Sunday, October 13, 2013

NBC News – St. Augustine mission dig site
In St. Augustine where a building is scheduled to go up, a mandatory archeological examination is being held. This was a Franciscan mission called Pocotataca from the early to mid 1700's, serving some Europeans, but mainly native Americans of the Yamassee Tribe of South Carolina. There is no silver or gold on the site, but a large amount of Indian pottery and some European. A farmstead was found there, as at the other three such missions located near St. Augustine. There were about 20 huts constructed from poles and palm fronds, a small church and a “casa fuerte” or fortress. The 1717 census shows 95 people living there, whereas in 1739 the population had dropped to 56 due partly to European diseases to which the Indians had no immunity. Another interesting establishment there was Fort Mose, the first legally sanctioned free black community in the United States. Then in 1763, when the British took over Florida, most of the Indians moved with the Spanish to Cuba. Other population drops among the Indians occurred when the Indian women married white men and settled down away from the village.

St. Augustine is a beautiful and very interesting town, due to the fact that a number of its buildings go back to Spanish days. Much of the architecture in the town has a Spanish influence. It began in 1565 as the capital of Spanish Florida, and continued as a population center until modern times, simply changing hands when new nations took over. Don't drive through there if you're in a hurry, because the streets are narrow and some are one-way, but if you do drive through take the time to look at the scenery. The best thing to do is to park your car and walk down the main streets, stopping to look in all the little shops and restaurants until you simply have to rest. Don't forget to tour the Castillo de San Marcos, a large and very impressive Spanish Fort. If you come at the right time, they will march in wearing their Spanish uniforms and fire the cannons for the tourists.

I went to church today. I am only going once a month, at which time I pay my pledge. If I go on the second Sunday in the month my favorite minister will give the sermon. He is well-educated, but gives a down-to-earth talk and makes it interesting. He is a carpenter by trade and has shoulder-length straight hair with beads woven in at the sides like an Indian. He is tall and lean and looks very striking. He serves two other Unitarian Universalist churches in the surrounding area on other Sundays.

I met with Ginger for lunch. We went to Famous Amos in Arlington, and I had a new item on their menu – a three egg omelet with cheese, onions, country ham, diced tomatoes and peppers in it. It was delicious. I couldn't finish it all, so I brought the rest home for supper tonight. I took Ginger my last two novels and she was overjoyed. I hadn't told her that I had written them. She is always looking for something to read. We are very similar people, in that we are quiet-living, not showy, and we enjoy a good mystery. I'm glad she lives close enough for me to visit regularly.

Clay balls from Mesopotamia yield code to information storage -- NBC News


Archaeologists are using CT scanning and 3-D modeling to crack a lost prehistoric code hidden inside clay balls, dating to some 5,500 years ago, found in Mesopotamia. The balls are covered in stamped or carved symbols.
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Researchers studying clay balls from Mesopotamia have discovered clues to a lost code that was used for record-keeping about 200 years before writing was invented.
The clay balls may represent the world's "very first data storage system," at least the first that scientists know of, said Christopher Woods, a professor at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, in a lecture at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum, where he presented initial findings.
The balls, often called "envelopes" by researchers, were sealed and contain tokens in a variety of geometric shapes — the balls varying from golf ball-size to baseball-size. Only about 150 intact examples survive worldwide today.


The researchers used high-resolution CT scans and 3-D modeling to look inside more than 20 examples that were excavated at the site of Choga Mish, in western Iran, in the late 1960s. They were created about 5,500 years ago at a time when early cities were flourishing in Mesopotamia.
Researchers have long believed these clay balls were used to record economic transactions. That interpretation is based on an analysis of a 3,300-year-old clay ball found at a site in Mesopotamia named Nuzi that had 49 pebbles and a cuneiform text containing a contract commanding a shepherd to care for 49 sheep and goats.
How these devices would have worked in prehistoric times, before the invention of writing, is a mystery. Researchers now face the question of how people recorded the number and type of a commodity being exchanged without the help of writing.


The CT scans revealed that some of the balls have tiny channels, 1-2 millimeters (less than one-tenth of an inch) across, crisscrossing them. Woods said he's not certain what they were used for, but speculates the balls contained fine threads that connected together on the outside. These threads could have held labels, perhaps made out of wax, which reflected the tokens within the clay balls.
The tokens within the balls come in 14 different shapes, including spheres, pyramids, ovoids, lenses and cones, the researchers found. Rather than representing whole words, these shapes would have conveyed numbers connected to a variety of metrological systems used in counting different types of commodities, Woods suggested. One ovoid, for instance, might mean a certain unit, say 10, which was used while counting a certain type of commodity.


The researchers, however, were perplexed when their CT scans found one clay ball containing tokens made of a low-density material, likely bitumen, a petroleum substance. "When we make a three-dimensional model of the cavity you get this very strange amoeba like-looking shape," Woods said during the lecture.
The tokens, in this instance, had air bubbles around them, suggesting they were wrapped in cloth before being put in the ball, the cloth disintegrating over time. In addition, it appears that a liquid, likely liquid bitumen, was poured over the tokens after they were inserted into the balls. What someone was trying to communicate by creating such tokens is unknown.
"That's a mystery," Woods told LiveScience in an interview. "I don't really have a good answer for that," he said, adding that the bitumen tokens may represent a divergent accounting practice, or, perhaps even, that the transaction recorded involved bitumen.
In ancient Mesopotamia bitumen was used as an adhesive and to waterproof things like baskets, boats and the foundations of buildings, Woods said. [In Photos: Treasures from Mesopotamia]


All of the clay balls contain, on the outside, one "equatorial" seal (running through the middle) and quite often two "polar" seals, running above and below.
The equatorial seals tend to be unique and more complex containing what appear to be mythological motifs; for instance a ball from the Louvre Museum shows human figures fighting what appear to be serpents. The polar seals, on the other hand, are repeated more often and tend to have simpler geometric motifs.
Based on this evidence, Woods hypothesizes the seal in the middle represents the "buyer" or recipient; the polar seals would represent the "seller" or distributor and perhaps third parties who would have participated in the transaction or acted as witnesses.
Many people would have acted as the buyers, but only a limited number of sellers or distributors would have been around to transact business with, explaining why the polar seals are repeated more often. 


Many people would have acted as the buyers, but only a limited number of sellers or distributors would have been around to transact business with, explaining why the polar seals are repeated more often. 
After a transaction of some importance was complete, one of these clay devices was created to serve as a "receipt" of sorts for the seller, as a record of what was expended. "There's a greater necessity to keep track of things that have been expended than things that are on hand," Woods said in the lecture.
Deciphering what transaction each clay ball represented is a trickier problem. Woods suspects the tokens represent numbers and metrical units. It's possible that, through the different token shapes, people in prehistoric times communicated numbers and units in a way similar to how the first scribes did 200 years later when writing was invented. If that's the case, Woods and other scientists may be able, in time, to crack the code by uncovering how token types cluster and vary.
"If they are, then there is at least some hope of deciphering the envelopes and with it uncovering the earliest evidence for complex numerical literacy," Woods said.


The amount of detail the scientists gleaned from the CT scans and 3-D modeling was extraordinary, Woods said during the lecture. "We can learn more about these artifacts by non-destructive testing than we could by physically opening the envelopes," he said.
Woods will publish the full research results in the future and plans to put the images and 3D models online.