Vol. 15 No. 4 Winter 2011-12
  

The 2012 Phenomenon

By Michael Bawaya

Rosario Panti, brandishing her sastun, spoke of “darkness.” On December 21, 2012, there will be a series of solar eclipses. Technology will fail. Computers, high definition TVs, cell phones—all of our wondrous inventions will mysteriously shut down.

Panti, surrounded by me and a number of other journalists, held forth in the bar of the swank Ka’ana Boutique Resort in western Belize. Though appearing unprepossessive in her white T-shirt and jeans, Panti has a distinguished pedigree: she is the granddaughter of Elijio Panti, who is said to be the last Maya healer, and she herself is advertised as the last Maya shaman. Furthermore, she had her sastun, a strange object looking something like a petrified mushroom, which apparently invests its owner with oracular powers. It is, she said, 4,000 years old, and one of only 13 sastuns known to exist.

December 21, 2012 on the modern calendar (According to some correlations the date is December 23.) correlates with 13.0.0.0.0, the last day on the Maya long count calendar, the fateful day when the world will go dark or, according to some prophesies, meet a fate far worse. The ancient Maya were such a remarkable people that, centuries later, the putative end of their calendar has created a veritable cottage industry of doomsaying. Books (some 3,000 of them by one count), articles, and movies portray a variety of cataclysmic, world-ending events that, it’s alleged, the Maya somehow foresaw.

Revealing The Past Through DNA

By David Malakoff

It’s a David-versus-Goliath clash that has garnered headlines. For decades, a small Native American tribe in California called the Kumeyaay has been squaring off against the University of California, San Diego, demanding the reburial of ancient human remains found during a campus building project in 1976. These aren’t just any bones. Scientists believe the so-called La Jolla skeletons—which radiocarbon dating shows are 8,730 to 9,350 years old—may hold a trove of well-preserved ancient DNA that could reveal insights into the peopling of the Americas.

Many Kumeyaay, however, believe that DNA testing would be an offensive desecration and argue that federal law gives the tribe the right to control the skeletons. The academics “have continually disrespected our ancestors,” tribal official Steve Banegas told Indian Country Today last August. Some researchers, meanwhile, reject that claim, arguing that the skeletons are unrelated to the tribe and pressing officials to allow DNA studies. The university, they argued in a May, 2011 letter to the journal Science, should not favor “the ideology of a local American Indian group over the legitimacy of science.”

Not long ago, such stormy rhetoric typified the relationships between scientists and Native Americans in the U.S. and Canada. Tired of being treated as faceless, powerless subjects by non-native researchers, many tribes began pushing back in the 1970s. They imposed new rules on researchers and demanded the return of ancient remains and artifacts that had been hauled off to universities and museums.

But that mistrust is giving way to greater cooperation between DNA researchers and members of indigenous groups. The culture of science has changed,” said Dennis O’Rourke, a genetic anthropologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City who has been involved in studies of Native American DNA since the 1980s. “There is greater collaboration with Native American communities, and more awareness of their perspectives and needs.

The Dean Of Texas Archaeology

By Kristin Ohlson

Whenever visitors came to one of Dee Ann Story’s field schools, they weren’t likely to find her sitting in the shade taking a break. “She’d either be at the mapping table or, once excavation started, down in the pits,” said Harry Shafer, professor emeritus at Texas A & M University, who was Story’s first Ph.D student at the University of Texas. “She’d be down there shoveling dirt or studying features or whatever. She never asked her students to do anything that she didn’t do as well.”

There was always a plume of smoke coming from Story’s pit, as she was a heavy smoker for much of her life, a habit that contributed to her death on December 26, 2010, from lung cancer. Her passing sent a jolt through the archaeological community, especially in Texas, where she was well known and sometimes called “the dean of Texas archaeology.” “It’s hard to think of a more gracious and dedicated person than Dee Ann,” said Mark Michel, the president of The Archaeological Conservancy, on whose board Story served for years. “She was just topnotch in every way.”

Story was born in 1932 to Emma and Eugene Suhm of Houston. Her childhood was spent living near a bayou, where she investigated things poking out of the dirt and explored the waterways on a raft. She grew to love nature, animals, and hiking through the outdoors. From her earliest days, her family described her as strong-willed and intensely curious about the world.

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