Empathy Across Time

 My recent post titled Vastly Different Timescales has been nagging me.  In that post, I quoted science writer John McPhee who posited, in Basin and Range (1980), that we human beings find it difficult to relate to periods of time that are beyond those small spans of years that encompass the two generations before us and the two generations after us.  This confounds efforts to really understand greater stretches of time, specifically the enormous expanses of time that we encounter in astronomy, geology, and paleontology.  I summed it up by writing:

As we expand our view beyond that spread of a five-generation period (covering, say, roughly 100 to 150 years), perhaps we’re back to “one, two, many” if only to maintain some sense of self and step back from the full implications of deep time.

I do think a basic aspect of that is correct.  Vast expanses of time – deep time – are extremely challenging to understand.  What understand in this context means is not clear, I guess I’ll know it when it happens.  What has bothered me in particular is that McPhee’s construct, though specific to deep time, raises the prospect that we human beings are actually unable to be comfortable with, relate to, and incorporate into our lives, periods that extend beyond the 100 to 150 years that encompasses five generations but which fall short of deep time.  Upon reflection I find I don’t believe that.  The challenge arises with periods of millions or billions of years, but perhaps not with periods of thousands of years.  That is the focus of the current post.

I think our capacity to understand spans of thousands of years hinges on whether or not those blocks of time involve human beings.  Though it’s true that we may be able to put names and faces to those generations immediately before and after us, and that we may be most concerned about them, the scope of our attention and concern is not limited to that.

My previous post focused in part on the dissonance that comes when vastly different timescales came into contact – for instance, our lifespans and fossils that are millions of years old.  I began that post with a picture of some fossil sand tiger shark teeth found in an area on the Maryland side of the Potomac River near Liverpool Point.  These teeth, Paleocene in age, are a little less than 60 million years old.  I doubted that I could really appreciate what that age meant or the world in which those sharks lived.  Well, I want to consider the implications of a different set of objects that also come from around Liverpool Point.  Here is a handful of projectile points that were found (not by me) in that area.

The  identifications I’ll gingerly put forward for these points are based on some reading, just enough to get me into trouble.  The middle two could be Lamoka points.  They are similar to those identified as Lamoka on the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory’s Diagnostic Artifacts in Maryland website. Lamoka points are common through the Northeast, particularly the Potomac Valley and date back to some 3500 to 2500 BCE, during the Late Archaic period, though they may have been used much later than that into the Middle Woodland.  The points on either end of this array may be Bare Island points, based on what I find on the Laboratory's website.  These points fall into an age range from 5000 BCE to 1000 CE.  The Laboratory notes that Bare Island points, prevalent in the Northeast, are common in Maryland and “are among the most abundant points found in the Coastal Plain portions of the Patuxent and Potomac.”

I’m not sure that these identifications with their attendant ages make sense given the area in which the point purportedly were found.  This area of Maryland may have been occupied by Native Peoples since at least 900 CE (Piscataway Indian People).  (Scott M. Strickland, et al., Indigenous Cultural Landscapes Study for the Nanjemoy and Mattawoman Creek Watersheds, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, November 2015.)  I cannot even offer complete assurances that these points, in fact, were collected here.

As important as those issues are for those who study these artifacts, they’re really a distraction from the very simple point I want to make with them:  they are probably at least a thousand years old, a time span beyond the five-generation one of which McPhee writes.

The impact that these objects have on me is decidedly different from that which comes from finding fossils such as the sand tiger teeth featured in the prior post.  With these projectile points, there is a communion with the past that I experience when I handle them, one unlike the emotions that fossils inspire.  For the latter, the message that comes through is one of awe in the face of the vast expanses of time and for the dramatically different worlds the fossils signal.  For the former, those products of human endeavor, there is a strong recognition that these points connect me to people, though of a different time and culture, with whom I share a basic and fundamental commonality.  As I’ve considered this, the word that has come to mind is empathy.  This empathy extends far beyond the two generations behind me, it connects me to millennia.

Do I truly understand the people who crafted and used these points?  No, but our shared humanity means that we are connected and that is a start.  At this point, I am prompted to quote Walt Whitman from Song of Myself.  The whole of it is appropriate but this line will do:  “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

That empathy serves to bridge gaps of many years came clear to me when I read archaeologist Lisa Rankin’s chapter titled Native Peoples From the Ice Age to the Extinction of the Beothuk (c. 9,000 Years Ago to AD 1829).  (A Short History of Newfoundland and Labrador, Newfoundland Historical Society, 2008.)  In this chapter, Rankin summarized the “Seasonal Round” of life for the hunter-gatherers who lived in the Newfoundland and Labrador area during “prehistory.”  Her exposition on this topic is plain and simple, there’s really nothing poetic and literary here.  Yet, her text moved me, speaking directly to the issue I grappled with when I contemplated the points from Liverpool Point.  With it, Rankin helped me cross temporal barriers and perhaps some cultural ones as well.  I will quote the passage in question at some length:

Because [hunter-gathers] did not domesticate food sources to help them survive, they had to schedule their annual activities to take advantage of the wild food sources available in different locations at different times of the year.  Generally speaking, these prehistoric culture groups took advantage of ocean resources in the spring through autumn when sea mammals, fish, sea birds, and shellfish were readily available.  At this time berries and other plant foods were also harvested.  During the summer months their sites were located along shorelines in both inner and outer bay regions as well as on islands.  In the warm months food was plentiful and people could band together at larger settlements and visit relatives and friends.  It was probably a very sociable time when social, political and economic bonds were forged.  In the colder winter months they split up into much smaller groups, perhaps nuclear families, and travelled to interior regions to hunt caribou and other smaller land mammals.  Winter settlements were usually smaller than summer settlements because winter resources were less abundant and unlikely to feed as many people.  (p. 6)

The ebb and flow of that life, as Rankin described it, is real to me.  As I read those words, I could envision the dance to the music of time that marked the lives of those Newfoundland and Labrador peoples.  Although the Native Peoples of the Liverpool Point area differed culturally and had changed from a hunter-gatherer life style to one incorporating some slash-and-burn agriculture by the time Europeans first arrived, their lives even then still involved movement to the rhythms of the seasons and the migration of animals.  Holding those projectile points evokes that circle of life.

In the end, deep time remains beyond reach in many ways for me, but those shorter time horizons that involve modern humans evoke an empathy that brings some understanding.

A Point With Multiple Dimensions

I manage to confine my collecting to a few, discrete interests, though the temptation is always there to add another.  I admit I felt a tug as I read novelist Gary Shteyngart’s account of his obsession with expensive, mechanical wristwatches, sparked by Donald Trump’s rise to power over the course of 2016.  Yes, it seemed to him that the time is out of joint.

How almost irresistible when he writes lovingly about his four-thousand-dollar Nomos Minimatik Champagner watch with its “exhibition-case back” revealing its inner mechanics:

[It] is a riot of sunburst decoration, tempered blue screws, and a small constellation of rubies.  A tiny golden balance wheel spins back and forth, regulating the time . . . , and this action gives the watch the appearance of being alive.  It is not uncommon for some watch enthusiasts to call this part of the watch its “heart,” or even its “soul.”  (Shteyngart, 2017, p. 38.  Full citations to all reference are provided in the Sources section at the end of this post.)

But, no, collecting mechanical watches would be far too expensive and possibly smack of affectation.  Even the few interests I’m feeding are too many.

Nevertheless, there is a virtue to multiple interests because, at some rare moments, my interests intersect, suggesting there may be some sort of logic to my collecting mania, not simply a psychological need.  So it is with a recent purchase, a rather small Native American projectile point with a broken tip from New York.  Though certainly not of high quality nor expensive, this point is profoundly appealing because in it are met three of my collecting passions – points, minerals, and fossils.

This is a triangular Madison Point, an identification based on William A. Ritchie’s A Typology and Nomenclature for New York Projectile Points (1961, p. 33-34), which squares with what the seller asserted.  According to Noel D. Justice, Madison Points were part of many “cultural phases across eastern North America” during the Late Woodland period, probably dating from 800 to perhaps as late as 1350 CE (Justice, 1987, p. 224, 227).  Ritchie describes Madison Points as “very finely chipped by pressure flaking” (p. 34), though I assume that the artisan who fashioned this point used some direct percussion flaking initially to shape it.  Ritchie also notes, “Among the northern Iroquois the principal material employed was Onondaga flint from the exposures of central New York and the Ontario Peninsula.”  (p. 34)  Absent any provenience (beyond the geographic state in which it was recovered), I won’t make any such claims for this particular point.

Nevertheless, my point is manufactured from Onondaga chert.  This gray chert is often referred to as flint, though, as I have learned, geologists apply the term chert to all of those rocks that artifact and rock collectors tag with such terms as flint or jasper based on differences in color.  As Prothero and Lavin write, “The color differences are not only superficial, but frequently misleading, especially since heat treatment may change the color range of a particular chert.”  (Prothero and Lavin, 1990, p. 561.)

Chert has a geological life story understood in general, but apparently not in its smallest details.  It is a hard sedimentary rock composed of silica (silicon dioxide) in the form of very tiny crystals, either only discernable under a microscope (microcrystalline) or not even then (cryptocrystalline).  This material comes into being through what has been characterized as “an obscure chemical process”  (Roberts, 1996, p. 24) involving the precipitation of silica from solution.  Chert can be found as nodules, lenses, or beds depending upon the environment within which it forms.  Given its fine crystalline composition, chert fractures conchoidally, that is, “fracture faces have smooth, curved surfaces” with sharp edges (Ostrom and Peters, 2012, p. 12) which makes it ideal for fashioning projectile points, scrappers, and knives.

Assuming the chert in this point was found as a nodule, which is likely given its origin in the Onondaga Formation dating from the Devonian Period, it is also highly likely that the source of its silica was the hard silicon elements (spicules) that sponges secrete to give themselves structure and a means of protection.  (Maliva et al., 1989, p. 523)

From their analysis of thin slices of the chert from different sites in the northeastern U.S., Prothero and Lavin find that the chert in Native American implements can often be easily identified as to its place of origin.  I found their description of chert from western New York State particularly applicable.  They write, in part, of this chert:  “Small (0.1 mm in diameter) dolomite rhombs are abundant, but there are few large rhombs.  Fossils and pyrite are common . . . .”  (Prothero and Lavin, p. 570)

Two elements of that description ring very true for the point I have in hand.  First, there are the dolomite rhombs which are the rhomboidal crystals or impressions of those crystals left by some dolomite caught up in the geological process creating the chert.  The mineral dolomite is a calcium magnesium carbonate and is the primary component of dolomite, a biogenetic sedimentary rock.  Pictured below is a close-up (30x) of a small portion of one face of my point.  This chert, under magnification, appears less strongly colored than a more removed view would have it since the color is, I surmise, often the cumulative effect of impurities in the mineral.  I have marked several of the rhomboidal shapes that appear on the surface of this section of the point; these are, I assume, dolomite rhombs.

Then there are the fossils in Onondaga chert which is where another of my collecting interests finds play in this point.  Pictured below is the full point (minus, of course, its tip) with an inset showing a closer look at a small hole in its surface – a fossil mold.

Given the common occurrence of fossils in Onondaga chert, it isn’t at all that surprising that Native American stone artifacts fashioned from this material would, sometimes, contain a fossil or two.  Source of the mold in my point?  The seller suggested coral and he may well be right.  But, the impression in the point strongly reminds me of columnals from some types of crinoids.  These animals, also known as sea lilies, create long structures of “stems” topped with long branch-like appendages for food gathering.  Secreted calcium carbonate pieces (ossicles) provide crinoids with structure and protection; in the stem, the stacked individual ossicles are known as columnals.  Crinoids are still with us, but their fossil record goes back well before the Devonian Period, which means that, yes, they were around when and (based on my reading) where the Onondaga Formation was laid down.

Pictured below is a bit of a Devonian crinoid fossil (first image) I found at a site in Maryland exposing Needmore Shale (which has been stratigraphically correlated to the Onondaga Formation in the Devonian’s Eifelian Age, about 393 – 388 million years ago).  The arrow points to where some columnals remain (the grooves to the left of the head of the arrow are where columnals have been lost).  The columnal in the second image, the first one remaining in the stem, appears to match nicely the mold left in my point.

Sure, not conclusive evidence, but wonderfully suggestive.

Shteyngart’s New Yorker essay is, ultimately, quite dark.  As the presidential campaign unfolds in 2016, his need to buy watches spirals out of control; he is “in deep.”  I may be contorting his message, but when he writes of how people cope and coped in Putin-era and Soviet-era Russia (e.g., collecting deluxe shaving equipment or compulsively doing mental math problems), I read him as saying that, in a society out of joint, we turn to find refuge and security in “the particular and microscopic” because they are “the only things that could still prove reliable.”

He may have a point.


Sources

Noel D. Justice, Stone Age Spear and Arrow Points of the Midcontinental and Eastern United States, 1987.

Robert G. Maliva et al., Secular Changes in Chert Distribution:  A Reflection of Evolving Biological Participation in the Silica Cycle, PALAIOS, Volume 4, Number 6, December 1989.

Meredith E. Ostrom and Roger M. Peters, Wisconsin Rocks and Minerals, Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey, ES046, 2012.

Donald R. Prothero and Lucianne Lavin, Chert Petrography and Its Potential as an Analytical Tool in Archaeology, in N.P. Lasca and J. Donahue, editors, Archaeological Geology of North America, Geological Society of America, Centennial Special Volume 4, 1990.

William A. Ritchie, A Typology and Nomenclature for New York Projectile Points, New York State Museum and Science Service, Bulletin Number 384, April 1961.

David C. Roberts, A Field Guide to Geology:  Eastern North America, 1996.

Gary Shteyngart, Time Out:  Confessions of a Watch Geek, The New Yorker, March 20, 2017.

Provenance or Provenience? ~ Not a Chance

Oh, the trouble those amateur collectors cause.  For once, I’m not the culprit; rather, it’s someone unknown who once filled a cigar box with projectile points made by early Native Americans (the most likely identity of their makers).

This post, featuring no specific fossils, is about where things start and where they end up.  Specifically, it begins with my in-laws’ house, which dates from the colonial period, digresses a bit, considers the contents of that cigar box, offers a vocabulary lesson that has a paleontological connection, and concludes . . . with many unknowns.

My in-laws’ house in New England, built in 1727, contains many treasures which are slowly coming to light as we work our way through its contents.  One of my earliest memories of this house is the same as one of my most recent – a sore head.  Just the other day I knocked the top of my head on the lintel of a doorway.  The conventional wisdom among family members is that the low doorways in the house reflect the lower average height of people in centuries past.  So, when I read Bill Bryson’s At Home:  A Short History of Private Life (2010), I was particularly intrigued by the following note:

The low doors of so many old European houses, on which those of us who are absentminded tend to crack our heads, are low not because people were shorter and required less headroom in former times, as is commonly supposed.  People in the distant past were not in fact all that small.  Doors were small for the same reason windows were small:  they were expensive.  (This note appears on page 68 of paperback edition.  I assume Bryson would apply his logic to doors in colonial homes in the United States, as well.)

So, apparently, the accepted explanation is wrong and a different reason holds sway.

This is quintessential Bryson – prose written in a fluid and engaging style, prose that is often quite humorous, typically offering up kernels of information intended to startle and challenge the reader.  It’s much like reading a long series of well-written, rather entertaining encyclopedia articles.  The conceit of this book is that he’s explaining the social, cultural, political, and architectural history behind the 150-year-old rectory he owns in England.  By extension, his mission is to explain houses and home life in, well, England, with some reach to the United States and parts of Western Europe during the past century and a half.  But it's largely simply a platform from which Bryson feels free to launch himself into discussions of myriad topics, sometimes only marginally, if, really at all, connected to the topic at hand.  (I can relate.)

On this particular issue of doorway height, I have a quibble with the sentence:  “People in the distant past were not in fact all that small.”  I don’t know quite what he’s asserting.  They weren’t any shorter than people today and so also banged their heads when (if) they forgot to duck?  Or, they weren’t enough shorter to account for lower lintels and, so, may have banged their heads, though perhaps not as often?  Regardless, I’m not so sure Bryson is completely right.  People were somewhat shorter back then.  Recent historical research on average heights in the population in England over the past couple of centuries shows that men were shorter by between 2 to perhaps 3 inches in the very early decades of the 19th century than they are today.  Is that enough to have influenced builders’ standard sizes for doorways and doors?  How much shorter, on average, were doorways and doors a couple of hundred years ago?  (See Table 3 in Height, Weight and Body Mass of the British Population Since 1820, by economic historian Roderick Floud.  He presents data for the mean height of English adult males between 1800-1819 to 1960-1979.  This paper is part of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Working Paper Series on Historical Factors in Long Run Growth.  It is Historical Paper 108, published October 1998.)

There’s another explanation with some currency in the family:  small doors meant less heat loss. This one’s not considered by Bryson.

Setting aside that minor objection about painfully low doorways, I do have a somewhat more substantive issue to raise with Bryson.  Why do “cabinets of curiosity” not make an appearance in the book?  It’s a particularly glaring omission when the springboard for the book is a mid-19th century English rectory.  I have a sense that rectors, with few obligations associated with their position, had plenty of time on their hands and, as a result, were able to be in the vanguard of the mania for natural history exploration and collecting that gripped a large swath of the population on both sides of the Atlantic during this period.  Bryson does acknowledge that there was such an interest among some elements in the population:  “Fieldwork was now all the rage among gentlemen of a scientific bent.  Some went in for geology and the natural sciences.  Others became antiquaries.”  (p. 510.)  But, what of the concomitant drive to display what one found and the effect that had on, at least, the furniture in the house, if not one of its rooms?  A cabinet of curiosities might be just what we’d think it was – a piece of furniture in which to display finds, or it might have been an entire room dedicated to the owner’s collection of objects from the natural world.  (See, “And a Little Child Shall Lead Them”:  American Children’s Cabinets of Curiosities by historian Shirley Teresa Wajda which appears in Acts of Possession:  Collecting in America, edited by Leah Dilworth, 2003.)

Of the myriad strange and wonderful things to have emerged from my in-laws’ house, I would consider only the contents of that old cigar box as offering possible candidates for display in a cabinet of curiosities.  As already noted, the box when it came to light in the attic was full of Native American projectile points (with a rock and piece of coral, thrown in).  Noel D. Justice’s description of Native American points offers a thoughtful perspective:  “Being the products of particular cultural traditions from specific time periods, they represent fossilized behavior patterns of their makers.”  (Stone Age Spear and Arrow Points of the Midcontinental and Eastern United States:  A Modern Survey and Reference, 1987, p. 6.)  These are amazing artifacts of cultural history, utilitarian, of course, but also strikingly beautiful.

After agreeing to “curate” these artifacts (foolish of me) for the family, I found myself in new and confusing territory, and remain there, the job undone.  I assumed that most, if not all, of what I had before me were arrowheads or spear points, but that’s just the neophyte’s view.  Justice writes, “Use-wear analysis has shown that these tools were often used as knives, saws, and many other things besides tips for spears and arrows.”  (Stone Age Spear and Arrow Points of the Midcontinental and Eastern United States, p. 1.)  Further, as they wore or broke, they were often refashioned to serve the same or another purpose.  To cover my bases (and my ignorance), I’ve referred to all of the objects from the cigar box as projectile points or points.

So, I started off not knowing what I had and it only got worse.  The individual points came with absolutely no indication of their provenance, with the exception of a very few carrying the penciled notation:  “W. Co.”  One has what I interpret as “Cherike Okla” inked across it.  “Cherike” – Cherokee?

(This point is 2 ¼ inches long.)

At that juncture, the exercise became even more interesting with a paleontology link.  The paleontological dictum I’ve heard and certainly repeated is that a fossil without provenance is of little scientific value.  I thought I knew what was meant by provenance in that context – precise information on where the object was found.  I realized that I really didn’t know the word or how it should be used when I stumbled over the (new-to-me) term provenience in the archaeological literature on points (I assumed initially that some author or editor had failed to adequately proof the copy or had ignored his spellchecker).  I went in search of an explanation.

The Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) defines provenance as:  “The origin, or history of ownership of an archaeological or historical object.”  It defines provenience, in contrast, as:  “The three-dimensional context (including geographical location) of an archaeological find, giving information about its function and date.”

Interestingly enough, art history literature is a useful source for thoughtful discussions of the differences between the two terms because many art historians are concerned about the tendency by some to treat the terms as synonyms.  For art historians, delineating provenance is of importance because it establishes the history of an individual work of art’s possession and ownership (consider, for example, the significance of provenance for art work coming on the market that may have been looted during the Holocaust).  As a consequence, provenance is clearly not provenience which is the findspot, that  “three-dimensional context” of an object’s discovery in the field.  The distinction is summed up very nicely by archaeologist Rosemary A. Joyce, in From Place to Place:  Provenience, Provenance, and Archaeology (a chapter in Provenance:  An Alternate History of Art, edited by Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Jackson Reist, 2012):

. . . provenience is a fixed point, while provenance can be considered an itinerary that an object follows as it moves from hand to hand.  (p. 48.)

Conclusion from this excursion into definitions of terms?  That I’m truly lost.  I don’t know either the provenance or the provenience of these points.

As for the use of these terms in a paleontological context, even such an august institution as the American Museum of Natural History appears to blithely confound the two, expanding the definition of provenance to embrace provenience.  Provenance, it asserts, means:  “Information that defines a specimen in terms of the specific geographic point of origin as well as the background and history of ownership.  Also known as provenience.”

So, lacking provenance and provenience for the points, the task of identifying the age or the culture from which any of these points came (other than perhaps the single one pictured above) is beyond me.  Point identification guides (like Justice’s cited above or The Official Overstreet Identification and Price Guide to Indian Arrowheads, 13th edition, 2013) begin the process assuming one already knows at least the broad geographic region of the point’s discovery.  This is critical, in part, because a point typology, specific to a time and culture, may reappear elsewhere at a later date.

I didn’t think it was an option to leave the contents of the cigar box in a hopeless jumble, partly because that risks damage to the points.  As a result, I was delighted to find the undergraduate honors paper by Katelyn Scott titled Native American Projectile Points:  What Stories Can They Tell Us? (Honors Projects, Paper 46, Illinois Wesleyan University, 2013) which offered a way out.  What I most enjoyed and appreciated is a segment of the paper that, for all of its “scientific” trappings (it is a sociology/anthropology honors paper after all), constitutes a charmingly frank and personal essay recounting how Scott struggled to make sense of, and accession, a projectile point collection for the Ames Library at Illinois Wesleyan, a collection that had no provenience and next to no provenance.

Her journey is fun to follow as she delves into the archaeological literature, and then seeks out professional archaeologists with expertise about projectile points.  I particularly enjoyed it when she discovered that the professionals she consulted were so regionally specialized in their knowledge of points that they could classify only some of the points as to type but pleaded ignorance about the majority (suggesting that this was an eclectic aggregation of points from various parts of the country).  And I sense she relished the detective work involved in trying (albeit unsuccessfully) to piece together the provenance of the collection, including pondering what might be learned from the date on the pages from the Christian Science Monitor newspaper in which the points were wrapped.

The organizing principle she selected, with help from the literature and the experts, was generally based on the stems (the area of the point separating the base from the body) – the absence of a stem, the shape of the stem if present, and whether notches separated the base from the body.  These three broad categories (of which there are various subcategories) are illustrated below (based on James. W. Cambron and David C. Hulse, Handbook of Alabama Archaeology:  Part 1 Point, Types, Archaeological Research Association of Alabama, November, 1975, p. xvii).

I followed her lead, but even this broad grouping strategy has often thwarted my best efforts, particularly given different subcategories and the subtle distinctions among them.  For instance, distinguishing stems that expand as they reach the base of the point from points that are notched has been problematic.  Do these characteristics fall on a continuum and only an expert eye can distinguish where stems and notches separate?  Further, some notches are considered side notches while others are corner notches.  The mind reels.

Here are a few of the better points I worked with.  The first is a straight stemmed point (3 3/8th inches long).  The next two are a side-notched point (2 5/16th inches long) and (I think) a corner-notched point (3 5/16th inches long).  Finally, there’s a picture of one grouping of points that, when I put it together, I thought consisted of all corner-notched points, but, as I study the picture, I have my doubts.

In the end, although my vocabulary has been enriched and made a bit more precise, I am left, not only facing a somewhat organized, nicely displayed collection of unknowns, but also balancing on the cusp of a brand new, potentially consuming interest.  Not at all where I want to be.