Ligabue Magazine 37

18.00

Second semester 2000
Year XIX

For once let’s focus on them. Them? Our collaborators whose articles appear in this issue of Ligabue Magazine. Since its inception nineteen years ago, the Letter from the Editor has always briefly outlined the contents of the magazine, highlighting points of particular interest with some appropriate comment, thus only leaving a few lines to describe the authors, who always deserve much more credit than the brief praise received from us. Each issue of the magazine is initially conceived and composed inside the head of Giancarlo Ligabue. In his own writings and in those of the Research and Study Centre, he is the first to emphasise the value of those who so passionately contribute to completing the various projects, whose results attract the attention of the international world of science.

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* Digital versions from no. 1 to 57 are obtained from a scan of the Magazine. They may therefore have imperfections in the display of texts and images.

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So in this issue I will work backwards and first describe a collaborator, who is almost one of our recruits, albeit with his own hard-won merits: Davide Domenici, the worthy son of Viviano Domenici, whose work readers have read and appreciated for years. Davide, 32, graduated from Bologna University with a thesis on Peruvian archaeology and has been on several archaeological missions to Peru, Mexico and Easter Island. In 1998 he was joint director of the Rio La Venta Archaeological Project, recently described in this magazine.

Young Davide is an indefatigable worker and explorer and – I might add- quite admirable, given his countless popular scientific publications. For the publishers Jaca Book he has translated and edited works on pre-Colombian American archaeology. He also edited the Archaeological Guide to the Mediterranean published by CLUP-Utet Libreria, while continuing his work on the Rio La Venta area. Given that he is one of those quick-thinking bright scholars, he even also has time to conduct archaeological research for the University of Bologna. Was I not right to describe him as admirable?

As if all this were not enough, you will soon notice that he is also a good writer, if you turn to his article on page 74 dedicated to Altamura Man (found in the town near Bari), who lived 150,000 years ago and was probably an interrnediary form between Homo erectus and Neanderthal Man. The description of what finding the complete skeleton must have been like is utterly captivating. The author himself also managed to reach the skeleton’s cave after being guided by expert speleologists on a very difficult underground journey: “for a palaeontologist used to working with a few fossil fragments, it is an incredible mine of inforrnation. For a layman, on the other hand, it is quite simply an unforgettable emotion. I find myself face-to-face with a forefather, encountered after a long descent into the bowels of the earth, evoking almost initiatory aspects. I also have a feeling of melancholy: I can t help but think of the personal tragedy of this man imprisoned underground with no way out.” So even palaeontologists have a heart!

On page 114 we fly to Nepal with Diana Riboli, an anthropologist specialised in ecstatic and shamanic aspects of religions. This young lady must also be part of that race of scientists who manage to stop the sun so their days will last forty-eight hours. Reading her curriculum, mere mortals will be awed: a first-class degree in cultural anthropology (1990) catapulted her from Perugia to Rome, then Nepal, Africa and Greece. All the while she was deepening her research, winning prizes, writing articles and books, taking part in conferences and completing two doctorates at the University of La Sapienza, Rome. She has come a long way down almost impenetrable roads, which for her seem to be made of velvet. A special focus for her various interests is in Nepal, where for years she has been studying shamanism in one of the world’s poorest ethnic groups – the Chepang. The members of this group turn to shamans called pande, who are in close contact with supernatural forces and act as intermediaries between the human world and the beyond. They also have therapeutic powers, accompany dead spirits to the land of the forefathers and describe themselves as tunsuriban, i.e. capable of travelling to both the heavens and the underworld. On reading her article you will immediately note that Diana Riboli is a master in penetrating the secrets of this mysterious world.

Many readers will remember a report we published some time ago on the undertaking of a bold explorer, who ventured up the Andes in search of the source of the River Amazon. That intrepid explorer was Jacek Palkiewicz, born in 1942 at Immesen, Poland, in a concentration camp. Someone once wrote of him that his speciality is surviving. Indeed, he has created a school of survival in so-called extreme conditions and has published various handbooks on the art of living beyond all limits in emergency situations. He is a master of many trades: Navy officer, Diamond hunter, skipper on a large yacht, glider pilot, and one of the greatest experts on Siberia. He has explored half the world – from the Sahara to Mongolia – and even taught Soviet astronauts how to survive a crash landing. When he’s not surviving by the skin of his teeth, he lives at Cassola, Vicenza, with his wife, the Italian painter Linda Vernola and two sons, who must surely have been brought up like record-breaking athletes.

In short, you will have realised that Jacek Palkiewicz is – to use Piovano Arlotto’s expression – one of those people who while doing one thing dreams up another hundred things to do. Look where has he just been to! One of the least welcoming places in the world in the most remote part of Russia, Big Diomede is an island in the middle of the Bering Strait, on the Time Line, where they celebrated the beginning of the third millennium eleven hours earlier than in Italy. Only three kilometres away, Small Diomede belongs to the United States and on that island the Americans toasted the advent of the new millennium twenty-four hours later. The shockingly harsh daily life of the twenty-eight Russian soldiers garrisoned on an island forsaken by Moscow is described on page 38 by our adventurous Italo-Polish explorer. I’Il have to keep it short now, since there is very little space left on this page.

The article by journalist and expert archaeologist Giulia Castelli Gattinara on page 172 takes us to the Acacus mountains in the Sahara, among rock paintings and engravings going back 12,000 years and some even older artefacts. The article pays homage to the great work of Professar Fabrizio Mori, the leading expert on Saharan prehistory.

Thomas Hester, director of the Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory and professor of anthropology at the University of Texas describes on page 94 the importance of Venetian glass beads – red, white and blue – from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. But here I am again having to cut down to a few lines the biography of our colleague Adriano Favaro, a greatly valued journalist on Il Gazzettino, and an excellent scientific reporter, who often popularises the results of many Ligabue Study and Research Centre missions, which have taken him to Mount Everest, K2, Egypt, Sudan and Latin America.

On page 142 he offers a brief but comprehensive account of the life of Freya Stark, who was made a Dame by the Queen of the England and died in Asolo a few months after her hundredth birthday in 1993. There can be no doubt that Freya Stark was a famous explorer and an excellent writer, but – between ourselves – she was also an unrepentant rather cantankerous eccentric.

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