Hew Morrison, a forensic artist, has given a face to Ava, the Bronze Age young woman whose skeleton, now housed in Thurso, Scotland, has been the center of a study directed by archaeologist Maya Hoole. The reconstruction* shows a fair-skinned damsel with red hair and greenish-gray eyes, a rounded chin, and full lips.
 
Ava, unlike other Bronze Age people, was buried in a pit cut in solid rock. That kind of burial shows some considerable effort went into the process. Who gets that kind of burial when the strongest cutting tools are bronze? Hoole says that although she knows of other such rock-hewn burial pits, burials in solid rock are unusual.
 
We can surmise, but there’s no final way to know Ava’s standing in her 3,700 year-old, now long gone culture. Her remains included a decorated beaker that showed complex craftsmanship. This young woman was significant in some way. But in what way?
 
Take a stroll through any cemetery, and ask yourself about the strangers beneath you. They were all significant in some way; that’s why they lie beneath markers cut of stone. Their significance is probably lost to you, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t important in their time.
 
Now look around. You are surrounded by Avas. They all have some significance, and you are fortunate to see them as they are. You don’t need to reconstruct the living, just appreciate them.
 
*See Ava online at http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-36923891 , and http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-35558638 , and https://achavanichbeakerburial.wordpress.com

Across the world there are plateaus, highlands of various sizes and elevations that stand above the surrounding landscape. They are all doomed, some of them already in spectacular decline. The Colorado Plateau, for example, has a famous canyon, a gouge (gorge) 277 miles long, ten miles wide, and more than a mile deep in places. The canyon is there because the Colorado River washed away five and a half trillion cubic yards of rock over the course of millions of years. The destiny of any highland is erosive decline. Maybe we should learn a lesson from plateaus.
 
In South America some plateaus are called tepuis. Tepui means “house of the gods” in the language of the Pemon peoples of Venezuela and Brazil. The indigenous people do not live on tepuis, nor do they visit the sacred lofty tops of these isolated table mountains. In deference to their religion, I won’t ask you to climb an actual tepui, but rather, a figurative one.
 
In gyms and on fields across civilization, athletes train by reaching physical goals. In academies around the world students improve by reaching intellectual goals. In both endeavors, the metaphor of plateau plays a dominant role. “I bench pressed more today than ever before; I’ve reached a new plateau.” Or, “I graduated from the university and reached a new plateau of accomplishment.” The metaphor of reaching a plateau spreads to almost any endeavor: Making profits, mastering difficult fingering on the piano, getting married, and even becoming more adept at meditating.
 
When no higher elevation is possible, then there’s a chance of erosion. Just staying at a higher elevation requires effort. Reaching the “house of the gods” is no guarantee that one will stay there. Plateaus have edges and gouges. Without constant vigilance and energy, a person who reaches a plateau can plunge back to the lowlands.
 
Achievement, as most of us know, can be empty. Look at your trophy and then ask, “What’s next?” Like appetite, the desire for a new accomplishment returns. Glory days in the “house of the gods” is temporary for the restless. You might, however, argue that an accomplished person has reached the ultimate plateau. Why should someone on top keep striving?
 
The highest plateau in the world is the Tibetan Plateau. It is still rising, but as it rises, it daily succumbs to the forces of erosion that will eventually wear it down. The “house of the gods” will eventually become a pile of rock debris. Is there a lesson? When you get to the top of your chosen plateau, bask briefly in your glorious position, and look out over the surrounding world from the tepui you conquered. In your gaze, see if you can find another plateau to climb and a different “house of the gods” to visit.

Vikings in Australia! That’s a long way from home, isn’t it? Now we know that in addition to going to Iceland, Greenland, and North America, the Vikings sailed to Australia. University of Sydney archaeologists have uncovered a Viking settlement near Derby on the northwestern coast: Foundations, graves, implements, weapons, and human remains.  
 
Imagine their encounters with the aboriginal people who might have spoken Wunambal, Worora, or Ngarinyin, languages highly different from medieval Norse dialects. Talk about the arrival of aliens from another world! They differed in many ways from the indigenous people, but the Viking penchant for travel was probably the chief difference. Place was for many Vikings a temporary lodging, a point from which to explore and raid. Loot seemed more important than land. In contrast, the animist Australians felt a special spiritual tie to the places of their births.
 
The visitors, the Vikings, left a millennium-old physical mark on the land that will change only slowly with geologic processes. The aboriginal people left a different kind of mark, a living tradition that seems to maintain the spirit of the place. In a yearly festival of dance and art, that spirit of place seems as durable as any stone tomb. 

Everyone needs an emotional Faraday Cage. From inside one can see everything going on outside, but none of the imbalanced charges from the outside can interfere with the balance of charges on the inside.  

Archaeologists working in Inner Mongolia have discovered an 8,000 year-old Neolithic village complete with remnant foundations, artifacts, and a tomb. The bones in the tomb dated to 8,400 years ago. We’re talking eight millennia. Let’s get a perspective.
 
About a millennium ago, the Pueblo (Anasazi) culture flourished in the American Southwest. Leif Eriksson chanced upon North America. Danes controlled England. About two millennia ago, Christ walked roads in the Middle East; Caesar Augustus ruled the Roman Empire, and the Han dynasty arose in China. About three millennia ago, Phoenicians sailed the Mediterranean; the Olmecs flourished, and the Adena people built mounds in the Ohio valley. Then, at four millennia ago, people occupied Stonehenge and built the first palace on Knossos. Around 5,000 years ago the Neolithic Period came to an end, Stonehenge was in its initial building stages, and the Aegean Bronze Age began; the Minoan culture arose, and agriculture started to change how humans could acquire food as urban dwellers. Go back six millennia and you see the development of copper metallurgy in Europe, the first metal ploughs, and potters’ wheels. China was in its Neolithic Period some seven thousand years ago, and some group built circular ditches in Central Europe. Skip back yet another millennium and you see a functional village whose ruins archaeologists recently unearthed in Inner Mongolia, a village constructed and occupied 84 centuries ago.
 
I don’t know how this impinges on your idea of place, but for me the lesson is threefold. First, I know that any place, save the recent occupation of peaks of the highest, bleakest mountains, the coldest Arctic and Antarctic realms, and the driest of deserts probably had some variable human influence over 8,400 years. That means that where I live had in the near and distant past a shaper and that I am, like the transitional tenants in an apartment building, just a temporary resident who might or might not contribute anything to the character of the place. Second, I know that leaving a mark for future residents is chancy at best, especially when I consider the great depth of time from which I get hints of life only through the tedious work of archaeologists. Third, I know that regardless of my level of hubris, I am not a long term owner, if I consider “long term” relative to age of the Inner Mongolian village.
 
That first alteration of the land, that first farm by an unknown farmer, made my life possible. The first villages were the foundations of my urbanized living. I know the point is old and cliché. But if I consider place as primary because, as I argue, there’s no time without place—no time until after the Big Bang—then by looking at place I can fully understand why this is not my practice life. I have to consider how I might leave a place so that others might know that I was here giving them something significant that enhances their own use after I am gone. Whatever I do will eventually fall into ruin, but if I’m a bit skilled and a bit lucky, I will have some positive effect on those who occupy this place, the world, shortly after me.
 
So, too, you. You and your work will become the remnants, the artifacts, future archaeologists will carefully uncover as they study and define place. You are the foundation of an Inner Mongolian village that tells the tale of your time.

Brazil. 500 years ago.
 
Amerigo Vespucci explored the coast of Brazil and wrote his observations of the people he lived with for 27 days. He saw their long homes for communal living, ate with them, and drew a few conclusions. He says they had no religious faith and that they lived “according to nature.” No one, he claimed, had any private property, and they had no need of laws as a consequence. Then he reports the consequences of running afoul of social mores. A man who had ten wives, for example, was “jealous of them” and if one of them was “guilty” of something, he punished her and sent her away. Had Amerigo submitted his observations and subsequent conclusions to a dissertation committee, he would have no doctorate. However, we might take some of his observations and draw our own conclusion.
 
Amerigo related that the people waged savage war, ending in cannibalism and slavery of the conquered. The practice perplexed him: “That which made me the more astonished at their wars and cruelty was that I could not understand from them why they made war upon each other, considering that they held no private property or sovereignty of empire and kingdoms and did not know any such thing as lust for possession, that is, pillaging or a desire to rule, which appear to me to be the causes of wars and of every disorderly act. When we requested them to state the cause, they did not know how to give any other cause than that this curse upon them began in ancient times and they sought to avenge the deaths of their forefathers”* (italics mine).
 
The world. Today.
 
*John Carey, Ed. Eyewitness to History. Avon Books. 1987. (Originally published in Great Britain as The Faber Book of Reportage)

Earth turns. That turning has an apparent effect on anything in motion. At the Equator, Earth turns at 1040 mph, but then it has the full circumference of the planet to circle in a day. At higher latitudes, the path of rotation is shorter, so the planet doesn’t turn as fast. If the entire planet turned at the same speed, it would break apart. By analogy, think of a car’s wheel and tire. The wheel has a smaller circumference than the tire, so it doesn’t need to turn as fast as the tire to make a single rotation. If you put chalk marks on a tire at the wheel and at the tread, they would maintain their relative position to each other after a turn. They can do that only because the tire must go faster to keep up with the wheel.
 
If you could hover over the North Pole, the Equator is the tire tread; 60 degrees north marks the wheel. If something travels from the Equator toward the poles it begins its journey from a position that is already traveling faster than a position at higher latitude, and so it veers toward the direction of turn, making a seemingly curving path to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the south in the Southern Hemisphere. North of the Equator, moving objects veer right; just the opposite on the south side. Weather systems, winds, and ocean currents all reveal this turning called the Coriolis Effect. Don’t believe me? You can see demonstrations of the effect on YouTube. Even as you drive down a straight highway, you compensate for the same unfelt effect; otherwise, your car would, in the Northern Hemisphere, veer to the right. 
 
In math, points have no dimensions, and lines have length but no width. Sure, we put a dot where we want a point. That’s a product of our need to identify something that has no dimension. Strangely, we can use points as the bases of location, and we can use them to define lines.
 
Make a dimensionless point move. There! You have a line, but it doesn’t have to be straight. It can curve. A curve is the width-less path of a moving point. And in that definition according to George F. Simmons, a straight line is the bare minimum, a simple form of a curve.* Strange! A line is the simplest curve. What’s this world coming to?
 
Walking the straight-and-narrow philosophical or cultural path isn’t what it seems. No matter what we think, we don’t walk as we think. There’s always a hidden component, something of a dimensionless pull, a philosophical Coriolis. That we maintain our sense of certainty is a seeming miracle. We’re always compensating, either knowingly or unknowingly.  
 
There are some that you know whose resistance to veering builds for years like the strain along a fault zone. Like the two sides of the San Andreas Fault, there will eventually be movement, some release of the strain. The gradual veering of compensation will become an abrupt correction in a path that can have devastating effects. We say, “Her world fell apart.” “His life was off course.”

Acknowledging that our paths need constant correcting is a good start to staying on them. The miracle is that so many of us do make those minor adjustments as we travel a world spinning at different speeds. 

*Precalculus Mathematics in a Nutshell, Fall River Press, 1997.

Every farmer knows his dirt. For the rest of us, the ones who simply go to a grocery store where the food somehow just shows up each day, dirt is, well, just dirt.
 
Agronomists know dirt scientifically. They study it in cross sections or cores, labeling layers rich in humus (the O layer on top) through a mixed level of humus and mineral matter (the A horizon), and then downward, in an idealized model, through the “zone of eluviation and leaching” (E horizon), the layer of accumulation of transported clays (the B horizon), and finally the partially altered parent material (C horizon) that sits atop unweathered rock.
 
Dirt isn’t, as the uninformed believe, just dirt. It’s a complex of organic and inorganic matter that develops differently under different climatic conditions, over different kinds of bedrock, and through different surface processes. Some dirt, for example, forms in one place and then travels to another via streams, winds, and glaciers. As I have written elsewhere, soil particles from Africa can be found in the Amazon.
 
As we all learn in elementary school, dirt is an important resource. It’s loss or degradation decimates agriculture and affects a food economy. The American Dust Bowl of the 1930s is historic proof of soil’s importance.
 
But like so much of place that we take for granted, dirt only attracts the attention of most of us when it interferes with daily living. Gotta keep the floors clean, right? And then along streams there’s that costly cleanup of mud after a flood. Why can’t we just keep dirt on farms where it belongs?
 
Although dirt is indispensible to our survival, most of us find it a nuisance. That says something about our disconnectedness with what we are: Most of us pay little attention to what underlies our existence. And that applies to the ubiquitous social, cultural, and philosophical underpinnings of our lives. When something becomes a nuisance, an immanent threat, or an immediate necessity, we pay attention, and we learn something about it.
 
Learning about dirt serves as a good analog for self-examination. Each of us moves across fertile and infertile social, cultural, and philosophical grounds. We can take them for granted, fail to examine the layers, and wait for a loss or degradation, or we can dig to study their origin and composition, to see the layers all the way down to the bedrock. 

In his Ted Talk, Henry Cliff, a particle physicist at CERN, reports that the Higgs Field is ten-thousand-trillion times weaker than it could be. That’s really good news. It means we can have a universe and be a part of it. Whew! That’s a relief. I was worried that I couldn’t exist until he said that.
 
Then he adds that Dark Energy is also associated with a befuddling number. According to Cliff, “Dark energy should be 10,120 times stronger than the value we observe from astronomy.” Ready? Here’s the number it “should” be rather than the number we observe through astronomy: “A thousand-trillion-trillion-trillion times bigger than the number of atoms in the universe.”
 
Yet, here I am. And so here you are. Both of us are stuck in a universe that, according to some physicists, is precisely fine-tuned for us to exist. Henry Cliff says that this information hints of a multiverse. Okay. I can go with that. Just don’t fool around with my Higgs Field and Dark Energy strengths. I like them the way they are.
 
While physicists struggle with field and energy strengths, we might spend some time working to understand other, less physical strengths, such as the strength of good and evil. We’re not going to change the field and energy strengths of the universe, but we might be able to do something, if only temporarily, about the strengths of good and evil. 

​Ignorance Lies in the Details
 
When the MeerKAT First Light telescope’s 16 working dishes produced their first image of the distant sky, they revealed 1,300 galaxies in a tiny part of sky where previously astronomers had counted only 700. Eventually, the Southern Hemisphere’s largest telescope will have an array of 64 dishes. Imagine the detail.
 
Thirteen hundred galaxies! Figure an average of 200 billion suns per galaxy. So, maybe 260 trillion stars. And soon MeerKAT’s full 64-dish array will probably identify more in that celestial segment that takes up only one hundredth of the sky. Do some extrapolating, and you’ll have mind-boggling numbers (as though 260 trillion isn’t mind-boggling enough).
 
So, for all of human history, no one has ever known, until recently, that that portion of the sky was so dense with galaxies. Now we know, but we still don’t see all the detail, and even the completed MeerKAT’s array will not reveal everything out there.
What can we do with all this new detail? Will it add to our understanding and give us wisdom?
 
Uncountable stars are not the only instance of overwhelming detail in our lives. Take the instance of a computer-assisted proof announced by Marijn Heule, Oliver Kullman, and Victor Marek as an example of something so detailed that it is in a sense useless.* Their computer-generated proof involving the Boolean Pythagorean triples problem produced a file that has 200 terabytes that the authors have reduced to 68 gigabytes. If you wanted to download it, you would need about 30,000 hours of computer time. Then what would you do with it? If it takes 30,000 hours just to download, what would it take to read through and check the proof?
 
“χρὴ εὖ μάλα πολλῶν ἵστορας φιλοσόφους ἄνδρας εἶναι,” wrote Heraclitus. Loosely: “Men who love wisdom must certainly ask about many things.” He also wrote (I’m paraphrasing here) that even though acquiring facts is necessary for wisdom, facts do not of themselves guarantee either wisdom or understanding. The MeerKat’s completed array will expose us to more galaxies than we could possibly ever fully study and more mysteries than we could possibly ever fully solve. And no one will sit down with 30,000 hours of download to laboriously read through a proof for Pythagorean triples to make sure it all makes perfect sense.
 
Both the MeerKAT discovery and the computer proof demonstrate that seven billion currently living humans have access to more information, more facts, than all 100,000,000,000 human predecessors combined. Yet, here we are, still pondering “meaning,” still befuddled, still seeking “wisdom.”
 
Categories and patterns are our only path to “wisdom” and understanding. We can’t put all the details in our brains. We have to simplify, to categorize. The problem is that in putting so much into any classification, we might throw in something that doesn’t truly belong, but rather just has the semblance—on its surface—of belonging. To truly examine the details of every detail takes us into spirals that inevitably open up more spirals. (That, for example, is what physicists are now discovering about quarks. They knew that three quarks combined to make protons and neutrons, but now they suspect that four quarks can combine to make various tetraquarks. What’s next? A pentaquark? A hexaquark?)
 
Maybe that is why we run to biases and prejudices as secure “wisdom” regardless of our supposed sophistication in acquiring information. Ironic, isn’t it? We gather details and end up with simplifications.    
 
*Nature 534, 17–18 (02 June 2016) doi:10.1038/nature.2016.19990