La Cieneguilla Petroglyph Site
Gambler's House
by teofilo
3M ago
Today is the Winter Solstice, and the fifteenth (!) anniversary of this blog, so I thought I would take a break from my ongoing series on epidemics and depopulation to talk about an interesting rock art site I visited recently and its archaeoastronomical potential. The La Cieneguilla site is relatively obscure and I’ve been able to find very little about it in published sources. It is a few miles southwest of Santa Fe and is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, which has a very basic webpage about it but doesn’t otherwise provide much information. I’ve been curious about it for many year ..read more
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Virgin Soil, Widowed Land: A Curious African Counterpoint
Gambler's House
by teofilo
10M ago
Delaney Park at Noon on the Winter Solstice, Anchorage, Alaska Happy Solstice! I’m still working on continuing my series of posts on the study of Native American population collapse, but as part of this project I’m also reading about other parts of the world that share some of the same kind of history. Lately I’ve been reading a lot about Africa, which has a fascinating history that overlaps with that of the Americas in some respects but not others, and I was struck by a remarkable difference in how the topic of historical demography has been handled by Africanist scholars in the same period w ..read more
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Virgin Soil, Widowed Land: High-Count Hegemony
Gambler's House
by teofilo
1y ago
Arizona Welcome Sign If Sherburne F. Cook was the dominant figure in the “Berkeley Era” of the study of Native American historical demography, his equivalent in the next period was undoubtedly Henry F. Dobyns. Dobyns was a complicated, controversial figure and his legacy today is decidedly mixed, but his importance to the intellectual history of this issue is unquestionable. It is no exaggeration to say that he single-handedly launched the topic into the scholarly limelight, and he continued to pursue it for decades even as questions about his own methodology and approach began to spur a backl ..read more
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Virgin Soil, Widowed Land: The Berkeley Era
Gambler's House
by teofilo
1y ago
California Welcome Sign The study of Native American depopulation and the role of epidemic disease in it began in earnest around the beginning of the twentieth century, and from that point until 1966 it remained a relatively obscure niche topic across several different disciplines. Interestingly, the few scholars interested in this topic, regardless of disciplinary background or specific position on the substantive issues, were overwhelmingly concentrated at a single institution: the University of California at Berkeley. It’s not entirely clear why Berkeley became the focus of study for this t ..read more
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Hello Again!
Gambler's House
by teofilo
2y ago
Winter Solstice Sunset Well, I didn’t expect it to be a whole year since my last post, but that’s just how it has worked out. It’s been quite a year for me in my personal life, but I have been keeping up with researching my Virgin Soil, Widowed Land series of posts, and in fact that project is ballooning into something much bigger than a series of blog posts. One thing that’s becoming clear through that process, though, is that it is about time to wrap up this blog and move on to other platforms. WordPress has made various changes that make my current setup pretty obsolete and hard to use, and ..read more
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Virgin Soil, Widowed Land: Parallel Tracks
Gambler's House
by teofilo
3y ago
Wijiji Trail, Heading Back toward Campground Today is the winter solstice, which makes it the 12th anniversary of this blog. I usually do an archaeoastronomy post on this occasion, but since I’m now in the midst of my series on the role of disease in the depopulation of Native America I’m instead going to do a post giving a broad overview of the research on this topic as I see it. Subsequent posts will go into more detail about the different periods of research and the major developments and trends within them. I said in my last post that the series would continue with posts about individual ..read more
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Virgin Soil, Widowed Land: Overview and Scope Update
Gambler's House
by teofilo
3y ago
Clinic, Pilot Point, Alaska Well, it’s certainly been a while since I introduced this series! The coronavirus hasn’t gone anywhere, though, and neither have I. I’ve been reading lots of fascinating stuff on New World (de)population and disease history, and I have a pretty good idea of the way the series is going to look overall. I’m still not sure how long it’s going to take (at least several months) or how many posts it will ultimately include. I have enough of a sense now, though, to give a tentative outline of the topics I intend to cover, and that’s what I’ll do in this post. I’ve also dec ..read more
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Virgin Soil, Widowed Land: Introduction
Gambler's House
by teofilo
4y ago
Chief Andrew Isaac Health Center, Fairbanks, Alaska Today is the summer solstice, which is an event I usually mark with a blog post about archaeoastronomy. Today I’m going to do something a little different, though. Since the coronavirus pandemic has been dominating and reshaping life around the world for months now, with no end in sight, I’ve been reading up on past epidemics and their impacts on the populations and societies of the Western Hemisphere, and today I’m launching a series of blog posts discussing these issues. I don’t have a clear sense yet of how long this series will go on or ..read more
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An Annual Update
Gambler's House
by teofilo
4y ago
The Library Bar & Grill, Albuquerque, New Mexico Today is the winter solstice, which makes it the eleventh anniversary of this blog. Last year on this date I announced that I was scaling back to a more occasional posting schedule, and I’ve certainly stuck to that. I haven’t been doing a whole lot of reading specifically on Chaco Canyon recently, but I have actually been doing a fair amount of reading in general, so I thought today I would do a quick update on what I’ve been reading over the past year and how it relates to my (still rather vague) longer-term plans. I ordinarily write abou ..read more
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The Mesoamerican Context for Chaco Astronomy
Gambler's House
by teofilo
5y ago
Opening at Casa Rinconada That Channels Sunbeam at Sunrise on Summer Solstice Today is the summer solstice, so I thought I’d pop back in to do a post about archaeoastronomy, as is my wont. This time it isn’t about the archaeoastronomy of Chaco Canyon per se, but the larger context in which it would have developed, namely that of the civilizations of Mesoamerica to the south. I’ve mentioned before that I have a tentative theory that part of the impetus for the rise of Chaco as a regional center may have been that its leaders were the first in the Southwest, or at least the northern Southwest, t ..read more
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