L'ans aux Meadows, Newfoundland
We drove all day though fog and rain to reach the Northern tip of Newfoundland. More than 1100 years ago my Viking ancestors established a settlement here in North Anerica. They called the place Vinland because of the wild grapes. The dig is about 2 kilometers from our campsite.
I have a recessive disease calledDupuytren's contracture, which is also called "Viking's disease". This causes my fingers to curl up so it's hard to grasp my tennis racket or put my hand in my pocket. About every three years I have my fingers surgically straightened. I'm lucky. Sometimes it also causes one's penis to curl up.
We're wondering how exactly they have this archeological site dated. The trees here are not long-lived, so dendrochonology may not be all that helpful. I read that they have done some carbon dating on the site, which is not that precise.. However, the bronze and iron artifacts they've recovered leaves little doubt that Eric the Red spent some time here.
We'll visit the digs in the morning and report our findings. Forget Columbus day. This is the real deal. My quivering, curled fingers tell me that my European ancestors were here first.
By now, you've probably heard that the inflatable Pink Floyd pig, broke loose at a California concert and flew high before exploding in the stratosphere. The pig had the word "Obama" stenciled on its belly, with a checkmark next to the word... The pig came to rest in tatters in two driveways in a California desert town. The inhabitants will split a $10,000 reward from Roger Waters.
In the morning, we hiked up to more Indian ruins. The story is the same: built from 1250 to 1275 A.D., dated by dendrochronology, abandoned for reasons unknown. I find an interesting looking bud on a cactus and eat it. I expect visions, but nothing happens.
We look at the Natural Bridges National Monument later in the day and have lunch. The monument was declared the first International Dark Sky Park. They have an astronomy program tonight and Sunday at 9PM. The weather report is for partly cloudy tonight and mostly cloudy Sunday evening.
I learn the difference between plateaus, mesas, buttes and pinnacles. They all have flat tops but are different sizes. It's just another crazy, imprecise human classification system like rivers, streams and creeks. Most of the red buttes and pinnacles we've been looking at lately are 250 million year old red petrified sand dunes.
My personal favorite is the Sipapu bridge. Sipapu is a Hopi word meaning place of original emergence. This is the place on earth from which the earliest humans emerged at the beginning of the world.
We wander down to Muley's Point and take in the vista carved by the San Juan river. Then down to the Goosenecks State Park to see the "meanders". Meanders occur when the river traps itself in a series of horseshoe bends by rapidly digging itself into soft rock. You can see the river travel ten miles to get downstream one mile.
I don't have a picture of the meanders. Even though we're looking down 1,000 feet from a bluff, you really need a helicopter to take in the bends. I do a video, but it's 76 megabytes, too big to be worth posting. The last two minutes of the video is of my tennis shoes after I put the camera strap back on my shoulder. I need to learn how to stop filming. I've got the start part figured out. The picture below is of the San Juan from the Muley's point overlook. You can just make out a dirt road below leading to the river.
There's a big "four-corners" Indian festival today right up the road in Blanding. The Zuni, Hopi and Navajo tribes will all be competing in an art festival.
I was up at 2:45 this morning. I slipped outside without spoiling my night vision and took in the stars and desert silence. For the first time I locate the Navigator's Triangle from the Milky Way, rather than the other way around. At 5 AM, the noise level has picked up. A coyote is yipping up on the bluff and someone close has a jackass. We may go camp in the Valley of the Gods today. We'll put out the lawn chairs, read novels and wait for darkfall.
The canyons and mesas of the Four Corners region are filled with thousands of ruins built by eary Anasazi Indian inhabitants. Some of the most visited are here in the Mesa Verde National Park in the Southwest corner of Colorado. Though dendrochronology, the study of tree rings, the constuction of these dwellings can be dated very precisely.
The best preserved ruins are those built in caves or cliff dwellings sheltered by rock overhangs. As we drive the rim of the mesa we can see a half dozen examples of these.
The Indians here lived on top of the mesas for thousands of years. During a 20 year period ending about 1276 A.D., they retreated to cliff dwellings and then abandoned these within a ten year period. The reason for the retreat and exodus is thought to be a 23 year drought which decreased food supplies and increased warfare over scarce resources.
A major source of food was corn. They used a "dry farming" (no irrigation) method, planting in wet, low-lying areas where water pooled in the spring after the eight-foot snowfall melts.
The development of Maize (corn) by an early Mesoamerican geneticist probably happened sometime between 10,000 and 6,000 BC in southern Mexico. This development has done more to enable a population explosion to six billion than any other human invention.
From the 1938 to the 1960s, Mangeldorf's 'Tripartite Hypothesis' on the origin of corn was widely accepted. He believed that corn was developed from a cross between an undiscovered wild Maize and the plant Tripsacum.
In 1968, George Beadle, in retirement, began to provide convincing evidence for his own 'Teosinte Hypothesis', which simply believed that Maize was developed from the plant Teosinte. Today scientists generally accept the Teosinte Hypothesis because of advances in the study of genomes.
The park is located between Durango and Cortez in the southwest corner of Colorado. The entire area, including the large park, is dotted with the architectural remnants of the Pueblo indians.
The centerpiece of the park is an excellent museum that displays small dioramas built by depression era Civilian Conservation Corp artisans. These displays illustrate the development of Pueblo architecture and building techniques over a period of many centuries.
The Pueblo Indians attained a high state of technology and the museum contains fine examples of stone and bone tools, jewellery, pottery, building construction materials, woven cotton clothing, woven baskets, arrows and similar artifacts. Some of these items are from Mexico and California implying that a widespread trading system had developed.
The museum also contains many fine fossils and examples of rare stones, including my personal favorite, the Firecloud. One exhibit does a good job of speculating about the original migration from Asia ten to twenty thousand years ago.
At the high point of this culture, before a great drought in the 13th century, these people were building large villages of three-story stone houses that still stand proudly after eight centuries. The development of agriculture (including corn, beans, cotton and squash) allowed this people to build and develop an impressive civilization. The type of construction and the density of construction sites imply a very long period of peace before a retreat to more defensible cliff dwellings.
Dendrochronology, or the study of tree rings, has enabled archeologists to precisely date the times that various buildings were constructed and when this large civilization disintegrated and migrated to Arizona and New Mexico to form (or join) six related tribes, including the Mogollons. Speculation is that rapid population growth, combined with a great drought of thirty years, caused the collapse of this advanced civilization.
One of the exhibits has some interesting speculation about the origin of corn. One theory is that it originated as a deliberate cross between two weeds, implying that genetics was developed long before Gregory Mendel started playing around with peas.
The park burned to the ground in 1991 due to Park Service mismanagement and failure to allow small natural fires to clear wood trash and undergrowth. The blackened, dead Junipers will require 150 years or more to recover. It's a different type of park, but worth a day. We find a place to spend the night and I ask my faithful companion if we can have liver and onions for Veterans Day. She says, mysteriously, 'Next year, in Jerusalem'.
