Archaeology Magazine - January/February 2015 - 8

LETTERS
A Way to Remember
"Dawn of a Thousand Suns" (November/December 2014) brought back
memories of a visit to the Nevada
Test Site that I made some years ago.
In 1988 I was a petroleum geologist
working in Nevada. I attended the
Geological Society of America convention in Las Vegas that year and
took their "Geology of the Nevada
Test Site" feld trip. After I read your
article I dug out all my material from
that trip. I still have all the handouts
and maps we were given in our oneday tour. We visited Yucca Mountain,
the Sedan crater, and Frenchman
Flat, and went underground in the G
Tunnel. We were not allowed to bring
cameras, but I recognize the train
trestle and the bank vault in your
piece. We had lunch at the Area 12
cafeteria on the test site, we drove on
lots of dirt roads, some of which were
no more than paths, and we once even
got lost. I also remember that we were
issued radiation badges upon entering the site that were checked and
reclaimed when we left. As we were
exiting a dirt road onto an improved
one we drove past a sign. I looked
back and saw that it read, "Dangerous
Radiation Area. Do Not Enter." But
apparently no harm was done.
Paul Roales
Tulsa, OK
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Mistaken Identity?
To one familiar with Mexican fauna
and/or amphibians, it is clear that the
"frog with jaguar-like spots" in the
detail from the Mesoamerican fresco
on page 34 of the November/December 2014 issue actually represents a
toad, probably the cane toad (Rhinella
marina), because it is the most dramatically huge toad in Mexico. The structure on the back of the head is one of
the two venom-producing parotoid
glands, typical of true toads, and the
supposedly "jaguar-like" spots are actually the "warts" typical of toad skin.
Ronald H. Pine
Lawrence, KS

Spinning a Tale
I read with interest Andrew Lawler's article "Seafaring in Ancient Sri
Lanka" (November/December 2014).
However, I believe that the archaeologist may have made a mistake in identifying the "small round piece of darkblue glass with a hole in the middle" as
a possible loom weight. From the brief
description it sounds like it almost
certainly is a spindle whorl. Spindle
whorls are the fywheels of drop
spindles, which were used for thousands of years prior to the invention
of the spinning wheel to spin thread.
Loom weights are, by defnition,
heavy enough to maintain tension on
a number of warp threads on a warpweighted loom. It is improbable that
any object described as "small" and of
a comparatively low-density material
like glass would be used as a loom
weight, assuming that warp-weighted
looms were in use in that part of the
world at that time. In addition, glass

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spindle whorls are known from the
period of the Sri Lanka wreck. They
would probably have been considered
luxury goods since spindle whorls
may be made from dried mud, wood,
ceramics, pottery shards, metal, or
glass. A glass spindle whorl could
actually be a demonstration of wealth.
George Monsson
Fort Morgan, CO

Buffalo Story
I was surprised at Eric A. Powell's
article on the bufalo jump he visited
("Letter from Montana," November/
December 2014). The history we
learned was that jumps were used as
long as 6,000 years ago. In the time
before horses, this was a critical method of killing a large, wily, wary animal,
and there are thousands, perhaps tens
of thousands, of jumps scattered across
the northern plains. The drive lines,
tepee rings, fre pits, etc., are commonly found at many of these sites.
Maurie Petterson
Sheepdip, MT

Eric A. Powell responds: Communal buffalo hunting in the High Plains does indeed
have a long history, going back many thousands of years at places such as the Calderwood jump in Alberta. However, study
of earlier bufalo kill sites shows that until
around a.d. 600, hunters typically lured
a few animals at a time into traps rather
than clif jumps. The classic bufalo jump
with extensive cairn-lined driving systems
became common in the Late Prehistoric
Period, the era covered by the article, when
the archaeological record shows evidence for
large-scale bufalo drives and meat processing on a near-industrial scale.

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ARCHAEOLOGY * January/February 2015

Archaeology Magazine - January/February 2015

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