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Cheribaya, Desert Mummies: Discovering a Lost Culture

9/30/2022

Trish Marx
The Earth Whisperer

One upon a time, about a thousand years ago, a vibrant tribe of people, lived a simple life in the Alticama of southern Peru, the driest desert on earth. We call them the Chiribaya, but locals, who knew where their remains were, called them the gentle spirits and left them to rest in peace. There was gold and other precious metals in the sandy hills where they lived, but they left them un-mined. They were afraid that the Aztecs and Mayans who lived nearby, might attack them for their riches. It is amazing to think that a group of more than 20,000 people agreed to not be greedy, leave the riches untouched so they could live in peace.

Local people who now live in that area knew about them because they placed their dead in sand holes, sitting crossed legged and upright, with a bundle beside them containing what they would need for the afterlife.

The bodies were preserved by a salty chemical in the dry sand. Years later, the sand shifted so modern people knew where to go and archaeologists came to study them.
Dr. Sonya Guillen, a Peruvian archeologist and anthropologist got the job of heading the study of the Chiribaya, who are the ancestors of modern Peruvians. I went down there with a photographer and we followed her for three weeks as she worked. Here’s what I learned:

The Chiribayans live on the sand mountains of the Alticama. They had to communicate directly with each other, which meant that they had to walk all over the mountains. This isn’t easy because I tried it. I discovered that dry sand on a hill is very slippery.
They dug holes in the sand for their homes, shoring up the walls with planks. They ate vegetables grown in the soggy land along a small streambed. What they did revere was their ancestors, who taught them how to live and thrive in harsh conditions. Their bundles contained a llama blanket (because the desert was cold at night), painted pottery, food, beer or wine, bowls with vegetable or Llama meat stew, llama shirts, all signs that they lived in comfort.

I learned you don’t need computers, video games or television to define luxury; peace, whalebone flutes, and a nightly carpet of stars on an azure blue sky will do just fine.

Chiribayba painted pottery: animals, insects and plant-life of southern Peru. After visiting Dr Guillen, Japanese anthropologists returned home to write a computer program about all the living things in the desert. In order to understand the curious images on this pottery, they also had to travel to understand the work of others.

Chiribaya child living in Peru today.

A dog DNA expert tested the DNA of this living dog, Alhaji, against that of the mummy dogs in Dr. Guillen's museum.

he Altacama Desert is mostly bare sand hill. The vegetation must be able to live with little moisture.

Dr. Gullen brushes debris off a mummy, before studying it and storing it in her mummy bunker.

This is the torso of a mummy found with her weaving tools, needed for her afterlife. Balls of colored yarn and large thorns used for knitting are in the basket on her left shoulder.

Trish Marx has authored some terrific nonfiction titles. Check out Everglades Forever for some more high interest reading about animal behavior.

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Tiny Frogs Are Big News

9/29/2022

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Laurence Pringle
celebrating nature, inspiring good writing

Can you name the world's fastest mammal? How about the biggest shark? If you said the cheetah, and the whale shark, you’re right! It's safe to say that we will probably never discover faster, or bigger, animals. However, it is still possible to find small animals that can set new records for being tiny.

Take frogs, for example. For many years, two kinds of frogs were tied for the honor of being the world's smallest. One species lives in Cuba, the other in Brazil. These frogs are so small that one can perch its whole body on a United States dime. Look at a dime and imagine an adult frog sitting there!

Recently, those two little species from Cuba and Brazil lost their title as Earth's smallest frogs, thanks to two scientists from the United States. They were herpetologists (scientists who study amphibians, including salamanders and frogs). In 2009 these scientists were studying frog calls on Papua New Guinea a large island nation north of Australia, in the Pacific Ocean.

The scientists were recording frog calls at night. All around, they heard chirping sounds that came from dead leaves on the forest floor. "Probably insects," they thought, but they decided to check. They searched among the leaves but found nothing. Frustrated, they grabbed whole handfuls of leaves and stuffed them into a clear plastic bag. Then they slowly searched through the bag, leaf by leaf. A small frog hopped off one of the leaves!

When I say "small frog," I mean one that can sit on a dime with room to spare. It was just 7.7 millimeters long. That's less than a third of an inch. Though the scientists later discovered another slightly bigger relative, the first one is now officially Earth's smallest frog—and Earth's smallest four-footed animal.

These tiny frogs are hard to catch. They can leap 30 times their own length. But the herpetologists managed to catch quite a few, take photos of them, and learn about their lives, close up. It wasn't until January 2012 that the scientists announced their discovery. Since this frog was discovered near a village called Amau, it was given the scientific name of Amauensis. Eventually, people may come to call it the Amau frog.
In the world of science, the tiny Amau frogs are very big news.

It's a frog alright...an Amau frog hanging out on a dime.

The tiny Amau frogs were discovered just before Laurence Pringle's book on frogs was published--too late to include this big news. At the end of his book FROGS!, Larry has an Author’s Note called “A Life Full of Frogs” in which he tells about his close encounters with frogs as a child, as a father, as a wildlife photographer, and as a neighborhood ecologist acting locally to protect and even create anuran habitats. His relationship with frogs continues to this day. He says, "Our Spring evenings are sweetened by a chorus of spring peepers from the neighborhood wetland forest. Also, almost every day we visit our backyard garden pond. Several green frogs, large and small, live there. There are tadpoles of both green frogs and gray tree frogs."

Pringle, Laurence. "Tiny Frogs Are Big News." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 13 Oct. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/tiny-frogs-are-big-news.

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Roads Made of Water

9/28/2022

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Cheryl Harness 
She's historical!

When the United States was a baby nation, it had lots of wheel-busting wagon trails, but hardly any highways. Traveling was difficult—unless water was nearby. Then you could FLOAT yourself and your stuff to market. Rivers don't always flow where you want to go, so Americans did what ancient Egyptians and medieval Chinese and Europeans had done. They built CANALS, the BIG idea in America in the early 1800s, and none was more important than the famous Erie Canal.

On July 4, 1817, at tiny Rome, NY, the digging began. In the next eight years, thousands of men sweated, clearing woods, and digging miles of ditch, four feet deep, 40 feet wide! They built up a TOWPATH beside it for the animals, who'd pull the boats along, when the ditch was full of water. Inventive engineers built 83 LOCKS, too, in which the water moved up or down over the land, and 18 AQUEDUCTS (bridges to carry water over deep valleys).

Finally, early on October 26, 1825, at Buffalo, NY, a cannon BOOMED! Trumpets tootled! New York Governor DeWitt Clinton and his guests stepped onto their packet (or passenger) boat. A team of horses tossed their heads, eager to start. More horse-drawn packets waited to join the parade. Off they'd go, four smooth miles per hour, to Albany, seven days and 363 miles away, on the very first ride on the completed canal, the longest in the world.

People atop the flat-topped packets waved at the folks on the land. They watched out for low bridges—or else: splash! From Albany, the canal boats (minus the horses!) glided down the Hudson River, past dark hills sparkling with bonfires.

Bells rang and flags fluttered that November 4, 1825, as the packets passed Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. Then Governor Clinton emptied a keg of Lake Erie water into the harbor. Why? To show that the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean were connected and that Americans were connected to the world. In the next decades they'd build miles of canals— until their next BIG idea came chugging down the railroad track.

The wedding of the Great Lakes and Atlantic Ocean waters

Boats were pulled by horses walking along a towpath beside the canal.

Here's a treat for you. Cheryl Harness is not only an author, but she is also an illustrator. This is a spread from her book "The Amazing Impossible Erie Canal."

One of Cheryl Harness's best known picture books is her fantastical, factual Ghosts of the White House. "Do I really believe that dead presidents spook around the White House, talking about when they lived there? NO! But I'm not above using FANTASY to explain HISTORY! Each president represents a chapter in the story of our country!"

MLA 8 Citation
Harness, Cheryl. "Roads Made of Water." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 26 Sept. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/roads-made-of-water.

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WHY HIP HOP POETRY MATTERS

9/27/2022

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Carole Boston Weatherford

The Poet Professor

One reviewer claimed that my book, The Roots of Rap: 16 Bars on the 4 Pillars of Hip Hop, surprised him. “I didn’t take Carole Weatherford for a hip-hop head,” he confessed.
Maybe not. But I have designed and taught a hip-hop course for college students. I write poetry and stories steeped in oral traditions. And I was raised on family lore; street, playground and handclap rhymes; proverbs; spirituals; and the call-and-response of the black church. As a child, I also read Langston Hughes poems and chanted James Brown’s anthem, “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud.” I later tuned into Gil Scott Heron’s spoken word manifesto, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”

Back in the day, I partied to Whodini, the Fat Boys and Run DMC, but did not fathom the power of rap until 1981 when I heard “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. The song confirmed for me that rap is rooted in resistance.

Rap originated in the late 1970s among alienated black and Latino youth in the Bronx, Harlem and Brooklyn. The genre has since come of age, and rappers have won Grammys for best album (The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill in 1999) and best song of the year (Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” in 2019). In 2017, Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer prize for music, a first for rapper.

Today, hip hop is the language of global youth culture. Rap reveries have replaced hoop dreams, especially as a male rite of passage. A vehicle for self-expression, hip hop gives youth validation and agency. Despite rap’s rebellious vibe, the genre has form and makes use of figurative language.

Here’s how I harness the power of hip hop in the classroom. I discuss rap’s roots in oral traditions and its use of poetic elements. I show documentaries on the pillars of hip hop: graffiti, breakdancing, deejaying and emceeing. We study how rap influences pop culture, politics and commerce. Finally, I get students to write homages, confessional lyrics, social commentary and/or advertising jingles. My son and collaborator, poet/illustrator Jeffery Weatherford, amps up the excitement with a mini-studio that lets students download beats, record lyrics and mix audio. Mobile apps can produce similar results.

Like the genre itself, rap workshops convey to students that their voices deserve to be heard.

James Brown by Frank Morrison.

Rapper by Frank Morrison

Carole Boston Weatherford has written many books inspired by oral traditions, including The Roots of Rap: 16 Bars on the 4 Pillars of Hip Hop, illustrated by Frank Morrison. Here is Vicki Cobb's review.

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Earthquakes on the Mississippi?

9/26/2022

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Jan Adkins

The Explainer General

Gigantic earthquakes rocked the Midwestern United States between December 16, 1811, and February 7, 1812. A fault in our continent’s stone base runs beneath the Mississippi River near what is now New Madrid, Missouri. Unequal pressures built up on both sides of this fault and the sides slipped to ease the pressure. Whammo—the first of 3 earthquakes from these slips was felt as far away as New York City, Washington, DC, and Charleston, South Carolina.

There were no scientific instruments to measure the New Madrid Quakes in 1812 so geologists have sifted through widespread accounts from old journals and newspapers for data. Putting the accounts together on a map, we know the quakes were felt over an area of 1,930,000 square miles. They earthquakes began with a pair of terrific shocks at 2:15 and 7:15 local time on the morning of December 16, 1811, both measuring 7.2 - 8.1 on the Richter scale. They were followed by a 7.0 - 7.8 quake on January 23, 1812, and a 7.4 - 8.0 event on February 7, 1912.

The quakes were violent, earth-shifting events. There have been even more powerful earthquakes in Alaska and Hawaii, both vulnerable to deep geological pressures, But the New Madrid quakes are the largest to ever occur in the original forty-eight states. Yet little damage or loss of life was reported. The region was then part of Louisiana Territory, sparsely inhabited with small villages and only a few multi-story masonry buildings. We can’t know how many log cabins or small home chimneys were thrown down, or how many Native Americans were affected.

Coincidentally, the first steam paddle-wheeler on the Mississippi, the New Orleans, invented by Robert Fulton, was making its first trip south during the quakes. Land heaves caused massive waves to travel up and down the river. When the little southbound New Orleans met one of these waves it seemed that the great Mississippi was running backward. Some land rose, riverbanks crumbled, some land subsided and formed new lakes. The river’s course was so changed that maps were useless, and the steamboat did a remarkable job of “feeling its way” through the new channels to dock at New Orleans on January 10, 1812.

We’ve come to expect earthquake and volcanic activity around the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” and other hot-spots of geologic shift, but the New Madrid Quake was the product of an unexpected fault in earth’s crust we now call the New Madrid Seismic Zone. And, yes, there is the possibility of similar earthquakes from this zone in the future. The Earth that seems so solid is secretly restless.

The New Madrid fault and its surrounding area is still considered at high risk for major earthquakes today.

The center of the New Madrid earthquake is cited in this Kentucky tourism sign.

"The New Orleans" maiden voyage was perilous as the earthquakes had altered Mississippi River landmarks such as islands and channels, thus confusing the pilots' visual navigation. At some small river towns along the way, villagers begged to be taken aboard to escape the earthquake's desolation but the vessel could not accommodate them.

This 19th-century woodcut is captioned The Great Earthquake at New Madrid.

Jan Adkins is not only a writer, but also a wonderful illustrator. His personal website is under construction at the moment, but if you would like to find out more about him and see a list of his very well known books, click here.
Adkins is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom, a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam. Click here to find out more.

MLA 8 Citation
Adkins, Jan. "Earthquakes on the Mississippi?" Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 25 Sept. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/earthquakes-on-the-mississippi.

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Cheribaya, Desert Mummies: Discovering a Lost Culture

Tiny Frogs Are Big News

Roads Made of Water

WHY HIP HOP POETRY MATTERS

Earthquakes on the Mississippi?

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