Ready to go

I packed last night. Most of my "lightweight" summer clothes are dresses now, so I took several dresses in case it gets terribly hot again up where I'm going. (For various reasons I don't wear shorts. Especially not out of the house).

I also have lots of projects - the Ropes and Picots cardigan, the Oscilloscope shawl, the Miss Marple shawl (which I really, really hope to finish soon - I'm on repeat 6 of 10 "decrease" repeats, and then have a little while to go to finish it off). Some socks. And books.

I said I was looking for a new non-fiction book to read, and I think I found it. Some years back I bought a book on the pre-history of the eastern U.S. (it may even been from the late, lamented A Common Reader* catalog). It's called The Moundbuilders. It's one of those "educated layperson" books on archaeology - it's by George Milner. I started reading it last night (I like to read a few pages of anything I'm taking with me to read, to be sure it won't be one of those books I want to throw across the room).

(*There's been some talk lately online about Borders' books having apparently run itself into the ground because of bad management and a bad business model, though in the press it's largely being spun as "E-books killed the bookstore star" thing. I think A Common Reader is an earlier case of this - they had a FANTASTIC catalog, I loved ordering from them...and then they were gone. And apparently it was again a case of problems with the business plan and how the business was run. Which is really sad.)

It's very engagingly written. In some ways, it reminds me a bit of a book I read quite a few years ago now on Roman-occupied Britain. It's a similar style. I can't quite pin-point it, I think of it as a "British" style of writing - sort of anecdotes tied together thing (but I believe Milner is an American). It's also, I guess I'd say, it feels like the author of the book is sitting down with you over tea to tell you about his research - it's more of a general-overview than a "here is a catalog of the objects found in this mound. Now here is another catalog from another mound." I guess I'm saying it's not dry. And Milner is kind of operating on two levels of history in his writing - first, there is the actual historical time of the Moundbuilders, what the just-barely-postglacial world was like. But he's also discussing some of the early archaeological work done and some of the early ideas (Jefferson knew of mounds - and he believed the Moundbuilders where the ancestors of current Native Americans. Which is pretty much the accepted idea NOW, though there was a period time when apparently the prevailing belief was that the Moundbuilders were some kind of Golden-Era people who were in no way related to the "savages" who came after them and drove them out. (As Milner points out: it's easier for a culture to justify its mistreatment of the Native people if they see them as "savages" who destroyed some flourishing earlier culture.))

I also find it interesting - and I originally bought the book - because, having grown up in Ohio, I learned about the mounds and Moundbuilders in some of my history classes. (The Hopewell and, um....I'm drawing a blank on the second group we studied. Adena. I had to look that up. I have no idea if this information is accurate in line with what we now know/believe about these people, but this is the kind of thing I learned about.)

As a kid, I found the history of where I lived interesting. (I've already talked about my fascination with Deep Lock Quarry and the few remnants of the Ohio and Erie canal that were in the Metroparks). It was strange to stand there, out in the forest in the fall (for some reason, the fall always made me think more of the passage of time and of history), and consider that there were people who lived here, not only a hundred or so years before I was born, but even maybe a thousand years before I was born. It was interesting and in a strange way, slightly creepy (but creepy in a GOOD way - maybe, as an adult having read C.S. Lewis, I'd use the term "numinous" instead) to think about that, that there had been all these people who had lived and died, hoped and feared and loved, cooked food and made pottery, long before I was ever on the scene - and that they would never really fathom what would exist long after they were gone, and that I could just barely know some of the basic facts of how they lived, but never really know what they were REALLY like. So I'm looking forward to reading it, both to learn more about these early cultures, but also to recapture a bit of that sense of wonder of being 10 years old standing out in one of the Metroparks and thinking about what it would be like to be one of those prehistoric people catching fish and building shelters and raising their children...so different from the way people lived in my time, but maybe, in some ways, the same.

I'll be back in a couple weeks.