{"id":4236,"date":"2016-11-11T11:58:03","date_gmt":"2016-11-11T18:58:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maxcarmichael.com\/blog\/?p=4236"},"modified":"2020-07-01T14:36:20","modified_gmt":"2020-07-01T20:36:20","slug":"closing-the-circles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maxcarmichael.com\/blog\/?p=4236","title":{"rendered":"Closing the Circles"},"content":{"rendered":"

\""Artisans<\/p>\n

Rising From the Pit
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rising on a chilly morning in Price, Utah, after spending two days frenetically exploring the prehistoric rock art<\/a> of Nine Mile Canyon, I was determined to learn more about the so-called Fremont people who had apparently created it a thousand years ago. When I left my motel, heading down Main Street to the Prehistoric Museum, I saw snow on the high ridge above the Book Cliffs to the west, product of the storm clouds that had moved over the area yesterday while I was out in the canyon.<\/p>\n

Mostly alone in the silent archaeological galleries of the museum, I eagerly studied the exhibits, which focused primarily on the ancient Fremont culture that had spanned most of Utah, while providing both more ancient (Ice Age) and more recent (Native American tribal) context. Information, while new to me, was provided in fairly conventional forms, leaving me to gradually absorb and process what I’d learned, during the next few weeks, and to eventually add insight from my own eclectic research and work.<\/p>\n

But one revelation happened immediately when I walked into the main gallery. Straight in front of me at the back of the hall, illuminated by spotlights, was a full-scale reconstruction of a Fremont pit house from Nine Mile Canyon.<\/p>\n

When I first encountered the Fremont legacy and archaeological theories in the late 1980s, during my rock art expedition with Katie, I thought of them as less interesting, more primitive, and therefore doomed neighbors of the Anasazi who lived in cliff dwellings to their south and east. And when I heard about Fremont “pit houses”, I dismissed them as crude animalistic nests. Who would want to live in a pit?<\/p>\n

But as I walked toward the reconstruction, it came alive for me, and I suddenly saw myself living there willingly and happily, snug in a spacious, vaulted open plan shelter that would be warm in winter and cool in summer, with everything I needed organized and within reach. This was much better than the supposedly more advanced Anasazi’s ancestral pueblo cliff dwellings with their cramped, dark, uncomfortable warrens.<\/p>\n

I also immediately recognized other vitally important implications that made the Fremont more interesting and more inspiring than the Anasazi. And while methodically reviewing the surrounding exhibits, I learned to my surprise that one theory of the Fremont’s “demise” is that they eventually merged with the Nuwuvi and other adjacent tribes that were migrating into Fremont territory as part of the hypothetical Numic Expansion. So the Fremont may be an important part of the story of the Nuwuvi, the native people I’ve been closest to for decades.<\/p>\n

Finally, an information panel attached to the museum’s “Pleistocene hunters” diorama described the scientific controversy over the cause of the famous Quaternary Extinction Event. One old theory, popularized in the media, holds that Native Americans hunted the Pleistocene megafauna to extinction. But native technology was clearly never powerful enough, and native populations never large enough, to achieve that. The dysfunctional compartmentalization of science ensures that many contemporary biologists cling to the disputed theory that makes them feel better about their own work, regarding natives as irresponsible savages.<\/p>\n

\"Snow <\/a>
Snow above the Book Cliffs on the morning of my last day in Price <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Fashionably <\/a>
Fashionably dressed hunters in Ice Age Utah, painting by Joe Venus at the USU Prehistoric Museum <\/div> <\/div>
\"Native <\/a>
Native hunter-gatherers in the Basin and Range maintained an egalitarian communal society for at least seven thousand years – how does that compare to yours? <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Fremont <\/a>
Fremont house reconstruction in the USU Prehistoric Museum. A “pit house” sounds primitive and uncomfortable until you actually see one. <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Pit <\/a>
Pit house cutaway view in Nine Mile Canyon landscape, from museum’s web site <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Maybe <\/a>
Maybe it’s time for a renaming of the “pit house”. I’d rather live here than in any cramped, fortresslike cliff dwelling or adobe pueblo. <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Interior <\/a>
Interior of a traditional “blackhouse” like my Carmichael ancestors used in the Scottish highlands. Note strong similarities to the Fremont pit house. <\/div> <\/div>
\"Exterior <\/a>
Exterior of a Scottish blackhouse <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Gourmet <\/a>
Gourmet kitchen, Fremont style <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Like <\/a>
Like the Nuwuvi and other recent desert tribes, the ancient Fremont slept on and in luxurious rabbitskin blankets <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Fremont <\/a>
Fremont farmers crafted wooden shovels which are still usable after a thousand years <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"I <\/a>
I learned to make dogbane cordage, like this Fremont example, during my Nuwuvi skills course in the Utah wilderness <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"2,000-year-old <\/a>
2,000-year-old Fremont basket. Many years ago, I met the last southern Nuwuvi basketmaker, who used coiled techniques just like this. <\/div> <\/div>
\"Practical <\/a>
Practical thousand-year-old examples of Fremont pottery from Nine Mile Canyon <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"The <\/a>
The tradition of portable art has continued for 7,000 years, through the Fremont to the historical Paiute (Nuwuvi) of the Great Basin and Mojave deserts, reinforcing the ethical principle of ecological reciprocity <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"img_0994\" <\/a> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Legless <\/a>
Legless clay figurines attributed to the Fremont, closely matching the pictographs I saw in Nine Mile Canyon <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Fremont <\/a>
Fremont clay figurine <\/div> <\/div>
\"Fremont <\/a>
Fremont clay figurine <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"100-year-old <\/a>
100-year-old clay image of Yoruba spirit messenger Eshu-Elegba, from the African nation of Togo, with cowrie shell eyes, valuable trade items. The story of Eshu conveys the lesson that the highest form of morality is sharing and generosity. <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"The <\/a>
The local palette which Fremont painters had at their disposal <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\""Artisans <\/a>
“Artisans of the Rock”, painting by Joe Venus <\/div> <\/div>
\"To <\/a>
To native people, rock art is not a static enigma left by quaint primitives who are dead and gone forever <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Contradicting <\/a>
Contradicting what I was told by an authority on desert archaeology, this photo shows a recent Nuwuvi making symbolic pictographs, both representational and abstract <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n

Houses of Peace<\/strong>
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

During the years after Katie and I explored the Anasazi cliff dwellings of the Colorado Plateau, I was bothered by how cramped, uncomfortable, and inconvenient they seemed. I could hardly believe they had been used as full-time dwellings, but even if they had, their hidden, often inaccessible locations and fortress-like construction suggested that, far from the crowning achievement of an advanced civilization, they were more likely the refuge of timid people who lived crowded together like ants, with no privacy, in constant fear of attack.<\/p>\n

The misleadingly named pit houses of the Fremont, on the other hand, were clearly the spacious private homes of families who were living in peace, at ground level, unafraid of attack. They had somehow managed to develop a peaceful, egalitarian, and sharing society over a wide area to the north of the Puebloans, whose conflicted and violent culture would cause the invading Spanish so much grief in later centuries.<\/p>\n

The museum’s description of archaic social organization, informed by the social organization of recent desert tribes like the Nuwuvi, shows that the egalitarian and communal culture ascribed to the Fremont was not only sustainable, it was sustained for 7,000 years in the Great Basin and Mojave Desert, while Anglo-Europeans and other so-called advanced cultures developed their extremely hierarchical, unjust, unstable, and incessantly warlike nation-states and empires which would come to dominate the entire world. And the Fremonts’ material remains show that native ecology likewise remained stable and sustainable through those thousands of years. The only important changes during that long period represented resilient adaptations to changing climate, as communities became more or less settled or nomadic, more focused on agriculture or foraging and hunting.<\/p>\n

In essence, the Fremont were part of a timeless tradition following natural cycles, so the Anglo-European scientific bias toward technological progress, origins and endings, ages and eras, carbon dating and linear timelines, is misleading and inaccurate. Forget the 7,000 years. Fremont are today and always.<\/p>\n

By the Numbers: Rock Art Motifs in Nine Mile Canyon<\/strong>
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

After returning home and reviewing my rock art photos, I began to realize I could only justify the effort I spent in the canyon by trying to make sense of the rock art panels in retrospect. And I could only do that by thoroughly analyzing the content of the panels \u2013 making up for my rush through the canyon, my inability to hang out and contemplate each panel, my failure to give them the time they deserved.<\/p>\n

So I reviewed the photos over and over again, identifying and naming the motifs that seemed important to me, and counting them to get a sense of their relative importance or value to the artists themselves. I know this is one way in which archaeologists have studied rock art, but I didn’t want to distract or bias myself by first referring to the archaeological literature. I needed to go on the basis of my lifelong experience as an artist, and the experience with symbolic communication that I’ve acquired during the 15 years of my Pictures of Knowledge<\/a> project.<\/p>\n

I analyzed 56 panels in total.<\/p>\n

[table id=1 \/]<\/p>\n

Rock Art Questions and Insights<\/strong>
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

What did the panels consist of?<\/p>\n