History of the Dottoman Empire (part IV)

The eminent author and crackpot Charles Fort kept the memory of the Dorchester Urn alive, but the ever reliable Wikipedia is doing its part in the digital age. The Wikipedia scribes get some of the jargon, the date, and some of the details wrong in their entry on what they call the Dorchester Pot, but the story is essentially the same, and their article puts a date to the artifact. It is assumed to be 100,000 years old. This would be about the time the first Atlanteans landed on Dorchester's shores, much like the Pilgrims a few millennia after them.

When the minor continent from which the Atlantic Ocean gets its name sunk beneath the waves, its people scattered across the face of the globe. Massachusetts happened to be nearby so a good number of these evacuees ended up in Dorchester. Their traces remain but they are slight except for those who pay close attention.

The Dorchester Pot, or the Dot Pot as its known in Historical Society circles, is the most concrete piece of evidence that ancient civilizations existed in Dorchester proper. It was a sort of jar or urn made of unknown metal that was blasted out of a ledge of solid puddingstone. It was an out-of-place artifact which no one expected to find enclosed in Dorchester's bedrock. People had heretofore assumed that only savages and wildlife lived off Dorchester's landscape before the English arrived. Savages and wild life still co-exist in the Dottoman Empire alongside the highest hanging fruits of an enlightened, sophisticated, urban culture. There is no reason to suspect things were different in the past.

If you go down to the shore at Port Norfolk and slip through the gap in the chain link fence that separates this no-man's land from the rest of the Dot, you will find evidence that heroic, burly deeds were performed in a place that seems like a sleepy retirement nook today. The foundations of immense concrete works and rusted tools litter the shoreline. I witnessed a few codgers with their metal detectors walking methodically over the dirt piles and wind-blown trash. I asked them why they were searching for treasure here.

One of them told me, "This land holds secrets. Sometimes its a bottle cap, sometimes its a zinc nail from 1880. Other times, its something nobody can explain. I once dug up a thingamabob that I couldn't figure out what it was for the life of me. I sold it to an MIT professor who claimed I had dug up the most perfect example of a perpetural motion machine he had ever seen. He paid me 65 bucks! That's why I keep coming here every week."

Dorchester's soil holds many secrets.