I love archeology and my interests were Central and South America when I was taking classes in that sort of thing. And I was studying remote sensing when LiDAR was becoming a widespread tool. I was wondering how long it would take for researchers to bring it to the Amazon.

After reading the book, 1491, I am interested in what other locations can be identified. It appears there were many large civilizations in the Americas before Europeans found out it was here.

Looks as if we may have some amazing revelations ahead if they keep increasing the focus on Brazil, as the rainforest, especially, seems to be disappearing due to the greed at the heart of mankind's worst impulses. A lot is going to become far more evident as the canopy starts being dragged down so idiots can steal the land. Hopefully, they won't get too far, and in the meantime, LIDAR is showing things only diligent searchers suspected long ago concerning many actual cities which existed on the ground which was overtaken by forest far later.

Really envy the time you have spent increasing your awareness in real civilizations lost earlier. That will serve you well as a stupendous foundation as we look forward to the opening to new information for the 21st century.

Since I was quite young. My sister read Greek mythology to me for bedtime stories and she handed of several of her books when she was done with them when she was in college. When I finally went to college, I was well beyond my 20s, I got a degree in cultural anthropology. I was thinking of archaeology but I found culture and language more interesting and less physically demanding.

But I am a political animal too so I got another degree in political science. An odd duck but I found that most of my faculty friends all agreed that I was a true eclectic and I decided that it was something to be embraced. My interests are vast and I had a hard time deciding what to study, being older upon entry was any more helpful than being a teen right out of high school.



Now I'm retired, so I do a lot of armchair work these days.

and linguistics, too. By the time I got to full time (instead of piecemeal) courses, I was also well past my 20's, so I opted for a language major and anthropology minor, with a focus on Native American cultures. It was the specialty of the professor that I took most of my anthro courses from.

My interest started in childhood, with exposure to other cultures and their languages very early. Then my father, who grew up on a farm, showed me arrowheads and spearheads that he had found when plowing and saved. That same year in grade school, the My Weekly Reader publication for kids did an article on the excavation of King Tut's tomb. I was hooked. Archaeology and anthropology seemed to have everything to hold my interest - mystery, lost treasure, different ideas and ways of living and thinking.

Having spent most of my childhood in New England where I was exposed to many other languages and cultures including those in my own family, All grandparents spoke other languages from German to Finnish to Lithuanian. And then, when in grade school, we learned etymology of words as we learned them and also started reading and speaking French in the second grade. I was off to a good start from an early age, then I spent much of my first decades as an adult traveling all over the US and learned many dialects of American English, it's quite a thing.

It's a set of topics that still hold my interest through all these decades, fascinating and mysterious all at once.

Last edited Tue Dec 1, 2020, 07:14 AM - Edit history (1)

living with us in my childhood. She had some Hungarian friends who knew German and they used to sit on our front porch speaking German although they were all fluent in English. There were older Italians in our neighborhood who had come to the US around the same time as Aunt Emma and her Hungarian friends - late 1800's and early 1900's. They sat on their front porches speaking Italian. Felt like I needed a passport to walk down the street.

My father's mother was mixed, English, Seneca, and Mohawk. She died when I was 2 but my aunts told me about her and showed me Native crafts her grandmother had made and taught her to make. When my grandfather started dating, he had a long term relationship with a Jewish woman who was at all our family gatherings. The first time we met her was at our traditional huge family Christmas party at the farm. She explained Hannukah to us and handed out Hannukah gelt (chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil) to all the grandchildren.

When I learned to read and saw words I didn't understand, my father showed me how to use a dictionary. A few years later, when I asked what the stuff in parentheses after words meant, my mother explained that it told where the word originated. So I read those every time, too, along with the section on language families. Probably the only kid who read dictionaries as a pasttime.


I took German and Latin in high school to have a basis for most European languages, and Spanish in college.

designs and wavy line patterns in between the animal depictions are for. Just decorative, or do they have some meaning? Some of the patterns boxed inside squares remind me of sketches I do in planning a scarf or afghan to crochet.