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Photos post
Part two of copying my sister's post: photo update.
I haven't taken many for awhile, because my camera is only partly working. And the bits that seem to be really going bad (as opposed to just needing to be smacked around a bit to behave) are the lighting adjustment and the flash, so a lot of these needed a fair amound of futzing after I got them on the computer, and are still slightly pink, but they came out suprisingly okay for all that.
Also, I decided to play with Flickr as my host: I've had an account for years, because it's the default on LT, and doing it through my webspace has gotten substantially more annoying since they made it impossible to see directory indexes on the web. So you can see all these pictures at my flickr account, with slightly different descriptions and more image sizes.
Colonial Williamsburg: I only took a few pictures here, and most of those were for the Jayne Custis Tour, so I'm only putting up a few shots of my sister:
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stellar_dust in gaol, from the outside:
stellar_dust in gaol, from the inside, carrying her Stephen bag and one of the souvenir mugs that got you free hot drink refills for the rest of the year, looking wistful:
stellar_dust in the stocks, the image that is required by sacred and inviolate custom of all visitors:
stellar_dust and the orrery at the Williamsburg Library. (Orreries are excellent, and orrery is an excellent word.) We did a lot more exploring of the modern town that the other times I'd been to Williamsburg, which was great, and there was some really interesting sculpture around the (sadly closed) public library.
I don't post pictures of extended family & friends online, so have pictures of pets instead to stand in for holiday gatherings:
My uncle's dog. Image a cross between a stereotypical bassett and a stereotypical beagle: that's my uncle's dog:
My sister's cats, Darcy and Bingley, who have been *tragically* abandoned at their grandmother's house, and are therefore hiding. Very effectively, as you can see.
My housemate's blind kitten, Visas Murr the Valiant Jedi Kitty, riding on the shoulder of my housemate, who is wearing her Jedi robe:
We went to seven prehistoric Native American sites while we were with my mother's family in Ohio (+two that were closed and one we couldn't find), but my camera was only working for two of them.
Leo Petroglyph State Memorial is in the armpit of rural Southern Ohio, down miles of country highway and then a dirt road, surrounded by cow pasture and dead vehicles and stray hound-dawgs that wander on and off the site, and is apparently the local hangout for bored and hopeless rural teenagers. We got there using instructed that included a turn at a country store that no longer exists. It's really cool, though. We went there with my youngest aunt, who got her degree in anthropology locally and thus knew all the tucked-away places, and was being purposely difficult by refusing to tell us what it was like until we got there.
Here's the historical marker that is the sum total of interpretation at the site:
This shot shows my aunt in front of the picnic shelter that was built over the carved rock. At first we thought they'd actually put the picnic tables *right on top of* the carvings, but it turned out there was a hole in the floor of the shelter where you could look down at the carved rock. Below the shelter is a deep rocky gorge, with a 20-ft waterfall and some large overhangs that would have worked as rock shelters; I tried to catch some context with this shot, looking up from the waterfall, but my camera fails at sky, so you'll have to wait for my sister's pictures of cows to really get the whole experience.
Some shots of the actual glyphs. At some point in the site's history, the carvings were outlined in black paint to make them easier to see, which is why these photos came out at all. There's also a ton of modern graffitti, painted and carved, and places where you can see modern carvings had been sanded out of the rock, which made me kind of despair for humanity.
(W/some modern graffitti on the side of the pavilion floor.)
(taken in B&W)
Here'sstellar_dust taking context photos from the bridge that crosses the stream that cut the gorge:
On the way home from Ohio we stopped at the Newark Earthworks in Newark, Ohio. They're part of what was once the largest complex of ceremonial Hopewell Indian mounds in America, built around 2000 years ago and once covering most of the town of Hopewell, with a banked road that may have stretched 60 miles southward to the earthworks in Chillicothe (which we also visited, but I didn't get pictures of.) All that's left of the extensive complex are the Great Circle (preserved by enclosing a fairgrounds, then an amusement park), the Octagon Mounds (preserved by becoming a golf course) and one tiny corner of the Great Square (preserved by luck, and cut off by an interstate highway.) On one hand, I'm depressed by the blithe way white culture has - quite literally - plowed through these huge and fascinating wonders of the world. On the other hand, one of the things I find most fascinating about them is the history of the ways the surviving mounds have been integrated into, and interacted with, the White settlement over them.
Great Circle Mound is currently a public state park in the middle of the city with a staffed interpretive center and gift shop. The mound is a huge ring, with 20-foot walls with a 10-foot ditch inside, and an effigy mound in the center that looks vaguely like a three-toed pawprint or delta-wing plane. The park is almost exactly the size of the mound, so you literally drop of the side of the circle mound and into a highway, and people jog and walk dogs around the top of the ring, even though you're technically supposed to stay off it.
Looking inward from the top of the ring, to the central mound, over a Civilian Conservation Corps-era bridge that crosses the ditch:
Here, I'm standing on the central mound,stellar_dust is walking toward the outer wall, which you can see at the very back edge of the photo, to give a sense of the sheer size of the thing. The low, crescent-shaped mound, which lines up just above Sister's head, was put on the first 19th century map of the works but never found again; it probably didn't exist, but they dutifully rebuilt it anyway when they restored the mounds for the park.
Here's Mom (in red) and Sister (in pink) standing on the central mound. The building behind Mom is the visitor center, which stands just outside the original open entryway of the ring.
My sister, the druid! (We had all gotten matching pink hooded fleece capes earlier in the week, at a clearout sale our other aunt dragged us to, so we were wandering around ruins all week looking very woo-woo.) She's taking a 360° panorama of the ring from the center mound, which hopefully came out okay.
A shot of Mom standing on the central mound, coming in from the entryway; you can just see the wall of the other side of the ring behind Mom, through the trees:
The corner of the square that's still standing is called the Wright Earthworks, after the family on whose land it was preserved. (Not related to that other Ohio Wright family, though the original Wright airfields in Dayton apparently also have tons of moundbuilder history on and around them.) You get to the Wright Earthworks by going to the visitor center at Great Circle and asking for a map. It's between a winding residential neighborhood, an industrial center, and Route 13. There's a historical marker, a picinc table, and a tiny pull-off for a car.
The Octagon Mounds have been leased to a country club for a golf course since the city decided they couldn't afford a public park there in the 1920s. On the one hand, the golf course has helped preserve the site from development. On the other hand, it would be nice if archeologists and toursists could visit the actual site at times other than "when the weather is too nasty for golf." On the gripping hand, that's gotta be the awesomest themed golf course ever. Octagon Mound consists of two enclosures, a large octagon and a circle, connected by an avenue and with a bunch of inner monuds. It's been shown to have a large number of astronomical alignments, though as usual with archeoastronomy, you have to take it all with a grain of salt.
The public has access to a (very tiny) viewing platform which you can see part of the golf course from, and a short paved path that follows the exterior wall of one side of the octagon.
Here's Mom and Katy walking on the public path:
And a few shots from the viewing platform, giving only a vague idea of how large an complicated an earthwork has to be to hold an entire 18-hole golf course:
The reason I decided I want to go see the mounds again was that I was going to continue my yuletide story by having Jane and Lambert (of the College of Magics books) autocamping down the National Road and visiting moundbuilder/Fort Ancient religious sites along the way, learning about how Native Americans did their own sort of magic within North, South, East, and West. But as usual I got distracted by the fun of doing the historical research and only got the first bit of the story written. I bought a book at Hopewell Culture National Park, though, Mysteries of the Hopewell: Astronomers, Geometers, and Magicians, which should be excellently helpful if I ever *do* write the story about European magic meets the Moundbuilders.
I haven't taken many for awhile, because my camera is only partly working. And the bits that seem to be really going bad (as opposed to just needing to be smacked around a bit to behave) are the lighting adjustment and the flash, so a lot of these needed a fair amound of futzing after I got them on the computer, and are still slightly pink, but they came out suprisingly okay for all that.
Also, I decided to play with Flickr as my host: I've had an account for years, because it's the default on LT, and doing it through my webspace has gotten substantially more annoying since they made it impossible to see directory indexes on the web. So you can see all these pictures at my flickr account, with slightly different descriptions and more image sizes.
Colonial Williamsburg: I only took a few pictures here, and most of those were for the Jayne Custis Tour, so I'm only putting up a few shots of my sister:
stellar_dust in gaol, from the outside:stellar_dust in gaol, from the inside, carrying her Stephen bag and one of the souvenir mugs that got you free hot drink refills for the rest of the year, looking wistful:stellar_dust in the stocks, the image that is required by sacred and inviolate custom of all visitors:stellar_dust and the orrery at the Williamsburg Library. (Orreries are excellent, and orrery is an excellent word.) We did a lot more exploring of the modern town that the other times I'd been to Williamsburg, which was great, and there was some really interesting sculpture around the (sadly closed) public library.I don't post pictures of extended family & friends online, so have pictures of pets instead to stand in for holiday gatherings:
My uncle's dog. Image a cross between a stereotypical bassett and a stereotypical beagle: that's my uncle's dog:
My sister's cats, Darcy and Bingley, who have been *tragically* abandoned at their grandmother's house, and are therefore hiding. Very effectively, as you can see.
My housemate's blind kitten, Visas Murr the Valiant Jedi Kitty, riding on the shoulder of my housemate, who is wearing her Jedi robe:
We went to seven prehistoric Native American sites while we were with my mother's family in Ohio (+two that were closed and one we couldn't find), but my camera was only working for two of them.
Leo Petroglyph State Memorial is in the armpit of rural Southern Ohio, down miles of country highway and then a dirt road, surrounded by cow pasture and dead vehicles and stray hound-dawgs that wander on and off the site, and is apparently the local hangout for bored and hopeless rural teenagers. We got there using instructed that included a turn at a country store that no longer exists. It's really cool, though. We went there with my youngest aunt, who got her degree in anthropology locally and thus knew all the tucked-away places, and was being purposely difficult by refusing to tell us what it was like until we got there.
Here's the historical marker that is the sum total of interpretation at the site:
This shot shows my aunt in front of the picnic shelter that was built over the carved rock. At first we thought they'd actually put the picnic tables *right on top of* the carvings, but it turned out there was a hole in the floor of the shelter where you could look down at the carved rock. Below the shelter is a deep rocky gorge, with a 20-ft waterfall and some large overhangs that would have worked as rock shelters; I tried to catch some context with this shot, looking up from the waterfall, but my camera fails at sky, so you'll have to wait for my sister's pictures of cows to really get the whole experience.
Some shots of the actual glyphs. At some point in the site's history, the carvings were outlined in black paint to make them easier to see, which is why these photos came out at all. There's also a ton of modern graffitti, painted and carved, and places where you can see modern carvings had been sanded out of the rock, which made me kind of despair for humanity.
(W/some modern graffitti on the side of the pavilion floor.)
(taken in B&W)
Here's
stellar_dust taking context photos from the bridge that crosses the stream that cut the gorge:On the way home from Ohio we stopped at the Newark Earthworks in Newark, Ohio. They're part of what was once the largest complex of ceremonial Hopewell Indian mounds in America, built around 2000 years ago and once covering most of the town of Hopewell, with a banked road that may have stretched 60 miles southward to the earthworks in Chillicothe (which we also visited, but I didn't get pictures of.) All that's left of the extensive complex are the Great Circle (preserved by enclosing a fairgrounds, then an amusement park), the Octagon Mounds (preserved by becoming a golf course) and one tiny corner of the Great Square (preserved by luck, and cut off by an interstate highway.) On one hand, I'm depressed by the blithe way white culture has - quite literally - plowed through these huge and fascinating wonders of the world. On the other hand, one of the things I find most fascinating about them is the history of the ways the surviving mounds have been integrated into, and interacted with, the White settlement over them.
Great Circle Mound is currently a public state park in the middle of the city with a staffed interpretive center and gift shop. The mound is a huge ring, with 20-foot walls with a 10-foot ditch inside, and an effigy mound in the center that looks vaguely like a three-toed pawprint or delta-wing plane. The park is almost exactly the size of the mound, so you literally drop of the side of the circle mound and into a highway, and people jog and walk dogs around the top of the ring, even though you're technically supposed to stay off it.
Looking inward from the top of the ring, to the central mound, over a Civilian Conservation Corps-era bridge that crosses the ditch:
Here, I'm standing on the central mound,
stellar_dust is walking toward the outer wall, which you can see at the very back edge of the photo, to give a sense of the sheer size of the thing. The low, crescent-shaped mound, which lines up just above Sister's head, was put on the first 19th century map of the works but never found again; it probably didn't exist, but they dutifully rebuilt it anyway when they restored the mounds for the park.Here's Mom (in red) and Sister (in pink) standing on the central mound. The building behind Mom is the visitor center, which stands just outside the original open entryway of the ring.
My sister, the druid! (We had all gotten matching pink hooded fleece capes earlier in the week, at a clearout sale our other aunt dragged us to, so we were wandering around ruins all week looking very woo-woo.) She's taking a 360° panorama of the ring from the center mound, which hopefully came out okay.
A shot of Mom standing on the central mound, coming in from the entryway; you can just see the wall of the other side of the ring behind Mom, through the trees:
The corner of the square that's still standing is called the Wright Earthworks, after the family on whose land it was preserved. (Not related to that other Ohio Wright family, though the original Wright airfields in Dayton apparently also have tons of moundbuilder history on and around them.) You get to the Wright Earthworks by going to the visitor center at Great Circle and asking for a map. It's between a winding residential neighborhood, an industrial center, and Route 13. There's a historical marker, a picinc table, and a tiny pull-off for a car.
The Octagon Mounds have been leased to a country club for a golf course since the city decided they couldn't afford a public park there in the 1920s. On the one hand, the golf course has helped preserve the site from development. On the other hand, it would be nice if archeologists and toursists could visit the actual site at times other than "when the weather is too nasty for golf." On the gripping hand, that's gotta be the awesomest themed golf course ever. Octagon Mound consists of two enclosures, a large octagon and a circle, connected by an avenue and with a bunch of inner monuds. It's been shown to have a large number of astronomical alignments, though as usual with archeoastronomy, you have to take it all with a grain of salt.
The public has access to a (very tiny) viewing platform which you can see part of the golf course from, and a short paved path that follows the exterior wall of one side of the octagon.
Here's Mom and Katy walking on the public path:
And a few shots from the viewing platform, giving only a vague idea of how large an complicated an earthwork has to be to hold an entire 18-hole golf course:
The reason I decided I want to go see the mounds again was that I was going to continue my yuletide story by having Jane and Lambert (of the College of Magics books) autocamping down the National Road and visiting moundbuilder/Fort Ancient religious sites along the way, learning about how Native Americans did their own sort of magic within North, South, East, and West. But as usual I got distracted by the fun of doing the historical research and only got the first bit of the story written. I bought a book at Hopewell Culture National Park, though, Mysteries of the Hopewell: Astronomers, Geometers, and Magicians, which should be excellently helpful if I ever *do* write the story about European magic meets the Moundbuilders.