I have several atlatls.
Way cool. Do you practice with them? I'm strictly an armchair expert. I'd probably spear my own foot if I tried to cast a dart. No, really, my friends will tell you.
People novels? Never heard of them… tell me more
I'm so glad you asked.
Kathleen O'Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear are a married couple, practicing archaeologists, who write novels, seperately and together. Together they have written a series of novels set in different eras of prehistoric North America.
The first in the series is People of the Wolf, which brings the first tribe of paleo-Indians through the ice barrier. Most subsequent volumes are named People of the…Something: People of the Nightland, People of the Sea and so on.
Each novel is self-contained and hundreds or thousands of years seperate them, but the premise is that all the characters descend from the original tribe, The People. Also, certain meta-characters develop across the whole set of novels. A character in one book becomes an ancestor in another book, and perhaps a powerful spirit being later on. So there is value in reading the books in 'historical' order.
I think the most successful are the novels set not long before the historical era, where it's reasonable to project known historic cultural traits back into the past. We know or can infer a lot about how the High Mississippians or the pre-League Iroquois lived. The Gears often project historical traits far into the past, which fails to convince me. 8,000 years is a long time, and the Archaic was a very different era from the Late Woodland, f'rinstance. But then, these are novels, not history books. When the Gears take a tendentious view of controversial subjects like Kennewick Man or the fall of the Chaco Anasazi, they may be playing the stories for drama rather than expressing their own actual beliefs.
The novels are infused with Indian spiritual concepts. I'm fascinated by a world where a Contrary experiences reality backwards, and may marry a Great Horned Serpent. Of course these are the authors' interpretations of these concepts, and actual believers may disagree.
The Gears sometimes vent their frustrations as professional archaeologists, and express unkind opinions about contemporaries who would bulldoze an ancient habitation site in order to put up a strip mall on schedule, or who would demand the repatriation of human remains before they can be fully studied. I try to remember that these are their opinions and they're entitled to them. If you're sensitive to any of these issues, you may be offended.
The authors have some other quirks. Someone (probably Kathleen) likes to write strong female characters, who probably appeal a lot to women readers. The novels feature many more women warriors and war chiefs than you'd have found in real life, and they're mostly fem women who marry and raise children, not two-spirits. Oh well, these are novels, and these characters are more interesting than the candy-floss girls in many Boys' Own Adventure books.
I read very little fiction, haven't the time or the interest, but I'm working my way through this whole series. I recommend it highly to anyone who is interested in prehistoric North America and has time to read some well-written fiction.
Beyond the Sea of Ice also looks interesting, thanks for bringing it up.
