“Everything you buy makes everything you own less valuable.”
In Trento, Italy they discovered the remains of a Roman town under one of the main squares. this is part of the artifact hoard.
Everything
Global Warming Good
Otzi the Iceman was discovered in 1991by some hikers in the high Alps near the border of Austria and Italy. He had been frozen in a glacier for 5000 years. It appears that he was murdered. From his mummified remains an amazing amount has been learned about life in the copper age. Otzi became an international superstar. The museum was crowded so I bought the book. The mummy is on display and the photo above is a recreation made by scientists and artist of what he might have looked like. Lean more.
Books
“Before printing the total number of books in Europe was well under one hundred thousand. By 1500, after forty-five years of the printed book, the total has been calculated at nine million.”
Paul Johnson in The Renaissance a Short History.
Lessons from History
“That people do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of the lessons that history has to teach us.”
Aldous Huxley
History
“Most history is guessing and the rest is prejudice.”
Will Durant
In Volume One of The Story of Civilization
Photo is of a Saguaro Flower. This years bloom is not as big as in past years but is still magnificent.
Book Review: The End of History
The End of History
by
Francis Fukuyama
I tried to read The End of History back in the 1990s when it first came out and failed. I couldn’t follow the arguments at all and gave up. This time I listened to the audio version and I got it. Fukuyama argues that Liberal Democracy is the best available form of government and now that it is being attained the progress of political history will stop. Continue reading “Book Review: The End of History”
Election Day Final
A Hohokam petroglyph site near Badger Springs AZ
Politics is applied ethics
No matter how the election turns out today the Hohokam will still be gone and eventually so will we. From the archeological record we haven’t been able to deduce what caused the Hohokam to stop thriving and to eventually abandon the massive irrigation system and the large villages they had built along the Salt and Gila Rivers. With a lot more information, including a written record, we aren’t absolutely sure what caused the Roman Empire to falter and fall about 300CE.
I’ve started working as a volunteer docent at the Pueblo Grande Museum and while I’m learning my stuff I will write blog posts about lots of my discoveries. In this age of Google and Wikipedia it is possible to know almost any fact. But in the archeological record that the Hohokam left there is much that we don’t know. I like to think of it as the anti-google. In the next post we’ll explore why the Hohokam made stone donuts.
Monument Moment
“To the Heroes who have fallen in the various battles with ______ Indians in the Territory of New Mexico.”
We saw this plaque with the word removed on the monument in the Plaza in Santa Fe last week. Continue reading “Monument Moment”