Cornell's Johnson Museum is a nice litle gem. Me and the camera were sneaking around in there yesterday. This (oh lord, why didn't write all the details down?) pre-Columbian pot is approx. 2000 or more years old and I just love it, its so funny. They call it a screaming woman. People sometimes wonder why I fiddle around and add things to pots and have fun, but listen, as long as people have made pots, they have had fun and made funny items. What amazes you about a clay item like this is the absolute technical skill in making it, without all the machinery and tools such as I have, also its age. It is ancient, but ready to use. I have a number of other items to present in coming posts. The museum is planning a pre-Columbian show next month!
Out the fifth floor window of the museum you can look up Cayuga Lake to the north quite a distance. Directly outside the museum is one of Ithaca's gorges. Just imagine walking along and suddenly there is a dropoff of hundreds of feet, that's Ithaca. I was parked by the suspension bridge over Fall Creek, which is a small river behind my house but here a few miles downstream is a huge and rushing torrent descending over several falls and hundreds of feet into the lake.
13 comments:
Very cool, Gary. Any idea what that kind of pot was used for?
very cool.. I love museums. I love history. I love the connection you can get with the past just being in the presence of something like this.
used for? maybe something nasty like collecting blood of sacrifices so that everybody could pass it around and have a sip...
Think I'll skip this round. My tummy's kinda bothering me.
don't know what it was used for. though i would have a hard time sipping from that pot.
doesn't quite look like an incenscor (however that is spelled).
in another time and place, we potentially could view as nasty if they wasted the blood from sacrifice.
i don't know what they did.
blood from certain living officials was cosmologically demanded at various pre-columbian times.
that museum sure is special.
our pal Deborah is a Cornell alum and knows this territory....
maybe it was just the potter's little sister laughing at his joke? and they filled it with chocolate?????
Lovely photos, all. Even though the screaming pot scares me a little. I think it looks more like a dental visit, but that's just me.
I can just imagine what those same landscape photos look like in summer, with all the green lushness...
what in heck is this word 'summer'?
i recently went to the dentist because a part of a tooth cracked off-i imagine like a glacier calfing an iceberg-and the dentist said something about relaxing. that may have been the first time dental visit and relaxing were put together for me.
made all the difference for that experience.
The view is fantastic, Gary! Although, I had noted on our trip up there - that there really weren't any 'views'. Just alot of up and downs and back up and down again. I had mentioned to Jim that I didn't think there was one square mile of flat land anywhere. So this 'view' is quite nice.
I love the suspension bridge!
Kate&Jim
that bridge really sways in the wind too!
gary, didn't you take them to the supermarkets built on swamps. ithaca has flat land. in fact if one lives and works in downtown, one loses the ability to walk those hills easily.
As the tourist council bumper sticker says: Ithaca is gorges.
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