Robert-Goldwater-Library

NG investigates the Maya collapse

Scholars have long puzzled over the Maya civilization's rise to glory and fall to ruin. The latest thinking is that a man named Fire Is Born made the Maya great. But no one person or problem caused the collapse. Simply put, everything went wrong.

The cover story of the August 2007 issue of National Geographic Magazine explores current theories on the rise and fall of the Maya. Joining the standard NG treatment ('imaginative' drawings recreating moments in Maya history) are selected art objects and dramatic photography of Maya sites. The online version of the magazine includes features such as an interactive map and interviews with the writer and photographer, and related links to other NG features, web sites and printed books and articles.

The Inca: Bridging Gaps

An Inca suspension bridge in 1877 and the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson. Engraving, from “Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas” by E. George Squier (Harper and Brothers); Angel Franco/The New York Times

via NYTimes:

How the Inca Leapt Canyons
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: May 8, 2007

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Conquistadors from Spain came, they saw and they were astonished. They had never seen anything in Europe like the bridges of Peru. Chroniclers wrote that the Spanish soldiers stood in awe and fear before the spans of braided fiber cables suspended across deep gorges in the Andes, narrow walkways sagging and swaying and looking so frail.

Yet the suspension bridges were familiar and vital links in the vast empire of the Inca, as they had been to Andean cultures for hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spanish in 1532. The people had not developed the stone arch or wheeled vehicles, but they were accomplished in the use of natural fibers for textiles, boats, sling weapons — even keeping inventories by a prewriting system of knots.

So bridges made of fiber ropes, some as thick as a man’s torso, were the technological solution to the problem of road building in rugged terrain. By some estimates, at least 200 such suspension bridges spanned river gorges in the 16th century. One of the last of these, over the Apurimac River, inspired Thornton Wilder’s novel “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.”

Although scholars have studied the Inca road system’s importance in forging and controlling the pre-Columbian empire, John A.Ochsendorf of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology here said, “Historians and archaeologists have neglected the role of bridges.”

Dr. Ochsendorf’s research on Inca suspension bridges, begun while he was an undergraduate at Cornell University, illustrates an engineering university’s approach to archaeology, combining materials science and experimentation with the traditional fieldwork of observing and dating artifacts. Other universities conduct research in archaeological materials, but it has long been a specialty at M.I.T.

Photos: Carl T. Gossett Jr./The New York Times, left; Adriana von Hagen, center; and Robert Spencer for The New York Times

The first steel section, top, being installed on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in 1963. The last remaining Inca bridge in Peru, center, was the model for the M.I.T. bridge project. John A. Ochsendorf of M.I.T., above, showing cable made in Peru.

Students here are introduced to the multidisciplinary investigation of ancient technologies as applied in transforming resources into cultural hallmarks from household pottery to grand pyramids. In a course called “materials in human experience,” students are making a 60-foot-long fiber bridge in the Peruvian style. On Saturday, they plan to stretch the bridge across a dry basin between two campus buildings.

In recent years, M.I.T. archaeologists and scientists have joined forces in studies of early Peruvian ceramics, balsa rafts and metal alloys; Egyptian glass and Roman concrete; and also the casting of bronze bells in Mexico. They discovered that Ecuadoreans, traveling by sea, introduced metallurgy to western Mexico. They even found how Mexicans added bits of morning-glory plants, which contain sulfur, in processing natural rubber into bouncing balls.

“Mexicans discovered vulcanization 3,500 years before Goodyear,” said Dorothy Hosler, an M.I.T. professor of archaeology and ancient technology. “The Spanish had never seen anything that bounced like the rubber balls of Mexico.”

Heather Lechtman, an archaeologist of ancient technology who helped develop the M.I.T. program, said that in learning “how objects were made, what they were made of and how they were used, we see people making decisions at various stages, and the choices involve engineering as well as culture.”

From this perspective, she said, the choices are not always based only on what works well, but also are guided by ideological and aesthetic criteria. In the casting of early Mexican bells, attention was given to their ringing tone and their color; an unusually large amount of arsenic was added to copper to make the bronze shine like silver.

“If people use materials in different ways in different societies, that tells you something about those people,” Professor Lechtman said.

In the case of the Peruvian bridges, the builders relied on a technology well suited to the problem and their resources. The Spanish themselves demonstrated how appropriate the Peruvian technique was.

Dr. Ochsendorf, a specialist in early architecture and engineering, said the colonial government tried many times to erect European arch bridges across the canyons, and each attempt ended in fiasco until iron and steel were applied to bridge building. The Peruvians, knowing nothing of the arch or iron metallurgy, instead relied on what they knew best, fibers from cotton, grasses and saplings, and llama and alpaca wool.

The Inca suspension bridges achieved clear spans of at least 150 feet, probably much greater. This was a longer span than any European masonry bridges at the time. The longest Roman bridge in Spain had a maximum span between supports of 95 feet. And none of these European bridges had to stretch across deep canyons. [read on...]

A New World: England's first view of America

via The British Museum site:

A New World: England's first view of America
15 March – 17 June 2007
Room 5

'Staggering' The Times

'Enthralling...unmissable' The Telegraph

The extraordinary watercolours of John White gave the Elizabethan world its first glimpse of America, ultimately shaping its view of the New World. This exhibition focuses on more than 70 watercolours made by White on the voyages to Virginia (now North Carolina) in the 1580s. These images are  the earliest visual record by an Englishman of the flora, fauna and people of America and provide us with an idea of how fascinating this strange New World must have been to Europeans of the late 16th century.
      
The exhibition also features a selection of Elizabethan portraits, maritime and scientific instruments from the period, alongside historic maps, books, prints and other exquisite objects which relate to Elizabethan navigation and capture the excitement of this golden age of exploration.
      
A New World looks at the lasting impact John White's watercolours had on the Old World's impression of America. His legacy continued for over 250 years after his death thanks to the reproduction and adaptation of his work by later artists, a selection of which is displayed in the exhibition.
      
Exhibition supported by The Annenberg Foundation.       
      
Generous support was also provided by the American Friends of the British Museum and Mr Francis Finlay.

via Time Out, Mon Mar 12, 2007:

A New World: England's First View of America
by Sara O'Reilly

[Critics' Choice]
Until Jun 17 British Museum, Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3DG

A new exhibition opening at the British Museum on Thursday provides an opportunity to see the artworks that were largely responsible for shaping England’'s initial idea of America.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a collection of watercolours by John White, who travelled to America with Sir Walter Raleigh in order to document the New World.

White's fascinating pictures of the complex and sophisticated culture of the North Carolina Algonquin Indians and the landscapes, wildlife and plants of 'Virginia' (what we now call North Carolina was named by Raleigh for his queen) are the only surviving original visual record of this period of America’s history. Although the paintings are all part of the British Museum’s collection, they are being displayed together for the first time in 40 years. They’re accompanied by artefacts – portraits, maps and navigational instruments – loaned by the National Portrait Gallery, the British Library and the National Maritime Museum to set the scene at the Elizabethan court in a display that marks the 400th anniversary in May of the first permanent Jamestown settlement.

The exhibition also provides a glimpse of the earlier ‘lost colony’ of Roanoke. Although relatively few facts have come to light about John White, it is known that he was part of a second expedition dispatched by Raleigh after an initial fact-finding voyage in 1584. Accompanying Thomas Harriot, Raleigh's tutor in navigation, a linguist, recorder and surveyor whose task was to establish the land’s potential for farming and trade. White’s job was to produce visual records and maps in order to drum up investment and entice colonists prepared to found an English plantation.

The 1585 voyage anchored off the outer banks of what is now North Carolina built a small fort on the island of Roanoke, surveyed the coastline and brought back to England reports and pictures of the site they deemed the perfect place to start an English community. Preparations were made for a permanent colony of 115 men women and children at the 'Cittie of Raleigh' on the Chesapeake and John White was appointed their governor with 12 assistants. But when the new expedition set off in 1587 it landed at Roanoke with insufficient supplies. White was obliged to return to England to get assistance but once there he found that, because of the Spanish Armada, his relief ships were denied permission to sail.

When he finally made it back to North Carolina, three years later in 1590, no trace of the colonists remained and the legend of the 'lost colony' of Roanoke – the subject of much intriguing internet debate – was born.

Middle Passage @ Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts

via NYTimes, Art in Review, 12/15/06 :

MIDDLE PASSAGE: WHITE SHIPS, BLACK CARGO
Drawings by Tom Feelings
Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts
80 Hanson Place, Brooklyn
Through Feb. 4

The Middle Passage is the name given to the dangerous sea leg of the slave trade, across the Atlantic Ocean from the west coast of Africa to North and South America and the Caribbean. It is also the subject of this astonishing suite of 52 black-and-white drawings by the African-American artist Tom Feelings, who died in 2003. The drawings took Mr. Feelings, a Brooklyn native, more than 20 years to complete. Composed through the unusual process of layering tissue paper over watercolor imagery, with pencil and tempera highlights, the drawings are smoky and ethereal. But the acrid content belies the softly beguiling presentation.

Mr. Feelings indulges in no lazy romanticism of Africa, depicting the origins of the slave trade in local tribal conflicts. Several drawings show African kings assembling and trading slaves with the Europeans for guns, molasses and rum.

The most affecting images illustrate the suffering and desperation of the captives on board the slave ships. There are countless images of them being force-fed, beaten and raped, of their bodies chained and pressed together, back to belly, in the putrid bowels of leaky hulks.

Thousands died of disease, starvation and torture; others took their own lives. But moments of humanity emerge, as when a European sailor tries to stop a slave from certain suicide by leaping overboard. Perhaps he is just trying to preserve his investment, though his fearful eyes suggest an uneasiness and conflict in the slave trader’s heart. BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO

"Coaxing" Reviewed

Mask (semese)
Papuan Gulf, Western Elema area, Kiri people
Cane or wicker framework, bark cloth, plant fiber, pigment, palm wood; 84 5/8 x 55 1/8 x 13 3/4 in. (215 x 140 x 35 cm)
The Field Museum, Chicago, Collected by A. B. Lewis 1912

via NYTimes:
Art Review | 'Coaxing the Spirits to Dance'
Works That Called Out to the Gods and Offered Them a Place to Dwell
By GRACE GLUECK
Published: October 27, 2006 {excerpts}

Helpful spirits, essential to the good life, didn’t come easily to the clannish peoples of the Gulf of Papua. They had to be coaxed. And in the coaxing lies the history of Papuan art, a religious pursuit entirely devoted to making masks, figures and spirit boards for habitation by the powerful local gods whose intervention was sought for success in hunting, harvesting, warfare, trading and treating the sick.

How the Papuans practiced their beliefs on the remote Pacific island of New Guinea in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when they still had little contact with the West, is the complex and fascinating story told in "Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This exhibition of some 60 objects and 30 rare photographs of the works on site or in actual use is the first comprehensive study of the material, the Met says, since a pioneering survey in 1961 mounted by the former Museum of Primitive Art in New York. The current show was organized by the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, in collaboration with the Met, and the New York presentation was put together by Virginia-Lee Webb, the Met's research curator in the art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas.

The art reflects the Papuan social order, which was based on families, especially those whose ancestry was identified with particular rivers and places. Each family’s totemic emblems and legends spoke of its land and spiritual heritage. The men in the society kept the traditions and made the art. They lived in long houses, apart from their women and children (who were forbidden to enter). The long houses, long huts with individual cubicles, served as communal residences as well as performance halls for the spirit-coaxing dances, and also provided a place for clan shrines, maintained to preserve each family's tree.

The carved and painted "spirit boards" made throughout the gulf region, on the south coast of present-day Papua New Guinea, are probably the most easily recognized of the area's traditional artworks. Each board was meant to serve as a home for the rain forest or river deity embraced by a particular clan. Their central designs, passed down from fathers to sons and through marriages, typically represent a bush or river spirit, with a heavily stylized face and perhaps a small body, surrounded by various totemic symbols.
[...]

William G. Lawes (English, 1839–1907)
Young Men with Maiva Shields, 1881–89
Papuan Gulf, Port Moresby
Gelatin silver print; 5 7/8 x 8 in. (15 x 20.3 cm)
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

The show's many photographs depicting Papuan customs, habitats and arts were mostly taken by the anthropologists and photographers who visited the area as Christianity was beginning to take hold at the end of the 19th century. More than a few depict objects in the show in their original settings, like a cheerful Wapo spirit board that was placed on pig skulls in a long-house shrine, snapped in 1930 by the Swiss anthropologist Paul Wirz.

The dean of Papua's photographers, however, was an Australian, Frank Hurley (1885-1962), best known for his images of Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic in 1914. The first to use cinematography and aerial photography in the Gulf of Papua, Mr. Hurley collected objects and photographed places that no longer survive. His aerial view of Kaimari villages on the Purari Delta in 1922, shot from about 1,500 feet, gives a vivid idea of the territory and its watery byways.

[read full article]

Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf : images + video clips

click image above to play video.
 

via The Metropolitan Museum of Art:

Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf

main page

MORE ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

IMAGES

VIDEO

Each of these two video clips shows a digitized sequence from the original silent film by Frank Hurley entitled Pearls and Savages. Both masked performances were reenacted at Hurley's request. Hurley also made still photographs of the masks, two of which are included in this exhibition.

Looters help team uncover 4,800-year-old ruins

from asahi.com

06/21/2006

BY HIROSHI ISHIDA AND KUNIICHI TANIDA, THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

CHANCAY, Peru--Japanese researchers said they believe they have discovered--with the unintended help of looters--the ruins of a temple at least 4,800 years old that could be one of the oldest in the Americas.

The temple was likely built before or around 2600 B.C. when Peru's oldest known city, Caral, was created, the researchers said.

The discovery was made in the ruins of Shicras located in the Chancay Valley about 100 kilometers north of Lima. The team started full-scale excavation work on Monday.

There are two 10-meter-high pyramid-shaped structures made of stone running north to south for about 50 meters and east to west for about 30 meters, according to Tetsuya Inamura, professor of cultural anthropology at Aichi Prefectural University who is part of the excavation team.

   Experts said they hope the discovery will shed light on the origins of ancient civilizations of Latin America.

"It can be regarded as a structure built using organized labor," Taiken Kato, professor of cultural anthropology at Saitama University, said. "If the excavation could confirm urban developments in a wide range of coastal areas in Peru, it would contribute to unraveling the formation of the Andes civilization."

In August last year, Hiroshi Sakane, chief curator of the Lima-based Museo Amano, and Masami Fujisawa, professor of seismic engineering at the Tsukuba University of Technology, found the ruins in a 4-meter-wide, 8-meter-deep pit apparently made by looters.

   The Amano museum was established by Yoshitaro Amano who spent his life collecting artifacts of the Chancay culture.

When the two researchers looked into a section of the pit, they found reed bags filled with stones and pebbles that were used as reinforcing material, scrapings of charcoal and fibers, and other items.

The researchers said the ruins were likely part of a religious facility, possibly a temple, because of the complicated construction method used and the traces of fire apparently used in rituals.

   Radiocarbon dating showed the reinforcing materials and scrapings of charcoal and fibers were up to 4,800 years old.

   There are also indications that the structure underwent reconstruction work seven or eight times.

A team comprising Japanese experts on archeology, cultural anthropology, seismic engineering and other fields, as well as a Peruvian archeologist from the Amano museum, was granted permission to excavate the site from the Peruvian government.

The past 10 years have yielded some remarkable findings at the archeological site in Caral, about 150 km north of the ruins, including a temple at least 30 meters tall built with gigantic stones, as well as a group of at least 30 large buildings.
(IHT/Asahi: June 21,2006)

Craig Morris, a Towering Figure in Inca Expeditions, Dies at 66

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD (via nytimes.com)

Photo source

Craig Morris, an archaeologist who helped transform modern knowledge of the Inca civilization and a leader of research and exhibitions at the American Museum of Natural History, died Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 66 and lived in Greenwich Village.

The cause was complications of heart surgery performed on Monday at NewYork-Presbyterian/ Columbia hospital, the museum announced.

Dr. Morris was a towering figure in pre-Columbian archaeology, colleagues said. His research on the Inca culture took him on expeditions to the heights of the Andes and down to the valleys of the Pacific coast for years of vigorous excavations.

One of his most intensive expeditions explored ruins of Huánuco Pampa, the huge Inca city at an elevation of 12,000 feet in the Andes. In the 1970's and 80's, he excavated more than 300 of the sites and some 4,000 crumbling buildings.

Other archaeologists said Dr. Morris's excavations and interpretations transformed understanding of Inca urban life before the Spanish conquest in the early 16th century. His more recent research concentrated on the architecture and ceramics of coastal Peru as a reflection of Inca political and economic structure. He also incorporated aerial and declassified satellite photography in his latest work.

For 10 years, until 2004, Dr. Morris was dean of science at the American Museum, overseeing the staff of curators and coordinating their work on public exhibitions. "He was a pillar of our community personally and intellectually," said Ellen V. Futter, the museum president.

Michael J. Novacek, senior vice president and provost of the museum, said that Dr. Morris had a major role in the renaissance of the scientific exhibitions at the museum in recent years. He took a direct hand in curating several temporary and permanent exhibits, including one on the royal tombs of Sipán in Peru.

But it was Dr. Morris's own research that dominated his 31 years at the museum, where at his death he was a senior vice president and curator of anthropology. His expertise in Inca culture and his scholarly publications earned him membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He was also vice president of the Institute of Andean Research, treasurer of the Peruvian-American Research Foundation and an adjunct professor of anthropology at Columbia ...

• Read full obituary here

Expedition, Spring 2006

Expedition, volume 48, number 1 (Spring 2006) A E961

This posting is an experiment in providing timely access to the contents of journals received in the Goldwater Library. We will continue to send the monthly email "New Arrivals", which includes a list of journal issues received, for the foreseeable future.

Selected contents from this issue:

History and the Birds of Paradise--Surprising Connections from New Guinea
Stuart Kirsch
"By paying attention to the relationships responsible for the production of hats decorated with bird of paradise plumes we can suggest alternative understandings of New Guinea's history..."

A Short History of Anthropology at Penn (Download .pdf)
Igor Kopytoff
Concentrating on : "the Department's protohistory in the 19th century, closely associated with the founding of the Museum; the Department's formal beginnings in the early 20th century; and its revival after World War II, which effectively gave rise to the present Department."

* For the complete contents and other selected full text articles from this and all past issues, visit Expedition's website.*

Oldest Known Maya Mural, Tomb Reveal Story of Ancient King

by John Roach
via National Geographic News (December 13, 2005):

 

Archaeologists today revealed the final section of the earliest known Maya mural ever found, saying that the find upends everything they thought they knew about the origins of Maya art, writing, and rule. (Full online story here)

A detail from a vivid Maya mural depicting scenes of the creation story and, at the center, the maize god, who crowns himself king. The 30-foot-long mural was uncovered at the San Bartolo site in Guatemala. (image: Kenneth Garrett © National Geographic / source)
                            
The painting was the last wall of a room-size mural to be excavated. The site was discovered in 2001 at the ancient Maya city of San Bartolo in the lowlands of northeastern Guatemala.

"It is really breathtaking how beautiful this is," said William Saturno, an archaeologist with the University of New Hampshire and the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. [...]

The painted wall dates to 100 B.C., proving that these stories of creation and kings—and the use of elaborate art and writing to tell them—were well established more than 2,000 years ago ago, centuries earlier than previously believed. [...]

In addition to the mural, the researchers found the oldest known Maya royal burial, dating to 150 B.C. It serves as further proof for the existence of early Maya kings. [...]

Saturno, whose research has been supported by the National Geographic Society and is conducted with the Guatemalan Institute of Anthropology and History, reports the finds in the January 2006 issue of National Geographic magazine. [...]

Saturno and his team plan to continue excavating at San Bartolo for years to come.

"This is a tip of iceberg," he said. "The site is one square kilometer [0.4 square mile] in area. This room we've spent so much time in … it's a four-meter-by-nine-meter [13-by-30-foot] space."