Ralph Gironda: The world beneath his feet

Ten-thousand years ago in a moment blissfully unavailable on YouTube, a band of hunter-gatherers stopped on the east bank of a tidal river that ran both ways.

The Ice Age had broken and the landscape formations near Ossining would be familiar to residents today, even if giant holdouts from the Pleistocene like mastodons (a 10,000- year-old complete specimen named Sugar was found in Orange County in 1972) and 300-pound beavers would not.

Centuries before the pyramids rose, the people who would eventually give rise to the likes of the Wappinger, Aquehung and Mahican tribes of the region arrived with little and left little behind. Ralph Gironda, 63, from an early age has been fascinated by how they arrived, survived and eventually thrived.

“In high school I read ”˜The Will of Zeus”™ by Stringfellow Barr,” he said. “It was so well written ”“ almost a tale of literature ”“ that it piqued my interest. Then I started reading about Egypt and Mesopotamia. I read ”˜Eternal Egypt”™ by Pierre Monet and it talked about various cultures. And I was curious: Where did these cultures come from?”

Many students entertain great academic thoughts ”“ “This stuff about particle physics is kinda cool” ”“ but fail to water them and they are forgotten.

In Gironda”™s case, the prehistory bug bit and took hold. “”˜The Will of Zeus”™ in particular helped me develop an analytical mind. I became and remain very interested in making cross-temporal and cross-cultural connections. And then the next step: Once those connections are established, how did these cultures make things better?” He cites “Artifacts of Prehistoric America” by Louis Brennan as another book that molded his interest.

A class taught by Carolyn Kunin at Westchester Community College in 1970 was formative to the point Gironda rattles off her name and the course without a second”™s thought nearly four decades later. Through the Museum and Laboratory for Archaeology in 1971, Gironda, a graduate of New Rochelle High School and the grandson of a Mamaroneck cab driver who emigrated from Italy in 1890, headed into the woods. At least initially, he was neither Dan”™l Boone nor Indiana Jones.
“I was a city guy,” he said. “I was literally 100 yards into the woods and I was lost. I could find my way around the streets fine, but I could not find the trail. When had I ever seen a trail in the woods? But I figured it out and by the next day I was fine.”

That trail through the woods to a site called Piping Rock would over the course of the summer take Gironda back in time to the dawn of man on this continent.

Someone in that bygone hunter-gatherer band had been to Coxsackie or knew someone who had been there. A spot today called Flint Mine Hill in that Greene County community offers a bounty of apple-green chert, a smooth, hard, easy-to-work stone.

Banging a spear point from quartz takes skill of the highest order and the first Native Americans possessed that skill at the Piping Rock site, leaving behind a white quartz point fluted on both sides. But nine of the 10 points found at the Piping Rock site were chert and one of those was a fluted beauty 10 millennia old. Chert is far easier to work than quartz and, excepting volcanic glass (when available), is the preferred tool-making stone for Native Americans coast to coast. The Coxsackie variety is notably pure and was actively mined and traded by natives until Europeans showed up with guns, killing the market.

Gironda to date has worked on six sites in New York and three in New Hampshire. His fieldwork led him to build a better mousetrap of sorts. U.S. patent no. 4,162,967 is Gironda”™s collapsible version of a shaker screen. He never made any money off it, but it remains a project of which he is proud. The patent was issued in 1979 and today he still points out a couple of tweaks required to bring the tool to its intended place beside a well-dug unit.

Gironda handles filing at the White Plains office of the international law firm Wilson, Elser, Moskowitz, Edelman & Dicker. He came aboard in 2003. He took a page from the world of artifact administration by coding the firm”™s files with the first letter of the litigation and its date. “I came upon a system and just like with cultural activity, I thought, How can I do this better? The letter and the date together led to better speed and accuracy of both filing and retrieving.”

Gironda possesses a tireless curiosity and said he would like to study the Pueblo cultures of the American Southwest ”“ descendants of the Anasazi who built Chaco Canyon and who live today in places like Taos and Acoma. Other Gironda fascinations have included ancient Rome and Greece, medieval Europe, even philosophy.

“Where does the river go?” he said. “I”™m trying to see where the river of archaeology goes. That”™s what I”™m going to do.”