There’s an interesting character in this scene from a Classic Maya vase. In the main scene, an aged underworld god is enjoying the company of a bevy of young women, but below him a rabbit scribe is keeping its eyes out and its ears perked while taking notes.
None of the rabbits I’ve ever known in my life have been so practical!
Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
Here are some beautiful computer reconstructions of important archaeological sites in Mesoamerica.
Advestudios, which produced these images, also creates videos and 360 vistas. Their work is wonderful for helping to picture these sites as living, functioning cities and settlements.
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
Casey (otherwise known as hot.glue.burns on Instagram) made a Native American variant of Captain America’s costume for the 2019 San Diego Comic-Con. And the cosplay is both inventive and gorgeous!
Poster Cosplay in America has copied & pasted some of Casey’s thoughts:
“I originally brainstormed this costume in late 2015, but I really started rolling on production this last year, once I committed to this years SDCC… My main goal was to make a Native American variant of a fan-favorite character. I was immediately drawn to Captain America because of everything he symbolizes as basically the poster boy of a nation. To me it was the perfect parallel. And once I visualized the red and white bone breastplate on my abdomen, I knew this was something I had to see through.
“A lot of old school leather work with the awl! The majority of the armor was made from a base of 6mm EVA foam with 3 oz deer hide glued over it. The pieces were then stitched together with sinew or leather lace. Using this technique allowed me to form curves and build the necessary bulk of the armor pieces while also getting the suede textures I was looking for. And a whole lot of beading!”
Found via Good Stuff Happened Today on Tumblr.
Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day!
Crossposted from the Playfully Grownup Home blog.
In Making Stuff occasional feature, we share fun arts and crafts done by us and our fellow geeks and nerds.
This decorated hat was created by an indigenous North American Huron/Wyandot artisan around 1840. It is made of wool, silk, and moosehair, worked using traditional techniques, but patterned after the Glengarry-style cap of the Scottish highlands and decorated with a Victorian floral motif.
Hats and other decorated objects like this one represent a complex interplay of cultural, artistic, and economic influences. Indigenous artisans from Iroquoian, Wabenaki, and other native nations had long created trade goods intended for exchange with European settlers and adapted to European tastes. In the nineteenth century, indigenous creators took advantage of the growth of a tourist industry around the Great Lakes region to market a broader range of wares combining forms that white customers would recognize and find useful, like this Glengarry cap, with decorative schemes that appealed to Victorian sensibilities while preserving traditional techniques. Such objects were created in a combination of traditional and modern materials, such as moosehair and leather combined with wool, silk, and glass beads.
The creation and sale of these goods—often produced by female artisans—provided both a means of preserving traditional artistic methods and a valuable economic resource to indigenous and First Nations peoples at a time when other opportunities in white-dominated American and Canadian society were hard to find, and indigenous cultures were often suppressed, sometimes violently.
Image: Glengarry-style cap via Metropolitan Museum (Metropolitan Museum, New York; c. 1840; wool, silk, and moosehair; unknown Huron/Wyandot artist)
Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
Did you know that Aztecs created floating garden islands on swamps to feed 200,000+ people? I didn’t before now.
An article by Lynette Townsend for the Museum of New Zealand descibes the structure of the chinampas:
“These ingenious creations were built up from the lake bed by piling layers of mud, decaying vegetation and reeds. This was a great way of recycling waste from the capital city Tenochtitlan. Each garden was framed and held together by wooden poles bound by reeds and then anchored to the lake floor with finely pruned willow trees. The Aztecs also dredged mud from the base of the canals which both kept the waterways clear and rejuvenate [sic] the nutrient levels in the gardens.”
Apparently the chinampas were separated by channels, and canoes were used for transport. In addition to food crops and flowers grown, fish and birds drawn to the chinampas were caught for food as well.
What an incredibly smart feature to engineer! It also strikes me as a fantastic (no pun intended), pragmatic thing to adapt into a SFFnal world.
Found via Ultrafacts at Tumblr.
Images: models by artisan collective Te Mahi via Museum of New Zealand / Te Papa Tongarewa.
The Visual Inspiration occasional feature pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?
According to CBC News, a thousand-year-old Maya text has been authenticated by scholars at Mexico’s National Institute of History and Anthropology (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, or INAH).
The pictographic calendar-style text was made between 1021 and 1154 CE, and is the oldest known pre-Hispanic manuscript from the Americas. It was made from three layers of amate paper (bark paper). Only 10 pages of a conjectured set of at least 20 sheets currently survive.
The document’s authenticity was questioned on the basis of two main concerns: missing archaeological records of its original context (due to it having been looted and traded), and its differing style compared to other authenticated Mayan codices.
According to Sofia Martínez del Campo from the National Coordination of Museums and Exhibitions (Coordinación Nacional de Museos y Exposiciones del instituto, or CNME, at INAH), quoted in the INAH announcement, the current analysis included making a detailed photographic record, as well as examining the dating, materials, entomology, iconography, chemical-mineralogical characterization, morphometry, chronology, style, and symbolism, among others.
The specialists found the presence of Maya blue color (azul maya) and pigments based on cochineal dye as well as leftover drops of a chapopote resin. (Britannica says: “[…] chapopote [was a] a native asphalt commonly applied to clay figurines as a decoration; occasionally, chapopote entirely covers the figures, while in other examples it is used to decorate only the face, mouth, or eyes.”)
In addition, INAH announced that the folding book will no longer be known by its previous name (Grolier); instead, the work will be known as Mexico Maya Codex (Códice Maya de México).
The Mexico Maya Codex will be shown to the public for one month, from September 27 to the end of October, 2018, as part of the International Book Fair of Anthropology and History (Feria Internacional del Libro de Antropología e Historia, or FILAH).
Also during the FILAH book fair the book El Códice Maya de México (The Mexico Maya Codex) will be released. It will include a facsimile edition of the pre-Hispanic text in addition to academic and scientific articles.
Only three other pre-Hispanic codices are known, called Madrid, Dresden, and Paris (for the cities where they are kept).
Visit the INAH announcement in Spanish for more details and a link to the announcement video.
Found via N. K. Jemisin on Twitter.
Apparently someone somewhere deemed an earlier analysis (reported e.g. by the Smithsonian.com in September of 2016) not conclusive enough, even though that one also authenticated the Mexico Maya Codex. (My Spanish isn’t good enough to spot any specific reasoning for the 2018 study in the INAH announcement.)
In any case, getting more information on traditional Maya religion and life before Europeans destroyed it can only be a good thing in my book—if you’ll pardon the pun. 🙂
Images of individual pages by Martirene Alcántara; laboratory analysis by Alba Barrios-Laboratorios, INAH; all via INAH.
Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
In the U.S., and indeed more widely in the Anglo-American world, Meriwether Lewis and William Clarke are known for their two-year expedition of the Louisiana territory (purchased from France in 1803) and the land beyond the “great rock mountains” in the west.
Less commonly remembered in cursory mentions is the extent of Lewis and Clarke’s interactions with local Native Americans. (Apart from Sacagawea, who is known at least in the U.S.) The whites didn’t just exchange gifts or talk about trade or clash with the local population; they received invaluable help and information (like when the expedition wintered with the Mandan people in present-day North Dakota).
Now it seems that western historians need to re-evaluate that extent.
According to The Jefferson Watch, cartographers have identified at least ten places in the journals of Lewis and Clarke where the captains talk about the maps by Native American hosts to help them figure out the lay of the land.
Christopher Steinke, at the time a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, found one of those maps at the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) in Paris. It was drawn by Inquidanécharo, a chief of the Arikara (in French, Ricara), who was apparently also known as Too Né.
LudditeLabs on Twitter did some of the heavy lifting and linked to the BnF digital copy of the map:
An article by Steinke is available at JSTOR, where this abstract comes from:
“The Bibliothèque nationale de France contains a hitherto unnoticed map attributed to Inquidanécharo, a Ricara chief. Lewis and Clark knew him as Too Né, an Arikara village leader who accompanied them upriver to the Mandan and Hidatsa villages in 1804. The map, which Too Né showed to playwright and artist William Dunlap when he visited Washington in 1806, is the most detailed surviving Indian representation of the Great Plains from this period. It invites scholars to reorient early American exploration and cartography from indigenous perspectives. Too Né interpreted his map as a work of history and cartography and situated the American explorers in the historical and religious landscape of the Arikara people.”
In “Here is My Country”, Steinke outlines some of the main features of Inquidanécharo’s map, and recounts some history surrounding it. He also lists a few other Native American maps from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
What most struck me, though, is that Native American maps seem to have contained more information than just geographical details—they also depicted cultural connections and ethnographical information.
I knew Native Americans used symbols and pictograms, and had to have—like people everywhere—a way of talking about and remembering locations outside their immediate surroundings. I had no idea, however, that Native American cartography was as polished or wide-reaching as it was (a hint for the Finnish school system), let alone that their maps might still be extant. Fascinating!
Found via bluecorncomics on Twitter.
This post has been edited to correct a typo.
In Live and Active Cultures we talk about cultures and cultural differences.
Maps tell us where we are and how to get where we’re going. Sometimes, the top-down, bird’s-eye-view style of map we are most used to today is not the most helpful tool for achieving that goal. Anyone who’s had to orient themselves in a strange landscape with a traditional map knows the frustration of trying to match the visible landmarks and shapes of the terrain to the lines and symbols of the map. There are also plenty of places where pulling out a flat paper map would be impractical.
From Greenland comes a different approach to mapping. These drawings show two carved wooden maps of the coastline around the eastern Greenland settlement of Sermiligaaq that were sold to Danish explorers by a local named Kunit in the 1880s.
These small carvings, known as the Ammassalik wooden maps, represent the shapes of the coastline. The narrower map represents a string of islands; the wider one records a stretch of the mainland coastline and is read in a continuous stretch up one side and down the other. They are small enough to be held inside a mitten so that a traveler paddling down the coast by kayak could feel their way along from one bay to the next.
Just another example of how human ingenuity finds different solutions to similar problems.
Image: Drawing of the Ammassalik maps via Wikimedia
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
Jeffrey Veregge, an artist and member of the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe in Washington state, makes positively fantastic versions of mainstream genre icons like superheroes, movie characters, Transformers, aliens, and the like.
Veregge himself says of his work:
“This site, the work that is seen on it is a reflection of a lifetime love affair with comic books, toys, TV and film. Taking my passions and blending them with my Native perspective, artistic background and the desire to simply be me. Basically I am just trying to have fun and get back to that kid that went to art school to begin with, wanting to create artwork that I want to see and make just for the hell of it.”
Several of his designs would make fantastic fabric prints, like this Flash-inspired one, for example:
If there was a fabric Flash version, I’d use it for pencil cases, zipper travel pouches, or a table cloth. Or maybe tall, tall shades with a wide border on the bottom; that would look really striking.
Visit Veregge’s home page for more!
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
The Inca empire of South America was connected by a network of roads used by chasqui runners and pack llamas carrying messages and supplies around the empire. The Inca, creating their empire in the Andes mountains, faced challenges unlike those of flat-land and river-valley empires, among which was the problem of crossing numerous steep mountain valleys and rivers that ran dangerously swift in the flood season. Their solution to this problem was: rope bridges.
Suspension rope bridges spanned rivers and valleys, the longest reaching a length of 45 meters. They were made with ropes twisted out of grass and had to be rebuilt every year or two. The rebuilding was dangerous work that was assigned to local villagers as part of their obligation to the empire. Most Inca bridges have long since been replaced with modern structures, but one, the Q’iswa Chaka over the Apurimac River in Peru, is still rebuilt every year by local people as a way of preserving their heritage.
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