AA-2026-A4D8B0
On the image
Six men stand in a loose, unofficial circle on an eroded limestone slope, all of them looking down at something none of them are touching, which is the classic posture of amateur expertise. Someone has clearly found a hole, a bone, an odd rock, or a snake, and in the finest tradition of informal American manhood, no one intends to be the first to reach in and find out.
The wardrobe tells you this was not planned as fieldwork. A cowboy hat and a red ball cap stand in for equipment, one man has stripped to the waist for no scientific reason, and everyone else is dressed for church or for nothing in particular, which in the 1960s rural South often amounted to the same wardrobe. Exposed roots and stripped-bare rock mean the hillside itself had already been worked over by weather or by hand long before this group arrived to stare at it.
Whatever the object of interest was, the picture guarantees nothing was ever written down about it. Six witnesses, one afternoon, and the outcome survives only as a photograph of grown men committing hard to looking serious about a hole in the ground.
Visually related — by likeness
Six Men Gather Round a Find on a Limestone Hillside, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-A4D8B0. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/six-men-gather-round-a-find-on-a-limestone-hillside-1960s.
@misc{aaAA2026A4D8B0,
title = {Six Men Gather Round a Find on a Limestone Hillside, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-A4D8B0},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/six-men-gather-round-a-find-on-a-limestone-hillside-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Six Men Gather Round a Find on a Limestone Hillside, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-A4D8B0 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/six-men-gather-round-a-find-on-a-limestone-hillside-1960s ER -
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