Dont Scream by Joan Lowery Nixon essays

Dont Scream by Joan Lowery Nixon essays One characteristic of Jessica Donnally in the book, Dont Scream, by Joan Lowery Nixon, is curiosity. Jess spends much of her time attempting to find out the details of other peoples lives, and it often gets her in trouble. The main characters in the book are Jessica Donnally, Lori Roberts, Mark Malik and Scott Alexandar. Jess is a normal sixteen-year-old girl with an unsatisfiable curiosity and a great compassion for kids. Lori is Jesss best friend. Mark and Scott have both recently moved to Oakberry, Texas. Jess is excited when she learns that there is going to be two new students in her school. When she finds out that one of them, Mark, is moving in next door, she jumps at the chance to welcome him. Her mom bakes a cake and when Jess takes it over to the Maliks house, she finds out that they are a little different from most families. Mrs. Malik seems confused and threatened by Jess offering her the cake as a welcome gift. However, Mark seems semi-normal, and he explains that where his family used to live, in New York, people are not neighborly. Jessica likes Mark despite that she does not know much about him. When she calls Lori, Jess discovers that she is interested in a new student also, Scott. Before the school year starts, Jess and Lori decide to spend one last day at the nearby lake. To get to the lake, they take a shortcut through the woods. They are the only ones who know about the shortcut. On the way to the lake, they stop at a large rock they had named Castle Rock as children. Instead of continuing on to the lake, Jess and Lori sit on the rock and talk for a while. Then, Jess thinks someone is watching them, and both of them run out of the forest. That night, Jess sees Mark again and is curious about what looks like tree moss on his shoes. She immediately questions him about whether he has ever been in the woods. However, even when Mark says he has never been in the wood...

The Lost Maya Village of Cern

The Lost Maya Village of Cern Cerà ©n, or Joya de Cerà ©n, is the name of a village in El Salvador that was destroyed by a volcanic eruption. Known as the North American Pompeii, because of its level of preservation, Ceren offers a fascinating glimpse into what life was like 1400 years ago. The Discovery ofCern Shortly after dinner started, one early evening in August about 595 AD, the Loma Caldera volcano of north-central El Salvador erupted, sending a fiery mass of ash and debris up to five meters thick for a distance of three kilometers. The inhabitants of the Classic period village now called Cerà ©n, a mere 600 meters from the volcanos center, scattered, leaving dinner on the table, and their homes and fields to the obliterating blanket. For 1400 years, Cerà ©n lay forgotten- until 1978, when a bulldozer inadvertently opened up a window into the perfectly preserved remains of this once thriving community. Although it is presently unclear how big the town was before it was destroyed, archaeological excavations conducted by the University of Colorado under the auspices of the El Salvadoran Ministry of Culture have revealed an astonishing amount of detail of the working lives of the people who lived at Cerà ©n. Components of the village excavated so far include four households, one sweat bath, a civic building, a sanctuary, and agriculture fields. Negative impressions of agricultural crops, saved by the same flash-heat that preserved images at Pompeii and Herculaneum, included 8-16 row corn (Nal-Tel, to be exact), beans, squash, manioc, cotton, agave. Orchards of avocado, guava, cacao grew outside the doorways. Artifacts and Daily Life Artifacts recovered from the site are just what archaeologists love to see; the everyday  utilitarian wares that people used to cook in, to store food in, to drink chocolate from. The evidence for ceremonial and civic functions of the sweat bath, sanctuary, and feast hall is fascinating to read and think about. But really, the most spectacular thing about the site is the everyday normality of the people who lived there. For example, walk with me into one of the residential households at Cerà ©n. Household 1, for instance, is a cluster of four buildings, a midden, and a garden. One of the buildings is a residence; two rooms made of wattle and daub construction with a thatched roof and adobe columns as roof supports at the corners. An interior room has a raised bench; two storage jars, one containing cotton fibers and seeds; a spindle whorl is close by, suggestive of a thread-spinning kit. Structures at Cern One of the structures is a ramada- a low adobe platform with a roof but no walls- one is a storehouse, still filled with large storage jars, metates, incensarios, hammerstones and other tools of life. One of the structures is a kitchen; complete with shelves, and stocked with beans and other foods and domestic items; chile peppers hang from the rafters. While the people of Cerà ©n are long gone and site long abandoned, the excellent inter-disciplinary research and scientific reporting by the excavators, coupled with computer-generated visuals on the website, make the archaeological site of Cerà ©n an indelible image of life as it was lived 1400 years ago, before the volcano erupted. Sources Sheets, Payson (editor). 2002. Before the Volcano Erupted. Before the Volcano Erupted: The Ancient Cerà ©n Village in Central America. University of Texas Press, Austin. Sheets P, Dixon C, Guerra M, and Blanford A. 2011. Manioc cultivation at Ceren, El Salvador: Occasional kitchen garden plant or staple crop? Ancient Mesoamerica 22(01):1-11.