cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I don't matter. If it doesn't immediately bring an old memory up, ask the people around you in the office right now if they were ever walking around in the woods as children and found a big pile of stones that they didn't understand. Most of us who grew up in suburban or rural environments have these memories. Often a hillside, and either a heap or sometimes an even stack of stones pushing up from among the leaves. Native Americans began to settle North America over 14,000 years ago, while Europeans began their occupation of the continent only around 500 years ago. One group has had a lot more time than the other to build things out of stone. Archaeologists have recently started to reckon with the reality that we live surrounded by the stone remains of Native American graves, foundations, terraces and altars. We find these remains everywhere and there are guidelines we can follow to understand what might be an ancient archaeological site and what is a farmers' old pile of rocks that the plow ran into. While there are specific sites that I propose to discuss, the real locations relevant to Atlas Obscura here are the ones that the readers recall from their own lives. The stone-covered burial sites and foundations that litter North America and have no historical markers, in part because of the legacy of a belief that stone-built sites had to have been constructed by people or European descent. When standing at the site of a modern stone pile this idea is patently absurd. I could easily recreate any one of these stone piles, but the result would be very different depending on my motive. How is that any different from weighing the life experience of any person who has lived here for thousands of years? It isn't. In other news, I have less than $15 left to my name. I am destitute. Things are bad and there is no way to avoid that. I have to pay for gasoline in order to move from place to place and I need a certain amount of food. Also my cell phone came due and I don't have the money to cover it. This is where I melt into the general cacophony of homelessness and irrelevance. I don't matter. 4:04 a.m. - 2020-01-28 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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