Still we are not, nor will we ever be, a Stone Age people again. I knew a young man whose greatest dream was to “become an Indian.” He was an Anglo, but he so admired the natural lifestyle and skills that were a way of life for many Native Americans that he truly believed that if he emulated their lifestyle he would become an Indian. Of course no amount of wanting could have made him an Indian. But he could not conceive of the fact that his own ancestors were an ancient people who also lived their lives in accordance with the laws of nature, long before the inhabitants of this continent.
My own Neolithic ancestors were skilled makers of axes, several types of flint knives, stone tools, utensils of bone and simple forms of pottery for cooking and storage. They lived in squat houses, built with half their structure below the surface of the earth, lined with dry-stone wall construction and a fire pit in the center for warmth and light. In early times they lived primarily in family groups referred to as tribes, headed by a chief who was loyally respected as “the law.” They were buried in a crouched position, along with an assortment of weapons and possessions, in pits dug in the earth and lined with stone and either roofed with slabs or covered with heaps of stones. They were Highland Scots.
Had my friend understood the contributions of his own culture, he would have had pride and admiration for his ancestors’ achievements. And if he could have understood his relationship to all humanity he might have learned that he is part of the Native American culture through the vast family of humankind. There appears to be a resurgence of people like my friend, people who are driven by the desire to return to their beginnings. This is a good and settling thing. Although some Native Americans are able to learn valuable lessons from their great-grandfathers, for the most part the culture is fast disappearing.
Yet many Native Americans can offer valuable insight into the thoughts and ways of more ancient people. Without their insight there would be only two sources of information as to how early people lived: one provided by archaeologists who dig up the material things that humans made and used; and another from what has been written about present-day tribes, bands, and villages of uncivilized people. However, a Plains Indian medicine bundle viewed simply as an archaeological object would relate little compared to how much an ethnologist can discover by talking to a living Native American of that heritage.
The clues to what we really want to understand—the way of life and the humanity of our various ancestors—aren’t directly preserved, but inferred from the material things that they made. Much of the evidence is missing, and archaeologists often disagree over the meaning of the evidence that has survived.
For instance, a tribe of western Australian aborigines, the Pitjendadjara, carry on a religious and moral life of great intensity, but they make and use so few and such perishable material objects that, were these people introduced to us only through archaeology, we would barely know that they had existed and we would know nothing of their moral life. They make only five tools: a spear, an atlatl, a wooden carrying dish, a stone slab on which to grind food and a digging stick. They perform their rituals to ask for abundance of animal and plant food, and they follow a morality of personal relations with dignity and conscience.1
Once, my husband Richard and I spent a week in Comb Wash, one of our favorite canyons south of Blanding, Utah. The main purpose of the trip, aside from physical and mental revival, was to collect grey and red clay for pottery. On the first day we each carved a walking stick from carefully selected willows growing near our campsite. We peeled the bark off in a few places to effect a design, and carved our initials and the date on the bare wood. Then the tip was fire-hardened in the ashes of our campfire.
Every day we walked several miles up and down the red and white sandstone canyons looking for likely clay sources. On each excursion we collected new “treasures.” Richard found a perfect hammerstone and used it to cleave flakes from some of the large jasper nodules that were abundant in the stream bed. But the sharp edges of the blanks (slender flakes of stone to use for chipping arrowheads) cut his shirt pockets and weighted down his day pack. So that evening I made a sturdy, basket-like carrying sack from yucca leaves. It had a long strap and was designed specifically for collecting rocks.
By hiking the canyons and stream beds I could search for smooth pottery-polishing stones, and I collected many. We also found several deer antlers that had been dropped the year before and brought them back to use for tools.
At the time we collected them, all of these materials were indeed useful items of significant value. In fact, we could hardly wait to show each other our prize of the day: the smoothest polishing stone, or the perfect splinter of flint. And, by the time we were ready to leave the area, we had several containers of clay, pottery (some fired and some in various stages of completion), minerals for paint, sand to use for temper, thin yucca leaves for paint brushes, a bundle of sunflower stalks for atlatl darts, a tin can full of pine pitch for attaching arrow points to darts, a quantity of cedar bark to twist into rope and a few dozen (perfectly straight) dead yucca stalks for hand-drill fires. All this in addition to our walking sticks, the yucca bag, chunks of jasper and a day-pack full of multi-shaped and various-sized polishing stones.
Yet none of these items, so essential in primitive life, are necessary in the modern world; just as many “necessities” of the modern world lose value in the natural world where there are no electric outlets. Primitive people, like the Pitjendadjara, learned to condense their belongings to what was necessary and valuable. It made moving easier, but it also eliminated some of the petty jealousies and hoarding we see manifest in modern societies, where feeling deprived of whatever others have accumulated causes violence, and even killing.
It has been our experience that when materialism in the form of hoarding rears its ugly head on the trail, the students instinctively chastise the guilty party, usually by shunning, to bring him or her into compliance with the moral code of the group.
If we could travel back in time to a Neanderthal settlement of fifty thousand years ago, we would most certainly meet a more hospitable reception and face less danger than a Neanderthal would in any large American city. On the other hand, the culture-shock experienced by Neanderthals transported to the late twentieth century would be violent indeed. They would be horrified by the noise, filth, cruelty, exploitation, alienation and other conditions of modern life, especially as it is lived amidst roads and buildings constructed of dead and spiritless materials inflicted upon us by technology.
I often compare life in the city to a drive with the car windows up. We manage to arrive where we set out to go, but the experience is glazed by the closed window. We need to open our windows, let our hair blow in the breeze, get out and look at what we are passing by, touch it and feel it. Experience life. Many people say that the hardest part of a primitive living experience is coming back to civilization. It’s true. I go to the desert to rejuvenate, to become grounded when life in the city becomes too stressful or cluttered, and as I meld back into the modern world it seems that the flaws of our society are glaring.
Our Beginnings
According to current belief, human evolution on this planet covers roughly 15 million years. During that time our bodies and minds were changing drastically, we were evolving, adapting to our environment.