Broken Celt

We’re not talking about the Irish. We’re talkin’ about stone tools used by aboriginals.

Celts, pronounced sell-tz, found in the Northeast typically are about six inches long with a beveled edge. They are finely polished.

These simple, but beautiful implements were used for hoeing the earth. You can’t hold one in your hand and not have cosmic reflections on culture and time and the meaning of existence.

But here’s a seemingly discordant factoid: In New York, at scores of sites where prehistoric people lived, excavations have found broken celts of the highest quality.

These tools weren’t simply discarded. They were neatly broken in half and then carefully buried along with other implements.

Archeologists can’t explain it. Why would native peoples break their finest crafted tools and leave them behind?

One theory is that when native peoples decided that it was time to pick up and move on to a new location, they broke celts and left them behind as part of some ritual of gratitude to the earth that sustained their community for a time.

This post happens to be our NT2 version of a broken celt. We have to move on, too. Some of our members have assumed new jobs. Other members have obligations they can’t ignore. The result is that we can’t devote an adequate amount of time to the blog. So, we’re going to suspend it. We say suspend, instead of end, because we hope to return again one day, but we don’t know when.

As we depart, we, too, want to express our gratitude. We had this little online community were we could express our views and receive pointed responses from readers. Those responses were a source of great satisfaction for us.  In this regard, none of us derived any specific benefit from this effort other than the enjoyment of good contrarian conversation.

It occurs to us that this activity was probably quite similar to the aboriginals who gathered around a long house fire two or three thousand years ago. No doubt they had their arguments about leadership and governance in their small society. No doubt they became annoyed with each other at times. But it also seems clear from the scant record they left behind that they had a real appreciation for their surroundings and for their community. So do we. So do we.