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Comment by cammasmith | Hacker News Reader

Can't even imagine what it's like to live in Europe. Just casually going on a walk and finding a coin that is over 2 millennia old. Just another Tuesday.

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You can walk around the USA and find flint arrowheads ... not sure the Native Americans used coins as such.

Yeah the wild thing about the southwest is the open-air museum aspect of it, not the layers on layers. For petroglyphs, the southwest has so many that date to the high middles ages (~1100 AD) you can stumble on them by accident as a hiker. AFAIK the oldest in the area are still thought to be these ones[0], about 9000 years ago. (Always controversial to date rocks I guess, but the oldest North American mummy should be easier and is about the same.[1])

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnemucca_Lake [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_Cave_mummy#Dating

The southwest has plenty of layers on layers. Tucson is built on a Spanish fort, which is built on native villages on top of yet older native villages going back almost 4,000 years, as one example.

For another example, most neighborhoods in eastern phoenix are built on top of old Hohokam villages, adjoining older basketmaker sites. The canals throughout the city often follow the old Hohokam canals. Fun fact, the Intel Chandler campus is on top of old hohokam suburbs of Pueblo de los muertos, which is buried under the modern suburbs.

The Puebloan culture in the southwest during that time was basically a full fledged civilization. It's insane how underresearched such a culture is despite having built megastructures like within the Grand Chaco Canyon

did they leave behind significant amounts of writing?

Nope. Which is what makes it so difficult. Additionally, adjacent nations like the Navajo, Apache, and others are very tight lipped about their extremely robust ancestral and oral history because of bad experiences along with taboos.

It felt like a mix of rightful wariness due to untrustworthy opportunistic anthropologists from the 19th and 20th century along with taboos that developed due to some sort of collapse.

Indeed! If you're around Taos, NM, there are several national/state parks that contain the remaining structures of the Pueblans.

The Puye Cliff Dwellings are over 1,000 year olds, and you can free roam most of them. It is quite wild being able to go into cave dwellings in the cliff. I'd highly recommend visiting if anyone is considering it.

Old trade beads can sometimes be found, old stashes and caches. Pony beads, seed beads, and others. They were traded/used as "money". The Hudson's Bay Company brought millions of them to this continent.

https://surface.syr.edu/beads/vol2/iss1/6/

Growing up as a kid, we used to find old wagon wheels and arrow heads frequently. There used to be an old fort not far from where my parent's house was located. A limestone creek ran on the back part of their property and defined the property line. We'd find all sorts of artifacts up and down this creek. I even came across a rock with an circular hole that was obviously bored into it and charring around the hole. I used to have some interesting show-n-tells. This was in the 80s.

I grew up in the bed of a drained lake (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Portage#:~:text=this%2...), so there were no native American artifacts to be found. The best we could do were the foundations of some homes that had been on sanitary district land but then torn down with the area reverting to forest (sadly, this forested area which was open to exploration when I was a kid has since been fenced off).

I feel the same way about the US. Can't imagine the vast wilderness you still have. I've never been somewhere truly wild and untouched by man.

> truly wild and untouched by man.

In the US you can find truly wild places, but it is pretty hard to find places untouched by man. Humans have been here for at least 15000 years, and from the very beginning were having huge impacts on the ecology.

Downtown Los Angeles has a pretty famous park and museum with fossils of preserved megafauna that have been extinct for millennia still regularly found just chilling in a bubbling lake of oil. I even worked there 25 years ago.

What's it called?

La Brea tarpits

The the tar tar pits.

(La Brea means "the tar").

A bit west of downtown, too, but I'm an annoying pedant.

Then it’s actually “The tar tar pits”. ;)

Sounds kinda like a Mario 64 stage.

La Brea tarpits, the essential LA elementary school field trip

And well known to fans of Dr Demento. This is the Wikipedia about “Hancock Park” the city park that contains the tar pits and museum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hancock_Park

There is also a district of the city that contains NIMBYs and other fossils, by a similar name.

Pico and Sepulveda! Pico and Sepulveda!

I remember it well and now I can’t get that stinger out of my head

I left you an email. Closed Links.

the museum is small but excellent; it has a wall covered just in Dire Wolf skulls found there

There's a pub a few minutes from me that was built in the 1620s and every time I go past it strikes be just how long ago that is.

That's roughly when The Mayflower set off, and St Peter's Basilica was built. And it's still a working pub, open every day.

https://www.theoldeboarshead.co.uk/about-the-pub/

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