February 17, 2011

Willandra Lakes Region, Australia, Woners Of Australia, 7 Wonders, Lakes Pics

The fossil remains of a series of lakes and sand formations that date from the Pleistocene can be found in this region, together with archaeological evidence of human occupation dating from 45-60,000 years ago.

It is a unique landmark in the study of human evolution on the Australian continent. Several well-preserved fossils of giant marsupials also have been found here.

The fossil remains of a series of lakes and sand formations that date from the Pleistocene can be found in this region, as well as archaeological proof of human occupation dating from 45-60,000 years ago.

It is a unique landmark in the study of human evolution on the Australian continent. Several well-preserved fossils of giant marsupials are also found here.

The Willandra Lakes Region is primarily a geological site, with fauna and flora of significant concern in an archaeological sense: the Willandra Lakes may be the best locality for establishing a link between the extinction of the giant marsupial fauna and predation by humans. The Australian geological environment, with its low topographic relief and low energy systems, is unique in the longevity of the landscapes it preserves. The site includes the entire lake and river system from Lake Mulurulu, the latest to hold water, to the Prungle Lakes, dry for more than 15,000 years, and the region is unique on earth.

The Willandra Lakes provide excellent conditions for recording the events of the Pleistocene epoch (when man evolved into his present form), demonstrating how non-glaciated zones responded to the major climatic fluctuations between glacial periods.

When Willandra Billabong Creek ceased to flow and so to replenish the lakes, this dried in series from the Prungle Lakes in the south to Lake Mulurulu in the north over several thousand years; as each lake evaporated, it became an independent system undergoing a basic transformation from fresh water to saline water to dry lake bed.

As long as water remained in a lake, dunes were accumulated along the eastern margins. It is this system of transverse crescent-shaped dunes, called ‘lunettes’, which contain evidence of past hydrological and geochemical environments.

The freshwater lakes concentrated clean quartz sands on eastern beaches, but the lakes became more saline as they dried out, and clay pellets were chipped from the exposed lake floor by high winds to form distinctive clay lunettes.

Such clay dunes are rare in world terms, and the well-preserved fossil examples in the Willandra Lakes region are an important geological resource; the 30 m high Lake Chibnalwood clay lunette is among the largest on the planet.

The Willandra Lakes Region is a remarkable illustration of a site where the economic life of Homo sapiens can be reconstructed, showing an amazing adaptation to local resources and a fascinating interaction between human culture and the changing environment. The fossil landscape remains largely unmodified since the end of the last Pleistocene ice age.

Archaeological discoveries made here are of remarkable value. They include a 26,000-year-old cremation site (the oldest known in the world), a 30,000-year-old ochre burial, the remains of giant marsupials in an excellent state of conservation, and grindstones from 18,000 years ago used to crush wild grass for flour whose age can be compared with that claimed for the earliest seed-grind economies. The region also contains the remains of hearths, some dated to 30,000 years ago.

The location also provides proof of the most distant point of dispersal reached during the course of the last glaciation by Homo sapiens and the earliest economic data in the world for human dependence on freshwater resources, in a pattern paralleled by Aborigines as recently as 100 years ago on the Darling River.

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October 30, 2010

The Aztecs had two different games – and patolli tlachtli. Tlachtli was a ball game between teams with a rubber ball. The court was shaped like a capital I and was 60 meters long and 10 meters wide. One person from each team would have to throw the ball through a hoop high vertically above head with hands-free knees. The ring is placed on opposite walls in the center of the court. Somehow this game of modern football and basketball. The team that made the first basket won the game. Sometimes it took hours to complete a game.

The other party, patolli was a game of chance played with stones and dry beans. In this game you are given six pieces to play and have ten stones of jade to play. The forum to play in an “X” divided into squares. Each player has a port in the middle of the “X”. Now you must decide how many jade stones you want to bet on the game. It gives you five cacao beans with white dots painted on them. These will be used as given. If you get a white dot moves one box, if you get two white dots that move two squares and so on, but if you get five white dots that move ten squares. The pieces must be right. To begin the game you have to throw one. When you do return to base, take that piece of board, your opponent is a jade stone. Keep playing until one player has lost all their beans.

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• The Aztecs, Laws and Politics
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May 18, 2010

For a quarter of a century, two archaeologists and their team slogged through wild tropical vegetation to investigate and map the remains of one of the largest Maya cities, in Central America. Slow, sweaty hacking with machetes seemed to be the only way to discover the breadth of an ancient urban landscape now hidden beneath a dense forest canopy.

Even the new remote-sensing technologies, so effective in recent decades at surveying other archaeological sites, were no help. Imaging radar and multispectral surveys by air and from space could not “see” through the trees.
Then, in the dry spring season a year ago, the husband-and-wife team of Arlen F. Chase and Diane Z. Chase tried a new approach using airborne laser signals that penetrate the jungle cover and are reflected from the ground below. They yielded 3-D images of the site of ancient Caracol, in Belize, one of the great cities of the Maya lowlands.
In only four days, a twin-engine aircraft equipped with an advanced version of lidar (light detection and ranging) flew back and forth over the jungle and collected data surpassing the results of two and a half decades of on-the-ground mapping, the archaeologists said. After three weeks of laboratory processing, the almost 10 hours of laser measurements showed topographic detail over an area of 80 square miles, notably settlement patterns of grand architecture and modest house mounds, roadways and agricultural terraces.
“We were blown away,” Dr. Diane Chase said recently, recalling their first examination of the images. “We believe that lidar will help transform Maya archaeology much in the same way that radiocarbon dating did in the 1950s and interpretations of Maya hieroglyphs did in the 1980s and ’90s.”
The Chases, who are professors of anthropology at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, had determined from earlier surveys that Caracol extended over a wide area in its heyday, between A.D. 550 and 900. From a ceremonial center of palaces and broad plazas, it stretched out to industrial zones and poor neighborhoods and beyond to suburbs of substantial houses, markets and terraced fields and reservoirs.
This picture of urban sprawl led the Chases to estimate the city’s population at its peak at more than 115,000. But some archaeologists doubted the evidence warranted such expansive interpretations.
“Now we have a totality of data and see the entire landscape,” Dr. Arlen Chase said of the laser findings. “We know the size of the site, its boundaries, and this confirms our population estimates, and we see all this terracing and begin to know how the people fed themselves.”
The Caracol survey was the first application of the advanced laser technology on such a large archaeological site. Several journal articles describe the use of lidar in the vicinity of Stonehenge in England and elsewhere at an Iron Age fort and American plantation sites. Only last year, Sarah H. Parcak of the University of Alabama at Birmingham predicted, “Lidar imagery will have much to offer the archaeology of the rain forest regions.”
The Chases said they had been unaware of Dr. Parcak’s assessment, in her book “Satellite Remote Sensing for Archaeology” (Routledge, 2009), when they embarked on the Caracol survey. They acted on the recommendation of a Central Florida colleague, John F. Weishampel, a biologist who had for years used airborne laser sensors to study forests and other vegetation.
Dr. Weishampel arranged for the primary financing of the project from the little-known space archaeology program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The flights were conducted by the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, operated by the University of Florida and the University of California, Berkeley.
Other archaeologists, who were not involved in the research but were familiar with the results, said the technology should be a boon to explorations, especially ones in the tropics, with its heavily overgrown vegetation, including pre-Columbian sites throughout Mexico and Central America. But they emphasized that it would not obviate the need to follow up with traditional mapping to establish “ground truth.”
Jeremy A. Sabloff, a former director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and now president of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, said he wished he had had lidar when he was working in the Maya ruins at Sayil, in Mexico.
The new laser technology, Dr. Sabloff said, “would definitely have speeded up our mapping, given us more details and would have enabled us to refine our research questions and hypotheses much earlier in our field program than was possible in the 1980s.”
At first, Payson D. Sheets, a University of Colorado archaeologist, was not impressed with lidar. A NASA aircraft tested the laser system over his research area in Costa Rica, he said, “but when I saw it recorded the water in a lake sloping at 14 degrees, I did not use it again.”
Now, after examining the imagery from Caracol, Dr. Sheets said he planned to try lidar, with its improved technology, again. “I was stunned by the crisp precision and fine-grained resolution,” he said.
“Finally, we have a nondestructive and rapid means of documenting the present ground surface through heavy vegetation cover,” Dr. Sheets said, adding, “One can easily imagine, given the Caracol success, how important this would be in Southeast Asia, with the Khmer civilization at places like Angkor Wat.”
In recent reports at meetings of Mayanists and in interviews, the Chases noted that previous remote-sensing techniques focused more on the discovery of archaeological sites than on the detailed imaging of on-ground remains. The sensors could not see through much of the forest to resolve just how big the ancient cities had been. As a consequence, archaeologists may have underestimated the scope of Mayan accomplishments.

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• Maya Prehistory and Caracol
• About Caracol
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• History of Caracol