archaeology

June 3, 2008

Ethnoarchaeology and Gender

Filed under: Culture

    In the early 1990s Hetty Jo Brumbach and Robert Jarvenpa embarked on a new phase of ethnoarchaeological research that focused on gender dynamics. Realizing that archaeological treatments of women’s and men’s roles had not kept pace with the burgeoning work on gender relations, sexual stratification and related issues in cultural anthropology, we returned for additional fieldwork with our Chipewyan friends and consultants in Patuanak and Knee Lake, Saskatchewan.

      Several additional late historical archaeological sites were documented, providing a total of 44 sites in our regional database. Adapting a "task differentiation" framework developed by Janet Spector, we systematically interviewed Chipewyan women and men about a range of subsistence activities involved in the pursuit, harvesting, processing, consumption and storage of animal and plant food resources and products. By integrating such testimony with observation of ongoing hunting and fishing behaviors and historical archaeological patterning, we developed several empirical generalizations about women’s and men’s behavior in foraging societies that have implications for archaeological interpretation generally.
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Ethnoarchaeology in Indonesia and Southeast Asia

Filed under: Culture
Torajan Ancestral Houses

    I chose Southeast Asia and Indonesia for this research because this area is well-known for the importance of feasting in its many traditional societies, and many accounts of feasts describe them as being given entirely for prestige, or "merit," either in this world or the afterworld. Thus, it seemed to be a good test case for the ecological model.

    The ethnoarcheological work that I am pursing in Indonesia in conjunction with Ron Adams is focused on documenting:

  • The range of feasts in traditional Torajan society,
  • The costs and benefits of feasts, and
  • The way that feasts are used to create political alliances within and between communities.

      Traditional Torajan communities range from transegalitarian to simple chiefdom societies. Torajan funeral feasts are some of the most extravagant competitive displays that we know of in the contemporary world. More detailed analyses are presented in a preliminary report by myself (Torajan Feasting in South Sulawesi-.pdf file), and in Adams’ MA Thesis.

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November 25, 2007

Hoabinhian

Filed under: Culture

    The term Hoabinhian was first used by French archaeologists working in northern Vietnam to describe Holocene period archaeological assemblages excavated from rock shelters. It has become a common term to describe stone artefact assemblages in Southeast Asia that contain flaked cobble artefacts. The term was originally used to refer to a specific ethnic group, restricted to a limited time period with a distinctive subsistence economy and technology. More recent work (e.g. Shoocongdej 2000) uses the term to refer to artefacts and assemblages with certain formal characteristics.

History of Definitions

    In 1927 Colani published some details of her nine excavations on northern Vietnamese province of Hòa Bình. As a result of her work the First Congress of Prehistorians of the Far East in 1932 agreed to define the Hoabinhian as a culture composed of implements that are in general flaked with somewhat varied types of primitive workmanship. It is characterised by tools often worked only on one face, by hammerstones, by implements of sub-triangular section, by discs, short axes and almond shaped artefacts, with an appreciable number of bone tools (Matthews 1966).
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May 23, 2007

New Analysis Of Pottery Stirs Olmec Trade Controversy

Filed under: Culture

Clearing - or perhaps roiling - the murky and often contentious waters of Mesoamerican archeology, a study of 3,000-year-old pottery provides new evidence that the Olmec may not have been the mother culture after all.

Writing this week (Aug. 1, 2005) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team of scientists led by UW-Madison archeologist James B. Stoltman presents new evidence that shows the Olmec, widely regarded as the creators of the first civilization in Mesoamerica, imported pottery from other nearby cultures. The finding undermines the view that the Olmec capitol of San Lorenzo near the Gulf of Mexico was the sole source of the iconographic pottery produced by the earliest Mesoamerican civilizations.
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May 17, 2007

New Evidence Of ‘Human’ Culture Among Primates

Filed under: News, Culture

Fresh evidence that suggests monkeys can learn skills from each other, in the same manner as humans, has been uncovered by a University of Cambridge researcher.

Dr Antonio Moura, a Brazilian researcher from the Department of Biological Anthropology, has discovered signs that Capuchin monkeys in Brazil bang stones as a signalling device to ward off potential predators.

While not conclusive, his research adds to a mounting body of evidence that suggests other species have something approaching human culture. A strong case has already been made for great apes having a capacity for social learning, but until now there has been no evidence of material culture among the “new world” primates of Central or South America, which include Capuchins.

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May 8, 2007

The Tibetan After-Life

Filed under: Culture

The "Bardo" or Intermediate State

The Bardo Thodel - The "Tibetan Book Of The Dead"

Like the Egyptians, the Tibetans had their "books of the dead", which were not only guidebooks for the deceased, but also magnificent spiritual writings.

The Bardo Thodel, or "Book of the Intermediate State" (popularly but inaccurately known in the West as "The Tibetan Book of the Dead") is widely and traditionally attributed to Padmasambhava, the legendary Indian Tantric master who was said to have introduced Buddhism to Tibet in the middle of the eighth century, conquering and converting all the native demons and deities in the process.

In actual fact, compilation of the Tibetan Books of the Dead involved a number of authors, working over several generations.  The present corpus, of which the popular "Tibetan Book of the Dead" is only the best known and most accessible of a large number of writings (mostly mantric and magical), dates from the 14th or 15th centuries [Detlef Ingo Lauf, Secret Doctrines of the Tibetan Books of the Dead, pp3-4, (Shambhala, Boulder, 1977)]. (more…)

The Chinese After-Life

Filed under: Culture

Yin and Yang Souls, and the Disintegration of the Embodied Personality

"After death, when this small troop of colourless spirits [that make up the personality] was dispersed, how could they possibly be gathered together and reformed into a unity?"

The Taoist Conception of Post-Mortem Personality Fragmentation

The Chinese Taoists, like the ancient Egyptians, were greatly concerned with ensuring the survival of the individual after physical death.  Their metaphysics was based on the ancient Chinese conception of the polarity of Dark and Light, Negative and Positive, Yin and Yang; the two fundamental principles in the Cosmos.

According to the Chinese, just as the Cosmos consists of and comes about through the interaction and interchange of Yin and Yang (as superbly illustrated in that magnificent Chinese Oracle, the I Ching - pronounced "Yee Jing"), so, in a similar way, the human personality consists of and comes about through two principles or "souls", a Yin soul and a Yang soul, which are welded together during life, but separate at death.  Their separation means the end of the personality as such, even though the Yin and Yang principles survive.  One Jungian writer, Cary Baynes, summarises the matter as follows:
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The Hellenistic (Later Mediterranean) After-Life

Filed under: Culture

The Ascent of the Soul Through the Celestial Spheres

The Hellenistic-Roman Era

The military campaigns of the Macedonian king Alexander the Great creating an empire that stretched from Italy and Libya in the West to Northern India in the East.  After his death in 323 the cultural and religious melting pot remained, and became what we know as the Hellenistic Civilisation.  This civilisation survived and flourished throughout the Roman era until the coming to power of political Christianity with the conversion of the emperor Constantine in the early fourth century.

Chaldean-Platonic Cosmology

This long period saw the coming together, and popular practice, of the different religions, philosophies, and occult conceptions of Egypt, Persia, Syria, Greece, and Asia Minor, into a single all-embracing cosmology.  This cosmology was basically an astrological one, and appeared to originate from a synthesis of Platonic, Syrian/Babylonian/Chaldean, and Mithraic Persian elements.  It was based on the idea of the Earth as the centre of the universe, around which were the successive celestial or planetary spheres.  Beyond these was the sphere of the fixed stars, and beyond that, the pure spiritual-Divine world itself.  It is from this supracelestial world that the soul in its purity originates, and to which it returns. (more…)

The Middle Eastern And Mediterranean After-Life Conception

Filed under: Culture

The Cessation of The Personality With Bodily Death

"(Better) to serve as the hireling of another, of some portionless man whose livelihood was but small, than to be lord over all the dead that have perished."

Homeric Pessimism

In contrast to the optimism of the Egyptians, the majority of civilisations that developed in and around the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East in the centuries before Christ took a dim and pessimistic view.  The ancient Babylonians, Hebrews, and Homeric Greeks (by "Homeric" is meant the viewpoint of the great poet Homer 8th century B.C.E.) and his public), saw the after-life state - the Underworld, Sheol, Hades - as a dark, miserable, quasi-existence; the dead being but a pathetic shadow of their former living selves.

A graphic literary illustration of this is given in Homer’s account of the meeting of Odysseus with the shade of Achilles, the greatest and most renowned of all the Greek heros.  Odysseus, descending to Hades in order to consult the dead seer Teiresias concerning the circumstances that prevented him from returning home, encounters Achilles, and congratulates him regarding the honors and fame he had won through his part in the siege of Troy.  Achilles rejects Odysseus’ words with a devastating reply: (more…)

Multiple Souls and Multiple After-Lives

Filed under: Culture


"The dead man is at one and the same time in heaven, in the god’s boat, under the earth, tilling the Elysian fields, and in his tomb enjoying his victuals"
The Great Egyptian Civilisation

Of all the great civilisations known at the present time, only ancient Sumer, which developed in the Mesopotamian basin in the fourth century before Christ, exceeds in age that of ancient Egypt.

Egyptian civilisation as it is known began when the King (or Pharaoh) Menes unified the separate Upper and Lower Kingdoms along the Nile in 3100 B.C.E.  Menes founded the first of thirty-one dynasties (this is the traditional number, according to the enumeration of the late (4th Century B.C.E.) Egyptian priest Manetho.  The precise number of dynasties - especially some of the minor ones - has however been disputed by modern scholars) of an empire that was to last until Alexander the Great’s  conquest in 332 B.C.E., a period longer than that of any other known empire (see table 2-1). (more…)

The Egyptian After-Life

Filed under: Culture

AFTER-LIFE EXISTENCE - AN OCCULT ANALYSIS

INTRODUCTION

On these pages an attempt has been made to deal with is the nature of the human personality after physical death.  This subject evokes a host of questions - questions that are traditionary the province of religion.

What happens to us when we die? In what form, if any, does consciousness and the personality survive? Is there a spirit world? A heaven and hell? Can the deceased communicate with the living, through mediums and seances, as Spiritualists suppose? Do we meet personally the God of religion, as Christians and others assume? Is there such a thing as reincarnation, as the Eastern religions and many esoteric philosophies teach? And if so, why don’t we remember our past lives?

We are dealing here with very important questions, of relevance, obviously, to each and every one of us.  This is a topic which, as I have said, is traditionally the province of religion.  But how complete, if at all, is the understanding of the various religions on this matter?

I would suggest that the understanding of the official or exoteric (outer, doctrinal, ecclesiastic) religions, although always containing some truth, is more often incomplete than complete when it comes to  dealing with these vital questions.  It is incomplete because it is bound by the dead letter of dogma, rather than living intuition.

What I have attempted in these pages is in contrast an esoteric - an inner, intuitive, mystic, occult, "heretical" - explanation of existence after bodily death.

What is being attempted here is an (obviously incomplete) synthesis of previous human knowledge on this subject.  Over the past thousands of years, countless priests, occultists, sages, healers, Seers, and, in the last few decades, even doctors and counsellors, have contributed to an ever-growing store-house of knowledge on this subject.  I have taken some of that vast body of material (those few aspects of it that I have been able to assimilate) and brought it all together.

But such a perspective is only possible through the widespread availability of such material.  This availability in turn depends on two historical quirks of the present age and society - the printed (and now the electronic) word and the secular and non-totalitarian government.  For the printed word makes knowledge universally available at an almost negligible cost, and the Internet has added further to free dissemination of information.  And  that even rarer and more precious commodity, the secular non-totalitarian government ensures that such knowledge, being available, will not be repressed through religious or ideological reasons (which is not to say the always present menace of censorship will not be constantly be rearing it’s ugly head!).

Yet every synthesis is also a new creation.  Thus, the conclusions arrived at here are my own, and are certainly not intended as hard and fast dogma.  It is hoped that the conclusions I have drawn will trigger the reader’s own intuition, inquiry, and individual understanding.

May 4, 2007

A Short History of the Pyramidology (Part 6)

Filed under: Culture

By Kevin Jackson

Find out more

Read on

  1. Secrets of the Great Pyramid by Peter Tomkins (Penguin, 1973)
  2. Giza: The Truth by Ian Lawton and Chris Ogilvie-Herald (Virgin Books, 2000)
  3. The Orion Mystery by Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert (Arrow, 1994)
  4. Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock (Century, 2001)
  5. Isis Unveiled by Madame Blavatsky (Theosophical University Press, 1984 (more…)

A Short History of the Pyramidology (Part 5)

Filed under: Culture

By Kevin Jackson

New Agers

‘…attention shifted from the physical presence of the Giza structure to its proportions.’

The 1960s and 70s also saw the rise of that loose coalition of unorthodox and far-fetched beliefs known as New Age philosophy. The Pyramid plays as lively a role in this philosophical fashion as it did a hundred years ago in the heyday of Theosophy, and the mania for all things ‘pyramidical’ burns as ardently as ever.

‘…the media rang with reports of people using mini-pyramids to keep milk fresh, and to sharpen not only blades but also brainpower.’ (more…)

A Short History of the Pyramidology (Part 4)

Filed under: Culture

By Kevin Jackson

Extra-Terrestrials

With the 1960s came something a little more space age. In 1969 - not so coincidentally, the year of the Apollo 11 mission that first put men on the moon - there appeared the first English-language version of the book Chariots of the Gods? The author of this curiously written and much publicised work was a Swiss hotelier, Erich von Daniken, and its theme passed into popular consciousness, borne along by serialisation in tabloid newspapers.

‘…the earth had long ago been visited by superior beings from other worlds…’ (more…)

A Short History of the Pyramidology (Part 3)

Filed under: Culture

By Kevin Jackson 

Atlanteans

http://www.geocities.com/nur_4hm/arkeo/short5.jpgEdgar Cayce ©

Occultists of all stripes continue to be keen on the Pyramid as a place of spirits and demons, but the traditional belief that it was the product of some ‘lost wisdom’ from ancient times took on a new wrinkle round about 1923, when a poorly educated American by the name of Edgar Cayce (1877-1945), who had already made something of a name for himself as a trance medium, began to tell his listeners that they had lived previous lives in the lost, sunken continent of Atlantis. He claimed that he too had lived on Atlantis, and had been a high priest there. (more…)






















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