While I'm at it a few more old news items from the same source:
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A Historical Fantasy
An Archaeological Mystery
A Historical Fantasy
An Archaeological Mystery
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About Me
- John
- John Bedell is an archaeologist, historian, and father of five living in Maryland. He has self-published two novels and is writing a third.
2 comments:
It's kind of terrifying to see someone who can't comprehend that "hiking" is simply walking cross country, and that you can both hike for leisure AND hike out of necessity.
And they also apparently think that no indigenous person has ever taken a walk for leisure?!? That they somehow never wanted or needed a break from long days of monotonous non-Capitalist labor, performed in their homes (hand-sewing, weaving, food preservation, etc)?
That they didn't live in an "unnatural" village space where nature had been cleared away or otherwise reshaped to suit an imposed human order; and sometimes they wanted to get away from the noise of people and livestock, and the smells of cook-fires and latrines, and the monotony of uniformly designed houses clustered around well trodden footpaths, and simply go take a walk through the woods, to enjoy some quiet and solitude away from the hustle and bustle of human life? Maybe hike up their favorite hill, simply to enjoy the view from the heights and feel the clean wind on their face instead of the smoke and soot and grime of village life?
There's even a fairly common tendency among indigenous (or even all) peoples to physically demarcate boundaries between "natural" and "unnatural" areas. Everyone in every society lives apart from nature, even if only slightly - and in many cases, the distinction between "civilized" space and "natural" space becomes an important religious aspect.
The Ancient Greeks looked at the tall, remote peak of Mount Olympus and said "The gods live there!", and did not tread there lightly. The Shintoists of Japan built (and build) shrines in places of natural beauty, with boundaries demarcated by ritual gateways (Torii) and ritual rope enclosures (Shimenawa), to inform anyone crossing said boundaries that they are leaving the human realm and stepping into the spiritual one. Peoples and societies so old we don't know their names traveled out of their way to places of remote natural beauty and carved petroglyphs into canyon walls, built cairns out of stones, etc.
So to think that indigenous people somehow were never "alienated" from natural places, and sometimes went out of their way to visit said place to obtain an "authentic experience" is baffling.
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