#Physical Archeological

[xtruss]

Excavating a Language at the End of the World

How an Old Dictionary is Revealing New Perspectives on an Indigenous Culture.

— By Katarina Zimmer | July 31, 2024

Image: Shutterstock

Deep in the southern hemisphere, where frigid waves lap against the toe of the South American continent, the sea has no single name. Locals have called it tāralömbi when the water is perfectly calm. Čilamaii are the swells that gather along the coast, mötālömön is the roughening of the water by western breezes. Döna is the term when certain winds ruffle the ocean’s surface in such a way that the movement of fish underneath cannot be discerned and canoes must return ashore.

The Indigenous Yaghan people who have spoken these words are native to Tierra del Fuego—the mosaic of islands, fjords, channels, bays, and coves created by the submerged foot of the Andean mountains in southern Argentina and Chile. The Yaghan and their ancestors are thought to have persisted in this harsh, windy, and cold seascape for thousands of years. There, they have built canoes, from which they hunted sea lions and seals with harpoons. They have caught fish, gathered mussels, made ornaments, and celebrated rites of passage. They have roamed far and wide.

The last truly native speaker of Yaghan, Cristina Calderón, died in 2022. Up to a few hundred members of the group are still alive today—including Calderón’s granddaughter Cristina Zárraga and others who are working to revitalize the language; Yaghan is classified as “dormant” by the Endangered Languages Project.

Dictionaries, it turns out, can be excavated for rich information missing from the archeological record.

Although archaeologists have long been fascinated by the deep history of this seafaring, nomadic people, many of the physical remains their ancestors left behind have been lost to time. Fortunately, they have also left clues in the Yaghan language.

The Yaghan words for the sea were exhumed from a 19th-century Yaghan-English dictionary compiled in the late 1800s by an Anglican missionary. In a recent paper in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology, a team of Norwegian scholars argue that studying this historical snapshot of Yaghan could yield important clues about these people’s lives over the centuries. The same approach could be used for potentially hundreds of other languages, dead, alive, or dormant, across the globe to better understand old ways of life, ancient ecologies, and humans’ connection to the landscape.

Dictionaries, Such As The One Created For The Yaghan Language, It Turns Out, Can Be Excavated For Rich and Nuanced Information Missing From The Physical Archeological Record.

“You could think about language in a similar way as we think about the archaeological sites in a landscape,” says the lead author of the new research, archaeologist Jo Sindre Eidshaug of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Marine Ventures project, an international archaeological research effort. Eidshaug views language as something that “settles” a landscape just like physical artifacts, as people develop knowledge and vocabulary in places where they spent most of their time.

“This kind of research gives us a new tool to understand some [questions about] the life of these people in the past,” adds Angélica Tivoli, an archaeologist at the Austral Center for Scientific Research of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council in Ushuaia, Argentina, who wasn’t involved in the new work.

Today, while language revitalization efforts of Zárraga and others are underway, little Yaghan is currently spoken in Tierra del Fuego. The Yaghan culture and language underwent a devastating decline after Europeans arrived. In the 1880s, about 90 percent of the Yaghan people died from infectious diseases Europeans brought. The decline continued into the 20th century, when many Yaghans continued to die prematurely and faced discrimination for speaking the language. Today’s Yaghan people still fashion traditional harpoon points of whale bone and weave baskets, nowadays mostly to sell to tourists, but they can no longer canoe or boat freely due to restrictions by the Chilean Navy.

Thomas Bridges, who constructed the dictionary, first met the Yaghans as a teenager in 1856 and later lived with them for 30 years. Carefully documenting their language and culture helped Bridges to translate the Gospel of Luke into Yaghan, as part of Anglican missionary tradition to make the Bible accessible in local languages. But while a complete Yaghan Bible may never have come to fruition, Bridges’ dictionary includes about 32,000 words. “That level of detail he was documenting—it’s so beautiful,” says Oxford University ornithologist Andrew Gosler, research director of the Ethno-Ornithology World Atlas which collects Indigenous knowledge on birds. “To be able to document that kind of detail,” he says, demonstrates a closeness with the native speakers.

Grandmother Tongue: Cristina Calderón, pictured here, was the last known truly native speaker of Yaghan. She died in 2022, but her granddaughter Cristina Zárraga and others are working to revitalize the language. Historical perspectives, like that from the newly analyzed dictionary, help enrich contemporary understanding of the culture’s deep history—and connection with the landscape of Tierra del Fuego. Photo By: Víctor Alejandro Correa Rueda/Wikimedia Commons

Because Bridges was merely striving to record the Yaghan vocabulary as comprehensively as possible, his dictionary may be less colored by prejudices and personal agendas than ethnographic reports of the Yaghan by other missionaries and travelers, Eidshaug says. But still, the dictionary is limited in the kinds of questions about the past it can answer. Languages change over time, so it’s unlikely, for example, to shed light on deep archeological questions, such as the origins of the first marine hunter-gatherers in Tierra del Fuego some 7,000 years ago. Or to necessarily give a full picture of the richness and breadth of Yaghan life.

In other places, like Australia, male linguists have been historically more likely to ask men than women about their practices, documenting little on activities traditionally carried out by women, notes linguist Luisa Miceli of the University of Western Australia. Bridges also mostly worked with only one Yaghan couple—Okokko and Camilenna—to understand the language, possibly limiting his view of the communities’ activities as a whole, Gosler says. And, many concepts in Yaghan are so specific to culture and place that they’re hard, if not impossible, to fully encapsulate in other languages, adds Zárraga, who learned the language as an adult from her grandmother.

But the dictionary might have encoded detailed knowledge about the kinds of resources, practices, and deep environmental understanding that were assembled over hundreds or thousands of years in Tierra del Fuego, much of which hasn’t been preserved in the archeological record. “The kind of environmental knowledge that is picked up in this language has an antiquity to it,” Eidshaug says.

Most Physical Traces of Yaghan Culture, Like Any Remnants of Foraged Feasts, Were Lost To Time.

Wherever they went, Yaghans accumulated knowledge and vocabulary about their environment—the climate, the sea and its inhabitants, the coastline, the beach, and the forested hinterlands of Tierra del Fuego. Archaeological studies have mostly focused on shell middens along the coast—ring-shaped piles of shells that were discarded around dwellings—where animal bones and bone tools were preserved thanks to the alkaline chemistry of the shells.

The dictionary catalogs commonly hunted and foraged foods that don’t preserve—fast-degrading things like crab shells, berries, and fungi—in line with some ethnographic reports. Eidshaug counted 48 Yaghan terms for local fungi, many that describe their ripening in rich detail. For example, auačix, the round yellow summer fungus that grows on the šöšči tree: čikidönara describes immature fungi; pöša the second stage just before the fungus opens in holes and gets puffy; and dönara is when they are fully ripe, shortly after falling from the trees.

Most physical traces of the central vehicle of Yaghan culture, the bark canoe, like any remnants of auačix feasts, were also lost to time. Yet the dictionary describes in detail the resources and strategies involved in canoe-making. Bark is cut from the šöšči tree, and wood fiber called uri is used for sewing. Hūšun—seed stalks of wild celery—are sewn as pads into the seams to make them waterproof. Tstāgi soil is used to cement the seams. Tatega—pieces of young smooth bark—are attached to the canoe’s upper edges to protect paddlers from blisters. Through words like these, “we get a broader picture of the material culture,” Eidshaug says.

By Any Other Name: While trying to better understand the Yaghan language and culture—in order to craft translated Bible verse—a 19th-century Anglican missionary ended up creating a detailed map of the Indigenous group’s local knowledge and worldviews within his handwritten dictionary. Here, he documented the many Yaghan words for funguses. Credit: Yahgan Dictionary, 1865, hosted on Patagonia Bookshelf.

The dictionary also offers a window into some of the intangibles of Yaghan culture and worldview. Some entries pertain to rituals, such as kīna, an initiation ceremony for boys aged 12 to 17. The Yaghan word “to go” is often combined with prefixes to indicate direction; some denote the cardinal directions like north and south, but others indicate “toward land” or “away from shore,” illustrating how people mentally divided their landscape. Other entries explain how Yaghans kept time according to the seasonal changes in nature around them. Čgaiaŋgūta is the season for ripe auačix fungus. Čīyāgörana is the season when šöšči tree bark loosens, hākūa for making spring canoes. Iūan is the time when older crabs carry the younger ones, čīiūaiella the time after they’ve separated.

Information buried in the dictionary might also help interpret the physical archeological record. In the dictionary, for instance, Uštānim is described as a porpoise jaw used as a comb. Isöska is the lower jaw bone of a whale used as spear bones. Dictionary entries of this type could help archaeologists make sense of a hodgepodge of bones found underneath shell middens, and perhaps provide important context to certain tools, Tivoli says. “Maybe it’s a way of calling our attention to look deeper into the archaeological record,” she says.

Many nouns describe local animals, which represent a third of the dictionary. The wealth of different terms for certain animals—such as for shellfish—may reflect a recent increase in their importance as a resource relative to other creatures.

This new, linguistic approach to uncovering more about a long-lived culture as described in Eidshaug’s paper is quite valuable, says archaeologist Flavia Morello of Chile’s Institute of Patagonia and the Cape Horn International Center, both part of the University of Magallanes. It shows how dictionaries can act as gateways to unique cultures and in doing so help foster a deeper societal appreciation for cultural diversity and the kinds of relationships humans can cultivate with landscapes. “It’s very inspiring as a paper,” she says.

Archaeologists elsewhere are increasingly interested in leveraging language in similar ways. Miceli and her colleagues recently published a pilot study to explore what kind of information they could glean—from dictionaries of 10 Aboriginal languages in Australia—about domestic fire use, and whether this could be useful in guiding archaeologists in excavating sites, Miceli says. Past collaborations between archaeologists and linguists have often centered on answering questions about the likely homeland of ancestral languages, and how and why they spread, rather than using vocabulary to help with archaeological excavations. “That, I think, is quite new,” Miceli says.

Watertight Insights: Many of the physical artifacts of the Yaghan people—whose ancestors have occupied Tierra del Fuego likely for thousands of years—have been lost to time and harsh weather. By digging through the 19th-century dictionary, scholars were able to learn more about the details of how people once made the canoes that plied the area’s waters. Photo courtesy of Springer Link.

Eidshaug and his colleagues also applied this same proof of concept to a dictionary of Norwegian as it was spoken among coastal fisher-farmers and other people in the area in the 1840s. And there are many more old dictionaries of languages waiting to be excavated from archive shelves.

In the case of the Yaghan, the hope is that such investigations not only answer archaeological curiosities but also help the living communities engage more deeply with their past. “We’ve connected several times with archaeologists who study artifacts and middens, and it has always been an interesting topic for us Yaghans,” says Zárraga, who spoke with me through an interpreter from her native Spanish language.

Zárraga spent a decade living with her grandmother, learning Yaghan practices, values, and language—and about her grandmother’s experience as the culture around her eroded. “It was … very pure cultural knowledge that my grandmother had, through the language,” Zárraga recalls. She is working to carry this ancestral knowledge forward in time. She’s already written two educational books on the Yaghan language and has plans for a Yaghan-Spanish dictionary. Eidshaug, meanwhile, has digitized Bridges’ dictionary to make it more easily accessible.

Though media reports often described her grandmother as the last Yaghan speaker, Zárraga hopes her efforts will ensure that the language and its embedded information will not molder in archives, and that the unique culture it described won’t go the same way. “That’s why it’s very, very important, all of these things that my grandma gave me,” she says. “So we are not the last ones.”

— Katarina Zimmer is a Science and Environment Journalist Currently Based in Germany.

[ravings-of-a-mad-scientist]

Scientist Stereotypes

Biologist: Can't do math

Theoretical Physicist: Can’t do anything but math

Geologist: Rock collection addict

Military Scientist: Meet the Engineer TF2

Archeologist: Thinks about the Roman Empire more times a day than most men think about sex 

Sexologist: Thinks about sex more times a day than most men think about the Roman Empire

Chemist: A pyromaniac and/or is very fun at parties

Science Communicator: Is only fun at parties when everyone else there are nerds

Mycologist/Entomologist: They are VERY interested and passionate about gross things and THAT IS YOUR PROBLEM

Computer Scientist: gay

[unwillingtoreachout]

What are you guys' headcanons for what the foxes' majors would be? (as in alternative majors that you think they would take, not their canon ones)

[shy-forceghost]

I know they were busy saving the world and all of that, but we really got robbed of some interactions between Yasmine, Ava and Beatrice just ... being nerds together.

Imagine the potential: Yasmine blasting out fun history facts and then Beatrice complementing by bringing up a whole linguistic analysis; Ava just listens in awe before adding the most mind-blowing dystopian theory based on a sci-fi book she read.

[sleepsart]

Well, Jory's a bystander in the hero world for now! Sometimes an alien just needs to get groceries, no time for all that! Ough but groceries means money...

[ginger-education]

Intro!

Back to navigation!

Hello! I'm Kayde, I also go by Ginger and Maple! My pronouns are She/her!

I'm 18 years old, my birthday is October 3rd.

I'm a trans woman as well as pansexual!

My discord is dandelion713

Here are some of the things I'm passionate about learning! (In no particular order)

Social Sciences (Archeology, geography, anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science)

Natural Sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Earth Science (Geology, Mineralogy), and Space Science)

Formal Sciences (Statistics, Mathematics)

Professional Sciences (Education, Medicine, Public Policy, Law, Journalism, Architecture, Transportation)

Humanities (History, Religious Studies, Literature, Art, Philosophy, Linguistics)

And I'll add more to this as I think of more!

[myrmica]

despite my best efforts i still feel awfully agitated when i have a day where i don't get anything done (on my own creative projects. other types of work don't really register as accomplishing anything, doesn't matter if i was busy doing other stuff or feeling under the weather or resting etc) and it's very related to the "if i don't feel passionate about something i may as well not be alive rn" thing. not being focused towards something inspires such a feeling of dread. it isn't about productivity the way it appears on the surface i have untangled the root causes but not yet bested them

[non-conventionnel]

Facebook Page

[rainingmbappe]

Why would I think about finding love at 3 am when I could be thinking of all the knowledge that I'll never attain in my mortal lifetime

[meowkittykitty303]

[cosmicportal]

“Chakana” is the combination of two words and it's most accurate translation is "Lightdoor"

Chakana Geoglyph - Nazca

The word “Chakana” can be traslated as portal door or even Bridge

[brucewaynehater101]

I need you to stop me from making another Tim Drake centric fic

I got this random idea that won’t leave me alone

like what if the emotional scars and trauma people have show up physically too most commonly as little cracks on the skin and all of the bats have them

they hide them tho with make up and stuff so people don’t question it except Tim hides them from everyone maybe bc that’s what his parents taught him to do maybe bc he just doesn’t want to burden any of the bats

the bats think that Tim is fine so to them he’s invincible which leads them to treat him as such subconsciously or otherwise especially Bruce

it takes a lot for something to be bad enough that they physically manifest and Tim has A LOT bc everyone thinks he’s invincible

:) it won’t leave me alone help me I beg of you

Hmm.... Let's add on, shall we? This is a very rad idea. You should definitely write a fic about it, but no pressure.

Mind if I explore it? Also, feel free to disregard any part below you don't want/disagree with. This is just brainstorming ^^

Alright. Emotional scars are a physical mark on someone's skin.

Similar to regular scars, they can fade as a person heals.

Some may never disappear, and some only appear for a short time.

What would their color be?

Would they look like actual cracks in a person (so black-ish in color)? Would they be gold or multi-colored (different colors represent different kinds of emotional traumas)?

The level of hurt inflicted is directly proportional to the size (length and width) of the scar.

Perhaps more could be deduced from the general shape (is it jagged? A single line? Branching?)

Not all people have these marks

Most of the population manifests them. There's some prejudice against folk who don't [something something they are heartless, incapable of feelings, not able to be emotionally hurt, cold, detached, etc.], but hiding scars is also common. Therefore, it's harder to discern whether someone is hiding their marks or markless. It's a very fine line, so most people allow a smaller mark to show every once in a while. There's even a few trends to proudly display all marks.

Marks appear at the time of the emotional harm

It may not be apparent at the time due to the location, but the individual being hurt will manifest the mark at the very moment of emotional harm.

Anyways, that's the background stuff. Fun, but let's get into Tim specifically ^^

Tim's parents are part of the few who believe that showing off your scars to anyone, even your loved ones, is both a weakness and a way to guilt-trip people. Therefore, through their archeology studies, they managed to obtain magical objects to prevent the showing of emotional marks. It's similar to glamor.

Tim's object can change forms to suit his needs (so a ring at one moment and an earring the next). This ability prevents the Bats from discovering it.

Janet fakes a very small mark on her hand when she wants to discourage any rumors that's she's incapable of manifesting marks. For Tim, though, his parents wanted him to have rumors of being incapable of forming marks. It served their purpose better for him being the cunning Drake heir.

The deception started from birth, so no one but the Drakes know of Tim's ability to form marks [and the Drake parents never see the marks they leave behind on their child].

The Waynes, long before Tim entered their life, were aware of these rumors. Thus, when Tim demands to become Robin, he doesn't correct their assumptions.

Bruce is a callous fucker to Tim at the start. If Tim can't be hurt emotionally, then Bruce's ill-treatment of him is fine (which is flawed logic. The markless can be emotionally hurt, and they still deserve kindness, dignity, and respect even if they couldn't. Bruce was mentally fucked up, but it doesn't excuse his treatment).

Eventually, Bruce comes to the second realization that Tim should still be treated well even if it doesn't hurt him regardless. The man's behavior is better, but he still has the notion in mind that Tim can't be emotionally hurt. He uses this for missions and to downplay the way his other kids treat Tim (specifically Jason and Damian when they first meet Tim).

Tim gets used to a rotation of insult-names: Robot Robin, heartless, markless (said insultingly), cold-blooded, unfeeling bastard, etc.

He's also subject to a TON of misunderstandings. People are more reluctant to love him due to the belief that he can't love them back. He gets yelled at and told off for "masking/faking his emotions" when he's actually being genuine.

Which adds to his hurt :)

He also has to pretend not to grieve his parents when they die :(

Due to how rare markless are, the Bats don't meet "another" one until after the BruceQuest. When they chat with this person, they realize how many misconceptions they have about them (such as the markless being incapable of feelings. In fact, they accidentally offend that person when they tell the other they don't need to fake their emotions in front of the Bats. Safe to say, the markless individual becomes incensed when they realize how they've been treating their own markless family member).

This would be at least four (probably closer to five) years after Tim first became Robin. The entire family has a meltdown.

Tim, on the other hand, is used to the treatment the Bats have been giving him and becomes incredibly uncomfortable with them trying to care for his feelings and whatnot. It's rocky for a long while as everyone tries to seek forgiveness for something Tim bitterly doesn't hold against them (he is lying to them after all).

Tim rarely, if ever, views his own marks. The last time he checked was when he was having his identity crisis after Robin was taken from him. His entire body, from head to toe, had cracks in it. There was a giant, gaping crack on his back for the metaphorical stab in the back it was.

And we haven't even gotten to when the Bats figure out Tim was never markless :)

[thenightwolf51]

What if Jack and Maddie Fenton were actually Jack and Janet Drake?

The Drakes are their actual identities but they created the Fentons as a why of letting loose, of getting to be their truest most unhinged selves and pursue their true passion without the eyes of high society Gotham judging them.

Whenever the Drakes are supposedly out of the country on archeological digs they are actually in a little no where town in the midwest.

The Drake wealth is perfectly capable of funding their experiments and prototypes and every now and then they do show up to a dig for a week or too, but the Fentons are who they truly are.

So of course Gotham never finds out about Janet's first pregnancy and little Jasmine is welcomed into the world as an Amity Park Fenton, not a Gotham Drake. Janet's second pregnancy however.

Well as i said, the Fentons are who they truly are at their most unhinged and unfiltered. And upon finding out that their having a set of identical twins, well, can you really blame them for passing up this perfect opportunity to test Nature vs. Nurture.

One boy would be a wealthy Drake raised as an only child in a hostile city, the other would be a Fenton raised with his older sister in a peaceful small town.

That's what they decide and thats what they do, and everything is as cannon goes. Tim doesn't know that his parents "archeological digs" are really an excuse to spend most of their time as the Fentons, and Danny and Jazz don't know that the longer "ghost conventions" are an excuse to handle Drake affairs and check on their unknown brother.

At least until things start to get complicated.

(Im not sure if Maddie fakes Janet's death or if she really dies, and if Jack's coma is fake or real and he lost his Fenton memories. Or maybe the death and coma dont happen at all and the truth comes out some other way like Danny finding the Nature vs. Nurture notes or a school trip to gotham or maybe Jazz desides to go to college in Gotham and it comes out that way somehow.

This obviously works best as a "bad parents Jack and maddie" though how bad they are can be entirely up to you. Maybe everything comes out sometime after a "reveal gone right" and Danny and Jazz think their parents are getting better only to be smacked in the face by the betrayal of "secret billionaire parents who essentially abandoned their brother"

Dont know but im tossing it to the void.

To me the most important scenes in this idea is Tim angst at the fact that his parents were never actually too busy to be there for him and had instead chosen no to be there, the somewhat bitter consolation of learning that even when their parents were physically there they still weren't there there for his siblings, and then some good ole slightly unhinged sibling bonding.

Maybe the measuring of ecto contamination and debate in if their parents presence did more damageto their health or less

They honestly might be tied on mental and physical scars. All three kids tend to come with headcanons about neglect and malnourishment)

@hdgnj @omnicrafts @im-totally-not-an-alien-2 @tathartiel @0mnicrex @ailithnight @little-pondhead

[ew-selfish-art]

DP x DC AU: Letters and Paper goods are easy to store, and therefore, easy to hide. Danny has drama to monger though.

Tim Drake becomes a ward of Bruce Wayne at the same time the Drake Corporation is crumbling, and his father's health is declining. Dana, his father's physical therapist turned new wife, isn't optimistic these days, and Tim can read the writing on the wall.

Times have changed and Bruce and Dick are treating him with kid gloves. Jason Todd is alive again, been there suffered that. Young Just-Us has proven yet again to be his true family... But Bruce 'welcomes' him home the second the fake uncle is sniffed out.

So, Tim rationalizes, If Drake Corp is going down, then so shall the reason he spent his childhood abandoned. The many, many archeology digs his parents left him for over the years and their many, many stolen historical pieces. Tim is ready and able to get rid of them all.

He first returns the artifacts that have obvious origins to the people with whom they belong. Then it starts to get a little hazy as to where each item stolen is from. The paper goods are the hardest to place.

Years later, Tim has almost completely emptied his parent's old home of their stolen goods. By now, he runs a fortune 500 company and is working as Red Robin. Going through the last of the archives means going through the very last objects his parents ever preferred over his company, and he can't wait to be rid of them.

A glowing green envelope however... this one he feels compelled to keep. He hadn't known it back when he started this project- but somehow his Parents had found objects drenched in the essence of the Lazarus Pits. And it wasn't just one letter, it was dozens and dozens.

Tim Drake knew it would be risky to move them, but he needed to get these letters to an ex-league member to understand what the language of the dead was trying to proclaim.

_____

Danny hates a fetch quest but apparently Ghost Writer is having a bad day. It starts with Danny running by the guys library to have a chat when all of a sudden, the question of certain... ghost relations... came up. Danny is always more than thrilled to hear about how the various ancient-as-in-old ghosts interacted with the Ancients-as-in-yikes ghosts.

Ghost Writer finally admitted to the monarch in training that if he wanted to know so badly, that he could track down Clockworks old letters. They'd been scattered well before Ghost Writer could properly work on the ghost archives (read: was still alive), and it wasn't until he'd long worked on the library that such affairs were noted as missing.

The potential for gossip was just too good! A call home to Sam, Tuck and Jazz to let them know he was on an adventure, and then Danny flew off with little more than some hints by GW and an annoyed nod of cryptic agreement by CW.

Danny goes about wondering Gotham as himself, not yet seeing the need to be Phantom, when he runs into the very guy he was looking for.

"Hey- you don't happen to have a shit ton of letters written in the language of the dead do you?" Danny smiles as innocently as possible as he watches all seven stages of grief play out on the guy's face. Then something changes and Danny can tell that this guy is like, scary competent.

"I do, however, I was double crossed and a shit ton of assassins are on their way to try and take them."

"Uh... Bummer for them I guess? I'll just take them and go- I don't even really need to keep them if you want em back-"

"Assassins. They won't exactly leave empty handed."

"Huh. Well... Wanna come with? These are supposed to have some pretty juicy drama in them." Danny awkwardly places a hand on the back of his neck.

A knife being thrown in their direction was enough to get this guy to make a decision.

"Let's go spill some tea then."

Danny grins as he pulls the guy through a rapidly drawn portal, ignoring the wide eyes he makes. Turns out his name is Tim, and walking him through afterlife drama is the best- how does he know so many dead assassins??? One of these letters is about a guy who took Tim's spleen??

[sevenfactorial]

Here's info about the competition (actually just announced earlier this month):

The competition seems to be exclusively on the software/algorithms side. The scans of the test pieces have been done and ink has been detected. So how does one turn that mess of data into letters? Hopefully we'll know soon.

I think it also has the most up to date (and aggregated) info I could find on how it's been going, so it's also a reasonable place to read up on the long long journey so far.

The Herculaneum papyri are more than 1800 papyri that were carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius (79 CE), constituting the only surviving library from antiquity that exists in its entirety. Now using new x-ray technique, these scrolls are being read for the first time in millennia

[tossawary]

I wish we saw more casual diversity among Vulcans in regards to... well, everything: fashion, art, history, geography, language, religion and philosophy, occupations, familial units, and logical styles and emotional management, and so on. The monoculture that "Star Trek" tends towards is both unrealistic and kind of boring.

(I think that my ideal "Star Trek" show would have a minimum of two matching non-humans in the main crew who are from opposite sides of their planet; these two alien coworkers have almost NOTHING in common. It immediately creates compelling character dynamics.)

Anyway, even within the specific Surakian Logic sect that Spock and his family seem to belong to, there's still opportunity for fun, divisive hobbies among this particular group of Vulcans. We can have judgey Vulcans looking at other Vulcans' weird, harmless antics and saying, "What illogical behavior," while the other Vulcans are judging them back for being illogical in their own opinion. Let Vulcans be REAL nerds: I think that pre-Surak historical reenactment is not an uncommon hobby, both casual LARPing and hardcore reenactment.

It's educational to spin and weave and sew your own pre-Surakian garments! It's educational to forge your own weaponry! It's grounding, like meditation! It is humbling to truly realize the complicated labor involved in fabrication. Even when they were surrendering to their emotional urges, you know, Vulcan ancestors were not completely illogical: they knew how to fashion a comfortable garment well-suited to the desert. Camping in the wilderness and foraging for food connects oneself to nature, teaches about history, and settles oneself in the present.

Also, it's good physical exercise and emotionally cathartic to beat the shit out of each other with foam-wrapped lirpa, screaming at the top of your lungs. It's very logical. There's a medical team on standby, reading on their pads and drinking tea.

You beam down in the wrong part of the desert at the right time and find a bunch of scantily-clad Vulcan warriors (outfits depend on the chosen time period and location) (of all genders) shrieking and rolling in the dirt, until a timer goes off, and then the scheduled mock-battle is over and everyone helps each other up. (Depends how hardcore the group is, of course.) (Also, yeah, obviously, some of these groups have a hook-up culture attached / embedded.) Two bleeding guys who were previously punching each other in the face salute each other and part ways, one to go write a new archeological paper based on his findings here ("Fascinating") and the other to his low-level government desk job ("Most invigorating exercise").

If this happens anywhere near where people live, then the neighbors are shaking their heads and saying to each other, "I don't know how anyone could come to their conclusions and call it logical. Their foundational premises must be flawed." 😐 Some of them while closely watching the entire scandalous affair through binoculars and telescopes, of course. 🤔