Thursday, April 7, 2016

William H. Waldren, Boquique and the Balearics (Time Team)

Here's a full episode of Time Team as they explore a Bell Beaker settlement in Mallorca, Balearic Islands with William Waldren.

The settlement appears to have had an aqueduct that fed at least two large buildings within a fortress type enclosure.  A nearby temple site or complex had an observation post was oriented in the saddle of two mountains, very directly oriented toward Crux, or "The Southern Cross".*





William Waldren basically wrote the history for much of the Balearic Islands [here]

Here's the obituary of William H. Waldren, archaeologist. [here]



American painter and archaeologist william waldren memorial


* I'll have to do more reading on the various mythologies of the Crux, but in Christian times it was associated with the death of the Sun in the equinox, symbolizing the death of Christ for three days and then his victory over the cross and resurrection.  Because Crux disappeared in the Northern latitudes, its myth survived in Greece the longest as the beastial parts of the Centaurus.  It nearly completely disappeared from Europe at the very beginning of the Christian era, so it was widely accepted to be a sign.  In Greek mythology it is again associated with the sun, but in a less direct way.

As a side, side note...

You'll remember that a number of the funerary Beaker potteries have cross bottoms... 

7 comments:

  1. Hi BBB,

    I'm RK from the Eurogenes blog, and recently I've started putting together a hypothesis about the dramatic collapse of Y-chromosomal effective population size across Eurasia in approx 6k BP, and its implications for the social landscape of the period. I'm trying to tailor its application to Europe, so I'm already knees deep into material on Corded Ware and other present-day cattle/sheep-raising non-horseriding cultures of East Africa haha.

    I agree with you fully on the implied point in your post on 'child beakers', that insights from ethnography and sociopolitical/economic analyses of present-day small scale societies and the individuals in them, can give us a much more realistic view, when projected into the past, than what we get if we start off from our own culture-bound ideological concerns or academic/interpretive traditions.

    I'm trying to see if the hypothesis is consistent with what we know about Bell Beaker. In that light, do you mind communication via email?

    Thanks in advance, RK.

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    1. Ryukendo, let me know if you got my email in your notifications..

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    2. Hmm no not yet, where exactly?

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    3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    5. Hey RK,
      Hope you're not copying and preying me on my hypothesis! :-)
      http://shulaveri2bellbeaker.blogs.sapo.pt/

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