…you may have noticed that I’ve been on the road lately. Although yesterday we returned home (yeah!)—and it is MOSTLY our Home AGAIN (double yeah!)—today I was traveling again. To Rome. Not the Italian or even the New York one, but the one in northwest Georgia, where I attended Society for Georgia Archaeology semi-annual meeting events.

There, I got stuck in the parking lot of the Chieftains Museum (also the home of Major Ridge, a prosperous Cherokee who was forced to endure the Trail of Tears ethnic cleansing/removal to lands that became Oklahoma over the winter of 1838-39*), waiting for a parade of modern wagons drawn by pairs of mules escorted by myriad riders on horseback to pass by. I estimate there were perhaps two hundred non-human critters involved in that mini-migration….

* Ridge, whose name in Cherokee was Ca-nung-da-cla-geh, was murdered by other Indians in 1839 for having signed the Treaty of New Echota (then the Cherokee Capital, in Georgia) in 1835, along with a minority of other Cherokees and without the permission of the tribal government. The treaty was an agreement by the Cherokees to leave their southern Appalachian homeland in return for monetary compensation and lands to settle out west.

PS If you’re bored with the above, perhaps you’d be interested in this NYTimes piece on worm grunting aka worm charming? BTW, the full PLoS article by Kenneth C. Catania is here….

This entry was posted in anthropology, archaeology, faunal on Saturday, 18 October 2008 at 6:06 pm.
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