Word: ancient
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Most shoppers and most shopkeepers still hew to this ancient system, but a rapidly increasing number of Italian housewives have allowed themselves to be liberated. The liberator: the American-style supermarket...
When Florida's usually placid Seminole Indians get a crazy feeling, they drink an ancient tranquilizing tea brewed by the medicine man. This news finally reached the drug world recently through an ex-G.I. with a yen for tranquilizers. He rushed into the Upjohn Co.'s headquarters in Kalamazoo to extol the Seminole tea virtues, especially its lack of side effects. The man who brewed it for him, he reported, was none other than Josie Billie, or Kachanagofte (Big Tiger), onetime chief Seminole medicine man for 25 years and the only person alive who knows the formula...
...able to announce its findings, at least two years before a new product could reach drugstores. Billie's tea, notes one researcher, contains "gunk" that needs thorough investigation. But Upjohn considers the" project highly worthwhile. Very useful drugs have been found before in unorthodox fashion, e.g., reserpine, the ancient tranquilizer made from India's Rauwolfia plant, which became an antihypertensive drug. A favorable outcome will make Medicine Man Billie a rich...
Soon, other Easter islanders were rushing to Heyerdahl with the contents of their "secret" ancestral caves-small stone skulls and images, artifacts and wood carvings-which he excitedly declares "were entirely different from all ancient and modern art hitherto known from Easter Island." Heyerdahl became an initiate of sacred rites. He crept round the island at night, eating chickens buried according to formula in earth ovens, muttering incantations to placate hostile aku-akus, shouting out ritual invocations such as: "Wizard Juan, stand up for good luck!" Only slowly did it dawn on Heyerdahl that the natives might be hipsters...
...Armchair. Despite these body checks, Heyerdahl is convinced that he has found additional evidence that the Easter Island image makers were originally seafarers from Peru. One reason: ancient Peru was known for megalithic structures not unlike those on Easter Island. The book-translated from Norwegian into chatty, slapdash English-has travelogue overtones of mystery and menace that seldom seem justified by the events described. Perhaps the Easter islanders were a shade too hip for the Western visitors, but they still provide a good story for armchair archaeologists...