What We Lost in the Swamp: Poems

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I’ll never forget seeing this place for the first time,” recalls Sayers. “It was one of the greatest moments of my life. I never dreamed of finding a 20-acre island, and I knew instantly it was livable. Sure enough, you can’t put a shovel in the ground anywhere on this island without finding something.”

PDF / EPUB File Name: What_We_Lost_in_the_Swamp_-_Grant_Chemidlin.pdf, What_We_Lost_in_the_Swamp_-_Grant_Chemidlin.epub Look... he's a little self-focused, like. Maybe he got lost. If you find him, I'll pay. We've got some leftovers worth a copper or two. Cyrille: That... poltroon. Said we'd go salvaging... we should split up... then she left me. I know... she heard me yelling. Marronage, the process of extricating oneself from slavery, took place all over Latin America and the Caribbean, in the slave islands of the Indian Ocean, in Angola and other parts of Africa. But until recently, the idea that maroons also existed in North America has been rejected by most historians. During more than ten years of field excavations, archaeologist Dan Sayers has recovered 3,604 artifacts at an island located deep inside the swamp.After the Civil War, timbering opened up the swamp (an 1873 store, pictured, served loggers). Sayers has been unable to find accounts of departure from this purgatory: “Until we hear from their descendants, or discover a written account, we’ll never know details of the exodus.” Inside the densely forested swamp today, says Sayers, “There are at least 200 habitable islands. There may have been thousands of maroons here.” I ask him how his Marxism influences his archaeology. “I think capitalism is wrong, in terms of a social ideal, and we need to change it,” he says. “Archaeology is my activism. Rather than go to the Washington Mall and hold up a protest sign, I choose to dig in the Great Dismal Swamp. By bringing a resistance story to light, you hope it gets into people’s heads.” He pulls out a disk of plain, earth-colored Native American pottery, the size of a large cookie. “Maroons would find ceramics like this, and jam them down into the post holes of their cabins, to shore them up. This is probably the largest item we’ve found.” Then he shows me a tiny rusted copper bead, perhaps worn as jewelry, and another bead fused to a nail. The artifacts keep getting smaller: flakes of pipe clay, gunflint particles from the early 19th century, when the outside world was pushing into the swamp. The canal now known as Washington Ditch was the first significant encroachment into the Great Dismal Swamp. More canals were dug. Timber companies cut thousands of acres of Atlantic white cedar, known locally as juniper, and turned it into barrel staves, ship masts and house shingles.

His interpretations are stretchy, but I like the book, and it was useful on the history,” says Sayers. “When it came to the archaeology, I had nothing. I didn’t know where to look, or what to look for. So I decided to survey the swamp, find the high ground and dig there.” Kiki: Ah... my trunk. Cyrille--that's my partner--must have the key on him. He's probably still in the swamp. He's a thorough sort. When ideological passion drives research, in archaeology or anything else, it can generate tremendous energy and important breakthroughs. It can also lead to the glossing over of inconvenient data, and biased results. Sayers has concluded that there were large, permanent, defiant “resistance communities” of maroons in the Great Dismal Swamp. Is there a danger that he’s over-interpreted the evidence?

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Root> DDOwiki meta> DDOwiki metacategories> Quests> Quests by favor reward> Quests with 6 base favor reward That pisser. He must have seen me looking... must have dumped it! I'll string him up for the flies. It was probably the greatest underestimation in the history of archaeology,” he says. “Instead of 12 weeks, it took three eight-month sessions. Then I spent five more summers excavating with my students in field schools.”