Tag Archives: archaeology

What I Will Be Doing for Beltane

Yes, “will be doing.” Some people look at the calendar and say that Beltane is this evening and tomorrow. Others celebrated last weekend, according to the “weekend nearest the cross-quarter day” rule. Only by that rule, it comes next weekend.

By the Sun, it falls on Saturday the 5th, as this archaeastronomical Web site will show you.

I plan to visit one of the archaeastronomical sites in southeastern Colorado of which I have written before. This one, the Sun Temple, as the contemporary researchers call it, will be new to me. Something is supposed to happen there on the cross-quarter days. I hope to post photos and/or video links next week.

Meanwhile, you may decide if Beltane and the other cross-quarter and quarter days is

a. Calculated by the solar/astronomical calendar.
b. Calculated by the secular calendar and celebrants’ work schedules.
c. A week-long season, so the day does not matter.

If (a) or (b), is it better to celebrate early to get “rising energy” or as close to the actual moment as possible?

Martin Brennan at Anubis Caves

Boulder, Colorado, resident Martin Brennan is known for writing visionary books about ancient megalithic monuments, such as The Boyne Valley Vision.

A new video clip shows him discussing the mysterious carvings that appear to be synched to the equinoctial sunset shadows at “Anubis Caves,” a site in the Oklahoma Panhandle. You can view them at filmmaker Scott Monahan’s site or at the Mythical Ireland site.

The case for a Celtic connection was made by Barry Fell, Gloria Farley, and the late Bill McGlone, particulary in his book Ancient American Inscriptions: Plow Marks or History?

I have discussed this issue before. It truly baffles me. McGlone makes a plausible argument for the transatlantic origin of these symbols and writings, except . . . .

Why here? Why in far western Oklahoma and southeastern Colorado? There were no great trading cities here 2,000 years ago and no gold nuggets lying on the ground. According to conventional archaeology, there were only a few people here, living the simplest hunter-gatherer lives. They were probably similar to the people encountered by the Coronado expedition in the 1540s living along the rivers (little rivers, mostly) of the High Plains and hunting buffalo when they could.

It’s a hell of a long way to go for a Druidic vision quest.

Nevertheless, the other more contemporary puzzle is why these alleged Celtic inscriptions are so ignored by contemporary Colorado Pagans, most of whom have never heard of them. If you had Stonehenge only four hours’ drive from metro Denver, wouldn’t you go there now and then?

UPDATE: While I concentrated on the alleged Celtic presence in the Southern Plains, I should point out that other students of the inscriptions claim a Punic (Phoenician or Libyan) presence also. It is hard to discuss all this without getting into the politics of diffusionism and the turf battles between Old World and New World archaeologists, all beyond the scope of this blog.

The National British Pagan Burial Mound

I blogged earlier about how some British Pagans have borrowed the rhetoric of North American tribes, wanting their own version of NAGPRA and control over the remains of prehistoric British people.

Blogger and academic Yvonne Aburrow suggests that such remains, after study, might go into a national burial mound.

It would be wonderful if a keeping place for the ancient British dead could be specially constructed, perhaps in the form of a very large Iron Age roundhouse, or a burial mound, where the dead could be kept in special shrines, with all the details known about them and their lives displayed near them, but still allowing archaeologists access for research.

Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes full of Bible people

During the 2002 American Academy of Religion-Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in Toronto, the Royal Ontario Museum had a well-timed display of the so-called “James ossuary.”

It was a 1st-century CE stone box of a type used in the Middle East back then for storage of cleaned and dismembered skeletons of the dead. This one was inscribed, “James the brother of Jesus,” and much excitement was felt over that.

Until it turned out to be a fake. The box was real enough, but the inscription was not.

So you have to wonder about these inscriptions that claim to read “Judah son of Jesus,” “Mary,” and so on.

Now the Discovery Channel is about to unleash a show about a whole stack of ossuaries. Yes, it’s the Jesus Family Tomb.

Ah, biblical archaeology. It’s rarely dull. The “Lost Tomb of Jesus” indeed. How the Christian bloggers will blog, the preachers will preach, and the dull thumping sound you hear is an archaeologist beating his head against the wall.

(The title is an homage to Malvina Reynolds, whose songs helped me to survive high school.)

The eye of power, bwahahaha


I saw this ancient artificial eye discussed sanely in Archaeology magazine, but then there is the “soothsayer or priestess” angle.

Trust The Daily Mail for that.

Archaeologists said the woman was a female soothsayer or priestess and would have transfixed those around her with her eyeball, making them believe she had occult powers and could see into the future.

Take a clue from the ancient priestess and wow ’em at the next psychic fair.

Pagans Want Some Bones Back

Borrowing the rhetorical tools developed in North America, British Pagans are becoming increasingly vocal on the issue of “ancestral remains.”

British pagan groups are increasingly asking for human remains and grave goods from pre-Christian burials to be returned to them as well. The presence of what they see as their ancestors in dusty drawers or under harsh display lights is an affront to their religion. To them, the bones are living beings, whose existence is bound up with their religious descendants and the sacred land.

I am friends with some of the British Pagan academics who have been pushing this issue hard. On the other hand, ask any geneticist: lots of people, most of them not capital-P Pagans, are descended from those ancient ancestors.

So let us admit that these demands are to a large extent a stunt. We are dealing with self-appointed spokespeople here. David at the Cronaca archaeology blog has other comments.

Ancient British religion–stranger than we imagined

Were the heads of dead children really a memorial?

In the depths of the cave, there’s the first glimpse of the trapped pool of water– this was the bridge to another world, the high altar of a Bronze Age basilica.

Any BBC Scotland viewers, let me know what you think of the program.

The explication of Sheela-na-gig

Sheela-na-gig T-shirt from the Twisted Mythology God ShopSheela-na-Gigs by Barbara Freitag, (Routledge, 2004) caught my eye at the AAR-SBL bookshow because it promised a thorough, cross-disciplinary methology, if not the answer to the origin of the puzzling carvings on old Irish and English churches.

You can buy a Sheela-na-Gig T-shirt too.

Author Barbara Freitag, who teaches at Dublin City University, crisscrosses through archaeology, literature, medieval history, and even a little military history while seeking the origin of these crude carving that usually show either a woman spreading her vagina or else squatting to give birth.

Even the etymology is tricky. Though “Sheela” or “Sheila” is an Irish form of “Cecilia,” (a name brought by the Normans), “gig” is a puzzle. It has variously been defined in dictionaries of slang as meaning the female genitals, a “wanton” girl or prostitute, or anything that whirls around. (The third gives us “whirlygig” as well as “jig,” the dance, plus “gigolo,” a paid dancing partner.)

The British West Indies fleet during the time of the American Revolution included a small ship called Shelanagig. Not exclusively Irish, the statues have also been recorded in Scotland, England, and Wales.

And in 18th and early 19th-century Irish folklore, Sheila was the wife of St. Patrick, not to mention one of the names used as personifying the nation of Ireland itself.

Freitag is reluctant to endorse the sweeping Margaret Murray-style “ancient Pagan goddess” interpretation of the statues, but she does conclude that it is possible “to place the Sheela-na-gig in the realm of folk deities in charge of birth.”

In Ireland particularly, she notes that they cease being carved and are even removed from churches during the reformation of manners (led by the now-legitimate Catholic clergy) that begins at the close of the 18th century and continues through the 19th. “Customary folk practices, wake amusements in particular, were curbed, marriage and sexual behavior were restrained and public order was controlled.”

Sheela-na-gigs is readable and interesting for the fun of following someone working out an intellectual puzzle. Freitag also includes photos of a large selection of Sheelas–they do not all look like the T-shirt image, not at all–plus a catalog of all the known such sculptures whether still extant or merely recorded in the past.

Megaliths, archaeology, and the ‘stoned age’

In graduate school, I took a couple of classes on Mesoamerican religion taught by Davíd Carrasco, an scholar of such edifices as El templo major in Mexico City.

One thing I came away with was that such structures served often to demonstrate how King Somebody’s reign was in sync with the gods, the will of Heaven, or however you want to phrase it.

It made me look at places such as Stonehenge with new ideas. Could it really be not so much an observatory as an expression of Royal Will? (Or several Royal Wills, since it was built over centuries?) Ditto such American sites as Casa Rinconada, the huge kiva at Chaco Canyon. Was it as imperialistic as Hitler’s Olympic stadium? Was Stonehenge laid out by a Neolithic Albert Speer?

And let’s bury once and for all the idea that megalithic structures told farmers when to plant. Farmers and gardeners do not need giant rock arrangements for that. Every locale has its signs in the natural world. “When the oak leaves are the size of a mouse’s ear, it is time to plant warm-weather crops” — or whatever works for you.

All of this is a prelude to an interesting article about a megalithic site in Brittany that offers unusual opportunities for archaeological work.

In most cases, virtually no artifacts or other evidence of the builders has survived, leaving the field wide open for speculation:

As man emerged from the caves and forests to cultivate open ground, he replicated the old, sacred caves by building cave-like tombs. These were made of groups of stones, covered with soil. At some point, in around 4000 to 3500 BC, mankind emerged further into the light. The pattern of stones within the tombs was expanded and uncovered to form ceremonial stone circles.

What happened inside such enclosures has excited fevered speculation for centuries. Human sacrifice? Elaborate astronomical observations? Sexual and drunken orgies? Ceremonies at the winter and summer solstices to encourage the healthy growth of crops? Professor Burl suggests that, far from being elaborate astronomical observatories, most stone-circles are shaped by local topography. They do often, however, have alignments with summer and winter solstices and the movements of the Moon. Professor Burl’s best guess on their purpose is a mixture of propitiation of the crop gods and sexual and alcoholic-psychedelic orgies. There is much archaeological evidence that the late Stone Age was also a stoned aged.

Read the whole thing, quick, before the link expires.(Hat tip: Cronaca.)

Vinland 3

Part 1

Part 2

From the skeptics’ point of view, the acceptance of a Norse presence in North America, following the archaeological dig at L’Anse aux Meadows, should have made the Kensington Runestone a non-issue.

“No Kensington stone is needed to prove that the Scandinavians reached America first,” wrote James E. Knirk of the University of Oslo, reviewing works by two Kensington supporters for the journal Scandinavian Studies.

But the arcane arguments continue. In a lengthy rebuttal (PDF) to Knirk and other skeptics, Richard Nielsen, the best-prepared of the stone’s defenders and author of the book mentioned earlier, marshaled a long series of linguistic defenses for the Minnesota runes.

He argued, with extensive citations, that they did represent “a faithful record of medieval Scandinavian speech” and that their dialect was unknown to the farmer Olof Ohman.

The purported location of the stone’s discovery, west of Minneapolis, seems to make little sense in terms of a possible Norse journey up the St. Lawrence River, through the Great Lakes, and into Minnesota, but Nielsen has an explanation for that too.

Writing in the Journal of the West, Nielsen argues that the location makes more sense if, as he believes, the Norse launched trading trips into the interior of North America from Hudson’s Bay. Indians from the region (Santee Sioux, Mandans, and others) were known to have used a trading route that went down the Red River to Lake Winnepeg and then by other water routes to Hudson’s Bay. The Kensington site, he claims, lies on the portage between the Mississippi watershed and the Red River watershed.

These claims, in turn, tie in the fascinating history of the Norse settlements in Greenland, which did endure for four centuries despite their stubborn insistence on not learning from the Dorset-culture Eskimos and on attempting to maintain a pastoral economy in the near-Arctic.

Personally, I have no strong feelings about the Kensington Runestone’s authenticity, although I do suspect that there was more to the Norse exploration than just the L’Anse aux Meadows station.

Instead, Nielsen’s passionate “outsider” defense of the stone reminds me of another friend of mine, the late Bill McGlone, and his quixotic study of some Colorado stone inscriptions.

More to come.