Distant Past’s Artifacts, Relics, & Start of Human Caused Extinctions
Stories and Histories of Our Place
What happens to a population like the Arawak of the Carribean or the varied Indigenous groups of Cascadia post plagues, wars and other extinction events … numbering in the millions before 1492 with 40,000 alive in 1900? The same happened in the West, and a natural example may have occurred at the Time of Christ, a Tsunami. Almost all others, advertent and inadvertent have been human caused. One certainty, for the Native Indigenous of the Cascadia and Far West cultures with 60 or 80 languages respectively, they lost their story tellers! And they lost their Camas & Wapato fields, the latter while already suffering without the benefit of the rest of the America’s use of the 3 Sisters & Potato. Perhaps they had other resources before Rising Shorelines, but that is an Underwater History that may
never be known. Artifacts are tough to come up because sea water destroys almost all materials. Close on shore we have a trace of ancient Tsunamis and the traces of Middens that early farmers consumed because seashells are pure calcium carbonate that we today call “lime.” Lime sweetens peat and acidic soils and allows the growing of sweet European vegetables. This writer was born in the wrong Century, as a 21-year-old he heard a U.S. General (Viet Nam) saying, “bomb them back to the Stone Age“. It was history repeating itself (as it does if one does not learn from it); see Extinctions, the Cayuse. With no common language, with no written languages, and the loss of elderly story tellers the difference between truth and fiction is difficult to discern. Looking back, one certainty for this writer is that most of what he learned in his public SHS state history class was untrue (and about Viet Nam, false as there is also a difference between false and untrue). A digression, except it is true that the West has few artifacts and relics upon which to reconstruct a history. The prior inhabitants were earth friendly and relied upon biodegradables. They used the earth but cared for it. They were not careless. For related topics: Burying History, Cascadia History vs. Wild Far West’s, Early Native American Conflicts, History, the Search to Live Fully Realized Lives, Holocausts, Pre Columbus-Population, Swinomish Middens and Yakima & Sami Tepees, Indigenous Populations: 1492, 1792, 1892.
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Ethnobotanicals and native animals also mentioned: Other starches: Silverweed, Yampah and Yarrow; Swallows & Swifts: Blue-Violet Swallows, Barn Swallows, and Swifts; Alders: Red, White, Grey & Green.