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Sometimes I like just browsing random stories about this kind of thing. It's pretty incredible the amount of stuff still being discovered and dug up today, half the time in situations where people have been living on top of it for centuries.

The insane heat waves Europe has been getting have revealed the outlines of ancient excavations and building foundations all over the UK; from the Romans, from the Iron Age, and even the Neolithic area. They're markings really only visible from the air and look a bit like crop circles.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/uk-heatwave-ancient-sites-revealed-1.4787672

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-45170581

Also I've been reading up on a discovery in boring old Arkansas City Kansas last year, which looks to be basically rewriting everything everyone thought they knew about Plains Indians like the Wichita.

The lost city of Etzanoa was thought as a major exaggeration if not a complete fabrication by early Spanish explorers who had shit go sideways on them and wanted to make it seem like it had been for a good reason.

Cahokia near St. Louis has been considered the biggest Native American city ever found in North America, and this one may be bigger. It's kind of surreal actually because I remember hearing about it as just another anecdote of 'lol those kooky Spaniards and their many fuckups and all the lies they told'. But I guess we have to give them this one now.

Something like 20,000 people lived there, maybe more. They all cleared out ahead of the Spaniards (just 70 Spaniards lol...pussies) and all they could do was count the houses for a few miles before getting spooked at how damn many there were and turning back. Then they met a few hundred warriors from an enemy of the Wichita with a really complicated name that had been on their way to attack the city and got owned pretty hard by them, but a hundred years later no one could find any sign of any of this. Although it was the cannonballs discovered at the site recently by a highschool kid along with all the pottery fragments arrowheads etc locals had been digging up by the wagonload that clinched this as definitely being the right place.

tl;dr summary: The city of Etzanoa was highly developed and big—at least five miles across. Blakeslee says that the approximately 20,000 inhabitants of Etzanoa possessed the infrastructure for processing “industrial quantities” of bison, likely spoke multiple languages, and traded at great distances. This, he says, shatters the “Hollywood image” of native people in the great plains. The ancestors of the Wichita who lived in this city—and, Blakeslee thinks, many other cities like it in the region—were an urban, industrious people, a far cry from the popular conception of the early indigenous peoples of North America.

More detailed article: https://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/article145026439.html


So anyway glad to know they weren't all just a bunch of dirty hippies.

But how many scalps did they keep there?

It's kind of funny actually because for so many years these certain ideas about Plains Indians were in the popular imagination to where it becomes almost how you envision the 'default' Indian...when no, actually, in the state in when they inspired all that their own people would've considered them a bunch of bumfuck nobodies.

I wonder if it's a little weird to be a Wichita Indian living today and realizing this culture of your ancestors you were venerating and preserving was actually a fairly recently developed one of what was basically a scattered bunch of post apoc survivors who didn't even bother to pass on any real info about the time when they had a civilization that mattered.

I'd actually be interested in hearing from one of the kids around here how all this Native American stuff is taught in school these days. Is it still all about the narrative of evil and greedy white man driving out good and noble nature loving brown man just like in a Disney cartoon? Because the real history is so much more interesting and involves human beings. It's been becoming more obvious for awhile now that so many of these cultures were in such steep decline for their own reasons before whitey made their appearance with incredible timing to just sort of easily push them right the hell over. History would've been very different if contact had been made while a lot of these tribes and empires were at their peak.

I still can't figure out why 20,000 people would evacuate over 70 Spaniards. Although maybe they had word of the other tribe coming to attack them and thought these were some kind of freaky god beings sent to hit them first, who knows.

If no word of the Spaniards or Euros in general had gotten to them yet (although by 1601 surely it had) I imagine it would've been a little like having a UFO touch down in your city...except not really because we're all pretty acclimated to the idea of space aliens and it would be nowhere near as weird to us as these bizarre pale, hairy things in metal armor hauling giant metal tubes and riding on the backs of some kind of giant deer just showing up out of nowhere.

I'm gonna try and dig up the original account from the Spanish leader guy before continuing to talk to myself in this thread.

There is a theory (and it is exactly that, a theory) that the death from diseases brought to America by the Spanish may be far worse than originally believed.  It's possible these people heard word that epidemics followed the Spanish wherever they went, so they fled in a desperate attempt to avoid it.  Or perhaps the disease had already struck.  It's hard to fight after you've buried a large portion of your army.

@Zassuen @Chips Thoughts on this?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/03/fire-engulfs-brazil-national-museum-rio

It wasn’t immediately clear how the fire began. The museum was part of Rio’s Federal University but had fallen into disrepair in recent years. Its impressive collections included items brought to Brazil by Dom Pedro I – the Portuguese prince regent who declared the then-colony’s independence from Portugal – Egyptian and Greco-Roman artefacts, “Luzia”, a 12,000 year-old skeleton and the oldest in the Americas, fossils, dinosaurs, and a meteorite found in 1784. Some of the archive was stored in another building but much of the collection is believed to have been destroyed.

Really is a shame all this irreplaceable history was being held in a building with exposed wiring and no sprinklers. Oh, and..

Rio’s fire chief Colonel Roberto Robaday said the firefighters did not have enough water at first because two hydrants were dry. “The two nearest hydrants had no supplies,” he said. Water trucks were brought in and water used from a nearby lake.

If only someone had realized the hydrants were just completely non functional modern art pieces before this tragedy occurred...

Btw socialism is definitely responsible for all of this, the problems with neglected maintenance etc began in 2014.

The problem started in 1889 when we stopped being an empire, it just went downhill from there.

On a more serious note, yeah definitively was our socialist gov..

To be honest, if a constitutional monarchy like the british was established in the revolutionary coup instead of a republic from scratch, our situation could be better right now.

At least we wouldn't have Lula and Dilmanta to ruin things. Or Collor to confiscate citizen money.

Damn brazillians, they ruined Brazil.

 

In truth, the probable cause of this that our politicians are corrupt to the root and love to take things that don't belong to them. You should've seen when Aecio Neves used public money to construct an airport for his benefit and almost fucked up Minas Gerais entirely. Guess which state voted for Dilma when Aecio was competing with her for presidency? Minas Gerais.

Then we have the whole thing with Odebrecht. Lava-Jato and Mensalão don't really need much explanation.

Sometimes i wish i could unite the entirety of the politics of Brazil in one building, so i could kill them all. I'd probably start with Lula.

If i recall correctly, there's also the matter of the government not funding research and cultural buildings enough. There was the case of a brazillian particle acellerator which the country refused to contribute resources to. I don't know exactly if this is already solved, but i was really angry at the time at how the government could miss the opportunity to fund such a breakthrough.

I would Bitch some More, but then it would go far beyond the subject of this thread, so I'll just make another thread.

"If only someone had realized the hydrants were just completely non functional modern art pieces before this tragedy occurred...", Oh but they did, almost all of our hydrants are completely dead, that's especially so in Rio.

A tragedy indeed, most cultured brazilians are furious about the proper mismanagement of funds, but this was expected, there's a general lack of funding, as the "culture" budget is directed towards rich assholes whos only talent is being lucky enough to have an audience even dumber than they are, and that's for them to go on national TV like pricks and suck the dicks of the politicians that gave them money like the whores they are,

Continuing, multiple museums are in the same disrepair, as I myself volunteered to repair some of the electronics in a military museum who I've visited every couple of months, because of the 100k (all the money I'll talk in this post will be BRL divide it by four and you'll get USD) they needed per year, they were getting 10-20k, fucking disgraceful, many, and I do mean MANY, priceless artifacts have been lost to piss poor management, this only caught the news because of the "oohhh eeey big fiah".

Btw just to put it in perspective how stupid our current system is the minimum funding required by our national museum was 500k, it got 100k, the current funding to wash our deputies cars (our version of overpaid senatorial aids) is 700k, yes just to WASH THE BLOODY CARS, our lovely ex-president who is in jail with over 50 counts of corruption, is still entitled to, and this may get a little long:

Four security guards: 13k salary each per month,

Two offical cars: more than a million each, tax per year in the 50k range, and of course "free" gas,

8 assistants with salary in the 14k range,

two separate 9k retirement salaries,

a massive undisclosed ammount for housing "assistance",

some other bells and wissles,

amounting to an estimated cost of over 4 million per year, and THAT'S FOR A FUCKING GUY THAT'S IN PRISON.

 

P.S. Just saw a video of the aftermath, and I don't believe it, in the midst of all the  destruction a single cabinet stood unscathed by the fire, THE FUCKING POLITICAL AND SOCIAL GROUP FLYER CABINET,

I'm done, what fucking loopy land is this shit.

Don't worry. We can always just fly over to Portugal and get european citizenship through illicit (read: escaping deportation, getting married or whatever other means that can be found) and live in a country with a working government.

At least, that's what everyone seems to be advocating to do. I'm starting to consider it too, since my family seems to have property on Sicily.

This was Probably the funniest archeology news I've read in quite some time,

http://time.com/5371503/ancient-egypt-tomb-old-cheese/

Well maybe not this article, but I couldn't find the NBCI article, but still, a 3400-year-old cheese littered with an unknown variant of an deadly disease, what could go wrong.

 

Girl, 8, pulls a 1,500-year-old sword from a lake in Sweden

I'm not quite up to date on how all this works but shouldn't she be crowned Queen of something or other now?

Her name is Saga and she swam in a Swedish lake, I think she's already beaten all possible pretenders.

https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/vampire-burial-reveals-efforts-prevent-childs-return-grave

1. Be pwned by mosquitoes

2. Gag vampires with rocks

3. ????

4. Profit!

This was the same malaria epidemic that stopped Attila's advance by the way.

https://youtu.be/q6-ZGAGcJrk