M.J. Rose

As our waters recede due to drought, strange and beautiful things emerge – as if from a time machine.

Colonial church emerges from receding reservoir in Mexico
SF Gate/Associated Press

“MEXICO CITY — Leonel Mendoza fishes every day in a reservoir surrounded by forest and mountains in the southern Mexico state of Chiapas. But in recent days, he also has been ferrying curious passengers out to see the remains of a colonial-era church that has emerged from the receding waters.

A drought this year has hit the watershed of the Grijalva river, dropping the water level in the Nezahualcoyotl reservoir by 82 feet.

It is the second time a drop in the reservoir has revealed the church since it was flooded when the dam was completed in 1966. In 2002, the water was so low visitors could walk inside the church.

“The people celebrated. They came to eat, to hang out, to do business. I sold them fried fish. They did processions around the church,” Mendoza said.

The church in the Quechula locality was built by a group of monks headed by Friar Bartolome de la Casas, who arrived in the region inhabited by the Zoque people in the mid-16th century…”

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News of the very, very old. This time, it’s about incredibly ancient art.

So far the team has unearthed three engraved fragments – and they hope to find more

Ice Age engravings found at Jersey archaeological site
By Jonathan Webb (BBC News)

“A dig in Jersey has yielded a stash of hunter-gatherer artefacts from the end of the last Ice Age, including stone pieces criss-crossed by carved lines.

They are similar to engravings found from the same period in continental Europe, but are the first of their kind in the British Isles.

Archaeologists are in the early stages of analysing the finds, but estimate them to be at least 14,000 years old.

This places the camp among the earliest in northern Europe after the freeze.

It would also mean that the markings pre-date the earliest known art in the UK, which was found carved into stone walls and bones at Creswell Crags in Derbyshire in 2003.

However, the team wants to study the engravings more closely and hopefully find more of them, before making any grand claims.

Dr Chantal Conneller is co-director of the Ice Age Island project, which for five years has been working on the Les Varines site in the south east area of Jersey. She told the BBC: “We’re feeling reasonably confident at the moment that what we’ve got fits into this broader idea of non-representational Magdalenian art…”

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More very, very old book news:

Two pages from Samuel Ward’s translation for part of the King James Bible. An American professor who came upon the manuscript last fall at Cambridge says it is the earliest known draft for the King James translation, which appeared in 1611. Credit Master and Fellows of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge; Maria Anna Rogers (Photo)

Earliest Known Draft of King James Bible Is Found, Scholar Says
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

“The King James Bible is the most widely read work in English literature, a masterpiece of translation whose stately cadences and transcendent phrases have long been seen, even by secular readers, as having emerged from a kind of collective divine inspiration.

But now, in an unassuming notebook held in an archive at the University of Cambridge, an American scholar has found what he says is an important new clue to the earthly processes behind that masterpiece: the earliest known draft, and the only one definitively written in the hand of one of the roughly four dozen translators who worked on it.

The notebook, which dates from 1604 to 1608, was discovered by Jeffrey Alan Miller, an assistant professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey, who announced his research on Wednesday in an article in The Times Literary Supplement…”

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