Photo from Slavorum.org.
Along with medieval weapon bits, archaeologists digging in in the old center of Königsburg, now the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, on the Baltic Sea, discovered these pendants symbolizing the god Perun, dating from the late Middle Ages.
The article ends, “What can we say, time to buy Perun’s Axe pedants!”
Next to the news article, a link to a story titled “Which Slavic God Are You?” (Veles, thanks for asking.)
Things are changing.
(National Museum of Denmark)
The acidic peat surrounding this grave of a Bronze Age girl, labeled a “priestess” for her elaborate jewelry, preserved her clothing and hair but not her skeleton. The burial was found in 1921, but only this month did analysis reveal that, for instance, the wool in her skirt came from the Black Forest region of German, but also that she herself may have traveled back and forth.
The Bronze Age teenager was wearing a wool skirt belted with a large bronze disk with spirals on it.
“She looks, in a way, very modern, in this kind of miniskirt and a kind of T-shirt,” [Danish researcher Karin] Frei told Live Science. (Her unique fashion sense has inspired scores of Pinterest-worthy re-enactments.)
Houses built of upright or stacked stone slabs in defensible locations characterized the Apishapa River canyon sites from about 1000–1400 CE .
The ranch was owned by a man named Howard Munsell (now deceased). Unlike a lot of Southern Plains ranchers who are, shall we say, standoffish toward strange visitors, he had previously run a trail-ride business, and so he was able to handle several dozen campers on his land, providing water and basic sanitary facilities.
(After his passing, the 13,000-acre [5260 ha.] ranch was sold: see photos at this real estate agency’s website.)
One May weekend in the 1980s, M. and I took our turn at carefully piloting our ’69 VW Westfalia camper across a ford in the Apishapa River. What was the attraction? An archaeological site — and the 37th degree of north latitude.
Apishapa Culture rock art, probably from 1000–1400 CE.
Most of our fellow campers were UFO hunters. A couple were “crusties” who looked like they had crawled out of a Dumpster just long enough for the weekend. For our part, we were excited about a chance to get into a place that is normally closed to outsiders, look for rock art, and just poke around. If the Space Brothers landed, that would be only a bonus.
The organizers had an elaborate esoteric diagram that guided them to the spot, which was on the 37th parallel.
In fact, the idea that Latitude 37° North is a “paranormal freeway” persists:
Chuck [Zukowski] has investigated several cattle mutilations in Southern Colorado over the past few years, and while preparing a talk for a recent UFO conference, he was trying to look for patterns in the places that the mutilations took place. With this on his mind, Colorado had its largest natural earthquake in a century. It was a 5.3 on the Richter scale and centered in the southwest part of the state. Within 15 hours Virginia received one of the largest earthquakes it had ever had as well. It registered as a 5.8. Neither quake caused much damage, but Chuck noticed that they were both near the 37 degree latitude line. He then noticed that his cattle mutilation cases were also near the 37 degree latitude line.
Oh dear. Cattle mutilations. Been there, done that, got the Fate magazine T-shirt. But I can credit the “mutilation” flap for introducing me both to ceremonial magic and newspaper reporting as a job, which is another story.
So what does this all mean? I have no idea. Chuck has speculated that perhaps there are secret military bases in these areas. It is hard to say, and Debbie says she is still in the middle of increased UFO reports.
Yeah, me neither. But I will always be glad that I could walk the bluff along the Apishapa (Ute for “stinking water,” by the way, referring to its late-summer stagnant pools) while the true believers watched for UFOs.
UPDATED TO ADD: I did read Ben Mezrich’s The 37th Parallel: The Secret Truth behind America’s UFO Highway. It’s junk. It’s full of basic geographical mistakes, for one thing (“El Paso” is not a city in Colorado, but Mezrich keeps saying that it is). Apparently he wrote it from taped phone calls or something and never visited the places that he writes about — he just takes everything that Zukowski tells him and treats it as gospel.
At Bad Archaeology, a skeptical look at Alfred Watkins and the “discovery” of ley lines:
According to a later account, all this [discovery of a hidden web of straight lines in the English countryside] came to him “in a flash” on 21 June 1921 during a visit to Blackwardine; according to his son Allen, this happened while poring over a map. A variation on the ‘origin myth’ quoted by John Michell holds that the revelation happened whilst out riding in the hills near Bredwardine in 1920, observing the Herefordshire landscape he loved. It is unclear why there are two different versions of the story; Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy note wryly in their excellent Ley Lines in Question (Tadworth: World’s Work, 1983) that John Michell’s version reflects how “ley hunters would like to think it happened”.
Speculations about “trackways” and astronomical alignments go back well into the nineteenth century, before even Watkins’ time.
A critique of the Wikipedia entry for ley lines is included.
The White Horse of Uffington (Google Earth)
Making large ceremonial marks on the land is an ancient practice. Here are examples from Peru, Chile, England, Brazil, Russia, the Arabian peninsula, and the United States
BBC
How will the archaeologists of the future explain how barrow (also known as as tumulus) building stopped in the Neolithic — and then resumed, 5,500 years later?
We know this one was built on a solar alignment, because the BBC tells us so.
See the barrow under construction here. And yes, dead people.
A Swedish archaeologist reviews a new book, Anders Winroth’s The Age of the Vikings, and makes this observation:
Myself, I was intrigued to learn that the infamous, messy and impractical “blood eagle” murder method may just be the fruit of High Medieval writers misunderstanding one of the countless references in Viking Period poetry to carrion birds munching on the slain (p. 37). There is to my knowledge no osteological evidence for it. Also interesting to me, I can’t recall reading about the Spanish Moor Al-Tartushi’s report on life in Hedeby before (p. 197). But that may just be because I’m not an historian.
Funny thing, I had been thinking of that alleged method of torture/execution a couple of days before.
Read the rest at his blog: “New Popular Book on the Viking Period.”
Photo from the Siberian Times.
Why the comparison between countless tons of quarried stone and “the oldest wooden statue in the world,” estimated at 9,500 years before present? In each case, there are those who believe that the structures (particularly the Great Pyramid) and the sculpture from the Ural Mountains contain secret codes.
The tall statue is made from larch wood and its surface is marked by a variety of lines and faces. These must mean something, researchers claim, but explanations vary from faces of spirits to encoded navigational information to a form of ancient writing something like Ogham or runes.
An article in the Siberian Times rounds up some of the speculation:
Expert Svetlana Savchenko, chief keeper of Shigir Idol, believes that the structure’s faces carry encoded information from ancient man in the Mesolithic era of the Stone Age concerning their understanding of ‘the creation of the world’. . . .
Professor Mikhail Zhilin, leading researcher of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Archeology, explained: ‘We study the Idol with a feeling of awe. This is a masterpiece, carrying gigantic emotional value and force. It is a unique sculpture, there is nothing else in the world like this. It is very alive, and very complicated at the same time.
‘The ornament is covered with nothing but encrypted information. People were passing on knowledge with the help of the Idol.’
He is adamant that we can draw conclusions about the sophistication of the people who created this masterpiece, probably scraping the larch with a stone ‘spoon’, even though the detail of the code remains an utter mystery to modern man. . . .
Some have claimed the Idol includes primitive writing, which, if true, would be amongst the first on Earth, but there is no consensus among experts who have studied the Urals statue.
¶ Based on only six skeletons, some people are going crazy on Facebook, etc., about female Norse warriors. It’s not that simple, says someone who read the original archaeology paper. But it’s still interesting.
¶ Peg Aloi is a bit short of breath about a possible new film series on the Arthurian legend.
¶ What is it like to be an intern in a witchcraft museum? At least here is someone who knows who Cecil Williamson (Gerald Gardner’s business partner) was.
In college I had a work-study job in the library, and my favorite part was shelving books, because I worked alone, deep in the stacks, and if I found something interesting, I could skim it quickly and either check it out or come back for it.![bogpeople_thumb[2]](https://i0.wp.com/blog.chasclifton.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/bogpeople_thumb2.jpg?ssl=1)
One day I rolled my cart up to the rows of books awaiting reshelving, and there was one whose spine read The Bog People — Glob.
Was this for real? BogGlobBog?
It turned out to be serious anthropology: Here is an American Anthropologist review (PDF) from 1969, when it was published. Pagan sacrifices? Medieval murders? I think I learned the word liripipe from reading The Bog People, rather than by joining the Society for Creative Anachronism.
The bog mummies are so fascinating because of their state of preservation. They are not just bones – you can see them as individuals, often wearing the clothing in which they died.
People create stories about them, such as Lindow Man, the so-called Druid prince. Did he suffer a ritualistic Robert Graves-ish triple death — clubbing, throat-cutting, and strangulation?
Others, such as Ronald Hutton, offer a simpler explanation: the so-called throat-cutting was the accidental slash of the peat-cutter’s spade, the ligature merely a cord holding an amulet or piece of jewelry, and the cause of death was a straightforward bludgeoning — why, no one knows.
Archaeologists debate whether the bog bodies were simple crime victims or ritual-murder victims. Were they locals or outsiders? Ordinary people or celebrities?
Because some bear horrific wounds, such as slashed throats, and were buried instead of cremated like most others in their communities, scientists have suggested the bodies had been sacrificed as criminals, slaves, or simply commoners. The Roman historian Tacitus started this idea in the first century A.D. by suggesting they were deserters and criminals. . . .
Niels Lynnerup, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Copenhagen who has studied bog bodies, believes that they were sacrificed—but the enigma, he said, revolves around why.
You look at their faces, and you wonder how they ended up tossed into a pool in a bog.