Ravenous

Quetzalcoatlus goes down in history as the largest flying organism of all time, with a wingspan of 12 metres, which is larger than some planes. Quetzalcoatlus was the undisputed king of the Late cretaceous skies, so it seems fitting that its name is derived from an Aztec god, Quetzalcoatl. Although its wingspan is impressive, Quetzalcoatlus also had a huge 2.5 metre long skull, that is the average height of an Asian elephant! To get such a huge animal in the air, a complex system of air sacs was needed inside the bones, this meant that Quetzalcoatlus probably weighed no more than 250kg. Quetzalcoatlus, along with many pterosaurs, was originally thought to spend most of its time gliding over the oceans, skimming fish out from the surface of the water with their elongated beaks. However, due to the skull and beak morphology and the presence of fossils far inland it has become more widely accepted that Quetzalcoatlus stalked prey far below on the land. The fore and hind limb morphology of Quetzalcoatlus also suggests that they were competent walkers on the land, they would have stood up to 3 metres tall. 

Hidden like Viking gold under the landscape there is a rich body of nearly lost folkwitch tradition hiding in plain sight on the internet. Particularly in the 18th and 19th century antiquarians, folklorists and ethnologists documented the rural and occasionally urban folk beliefs of practically all of the UK and much of Europe. Organizations like the Folklore Society, founded in 1878, were created to help catalog and publish this body of collected ethnological data. A vast repository of a spectrum of witch and cunning craft practices.

Below are a list of links to various sources on the internet. The non Abramhamic roots of British folk traditions date from an era of Celtic settlers, and thus much of the spirit tradition concerns beings we now collectively call “fairies”, though their origins and nature differ greatly.

Books Available Online for free:

Folklore Society/Folk-Lore Journal:

Over 100 publications made by the Folk-Lore Society can be found on Archive.org. Unfortunately these are mostly unsorted, although they represent a massive amount of folkwitch information. Particularly in the realm of curses, hexes, salves, second sight, and boundary magic.

I will be launching a separate blog dedicated to delving into the contents of the Folklore Society’s publications in the next few weeks. In the meantime - Happy digging: Link to archive of FOLKLORE JOURNAL

Books whose content focuses on first-hand accounts of folk traditions, alpha by author. (* denotes particularly important titles)

Richard Blakeborough - Wit, Character, Folklore and Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire (1898)

J G Campbell - Witchcraft & Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1902) - Superstitions of the Highlands & Islands of Scotland, Collected entirely from Oral Sources (1900)*

Edward Clodd - Tom Tit Tot - an essay on savage philosophy in folk-tale (1898)

Oswald Cockayne - Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England (1864)

Thomas Crofton Croker - Fairies Tales and Legends of the South of Ireland (1834)*

John Graham Dalyell - The Darker Superstitions of Scotland (1834)*

Walter Evans-Wentz - The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911)

Richard Folkard - Plant Lore, Legends and Lyrics (1892)

W. Gregor - Notes on the Folklore of the North East of Scotland (1881)

Lady Gregory - Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920)*

William Henderson - Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (1866)*

Thomas Keightley - The Fairy Mythology (1828)

Robert Kirk - The Secret Commonwealth (1893, written 1691)*

Fiona Macleod (William Sharp) - Where the Forest Murmurs (Nature Essays) 1906

James Napier - Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within this Century (1879)*

Sir Walter Scot - Letters on Witchcraft and Demonology (1884) - The Existence of Evil Spirits Proved (1843)

Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe - A Historical Account of the belief in Witchcraft in Scotland (1884)

Wirt Sikes - British Goblins Welsh Folklore fairy mythology legends and traditions (1880)

Eve Simpson - Folklore in Lowland Scotland (1908)

Benjamin Thorpe -Northern Mythology, Comprising the Principal Popular Traditions and Superstitions of Scandinavia, North Germany, and the Netherlands Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3

Lady Wilde - Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland * Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3

Thomas Wilkie - Old Rites, Ceremonies, and Customs of the Inhabitants of the Southern Counties of Scotland (1916) (History Of The Berwickshire Naturalists’ Club Vol 23 1916-18, pages 50-145)

Suggested books that are unfortunately in copyright or otherwise not currently available online:

(Links to goodreads and worldcat.org)

Katharine Briggs - The Anatomy of Puck (1959)* - Pale Hecate’s Team (1962)* - Fairies in English Tradition and Literature (1967)

Thomas Davidson - Rowan Tree and Red Thread (1949)

George Ewart Evans - The Pattern Under the Plow (1971)* - Ask the Fellow Who Cuts the Hay (1965) - The Crooked Scythe

Harold Hansen - The Witch’s Garden (1978)

DA Mac Manus -The Middle Kingdom (1959)*

Emma Wilby - Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (2005)* - The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (2010)

C. L. Zalewski - Herbs in Magic and Alchemy: Techniques From Ancient Herbal Lore (1990)

Misc Short articles:

Frederika Bain - The Binding of the Fairies: Four Spells (2012)

Thomas Forbes - Witch’s Milk and Witches’ Marks (link to pdf)* (Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, XXII 1950)

Fae Honeybell - Cunning Folk and Wizards In Early Modern England (2010) (link to pdf)

I was hoping for a better article with a less sensational title to come out, but this will have to suffice.

One of Angamuco’s ‘neighbourhoods’, revealed using light detection and ranging scanning. Photograph: C Fisher

Archaeology might evoke thoughts of intrepid explorers and painstaking digging, but in fact researchers say it is a high-tech laser mapping technique that is rewriting the textbooks at an unprecedented rate.

The approach, known as light detection and ranging scanning (lidar) involves directing a rapid succession of laser pulses at the ground from an aircraft.

The time and wavelength of the pulses reflected by the surface are combined with GPS and other data to produce a precise, three-dimensional map of the landscape. Crucially, the technique probes beneath foliage – useful for areas where vegetation is dense.

Earlier this month researchers revealed it had been used to discover an ancient Mayan city within the dense jungles of Guatemala, while it has also helped archaeologists to map the city of Caracol – another Mayan metropolis.

Now, researchers have used the technique to reveal the full extent of an ancient city in western Mexico, about a half an hour’s drive from Morelia, built by rivals to the Aztecs.

“To think that this massive city existed in the heartland of Mexico for all this time and nobody knew it was there is kind of amazing,” said Chris Fisher, an archaeologist at Colorado State University who is presenting the latest findings from the study at the conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin, Texas, this week.

While less well known than the Aztecs, the Purépecha were a major civilisation in central Mexico in the early 16th century, before Europeans arrived and wreaked havoc through war and disease. Purépecha cities included an imperial capital called Tzintzuntzan that lies on the edge of Lake Pátzcuaro in western Mexico, an area in which modern Purépecha communities still live.

Using lidar, researchers have found that the recently-discovered city, known as Angamuco, was more than double the size of Tzintzuntzan – although probably not as densely populated – extending over 26 km2 of ground that was covered by a lava flow thousands of years ago.

The city of Angamuco, which occupies a lava field on the eastern edge of the Lake Pátzcuaro basin. Photograph: C Fisher

“That is a huge area with a lot of people and a lot of architectural foundations that are represented,” said Fisher. “If you do the maths, all of a sudden you are talking about 40,000 building foundations up there, which is [about] the same number of building foundations that are on the island of Manhattan.”

The team also found that Angamuco has an unusual layout. Monuments such as pyramids and open plazas are largely concentrated in eight zones around the city’s edges, rather being located in one large city centre. According to Fisher, more than 100,000 people are thought to have lived in Angamuco in its heyday between about 1000AD to 1350AD. “[Its size] would make it the biggest city that we know of right now in western Mexico during this period,” said Fisher.

First found by researchers in 2007, archeologists initially attempted to explore Angamuco using a traditional “boots on the ground” approach, resulting in the discovery of about 1,500 architectural features over each square kilometre surveyed. But the team soon realised the rugged terrain meant it would take at least a decade to map the whole area.

Examples of sunken plazas, patios, and related features in Angamuco. Photograph: C Fisher

Instead, since 2011 the lidar technique has been used to map a 35km2 area, revealing an astonishing array of features at high resolution, from pyramids and temples to road systems, garden areas for growing food and even ball courts.

So far more than 7,000 architectural features over a 4km2 area seen using lidar have been verified by the team on the ground, with excavations undertaken at seven locations to shed further light on the site.

The earliest evidence from the city, including ceramic fragments and radiocarbon dating of remnants from offerings, dates to about 900AD, with the city believed to have undergone two waves of development and one of collapse before the arrival of the Spanish.

Fisher adds that lidar is likely to lead to further developments. “Everywhere you point the lidar instrument you find new stuff, and that is because we know so little about the archaeological universe in the Americas right now,” he said. “Right now every textbook has to be rewritten, and two years from now[they’re] going to have to be rewritten again.”

Fisher has also used lidar to explore a remote area of the Mosquitia region of north-eastern Honduras, shedding light on what is now known as the City of the Jaguar. This settlement, the team found, had terraces, water control features such as canals, and boasted about 10 plaza complexes, with the whole city stretching over three square kilometres.

“Many of these areas of the Americas that we see today that we think that we would classify as pristine tropical forests are really abandoned gardens,” says Fisher.

However, previous coverage of the work has proved controversial, with some saying claims of a “lost city” smack of colonialist rhetoric.

Elizabeth Graham, professor of mesoamerican archaeology at University College London who was not involved in the projects, said the team’s work was impressive, and that lidar was backing up long-held suspicions about the size of archaeological settlements.

“Once it shows all traces of the land surface, we can interpret those, because you can tell what is natural and what is not,” she added. “It’ll show you terracing, where houses are – or at least structures of some sort – agricultural features, manipulated land – all of that.”

GOING LONG  Starting around 1300, high-ranking members of a pre-Inca population increasingly had their heads bound into a narrow, elongated shape during infancy, a researcher says.

Bigwigs in a more than 600-year-old South American population were easy to spot. Their artificially elongated, teardrop-shaped heads screamed prestige, a new study finds.

During the 300 years before the Incas’ arrival in 1450, intentional head shaping among prominent members of the Collagua ethnic community in Peru increasingly centered on a stretched-out look, says bioarchaeologist Matthew Velasco of Cornell University. Having long, narrow noggins cemented bonds among members of a power elite — a unity that may have helped pave a relatively peaceful incorporation into the Incan Empire, Velasco proposes in the February Current Anthropology.

“Increasingly uniform head shapes may have encouraged a collective identity and political unity among Collagua elites,” Velasco says. These Collagua leaders may have negotiated ways to coexist with the encroaching Inca rather than fight them, he speculates. But the fate of the Collaguas and a neighboring population, the Cavanas, remains hazy. Those populations lived during a conflict-ridden time — after the collapse of two major Andean societies around 1100 (SN: 8/1/09, p. 16) and before the expansion of the Inca Empire starting in the 15th century.

For at least the past several thousand years, human groups in various parts of the world have intentionally modified skull shapes by wrapping infants’ heads with cloth or binding the head between two pieces of wood (SN: 4/29/17, p. 18). Researchers generally assume that this practice signified membership in ethnic or kin groups, or perhaps social rank.

HEADY BURIALS In southeastern Peru, structures at the base of a cliff contained the bodies of presumably high-ranking members of a pre-Inca-era population known as the Collagua. These individuals gradually adopted a style of intentional head shaping that resulted in many of them having long, narrow noggins, a new study finds.

The Callagua people lived in Colca Valley in southeastern Peru and raised alpaca for wool. By tracking Collagua skull shapes over 300 years, Velasco found that elongated skulls became increasingly linked to high social status. By the 1300s, for instance, Collagua women with deliberately distended heads suffered much less skull damage from physical attacks than other females did, he reports. Chemical analyses of bones indicates that long-headed women ate a particularly wide variety of foods.

Until now, knowledge of head-shaping practices in ancient Peru primarily came from Spanish accounts written in the 1500s. Those documents referred to tall, thin heads among Collaguas and wide, long heads among Cavanas, implying that a single shape had always characterized each group.

“Velasco has discovered that the practice of cranial modification was much more dynamic over time and across social [groups],” says bioarchaeologist Deborah Blom of the University of Vermont in Burlington.

Velasco examined 211 skulls of mummified humans interred in either of two Collagua cemeteries. Burial structures built against a cliff face were probably reserved for high-ranking individuals, whereas common burial grounds in several caves and under nearby rocky overhangs belonged to regular folk.

SHAPING UP About 300 years before the Inca arrived, low-ranking members of the Collagua people sometimes had their heads flattened at the back during infancy (left). More often, their heads were not modified (right).

Radiocarbon analyses of 13 bone and sediment samples allowed Velasco to sort Collagua skulls into early and late pre-Inca groups. A total of 97 skulls, including all 76 found in common burial grounds, belonged to the early group, which dated to between 1150 and 1300. Among these skulls, 38 — or about 39 percent — had been intentionally modified. Head shapes included sharply and slightly elongated forms as well as skulls compressed into wide, squat configurations.

Of the 14 skulls with extreme elongation, 13 came from low-ranking individuals, a pattern that might suggest regular folk first adopted elongated head shapes. But with only 21 skulls from elites, the finding may underestimate the early frequency of elongated heads among the high-status crowd. Various local groups may have adopted their own styles of head modification at that time, Velasco suggests.

some lovely biology-inspired art by Odra Noel, who uses vivid colors painted on silk to create these microscope views of cells and tissues:

1. the retina

2. adipose tissue

3. a maturing ovum with surrounding ovarian tissue

In what’s being hailed as a “major breakthrough” in Maya archaeology, researchers have identified the ruins of more than 60,000 houses, palaces, elevated highways, and other human-made features that have been hidden for centuries under the jungles of northern Guatemala.

Using a revolutionary technology known as LiDAR (short for “Light Detection And Ranging”), scholars digitally removed the tree canopy from aerial images of the now-unpopulated landscape, revealing the ruins of a sprawling pre-Columbian civilization that was far more complex and interconnected than most Maya specialists had supposed.

“The LiDAR images make it clear that this entire region was a settlement system whose scale and population density had been grossly underestimated,” said Thomas Garrison, an Ithaca College archaeologist and National Geographic Explorer who specializes in using digital technology for archaeological research.

Garrison is part of a consortium of researchers who are participating in the project, which was spearheaded by the PACUNAM Foundation, a Guatemalan nonprofit that fosters scientific research, sustainable development, and cultural heritage preservation.

The project mapped more than 800 square miles (2,100 square kilometers) of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in the Petén region of Guatemala, producing the largest LiDAR data set ever obtained for archaeological research.

The results suggest that Central America supported an advanced civilization that was, at its peak some 1,200 years ago, more comparable to sophisticated cultures such as ancient Greece or China than to the scattered and sparsely populated city states that ground-based research had long suggested.

In addition to hundreds of previously unknown structures, the LiDAR images show raised highways connecting urban centers and quarries. Complex irrigation and terracing systems supported intensive agriculture capable of feeding masses of workers who dramatically reshaped the landscape.

The ancient Maya never used the wheel or beasts of burden, yet “this was a civilization that was literally moving mountains,” said Marcello Canuto, a Tulane University archaeologist who participated in the project.

“We’ve had this western conceit that complex civilizations can’t flourish in the tropics, that the tropics are where civilizations go to die,” said Canuto, who conducts archaeological research at a Guatemalan site known as La Corona. “But with the new LiDAR-based evidence from Central America and [Cambodia’s] Angkor Wat, we now have to consider that complex societies may have formed in the tropics and made their way outward from there.”

SURPRISING INSIGHTS

“LiDAR is revolutionizing archaeology the way the Hubble Space Telescope revolutionized astronomy,” said Francisco Estrada-Belli, a Tulane University archaeologist and National Geographic Explorer. “We’ll need 100 years to go through all [the data] and really understand what we’re seeing.”

Already, though, the survey has yielded surprising insights into settlement patterns, inter-urban connectivity, and militarization in the Maya Lowlands. At its peak in the Maya classic period (approximately A.D. 250–900), the civilization covered an area about twice the size of medieval England, but it was far more densely populated.

“Most people had been comfortable with population estimates of around 5 million,” said Estrada-Belli, who directs a multi-disciplinary archaeological project at Holmul, Guatemala. “With this new data it’s no longer unreasonable to think that there were 10 to 15 million people there—including many living in low-lying, swampy areas that many of us had thought uninhabitable.”

Virtually all the Mayan cities were connected by causeways wide enough to suggest that they were heavily trafficked and used for trade and other forms of regional interaction. These highways were elevated to allow easy passage even during rainy seasons. In a part of the world where there is usually too much or too little precipitation, the flow of water was meticulously planned and controlled via canals, dikes, and reservoirs.

Among the most surprising findings was the ubiquity of defensive walls, ramparts, terraces, and fortresses. “Warfare wasn’t only happening toward the end of the civilization,” said Garrison. “It was large-scale and systematic, and it endured over many years.”

The survey also revealed thousands of pits dug by modern-day looters.

“Many of these new sites are only new to us; they are not new to looters,” said Marianne Hernandez, president of the PACUNAM Foundation. Environmental degradation is another concern. Guatemala is losing more than 10 percent of its forests annually, and habitat loss has accelerated along its border with Mexico as trespassers burn and clear land for agriculture and human settlement.

“By identifying these sites and helping to understand who these ancient people were, we hope to raise awareness of the value of protecting these places,” Hernandez said.

The survey is the first phase of the PACUNAM LiDAR Initiative, a three-year project that will eventually map more than 5,000 square miles (14,000 square kilometers) of Guatemala’s lowlands, part of a pre-Columbian settlement system that extended north to the Gulf of Mexico.

“The ambition and the impact of this project is just incredible,” said Kathryn Reese-Taylor, a University of Calgary archaeologist and Maya specialist who was not associated with the PACUNAM survey. “After decades of combing through the forests, no archaeologists had stumbled across these sites. More importantly, we never had the big picture that this data set gives us. It really pulls back the veil and helps us see the civilization as the ancient Maya saw it.”

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/maya-laser-lidar-guatemala-pacunam/