New old things

A quick assessment might lead you to think that, at least with stuff down here on Earth, we've discovered about all there is to discover.

We can go pretty much anywhere now, from the tops of the tallest mountains to the bottom of the Marianas Trench.  We've explored all of the continents; even remote places like Antarctica, Siberia, the Yukon, the Amazonian rain forest, and Tibet have been the subject of intensive study.

It's easy for most of us, with our relatively insular lives, to underestimate the size of the planet.  Even those who -- like myself -- have been lucky enough to travel extensively can lose sight of how inaccessible some places are.  Despite technology now allowing us to visit (and live, if we want) pretty much anywhere, there are still huge areas of trackless wilderness out there.

Meaning that huge areas have minimally-studied plants, animals, geological history, paleontology, and -- apposite to today's topic -- archaeology.  So if you're going into science, fret not; it will be a long time before we run out of stuff to explore.

The topic of new discoveries occurred to me when I was reading a couple of articles sent to me by my friend, the outstanding writer Gil Miller, having to do with recent bits of human history that have been uncovered (literally) by researchers.  The first was about the discovery of a previously-unknown two-millennia-old Buddhist temple at a site in Pakistan near the town of Barikot thought to have been completely explored.

The temple, which has been tentatively dated to the second century B.C.E., contains a stupa -- a hemispherical temple, often ornately-carved, used for meditation in the Buddhist tradition -- as well as the bases of several columns, and the foundations of vestibule rooms and a public courtyard.  It's thought to have been constructed during the reign of Menander I, who was Greek by origin, but a Buddhist convert who spent most of his life in what is now India and Pakistan, and who was said to have "conquered more regions than Alexander the Great."  In an all-too-common pattern, the conquests didn't last long after Menander's death; his son, Strato I, and (possible) grandson, Menander II, were plagued by attacks from the Maues, a Scythian tribe that eventually conquered most of what had been Menander I's kingdom.  

Unfortunately, archaeological dig sites often get destroyed by plunderers who have figured out that tombs frequently contain valuables, and this site is no exception.  Apparently there are trenches all over the place, dug by robbers, who tore through and destroyed "worthless" artifacts like walls and floors, but -- fortunately -- the area around the temple was relatively unscathed.

The second study is from halfway around the world, in the Yucatán region of Mexico, where a unique bit of research gave us a lens into the peak of Mayan civilization (on the order of eight hundred years ago).  It's been known that cacao was a sacred plant to the Mayans; they're the ones who started humans consuming chocolate, and we pretty much haven't stopped since.  Cacao is a remarkably tricky plant to grow.  It needs a particular combination of soil chemistry, air humidity, calm, and shade in order to flourish.  The Mayans became experts at finding places to grow cacao -- so the researchers reasoned that where you find abundant wild cacao plants, it might be a good indicator that there were Mayan ruins nearby.

However, cacao plants aren't immortal; the plants cultivated by the Mayans eight centuries ago are long gone.  But researchers from Brigham Young University realized that there might be persistent biomarkers -- like the chemicals theobromine and caffeine -- that might indicate where cacao had been grown historically.

So they started sifting through soil samples.

What they found was that the biomarkers were predominantly found near limestone sinkholes -- nine of the eleven sinkholes tested showed measurable theobromine and caffeine in the soil nearby.  They began investigating the sinkholes themselves, rappelling down the walls to the bottom, and found jade and ceramic artifacts, including some tiny ceramics shaped to look like miniature cacao pods.

"We looked for theobromine for several years and found cacao in some places we didn’t expect," said Richard Terry, the senior author of the paper.  "We were also amazed to see the ceremonial artifacts.  My students rappelled into one of these sinkholes and said,  ‘Wow!  There is a structure in here!’  It was a staircase that filled one-third of the sinkhole with stone...  Now we have these links between religious structures and the religious crops grown in these sinkhole.  Knowing that the cacao beans were used as currency, it means the sinkholes were a place where the money could be grown and controlled.  This new understanding creates a rich historical narrative of a highly charged Maya landscape with economic, political and spiritual value."

The third paper was about a dig site in Italy -- surely a thoroughly-studied place if ever there was one -- where researchers uncovered a trove of helmets and other relics from near the Acropolis of Elea-Velia, in the Cilento region.  Elea-Velia was settled by Greeks in the sixth century B.C.E., and became a major trading center between the resident Greeks, the Etruscans to the north, and the rising Roman republic in the south.  The helmets are thought date from the late sixth century, and to have been part of a ritual of thanks for the victory the Greeks and their Etruscan allies had over the Carthaginians in the Battle of Alalia, off the coast of Corsica.

One of the newly-discovered helmets from Elea-Velia

Also uncovered were a tile floor, various pieces of painted ceramics, and the remains of weapons.

Whenever I read about stuff like this, it always makes me wonder what other amazing finds are waiting to be discovered.  If a trove like the one at Elea-Velia, ritual sites such as the one in the Yucatán, and the Buddhist temple in Pakistan can escape notice for the hundreds of years we've been digging up ancient relics, there has got to be a ton more out there to find.

So we need to keep looking.  Every time we find something like this, it enriches our knowledge of our own past.  It reminds me of the wonderful quote by Carl Sagan -- he was referring to astronomy, but it could equally well be applied to any science -- "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week combines cutting-edge astrophysics and cosmology with razor-sharp social commentary, challenging our knowledge of science and the edifice of scientific research itself: Chanda Prescod-Weinsten's The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred.

Prescod-Weinsten is a groundbreaker; she's a theoretical cosmologist, and the first Black woman to achieve a tenure-track position in the field (at the University of New Hampshire).  Her book -- indeed, her whole career -- is born from a deep love of the mysteries of the night sky, but along the way she has had to get past roadblocks that were set in front of her based only on her gender and race.  The Disordered Cosmos is both a tribute to the science she loves and a challenge to the establishment to do better -- to face head on the centuries-long horrible waste of talent and energy of anyone not a straight White male.

It's a powerful book, and should be on the to-read list for anyone interested in astronomy or the human side of science, or (hopefully) both.  And watch for Prescod-Weinsten's name in the science news.  Her powerful voice is one we'll be hearing a lot more from.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Voices from the jungle

When I was a teenager, I was fascinated with the Mayans.  The history and culture -- what we knew of it at the time -- was fascinating enough, but I think what really captured me was the unique way the language was written.

At that time, very little of the writing had been successfully deciphered, and much of what had been was tentative at best.  In fact, for some time the task was that most daunting of linguistic puzzles; an unknown script coding for unknown sounds in an unknown language.  The surmise that the glyphs primarily represented not just a single language, but two -- the extinct Ch'otli' language and the extant Yucatec language -- didn't help matters.  Complicating things further was the fact that it turns out that similar to Japanese hiragana and kanji, some of the glyphs represent syllables and others represent entire words.  The team effort to completely decipher Mayan glyphs took well over a hundred years, culminating in a paper in 1986 that allowed just about every classic Mayan inscription to be read.

The most daunting thing is that the patterns connecting spelling to pronunciation were convoluted.  Some words had "echo vowels" -- vowels repeated from the previous syllable when written, but not pronounced (e.g. yop, leaf, written using the syllables yo-po).  Other written-but-not-pronounced vowels were "disharmonic" -- not the same as the preceding syllable -- and the rules governing which syllabic glyph to use are abstruse to say the least.  (Of course, in reality, the Mayans have nothing on English for bizarre spelling-to-pronunciation correspondences; consider how -ough is pronounced in the words rough, through, thorough, ought, drought, and hiccough.  I even have an idea of why that mess happened historically, and I still think it's ridiculous.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata, Escritura maya, CC BY-SA 4.0]

And, of course, the main difficulty was the paucity of examples of the script, mostly due to the Spanish, who came in during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and proceeded to destroy as many of the heathen inscriptions they could get their hands on.  People like Diego de Landa, bishop of the Yucatán in the late sixteenth century, burned just about all the Mayan codices, and his belated efforts to preserve what was known about the script and the languages they represented were half-hearted at best.  Even so, historian and linguist William Gates -- in what has to be preserved forever in the annals of chutzpah -- said, "ninety-nine percent of what we today know of the Mayas, we know as the result either of what Landa has told us... or have learned in the use and study of what he told."

Well, if you count that he destroyed ninety-nine percent of the inscriptions first, then yeah, ninety-nine percent of the remaining one percent were preserved by de Landa and his friends in the Inquisition.

It's heartening, though, that five hundred years later, we find remnants of that lost civilization.  (There are still people who speak Mayan languages today, but it's undeniable the Spanish pretty well obliterated the culture of an entire people.)  Just last week, it was announced that some explorers trying to map out caves in the Yucatán stumbled upon three pieces of pottery dating back to the Late Postclassic Period (1200-1550 C.E.).  One of them was in fragments -- crushed when it was caught in between growing tree roots -- but the other two are in remarkably good condition.  The Mayans had a positive fascination for caves, and thought (like many early civilizations) that they represented the entrance to the underworld, a place called Xibalba (literally, "place of fright").  Just as the Greeks did at the cave of the Delphic Oracle, the Mayans brought offerings and sacrifices into caves to appease the gods and spirits of the nether world, and it's thought these three vessels were probably examples of those ritual gifts.

Even by comparison to other cultures' ideas about the horrors of the afterlife, Xibalba is impressively awful.  The lords of Xibalba seemed to enjoy causing pain and humiliation, and sent human spirits after death into a series of tests in various "houses" -- Dark House (completely pitch black, as you might have guessed), Rattling House (ice cold, with pounding hailstorms), Jaguar House (guess what lived there, and were dreadfully hungry), Bat House (ditto), Razor House (filled with blades that moved around on their own), and Hot House (which was on fire).  Just the names of the gods of Xibalba would be enough to dissuade me from ever going there (not, I suppose, that you had a choice).  There were:

• Xiquiripat ("Flying Scab")
• Cuchumaquic ("Gathered Blood")
• Ahalpuh ("Pus Demon")
• Ahalgana ("Jaundice Demon")
• Chamiabac ("Bone Staff")
• Chamiaholom ("Skull Staff")
• Ahalmez ("Sweepings Demon") and Ahaltocob ("Stabbing Demon") (who teamed up to hide in the dust of unswept parts of your house, then jumped out and stabbed you to death, which is a pretty good incentive to keep the floor clean)

Which definitely makes me wonder who spent their time making this shit up.  I mean, if you're gonna come up with wild tales, at least leave out the sentient razor blades and pus demons.

So it's a fascinating culture, but one I'm rather glad I don't belong to.  The Judeo-Christian hell I had to contend with when I was a kid growing up in the Catholic Church was bad enough.

Be that as it may, it's pretty cool that Diego de Landa and his ilk didn't silence all of these distant voices from the jungle.  I've been lucky enough to visit that part of the world twice, and the pyramids and stone temples they left behind are awe-inspiring.  Perhaps there are still more relics out there in the rain forest waiting to be discovered -- and which will give us another lens into a vanished civilization.

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I've mentioned before how fascinated I am with the parts of history that still are largely mysterious -- the top of the list being the European Dark Ages, between the fall of Rome and the re-consolidation of central government under people like Charlemagne and Alfred the Great.  Not all that much was being written down in the interim, and much of the history we have comes from much later (such as History of the Kings of Britain, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, chronicling the events of the fourth through the eighth centuries C.E. -- but written in the twelfth century).

"Dark Ages," though, may be an unfair appellation, according to the new book Matthew Gabriele and David Perry called The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.  Gabriele and Perry look at what is known of those years, and their contention is that it wasn't the savage, ignorant hotbed of backwards superstition many of us picture, but a rich and complex world, including the majesty of Byzantium, the beauty and scientific advancements of Moorish Spain, and the artistic genius of the master illuminators found in just about every Christian abbey in Europe.

It's an interesting perspective.  It certainly doesn't settle all the questions; we're still relying on a paucity of actual records, and the ones we have (Geoffrey's work being a case in point) sometimes being as full of legends, myths, and folk tales as they are of actual history.  But The Bright Ages goes a long way toward dispelling the sense that medieval Europe was seven hundred years of nothing but human misery.  It's a fascinating look at humanity's distant, and shadowed, past.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]