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National Geographic : 2015 Apr
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Ancient Worlds EXPLORE Surreal life-size figures on a sandstone wall in Utah’s Horseshoe Canyon may be thousands of years younger than experts estimated. Using new techniques to gauge how long rocks had been exposed to sunlight, researchers sig- nificantly narrowed the period in which the mural must have been painted. Their reconstruction of events: 2,000 years ago a sheet of rock fell from the cliff. Artists then used the fresh surface as their canvas. About 900 years ago another sheet fell, taking a few painted figures with it. Steven Simms, a Utah State University archaeolo- gist involved in the research, thinks the paintings may have been made within a few hundred years of the first rockfall, during a time of major transformation as corn farmers from the south moved into a region peopled by hunter-gatherers. In Simms’s scenario “the farmers come in large numbers. They take over the land, hunt all the game. The hunter-gatherers are pushed to the margins.” Under those circumstances, he says, “this art could be something of an old tradition that they’re holding on to for power pur- poses.” — A. R . Williams A Mural’s New Date REPATRIATING HISTORY After two centuries abroad, Mexico’s first sweeping, native-authored his- tory is back home again. Last fall the National Institute of Anthropology and History acquired three 17th-century volumes—two written in Span- ish; the third, the Codex Chimalpahin ( below left), in Nahuatl—from the British and Foreign Bible Society. In 1827 a priest traded the vivid, hand- written accounts of life, society, and politics in Aztec Mexico for a stack of Bibles. Now that the tomes have returned to Mexico, historians there can get a fresh look at their country ’s pre-Hispanic past. — Jeremy Berlin PHOTOS: FRANÇOIS GOHIER (TOP); CHRISTIE’S IMAGES/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
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