Hi Bernd! Thanks for sharing the interesting back-story on Havana. Ever since reading Burke's Cosmic Debris, I have been fascinated by those meteorites that have connections with indigenous peoples.
It makes me think of that old movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy", about a bushman who "finds" a coke bottle dropped from an airplane and considers it an object of reverence and worship. Actually he was struck on the head with it - the ultimate soda bottle hammer! But, in my mind I see a meteorite and not the coke bottle, and I wonder what ancient cultures must have thought of these heavenly gifts. These cultures were generally agrarian, animist, and held a deep innate respect for nature and it's wonders. How magical and supernatural a meteorite must have been in their eyes. I never tire of reading those stories. :) Regards and clear skies, MikeG ......................................................... Michael Gilmer (Louisiana, USA) Member of the Meteoritical Society. Member of the Bayou Region Stargazers Network. Websites - http://www.galactic-stone.com and http://www.glassthrower.com .......................................................... Message: 4 Date: 18 Jan 2009 16:41:59 UT From: [email protected] Subject: [meteorite-list] Havana To: [email protected] Message-ID: <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Hello Michael G. and List, Maybe this excerpt from Buchwald is helpful, too: BUCHWALD V.F. (1975) Handbook of Iron Meteorites, Volume 2, pp. 635-637: Havana, Illinois, U.S.A. 40?20'N, 90?3'W Fine octahedrite, Of. Bandwidth about 0.35 mm. Annealed kamacite. Group IIIC. 11.4% Ni, above 0.2% P, 20.5 ppm Ga, 21.6 ppm Ge, 0.3 ppm Ir. Artificially annealed and cold-worked. History "In the summer of *1945*, members of the Illinois State Museum under the direction of Thorne Deuel, Director of the Museum, excavated a group of Indian burial mounds in the Havana, Mason County area. Burial No. 10 in Mound No.9 of this group yielded 22 rounded bead-like objects, composed of strongly oxidized iron, together with slightly more than 1000 ground shell and pearl or pearl slug beads. As the burial was evidently prehistoric and of Hopewellian age, it was at once conjectured that the iron might be of meteoric origin" (Grogan 1948). Two complete rounded specimens and two fragments were thoroughly examined by Grogan who presented an exhaustive description and concluded that the beads were actually worked meteoritic material. Arnold & Libby (1951), who examined wood from the same Mound No. 9, found a C-14 age of 2,336?250 years, which confirmed the Hopewellian age. The Illinois burials are thus of approximately the same age as the burials discussed under Hopewell Mounds, situated 600 km farther east in Ohio, see page 656. Wasson & Schaudy (1971) analyzed the material and found it similar to Mungindi, belonging to group IIIC. Collections: Washington (12 g); Illinois State Museum. Description The small iron-bearing masses had cylindrical to flattened globular shapes and maximum transverse diam?eters of approximately 3/16 to 5/8 of an inch. Dr. Deuel and his associates first advanced the hypothesis that they were beads after observing that in the burial the metallic objects alternated with one or two disc-shaped, cut and ground shell beads and that their sizes varied in a manner indicating that all had been graded to size on a string. Best from rainy Germany, Bernd ______________________________________________ http://www.meteoritecentral.com Meteorite-list mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
