Posts tagged change
CU Boulder scientists uncover molded brass artifact from Asia in Alaska
Nov 14th
UNEARTHED AT ALASKA ARCHAEOLOGY SITE
A team of researchers led by the University of Colorado Boulder has discovered the first prehistoric bronze artifact made from a cast ever found in Alaska, a small, buckle-like object found in an ancient Eskimo dwelling and which likely originated in East Asia.
The artifact consists of two parts — a rectangular bar, connected to an apparently broken circular ring, said CU-Boulder Research Associate John Hoffecker, who is leading the excavation project. The object, about 2 inches by 1 inch and less than 1 inch thick, was found in August by a team excavating a roughly 1,000-year-old house that had been dug into the side of a beach ridge by early Inupiat Eskimos at Cape Espenberg on the Seward Peninsula, which lies within the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve.
Both sections of the artifact are beveled on one side and concave on the other side, indicating it was manufactured in a mold, said Hoffecker, a fellow at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. A small piece of leather found wrapped around the rectangular bar by the research team yielded a radiocarbon date of roughly A.D. 600, which does not necessarily indicate the age of the object, he said.
“I was totally astonished,” said Hoffecker. “The object appears to be older than the house we were excavating by at least a few hundred years.”.
Hoffecker and his CU-Boulder colleague Owen Mason said the bronze object resembles a belt buckle and may have been used as part of a harness or horse ornament prior to its arrival in Alaska. While they speculated the Inupiat Eskimos could have used the artifact as a clasp for human clothing or perhaps as part of a shaman’s regalia, its function on both continents still remains a puzzle, they said.
Since bronze metallurgy from Alaska is unknown, the artifact likely was produced in East Asia and reflects long-distance trade from production centers in either Korea, China, Manchuria or southern Siberia, according to Mason. It conceivably could have been traded from the steppe region of southern Siberia, said Hoffecker, where people began casting bronze several thousand years ago.
Alternatively, some of the earliest Inupiat Eskimos in northwest Alaska — the direct ancestors of modern Eskimos thought to have migrated into Alaska from adjacent Siberia some 1,500 years ago — might have brought the object with them from the other side of the Bering Strait. “It was possibly valuable enough so that people hung onto it for generations, passing it down through families,” said Mason, an INSTAAR affiliate and co-investigator on the Cape Espenberg excavations.
The Seward Peninsula is a prominent, arrowhead-shaped land mass that abuts the Bering Strait separating Alaska from Siberia. The peninsula was part of the Bering Land Bridge linking Asia and North America during the last ice age when sea level had dropped dramatically, and may have been used by early peoples as a corridor to migrate from Asia into the New World some 14,000 years ago.
The artifact was discovered in August by University of California, Davis, doctoral student Jeremy Foin under 3 feet of sediment near an entryway to a house at Cape Espenberg. Other project members included Chris Darwent of UC Davis, Claire Alix of the University of Paris, Nancy Bigelow of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Max Friesen of the University of Toronto and Gina Hernandez of the National Park Service.
“The shape of the object immediately caught my eye,” said Foin, who spotted the soil-covered artifact in an archaeological sifting screen. “After I saw that it clearly had been cast in a mold, my first thought was disbelief, quickly followed by the realization that I had found something of potentially great significance.”
The CU-led excavations are part of a National Science Foundation-funded project designed to study human response to climate change at Cape Espenberg from A.D. 800 to A.D. 1400, a critical period of cultural change in the western Arctic, said Mason. Of particular interest are temperature and environmental changes that may be related to Earth’s Medieval Warm Period that lasted from about A.D. 950 to 1250.
“That particular time period is thought by some to be an analog of what is happening to our environment now as Earth’s temperatures are rising,” said Mason. “One of our goals is to find out how these people adapted to a changing climate through their subsistence activities.”
The Cape Espenberg beach ridges, wave-swept deposits made of sand and sediment running parallel to the shoreline that were deposited over centuries, often are capped by blowing sand to form high dunes. The Cape Espenberg dwellings were dug into the dunes and shored up with driftwood and occasional whale bones.
The team is examining the timing and formation of the beach ridges as well as the contents of peat and pond sediment cores to help them reconstruct the sea-level history and the changing environment faced by Cape Espenberg’s settlers. Information on past climates also is contained in driftwood tree rings, and the team is working with INSTAAR affiliate Scott Elias, a University of London professor and expert on beetle fossils, who is helping the team reconstruct past temperatures at Cape Espenberg.
While the hunting of bowhead whales was a way of life for Inupiat Eskimos at Barrow and Point Hope in northwestern Alaska 1,000 years ago, it is still not clear if the Cape Espenberg people were whaling, said Mason. While whale baleen — a strong, flexible material found in the mouths of whales that acts as a food filter — and a variety of whale bones have been found during excavations there, the sea offshore is extremely shallow and some distance from modern whale migration routes. However, there is evidence of fishing and seal and caribou hunting by the group, he said.
The Inupiat Eskimos are believed to have occupied Cape Espenberg from about A.D. 1000 until the mid-1800s, said Hoffecker. They are part of the indigenous Eskimo culture that lives in Earth’s circumpolar regions like Alaska, Siberia and Canada.
The Cape Espenberg site has yielded a treasure trove of several thousand artifacts, including sealing harpoons, fishing spears and lures, a copper needle, slate knives, antler arrow points, a shovel made from a walrus scapula, a beaver incisor pendant, ceramics, and even toy bows and toy harpoons. The bronze artifact unearthed in August is currently under study by prehistoric metallurgical expert and Purdue University Assistant Professor H. Kory Cooper.
A video news story on the discovery is available by going to http://www.colorado.edu/news/ and clicking on the story headline. A podcast on the find can be found at http://www.colorado.edu/news/podcasts/
Culberson’s Challenge
Nov 13th
Rational thinkers need a corollary with which to counter Pascal’s Wager, which essentially is “Either God exists or doesn’t exist, but if so and I believe in God, I will go to Heaven instead of Hell after I die; if God doesn’t exist, I have lost nothing.”
That’s not believing; that’s just saying you believe.
By that reasoning, then you might as well follow the teachings of your chosen “God.” Otherwise, you are admitting that your “God” is so weak as to be fooled by lip-service believers and lets anyone into Heaven just for half-hearted belief, not for good deeds. That’s not a God. That’s a bored security guard.
Blaise Pascal lived from 1623 to 1662 in France and was a brilliant scientist, mathematician, and writer who also invented a calculating machine at 18. In 1654 he had a “mystical experience” and converted to Jansenism, a doctrine of the sect of Roman Catholics in opposition to the Jesuits.
In other words, Pascal himself had doubts about what he had been taught as a Roman Catholic, and if that isn’t enough to make his so-called “wager” suspect, consider that he also wrote “Men blaspheme what they do not know” and “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction,” both in his Lettres Provinciales [1656-1657].
So, for all you people with such weak religious belief that you take the easy way out to literally “save your soul” or with such weak intelligence that you cannot decide for yourselves what to believe, here is Culberson’s Challenge:
Assume there is no “God.” Then, priests, cardinals, the Pope, preachers, ministers, and all other self-appointed spokespeople for “God” are either liars or deluded into ignoring the empirical evidence of science and mistakenly believing that God exists.
Either way, they are not to be trusted, and as the growing evidence of widespread sexual misconduct mounts, that would seem to be the case.
Now assume there is a God who created us and all the so-called reality around us: the planets, the solar system, the stars, the universe, and the “world.” Then we are all merely figments of God’s own imagination and therefore do not exist outside of that imagination.
However, if we are figments of God’s imagination, if we are manufactured “real” creatures in God’s own image, or if we are truly independent sentient beings with or without free will, what would eternity in either Heaven or Hell mean? We would eventually become used to our existence in either one and inured to the pain that supposedly awaits us in the one and bored in the other of those futures.
And name one other thing in nature that lasts forever without wearing out, running down, burning up, or simply dying.
Therefore, I propose that neither future of “eternity” is anything to aspire to, and consequently believing in the existence of “God” is of no benefit whatsoever while we are alive, just as not believing in Santa Claus when we were children didn’t change whether we got Christmas presents from our parents.
Thus, I challenge you either to give up your belief in a supreme being who supposedly created you and controls you and the world, or else to continue your disbelief in such a mythology, because either way, you lose nothing.
Of course, there are some misguided fools who will not accept this challenge and say, “Better safe than sorry,” which is merely religious belief by slogans and sayings.
This thinking is the basis for all religious belief, and it is the most dangerous aspect of believing in a “God,” because it leads to this sort of logic:
“There must be a God, because everybody says there is. Therefore, I can lead my life believing in God and do anything I want to, because if I ever do anything that God doesn’t want me to do, God will stop me. Therefore, I can do anything I want until God stops me, including trying to convince as many other people I can that God exists, because there is ‘strength in numbers,’ and the more people who believe in God increases the chances that God does exist.”
If you accept my challenge and choose to live without a belief in God, your life on earth will be much less complicated and frustrating and stressful, and it will be much more rewarding, enjoyable, and definitely free of self-imposed religious pressure.
“God” loses. You win.
I rest my case.
Boulder County –More cone zone nightmares on Valmont
Nov 10th
Boulder County, Colo. – Taking advantage of the warm weather, the Boulder County Transportation Department will complete late-season paving projects this weekend on Valmont and Isabelle roads.
Valmont Road will be closed to through traffic between 75th and 95th streets from 8:30 a.m. until 4 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, Nov. 11 and 12. Local traffic, deliveries and emergency vehicles will be allowed through the closure.
Although paving will be complete, roadside activity will continue along Valmont Road project through the remainder of the year. Road users should continue to exercise caution and expect minor delays as crews finish up the project.
The repaving of Isabelle Road east of 95th Street will begin on Monday, Nov. 14 and continue for two weeks. Road users should expect on-going construction, uneven road surfaces, and travel delays through Thanksgiving week, weather permitting.
All schedules are subject to change due to weather or other mitigating factors. Updates are available at www.BoulderCounty.org/Transportation.
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