Finding History With Modern Technology

Searching for the past has always been a difficult task, one that only those with brilliant minds and extreme patience were able to do with any measure of success.  Many sites may jut from the countryside and make themselves known, just waiting to be explored, but most are not as helpful.  They lay in the depths of the earth, worn down by erosion, covered in earth that has shifted over time and overgrown with thousands of years of thriving plant life.  Advances in technology are beginning to overcome these obstacles, however, making accessible many locations which would have otherwise remained hidden from us.

The addition of such technologies as air-photography and satellite imaging means that archaeologists can now scan the earth from the sky.  This enables patterns in the landscape to be analyzed and probable locations of buried sites to be recognized.  Air-photography has already seen great success in finding the numerous tels of the Middle East, each one the potential site of a buried city thousands of years old.  The same techniques, along with satellite imaging, are being used to map the rain forests of Central and South America as well, finding overgrown Mayan temples and other formerly inhabited areas.

Of recent interest has been the aerial mapping of Libya, now that it has become opened up to archaeological investigation.  Already more than 100 sites have been found which are thought to be the remains of a regional culture that existed some 2000 years ago.

This potential for new knowledge will likely be rewriting history for some time in the future.  Gaps in our understanding will be filled and old beliefs dispelled by new information.  The revelations may be resisted at first by those who have an interest in preserving their work, but as more of the truth becomes known, humanity may begin to acquire a full understanding of its distant past.

Support for the American Revolution

Never a Majority

From the way they present it in the history books we all studied in school, you'd think that the American Revolution was a nearly unanimous thing- barring a handful of villainous Tories, of course. The reality, though, was far different.

Total support for the Revolution was about forty or forty-five percent. It was never a majority. Fifteen or twenty percent were loyalists or “Tories.” Thirty-five to forty-five percent were basically uninvolved, either due to philosophical pacifism or political apathy.

 

The Revolution didn't happen because the majority of Americans flocked to Washington's standard. Even among the forty or forty-five percent who actively supported the Revolution, only a minority actually fought.

 

The Revolution happened because a tiny handful of committed Americans, faced with a situation they were unwilling to tolerate, decided to risk everything to fight against it. A much larger percentage, but never a majority, provided support in varying degrees to the few who fought.

 

That's always the way of it. Those who struggle for major changes in society are almost never in the majority, and often they find themselves facing terrible odds. Every once in a while, they get a win. And then, just like the millions of French people who tried to claim membership in the French Resistance when the war was over even though the organization had never had more than two hundred thousand members when it really mattered, the story gets whitewashed. A lonely struggle by a handful of outsiders gets described and then taught as a unanimous mass movement.

Mayans in Georgia?

The mystery of the Mayan migration has had archaeologists searching decades for answers.  Rapid depopulation of what were once massive cities in Central America left no evidence as to what had happened to the people that once lived there.  Theories abounded, but none were ever confirmed with any degree of accuracy – not until a few weeks ago.

Ruins known as the Kenimer Mound, in Georgia, USA, were recently excavated, revealing some interesting facts regarding the people who once occupied them.  These ruins were widely assumed by the locals and scientists alike to be Cherokee in origin, despite denials of these connections by modern Cherokee.  Now, after an excavation, artifacts and other evidence have been recovered that suggests the people who built the city in the Georgia Mountains were originally Mayan.

Carbon dating evidence puts occupation at the same period as the Mayan depopulation.  Images on artifacts show remarkable similarities to those found in Central American sites.  Some scientists are still disputing the reliability of currently collected evidence, but the excavation of the Kenimer Mound is still in the early stages and promises to provide a great deal more information over the next few years.

If the theories about Mayan occupation of Kenimer Mound are proven correct, it would be one of the biggest discoveries of the century, answering the much-asked question of where so many millions of people could have gone to.  It would also most likely prompt even further excavations which could lead to potentially hundreds of new sites in both Georgia and the surrounding areas.

Origin of Stonehenge "Bluestones" Discovered

Spoiler Alert: It isn't anywhere NEAR Stonehenge.

One of the more mystifying and intriguing monuments in western history is that of Stonehenge. Built 5,000 years ago in the modern-day region of Wiltshire, England, it is made up of two concentric rings of “henge” stones. The monument was built and altered over the course of 1,500 years, with massive stones being moved across great distances by a Neolithic people that had very little technology for such work. The most recent discovery, of the birthplace of the inner “blue stones”, has only added to that mystery.

The large sarsens, or henge stones, are so named for the two enormous standing stones that support the lintel, or smaller top stone that’s braced across it. It’s unclear how early people were able to lift the massive stones, which way many tons, to brace them across. However, it is believed that the sarsens were quarried from the Marlborough Downs, just 20 miles north of the Stonehenge site.

More perplexing is the recently discovered birthplace of the “bluestones”, which are also enormous but that were placed 1,500 years before the sarsens and rest in the innermost “horseshoe” at the center of the circle. According to geologists Robert Ixer and Richard Bevins, the bluestones originated in a 65-mtere long outcropping in North Pembrokeshire. The out-cropping, which is called Craig Rhos-y-Felin near the Pont Saeson, is 160 miles from the Stonehenge site in Wiltshire. The determined this through a pain-staking process of petrography, comparing mineral and textural relationships between rocks. Though it took nine months to triangulate the original home of the bluestones, it’s still unclear how a Neolithic people managed to move such massive stones such an incredible distance.

There are several theories as to how this happened. One promotes the idea that these primitive people did find some way of transporting the stones, such as using a series of wide, shallow-bottom boats and sledges. Another includes going overland with a series of logs that the stones were rolled across, similar to how Egyptians moved their quarried stone overland. The other idea is that the stones were actually moved by glaciers millennia before and were deposited on the site, the opportunistic people simply carved the stones and stood them on their ends.

According to Wired Science, Ixer and Bevins hope to discover when and how the ancient people took the stones on their 160 mile journey by discovering the exact pieces of bedrock from which the stones were removed.

The Peasant's War

In The Holy Roman Empire

People usually think of the medieval peasant as miserable and downtrodden, but the peasants of sixteenth century Germany had managed to become fairly prosperous and no longer expected to be treated like serfs. When a series of complex economic and political changes began to erode their hard-won position, they didn't take it lying down. Instead they went to war, staging a series of massive rebellions against the feudal order between 1524 and 1526.

300,000 people are thought to have been involved in the Peasant's War, which was largely confined to the German areas of the Holy Roman Empire. 100,000 are thought to have lost their lives, and atrocities were committed by both sides.

 

In the end, as is usually the case with peasant rebellions, the rebels lost. However, they did succeed in inflicting a number of defeats on armies composed of and commanded by their supposed betters- just like the ikko-ikki peasant rebels in medieval Japan.

 

Interestingly, there is another parallel with the ikko-ikki. Both sets of rebellious peasants had the custom of gathering in a ring or circle to emphasize the equality of the rebel fighters. The German peasant rebels made at least some of their tactical decisions democratically. It's an interesting aspect of the peasant rebellion as a historical phenomenon- in many cases the rebels actually did present a more democratic and equal alternative to the feudal order. In a way, it can even be compared to the General Assembly meetings used by today's Occupy protesters to make decisions through consensus.

 

 

"The Dating Game Killer": Rodney Alcala

The smarmiest criminal of them all.

Rodney Alcala was kind of smarmy on his 1978 The Dating Game appearance, but he was a good-looking guy, so he got away with it. His long hair masked the creepy intentions hidden in his answers about night, and his California tan made viewers think he was smooth rather than sleazy.

That was why he won.

It was good news that bachelorette Cheryl Bradshaw caught on to Alcala's true nature and refused to go out with him. By the time the show aired, Alacala was a convicted rapist--something the background checks on the show failed to discover. He'd also murdered by this time, later being revealed as a notorious serial killer later dubbed "The Dating Game Killer," who has potentially killed as many as 50 women.

A year after his The Dating Game appearance, Alcala was arrested and sentenced to death in California for five murders between 1977 and 1979. He has not yet been put to death, and was convicted in 2011 for two more murders in New York City.

Alcala's M.O. was particularly brutal. He would strangle his victims until they lost consciousness several times, waiting until they awoke to strangle them again. After these women's deaths, he would keep pairs of their earrings in storage lockers. Alcala's first crime was in 1968 in Los Angeles, taking an eight-year-old girl into his apartment, raping her and beating her with a steel bar. A witness saw Alcala luring the girl to his apartment, but he escaped, fleeing then to New York.

His first conviction was for the death of Robin Samsoe, a 12-year-old California girl who disappeared in 1979. Alcala was sentenced to death for Samsoe's murder in 1980, but his conviction was overturned because the jury had been told of his prior sex crimes. He was convicted again for the Samsoe murder, but his death sentence was overturned in 2001.

He also isn't a model prisoner. He self-published a book in 1994 called You, the Jury asserting that he was innocent in the Samsoe case and suggesting another murderer. He filed a lawsuit against the state of California because they would not give him a low-fat diet at San Quentin State Prison.

Since 2001, Alcala's DNA has been matched with a number of cold cases in California and New York. Most notorious is the 40-year cold case of Cornelia Michel Crilley, a TWA flight attendant who was raped and strangled in her Manhattan apartment in 1971.

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The Legend of 2012 - The World Ends Yet Again

People are obsessed with their own mortality, and as a consequence, people become obsessed with trying to predict the end of the world.  In the last 20 years, a half-dozen such predictions have been made and, without fail, each has turned out to be false.  The latest in this Armageddon-welcoming behavior is based on the Mayan calendar.

The Mayans were very skilled astronomers, of that there is no doubt.  Their calendar was amazingly accurate and their knowledge of the stars extensive.  According to their calendar, the end of an age is coming in December of 2012 and many people are using this as yet one more opportunity to claim that “the end is nigh”.

Anyone who has done at least a rudimentary study of the way the Mayan calendar works, however, will know that the December 2012 date has nothing

to do with the world blowing up, getting hit by a meteor or falling victim to zombie armies.  The date in question is simply the end of a cycle on their calendar that corresponds to the 13th Baktun (a cycle of 14,400 days).  In Mayan belief, this means the end of an age and the beginning of something new, but does not signify that any destruction is involved.

People feel the need to read more into it than is actually there and, unfortunately, they are often supported by vigorously vocal people with little understanding of the subject they speak of.  In the year 1000, panic rose as people believed that the 1000 year mark meant the end of the world.  When we

hit Y2K, there was a similar panic.  Throughout history, people have been trying to decipher the bible, under the assumption that if you did your math properly you would find the exact date of the end times.  Many predictions have been made and all have been unerringly wrong.

December of 2012 will come and go, just like any

other year before it, though perhaps with a little more irrationality on the part of end-times enthusiasts across the world.  After which, another date will be found for world’s end and the cycle will once again continue.

The Pennamite-Yankee Wars

A Lost Chapter of American History

Did you know that the states of Pennsylvania and Connecticut have fought three wars with each other, one of which was after American independence? Not many people know this, but the Pennamite-Yankee Wars really happened.

 

The reason for these forgotten conflicts was that different British monarchs granted the same areas of what is now northern Pennsylvania to both Pennsylvania and Connecticut, resulting in conflicting land claims. “Yankees” from Connecticut moved in to settle the area, but so did “Pennamites” from Pennsylvania. It didn't take long before the two sides were shooting at each other, and then the militias of the rival colonies got in on the act.

The whole thing got muddled up with the War of Independence, so participants in the Pennamite-Yankee War were also involved in the revolution. After the war ended, the Yankees in Pennsylvania tried to secede and form their own State of Westmoreland with the help of Vermont's Ethan Allen. The whole thing was only resolved when the government eventually ruled in favor of Pennsylvania's claim to the Wyoming Valley, while also confirming the land claims of the Yankee settlers so they wouldn't lose their farms. The Pennamite-Yankee Wars weren't very bloody as wars go, but they were actual shooting wars with battles and fort sieges and even a “death march.”

 

Now don't you wonder why this one always gets left out of the history books? If we want kids to take an interest in history, shouldn't we be telling them about stuff like this?

 

 

"The Iron Lady"

Learn a few facts about Margaret Thatcher before Meryll's movie.

Meryll Streep's new movie, The Iron Lady will be released on December 30 in limited release here in the States. Streep plays Margaret Thatcher, the first British female Prime Minster. What better to time to get to know Britain's "Lady" a bit better? Here are a few facts about the woman who earned Meryll another ticket to the Oscars:

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Margaret Thatcher ran a tight ship. British columnist Iain Dale called her “a sensible housewife who pinched pennies as male politicians debauched the pounds.” Thatcher hosted tea and scone parties on her famously coordinated table settings at her home in Belgravia, England. She was domestically involved with both home and family, and as one of the core issues of her campaign, urged women to stock up on “tinned food” for fear of inflation.

Thatcher believed that “the most terrifying thing in life” is not terrorism but is having “time on your hands and nothing to do” . Perhaps this attitude was how she handled so-called Brighton bomb so well. At the Conservative Party conference in 1984, a terrorist placed a bomb in the hotel where Ms. Thatcher was staying—apparently to try and kill her. She “knew immediately that it was a bomb—perhaps two bombs.” But fortunately for her and her country, “those who sought to kill me had placed the bomb in the wrong place.” Although the glass of her hotel suite was shattered, Ms. Thatcher decided to continue the routine of the day. She let it affect her so little, she was more concerned about finishing her speech for the convention.

Thatcher believed in the peaceful coexistence of Britain and Europe in the European Union. She felt that Britain and the countries of the Union could agree more easily because they had a common culture. Instead of just being thrown together because of the “creation of the Treaty of Rome,” the countries were innately similar. She said, “Too often, the history of Europe is described as a series of interminable wars and quarrels.” Now, the countries should learn to live in “peaceful coexistence.

After her election, Margaret Thatcher achieved the impossible. Her peers and country didn’t think of her as a female prime minister, but as a prime minister who did an excellent job and happened to be a woman. Margaret Thatcher rose above her birth poverty and gender to become Britain’s revered “Lady” and one of the most respected Prime Ministers ever. Meryll's got some pretty big shoes to fill.

The Mayan Calendar

Not Necessarily The End

It has long been rumored that the world would end in the year 2012 courtesy of theories based on the Mayan calendar. Scientists, however; believe that the Mayan prophecy simple predict the end of one cycle and the beginning of a new creation cycle. Meanwhile, rumors continue to fill online forums and other venues regarding our cataclysmic end.

We are weeks away from 2012 and just a shred over a year from our supposed ending date of December 12, 2012. Will there be a major event that alters how the world functions? Probably not. On the other hand, as the time approaches will scientists be able to convince those that believe that it won’t happen; that we just simply turn over a new dawn a start a new cycle of earth rejuvenation?

It is broadly believed that modern humanity projects a messianic belief system, which is at the core of our upbringing, onto a civilization that had no such inclinations. The Ancient Mayan community had their deities, each one for a certain task, cycle, or rhythm, that appeared or reappeared based on the cyclic occurrences of their calendar which ran on an average period of 394 years.

The National Institute of Anthropological History in Mexico has been working feverishly to dispel the world of the notion that we will simply cease to exist. The Institute has identified over 15,000 Mayan symbols and has only found two references to 2012. The concern of the scientists studying Ancient Mayan texts is that as the date approaches there will be more incidents of panic and possible outbreaks of group suicides.

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