“The most obvious thing that
distinguishes knowledge from belief is truth…
truth is independent of what anyone
happens to believe is true,
and that simply believing something is
true does not make it true.
Indeed, even if everyone believes that
something is true, it may turn out to be false…
knowledge requires something less than
certainty.
In practice, when we say something is
“true”
we usually mean that it is “beyond a
reasonable doubt”.
We usually justify beliefs and knowledge
claims by appealing to one of the four ways of knowing:
– “I saw it!” (perception)
–“Someone told me” (language)
– “I worked it out” (reason)
– “It’s intuitively obvious” (emotion)
from Richard von Lagemaat’s course book
“Theory of Knowledge”
I
guess I keep coming back to thoughts on “Ways of Knowing” because of that
upcoming NEARA Conference that I can’t afford to go to. It’s a struggle for me
these days just to be able to afford to pay attention.
And I guess from that constant attack on my
beliefs about Indigenous Stonework, something I’m just really beginning to grasp
after 25 years and, like any good man of wisdom, to realize there is more to it
than I’ll ever understand.
In April 13, 2015 I saw that this page had
been added to the SWI web pages:
Sampson Rock in Madison, CT is a special and evocative place
This is a glacial erratic, a “rocking stone” and, in this taxonomy, a Notable Stone.
I was a little hopeful when I read Thorson's first sentence or two:
“Of course their (sic) are! There have to be! Hundreds of
thousands of human beings have walked and worked the New England uplands for at
least 11,000 years. And many features have been confirmed as pre-Colonial
by properly credentialed archaeologists.” I had hoped for some examples other
than the one given, Sampson Rock, but then the author’s belief quickly turned
back to the same old culturally biased thing:
“But let us not
conflate the few, the small, and the odd stone features in the woods with the
latticework of abandoned stone walls gracing much of the New England
countryside. This latticework of walls is the collective work of colonial and
early American farmsteads built by Euro-settlers and their descendants since
1607.” The author ties into NEARA as he writes, “Last night, while giving a
talk to the
Boxborough
Conservation Trust in Massachusetts, I got the inevitable question
about pre-colonial stone ruins. This morning, I decided to post my answer
in the form of a keynote speech I gave several years ago to the New England
Antiquities Research Association.
Once you follow that link and get
to “The Odd Stone Out” speech, you find that the one thing that bothers Robert
Thorson the most is ( a lack of?) scientific proof that “Native Americans” or
Indigenous People built stone constructions found in New England. He writes:
“To my mind, the most important research question facing us today is how to
sort out the certainty of a tiny bit of pre-historic stonework from the
self-evident stonework of the historic era.” He lets us know that, “The answer
for me lies in what I call my conceptual toolbox. In it are many tools that I
have gathered over the years. But there are five tools that I return to time
and time again when going about my work. I dub them: (a) Ways of knowing; (b)
the parsimony principle, (c) the “good” hypothesis; and (d) the idiosyncratic
factor.”
(Using the Science of Mathematics,
I sense that this may not actually be five tools, but I am not very good when
it comes to numbers.)
“(a) Ways of knowing:
“These boundaries between tradition, intuition, science, and faith must be
acknowledged and respected if we are to make progress.” I’m not sure whose Traditions he is talking about,
but many Indigenous Cultures in the hemisphere have traditions of placing
stones in donation or memory piles, from early contact times up to the present,
examples of which can easily be found and have been documented by scientists
who study Anthropology. Intuition and Faith can influence Science, “another
word for secular logic: For the question “How do you know?” it answers:
“Because I can prove (sic)” Its key tools are the hypotheses, experimental
trials, quantitative analysis, and comparative methods.”
(This
might prompt another person to segway into and to explain “hypotheses,” but
instead Thorson jumps to number two or:)
(b): the parsimony
principle: “ The basic idea is that, given two plausible competing explanations
for the same observation, the simplest or most familiar is the most likely to
be correct.
By using the
phrase, “most likely,” I am affirming that the principle applies not to truth
or falsehood, but only to probability of being correct. This parsimony
principle is not proof of any kind. Rather, it’s a “rule of thumb” used to help
in the framing of hypotheses, not a test of whether one is true or not.
By using the
phrase simplest, I mean the one requiring the fewest and/or the least
convoluted assumptions. Bt (sic) familiar, I mean the one that is most
consistent with time-tested, local explanations.”
I know well those “time-tested, local explanations.”
Every Stone Wall book ever written or plagiarized from Eric Sloane on down perpetuates
those ideas that cloud actual scientific thinking and observation, not to
mention ignoring another facet of the Parsimony Theory. It may be important to
take into consideration that Indigenous People lived in the area called New
England for somewhere around 12,000 years while European Contact and Colonization
only happened in the last 400 years.
My math skills plague me again: out of the
total human history of the area, what percentage of total time is that Post-Contact
period?
(c): the “good”
hypothesis: “A hypothesis is a good question framed as a statement that
yields a binary (yes/no) answer (for each attempt at falsification). This
sentence requires some unpacking,” Thorson continues, stating that a good
question is (and thankfully doesn’t tells us how many these four or five points
are):
Novel: hasn’t been
asked and tested before.
Relevant: worth knowing. Relevance is culturally determined.
Ethical: does no harm, or harm within culturally accepted
norms.
Testable: with
observations or measurements.”
I consider these as semi-novel “good If/Then
questions,” worth knowing (as in the true nature of these stones), ethical for
the same reason, and certainly testable by critical observation – although I
get tired just thinking about how to measure them all, - and really quite
incredibly beautiful and awe inspiring as an art form, as well as perhaps a sustainable
permaculture developed over thousands of years:
If the Indigenous People of Turtle
Island (Native Americans of North America) maintained the landscape with fire
then how were those fires controlled, especially in areas of dense population
such as New England?
If Paleo-Indians (the Ancestors of the
Indigenous People of Turtle Island) made “sophisticated prehistoric stone walls
deep beneath the surface of Lake Huron,” the most recent find described as “two
stone lines forming a lane about 30 metres long and eight metres wide which
ended in a corral-type structure” with “hunting blinds built into the sides as
well as other lanes and structures,” then why not elsewhere on Turtle Island?
If there are many free standing stone
concentrations/constructions that resemble animals, both actual and legendary,
that figured highly in the Indigenous People of Turtle Island (Native Americans
of North America) Worldview – the turtle, bear and deer etc. along with the
Great Serpents (including the one in Ohio) etc., - then who was more likely to have the time and
motivation to create this artwork?
If those same techniques of artwork can
be found in those longer piles of stones most often called “stone walls” then
again, who was most likely to have the time and motivation to create this
artwork?
(d): the idiosyncratic factor: “Doodling –
that a feature exists for no good reason at all."
Really this is a silly kind of way
to throw a monkey wrench into the artistic aspect of stonework and nullify its
existence as Indigenous despite the similarity to other stone structures world-wide
and especially all that of the Western Hemisphere, from Machu Picchu to Bannock
Pont.
(Most writers make use of the expression "Whimsy" in place of "Doodling," as in "Whimsical Walls.")
(e): "???"
It’s
kind of convenient that I can come up with my own (e), a phrase beginning with
that letter:
Ethnic Cleansing: To deny that there are remnants
of Stonework (and Earthworks) of many kinds that illustrate an Indigenous
presence on the Sacred Cultural Landscape of Turtle Island is a form of “Ethnic
Cleansing." I’ll also add that the reuse of Indigenous made stonework,
adding wooden rails to comply with heights specified in Colonial Fence Laws,
and perpetuating the claim the great majority of them, especially about a
quarter million miles of rows of stones, as post contact “stone walls and
fences” was and is a continuing form of cultural appropriation very much
related to the appropriation of Indigenous Homelands and a long history of Colonialist archaeology in the hills of the "New England:"
Could Money be involved in all this reluctance to recognize and ‘Ethnically Cleanse” Indigenous Stonework (and, in the Housatonic watershed where I live, the Indigenous People who are the most likely descendants of those People)??
Let’s test THAT Hypothesis…
