cafecuriosity

Nice Cup of Hot Chocolate

A confession - I am partial to the occasional cup of hot chocolate. However, I rarely spend any time at all, thinking about the journey the chocolate undertook to make its way into my cup. Echoes of a much longer and much, much older chocolate expedition caught my attention this week. Researchers announced they had discovered theobromine a chocolate marker in the shards of ceramic drinking cylinders unearthed at the Chaco Canyon settlement in New Mexico.

Fingerprints on History

 The electronic age is going to be hell for historians. Paper records have a reassuring physicality and a surprising ability to endure, despite damp, fire and dusty neglect. Nor are they subject to capricious changes in industry formatting standards. Barack Obama's battle with bureaucracy to retain his Blackberry is well known. He is America's first truly digital President. While his speeches may be recorded for posterity, and the commentariate's take on his policy may live on thanks to YouTube, the digital divide poses problems of its own.

Great Boot, Shame About the Grill!

OK, time for a confession. I'm one of those sad creatures who anthropomorphize their cars (and motor bikes for that matter). My much-loved Ducati SSD900 was the 'Beast'. He (it was definitely a he) was big, black, fast and bad! My Jaguar (The Boy) was a refined old gentleman, all refined leather and wood, while the Alfa Spider (The Toy) was all flash (and limited go). My current car a Chrysler 300C is all squat power - a 5.7l V8 will do that for you. I love its angry growl when i turn the ignition and the way it snaps my head back when I put my foot down on Sheik Z Road. I get when Now a team Florida State have established that car design imbues our vehicles with a discernible personality all of their own and in the process, proved once and for all that academics really do need to get out more. Now researchers have long asserted that we gain 90% of our information from faces. It seems evolution has configured our brains to examine faces to detect threats, assess social relationships and intuit emotions and personality traits. This explains why I always thought my Alfa Spider was 'hot'!   http://www.fsu.com/pages/2008/11/26/cars_have_personality.html   Image: 1. Alfa Spider, author, 2. Chrysler 300C, www.autoexpress.co.uk

Revealing Hidden Charms

One of the charming necessities of live as an impoverished artist is the economic imperative to recycle materials - particularly unsuccessful canvasses and boards. This poses a problem when the artist becomes eminently collectable and has spawned a new geek sport - peering behind layers of old paint for ghostly images of pictures past. Recently, one such team got lucky when they detected a woman's portrait behind Vincent van Gogh's 'Patch of Grass'. Drawing collaborators from the Delft University of Technology and the University of Antwerp, the team used synchrotron radiation induced X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, a new technique that measures the fluorescence of each chemical element, allowing large areas of canvass to be mapped quickly and in great detail. Art historians suspect around 30% of van Gogh's paintings may have been painted over, so the hunt is on - for funding as much as hidden images!  http://www.tudelft.nl/live/pagina.jsp?id=6383a391-d2c6-4341-bcd0-62cba4cff50b&lang=en   Image: Hidden portrait of an unknown woman behind Vincent van Gogh's Patch of Grass', Delft University of Technology

Not So Virgin

There's a charming ad currently playing on what passes for cable television in Dubai featuring Isabelle Allende . The author talks about our love of storytelling, opining that we are hardwired for storytelling. One of the most powerful stories is the notion of the pristine wilderness, untouched by human hands, with all its romantic connotations. Few tracts of wilderness evoke this as provocatively as the Amazon. Ever since reading Charles C. Mann's '1491', I've been watching the evidence for pre-Columbian Amazonian occupation pile up. The latest contribution comes from the Universities of Florida and Brazil by way of the Kuikuro an indigenous Amazonian tribe. Their paper suggests that what was once mistaken for virgin tropical forest is in fact the creation of human hands - lots of them! The plan of these settlements took the form of a tapestry of walled villages, smaller hamlets, all clustered around a main plaza and date from 1250 through to 1650, when European diseases caused the local population numbers to crash. Fish farms lie dotted about the hamlets some of which are built on the 'black earth' fields built up by the early Indian inhabitants. Each settlement was dominated by a road running northeast to southeast, connecting to the central plaza and surrounded by defensive earthworks. It's a twist in a story that turning out to be more fairytale than reality TV. Plus, it's a bit of a bugger for conservationists trying to model unblemished biodiversity!   http://news.ufl.edu/2008/08/28/urban-amazon/   Image: 1. Aerial photo of a Kuikuro village in the Amazon, 2 - 4 Excavating an Amazonian settlement site, University of Florida

Triumph of Industry Over Priorities

Dubai has many charms. Yet beneath its cosmopolitan and very bling bling exterior and high energy development pace, its day-to-day priorities can be baffling. My wife and I live in an apartment in one of Dubai's major beachside developments as the accompanying picture shows. It resembles Batman's Gotham City at first glance. (and some of the cars rival the Batmobile in size!) The development comprises six or seven clusters of six towers dominating the beachside environment. As I stepped out of my lift entrance to the underground car park in my block, I saw two of the building's maintenance staff, each astride a ride-on mini street cleaner industriously washing the white painted arrows marking out the traffic flow direction on the car park floor! Given that Dubai relies on desalination for its water supply, this was a very expensive buff and polish. I hope the cleaners were using recycled water! Still, those white arrows were gleaming in the garage's fluorescent lights!

Blow Glass Like An Egyptian!

Archaeologists always appear reluctant to give civilizations credit for trading technology. Until recently, Egypt was thought to have imported its glass from the Near East and reworked it to produce glassware and temple offerings. A team from Cardiff University has reconstructed a 3,000 year old kiln use to manufacture glass at Armana, on the banks of the Nile. The site dates back to the reign of Akhanatum 1352 - 1336 BC. and was part of  an industrial complex containing a pottery and facilities for producing blue pigment and faience. Not only were local craftsmen making their own glass, but they were producing a wide range of other products at the same site.

There's a saying that you only find what you look for. Egyptologists have lived up to that by focusing on temples and royal graves. The daily lives of ancient Egyptians have received little attention. This situation wasn't helped by having most of the mounds identifying ancient cities ploughed under or buried under modern cities. Halfway between Aswan and Luxor lies the remains of Tell Edfu. Under the provincial town mound lies 3,000 years of Egyptian stratigraphy. Cities like Tell Edfu mobilised the harvest for the Pharos and archeologists excavating a courtyard there have found the largest grain silos in a town centre. They comprise seven round mud-brick structures 5.5 to 6.5 meters in diameter dating back to the 17th Dynasty (1630 - 1520 BC). Archaeologists also found an earlier mud-brick building with 16 wooden columns - possibly a governor's palace used for administration. It's a far cry from the sexy monumental architecture that powers Egypt's tourism industry. 

http://www.cf.ac.uk/news/mediacentre/mediareleases/Dec07/three-thousandyearold-furnace-rebuilt-to-uncover-egyptian-glassmaking-secrets.html   http://news.uchicago.edu/news.php?asset_id=1402   Image: 1. Reconstructed glass kiln, Cardiff University, 2 & 3. Tell Edfu excavation site, N. Moeller, Tell Edfu Project

Adding Sparkle To the Lords of Copan

One of the images that remain with me to this day was the procession of intricately carved stele celebrating the accomplishments of the Lords of Copan. The stele are to be found at Copan at the end of the Mayan trail just inside the Honduran border with Guatemala.. The ruins are majestic and I don't think I missed a single excavated stone. However, the Lords of Copan have hid one of their greatest treasures, a Rosalila inside one of the great pyramids. The blood red Rosalila was a majestic temple built at the height of the Mayan civilisation around AD 400 - 800. The Rosalila was later concealed inside a larger pyramid and only discovered late last century. There is a replica Rosalila to be seen in the heart of the Copan museum. The reconstructed Rolalila is embellished with a collection of exotic masks and intricate designs. Now a Queensland University of Technology researcher has established that the Mayans covered their temples with over 15 coats of red and white paint and layers stucco before coating it with mica. The Maya temples would have glittered in the bright tropical sunlight. Naturally, being Mayan, nothing was simple. The discovery was a love child of an infrared analysis technique known as FTIR-ATR spectral imaging which had never before been used in an archaeological context. Another example of a wonderful technology at the command of an inventive mind!

http://www.news.qut.edu.au/cgi-bin/WebObjects/News.woa/wa/goNewsPage?newsEventID=15353   Image: 1. 18 Rabbit stele, www.ultimatejourney.com, 2. Location map of Copan, Wikipedia, 3. Reconstruction of the Rosalila in the Copan museum, Dr. Jay Hall

Continuity Suggests New Stonehenge Insights

Few civilisations spring fully formed from the earth. Most represent either a continuation of existing an civilisation or a reactive break with tradition. Nowhere is this better illustrated than at the iconic Stonehenge. Once thought to be an evocative representation of a single idea, Stonehenge is now seen as either a development of a dominant culture or as a series of evolutionary changes. Approximately 500 metres north of Stonehenge is a feature known as the Cursus. Discovered in 1723 it is 100 metres wide and runs for about a mile. Carbon dating by the University of Manchester of an antler pick used to dig the Circus revealed a sensational date of 3,500 years BC - 500 years older than Stonehenge. It now appears Stonehenge was built within an existing complex of standing monuments, including the Cursus.

Further evidence of the cultural continuity as a driving power behind Stonehenge emerged when University of Sheffield archaeologists radiocarbon dated remains from human cremation burials. The burials tested were excavated in the 1950s but had never been sampled. The dates showed the site around Stonehenge had been in continuous use from 3,000 BC to after the sarsen stones were erected in 2,500 BC. The burials are initially few in number, expanding in later decades. Archaeologists now speculate Stonehenge was erected by ancient chiefs and became the internment site for them and their family. Stonehenge has been a special place for 500 years, remaining vibrant due to the relationship links associated with the site. Continuity saw the site itself remain in use while the manifestation of that usage morphed.

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=3719   http://www.shef.ac.uk/mediacentre/2008/1024.html   Image: Recently discovered antler pick used to dig the Circus, University of Manchester, 2. Excavation site, University of Manchester, 3. Stonehenge, Clint Scholtz

Europe Loses Another Invention To the East

The UN cops a lot of flak but it recently brought together a team which turned a small slice of art history on its head. When 18 European countries came together ot fund a synchrotron they were hoping for breakthroughs in phareceuticals, cosmetics, petrochemicals and microelectronics. They probably weren't thinking of messing with 7th Century AD Buddhist cave paintings. Yet the same technology which makes a synchrotron ideal for analysing very thin layers of compounds in cosmetics and petrochemicals also works when focused on the layers of pigment used to depict aspect of Buddist life in the Bamiyan caves. Combining four synchrotron specialities; micro spectroscopy, micro x-ray fluorescence, micro x-ray absorption spectroscopy and micro x-ray diffraction researchers discovered Bamiyan's long-forgotten artists had developed oil based paints hundreds of years before it was 'invented' by Europeans. Sadly, the Bamiyan caves last achieved a world audience when the Taliban turned its artillery on two ancient gigantic standing statues carved into the cliff face in 2001.

http://www.esrf.eu/news/general/bamiyan/   Image: 1. Researchers take paint samples from a Bamiyan cave, National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo, 2. Detail from a cave painting, National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo