All Hail Atlantis

A 5000-year-old sunken city off the southern Peloponnese is the latest candidate for the fabled city of Atlantis. Known as Pavlopetri, and straddling some 30,000 square meters of the ocean floor, it is the first submerged Greek city found that actually predates Plato’s 360 BCE-era references to Atlantis in Critias and Timaeus.

Meanwhile, in their continuing refusal to address climate change, the planet’s industrialized nations are proceeding to slip beneath the waves new cultures, new peoples, new civilizations, new Atlanti. The Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu, for instance, is expected to disappear into the Pacific Ocean in less than 50 years.

In Dubai recently opened the $1.5 billion, 113-acre Atlantis Hotel, located on the world’s largest artificial island, offering rooms for $26,000 per night. This when roughly 1 billion people on this planet go to bed hungry every night.

Welcome to our world.

No Fear

The New York Times this week dispatched a reporter to Hawaii to determine whether the fear merchants of North Korea and the American right had succeeded in scarifying the islanders.

Seems a Japanese newspaper, Yomiuri, reported on June 17 that, according to an “analysis” by the Japanese Defense Ministry, “it is believed” North Korea “might” fire a long-range ballistic missile “toward” Hawaii, “maybe” around July 4.

The shadowy, assumption-riddled Yomiuri piece seems primarily geared towards instilling fear in the Japanese people, spinning scenarios of the missile landing near the Japanese island of Okinawa, or dumping a first-stage booster over the Chugoku or Shikoku regions of Japan. But it was the Hawaiian speculation that was immediately latched onto by US-oriented fear limpets—despite the fact that the article explicitly states that any missile must land at least 500 kilometers short of the main Hawaiian islands.

And so, people prone to flogging and/or feeling fear having been in a flap for nearly a week now, the Times set out to discover if the Hawaiians themselves were wringing their hands and running for shelter.

No.

Things Keep Their Secrets

I live in the high foothills of northern California, along the Cascade-Sierra divide, on land where Ishi once lived.

Ishi, “the last of the Yahi.” The marooned American Indian famously portrayed, with no little sympathy, by Theodora Kroeber in Ishi In Two Worlds. The man who, on August 29, 1911, most probably walked across what is today “my” “land,” on his way down out of the wilderness, into a corral occupied by east Oroville butchers. Who was briefly jailed, then spent the four remaining years of his TB-shortened life as a museum piece, literally living in a Museum of Anthropology, at the University of California in San Francisco.

Ishi, in his four short years among whites, didn’t say much. He never, as an example, revealed his name. At all times, however, whenever among whites, he was adamant: he was the last of his tribe. All other Yahi, all his relations, alpha to omega, had died.

This is my 34th year (on and off) on Ishi’s land.

And I will tell you this: Ishi was not the last of his tribe.

And, in this diary, I will tell you why that is all I will tell you.

Mapping Through Georgia

There is a hopeful article in the November/December issue of Archaeology that details how modern archaeologists can obtain knowledge of vanished American Indian cultures without disturbing sites that may contain human remains.

At what is now Etowah Indian Mounds State Historic Site in what is now the state of Georgia, archaeologists have eschewed the digging of hundreds of thousands of test pits, which traditional archaeological methodology would consider necessary to fully assess what might lie concealed here, beneath 500 years of flood- and plow-scoured land.

Instead, an archaeological team moving over the surface of the earth utilized sophisticated portable sensors to map a shrouded underground city of more than 140 buried buildings, “without turning a single shovelful of earth.”