Imagine walking along one day along a barren hill in Peru and stumbling upon 10-metre high pyramid. What would you think?

A) A perfect setting for an Indiana Jones themepark. Time to call someone in Hollywood.
B) What a fine reference for aerial surveillance and counterinsurgency efforts. Whisper a secret prayer/signal softly into the crack between the stones and wait for reinforcements.
C) Wow, those ancient Peruvians sure had big clocks. Stand back in awe, hands raised.
D) What a waste of stone. Walls or a house would have been a better choice, since nobody seems to have survived because of the pyramid.

If you chose C, you would have made a fine priest 4,000 years ago, according to the Sunday Times:

The oldest astronomical observatory in the Americas, it told farmers exactly when to sow their crops. Its discovery has provided startling clues to the way in which early man learnt to cultivate his fields.

“I was staring up at a statue on a ridge above the temple and realised it all aligned with the stars — it was an amazing moment,� the bearded scientist said last week.

“This alignment meant that at dawn at every winter solstice 4,200 years ago, key stars would appear in line with the temple and alert priests that river flooding was due and it was time to start planting crops. It was laid out as a wake-up call to the community.�

Bearded? Anyone else wonder what that has to do with anything?

I like the concept of priests as people who advance scientific knowledge and push the use of technology for “better” living. I also like the story about how police managed to recover a stolen Bronze Age relic, which eventually enabled a modern astronomer to decipher its meaning:

Since police tracked down the thieves in Switzerland in 2002, archaeologists and astronomers have been trying to puzzle out the disc’s function. Ralph Hansen, an astronomer in Hamburg, found that the disc was an attempt to co-ordinate the solar and lunar calendars. It was almost certainly a highly accurate timekeeper that told Bronze Age Man when to plant seeds and when to make trades, giving him an almost modern sense of time.

Wikipedia has an interesting review of how the relic was recovered and whether it is genuine.

Remember that old joke about the octogenarian pirate? You know, the one who goes around saying “Aye-matey” (I’m eighty). Sorry, it’s not every day I get to put a pirate joke in a log entry. Speaking of log entries I was reading the ship log over at the 826 Valencia Store, and noticed a fascinating take on the risk of being a buccaneer versus the modern workman:

Arrgh, being a pirate was obviously risky, but not too risky a business.

It paid to be a southpaw, it would seem. And loss of one eye is listed, but what about two? I can see “capable one-eyed buccaneers” (pun intended) as a plausible explanation for the lower rate for pirate compensation, but what was the payout for being blinded?

And what would be the modern equivalent of the “favorite or lucky leader”?

Some clever scientists have reviewed current events to try and find a universal pattern to terrorism and published a paper with their results:

We report a remarkable universality in the patterns of violence arising in three high-profile ongoing wars, and in global terrorism. Our results suggest that these quite different conflict arenas currently feature a common type of enemy, i.e. the various insurgent forces are beginning to operate in a similar way regardless of their underlying ideologies, motivations and the terrain in which they operate. We provide a microscopic theory to explain our main observations. This theory treats the insurgent force as a generic, self-organizing system which is dynamically evolving through the continual coalescence and fragmentation of its constituent groups.

It looks like they were trying to prove the old adage that ideologies, motives and terrain do not impact methods used by insurgent forces. I think that would be useful as an elimination of factors that are often mistakenly assumed to influence method, rather than proof of universality. In other words, does the universality of a hammer as a tool for hammering surprise anyone? Does it matter if the people who use hammers for hammering spend their money on different causes?