Page 17 - Black Range Naturalist, Vol. 3, No. 1
P. 17

 A Mimbres Controversy
 

A friend recently drew my attention to the work of R. Robert Robbins, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin. Robbins, in 1990, posited that the design on a Mimbres bowl documented the supernova of 1054 which formed the Crab Nebula. (A false color image of the Crab Nebula, from NASA, is shown below.)
a rabbit and a round object with 23 rays near its foot, to other things. Others, like some claiming similar documentation from the indigenous people of Missouri and California, were prone to agree with Robbins.
Carbon-14 dating indicated that the bowl was not made prior to 1050. The site where it was found (Galaz) was abandoned in 1070.
Glyph in Chaco Canyon now believed to represent the supernova of 1054. The dot to the upper left is thought to be Venus.
The idea that the Mimbres might have recorded this event on at least one bowl and the recent findings at Chaco collided in my mind, forcing a bit of memory to happen. The image below is of a glyph in Frying Pan Canyon. It does not look like any other glyph I have seen in the area and looks suspiciously like the purported images of the supernova. If does depict the supernova, this would give us a good date for the images at Frying Pan, among other things.
  NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU); Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin (Skyfactory)
The Mimbres are known astronomers, and they documented various astronomical events and schedules in their art. They would certainly have noted the supernova. It was visible during the daylight hours for 23 days, based on Chinese records of the event, and remained visible to the naked eye for 21 months (24 months in some sources).
   Did the Mimbres record the event? Some archaeologists thought not and attributed the bowl’s design, which shows
15

























































































   15   16   17   18   19