Wednesday, November 30, 2022

"A Prehistoric Connecticut Site"

 Essays from Essex, my latest collection of personal essays, is expected to be back from the printer today, or so my publisher tells me. The book can be ordered from her - 

https://bauhanpublishing.com/shop/essay-from-essex/ or from my brother’s bookstore - www.toadbooks.com. The information on Amazon’s website is still wrong, as of this morning. I apologize for misleading you in my last essay of almost two weeks ago.

 

Like many, I have become disgusted with our politicians. They represent, for the most part, an assemblage of self-righteous, pontificating rogues, more interested in lining their own pockets than in advancing the desires of an aspirational people. There has been a lack of substantial debate and respectful discourse – offering choices of extremes and a lack of nuance.

 

The attached essay stemmed from a short hike onto a friends property     about three weeks ago.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“A Prehistoric Connecticut Site” 

November 30, 2022

 

“Honor the sacred. Honor the Earth, our Mother. Honor the Elders. Honor all with whom we share

the Earth: four-leggeds, two-leggeds, winged ones, plant, and rock people. Walk in balance and beauty.”

                                                                                                                                                Native American Elder

 

Unlike Stonehenge, the prehistoric artifacts I saw on a friend’s property in the northeast section of Lyme, Connecticut were invisible to the untrained eye. Deceptive in their simplicity, they are, nevertheless, evidence of human life from thousands of years ago. To the untutored, they might be dismissed as remnants of stone walls that marked boundaries in New England’s colonial past. In fact, they represent North American indigenous people’s celestial awareness, and were likely laid down three or four thousand years ago by ancestors of the Pequot Nation. 

 

On the east side of a knoll lay a boulder, with its triangular tip pointed east. Behind it, in serpentine fashion, trailed a wall of smaller stones, about seventy feet in length. On the west side of the knoll lay its counterpart, pointed west. It appeared that the triangular tips of the two large rocks point toward the rising sun during the summer solstice and the setting sun during the winter solstice. 

 

Estimates vary as to how many people lived in the Americas when Europeans first arrived in the late 15th Century, but the consensus is between four and five million in North America, and perhaps fifty million in Central and South America. Their ancestors are assumed to have been nomadic hunters from northeast Asia who crossed the Bering Strait during the last glacial period, approximately 20,000 years ago. The indigenous population became known to European immigrants as Indians, as Christopher Columbus assumed he had reached southeast Asia when, in fact, he was in what we know as the Caribbean Sea. It is estimated that between twenty and eighty percent of the native population died off over the next three and a half centuries, a consequence of wars and diseases brought from Europe, like measles and smallpox. 

 

Connecticut’s serpentine walls are less monumental than England’s Stonehenge or the Great Pyramids of Egypt, which were constructed at about the same time, and they cannot be compared to later edifices like Peru’s Monte Picchu, China’s Great Wall, or the ancient city of Petra in Jordan. Nevertheless, it is fascinating to walk on land trod by humans so many years ago, touching stones they touched.

 

One of the beauties of history is the perspective it provides. We are here but for a brief moment on the endless conveyor of life on Earth – one small part in a continuum. Yet it is natural to take pride in what we have built. We have tools and knowledge undreamed of four thousand years ago. But will anyone a thousand years hence look with wonder upon China’s Three Gorges Dam, Florida’s Disney World, or a New York City $150 million condo? Will today’s monuments still stand, as do the stone structures on my friend’s property? Or will they, like the colossal works of Ozymandias, become nothing more than Shelley’s “lone and level sands?” 

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