When the Earth Was New: Memory, Materiality and the Numic Ritual Life Cycle (Preprint Version)

Abstract

This book explores the contentious subject of Indigenous oral history in the Great Basin and a growing interest in oral traditions among archaeologists and anthropologists. When the Earth Was New considers the architecture of Numic place-based knowledge, interrogating traditional narratives that encode some of the earliest forms of scientific observation among diverse Indigenous communities describing a living sentient earth in the process of rebirthing herself.

The author employs an interdisciplinaryapproach that identifies and evaluates Numic oral teachings relative to the place-based data available from ethnography, ethnohistory, archaeology, and geology.

She invites the reader to consider the nature of contemporary and ancient Numic experiences, the profound possibilities of ancestral memory, the animistic worldview a sentient earth undergoing profound geological changes, Numic ethnogenesis, and the opportunities to explore potential convergences between science and indigenous ways of knowing. When considered in relation to both archaeological and geological processes, it may be possible to temporarily suspend our twenty first century notions, and for a moment, understand embodied perspectives. about When the Earth Was New.