Caral is a historic city in South America
Huge earth and rock mounds rise out of the desert of the Supe Valley near the coast of Peru in South America. These immense mounds appear simply to be part of the geographical landscape in this arid region squeezed between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountains. But looks deceive. These are actually human-made pyramids strong evidence indicates they are the remains of a city known as Caral that flourished nearly 5,000 years ago. If true, it would be the oldest known urban center in the America and among the most ancient in the world.
Research undertaken by Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady suggests that the 150-acre plex of pyramids, plazas and residential buildings was a thriving metropolis when Egypt's great pyramids were still being built. Though discovered in 1905, for years Caral attracted little attention, largely because archaeologists believed the structures were rainy recent. But the monumental scale of the pyramids had long interested Shady, who began excavations at the site in 1996, about 22 kilometers from the coast and 190 kilometers north of Peru's capital city of Lima.
Shady and her crew searched for broken remains of the pots and containers that most such sites contain. Not finding any only made her more excited: it meant Caral could be what archaeologists term pre-ceramic, that is, existing before the advent in the area of pot-firing techniques. Shady's team undertook the task of excavating Piramide Mayor, the largest of the pyramids. After carefully clearing away many hundreds of years' worth of rubble and sand, they identified staircases, walls covered with remnants of colored plaster, and brickwork. In the foundations, they found the remains of grass-like reeds woven into bags. The original workers, she surmised, must have filled these bags with stones from a nearby quarry and laid them atop one another inside retaining walls, gradually giving rise to the pyramid's immense structure. Shady had samples of the reeds subjected to radiocarbon dating and found that the reeds were 4,600 years old. This evidence indicated that Caral was, in fact, more than 1,000 years older than what had previously been thought to be the oldest urban center in the Americas.
What amazed archaeologists was not just the age, but the complexity and scope of Caral. Piramide Mayor alone covers an area nearly the size of four football fields and is 18 meters tall. A nine-meter-wide staircase rises from a circular plaza at the foot of the pyramid, passing over three terraced levels until it reaches the top. Thousands of manual laborers would have been needed to build such a project, not counting the many architects, craftsmen, and managers. Shady's team found the remains of a large amphitheater, containing almost 70 musical instruments made of bird and deer bones Clearly music plaved an important role in Caral's society. Around the perimeter of Caral are a series of smaller mounds and various buildings. These indicate a hierarchy of living arrangements: large, well-kept rooms atop pyramids for the elite, ground-level quarters for shabbier outlying dwellings for workers.
But why had Caral been built in the first place? Her excavations convinced Shady that Caral once served as a trade center for the region, which extends from the rainforests of the Amazon to the high forests of the Andes. Shady found evidence of a rich trading environment, including seeds of the cocoa bush and necklaces of shells, neither of which was native to the immediate Caral area. This environment gave rise to people who did not take part in the production of food, allowing them to become priests and planners, builders and designers. Thus occupational specialization, elemental to an urban society, emerged.
But what sustained such a trading center and drew travelers to it? Was it food? Shady and her team found the bones of small edible fish, which must have come from the Pacific coast to the west, in the excavations. But they also found evidence of squash, sweet potatoes and beans having been grown locally. Shady theorized that Caral's early farmers diverted the area's rivers into canals, which still cross the Supe Valley today, to irrigate their fields. But because she found no traces of maize, which can be traded or stored and used in times of crop failure, she concluded that Caral's trade leverage was not based on stockpiling food supplies.
It was evidence of another crop in the excavations that gave Shady the best clue to Caral’s success. In nearly every excavated building, her team discovered evidence of cotton - seeds, fibers and textiles. Her theory fell into place when a large fishing net made of those fibers, unearthed in an unrelated dig on Peru's coast, turned out to be as old as Caral. 'The farmers of Caral grew the cotton that the fishermen needed to make their nets, Shady speculates. And the fishermen gave them shellfish and dried fish in exchange for these nets.' In essence, the people of Caral enabled fishermen to work with larger and more effective nets, which made the resources of the sea more readily available, and the fishermen probably used dried squash grown by the Caral people as flotation devices for their nets.
What is the best way to teach reading?
By Keith Rayncr a Barbara R Foorman
Learning to speak is automatic for almost all children, but learning to read requires elaborate instruction and conscious effort. Well aware of the difficulties, educators have given a great deal of thought to how they can best help children learn to read. No single method has triumphed. Indeed, heated arguments about the most appropriate form of reading instruction continue to polarize the teaching community.
Three general approaches have been tried. In one, called whole word instruction, children learn by rote how to recognise at a glance a vocabulary of 50 to 100 words. Then they gradually acquire other words, often through seeing them used over and over again in the context of a story. Speakers of most languages learn the relationship between letters and the sounds associated with them (phonemes). That is, children are taught how to use their knowledge of the alphabet to sound out words. This procedure constitutes a second approach to teaching reading – phonics. Many schools have adopted a different approach: the whole-language method. The strategy here relies on the child’s experience with the language. For example, students are offered engaging books and are encouraged to guess the words that they do not know by considering the context of the sentence or by looking for clues in the storyline and illustrations, rather than trying to sound them out. Many teachers adopted the whole-language approach because of its intuitive appeal. Making reading fun promises to keep children motivated, and learning to read depends more on what the student does than on what the teacher does. The presumed benefits of whole-language instruction – and the contrast to the perceived dullness of phonics – led to its growing acceptance across American during the 1990s and a movement away from phonics.
However, many linguists and psychologists objected strongly to the abandonment of phonics in American schools. Why was this so? In short, because research had clearly demonstrated that understanding how letters related to the component sounds in words is critically important in reading. This conclusion rests, in part, on knowledge of how experienced readers make sense of words on a page. Advocates of whole-language instruction have argued forcefully that people often derive meanings directly from print without ever determining the sound of the word. Some psychologists today accept this view, but most believe that reading is typically a process of rapidly sounding out words mentally. Compelling evidence for this comes from experiments which show that subjects often confuse homophones (words that sound the same, such as rose and rows). This supports the idea that readers convert strings of letters to sounds.
In order to evaluate different approaches to teaching reading, a number of experiments have been carried out, firstly with college students, then with school pupils. Investigators trained English-speaking college students to read using unfamiliar symbols such as Arabic letters (the phonics approach), while another group learned entire words associated with certain strings of Arabic letters (whole-word). Then both groups were required to read a new set of words constructed from the original characters. In general, readers who were taught the rules of phonics could read many more new words than those trained with a whole-word procedure. Classroom studies comparing phonics with either whole-word or whole-language instruction are also quite illuminating. One particularly persuasive study compared two programmes used in 20 first-grade classrooms. Half the students were offered traditional reading instruction, which included the use of phonics drills and applications. The other half were taught using an individualised method that drew from their experiences with languages; these children produce their own booklets of stories and developed sets of words to be recognised (common components of the whole-language approach). This study found that the first group scored higher at year’s end on tests of reading and comprehension.
If researchers are so convinced about the need for phonics instruction, why does the debate continue? Because the controversy is enmeshed in the philosophical differences between traditional and progressive (or new) approaches, differences that have divided educators for years. The progressive challenge the results of laboratory tests and classroom studies on the basis of a broad philosophical skepticism about the values of such research. They champion student-centred learning and teacher empowerment. Sadly, they fail to realise that these very admirable educational values are equally consistent with the teaching of phonics.
If schools of education insisted that would-be reading teachers learned something about the vast research in linguistics and psychology that bears on reading, their graduates would be more eager to use phonics and would be prepared to do so effectively. They could allow their pupils to apply the principles of phonics while reading for pleasure. Using whole-language activities to supplement phonics instruction certainly helps to make reading fun and meaningful for children, so no one would want to see such tools discarded. Indeed, recent work has indicated that the combination of literature-based instruction and phonics is more powerful than either method used alone.
Teachers need to strike a balance. But in doing so, we urge them to remember that reading must be grounded in a firm understanding of the connections between letters and sounds. Educators who deny this reality are neglecting decades of research. They are also neglecting the needs of their students.
A survivor from the skies
In a remarkable documentary, Wings of Hope, German director Werner Herzog re-counts the true story of an eighteen-year-old girl, the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Amazon jungle in 1971. Twenty-nine years later, Herzog returns to the jungle with Juliane Koepke, now a 46-year-old biologist, and she tells her amazing story on film.
Juliane had just graduated from high school in Lima, Peru and, with her mother, was flying out to spend Christmas at her father’s research station in the jungle. A half hour into the flight they encountered a horrific storm. In the midst of wild turbulence, the plane was struck by lightning and fell into a nosedive. Passengers screamed as baggage flew around the compartment. Then, the plane broke into pieces and suddenly Juliane found herself outside free-falling 30,000 feet. ‘I was suspended in mid-air, still in my scat. It wasn’t so much that I had left the plane but that the plane had left me. It simply wasn’t there anymore. I was all alone with my row of seats,’ says Juliane. ‘I sailed on through the air, then I tumbled into a fall. The seatbelt squeezed my stomach and I couldn’t breathe anymore.’ Before she lost consciousness, Juliane saw the dense jungle below, ‘a deep green, like broccoli’, with no clearings for hundreds of miles.
Somehow, miraculously, Juliane survived that fall from the sky. In the film, she speculates on a number of factors which may have combined to save her. First, the storm had produced a strong updraft from the thunder clouds. Secondly, being strapped into a row of seats, she was aware of falling in a spiralling movement, like a maple seed pod. Then, hitting the canopy of trees, she tumbled through a maze of vines which slowed her landing in deep mud.
But surviving the fall, though miraculous in itself, was just the beginning. When Juliane awoke hours later, wet and covered with mud, she was still strapped to her seat. Staggering to her feet, she assessed her injuries: a fractured bone in the neck, concussion and deep cuts in her leg and back. She was also in shock, lost and totally alone in the Amazon jungle.
No doubt it was her familiarity with the wilderness that enabled her to cope. Her parents were biologists and Juliane had grown up in the jungle. She realised her only hope was to follow a little stream of water nearby, trusting that it would eventually lead to a larger river and rescue. With no provisions, dressed in the miniskirt she had worn on the plane and wearing just one shoe, she set off through the jungle. She passed broken fragments from the plane - a wheel, an engine. ‘Initially, I saw planes circling above me, but after a few days I realised the search had been called off,’ she said.
Surprisingly, she felt no hunger but as the days passed her health was deteriorating rapidly. The gash in her shoulder, where flies had laid their eggs was now crawling with maggots. ‘I knew I’d perish in the jungle so I stayed in the water.’ Walking in the stream, however, presented one risk more serious than any others. Before each step she had to poke ahead in the sand with a stick, to avoid treading on poisonous sting rays, lying hidden on the bottom.
As the stream grew into a river, swimming was the only option. However, here in deeper water, there were new threats. Crocodiles basking on the shores slipped silently into the water as she passed. Juliane trusted that they feared humans and were entering the water to hide. She swam on. On the tenth day, starving and barely conscious, she spotted a hut and a canoe. They belonged to three woodcutters working nearby. Rescue was at hand.
For this 46-year-old woman, re-living such a traumatic experience on film must have been a great challenge. But she shows little emotion. Flying back into the jungle, she sits in the same seat (19F) as on that fateful day. She is dispassionate, unemotional in describing the flight. On the ground, when they finally locate the crash site, in dense jungle, Juliane is scientific in her detachment, looking through the debris, now buried under dense vegetation. She examines a girl’s purse, the skeleton of a suitcase. Walking along the stream, she spots the engine which she remembers passing on the third day. Her arms and legs are covered with mosquitoes, but she seems to ignore all discomfort. Then, back in the town, standing in front of a monument erected in memory of the victims of the crash, entitled Alas de Esperanza (Wings of Hope), Juliane comments simply, T emerged, as the sole embodiment of hope from this disaster.
