Two stories that have nothing to do with APOCALYPSE
Are you grateful? I sure am
Last call for my southern California events, which are THIS WEEK!
Friday, May 16 at 6 p.m. at Cellar Door Bookstore!
Saturday, May 17 at 7 p.m. at Automata! RSVP here!
APOCALYPSE is an Amazon Best of the Month pick in history!
Geographical magazine calls APOCALYPSE: “a deep dive into archaeology and history…[that offers] an opportunity to think about the future hopefully, not just fearfully.” Read the full review here!
APOCALYPSE has been officially out in the world for six days, and so today I’m resting from the relentless promotional cycle. In the past few weeks, and especially at the Society for American Archaeology meeting, I remembered what it felt like to have other ideas and learn new things. Being rewarded for my intense curiosity about random things I just learned about is what brought me to science writing in first place. I wouldn’t say I lost that curiosity while working on the book, but I did get so deep into its stories that eventually, they ceased to surprise me. (That was the also the good part, of course—not having to stop just because I had learned enough to meet a deadline.)
So here are two stories I wrote recently that, blessedly, have nothing to do with APOCALYPSE at all. May there be many more!
Fun with radiocarbon
Did you know there are times in the past where radiocarbon dating doesn’t really work? When the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere plateaued or reversed, and so for a long time it was nearly impossible to calibrate the radiocarbon results from those times to actual calendar years? And did you know that one of those confusing times is the 16th century, the key period for early contact for Indigenous people and Europeans in North America? And so archaeologists were basically just guessing about which sites dated to before contact and after??? I mean. This is one of the most significant events in human history. It seems pretty important to know for sure!
Archaeologists are now figuring out how to know for sure, and I spent many delightful hours learning about the technicalities of radiocarbon plateaus and Bayesian statistics in the halls of the Denver Sheraton at the SAA meeting. It turns out pretty much everyone was making the wrong guesses about when North American Indigenous sites existed and were abandoned, based on their assumption that any degree of European contact must have immediately disrupted them forever. Surprise: It didn’t. Calendar dates don’t lie. Read my story here.
The most influential drug trips in history
To greatly simplify 100 years of scientific history, archaeology used to treat the kinds of complex, hierarchical societies most of us now live in as humans’ inevitable, desirable endpoint. Now, most archaeologists would tell you the opposite: People were living pretty good lives before and without complex societies and their social and economic stratification. The mystery isn’t how we survived without those kinds of societies, but how and why we let ourselves get roped into them. (For more on this, see The Dawn of Everything, a great companion to APOCALYPSE, if I do say so myself.)
The answer varies across places and times, and last week I wrote the case of Chavín de Huántar, in the Peruvian Andes, which archaeologists think consolidated its influence, prestige, and new concept of authority through guided drug trips—an idea now bolstered by the discovery of residues of the drugs themselves inside bone tubes left of the floor of an underground temple. “This isn’t people going off on a vision quest, or even a shaman taking some psychoactive substance in an individual ritual,” one of the researchers told me. “It’s something more analogous to wine at communion.” I had a lot of fun thinking about that during conclave week! Read my story here.
