#meadowcroft

[victusinveritas]

Some maps showing the probable peopling of the Americas.

[pennsylvaniacore]

Source: Heinz History Center

Meadowcroft Rockshelter & Historic Village, near Avella, PA.

At 19,000 years old, this could be the oldest human settlement yet discovered in North America.

[sylksheeeee-a]

smash or pass

whispers the tiniest , smallest " smash " while looking at the ground , because she is blushing.

[thegirl20]

Helen Mirren and Celia Imrie filming The Thursday Murder Club

As the minibus is about to leave, the doors slide open for a final time and Elizabeth steps in. She takes the seat next to Joyce. ‘Good morning, Joyce,’ she says, smiling. ‘Well, this is a first,’ says Joyce. ‘How lovely!’ ‘I’ve brought a book, if you don’t want to talk on the journey,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Ooh no, let’s talk,’ says Joyce. Carlito pulls away with his customary care. ‘Splendid!’ says Elizabeth. ‘I haven’t really brought a book.’

[hoarder-of-dragons]

there needs to be a bigger Thursday Murder Club fandom here cause who else can I vent to about how awesome Ibrahim and Joyce are

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Madeline Peltz at MMFA:

In January, Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance said that Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts “is somebody I rely on a lot who has very good advice, very good political instincts.

[...] The Heritage Foundation is leading Project 2025, a far-right staffing and policy initiative backed by more than 100 conservative partner groups that seeks to remake the federal government into a vehicle for Trumpism. The proposals in the project’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership, would severely diminish reproductive, LGBTQ, and civil rights, implement draconian immigration policy, and crush climate change mitigation efforts. The Trump campaign has attempted to distance itself from Project 2025 as it becomes increasingly toxic, in spite of numerous well-documented ties between the Trump campaign and the project. A CNN review found that there are “nearly 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump,” and at least 140 former Trump administration staffers contributed to the project. Vance brings his own close ties to Project 2025 and Heritage. In October 2023, Roberts and Vance wrote a joint op-ed in The Hill titled “Don’t hold up Israel aid to further Ukraine War funding.” Vance reposted the op-ed to his official Senate website.

Vance has also made multiple public appearances with Roberts. In March 2024, he spoke on a Twitter Space with Roberts, Johnny Burtka, president of Partner 2025 partner Intercollegiate Studies Institute, research director of Project 2025 partner Center for Renewing America Micah Meadowcroft, and Antonin Scalia, senior advisor at the Manhattan Institute.

Ohio Senator and Trump VP pick J.D. Vance praises Project 2025 architect and Heritage President Kevin Roberts as “somebody I rely on a lot who has very good advice, very good political instincts.”

Wonder why we call the Trump/Vance ticket the Project 2025 ticket?

[hitchell-mope]

Awwww.

[gece-misin-nesin]

just finished the bullet that missed and oof. Richard Osman what is that ending. did you really have to kill me like that w bethany 😭

[newnamesamecharlotte]

People without a sense of humor will never forgive you for being funny

Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

[lenora-reyes]

A Stagnant Reprieve

Several months had passed now with no notable change since the incident that took place upon the Dragon Isles. While parts of Lily Pier had been revisited and reclaimed - the Squire had felt the same. Debilitating confidence was hidden with a broad smile and exceptional service to the people; but inside she felt great distress and frustration. Every day was an effort to strive to do more, to be better, and to grow in the ways needed of the Coalition.

She had met so many people in such a short time from the darkest parts of Duskwood to the poorest areas within Westfall. No one person was more invaluable than the other - and Lenora saw to it that her presence was known.

One such traveler she had met was a man by the name of Sir Jandor Briarwood. He happened upon the small town of Darkshire not too many days before while she had been doing a final patrol of the area. According to him, there had been some hysterical woman spouting about a witch in the area. And while it wasn't too far-fetched for the Squire to believe, it did raise some concern about the Coalition's absence in the darkened woods.

But if there was some one she could count on to keep things in check, it would be that of Blackscale. In their previous departure to the Dragon Isles, he had kept to his word to ensure the dangers would be kept at bay. Though as to the details of that venture, she didn't press too much. Especially given that her spirit had become completely shaken since their defeat against Stratogeth.

There were likely some conversations with Adamar to straighten her mindset and bottle those feelings she felt temporarily. But there was a boundary being set onto how much she depended on that guidance. So much so that she made any excuse to remain sparse from her mentors and keep as busy as she could. It wasn't like this boundary was needed though when Adamar was called to investigate more trouble elsewhere in the realm. Newfound activities that were adopted by the Squire ranged from reconstructing homes, to broadening her skills at the forge after Apprentice Hal's tutelage, and to train in isolation after any mandatory arrangements by her knights.

Every minute that wasn't spent doing something led her to that spiraling discomfort of despair. It was only in the presence of others that she could keep her mask on and put on the face that people wanted to see. That was easier than the nights she had to work herself to the point of exhaustion to sleep. There was a constant worry about the dreams that had surfaced in her coma that led her to fight against her body's needs.

On one of the final days before the voyage set to Northrend would take place, Sir Briarwood had arrived to Westfall injured after an attack in Duskwood. In her efforts to see to his recovery, she took him to the local church within Brushwind for treatment and to hear the doctrine of the light for some blessings. His armor was terribly damaged and the night was spent in utilizing some of the Draconium ore she had collected while at the Dragon Isles to fix it.

Given the effort of her contributions - there was no way Jandor felt he could return the favor outside of his appreciation and gratitude. That had felt like enough for the numbed Squire. And it gave her a sense of fulfillment when not a lot else had.

As the dawn of the voyage arrived, she brought herself towards the dock with what belongings she had for such a frozen hellscape. And while she had developed a close and strong bond with Dopey, her horse was brought about this time to accompany her onto the boat. The days that followed at sea were swifter than the months she had endured in Westfall.

Upon their arrival at Venture Bay - the Squire had kept her ears open and head down to escort those in need from the vessel. Everyone was given a hand where she could spare it. And while she had some interest in seeing what else the world had to offer, it felt watered down by the reception at the dock. But as she had promised to those she left behind - she made time to write to them telling of her arrival to Northrend.

Yet so much remained unknown to the Squire. And while she didn't know how to anticipate the trouble that lie ahead, she was mentally preparing herself for it. And before long, another solemn day passed where she was roused from her sleep to aid with the caravans and wagons.

The deciduous woodland of Grizzly Hills was surveyed as she followed on foot beside one of the wagons. Her horse was used to help pull one of the many wagons to the Howling Fjord. It was no surprise that the brisk cold air was certainly something she would need to adapt to. But if anything, she had a strengthened resolve to see things through.

And as she had expected, some journeys aren't made without a hiccup in the road. @theborderlandcoalition

[dinnerladies]

The start of a beautiful relationship ❤️

[theshadowbook-rpg]

Gráfico de Cletus para Arthur y Anastasia Addams.

[have-you-been-here]

Meadowcroft Rockshelter and Historic Village, Pennsylvania, USA

[commonrosary]

September 2nd, 2024 | Labor Day Weekend

Today was a break off of class, but not for studying! Spent the day doing most of my weekly readings and video assignments. - responded in 200 words to ASL History Forum - Dorothy Lee reading - Myth reading - Medicine Supplement reading - Ancient North American chapters 1,2, and 17 readings - viewing of Meadowcroft and Gualt sites - viewing of Guest Lecture for North American PreHistory - Ice Age Footprints documentary viewing for North American PreHistory - watered plants and cleaned room

[thegirl20]

I've become somewhat obsessed with the idea of Joyce and Elizabeth meeting when they were younger. (Without any husbands in the picture). Maybe Elizabeth sat down at Joyce's table in a restaurant to pull off a cover and Joyce got swept up in the romance of international espionage. Or maybe Joyce had to treat Elizabeth's wounds after a mission gone wrong.

Anyway, whatever happened, they fell in love and grew old together and ended up at Cooper's Chase in a lovely flat with a dog called Alan.

[alex51324]

Trip report, part 2!

Kooser State Park, Fall 2024

On the Sunday, we went to Meadowcroft Rockshelter and Historic Village, which is west of Pittsburgh, so the driving took a little longer than I'd have liked, but it's about three hours closer from Kooser than it is from my house. And the day was drizzly with occasional forays into actual rain, so it's a good day for something like that, where there are both outdoor and indoor exhibits to look at.

What Meadowcroft is famous for is the rockshelter, which is one of the oldest sites of human occupation in the Americas, dated to about 19,000 years ago.

What's interesting about that, is that prior to finding this site and a few others, the prevailing understanding was that the Americas were first settled sometime around 12,000 years ago.

If you've ever learned anything about the peopling of the Americas, here's an image (from Wikipedia) that may ring a bell:

During the most recent ice age, when a significant amount of the earth's water was tied up in glaciers, there was what's usually called a "land bridge" between what is now Siberia, and what is now Alaska.

(Incidentally, the name "land bridge" conjures up an image of something fairly narrow, that the people would have known was a significant crossing, but it was actually up to 600 miles (1000 km) wide. It's a narrow strip of land in the same sense that it would be fair to say that Pennsylvania occupies the narrow strip of land between the Atlantic Ocean and the Appalachian mountains--looking at a world map, that's a fair way to describe it, but that isn't what it seems like to live there. And the quote-unquote land bridge existed for thousands of years, so for many generations of people, it would have simply been where they lived.)

But I digress. Anyway, at the time that Siberia and Alaska were connected, what is now Canada and the northern portion of the US were covered in a solid sheet of ice, up to 3 km thick in places. Nothing grew on it the glacier, and as a result few animals ventured onto it. There's really no plausible way that people could have crossed it--until the glaciers started to melt. Around the same time that the "land bridge" was disappearing, an "ice-free corridor" would have opened up, allowing people to start to move southward. (As with the bridge, the corridor would have been much wider than the name implies, and people would not necessarily have though of it as a corridor.)

So it's a bit of a puzzle how the people in Pennsylvania got there 19,000 years ago. Or how the people at a site of similar age in Chile got there. Or the handful of other sites that have been found. The best theory now is that they made their way down the western coast of North America, possibly using small boats to hop from one habitable beach area to the next. Of course, as the glaciers melted, the coastline changed, so any traces these people left would have been long destroyed--except that, apparently, some of them hung a left as soon as they got below the glaciers, and traveled the entire way across the continent to Pennsylvania, and some others kept going South the whole way to Chile.

So Meadowcroft is an active archeological site and also a tourist site.

I forgot to take any pictures of it. Wikicommons has some, and I bought some postcards:

This is from the back of the shelter/excavation, looking out toward the tourist observation platform. The rockshelter is a natural overhang that created a covered area; there are tons of them in Pennsylvania.

And here's the observation platform:

You have to take a shuttle bus from the visitor center to the rockshelter, and then climb those steps; this and the fact that the drive took me longer than I expected--meaning I didn't have a whole lot of time before they closed--is why I didn't go back and take pictures once I realized I'd forgotten to do any.

The shelter would have originally been about as big as the dig site plus the tourist platform, at the time of the first evidence of human occupation, but over the millennia the outer edge of the sandstone roof collapsed several times, due to erosion and weathering. The archeological evidence suggests it was mainly used in the fall--right about the time I was there--and probably by one or two families at a time. They know it was used mostly in the fall, because the plant food remains are things like walnuts, hickory nuts, and hackberries, that come in that time of year. They were also eating venison and turkey. The earliest signs of occupation are from 19,000 years ago, and the most recent (apart from the archaeologists themselves) were a campfire pit and a pile of beer cans from the 1970's.

Interestingly, when they excavated the 1970's fire pit, they found another one from the 1700's or 1800's under it.

Anyway! In addition to the rockshelter, they have some fairly conventional, but well-done, living-history type exhibits, and a small museum.

For some reason*, the small museum has one room devoted to harness-horse racing, and there was this neat little exhibit about a young woman who set a world trotting record in 1916. Here's the sign:

And what's left of her racing cart:

And some pictures of her driving her horse:

I can't imagine that there were many women competing in harness racing in the 1910's, so I thought that was pretty cool.

(*I think the reason is that the family that donated a bunch of stuff to the museum were active in the sport, but I didn't have enough time to read all the placards, so I'm not sure.)

Over in the 17th-century Frontier Village, they had a replica of a woodsman's shack, which you can see is very recognizable as a precursor of the Adirondack shelter:

The logs aren't chinked, and the roof is birch bark instead of brush, but this is very close to what Geralt and Julian's shelter would have looked like in The Witcher and the Lordling. (Theirs was bigger, of course.)

In real life, shelters like this would be built and used by men from the settler (European) community, who went out into the frontier to hunt; in this area they would have mainly been hunting deer, the hides of which were valuable for international trade.

I did not ask the interpreter why he has such a very noticeable gap between the top of his leggings and the bottom of his shirt. Broadly speaking, I believe the costume is historically accurate--@beboots might know more? But I think usually the leggings and shirt would overlap considerably, rather than...that.

But anyway! Here you can see the structure of the shelter a little better, with the two upright poles supporting the wall-poles:

And the lattice of poles supporting the roof:

Forked branches holding up the roof-poles:

Some load-bearing pieces of twine:

The Frontier Village also had a station where you could try your hand at axe-throwing:

The 16th-century Monongahela village had a fairly dilapidated brush hut:

This would have looked a lot better when the brush was still green; in Witcher and the Lordling, these are one of the types of huts Geralt would have sometimes built before the big winter hut. In real life, they were built when people were traveling away from the village for a few days.

Here's another temporary shelter from the Indian Village section:

Again, in real life this would have been for short trips away from the village, for hunting or whatever other purposes.

In the village, the main dwellings were wigwams:

They only have one set up for you to go in, but they said that a real village would probably have had about five. They had a brush fence or palisade around the village, with their garden plots outside the fence, and a sort of pavilion, with a roof but no walls, that acted as the women's work area for processing plant foods and so forth.

Here's the lattice of poles that supports the wigwam:

The real ones probably would have been sturdier; the interpreters said that when they make their replica structures they pretty much have to stick to using deadfall wood or any invasive species that are being cleared out; the actual pre-contact Monongahela would have had better materials as well as more expertise.

Here's the hearth:

By this time period, chimneys existed in Europe, but a lot of non-wealthy people would have had basically the same arrangement, a central hearth in the main room.

The Monongahela village had another station where we could learn to throw an atlatl, which was very cool because I'd never quite understood how they worked.

About when I was doing that, I realized that I had very little time left before the place closed, so I raced through the 18th-century settler village without taking any pictures, dropped a hundred bucks at the gift shop, and went home, where my new rain canopy got a considerable workout as I cooked sausages in the rain.

It was really cool, though, and I want to go back--next summer, they're going to have some archaeologists digging a new section of the rockshelter and doing some lectures for the public, so I'd like to make it for that, and then also give myself enough time for a more thorough look at some of the exhibits that I raced through this time.

The next day, Monday, I made some further improvements to the shelter:

This was very necessary because it was raining harder, so quite a bit more was coming into the shelter, and also the two benches that I wanted to use as work surfaces for my cooking projects were at the edges, so anything I put on them got wet.

Project One was Campfire Brunch, consisting of hash browns (the dehydrated kind in a box), bacon, and eggs:

I cooked the bacon in the cast-iron skillet, and then put it in some foil to keep warm while I cooked the potatoes in the bacon fat. Yum!

Eggies:

All ready!

It came out pretty well--I usually just have oatmeal for breakfast on these trips, because I don't like getting up early, and then once I am up I want to get out hiking or whatever. But since it was raining too hard to do much of anything, and I had the canopy, it was a good time to try it.

I also tried making some cornbread--I used the little box of Jiffy mix that I picked up while I was buying the canopy--in my cast-iron kettle:

It didn't come out quite as well as this looks; the bottom was fairly burnt, but the top part tasted fine! And the burnt bits came out of the pot easily. One thing people sometimes do, when baking in this type of pot, is shovel some coals from the fire onto the pot lid; if I attempt this again, I'll probably try that.

I didn't take any pictures of supper, but it was a pottage of barley, rice, groats, and lentils, with herbs and dried mushrooms and stuff--I was aiming for a "what they eat in camp in a fantasy novel" kind of vibe, and it came out really well! Also some fish sauteed in butter in the skillet.

Definitely more elaborate campfire cooking than I've done before.

The next morning, we packed up and took a drizzly walk around Kooser lake before heading for home: