Memories Within Myth
By Patrick Nunn
The stories of oral societies, passed from generation to generation, are also scientific records.
This Article From Issue
November-December 2023
Volume 111, Number 6
Page 360
In the 1880s, the American journalist William Gladstone Steel made several visits to a freshwater lake that filled the caldera of an extinct volcano in Oregon. For Steel, these visits were the fulfillment of a dream that began while he was just a schoolboy in Kansas. It was one day in 1870, while reading the newspaper wrapped around his school lunch, that he noticed an article about the “discovery” of a spectacular body of freshwater named Crater Lake. “In all of my life,” Steel would later recall, “I never read an article that took the intense hold on me that that one did.” When he finally made it to the lake in 1885, he was so captivated that he determined to have the area designated as a national park. But designation was not easily gained and required extensive documentation of the region.
QUICK TAKE
- The abilities of preliterate societies to store, organize, and share useful information across generations are often not appreciated by modern literate societies.
- Multiple examples from around the world demonstrate that oral histories can be thousands of years old, passed down through hundreds of generations.
- The survival of our ancestors’ stories is a testament to humans’ capacity to endure through profound, even catastrophic, change, no less important today than millennia ago.
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