The January issue of National Geographic magazine is called “The Firsts Issue”. I think that Native Americans might “take issue” with some of the “firsts”. Chocolate is one of the very few firsts attributed to ancient Americans. So, maybe we should revisit this topic from a Native American bias. Since the earliest date for American occupation only goes back to 16,000 B.C., I guess we’ll have to start there to see how Native Americans compete with mankind’s firsts. Well,

Tonight, April 23, 2015, is an interesting night for sky watchers. At 8 pm Mountain Time, right after the sun goes down, you may be able to see a parade of prominent star brothers. Just after Grandmother Sun sets, she is followed by Mars and Mercury, then the Ani Tsutsa (Pleiades Constellation), then the Evening Star (Venus), and then the crescent Moon. Mercury and Venus shared a common significance with many Native American cultures. The significance of Venus has been pr

A couple of weeks ago, we observed a “Lunar Eclipse”. Because this year is when the moon is in its minor “Lunar Standstill” (refer to article on Lunar Standstill at Chimney Rock), it was the shortest Lunar Eclipse for many years. Because of the nature of the Moon’s and the Earth’s planes of orbit, an eclipse is an irregular event, that is, it appears to happen randomly. A Lunar Eclipse is when the moon is shaded by the shadow of the earth; when the earth is between the sun

There is excavation going on in Ceibal, Guatemala that is threatening the conventional wisdom concerning the ascent of man! Jacob Bronowski, who wrote the book “The Ascent of Man” and hosted the television series by the same name, wrote, “Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, his is not a figure in the landscape–he is a shaper of the landscape.” Bronowski suggested that before man could build great m

The civilization that inhabited the canyon in central New Mexico known as “Chaco Canyon” was indeed a “phenomenon”. Despite extensive archaeological study, there is little known of the society or the people that lived there. It seems to defy fitting into a known political and/or ritual society. As Lynne Sebastian, director of historic preservation programs at the SRI Foundation, puts it, “The extraordinary archaeological record of this society indicates both a strong polit