Sunday, May 04, 2014

IF-THEN Questions

     If there are many free standing stone concentrations/constructions that resemble animals, both actual and legendary, that figured highly in the Indigenous People of Turtle Island (Native Americans of North America) Worldview – the turtle, bear and deer etc. along with the Great Serpents etc, -  then who was more likely to have the time and motivation to create this artwork?
      If those same techniques of artwork can be found in those longer piles of stones most often called “stone walls” then again, who was most likely to have the time and motivation to create this artwork?
       If the Indigenous People of Turtle Island (Native Americans of North America) maintained the landscape with fire then how were those fires controlled, especially in areas of dense population?
        If Paleo-Indians (the Ancestors of the Indigenous People of Turtle Island) made “sophisticated prehistoric stone walls deep beneath the surface of Lake Huron,” the most recent find described as “two stone lines forming a lane about 30 metres long and eight metres wide which ended in a corral-type structure” with “hunting blinds built into the sides as well as other lanes and structures,” then why not elsewhere on Turtle Island?
        If: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/05/02/lake-huron-hunting-wall_n_5253041.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000044&ir=Green, then this just might create a null hypothesis of this: http://stonewall.uconn.edu/investigation/pre-european-contact/

3 comments :

  1. Who was the author of this interesting essay? I agree with much of the methodology proposed, though not necessarily with the conclusions. Whenever a scientist says "self-evident" he or she is making a prior assumption which should be subjected to the same rigorous testing proposed!

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  2. The Pre-European Contact deal is Robert Thorson's preface to a talk about his books to NEARA (in his own words: "keynote talk for the 2010 Annual Meeting of NERA, the New England Antiquities Research Association."). I might disagree about this statement by O'Shea: "None of it would have survived if it had been on land. This is the only place you could find this evidence. It's hard to find, but there's no other place you could find it."

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  3. Ah, that makes some sense. Thorson is a big time advocate of Colonial stone wall building. So it's not surprising that he would take this tack - at least he is willing to grant that SOME of the stonework is Native! But what is "manifestly obvious" to him is not what is "manifestly obvious" to me - or to the Narragansetts. I seriously doubt that Yankee farmers, who worked very hard to make the stony soil of New England produce crops, would have had the time to "doodle" - nor is there as far as I know a single shred of historical documentation to the effect that they ever did so. Allport does illustrate in her book on this subject a large stone cairn built in Connecticut by a farm laborer in the 18th century - but there is no indication of that person's ethnicity - it could well have been a Native! There is also reference to "Stone Bees" at which local hands would gather together to build something out of stone, sometimes liberally laced with grog! But I checked on the historical references to stone bees and every one of them refers to the foundation of a public building like a church or a town hall - none of them are on individual farmers' lands. So as far as I am concerned the doodle hypothesis is just - as SWAG - if you know what I mean.

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