Archaeologica.org

The consensus was that we could not imagine the circumstances whereby metal might be smelted naturally. That leaves "unnatural" and the only thing I can think of is that someone threw the wrong rock into a pottery kiln and later said..."holy shit! I wonder what THAT is." I like ...

A Roman camp was really a small fortified town, with its own shops and tradesmen, which was often set up for one night when the army was on the march. But Roman soldiers were so well trained that they could set it up in five to sixe hours. Livy, the great Roman historian, tells the story of how, on...

Wow... I grew up skiffing and water skiing those bogs and lagoons a a kid. Jumped off more than a few bridges on a dare and never had any idea! Very cool...

Probably disturbed more than a few spirits in the mounds. Or maybe they were kindred spirits and enjoyed our exploits!

So is there a consensus? What is it? Is this the wrong forum to ask?

Which throws us back to the old discussion as to what is a species?

Homo Shortrectus?

There have been findings of furnaces that suggest bog iron smelting in the Ohio and Pennsylvania area that pre-date European contact. But it seems to have been a lost technology. At the time of European contact the “natives” were very much in the stone age. And there is evidence of copper smelting ...

Back before the wars down there, We used to love to cruise the Sea of Cortez looking for big game fish and cruise the Baja looking for cave paintings. I met a guy by the name of Harry Crosby in a bar in Loreto, and he showed me caves around Mulege and Loreto. He was an expert and all I did was help ...

The debate gets a lot less interesting when people project their very local situation on the world at large, like Barry does: Except that my original query was regarding my local area... climate, flora, fauna, terrain are obviously different all over the world. I was curious about whether the stori...

That makes perfect sense in a screwed-up kind of way.

Not to those of us who live here.

Even today, fire-fighters are at the whim of the winds when they try to stop these things. Once they get going they seem to burn in the direction the wind pushes them until they run into an obstacle or run out of fuel. They have traditionally started on the west side of the mountains in the fall, w...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 093300.htm


Sequoiadendron giganteum... my favorite flora. And I love backpacking the area where they grow. But what does that have to do with where I live and am talking about?

Of course, there would have been no one to put the fires out if they did start from a lightning strike.

It would have been absurd to try... but why would they if they started them to modify the landscape?

Hunters need cover. They wouldn't burn the brush. Herders need open grassland. They would burn the brush. Pine cones need the heat of fire to spring open and disseminate their seeds. Without regular pine forest fires no healthy pine forests. Forest fires are indispensable for pine procreation. Fire...

Maybe its that damned volcano?

I'm having no trouble but... I don' know where I'ma gonna go when d' volcano blow...

That could be true down south, but in NorCal after a big storm you can look across one valley and see multiple lightning caused fires. i've seen electrical storms in other desests, do they really not happen in SoCal? Nothern California is an entirely different world... climate included, but not the...