Friday, April 08, 2016

Henry Smith Site (Montana)

"Hi-Line Fires Reveal Hundreds of Cultural and Historical Artifacts"
                    By Brett French french@billingsgazette.com  Apr 7, 2016
    “By reviewing the photographs and other images 2,400 points of data were marked across the 300 acres — roughly a site every 3 feet. Before homesteading on the surrounding lands altered the landscape, Chase estimated similar sites could have stretched across the landscape…”
         “When you look out across this (landscape) it tells a story of people in North America throughout time,” Chase said. “So we drove by a homestead on the way here, that’s one part of the Hi-Line’s history. We’re now into this part of the site which is one part of the Hi-Line’s prehistory..."

  Re-loading the page seemed to work to get rid of the questionnaire thing, so you can get to the full story here: http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/montana/hi-line-fires-reveal-hundreds-of-cultural-and-historical-artifacts/article_dadf4763-f0f1-5e5e-b49f-cb59bdc985c1.html

2 comments :

pwax said...

Man would it be fun to walk around there!

Tim MacSweeney said...

Well, you know, I think we (meaning those of us walking around and noting stone piles and walls that are much like those pictured in Montana) do walk around similar sites. New England's history, just like Montana's, doesn't start in 1620. The human presence goes back ten thousand years and more. The article keeps saying " a unique one of a kind" site, but really it's more of a case of who is looking at sites and stones in the same way around here professionally- other than Curt or Lucianne Lavin, maybe a few others I don't know about? Let's get some soil samples from under the snake-like stone wall or the stone pile studded with quartz and determine the age of it, stop pretending that we live in the one place in the world where Indigenous People didn't have an impact on the landscape or create stone features over thousands of years. "So what" if the stone feature is near an old colonial homestead (or a new McMansion) - that's only part of the landscape's human history, a tiny fraction of the much larger time period...