Jan. 2006
Poetic Fashion
by Wendy Shaw, Oracle of Narrative Style
This winter, fashion belongs to the doomed heroine. She is epic. She is vigilant. Cuts are severe, running from patrician to marshal. Colors that go unseen under cover of night. This winter a woman can live the story that she knows to be true, while she is mired in traffic or perishing of a tedious presentation. She is a Bolshevik, a Sami reindeer herder, a ruined heiress. But she can do it in the comfort of cashmere, with a glimpse of ostrich at the hemline. After all, we aren’t barbarians, or we would turn our fur to the inside and face the end looking like hell but caressed by genuine rabbit.
Taking Offense
When I write, I’m interested not just in the feel of words or the development of a character. I’m interested in ideas and how those ideas play out in a story. And the ideas I like best are ones that I’m, frankly, not too comfortable with. This column is a series of essays by thinkers whose ideas shaped this book. I want to share them with you as a peek behind the words and plot. I encourage you to get as offended, as provoked, as intrigued as I’ve been. Enjoy.
We were taught that America was populated by bands of mammoth hunters, crossing the now-submerged Beringia between Siberia and Alaska about 10,000 years ago as glaciers retreated from a swath of the interior of Alaska and Canada. It took another 5,000 years for these people to adapt to coastal living and become expert Inuit and Aleut sea mammal hunters. But there were problems -- 30,000-years-old sites in South American, evidence there was never ice-free corridor. So a few maverick archaeologists began to wonder. Maybe the first people didn’t walk. Maybe they paddled. Maybe there were ice-free refuges along the continental ice shelf. Maybe the remains of their cultures are under the waters that rose as the ice that melted. If so, people could have reached America much earlier and traveled much more quickly. If so, most of what we thought we knew about the peopling of the New World is simply wrong.
From: Lost World: Rewriting Prehistory – How New Science is Tracing America’s Ice Age Mariners
by Tom Koppel
Here Koppel tells the story of an early find that has opened archaeological thought to coastal entry theories. It’s the last day of a dig in ON Your Knees Cave on Prince of Wales Island off Alaska, and paleontologist Tim Heaton is collecting one more bag of artifacts before the helicopter pick-up in the morning.
He was wearing waterproof coveralls over layers of polypropylene and working in a cavern of the main chamber about thirty feet in from the entrance, an area that was so tight he could barely stretch out his legs. Above him protruded a rocky shelf, so low that he had to lean awkwardly under it and work at arm’s length in an area made wet and slimy by the seepage of water from a natural spring.
The battery-powered headlamp on his helmet cast a stark illumination, but digging in soupy sediments mean working mainly by feel. Suddenly, nudged by his trowel, a long, narrow piece of bone flipped up into view. Heaton gave it a quick once-over by the light of his headlamp. Then, reaching in farther, he found another bone, and soon another.
Pay dirt.
One of the objects he pulled out of the muck looked like a mandible, or jawbone, including the teeth, but it was so caked up with mud that he couldn’t identify it. Still, he knew it might be significant. Maybe this is not my last bag of the day, he thought…. He filled two more bags with sediment and carried them down to the sea.
As he washed these last bags, he quickly recognized what he had found. The mandible was clearly human. One of the other bones was part of a human pelvis, which had been chewed up a bit: Predator or prey? He wondered. The first bone that had popped up was about seven inches long and probably the rib of a mammal. The bone had been ground down on the sides and tapered in such a telltale way that it was certainly an artifact of some kind, possibly a punch for flaking stone…. Judging by the age of the bear and the seal bones he and Grady had been finding, he knew that the human bones and the artifact could prove to be very old….
Heaton was excited, but there was a potential hitch. The bones might spell trouble. Under U.S. law, whenever ancient human remains are found in such a setting the work has to stop and the local Native American authorities must be consulted. The local tribes, the Tlingit and Haida, could by law simply refuse to allow the bones to be studied….
Tim Heaton realized that his project was in jeopardy. He had to get a message out to the person in charge of excavations in the region, Forest Service archaeologist Terry Fifield, and his only link was the Forest Service radio.… After some frustration, though, he reached the police office in Craig, the main town on the island, and asked him to pass along a discreet message for Terry Fifield: “Important artifacts found. Must come in on helicopter tomorrow.”
By the time Fifield arrived, Heaton had laid out the clean bones on a piece of cardboard. Barely suppressing his excitement he watched Fifield’s face. He was astonished. “It was neat and exciting,” Heaton recalled, “the prospect that these could be the oldest human remains ever found in Alaska.”
The fate of the bones unearthed on Prince of Wales Island was very much in limbo as Heaton and the others packed up and flew out that day in the helicopter. But he knew that… the discover would shake some of the most cherished beliefs of American paleoanthropology.”
(The artifact would turn out to be 10,300 years old, and artifacts that old weren’t supposed to be found on islands, where the dominant theory held that humans only colonized much later.)
read a fascinating article about diffussionist migration theories
Cheap Wine Review
WWBD has been replaced by the Cheap Wine Review because I wanted to be able to write off wine buys. If you have a cheap wine for review email me and my husband and we will judge.
Smoking Loon, a $7 cab from California — “Be Your Own Loon,” the company’s website says (and it’s a fine Flash site, btw).
“A friendly wine, like someone you just met and who will not ask you, ‘How’s the weather?’ Amusing, not overbearing.” — Mark
Seduction rating: interesting stranger
Buying tip: look for bottles in the deep recesses of the shelf. These are ones others have been buying that very night.
Print Wayward Book Tour invitations for friends 