Steve and I both posted examples of two “ghosts of evolution” – plants that have evolved with animal “partners” to disperse their seeds, who have since gone extinct. These were the osage orange and the devils claw, both plants mentioned in Connie Barlow’s book, Ghosts of Evolution. Earlier this week I thought that it would …
Author: Reid Farmer
Mayan War Crimes
Yesterday’s LA Times and NY Times each had pieces on a spectacular archaeological find in the Classic Mayan site of Cancuen in Guatemala. Arthur Demarest, an archaeologist from Vanderbilt University, and his team are excavating there and found evidence of a great battle for the city around the year AD 800. Cancuen was taken by …
Technical Difficulties – Slow Blogging from Steve
Steve has asked me to pass on to everyone that he is having technical problems with his computer which will probably keep him from blogging until later in the week. It is also limiting his ability to read and answer e-mail, so don’t worry, he isn’t ignoring you!
Zuni Rock Art Blogging 3
The Kachina Cult (also spelled katsina or katchina) is the keystone of Zuni religion. This cult appears in all the Pueblos, but is most evident and best known from the western Pueblos of Hopi, Zuni, and Acoma. Kachinas are spirits, in some cases those of ancestors, who carry prayers from the people to the gods. …
Great Basin Rabbit Hunting
We know from the ethnographic literature that rabbit hunting was a major communal activity practiced by Native American groups in the Great Basin. Julian Steward’s classic Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups describes these and the equipment used in some detail. The major quarry was jackrabbits (Lepus californicus). Communal hunts were held in the Fall and accounts …
Little Petroglyph Canyon – Coso Rock Art District
In conjunction with the Society for California Archaeology Data-Sharing meeting in Ridgecrest, CA last week-end, a tour was arranged for us at the nearby Coso Rock Art District, a National Historic Landmark. This is a world-class archaeological resource that is located on the China Lake – Naval Air Warfare Center. The fact that this important …
Lives of Pronghorns
This article in the LA Times yesterday by Deborah Sullivan Brennan, laments the decline of pronghorn antelope herds in California from populations estimated at 500,000 at European contact to something in the range of 5-6,000 today. We all lament that. You should look at her piece, but Brennan says that there are too few open …
Trona Pinnacles
While in Ridgecrest, CA over the weekend for an archaeology society meeting, I made a side trip to the Trona Pinnacles National Natural Landmark. Ridgecrest and the Pinnacles are located in the high desert, east of the Sierra Nevada. During the Pleistocene and early Holocene, the Pinnacles area was at the bottom of Searles Lake, …
Montana Bison Hunt
There is an article in today’s Wall Street Journal by Brendan Miniter about a plan by the State of Montana to allow limited hunting of bison who have wandered out of Yellowstone National Park. The bison carry brucellosis, a disease that kills domestic cattle, and they can’t be allowed to mingle with cattle herds in …
More on the Airman in the Glacier
A couple of weeks ago, I posted this about the body of a WW II era airman found in a glacier in the California Sierras. The LA Times this week had more about the shipment of the body to a DoD forensics lab in Hawaii for identification, and the known names of the crew of …