#lithic frog!!!

[teeter-beetle]

Prehistoric Preparations

Archaeologists recovered the nearly 2000-year-old toolkit last February.

The kit, once belonging to a nomadic hare, consists of two flint hand-blades, four cactus spine spears, and a carved wooden shield.

The remains of the hare were also "pretty nicely preserved, actually." (Source: Prof. Ein Gastort)

Stay up-to-date, or learn more about hare nomads, at frogiverse.com

[liviavanrouge]

Show Yourself(Livia's Return)

Livia(Lost Soul): *Walks through the darkness* Every inch of me is trembling, but not from the cold

Livia: *Looks around* Something is familiar..like a dream I can reach but not quite hold, I can sense you there like a friend I've always known

???: *Hums, getting her attention*

Livia: *Walks after the humming* I'm arriving and it feels like I am home

---

Livia: *Comes out into a forest* I have always been a fortress, old secrets deep inside

Livia: You have secrets, too, but you don't have to hide

???: *Hums*

Livia: *Walks to a stone path, following it* Show yourself, I'm dying to meet you...

Livia: Show yourself, It's your turn

???: *Moves past Livia, moving quickly into the woods*

Livia: *Runs after them surprised* Are you the one I've been looking for all of my life? Show yourself, I'm ready to learn...

Livia: Ah-ah, ah-ah?

???: Ah-ah, ah-ah-ah!

Livia: *Runs down the path, thorns growing at her feet* I've never felt so certain...all my life I've been torn

Livia: *Smiles, deers and wolves running with her* But I'm here for a reason, could it be the reason I was born?

Livia: *Throws her hands up, thorns rising from the water, creating a bridge for her* I have always been so different! Normal rules did not apply!

???: *Flies up ahead of Livia, leading her forward*

Livia: *Looks back as the deers and wolves stopped following then looks forward* Is this the day? Are you the way, I finally find out why?

Livia: *Blows her hair out of her face, bears and buffalo's running with her as she neared a circle of totems*

---

Livia: *Stops in the middle of the totems, thorns around her arms and legs* Show yourself! I'm no longer trembling! Here I am, I've come so far!!

Livia: *Points to each totem, growing thorns around them, causing them to glow bright green* You are the answer I've waited for all of my life! Oh, show yourself! Let me see who you are!

Livia: *Turns and points to the tallest totem, thorns engulfing it*

???: *Walks around the darkness, watching her*

Livia: *Points to the crown totem, making it glow blue* Come to me now, open your door

Livia: *Turns and points to the book totem, causing it to glow yellow* Don't make me wait, one moment more

Livia: *Points to the sword, causing it to glow bright blue* Oh, come to me now, open your door

Livia: *Stares at the frog statue then points to it, causing it to glow green* Don't make me wait, one moment more!!

???: *Floats the statues down, settling them down around Livia*

Livia: *Stares then stands directly in the middle*

Mulan: *Appears from the sword statue* Where the north wind meets the sea

???: Ah-ah, ah-ah

Tiana: *Appears from the frog statue* There's a river

???: Ah-ah, ah-ah

Belle: *Appears from the book statue* Full of memory

Snow White: *Appears from the crown statue smiling*

Livia: *Stares at them all, her eyes widening*

???: Come, my darling, homeward bound!

Livia: *Turns, looking startled then smiles* I am found!!

Meleanor: *Smiles, standing in front of Livia*

Livia: *Smiles, her clothes turning into her fathers old uniform* Show yourself! Step into your power!

Livia: *Grins, and pulls her hood up, her hair tying itself into a ponytail* Throw yourself into something new!!!

Tiana, Bella, Mulan and Snow White: *Lifts their hands, Lilia's lithic appearing now colored with the princesses statue colors*

Livia: *Grab the handle*

Meleanor: You are the one you've been waiting for!

Livia: All of my life!

Meleanor: All of your life!

Livia: *Turns away, looking at the four princesses by their statues* Oh, show yourselves!!!

Belle: Ah-ah, ah-ah!

Mulan: Ah-ah, ah-ah!

Tiana: Ah-ah, ah-ah!

Snow White: Ah-ah, ah-ah!

Livia: *Lifts her lithic upwards, then stabs it into the ground, a bright glow coming from it* Ah-ah, ah-ah!!!

-----

Livia: *Opens her eyes*

Ortho: *Carrying her* Livia! You weren't responding!

Livia: *Flares her wings and holds her hand up* I'm going in, Ortho...

Ortho: *Stares then nods* Got it!

@anxious-twisted-vampire @yukii0nna @writing-heiress

[bauzeitgeist]

The most famous detail of Paul Rudolph’s Boston Government Service Center: the Lindemann Center’s enigmatic frog face. Arguably the single most surprising and joyful element of the complex, a massive toad-like skullform juts out from the Merrimac Street façade with laconic, big-eyed judgement. Accentuated with arrays of formwork ridges on the undersides of the paired upper barrels, like the eyelashes of drunken pupils, the larger cylinder emphasizes its cantilever with an underbite mouth ajar in a judging frown; its matching sun-ray of supporting grids making for a grille of teeth; a lazy snarl. Taken altogether, the detail is alluringly readable as the head of some huge, amphibious creature; like a giant, vigilant bust—an altar icon of anurous deity of a lost bufotoxic cult. This tripartite assemblage of drum volumes, so startlingly interrupting the dominant horizontal of the elevation, contains an interior meeting room whose dimensions were extruded away from the façade wall. While its logographic affinities were unintentional—Rudolph hardly ever engaged in the symbolic and, when asked, amusingly denied any determined representation or shape-making —the tightly clustered, protruding arrangement so strikingly registers as a pareidolic phenomenon, adding a moment that is whimsical but also, to a certain eye, foreboding. This is especially the case in the context of such a starkly monumental and epically lithic presentation—truly archaeological, nearly mythological. Lindemann Center at the Boston Government Services Center. Paul Rudolph for Desmond & Lord, 1962-71. Photos May 2017 and May & October 2020 @bauzeitgeist.

[uneasylisteningradio]

Audio & Playlist for June 22, 2020: Doors

Songs about doors! Special 3 hour version.

link to downloadable audio Playlist: Bay City Rollers - Saturday Night (Uneasy Listening theme song) Jimmie & Vella - The Door is Open - Jimmie & Vella

DJ speaks over The Living Strings - When Love Comes Knockin' at Your Door

The Monkees - The Door into Summer - Pisces Aquarius Capricorn and Jones Ltd The Velvet Underground - Temptation Inside Your Heart - VU Jimmy Hughes - What Side of the Door - I Like Everything About You / What Side Of The Door Shopping - Knocking - Why Choose

DJ speaks over Wynder K. Frog - The Green Door

Can - Outside My Door - Monster Movie Mississippi John Hurt - Keep on Knockin' - The Immortal The Ramones - You Should Never Have Opened That Door - Leave Home Serge Gainsbourg - Un Violon un Jambon - Vilaine Fille Mauvais Garçon Gregory Isaacs - Front Door - More Gregory St. John Green - Help Me Close the Door - St. John Green The Fall - My Door Is Never - Reformation - Post TLC

DJ speaks over John Barry - Doors & Bikes & Things

The Fruit Eating Bears - Door in My Face - Door in My Face The Humane Society - Knock, Knock - Knock, Knock / Tip-Toe Thru The Tulips With Me Hank Locklin - Kiss on the Door - My Kind of Country Music Discharge - The Possibility of Life's Destruction - See Nothing Hear Nothing Say Nothing The Wolfgang Press - Shut That Door - Bird Wood Cage

Little Richard - Keep a Knockin' - Little Richard Lithics - Edible Door - Mating Surfaces Daddy Cleanhead & the Chuck Higgins Band - Something's Goin' on in My Room - Something's Goin' On In My Room / Let Me Come Back Home Alice Cooper - Don't Knock at My Door (live) - Demo Sons of the Pioneers - Hard Times Come Again No More - Hard Times Come Again No More Fugazi - Shut the Door - Repeater The Misunderstood - Find a Hidden Door - Before the Dream Faded

The Sisters of Mercy - Poison Door - Walk Away / Poison Door Fairport Convention - Close the Door Lightly When You Go - Heyday: The BBC Sessions Door Chain PSA Darrell Banks - Open the Door to Your Heart - Open the Door to Your Heart/Our Love (Is in the Pocket) Bee Gees - Close Another Door - Bee Gees 1st Jim Lowe - The Green Door - The Green Door

Patsy - The Red Door - LA Women The Primates - Knock on My Door - Knock On My Door / She Posies - Definite Door - Definite Door The Lollipop Shoppe (The Weeds) - Don't Close the Door on Me - Just Colour

Gil Scott-Heron - No Knock Jack McVea - Open the Door, Richard - Open The Door Richard! / Lonesome Blues Thee Hydrogen Terrors - The Enemy Mancini - Terror, Diplomacy and Public Relations Phil Ochs - Knock on the Door - All the News That's Fit to Sing The Clash - Jail Guitar Doors - Clash City Rockers/Jail Guitar Doors Doom - War on Our Doorstep - Bury The Debt Not The Dead / No Security The Romantics - Open Up Your Door - In Heat Derek - Back Door Man - Back Door Man / Sell Your Soul

Ford Eaglin - That Certain Door - That Certain Door/By the Water Alice Donut - The Chicken Door - Nadine Harry Nilsson - At My Front Door - Son of Schmilsson Richard and the Young Lions - Open Up Your Door - Open Up Your Door/Once Upon Your Smile Carolanne Pegg - Open the Door - Carolanne

Velvet Underground - After Hours - The Velvet Underground The Isley Brothers - I'm Gonna Knock on Your Door - Turn to Me/I'm Gonna Knock on Your Door  The Ex & Tom Cora - A Door - Scrabbling at the Lock The Carter Family - Are You Lonesome Tonight - The Original Carter Family From 1936 Radio Transcripts Otis Redding - Open the Door The Happy Song (Dum-Dum) / Open The Door 

Betty Davis - Shut Off the Light - Nasty Gal

[uutpoetry]

bezoar - i

Scherezade Siobhan (@viperslang)

ni oblit, ni perdó          & the old abattoir   with its noir-rust        pro

-tocols     hāl of qurb grey brawn  its  crowning organs     that reek

of power  careening blood black  into the paladin   here the gaslight 

twitching in larval fuss  must scarce us  into some spur of care here

i must     hew myself         a tremendous fang – chine my spleen into

the adder’s hymn  this long gland   this prized tooth    for the cudgel 

& its rot-faced etch           bite god on the wrist               leave sunny

gashes along the body’s   incarnadine rosette    I – gilded   mormyrid

I – ceral as frog-limb     amphibious as moonlight         & its scuttled

Lucifer  polishing summer   moths into heads on silkpins at midnight

the skull   strums uncoupled from its    mapless scarring         no more

the sparkplug, the gimbal wires   just this lithe umber   stretching  past

crannied circuitry      just the haecceity      asleep     like  a jackal’s horn

Scherezade Siobhan

Bio : Scherezade Siobhan is a psychologist, writer & community catalyst who has written “Bone Tongue” (Thought Catalog Books, 2015), “Father, Husband” (Salopress, 2016)  & her next full length collection “The Bluest Kali” is scheduled to release in June 2018 via Lithic Press. She can be found squeeing about militant bunnies @zaharaesque on twitter & FB.

[travelworldnetwork]

By Christopher P Baker

10 December 2018

A decade ago, death stalked my drive to Parque Arqueológico Nacional de Tierradentro. The road from the town of Popayán over Colombia’s Cordillera Central mountain range was infamous for ambush and kidnap. Lonesome military posts hinted ominously at the presence of Farc guerrillas. I gripped the wheel tightly as I negotiated the unpaved road through a bleak, windswept Andean landscape, and cold fog swirled around me like a funeral shroud.

Thankfully, I arrived at one of the world’s largest necropolises alive. Unsurprisingly, I had the vast pre-Columbian hypogea of Tierradentro to myself.

View image of Colombia’s Cordillera Central mountain range was once too dangerous to visit (Credit: Credit: Christopher P Baker)

You may also be interested in: • The language at the end of the Earth • We may have cracked the mystery of Stonehenge • The tiny island of giant money

South America’s largest trove of religious monuments and megalithic sculptures isn’t on Easter Island, nor even in Peru or Chile, as most travellers might assume. It’s Tierradentro’s 162 underground tombs carved into solid volcanic bedrock, and the more than 500 monolithic stone statues and tumuli (ancient burial mounds) surrounding the nearby town of San Agustín, sprinkled throughout 2,000 sq km of the serried mountains and highland plateaus of the Upper Magdalena Valley in southern Colombia.

These mementoes of an advanced, yet unknown (and unnamed), pre-Columbian, northern Andean culture had largely been off-limits during five decades of civil war. Now that the region is finally safe from Farc guerrilla activity, the awe-inspiring, yet little-known, Unesco World Heritage sites are easily visited and are guaranteed to amaze and inspire.

South America’s largest trove of religious monuments and megalithic sculptures isn’t on Easter Island

Eight years after my initial drive to Tierradentro, I arrived anew in the remote region and centred on the hamlet of San Andrés de Pisimbalá, amid a mountainous knot on the upper slopes of the Inzá Valley, 115km north-east of Popayán. From the twin (and tiny) Museo Etnográfico and Museo Arqueológico below the village, I followed a hilly and muddy trail that looped over surging mountain ridges, linking the five core concentrations of ridgetop tombs.

Staring into a black abyss at Alto de Segovia – the most impressive of the sites – induced lurching vertigo as I descended an elaborate spiral staircase drilling like a nautilus shell into 8m of andesitic tuff. I felt like Indiana Jones entering the Emperor’s Tomb. Below, the vast burial chamber measured some 12m wide. My torch illuminated walls and columns profusely adorned with geometric designs in black, yellow and ochre pigments, and human and animal figures danced in the flickering shadows cast as I roamed.

Another tomb was expertly carved to replicate a slanted roof and other elements of a pre-Hispanic wooden house: an allegory, no doubt, to prepare the deceased for the continuum between life and afterlife that was a sine qua non of the enigmatic society that carved these impressive funerary monuments.

View image of Tierradentro’s 162 underground tombs were carved into solid volcanic bedrock centuries ago (Credit: Credit: Christopher P Baker)

Since the time of the region’s subjugation by Spanish conquistadors in the 1530s, the area has been inhabited by the Nasa, an indigenous group who speak páez (a Chibcha language). Yet little is known about the mysterious culture that flourished throughout the first millennium and then disappeared six centuries before the Spanish and the Nasa arrived on the scene. Although excavations began in the 1930s, archaeologists are still at a loss to explain who settled the region, where they came from or where they went. And no-one knows the relationship between the carvers of Tierradentro’s complex shaft-and-chamber tombs and, a 180km drive to the south-west, San Agustín’s earthen tumuli (burial mounds) and hulking statues.

The drama of the giant stone statue at whose base I stood seemed appropriate to its stupendous setting. It was weatherworn and smothered with blue-green algae. It towered above me some 5m tall – solemn, big-eyed, with a large scowling mouth.

The statue is one of a veritable army of colossuses and totems studding the plateau-like mesetas around San Agustín, a lovely colonial town close to the Ecuadorian border. About one-third are enshrined within Parque Arqueológico de San Agustín, comprising about 50 separate yet more-or-less contiguous ceremonial burial sites centred on the town that lends the entire collection its name.

View image of The Parque Arqueológico de San Agustín protects hulking stone statues hewn from volcanic tuff (Credit: Credit: Christopher P Baker)

The majority of the statues were found within immense tumuli in which the pre-Columbian people buried their chieftains. They contour the meseta like a basket of eggs. My guide, Davido Pérez, knew every detail of every statue and the dolmens – stone sarcophagi topped by huge slabs within the tumuli – that most of them guard. Ferociously expressive and vital, the statues are so refined and well preserved they cut across barriers of culture and time. Pérez chattered away as we followed a trail that wound uphill to Alto de los Ídolos, the largest of the ancient sites.

“What you see is the legacy of an intense funeral cult,” Pérez said. “Death was viewed simply as a transition to another life.”

Death was viewed simply as a transition to another life

Hewn from relatively soft volcanic tuff, the statues – known locally as chinas – range in size from barely 20cm to 7m. Most were rectangular. Some were oval. A few were as hemispherical as if turned with a lathe. And most were etched with abstract motifs or zoomorphic figures, wrapping two-dimensional designs around three-dimensional objects to walk a path between worlds. Sunlight threw into high relief the exotic designs filled with tense, latent energy. Some resembled snakes, frogs and birds of prey – symbols of creation, wealth and power in pre-Columbian culture. Many were warrior figures with jaguar-type fangs – an allusion to chamánes (shamans), spiritual leaders who were thought capable of absorbing the jaguars’ power.

At the top of a large knoll, half screened by masses of overhanging foliage, we came upon a solitary statue – nicknamed Doble Yo (Double Self) – staring dead ahead, a perverse smile carved upon his lips. He wore a carved jaguar fur, its large head resting atop his own head and topped, in turn, by the skin of a crocodile. “This statue fuses male and female,” Pérez said. “It also symbolises the coupling of human and animal spirits upon which shamans relied for sorcery and power.”

“This one is vomiting,” said Pérez, pointing at a bulging-eyed figure. “He depicts the ancient practice of ingesting hallucinogens.”

The symbolic meaning of many other designs can only be guessed at.

View image of Little is known about the pre-Columbian society responsible for Tierradentro and San Agustín (Credit: Credit: Christopher P Baker)

The next day, our horses sure-footedly negotiated the steep trail that led downhill to a site called La Chaquira. Dismounting, we clambered down a staircase carved into the hillside to stand at a rock-strewn precipice overhanging the turbulent Río Magdalena. Waterfalls plunged from the far canyon wall. It was stupendously picturesque.

Pérez turned to point out petroglyphs etched on the massive boulders poised above the canyon rim. The largest displayed a male with hands thrown high, paying homage to Mother Nature's magnificent landscape.

Peering down into the gorge, I envisioned Spanish conquistador Sebastián de Belalcázar and his ruthless army marching up the valley in the late 1530s after conquering the lands of the Inca. The indigenous Nasa put up a brave resistance but were no match for crossbows and muskets. They were driven into remote mountain redoubts. But the statues and tombs remained undiscovered until 1757, when Friar Juan de Santa Gertrudis stumbled upon the vast lithic library and called it “the work of the devil” as “The [natives] did not have iron or implements to produce such a thing.”

View image of Friar Juan de Santa Gertrudis, who came upon the statues and tombs in 1757, described them as “the work of the devil” (Credit: Credit: Christopher P Baker)

The tombs were looted centuries ago for their gold huacas (revered objects) and precious relics. And many of the original statues were lost or dispersed around the world. In 1899, for example, British anthropologists led by Captain H W Dowding loaded several dozen statues onto a boat bound for England. It promptly sank. Only one effigy was retrieved and transported to London, where it stands in the British Museum. Most extant statues are now anchored with concrete and rebar, but they still occasionally get spirited away. They’re in great demand on the illegal antiquities market and are now on the Red List of Latin-American Cultural Objects at Risk.

My only risk was wanting to stay

Despite its remoteness, I found this fertile centre of sculpture so compelling, and the once tense ambiance now so relaxed, my only risk was wanting to stay.

I lingered to enjoy the region’s cornucopia of other attractions: white-water rafting on the Magdalena River; exploring the Tatacoa Desert; a mountain drive to caves inhabited by nocturnal nightjars. As I once again negotiated an unpaved road through a wild, windswept Andean landscape, I found myself musing on how the dangers of guerrilla ambush are a thing of the past, and how San Agustín’s inscrutable statues and Tierradento’s dancing subterranean figures have finally risen from the dead after being off-limits for decades.

Join more than three million BBC Travel fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter and Instagram.

If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

BBC Travel – Adventure Experience