PUNTO DE VENTA

You Belong in a Museum

High and low lights of my career in museums: my primary professional gig.

Chronicle, 2023

ISCM Quarterly Report (Aug to Oct 2023)

Origins of stone worship date to 2-3 million years ago date to the Jasperite pebble "Makapgo" From The first talisman pendants - predecessors of amulets and crystals to the twelve pillars of Moses, Stonehenge, Gobekli Tepe, Stone Circles ion Japan, Irish prophetic stones, Native American Medicine Wheels. Preamble: interconnected processes in the brain and socail self The Neuroscience of Morals : intricately interconnected processes and regions of the brain. Funk and Gazzanigna observe that: “Moral neuroscience is an intricate and expanding field. This review summarizes the main scientific findings obtained to date. Morality is a set of complex emotional and cognitive processes that is reflected across many brain domains. Some of them are recurrently found to be indispensable in order to emit a moral judgment, but none of them is uniquely related to morality………….The neural circuits of brain regions implicated in morality overlap with those that regulate other behavioral processes,” Brain Architecture of human morality, Funk and Gazzanigna Current opinion in Neurobiology 2009 19:678-681) Musical Neuroscience makes the same observation – that music is interconnected intimately with speech, singing, dancing and is pivotal in the development of a social self. So “stone worship would be no different and interconnected with different processes and function – including very likely the development of a social self From the earliest times of human prehistory, formless stones have been revered and worshiped with the belief that these stones possess an intrinsic divine energy or force - "power", in a word. The worship of stone and megaliths is widespread throughout the world, on every continent, and is almost universal in ancient human cultures, including Africa, as well as Australia - although small round stones are the remaining monuments. man-made for the rock cult. Stone worship often took the form of megaliths - like symbolic temples, so to speak - from the Mesolithic period, then throughout the Neolithic, as well as the Chalcolithic period and, finally, until the of copper. There are more than 1000 examples of surviving stone circles. In Europe there are between 35,000 and 50,000 stone structures of one kind or another and there is a variety of circles, cromlechs, dolmens, menhirs, Logan stones, pillar stones, "oracle" stones (Ireland had numerous prophetic stone idols such as Lia Fail on the hill of Tara), passage tombs, burial mounds, kurgans, cairns or galgals, alignmententine. stones, Guardian stones, Omphalos or Navel of the Earth stones (the Oracle of Delphi had one), or "oracle" stones. As a point of information, in my research – while I found no stone megaliths in the Philippines, I did stumble across “thunderstones!” in “prehistoric” Philippine culture.

in: K.-H. Leven & N. Metzger (eds.) Brill's Encyclopedia of Medicine in the Greco-Roman World (forthcoming)

2024

Bajo el patrocinio del Departamento de Humanidades: Historia, Geografía y Arte y del Instituto de Estudios Clásicos "Lucio Anneo Séneca", el área de Historia Medieval organiza para el año 2024 la segunda edición del Seminario pluridisciplinar de "Cultura Medieval. Historia, Política, Arqueología y Arte", que se celebrará dos veces al mes, entre marzo y noviembre, en el Campus de Getafe. En cada sesión los ponentes invitados y los investigadores de la UC3M compartirán los resultados de su actividad científica sobre un tema específico.

The Japan Times, 2024

Russia and China’s prescription for a new international order is flawed and demonstrates that these authoritarian states are not interested in justice and equality, nor in indivisible security for all. Quite the contrary. They want indivisible security for themselves based on hierarchical relationships. They want an international order that ensures the integrity of their political systems, which would be forever shielded from transparency, the rule of law and democracy.

Environnemental impact of the cement's production.

Human review, 2023