The Pickax Unconceals

Humans have long known that the earth, and the things we find on it, yields reluctantly to the work we have for it. The historical period known as the “Stone Age” refers to the earliest era in human history, which begins with the planet’s first tools, implements formed with hands not unlike yours and mine. These early tools were openers, designed to open hard earth or wood or animal. They surely also used many other objects, and for many other purposes, but it is rocks that leave behind the longest lasting evidence. The use of tools, whose secret life inspires this series, stretches back into the mists of history. Tools predate by millions of years the first appearance of the species Homo sapiens. At least 3.4 million years ago, long before modern humans appear, somebody in Ethiopia wanted badly to strip the flesh off the bones of large animals. The marks on that bone, probably an extinct creature related to modern bovines, are a first testament to the not-so-secret life of tools. The hunter left behind unambiguous evidence of tool-marks on the bone, notches from the striking of a stone. Until something older is discovered, this moment marks the dawn of the Stone Age, which stretches forward in history until about 4000 BCE with the advent of metal smelting.

We know about these ancient tools because of its impact on an intended target, a piece of the world the tool was taken up to change. It should not surprise us that the impact of tools appears in the archeological record before any evidence of the tools themselves. On a geological timeline, it isn’t long before we have the actual artifacts. The oldest actual tools we have found, so far, came out of the ground in Kenya after 3.3 million years in hiding. These stone tools show clear evidence of intentionally chipped sides, sharpened ends, and were perhaps made in a process called flintknapping, which involves strategically striking rocks together to shape them for particular uses. It’s all guesswork, when it comes to the understanding the production and use of these tools, but the long history of everything touched by tools on earth begins – it seems – in a verdant northeast Africa between 3-4 million years ago. My question about these tools may never be fully answered, but it is useful to ask nonetheless: how were the bodies of the people using these tools changed by them? How were their relationships with one another, and their thoughts about the world, transformed by the tools they found in their hands?

            My favorite tool, in the prehistory category, is called a handax, which isn’t really an ax at all. We typically reserve that label for a tool with a handle. Handaxes, which appear around 2 million years ago (the Acheulean handax), are often pear-shaped, with a rounded and sometimes finely smoothed end that faces the hand, and a honed or sharped end for cutting, scraping, digging, or striking. The smooth sides interest me deeply, since they point to the life of the tool whose work was done on the soft flesh of a human hand. The marks made by these tools on the world tell a story that is far richer than mere survival; the business ends of handaxes have left behind evidence of early art, architecture, warfare, decoration, and imagination. The part of these tools that people gripped are sometimes smoothed and honed to allow for prolonged use with minimal harm to the hand. Surely many of these tools were made not for the generic human hand, but for the soft shape of a particular hand that was calloused and strengthened by each curve, and every use.

            The first “hafted” (handled) axes appear in the archaeological record about 50,000 years ago in Australia, and evidence of similar tools appear around the world in the ensuing millennia. These powerful, versatile tools of the Stone Age were surely used for innumerable purposes. A hafted ax radically increases the efficacy of the stone edge, and therefore opens up new sources of food, shelter, and security. These ancient tools seem to be designed to expose aspects of the world that are otherwise closed. The ax lays bare, or unconceals that which our prying fingers struggle to access. The ax alters aspects of the environment, but simultaneously alters the way its user feels and sees and thinks about the world. There are fascinating and important debates among archaeologists about the primary usage of each type of ancient tools, but it seems that all of these possible uses involve accessing aspects of the world that are difficult or impossible to uncover without the aid of technology. The best way to think about these first handled tools is probably to consider them pickaxes, perhaps tearing into rotting logs to reveal termites and other edible, protein-rich, nutritious insects. The pickax unveils enough food to transform a snack into a meal. As stone tools become more common around planet earth, archaeological evidence suggest people began to eat more tubers (starchy root-vegetables, like modern potatoes and carrots). The ground gives way slowly and painfully to digging fingers. It took the advent of digging tools like the pickax to make it possible for people to add tubers to the human diet in a widespread way. Other tools, such as “digging sticks” that appear in ancient Asia and among Indigenous peoples of North America, opened the ground to reveal a world of resources below.[1] Tools reveal the world in new ways, and transform the perspective – as well as the bodies – of the people that wield them.

Truth as Unconcealed

            The word most often used for “truth” in ancient Greece is aletheia, but the word has a somewhat different resonance than this translation tends to connote in English. Heavily influenced by the concept of truth as it moves through the Latin term veritas, the English word “truth” insinuates veracity, accuracy, and portable facts that are valid anywhere and everywhere.[2] Math and physics are right to emphasize this form of veritas-truth. But this is not a clean match for the meaning of the word aletheia in ancient Greek – which includes the language used by the founding philosophers of Greece (Attic Greek) and the dialect used to write the Christian New Testament (Koine Greek). The Greek word insinuates that truth is an event of disclosure, a revealing or unconcealing of some aspect of the world. Sometimes these meanings are virtually identical; 2 + 2 = 4 qualifies as “true” from both linguistic perspectives. But sometimes the difference is important. Alethia, for instance, goes beyond expressing mere correctness and insinuates something that resonates with a deeper reality. Alethia invites digging, and vigilance for the way further learning often transforms, complexifies, and adds nuance to the version of truth available on the surface. Truth as aletheia originates from Greek roots meaning not to escape notice, or to avoid oblivion (“a” is a prefix meaning “not”; “lethe” is derived from a verb that means “to escape notice” or “cause one to forget). This way of thinking about truth opens to curiosity and wonder, toward what is not-yet-known about the world.

There are fascinating histories of these tools published by archaeologists, including a copper pickax from 4500 B.C.E. Poland, which likely functioned as a status symbol more than an everyday tool for digging or fighting. The history of violence is also threaded through the history of this tool; stone that pierces ground and tree can also wreak havoc on bodies. I’ll avoid gory descriptions, but a pickax also can rapidly unconceal parts of the human body almost unimaginable in barehanded combat. Bones from our ancestors tell this story, too. If modern technological developments are any indicator, violent conflict likely generated advances in tools from time immemorial. Battle axes aside, it was the humble pickax that shaped stones for the great pyramids of ancient Egypt and broke the ground as human communities vacillated from nomadic wanderers to food-growing agriculturalists, and often embodied a combination of these modes of subsistence. These tools are ubiquitous today, and I often find myself taking them up. How do these tools shape the way we see the world?

            Throughout this blog series I am attending to the hidden ways that tools work, along with their histories and peculiarities. My primary purpose is to explore how tools have multiple directions of impact, a phenomenon I call backflow. We know that pickaxes have pierced and tilled the ground from time immemorial, but we have paid less attention to the secret life of this tool. My claim is that the ancient and venerable pickax works in multiple directions, opening up concealed aspects of the earth and molding the perspective of the one who swings it. But how has this genre of ancient technology impacted our bodies, our view of the world, our relationships, and our care for land? The pickax is a way of discovering truth, a manner of unconcealing and investigating the world, and with every successful swing we learn about the reality we inhabit with more depth and nuance. From the outset, we humans have sought to unconceal that which surfaces hide. The pickax taught us to think this way about that which hides – for better, and for worse.

Philosophy, and Holes in the Gound

The ancient philosopher Plato embeds a joke in one of his dialogues, about a young and uneducated servant girl who watches the great “first philosopher” of the Western tradition walk along the Greek landscape. His gaze is focused on the sky, not the ground, and despite his unprecedented wisdom and knowledge, he falls into a water-well and, presumably, needs the young girl to help him out. She jokes: “He's so keen to know what is in the heavens... that he has no idea what is at his feet in front of him” (from Plato’s Theaetetus).[3] The hole in the ground featured in this joke was surely dug by pickax, and its younger cousin the shovel, and used to unconceal water that would be out of reach without tools for digging. The joke itself is not about technology, of course, but about philosophers having their heads in the clouds. This problem would be amusing if philosophers weren’t also the people trusted to help us understand ethics, which navigate our responses to suffering, to injustice, and to our most pressing moral problems. I have been trusted to teach college students about ethics for more than two decades; it seems obvious that people who teach ethics should not be absent-minded professors. At least, we have a responsibility to keep our eyes on our feet and the faces and plants and animals and waters and earth in front of us. When it comes to the philosophy of technology, thinking about tools and what they reveal about us, and the world, is not enough. So, I went looking for teachers with muddier hands that Plato, Descartes, Kant (who actually wore white linen gloves!), and company. The teachers I have found are plants, animals, earth, mountains, water, and especially, my Seattle neighbors whose attention has long been on the ground that my discipline has inclined me to ignore. I regularly bring students from Seattle University, where I teach philosophy, to learn from these teachers too. The urban farm we visit, Yes Farm, is run by Seattle’s Black Farmers Collective.

There is a tidy row of pickaxes that hang in the shipping-container shed at the Yes Farm, a 1.5 acre plot of vegetable-producing land in the heart of Seattle. The plants that have occupied the farm land for decades include blackberry plants which inhibit agriculture, so we are often assigned the task of removing these “weeds.” Himalayan Blackberry (Rubus armeniacus – from Armenia, not the Himalayas) does not mind being cut at the surface, regrowing efficiently when cut or mowed. The work of removing blackberries involves uncovering the rhizome, the root-ball. When I first visited the farm with students, our pickaxes pierced the ground and exposed a distinct color change just below the surface. Two inches of dark, rich topsoil concealed a dull gray-brown clay, dense and unpenetrated by most of the plant roots. We asked our teachers at the farm about the clay layer and learned that our tools had uncovered a fascinating and deep history hidden by the version of “truth” evident from the surface. The pickax opens the earth toward deeper aletheia, in this case unconcealing thick, hard, dense clay that represents a serious obstacle to growing food on this land.

Since the 1960s, Interstate 5 has roared through the heart of Seattle. I remember this plot of land from my childhood. My dad took me occasionally to Seattle Mariners games, where you could sit for $3 at a very great distance from the action. To avoid parking fees near the concrete monstrosity that was the Kingdome, we would ditch our family station wagon a mile from the stadium, along Yesler Way near I-5. The Washington Department of Transportation retained ownership of a swath of land by the highway, at Yesler, with an offramp of compacted clay that was never finished or paved. The clay was mostly mined from deposits in the nearby Snoqualmie River Valley and used for its compaction and quick drainage. Because WashDOT left behind the clay substrate when they built I-5 in the 1960s, vegetation was slow to return and weeds were the volunteers that first arose to solidify the ground and occupy the land. By the time 10-year old Eric walked by that land in the 1980s, this piece of earth was overgrown, with a few walking trails, and already a place where people in the Yesler Terrace neighborhood grew food. It was also, already, a place where people experiencing homelessness could find a little piece of green space for tents and campfires. A few years ago Seattle’s Black Farmers Collective began to transform this space into an urban farm, and Yes Farm began. In came the shipping container, the pickaxes, and the opportunity for Seattleites, particularly Black residents, to take up tools more often associated with the country than the city.

Yesler Way, once called Mill Street, is named for the saw-mill operating pioneer (and two-time Seattle mayor) who during his lifetime was the richest Seattle resident and ran a mill just down-hill from today’s Yes Farm. His street, nicknamed “skid road” because of the ox-pulled logs that skidded down the hillside to the mill, became synonymous with Seattle’s working class, especially its immigrant populations, as the rich and powerful mostly built their homes far from Mill Street. Long before that, and for thousands of years, what is Yesler Way was a pathway over the hill and down to X̌ačʔu (pronounced “Hah-cha-oo”), now known as Lake Washington. The pathway originated at a marshy waterfront where a cluster of cedar longhouses was given the name Dzidzilalich (pronounced roughly “zih-dzee-LAH-lich”). This place-name means “little crossing over place,” and it was for countless centuries a place of meeting for Indigenous peoples in the Coast Salish region, a place for sharing, celebrating, marriage, trading, conflict, and resolution. The ancient caretakers of this pathway did not view land as something that could be owned, possessed, or divided into parcels. Non-native settlers introduced land ownership, used treaties to displace Indigenous populations, divvied up the place they named after the Duwamish leader Chief Seattle, and accidently left a little piece near the big highway unfinished. Owned by the Washington Department of Transportation, who laid down massive amounts of compacted clay, this little swath of land is today known as the Yes Farm.

The pickax unconcealed the clay, but the rest of this fascinating history is being uncovered with the logic of the pickax, not always with the tool itself. To use pickaxes is to be cognitively and physiologically shaped for various modes of understanding. Telling this story, and remembering it actively on the ground today, is an act of “taking notice” and “avoiding oblivion.” This is truth as unconcealing.

I wouldn’t know just where to start digging, but a skillful archaeologist wielding a pickax might peel back the layers of history in that land, slowly revealing recent topsoil deposits, then Snoqualmie clay, then the skidded mud road used for the loggers who cleared Dzidzilalich of its towering trees, then the compacted pathway used by Coast Salish peoples from time immemorial.  Beneath that lies a complex history of glaciation, inland seas and lakes, and so much more. The pickax, in the hands of archaeologists around the world, is a storyteller. This tool, used thoughtfully and carefully, opens the earth toward a rich and nuanced understanding of history. The leaders of Black Farmer’s Collective know this land well. Their pickaxes gently open damaged earth for healing, for production, for community. Their approach to food, and the Yesler neighborhood, defies the broad cultural logic that drives food production and distribution. Last year a skyscraper was built beside this humble farm — it was built by tools: cranes, bulldozers and jackhammers, etc. These tools are far more evolved that the pickax - the ancient tool that continues to rise and fall at the Yes Farm, teaching a story of agriculture, soil, history, and care for neighbors, as well as responsibility for a bruised and wounded earth.

That’s not the only story the pickax can tell, nor the only story it has told on this piece of land. By the 1890s most of the trees had been felled near the fledgling Seattle, used to build a mostly-timber city and to ship countless logs to San Francisco and beyond. In 1889 an unfortunate accident involving a pot of boiling glue led to a massive fire that burned most of Seattle’s business district. The trees that residents had toiled to fell, mill, and fasten were gone, but no time was spared as they turned to rebuild with less flammable materials. Economically this was a huge hit, and Seattle might have lost its foothold as the primary city in the Pacific Northwest, were it not for the humble pickax. In 1896 massive gold deposits were found in the Yukon, and Seattle outmaneuvered other west coast cities to become the primary supply point for an absolute stampede of hardy fortune seekers headed for cold Alaska. An estimated 100,000 people flooded into Seattle on their way north, and even the Mayor of Seattle resigned to make money off the influx. And who among these miners would dare go north without the primary tool of gold mining? Pickaxes flew off the shelves and headed north in the packs of folks who would almost all go broke looking for treasure. Before they lost their fortunes, however, they left a substantial portion of their investment behind in Seattle. Local historians of the city credit the gold rush with saving Seattle, ending a major economic depression and transforming the city to the economic hub that it is today.

These mining pickaxes, however, were built for and used for extraction, tearing into the earth to gather minerals. And, consequently, the user of the gold-mining pickax becomes attuned to the task of extraction. These axes open the earth, take that which is valued, and often leave the empty hole. Mining, of course, is an important and necessary part of human history, yesterday and today. Much attention needs to be given to the impact of mining tools on the earth, the environment, and the future. Part of this attention must address the logic of extraction, which often takes without any responsibility for the voids, or the harms, created by the taking. Sometimes the user forces tools toward extractive and exploitive uses, sometimes the tool seems to train the user to think like an extractor.

The harm is often justified by the profit, or technological advances, produced by the products of extraction. But my focus here is not on the marks the first stone tools left on the bones, or the massive holes left by modern mining. I am interested in how the pickax has shaped our approach to that which lies concealed. Has this tool, and tools like it, taught us to see a landscape as untapped resource? Have we learned from this tool to think about the natural world as inert, yielding resources waiting for the hard control of a tool to bring it to heel?

To say that tools are not neutral, a central claim in this blog series, is not to claim that tools are bad. The same tool that rips open the earth for the extraction of a metal like gold also opens Seattle ground so that clay can be replaced by wormy dark dirt, to grow food for Seattleites. The lesson of the pickax is vigilance, truth as not-escaping-notice. All of our tools shape the way we think about the world, but the way they change us is not inevitable. Tools can be weapons, and they can build community and solidarity. Tools can teach vigilance, or negligence. They can extract, or they can cultivate. One can use a pickax without following the vibrations of greedy extraction, but perhaps not without mindfulness. One key consideration in the philosophy of technology, and the hidden life of any tool, is the way its use shapes the thinking of the user. My hope is that by taking up tools intentionally we can notice the way they carry us into the world, into our work, into our relationships, and perhaps most importantly into our responsibilities.

[1] For instance, consider the traditional Salish digging process for Bitterroot: “A péceʔ (root digger) is used to dig near the sp̓eƛ̓m̓ [bitterroot] to loosen the soil. The péceʔ is traditionally made out of a stick that is slightly bowed on each side with sharpened ends. The handle is a piece of an elk antler with a hole in the center that fits on the ends of the stick. If one side of the péceʔ becomes dull then the elk antler can be relocated to the other end. Some people would carve designs in the elk handle, which was an heirloom passed down to the women in the family.” https://www.montananaturalist.org/blog-post/stories-of-the-bitterroot/

[2] Although the influence from Latin has had a heavy hand in shaping the modern use of the word, the etymology of “truth” in English is derived from the “Old English trīewth, trēowth which indicates “faithfulness” and “constancy.”

[3] Plato, Theaetetus and Sophist, trans. Harold Fowler (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1921), line 174a: “Why, take the case of Thales, Theodorus. While he was studying the stars and looking upwards, he fell into a pit, and a neat, witty Thracian servant girl jeered at him, they say, because he was so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there before him at his very feet.”