Tag Archives: Archaic hunter-gatherers

On Creativity, On Hiking in New Mexico, On the Creative Life, Uncategorized, Walking All Day On Stone

Bedrock Metate

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Bedrock metates are the oldest. They belonged to the Archaics, the first peoples in the Southwest, who became the Puebloans and still live and work here.

With a rounded mano as pestle, this one was used for the grinding of wild grasses. Corn had not yet spread up from its first cultivation in Mexico.

Season after season, a band of hunter-gatherers returned to this stone. As they arrived at their familiar camp, surely they felt, “There it is. Here we are.”

Time has filled this one with windblown sand.

On Creativity, On the Creative Life, On the Writing Life, Walking All Day On Stone

Rain in the Desert

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Slow, huge thunderheads.

Rain had washed everything, as though it had doused the desert with a gigantic fire hose. The daisies’ faces were plastered to the ground.

A pretty mano of pink granite. Where it lay was wilder than when it was made by an Archaic hunter-gatherer, probably a woman: only the rare hiker goes there now. The mano had been looking at the sky for two thousand years, at least. I admired it, then left it to its next eons of quiet and space and rain.

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