Language

I spent some years during and after college engaged in what is called “rescue archeology.” As real estate developers would start excavating and would find human remains or evidence of ancient habitation sites, construction would halt and it would be a race against time to salvage whatever knowledge about the site could be gathered using archeological excavation and documentation methods, which are normally painstaking and slow. The great sense of urgency of rescue archeology made me conscious of the disappearance of native culture (along with some family heritage related to an extinct tribe in Northern Massachusetts), and what it can teach us about our relationship to the land, something that Euro-American culture struggles with. 

 

To wit, for a number of years I worked with LaVan Martineau on his quest to translate the petroglyph and pictograph language that once blanketed the North American landscape but have largely succumbed to zealous land development, vandalism and genocide. I traveled to Northern Quebec and Nova Scotia to track down the “Rosetta Stone'' for the Mi'kmaq pictography, which is in the form of the New Testament in both the original “hieroglyphic” and Roman texts, and worked to identify and survey surviving sites, mainly in the eastern U.S. and Canada. I also tried to help him develop a database and get support to digitize his notes and images, even getting assistance from the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe to go after grant funding. 

When family health, moving, and work pulled me away from this, and I lost touch with LaVan, I then heard that he had died and wrote an essay about him. his place in history, and a eulogy about him and his work, which was published by MIT Press. His daughters put together an archives page to bring recognition of the urgency to preserve his vast archive.