Yesterday there was a good deal of messaging that was prompted by an article in The New York Review of Books, “Google and the Future of Books” by Robert Darnton. Vol 56, #2, February 12, 2009, in case anyone is looking for this on paper. The article is about the resolution of the lawsuit against Google’s plan to digitize all books, which was resolved in Google’s favor, kicking up fears of monopoly. The article takes a long historical view, tracing the impact of technology and the birth of the whole concept of copyright. Google is digitizing books without copyrights, books with expired copyrights that are out of print, books with copyrights that are “orphaned” (the publishing company has dispersed, the author can’t be located), and everything else they can get hold of. The question is how to manage all that stuff. (I do worry a bit about sunflares or the reversing of the planet’s polarity wiping out all the virtual books. But those catastrophes wouldn’t do ordinary books much good either.)
A respondent suggests that the real news is that ebooks are now profitable enough for anyone to care. And that other entities besides Google are puttin’ out the books on the Internet.
Athabasca University Press, is a “virtual” university far to the north in the province of Alberta where developing oil sands means there are a lot of vigorous people who have liberal gaps in their arduous work lives which they choose to fill indoors taking online courses. The director, Walter Hildebrandt, was the director of the University of Calgary Press when they accepted my book, “Bronze Inside and Out.” (It is partly available online through Google Books. I didn’t give permission nor did the press.)
Athabasca U Press is scouting a new trail by making their books available online for free, as well as the journals they publish. One CAN get the books bound conventionally, Print On Demand. I tested this service by downloading “Imagining ‘Head-Smashed-In’” by Jack W. Brink, one of the intrepid archeologists and paleontologists who have made Alberta one of the most exciting places to regard the deep past.
“Head-Smashed-In” is the name of a buffalo jump, a place where for millennia native peoples have chased the animals over a cliff in order to kill them for meat. One of the first things I learned was that it was the buffs who were supposed to get their heads smashed in, rather than the people, though some unfortunates did get caught up in the melee. Also, I had not known this had been the name of the place for a very, very long time -- in Blackfeet, of course.
A rather fabulous museum exists next to the site -- not ON it, since that would destroy what remains of the site. If you are going to southern Alberta this summer, mark on your map both Head-Smashed-In near Fort Macleod and the Tyrrell Museum near Drumheller, which addresses the much, much earlier dinosaur era and the slightly overlapping megamammal period of the mastodons. I know people who consider these “religious” institutions because one comes away infused with wonder at the clear evidence of nearly inconceivable events.
I just read “Imagining Head-Smashed-In” online. It is full of gorgeous photos of the land plus illuminating paintings of how things must have been -- FAR more complex and skillful than the usual conceptions of bison pouring lemming-like over a cliff. It turns out that this specific piskun (Blackfeet for buffalo jump) is archetypal, an example of how the actual cliff is only part of the operating terrain which includes a wide grassy basin above the cliff that stretches for kilometres, the abrupt sandstone break which leaks high quality spring water at the bottom, and then another smaller area suitable for the work of cutting up the carcasses, rendering fat, roasting meat in pit-ovens, cutting and drying muscle meat, cracking open leg bones for marrow. The final elegance is not far away: the river valley of the Old Man River, excellent for winter camping and stashing the preserved airtight packets of meat in rawhide while working on the hides of the animals.
This efficient and arduous work demanded cooperation among a hundred or more people until the arrival of horses made it unnecessary and then the elimination of the buffalo herds made it impossible. (See a parallel with printing?) To properly understand the remnants that they found, Brink and his crew replicated as much as they could. Buffalo chips (dung) DOES burn as well as wood, but only if there is a stiff breeze. Buffalo bones burn rather well, so long as they are greasy. Since the grease is nutritionally valuable, the bones were smashed and boiled in rawhide-lined pits heated with hot rocks, then the fat skimmed off. (One of the most outstanding tribal families today is named “Grease-Melters.”)
The crew figured out why the boiling pits contained one kind of stone and the roasting pits contained another: quartzite holds heat better for boiling while flat plates of sandstone are better for roasting pits. This is the sort of detail that can make historical novels come alive. They also discovered that smashing bones is a lot harder than one might think, not least because one’s face and clothes become spattered with marrow and grease.
The Head-Smashed-In museum is built as steps down a cliff face. Brink chuckles over today’s visitors to the museum assuming that inside they are looking at the actual rock of the piskun, because the reality is that it’s a huge casting created by spraying latex onto a real cliff to create a giganto mold. At the bottom of the cliff is another giga-casting of a partly excavated dig with real equipment scattered around it. To me this is MORE amazing than including an actual rock outcropping in a building.
Even more remarkable is Brink’s gradual realization that the local tribal population should be included, that much information remained among them (the last “jump” was about one hundred and fifty years ago), that there were political issues to resolve between and within the tribes, and that much could be resolved by good humor and participation.
Everyone with access to a computer can read this book. It is this last quality of being inclusive and generous that makes such a specialized subject valuable for everyone as an example, even if they don’t care whether they ever walk the line markers that show where the bison hazers should be or ever boil a bison bone. The story combines the determined strength of early nomads with the careful sifting and reflection of modern scientists in a fabulous tale. Don’t stop before the last lyrical “imaginings” of archeologist and arrow-user.
Imagining Head-Smashed-In: Aboriginal Buffalo Hunting on the Northern Plains by Jack W. Brink who “is Archaeology Curator at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, Canada. He received his B.A. from the University of Minnesota and his M.A. from the University of Alberta.”
Hardcover: 978-1-897425-00-8 (HC) $85.00
Paperback: 978-1-897425-04-6 (SC) $35.95
E-Book: 978-1-897425-09-1 (e-book) No cost.
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