July 12, 2005

• Very, very interesting indeed. Thankyou. Much here for my brain to sift thru. Love it.
• A grand post Plegmund. I love stuff like this, thanks for posting!
• )))!!!
• Oh what stunning stuff plegmund. I laughed a bit because the Yahoo story link sets off the automatic net blockers from here - a reminder that the past is very political still in China and that finds like this that show up the official line of '5,000 years as a unitary culture' for the nationalist bollocks it is remain quite the controversy. In some of the other links with the nice pics you get the finds placed in the Shang or Zhou Dynasties. Quite apart from the fact that there's actually a modicum of debate about whether these really existed or not they were certainly nothing to do with the culture that these finds come from yet the stories claim they 'belong' to. Also, kudos to the developer who actually stopped work on the site and called in the archaeologists. I shudder to think what's getting destroyed, lost or stolen every day as the never-ending building splurge steamrollers on.
• Interesting, Abiezer. Trawling around earlier, I came across a statement by a senior Chinese archaeologist saying the people whose culture this was were probably 'non-Asian' because the images looked like foreigners rather than Chinese people. It seemed an unlikely judgement (the images look unlike any normal human so far as I can see - though of course this chap has presumably seen many more that I haven't), but perhaps that theory is more congenial because it allows the unity of 'real Chinese' culture to be preserved?
• If the company had decided to just carry on its work, covering the site in concrete as is believed by archeologists to be quite common, the Jinsha civilization might have been forgotten forever. But they called in authorities. Restores my faith in humanity, just a little bit.
• ))) seconded!