[HN Gopher] Native American names extend earthquake history of n...
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Native American names extend earthquake history of northeastern
North America
Author : pseudolus
Score : 48 points
Date : 2025-04-18 23:22 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Colonization disregarded a lot of native data like this for
| hundreds of years -- it's amazing that it survived through
| language at all. I always wonder how much we've actually lost...
| but we'll never really know.
|
| A similar sort of "rediscovery" happened with crop rotation and
| soil renewal, natives had been using various methods for
| centuries but they were disregarded by european settlers.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| Yes, like "slash and burn" land management. And the "buffalo
| jump" method of chasing them off a steep cliff, falling to
| their death. And internecine tribal warfare, with constant
| usurpation of good land for farming and grazing.
|
| Good stuff: bring it all back, with the human sacrifices we've
| already renewed?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Great example of how people throw out the good with the bad
| and are seemingly incapable of navigating nuance.
| NoTeslaThrow wrote:
| Back? This country was built on taking and retaining land
| with violence. We just call it "property" now and act like
| everyone thinks this is fine. we now refer to human
| sacrifices as "essential workers" and "terrorists". Same
| fundamental dynamic tho--we just replaced the gods with the
| economy; but either way, people gotta die to keep it running.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| Which country? I think you'll find that the Americas and
| the "New World" consist of dozens of nations, and the
| confluence of several empires and other overseas powers
| which sent people here, in the capacity of explorers,
| evangelists, colonists, traders, you name it.
|
| And let us not discount the possibility that land in the
| Americas was the site of violence before 1492. Perhaps
| underpopulation kept that violent contention to a minimum,
| but surely, Indigeneous peoples learned warfare from
| practicing it on one another, whether in the Polynesian
| islands, AUS/NZ, China, or the Americas.
|
| And, White people have used more varied means other than
| violence in order to get around. Indeed, there has been
| intermarriage, and economic trade, and all sorts of
| peaceful, in fact quite agreeable means, of intermingling
| our culture with the indigeneous ones. It was the same with
| the Norsemen, the Vikings, the Slavs, and Celts, just to
| name a few: sure, there was conquest. There was violence
| and raping and pillaging. But there was also intermarriage
| and trade routes and merchants who picked up quite willing
| spouses. It went in both directions.
|
| Let's not attribute to violence what has also been achieved
| by diplomacy and peaceful means.
| NoTeslaThrow wrote:
| Well, sure. But it sure as hell aint't diplomacy and
| peace that built this society we live in now. Or at
| least, not a good sort of peace. That's especially true
| for the US and Canada. What went on before europeans made
| an appearance doesn't change this observation. I'll leave
| defending that to the people whose world we destroyed.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Nobody really knows what North American civic life was like
| before contact. The cities all depopulated before intensive
| contact due to disease.
|
| What settlers found were post-apocalyptic remnant groups.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Luckily they encountered a culture with writing, so their
| knowledge could be preserved for us today.
| neaden wrote:
| Crop rotation was the standard method of planting throughout
| Europe in the middle ages, it certainly wasn't lost by the
| settlers.
| NoTeslaThrow wrote:
| Well we have plenty of records of people who _did_ pay
| attention. (American?) Society as a whole isn 't very good at
| focusing on what will care about in the future.
|
| Anyway, it's not easy to turn oral history into speculation
| about the literal past. There's a reason such work focuses so
| much on geology! It's likely oral traditions encode a lot more
| literal history than we realize, but the ability to verify or
| interpret this as "history" in the western sense of
| "historiography" may be fundamentally impossible for large
| swathes of it.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| The history of earthquakes in New England is valuable because the
| long-term risks are more poorly understood than other parts of
| the US. We know there are a lot 5.x earthquakes, which do a lot
| of damage to the old European-style masonry construction which is
| still common there, but there is some evidence that suggests rare
| earthquakes are up into the 7.x range. If a 7.x earthquake
| occurred in New England, it would be devastating given the
| construction style of older buildings.
|
| Much of the US builds to very high seismic standards by global
| standards due to lessons paid in blood but there are still
| unknowns in regions like New England and a lot of construction
| that is not particularly seismic resistant.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Not only does brick collapse, it tends to flatten people when
| it collapses.
|
| Wood frame houses, even flimsy ones, are less deadly in an
| earthquake even if they do collapse.
| jessekv wrote:
| What are bricks good at? Are they purely aesthetic?
|
| Structurally speaking, concrete and wood clearly have their
| place, bricks just seem like a worse concrete to me.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| This reminds me of the Inuit oral history of the location of the
| HMS Erebus and Terror.
|
| https://parks.canada.ca/lhn-nhs/nu/epaveswrecks/culture/inui...
| bitwize wrote:
| Over at the Mohegan Sun casino, there's an exhibit about Moshup,
| a giant from Mohegan folklore. Moshup was said to be a friendly
| giant to the Mohegans, the Wampanoags, and other tribes in the
| area, protecting them from harm from his home on Martha's
| Vineyard island. But he could be roused to anger; and his
| stomping footsteps around the New England countryside were
| thought to be the cause of Moodus's seismic activity. Certain
| geological features in Connecticut were of great importance to
| Mohegans, said to be Moshup's footprints (but called "the devil's
| footprints" by English colonists because you know, colonialism).
|
| Growing up in Connecticut, you think you're relatively safe from
| earthquakes... until you read about the folklore around Moodus
| and other seismic hot sites, from Natives and from colonists, and
| then you get a little bit scared...
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(page generated 2025-04-22 23:00 UTC)