Translate

A little about Playa Zipolite, The Beach of the Dead . . .

Playa Zipolite, Oaxaca, Southern Mexico, on the Pacific Ocean. A little bit about my favorite little get-away on this small world of ours.

Zipolite, a sweaty 30-minute walk west from Puerto Angel, brings you to Playa Zipolite and another world. The feeling here is 1970's - Led Zep, Marley, and scruffy gringos.

A long, long time ago, Zipolite beach was usually visited by the Zapotecans...who made it a magical place. They came to visit Zipolite to meditate, or just to rest.

Recently, this beach has begun to receive day-trippers from Puerto Angel and Puerto Escondido, giving it a more TOURISTY feel than before.

Most people come here for the novelty of the nude beach, yoga, turtles, seafood, surf, meditation, vegetarians, discos, party, to get burnt by the sun, or to see how long they can stretch their skinny budget.

I post WWW Oaxaca, Mexico, Zipolite and areas nearby information. Also general budget, backpacker, surfer, off the beaten path, Mexico and beyond, information.

REMEMBER: Everyone is welcome at Zipolite.

ivan

Monday, June 15, 2020

Zilvano, Ditilenko - Zipolite Remix (Official Theme of the Nude Festival 2020)

Zilvano - I will be (official video)

Zilvano - Tierra Nueva (official video)

Zilvano - Souvenir (Official Video)

Zilvano - Like the whales (official video)

Zilvano - A piece of room (Official Video)

Mexico News Today June 15, 2020

MONDAY, JUNE 15, 2020

It’s not over yet, says coronavirus czar

The coronavirus pandemic “won’t end soon,” Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell said Sunday as more than 4,000 new Covid-19 cases were added to Mexico’s tally. FULL STORY
RELATED: 16 states drop to ‘orange’ alert; record number of new cases. FULL STORY

Tourism no longer ‘a source of excessive profits:’ minister

Miguel Torruco said the coronavirus-induced health and economic crisis has exposed the “decadence of the traditional models” in place in the tourism sector, whose policies have brought marginalization, poverty and environmental degradation. FULL STORY
Share this email and introduce friends to Mexico News Daily
ForwardForward

State dismantles 14mn-peso hospital that was never used

A second attempt at providing a mobile coronavirus hospital in Morelos has failed after the structure was flooded by rain. FULL STORY

AMLO offers a sermon with 10 guidelines to live by

President López Obrador has offered citizens 10 pieces of advice to overcome the coronavirus pandemic and adapt to the 'new reality.' FULL STORY

Guerrero extends virus confinement measures

Coronavirus restrictions prohibiting nonessential activities will remain in place in Guerrero until at least June 30, Governor Héctor Astudillo said. FULL STORY

US never came through with $2 billion to stem migration

The United States reneged on a pledge to invest US $2 billion in southeastern Mexico in what was to be a joint effort to reduce northward migration, President López Obrador said. FULL STORY

Beaches, hotels, restaurants open with reduced capacity

Monday is a momentous day for the tourism-dependent state of Baja California Sur: hotels, restaurants and beaches were to reopen after being closed for more than two months due to the coronavirus pandemic. FULL
STORY

Hotels, beaches in Puerto Vallarta reopen Monday

Hotels and beaches in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, were set to open Monday, Governor Enrique Alfaro announced, as coronavirus restrictions were eased in Jalisco and 15 other states. FULL
STORY

Lesson from the pandemic: pollution problem more than just cars on the road

The complexity of the pollution problem in the Valley of México goes much deeper than we realize, a fact that has become clear during the Covid-19 pandemic. FULL STORY

Couple abducted in Chapala bring total to 8 this week

The disappearance of eight people in the past week has residents demanding more accountability and more results from police to solve the 31 missing-persons cases reported so far this year. FULL STORY

Puebla governor investigated for making light of women’s disappearances

Miguel Barbosa is being investigated by his own party’s commission on honesty and justice for controversial remarks he made downplaying the disappearance of women in his state. FULL STORY

Whale stranded in Rosarito

A 24-meter whale that became stranded on a beach in Baja California will be buried nearby, a municipal official said. FULL STORY

Huge sinkhole closes section of Quintana Roo highway

A large sinkhole that appeared in Playa del Carmen collapsed a roughly 600-meter-long section of the Playa del Carmen-Tulum federal highway, a stretch of road that will eventually be near one of the Maya Train routes. FULL STORY

Restaurant is now a permanent food bank

The mission the volunteer-based Vallarta Food Bank in Puerto Vallarta, launched to help victims of the coronavirus, is 'to make sure everyone has food on their table.'   FULL STORY

Morena party delays reform of regulators after backlash

Mexico’s ruling party abruptly postponed a plan to fuse the telecoms and energy regulators and the competition authority after an outpouring of criticism. FULL STORY

THE MND POLL

THE STORY:
Narco’s testimony to US drug agency links ex-president to cartels
FULL STORY
THE QUESTION:
Do you believe that ex-president Calderón made secret deals with drug cartels?
VOTE HERE
LAST POLL:
Any holiday travel plans this year, or will you wait till 2021?
64% will wait.
VIEW FULL RESULTS

MEXICO LIFE

Rebellious artist Manuel Felguérez dies at the age of 91

A rebellious abstract artist who broke with the work of the muralists to open up a world of possibilities for Mexican artists died at his home in Zacatecas this week, writes Leigh Thelmadatter. FULL STORY

You can use salsa verde on all kinds of dishes and it’s also quite easy to make

Top chefs around the world use green sauce on seared scallops, poached eggs, grain bowls, roasted salmon and all kinds of grilled meats, writes Janet Blaser in The Tropical Table. FULL STORY

OPINION

Mexico’s railroads have a colorful history

It’s too early to buy a ticket or get off the tracks, but that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel may indeed be an oncoming train, writes Carlisle Johnson. Or maybe a metaphor for a future Mexico. FULL STORY
Newsletter options
Some readers prefer to stay up to date with the three-times-weekly summary of Mexico news provided by Mexico News Today. For others, however, it's too infrequent. The alternative is The Whole Enchilada: it gives readers links to the same stories as Mexico News Today but they arrive in your inbox daily rather than three times a week. If a daily news fix is what you want, check out The Whole Enchilada here.
 
ShareShare
TweetTweet
Copyright © 2020 Mexico News Daily, All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you signed up for it.

Our mailing address is:
Mexico News Daily
Bacocho
Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca 71980
Mexico

Add us to your address book


Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

HOT DEEP 4.0 by DJ DANI

Saturday, June 13, 2020

Y extrañas Zipolite? pues.....

Ultra-thin obsidian spangles from 100 BC present a mystery How were they made and how did they ever manage to drill a hole through them? By John Pint

Mexico Life
A translucent obsidian spangle A translucent obsidian spangle. Note size of hole. RODRIGO ESPARZA

Ultra-thin obsidian spangles from 100 BC present a mystery

How were they made and how did they ever manage to drill a hole through them?

I first saw them in the delightful little museum of Ameca, Jalisco, located 60 kilometers west of Guadalajara. There were more than a hundred of them: thin disks of obsidian no more than an inch in diameter, each one with a tiny hole right in the center.
Some museologist had strung them all together (unfortunately using an ugly green plastic cord) to form a shimmering pectoral which was impressive indeed.
I admired the pectoral, but what I couldn’t get out of my mind was the fragility of those disks, some of them as thin as a dime. How had they been made and — all the more intriguing — how could anyone possibly have put a neat little hole through every one of them without shattering the glass? My surprise at the thinness of those disks was based on my own experience trying to help out that druid …
Oops, let me back up a bit.
Obsidian is natural glass that comes from a volcano. Mexico’s state of Jalisco has more sources of obsidian than any other region in Mesoamerica and the fourth largest deposits of the natural glass anywhere in the world.
Anthropomorphic obsidian “charms” may have been sewn on clothing as spangles.
Anthropomorphic obsidian “charms” may have been sewn on clothing as spangles.
That’s why “the druid” contacted me. Well, to be more precise, he was an Englishman who desperately needed a disk of green obsidian for what he described as a druidic ceremony.
Now I just happened to know of an excellent source of green obsidian, but my modern-day druid insisted he wanted it in the form of a thin disk one inch in diameter, with a biggish hole in the center, and — via email — he asked me to find a Mexican artisan who could make such a disk.
So, off I went to my favorite obsidian craftsman, Don Eleno, who said, “Claro qué sí, I can make the disk and the hole, but the thinnest I could possibly get it is a quarter of an inch (6.4 mm).”
So, standing there in the Ameca museum in full vision of all those ancient disks, maybe 2 mm thick, I wondered just how those pre-Hispanic artisans had done it.
Soon I learned that many such disks had been found in the vicinity of Tequila Volcano and the first persons to write about them were archaeologists John Clark and Phil Weigand. They declared that the little jewelry disks had not been produced through grinding and polishing (Don Eleno’s technique).
“Percussion was used,” they said, following the obsidian blade-making procedure succinctly described by the 16th-century Spaniard Toribio of Benavente, a Franciscan missionary known as one of the “12 apostles of Mexico.”
Flat obsidian core is “as thick as the calf of the leg.”
Flat obsidian core is “as thick as the calf of the leg.” CHRIS LLOYD
“It is in this manner: first they get out a knife stone (obsidian core) which is black like jet and 20 cm or slightly less in length, and they make it cylindrical and as thick as the calf of the leg, and they place the stone between the feet, and with a stick apply force to the edges of the stone, and at every push they give, a little knife springs off, with its edges like those of a razor.”
But what about the hole? How do you pierce a glass disk no thicker than a coin, without breaking it?
Along came another archaeologist, Rodrigo Esparza, who put a couple of these disks under the microscope to find out.
The holes, Esparza told me, are sometimes in the center, but more often near the edge in the pieces found in western Mexico and in a few cases there are two holes, one at each extreme.
“If making a flake is complicated,” commented Esparza, “putting a hole through a sheet of obsidian only two millimeters thick is even more complicated. We decided to analyze the orifice with a stereoscopic microscope and a scanning electron microscope. The results revealed a very sophisticated technology for drilling a hole.
“With the stereoscopic microscope we could see that the surface had been rubbed with sand to facilitate drilling. To start to make the orifice, a very fine auger, perhaps of bone or horn, was used, plus the dust of ground quartz or flint as an abrasive. With different magnifications, we could see that the friction tracks inside the hole were circular and uniform. This suggests that a string-powered drill was used to produce smooth, balanced movement.”
Necklace with round and anthropomorphic spangles.
Necklace with round and anthropomorphic spangles. RICK ECHEVERÍA
This drilling technique, by the way, contrasts with the system used to perforate similar obsidian disks found near Teotihuacán. Archaeologist Alejandro Pastrana told me that only percussion had been used and when he and his teammates tried to replicate the procedure, “it took more than a thousand tries, over a period of two years, before we succeeded.”
Apart from shiny disks, collectors in western Mexico had also acquired thin obsidian “charms” shaped like animals, humans and even plants. All of these were pierced, suggesting they were designed to be strung on a necklace.
One little problem with all of this — from the point of view of an archaeologist — was that none of the items they were examining were in situ. Without some sort of context, there was no way of determining their age.
Then, in 2002 and 2003, archaeologists discovered several undisturbed tombs in Circle Six of the Guachimontones, the “circular pyramids” located 40 kilometers west of Guadalajara.
“Erick Cach was digging there,”says Rodrigo Esparza, “and out came four little round disks in one of the burials. Well, radiocarbon dating proved that that burial was from 180 to 100 BC.”
Esparza calculated that by the year 100 AD the shiny pierced disks had gone out of style.
  • 3—-c-sm-Spangles-and-dime-Rick-Echeveria
    Western Mexico obsidian spangles with US dime for scale. (Rick Echevería)
  • 5—-e-sm-30X-magnification-of-two-sides-of-orifice
  • 6—-f-sm-bangledTeotihuacan_-_Palacio_de_Atetelco_Warrior-Wikipedia
  • 7—-sm-A-Guachi-makes-a-perfect-stage
  • 10—-sm-forms-of-obsidian-jewelry-W-MX-Clark-Weigand
  • 4—-d-sm-Disks-strung-on-necklace-R-Echeveria
  • 2—-b-sm-Ameca-Museum-Obsidian-disk-pectoral
  • 3—-c-sm-Spangles-and-dime-Rick-Echeveria
  • 5—-e-sm-30X-magnification-of-two-sides-of-orifice
  • 6—-f-sm-bangledTeotihuacan_-_Palacio_de_Atetelco_Warrior-Wikipedia
  • 7—-sm-A-Guachi-makes-a-perfect-stage
  • 10—-sm-forms-of-obsidian-jewelry-W-MX-Clark-Weigand
  • 4—-d-sm-Disks-strung-on-necklace-R-Echeveria
  • 2—-b-sm-Ameca-Museum-Obsidian-disk-pectoral
  • 3—-c-sm-Spangles-and-dime-Rick-Echeveria
  • 5—-e-sm-30X-magnification-of-two-sides-of-orifice
  • 6—-f-sm-bangledTeotihuacan_-_Palacio_de_Atetelco_Warrior-Wikipedia
  • 7—-sm-A-Guachi-makes-a-perfect-stage
“Who knows why,” says the archaeologist. “Maybe a political change took place, maybe an elite family lost power or maybe this type of jewelry simply went out of fashion.”
Speaking of fashion, just how were these disks used? Stringing them like beads to form a necklace would have been highly impractical. The tiny holes (sometimes only half a millimeter wide) would only admit a slender string which the hole’s sharp edges would soon cut.
Far more logical would have been to sew the discs onto clothing, as spangles and sequins are used today. This would have shown the shiny, mirror-like surfaces to advantage and would have made the wearer sparkle like Elvis.
It’s easy to imagine this truly dazzling figure standing atop one of the Guachimontones, which surely must have functioned as excellent stages, because anyone on top would have been visible to every last one of hundreds of people filling the circle around the mound.
Was the elite, glittering VIP covered with flashing spangles a singer, a dancer, a preacher or a politician? Whatever the case, he or she would certainly get the crowd’s attention.
And there you are. That, I think, is why spangles were all the rage at the Guachimontones in the year 100 BC …  and that’s what I call entertainment!
The writer has lived near Guadalajara, Jalisco, for more than 30 years and is the author of A Guide to West Mexico’s Guachimontones and Surrounding Area and co-author of Outdoors in Western Mexico. More of his writing can be found on his website.