Monday Cup Of Links #64 - Underwater Archaeologist, Iron Age Fruit, Greek Gajalakshmi
Watch women at the Olympics
Happy Monday!
It’s a new month, and I feel like I just wasted more than half the year. It’s not true, though. I added about 15,000 words to my novel, which is pretty decent unless you compare it to the NaNoWriMo standard of 50,000 words in 30 days.
I was supposed to make significant progress on my novel in July. I did start pretty promising. But a bunch of personal circumstances conspire to ensure otherwise, and I lost the momentum I’d built up. I ought to get back on that horse, but I need to get over the guilt of feeling like there’s so many more important things to do that aren’t my novel.
I’m glad the Olympics are on; it’s great to take my mind off of earthly issues and look at the very best humanity has to offer. I’m loving all the Indian women winning medals. I feel so positive about my own body and what it is capable of, when I watch them lift weights, play badminton, throw heavy objects, and win at hockey.
Onto our links!
I came across a very interesting person while going down an Internet rabbit hole. Franck Goddio is an underwater archaeologist. Isn’t that a crazy interesting profession? It turns out, he found not one, but two underwater Egyptian sites, a couple of sunken Spanish galleon ships, the sunken remains of Alexandria’s eastern harbor, and several more.
I found his Thonis-Heraklion excavation the most interesting so far. Unfortunately, I’m not able to find a nice long writeup about the excavation. All I find is links to an exhibition he did of the artefacts, or some pictures. This is the best I can find, talking about a sunken warship they found in that site. This page on his website, with a ton of pictures, is cool too. I find this image of him really mindblowing, so I just have to share it here!New cave paintings and paleolithic-era tools have been discovered in the Aravalli hills, near Faridabad in Haryana. They also found stone-age tools, which suggest this area could have been a stone age tool factory! The site is large, about 5000 hectares. This makes it the largest paleolithic site found in India so far. While the site could be 100,000 years or so old, the paintings are between 20,000 and 40,000 years old.
The cave paintings (or petroglyphs, if you want to sound fancy) are from different eras. Some are line drawings from when humans couldn’t draw complex patterns, and we can apparently see how art evolved, with the later patterns being complex drawings of animals, people, foliage etc.
Another cool thing about this discovery is it was discovered based off of a Youtube video uploaded by a conservationist. The caves are pretty hard to reach, and a lot of the paintings are eroded or covered by foliage, so it wouldn’t have been an obvious site, and locals didn’t know their significance though they were familiar with the caves. But the archaeology department picked up on the significance and conducted a survey, after which they realized this was a groundbreaking discovery.And more recently, they found rice, peas and lentils were cultivated 3000 years ago in Vidarbha. The region is arid now and rice isn’t grown there, but 3000 years ago, it used to rain heavily there, making it favorable for rice cultivation. Apparently the winter and summer crops both were rice, and apart from that, there were varieties of peas, some wheat, and even jujube, karanda and gooseberries.
How they found these plants is interesting - so Rithi Ranjana is an Iron age archaeological site which is being excavated. Whenever they got to a layer which had artefacts from a particular era, they’d also take soil samples, and then wash and sieve them to get remains of dead plants and seeds to analyze.
The reason these findings are important is because knowing that the Indus civilization stretched so far south and so far inland in Maharashtra leads to all kinds of interesting possibilities. We also know where a lot of the plants originated, so getting a clue about them having made it to this far off place in the iron age leads to interesting ideas about trade and travel patterns.Artefact of the week: A four-drachm silver coin issued during the reign of the Shakha king Azilises of Gandhara (present day Kandahar). It has on it Gajalakshmi - Lakshmi flanked by elephants, who blesses you with wealth in the form of elephants. It’s amazing how this iconography hasn’t changed in 2000 years. Current image for comparison.
I have heard it said that the Hindi word “daam” to indicate cost is actually from the Greek word Drachm meaning coin/currency.