The Hocking Hills region of south-eastern Ohio is a jewel of an area — ravines, caves, and stone walls interweave throughout old-growth forest. Water is everywhere: streams, small cataracts, and waterfalls echo in many parts of the forest.The area was formed millions of years ago, when the Appalachian Mountains were eroding and the shallow seas […]
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Hocking Hills State Park in Ohio has long been a place of interest for human cultures. The Blackhand sandstone formed a series of ravines there, and coupled with the abundant water supply allowed for a micro-climate atypical for Ohio. This explains the existence of trees like black birch, Canadian yew, and hemlocks which don’t normally
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Witchcraft and werewolves have appeared in folklore across world history. This wooden statue by the Navajo/Diné artist Robin Willeto (born 1962) is called “Skin Walker,” and refers to evil witches thought to be able to shapeshift into coyotes. The place of coyotes in Navajo culture is unique — often sinister, they are classic trickster figures.
The Coyote, Werewolves, and Skin Walkers in Navajo Culture Read More »
Conrad Beissel (1691-1768) was the founding leader of a monastic group of dissident Christians in Ephrata. The cloister he set up in this remote location at one point held 80 celibate followers, both men and women. His final home, featured here, was a much larger space than many of Ephrata’s members, and yet it still
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These “Hero Twins” are two of the most important characters from Ancient Maya mythology, and now we can link their stories to an actual Maya practice of sacrificing boy children, especially twins, in the Classical Maya settlement of Chichén Itzá. The findings appeared this month in the journal _Nature_, co-authored by geneticist Rodrigo Barquera, which
Chichén Itzá Sacrificial Burial of Twin Boys from Hero Twin Myth Read More »
The Great Awakening had a lot of impact. Not only did it lay the groundwork for countless American high school students to read _The Scarlet Letter_, but it created a mood of religious dynamism that inspired many to begin their own Christian denominations. Like this person here, the “Publick Universal Friend,” neé Jemima Wilkinson, born
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Here you see the Spider, one of the most important geoglyphs that form the Nazca Lines amid the arid coastal plain of southern Peru. The Nazca peoples constructed this and other shapes and lines between 500 BCE and 500 CE, in one of the world’s driest regions. Today the Nazca Lines are a UNESCO World
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The magnificent ruins shown here are only some of the thousands of Ancient Puebloan structures found in southwestern Colorado’s Canyon of the Ancients National Monument. This particular site, found along the 6.5 mile Sand Canyon (loop) Trail, is similar to many of the region, with remarkable masonry that includes cliff dwellings, towers, public roofed
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This is a mid-19th century North American painting entitled _Indian Women Playing the Game of Plum Stones_, and testifies to the ubiquitous practice of dice gambling that American Indian women played in pre-colonial times. As evidence summarized by Warren DeBoer suggests, gambling was a pastime that American Indian women seemed to have enjoyed across
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This extraordinary scene from a 348-long muslin painting called “Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley” was done by an American artist named John J. Egan in 1850. Looking carefully at the details, you can see that white Americans are using their black slaves to open up an American Indian burial mound. The
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When you were a kid, did you learn that the first humans in the Americas crossed over the Bering land bridge about 12,000 years ago? Scholars have overturned this chronology completely, but it held away for many years in part because of this type of spear- or knife- head technology featured here, which is the
Clovis Culture and Migration Read More »
This is a colorized photograph of an unusual geographic formation that no longer exists — but for hundreds of years, it marked a major river system in the southern part of the U.S.. Known as “the Great Raft”, it was a terrific log jam, made up of season upon season of washed-away trees. Cedar, cottonwood,
This is a fanciful rendition of the Spanish _conquistador_ Hernán Cortés (d. 1547), dressed as an Ancient Roman centurion. The imagery is unusual for a number of reasons: first, Cortés was the main player that brought about the destruction of the Aztec Empire, which happened over a thousand years past Ancient Rome’s heyday. The artist
Hernán Cortés in New Codex Read More »
If you look for more than a second at the squiggles on this image, you will soon make out patterns of squares as well as some long lines joining them. These images made huge headlines in the fields of archaeology and history this month because of what they have revealed about an ancient civilization in
Ancient Civilization Discovered in the Ecuadorian Amazon Read More »
Today (September 16, 2023) several students from Shippensburg University’s history department travelled with Dr. John Bloom and me to the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter, an American Indian site in eastern Pennsylvania. The first slides you see come from the sandstone overhang that made a natural roof for the Meadowcroft encampment, as well as the main area
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These statues are some of the remaining examples of “mushroom stones” from the Ancient Maya people. They testify to the usage of psilocybin by indigenous Central Americans that goes back hundreds of years. The second photo shows a real-life example, called Psilocybe Mexicana. The Central American consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms for ritual purposes was brought
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A contemporary image of this hero — who died in 1512 — does not exist, but this painting of the indigenous Taíno (who hailed from the modern island of Haiti/the Dominican Republic) called Hatuey is my favorite. Painted by Lacoste, it shows his face in a triumphant smile. And though he was burned at the
You’re looking at a recreation of a funerary site from ancient Ecuador, where these three levels of human remains were unearthed in 1980 as builders were getting ready to construct an airport at the capital city of Quito: a total of nine vertical burial tunnel-chambers were found. These bodies date from 680 CE, to a
Chicha and Ecuadorian Burials Read More »
This is Acoma Pueblo, aka “Sky City,” and one of the oldest continually inhabited places of north America. Located on a nearly 400-foot mesa, it dates back as early as 1100 CE and has been a home to the indigenous Acoma people of modern New Mexico ever since, preserving ancient customs and beliefs even as
This is Sequoyah, a Cherokee American who lived from about 1770-1843 and is a rare example of an illiterate person who created a written language. Sequoyah was born in what is now Tennessee and demonstrated skill in a wide variety of crafts: he made jewelry, invented better dairy farm equipment, and forged iron. Observing the
Sequoyah and the Cherokee Alphabet Read More »
