Visit from Nal Morris.
Note: this text extracted from the article that JohnRudolph wrote in the BPAA Newsletter.
Our speaker for the month of July, 1999 was Nal Morris. Nal gave a talk about how and why so-called primitive people kept track of important events during the year. He demonstrated his points by showing us how two sites worked in the past and today.
According to Nal, not only did agricultural peoples need to know when to plant and harvest, but bunter-gatherer peoples also had appointments to keep during the year. One such appointment was when to leave the winter camp for the high country. Leave too early and your family could die in a blizzard. Leave too late and the wild crops could have come and gone. Miss the time when animals migrate and lose out on an important life-sustaining resource. The sun and the moon provided a way to know the time of the year. Ceremonies were also an important part of tribal life, dictated in part by a yearly timetable.
Nal with lecture notes
At Rochester Creek, in northern Utah, a very complex panel of glyphs yielded some of its secrets to Nal's observation and analysis.
At Parowan Gap in southwestern Utah, a narrow gap in the mountain ridge is embellished with petroglyphs that also revealed startling evidence of the Native American's intelligence and ingenuity in determining a great variety of important dates throughout the year.
This latter site has been shown by Nal to be so important historically and culturally that the State of Utah is taking steps to re-route the road that now passes through the gap, protect the petroglyphs from vandalism, and to construct an interpretive center to explain the workings of this site to the public. It is gratifying to know that archaeoastronomy is, more and more, recognized as a valuable and viable source of information about the knowledge of the early Americans.
John and Nal share an Archaeo-Joke , and a gift tie
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