Lives in Ruins

by Marilyn Johnson

  * ICAHM advises the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and the World Heritage Committee about archaeology and heritage.

  * Not to be confused, in the Googling, with the stock car racers of NASCAR or the swingers of NASCA International, a sex club.

  * I’ve read von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods, and I’ve read Silverman and Donald A. Proulx’s The Nasca, and the Nasca people were far wilder and more interesting than any ancient astronauts. And after reading von Däniken’s take on the Mayan calendar—and other advances from so-called “primitive” people—it seems his motive was essentially racist.

  * The story of the displacing of the Café Ayllu by the landowner, the local archbishop, is a heartbreaking one, detailed at http://www.cuzcoeats.com/2011/07/cafe-ayllu/; and at http://www.cafeayllu.com/Cafe_Ayllu_1/cafe_ayllu.html.

  * Another finding intrigued me: after the team took the engine apart, they dusted it for fingerprints and found none. Archival research turned up the fact that the van had been one of the first turned out in a fully robotized factory. Schofield’s talk, and the field of contemporary archaeology, remind me of the pioneering archivist Howard Gotlieb, who instead of waiting till his subjects were old and had gone through their files, would sign them up while they were relatively young and have them sweep their desks each week and send him the scraps and papers.

  * Moseley’s lecture, “Four Thousand Years Ago in Coastal Peru,” can be heard at https://peabody.Harvard.edu/node/581.