The Theologian's Table

    Otto Román, a Guatemalan archaeologist, excavating the cache of  polishe d  axes that were found in 2009. This ritual deposit  marked the beginning of occupation at Ceibal around 1,000 B.C .      Most of us have seen the movies of the swash-buckling archaeologist Indiana Jones. It offers up a romantic version of what digging up or hunting down ancient artifacts is like. This past semester in my "Principles of Archaeology" class I learned that portrayal is highly inaccurate, but to be fair, those films are a big reason why I want to study Archaeology.      When the average person thinks of Archaeology they may think of digging up skeletons, artifacts, or restoring ancient ruins. They may also think that it is a way to see how bye-gone cultures and societies worked, and to a large extent that's part of it. We might not realize how Archaeology is so important for world today though, and how it has helped our current civiliza...

A handful of ancient civilizations built pyramid style structures. You know what that means right? Aliens! That's right, tall white beings from the stars told the smaller brown humans how to build them...err...wait, I just realized how that sounded. The basis for Aliens helping our ancestors was an interesting thing at one time, however now it has evolved into something stupid and borderline racist. Anthropology and Archaeology are ever changing an evolving fields because new finds open up new possibilities we didn't consider before. Mostly it has to do with how we are realizing humans were more developed than we thought and were extremely quick learners, after all, only the strongest survive. Pyramids in Egypt The first pyramids were carved from bedrock and were tiered, not like the smooth looking pyramids you might think of. The shape of the pyramind is said to represent sunbeams coming down from the heavens which they believed how you got into the afterlife in their so...

For a while now the mainstream public has been under the assumption people of another culture maybe biologically different than themselves. Some of us remain unaware of the history of how biology and the discovery of different cultures became intertwined. This is helped along by published health studies conducted by the government and health insurance companies that focus specifically on race. Often times we hear on the news that the African American community is more likely to get hyper-tension or diabetes. While the cases of hyper tension have climbed in that community, the actual reasons behind it are being over shadowed by race. First, let's look at the history of how this came to be. Early European scholars wanted to classify humans into subspecies/races based on morphology (appearance) and geographical locations (Haviland et al, 134). A man named Carolus Linnaeus classified Europeans as "White", Africans as "black", American Indians as "red", and...

This is the eulogy I wrote for my Dad but I like to think of it as more of a tribute. Dad When I was in high school I read a really depressing play by Arthur Miller called "Death of a Salesman". It was a bout a guy named Willy Loman who worried a little too much about being well liked by his peers and others. I remember reading that he would have little fantasies about how many people would come to his funeral and exclaim their love for him,. Unfortunately for him it didn't end up like that, and what I took from it was that he couldn't be himself, those fantasies became destructive and he ultimately destroyed himself. I'm not here though to compare my Dad to Willy Loman though, my Dad was the anti Willy Loman. He was always his own person, as far I could tell he was never worried about any of the things Willy was and it enabled him to put God and his family first. He was more worried about being a good husband and provider for his family. He was more concerned wit...

Today Anna and I visited the Etowah Indian Mounds "digsite" which next to the Etowah river. The sight was inhabited by some of the ancestors of the Creek and Cherokee nations from around 900a.d. to 1550a.d. In 1540 the conquistador De Soto visited this place with 1000 of his soldiers while he was looking for the lost city of gold Cibola. After that the village was almost wiped out by diseases from the Europeans who carried them. Way to go De Soto. The people that fled the village during this time joined with other tribes like the Creek and Cherokee. The re-construction of the home you see in the photo on the left was the typical dwelling within the village(called a wattle, or daub hut) of the native towns-person/family. It was believed to have a wood or rock frame then covered in packed red clay. These homes would have sat crowded on the perimeter of the courtyard/plaza which was below the mounds. Here is a scale model to illustrate how ...

In my last post I talked a lot about magic, or a wizard that does magic. I don't believe in the type of magic that Harry Dresden does in the books nor in the kind that is in Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. I do however believe in other supernatural things. I believe there is a supernatural realm that we can't physically see and that there are things battling over our souls, but most importantly I believe in God and his son Jesus Christ as my savoir. This post will stating my decision to follow Christ and why I made it and everything that has shaped my faith into what it is today, I promise I will try not to be too preachy in the process. The Early Years. Let me start off by saying that I don't have some super dramatic conversion story, it all came about more subtle than that. My parents had already been going to church for a while before I was born, in fact that is where they first met, so I was pretty much brought up in the teachings of...

Occasionally I know how to take a great photograph and so I'll be posting several of the ones I like the most and I'll be giving short descriptions underneath them. This photo above is at Stage Fort Park in Gloucester, MA. Stage Fort was utilized during the war of 1812 against the British. It had a great strategic location being on the side of the harbor, also across the other side of the harbor was another Fort but unfortunately that one was not well preserved. What I like about this photo is the color contrast between the sky and earth and also that I took the picture right as the schooner on the water passed in front of the canon. These two photos I took in the desert outside of Las Vegas in a national park called The Valley of Fire. It was April around the time I went and as you can see spring was just starting in the desert and it was very beautiful. If you every get the chance to see the desert in the spring, I recommend it. This picture might not be the best in quality b...