Celebrating Rock Turkey on Thanksgiving

Here's "Rock Eagle," a prehistoric rock pile sculpture located in middle Georgia. It's one of the most spectacular indigenous rock piles I've seen in the US. The Native Americans who built it are probably the ancestors of the Muskogee or Creek Indians. Known today as the Woodland Indian phase, this culture lasted from 1000BC to about 1000AD.

But most archaeologists say that the effigy sculpture is not depicting a eagle -- rather, it's most likely a turkey. Calling this sculpture Rock Eagle is massive projection of our own mythology of eagles as fierce freedom fighters ( never mind that eagles will eat carrion before hunting) and has little to do with Native American sensibilities.

On the other hand, turkeys were undoubtedly the most important bird of the prehistoric forest. Food, clothing, and building materials all are uses of the average turkey sacrifice. Even Benjamin Franklin petitioned for American national symbol to be the turkey instead of the eagle. Humble, gracious, and bountiful, this bird is still a symbol of abundance for the American Continent.

So in the spirit of gratitude this Thanksgiving, say a toast to Rock Turkey!

Hoarding Gourds

My brother and I came upon this mother lode of gourds in the middle of Levy County, Florida, piled high at Fern Sink Farm. There was no one around so we selected six gourds between us, and left a ten dollar bill under a rock in the garage next door.

This is really the best way of procuring gourds from the earth. Grab them and toss money in the general direction of the gourd farmer. He doesn't want to know which gourds I took, nor do I want him to know. That is between me and the gourds.

Gourds fragments in human context have been found in Gainesville, FL as early as 11000 BC. The earliest known bottle gourd comes from the Windover site, dated to roughly 5300 BC. We can thank the swamps for this level of preservation.

Gourds make great ladles, containers, and percussion instruments, and are steeped in some crazy kind of mythos that I can only call an intense "presence." They navigate between consensual reality and the otherworld that we glimpse sometimes in dreams and visions. They're good luck, in other words.

I endorse gourd art for curing malaise of the soul.

Ancestral Brew in Ireland

This is applied archaeology at its best:

Two hungover scientists decided to test their theory that some Bronze age trenches were made to brew beer.

From the Wired story:

Then they repurposed a cattle trough, filling it with water and placing it in a clay-lined hole. Using granite stones toasted in a nearby fire, the pair heated the water until it was steaming but not bubbling — according to the brewers they consulted, 153 degrees Fahrenheit is the ideal temperature for breaking down starch into sugar. Then they scooped in barley. After bringing the concoction to a boil, they transferred it to containers, added bog myrtle, meadow sweet, and, of course, yeast — all ingredients available to Bronze Age boozers.

These intrepid truth-seekers knew they were on to something after they got drunk on their dirty trench beer.

Thanks to Archeoblog for the lead.

Piles of rocks

I've been quoted recently concerning a fascinating archaeological anomaly in the southeastern United States - the humble rockpiles that are scattered across the fields and forests of rural Georgia. In the July fourth edition of Flagpole, writer Jonathan Railey focuses on how vestiges of the past manage to remain protected because they remain invisible. Check it out: it's not every day that light is shed on the shadows of history.

Unfortunately, as Railey laments, the invisibility strategy is no longer working out for the rock piles, which are increasingly disregarded and destroyed by thirsty land development. This happens because most rock piles are believed to be "no more than" field clearing piles or property markers from the turn of the century. For the majority of the cases, this is the most likely scenerio.

However, an older phenomenon hides amongst these stones: rock piles built by Native Americans sometime in the deep past. While the most common myth is that they can mark burials, there is very little evidence for this. Another possibility is that they are prehistoric sacred sites, or "prayers in stone" as the United South and Eastern Tribes now call them. Because so much has been lost about the ways of the past, the reasons for these rock piles are largely mysterious.

Of course, the real pickle is that there is no sure-fire way to identify the origins of rock piles using standard archaeological investigation..... unless you dismantle them. The United Tribes recently made a call for protection of the prehistoric rock piles (USET resolution 2007; 037), but it's difficult to protect what cannot be discerned.

Archaeologists in the Northeast are responding the the call for protection; hopefully this new wave of public attention will result in new, non-intrusive methodologies for the study of rock piles. Check out this blog for good information about the mystery of rock piles in the NE.

My hope is that greater attention to landscape, more systematic survey techniques and a healthy respect for researcher intuition will help identify these crazy little piles of rocks. Don't let me start blabbing about radical empiricism again. We're still learning how landscape affects perception, and the rock piles themselves may have something to teach us about that. With a greater understanding of how the first Americans constructed their perception of landscape, their cosmology may become more visible again.

It's just hidden in plain sight.

Update (7/27/07): My response to Railey's article can be found here.

The Golden Gate

The Pacific Ocean revealed a rare treat earlier this week in San Francisco. The wreckage of the King Philip - a 19th century clipper ship - emerged from the sands of Ocean Beach for the first time in over twenty years. This wreckage is considered the most intact wooden shipwreck in the Northwest US. This is what's left of the hull.

I went down there on a blustery afternoon to snap a few photos. The preservation is amazing, considering that the planks originate from trees that were cut down somewhere in New Engand well before the Civil War. All kinds of items that would usually degrade are preserved in underwater conditions, mostly due to an anaerobic environment where the bacteria and fungi can't get a foothold.

This is a romantic-era painting of the shipwreck by Gideon Jacques Denny. The King Philip was not the fastest ship in the fleet when it ran ground in 1878. It was an old model, and couldn't keep up with the speed of steel hulled boats or the reliability of the new steamers. By the time the old clipper slumped onto Ocean Beach, it was mostly hauling bird and horse shit for use as fertilizer.

Oh, San Francisco, what is it about you that attracts the hauling of poop from all over the world?

Everyday I walk down to the Golden Gate, I watch the cargo boats heading out to Asia, loaded down with plastic detritus and bing cherries. I've always wondered about how it's come to this, how the global market structures our social order for the dubious honor of cheap cellphone accessories. As it turns out, the trade of prestige items has always been a powerful human drive in the San Francisco Bay.

Long before European contact, Native Americans gathered along these shores. Back then, 2000 years or so ago, the bay was lined with hundreds of shellmounds, where the human dead were buried along with oyster shells, ground stone tools and animal bones. Directly across from the Golden Gate, where the tongue of fog penetrates the heart of Berkeley, the political leaders of the coastal chiefdoms held court on those mounds.

These were not just garbage heaps, but ancestral power spots. The high-status familes lived on the mounds, holding elaborate rituals and feasts, and celebrating death as the eater of all things. As Archaeologists Edward Luber and Mark Gruber suggest, "the dead must be fed."

They danced, feasted, mourned and lived their lives on the estuary shores- and oh yes, they traded too. A lot. Their activity was not so different than what goes on today in the Oakland Harbor, the aggrandizement of wealth and the trade of distantly-produced goods. Perhaps this is what the Golden Gate demands of us, to feed the landscape with our bones, our tools, and our surplus.

Yeah, the Golden Gate demands surplus above all else. Bounty and abundance! If we can't pay the ferryman, we should stay at home. When the King Philip lost its anchor in the rough waters outside the gate, it was sailing without ballast. There was nothing in the hold. Not even poop. They learned a harsh lesson; pass with sufficient abundance or be tossed ashore by the underwater allies.

Keep this in mind next time you drive over the bridge. I recommend some junk in the trunk.

Modern Day Atlantis?

Since I'm probably moving to Florida in the next six months, the following piece of archaeo. news really hits home. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited to move back East to enjoy the last days of the coastal plain as we know it (before the sea levels rise, ya'll). It's an attitude that sneaks up on me like a sweet, sorrowful breeze .... I call it nostalgia for the present moment.

The wave that destroyed Atlantis

The legend of Atlantis may be more than just a myth. Research on the Greek island of Crete suggests Europe's earliest civilisation was destroyed by a giant tsunami. Until about 3,500 years ago, the Minoan civilisation was flourishing in the Eastern Mediterranean. But around 1500 BCE the people who spawned the myths of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth abruptly disappeared. Now the mystery of their cataclysmic end may finally have been solved. A group of scientists have uncovered new evidence that the island of Crete was hit by a massive tsunami at the same time that Minoan culture disappeared.

"The geo-archaeological deposits contain a number of distinct tsunami signatures," says Dutch-born geologist Professor Hendrik Bruins of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. "Minoan building material, pottery and cups along with food residue such as isolated animal bones were mixed up with rounded beach pebbles and sea shells and microscopic marine fauna. The latter can only have been scooped up from the sea-bed by one mechanism - a powerful tsunami, dumping all these materials together in a destructive swoop," says Professor Bruins. The deposits are up to seven metres above sea level, well above the normal reach of storm waves. "An event of ferocious force hit the coast of Crete and this wasn't just a Mediterranean storm," says Professor Bruins.

Source: BBC News (20 April 2007) Read the entire article here.

You know, if all the double-wides in Florida were equipped with a steel hull or at least a foam-filled bottom, then the apocalypse, when it rolls in, could quickly be transformed into the world's largest houseboat party.

Imaginal Archaeology

We're heading down to San Diego today for the annual conference for the Society of the Anthropology of Consciousness. They're an eclectic group of anthropologists, transpersonal psychologists, and consciousness explorers - including the remnants of the academic psychedelic research scene from the 1960s.

Back before Timothy Leary started hawking LSD like it was snake oil.

The image above is a prehistoric rock art site in Nicaragua, an ancient sacred site close to my heart, and the reason why I'm travelling down to San Diego. Spirals, concentric rings and other abstract geometric shapes (as well as as a few monkeys, birds and otherworldly creatures for good measure) were pecked into these boulders by the indigenous people of Nicaragua long before the Spanish arrived in the 15th century. Archaeologists still don't know who these people were, or when they lived.

I'm presenting a short paper on my experiences in Nicaragua last year when I volunteered with the Ometepe Petroglyph Project. I tracked my dreams during the fieldwork session to reveal my biases, expectations, and intuitions about prehistoric rock art on Ometepe Island. That practice forever changed the way I see the enterprise of science.

Let me tell you, I'm all about William James' radical empiricism, and learning to pay attention to the anomalous experiences we have but tend to deny because they don't fit our conscious worldview. Dreamwork can do this, as can body meditation, journalling, learning a new language, fasting, and watching an entire season of Battlestar Galactica in one sitting. I recommend all but the last.

When it's all said and done, this work is really about sense of place. By staying close to our perceptions, we can learn how be open to the unique landscapes all around the world and also in our own communities.

This work is crucial for places like Ometepe Island, where the ancient rock art is endangered by modern living practices as well as the eco-tourism market that is capitalizing on the artifacts.

I hope that by sharing my experiences about rock art and dreams, that more people will come to remember - and protect - the sacred landscapes we live within.