I finally made it up to Aliso Canyon this afternoon, hooray! As mentioned recently, I had not been there in several weeks, and it was so great to be back. I spent a lot of time looking at the ground, due to the influence "Forbidden Archaeology" has had on me. Now I wanna stop and pick up or dig up every embedded rock that has sharp edges. :) It was a wonder I got any hiking done, lol, but I just know that I am walking over buried artifacts - and maybe even some that are right there on the surface - every time I go up there. I'm just talking about old Indian arrowheads and tools, not stuff that goes back to Fred Flintstone's time, but I'll bet that if you dug down a ways, you could find some of his gear too.
I'm new to this stuff - paleoanthropology, or is it paleontology?.........maybe both. I don't know what to look for, but I'm gonna keep looking. At Aliso, just by looking at the old creek running through the park, you can tell that it's very old. And today I made a point to see if I could find an actual stratigraphic layer in the creek bed. Most of it, while ancient looking, just seems to be an 8 to 10 foot layer of mud and tree roots. But I did some looking, and I found a layer, maybe a foot thick, where you can see that a horizontal line of rocks are laid down, rocks of different material and shape but mostly of similar size, and they form a stratigraphic layer. Man, I would love to haul a geologist up there to tell me how old that layer is! It's right there in the creek bed. I know it's not prehistoric, but even if it was only a couple thousand years old, that would be mind blowing to me. Now I've got to know, so in lieu of finding a willing geologist I will do some Googling and see what I can come up with. Just four miles away we've got Santa Susana, with it's 80 Million year old rocks, so Aliso has gotta be at least a little bit old.
Sorry, but I'm all Geologied Out and also Archaeologied Out. I wanna discover something.
Most rocks just look like rocks, but you know something is down there. Man, now I'm never gonna get any hiking done. :)
Elizabeth, I am also reading in my book about some arrowheads and other implements that were found on an island in Lake Huron in the 1950s. These items were said to have been stratified (i.e. laid down and buried in a layer of stratum) during a period known as the Wisconsin Glaciation, which is broken down into three separate periods called Early Wisconsin, Middle Wisconsin and Late Wisconsin. In school, we would have been taught in general about The Ice Age of 10,000 years ago, but in the book, and in the science of geology, I am learning that the subject is broken down and described in a much more specific and localized way. Basically, however, the Wisconsin Glaciation refers to the last Ice Age, and to how far the Ice Sheet advanced down in to North America. This is of course how the Great Lakes were created, and I am reading also about something called a Glacial Till - like in "tilling" the Earth, where a glacier, when retreating or advancing, digs into the Earth and pushes a great mass of soil in front of it or in it's wake. A glacier tills the Earth in a humongous way, moving megatons of material, and when it did so during the Wisconsin Glaciation, which we now know went back to about 70,000 years ago, it buried a lot of stone artifacts that were dug up over the years, and most notably in the 1950s.
You have some amazing geology up there, SB. One day I will have to come up there and have a look for myself. You can show me around. :):)
I also saw, looking at your Facebook page today, that your film is gonna be shown at the Wisconsin Film Festival and also - it looks like - in San Francisco (mentioned by one of your friends).
I remember when you were working on it, with the dancer. He was dancing in nature, which was the idea if I have it right.
Huge congratulations on the festival screenings, Elizabeth. I am glad to hear of them and I know that these screenings will lead to more work for you. After the screenings happen, post about how things went, I would love to hear about it! :) :)
Well, that's all I know for tonight. I didn't watch a movie, but Grim came over to watch "Twin Peaks" Episode Five.
See you in the morn. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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