The encounter with historic places is stimulating and enjoyable, most of the following posts are heritage travel itineraries exploring ancient civilizations, history, architecture, and archeology. In such places, the accounts of human culture and social organization flow in time and space reveling details of particular communities or sub-cultures.
South America offers great material for photographers looking for architectural spots and dramatic pictures; indeed, the Colonial heritage of the Spanish Conquistadores rests close to modern buildings and ancient monuments of pre-columbian civilizations.
Questions about how religion grows, diffuses, and affects communities and cultures are linked to geographical factors: sacred geographies relate to spatial variations, the global pattern of religion, and their interplay shed lights on the properties of human persistence, tolerance, and motivation with respect to people and their belief systems.
According to Aboriginal legends in Uluru, during Alcheringa (Dreamtime) ancestral souls in the form of animals and humans emerged from the interior of the Earth and began to wander over the land. Their everyday actions (play, singing, fishing, hunting, marriage, and death) determined the characteristics of the landscape and became a sacred geography.
The Tu’i Tonga Empire is said to have been formed around the year 950AD. The first Tu’i Tonga (‘Aho’eitu) located his capital at the village of Toloa on the island of Tongatapu. The main remaining is a monumental stone architecture comprising of three coral limestone slabs.
Yap was central in the intensive cultural exchange in Micronesia, famously involving the large stonemoney discs quarried from distant islands of Palau and Guam. Indeed, the formalized Yap-focused exchange system known as sawei guided movement of tribute among diverse and dispersed clans in the Caroline Islands.
The islands of Palau have a rich artistic heritage of weaving, woodworking, performing arts, pottery production, oral narratives, stone statuary, and costume and body art. Palau’s first certain petroglyph site was identified on Babeldaob as a boulder marking the burial of the legendary Surech.
The understanding of the evolutionary origins of Orangutans and the successful reconstruction of the habits of their ancestors remain unresolved. Notwithstanding their high intelligence, Orangutans live in a relatively simple social system.