Stone Age

I grew up with certain dates drilled into my head: 1776, 1818, 1831, 1833 — the Revolutionary War, the statehood of Illinois, the settling of my hometown and its incorporation. When comparing the US to so-called Old World countries, I heard our nation called “young” and “new.” But all around me growing up I found things that felt older, that broke with that narrative of youth: arrowheads found in the woods by my house, fossils from the riverbed, the prairie plants my parents and neighbors grew in their yards, the stone tools in my town’s museum from 8,000BC, saber tooth tiger teeth sitting beside them, and the buffalo roaming through our town’s restored prairies, to name a few. I started to ask myself, how old was this place, really? I was told to trace my roots west to Europe, but what if I let them grow where I was planted, down into the Earth, deep like the prairie?

I explored these ideas in an interactive artwork. Try it out below.

The images used to build Stone Age via the software Twine.