A response to an archaeologist's response to "Apocalypto"

Years ago (when the price of computer links across calling areas to a national laboratory was prohibitively expensive) I was attending anthropology classes in Graduate Chemistry building at Stony Brook University. There, Phil Weigand, Ph.D. had a NSF grant for the study of ancient turquoise mine samples gathered from the American Southwest by Dr. Kelly and others at the University of Illinois I think, using neutron activation trace element analysis in statistical hyperspace. Many dangerous source mines had been entered and I am given to understand, also by another Japanese researcher for similar study.

The idea was to relocate, if you will, the origin of artifacts sources when such artifacts as mentioned in this op-ed piece (NY Times) are found without known local sources, i.e., there are no Mayan sources of turquoise known (then) and to authenticate with the small removal (20 milligrams or so) of a sample for testing. One of the problems was with clinal sampling, i.e., variation across the matrix of deposit and the questions of how, for example crypto-crystalline minerals are thought to be formed, that very process introducing variability. I once watched other samples go behind the wall in small glass containers to be activated, the lab is now run by a consortium of universities, Stony Brook the lead, where the Dept. of Energy once did.

At the time I was also told informally by another anthropologist, that at Pueblo Bonito I think don't quote me, there was a room full of turquoise pieces on the outside of the walled town, an adjacent structure only accessible from the exterior of the settlement that it was said the US National Parks Service would not discuss, because of two burials in the style of MesoAmerican ritual were found in it. As I was told we were trying to figure out how to extract "El Nino" data from the archaeological record.

Also, while there was just published "The Man-Eating Myth" by William Arens a social anthropologist with whom I had undergrad and graduate classes, in which he disputes the colonial descriptions and other descriptions of "cannibalism" purported by invaders and others practicing a territorial imperative, for example, those outsiders who are usually attributed to such reported rituals, beyond the "gustatory cannibalism" that results from dire extreme circumstances, which often is proscribed because it leads to a certain horrible disease.

Anyone want to comment about turquoise among the Maya? Posted to histarch

Further: 6 Jan 2007:

In light of the developments of the "Manhattan Project" and the support structures and sites placement on the US National Register (though perhaps given US "sovereign nation" stated status on some (or all?) reservations they should perhaps be UNESCO international sites, also an international effort, including reports of enriched uranium captured from Germany) it should be noted that, according to declassified material released circa 1978, that some railroad boxcars were listed as "turquoise" ore in bills of lading and perhaps labeled as such, that had actually contained uranium ore. Apparently also a problem on some reservations as people excavated it without protection from said ore.