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Johan Normark, a Swedish archaeologist, blogs on archaeoology in theory and practice, Maya studies, palaeoclimate, travels around the world and criticises New Age, creationism, and pseudoscience.

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Archaeological Haecceities

English - Archaeology, Maya, Travel

http://haecceities.wordpress.com/

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Archaeological Haecceities · 5h ago

Trade and the Maya collapse

Debates regarding the Maya collapse never end and in recent years various versions of the “drought” hypothesis have dominated (I tend to criticize them on various grounds). A new study on the distribution of obsidian at Classic and Postclassic sites has brought back an old collapse scenario to life.

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Archaeological Haecceities · 1d ago

The extirpation of idolatry in Colonial Yucatan

The extirpation of idolatry (idolatria) in the Maya area is a sad history of religious intolerance. During Colonial times idolatria meant “the adoration or cult that gentiles give to creatures or statues of their false gods” (p 149). From the earliest days of Christianity, idolatry became linked wit

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Archaeological Haecceities · 1W ago

2012: New Age reactions to the Xultun discovery

On Friday 11 May, John Major Jenkins (JMJ) wrote this on Facebook in response to the Xultun discovery: “Good news of new inscriptions. But scholars are using it to dismiss 2012. They are doing that by saying that it’s not about doomsday. DUH. Maya time is cyclic and goes on beyond 2012 — DUH. But [.

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Archaeological Haecceities · 1W ago

Quote of the day: spiny hedgehogs

My son Simon is in today’s Göteborgsposten (p 7), one of Sweden’s largest newspapers (only in the paper version as far as I can tell). We went to a family day at the city museum of Gothenburg. The theme of the day was “cultivate now”, to get people more interested in growing plants. My son began [..

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Archaeological Haecceities · 1W ago

2012: The Xultun discovery in Swedish news

I had planned something else for this post, since it is #666, but I changed my mind this morning when I saw a 56 seconds long clip on the Rapport news on SVT (Swedish television) concerning the discovery of the astronomical tables at Xultun that I mentioned in my previous post. Vetenskapsradion, on

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Archaeological Haecceities · 1W ago

Classic period astronomical tables

Most of the archaeoastronomical information from the Maya area concerning the movement of the Sun, Moon and planets like Venus, Mars and Mercury has been found in the Postclassic codices. In the recent issue of Science, Saturno, Stuart, Aveni and Rossi report on early 9th century wall paintings from

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Archaeological Haecceities · 1W ago

2012: Julia-Levy and the Mexican law

Readers of this blog may recall that I have written about an upcoming documentary that supposedly will show that the Maya were visited by aliens. The producer behind this documentary, the Mexican soap opera actor Raul Julia-Levy, is in the pseudo-news again. It now seems that the documentary may not

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Archaeological Haecceities · 2W ago

The Maya world of communicating objects

Tonight I will begin to read Miguel Angel Astor-Aguilera’s book The Maya World of Communicating Objects: Quadripartite Crosses, Trees, and Stones (2011). Miguel is an anthropologist and he has worked in the ejido of X-Cabil in the Cochuah region, half-way between Saban and Tihosuco. This will hopefu

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Archaeological Haecceities · 2W ago

Water in and between other objects – vessels and age-grade rituals

One of the “case studies” in my water as an archaeological object project deals with artifacts either produced by the help of water or produced to deal with water in one way or another. Ceramic vessels are first modeled when the clay is wet but later in the process water needs to be removed by [...]

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Archaeological Haecceities · 2W ago

Brief update

In case you wonder why there are so few blog posts these days it has to do with the fact that I have only 1,5 month left of work before my vacation. I have to finish a multitude of articles (nine or ten I think it is!) and work on two books. So my work [...]

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