PAUL DEVEREUX
feels a subterranean wind and admires ancient jewellery from around the world
THE BREATHING EARTH
Wupatki is a 56 sq mile (145km2) National Monument near Flagstaff in Arizona, close to the Sunset Crater volcano. It contains over 5,000 ancient Native American sites, one of which is 900-year-old Wupatki Pueblo, now a ruined multi-room earthen and stone masonry complex. Some of its buildings merge with natural outcropping rock. This priceless archæological site has for many years been vulnerable because of seismicity, flooding, and debris slides, and increasing extreme weather events due to global warming have accelerated its deterioration. Now, the Getty Foundation has granted $1.3 million to specialist conservation teams from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Minho in Portugal. They will develop innovative solutions to address Wupatki’s challenges that can also be applied to other climate-vulnerable cultural and natural heritage sites in due course, and in so doing they will incorporate knowledge from Native American wisdom. Hyperallergic, 28 Sept 2021.
The pueblo is essentially a mixture of Sinagua and Kayenta Anasazi Indian work. The Anasazi culture reached its height between AD 900–1300 and collapsed in the 15th century for reasons that are not entirely clear. The Anasazi were ancestral to today’s Pueblo peoples, such as the Hopi and the Zuni. The buildings are positioned directly above cracks in the Kaibab limestone, and the Native American builders consciously incorporated seismic vents to allow for cyclic exhalations of air issuing from deep underground. These ‘blowholes’ are openings to an estimated seven billion cubic feet of subterranean caverns, fissures and faults.
Factors such as changes in air pressure, thunderstorms and variations in surface temperature can affect the flow of air through these holes or vents, but usually air is drawn into the blowholes during the night and early morning, and expelled during the afternoon. Sometimes the air exits the vents at up to 30 mph (48km/h). Some Hopi wind-god legends refer to these blowholes, but we do not know fully what they meant to the ancient people who lived at Wupatki. (The larger context of all this is explored in this columnist’s imminently forthcoming Powers of Ancient and Sacred Places.)
PICTURES FROM THE PAST
When Italy’s Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, it destroyed the city of Pompeii killing many of its inhabitants. But due to heavy coverings of volcanic ash its remains were remarkably well-preserved, including streets, parts of buildings, and voids in the ash that could be filled with plaster to reveal organic features including human bodies in their death throes. It had been a wealthy city and a few colourful wall paintings survived, but most such frescoes were shattered. Thousands of their fragments are stored at the site’s archæological park. But a new, ongoing project by an international team led by Ca’Foscari University of Venice is developing robots powered by artificial intelligence to analyse the fragments and sort them so that at least some of the frescos can be pieced together and seen again after over 2,000 years, revealing all kinds of information about life and thinking of the times. It is a mammoth undertaking, but the AI machines can, among other extraordinary abilities, recognise residual colourings invisible to the naked eye, helping in the task of matching pieces that would elude human efforts. This jigsaw-solving tech will have useful implications for archæology far beyond Pompeii. BBC News, 25 Nov 2021.
NOT FOUND IN TIFFANY’S
The world’s oldest jewellery found so far has been discovered in the Bizmoune Cave in southwest Morocco. It consists of 33 artificially perforated shell beads dated to c.150,000 years old. Truly complex analysis by a team from the National Institute of Archæological Sciences and Heritage in Rabat, involving study of sediment layers, uranium dating and microscopic examination of the holes revealing wear and tear, confirmed that the beads had indeed been worn – but it is thought that the shells were not used purely for adornment, but as a general statement of identity. ARTnews, 22 Nov. 2021. (Original paper in Science Advances.)
THE LADY OF THE RINGS
While we’re on an ancient jewellery riff, we should mention the c.2,800-year-old ‘Lady of the Rings’ whose shallow stone grave was unearthed in Khakassia, southern Siberia. She had been buried with what is described as a “treasure trove” of bronze jewellery including unique rings, a bracelet, and a “massive” pendant, among other exceptional and beautiful objects. The woman had belonged to the Karasuk culture. Siberian Times, 16 Sept 2021.