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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Blackened and irregular, the prehistoric beads found in a centuries-old Illinois grave don't look like anything special. But the latest analysis1 shows that they were fashioned from an exotic material: the shards of a meteorite that fell to Earth more than 700 kilometres from where the beads were found.
The link between the Anoka meteorite, which landed in central Minnesota, and the Illinois beads confirms that "2,000 years ago, goods and ideas were moved hundreds of miles across eastern North America", says Timothy McCoy, co-author of the analysis and curator-in-charge of meteorites at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.
The beads were made by people of the Hopewell culture, which flourished in the US Midwest from 100 bc to 400 ad — spreading from its epicentre in Ohio to as far as Mississippi. The culture is known for sprawling ceremonial earthworks and for objects made of non-local materials such as mica. The iron beads were discovered in 1945 in a Hopewell grave near Havana, Illinois, alongside more than 1,000 shell and pearl beads. Together, they indicate that the grave's occupant was of high rank, says archaeologist Bret Ruby of the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in Chillicothe, Ohio, who was not involved with the analysis. "You've got to open a lot of clams to find 1,000 pearl beads."
Scientists have known for decades that the grave's 22 iron-nickel beads came from a meteorite, but they didn't know which one. Earlier research had ruled out the Anoka, an iron-nickel meteorite found in 1961 during the digging of a cesspool near Anoka, Minnesota.
[1] McCoy, T. J., Marquardt, A. E., Wasson, J. T., Ash, R. D. & Vicenzi, E. P. J. Archaeol. Sci. 81, 13e22 (2017). DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2017.03.003
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 17 2017, @12:34PM (5 children)
It's significant because the image of Indians that has always been peddled in America is of primitive, isolated hunter gatherers. They were people with no technology and no ability to work together for great projects. It was a useful stereotype for European settlers to employ because it was almost like they were doing the Indians a favor by bringing civilization to them.
In reality, as demonstrated by this find and many others, Americans had culture and technology and organization for a long time before Europeans ever set foot in the New World. They had extensive trading networks. Copper from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan has been found everywhere in North America. Obsidian from Yellowstone, likewise. Jade from Meso-America has been found all over the Mississippian cultural sphere.
Further evidence of their cultural sophistication has been found in their earthenworks. You don't walk out of your hut one morning and suddenly create an earthen mound with comparable volume to the pyramids at Giza. You have to work well with others. You have to have somebody doing the farming and hunting and cooking while you and others cart baskets full of earth. You have to have some guys protecting all the people doing those other activities. In short, you have to have organization and a hierarchy that can direct all those different efforts.
From middens and burial sites from those areas, we know what they farmed and how nutritious their diets were. We can tell from their bones and teeth what diseases they had and if they suffered from deficiencies. In many respects they were generally much better off than their contemporaries in Europe.
Another cherished myth, promulgated by European arrivals, was that their weapons and technology were so vastly superior to the Indians' that the latter simply couldn't compete. Well, not really true at the time of contact. The one true match up between European weaponry and military prowess and healthy representatives of the Mississippian culture happened when Hernando de Soto's expedition fought the Natchez [wikipedia.org]. The Natchez easily destroyed nearly all the Spanish, despite their weapons and armor.
In short, the teleological view of the history of the New World we've all grown up with is quite wrong in many respects. This bit in TFA is only another data point in hundreds and hundreds that have been coming out in the last 20 years that prove that.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Wednesday May 17 2017, @10:18PM (4 children)
I appreciate the Native American's influence on Benjamin Franklin and other philsophers concerned with governance during the time of colonization, and so do not discredit them as savages.
However, I will not equate an "earthen mound" to the Parthenon.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday May 18 2017, @03:58AM (3 children)
They were really big [westerndigs.org], and well constructed. Wikipedia on Monks Mound at Cahokia: "This makes Monks Mound roughly the same size at its base as the Great Pyramid of Giza (13.1 acres / 5.3 hectares)." It's much bigger than the Parthenon.
They built it out of earth and clay, not stone, because those were the available local materials. It was built to survive on a flood plain, and endured for a thousand years. It doesn't have carved stone friezes like the Parthenon. It may have had in wood or other perishable materials, but we don't know. We only have the small ceremonial objects recovered from burials and the like. I'm not an art historian but they look pretty comparable [google.com] to the Greek objects you see at the Met, to me.
"Earthen mound" underplays the Mississippian achievement, but I don't know what else to call it that would do it better justice. Maybe somebody with archeological training would know. But you could imagine the same thing would be true of the Parthenon if the best term we had for it was, "a stone building."
Maybe it's a PR problem. The Lycians and Lydians in Asia Minor were just as good at stone carving and metal working and everything else as the Greeks were, but few people in America or probably even Europe even know who they were. Doesn't mean they weren't just as intelligent, gifted, or as accomplished as the Greeks and Persians were. The Mississippians were even more totally erased from the formal historical record to the point where I doubt even people from St. Louis know what it is or that it's just across the river from them.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Thursday May 18 2017, @06:19PM (2 children)
That is a pretty big mound of stuff. Given the level of detail on the stone sculptures, I really doubt the craftsmanship was parthenon-level, but as you say, it could be PR. Asian prehistoric cultures I know quite literally nothing about.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 19 2017, @12:53PM (1 child)
Lydia, Lycia in Asia Minor, ie., Turkey. Same neck of the woods as the Romans, Greeks, Persians, Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Hittites, etc. Not really Asian, not really prehistoric. Just as accomplished as those other fine folks in all the usual metrics, but got overshadowed and forgotten in the PR battle. There are a lot of ancient civilizations like that, such as the Phrygians, Carians, Urartians, Gandharans. They were just as accomplished as the more famous groups.
It would be like, say, China winning out in the current clash of civilizations and 2000 years from now people thinking of Britons as primitives whose cultural sophistication was evaluated on how many chow mein restaurants London had. It seems absurd to us now, but it's pretty much what happened to the Lydians, Gandharans, and Native American cultures like the Mississippians and Hopewellians.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Saturday May 20 2017, @05:44AM
I am again slightly disappointed in the public education I was given, but I will try searching up on this topic shortly. Though imperfect, Wikipedia is a miracle. I suppose as far as education in the US goes, we do not typically interact culturally with Asian/North African countries enough to justify the investment in the school system. I would hope people in those areas would know more about their history, though.
On a tangent, I was recently struck with sadness that business suits with neckties have become almost ubiquitous. I would prefer to see Japanese businessmen in yukatas and Indian businessmen in lungis, for instance, at the very least in their own countries. They certainly look more comfortable. But as you say, we would see them in those and think "How could they wear bath robes to work?"