Excavations in Telfair County, Georgia, have uncovered not only remains of a Native American village, but could reveal evidence of Hernando de Soto’s exploration of the area in the mid-1500s, two hundred years before the founding of the British colony of Georgia. Read the Associated Press article about it here in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Here is a story that piques my interest in hiking and my love for ancient history. The New York Times Travel section features England’s Ridgeway Trail, which is “at least 5,000 years old, and may even have existed when England was still connected to continental Europe, and the Thames was a tributary of the Rhine.”
It’s hard to beat a hiking path that predates the very shape of the world.
Here is my favorite passage from the article:
Every so often we pass one of the distinctive clumps of beech trees that dot the landscape. There’s something about these copses: when you’re in one, its whistling shade is eerie and beautiful, steeped in a sense of another time, of history, of the age of the landscape. They have something of the dense atmosphere of a graveyard … The grasslands up here, beloved of sheep and horses, curve away in sculptural lines, creating deep bowls and broad gullies. It’s a landscape that exhales prehistory, littered with burial mounds, standing stones and hill forts thousands of years old.
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A very interesting piece in Pittsburgh’s Post-Gazette marks the 30th anniversary of African American programming at Colonial Williamsburg by delving into the cousine of enslaved blacks, a combination of European foods, African techniques, and American ingredients.
The rough conditions and harsh schedules in which the slaves had to prepare food are striking, made all the more so by the technological gulf separating even the best-equipped kitchen of the 1700s from the electronic luxuries of 2009.
On 13 October 1775, the Continental Congress ordered the creation of the the Continental Navy, which would later become the United States Navy. In other words, the Navy is older than the Republic itself.
The first ship commissioned was the Alfred, formerly named the Black Prince, thus establishing a long tradition in the U.S. Navy of renaming things to sound sillier than they sounded before.
Ironically, during my ten years of naval service I never set foot on a ship. But, if you get a chance to tour a US Navy vessel (I have toured the still-active Yellowstone and the legendary Constellation) don’t pass it up. The tight and efficiently packed interior of a ship, particularly a sailing vessel, is an experience unlike anything you might find on land … although perhaps not recommended for the claustrophobic.
And, if you see a sailor today, wish him a Happy Navy Birthday.
Beams believed to be from the water bastion of mid-18th Century Fort Edward have been dredged up, interestingly as part of clean-up effort aimed at removing dangerous pollutants from the bed of the Hudson River. Artifacts from the early encroachment of pre-Industrial civilization on the North American continent now have to be tested for industrial PCB’s just to determine whether they are safe for public viewing.
Fort Edward was the furthest navigable point inland on the Hudson, and therefore the beginning of “portage” or carrying goods and vessels overland from water to water. It is also known as the location where New Hampshire’s Major Roger Roberts wrote his famous Rules of Ranging.
