Think of it like this: In the beginning --or shortly thereafter--there was the Earth, and then along came the farmer, with his plow and his
digging stick, and then 10,000 or so years later along came the computer.
Black-and-white drawings detail the simplicity of the
digging stick, the intricacy of weaving, essential parts of an African glider, and the inner structure of the Egyptian pyramid.
A wooden
digging stick from Border Cave dated to about 40,000 years ago was found in association with bored but broken stones likely used to weight such sticks.
In the cases described here, Pfeiffer noted that the punctured nature of the cranial lesions were indicative of impact with a pointed object such as a
digging stick (unlike broader lesions characteristic of an object such as a falling rock or tree branch).
One of those was the economist Thorstein Bunde Veblen, who, when writing about Native American culture in 1915, understood that immaterial equipment [1915, 272] is far more valuable than the material equipment, hi a passage about the California Native Americans, Veblen wrote that, "the loss of the basket,
digging stick, and mortar, simply as physical objects, would have signified little but the conceivable loss of the squaw's knowledge of the soil and the seasons, of food and fiber plants, and of mechanical expedients would have meant the present dispersal and starvation of the community."
As Benally prayed, he invited Aspinall to join him in holding the ceremonial Navajo
digging stick or "gish." After the ceremony, a deeply moved Aspinall is reported to have said to Dr.
There we documented the women painting country and Dreamings, including Wati Kutjarra (Two Men), Kanaputa (
Digging Stick Women) and Dingarri (initiates) Dreamings for a French touring exhibition called Yapa Painters from Balgo and Lajamanu.1 In August 1992 the same group of women, including Munja, friend of Catherine Berndt, and Peggy Rockman Napaljarri (2) from Lajamanu, chose two hills near Wirrimanu to perform a Wati Kutjarra (Two Men) Dreaming ceremony for Milli Milli, an ABC (Australia) documentary film directed by Wayne Barker about his people, the Yawuru and related Kimberley peoples.
"According to the story, Lono was out digging his crops with an 'O'O, a
digging stick, and stabbed himself in the foot," recalls Nakamura.
In the course of a second season of fieldwork in 1994, drain WD3 was investigated following the discovery of a wooden
digging stick protruding from one ditch and the recovery of gourd fragments from the basal fill of another nearby ditch.
Gardens were prepared entirely by hand and with few tools: a long
digging stick, sometimes with the butt-end of a branch protruding from the working end for use as a footrest; a hoe made from the scapula (shoulderblade) of a deer or bison bound into a split stick with rawhide; rakes of deer antlers bound to a sapling handle or a bound sheaf of curve-ended saplings; and flat-rock hand trowels.
Swain and Sullivan also say they observed Krantz pocket artifacts, including a "donut stone" used as a weight on a
digging stick, and that the guide later placed this object on display alongside scores of other artifacts at the Smugglers Cove adobe.
In hard soil the root can be a foot deep, and you'll need a good
digging stick or a shovel to reach it.