I'm asking for some input. I just connected some ideas relating to the archaic use of belts:
Indian guy climbing tall coconut tree with ankles bound, crawling like an 'inchworm' up the tree. (30 sec. video) [When in Malaysia, I tried climbing a coconut palm but failed, I hadn't known this trick.]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgW-926XtFs&feature=related
Chinese girl swimming dolphin-style with ankles bound so as to allow 'dolphin tail' undulations.
http://the-arc-ddeden.blogspot.com/2007/10/10-year-old-chinese-girl-dolphin.html
[River dolphins in Yangtze river, dugongs as visual model for early human swimmers?]
Wrist bracelets/necklaces/vests/skirts with shells, beads, holed coins as visible wealth and counters (primitive abacus/calendar such as a thread bracelet with 28 beads to represent lunar month).
Diving belt: kelp/vine/water lily stem or folded cloth sarong (linen/silk/palm fiber/pounded tree bark (tapa cloth of Hawaii/Samoa); wrapped (rappel?) / lashed (leash?) around belly/shoulders/calves (depending on function)
-notched & clipped mongongo or salt-crusted mangrove leaves for hut shingles (origin of salt trade, barter gift exchange between women who constructed their own dome huts)
-net (or skin) bag/basket clipped/strung to belt to hold foods/shells or as woven or inflated floating basket
-used around calves as coconut palm climbing strap (cloth tube sarong not knotted, depends on fiber friction)
-used around ankles as dolphin tail for more efficient long-term swimming (not short dives)
-used as baby backpack (I saw an Indonesian woman swaddle her infant in a square cloth, piggy-back style, then easily switch to nursing postion, far more simply practical than today's baby backpacks)
-used to hold short sharp (bamboo) stick spear/prybar and flint/razorclam blade, hand-axe holder/handle/hook while swimming/climbing/walking to keep hands and legs free for movements.
-AmerIndians used wampum belts of shells on strings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum
for quipu, tokens and memory devices, highly valued. Other materials used porcupine quills. pounded goldleaf etc.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/AAT/message/364
-possibly after deep dive descent (while negatively buoyant) a (woven short sarong/skirt) could open parachute-like between ascending strokes to slow descent and then close during each arm/leg stroke phase to allow faster ascent. (from DeeperBlue.com message: This is how a dive works: Because of the air in our lungs, we are buoyant on the surface and remain so until about fifteen metres. The weight that a constant-weight diver wears around the neck helps him or her overcome the resistance at this depth. (Campbell wears about four pounds.) Between fifteen and thirty metres, most people are neutrally buoyant, and after thirty metres they are negatively buoyant, which means they sink. "Deeper than thirty metres, nobody swims," Marco Nones, a dive instructor in Sharm al-Sheikh, told me. "Fall down, fall down. Every diver slips." At the bottom of a deep dive, a diver is very heavy, because the lungs are so radically contracted. To return to neutral buoyancy, he must labor against this. Sometimes, on no-fins dives, he actually sinks while gliding between strokes and has to work to recover lost ground.
http://forums.deeperblue.com/general-freediving/84091-deepest-dive-new-yorker-article-sara-campbell.html.
When ascending at depth, one can't just propel up, one must brake downwards gravity effect, to stop sliding back down. This is like climbing a coconut palm tree without a foot strap, one tends to slip downwards after each step up, unlike climbing a ladder where you ratchet upwards each step and can't sink down (more like wearing long fins or monofin). One must brake the fall between strokes while allowing the glide up.
Any momentary rest, one must slow the descent by parachuting like a jellyfish*, or by becoming more horizontal. Probably spiral climbing is more efficient, like a tight corkscrew, each hand stroke vertically pulled down and pushed down but finished with horizontal outward flick to brake a second, then pulling hands inwards (and downwards slightly) and then forwards smoothly along body to far front and flick out hands again to brake before doing another stroke.
DDeden
Showing posts with label trade. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trade. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
"Archae-tecture"
Some thoughts on how housing developed:
I had puzzled over what happened many many thousands of years ago when some humans switched from semi-nomadic hunting and gathering housed in round tensional hut village dwellings to sedentary semi-agricultural square/rectilinear town housing. Although caves and rockshelters have always provided some forms of shelter, they were not often conveniently located, and probably used more for special activities (meeting place, food stores, art studios, temples, quarries) than regular domestic housing. I think simple dome piles, originally like beaver lodges, of stacked circular sedges & interwoven branches/saplings, may have been long employed for housing, and gradually they became more vertical and with thinner walls, transforming into the typical round hut, which then differentiated depending on the seasonal climate and migratory patterns of the people and various associated flora and fauna, and the increasing level of resource control and sedentary community development.
from (^) ( ^ ) (^)
to (^^) and {^ X ^} and [^^]
to [^^x^^]
to-- ^
- / _X_ \
/_____\
_____
to
====================
____________________
____________________
____________________
I 'knew' it was due to population concentration around a wellspring, a semi-controllable "domesticated" resource, where freshwater was always available and semi-domesticated animals were kept safe from predators by a wall or thorn fence.
But I didn't know how the dome huts converted to pyramid-roofed cube/rectilinear housing. Domes are stronger, stabler, roomier, better airflow control. Why change to a "worse" arrangement?
I think as populations grew, instead of enlarging the outer perimeter fence, they tightened their domes to fit more in, making them from hemisphere dome to round house to square house, then added a patio on top, then added a roof on top, which then became a second story house, which then became a 3 story apartment building.
It was hard to understand why didn't they just expand the perimeter fence, and keep making more domes outwardly. I think partly this was due to generations spent enclosed in the "permanent" compound, the children were told not to mess with the fences to prevent breaking it which would allow night-time predators to sneak in, and when the children grew they subconsciously continued to maintain that rule, repairing when necessary but not altering it. Only when subgroups moved in or out would the fence perimeter become a bit flexible, as part of a change in social order.
Also, to avoid polluting the well, all the food scraps & waste would be deposited outside the fence, resulting in a ring around, with only paths radiating from the center well, so people wouldn't want to build a house just outside the fence in the fertile wasteland, (better to move beyond to a "suburban" colony).
So the result was a concentric but discontinous ring of dome huts that evolved over generations to a series of rectangular huts in interconnected arcs (but split by paths/roads) radiating out from the center. Over time, 2nd and 3rd floors were added, which depended on both the house below and the neighboring house structural strength, while domes changed from houses to central social buildings like temples, later they also became more rectilinear due to population concentrations, canals and road congestion.
So, I'm glad to finally make sense of this prehistorical transition from dome structure housing to multiple unit subdivision blocks/longhouses. Interestingly, I figured it out by thinking about bubbles! A single bubble on a pond surface is a dome, but two combined bubbles form an adjoining vertical plane, and a ring of pond-floating bubbles produce rectilinear radiating vertical inner walls and horizontal floors (lacking only entrance/exit paths). I recall some Chinese traditional ring housing, 3 stories, vertical walls, around a central well. The residents said it was to protect them from predatory bandits, it may be a stage of social structural development which some cultures already passed through (like huge modern hyperpopulated rectilinear-imposed-grid cities) while others went through a parallel but distinctly different route (like feudal castles). DDeden
-
Brief add: post-hole artifacts probably derived from a period after dome huts were 'tightened' into roundhouses by tensional fence/wall effect on population density as function of social-physical concentration/compression; self-stabilized domes replaced by roundhouses with ground soil friction supporting post foundation (indicating shovels/drills used in well digging in soil).
-
Interesting information on theoretical structural architecture archaeology:
theoretical structural archaeology
-
Brief on housing in nature, in reference to Bucky Fuller (geodesic domes, isotropic vector matrix IVM):
Also, in a general sense, in nature, many animals tend to distribute their burrows/nests in an IVM pattern, not perfectly since the terrain contains many different local features (hills, ponds, dry spots) but in a generalized ecosystematic way. This depends on a lot of other factors, but holds true for many very different species, excluding highly social types (honeybees pack em in tight in hexagonal packing). I was thinking about how beaver families in small streams stay apart from other families (topographically descending knotted rope), but in large swampy lakes they tend to be horizontally equidistanced, that is, vectorially equilibrium distributed in a horizontal space-conserving fashion, (topographically planar crystal).
-
Etymology: commercial, merchant, marchand, mercantile, market, marine, mire/moor/mer
mer - sumer/meru/meroe/samar...,
cent/kent/zehn/ten/centum-satum
Malay: satu, Uzbek(?): sato
Why did Greek use thalassa for sea? thalassa sounds like Arab Selasa/thelatha (wednesday/3), did "thalassa = sea" come from salt-aqua/sal-akwa/thal-acca?
Malacca/malaga/malaya from mal-aqua?
-
update:
"Oddly, all tent-based cultures that evolved to locational permanency and more sophisticated materials use, seem to have rather naturally adopted the vertical-walls method." JB
Not so likely, since tents were specialized implements and derivative of dog domestication, long after generalized dome huts had been in use. Until then, skins and hides were food wraps and scraps, the whole furry carcass burned, just as in nature after wildfires.
Post-holes are found only after dome huts got (fence-tensionally) squeezed into ("vertical") roundhouses and longhouses with triangular roofs (from which nomads derived tipis, yurts, tents), and are associated with improved well-digging and early irrigation, which then encouraged vertical wall construction. DD
article on 10,000ka lakeside roundhouse:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100810101724.htm
Pygmies & bushmen: dome hut = mongolu (igloo, bungalo/buffalo, ger, geodesic, judaic, masjid?)
http://music000001.blogspot.com/2009/10/222-deconstructing-postmodern-condition.html
Slovenian marsh: veneti, oldest (square circle/merkaba) axle & wheel, wood canoe
http://www.angelfire.com/country/veneti/AmerDomoOldestWheel.html
I had puzzled over what happened many many thousands of years ago when some humans switched from semi-nomadic hunting and gathering housed in round tensional hut village dwellings to sedentary semi-agricultural square/rectilinear town housing. Although caves and rockshelters have always provided some forms of shelter, they were not often conveniently located, and probably used more for special activities (meeting place, food stores, art studios, temples, quarries) than regular domestic housing. I think simple dome piles, originally like beaver lodges, of stacked circular sedges & interwoven branches/saplings, may have been long employed for housing, and gradually they became more vertical and with thinner walls, transforming into the typical round hut, which then differentiated depending on the seasonal climate and migratory patterns of the people and various associated flora and fauna, and the increasing level of resource control and sedentary community development.
from (^) ( ^ ) (^)
to (^^) and {^ X ^} and [^^]
to [^^x^^]
to-- ^
- / _X_ \
/_____\
_____
to
====================
____________________
____________________
____________________
I 'knew' it was due to population concentration around a wellspring, a semi-controllable "domesticated" resource, where freshwater was always available and semi-domesticated animals were kept safe from predators by a wall or thorn fence.
But I didn't know how the dome huts converted to pyramid-roofed cube/rectilinear housing. Domes are stronger, stabler, roomier, better airflow control. Why change to a "worse" arrangement?
I think as populations grew, instead of enlarging the outer perimeter fence, they tightened their domes to fit more in, making them from hemisphere dome to round house to square house, then added a patio on top, then added a roof on top, which then became a second story house, which then became a 3 story apartment building.
It was hard to understand why didn't they just expand the perimeter fence, and keep making more domes outwardly. I think partly this was due to generations spent enclosed in the "permanent" compound, the children were told not to mess with the fences to prevent breaking it which would allow night-time predators to sneak in, and when the children grew they subconsciously continued to maintain that rule, repairing when necessary but not altering it. Only when subgroups moved in or out would the fence perimeter become a bit flexible, as part of a change in social order.
Also, to avoid polluting the well, all the food scraps & waste would be deposited outside the fence, resulting in a ring around, with only paths radiating from the center well, so people wouldn't want to build a house just outside the fence in the fertile wasteland, (better to move beyond to a "suburban" colony).
So the result was a concentric but discontinous ring of dome huts that evolved over generations to a series of rectangular huts in interconnected arcs (but split by paths/roads) radiating out from the center. Over time, 2nd and 3rd floors were added, which depended on both the house below and the neighboring house structural strength, while domes changed from houses to central social buildings like temples, later they also became more rectilinear due to population concentrations, canals and road congestion.
So, I'm glad to finally make sense of this prehistorical transition from dome structure housing to multiple unit subdivision blocks/longhouses. Interestingly, I figured it out by thinking about bubbles! A single bubble on a pond surface is a dome, but two combined bubbles form an adjoining vertical plane, and a ring of pond-floating bubbles produce rectilinear radiating vertical inner walls and horizontal floors (lacking only entrance/exit paths). I recall some Chinese traditional ring housing, 3 stories, vertical walls, around a central well. The residents said it was to protect them from predatory bandits, it may be a stage of social structural development which some cultures already passed through (like huge modern hyperpopulated rectilinear-imposed-grid cities) while others went through a parallel but distinctly different route (like feudal castles). DDeden
-
Brief add: post-hole artifacts probably derived from a period after dome huts were 'tightened' into roundhouses by tensional fence/wall effect on population density as function of social-physical concentration/compression; self-stabilized domes replaced by roundhouses with ground soil friction supporting post foundation (indicating shovels/drills used in well digging in soil).
-
Interesting information on theoretical structural architecture archaeology:
theoretical structural archaeology
-
Brief on housing in nature, in reference to Bucky Fuller (geodesic domes, isotropic vector matrix IVM):
Also, in a general sense, in nature, many animals tend to distribute their burrows/nests in an IVM pattern, not perfectly since the terrain contains many different local features (hills, ponds, dry spots) but in a generalized ecosystematic way. This depends on a lot of other factors, but holds true for many very different species, excluding highly social types (honeybees pack em in tight in hexagonal packing). I was thinking about how beaver families in small streams stay apart from other families (topographically descending knotted rope), but in large swampy lakes they tend to be horizontally equidistanced, that is, vectorially equilibrium distributed in a horizontal space-conserving fashion, (topographically planar crystal).
-
Etymology: commercial, merchant, marchand, mercantile, market, marine, mire/moor/mer
mer - sumer/meru/meroe/samar...,
cent/kent/zehn/ten/centum-satum
Malay: satu, Uzbek(?): sato
Why did Greek use thalassa for sea? thalassa sounds like Arab Selasa/thelatha (wednesday/3), did "thalassa = sea" come from salt-aqua/sal-akwa/thal-acca?
Malacca/malaga/malaya from mal-aqua?
-
update:
"Oddly, all tent-based cultures that evolved to locational permanency and more sophisticated materials use, seem to have rather naturally adopted the vertical-walls method." JB
Not so likely, since tents were specialized implements and derivative of dog domestication, long after generalized dome huts had been in use. Until then, skins and hides were food wraps and scraps, the whole furry carcass burned, just as in nature after wildfires.
Post-holes are found only after dome huts got (fence-tensionally) squeezed into ("vertical") roundhouses and longhouses with triangular roofs (from which nomads derived tipis, yurts, tents), and are associated with improved well-digging and early irrigation, which then encouraged vertical wall construction. DD
article on 10,000ka lakeside roundhouse:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100810101724.htm
Pygmies & bushmen: dome hut = mongolu (igloo, bungalo/buffalo, ger, geodesic, judaic, masjid?)
http://music000001.blogspot.com/2009/10/222-deconstructing-postmodern-condition.html
Slovenian marsh: veneti, oldest (square circle/merkaba) axle & wheel, wood canoe
http://www.angelfire.com/country/veneti/AmerDomoOldestWheel.html
Monday, January 21, 2008
Pilgrimage: Journey of mankind
forest: foli-frugivory/qpal walk/vert. pluck/call
mangrove: coast food/upright forage-walk-wade-float/stick
seashore: bait-trap/beach-cave/diving/thrust spear/words
rivers: dugouts/travel/woodcraft/hut/throwing spear/fire
plains: herding/STPost barter/horse/fibercraft/atlatl
fields: farming/town trade/carriage/shipping/owners
city: factories/machine/mass tele-comm-travel-edu
Sequence:
omnivory plucking, poking stick for hidden food crab-termite-tuber
thrusting spear & stone hammer/knife to open seafood, cutting
bait-trap bivalves/biface/blade in fish against predators/pests
seasonal migrations coasts, rivers, fruit/nut/flint/hunt rift
seasonal herd/harvest nets->sacks carry flint, fruit, nuts home
accidental gardening garbage/feces attracts pests, bury it, seed
dugouts, trade foods/goods:
coast foods/salt, sun-drying/smoking: basketry, fish net
forest fruit, herbs, vegetables: tump-line sack, head-carry
mountain flint, gems, ochre, grinding: knap-sack, ruck-sack
floodplain grain, grassland grazers, herding: cloth, leather
ports/trading posts: concentration of goods/people, town/city
Pilgrims: Rift-coastal migrations from South Africa to China to the New World
My interpretation: first there was the clam/oyster on the shores of the
Tethys mangrove coasts, picked up and eaten by a hominoid, that then
dropped the shell below the mangrove branch which was immediately
swallowed by a croc that then died from indigestion (or so).
Xmillion years of this accidental littering/shittering produced a
hominid that intentionally sets clams filled with fishguts/rotten
crab/fresh meat out to be consumed by shore pests like cats and
baboons and crocs around the papyrus marshes while seeking eggs.
Another Xmillion years, Homo is in the Rift valley without oysters but
lots of sharp rocks to make fake shells to set traps, so as to
dominate the herding migrating masses on their way from south Africa
to China along the Peri-Tethys shores (Mediterranean/Black/Caspian/Bolkash).
Another Xmillion years the Homo Proto-San are herding the sheep,
goats, horses, elephants, cattle along the same Peri-tethyan path when
nature lets loose with a monsoonally induced rainy glacial
melted massive flooding that swamps the entire Eurasian basin, leaving
only isolated populations in highlands separated culturally and
linguistically with confused mythic memories of terrible loss/fear of
the hordes of barbarians (herds of berber/barber/baabaa) and the
heroic shepherds "san|tek|elfs and the reindeer" (Saami, Evenki) that
saved the starving isolated upland settlements that had become so
dependent on trade due to specialized crafts.
No metaphysics, no supernatural abracadabra, just megafauna migrations
and natural interpretations from cultural myths derived from pre-literate
disasters. Ice Age mathematics-phonetics-genetics.
DDeden
mangrove: coast food/upright forage-walk-wade-float/stick
seashore: bait-trap/beach-cave/diving/thrust spear/words
rivers: dugouts/travel/woodcraft/hut/throwing spear/fire
plains: herding/STPost barter/horse/fibercraft/atlatl
fields: farming/town trade/carriage/shipping/owners
city: factories/machine/mass tele-comm-travel-edu
Sequence:
omnivory plucking, poking stick for hidden food crab-termite-tuber
thrusting spear & stone hammer/knife to open seafood, cutting
bait-trap bivalves/biface/blade in fish against predators/pests
seasonal migrations coasts, rivers, fruit/nut/flint/hunt rift
seasonal herd/harvest nets->sacks carry flint, fruit, nuts home
accidental gardening garbage/feces attracts pests, bury it, seed
dugouts, trade foods/goods:
coast foods/salt, sun-drying/smoking: basketry, fish net
forest fruit, herbs, vegetables: tump-line sack, head-carry
mountain flint, gems, ochre, grinding: knap-sack, ruck-sack
floodplain grain, grassland grazers, herding: cloth, leather
ports/trading posts: concentration of goods/people, town/city
Pilgrims: Rift-coastal migrations from South Africa to China to the New World
My interpretation: first there was the clam/oyster on the shores of the
Tethys mangrove coasts, picked up and eaten by a hominoid, that then
dropped the shell below the mangrove branch which was immediately
swallowed by a croc that then died from indigestion (or so).
Xmillion years of this accidental littering/shittering produced a
hominid that intentionally sets clams filled with fishguts/rotten
crab/fresh meat out to be consumed by shore pests like cats and
baboons and crocs around the papyrus marshes while seeking eggs.
Another Xmillion years, Homo is in the Rift valley without oysters but
lots of sharp rocks to make fake shells to set traps, so as to
dominate the herding migrating masses on their way from south Africa
to China along the Peri-Tethys shores (Mediterranean/Black/Caspian/Bolkash).
Another Xmillion years the Homo Proto-San are herding the sheep,
goats, horses, elephants, cattle along the same Peri-tethyan path when
nature lets loose with a monsoonally induced rainy glacial
melted massive flooding that swamps the entire Eurasian basin, leaving
only isolated populations in highlands separated culturally and
linguistically with confused mythic memories of terrible loss/fear of
the hordes of barbarians (herds of berber/barber/baabaa) and the
heroic shepherds "san|tek|elfs and the reindeer" (Saami, Evenki) that
saved the starving isolated upland settlements that had become so
dependent on trade due to specialized crafts.
No metaphysics, no supernatural abracadabra, just megafauna migrations
and natural interpretations from cultural myths derived from pre-literate
disasters. Ice Age mathematics-phonetics-genetics.
DDeden
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Earth = Home. Can't just throw it away & buy a new one.
Videos, pics, articles on human ancestry along sea coasts and whale evolution
humans and dolphin link
Some of the lines of Siddhidas Mahaju(N.S.987-N.S.1050) read as follows
सज्जन मनुष्या संगतनं मूर्ख नापं भिना वै
पलेला लपते ल वंसा म्वति थें ल सना वै
which state that even a moron can improve with the company of good people just like even a drop of water appears like a pearl when it descends upon the leaves of a lotus plant.
(my last blog post for now, can't predict the future)
Monday, June 25, 2007
Malayo-Polynesians brought chicken, banana, rats to America
Evidence that ancient sea faring Austronesians (Malayo-Polynesians) brought bananas & chickens to South America and Polynesian rats to North America, and that the Chumash natives of California may have derived sewn plank canoes from Hawaiians voyagers/traders. So far, no genetic evidence of mixing. Other articles of interest can be found at the Human Migrations yahoo group.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4085731a11.html
Coconuts and People Yahoo group discussion (chicken, sweet potato, bottle gourd):
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ICCRA/message/1092
Update Aug. 08: Further DNA testing appears to show that the fowl remains in South America were not unique to Polynesia, but were common throughout Eurasia.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4085731a11.html
Coconuts and People Yahoo group discussion (chicken, sweet potato, bottle gourd):
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ICCRA/message/1092
Update Aug. 08: Further DNA testing appears to show that the fowl remains in South America were not unique to Polynesia, but were common throughout Eurasia.
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