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Amazonian Shamanism With Cinematographer Paul Goldsmith - Ep 123
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On today’s episode we visit with Paul Goldsmith, award winning cinematographer and creator of Talking Stone: Rock Art of the Coso, documentary film and the coffee table book on Coso rock art based on our film. In this episode we discuss some surprising insights Paul has after firsthand meetings with practicing shamans in the Amazon. He gives us a glimpse of what they are like and some surprising reflections on his interactions. You will learn some interesting aspects about shamanism and the Native American cultures. A lively discussion!
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/rockart/123
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Transcript
Introduction to the California Rock Art Foundation
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello out there in archaeology podcast land. This is Dr. Alan Garfinkel. I'm the president and founder of the California Rock Art Foundation. And what we do is we identify, evaluate, manage, and conserve rock art both in Alta, California and in Baja, California.
00:00:21
Speaker
We conduct field trips, we have trainings, exercise, we do research, and in every way possible we try to preserve, protect, and coordinate treasures of Alta and Baja California rock art, of which there are many, and diverse.
Collaboration with Native Americans
00:00:35
Speaker
We also work closely with Native Americans and partner with them to recognize and protect sacred sites.
00:00:42
Speaker
So for more info about the fabulous California Rock Art Foundation, you can go to carockart.org.
Sponsorship and Support
00:00:48
Speaker
Also, I'm open to give me a call, 805-312-2261. We would welcome sponsorship or underwriting, helping us to defray the costs of our podcasts, and also membership in California Rock Art Foundation, and of course, donations since we are a 501c3 nonprofit scientific and educational corporation. God bless everyone out there in podcast land.
Rock Art Podcast Overview
00:01:16
Speaker
You're listening to The Rock Art Podcast. Join us every week for fascinating tales of rock art, adventure, and archaeology. Find our contact info in the show notes and send us your suggestions.
Paul Goldsmith Joins the Discussion
00:01:33
Speaker
Hello out there in archaeology podcast land. This is your host, Dr. Alan Garfinkel, for episode 123 of The Rock Art Podcast.
00:01:43
Speaker
We are blessed and honored to have Paul Goldsmith, an award-winning cinematographer, the gentleman who worked with me on the Talking Stone documentary film and the author of the Talking Stone book.
Experiences with Amazonian Shamans
00:01:56
Speaker
And we're going to talk about his firsthand knowledge of working with Shamans, the Achoa in the Amazon, and also his reflections on how to understand or appreciate
00:02:10
Speaker
the way to sort of reflect on rock art, rather interesting and dynamic interchange. Paul, good to hear from you again and to reconnect. Thanks for having me on, Alan. Yeah, it's really a pleasure. And we connected basically to have you I think contribute and talk about an interesting aspect
00:02:31
Speaker
of your personal experiences with the Atuar, am I correct? Yes, I have two things that I thought might be of interest to your audience. One is about a shaman from a journey, a film I took to the Amazon. And the other is about us, modern Western human beings and our interface with rock art and why it intrigues us. So there's two separate
00:03:01
Speaker
little stories. And why don't I start with the story about the Amazon? Is that good? Please do. Go right ahead.
Power Dynamics in Shamanism
00:03:09
Speaker
So I met Alan. Initially, we were put in touch with David Hearst Thomas, who's the curator of Museum of Natural History. And Alan wanted to do a film on rock art. David suggested me
00:03:21
Speaker
and we started in on this project and the idea was to make it from multiple perspectives instead of it being academics talking and speculating about rock art would try to go from as many different
00:03:37
Speaker
hear from as many different voices as possible. And one person I went to was a psychoanalyst who had journeyed to the Amazon for the last 15 or 20 years, had been very interested in indigenous people. And I thought she might have something interesting to say about these rock art images, even though she hadn't actually been to the rock art sites.
00:04:00
Speaker
So she's in the film, and then later when I turn the film into a book, she's in the book, sort of saying essentially her same comments. A couple of years later, she called me up and she said she had a book contract to write about Atuar Shaiman. Atuar is a tribe in the Amazon.
00:04:20
Speaker
And she'd been visiting them off and on for 15 to 20 years along with another psychoanalyst based in San Francisco. And they were going down probably for their final visit to finish the book. And did I want to come along and take still photos or shoot
Documenting Shamanic Practices
00:04:36
Speaker
some film?
00:04:36
Speaker
I wasn't sure at first, for one thing, I'm getting a little old and I wasn't sure how to do in the Amazon, but she was 80 years old and the other other fellow was 75. So I thought, well, if they can do it, maybe I can. And also, I wasn't quite sure what psychoanalysts who are very embedded in Freudian theory, how they could really connect to an aboriginal, essentially a prehistoric tribe and really have any contact with shaman.
00:05:06
Speaker
But I decided I liked both these people very much sort of in a sense, despite their training, they were highly trained, highly placed in the hierarchy of psychoanalysis. I really liked who they were. I thought they were very intuitive, curious people. So we went on down and the trip was basically a journey up the river, a tributary to the Amazon to visit a couple of of shaman.
00:05:33
Speaker
I had had a little experience with a shaman about 50 years earlier doing a film on Native American art. We filmed a Navajo medicine man.
00:05:43
Speaker
ancient guy in his late 80s came writing into a trading post in northern New Mexico and did a sand painting. And the idea was in the film was to show that the sand painting looks to us like art, actually looks a lot like a pictograph. But in fact, it's a ceremony for Native Americans. And after they do the ceremony and they say the prayers, then they flick sand over it and essentially destroy
00:06:08
Speaker
what we think of as a painting. So it's quite different from our concept of art. So I had some idea of who a medicine man was in my mind, this sort of sweet, gentle, old man. But what I learned in the Amazon,
00:06:21
Speaker
was that the shaman in that world, where the culture is still essentially intact as a prehistoric culture. They might wear short pants, they have a shotgun. There's certain very clear traces of modern life, but the culture, the things they believe in haven't really changed.
00:06:43
Speaker
And the world that the Amazon, a shaman inhabits in the Amazon, turns out to be a very violent world, not what I thought of as sort of a peaceful medicine man.
Spiritual and Violent World of Shamans
00:06:54
Speaker
The final shaman who we filmed, who was sort of the most powerful, was one of three brothers who had become shaman. One had been killed, assassinated. Another brother had quit very early because it was dangerous. And the fellow we were filming had been almost killed in an assassination.
00:07:12
Speaker
And why is it dangerous? Well, in these little villages, the societies, which I think might not be too different from the communities that you're familiar with with rock art, are relatively small, maybe about 100 people, 150. They never turn into real towns. There's two leaders. There's the leader of the community, the tribal chief or whatever.
00:07:38
Speaker
And then there's a shaman, and they are the two centers of power. And the shaman, because he has what we call magical powers, down there he can send out invisible poison arrows, or he can catch poison arrows and keep them from hitting you. He is seen as
00:08:00
Speaker
the source of a lot of what goes right or wrong in their culture. There was a village near the shaman we were filming, two villages upriver. A number of people died there. I don't know the name of the disease, but they didn't see it as a disease. They saw it as some sort of disaster. That village went to their shaman and said, what happened? Why are people dying?
00:08:26
Speaker
The shaman took Ayahuasca. He had visions. And in his vision, it was the shaman downriver that had caused this. He'd sent invisible poison arrows to these people. So naturally, the community is upset. They laid an ambush for the shaman. And while he was on his canoe going down the river, they shot him. They didn't kill him. He was badly wounded. He fell to the bottom of his canoe. His wife was there. She took over. She got him to safety.
00:08:56
Speaker
And he survived. He was the only shaman, the only house we saw on the Amazon that had any kind of walls. All the other houses were large, thatched structures, but they were completely open air, even the other shaman. This fellow had put in walls around its house because he was still concerned about possible attempts at revenge. The point in terms of the rock art and American culture is that the
00:09:25
Speaker
images that we see in the COSO rock art, presumably a number, a large percentage of them were done by Shaiman. And
00:09:35
Speaker
probably shaman who were living in a somewhat similar culture to the shaman from the Amazon. They were very powerful figures in their community. They were the ones who had the visions. They were the ones who prepared any drugs or medicines or hallucinogens. They were the ones who managed the rituals, ceremonies, and
00:10:00
Speaker
I would presume that they also lived in a world that wasn't totally peaceful, that had violence in it. And one of the Koso Canyons is called Monster Canyon. And even the archaeologist called it Monster Canyon, obviously a very anthropomorphic term. But just looking at those images, they sure look like monsters. They're very clearly aggressive.
00:10:26
Speaker
terrifying images that seem to say something like, stay out of here, or I'm powerful, or violence is definitely an element in those images. And I think what I learned in the Amazon is that the shaman's world definitely includes violence. It's an element that's just natural to what they do, the power they have. And I think those rock art images
00:10:55
Speaker
must also include a feeling of threat or violence or it's impossible really to interpret it for us as Western modern people, but there's definitely an element of it that
00:11:13
Speaker
is not just a two dimensional pictograph.
Ancestral Connections through Ayahuasca and Rock Art
00:11:16
Speaker
It strikes emotion into people and maybe even fear, in some cases, or respect. But there's a lot of repercussions from those images. Does that make sense? So the imagery or the use of ayahuasca amongst the Achoa appear to focus a lot on this dream state or these visions that they get
00:11:40
Speaker
and that these are messages from the beyond that play into their daily lives. Is that correct? Yes. I mean, I think all humans at every age are looking to understand cause and effect. And in our age, we look a lot to science for the causes.
00:11:59
Speaker
But if you don't have science, you're still looking for the causes. And you're still, I think, just as certain of what the causes are, whether they're stars or events with animals, weather, or more likely some sort of contact between our world and this other world that a shaman makes. So I think it's really just that the shaman was the contact beyond this everyday world that we all would have been.
00:12:28
Speaker
And there was an illusion in that movie, the clip that I saw, or the movie that you put together about the Achewar believing or part of their cosmology is that their ancestors still exist and they can communicate with them in a supernatural fashion.
00:12:47
Speaker
Am I correct in that understanding? Yes, and I don't think they're the only ones. One close friend of mine who's worked with Michael Pollan, who's written a book about psychedelics, he recently took mushrooms in a guided psychedelic experience, and he said that he was in contact with his ancestors. So I don't think it's strictly taking in the Amazon.
00:13:11
Speaker
I think the ancestors are alive in us to some respect. You know, we certainly dream about our parents or people who've died. And I think it's quite possible with psychedelics of some sort, we're in contact at a further level. That's fascinating because I've always thought about some of the rock guard images and certainly the images and the kosos
00:13:39
Speaker
as somehow being memorials or images recognizing the ancestral, the ancestors, the kin, and memorializing their lives in some of these images themselves, and that this was a way of sort of perpetually recognizing and remembering them, if that makes any sense.
00:14:02
Speaker
I think it makes a lot of sense. I mean, most of us, probably all of us have photos of our family members, of parents and grandparents around in our house.
Human Attraction to Rock Art
00:14:11
Speaker
I don't think we want to live in a world that's strictly in this moment. I think we very much want to include the past and our ancestors and even teachers and old friends we want. We want that history to be alive. And we have a number of ways of doing it.
00:14:33
Speaker
I think in these cultures, the rock art is a primary way of doing it. What was the main takeaway that you got from being with the Achoa and the Shamans that kind of may connect you to some of the experiences you had making our film? Was there any sort of epiphanies that you had? Well, the surprise for me was the
00:14:58
Speaker
the violence that the shaman lived in. When the shaman talked about who his teacher was, at a certain point he would then go, and he was killed. So I had never thought of violence and danger in connection to the rock art images.
00:15:17
Speaker
I imagine ceremonies and we can speculate are they hoping for a good hunting or are they thanking for having had a good hunt or are they making an image of a shaman who's just on a ceremony. But I didn't think of them having
00:15:33
Speaker
these sort of repercussions. And if it is such a violent world, then a lot of those images are echoing violence. In other words, if there's an image of a shaman pecked in that rock art, and some of them the anthropomorphic figures, those figures may be
00:15:55
Speaker
memorializing someone who's who's killed someone or maybe who was killed himself or was almost killed. This is a this is a person who's one foot is in another world, an underground world or a spiritual world, but who also is a very violent world in our culture. And I never thought of the images having emotionality to them like that or danger or fear.
00:16:23
Speaker
That makes a lot of sense to me. Okay, well let's stop there and we'll pick it up on the next segment. See you in the flip-flop, gang. Welcome back to episode 123 of your Rock Art podcast. We are blessed and honored to be speaking with Paul Goldsmith, very noted and rather illustrious cinematographer we've worked with over the years.
00:16:49
Speaker
He's with us to talk about shamanism, but also about his, a bit of a unique perspective and some insights regarding the rock art studies that we did together. Paul, why don't you take it from here? Okay, thank you, Alan. Having done the film with Alan, Talking Stone, Rock Art of the Kosos, I still thought it was while I was filming. I sort of shot them from the hip, but it was so hard to get access to these places. I thought I should do something.
00:17:18
Speaker
And then I looked at these photos and I thought, well, this is pretty interesting. I should do something so people can see them if they don't see the film, which was shown a few times on public television in Southern California. And there's some websites you can get it. But, you know, film is different. I thought maybe this could be a book.
00:17:36
Speaker
So I wrote some more text. I included what I learned in the film. And the University of Utah Press published a book. So between the film and the book, I naturally showed this to all of my friends and talked about rock art and my interest in Aboriginal culture and the culture beyond ours, which is so layered with the technical
00:17:59
Speaker
the layers of technology that we live in, which separate us from nature. And I was gradually realized that almost everyone was interested in the rock earth. They weren't too interested in some of the other things that I was interested in, arrowheads, shaft straighteners, various artifacts from the culture. That was just rocks to them. But they all seemed to be interested in the petroglyphs, every person.
00:18:25
Speaker
male, female, people who didn't have any particular interest in archaeology. And I was somewhat puzzled by this.
00:18:34
Speaker
And at the same time, shortly after this, I was doing a film on consciousness in England. Francis Crick, first convention on consciousness and a bunch of neurobiologists there and neuroscientists. And I learned in the filming about how the architecture of our brain is so much how the function of how we think and how we behave. So with that in mind, I thought,
00:19:04
Speaker
Maybe this rock art piques people's interests because there's something in our mind that it lights up some neurons fire. I'd also read a book about the history of words and alphabet. And clearly, the earliest writing is hieroglyphics and cuneiform. But before the writing, we humans must have been very involved with reading
00:19:31
Speaker
Thank you very much.
00:19:35
Speaker
things that weren't written but were visually in front of us. I'm sure for 100,000 years we could follow animals' hoof prints and follow trails. And I think any experienced tracker can tell you what kind of animal, sex of the animal. Is it running? Is it hunting? Anybody who's involved with fishing?
00:19:56
Speaker
can read the surfaces of the water, people can read the weather some. So I'm thinking that for tens of thousands of years we were sort of reading, but we weren't reading from print or books. But our brain was developing the skill to read.
00:20:13
Speaker
to take visual imagery and make sense of it. So that when we gradually shifted into things like hieroglyphics and cuneiform, and then ultimately the alphabet, our brain was ready to take this on. Just as if you look at any child's very young child, you can see how they're just absolutely ready to learn language. It's hardwired in the brain. You just have to give them the language that they're there to learn.
00:20:40
Speaker
They speak Chinese, they learn Chinese. They speak English, they learn English. They're ready to go. So I was thinking, our brains must have been ready for this visual communication. And this rock art looks a lot like some form of visual communication.
00:20:57
Speaker
And I think the reason why pretty much everyone I know got interested in it is something in their brain fired when they looked at it and you know some early level that is still there. And they were energized to interpret it or to make a story out of it or to respond to it some way. And I thought that was an interesting aspect about rock art because we
00:21:23
Speaker
mostly are talking about the people who made it and what they were thinking and how to interpret it, but we don't look at us and why we are interested in it. And that's my take on why I think we're interested in it. What do you think?
Neuropsychological Connections to Rock Art
00:21:38
Speaker
Well, I think you're on to something, Paul, in a big way, because one of the things I've learned, I connected with a gentleman from Mesoamerica, from Mexico City, an East Indian scholar, a Fulbright scholar,
00:21:54
Speaker
His name is Tirtha Mukhopadhyay, and he's specialized in aesthetics and neurophysiology, neuropsychology. There's a thing called neurotheology as well. And we spent four years writing a book on some of these aspects. And one of the elements that is the strongest and perhaps somewhat revolutionary or somewhat controversial
00:22:23
Speaker
is that these images continue to this day to emote. In other words, when a person sees them, there's some sort of physiological or neuropsychological tether that occurs, and they begin processing the image, and they feel things. They get emotions. It could be excitement. It could be terror. It could be joy.
00:22:53
Speaker
it could be some sort of transcendence, but they begin to either understand or almost understand or feel there's some sort of communication and feeling, almost an agency coming from the images themselves and speaking to them in a very unusual way. It's a way that these images tell us something about the artisan and what the artisan was intending
00:23:23
Speaker
and it gives us a glimpse back, a connection to the original intent perhaps of what these images were trying to portray. This is kind of in a similar sense along the same lines as studying the gestural elements
00:23:45
Speaker
of the figures. Sometimes the figures have their arms astride up towards the sky and this posture they call the holy hands. Sometimes they're down by their sides. Sometimes they're out
00:23:58
Speaker
Sometimes you'll see it almost in supplication, almost pleading under another larger figure. And I've seen that in the Kosos and elsewhere in rock art. And so there's something in our psychology, in our minds, that allows us to understand or somehow equate an image
00:24:23
Speaker
and get something from it. Does any of that make any sense to you, Paul? Well, I agree, but I also disagree. I mean, when you started to say how when we see this, our brains are activated and neurons are firing, you know, we put our attention to it. We're excited and interested in some. I agree with that.
00:24:41
Speaker
You then went on to say that there's something in the images that bring that out. And I disagree with that. I mean, I think the images are, as the painter says in our film, the language of abstract art. They're some of the basic images that you can come up with.
00:24:58
Speaker
But I don't think that the emotionality is coming from the images. After all, people often look at them and go, oh, these are aliens. It's clearly an alien. Look, this person has three eyes or three heads. And they were not telling us they're aliens. They didn't have that in mind at all. That's us. I think that so much of the interpretation is
00:25:23
Speaker
is from modern Western human beings who can't begin to imagine a world that has no science but is based around enormous number of taboos and
00:25:37
Speaker
and spiritual connections that are extremely strong but unimaginable to us. So I don't give the images quite the credit for connecting to us. I just think the simplicity of them, after all, a lot of those images are geometric.
00:25:58
Speaker
it's right right to see that they are yeah suffocating they're in prayer they're in this or that but they we connect and we look at them but it but again what i what i see is when you have an anthropomorpha some sort of an animal human figure or an or a human figure and it has a certain set of gestures to it what they found scientifically they've done studies with artists and
00:26:25
Speaker
and actors and actresses, where they replicate those postures that are either in three-dimensional, you know, antique 30, 40, 50 thousand year old, you know, portable sculptures, or that appear on Rock Guard itself. The particular actors or actresses are then asked to
00:26:51
Speaker
tell us what they feel, what they see, what they sense from conducting those particular postures. And they get a sense from those postures of whether this is sorrow, whether it's elation, whether it's some sort of a fear or an openness or some sort of a
00:27:18
Speaker
There's different ways to call it. You call it supplication, prayer. You can call it transcendence. You can call it what you want. But I think there is that particular sense embedded in the gestures that are represented. That's my point on that one. But you're right. Much of this is very abstract.
00:27:44
Speaker
very difficult to understand and would be nearly impossible for a Western industrial thought or some sort of a Cartesian mind to wrap their minds around and get anything from it. So maybe it comes from the confusion or the frustration or the ability of trying to deconstruct
00:28:09
Speaker
what is being potentially elicited and communicated in these symbols. And as you were saying that it fires certain elements of our neurology. And so we get this overwhelming message to try to decode or deconstruct what these images are trying to tell us. What about that?
00:28:32
Speaker
Well, I agree. We get the message to try to decode it. And I agree that they're communicating, but they're not communicating with us. They're communicating with that shaman in the Amazon. And when actors perform those gestures, I believe they do connect to certain emotions.
Cultural Gaps in Understanding Shamanism
00:28:51
Speaker
But they're modern Western human beings who have been
00:28:56
Speaker
their culture has taught them that this gesture means this and this gesture means that. And I think there's a certain amount animals bear their teeth. I think that's a pretty clear vision of a threat. But I think a lot of these images are well beyond that. It's a much more developed culture.
00:29:16
Speaker
And I was talking to Peter Nabobkov, who's written some books on Native American culture. And I was saying how, imagine that people came, a tribe comes to this cave and does some sort of ceremony that lasts for days. And there's dances, there's songs, there's stories told. Maybe there's even sacrifice. Imagine as much as you can,
00:29:43
Speaker
And in this cave, they've lit some candles and then they're gone. And a thousand years later, we show up and there's the cave and there are these three puddles of wax.
00:29:54
Speaker
No, you know, the archaeologists are going to start speculating. Why are there three puddles? And why are they lined up like this? You know, where did the wax come from? And how much? You know, the whole event, which is, you know, ninety nine point nine percent, not the wax.
00:30:15
Speaker
is invisible. And I think most of what those images come from is invisible. And I think the remarkable thing is that even now, thousands of years later, they are written in a language, you know, they are
00:30:36
Speaker
close to being hieroglyphs or something. They're not so abstract or vague. They're not the sand painting that's been brushed out. We can't read that sand painting. It's gone. These images are still there, and we do connect to them. I think the more specific we get on our interpretation, I think the further away we get from what was really going on.
00:31:05
Speaker
Well, you know, I think yes and no, because I think in certain instances, and we have these available to us, that the symbols themselves are shared ethnographically, or the information about the sacred narrative is told to us about certain panels or certain pictures. And if we use those as a bit of a template,
00:31:34
Speaker
They may be some insights, glimpses of what we're talking about. The one I'm thinking about specifically is there's a very large painting in the Kauai Sioux country and it's on a boulder, it's on an isolated pillar of limestone. The boulder is broken in two and water comes out of it.
00:31:59
Speaker
It's an ecophonic site, so if you talk into the rock, it comes and it's sort of in an amphitheater kind of effect. And on that rock is a large four-foot image of a being, and also there's snakes on both sides of it. Well, we know from the native people they've told us what that particular image means.
00:32:22
Speaker
It's a particular animal master being that master lives in the underworld and that's the corridor, the portal to this underworld and that animal master or mistress is responsible for the transmogrification, the resurrection of the spirit animals bringing them back. So in any event,
00:32:45
Speaker
And that's rare that we get those glimpses of what they're telling us. And I think we'll stop it right there for that segment. See you in the flip-flop, gang.
00:32:56
Speaker
Welcome back. This is the third and final segment of the Rock Art Podcast, Episode 123 with Paul Goldsmith. And in the second segment, we were talking about some of the reflections I had about some of our understanding of rock art. Paul seemed to want to respond, so Paul, give it a go.
00:33:16
Speaker
Well, Alan had just given us an example of rock art that we do, we can interpret accurately, a Kawaiasu site where there's a creation story of the Kawaiasu. And the elders have said that's what it is. And I believe that's probably true. If they say so, I'm sure that's it.
00:33:37
Speaker
My point is, first of all, that's a relatively rare situation where there's anybody alive today who can say, oh, yes, we know in our culture that represents this and that and so on. The Native Americans I talked to in the film and in the book didn't begin to do that.
00:33:53
Speaker
But what I would say, Alan, is you have been able to give this a title, the Kawaii Subaru story with the snakes and so on. But how sparse that is compared to what it must mean to them, for instance, I could show you a swastika, which is a common image in Native American culture and in Indian cultures. It's a
00:34:19
Speaker
seems like a pretty basic, almost abstract image that could be four directions, four winds, could be up and down, but you show that to an old Jew and there's a lifetime's worth of agony and anger and
00:34:35
Speaker
and emotions I can't begin to, you know, you could write a book on what that is saying to him. Or a cross, another X, basically, a very simple straight line with a horizontal, shorter horizontal line. We can say, oh, it's a cross. And then we could go a little further and say, oh, it represents the cross that Jesus was crucified on. But that's pretty sparse. There are people who
00:35:00
Speaker
were willing to die for that cross. There's probably been hundreds of thousands of people who have died with that cross clasped in their hands. The story of Jesus, the crucifixion, what it means to people, what the churches they went to as a child, what their parents said, the priests, I mean, the density of it. Again, you could write a book. So
00:35:26
Speaker
being able to even define something, which I think is really rare in rock art, still doesn't begin to go to penetrate the world, what that means to the people who live in that world. If you knew nothing about Christianity, the cross wouldn't mean much. Right. And Paul, you're exactly right. We can't possibly appreciate
00:35:52
Speaker
nor really recognize or sort of somehow perhaps intuit what the cosmological realm was or what the theological veneer is for Native people in any way possible because it is so foreign
00:36:13
Speaker
to most minds in the modern world. It's certainly so foreign and so difficult and so different than anything that we would appreciate or understand that it begins to pale by comparison. And you're exactly right.
00:36:31
Speaker
Well, I'll just end with what I asked one of these shaman because they were now in their 70s. I think they're the last generation who actually will be shaman embedded in their culture with all their power. I think that's going to they may still be around, but they won't be what they were. And I asked him once, when when did he first meet a white man? And he said, oh, he was a young man. I think he was.
00:36:56
Speaker
17 or 18. And I said, well, what happened? He said, well, we knew that if you saw a white man, you should try to kill him.
00:37:04
Speaker
So I'm saying that just to give you an idea of how distant their culture is from ours. Absolutely. And I'm sure that's accurate. Well, I guess that's all we're going to have time for right now. And I hope our listeners got a glimpse of some of the deep and abiding understanding and reflections from Paul
Episode Credits
00:37:27
Speaker
and Alan. It's been in a rather an interesting and dynamic interchange. Thanks, Alan. Seeing the flip flop gang.
00:37:40
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Rock Art Podcast with Dr. Alan Garfinkel and Chris Webster. Find show notes and contact information at www.arcpodnet.com forward slash rock art. Thanks for listening and thanks for sharing this podcast with your family and friends.
00:38:12
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.