Potsherding: Lessons in Storytelling & Conservancy: Part 1

Potsherding, pronounced pot sherding, is hunting for indigenous peoples’ relics, for me, in eastern Massachusetts’ spring plowed fields.  Much like expressive photography, potsherding is, in part, storytelling and conservancy through methodical traipsing over the land.  With potsherding, in unremarkable fields along the embankments and cuts left from the plow’s blade—eyes scanning, attention fixed—seeking the unseen.  With outdoor photography, for me, in the beautiful Pioneer Valley, also seeking the unseen.  Neither are straightforward endeavors of merely lacing up your boots and ambling through a field or in nature probing the scene, your attention fixed.  And each involves many of same skills and require similar passions for storytelling, conservancy and a love of the land. 

When I was younger, I had a friend who was twice my age in years and four or five times my age in life experience.  Darrell seemed adept at anything that fixed his attention or fired his passion. When potsherding with him, that is hunting for indigenous peoples relics in Massachusetts’ spring plowed fields, Darrell taught me much about discovery, storytelling and conservancy that influences my image making to this day.  That influence  can be seen in images I’ve made at Foxbard and Bardwell Farms, two of the Pioneer Valley’s first farms, each established in the 18th century.

Lessons & Similarities

Darrell was a remarkable outdoorsman.  For several years he lived alone in a cabin—with no electricity or running water—on an island set on an isolated lake in the backwoods of Maine.  It was there he acquired his encyclopedic knowledge of foraging in the forests of New England.  Darrell could tell you which plant could sustain, which could cure and which could injure.  A hunter, he used every bit of an animal, even beyond simple sustenance.  A talented and diverse artist, he collected deer and moose antler shed in winter, sculpting it with dentist tools into exquisite animistic statues—shamanistic and surreal depictions of elegant, sinuous beings that overtook the flow of the bone.  He was equally adept at pen and ink renderings of the moose and other wildlife of his native Maine.  Darrell stood where the clichés ‘jack of all trades’ and ‘font of wisdom’ intersected.  This seemed even more so when we went ‘potsherding’—that is, methodically plodding the newly plowed corn fields of southeastern Massachusetts looking for indigenous people’s artefacts in the fresh furrows.  Fields similar to those I often plod nowadays in the Pioneer Valley looking for nature’s artefacts to place within my frame when image making.

Darrell and I shared an admiration for the ingenuity, craftsmanship and aptitude of the people of pre-colonial New England.  Not only had they had walked the same woods and fields that we walked, they had prospered by nature’s economy.  With steadfast effort and resourcefulness, they coaxed the land to their will in ways both sophisticated and sublime.  The remnants and relics of those efforts seemed all around us in southeastern Massachusetts—and all of New England.  Traces could be seen in local lithic sites consisting of stone mounds and stone rows, embrasures and chambers that seemed to mimic and augment a receding glacier’s vestige eskers, moraines, potholes and erratics.  The original peoples of the region called down to us in the names of the towns we lived in, the streets we lived on, and the parks, rivers, ponds and beaches we played in.  Remnants were also found buried in places now only revealed by the farmers plow or the occasional archeologist.  In those springtime fields being readied for corn—a plant cultivated in New England for a thousand years—Darrell taught me the art of potsherding.  Much like photography, potsherding is an art of storytelling; a story that, at once, reveals and preserves a bit of a place, including the uses people put to it.  Much like expressive outdoor photography, it is storytelling through methodical traipsing over the land, with potsherding, in fields along the embankments and cuts left from the plow—eyes scanning, attention fixed—seeking the unseen.  Other commonalities between potsherding and outdoor expressive photography are evident. 

Like photography, potsherding is no straightforward endeavor of merely lacing up your boots and ambling through a field or in nature probing the scene, your attention fixed.  As for potsherding, it is no mean feat, acquiring the capacity to discern amongst the almost infinite dirt covered pebbles and shards of unremarkable stone that carpet recently plowed fields the fully formed, hand worked, minimalist masterpieces of stonework, that are both high art and indispensable tool.  It involves many of same skills attributable to outdoor photography.  For example, scouting and an intimacy with local light and weather conditions are key.  Much like outdoor photography, angled light of early morning or late afternoon often best suits efforts of delineating the kernel of an arrowhead or worked shard of quartz or flint from the cob of an ordinary scrap of stone.  An understanding the lay of light in situ at any given time of the day and year, along with an understanding of the malleability of weather conditions in the area, are also key to these efforts.  As Darrell taught me, when potsherding, one does not merely follow behind the ordered chaos of the plows cut like a seagull in search of an easy meal.  Rather, one awaits spring rain to tamp down the upturned soil and bathe the unearthed stones.  Otherwise, all you are likely to find in the shallow trenches are undistinguished lumps clutching closely at their robes of dirt, coyly hiding their true character.  And should you go into the plowed fields too soon after a hard rain, you risk leaving a boot in the muck for future potsherders to uncover. 

Much like a successful outdoor image making excursion, potsherding for relics relies on conditions beyond our control, but conditions that can be paid attention to and contemplated in a manner that best allows for the opportunity to achieve the outcome we’ve envisioned, to tell the story we’d hoped to tell.  Another similarity between potsherding and photography is the indispensable commitment to honing your aptitude for perceiving that gem of hand worked stone, dirt covered and barely differing amongst the multitude of similar pebbles and shards that surround it.  Specifically, of seeing that which is not readily seen, of visualizing something left unrevealed until, in photography, you place your frame around it.  That is, until you compose and, in the process, uncover something wrought from nature, shaped from the environment—something completely a part of nature and only extracted from it and brought into the light by your efforts, and your guile and commitment to the craft and the art of image making.

My time with Darrell remains with me and influences my approach to outdoor expressive photography these years later—it informs my ultimate goal of coming back with more than just pixels aligned and arrayed just so.  I carry that time as a reminder that my photography—much like potsherding—tries to tell a bit of the story of a place and, by that, effects my relationships with those places I visit here in the Pioneer Valley in order to make images, a region of lands tended, managed, cultivated and lived in for eons.  And today, I can draw a straight line—a leading line—between what I took away from our time potsherding for artefacts then and my outdoor expressive photography now.  Much like that favorite lens or other beloved piece of kit, I carry Darrell’s lessons with me to this day, whether in the field or the digital darkroom.  

Darrell taught me much about life and the patient art of careful, considered scrutiny of areas nearly universally overlooked for the bounty that they may contain.  He taught me as well that the true bounty was not necessarily the artefact found but the connection between the past, the place, the people, myself and the story these together make.  Back then it was for bird points and shards, the odd adze or celt, or even a spear point that I traipsed the local farmlands seeking that connection, that story.  Now it is the well composed scene—a singular tree backdropped by sweeping cloud or a striking sunrise tickling a pattern in the furrows or on the fences that lace the fields—that pushes me to tie up my boots and traipse across the managed and cultivated lands of the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts in the hope of more connections, more stories.

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Storytelling & Conservancy

Walking the fields, furrows and forests of the region with camera at hand calls me back to those outings with Darrell.  Every step—then and now—being  made for the sake of finding something hidden in order to bring it to the light and to share and preserve it and to tell a bit of story of a place.  At heart, Darrell was a preservationist and story teller fixing into place a bit of history, conserving and preserving a place and its story, much like I aspire to be today though expressive outdoor photography. 

In those fields Darrell sought, head bowed as in reverence, traces of a sophisticated civilization so that he could bring those back into the light in order to preserve and share traces of the people who left them.  He kept meticulous records of his finds especially in one nearby corn field with a particularly robust lithic harvest.  His hand drawn map of that field plotting his finds and the surrounding forest was a flag with which he staked his unyielding fascination that a people, with an unappreciated sophistication, had lived, loved, hunted and sustained themselves in the acres of woods patched with cornfields near his home.  His dedication to the art of potsherding the very warp and weft of that flag.  A flag of discovery and preservation.  A flag I try to raise to this day when making images.

Much like expressive photography, Darrell’s efforts, well beyond the mapping of his finds, beyond his flag, amounted, in total, to contextualizing a place anew.  He did this by draping a place with a deeper meaning beyond the plow’s cut and the wager of a tangible harvest.  Through his discoveries and his map, Darrell ultimately was telling—or at the very least contributing to—the story of a place.  That is, the found shards and scraps—Darrell’s remnants and relics—when considered together through the lens of history amounted to a new mosaic that added something to the story of those anonymous fields and furrows.  Those finds inevitably wrapped those places and their past inhabitants in a new context that was at once always present and yet completely new and unknown.  His repeatedly returning and hunting for additions to that story, that mosaic, is much what I do in my photography and for the same purpose.  That is, to make from the otherwise overlooked bits and bobs of a place—through contemplative examination over time—something new, in an attempt add to the story of a place and, if successful, perhaps tell a new story.  Image making is my attempt at turning land into landscape, of adding human meaning through context and story—even enlisting these words, this essay, as my map, my flag.

Perhaps this commonality of potsherding and expressive photography—the addition to or enhancement of a story, a context, of a place—is the most compelling aspect of each.  Both expressive photography and potsherding contextualize a place through telling or adding to a place’s story.  Those stories turn the land into landscape—with relics from the past on one hand and thoughtfully composed images on the other.  Landscape is something more than land.  It is a human construct providing a context, a foundation, from which to find meaning.  Whether that meaning goes no further than the aesthetics of beauty or to a deeper place, engagement with the landscape is yet another interaction between people and the land we inhabit.  Both potsherding and expressive outdoor photography implicate the interactions between people and the land—the women and men who people the land—past and present—and the uses they put to the land.  This is so even in wild places because many wildernesses left today are the result of human interaction in cordoning off such from human activity beyond not much more than bare interaction.

The deeper, preservational aspects of potsherding are profoundly ingrained in what I am trying to do with my photography.  That is to say, I see my image making, as I am sure many do of their own, as an act of preserving something which, on some level, did not exist before the act of creation, the act of placing a frame around the textures, colors, visual relationships, etc., that culminate in compositional cohesion.  But more than that.  In photography, as in potsherding, when all these discrete acts of creative preservation mount up, we are left with a tapestry depicting a place and its story—a tangible account of that place.  A story that fixes a bit of a place into place.  And, if we are lucky, an entry into the ledger of conservancy.  In the end, Darrell’s finds and his handmade map and my images and words, along with the acts and reverence that accompanied their creation, manifestly preserve the objects found, those relics of our efforts—his points of stone and my points of light.  But more importantly, perhaps, they preserve the very places from which they sprung, the fields and furrows of lands we roam that have been manned and managed, farmed and framed, worked and worshipped from time out of hand.

Doug Butler

In Part 2, I discuss the two farms were these images were made, the conservancy efforts to maintain the land’s pastoral state and conservation through preservation in art, images and discovery through engagement with the land.