Ever since I was a child, I have always wanted to climb tall pyramids and discover hidden ancient cities. I learned later on that there were pyramids all over the world and that ancient cities were everywhere, many so fantastic that they baffled scientists as to how they were made. I remember hearing of how there were head hunters in Peru and how scientists could not get close to the area without being killed. All the excitement moved through my head of all the possibilities to be found in Peru. The fact that the cities were buried deeply in the canopy of the rain forests meant no one was disturbing the sites and we could find out the true nature of the civilizations there. Were they the savage creature’s explorers and scientists made them out to be or were they more like ourselves, family oriented and an advanced society or societies, maybe as advanced or more advanced than ourselves, lost to the ravages of time. Or were they, did they move to another area of the world, were they destroyed by other civilizations? Or did they just die out? All these thoughts, among others, always pulling my mind to the Peruvian land in search of the past, in hopes of discovering the future.

     Manchu Picchu was always amazing to me. A city 4 miles high in the mountains all made of stone, with a majestic view from all corners. Looking at the city from a distance it seems to be at the top of a step pyramid, with all the terraces coming up from all sides of the mountain. They were said to be for farming and that the city was self-sufficient because of these terraces, but I believe in my heart that they just wanted to be atop a pyramid, for the symbolic look of it, because it is also thought to be the place of worship and/or privilege.  We know how religious and/or the privilege want to be at locations that show power and the presence of a higher power.

     Machu Picchu was re-discovered in 1911by Hiram Bingham and was originally thought to be Vilcabamba, the last city the Spaniards conquered, Paititi, the City of Gold, or El Dorado, but it was neither of these and really is still not fully understood. If you look at a close up picture of the city it is amazing the technical prowess they have shown. The walls to the terraces are perfect and still show no wear as if they were formed by the mountains themselves. The roofs of the buildings are missing, probably made from organic matter, but the windows and structures shown within the walls are amazing and to think that they were built at least 1500 years ago boggles the mind. The ledges, walls and windows are whole with no rocks out of place; looks as if it could have been used recently and just stopped being used. This was probably a place of celebration as well, with large squares and areas sizable for public gathering or even a getaway location for a holiday. The mind just wonders and sees more and more as you imagine the possibilities.

     Lake Titicaca is another amazing city location, underwater there are hundreds of miles of buildings and roads stretching in all directions. The lake is said to have been 10 times its present size of some 8400 square kilometers. It is said that upheavals and areas drying up has shrunk its size. The lake was initially salt water as well and over the course of time has become fresh water. The lake is about 12000 feet above sea level and is still fed by tributaries keeping its level constant. One amazing thing about the lake is the variety of the sea life it presents, which leads me to believe the ruins are very old, like the seahorses, which is only found in sea water, which have adapted to the environment and thrive in the lake.

       Expedition Atahuallpa’2000 was an expedition group that did a three year study of the location and found a lot of pottery and relics that resemble relics found from other cities of an unexplained nature and predates the Incan Empire. My mind is asking if this city is old enough to be buried beneath an ocean like bay and obviously thrust 12000feet into the air and time has converted out all the salt water and converted the sea life, how old are these cities really. We always read dates of cities being 1500-3000 years old, even the Egyptian pyramids until lately were dated alike. Until recently it seems that dating systems were left to the person finding the sites and were left that way. Even with today’s dating technologies we are hard struck to fight these dating habits.

     Yet another fascinating place within Peru is Puerta de Hayu Marka or Doorway of the Amaru Meru/ Aramu Muru Or even Gate of the Gods Found in Peru. It is this large doorway cut into this very large rock and leads to nowhere. Many Shaman priests have said that they performed ceremonies that opened portals into other worlds or that magical disks were used to step into other dimensions. Anthropologists say that there is a slot to one side of the doorway which could fit a disk, but no disks have been found. There are many legends as to the gateway to the gods, from the Inca, Azteca, and even the Spaniards, from great spiritual feats to just touching the wall and having visions of constellations of  stars and tunnels going on in all directions. Looking at the wall and door way it does look like something from the Twilight Zone and the construction of a door way into solid rock is quite an accomplishment. Just being able to chisel into the rock is remarkable, but to do it perfectly and have a flat smooth back in mind boggling.

     Peru also has a sea port some 15 miles further inland than even Lake Titicaca, it is called Tiahuanacu and is 12500 feet above sea level as well. Arthur Posnansky, a German engineer who dedicated fifty years to its study, dated its origins to 15,000 B.C. Most anthropologists agree that the city must have been built while the sea was only about 600 feet away, which is the dilemma how the structure could be so young when the scientist think the land was pushed up around 100 million years ago. All around the site is evidence of ocean life and the water itself. So it was built near the ocean. Why can’t the buildings be 100 million years old? Are we certain that everything we know is accurate? Or even 30000 years, the Sphinx is now believed to by at least that old. Why do we underestimate the time we have evolved?

     Peru has many fascinating sites, to many to list in one report, but it leads to the question, who are we? Where are we from? There are the Nazca lines, shapes made out of small stones scattered throughout the desert, areas that look like airports, waiting for someone to land, among others. These artifacts are located worldwide as well; not leading to a history that a few thousand people with stone tools could create, so again I ask, who are we?

     “Free at Last! Free at last! Thank god almighty, we are free at last!” These were the words spoken by Dr. Martin Luther King in his I Have a Dream speech August 28, 1963 at the Lincoln memorial. This is what Dr. King is most known for his dreams of freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We hear little of Dr. King’s use of nonviolent resistance, the effects of its use, the victories, and the losses, only that Dr. Martin Luther King had a Dream.

     Dr. King was a devout Christian and attended seminary graduating with honors. At 26 he became a pastor and all the pieces of the protest movements started falling in upon him. King was verse in Mohandas K. Gandhi’s vision of Satyagraha, the use of truth-force or love-force to win over your enemy and convert them into being your friend or at least sympathetic to your cause. King knew that violence would only beget violence and would make life more difficult for the people whom he was fighting for, so he began to teach his followers the power of the nonviolent resistance and the power within them as well.

     Since the people that Dr. King was to train were used to only knowing violence, that is violence toward them, it was difficult at first to train them. The people of Alabama thought that at first he wanted them to run away or give in, to be cowards. That is why Dr. King had meetings every Monday and Thursday night to explain the power of this type of resistance. He explained that he wasn’t giving in at all that nonviolent resistance means what it says resistance, as in boycotting, refusing, and disobeying bad laws, all these things being done in a polite, nonthreatening way showing compassion and love, but by no means being cowardly in any means.

     King was a strong willed man and fully confirmed in his beliefs to the extent that he was willing to go to jail, be harmed, or even killed in defense of these beliefs. Many times during his peaceful protest many were hurt or went to jail, which is what he says provides a chance for outsiders to see and comprehend their struggle. As I stated earlier, all the resistance is done peacefully, meaning that neither Dr. King nor any of the protesters fight back or use any type of violence what so ever. This is the very strength of the movement, showing a commitment to the cause, protesting, sitting at lunch counters, riding in the front of the bus, using the water fountains, behaviors that got the attention of the people nonviolently.

     A nonviolent attitude had to be maintained as well, so that being said anyone that wanted to protest with Dr. King’s group had to go through training and if anyone could not hold back their emotions of violence then they could not participate. The holding back of violence was the most important part of the whole process and the most difficult. If people start hitting you, you want to raise your hands in defense, but you cannot, any act of hostility would be seen as just that hostility and the movement would had been colored as that, a hostile act.

     Later because of the restraint of the protesters, more and more people were joining the resistance. It was not just blacks, whites, Japanese, basically groups that believed in the cause or had a cause of their own joined as well. The movement kept gathering momentum and as it grew Dr. King added more to the agenda. King started seeing how many groups were being kept down as bad as the African American were and this as well stoked the fire of freedom too.

     King worked hard for labor rights for all races seeing that it didn’t matter if you were black or white, employers held you down, very seldom letting you get ahead. Because of the low paying jobs or in most cases no jobs available, King thought that the government should start putting more money into poorer neighborhoods. For this, people started calling him Communist, but in reality, he was more of a Socialist and wanted the government to become more so as well. He believed that people should not be forced to live in squalor and should have the dignity of a good job and the opportunity to better themselves. King also thought this would not be an easy or quick job calling for the spending of hundreds of billions of dollars to complete the process. These thoughts did not make the government happy, Linden Johnson was agitated because Dr. King was asking him to withdraw from the Vietnam War and too spend the money on our citizens.

     Dignity, Humility, Honor, and Family were things that Dr. King was fighting for and not just for the people within the movement, but for everyone. The nonviolent resistance is a process used to allow both sides of a conflict to come out winners. Unlike violent conflicts where there are casualties on both side, nonviolent conflict has little or no casualties and allows for people to come together afterwards and reconcile their differences. This is another reason to which King went this direction for protesting, he did not want to have a race war start in our country, he wanted everyone to reconcile and live as one people. Dr. King always used the statement from Thomas Jefferson, “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and that is all he wanted, people to live amongst one another.

     Dr. King admitted that it would be a long process, people would be uncomfortable at first seeing their children playing with others, but over time it would become normal behavior.

      Segregation no matter how small harms us all, whether we segregate ourselves from others or force it upon anyone else; we are doing harm to our self as a nation. I was asked by a friend yesterday, “What do you think King would have thought of us today?” I thought about it for a little bit and I replied that I do see some improvement, but at the same time a lot of segregation and fear permeates our society. In  my opinion most of our problems exist because of the fear and segregation, keeping us apart, not allowing us to move forward as a nation. It would be nice to use Love force and become whole as a nation, maybe then our leaders might listen to the 99% and remember King for what he was a visionary.

      Up till May of 2011, I really never thought of gentrification. In fact I never heard the word before and was shocked to realize what was going on.  Gentrification in short is the removal of one people or culture in place of another. After the experience at Towson last year with ‘Anthropology by the Wire’, my life has changed. I no longer just glance at information in the same light, it is almost as if something in me was turned on and it keeps looking deeper. Not consciously, but some demon inside of me is tapping me inside my head saying, “Jim look at this”, and at that moment more is revealed. Even classes I took this semester started unlocking more of those pieces in my head. One example of this is my sociology 141 class, Racial and Cultural Minorities. It seemed like each class I attended led me further down the rabbit hole and it became an obsession in my mind. Everything I learned from Native American and the trail of tears to Martin Luther King and even the Sundown towns just tore me up inside almost removing parts of my soul. At times I just wanted to cry and did at times. My personal heritage is part Native American, Cherokee to be precise; my great grandparents, on my mothers’ side, were full blooded. They were farmers and my grandfather was a Baptist minister. I always wondered why I was never shown the ways of my Cherokee heritage, but learned 46 years later in a class in college the truth and it made me feel shallow, it is even choking me up as I was writing this dissertation. To find out that they were forced to go to school to learn European ways and to forget about our ancestral ways, also forced to become farmers and Christians, as well as not to relate their heritage to their descendants is a travesty. I digress; going back to Baltimore City, when I was a child here, Baltimore was the tenth largest city in America. I was proud of my city, everywhere you read or looked talked about our city growing just like New York and Chicago among others, and I did not know what was going on. Even in 1979, my family purchased a parcel of land in the Oliver Beach area. The deed had written on it, “No colored allowed to purchase”. This leads me to another class I attended on ‘Sundown Towns’, where races were forced to leave their homes and relocate to cities that allowed ‘their kind’. Being white, I never knew that people were segregating me and others from what they thought were the wrong kind. I remember when I was younger and lived in New Jersey for a while, Toms River to be exact, and in order to move into the community we needed to go and talk to Uncle Ben, he was the guy that determined if you could move there or not. In Jersey many of my friends from school were Jewish and Italian, that is because that was who lived there. My neighborhood was all white as well as most other neighborhoods I have lived in. Not until I moved to Maryland in 1977 did my family live in any sort of mixed raced neighborhoods. Even then, the events going on did not come to my realization. The Whites were leaving the cities and moving to neighborhoods that were very controlled in account to who moved in. That is why businesses left and the poor were left behind. Not all poor but black poor or the poor that were considered colored as well. You always hear over the years the term, “there goes the neighborhood”, and everyone starts to move out. Sadly enough that is where Baltimore was left. 35-40 years ago over a million people downtown and today less than 500,000. As you drive down her streets, boarded and condemned buildings everywhere. Some people are trying to preserve sections of our heritage, some are creating lots,  for parks and beautification, while others are working with groups like ‘Habitat for Humanities’ working to rebuild the dream of Baltimore and other cities. But even with groups like these, the oppressive structures of the white dominated society are crashing down on these people. Gentrification moves forward, slowly, methodically, taking with it the people who were previously left behind.

Attended the SUR convention 10/17/2011 was interesting and fun. Displayed our poster board and video for Anthropolgy by the Wire. www.anthropologybythewire.com

For undergraduate students giving them more of an access to grants and the adventure of studys. There were a lot of well done projects by many promising future scientists.

http://www.blackthisout.com/thread/e-flyer.jpg

Leech and maggot theropystill alive

archaeologicalnews:

 

In his climate-controlled “cemetery,” University of Colorado anthropologist Dennis Van Gerven preserves roughly 420 ancient Nubian mummies that provide clues about life and death in 600 A.D.

Leading up to one of his public talks, he picked up the jaw of one of the mummies, ran his…

Gigantopithecus part 2 is it Big foot?

Gigantopithecus is it Bigfoot?