Balboa Park

Today at Balboa Park we visited numerous different exhibits at the museum of man. The first one that our group went into was the exhibit of copper. This was in a very small room seperate from the main museum. Inside I spent a while looking mainly at the area that educated us about the smealting process. This really caught my attention as I read about how they would take a bamboo stick, slap some clay on the end of it, and everyone would sit in a ring around the fire taking turns blowing through it. This process would smealt the metals. Some other cool things were that they had little tools and figureens that they made the copper into. Some of these were used for maces while others could just be considered art. One thing new that I learned was that copper, when found in areas where it had been oxidizing such as in the earth, is turqoise rather than its bronze normal color.

The next exhibit we explored was the Mayans. The first thing I saw when I walked in was the giant pillars that were used as art works of gods, calendars and other carvings of importance. I also learned more about the Mayan Ball game which I had origionally planned to do for my articfact. The exhibit about the ball game talked about how it was sometimes used as warfare but usually for entertainment purposes. I found the "entertainment" part very interesting because the loser of the game was killed and savrificed to the gods.

The Mayan exhibit also had small figureens, but instead of them being made of copper it was clay (due to the fact that their regionn did not have copper). When archeologists found these, it helped them understand more about the society, culture, worship, and clothing.

Overall our trip to Balboa Park was enlightening and fun. I'm glad we were able to go out and explore rather than be in the classroom!