Customized Tobacco Pipes from Jamestown

To have a house full of things with your own name or initials stamped onto them -- or embroidered into them, or painted in the plaster, or whatever -- was one of the top status symbols of the 17th century. I once excavated a whole pit full of wine bottles all stamped with AA, the initials of Arthur Allen, owner of the plantation.

Now the archaeologists at Jamestown have found a cache of broken tobacco pipes stamped with some of the famous names from the first years of the colony:

Archeologists at Jamestown have unearthed a trove of tobacco pipes personalized for a who's who of early 17th century colonial and British elites, underscoring the importance of tobacco to North America's first permanent English settlement.

The white clay pipes — actually, castoffs likely rejected during manufacturing — were crafted between 1608 and 1610 and bear the names of English politicians, social leaders, explorers, officers of the Virginia Company that financed the settlement and governors of the Virginia colony. Archeologists also found equipment used to make the pipes.

Researchers believe the pipes recovered from a well in James Fort were made to impress investors and the political elite with the financial viability of the settlement. They are likely the rejects that failed to survive the ceramic firing process in a kiln.

The find comprises more than 100 pipes or fragments. More than a dozen are stamped with diamond shapes and inscribed with the names or initials of luminaries including explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, who dispatched the colonists to the territory he named Virginia. He also is credited with popularizing tobacco in England and is said to have smoked a pipe just before being executed for treason in 1618.

Other names include Capt. Samuel Argall, a major Virginia Company investor and governor of Virginia; Sir Charles Howard, Lord High Admiral of England; and Earl of Southampton Henry Wriothesley, a Virginia Company official who was also William Shakespeare's major patron.

Imagine the thrill of digging something from the ground stamped with the name of Sir Walter Raleigh. Sometimes archaeology connects to the past in a direct and dramatic way.

Still Scamming on Wall Street

So Goldman Sachs, riding high again after we saved them from the collapse of their effort to turn sub-prime mortgages into a vast profit engine, is back at the forefront of Wall Street skullduggery. They have done a deal with Facebook, investing about $250 million of their own money in a way that values the privately held company at $50 billion. Now why would they do this? Not because they think it is a good investment. Honestly, would anybody be surprised if a visitor from ten years in the future showed up and said Facebook no longer exists in his world? Not I. No, Goldman Sachs is going this so they can make fat fees by persuading other insider fatcats to invest in Facebook on the same terms. And it will probably work. A lot of that money that was washing around the world ten yeas ago, its owners so desperate for investment opportunities that they decided to lend it to homeowners who were not likely to pay it back, is washing around again. Since there don't seem to be any good ideas about where to invest it, the bad ideas are back and riding high.

Bolsa Familia

Brazil used to be the most economically unequal country in the world, with the biggest divide between rich and poor. Now it is the country where that gap is shrinking the fastest. This has several causes, including the industrialization of the country and the growth of middle-class professions like banking and engineering. But what is raising the incomes of the poorest Brazilians is a government program called Bolsa Familia, the family grant. Other countries have tried similar programs, but Brazil's is the biggest ever. Tina Rosenberg:

The program, called Bolsa Familia (Family Grant) in Brazil, goes by different names in different places. In Mexico, where it first began on a national scale and has been equally successful at reducing poverty, it is Oportunidades. The generic term for the program is conditional cash transfers. The idea is to give regular payments to poor families, in the form of cash or electronic transfers into their bank accounts, if they meet certain requirements. The requirements vary, but many countries employ those used by Mexico: families must keep their children in school and go for regular medical checkups, and mom must attend workshops on subjects like nutrition or disease prevention. The payments almost always go to women, as they are the most likely to spend the money on their families. The elegant idea behind conditional cash transfers is to combat poverty today while breaking the cycle of poverty for tomorrow.

As I said, the program seems to be reducing poverty in Brazil. Americans who read Rosenberg's description are likely to cringe, though, because it brings up all the ugly debates we have had over the past 50 years about "welfare dependency" and the like. I should note that when it was introduced, Aid to Families with Dependent Children -- AFDC, our old welfare program -- also helped to reduce poverty, and federal housing aid did, too. The American experience seems to show, though, that this approach can only help so much, and even that help comes at a cost. I have read several major pieces from liberal newspapers like the NY Times and the old Washington Post about people who grew up on welfare and whose only important skill was knowing how to work the welfare bureaucracy, and no liberal I know would point to the old housing projects of the 70s as a model of how to help poor people or make the world better.

I think, though, that the limits on who could get AFDC were a big part of its problem. First, it was largely limited to unwed mothers, and if that was not the sole reason marriage rates fell in poor neighborhoods it can't have helped. Second, all the hurdles we set up to keep people from abusing the system only encouraged certain people to become welfare experts, and to refrain from taking jobs or opening bank accounts that would hurt their welfare eligibility. The Mexican and Brazilian programs pay money to married people with low-paying jobs. By using the income per family member as the only criterion for who can apply, they make the system more honest and reduce its impact on people's behavior. In the United States we have shifted much of our "welfare" spending to what we call the Earned Income Tax Credit, a sort of negative income tax that helps only people who actually have jobs, and I think this is an excellent idea. (The EITC is under attack from Republicans now, but one of its original backers was a governor of California named Ronald Reagan.) I believe that in the US today the "war on drugs," our crazy prison system, and our screwed-up health care system are bigger obstacles to reducing poverty than our welfare policies.

John McDermott

I just discovered this wonderful gallery of images of Asia by John McDermott. With a whole series on the trees of Angkor Wat. Marvelous.

The Ruins of Detroit

At the Guardian, a slide show of Detroit's ruined buildings. Above, the 1928 United Aritsts' Theater. Below, the St. Christopher House, a former public library.

Hare Hammock

Hare Hammock is an archaeological site in northwestern Florida that includes a large burial mound of the Weeden Island culture, which dates to around 500 to 800 AD. These and many other ceramic vessels were removed from the mound when it was excavated in the early 20th century. The effigy in the second picture is one of many artifacts that make me think there has to have been regular contact between the southeastern US and Mesoamerica, but since there are no Mexican artifacts in Florida, this is hard to prove.

The Weeden Island people were one of those Indian groups that had two material cultures, one for daily use and one purely for ritual. So if you dig at a Weeden Island settlement, as I have -- on Weeden Island, no less -- you find nothing like these beautiful objects. Instead you find sherds of some stuff that looks like asphalt and gets my vote for the ugliest pottery ever made, along with roughly made stone tools and lots of flakes. All the burial mounds that weren't looted before 1960 are now protected, so neither I nor anyone else of my generation will pull anything like these wondrous artifacts from the ground.

Christmas Presents

Clara on her new bike.

Ben with the Nerf gun arsenal.

And the new bay window, which Lisa and I gave to each other.

Horse in the Blue Afternoon

Woodblock print by Tadashi Nakayama, 1991.

The Rain of Blackbirds

Certain myths seem more plausible in the light of this story from the Associated Press:

BEEBE, Ark. – Wildlife officials are trying to determine what caused more than 1,000 blackbirds to die and fall from the sky over an Arkansas town. Arkansas and Fish Commission said Saturday that it began receiving reports about the dead birds about 11:30 p.m. the previous night. The birds fell over a 1-mile area of Beebe, and an aerial survey indicated that no other dead birds were found outside of that area.

Commission ornithologist Karen Rowe said the birds showed physical trauma, and she speculated that "the flock could have been hit by lightning or high-altitude hail."

The commission said that New Year's Eve revelers shooting off fireworks in the area could have startled the birds from their roost and caused them to die from stress.

Robby King, a wildlife officer for the agency, collected about 65 dead birds, which will be sent for testing to the state Livestock and Poultry Commission lab and the National Wildlife Health Center lab in Madison, Wis.

Rowe said that similar events have occurred elsewhere and that test results "usually were inconclusive." She said she doubted the birds were poisoned.

Surviving Modern Life

Freedom is the great blessing of modern life and also our greatest peril. We are free as no other people before to think our own thoughts, choose our own careers, pick a "lifestyle" that suits us, and find our own meaning and purpose. But these things are not always easy to do.

This week David Brooks reviews a book by two academic philosophers, Hubert Dreyfus of Berkeley and Sean Dorrance Kelly of Harvard, called All Things Shining. After a tour of the western tradition, Dreyfus and Dorrance look into the problem of life in the age of freedom. Brooks summarizes:

For the past hundred years or so, we have lived in a secular age. That does not mean that people aren’t religious. It means there is no shared set of values we all absorb as preconscious assumptions. In our world, individuals have to find or create their own meaning.

This, Dreyfus and Kelly argue, has led to a pervasive sadness. Individuals are usually not capable of creating their own lives from the ground up. So modern life is marked by frequent feelings of indecision and anxiety. People often lack the foundations upon which to make the most important choices.

As Brooks notes, this ignores the millions of people who still belong to traditional religious sects; one of the phenomena of the modern era has been the rise of hyper-traditional religious forms that go out of their way to reject the freedom modernity affords. But for the secular among us, this is a good summary. I also think Brooks is mistaken to put too much emphasis on the religious side. In a traditional society it is not just a theory of the universe that people receive from their parents, but a way of life: a mode of working, the structure of a typical day, a kind of house and a way of arranging space within it, and so on. Even deeply religious moderns face many more choices than most people did in the ancient world.

Besides the need to make many choices, another problem faced by secular moderns is finding a way to escape from the everyday world. For reasons we cannot yet explain, most humans come equipped with a longing for transcendent experiences. As much as we throw ourselves into daily life we cannot escape the desire for something more, something different, something that lifts us beyond ourselves and makes us feel connected to a greater all. Modern people who do not feel this transcendent belonging in religious ceremonies have gone looking for it in other places. Especially in sports:

Spiritually unmoored, many people nonetheless experience intense elevation during the magical moments that sport often affords. Dreyfus and Kelly mention the mood that swept through the crowd at Yankee Stadium when Lou Gehrig delivered his “Luckiest Man Alive” speech, or the mood that swept through Wimbledon as Roger Federer completed one of his greatest matches.

The most real things in life, they write, well up and take us over. They call this experience “whooshing up.” We get whooshed up at a sports arena, at a political rally or even at magical moments while woodworking or walking through nature.

I like this analysis of our sports obsession, which applies equally to rock concerts and the like. It certainly fits into the same paradigm of collective experience as public religious experiences, and "whooshing up" is a nicely neutral description of the high people get from a big victory by a team the identify with. Of course, it is hardly original, but then few good ideas are. I think Brooks is right that sports and music fandom are central to modern life: "The activities often dismissed as mere diversions are actually central." But I think this is too glib:

Real life is more about serial whooshes than coherent meaning.

Moments of transcendence are only part of life, and we need the everyday world of work, family, and friendships just as much. A life that is no more than a string of whooshes would strike most of us as unserious and empty.

I would also say that I am not sure people in past societies were any happier than we are. If they were supported by stronger social structures and more sure of their place in the world, they also had less freedom and much more real physical suffering. For many of them religion was a less important source of ecstatic moments than war or other extreme violence. Every period of human life has its blessings and its torments, and I think is is narcissistic to assume that our problems are worse than other people's.

The Sarcastic Product Review

At Amazon you can review a product without actually buying it, and it seems there are people who spend their spare time searching the site for strange-looking products and posting sarcastic reviews. Cracked has an amusing collection.

The Battle of Towton, 1461

The Battle of Towton in 1461 was the biggest battle in the Wars of the Roses. At least 50,000 men participated, some say 75,000, and contemporaries said 28,000 men were killed. Whatever the numbers, it was certainly a big and bloody affair, and it allowed the Yorkist Edward IV to seize the throne from his Lancastrian cousins.

The Economist has a great article on the archaeology being done at the battlefield, especially the analysis of 40 skeletons from a mass grave nearby:

The men whose skeletons were unearthed at Towton were a diverse lot. Their ages at time of death ranged widely. It is easier to be precise about younger individuals, thanks to the predictable ways in which teeth develop and bones fuse during a person’s adolescence and 20s. The youngest occupants of the mass grave were around 17 years old; the oldest, Towton 16, was around 50. Their stature varies greatly, too. The men’s height ranges from 1.5-1.8 metres (just under five feet to just under six feet), with the older men, almost certainly experienced soldiers, being the tallest.

This physical diversity is unsurprising, given the disparate types of men who took the battlefield that day. Yet as a group the Towton men are a reminder that images of the medieval male as a homunculus with rotten teeth are well wide of the mark. The average medieval man stood 1.71 metres tall—just four centimetres shorter than a modern Englishman. “It is only in the Victorian era that people started to get very stunted,” says Mr Knüsel. Their health was generally good. Dietary isotopes from their knee-bones show that they ate pretty healthily. Sugar was not widely available at that time, so their teeth were strong, too.

Laid out on a laboratory bench in the University of Bradford’s archaeology department, the biggest of the soldiers still look burly (though their bones, without any collagen in them, are incredibly light to handle). They seem to have led active lives. Bone grows in response to strenuous muscular activity, particularly if exercise starts in childhood. For instance, the serving arm of a professional tennis player has as much as a third more bone in it than his non-dominant arm.

Some of the Towton men display the same type of unusual bone density. But it is distributed in a very unmodern way: their upper-arm bones are very well-developed towards the right shoulder and the left elbow. The medieval longbow, which placed huge stress on both the drawing arm and the arm that held the bow steady, may have been responsible. Towton 16 has something known as an avulsion fracture to his left elbow, a condition first clinically identified among young baseball players in America. This injury occurs only in adolescence, when the bones in the arm have not yet fully fused, and may have been caused by attempts to practise with an adult longbow. In 1420s England the teenage Towton 16 was suffering from Little Leaguer’s Elbow.

Fascinating stuff.

Happy 2011

Happy New Year, everyone.

I, of course, was asleep long before midnight, so my first sight of 2011 came on this sunny morning, in the midst of a little warm spell that sent yesterday's temperature above 50. That meant that Clara and Thomas could ride their new bikes, which was nice, and it should be nice again today before rain comes in this afternoon.

I look forward to the new year with interest. I will be teaching at Hood College again this spring, a course called Celts to Vikings that focuses on the northern European barbarians in the early middle ages. I taught this class there before, four years ago, and very much enjoyed it. This year I have recast it to avoid anything I just taught in my medieval survey class, leaving time to delve deeper into the sort of obscurities I love: druidic theology, pagan attitudes toward death, the cult of the severed head, the law of feud, whether Merlin and Arthur were real people, and similar things. We will be reading Irish legends, the lives of Celtic saints, Welsh bardic poetry, Anglo-Saxon elegies, Viking sagas, bits of Caesar and Tacitus that deal with the Celts and Germans, and Latin chronicles from the 8th and 9th centuries.

At my real job I will be finishing up a project I have been working on for seven years, our archaeological and historical study of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Park. The park runs along the Potomac River for 160 miles, from Washington to Cumberland, Maryland. This has been a wonderful project and I am sad that fieldwork is over. But it will be satisfying to finish our reports and wrap up all the good work we have done. Even better, I get to write a 40,000-word account of the archaeology in the park for sale to the public, and I am very excited about that.

My eldest graduates from high school in the spring -- it is to be hoped, anyway -- and confronts a future to which he has given not a single thought. This should be interesting. Then my daughter enters her senior year, and since she has ambitious plans for college we will enter into the role of nervous parents and fret over how much to get involved in her applications and how much advice to give about college choices.

Sometime in the midst of this I plan to finish the first draft of my novel -- wish me luck with that -- plant my garden, watch my young children grow, and celebrate 20 years of marriage.

Farewell, 2010

May your sorrows pass with the year, and your joys live on.

Tim Romano's "Wanderer"

Searching for a digital text of my favorite Anglo-Saxon poem, "The Wanderer," I stumbled across a new verse translation by Tim Romano. I have never heard of Tim Romano, but I like this version better than any other I have read. Excerpts:

A haven awaits
the homeless soul
waters serene
though wretchedly
on the ocean's lanes
long must he work the oars
in a wintry sea
fare as a fugitive.
Fate is decreed.
So said the exile
anguish recalling
ruthless killings
how his kinsmen fell.

. . .

on this dark earth
wind-blasted
walls are standing—
homes overlaid
with layers of ice
halls falling apart
the powerful lying
their bliss all broken
brave ones fallen
proud by the wall.
War claimed some
and bore them away.
The water-bird took one
over high seas.
The hoary wolf
dealt one his death.

. . .

Where now the horse?
Where now the rider?
Where now the ring-giver?
Where now the high seats?
Where the hall-joys?
O bright chalice!
O chain-mailed warrior!
O the dignity of the people!
How those days went
to naught under night's helm
as though they had never been.

At the MOMA

Artdaily.org has a nice collection of photos of the Museum of Modern Art in New York up today, but there doesn't seem to be any permalink so you had better look soon.

The Ice-Bound Lighthouse

Lake Erie, Cleveland Harbor.

No Libertarians at the Constitutional Convention

Christopher Beam wrote a long piece for New York Magazine about libertarianism, explaining why it will never be a mainstream political option. This piece isn't bad, but it includes one glaring error:

there’s no idea more fundamental to our country’s history. Every political group claims the Founders as its own, but libertarians have more purchase than most. The American Revolution was a libertarian movement, rejecting overweening government power. The Constitution was a libertarian document that limited the role of the state to society’s most basic needs, like a legislature to pass laws, a court system to interpret them, and a military to protect them.

After I read this, I thought, I should write something explaining why that isn't true. I never got around to it, but, fortunately, John Vecchione did the job for me.

The Founders believed in carefully delineated federal powers either broad (Hamilton) or limited (Jefferson, sometimes) but all believed in a more powerful state than libertarians purport to believe in. If ever there was a libertarian document it was the Articles of Confederation. There was no national power. The federal government could not tax. Its laws were not supreme over state laws. It was in fact, the hot mess that critics of libertarians believe their dream state would be… and it was recognized as such by the majority of the country and was why the Constitution was ratified. The Articles of Confederation is the true libertarian founding document and this explains the failure of libertarianism. . . . Libertarianism appears to be like arsenic, a stimulant in small doses but deadly poison when taken in large doses.

One can only be a libertarian by completely ignoring history. The libertarians I know pretend to be very rational and to weigh up the evidence about society and the law in a scientific way, but as it happens there is a lot of evidence concerning what happens to human societies without powerful governments: misery. There have been, in the course of human events, many states with very weak powers. They were all either conquered by their neighbors, split up, or overthrown, because no complex society can function for long without a government strong enough to keep order among its citizens. Medieval Iceland is a good example, a society with next to no government where things eventually got so bad that the Icelanders invited the King of Norway to take away their independence. As Vecchione says, we tried an experiment in weak government at the beginning of our own history -- weak national government, anyway, since the states had all sorts of powers libertarians want to refudiate. The Articles of Confederation were a failure, which is why we got the Constitution. How so many smart people can espouse libertarianism in the face of history remains, for me, something of a mystery.

Lisa Rinzler

Lisa Rinzler's most famous photographs are of suitcases abandoned in New York State mental hospitals -- above is "Attic Main Room, Willard." But this online exhibit shows that she has a wide range. I like the one below. "Family of Markers."

RIP Dennis Dutton

Dennis Dutton, founder of one my favorite web sites, has died. Arts & Letters Daily has been daily reading for me since I first discovered it, and I have found many wonderful things there. Dutton liked to throw out controversial ideas, and sometimes he tried to rile up his academic audience with silly conservative essays -- "We'd love Arts & Letters Daily to be the meeting place for critical thinkers from all over the map," he once said -- but the overall tone of his site was always interesting. He said this to an interviewer in 2000:

It's a grave mistake in publishing, whether you're talking about Internet or print publication, to try to play to a limited repertoire of established reader interests. A few years ago, Bill Gates was boasting that we'll soon have sensors which will turn on the music that we like or show on the walls the paintings we like when we walk into a room. How boring! The hell with our preexisting likes; let's expand ourselves intellectually.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, which owns the site, says it will continue, but since Dutton has done almost everything himself it will be a completely different publication.

A New City in Chicago

The new plan for the site of the South Works steel plant on Chicago's lakefront has people excited and hopeful. The Chicago Tribune and the NY Times both invoke the memory of famous Chicago designer Daniel Burnam, he of "make no little plans." The old steelworks, which once employed 30,000 people, closed down in 1992, and the 460-acre site has been vacant for a decade. The new plan envisages creating a new urban neighborhood connected to the existing street grid, including both high rises and townhouses, a marina, a network of parks covering 125 acres, and up-to-date environmental features like a separate, filtered sewer system for rain and melt water:

The plan calls for 13,575 market rate and affordable homes to serve 50,000 new residents, 17.5 million square feet of retail and commercial space, a high school and a marina with 1,500 slips, to be built in phases over the next 30 years. The estimated cost is $4 billion.

If this was what planners really did for a living (not, say, churning out yet more plans for suburbs where everyone lives on a cul-de-sac), I would have become one, because projects like this really capture my imagination.

The Twin Mysteries of Anasazi Abandonment and Archaeological Faddism

In the 13th century, the people we call Anasazi abandoned their towns at Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, and other sites on the Colorado Plateau and migrated to southern Arizona and Mexico. The Hopi and Pueblo, we think, are their descendants, as are many people of northern Mexico. Why did they leave their homes?

Thirty years ago archaeologists thought they had found the answer when they discovered that around AD 1250 the region was hit by a terrible, decades-long drought. This was one of the great successes of the ecological paradigm that dominated archaeology at the time and sought to explain the past in scientific terms. The thing is, as George Johnson explains in this fine article, the places they went to were even drier than the ones they left. And when wet weather returned to the Colorado Plateau in the 1300s, the Anasazi stayed away. So while the drought may have played a part in these events, in cannot be the whole explanation.

Now a new generation of archaeologists has come along practicing a new paradigm we might call Culturalism. The leader of this school, British archaeologist Ian Hodder, has hypothesized that neolithic towns in the Middle East grew up not so much for economic reasons, as centers of agriculture or trade, but as centers of religious and cultural life. Some of Hodder's followers have been studying the American southwest, and they see indications that cultural changes may have been behind the move:

By studying changes in ceremonial architecture and pottery styles, Donna Glowacki, an archaeologist at the University of Notre Dame, is charting the rise of what may have been a new puebloan religion. . . . Though the dogma may be irrecoverable, Dr. Glowacki argues that it rapidly attracted adherents. A center of the movement, she said, was the McElmo Canyon area, west of Mesa Verde. Excavations indicate that the population burgeoned along with the new architecture. An influx of different pottery designs suggests immigrants from the west were moving in. Then around 1260, long before the drought, the residents began leaving the pueblo, perhaps spreading the new ideology.

Other archaeologists see evidence of an evangelical-like religion — the forerunner, perhaps, of the masked Kachina rituals, which still survive on the Hopi and Zuni reservations — appearing in the south and attracting the rebellious northerners. . . .

Which is very interesting, but I confess that the way this fits in so neatly with the theories currently dominant in the field makes me wonder. I am waiting for the return of nineteenth-century style explanations based on invasions and migrations, since, after all, many Anasazi sites were obviously destroyed with great violence:

Villagers were scalped, dismembered, perhaps even eaten. Families were slain inside their dwellings, and the pueblo was burned and abandoned. Curiously, as was true throughout the region, the victors didn’t stay to occupy the conquered lands.

Is Cancer a New Disease?

A few months ago I posted about a study of ancient cancer that concluded it was quite rare in ancient times. Now the NY Times has a very interesting feature by George Johnson arguing that the evidence won't support this conclusion. After acknowledging that the authors of the previous study were only able to document 200 cases of cancer in the archaeological record, Johnson goes over all the reasons why this number is likely to be too low: most cancers don't affect bone and so leave little trace, many cancers are very rare, only very recently have archaeologists had the technology to look inside mummies or skeletons for evidence of tumors. And:

Even with all of that taken into account, there is a fundamental problem with estimating ancient cancer rates. Two hundred suspected cases may not sound like much. But sparsity of evidence is not evidence of sparsity. Tumors can remain hidden inside bones, and those that dig their way outward can cause the bone to crumble and disappear. For all the efforts of archaeologists, only a fraction of the human bone pile has been picked, with no way to know what lies hidden below.

Anne L. Grauer, president of the Paleopathology Association and an anthropologist at Loyola University of Chicago, estimates that there are roughly 100,000 skeletons in the world’s osteological collections, and a vast majority have not been X-rayed or studied with more modern techniques.

According to an analysis by the Population Reference Bureau, the cumulative total of everyone who had lived and died by A.D. 1 was already approaching 50 billion, and had nearly doubled by 1750. (The analysis refutes the oft-made assertion that more people are alive today than have ever lived on earth.) If those figures hold, the number of skeletons in the archaeological database would represent barely one ten-thousandth of 1 percent of the total.

Within that minuscule sample, not all of the remains are complete. “For a long time archaeologists only collected skulls,” said Heather J. H. Edgar, curator of human osteology at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. “For the most part, there’s no way to know what the rest of those people’s skeletons might have said about their health.”

Not only is the evidence bad, but really don't know what portion of modern skeletons (or mummies, if we made them) would show evidence of cancer. Like most interesting questions, this one remains open.

Since I found this piece so interesting and could not remember ever hearing of this George Johnson before, I looked him up. He has been contributing to the Times on archaeological and scientific topics for years, and here you can find links to a lot of other things he has done.

In Case You Were Feeling Too Good About Humanity

Archaeologists in Peru have found gruesome evidence of child sacrifice:

Eighty-two skeletons of the Muchik people—including 32 that were mostly or completely intact—have been discovered since 2003 at the Cerro Cerillos site in the Lambayeque Valley on Peru's arid northern coast.

All are children, say the archaeologists.

Seeds of a paralytic and hallucinogenic plant called Nectandra, which also prevents blood clotting, were found with the skeletons, suggesting the children were drugged before their throats were slit and their chests cut open.

During the sacrifices, sharp bronze knives were used to hack the children to death. One skeleton had more than 25 cut marks on it. A few had their hands and legs bound with rope.

"It is so beyond what is necessary to kill a person. It really gives you the chills," Klaus, an anthropologist at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, told National Geographic News. "But we are trying to understand this on their terms, not ours."

Which raises the question, do we really want to understand the terms on which this made sense?

Caves on Mars?

These two deep pits on Mars are getting a lot of attention these days as possible caves. One is 600 feet (180 meters) in diameter, the other 1,000 feet (310 meters). The Mars Odyssey spacecraft first recorded these last year using its infrared camera, THEMIS. So NASA sent the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to take these images in visual light.

"When compared to the surrounding surface, the dark interiors of the holes gave off heat at night but were cool by day," said Alfred McEwen, principal investigator on the HiRISE camera. "So we then decided to target these with MRO because this thermal information may be evidence for these being caves—but the jury is still out on that."

The Mother of All Coin Hoards

Construction workers in northwestern China recently unearthed a hoard of copper coins dating to the Northern Song dynasty (AD 960-1279) that weighs more than 3 tons.

More on the Denisovan People

I already called to your attention the anomalous, 30,000-year-old DNA of the finger bone from Denisova Cave in Siberia, which seems to come from a human species neither ours nor Neanderthal. Now this discovery is back in the news because a second specimen has been identified, a tooth, and because of some extended genetic analysis. This analysis suggests that Denisovans (as they are now being called) interbred with modern humans, and that traces of their DNA can be identified in the genomes of contemporary people in New Guinea.

"We don't think the Denisovans went to Papua New Guinea," located at the northwestern edge of the Pacific region called Melanesia, explained study co-author Bence Viola, an anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

"We think the Denisovan population inhabited most of eastern Eurasia in the same way that Neanderthals inhabited most of western Eurasia," Viola said. "Our idea is that the ancestors of Melanesians met the Denisovans in Southeast Asia and interbred, and the ancestors of Melanesians then moved on to Papua New Guinea."

Keep in mind the caution I always offer about new genetic results, that it will all be very interesting if it turns out to be true.

Irish Monks in pre-Viking Iceland

The Viking settlers of Iceland recorded that when they reached the island around AD 870 they found it empty of people. However, later Icelandic writers mentioned rumors of European predecessors, possibly Irish monks, and Irish monks themselves also recorded hints of settlements on lands to the north. Here is Cicuil, an Irish monk writing around AD 825:

It is now thirty years since clerics, who live on the island [Thule] from the first of February to the first of August, told me that not only at the summer solstice, but in the days round about it, the sun setting in the evening hides itself as though behind a small hill in such a way that there was no darkness in that very small space of time...

Now archaeologists have found the first good evidence of an Irish presence in Iceland. In a man-made cave called Seljalandshellar they found a stone cross carved on the wall in the style of 9th-century stone-cut crosses from northern Ireland or the Scottish islands. Excavating outside the cave mouth they found what looks like debris from digging out the cave beneath a layer of volcanic ash from an eruption in 871; beneath that same layer they found what may be the hoof prints of sheep. It isn't much, but when you consider that these Irish monks were famously ascetic, and they ones who went to Iceland probably did so because the life in an Irish monastery wasn't rigorous and demanding enough for them, you wouldn't expect to find piles of pottery.

American Voter Behavior in One Cartoon

Tom Toles explains it all. From a wonderful collection of his best cartoons of the year.

The Cost of Military Spending

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

--President Dwight Eisenhower