Unbelonging Endnotes
1. What makes a weed a weed? A weed is "a plant in the wrong place" or a “plant growing where it is unwanted.”
Wikipedia: JR Harlan and JM deWet Some thoughts about weeds. Economic botany 1965
2. The term weed is applied to any plant that grows or reproduces aggressively, or is invasive outside its native habitat.
Wikipedia: Jules Janick, Horticultural Science San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1979
3. Humans started to domesticate plants unwittingly. Seeds survive digestion, and end up in the toilet area. Plants grow from these seeds. Humans observed this, and started planting.
Jared Diamond, Guns Germs and Steel, New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company 1999
4. The key to farming is alteration of the gene pool of exploited resources, which botanists and zoologists normally call ‘domestication.
Ian Morris Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014
5. Map of indigenous, occupied and unceded land
6. The dominator model, the pursuit of external power, frames all relationships as power struggles.
bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, New York: Washington Square Press, 2004
7. Focusing on indigenous science, it’s clear in these circumstances that European colonization created a violent rift between humans and their connection to the land.
Jessica Hernandez PhD, Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science, Huichin, unceded Ohlone land aka Berkeley California, North Atlantic
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, Minneapolis, Milkweed Editions, 2013
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity Hardcover New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021
8. “New species of plants and animals were introduced to the colonies to facilitate development and to 'strengthen' indigenous species. One effect of this system of redistribution was the interference caused by new species to the ecologies of their new environments and the eventual extinction of several species of bird and animal life.”
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London, New York, Dublin: Zed Books, 1999 page 65
9. Colonialism began in the 15th century as Europeans looked for resources. The first colonies were established in the Western Hemisphere by the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th–16th centuries. The Dutch colonized Indonesia in the 16th century, and Britain colonized North America and India in the 17th–18th centuries.
Ibram X. Kendi Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, New York: Bold Type Books, 2017
Jamila Osman, “What Is Colonialism? A History of Violence, Control and Exploitation” Teen Vogue, October 11 2020, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/colonialism-explained
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopedia. "colonialism, Western summary". Encyclopedia Britannica, 29 Apr. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/summary/Western-colonialism.
10. The broad use of the word neolithic is problematic, and needs a disclaimer. The neolithic age, meaning new stone age, is the last part of the stone age, when humans developed farming, pottery, and the first city-states. But The three age system of archeology–the stone age, bronze age and iron age–does not relate to any of the world other than the Mediterranean and near east. In fact, it is an ethnocentric system of measuring the development of humans centered around what technologies specifically Europeans progressed with. http://www.actforlibraries.org/about-the-three-age-system-of-prehistory-archaeology/
Alice Beck Kehoe, The Land of Prehistory: Critical History of American Archaeology New York: Routledge, 1998
11. The people called “Minoans”
Sir Arthur Evans, "Minoan Civilization at the Palace of Knosses" Monthly Review, London, 1901
Sir Arthur Evans Handbook to the Palace of Minos at Knossos with Its Dependencies (2nd ed.). Kessinger Publishing, 2003
Sir Arthur Evans, The Palace of Minos: a comparative account of the successive stages of the early Cretan civilization as illustrated by the discoveries at Knossos (Band 1): The Neolithic and Early and Middle Minoan Ages, London, MacMillan and Co, 1921
Sir Arthur Evans, "The 'Tomb of the Double Axes' and Associated Group, and the Pillar Rooms and Ritual Vessels of the 'Little Palace' at Knossos", Archaeologia, 1913
12. “Crete and the other Aegean Islands were among the areas that remained unaffected by the infiltrations of Indo-European-speaking tribes during the third millennium; these islands may owe their cultural survival to the fact that Indo-European peoples depended heavily on the horse and were, at least in their early stages, not well acquainted with navigation. It is important to remember that the Minoans flourished for some two thousand years after most Old European cultures in east-central Europe had disintegrated through contact with Indo-European cultures.” “Because [Water]Birds inhabit both terrestrial rivers and lakes and the celestial environment, where rain originates. They provided a link between earthly life and beyond.” page 138
Marija Gimbutas, The Living Goddesses, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999
Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess, San Francisco: Harper, 1995
13. The first permanent human-settlement on Crete was 7000 BCE, as a farming community, on a small hill, which is the site of Knossos.
Alan Peatfield, “Ritual and Religion in Neolithic Crete?”, Decoding Neolithic Atlantic and Mediterranean Island Ritual Nash, G. and Townsend, A. (eds.), London: Oxbow, 2016
14. Early in the culture, what you would call Neolithic, the caves were a combination of things: places of secondary burial, performance and ritual, and places for us to live. We also buried our dead more than once, full of ritual. Sometimes transferring bones from grave to pots.
Alan Peatfield, “Ritual and Religion in Neolithic Crete?”, Decoding Neolithic Atlantic and Mediterranean Island Ritual Nash, G. and Townsend, A. (eds.), London: Oxbow, 2016
15. Lucy Goodison, Death, Women and the Sun: Symbolism of Regeneration in Early Aegean Religion London: University of London, Institute of Classical Studies, 1989
16. Ancient artworks are ritual instructions. Adopting a posture gives one that experience.
Felicitas Goodman, Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990
17. Figures and artworks were ritual instructions. “If one adopts such a posture, one will have such an experience”
Felicitas Goodman, Ecstasy, Ritual, and Alternate Reality: Religion in a Pluralistic World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988
18. Ritual action is the base of Minoan religion. Their religion was not belief, but active performance.
Christine Morris and Alan Peatfield, “Experiencing ritual: Shamanic elements in Minoan religion”, Michael Wedde (ed.) "Celebrations: anthropological and archaeological approaches to ancient Greek ritual". Norwegian Institute, Athens: Astromeditions, 2006
19. Clay figurines were functional and interacted with. Sometimes burnt, deconstructed and reconstructed and interactive.
Yannis Hamilakis, "Eating the dead: mortuary feasting and the politics of memory in the Aegean bronze age societies", from Branigan, K. Cemetery and society in the Aegean bronze age. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998
20. The worship around the tombs represents the earliest type of communal ritual in Minoan Crete.
Nanno Marinatos, Minoan Religion, Ritual, Image and Symbol, Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1993
21. There was a huge change in the final Neolithic period, 3600-3000 BCE. Contact with other cultures increased, population bloomed including an influx of people from elsewhere, social structures became stratified, with the elite, and ceremony became institutionalized.
Krzystof Nowicki, “The End of the Neolithic in Crete” Aegean Archeology, Volume 6, Warsaw: Art and Archeology, 2002.
22. In the middle bronze age, around 2000 BCE, another change occurred. When the buildings were built, society changed rapidly. As their culture grew to even more complex levels, they developed hierarchies. Those who lived and worked in these large buildings were elite and dominated the ritual culture. The connection to ritual became further institutionalized. Buildings were built that mimicked the natural structures where we used to perform rituals and dance.
Leota Tyree, “Minoan Sacred Caves” in Πεπραγμενα Τον Θ Διεθνους Κρητολογικου Συνεδριον, Heraklion, 2006