on culture
Is This Ancient Map of the Cosmos Younger Than Previously Thought?: A controversial new analysis of the Nebra Sky Disc suggests the artifacts dates to the Iron Age, not the Bronze Age
Smithsonian Magazine SmartNEWS, September 2020
In 1999, two treasure hunters exploring a prehistoric enclosure near the German town of Nebra happened upon a bronze disc inlaid with gold symbols. After crudely excavating the artifact, the pair attempted to sell the now-damaged disc, as well as a selection of weapons and tools, to local archaeologists—an illegal transaction, they discovered, as the objects actually belonged to the state of Saxony-Anhalt.
For the next several years, the Nebra Sky Disc circulated among black market antiquities dealers and collectors. Authorities only recovered the artifact in 2002, when a sting operation worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster ensured its safe return to Germany.
Show and tell: Holsinger Portrait Project develops a more complete picture of local history with photographs of African Americans
C-VILLE Weekly, June 2019
DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid. Two chains coiling around one another, a spiral ladder of genetic material we inherit from our parents. It informs, on a biological level, who we are—how our bodies develop, both inside and out—the strength of our heart muscles and the shape of our bones, the color of our eyes, our hair, our skin.
Not long ago, DeTeasa Brown Gathers, born and raised in Charlottesville, wanted to find out more about who she is. She started piecing together her ancestry online, and she sent in her DNA for analysis with the hope that it would connect her with even more relatives of many generations, ones she didn’t grow up knowing about, and enlarge her family tree.
Then, a message appeared in Gathers’ inbox on the ancestry website. “I have a picture,” wrote Ashley Irby, who at that point was a total stranger to Gathers. It was a photo of Peggy Ragland Brown Spears, Gathers’ great-great grandmother.
When Gathers, who didn’t know much about her great-great grandmother, finally saw the photo, she saw something the DNA alone couldn’t possibly have provided. “I saw my family deep in her face,” says Gathers. “So many family members resemble her.” It made the work of researching her heritage more immediate.
After inhabiting Virginia land for 10,000 years, the Monacan Indian Nation finally receives federal recognition
C-VILLE Weekly, March 2018
Light rain falls soft and steady on patchy grass, whispering pat-pat-pat-pat as it dampens the rocky soil.
It’s late February, and despite the rain, the air is warm at the foot of Bear Mountain in Amherst County. Dean Branham isn’t wearing a jacket, and rain droplets bead and roll off his baseball cap onto his shoulders, darkening his plaid Oxford shirt.
Shirtsleeves rolled up and hands in the pockets of his khakis, Branham, 57, looks at a large, newish rectangular stone a few yards ahead. “Bear Mountain,” reads the inscription. “On this site are buried our Monacan ancestors: Johns, Branham, Hicks, Lawless, Beverly, Adcock, Redcross, Knuckles, Duff, Clark, Roberts, Nuckles, Willis, Hamilton, Terry. The first burial took place in the 1800’s [sic].”
“When I come up here, I think about all our older people who are buried here,” says Branham. His grandmother buried two of her children, twins, in this cemetery, though Branham’s not sure which of the unadorned lichen-covered stones on the sloped ground marks their grave.
Owning it: Comedy performer L.E. Zarling finds happiness in improv
C-VILLE Weekly, December 2018
It’s a Saturday morning in Richmond, and L.E. Zarling has ordered a chocolate croissant to go with her latte at Lamplighter Coffee. She looks at the pastry, covered in a heavy-handed sprinkle of powdered sugar. Then she looks at her black turtleneck sweater. “Fuck it,” she says before taking a bite. “I’m going to enjoy the hell out of this thing.”
This sort of just-go-with-it-and-own-it-while-you’re-at-it attitude is the way Milwaukee-born and Richmond-based comedy performer and instructor L.E. (Lilith Elektra) Zarling approaches most things in life. It’s certainly how she approaches comedy, which she brings to IX Art Park on Thursday, in the form of a two-hour improvisational workshop geared toward trans and non-binary people. After the workshop, Zarling will perform her one-person improv show, Wisconsin Laugh Trip.
Zarling started in comedy in 2003, when she was 33 years old. She realized that if she was the one with the mic, everyone in the room had to listen to her; and she wanted to be heard. A few years later, while living in Charlottesville, she pivoted to improv comedy and storytelling, where it’s always something new.
Locals craft their own brand of activism
C-VILLE Weekly, January 2018
Seven hours and 10 minutes into the new year, a Subaru station wagon pulls out of a Charlottesville driveway and sets out for Lovingston, exhaust billowing from the muffler pipe into the frigid air. The dashboard says the outside temperature is 9 degrees Fahrenheit.
As the car zips down 29 South, a creamy orange-yellow dawn creeps forth from the horizon, slowly overtaking the fading night sky. The new light casts a pink glow on the frost twinkling on the bare trees and brittle brown shrubs on the roadside, and minimizes the effect of a lit plastic Nativity scene standing at the edge of a lawn.
Her puffy winter coat swishing against the back of the front passenger seat, Ms. Smith half-turns around to talk to her friend, Ms. Lane, who sits in the back. They lament the closing of Sprouse’s Furniture in North Garden, and talk about attending political protests like the Equal Rights Amendment marches in Washington, D.C., during the 1970s and ’80s before the conversation shifts to the task at hand.
Here’s the deal, Smith tells Lane: The gray stone statue of a Confederate soldier that stands outside the Nelson County Circuit Courthouse in Lovingston was put up in 1965—just a year after the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and around the same time Nelson County began desegregating its schools.
Smith and Lane are contributors to The Kudzu Project, a new guerrilla knitting activism project that seeks to call attention to the history of Confederate monuments throughout Virginia by encouraging people to consider and question their relevance. They do so by temporarily covering the monuments, one at a time, with a shroud of knitted kudzu.
Jitney is fueled by authenticity and emotion
C-VILLE Weekly, September 2017
[…] Nine black characters—played by nine black actors—in a play written by a black playwright. It’s a rare occurrence in Charlottesville theater, but one that the city will see consistently over the next few years, as a group of local actors and directors stage all 10 plays in Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, a decade-by-decade look at the African-American experience in the 20th century. Jitney is the second play they’ve staged; the first, Fences, directed by Clinton Johnston, had a spring 2017 run.
“Doing community theater in Charlottesville as an artist of color is always challenging,” says Leslie Scott-Jones, Jitney director and one of the cycle’s producers. When Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School, came to Scott-Jones with the idea to stage the entire Pittsburgh Cycle, Scott-Jones agreed immediately because of what it would mean for actors and directors of color.
“No one does black theater” in Charlottesville, says Scott-Jones—black theater being plays with black characters written by black playwrights for black actors. Scott-Jones says that a lot of local talent goes ignored and unmined because there aren’t many roles for actors of color. There’s been the occasional production (Live Arts did Wilson’s Seven Guitars during its 1998-1999 season), but stories by and about people of color aren’t told as often as they could—and should—be told.