A MAJOR POST-SCRIPT.…...A ‘Lost World’ In Wyoming….. BBC Pics of Scotland …. All Are One....
by Bernie Bell - 07:38 on 07 March 2023
A MAJOR POST-SCRIPT ….
I’ve added a PS to this piece…. http://www.spanglefish.com/berniesblog/blog.asp?blogid=16176 - telling of how the dig at the Ness of Brodgar will only happen for two more years – for now.
I did feel that the site was ready to be left for a bit - wrote the following to a patient archaeologist after my Ness visit last year…
“I have the idea that it might not be too long before work there finishes for now, giving y’all a chance to catch up with and make what you can of what has been found, while the place is covered over again and given a chance to catch up with itself – given some peace - until next time – the next phase. When I raise a glass tonight, I’ll raise it to the next manifestation of the Ness – whenever that might be”
…..but I’m still kind-of reeling from the news.
I’m pleased that a decision was made not to cover the site in a protective structure. The position of the Ness of Brodgar matters – what can be seen from that site, and where the site can be seen from. I wrote something about this, here….
https://theorkneynews.scot/2018/11/16/lochside-viewpoint-exactly-what-it-says-it-is/
To cover it with some kind of huge aircraft-hangar-like structure would detract from the place in many, many ways. It would also look horrendous in that landscape!
Mike liked the line in Sigurd Towrie’s piece about how the site will be “returned to being a green field” – he was saying how it will be good for all the whirlpool of activity to calm for a time – as it has done before.
We’ll have to go back to leaning over the gate and connecting….thinking…..and remembering……
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A ‘Lost World’ In Wyoming…..
We watched a recorded telly programme called ‘Secrets of the Jurassic Dinosaurs’ presented by Liz Bonnin….
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m001jfzn/secrets-of-the-jurassic-dinosaurs
I wasn’t sure about the first episode - felt that it hadn’t caught my interest - which was odd, as it’s a subject I’m interested in and Liz Bonnin is a good presenter. We then watched the second in the series and I realised that it wasn’t so much that it didn’t ‘catch’ me, as that I was confused. I find it hard to grasp the enormity of that site in Wyoming – the ‘lay-out’ of it and what is being found there.
The Jurassic is so long ago - 199.6 million to 145.5 million years – I have trouble grasping that time-span to start with – yet the archaeologists and technical experts can work out, by ‘modelling’, what is likely to have been happening there – bringing the scene to life again – carnivorous predators hunting plant-munching herbivores, and their inter-action with each other - based on where their remains are found on the site and their in situ placing.
This site is extra-ordinary, but these kind of sites do turn up now and then – there have been quite a few discovered in China.
I’m trying to get my head round the idea that these sites, where what’s found can build a picture of life in that place at that time, so long ago, are still there in the land, in the rocks – are still part of our world, all around the world.
That’s the wide-reaching concept which opens my mind to the inter-connectedness of life through Time.
I’ll watch these programmes again and maybe be able to take it on board a bit better next time. This kind of programme is what makes a telly worth having - if not always worth watching!
The Fossil & Heritage Centre in Burray has some ace fossils including an Ichthyosaur, as found at the site in Wyoming…
https://theorkneynews.scot/2019/08/16/the-fossil-heritage-centre-burray-exactly-what-it-says-it-is/ .
And that takes me to Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Lost World’ again… http://www.spanglefish.com/berniesblog/blog.asp?blogid=16154 where he describes spiky-backed creatures swimming in the Central Lake – Ichthyosaurs.
This playing with the concept of Time got me thinking of how we look up to the sky and can see the light of stars billions of miles away – some of which no longer exist – but we see their light because of the time it takes to reach our eyes.
And there was Lake Orcadie, from which some of the life is still here…. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMYW5ThfyiQ
We have a picture of a fossil fish which we found at the right hand end of Skaill Bay, Orkney. It’s a generally more rocky area than most of Skaill Bay, and we were lucky enough to see this……………………..
By now it will probably have disappeared again – re-buried in the sand or washed away by the waves. So it goes.
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BBC Pics of Scotland…..
……..24th Feb to 3rd March 2023…. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-64791256
Linzi Wilding’s pic. taken from the Inchnadamph Bone Caves took me back to one of the best holidays we’ve had…
https://theorkneynews.scot/2018/06/14/the-western-isles-or-there-and-back-again-xvi/
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All Are One….
From ‘Emergence’ magazine…..
When You Meet the Monster, Anoint Its Feet
by Bayo Akomolafe
“This is a tale about the brilliant betweenness that defeats everything, corrodes every boundary, spills through marked territory, and crosses out every confident line.”
“This week we bring forward a story from our archive that dismantles tired, binary concepts of race and presents a new vision of identity—one that is intertwined, composite, and emergent. Drawing on his Indigenous ancestry, writer and lecturer Bayo Akomolafe invokes the creation story of the Yoruba people of West Africa to explore the disruptive, generative “middle”—the place between heaven and the primal ocean where the deity Obatálá creates land and humanity, and where neat boundaries are troubled and undone.
In this space, Bayo brings together opposing racial theories—ones that present race as either biologically or socially constructed—and shows them to be not separate, but deeply entangled. Resituating race in the age of the Anthropocene, where the boundaries between human and nonhuman are porous and dynamic, Bayo invites us to rethink how we perceive ourselves and each other.”
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Here’s one I made earlier…. https://theorkneynews.scot/2020/09/30/living-in-uncertain-times/
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