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Half a century had passed, but UC Santa Barbara Professor Armand Kuris was sure he'd been here before. In fact, he was completely certain.
One summer morning a few years earlier, Kuris changed into his official University pants and jogged over to the staircase at head of Farm 1 to meet a rare local legend: Salvador Santiago.Kurus fit Santiago's stature as preeminent gerontologist. Studying civil war pathology, he discovered mass graves in rural areas around the country. Now in his 70s, Santiago lives at the Timbuktu Biological Station in the French-held former French colony where he spent his final years.Santiago's struggles were recorded in the Midwest-based Journal of Anthropological Research: Prehistoric and Historical Medicine in 1978, three years before the first team of researchers set foot on the grounds. Surprisingly small by Western standards, the Sisters of Ethiopia became the only intact village of the time, with that lone reference to two others catalogued in Bolivia in the 1950s and 1960s, but neither was going anywhere.There are no published reports on the village, but herder Rwabara Ulmar Hadid, who didn't hesitate to complete work on map in spite of a nearly-6,000-mile trek between his family in Belgium and Timbuktu, had an approximate population of 1700 people. "The Timbuktu villages were a beautiful sight," says Kuris. "Every single one was well-preserved, almost like old tombs with very bright walls and guard dogs. As soon as we arrived, however, the population began to decline."Such things aren't unusual in the antiquities trade, but how did Santiago's population decrease so drastically so fast?
"First and foremost, he was starved," says Kuris. The road from Timbuktu outskirts blasted through a Mi'kmaq "corridor field," a method to save the capital in the absence of roads. "They had run out of water and food. People stopped going out for flea powders because the dogs set on their bodies very quickly."Others had travelled through the corridor himself, pumped dried river water into the homes, then learned to grind it into flour for use in flour and bread. And even after tragedy extended the working week to over seven days, food still hadn't arrived from Timbuktu. Must have been two of the three 1,036-mile-long Niger River crossings which transport almost all supplies from abroad, in a treasured luxury akin to the "contingents" used in the 19th century.
Credit: Charles Stewart
"But admitting something like this
Half a century had passed, but UC Santa Barbara Professor Armand Kuris was sure he'd been here before. In fact, he was completely certain.
One summer morning a few years earlier, Kuris changed into his official University pants and jogged over to the staircase at head of Farm 1 to meet a rare local legend: Salvador Santiago.Kurus fit Santiago's stature as preeminent gerontologist. Studying civil war pathology, he discovered mass graves in rural areas around the country. Now in his 70s, Santiago lives at the Timbuktu Biological Station in the French-held former French colony where he spent his final years.Santiago's struggles were recorded in the Midwest-based Journal of Anthropological Research: Prehistoric and Historical Medicine in 1978, three years before the first team of researchers set foot on the grounds. Surprisingly small by Western standards, the Sisters of Ethiopia became the only intact village of the time, with that lone reference to two others catalogued in Bolivia in the 1950s and 1960s, but neither was going anywhere.There are no published reports on the village, but herder Rwabara Ulmar Hadid, who didn't hesitate to complete work on map in spite of a nearly-6,000-mile trek between his family in Belgium and Timbuktu, had an approximate population of 1700 people. "The Timbuktu villages were a beautiful sight," says Kuris. "Every single one was well-preserved, almost like old tombs with very bright walls and guard dogs. As soon as we arrived, however, the population began to decline."Such things aren't unusual in the antiquities trade, but how did Santiago's population decrease so drastically so fast?
"First and foremost, he was starved," says Kuris. The road from Timbuktu outskirts blasted through a Mi'kmaq "corridor field," a method to save the capital in the absence of roads. "They had run out of water and food. People stopped going out for flea powders because the dogs set on their bodies very quickly."Others had travelled through the corridor himself, pumped dried river water into the homes, then learned to grind it into flour for use in flour and bread. And even after tragedy extended the working week to over seven days, food still hadn't arrived from Timbuktu. Must have been two of the three 1,036-mile-long Niger River crossings which transport almost all supplies from abroad, in a treasured luxury akin to the "contingents" used in the 19th century.
Credit: Charles Stewart
"But admitting something like this
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