Friday, June 13, 2008
Mummy Diaries
I've written aboutHermann Parzinger's discovery of a frozen mummy entombed in a Mongolian kurgan, or burial mound, before, but my article in the July issue of Discover delves deeper into the information that researchers are pulling from the bones and dessicated bodies of ancient warriors.
The full text should be up on Discover's website in a few weeks, but in the meantime you can grab a copy at your local bookstore. There's lots of archaeological excitement and pictures of yucky mummified bodies -- and even a little global warming crisis for good measure.
While reporting the story, I met with paleo-pathologist Michael Schultz, a professor at the University of Goettingen who studied the Scythian remains for Parzinger. While at his lab, Schultz handed me the skull of a man killed by an arrowhead 2,600 years ago. To Schultz's trained eye, the marks on the skull revealed excruciating details of an ancient operation gone terribly awry:
Holding the victim’s skull in one hand and a replica of the deadly arrow in the other, Schultz paints a vivid picture of a crude operation that took place on the steppes of Siberia 2,600 years ago.
“The man was crying, ‘Help me,’ ” Schultz says. Thin cuts on the bone show how his companions cut away his cheek, then used a small saw to remove pieces of bone, but to no avail. Pointing to a crack in the skull, he describes the next agonizing step: An ancient surgeon smashed into the bone with a chisel in a final, futile effort to free the arrowhead. “Hours or a day later, the man died,” Schultz says. “It was torture.”
Labels: discover, mummies, mummy, Parzinger, schultz, Scythian, siberia
In January, I flew to Oregon to interview archaeologist Dennis Jenkins (above). Jenkins specializes in the prehistory of the American West and works at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Together with a British TV crew, Jenkins and I drove over the Cascades (in the snow -- I hate driving in the snow) to Paisley, Oregon, which is a few hours south of Bend. I always imagined Oregon as lush and green and pine-scented, but it turns out eastern Oregon is a great big dry desert.
That dryness made it possible for a few very, very old pieces of feces -- coprolites, in archaeological parlance -- to last a very, very long time. A few years ago, Jenkins excavated a set of caves on the other side of an ancient lakebed from the town of Paisley. He found evidence that humans were there almost 15,000 years ago. That's a lot longer than most people thought. The Paisley coprolites are some of the earliest and best evidence for human occupation in
the Americas.
I wrote about the discovery -- which involved researchers working as far away as Oxford and Copenhagen -- for the July/August issue of Archaeology. A slightly longer version of the piece can be found here, but for the full text you'll have to pick up the magazine at a newsstand or come over to my house and read my copy.
Labels: americas, ancient, coprolites, dennis, dna, eske, immigration, jenkins, paisley, poop, willerslev
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Noodle Kings
The first of what I hope will be a few dispatches from Japan, this one published in the stylish new British magazine Monocle's June issue. I spent a few days in Osaka, where the ramen noodle was invented 50 years ago. Hundreds of the world's instant ramen noodle manufacturers were there for the World Instant Noodle Association Summit in April, and I was on the scene to find out why there needs to be a World Instant Noodle Association in the first place. (100 billion servings a year, it turns out, in just about every country on Earth.)Check the issue out on newsstands -- Monocle charges a lot for subscriptions, but if you're interested in an incredibly eclectic mix of international political and business (and cultural and fashion) coverage with a minimal emphasis on the USA it might be worth it.
Labels: article, instant, japan, monocle, noodle, osaka, ramen
