Temple of the Feathered Serpent, Teotihuacan

View of the tunnel using a laser scanner. Image: INAH

 A reconstruction of the Ciudadela. The Temple of the Feathered Serpent can be seen at the upper center, with the Adosada directly in front of it.

At a recent INAH press conference on the Tlalocan project, it was announced that a substantial offering and three chambers have been discovered at the far end of a tunnel discovered under the Temple of the Feathered Serpent at Teotihuacan, Mexico. The tunnel had been closed off around 1,800 years ago by the occupants of the city, and was only re-discovered by chance.
Lead archaeologist Sergio Gómez Chávez gave a brief account of the work that began at Teotihuacan 11 years ago.

An extensive offering
It started, he explained, when heavy rains revealed a small cavity, that then became a shaft leading to a tunnel of approximately 120m long under the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. Recently, at 103 feet along the tunnel the archaeologists discovered an abundant offering covering a space of 4m wide by 8m in length. Located at a depth of 18 metres, this offering, known as “number 48″, may well be an announcement that something extremely important lies within the next three chambers, perhaps says Gómez Chávez, the people linked to the power structure of Teotihuacan. 

The offering is composed of four green stone anthropomorphic sculptures, dozens of large snails from the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, thousands of beads made from various materials, imported Guatemalan jade, rubber balls, the bones and fur of big cats, beetle skeletons, pyrite discs, and a wooden box containing worked shells.

“As we continue to explore, the offerings are becoming increasingly numerous, rich and varied,” said Sergio Gómez Chávez.

Apart from the most recent deposit, in the last sections of the tunnel the archaeologists recovered “more than 4,000 objects of wood in a perfect state of conservation,” over 15 thousand seeds of different plant remains and remnants of skin, possibly human, to be submitted for analysis.

The Miccaotli phase
All this ritual activity was carried out between 150-200 AD, in the Miccaotli phase, when Teotihuacan was modified in three stages, and previous structures demolished. At the Citadel remnants of a previous building to the Temple of the Feathered Serpent pyramid were discovered, as well as a  ball game court, 137m in length, and 100m from the entrance of the tunnel.

“We have all the evidence that corroborate that the Citadel was used as a sanctuary to recreate not only the creation myths, but also for political purposes. The powerful people almost certainly used this space to justify their rule” explained Gómez Chávez.

Madaba Map

Discovered in a church in Madaba, Jordan, in 1884, the Madaba Map is the oldest surviving cartographic depiction of the Holy Land. Created in the form of a mosaic it dates to somewhere between A.D. 560-565 and originally showed an area that stretched from southern Syria to central Egypt. By the time it was discovered much of the map was already gone, however its remains include a detailed depiction of Jerusalem. "The bird's-eye view shows an oval-shaped walled city in the very center of the map with six gates and twenty-one towers, the colonnaded main thoroughfare … and thirty-six other identifiable public buildings, churches and monasteries," writes Jerome Mandel in an article published in the book "Trade, Travel and Exploration in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia" (Routledge, 2000). At the time it was created the Byzantine Empire ruled the Holy Land. 

On the sixth-century mosaic map of Palestine that paved the floor of a church in Madaba in Transjordan, Jerusalem holds a dominant position (Avi-Yonah 1954: 50-60, plate 7, nos 52-3). The colonnaded main street of Hadrian's Aelia Capitolina, the cardo maximus, is clearly visible, running southwards from what is now the Damascus Gate in the direction of Mount Zion, which lay outside the southern city wall until changes brought to the line of the city wall at the time of the Empress Eudocia in the middle of the fifth century. In a distinguished central position on the west side of this street, breaking the colonnade, are the steps leading to the propylea of Constantine's basilica; its three doorways are clearly visible. The complex of buildings on Golgotha is the largest edifice depicted, and is clearly meant to be seen as the focal point of the city, culminating in the domed rotunda which by that date covered the Holy Sepulchre. The steps leading directly to the main entrance of the basilica off the street recall Eusebius' description of its fronting onto the main thoroughfare. 

The deliberate emphasis on the central position of the Constantinian buildings at Jerusalem on the Madaba map reflects the importance of the Constantinian foundations. If Jerusalem was for the Christians the centre of the world, then the centre of Jerusalem itself could only be the place of Christ's death and resurrection. By contrast with the church of the `Upper Room' where the Jerusalem community had worshipped down the ages, tucked away outside the city on Mount Zion, Constantine's Holy Sepulchre was on the site of the Hadrianic temenos, alongside the forum and near the central crossroads, approached by an impressive flight of steps from the main thoroughfare; the new Christian monuments, and no longer the pagan temples, were the highlights of the city. 

Thus fourth-century Jerusalem saw Christianity symbolically transported from its place outside the walls to the very heart of the city. Roman Aelia was now the Christian Jerusalem. It was Constantine's creation of the `new Jerusalem' of Rev 21:2 - `And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband' - which lay at the heart of the Holy Land's emergence as a goal of pilgrimage in the fourth century (Hunt 1982).

The Oldest Evidence of Divination

The Venus of Dolni.

The oldest ceramics in the world are small prehistoric sculptures dug up at an archeological site in the modern Czech Republic. The most famous piece is a four-and-a-half-inch high abstract female nude known as the Venus of Dolni that was discovered in 1925 and was created between 29,000-25,000 bce, in other words, up to 31,000 years ago. The Venus figure was made out of clay and thrown into a fi re where it became hard and burned black. 

People have found other prehistoric figures sculpted from clay and preserved because they were placed in caves, but before the Venus of Dolni and the related Czech finds it seems no one had ever thought of making the clay hard by firing it. But why did this prehistoric sculptor think of throwing the figure into the fire in the first place? No one can know for sure, but one theory that some archeologists propose is that throwing the figure into the fire was a type of divination. Perhaps, the artist wanted to see how the figure would react in the flames and different reactions would have had different meanings, something like the Chinese method of divination in which they threw bones into a fire and interpreted the cracks that formed. Balls of clay might have been used first and then the figures were used to get a clearer message from or about that particular figure. If this is true, then these prehistoric figures are not only the oldest known ceramics but also the results of the oldest known divinatory practice and a type of interpretive divination. 

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Hel

Hel (Old Norse Hel, “Hidden”^[1]) is a giantess and goddess in Norse mythology who rules over Helheim, the underworld where the dead dwell. According to the thirteenth-century Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson, she’s the daughter of Loki and the giant Angrboða (“Anguish-boding”), and therefore the sister of the wolf Fenrir and the world serpent, Jormungand. She’s generally presented as being rather greedy and indifferent to the concerns of both the living and the dead.

Many scholars view Hel as a late feature of Norse heathendom, and likely an invention of the poets.^[2] Either way, it’s interesting to note that the Old Norse word Hel, which is the simpler and probably much older version of the place-name Helheim, is grammatically feminine. The writers cited above use this as a piece of evidence for the argument that the goddess Hel is a literary “personification” of the underworld. However, in the animistic and pantheistic worldview of the ancient Norse and other Germanic peoples, where nothing is inert or impersonal and everything is in some way divine, the view that the underworld comprises the tangible manifestation of a goddess – or, to put it another way, the view that a goddess is the force that animates the world beneath the ground – would be considered perfectly normal. Even if Hel is a literary invention – which must remain an open question – she’s a literary invention that’s very much in keeping with the spirit of the pre-Christian Germanic outlook on life.

References:
^[1] Orel, Vladimir. 2003. A Handbook of Germanic Etymology. p. 156, 168.
^[2] See, for example:
Ellis, Hilda Roderick. 1968. The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature. p. 84.
And:
Simek, Rudolf. 1993. Dictionary of Northern Mythology. Translated by Angela Hall. p. 138.

BU Archaeologists Discover Oldest Maya Calendars

 A BU team has uncovered a Maya mural and a strange and unique series of calendric calculations, in what they believe to be the workplace of a Maya scribe. Video courtesy of National Geographic

Skeletal remains found at site add to mystery.

Those worried that the world will end today can relax. Reports that ancient Maya astronomers predicted the apocalypse would arrive on December 21, 2012, were wrong. The Maya, it turns out, never provided specifics about when the world would end. In 2010, a team of BU archaeologists debunked the doomsday scenario and showed not only that the Maya did not think the world would end, but thought that the calendar would start over, like a car odometer. Read about their discoveries below.

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Night had fallen over the dense jungle surrounding the ancient city of Xultún, Guatemala, and Franco Rossi and Aviva Cormier were kneeling in a deep tunnel, brushing dirt from an ancient ceramic vessel within what could be a tomb that had been found beneath the floor of a Maya ruin.

Rossi (GRS’15) used a fine brush to gently remove dirt from the tombstone’s surface so they could eventually lift it, while Cormier (GRS’16) carried the dirt out of the narrow trench. That was when Rossi noticed it—a small fragment of a human skull beneath his brush.

“It was truly amazing,” he says. “Not only to uncover the ancient remains within this tomb, but to actually find what you had hoped would be there all along.”

In all, the excavation by a team of archaeologists led by William Saturno, a College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of archaeology, revealed the skeletal remains of six people who researchers believe lived during the Classic period of ancient Maya civilization, between A.D. 250 and 950. More important, members of the team suspect that the remains are linked to figures depicted in a mural just a few feet away. Saturno found that mural two years ago, along with a strange and unique series of calendric calculations, in what he believes was the workplace of a Maya scribe. Those findings were published last spring in Science and National Geographic.

“We have this bizarre little room with notations in it, and we believe it’s part of a residential complex,” says Saturno, director of the BU Study Abroad Guatemala Archaeology Program. “We’re looking at Maya scholars and scribes as they figured out their place in the universe. We can look at the history of science in the New World in a way that we couldn’t before. I feel like I can get into the head of these incredible scholars and ancient society.”

Saturno is famous among Central American archaeologists as the lucky finder of 2 of the 10 to 15 Maya murals known to exist. In March 2010, he led a team of BU archaeologists to Xultún, one of the largest and least explored of Maya centers. The six-square-mile area is believed to have been home at one time to tens of thousands of people. Maxwell Chamberlain (CAS’11, CAS’12), one of Saturno’s Study Abroad students, wandered on a lunch break into a tunnel dug by looters, where he found a red line on a stucco wall, so faint he could barely make it out. It was the edge of a large mural that may depict the people whose remains were found by Rossi.

“If you look at the figures in the mural,” says Rossi, “almost every one is wearing two pendants—one in their headdress, one in their necklace. The person whose remains were recently unearthed is also wearing these two ceramic pendants, and one has a hole in it like it would have been on a necklace. That’s why the find is a really big deal. We may actually have found one of the mural’s creators.”
The focus of the dig is a room roughly the size of a walk-in closet. The north wall is decorated with a mural showing a seated king holding a scepter and wearing blue feathers. The west wall is dominated by three black human figures and millimeter-thick black and red glyphs. The east wall has a seated figure painted in black, but also several mysterious hieroglyphic texts. These glyphs, which are unlike any at other Maya sites, appear to represent the various calendric cycles charted by the Maya—the 260-day ceremonial calendar, the 365-day solar calendar, the 177-day (or 178-day) lunar semester, the 584-day cycle of Venus, and the 780-day cycle of Mars.

Saturno has since pioneered a way to jigger a flatbed scanner to take 8½-by-11-inch pictures of the wall. On the fourth floor of CAS, his students can see things that weren’t visible back in Xultún.
“We were only able to identify some of the astronomical tables through the scan,” Saturno says. “Much of the paint wasn’t in a condition that we could identify it. Only through examining and processing the scans, and changing the red writing to black, did we see more numbers.”

Saturno and Rossi are persuaded that the calculations put an end to the “doomsday myth”—the belief that the Maya predicted the world would end in 2012.

“People love world-ending scenarios,” says Rossi, who with Cormier continues to work on the human remains. “After this one, there’s going to be another one. It’s just what people do.”

This article originally ran on August 9, 2012.

 By Amy Laskowski

HOLY MONSTERS

If you look closely at the left-hand portal you'll see that one of the saints is holding his head in his hands. This is Saint Denis, the first bishop of Paris, who died in 273 A.D. According to legend, Roman soldiers tortured Denis near where Notre-Dame now stands and then decapitated him. The legend says that the martyred saint picking up his head and walked almost four miles to the site where the cathedral of St. Denis now stands. Probably the legend was created centuries afterwards St. Denis died. It gave the abbey located at St. Denis a special attraction, and St. Denis became well know among French saints. Wherever you see St. Denis depicted, you will see that he holds his head in his hands

Of course, it is not only monsters who have their heads removed in Anglo- Saxon England. Saints seem likewise prone to this disorder. There are a number of headless saints in the Anglo-Saxon canon, but a single example will suffice to connect monstrosity and sanctity. Ælfric translated into Anglo-Saxon an account of the martyrdom of Saint Edmund, King of East Anglia in the ninth century. Known for his holiness, Edmund was the unfortunate victim of a series of attacks by the Danes in 870. After having been captured and riddled with arrows that failed to kill him, Edmund was decapitated. His head was left in the woods by the Danes. His followers sought him, and found that:

It was a great miracle that a wolf was sent through God's guidance to defend that head day and night against other wild animals. They went out then looking and frequently called out, just as is the custom of those who often go into the woods: "Where are you now, companion?" And that head answered them, saying "here, here, here" as often as any of them called, until they all came, on account of its calling to them. Then the grey wolf who watched over the head lay with his two feet embracing that head, greedy and hungry, but on account of God, he did not dare to taste the head. Instead, he kept it from wild animals. Then they were astonished at the wolf 's shepherding and they carried that saintly head home with them, thanking the Almighty for all his miracles.  

The saint is made headless, like the monsters, but his head-able to speak after being severed from its body-is then protected by a ravenous wolf, an animal associated with violence and death through the trope of the Beasts of Battle.  Why do saints and monsters share this common ground? As Kristeva writes, "the abject is edged with the sublime." Literally, on the Hereford Mappamundi and the Tiberius B. v. Map, the English are `edged' with the monsters of Africa. This zone, which Kristeva might describe as "a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered," is the realm of the abject, the disgusting. If the monsters might be said to live "at civilization's periphery," this is also where the Anglo-Saxons found themselves, beyond the pale, in the margins of the world, surrounded by monsters.

Early Attempts at Calculating the Age of the Earth

'Before the world came into being there existed only the Cosmic Egg that floated unchanging in the Void for untold ages. Yin and Yang was the Egg, opposites perfectly mingled. And it was because they were perfectly mingled that the world could not yet be.

'Then within the Egg was born P'an Ku, the primordial man who slowly grew and grew until the Egg felt too cramped for him. Impatiently he stretched out his limbs and his hand closed about an axe, coming from whence no one knows. Striking with all his might, P'an Ku split the shell of the Egg and burst free.

'He then began to fashion the material of Chaos, separating Yin and Yang into sky and earth, in which he was aided by the four most fortunate creatures who had emerged from the Egg with him: the Unicorn, the Dragon, the Phoenix and the Tortoise. They were engaged in this labour for 18,000 years and each day P'an Ku grew ten feet, using his own body as a pillar to force heaven and earth apart.

'When the separation was complete and they had settled in their places, P'an Ku died. His breath became the wind and clouds, his eyes became the sun and moon. His stomach, head and limbs became the principal mountains of the world, watered by the rivers of his sweat and tears; his flesh became the fertile soil and his hair the plants and trees which took root in it. The fleas on his body became the human race. Then P'an Ku drifted in space for a further 18,000 years before entering a holy virgin as a ray of light and being born into the world by her as Tien-Tsun, the First Cause.'

Historically, the subdivision of Precambrian rock sequences (and, therefore, Precambrian time) had been accomplished on the basis of structural or lithologic grounds. With only minor indications of fossil occurrence (mainly in the form of algal stromatolites), no effective method of quantifying this loosely constructed chronology existed until the discovery of radioactivity enabled dating procedures to be applied directly to the rocks in question.

The quantification of geologic time remained an elusive matter for most human enquiry into the age of the Earth and its complex physical and biological history. Although Hindu teachings accept a very ancient origin for the Earth, medieval Western concepts of Earth history were based for the most part on a literal interpretation of Old Testament references. Biblical scholars of Renaissance Europe and later considered paternity as a viable method by which the age of the Earth since its creation could be determined. A number of attempts at using the "begat" method of determining the antiquity of an event-essentially counting backward in time through each documented human generation-led to the age of the Earth being calculated at several thousand years. One such attempt was made by Archbishop James Ussher of Ireland, who in 1650 determined that the Creation had occurred during the evening of Oct. 22, 4004 BCE. By his analysis of biblical genealogies, the Earth was not even 6,000 years old! 

From the time of Hutton's refinement of uniformitarianism, the principle found wide application in various attempts to calculate the age of the Earth. As previously noted, fundamental to the principle was the premise that various Earth processes of the past operated in much the same way as those processes operate today. The corollary to this was that the rates of the various ancient processes could be considered the same as those of the present day. Therefore, it should be possible to calculate the age of the Earth on the basis of the accumulated record of some process that has occurred at this determinable rate since the Creation. 

Many independent estimates of the age of the Earth have been proposed, each made using a different method of analysis. Some such estimates were based on assumptions concerning the rate at which dissolved salts or sediments are carried by rivers, supplied to the world's oceans, and allowed to accumulate over time. These chemical and physical arguments (or a combination of both) were all flawed to varying degrees because of an incomplete understanding of the processes involved. The notion that all of the salts dissolved in the oceans were the products of leaching from the land was first proposed by the English astronomer and mathematician Edmond Halley in 1691 and restated by the Irish geologist John Joly in 1899. It was assumed that the ocean was a closed system and that the salinity of the oceans was an ever-changing and ever-increasing condition. Based on these calculations, Joly proposed that the Earth had consolidated and that the oceans had been created between 80 and 90 million years ago. The subsequent recognition that the ocean is not closed and that a continual loss of salts occurs due to sedimentation in certain environments severely limited this novel approach.