Madame Butterfly

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  2. Posted

    In the Last Supper that really does look like a woman sitting to the right of Jesus...Hmmmm.

    347067[/snapback]

     

     

    I think it's completely obvious myself. But think about this.

     

    Because for years you were told it was Jesus and his disciples, did you ever look for a woman in the painting or the disciples for that matter, or did you only focus on Christ?

  3. Posted

    At first, as a new poster, that my opinions weren't as respected as those who had been here as long as others.

     

    Understandably others you know have earned your respect.

     

    I feel that it should be that all have your respect until they've done something to have it withdrawn.

  6. Posted

    Soldiers’ blogs bring Iraq war home

    The new Ernie Pyles: Cbftw and Sgtlizzie

     

    By Jonathan Finer

     

    Updated: 1:16 a.m. ET Aug. 12, 2005

    BAGHDAD - There were no reporters riding shotgun on the highway north of Baghdad when a roadside bomb sent Sgt. Elizabeth Le Bel's Humvee lurching into a concrete barrier. The Army released a three-sentence statement about the incident in which her driver, a fellow soldier, was killed. Most news stories that day noted it briefly.

     

    But a vivid account of the attack appeared on the Internet within hours of the crash last Dec. 4. Unable to sleep after arriving at the hospital, Le Bel hobbled to a computer and typed 1,000 words of what she called "my little war story" into her Web log, or blog, titled "Life in this Girl's Army," at http://www.sgtlizzie.blogspot.com.

     

     

    • More world news

     

    "I started to scream bloody murder, and one of the other females on the convoy came over, grabbed my hand and started to calm me down. She held onto me, allowing me to place my leg on her shoulder as it was hanging free," Le Bel wrote. "I thought that my face had been blown off, so I made the remark that I wouldn't be pretty again LOL. Of course the medics all rushed with reassurance which was quite amusing as I know what I look like now and I don't even want to think about what I looked like then."

     

     

     

    Since the 1850s, when a London Times reporter was sent to chronicle the Crimean War, journalists have generally provided the most immediate, first-hand depictions of major conflicts. But in Iraq, service members themselves are delivering real-time dispatches -- in their own words -- often to an audience of thousands through postings to their blogs.

     

    "I was able to jot a few lines in every day, and it just grew from there," Le Bel, 24, of Haverhill, Mass., said in an e-mail. Her Web site has received about 45,000 hits since she started it a year ago.

     

    At least 200 active-duty soldiers currently keep blogs. Only about a dozen blogs were in existence two years ago when the U.S. invaded Iraq, according to "The Mudville Gazette" ( http://www.mudvillegazette.com ), a clearinghouse of information on military blogging administered by an Army veteran who goes by the screen name Greyhawk.

     

    Written in the casual, sometimes profane language of the barracks, they give readers an unfiltered perspective on combat largely unavailable elsewhere. But they are also drawing new scrutiny and regulation from commanders concerned they could compromise security

     

    In April, Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, the top tactical commander in Iraq, published the military's first policy memorandum on Web sites maintained by soldiers, requiring that all blogs maintained by service members in Iraq be registered. The policy also barred bloggers from publishing classified information, revealing the names of service members killed or wounded before their families could be notified and providing accounts of incidents still under investigation.

     

    ‘Give away the farm’

    "We don't have a problem with most of what they write, but we don't want to give away the farm," said Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, a military spokesman in Baghdad, who said such guidelines are nearly identical to those required of news organizations that cover the military.

     

    Enforcement of the policy was left to the discretion of unit commanders. In late July, Arizona National Guard Spc. Leonard Clark became the first soldier found to have violated the new policy. He was fined $1,640 and demoted to private first-class for posting what the military said was classified material on his blog.

     

    His site has since been shut down, although much of the content has been posted elsewhere on the Internet. He did not return e-mail messages seeking comment.

     

    His postings -- which included long entries detailing attacks against American patrols and convoys -- described his company's captain as "a glory seeker" and the battalion sergeant major as "an inhuman monster." In at least one entry, Clark, who has run for political office in Arizona several times and was widely expected to run for Senate in 2006, suggested that his fellow soldiers were becoming opposed to the U.S. mission in Iraq.

     

    "A growing number of men here are starting to wonder why we should continue to risk our lives for this whole mess when we know that the government will probably pull out of here," he wrote on April 11.

     

    Other soldiers have said they decided to take down their Web sites after warnings from superiors. Last December, after an explosion in a soldiers' mess hall near the northern city of Mosul killed 22 people, including 14 U.S. soldiers, Maj. Michael Cohen, the doctor on duty at the nearest medical facility, wrote about the carnage on his blog http://www.67cshdocs.com :

     

    "As I stepped outside, I couldn't believe what was going on. There had to be at least 30 patients on the ground waiting for medical care. We divided and conquered, going from patient to patient trying to determine who had the worst wounds and who needed to be treated first," he wrote. "We identified several patients with femur fractures as well as two humerus fractures. We also had two patients who were paralyzed from the waste [sic] down, another with some bleeding in the brain, and two more with eye injuries."

     

    Soon after, however, he posted this message:

     

     

     

    "Levels above me have ordered me to shut down this website. They cite that the information contained in these pages violates several Army Regulations. I have made a decision to turn off the site."

     

    ‘Therapeutic’

    At least one former military blogger, however, is channeling the publicity his blog earned in Iraq into a new career. Colby Buzzell, a soldier who during his 12-month tour of duty started a blog called "My War" ( http://www.cbftw.blogspot.com , which stands for his initials plus an antiwar epithet), was eight months into his deployment when he read a magazine article about blogs and decided to give it a try. Within weeks, he said, his blog was receiving thousands of hits per day, and literary agents began peddling their services.

     

    "It all happened at an alarming rate, basically overnight, after I wrote about a firefight. I have no idea how the heck people found out about it, they just did," said Buzzell, who got out of the military six months ago.

     

    His book about his time in Iraq comes out in October. He has also written two articles for Esquire magazine. Now 29 and living in Los Angeles, he called blogging from the war zone "therapeutic."

     

    "You go out on a mission or patrol, come back and sit down at a computer, and it was kind of a release," he said in a telephone interview. "I wasn't writing for a book deal, I was writing for myself. It was a way to deal with the madness and made the days go by a little faster."

     

    Soldiers' Web sites vary from multimedia presentations of digital photos and videos to simple text written in journal form. Many bloggers say they do it to keep friends and family up to date or to counter what they consider the biases of the mainstream media.

     

    Many entries are deeply personal. Battered but still able to perform her duties, Le Bel returned to her unit a few days after the roadside bomb attack. She attended the memorial service for her driver, whom she never named, and shared her thoughts with the readers in a Dec. 7 posting:

     

    "I am now deathly afraid of the nightmares I have already seen bits and pieces of. I can see them in my mind when I close my eyes, I see the truck slamming into the wall and it scares me all over again. Why did I walk away from a wreck that killed a comrade and friend?"

  11. Posted

    Hurricane History Found in Trees

    Larry O'Hanlon, Discovery News

     

     

    Aug. 12, 2005— Pine trees in the southeastern U.S. may have the answer to a question millions are now asking: Are hurricanes becoming more frequent?

     

    The isotopic signatures from centuries of hurricanes have been found in the rings of old pine trees near Valdosta, Ga., say researchers at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

     

    By looking throughout the southeastern U.S. for more trees with similar records, the scientists hope to provide some hard evidence to compare with models that predict more hurricanes due to global warming.

     

     

    New Method Predicts Hurricane Season

    "What we're trying to do is understand the frequency of hurricanes and how variable they are," said tree ring researcher Claudia Mora of the University of Tennessee. "We're trying to come up with a reliable way to say this."

     

    To prove the new approach is reliable, Mora and her team studied the oxygen isotopes locked in the tissues of late-season growth inside of annual growth rings from pine trees near Valdosta, Ga.

     

    What they found was a signal from every known hurricane from more than 50 years that dropped rain in the area. Then she pushed the record further.

     

    "We've taken it back 100 years and didn't miss a storm," said Mora. She presented her latest findings Thursday at a joint meeting of the Geological Society of America and the Geological Association of Canada in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

     

    Mora's method involved sampling specific seasons from past years within tree rings to extract the isotopic signals of hurricanes. They can do this, said Mora, because hurricanes are already known to be naturally low in oxygen-18.

     

    So the rain from hurricanes — which is quickly sucked up by longleaf and slash pine trees after the storm — is distinctly depleted of oxygen-18.

     

    That isotopic signature remains locked inside the cellulose of plant cells that grow immediately after a hurricane, she said.

     

    But even 100 years is not enough data when you're talking about climate change, said Mora. So she and her team have broadened the area and the ages from which they are gathering hurricane data in the southeastern U.S.

     

    Already they have found a record of tropical cyclones spanning 227 years and other clues to climate in that region reaching back to 1450 A.D.

     

    "I think they've made a convincing case," said stable isotope biochemist William Anderson of Florida International University.

     

    It's research that's extremely timely as well, he said, since there is increasing concern about what global warming is actually doing to hurricanes and other meteorological systems worldwide.

  14. Posted

    Updated: 08:33 PM EDT

    New York Fire Department Releases 9/11 Accounts

    15 Hours of Radio Transmissions and 500 Oral Histories Made Public

    By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN and SARA, AP

     

    NEW YORK (Aug. 12) - In thousands of pages of oral histories released Friday, firefighters describe in vivid, intimate detail how they rushed to save fleeing civilians from churning smoke and fire before the World Trade Center collapsed in a monstrous cloud of debris and choking dust.

     

     

     

    Firefighters on 9/11 (Reuters / Corbis)"As we were running, it overtook us, the impact... It turned pitch black. You couldn't see anything, but you could still hear the screaming again, and the yelling."

     

     

     

     

    The histories, recorded in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attack, offer some of the most detailed descriptions of the day's horror as seen through the eyes of firefighters who lost 343 of their brethren.

     

    Firefighter Maureen McArdle-Schulman recalled hearing someone yell before the collapses that something was falling from the towers.

     

    "It turned out it was people coming out, and they started coming out one after the other," she said. "We didn't know what it was at first, but then the first body hit and then we knew what it was. ... I was getting sick. I felt like I was intruding on a sacrament. They were choosing to die and I was watching them and shouldn't have been. So me and another guy turned away and looked at a wall and we could still hear them hit."

     

    Emergency medical technician John Felidi recalled that when the south tower fell, "We heard a rumble. I heard the rumble and looked _ in the back of me all I seen was a monstrous - I can't even describe it. A cloud. Looked like debris, dust."

     

    The 12,000 pages of oral histories were made public along with hours of Fire Department radio transmissions, their release brought on by a lawsuit filed three years ago by The New York Times and long contested by the city.

     

     

    Excerpts From FDNY Testimony About 9/11 

     

     

      Getty Images

    "It was evident that we weren't going to be able to get to people above the fire. Based on the number of jumpers, we could only assume that hundreds of people were trapped. ... Then the building started to come down.

    -- Deputy Commissioner Thomas Fitzpatrick

     

    "Somebody yelled something was falling. We didn't know if it was desks coming out. It turned out it was people coming out, and they started coming out one after the other. I felt like I was intruding on a sacrament."

    -- Firefighter Maureen McArdle-Schulman

     

    ''I'm getting four different chiefs giving me four different command posts. ... Somebody at the scene has got to help me out and consolidate this.''

    -- Unnamed firefighter

     

    After the towers collapsed, "at this point, the radio was pretty open because there weren't a lot of survivors really. Guys ran in different directions. It has a lot to do with the choices you made: which direction you ran, what you decided to do, how close to the buildings you stayed..."

    -- Fire Lt. Warren Smith

     

     

    Sources: AP, Reuters

     

     

    Some of the material had been released before, and the records released Friday were unlikely to fundamentally change the understanding of the Sept. 11 attack.

     

    Still, the histories offer a poignant catalog of firefighters' still-fresh memories of the towers' horrifying collapse. And the radio transmissions added new texture to the historical record of the day, beginning at 8:46 a.m. with an urgent but calm description of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center.

     

    "The World Trade Center tower Number One is on fire!" one firefighter radioed.

     

    As the depth of the crisis became clear, the voices on the radios thickened with panic.

     

    "Send every available ambulance, everything you got to the World Trade Center," a firefighter calls from Engine 1. "Now!"

     

     

     

     

     

    Sept. 11 family members pored over the records Friday, some tearing up at descriptions and sounds of the attack and response. At an office building in midtown Manhattan, a half-dozen family members and two fire officers bent over laptops to examine the material.

     

    Fire Lt. Jerry Reilly, who escaped the trade center, said the transmissions were almost too painful to hear. "I never heard any of this before - the chaos," he said, his eyes tearing up.

     

    The records shed some new light onto lingering questions and long-standing complaints about the response. Firefighters described faulty communications equipment and some disobeyed orders.

     

    A group of victims' families who have become advocates for reforming building codes and emergency response had eagerly awaited the release of the records in hopes they would challenge the notion that many firefighters in the north tower heard, but chose to ignore, an evacuation message issued after the south tower collapsed.

     

    Some city officials, including former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, have suggested some firefighters ignored the mayday call in acts of personal heroism. But the group of families has sought to lay blame on the city for providing firefighters with faulty radios.

     

    At least one fire lieutenant, Gregg Hansson of Engine 34, said he heard the call to evacuate while he was on the 35th floor of the north tower, and saw his colleagues leaving.

     

    "I heard a mayday given over the command channel to evacuate the building," Hansson said in his oral history. "He started to tell everyone to evacuate, and I did also. I saw all the units get up, everybody got their gear, everybody started for the staircases to evacuate."

     

    Another firefighter who was in the north tower, Paul Bessler, recalled seeing a fellow firefighter going up the stairs as though he was "on a mission."

     

    "Just at that point, my radio came clear as day, 'Imminent collapse. This was a terrorist attack. Evacuate.'"

     

    "We relayed that again, hoping that the brothers would hear it above us, and I remember the look on Andy's face, like apprehension that we were going to leave this building," he continued. The north tower collapsed moments later.

     

    The transcripts reinforce the perception that some firefighters throughout the trade center dropped protocol and simply acted according to their best instincts.

     

    Firefighter Patrick Martin of Engine 229 said that after the south tower had collapsed and before the north tower came down, his lieutenant instructed him to go on a boat taking people to hospitals across the Hudson River.

     

    "I told him I wasn't leaving," Martin said. "We were still missing one guy."

     

    Timothy Burke of Engine 202 said a firefighter from another company had a cell phone, and he and others used it to call their families.

     

    "It seemed pretty bad that everybody was willing to get on the phone and try to call their wives to say goodbye or say whatever," he said. "Just the faces of people _ you kind of knew that some of us were going to get hurt because it was too too too much going on."

     

    The New York Times and families of Sept. 11 victims sued the city in 2002 to release the records.

     

    The city withheld them, claiming the release would violate firefighters' privacy and jeopardize the prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, who ultimately pleaded guilty to conspiring with the Sept. 11 hijackers.

     

    In March, the state's highest court ordered the city to release the oral histories and radio transmissions but said the city could edit out potentially painful and embarrassing portions.

     

    The Fire Department, in a statement, said it hoped the release of the records would not cause firefighters and their families additional pain.

     

    "The Department believes that the materials being released today ... will serve to further confirm the bravery and courage of our members who responded to the World Trade Center," the statement said.

     

    Associated Press Writer Erin McClam contributed to this report.

  15. Posted

    Inca Tax Records Were Tied Up in Knots, Study Says

     

    Stefan Lovgren

    for National Geographic News

     

    August 11, 2005

    Known for its intricate textiles and spectacular architecture, the Inca Empire ranks among the world's great civilizations. Yet the ancient Inca apparently lacked a written language.

     

    To record information, the ancient Inca used enigmatic devices called khipus, mop-like textiles. Made from cotton or animal hair, the objects consisted of multiple knotted strings hanging vertically from a single horizontal string.

     

     

    Khipus were probably used for more than just recording numbers. Some experts say they may have been a medium for recording historical information—possibly as a form of writing.

     

    Now a new study shows that khipus were used as documents in a sophisticated accounting system passed up through the Inca bureaucracy.

     

    "They're quite complex, and there's a tremendous amount of information in them," said Gary Urton, a professor of pre-Columbian studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "They are beautifully structured to take care of what was … a hierarchical organization overseeing activities in the Inca Empire."

     

    The study, by Urton and co-author Carrie Brezine, is published in tomorrow's issue of the academic journal Science. The researchers analyzed 21 khipus found in an urn under the floor of a house adjacent to the Inca palace of Puruchuco on the central coast of modern-day Peru.

     

    Central Authority

     

    Tribute in the form of a labor tax was imposed on subjects of the Inca Emipre, who were assigned to work a certain number of days each year on state projects.

     

    Urton says the khipus that he analyzed, which were organized in a three-tier hierarchy, show how census and tribute data were assembled and transferred among different levels of authority within the Inca administrative system.

     

    The khipus on the lowest level of the hierarchy may have represented contact between the khipu keeper and local laborers. While the top level probably represented contact between the palace of Puruchuco and a central authority.

     

    "What we may have represented is that the khipus on top, containing the most aggregated data, came into the local palace as commands on the organization of activity on the local level," Urton said.

     

    "And then that information was subdivided into the middle level and then further subdivided into the lower level."

     

    Early Writing

     

    In his 2003 book Signs of the Inka Khipu, Urton said the khipus may have been an early form of writing. Instead of using graphic signs for words, khipus may have used a sort of three-dimensional binary code, similar to the language of computers to represent information, Urton said.

     

     

    One class of khipus was not mainly statistical in nature but may have represented poems, songs, histories, or genealogy. "This is an attempt to bring together information on khipu structure that had not been noticed or recognized by previous researchers," Urton said.

     

    But no khipu narrative has been deciphered, and any interpretation of a writing system will be very hard to prove. While researchers know there is a connection between the system of writing numbers and the system of writing names and information, they can't yet prove it.

     

    "We might read that a given khipu string contains the numerical value 256, but we don't know 256 of what," Urton said.

     

    "I'm not saying [khipus could be] read like a phonetic alphabetic script. But we believe there's information there, in the forms of color or the directionality of the strings, that could be interpreted by someone knowledgeable in the system of recording to say, Oh, this is 256 workmen, or this is 256 days of work," Urton said.

     

    Burial Site

     

    Although it lasted for only a century, the Inca Empire, centered on the Andean mountain range, was the most extensive in the Americas before being destroyed by Spanish conquistadors in 1532.

     

    The khipus were used throughout the reign of the empire. Earlier versions of the devices may have been used by pre-Inca people more than 500 years before the Spanish invasion.

     

    The Spanish conquistadors destroyed most khipus they came across. Only about 700 khipus have been recovered, almost all from looted Inca tombs.

     

    Khipus have a main horizontal cord from which thinner pendant strings hang. The Incas used three types of knots to tie these strings. The knots represented various numerical values.

     

    For their new study, the researchers analyzed 21 khipus. Information about them was entered into a database constructed by Brezine, a mathematician and archaeology graduate student. The database allowed the team to compare and contrast values and information on the khipu strings.

     

    The researchers found that 7 of the 21 khipus were related in a three-tier organization, believed to be an accounting hierarchy. Values on groups of khipus on the lower level were added up on strings of khipus at the next higher level.

     

    "Until now all studies have involved looking at individual samples," Urton said. "Here, we are actually seeing the communication of information within a set of khipus … where the sum of values is not on the khipu itself but on another khipu. It's a communication event embedded there in the knots and strings of the khipu."

  17. Posted

    Ancient Chocolate Found in Maya "Teapot"

     

    By Bijal P. Trivedi

    National Geographic Today

     

    July 17, 2002

    Analysis of residue from a ceramic "teapot" suggests that the Maya, and their ancestors, may have been gobbling chocolate as far back as 2,600 years ago, pushing back the earliest evidence of cacao use more than 1,000 years.

     

    "This reopens the whole debate about who first invented chocolate," said Jonathan Haas, curator of the mouthwatering "Chocolate" exhibition at the Field Museum in Chicago.

     

     

    The first chemical evidence of cacao use came about 15 years ago after the analysis of residue from a vessel found at the Mayan site of Rio Azul in northeastern Guatemala and belonging to the Early Classic period of Maya culture—approximately A.D. 460. But Michael Coe, co-author of The True History of Chocolate, believes based on a slew of evidence, some linguistic, that the roots of chocolate go much further back to the great Olmec civilization, which preceded the Maya.

     

     

    "The Maya derived a lot of their high culture from the Olmec," said Coe, also professor emeritus of anthropology at Yale. "Even the word 'cacao' is not a native Maya word—it's Olmec." The Olmec lived in the southern Gulf of Mexico between 1500 and 500 B.C., and their influence extended to Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, Costa Rica, and El Salvador.

     

    "The new find is hard chemical evidence that the Mayans were drinking chocolate in 500 B.C.," said Coe, suggesting that people were cultivating the cacao tree long before the Maya civilization, which flourished in southern Mexico, the Yucatán, and the highlands of Belize between 500 B.C. and A.D. 1500.

     

    Chocolate is made from the seeds of the cacao tree, which are swaddled in gooey white flesh inside green-yellow pods. The seeds and the pulp are scooped out of the pod and allowed to ferment until the seeds are a rich dark brown. The seeds are then dried, and then roasted before being ground to produce a thick chocolate paste.

     

    Chocolate for Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner

     

    The Maya had a lifestyle many kids would envy—chocolate at every meal. "It was the beverage of everyday people and also the food of the rulers and gods," said Haas. In fact, the scientific name for the cacao tree is Theobroma cacao—"food of the gods." Hieroglyphs that depict chocolate being poured for rulers and gods are present on Maya murals and ceramics.

     

    Now the newly-analyzed spouted ceramic pot reveals the deeper darker history of this almost drug-like substance.

     

    Mayan teapots have always fascinated Terry Powis, an archaeologist at the University of Texas at Austin, which is how his investigation began. "Spouted vessels are very distinct from other Mayan ceramics and quite rare, typically associated with elite burials," he explained.

     

    Fortunately for Powis, fourteen such vessels were excavated in 1981 from a site at Colha, which lies close to the Caribbean coast in northern Belize, and have since been housed at the University of Texas, Austin. The Maya occupied Colha, which is known for its production of stone tools and its Preclassic spouted vessels, continuously from about 900 B.C. to A.D. 1300.

     

    Powis's goal was to determine whether the vessels were indeed used to pour some type of chocolate libation.

     

     

    He scraped residue from the vessels and sent the samples to W. Jeffrey Hurst, who has a delicious job as an analytical biochemist at the Hershey Foods Technical Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

     

    Using "high performance liquid chromatography coupled to atmospheric-pressure chemical ionization mass spectrometry," Hurst analyzed all the samples. The first instrument separates all the components of the mixture and the other measures the molecular weight of each. Cacao is a blend of more than 500 chemical compounds. Of this tasty compendium the signature chemical is a compound called theobromine—the chemical marker of cacao.

     

    Of the 14 samples analyzed, 3 were positive for theobromine, "chocolate, that is," said Powis. The study is published in the July 18 issue of the journal Nature.

     

    These spouted vessels were first dubbed chocolate pots about 100 years ago. Archaeologists knew from Spanish accounts that the Maya drank liquid chocolate and just assumed that the teapots were used to pour the beverage. "Now we have proof," said Powis.

     

    Chilli, Honey and Maize With Your Chocolate?

     

    By the time the Spanish reached the Maya, around the 1500s, everyone was drinking chocolate—rich and poor alike. Traces of chocolate have been found in ordinary Maya houses.

     

    The Maya drink was very different from America's thin, watery hot chocolate, said Powis. According to Spanish accounts—many of which come from Bishop Diego de Landa, whose descriptions of Maya culture and language are the primary tools used today to translate Maya glyphs—the Maya enjoyed their hot chocolate thick and foamy.

     

    While standing, Maya poured the chocolate drink from one vessel to another on the ground. The drop, together with the fatty cacao butter, produced a thick head of rich, dark, chocolate foam—the most coveted part of the drink.

     

    Chemical analysis of these vessels is now becoming a standard tool in archaeology. As long as they're not washed, they can be analyzed for ancient residues. Powis hopes to use the same type of studies to reveal the other ingredients used in the chocolate drinks. From Spanish records, Mayanists already know that the chocolate was mixed with maize, water, honey, or chilli. But what other secret ingredients are discovered will be a sweet surprise.

  18. Posted

    Masks, Other Finds Suggest Early Maya Flourished

     

    Stefan Lovgren

    for National Geographic News

     

    May 5, 2004

    Watch the National Geographic TV Special Dawn of the Maya Wednesday, May 12, at 8 p.m. ET on PBS.

     

    At the Mayan city of Cival, Guatemalan archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli was walking in a tunnel left by looters when, by sheer chance, he made a major discovery: a massive face mask of a sun god carved on the wall of the main temple pyramid.

     

     

    The mask—5 meters (16.5 feet) wide and 3 meters (10 feet) tall—was stunning. But what made it truly remarkable was its age, dating back to around 200 to 150 B.C., a millennium before what is considered the height of Maya civilization.

     

    The early years of Maya civilization, the so-called pre-classic period—from 2,000 B.C. to A.D. 250—has often been dismissed as primitive, an era lost in myth before the Maya's true rise to greatness.

     

    But new discoveries, like the mask Estrada-Belli found, reveal a society that flourished in the deep jungles of Guatemala long before the time of Jesus Christ. Its features—kings, complex iconography, elaborate palaces, and rituals—may have been just as dazzling as those of the classic Maya.

     

    "We're pushing the beginning of Maya civilization far back into the pre-classic period," said Estrada-Belli, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, whose work is funded by the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration. "Everything is looking much more ancient," he said.

     

    The new discoveries are described in a National Geographic TV special, Dawn of the Maya, which airs Wednesday, May 12, at 8 p.m. ET on PBS.

     

    Spanning more than two millennia, the world of the Maya evokes images of ancient pyramids soaring over the jungle, giant carved stones covered with hieroglyphics, and a sudden mysterious demise.

     

    With awe-inspiring cities like Tikal and Chichén Itzá, the Classic Maya period, from A.D. 250 to 900, rivaled Egypt and Rome in its splendor and intellectual achievement.

     

    Until now, scant attention had been focused on the pre-classic period. However, the new research suggests this is when the elaborate Mayan rituals and ceremonial temples arose, and when their calendar, writing, and kingship emerged.

     

    Telling Time

     

    The sculpture found by Estrada-Belli in Cival has a complex iconography. It has an anthropomorphic face. Its nose and forehead are human, but two pinnacles on top of its eyebrow identifies the deity as a sun god.

     

    It's almost as if someone made this yesterday," Estrada-Belli says in the film. "It's incredible to imagine that we're touching this and we're looking at this just as people did over 2,000 years ago."

     

    Only a week ago, Estrada-Belli found a second mask. He believes two pairs of the masks once flanked the stairway of the temple, which rises 33 meters (108 feet) above a central plaza. It may have provided the backdrop for elaborate rituals in which the king impersonated the gods of creation.

     

     

    The pre-classic complex is like a sundial. "It had an important astronomical function," Estrada-Belli said. "It's no coincidence that the central axis of the main building and the plaza is oriented to sunrise at the equinox."

     

    In June 2002 his team found an inscribed stone slab, known as a stela, dating to 300 B.C., inside the complex. It may be the earliest such carving ever found in the Maya lowlands.

     

    In the plaza, the team also found a cross-shaped depression containing five smashed jars, an offering for water. Under the center jar were 120 pieces of jade, most of them polished. There were also five jade axes with their blades pointing upward, most likely part of a ritual associated with the Maya agricultural cycle and the maize god.

     

    "We believe these offerings reflect the beginning of formal dynasties and the beginning of Maya state society, much earlier than anyone previously thought," Estrada-Belli said.

     

    Using satellite technology, he has determined that Cival was twice as big as initially believed, and may have housed at least 10,000 people. It had an institution of kingship, and may have been the capital of a pre-classic kingdom or state.

     

    "The size of Cival shows that the pre-classic period was an era of fully developed civilization, and it was not dominated by a single, major city, but rather a network of cities," Estrada-Belli said. "This changes our idea of the pre-classic period."

     

    Myth of Creation

     

    At the ancient city of San Bartolo, another team of archaeologists has found a mural over 2,000 years old that depicts in great detail the Maya myth of creation.

     

    "In terms of pre-classic Maya, this is basically a Sistine Chapel," said Karl Taube, a Maya iconography expert at the University of California at Riverside.

     

    The Maya version of creation centers around the maize god, who descended to the underworld where the lords of death killed him. Years later, his sons defeated the lords of death and resurrected the maize god. His return to the surface of the Earth marks the first day of the Maya world.

     

    The early mural, depicting a version of these events, suggests that the Maya myth of creation originated in the pre-classic era.

     

    Meanwhile, Richard Hansen, another National Geographic Society grantee and archaeologist at the University of California in Los Angeles, is excavating the sprawling, pre-classic city of El Mirador, which contains the massive pyramid of Danta and is estimated to have housed approximately 100,000 people.

     

    Hansen aims to find the kings from the dawn of Maya time. He is focusing on a small pyramid at El Mirador, which bears a magnificent engraving of a large jaguar paw. Hansen thinks it could be the burial place of the so-called "Jaguar King," one of 19 early Maya kings previously unknown to archaeologists.

     

    "The person who constructed this building was not a simple chief living in a grass hut," Hansen said. "This was a king on the order of Ramses and Cheops."

     

    By A.D. 250, the Maya pre-classic era came to an end. Hansen suspects that in constructing their great buildings, the early Maya exhausted the environment on which their farming depended, contributing to their downfall.

     

    Estrada-Belli has found remnants of a defensive wall around Cival, indicating that the city had been under threat. He believes that the pre-classic cities belonged to strategic geopolitical alliances vying for power, just like the classic Maya cities of Tikal and Calakmul did centuries later.

     

    Estrada-Belli said: "Cival was probably abandoned after a violent attack, probably by a larger power such as Tikal."

  24. Posted

    Apparently he fell in love with Angelina Jolie while filming Mr and Mrs Smith.

     

    They kept it hush hush until just before the movie opened when they were photographed on the beach together in Africa.

     

    He'd denied to Jennifer that he had any feelings for AJ, so in a recent interview in Vaniety Fair she said she was just as surprised as the rest of the world by the photos of them together all over the world now.

     

    She says he told her he'd never cheated on her. She chooses to believe him.

     

    But even if he didn't physically cheat, it seems that there was an affair of the heart.

     

    He cheated on Gwyneth too.