The Seven Voyayas
Mac Crary
Curricular Extension Homework
Shirley Williams TCC Archaeology
Dec. 2018
Based on: Assigned and supplemental videos, syllabus,
class lectures, textbook, personal notebooks, Critical Path by Buckminster Fuller
In searching blindly my eyes finally opened
To all that I had missed.
Introduction: Clovis Revised
In terms of raw science there was nothing particularly cataclysmic about Monte Verde in Chile. It was simply well-preserved. Something was there across the Spanish Sea to be discovered. No one who knows the earthbound saga of Galileo is unaware that behind the totems of God’s power is a lack of appreciation for the diversity of divine imagination. Yet the discovers faced more than allegations of buccaneer. They faced more than a scholarly problem. Tom Dillehay describes a social problem so profound it nearly led him to ruin his own discovery.
Clovis Point, the point where an old culture in the Americas was identified, whose spearpoints sharp enough to kill a rhino were at least 11,499 years old, was established as an idea about the arrival of man to the Americas but dated later than ruins in Monte Verde. Clovis culture origins had managed to become a doctrine and how this unfolded became what Dillehay calls the problem of “archaeological politics.” It’s not a bad idea to come to grips with this unsettling, difficult expression, “archaeological politics,” because, in its grip, what we might find and arrive at about the history of archaeology could help prevent future loss and perhaps even yield a philosophy of archaeology. To sort this out then we must briefly examine the difference between politics and philosophy, their crossroad and a few simple thought exercises to help create a guide for the so-called twelve commentaries.
A thread of this search for a unifying lens created from simple notions that weave into a serviceable form can be found in Leibnitz’ philosophical assessment that there are truths of fact and truths of reason. If first facts give rise to a truth of reason that becomes invested in recognition and a call to valor by supervised conformity it can then be difficult to surmount fixed ideas in light of new facts. Healthy, professional people may still be excitable enough not to properly qualify their remarks leaving them faced with recanting former declarations, not easy for everyone.
Archaeology at the turn of the 20th century was also occurring in the age of heroic invention, against the background of patented ideas by Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. The resulting mindset, even informed by the humanity of Ken Boas, which it wasn’t always, still staked out a territory in a form of intellectual gold rush. The resulting doxology is pressure to conform from above. Perhaps our rush to understand makes us vulnerable. Given the shameless looting and plunder that has transpired in the ages past, it seems surprising anyone accepts we have any conviction about what was ever there.
There are a hundred ways to write sentiments
Five ways to draw tears from a stone.
The beginning was etched with a laugh
Only the end said, “remember me.
Voyaya One: Chaco Canyon, where superstition discovered brilliance
The Japanese Kojiki is a record of very ancient matters the lore of which is a book of mystery and meaning, myth and history, yet Americans have never adopted a similar stewardship of their ancient past. Despite this, Anne Sofae of The Solstice Project refers to her discovery of the Sun Dagger in Chaco Canyon as the discovery of an ancient American cosmology, our Kojiki in stone. Why walk away from affinity with our ancestors? It is part of our natural estate if you adjust the turn of fortune away from colonialism and abandon fictions about race.
However, to read into the cosmology, or one should say fascinating architectural skill, found in the Chaco Canyon may be drafting observers into unwarranted meta-archaeology, built upon divination and projected upon material evidence as though the divination was ancient, rather than conscriptive. What may have been a brilliant observatory created for civil assembly and assessment of the world around them has been primitive-ized into an occult, even Christian scenario, in the sense of a central idea, in this case calling upon God’s favor.
Art for art’s sake is clear in many ancient sites from Mayan temples and this tendency, as well as its suppression, extends to ancient Egypt, and is part of the expression found in what we consider their religion. The idea that some evidence for belief could be given artful representation, rather than blind faith, cannot be rejected just because the artists are not scornful. Perhaps the joy of the ideas their peers expressed was so well received, the artisans said, yes, I see, and behold, here I shall illustrate that, my friend.
The scientific process of archaeology was well illustrated in the discoveries made at Chaco Canyon once diggers realized that a formidable conceptual idea was at its foundation. This helped them address the congregation areas as well as the outposts. In sum, we learned that inscriptions can be made from grand structure, and that an interested person, adept enough, can learn to read them, not always, unfortunately, as Pittsburgh has learned to their crying shame, to human betterment, but the tale of decapitated peace signs at my old school indexed to Liverpool Street’s Bidwell may have to wait for the tacid approval of WQED.
Voyaya Two: To Dig it or not to Dig it
In his book Prometheus Bedevilled, mathematician Norman Levitt questions the entire enterprise of archaeology and dismisses the notion of professionals in their ranks. Half-witted that they are they can’t even protect themselves from the haggling and nagging backwards harassment of Native Americans, he announces. The mentality in evidence barely makes room for archaeology as one of the Fine Arts, its value purely imaginary. While the idea is clearly unbecoming, one mustn’t fail to recognize great force that he puts behind it. “North American archaeology,” he states, “is basically little more than a recondite hobby pursued by a handful of privileged enthusiasts, most of them white. Other than private satisfaction, not much is at stake in its continuance.” It’s a curious, hard-hitting attitude delivered from the holy ground of a mathematician. He bemoans the “dreadful sense of permanent dispossession,” that creates a irrational and militant environment for archaeologists, always cowardly about it, in the turf wars of black culture and Native Americanismo. He makes himself sound more friendly by quoting a Native American who is named Vine Deloria. “Deloria’s fury carries him over the edge into fantasy. He maintains that anthropologists and archaeologists have nothing valid to say about the origin and history of native peoples. The scientific methods these researchers employ to determine dates, durations, and ancestral affiliations are worthless because (at least to Native Americans) Western science is itself worthless.” What a friend to archaeologists he is to sound out these nattering nabobs of negativity!
Probably the native American grudge in part speaks to the Western dilettante finding themself. I’ve heard Islamic scholars make similar jabs at poets in their midst. P.D. Ouspensky makes mystical claims about the goals of the nascent yearnings for celestial insight that the raptures of Western scholarship bring to the table of ancient mysteries. “To be disappointed in science,” he writes, “does not mean losing interest in knowledge. It means being convinced that the usual scientific methods are not only useless but lead to the construction of absurd, contradictory theories.” It’s hard to know, however, when the search for knowledge, abandoning the first principle of verification, takes on an attempt to cause trouble by explicit permission simply to dazzle. In analysis of dream and the search for ethical understanding, M.L Von Franz grapples with the mystery of the appeal in evil, writing, “ethically sensitive individuals have trouble in finding their own individual inner way, but one can also say that to be ethically sensitive is one of the great incentives in the process of individuation.” Accordingly, it is important not to be too quick to judge who is the sheep and who is the wolf in the innocent scholar roaming the dark woods.
Forgive me for seeing in this pop culture friction the loaded reasoning of the full metal shaman.
Voyaya Three: Atlantis, Ottomans and the Library of Alexandria
There is something akin to Atlantis about the Library of Alexandria. It is lost, historically based and no one really knows where it is, although the education of guesses in the matter is a professional concern. Many accounts have it that it was torched and destroyed in the end by Muslim hooligans, but other accounts show that much was made of the Muslim grand finale to cover the likely obliteration by Christians. There were also accidental fires in skirmishes with the Romans.
The problem of historical fiction is a two-way street as the discovery of Troy by Henry Schliemann and his Greek wife demonstrate. He believed the account of Homer and straightforth, derfing ho to prove it so. Other arenas of the intersection between belief and reality are not so productive. Black Athena, a new myth about Africa, has its strengths and weaknesses, but evidence of things unseen does not establish their existence per se, lost wax, surely.
This is a problem in exploring areas of the Ottoman Empire as well, which can profit from historical fiction as a genre. Just as Mary Renault dramatized Alexander the Great in the book, Persian Boy, you find a few novels of mention, Brides of Sulieman, The Historian (a vampire novel) which are based in or whirl through the Epoch, but nothing as grand as James Michener’s voyages into places like Poland or Texas, and this is unfortunate.
Archaeologists, of course, is research based in fact. Yet the background for books like Agony and the Ecstasy come to mind often when exploring places of historic fact, because readers of fiction brush upon the past in the settings. Just as Michelangelo was breaking the law of the Church by studying cadavers in secret, the Greeks in Egypt found relief from their medical traditions in the willingness of the North Africans to engage in dissection.
Because archaeology has a distinguished tradition of humanism in the matter of dignifying different people and races, as exhibited by Ken Boas’ struggle against eugenics, the pathologies of political nomenclature are abrasive in the text of social change in archaeology. One of my own discoveries this semester was to think up a joke: Why did the Germans measure Hitler’s head? Because he was their ruler. It’s funny because the swelling ego of the master race were barbaric pigeons yet their subordinates cowered and turned their blind rage on the truly helpless, clearly proof of superiority.
The Library of Alexandria has been said by some archaeologists not to be significant so much for its disastrous loss but as Ayn Rand said in The Fountainhead after the soul-less tore down The Temple of the Human Spirit, but because it ever existed at all.
A Librarian of my acquaintance doesn’t like fiction, but when you see the fictions motivated by people claiming to be living in truth, maybe it can be clearer thinking than presumed. In either case, there is no doubt it should be properly labelled.
Voyaya Four: The Nature of Reality
Machiavelli would have shrugged at how a handful of Spanish soldiers conquered Peru. Jared Diamond’s search for an artificial balance based on geography however overlooks a conspicuous point. When the Conquistadors decimated an Inca Army in a single day it was not entirely due to Spanish prancing and steel. The Inca, despite having a more accurate calendar than the one used by Conquistadors, had a finite comprehension of the capacity in man for evil that led them to assume their numbers would humble the Spanish. Their intellectual parameter failed to credit boiling cold blood. Had they been as ruthless themselves, the Spanish would have been ensnared. Mutual survival was not in the cards for the Spanish. In this grand epic’s finale is the baited lisp. For who now doubts Diogenes that trickery is the nature of reality?
So, who is Jared Diamond? Diamond is a peculiar individual driven by interest in biology, sex, experimentation and revenge. Germs, guns and steel in which he wrongly attributes conquest to artificial power rather than ruthless calculus of mind, presents an argument hiding its saturation with derision, never openly saying that cooperation is naive, and yet his posture is affirmative, he means the best for the primitives with whom he smiles, bestowing praise.
The refraction of a 21st century purpose onto the capacity to make scabbards, manipulate steeds, and prance in a Roman femininity called macho grace, makes deadly satire drooling from murderous gashes a new agenda, but calling it victory is defeatist. The ruthlessness brays of its victory, granting clemency to Pizarro, a royal penis unworthy of spitballs.
Ironically throughout the custody of decimaters the Church called themselves moralists. Failure to hide admiration for the achievement makes us caretakers of a new eugenics, even as Jared, one of the saving remnant of those Jews destroyed by Hitler, wears the usual mask.
Voyaya Five: Egypt Insitu
In contemplating The Old Kingdom, there is no doubt the lifeblood was the Nile, so perhaps the stark difference between water and sand, the crystaline shining of the dry element endless and scorched pitched sideways upon the flowing relief and bounty of the Nile’s waters, may have given rise, on a day hot enough to induce delirium, to a keen vision of man’s place and seemed an offering from both the sun and within to bring about a perception of man’s place as a tribute to the divine as though from a mirage; the ennebriation of love, frail as gossamer, may move mountains to the supernatural door. We are invited to see this, as a placemark in the sands of time. The colossi, seemingly immovable, as stern as the earth before a quake, levitates from within by the magic of man’s power to appreciate the celestial. Whenever a tempest of slaves, a party of Hercules, or the lift of a Pharoah’s pinky we will never know, how did they ever do it? A mirage laid bare.
“Devotion to the supernatural,” informs the text of Ancient Egypt in a video about the history of the Coptic Church which illustrates that monotheism must make a superstitious boast about what it finds outside its purview. However, the reality is more a myriad and domain of extravagance, a critique of the manifold, an assessment, and this seems so also in the slightly younger Inca Empire.
In Egypt, Isis led a consort of scorpions to avenge her insults, and the Sun God’s passage through the Underworld is told in a Book of Hours. In Inca stories Quetzcoatl arrives in a sun of rain, flooding the land with a host of gobbling turkeys, under the plumes where a spiny, gigantic crocodile dries up into immense mountain ranges. The Inca braided cords to do their math. Must we see the everlasting in simply wanting to laugh and enjoy a little of our lives?
No doubt monotheism is simply redeeming heresy in destroying what little remains.
Voyaya Six: The Perils of Otzi
Otzi lived a bit happy the man, trusting to luck with unfinished flying spears. One sees in him Job, fallen from a high place of fortune to ridicule by peers. Perhaps they doffed their hats, what a fine ham he had made, darting to and fro, like der Suss of Goebbels’ mirth, an object lesson in the nature of reality. If they saw him now, wouldn’t they growl in pains of surprise at how the manner of his passing earned him a place among immortals? Would they kick themselves from oblivion, shaking their fists at the perverse humor of the Sun God?
My school enjoyed a very intense glimpse of what Pittsburgh calls society for creative anachronism in the gifted re-invention of past forms of a guest sculpture whose archaeological stance of preservation led him to master the tools of the stone age trade. He wants to put himself in Otzi’s shoes and find the vision thing. He down with every shimmy of the expertise in a faithful tribute to Otzi.
While our guest demonstrated the strength and skill needed to live cro-magnon in the era of the mastodon by excavating the flint-knapping of an enigma from that time, for a weaker, simpler sort of man as I, the issues raised by perilous Otzi are a little different. One of the reasons is that it is so easy to mythologize, as Jean Auol did in her Clan of the Cave Bear. While one might profit in musing over the idea that griffins were invented, and long believed, due to dinosaur bones, it is not always redemptive that myth has some basis in legend. Another example is the darkest side of archaeology of all, the enemy of Boas, Josef Goebbels, who invented a dimmy he called Der Suss, and used the stereotype to create a collection room for archaeologists outside the ovens of Treblinka.
We find the caustic sweep of looters almost immediate in Dealey Plaza at the grave of Oswald, and the fleshing, raking of the emergency room details. We are in trouble with the savants of sadism, as they laugh with glowing words about dreamers clinging to last instances of savor in pain’s surcease when mortally stricken. Kees Bolle in The Freedom of Man in Myth announces funeral rites for JFK as a mass ceremonial gathering that weaves together everything from shamanism and the Bhavagad Gita to St. Augustine, rendering our subject raised for entrance to the Twilight Realm of Zeus guarded at the gate by Oswald the three-headed Godzilla.
In Cult of the Dead in a Chinese Village the very act of preservation can suggest diminished authority, and the ancestors themselves may grouse. To challenge death itself by expression of opinion about the demised is deemed an affront. The greatest displeasure can be incurred by recording the incident. M.L von Franz, in Shadow and Evil in Fairytales eloquently describes bad conscience keeping us awake, and there is no greater posit to the accusation that unearthing Otzi was nothing better than grave robbing in the memory of Capt. De Soto.
Voyaya Seven: From Chahokia to Wampum and tears
The root word in Hopi for heart is remember. Yet linguistic suppression of the Native American story has never abated, and we live in a post-cultural genocide world, a strange one at that, where an arch-conservative white man from Hollywood like Kevin Costner gets to play dress up and call himself something like Chief Dances with Wolf. At the turn of the 20th century 19 Hopi Indians were imprisoned in Alcatraz basically for playing hookie. Stereotypes dehumanized those we refused, and were even forbidden, to understand, so, unsurprisingly, there is regret among more enlightened people looking back.
When Smithsonian Magazine recorded the achievements of Cahokia, they disbelieved it was Native Americans and spoke in dream of a lost race. How else could Mississippi Valley contain evidence of a lost civilization greater in its time than London? Likewise the Paleo-Indians hunting mammoths at Head Smashed-In buffalo jump in Alberta must have been superstitious little packs of dogs. Our benighted record keepers have saved from smallpox some of the ugliest curses ever recorded in the last words of Indians betrayed.
Despite the Five Nations creating inspiration to Benjamin Franklin at the Continental Congress, to this very day archaeologists are heckled for giving Native Americans their due. John Wayne, one of the most profound traitors ever to hold America in its sway, photographed purposefully with Oswald, called them savages to his dying day.
Afterthought:
The Genius of John Hope Franklin can lead to the question: Was Pandora real? Resentment aside (which in Black letters it never is) it is possible to retrieve and amend realities about African civilization, dignities and contributions to the human race of which they are the greatest of grandparents. John Hope Franklin’s career is one of the greatest odysseys in American history, not only because of his painstaking gift of clarity and command of the facts, but also because of the darkness that covers the Reconstruction, an era whose promise he has completed for those with a heart yearning to know. The brutal truth of falsehood is gone wherever his pen has graced review. Clear-headed from many years of historical writing and analysis, he went to Africa for a mind expanding journey.
How discovery shapes a mind is central to humane progress in areas of education, and blanking out African contributions have been catastrophic to our integrity as a global society.
Archaeology as a field seems to me now to be partly a search for the stories of mankind's emergence on earth, which is attended by questions that are so mysterious it is in some ways hard to express or figure, but seen within a natural history of eras, changing features, landscapes and fellow creatures, particularly mammals that also emerged, some disappearing, with the attending questions of adaptation and evolution. Hidden in this landscape we arrive at fields of achievement, lost civilizations, settings and places, Akkadia, Babylon, Sumeria, Hittites, Assyria, each with relics, images, languages like Linear A and B, each a voyage of discovery for analysis by scientific methods, dating, fossil review and painstaking but always fascinating and rewarding litanies of preservation, with the attending care to save, leave as undisturbed as possible, and never destroy.
Of course, the lessons of history are there to remind us that our modern age has learned a stark lesson from the past, where much has been destroyed, in fact, in the New World, the destruction was so zealously pursued by the Spanish that the mysterious that anything like the four codexes got away is as great as any finds.
Archaeology is also a geological adventure, taking us down the Fertile Crescent, over the Euphrates, into Nubia and restoration of a past killed by racist colonial images and looting. In its curriculum we find that labeling method isn't just a function of storage but also of representation of the past, and the false labels used by our ancestors for ethnocentrist reasons. To find ourselves reviewing the world they inhabited also requires self-examination and our place as researchers, as well as our motives.
Sites themselves are story laden, found in each country, informed by that country’s ideas of themselves, appreciation of the heritage and interest in their own past. It is possible to find people enthusiastic or bored about the same thing, momentous to one and useless to another. Yet whether discussing the age of the Sphinx, the British journeymen in the Valley of Kings, the Rosetta Stone, Hammurabi Code or cuneiform writing, the identity of archaeology is always beautiful with the powerful artistic miracle of those who came before us and seemingly had so much less to go on in shaping their vision for the earth.
In some ways the most refreshing aspect of archaeology is vocabulary. Who would be fulfilled without having the words obsidian, frankincense, hieroglyphs, apothecary or mumiya in their definitionary? Nor are we learned until we can see Napoleon in his day of power in Egypt or appreciate stories like Sinbad until we know some facts about Marco Polo. Adventure and magic are not at all entirely stories of fiction, not at all. Lawrence of Arabia, the search for Ubar, Atlantis of the sands are not worlds apart from the genie in Aladdin's lamp, merely a difference of keeping awake and twenty winks.
Of course, some of it is grisly, the dung findings, and canopic jars, fear of awakening microbes in an ice age gown or braided shoe, there are the sorrows of death, the trauma of disease, the sadness of conflict, the bottle of moonshine hidden in dung, but these are never inhibitors and provide resources for assessment as surely as masks and turqouis. Whether using magnets or satellites, hand held shovels bums or color match, waterproof grid paper, the facts are gritty for cataloging and the finds arresting. One may get used to, eventually, from fashion adoption, something like a scarab, but one never stops stopping dead at the astronomy.
When Lao Tzu talks about the ten thousand things, meaning the Paleolithic, the Copper Age, coprolite, nested screens, the bushwhacking of Otzi, whether dug in meters or inches, timed in seconds or eons, tracing elements in volcanic rock, looking at scratches for signs of intelligent thought and effort to explain, whether sieving sand with consent of Zahi Hawass, the seal of eternity is broken the minute we open our eyes, and although Lao Tzu says that seeing the ten thousand things is bewilderment of the senses, it is also enchantment and an attempt, to try and explain.
