Archaeology 101
About seventy-five students gathered in the large lecture hall, PJ 120, for the second class of the Winter semester for Introductory Archaeology. The professor, William Carey, began the day’s lecture.
“Over the years in teaching this class I have come to realize that many of you consider archaeology a boring field. However, how one could come to that conclusion, especially after taking my class has always been a mystery to me,” Muffled chuckles and feigned coughs came from around the hall. Even the Professor smiled at his old, well used joke.
“I know many of you have only taken my class to fulfill University requirements but whether you want to pursue the field or not I’m here to show you that archeologists are definitely the ‘movers and shakers’ of the day, no pun intended.”
“Archaeology can be mysterious and intriguing. Certainly, it is filled with ancient mysteries and lost civilizations. And that’s the part that pulls people in. So, today, for fun, we’ll talk about that.”
“But first, let’s have a quick little review. You should remember that Archaeology encompasses discovering our origins and then using what we learn and the artifacts we find to reconstruct history. Last time we talked I defined interdisciplinary research as the collaborative effort of various professions working together to come up with feasible answers to questions of our history and to help determine our past correctly.” He spoke slowly so those interested students could write down what he was saying. “Some of these professions are medicine, astronomy, psychology and etymology.” He wrote them on the board.
“In addition, the field of archaeology itself has branched off into several specialized areas. Several are listed in the text. Anyone read that far and can tell me some of the different areas of specialization?”
A light brown-skinned girl, with straight shoulder length hair, dressed in a brown T-shirt and blue jeans raised her hand. “I didn’t read about it in the textbook, but my mother is an archaeologist who specializes in a field.”
“Really? She’s an archaeologist?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your name?”
“Courtney Dickerson.”
He scanned down his class roster.
“Okay. And, what’s your mother’s name?”
“Justin Dickerson.”
“Justin? J-U-S-T-I-N?”
“Yeah, all the girls have boys’ names in my family.”
He wrote the name next to Courtney’s on his roster. “Okay, tell us, what is your mother’s specialization?”
“She’s a Biblical archaeologist.”
“A Biblical archaeologist? Now there’s a good one. I don’t think that field is even listed in the textbook. Do you know anything about her work?”
“When I was little, my mother used to take me and our family with her to excavation sites.”
“So, you’ve had firsthand experience?” She nodded. “Wow, in all these years, I think you’re the first student who had an archeologist in their family. What’s your major, Archaeology?”
“No.” Courtney let out a chuckle. “It’s Education. My mother made me sign up for this class.” A light laughter echoed off the walls of the hall.
“Oh, I see,” he smiled. “Well, good,” he repeated. He seemed pleased with her comment about her mother.
“So let’s get to these slides.” He walked over and dimmed the lights in the room. He lowered the projection screen and clicked on the first slide.
“After man started traveling the world, he found striking resemblances between the artifacts and the ancient remains of civilizations that were thousands of miles apart. And, as far as we know, civilizations that never came in contact with each other.”
“Here, you can see the similarity of the pyramids of ancient Egypt and those in South America.” He clicked to the next slide. “Two distinct and separate civilizations separated by oceans and centuries, yet they have similar architecture, legends, myths and even languages. So here is a mystery for you. How is it that ancient architecture and languages of South American tribes are similar to Hebrew and the language of the Phoenicians, and to the structures in Egypt?” He looked around the room. “The answer? We don’t know.”
“Let’s look at another mystery.” He clicked on the next slide. “One of the most impressive and largest works of art in the world, done sometime between 200 B.C. and 600 A.D., are these mysterious lines found in several Andean regions of South America. They weren’t detected until 1939.” He clicked to the next slide.
“You can see here the ruler straight lines, strange curves and patterns depicting birds, spiders, monkeys all engraved onto the desert floor of southern Peru in the plains of Nazca. No one knew they were there because they can’t be seen from the ground not even when standing next to them. The only way to see them is from the air. So until man learned to fly they remained invisible. No one knows why or how they got there. Maybe an ancient irrigation system. Maybe a part of some kind of ritual. We don’t know. So the question is, how could a people that lived hundreds of years ago that couldn’t fly, make these markings?” He cleared his throat before he spoke. “Again the answer is, we don’t know.”
The instructor clicked to the next slide as a student spoke from the back of the room.
“I’ve heard that those lines are like landing strips, and like aliens or something in ancient times landed there.”
“Aliens?” The professor took a deep breath. “I don’t think so. And stories like that make it difficult for real historical analysis to happen because scientists then need to take time to dispel the erroneous information. It’s really too bad that people don’t think that early man was both intellectually and technologically advanced enough to let’s say, build the pyramids. But if you learn nothing else in my class, know this, the designers and builders of our ancient past was us. It was man. Not aliens.
“Here, let’s switch gears for a moment.” He clicked off the projector and went over and turned on the lights. Let’s look at the scientific evidence for the possibilities of life on other planets - of aliens.”
“First, for man to form on this planet it took an asteroid striking the Earth’s surface at the instant exactly prior to our development to weed out the huge land animals and not totally destroy the planet so that mammals could survive. This is an asteroid that would have missed hitting Earth altogether if it had been say fifteen or twenty minutes earlier or later.
“Then it took blue-green algae 1.4 billion years of photosynthesis, without any other devastating incidents occurring, to change the atmosphere permanently so oxygen-breathers could emerge. All chance occurrences that had to happen for humans to evolve. Could the exact same thing happen somewhere else? Probably not.
“Now, add to that the fact that during the history of this planet there have been over fifty billion different species that have existed. Fifty billion,” he emphasized. “But there is a ninety-nine percent extinction rate on this planet. In other words, humans are lucky to be here because it was about a one in fifty billion chance that they’d survive. And of those fifty billion species that have lived on the planet Earth we are the only ones that are intelligent enough to even contemplate that other beings may exist.
“On the other hand, if you’re inclined to believe that God created the Earth and its inhabitants, then, you should be convinced that if He had placed man somewhere else He would not have given man a second chance after the flood. Why care if they’re wiped out if you have other humans living somewhere else. Right?
“Sure, ancient man made great advancements in science, mathematics and architecture, perfected thousands of years before we – modern man ‘discovered’ them. And, yes somehow such technology was lost. A global loss, no less, of intellectual ability, but that doesn’t mean man, at some point, wasn’t able to do it.”
“If they have all this evidence that proves against this idea of visiting aliens,” a student asked, “why would they say that lines on the ground or pyramids were made
by spacemen in the first place? I mean, they must have had some evidence to come to that conclusion.”
“No, they didn’t.”
“They didn’t have any evidence?” the student repeated.
“No,” Professor Carey said and brushed his hands over his hair. “They just needed a way to explain something that had no explanation. People wanted to know how and why the pyramids were built. What the relationship between the pyramids of Egypt and those built in Mesopotamia and the New World were. What happened to the technologically advanced people that built them? Did they just vanish?”
“So, they concocted alien stories. Certainly, we need to ask these questions. How did they get their skills? Did these architects of ancient time emerge out of nowhere, without the influence of other civilizations? Why the similarities in cultures separated by time and distance? Were the skills derived from the influence of a single, original people that were split up because of some cataclysmic event? This is why being able to correctly piece together history, using all of our resources, is so important so that we don’t come to conclusions like ‘the aliens did it.’
“When I was in college I read a book,” the professor continued, “that tried to show how ridiculous it is to take small pieces of evidence and make a determination of a people or culture. The book, called The Weans, by Robert Nathan, tells about a fictional archeological excavation of our United States in the future when it is a desolate and uninhabited wasteland. The book is meant to be a humorous, satirical look at the mistakes and assumptions made by archaeologists, who didn’t take the time to look at all the facts.
“It’s called The Weans because the archeologists in the book found many references to “U.S.” as they excavated, which we know stands for “United States.” They didn’t know what it stood for and associated it with “us” or “we” and so they named us the “Weans.”
“The assumptions they made from our ruins were ludicrous. These archeologists decided that we were very religious people and worshiped a goddess who gigantic statue was found partly submersed in a large body of water. The goddess’ name was ‘Lib’ or ‘Libby’ or as we know, the Statue of Liberty, which of course we didn’t worship as a goddess.”
“This is exactly how the story of spacemen got started. Bits and pieces of archeological evidence are put together and a story is created that does nothing but sell books and get people confused about our real history.”
“Understand that we cannot take one piece of information, like the Statue of Liberty, and determine that an entire population worshipped the Goddess Libby. By the same token, we can’t take a set of lines on the ground that go nowhere, and couldn’t support a heavy vehicle of any sort, and assume that we had an alien invasion.
“Today, scientists have thoroughly debunked those notions. And I don’t want you leaving my class believing that aliens are responsible for the remarkable, although mysterious, remnants of ancient Earth.”
Professor Carey glanced around the room, wanting to make sure he got his point across. “Now before we go on, let me pose a question to you. If there were once ancient visitors to our planet, where are they now? Why haven’t they ever come back?
“And consider this,” he continued. “You would think there would be a story of the events of the arrival of spacemen, if it had any truth to it. A story that perhaps was passed down. Some legend of it at least, wouldn’t you? Some manuscripts? Some markings? Something. But there isn’t.”
“This is prehistory, right? Prehistory isn’t written down.” A student interjected. “Maybe that’s why nothing is written down about it.”
“That’s a good point, but wouldn’t that be a hellava story to get lost? The one that tells us aliens built the pyramids.” He laughed. “We still have non-canonized books of the Bible around, the writing of Plato and ancient Egyptians. We didn’t lose those. How in the world would we lose a writing describing aliens descending from outer space?”
“A lot of these alien stories came from people seeing wall markings and painting in ancient Indian civilizations. Paintings that they decided looked like men in some sort of spacesuit. But when you listen to Indian oral stories there is no mention of space visitors. The erroneous conclusions come from outsiders, not from those that passed down the history.”
“It has been hypothesized that a technologically advanced people did live as far back as 100,000 years ago, making them older than we believe man to be. Some believe that they had the technology and were responsible for our ancient mysteries. But just like there is no archaeological evidence of aliens, there is none of a people that lived that long ago. Plus, how can a people hundreds of thousands of years old explain ancient structures that are no more than 5,000 years old?”
“So, Professor Carey, there were no alien encounters, invasions, or visitations with Earth men?”
“No. There weren’t.”
“How do you know for sure?” A student in the back asked.
“We can’t always say for sure what did happen, but we can ninety-nine percent of the time, say what didn’t happen. And in this case, we know there were no invasions from space.”
Professor Carey glanced at the wall clock and then down as his watch. “We didn’t cover everything I had planned for today, but we had a good discussion. He hesitated. “Are there any other questions or comments?” No one offered anything. “Then we’ll see you next class.” He raised his voice over the noise of the students leaving the classroom. “Read chapters four through seven in your textbook and I’ll see you Wednesday.”
Courtney Dickerson left the lecture hall and caught up with her friends Kelly and Robin.
“Hey, Courtney,” Robin said, “You goin’ on the yard?”
“No, I gotta go back to my room and call my dad.”
“Why, something wrong?”
“Oh, no. I just need some money and I want to ask him if I can go to Florida for Spring Break.”
“You think your parents’ll let you go?” Kelly asked.
“My dad a probably say I can go, but my mother is a different story. She’s been translating some manuscripts that she and my uncles found when they went to Jerusalem and she’s actin’ all weird lately. Plus, she never lets me do anything. She’s so old-fashioned.”
“Yeah, so good luck with that, huh?”
“Exactly. And she really won’t be too happy when I tell her we learned about aliens and lines on the ground in archaeology class.”
CHAPTER FORTY
Cleveland Heights, Ohio
It was mid-January by the time I got over to see Mrs. Margulies and to pick up Dr. Margulies’ things she wanted to give me. I hated that I didn’t keep my promise of making it over by New Year’s, but it was so hard getting up the courage to go over there. I took Claire with me. I didn’t want to face all that sadness alone.
A lingering snow storm and cold winds whipped heavy white flakes across every inch of the way, making our trek to bring good cheer and mirrored sympathies shivering and slick. We slowly plowed our way through the winter wonderland to her house underneath a bright sun that gave false hopes of warming rays. Trees, cars and people were covered with snow and curbs had it banked four feet high. We were definitely making up for the lack of winter weather in December.
Being in Dr. Margulies’ home brought back such memories. They were almost overwhelming. It seemed like any moment he would come bounding through the door, laughing, calling out to me, “Lizzy,” he would say, “what trouble have you gotten yourself into now?”
I’d known Dr. Margulies for about fifteen years, but it seemed like I’d known him all my life. I met him at Case Western Reserve University when he was assigned as my advisor for my dissertation, but he quickly became a part of everything I did. He became family.
Man, I’m gonna miss him.
Seeing Mrs. Margulies so consumed with grief, even this long after his death, made me even sadder. I don’t know what I would do if anything happened to Mase. Claire stuck close to me.
/> Claire and I stayed a long while listening to Mrs. Margulies talk about “her Jacob.” I could see in her eyes the loneliness and I hated to leave her that way.
After taking off all of our winter gear in the mud room, she directed us towards the kitchen. The kitchen was small, but warm and quaint. The checkered café curtains, poppy (she was very specific about the color) and white, made the room bright. She sat us at the white farm-style table with matching spindle chairs.
“How about some hot chocolate.” More of a statement than a question as in no time she was pouring us hot chocolate into poppy colored mugs. While she was busy around the kitchen, she started telling us about her and Dr. Margulies. We watched as her sad eyes give way to a twinkle that grew brighter with every word she spoke.
It would have been forty-two years they had been married this coming October, she told us. Claire touched Mrs. Margulies’ hand. She patted Claire’s hand, offering her a warm smile. Then she let her memories drift back to a time she had shared with Dr. Margulies. She told us how they’d met at church and how she’d been captivated by his dark black hair and beautiful green eyes.
“That’s a beautiful story, Mrs. Margulies,” Claire said softly as she finished her story. Claire. Always the romantic.
“Oh, please call me Frances.” She stood up and patted her hands on the front of her thighs and went over to the stove and poured us more hot chocolate. “Yes, and I guess it really was fate that brought us together. You know he was born Jewish, but his mother changed religions. If he hadn’t been at church, I guess I would have never met him.” She looked at the two of us and then seemed to get a little embarrassed. “Oh listen to me. You girls didn’t come here to hear an old woman ramble on about ancient history. You came for the boxes.”
“Oh that’s okay.” I assured her. “We enjoy hearing you reminisce.”
“I’m glad I didn’t bore you. We wouldn’t want you to have an excuse not to come and visit me again.”
Claire spoke up before I could even open my mouth. “Don’t worry, we’ll be back. Won’t we, Justin?”
In the Beginning: Mars Origin I Series Book I Page 17
