotic possibilities of geometry, let me say that the fractality occurs in the topology of the social network.
Fractal properties for pornography should not be surprising because we already know (Foxman et al. 2006; Freiesleben de Blasio et al. 2007; Liljeros et al. 2001; Liljeros et al. 2003) that our network of sexual relationships has fractal properties. Specifically, the articles documenting this have found that the number of sexual partners is distributed as a power law. That is, a large number of people report having a single sexual partner (depending on the study, within the last year or within the respondant's lifetime). A much smaller number of people report having had 2 sexual partners, a yet smaller number say they have had 3, and so forth. The decline in the number of people (let's call it "y") who report having x number of partners as x increases obeys a particular kind of function that mathematicians call a power law, in which a constant negative exponent describes how y decreases as x increases. One notable characteristic of a power law is that the "tail" of the distribution is "long," which is to say, much longer than would obtain if the distribution were normal or exponential. Thus, a small but significant number of people have large nmbers of partners, way up in the double or even triple digits. We can think of the number of sexual contacts as forming a network in which the nodes are individuals and the links are sexual relationships between them. The power law then describes the mathematical structure of the links in the network--an aspect of its topology--indicating that it is a scale free network. These network characteristics are significant in real life because, for example, they help determine key properties of the network such as its robustness to shocks (e.g., attacks or failures), or rates of contagion (i.e., the propagation of a disease or computer virus) (Barabasi, 2009). Understanding the topology of these networks is critical for preventing or stopping epidemics, a subject that has been studied most intensively in the case of sexually transmitted diseases.
Fractal (scale-free) network topology is related to the "small world" property of such networks (Amaral et al. 2000), which permits remarkably short connections between distant nodes, explaining the "six degrees of separation" phenomenon and allowing the Kevin Bacon game to work. The network of movie actors is famously a case of a small world, scale free network. The actors are nodes and being cast in the same movie forms a link between a pair of thespians. Perhaps more apt in this context is Truman Capote's reputed International Daisy Chain game, in which "'You make a chain of names,' he [Capote] wrote friends in New York, 'each one connected by the fact that he or she has had an affair with the person previously mentioned; the point is to go as far and as incongruously as possible'" (http://www.geraldclarke.com/treat.htm). Supposedly, Adolf Hitler and Cab Colloway were separated by only three links, illustrating the small world quality of the network.
Turning from sex to pornography, a new article has been posted to arXiv in which the network topology has been analyzed for adult movies in the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). Here's the citation:
Gallos, Lazaros K., Fabricio Q. Potiguar, Jos´e S. Andrade Jr, and Hernan A. Makse (2013). IMDB network revisited: unveiling fractal and modular properties from a typical small-world network. http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.1175v2.
The full Internet Movie Database (IMDB, www.imdb.com) has, as I mentioned, been analyzed previously for its small world property (Watts and Strogatz 1998). Now, Lazaros and his colleagues have analyzed and discussed the fractal and small world qualities of the subset of the IMDB comprising adult movies. I didn't know there were adult movies listed in the IMDB, and I don't see any filter or genre listing for them; perhaps you have to have a paid subscription to the database to obtain that information. The "collaboration" network of actors in the adult movies has a somewhat different topology than that of the full movie database. Maybe the differences shouldn't be surprising, given the innate differences between pornographic and "regular" movies. For example, I can only imagine that the cast is much smaller on average in an adult movie than in a regular flick. The adult movie network is, according to the article, a small world, but fractal characteristics emerge when one establishes a link between two actors if they have been cast in at least 2 movies (instead of just 1).
Because of their topological properties, epidemics can propagate much more quickly in scale-free networks than in random ones. However, at the same time, the scale-free property creates opportunities to stop epidemics, by attacking or protecting the highly connected nodes, which in a sexual network are those with large numbers of partners (Liljeros et al. 2001). Given that filming in the adult movie industry is currently suspended because of an actor's positive HIV test, those most concerned should take into account the topology of their network.
References cited
Amaral, L. A. N., A. Scala, M. Barthelemy, and H. E. Stanley (2000). Classes of small-world networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97(21), 11149-11152.
Barabasi, Albert-Lazlo (2009). Scale-Free Networks: A Decade and Beyond. Science 325:412-413.
Barabási, A.-L., & Albert, R. (1999). Emergence of scaling in random networks. Science, 286, 509–512.
Foxman, B., Newman, M., Percha, B., Holmes, K. K., & Aral, S. O. (2006). Measures of sexual partnerships: Lengths, gaps, overlaps, and sexually transmitted infections. Sexually Transmitted Diseases, 33(4), 209–214.
Freiesleben de Blasio, B., Svenssen, Å, & Liljeros, F. (2007). Preferential attachment in sexual networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(26), 10762–10767.
Liljeros, F., Edling, C. R., & Amaral, L. A. N. (2003). Sexual networks: Implications for the transmission of sexually transmitted infections. Microbes and Infection, 5, 189–196.
Liljeros, F., Edling, C. R., Amaral, L. A. N., Stanley, H. E., & Åberg, Y. (2001). The web of human sexual contacts. Nature, 411, 907–908.
Watts, Duncan J. and Steven H. Strogatz (1998). Collective Dynamics of 'Small World' Networks. Nature 393, 440-442.
Fractal properties for pornography should not be surprising because we already know (Foxman et al. 2006; Freiesleben de Blasio et al. 2007; Liljeros et al. 2001; Liljeros et al. 2003) that our network of sexual relationships has fractal properties. Specifically, the articles documenting this have found that the number of sexual partners is distributed as a power law. That is, a large number of people report having a single sexual partner (depending on the study, within the last year or within the respondant's lifetime). A much smaller number of people report having had 2 sexual partners, a yet smaller number say they have had 3, and so forth. The decline in the number of people (let's call it "y") who report having x number of partners as x increases obeys a particular kind of function that mathematicians call a power law, in which a constant negative exponent describes how y decreases as x increases. One notable characteristic of a power law is that the "tail" of the distribution is "long," which is to say, much longer than would obtain if the distribution were normal or exponential. Thus, a small but significant number of people have large nmbers of partners, way up in the double or even triple digits. We can think of the number of sexual contacts as forming a network in which the nodes are individuals and the links are sexual relationships between them. The power law then describes the mathematical structure of the links in the network--an aspect of its topology--indicating that it is a scale free network. These network characteristics are significant in real life because, for example, they help determine key properties of the network such as its robustness to shocks (e.g., attacks or failures), or rates of contagion (i.e., the propagation of a disease or computer virus) (Barabasi, 2009). Understanding the topology of these networks is critical for preventing or stopping epidemics, a subject that has been studied most intensively in the case of sexually transmitted diseases.
The impact of network theory could have been limited if not for a series of findings that underlined the perils of ignoring network topology. Take, for example, the discovery of Romualdo Pastor-Satorras and Alessandro Vespignani that on a scale-free network the epidemic threshold converges to zero. It has long been known that only viruses whose spreading rate exceeds a critical threshold can survive in the population.Whereas the spreading rate captures the transmission dynamics, the threshold is determined by the topology of the network on which the virus spreads. Therefore, the vanishing threshold means that in scale-free networks even weakly virulent viruses can spread unopposed, a finding that affects all spreading processes, from AIDS to computer viruses.[Barabasi 2009, internal citation omitted]
Fractal (scale-free) network topology is related to the "small world" property of such networks (Amaral et al. 2000), which permits remarkably short connections between distant nodes, explaining the "six degrees of separation" phenomenon and allowing the Kevin Bacon game to work. The network of movie actors is famously a case of a small world, scale free network. The actors are nodes and being cast in the same movie forms a link between a pair of thespians. Perhaps more apt in this context is Truman Capote's reputed International Daisy Chain game, in which "'You make a chain of names,' he [Capote] wrote friends in New York, 'each one connected by the fact that he or she has had an affair with the person previously mentioned; the point is to go as far and as incongruously as possible'" (http://www.geraldclarke.com/treat.htm). Supposedly, Adolf Hitler and Cab Colloway were separated by only three links, illustrating the small world quality of the network.
Turning from sex to pornography, a new article has been posted to arXiv in which the network topology has been analyzed for adult movies in the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). Here's the citation:
Gallos, Lazaros K., Fabricio Q. Potiguar, Jos´e S. Andrade Jr, and Hernan A. Makse (2013). IMDB network revisited: unveiling fractal and modular properties from a typical small-world network. http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.1175v2.
The full Internet Movie Database (IMDB, www.imdb.com) has, as I mentioned, been analyzed previously for its small world property (Watts and Strogatz 1998). Now, Lazaros and his colleagues have analyzed and discussed the fractal and small world qualities of the subset of the IMDB comprising adult movies. I didn't know there were adult movies listed in the IMDB, and I don't see any filter or genre listing for them; perhaps you have to have a paid subscription to the database to obtain that information. The "collaboration" network of actors in the adult movies has a somewhat different topology than that of the full movie database. Maybe the differences shouldn't be surprising, given the innate differences between pornographic and "regular" movies. For example, I can only imagine that the cast is much smaller on average in an adult movie than in a regular flick. The adult movie network is, according to the article, a small world, but fractal characteristics emerge when one establishes a link between two actors if they have been cast in at least 2 movies (instead of just 1).
Because of their topological properties, epidemics can propagate much more quickly in scale-free networks than in random ones. However, at the same time, the scale-free property creates opportunities to stop epidemics, by attacking or protecting the highly connected nodes, which in a sexual network are those with large numbers of partners (Liljeros et al. 2001). Given that filming in the adult movie industry is currently suspended because of an actor's positive HIV test, those most concerned should take into account the topology of their network.
References cited
Amaral, L. A. N., A. Scala, M. Barthelemy, and H. E. Stanley (2000). Classes of small-world networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97(21), 11149-11152.
Barabasi, Albert-Lazlo (2009). Scale-Free Networks: A Decade and Beyond. Science 325:412-413.
Barabási, A.-L., & Albert, R. (1999). Emergence of scaling in random networks. Science, 286, 509–512.
Foxman, B., Newman, M., Percha, B., Holmes, K. K., & Aral, S. O. (2006). Measures of sexual partnerships: Lengths, gaps, overlaps, and sexually transmitted infections. Sexually Transmitted Diseases, 33(4), 209–214.
Freiesleben de Blasio, B., Svenssen, Å, & Liljeros, F. (2007). Preferential attachment in sexual networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(26), 10762–10767.
Liljeros, F., Edling, C. R., & Amaral, L. A. N. (2003). Sexual networks: Implications for the transmission of sexually transmitted infections. Microbes and Infection, 5, 189–196.
Liljeros, F., Edling, C. R., Amaral, L. A. N., Stanley, H. E., & Åberg, Y. (2001). The web of human sexual contacts. Nature, 411, 907–908.
Watts, Duncan J. and Steven H. Strogatz (1998). Collective Dynamics of 'Small World' Networks. Nature 393, 440-442.
Thursday, December 12, 2013
A Comment on Michael E. Smith's blog post "Problems with the big journals, Science and Nature"
Michael E. Smith's recent post "Problems with the big journals, Science and Nature" is right on target. These prestige or "luxury" journals do seem to focus more on the potential newsworthiness of their articles than on their scientific value. I don't say this from personal experience because I've never had the temerity to submit to them. But I remember a dinner party with some friends who've published in them repeatedly. While discussing a manuscript they were preparing, the most successful of them all said something like, "We can't send this to Science. They're only interested if its the oldest or the biggest or the smallest." And this was not sour grapes. He had published several articles in Science. He'd figured out the magic formula and wasn't bitter about it. He was merely stating what he perceived to be a fact of life. So, I would say there is a widespread perception among scientists that these journals are primarily interested in results that are going to make headlines. This doesn't mean that the articles they choose are therefore necessarily unworthy. In the Venn diagram for publishing results, the domains for "newsworthy science" and "significant science" do overlap. I scan Science and Nature every week, and I find many of the articles interesting not only for their substantive results but also for their innovative combinations of methods.
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Twitter for archaeologists? From Michael E. Smith's blog...
On the alleged value of Twitter for archaeologists:
"Direct access to important people in science and government."
Michael Smith's remark:
"Yeah, I need to communicate with Barack Obama so I'll try Twitter. Or maybe I missed a tweet from Steven Hawking." -MES
"Direct access to important people in science and government."
Michael Smith's remark:
"Yeah, I need to communicate with Barack Obama so I'll try Twitter. Or maybe I missed a tweet from Steven Hawking." -MES
Friday, December 6, 2013
Videos of the Exploration of the Exploration of Cenote Sac Uayum at Mayapan
The cenote (sinkhole) of Sac Uayum is a large and visually impressive vertical cave located a short distance to the south of the great encircling wall of Mayapan, the Late Postclassic period capital city in the state of Yucatan, Mexico.I first visited Sac Uayum in 1991 while I was excavating at Mayapan. At that time, I became aware of a local belief that the cenote was unusually dangerous because it was guarded by a plumed serpent, and I wondered whether that might be why the cenote was evidently excluded from the circuit of the city wall, which bends inward to avoid it. I mentioned this in an article I published in 2005:
Brown, Clifford T. (2005) Caves, Karst, and Settlement at Mayapán, Yucatán, in In the Maw of the Earth Monster: Mesoamerican Ritual Cave Use, edited by James E. Brady and Keith M. Prufer, pp. 373-402. Austin: University of Texas Press (The Linda Schele Series in Maya and Pre-Columbian Studies).
At the time, I didn't attempt to enter the cave--which would have required a vertical descent--for lack of both equipment and training.
Fortunately, my friend Bradley Russell has now apparently explored the cave along with Pedro Delgado Ku, Barbara Escamilla, and others. But first, they performed a heets' lu'um cleansing ceremony to protect themselves from the evil winds and spirits in the cave. I paste below a link to a video the Bradley posted on Youtube showing the ceremony. Below that, I have also embedded links to three other videos showing the exploration of the cave itself. I remember the cave as having deep water covering the entire floor, so not surprisingly, they used scuba diving to explore it, as you can see in the videos.The videos and photographs are high quality.
Outstanding, Bradley! What fun! Great work!
There is a National Geographic article online about their work, which was supported in part by the Society. Here's a link to a number of other videos about Brad's research on the National Geographic website.
Brown, Clifford T. (2005) Caves, Karst, and Settlement at Mayapán, Yucatán, in In the Maw of the Earth Monster: Mesoamerican Ritual Cave Use, edited by James E. Brady and Keith M. Prufer, pp. 373-402. Austin: University of Texas Press (The Linda Schele Series in Maya and Pre-Columbian Studies).
At the time, I didn't attempt to enter the cave--which would have required a vertical descent--for lack of both equipment and training.
Fortunately, my friend Bradley Russell has now apparently explored the cave along with Pedro Delgado Ku, Barbara Escamilla, and others. But first, they performed a heets' lu'um cleansing ceremony to protect themselves from the evil winds and spirits in the cave. I paste below a link to a video the Bradley posted on Youtube showing the ceremony. Below that, I have also embedded links to three other videos showing the exploration of the cave itself. I remember the cave as having deep water covering the entire floor, so not surprisingly, they used scuba diving to explore it, as you can see in the videos.The videos and photographs are high quality.
Outstanding, Bradley! What fun! Great work!
There is a National Geographic article online about their work, which was supported in part by the Society. Here's a link to a number of other videos about Brad's research on the National Geographic website.
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