Sometimes thought it is a bummer living in the states, less of an opportunity to go find some 1000+ year old relics knowing full well the likelihood of that happening is slim even if I lived in another country with bronze/iron age.
The oldest copper artifacts we have are from the old copper complex around Lake Superior, and more recent metalworking traditions were present throughout much of the Americas.
Archaeological evidence has not revealed metal smelting or alloying of metals by pre-Columbian native peoples north of the Rio Grande; however, they did use native copper extensively.[32]
Which then further cites: George Rapp Jr, Guy Gibbon & Kenneth Ames (1998). Archaeology of Prehistoric Native America: an Encyclopedia. New York: Taylor & Francis. p. 26.
I do not own this book, so I apologize I cannot verify the citation.
I didn’t realize how easy native copper smelting was until I watched some of those primitive YouTube channels where they make a water filtration system and smelt some copper using a hand made smelter. Linked below if anyone is interested.
It's not exactly easy - requires good quality coal, and fine tuning to get the right airflow to coal ratio to create a sufficiently hot furnace without becoming oxidizing. Those guys describe having to try multiple times before working out a successful process to produce copper, documenting a couple of their experiments in videos. They've nicely fully documented their final configuration in this video - some high quality experimental archeology work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYaJuab5riE
Keep in mind that you have to be wary of poisonous fumes - hopefully the elements giving their copper alloy a brassy appearance don't include lead, or worse, arsenic.
Native copper working is considered metallurgy in archaeology. If you disagree, feel free to take it up with the archaeometallurgists.
Moreover, purification from ores was done. The so-called copper bells of the southwest were mainly produced from ores rather than native copper and were often alloyed with arsenic or silver to modify the color. The main center of production was paquimé (~180mi west of the Rio Grande), but the cultural area extends well over the border into AZ, NM, and CO.
My understanding that advanced stone, shaped with metal, lasts. However, simple stone tools (think axes, hammers, flint arrowheads etc) tend to get easily lost. This is made furthermore difficult by the difficulty (impossibility?) of distinguishing them on tools like metal detectors
No, they're quite easy to find if you know what you're looking for and you look in the right places. Lithics in the ancient world were a bit like plastics today: ubiquitous and highly disposable.
For particular lithics industries/tools and certain situations you might get some amount of reworking, but ultimately people were producing new tools very frequently. That means that any area in which you might find them on the surface will usually have some and a long term production site will have overwhelming artifact density. They can occasionally look like normal rocks, but once you train your eye the worked faces become visually distinct.
I think most folks would have more fun with a metal detector and a map of Civil and Revolutionary War military camps and battlegrounds, or even just poking around ghost towns or old farmhouses, than looking for pre-Columbian artifacts, up here north of the Rio. It's largely disappointing and if you actually manage to sort-of prove that the broken barely-recognizable spear point you found came from some named group of people circa 800 CE, you'll inevitably find that we know almost nothing about them and that what we do know makes them sound exactly like every other group around that time, since we just don't know much about any of them besides trite generalities.
I would reckon the chances are higher to still find something in the states.
The "old world" had quite a head-start in digging up stuff and is also much more densely populated, so more people have been digging up old stuff for longer.
BUT!! The US has great magnet fishing - tons of guns thrown over bridges. (Be careful though - WWII guys threw contraband over these bridges - grenades etc).
Stone and ceramic are very durable (the latter tends to break into potsherds, but doesn't rust away as iron does). And population density doesn't need to be particularly high to be able to locate settlements and dig up artifacts.
This is simply not true. There are many places where you can go where the impacti of the Native Americans is still very obvious. There are places where you can find hundreds of religious carvings, arrowheads, obsidian artifacts, ect.
We homeschool and my wife has taught 7 of our 8 kids using:
Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.
Highly recommended for parents with kids at the age to start reading.
That's the most famous product of the Direct Instruction project-- the idea that you could break down subjects into explicit, tiny pieces that students can master effectively, and standardize the most effective curriculum you develop after years of experiments.
It works far better than most educational programs, but teachers tend to hate it because it doesn't give them latitude for creativity and planning their own lessons!
Yes, I taught all 4 of my children using that book and it’s amazing and works and should be the standard everywhere.
It was actually recommended to us by our first daycare teacher who used to teach elementary school before retiring. She said that early in her career they were all using this book and never had a problem teaching any of the children how to read ... until the school system was flooded with new theories every year that promised to do it better only to end up worse with every decade she taught. So she went out and told every parent she could to get the this book and do it themselves.
Worked like a charm.
Unless I misunderstood the article, this book does use some of the 3-cue method with the stories in the last few chapters that have picture representations. But I get the feeling there's really a delicate balance between using techniques to understand what you're reading vs an ability to just read words.
You think this would be a good book for a non english native kid or is very 'english' specific? I can't find any good books in portuguese about teaching kids to read that doesn't use the 'visual' method (since it is what is used in schools). I wouldn't mind translating the lessons myself to portuguese and present it to him of course, but if 50%+ is english specific (grammar rules, etc) than maybe not a good idea
I've also had awesome results with this book! My 5 year old seems to really enjoy the lessons. He's still working on building confidence with regular text (the early lessons in the book use a special orthography), but doing fantastically well for his age.
That’s the book my mom used to teach me how to read. I don’t remember much about it, but it was apparently effective, so it’s nice that it’s stuck around for the past ~20 years.
1. Continue to lose weight - i've lost 10 pounds the past month, would like to lose 30 more.
2. Work through PentesterLab Pro - past couple times I would get halfway through the first badge and just stop. This time I am pairing it with Anki cards.
3. Continue getting 7-8 hours sleep, been doing this since I read 'Why We Sleep'
4. Learn Ruby/Rails build a handful of applications.
Honestly, this is one of the reasons I am looking to move out of state. Eventually somethings gotta give and I am assuming it will be much higher state and property taxes.
> Eventually somethings gotta give and I am assuming it will be much higher state and property taxes
Well since y'all refuse to consolidate governmental units, it will be higher property taxes. A typical suburb with 50,000 people has its own police department, its own fire department, its own library system, its own parks department, road department, etc. Two school systems (K-8 and high school), each with a full administration! Drive your car, cross an intersection, and now you are in some other identical suburb of 50,000 people with all those same governmental units.
I know you want your community to feel like a little village, and your community is better than the one next door, so you'll never vote to combine into one. This is how much it costs.
Someone pays $15000 per year tax on a $280000 house. I pay $9000 per year on a $650000 condo. I share the cost of a police chief with 2.7 million people and you share it with 50,000.
P.S. This is the newer version[2] I'm using to track my daily work (goal is to do 40 pomodoros per week). I've left the data in it because still developing this new habit
What a hack (the reporter) Social Security and Medicare are over 50% of the federal budget and only going to grow. It would seem prudent to look at structural changes there when discussing federal debt and deficits into the future.
