Protecting cultural heritage during crises and wars is a big challenge, especially if conflict erupts suddenly and consumes a country with violence.

As head of the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums in Syria during the worst stage of history for my country, I contended with this challenge firsthand. That’s why I know, in this moment, it is essential for Ukraine to choose the right strategy to protect its threatened cultural legacy. Not everything can be saved in such circumstances, but we have a scientific, moral, and humanitarian responsibility to provide all forms of support to help guarantee the protection of our world heritage.

My leadership tenure was the most difficult period of my life. For five years, from 2012 to 2017, I took on the work of overseeing cultural heritage preservation during the war. But these years were also the most important ones of my life. I gladly served as a volunteer, without a monthly salary or any compensation, for the honor of helping preserve Syrian cultural heritage, rescuing artifacts that serve as markers of identity and collective memory for Syrian people.

When I was appointed director in August of 2012, it was clear that Syria was heading toward tragedy. As violence escalated throughout the country that summer, the Syrian prime minister fled Syria and the minister of defense and four generals in the army were killed in a bombing.

Proceeding from the idea that the protection of cultural heritage unites us all, my colleagues and I developed a plan outlining how to save what could be saved, especially from the 34 museums distributed throughout Syria. This was in line with our charter—the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums was founded in 1946 as a government-owned agency tasked with the protection, promotion, and excavation activities in all sites of national heritage in Syria. Because we are not affiliated with political parties, we could put ideology aside to come together around this shared vision.

Our cohort of scholars and artists were determined not to repeat the tragic experiences of other countries such as Iraq, when the national museum in Baghdad was looted in 2003. To this end, we set out to work with cadres in all provinces, seeking cooperation with members of the local communities in areas where institutions were absent, to mitigate damage to archaeological sites.

By the end of the summer of 2012, when we concluded the general situation in the country was heading toward destruction, we made the decision to empty all museums of antiquities and transfer them to safe places, such as underground warehouses equipped with surveillance cameras and resistant to explosions, fire, and theft. We transferred important historical documents, especially from the Ottoman period, to similarly fortified spaces, which were also equipped with devices that helped provide the appropriate humidity and heat to protect them from damage. We reinforced the museums themselves with strong iron doors, alarms, and surveillance cameras.

When violence escalated and spread throughout the country in 2015, we realized we needed a new strategy. By then, the security situation in Damascus had improved somewhat, so we resolved to transfer the archaeological holdings from Syrian museums throughout the country to the capital. Still, the decision carried its own risks due to threats on the roads between Damascus and other cities.

Take Palmyra. On the evening of May 21, 2015, when the city fell to ISIS terrorists, we had no choice but to act fast. Palmyra is one of the most important world heritage cities due to its historical importance, millennia-old archaeological sites, and the diversity of its ancient buildings, many of which are exceptionally well preserved. So, in coordination with the Syrian military police, colleagues at the National Museum of Palmyra transported three trucks full of hundreds of statues and artifacts across the desert in the dead of night.

The mission ended up becoming one of our most successful operations in violent conditions. Once Palmyra was liberated in March 2016, we weren’t taking any more chances: we began moving the remaining holdings we couldn’t evacuate during the first mission to Damascus. After two months of hard work, with the participation of about 60 employees from the National Museum in Palmyra, we succeeded in emptying the museum—rescuing hundreds of ancient statues that represent Palmyra art as well as the huge statue of the Lion of Al-Lat (Athena), which weighs about 15 tons—before ISIS occupied the city for the second time, in December 2016.

We followed this strategy in the rest of Syria’s museums during the same period and under the same difficult circumstances. Whether it was rescuing the Deir ez-Zor Museum’s clay tablets, the Aleppo Museum’s precious statues and jewelry, or the Homs Museum’s treasures from the Qatana site, which dates back to the second millennium B.C.E., we were always careful to choose the most important artifacts that could be transported, and to document and photograph them before and after carrying out each mission.

Since the spread of armed groups throughout Syria threatened the roads, one of the most important precautions we took before each transport was to ensure our routes were safe. When we could not securely remove the artifacts by ground, we were forced to get creative. In Raqqa, for instance, which fell under the occupation of ISIS and turned into their capital, we hid a large part of the Raqqa Museum’s holdings in one of the rooms on the second floor of the museum that we secretly converted into a warehouse. By getting rid of the room’s door and building a wall in its place, we were able to keep around 1,097 artifacts hidden during the three years of ISIS rule, despite the destruction the museum building faced.

Following this strategy, we were able to rescue the vast majority of antiquities in Syrian museums. It is with great pride that I look back on the priceless heritage we safeguarded, but I do not wish that specialists in archeology and cultural heritage preservation in countries experiencing wars and violent conflicts should ever find themselves in such a position. Except for some loyal friends from international cultural institutions, who helped us in Syria during those difficult years we lived, we were on our own.

That’s why we need cooperation between all specialists everywhere to help countries that suffer from crises and wars save their cultural heritage from vandalism and theft. Such work does not need to wait for strife to get started. In 2019, for example, I was an expert on the UNESCO team that developed an emergency plan for the National Museum of Sudan in Khartoum and the World Heritage Site in Sudan. It was an opportunity to convey the Syrian experience to my international colleagues and to make plans during peace rather than wait for conflict to break out first.

But that’s not enough. We must continue to push for a world where protecting cultural heritage falls outside of political disputes when they do occur. As we’ve seen time and again, world treasures need to be kept out of wars and conflicts between different countries, so that when they do occur in a particular country or between two countries, everyone respects the international conventions that provide for the protection of cultural heritage.

The protection of cultural heritage must be seen as a means to bring us together. Over time, political differences stop and change according to interests, but the loss of cultural heritage will be eternal for us as peoples and civilizations everywhere in the world.

The post When War Comes for the Museum appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But, as a matter of history, the “Silk Road” was nothing like the Belt and Road Initiative. In fact, in its time, there was no “Silk Road” at all. The Silk Road is actually a modern label in widespread use only since the late 20th century. It refers variously and imprecisely to long-distance trade and interactions across Afro-Eurasia.

In reality, the Silk Road was never a formal network directed by one state power, as the Chinese propose with the Belt and Road. To the contrary, there were numerous mutable trading networks over this period. Some of these dealt in silk, raw and woven. Others did not. Some started in China or Rome, some in Central Asia, India, or Africa—and many other places. Journeys were by sea, by rivers, and by land—or by all three. Sometimes governments were involved in trade, sometimes private traders, and sometimes it was both.

Despite these ambiguities, the Silk Road should not be dismissed as a concept. The Silk Road has acquired a familiarity that has real value, because it has brought regions that are rarely covered in modern historical writing to greater prominence and accessibility. As a result, the term’s growing popularity has encouraged a more global historical viewpoint.

Central to the idea of the Silk Road is the interaction across boundaries, be they chronological, geographical, cultural, political, or imaginary. Those interactions, and the effect they had on individuals and their cultures, are the Silk Road’s real legacy, especially since the vast majority of objects of the Silk Road—everyday and luxury, traded or not—disappeared long ago. Food, wine, and medicines were consumed. Slaves, elephants, and horses died. Textiles, wood, and ivory decayed. Glass and pottery were broken. Only in rare cases did objects survive by design or accident, as in hoards of metal or glass, or in burials when objects were sufficiently valued to be interred with corpses.

Nevertheless, the story of a single object can sometimes encapsulate the rich interactions of the Silk Road. Such is the case with a gilt-silver ewer found in the tomb of a sixth-century general and his wife in what is now northwestern China.

The ewer was probably made at the heart of the Silk Road in Bactria (present-day northern Afghanistan), possibly when the region was under the rule of peoples who had migrated from the borders of China and the steppe, the Hephthalites. The ewer, 14.5 inches tall, shows its diverse background. Made with Sasanian Persian metalwork hammering techniques, it features both literary motifs from classical Greece far to the west as well as influences from India to the south. The biography of this ewer, therefore, covers the whole geographical length and breadth of the Silk Road.

In one sense, the ewer spans 3,000 years. The scenes portrayed on it date to classical Greece, 1,500 years before its actual creation. Since its burial, it has spent another fifteen centuries to the east of its birthplace in northwestern China.

Everything about this piece encapsulates Silk Road movement and interaction. Its form and materials, for example: metalware ewers spread from Rome through Sasanian Persia to central Asia, while in China the form is usually emulated in ceramics. Each place gave its own characteristics to the ewer’s basic form: the square handle of the Sasanians (the last Persian empire before the rise of Islam in the seventh century) or the camel’s head on this Bactrian piece. But perhaps its most fascinating features are the scenes from the Trojan War depicted around the ewer.

The gilt-silver ewer found in the tomb of sixth-century general Li Xian in what is now northwestern China. Courtesy of the Guyuan Museum.

Stories of the Trojan War probably traveled eastwards long before the Silk Road, with people, on objects, and possibly in texts. In the fourth century B.C. the Greek world and its influence expanded dramatically, owing to the campaigns of Alexander the Great (r. 336–323 B.C.).

Alexander reached Bactria in 329 B.C., conquering it over the next two years. On his victory in 327 he took a bride, Roxane, who is usually described by historians as a Bactrian. Although Alexander’s rule did not last long—he died in Babylon four years later—the introduction of Greek language, administration, architecture, art, and culture eastwards into Central Asia was to have a significant influence, the so-called Hellenization of this region. And this influence might have spread further east: Some have attributed to it the appearance of life-size realistic statuary in China—exemplified by the terracotta warriors guarding the tomb of Qin Shihuangdi (r. 221–206 B.C.).

While aspects of the Greek legacy were adopted into Roman culture, and while it is plausible to believe that depictions of the Trojan War were readily understood—and used—by many in the Roman Empire, it is more difficult to understand how such images were viewed by the peoples on what was once the fringes of Alexander’s empire in central Asia. The craftsmen of Hephthalite Bactria who produced this ewer were separated from the story and its birthplace by a thousand years in time and over three thousand miles in space. Even if the episodes depicted on this ewer can be traced back to Greek mythology, they might have been incorporated into some other more local narrative by this time and would have been described by their makers and owners in a way that we would not recognize.

The ewer probably did not stay more than a few decades at most in Bactria before being taken east, to Guyuan in the northwest borders of China. Its new owner, Li Xian, was the son of immigrants. According to the biography inscribed on stone inside his tomb, his ancestors were from the steppe to the north and had moved to the border regions some generations before. By the time of Li Xian, they had taken a Chinese surname. We do not know whether they had retained their own language, or even what that language was. But this biography shows that they had not lost the knowledge of their northern steppe ancestry.

In this way, the ewer demonstrates how culturally complex China has always been, with waves of invaders and migrants, especially from the porous and oft-challenged borders to the north and northwest. We should not assume that people living in China at that time were accustomed to being part of a unified empire or that everyone saw this as the norm or ideal.

In the fourth and fifth centuries, northern China, including western areas into the trade routes and along the Hexi corridor, was under the rule of proto-Mongol Xianbei, who also came from the northern steppe. Around the time Li Xian was born, the Xianbei were ruling from Luoyang on the Yellow River, but their empire was in trouble. Rebellions in the north and battles between competing factions led to the empire’s division in 534. One of the reasons given for this was the growing divide between the regional rulers in the north, who still retained their contacts with the steppe, and what these rulers saw as the increasingly distant and sinified Xianbei elite in the Luoyang capital.

As a military commander posted to frontier stations, Li Xian would have traveled considerably, and many of his travels would have taken him along the trade routes of the Silk Road as well as to the capital to give reports and receive orders. In the year 525, a Hephthalite envoy passed through Guyuan en route to Luoyang; he was accompanied by a lion, one of his diplomatic gifts. This was not a unique gift: Lions were presented to the Chinese court by Tocharians in the seventh and eighth centuries, and one sent from Samarkand in 635 received an imperially commissioned rhapsody in its honor. Li Xian would have been only a young man in 525, but given the status of his family, it would be expected that they would have entertained the envoy during his stay and possibly they received the ewer as a gift.

How did Li Xian see and use the ewer? Was it an exotic piece brought out for formal banquets, filled with local grape wine for his guests and intended to reflect his status and cosmopolitanism? Or was it used at less formal occasions—or not used at all?

For all we know, he might have acquired it only shortly before his death and never put it to use.

These are tantalizing questions but ones on which we can only speculate. The same goes for what Li Xian made of the design on the ewer. Did he know anything of the Trojan War story, even if it had become assimilated into local myths? Or was the piece interpreted as depicting another local story? Or not interpreted at all, just seen as an attractive or an exotic design?

Not all people ask questions about the world around them and the objects they encounter. Indeed, perhaps this ewer held more interest and value to his wife: theirs was a joint tomb. But this object and its journey reflects a time of cultural movement and encounters—the story of the Silk Road—which left an imprint on pre-modern society across Afro-Eurasia and still resonates today.

The post The Centuries-Old Silver Jug That Conjures the Mysteries of the Silk Road appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The ancient caravan city of Palmyra, also known as Tadmor in Arabic, is one such place. Stretching three kilometers through the Syrian Desert, its ruins tell enumerable stories, thousands of years in the making. The city was never fully abandoned, and so Palmyra is an archive beyond its buildings: one of people, culture, and conflict across time.

Palmyra prospered in antiquity as Romans and Parthians vied for dominance of the region. In the Byzantine and early Islamic era, Palmyra’s ancient temples were remade into churches and mosques, and, during the early-modern and colonial periods, foreign expeditions documented and secured Palmyrene artifacts for distant museum collections. Syrian and international teams of archaeologists reconstituted the ancient city through excavation and reconstruction in the 20th century.

Detail of two-part panorama featuring the Colonnade Street and the Temple of Bel in Palmyra. Albumen print by Louis Vignes, 1864/Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute.

Each of these phases in history reframed Palmyra, physically changing and conceptually altering the once-thriving metropolis.

And today, militants have caused irrevocable destruction to Palmyra’s monuments and people. Our own, heart-wrenching moment in Palmyra’s history has been met with a variety of responses, including digital reconstruction projects, museum exhibitions, academic conferences, and significant media coverage. Although sometimes uneven and the subject of criticism, these projects signify an impulse to resist the damage done during the current Syrian conflict by reimagining the site as it was before the destruction, or as it may be remade in a more hopeful post-war future.

I have been fortunate enough to have co-curated together with Frances Terpak the online exhibition The Legacy of Ancient Palmyra. This project is the first of its kind taken on by the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles. The focus of the exhibition is the remarkable material held by the GRI, including the earliest known photographs of Palmyra, taken by the French naval officer Louis Vignes in 1864, and a rare set of etchings made after on-site drawings by the French artist and architect Louis François Cassas in 1785.

Together these two collections offer a window into a seemingly distant time in Palmyra’s history, but one that was no less complex than our own. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the ruins of Palmyra and the village of Tadmor contained within its ancient walls were part of the Ottoman Empire. Palmyra was connected to the world through caravans consisting of hundreds of camels, as it had been for thousands of years. Expeditions to the site, like those of Cassas and Vignes, foreshadowed a deeper penetration of Western influence in the region as well as the beginnings of archaeological investigations.

Valley of the Tombs in Palmyra. Etching after Louis-François Cassas, ca. 1799/Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute.

Cassas’ prints were part of a larger survey that documented monuments from Istanbul to Cairo and part of a career that recorded and published views of classical ruins in Rome, Sicily, Greece, and Croatia. Although not known well today, Cassas was recognized by intellectual elites of his day, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, precisely because he had gone to Palmyra to see and draw these famed ruins.

The work itself, which can be considered the most comprehensive study of Palmyra before the 20th century, consists of close to 100 large-format etchings. These etchings are a collection of technical renderings, architectural plans, landscape views, and reconstructions of the magnificent buildings that have been intentionally demolished in recent years.

The painstaking detail in Cassas’ original drawings and the final prints display his desire to create a body of work that had superb aesthetic value. And by design, his imaginative depictions of the site also became blueprints for European artists to use in works of architecture, painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts.

View of the interior courtyard of the Temple of Bel showing the mudbrick homes in the foreground. Albumen print by Louis Vignes, 1864/Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute.

Neoclassical Europe had already had a taste of Palmyrene art from the earlier and more famous British expedition of Robert Wood and James Dawkins, whose monumental book The Ruins of Palmyra, Otherwise, Tedmor in the Desert (1753) was often cited as a source for architectural inspiration in 18th-century England. For example, the now-destroyed coffered ceiling of the Temple of Bel, which was depicted in the Wood and Dawkins publication, was replicated in the interiors of at least four prominent buildings designed by Robert Adam and others.

Cassas’s goal was to give this audience more material by providing lavish depictions of a style that became to be known as “Roman Baroque.” Although the term is generally not favored by art historians today, “Roman Baroque” suggests what Cassas and his audience found so powerful in Palmyra’s art and architecture. The colossal scale and opulent decorations of the Roman-era buildings in the great cities of the Eastern Mediterranean rivaled some of the best examples of classical architecture found in the West, even in Rome.

Palmyra’s architecture exemplified this concept, and, combined with its location “lost” in the desert, magnified its appeal. Embroiled in the struggles of the French Revolution, thinkers in Cassas’ time readily connected the perceived abandonment and decline of Palmyra as a cautionary tale to the possible destruction of their own civilization.

Imaginary view of Tetrapylon. Etching after Louis-François Cassas, ca. 1799/Courtesy of the Getty Research Institute.

Nearly 80 years after Cassas’ travels to Syria, Louis Vignes brought his camera to Palmyra and moved its ancient monuments into the modern era. To our eyes, Vignes’ images may appear nostalgic, and in light of current events, ghostly, as visages of a past no longer present. But to a 19th-century viewer, they would have been seen as concrete evidence, either validating or refuting the embellishments of earlier accounts. In contrast to the timeless and almost dream-like qualities of Cassas’ images, Vignes grounded Palmyra in a photographic immediacy that places the viewer in the monument.

This 1864 expedition to Palmyra was an offshoot of a larger geological and cultural survey of the Dead Sea region that was sponsored and led by Honoré Théodore Paul Joseph d’Abert, duc de Luynes, a French nobleman with a passion for archaeology, science, biblical history, and technology. Vignes, a ship’s captain hired for the mission because of his knowledge of the regions’ ports, had only briefly trained in photography before embarking on this journey.

The regional survey was meant to be scientific and comprehensive. Along with photographing classical, biblical, and crusader sites, the expedition team documented and mapped the sources of rivers described in the Bible, and collected core samples from the Dead Sea and specimens of its marine life. The expedition brought two small collapsible metal boats across the desert to be reassembled and used for research as needed.

The images produced by Cassas and Vignes are squarely set inside a colonial or orientalist vision of Palmyra, mostly concerned with its classical past. They were made in an interventionist period which deserves unsympathetic criticism for the lasting economic and political effects it caused in the region.

View of Palmyra from Qalaat Shirkuh before the destruction of its major monuments by ISIS. Photo by Judith McKenzie/Manar al-Athar, 2010.

Alongside and inseparable from this fraught history are the beginnings of modern scholarship on Palmyra and around the world. Many scholars from many countries have dedicated their professional careers to researching Palmyra. Through their efforts we know that Palmyra, throughout much of its history, was home to changing multi-ethnic and religiously diverse societies. Modern archaeology has reframed the city in our own time by excavation and decipherment of inscriptions. These images of daily life through the ages, culled together from decades of work by scholars, replace the earlier Western concept of Palmyra as a landscape of romanticized ruins belonging to a lost civilization.

Appallingly, Syrian archaeologists, workers, and others with knowledge of this and other sites in the war-torn country have been targeted and killed in recent years. In some reports, these atrocities have occurred when attempts were made to protect the sites from ISIS looters, who have been systematically seizing and selling antiquities to fund their activities.

Pursuing knowledge about Palmyra cannot undo the damage done. But it can offer new narratives that promote the value and importance of cultural heritage. From a nexus of trade in antiquity to a modern tourist destination, people from diverse backgrounds flocked to Palmyra. Continued engagement with the place, digitally if not physically, will help future generations reframe Palmyra once again.

The post Reflecting Splendor and Conflict in Enduring Visions of an Ancient City appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I often marvel at how a schlocky choice of leisure reading began a lifetime of involvement with Mexico. I also marvel at the irony of being seduced by such fantastical theories, when my lifetime connection to Mexico became focused on everyday life—that of the Aztecs I was studying, as well as my own family’s.

I married an archaeologist, and our daughters April and Heather spent much of their childhood in Mexico. My wife Cindy and I decided that Cuernavaca, about a two-hour drive south of Mexico City, would be a good base for fieldwork. It’s a modern city with good schools and hospitals. The fact that it was a gorgeous city (“La ciudad de la eterna primavera,” or “city of eternal springtime”) didn’t hurt. Most important, there were numerous Aztec-period peasant villages in the area I could excavate.

Wall foundations of Aztec peasant houses the author excavated at the site of Capilco.

 
My choice puzzled many colleagues. Archaeology in Mexico has traditionally focused on the big ruins—Teotihuacan, Monte Albán, Chichen Itza. “Aztecs” equal pyramids and palaces to most people. Indeed, one such site—Teopanzolco—was literally in the middle of Cuernavaca. But I wanted to figure out what life was like for Aztec farmers and other commoners. Most written sources on Aztec history—texts by Spanish friars and native historians—deal exclusively with kings and nobles, the one percent of Aztec society. What about the 99 percent? Instead of searching for pyramids and tombs, I sought out the crumbled remains of small adobe houses. I excavated trash heaps of broken cooking pots and kitchen knives. (We archaeologists who study ancient households are obsessed with trash, because it is our window into daily life).

However boring or ordinary it seems, my unorthodox focus on villages and kitchen trash yielded big results. It contradicted some longstanding assumptions, including the notion that average Aztecs, oppressed by nobles, lived in abject poverty and had few choices in life. The people who lived in these sites were fairly well off. They had many imported items in their homes, and they owned goods in the latest styles of Aztec society.

Broken flutes from domestic trash piles. Every house had musical instruments.

 
The Aztec communities that we excavated—often digging in people’s backyards—had been prosperous and successful, something I hadn’t anticipated. Indeed, these ancient farmers devised an economy based on local resources, one that operated at a small scale yet linked to broader realms through trade and exchange of knowledge. That is, the Aztecs had discovered the sustainability principles of “deep economy” long before Bill McKibben wrote a book about it. A house-by-house census written in the Aztec language (Nahuatl) provided the final clue to their success: These farmers belonged to a kind of community council called a calpolli, which gave them freedom to farm and live as they wished, without kings and nobles bossing them around.

Meanwhile, my family’s everyday life was also enriched by the Aztecs. We adopted Mexico as a second home. We would pile our tools, gear, and April and Heather into the car every year for the drive from Arizona to Cuernavaca. Sometimes we went for a semester or a year; we almost always spent the summer. Cindy and I did fieldwork or studied artifacts in the lab, and the girls went to school or played with friends in the neighborhood.

The author’s daughter Heather and her neighborhood pals heading to day camp in the author’s truck.

 
We always boiled water for drinking, cooking, washing fresh vegetables, and brushing teeth. Boiling water was a big deal in our daily routine, taking up hours of stove time every day. But although we lectured the girls about clean water and contamination, April and Heather both went through a period of nearly constant intestinal ailments—from simple diarrhea to amoebic dysentery. We became close to our neighborhood pediatrician. I recall carrying 5-year-old Heather down the street to the doctor because she was too sick and dehydrated to walk. Many years later, after they were grown, the girls made a devastating confession that clarified a lot: “We used to drink water from the garden hose with our friends.” You know, because they weren’t supposed to do so.

While in Mexico, our girls experienced extremes of poverty and wealth they didn’t see in our middle-class American life. The laborers in our excavations were campesinos or farmers from a nearby village. Cindy and I got to know families in one village quite well, and we became compadres with several couples: We formed very close, if formal, social bonds with parents and sponsored their children, either in religious sacraments (baptism or confirmation) or in more secular activities (graduation from sixth grade). We bought the bride’s dress for one wedding, we paid for the band at another. April and Heather had many friends there and witnessed humble rural life first-hand—sleeping in an adobe house with a dirt floor, for example, and being awakened in the morning by pigs trying to push the door in.

Mexico’s affluent also inhabited a world we’d never before experienced. Once our girls were old enough, we enrolled them in a private school in Cuernavaca, the Instituto Oxford. The tuition put a big dent in our income, and I think we may have been the poorest family at the school. April and Heather let us know that we were the only ones at the school without servants. The girls’ friends from school lived in mansions nestled behind security gates and graced with pools and tennis courts. Maids cleaned up after sleepover parties. Their parents spoke both Spanish and English and regularly flew to Texas to shop.

But regardless of class divides, Mexico warmly embraced my family, and provided all of us with a wealth of experiences, in addition to a rich culture and a second language. I’m eternally grateful I picked up that book so many years ago, in search of Atlantis. Fruitful quests, and inspiration, can often be sparked by the most seemingly inconsequential of choices. Our time in Mexico taught us that both archaeology and family benefitted greatly from a focus on everyday surprises.

The post Why I Dig Aztec Kitchen Trash appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Occasionally, I’m harried by pedants who insist that birds are not and cannot be dinosaurs. Birds—they protest—are descended from dinosaurs. But biodiversity cares not a whit for human classification systems. In reality, birds are just one branch within the wider dinosaur family tree. For millions of years, birds lived alongside the Mesozoic celebrities we know and love. But when the earth-bound dinosaurs we call Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops bit the dust, the avian dinosaurs we call birds survived.

The idea that birds are living dinosaurs isn’t new. Victorian and early 20^th century researchers toyed with the notion, and paleontologists forcefully reinvigorated the idea during the 1970s, when the discovery of some exceptionally bird-like forms—such as the switchblade-clawed “raptor” Deinonychus—hinted at a deep connection to early birds. Since then, discovery after discovery has confirmed that avians truly are a form of dinosaur. We’ve also learned that most dinosaurs were probably warm-blooded creatures with feathers. This has become so established that the discovery of the fossils of yet another plumage-covered dinosaur has become a rather mundane event.

While paleontologists have no trouble seeing a raven’s inner dinosaur, many people resist the idea. They prefer the scaly, imposingly reptilian visions of dinosaurs from decades long gone. But complaints that dinosaurs are somehow less scary when coated in feathers are total bosh. Picture Tyrannosaurus rex covered in a coat of fuzz (as we can rightly expect the carnivore to have worn based on other tyrannosaurs found with such plumage). Our favorite dinosaurian monster still would have been every bit as powerful and rapacious, the fluff on its body rippling and wafting as the tyrant launched itself from the shadows of the Cretaceous forest to plunge its railroad-spike-sized teeth into the neck of an unsuspecting young Triceratops.

If other lineages of dinosaurs survived to this day—modern descendants of Apatosaurus and other favorite forms—perhaps the break between dinosaurs and present-day life forms wouldn’t seem so sharp, and elementary school children would learn that the major forms of vertebrate life are fish, amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, and mammals. (Of course, go back far enough and all those groups could technically be called “fish,” given their evolutionary descent from a particular fish lineage that grew limbs and clambered through Devonian swamps, but that’s an essay for another time.) Calling birds dinosaurs challenges our perceptions of the categorization of life, and that is precisely why I relish purveying this fact of evolutionary history.

Extinct dinosaurs are only becoming odder and more fascinating through the realization that we live among their surviving relatives. Paleontologists now recognize that many traits we think of as distinctively “bird” were actually widespread among other dinosaurs. When pregnant with a clutch of eggs, mother Tyrannosaurus laid down a specific type of tissue called medullary bone in parts of her skeleton, just as modern birds do. Paleontologists now believe that dinosaurs were teen moms—life for them was apparently so harsh and prone to early death that they had to start reproducing before they hit full maturity if they were to leave any descendants to the next generation.

Feathers hold even more clues. Not only have researchers discovered scores of feathery, fluffy, and fuzzy dinosaur fossils, but some paleontologists have been able to reconstruct dinosaur colors—colors!—by comparing microscopic structures in those feathers to the same features found in living bird plumage. The pigeon-sized feathery dinosaur Anchiornis was glossy black, like a magpie with a tuft of red feathers on the head, further blurring the line between dinosaurs past and present.

With apologies to birders and ornithologists, for me, birds can never compete with their celebrated non-avian relatives. A raven lacks the majesty of a flesh-rending Allosaurus. A hummingbird, astonishing as the little avian is, will never be quite so bizarre as the titanic sauropod Supersaurus, stretching over 110 feet from the tip of the herbivore’s tiny head, down a elongated neck, hefty body, and graceful tail.

But I still love to watch the one remaining branch of dinosaur hop and flit about. They connect the world I know to a prehistoric past I’ll never get to see, left to us only in preserved remnants of tooth, bone, and feather in the sorts of dig sites I find myself inextricably drawn to every summer. The ravens that fly over and turn a quizzical eye towards me as I search Utah’s dinosaur-rich rocks don’t seem so different from the long-lost ancestors that I’m hoping to uncover. They make time travel wonderfully simple. From beak to tail feathers, birds are beautiful, delicate dinosaurs that remind us of a time when our furry mammalian ancestors snuffled and hid beneath the feet of the most wonderful creatures ever to have evolved.

The post The Dinosaurs in My Yard appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.