Words: 756
As I went about my day I never thought I would see anything other than dirt and shovels. Who would have thought while planting flowers you could find history? While I was swiveling away I hit something that didn’t feel like dirt. As I looked closer, I saw something that was tan. I carefully crouched down and started digging with my hands to loosen the dirt around what came to be a pot and animal hide. I was so intrigued that I kept digging carefully but quickly.
I came across more than I thought I would ever find. As I continued looking I found what looked like a raw hide and an odd shaped rock. My mind was racing and I made the unconscious choice of selection. Selection is the process in which your mind and body help you choose certain stimuli to attend to (Floyd 109). I had never seen or found anything like this in my life. I was drawn in and I had to figure out where they could have come from. Organization is the most important part of discovering where these artifacts came from.
Organization, helps you make sense of the information by revealing how it is similar to, and different from, other things you know about (Floyd 109). I went and researched the area where I had been. I was in Television metro park, a place where many people were taking all different forms of transportation. Television had trains and boats always coming and going through, so it could have been anyone who left these things behind. As I continued thinking about it, I wondered what person would travel around with an animal hide.
The only thing that made sense was to think that there were old Indian tribes who had lived there long before. They could have made use of these items as tools in their everyday life. My only interpretation as that it couldn’t have been from any recent time period or any type of person I knew of still existing today. Interpretation is to figure out what it meaner for you (Floyd 109). In having these items maybe the person who had them was a warrior. The rock was shaped Just like the tip of a spear.
The person traveling with these items at the time could have been traveling during a time of war, carrying a weapon to protect his family, or for hunting purposes. This made me think that things I found came from a person who had a strong sense of family values. However they may have been, they were probably someone who I would have liked to meet. A person who has strong morals and ethics is important or at least should be important to everyone. Ethics guides us in Judging whether something is morally right or wrong (Floyd 30).
In my life I have often struggled with empathy. Empathy is the ability to think and feel as others do (Floyd 28). In this assignment I tried to think about if I were to have these artifacts when I would have wanted to live where these tools could have been useful to me. The only thing that makes sense, which could be because of my anthropology class, is that Indian reservoirs were once where these parks were now. Many Indians were at war with settlers because they were coming to claim the Indian lands.
The rock that was shaped like the tip to the spear and the animal hide were the two artifacts that made me think that this was definitely Indian lands. These people had to fight for their families and their cultures. In my opinion I don’t know many people with the same sense of morality as these people. They had so much pride in where they came from and where they lived that they were willing to fight and die trying to protect it. While digging in the dirt I never thought I would find such a wonderful experience.
I found artifacts that intrigued me and made me wonder about things outside of what is going on now around me today. The land that these objects were found on has changed many times over the years. Tomato became the Crossroad of America with all of its quick and convenient forms of travel. But even before those times that land was home to Indian tribes; whose land was fought over and completely changed.