{"id":40,"date":"2011-11-20T12:35:05","date_gmt":"2011-11-20T12:35:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.sandralangston.com\/?p=40"},"modified":"2011-11-20T12:35:05","modified_gmt":"2011-11-20T12:35:05","slug":"time-in-layers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.sandralangston.com\/?p=40","title":{"rendered":"Time in layers"},"content":{"rendered":"

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“Vallata in bianco e nero” \u00a0pencil on paper, 2005<\/p>\n

We built our house on the edge of a gorge, or\u00a0fosso,<\/em>\u00a0which hasn’t really changed its topology in thousands of years. \u00a0How do I know this? \u00a0The ground is strewn with bits and pieces of stone and ceramic, \u00a0everything from \u00a0tools to neolithic pottery to Greek black \u00a0and red figure fragments. \u00a0Concentrations of shards, roof tiles, \u00a0and blackened areas filled with river stones still speak clearly of the habitations which once filled the countryside. \u00a0 At least until the advent of large tractors, which have reduced many of these sites to vague concentrations \u00a0of smaller and smaller fragments, yet they are \u00a0still identifiable. \u00a0 Down in the gorge below, an area where tractors are absent, there are deep trails through the woods which have been used for a thousand years by goatherds with their flocks, as they still are today.<\/p>\n

Research has shown that the countryside hereabouts, from north of Pisticci to the sea, was divided up into parcels of a couple of acres per family. \u00a0The town of Metapontum, founded in 800 BC, was the central hub for an extensive farming community, and the countryside was even more populated back then than it is now. \u00a0The area was known as Magna Graecia and it was the breadbasket for the Greeks five hundred years before Christ. Wheat was the most popular emblem on coins of the time. \u00a0 They also used the extensive deciduous forests as a source of wood for their ships, and the barren hills still testify to overuse of this resource.<\/p>\n

Before the Greeks there were indigenous \u00a0populations, and before them there were paleolithic peoples who left stone tools and fragments from their creation. \u00a0A friend who is an expert in the area tells me that some of the lithics that I have found are up to twenty thousand years old. \u00a0\u00a0I have \u00a0a collection of them, and my favorite is \u00a0a large, six-pound round river stone with thumb-sized twin indentations on opposite sides, \u00a0used for cracking almonds or hazelnuts. \u00a0I love to think that it has been migrating around the surface of the same field for ten thousand years, waiting for the day I stumbled upon it and moved it to its new, only temporary, home on my mantelpiece. \u00a0I have a crude, potato-like elongated stone that was some kind of knife, and loads of \u00a0chips and tiny sharp bits of stone, probably rejects from the day of their creation, \u00a0as someone tried to learn the art of flintknapping around the fire. \u00a0Each new plowing refreshes the possible finds, like a new set of numbers at the lottery. \u00a0A rain will dissolve the clods of soil and leave smooth flints balanced on small pyramids \u00a0like offerings. \u00a0 It is like a never-ending Easter egg hunt. \u00a0Very few people around my area have any interest whatsoever in collecting stones, so I have them to myself and I suffer very little guilt about my prehistoric kleptomania.<\/p>\n

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