Dear Editor,
I heard a doctor on the radio saying that the social restrictions of the pandemic are likely to cause people to lose track of things that they used to remember easily. The routines we used to follow have been . . .
disrupted and with it have gone the markers we used to help us remember where and when we’re supposed to be. I can relate to that — I used to find it easy to remember the day of the week and be prepared for the things I was to do on each day. Now, the weeks are a blur, and months fly by as weeks did before.
I’ve been pursuing an informal study via the internet, with emphasis on information about long ago civilizations — new information continues to emerge, giving new insights into the mysteries of the past. One area I have found interesting is the vast and surprisingly advanced culture that existed in the Americas, long before Europeans landed here. These hunter-gatherers used the rivers as highways and travelled and traded stone tools, jewels and copper ornaments throughout North America, including Pontiac region.
They built large mounds, often the size of a large barn and in some cases, the size of a present day big box store. This labour was done without the aid of beasts of burden, metal tools, or, as best we know, any written language. I have visited several of the sites, mostly in Ohio, Wisconsin and Kentucky, but they existed at one time throughout the eastern to the midwest United States and into Canada. It is an astounding feeling to stand atop an earthen mound 2,000 years old, built entirely by human labour with hand tools and baskets. Similarly to the Great Pyramids in Egypt, we can only speculate as to the full purpose of such structures and wonder at how the work was accomplished.
I was thought of as a good student of history in high school and college but I don’t recall any teacher or text book making any mention whatsoever of this vast developed culture that inhabited our continent before our ancestors arrived in what they took to be a trackless wilderness. And take it, they did, plowing over the smaller mounds, and digging up bones and funerary offerings as if they were resources to be plundered. Hundreds, if not thousands of these earth works were destroyed before Thomas Jefferson commissioned Squier and Davies to survey those remaining. I have a book of their illustrations and descriptions which I ponder, hoping to gain a flash of insight into not only the technology with which they accomplished such works, aligned to planetary and astral movements as they are but I wonder about how their energies were harnessed and directed to do so.
Just imagine, if our present-day leaders were to suggest we spend the next 100 years hauling baskets of clay and sand to pile and pack the earth to build a mound, top it with a wooden structure in which deceased elders would be placed, offering sculpted stone pipes and spear points, precious gemstones, copper ornaments, etc., then burning the house to the ground, and piling more earth on top, until the mound was as large as the biggest house in town. In some cases, even larger. Cahokia, near St. Louis, was the largest city in North America until mid-nineteenth Century. There is still a huge mound there and that would be an easy place to start if you are interested in finding out if I’m making up some lock down fantasy — I’m not.
These things exist, they’re there to be seen and wondered about, to remind us that this phase of human life is only one passing chapter and when we’re gone, the remaining people may not remember us, nor what we were doing while we were here. Another amnesiac culture will dismiss our existence, our hopes and dreams and our great works as being primitive and irrelevant. The future is not perfection, it’s just tomorrow.
Robert Wills
Shawville and Thorne, Que.
