EXCAVATIONS AT TAIMA-TAIMA, 1976 – A FORUM FTP UPLOAD

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

For your information.

Given that  a number of Forum members has already shown an interest in issues concerning the early prehistory of the New World, and with permission from the authors, the following paper has just been uploaded to the Forum FTP site:

REVIEW OF THE EXCAVATIONS AT TAIMA-TAIMA IN 1976.
Alan Bryan and Ruth Gruhn, University of Alberta.

Invited paper presented in absentia at the Encuentro Internacional Sobre Paleoambiente y Poblamiento Temprano en Taima-taima. Coro, Venezuela, September 2005.

For access, CLICK HERE

Jacques

[E.P. Grondine]

Hi Jaques -

Thanks so very much for sharing this paper. Talk about bad luck - let's see, theft of bones for collectors' marker, materials recovered lost in fire, and then apparently the loss of the entire site. And I'm sure that both the excavators and their lab and everyone else involved ending up being heaped with abuse for the early dates reported.

My guess is that Unit 3 was most likely a deposit made by the 10,900 BCE cometary fragment impacts, but there's no way of demonstrating that now. We do not know yet now how many comet fragments hit, where  they hit, and when.

One of the difficult things for me to do right now with my stroke damage is to parse out the uncalibrated radio carbon dates to real time calibrated dates - the later are very important when dealing with asteroid and comet impacts. Has the terminology for these remained consistent from some point of definition? Is there a convenient basic program or java aplet which has can do re-calibrations using the most recent calibration curve?


Once again, thanks for this excavation report,
E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

For your information.

Given that  a number of Forum members has already shown an interest in issues concerning the early prehistory of the New World, and with permission from the authors, the following paper has just been uploaded to the Forum FTP site:

REVIEW OF THE EXCAVATIONS AT TAIMA-TAIMA IN 1976.
Alan Bryan and Ruth Gruhn, University of Alberta.

Invited paper presented in absentia at the Encuentro Internacional Sobre Paleoambiente y Poblamiento Temprano en Taima-taima. Coro, Venezuela, September 2005.

For access, CLICK HERE

Jacques

TAIMA-TAIMA ADDENDUM

Here is an additional source of information on work carried out at Taima-taima. This Bradshaw Foundation “article” is very well illustrated and provides one with an extensive bibliography.

Oliver, José R. --  Taima Taima. A 13,000 years old Mastodon Kill
Site in Western Venezuela.

For access, click HERE.

Jacques

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Hi Jaques -

Thanks so very much for sharing this paper. Talk about bad luck - let's see, theft of bones for collectors' marker, materials recovered lost in fire, and then apparently the loss of the entire site. And I'm sure that both the excavators and their lab and everyone else involved ending up being heaped with abuse for the early dates reported.

You are certainly welcome ... on behalf of the authors, Al Bryan and Ruth Gruhn!

My guess is that Unit 3 was most likely a deposit made by the 10,900 BCE cometary fragment impacts, but there's no way of demonstrating that now. We do not know yet now how many comet fragments hit, where  they hit, and when.

Perhaps you should have a look at John Hawks’views on the significance of “impacts”, views with which I fully agree.

One of the difficult things for me to do right now with my stroke damage is to parse out the uncalibrated radio carbon dates to real time calibrated dates - the later are very important when dealing with asteroid and comet impacts. Has the terminology for these remained consistent from some point of definition? Is there a convenient basic program or java aplet which has can do re-calibrations using the most recent calibration curve?

You may want to have a look at CALPAL ( HERE), a calibration package which I find useful and, contrary to others, very user-friendly.

Once again, thanks for this excavation report,
E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

Jacques

[E.P. Grondine]

Hi Jaques -

Thanks so very much for sharing this paper. Talk about bad luck - let's see, theft of bones for collectors' marker, materials recovered lost in fire, and then apparently the loss of the entire site. And I'm sure that both the excavators and their lab and everyone else involved ending up being heaped with abuse for the early dates reported.

You are certainly welcome ... on behalf of the authors, Al Bryan and Ruth Gruhn!

My guess is that Unit 3 was most likely a deposit made by the 10,900 BCE cometary fragment impacts, but there's no way of demonstrating that now. We do not know yet now how many comet fragments hit, where  they hit, and when.

Perhaps you should have a look at John Hawks’views on the significance of “impacts”, views with which I fully agree.

One of the difficult things for me to do right now with my stroke damage is to parse out the uncalibrated radio carbon dates to real time calibrated dates - the later are very important when dealing with asteroid and comet impacts. Has the terminology for these remained consistent from some point of definition? Is there a convenient basic program or java aplet which has can do re-calibrations using the most recent calibration curve?

You may want to have a look at CALPAL ( HERE), a calibration package which I find useful and, contrary to others, very user-friendly.

Once again, thanks for this excavation report,
E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

Jacques

Hi Jacques

One of the wonderful things about the internet is that publishing with many illustrations including color illustrations is now very cheap. While publishing this way does not provide the same academic status as print publication, in many ways it is more useful, and perhaps the excavators may be able to recover something from this disaster by setting up a really nice internet site documenting their dig and the finds.

The online convertor at CALPAL is exactly what I need - many thanks for that link.

I went over to Hawks site, but I could not find his paper on impacts.  I did see his comments on Hawking's view of the problem.

This may sound fantastic, but from what I can make out of the impact record for the last 6 million years or so,  the asteroid and comet impact hazard to man is very real and quite massive. My own view is that we need to set up the best planetary defense system possible.

Setting up the very best detectors, which would be based on the Moon (CAPS - the Comet and Asteroid Protection System - an analysis done  by an engineering team from NASA Langley) is both technologically possible and financially possible. It would be best done on an international basis to spread the cost, and I really can't see any one nation paying for it by themself.

In any case CAPS would be a much better expenditure of less money than spending hundreds of billions of dollars to fly a few men to Mars, a goal the Mars Cultists here in the US are promoting.

In any case, even more modest impactor detection systems (Earth and free space based) will require an expenditure per year of several tens of millions of dollars per year, an order of magnitude more than is currently spent dealing with the impact hazard.

Its interesting: the aerospace community has a very different view of funding and budgets than the anthropological community does, even though the same units of currencies are used to measure both.

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas


 

.

[E.P. Grondine]

Ooops - Sorry Jacques.

 I replied from "most recent posts", and did not see the internet site documenting the dig you had already posted the link to. Well, at least I came up with an idea the excavators had already implemented.

I suppose I'll get some ability with this forum's format in a bit.

My apolgies,
E.P Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

[Robert Henvell]

Ignorant Query:Does organic matter from  some mineral rich artesian waters need to have a correction applied in a similar manner to organic material,which has been submerged in marine water,to provide a more accurate C14 age determination?

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Hi Jacques

One of the wonderful things about the internet is that publishing with many illustrations including color illustrations is now very cheap. While publishing this way does not provide the same academic status as print publication, in many ways it is more useful, and perhaps the excavators may be able to recover something from this disaster by setting up a really nice internet site documenting their dig and the finds.

The online convertor at CALPAL is exactly what I need - many thanks for that link.

You are most certainly welcome.

I went over to Hawks site, but I could not find his paper on impacts.  I did see his comments on Hawking's view of the problem.

Apologies for neglecting to provide the link to Hawks’ views on impacts. Click HERE for access to a few comments with which, as noted earlier, I fully agree. In other words, as is true for many aspects of the kind of palaeoanthropological (sensu lato) research we are interested in, there is no need for deus ex machina, be they special mutations or a variety of putative, poorly understood and dated cosmic events.

This may sound fantastic, but from what I can make out of the impact record for the last 6 million years or so,  the asteroid and comet impact hazard to man is very real and quite massive. My own view is that we need to set up the best planetary defense system possible.

Setting up the very best detectors, which would be based on the Moon (CAPS - the Comet and Asteroid Protection System - an analysis done  by an engineering team from NASA Langley) is both technologically possible and financially possible. It would be best done on an international basis to spread the cost, and I really can't see any one nation paying for it by themself.

In any case CAPS would be a much better expenditure of less money than spending hundreds of billions of dollars to fly a few men to Mars, a goal the Mars Cultists here in the US are promoting.

In any case, even more modest impactor detection systems (Earth and free space based) will require an expenditure per year of several tens of millions of dollars per year, an order of magnitude more than is currently spent dealing with the impact hazard.

Its interesting: the aerospace community has a very different view of funding and budgets than the anthropological community does, even though the same units of currencies are used to measure both.

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

Hopefully, my brief comments should make you realise that the Palanth Forum is really not the place to keep waxing eloquent about the nature and significance of past, present and future cosmic catastrophism and its avatars. And, for the life of me, I have yet to understand what this has got to do with Taima-Taima.

Respectfully,

Jacques

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Ignorant Query:Does organic matter from  some mineral rich artesian waters need to have a correction applied in a similar manner to organic material,which has been submerged in marine water,to provide a more accurate C14 age determination?

Hi Bob,

I have never been confronted with this particular dating issue, but much has been written about the problems caused by the role of artesian wells/waters in a variety of archaeological sedimentary contexts, including those found at Taima-Taima. I really don't have time to pull out specific references, but if you go HERE, you’ll find a number of pertinent articles. And please, don’t hesitate to let me know about the ones that are of interest to you.

Jacques

[E.P. Grondine]

Hi Jacques -

The problem is that the impacts at 10,900 BCE were COMET fragments, not an iron of or stony iron asteroid which would have produced the microspherules which Hawks' reference sited as being missing.

The cometary impact debris exists at many sites and was well documented by Kenneth et al.  Meteoritic Iron Spherules were produced by the two IRON impactors which peppered the megafauna bones - one in Alaska (31,500?) and one in Siberia (26,000) which Firestone's team also recovered.

Having been at this for some 10 years, I don't view impact events as "deus ex machina", but just a normal part of our Solar System as it exists.  I know for many it is difficult for them to abandon Newton's clockwork universe and deism (it was for me), but impact events are real.

It appears that at the current rates of detection funding, me, you, your family, everyone you ever knew or loved, and everything you ever did can be blown off the face of the Earth in the blink of an eye.  In particular, massive impacts (up to ca. 88,000,000,000 Hiroshimas in force) have been well documented, and occurred while man was evolving.

I suppose denying that is a kind of mental defense mechanism.

When I read the Unit 3 report at Taima-Taimat, I went uh-oh, there it is again, and hence my lengthy comment.  Of course, it could be something else, but unfortunately with the loss of the site there is no way of studying that site now to look for impactites.

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

[E.P. Grondine]

Hi Jacques -

For a person who does not think that Firestone and Kenneth et al.'s hypothesis is correct, you've been a most tolerant moderator. You have not suppressed evidence of impact events out right, but have presented both sides of the debate.

My assumption is that if comet impact crater(s) ca. 10,900 BCE could be demonstrated, you would not ignore them, but accept the crater(s) as conclusive evidence.

Evidence of a possible candidate formation has been found:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iturralde_Crater

which may neatly account for the Unit 3 deposit at Taima-Taima.

Iltrude, if it is indeed an impact crater, would seem to be in accord with Shawnee//Tuscarora traditions:

"Then the Good Mind built a fire, as he wanted to burn the Bad Mind up.

Then while the Bad Mind's heart was in the fire, it burst out, to the SOUTH.
The Good Mind went and grabbed it, caught it, and threw it back into the fire again.

Then it [the Bad Mind's heart] burst from the fire to the East, and
The Good Mind grabbed it, caught it, and threw it back into the fire again.

Then it [the Bad Mind's heart] burst from the fire to the North, and
The Good Mind grabbed it, caught it, and threw it back into the fire again.

Then it [the Bad Mind's heart] burst from the fire to the West, and
The Good Mind grabbed it, caught it, and threw it back into the fire again,
this time bursting. It burst under the ground.

"That's what I want to do with him", and then the Good Mind stamped on top of the ground. He jumped up and down on where the Bad Mind's heart had finally burst.

Then the Good Mind thought of going home.

When he came there close to where they lived [Kokumthena (Grandmother, the Creator), the Good Mind, and the Bad Mind], and then he heard somebody at where they stayed.

He stopped a little while, and then started to go to the place again.
There he met Grandmother [Kokumthena, the Creator], and she told him
"You [the Good Mind] have been naughty", she said.
"You have BURNT THE SKIN OFF OF HIM [the Bad Mind]."

All of which left the remnants of Iroquian people around Big Lick and Fort Payne. While some megafauna survived, like the human population, their numbers were greatly reduced.

The field of Earth impact studies has just begun. It is not known yet whether Iltrude is  or is a cometary impact crater. For that matter, Unit 3 may be simply be a layer of organic matter without buckeryballs, nandiamonds, or very high temperature carbon products.

To give you an idea of the scale involved, after the Alvarez's, Snr and Jnr, demonstrated the world wide iridium layer, it took 10 years to find the Chixculub crater.

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas