Walking back prehistory.

 Things aren't much calmer for me personally this weekend, but I'm going to do an actual post anyway.

mj0007 | Deposit Photos

That's a Clovis point. Although it's not the first Clovis point ever discovered; the first one was found not far from where I'm writing this -- at Blackwater Draw near Clovis, NM. In 1929, a road crew there ran across a big pile of woolly mammoth bones, and mixed in with the bones were spear points that looked a lot like this one -- clearly crafted by human hands. Subsequent archaelogical research dated the spear points to oh, about 13,000 years ago. That tracks with the theory that humans came to the Americas by way of a land bridge across the Bering Strait around that time, as the last Ice Age ended. So for almost a century, the accepted wisdom has been that Clovis Man was the first human in the Americas.

Which is great, as long as you don't think about the evidence of earlier human occupation that keeps turning up.

Take, for example, this story from the Associated Press this week: Researchers in Brazil have discovered some bones of giant sloths that were clearly worked by human hands and maybe even worn as jewelry. The researchers have dated these bone pendants, and they say they're 25,000 to 27,000 years old -- thousands of years older than Clovis Man.

And then there are the fossilized footprints at White Sands National Park, also not far from where I'm writing this. Archaeologists have used radiocarbon dating to estimate that those footprints are between 21,000 and 23,000 years old -- not quite as old as the giant sloth pendants, but not as recent as Clovis Man, either. 

National Park Service

At the time, White Sands was an inland lake, and the people who left the footprints shared their watering hole with mammoths, giant sloths, and camels. Yes, camels! 

It turns out there's a word for "camel" in Keres, the language spoken by members of Acoma Pueblo. Kim Pasqual-Charlie of the Acoma Tribal Historical Preservation Board is quoted in an article about White Sands in the most recent edition of El Palacio magazine as saying, "But how can we have that word if we'd never seen a camel?"

In other words, science is beginning to catch up with the wisdom in Native legends about how they have always been here. Archaeologists and anthropologists have ignored or scoffed at those stories for decades. Now? Maybe not so much. Science is discovering evidence that glaciers advanced and receded multiple times over the eons, and that could have allowed for the peopling of the Americas a whole lot earlier than once thought.

(Then there's the possibility that the Bering land bridge wasn't the only migratory route taken by early humans. There's DNA evidence that Polynesians had contact with South American tribes around 1200 CE, a few centuries before Columbus. And theories of pre-Columbian contact with people of the Americas abound -- although none are early enough to account for those giant-sloth-bone pendants.)

Still, there's pushback from some archaeologists, who want more proof of earlier settlements before they give such theories credit. I get that's how science is supposed to work. But there's also a well-documented tendency among Whites to disbelieve that Native Americans could have had an ancient, advanced civilization on this continent. That's how we've gotten theories that, y'know, savage Indians couldn't possibly have created things like the Great Circle Earthworks in Ohio, or Cahokia in southern Illinois, or Chaco Canyon here in New Mexico. Those things must have been created by a lost tribe of Israel. Or survivors from the fall of Atlantis. Or aliens! 

Because to admit that ancestral Native Americans created those things would require that we also admit how heinous our treatment of modern-day Native Americans has been. It's on par with the way we've treated Black Americans -- and to be honest, we as a society aren't ready to confront that, either, let alone atone for it.

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I want to talk about one other thing that was in the El Palacio article. Western society puts a lot of stock in dates: humans came to the Americas 13,000 -- no, 25,000 -- no, maybe even 50,000 years ago. (Yes, there's some evidence for it.) How can Native Americans say they've always been here? Fifty thousand years is a hell of a long time, but it's not forever. 

In response, the author of the article quotes Dr. Joe Watkins, an archaeologist with Archaeological and Cultural Education Consultants in Tucson, AZ, and a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Watkins observes that Westerners define themselves in opposition to others, in finding what makes them -- us -- superior to others. (See my point about Cahokia, etc., above.) He goes on: "But for us, I believe, history is a way of recognizing connections and relationships, relationships with non-human people. The Western perspective is largely irrelevant. It is beside the point."

He says, "On the Indigenous side, it doesn’t matter putting dates. Philosophically, we were never anywhere else."

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If you have an interest in this stuff -- and if you've gotten this far, I have to assume you do -- I encourage you to read the article in El Palacio. I found it fascinating. Here's the link again. 

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These moments of ancient blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Wealth is what we say it is.

My father was not a fan of President Franklin Roosevelt. I guess there was a lot he didn't agree with him on, but the thing I remember hearing most often is how FDR should have never taken the United States off the gold standard. That is, between 1879 and 1933, the dollar was backed by gold, the federal supply of which was famously held at Fort Knox in Kentucky. (The country's golden wealth nowadays is held in three locations: Fort Knox, Denver, and West Point, NY.) But in June 1933, Congress abolished the right of creditors to demand payment in gold. Severing the value of the US dollar from the price of gold allowed the Federal Reserve to inflate the money supply more easily, giving it another tool to fight inflation.  

Of course, the price of gold -- like that of any commodity -- is arbitrary. And to take the argument even further, the use of gold as a basis for measuring wealth is also arbitrary. We could have picked some other substance. Silver, maybe. Or something ancient societies used for trade -- like cacao beans.

Several weeks ago, I toured Chaco Culture National Historical Park. To say it's an amazing place is an understatement. The biggest ruin is Pueblo Bonito, which was built of adobe and was four stories high in places. Ancient Chacoans lived there, but most of the rooms were vacant most of the time. Our guide, who is Navajo and Zia Pueblo, suggested it might have been used as an inn, with many of the rooms only used by folks visiting for religious festivals and market days. 

On the cliff wall behind Pueblo Bonito -- just like at many sites around the Southwest -- are ancient pictographs (painted on) and petroglyphs (carved into the rock). Take a look at the petroglyph in the center of this photo -- the one with half-circles on either side of a vertical line: 

copyright Lynne Cantwell 2021

Looks kind of like a bug, right? That's what archaeologists thought it was. 

Well, in 2003, a researcher named Patricia Crown examined a cache of cylindrical pottery vessels found in the 1890s in one of the rooms in Pueblo Bonito. The Chacoan vessels had been dated to around 1100 CE, and it occurred to Crown that they were similar to vessels found at sites built by the ancient Mayans during their Classic period, around 900 CE. The Mayans used these vessels for drinking chocolate -- not hot chocolate as we know it today, but a fermented drink. Alcoholic, in other words. The source of the beverage was the same as our hot chocolate today, though: the cacao bean. Cacao beans grow on trees in pods. And take a look at how they grow:

Eric Freyssinge | Wikimedia Commons | CC4.0

Looks like that petroglyph, doesn't it? 

Crown had some potsherds of Pueblo Bonito vessels tested, and sure enough, traces of cacao turned up. Some ancient Chacoan had liked his fermented chocolate so much that he carved a cacao branch into the wall behind Pueblo Bonito.

It's about 1,200 miles from Chaco to the Mayans' cacao trees. But these two cultures were trading partners, and this happened hundreds of years before horses were introduced to the New World. Moreover, it's obvious that Mayan xocolatl would not have made the trip in its liquid state, so a Mayan must have taught a Chacoan how to grind the beans and make the drink, and then sent him home with a supply of beans -- for a price.

It turns out cacao was important to the Mayans as far back as 2000 BCE. Mayan kings used to pay their debts to one another in cacao beans.

So what valuable currency would the ancient Chacoans have traded for those yummy beans? Turquoise. There's a room in Pueblo Bonito that's referred to as the treasury, where archaeologists found a cache of turquoise beads. And some of the turquoise had been imported -- the closest turquoise mine to Chaco Canyon was in Cerrillos, NM, more than 150 miles away, but Chacoans also possessed turquoise mined in Colorado, Nevada and California.

But getting back to the chocolate: The ancient Mayans had a goddess named Ixcacao. She figures briefly in the Popol Vuh, the Mayan creation myth. (The author of the article at the link calls her Ixcocoa and, later, Ixcacau, but it's the same goddess.). 

The other thing about Mayan xocolotl is this: it's not sweet. Not at all. The Mayans would add chile to the drink to hide the bitter taste. That probably sounds kind of gross, but remember, this stuff was alcoholic. Lots of folks hate American beer because it's bitter, but they still drink it.

Anyway. Ancient Mayans used cacao as money; the ancient Celts used cows; we use paper and coins. Truly, wealth is what a society says it is.

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How's your summer reading going? Don't forget about the contest. Here's a link to the reading list and the rules. 

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These moments of chocolatey blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Mask up, social distance, and get your vaccine ASAP!