Journal of a Sabbatical

December 14, 1999

artifacts

Today's Reading: Autumn from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau edited by H.G.O. Blake, North Woods by Peter Marchand

Tom reminded me that there's an archeological society lecture at the Peabody Museum of Archeology tonight. The speaker is Thomas Mahlberg, staff archeologist for the Metropolitan District Commission, and his subject is a recently discovered site on the south shore - in the MDC playground at Wollaston Beach. Should be good.

And it was good. Real good.

last time there were no artifacts, just slides. This time the artifacts were on display as well as slides.

Maushop

13" blade

whale-tail pendant

whale-tail atlatl weight

set of gouges

sinkers or plummets from a fishing net

lots of quartz edge tools and pre-forms, like a tool kit

red ochre over everything

can't be a burial site because there's no bones

how to use an atlatl

whale tail on the Massachusetts license plate of the car parked in front of mine - will future archeologists think the people of Massachusetts revered the whale as a totem animal?

how little we know

sensing the presence of real people living real lives thousands of years before my ancestors ever set foot here - before any white people ever set foot here - here was a real place

grad student set out the artifacts on a table, each one on a sheet of paper

I picked up the 13" stone blade and felt its sharp edge and tried to imagine a man using it, maybe to cut up a beached whale (Maushop's gift)

Tom didn't show. Too bad. He would have liked the artifacts. Also I've been trying to get him to go see the exhibit about the Mic-Mac people of Nova Scotia, photographed in the 1930's (were the thirties just inherently more photogenic than the nineties?)

Everything carefully and deliberately placed where it was and undisturbed for thousands of years. Funny that the test holes the archeologists drilled didn't show anything but the construction people, who'd been told to watch for red ochre, found the soil stained with red ochre when they were digging a hole for a footing for the slide in the tot lot.

I envy the grad student who gets to spend her time researching these artifacts trying to find out who used them and what for and why they were placed there so deliberately.