Many vital communities are called “hunter-gatherer” communities. That is not it at all! They are often societies of gift and acceptance and re-gifting. Water and stone sculpt wood. The resulting shapes reveal potentialities of form. It’s easy enough to make a technology out of bone, but it’s even easier to work wood. You don’t have to hunt it.

Once you’ve seen the shape, you’re on your way to re-create or extend its shapes at any time, using stone, fire and any wood you can find. Wood is an enormous technological advance over stone-age bone, because it unites community strength and individual prowess in an open-ended way that still has not been exhausted. We are all the children of wood, and finds like the strand line above. The sea actually lays them at our feet!