Talking Walls, Matt Bua

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Talking Walls: Casting Out the Post-Contact Stone-Wall-Building Myth by Matt Bua

Catskill-based artist, sculptor and musician Matt Bua's encyclopedic new work lies at the crossroads of artist's book, archeological study, regional history, and parapolitical investigation. Talking Walls scrutinizes the oft-repeated story of the origins of the Northeast's famed stone walls. Were 252,000 miles of stone walls—enough to reach the far side of the moon—in fact built by European colonists in a period of roughly 100 years, or are they perhaps much, much older? Employing a mountain of testimony from archaeological sources, popular history, and elsewhere, Bua's book draws closer to a profound new reading of our shared landscape and its ancient past. Talking Walls includes a case study of a stone wall complex in Kiskatom, on the western edge of the town of Catskill.

"The title and ostensible purpose of Talking Walls belie Bua's true accomplishments: firstly, to have written a subtle but awakening criticism of the study of history in the Americas and the methodology (or lack thereof) applied by its amateurish practitioners in the 18th and 19th centuries; and secondly, to have created a wild, unkempt path through a dense thicket of diverse material whose sui generis merit as a challenging and discursive reading experience nearly outweighs the depth and breadth of his research." – Andrew Siskind

Each book comes with a 12x18 foldout map of the author's primary terrain, Kiskatom!
315 pp.