This morning we start our Bushman course.  The focus is on the primitive skills needed to live in the north woods during the warm weather months.  Primitive is occasionally used as a synonym for inferior, but a quick check of the dictionary will rectify that.  It is from the latin Primus, meaning the first of the original.  So primitive skills, then, are original or first skills.  They come from a place of no infrastructure or complicated gear and are a product of human creativity.

An interesting read on the topic from 1895 is Otis T. Mason’s The Origins Of Invention: A Study Of Industry Among Primitive Peoples.

It’s going to be a fun and educational week along the Aroostook.