The Long Memory of Stone
Relational Knowledge, Forgotten Civilisations, and the Sacred Patience of Mathematics
A reflection on ancestral knowledge, forgotten mathematics, and the deep memory carried in stone. This is not a new method—it’s a remembering. A circle of belonging, for those told maths was never meant for them.
Introduction: The Fog of Forgetting
We are taught to begin with the Greeks. But I begin with the stones. I begin with what endures.
The dominant story of civilisation is a directional one. It imagines knowledge moving in a straight line—from the river valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, to the temples of Egypt, through the philosophies of Athens and Rome, before drifting westward with conquest and empire. This narrative, often told with the steady certainty of a timeline, suggests that culture, science, and learning radiated outward from these “cradles of civilisation,” arriving like sunrise to enlighten the so-called empty lands of the Atlantic edge. By the time it reaches the coasts of Ireland or the hills of Argyll, this story has already decided what it will find: wilderness. Silence. A people waiting to be civilised.
But if you slow down—if you step off the imperial timeline and walk the coastlines instead—you begin to see a different pattern emerge.
You see massive stones, precisely placed. Passage tombs buried under hills that capture, for a single moment each year, the light of the midwinter sun. Circles of standing stones aligned not to myth, but to mathematics—tracking solstices, equinoxes, and the long lunar cycle that takes nearly two decades to repeat. These structures do not speak in written script, but they speak nonetheless. They speak through shadow and light, through axis and angle. They do not demand obedience. They invite attention.
And yet, as colonial archaeologists arrived at these sites—armed with classical training and Enlightenment values—they often failed to see the complexity before them. They assumed these monuments were random, primitive, decorative at best. Some even proposed that they were built by refugees from the Mediterranean, as if the people of the western coasts could not possibly have imagined or executed such engineering on their own. There was no curiosity about the systems of knowledge that might have produced these alignments. No willingness to believe that astronomy could exist without empire, or that mathematics could take root in oral cultures. The stones were measured, photographed, and mapped—but not understood. Not really.
Because to understand them would be to admit that the story of knowledge is not linear, but plural. That it did not begin in one place and radiate outward, but rose up in many places, shaped by land and sky, memory and need. The builders of these monuments—what I call the stone-borne people—were not waiting for civilisation to arrive. They were already deep in conversation with the world. They watched the stars move and the seasons turn, and they found ways to record that motion, not for profit or power, but to stay in right relationship with the places they called home.
And so I ask again: what if the erased peoples of the North Atlantic coast were not behind, but ahead—particularly in their relationship to maths, to time, to the sky? What if their knowledge was not primitive, but simply different—relational, ritual, intergenerational? What if the fog that clouds our view of them is not time, but arrogance?
This is part of my process in writing my next book, The Story of Math. I am not beginning with conquest, or with the proofs that survived empire. I am beginning with the stones—the ones that hold memory in silence, the ones that were never meant to be read, but lived with. Because I believe that learning doesn’t begin in mastery. It begins in attention. And that attention—patient, communal, generous—is a kind of mathematics all its own.
The Stone-Borne People
They didn’t need algebraic notation to track an 18.6-year cycle. They had time. They had trust. They had each other.
Long before the rise of textbooks and test scores, before numbers were abstracted into symbols on paper, there was another kind of learning—one carried in boats, in memory, in the steady rhythm of observation passed from hand to hand across generations. Along the Atlantic coast of Europe, there is growing evidence of an ancient seafaring culture that stretched from the cliffs of Cantabria to the standing stones of Islay, from the granite fields of Brittany to the green limestone of the Burren. These people—stone-borne, sea-connected—were not bound by the notion of borders or civilisational hierarchy. They moved with the tides and the stars, leaving behind not written records, but structures that still speak if we are willing to listen slowly.
What they left us are not ruins. They are instruments.
At Newgrange, in Ireland’s Boyne Valley, a narrow stone passageway runs inward beneath a grass-covered mound, opening into a chamber that receives the light of the rising sun for just a few moments each year—on the morning of the winter solstice. This is not mere symbolism. The alignment is so precise, the engineering so deliberate, that even after more than five thousand years, it still functions. This was built long before the Pyramids, long before Stonehenge. And yet it captures the turning point of the year—the return of light—with perfect, ceremonial grace.
Far to the north, on the windswept isle of Lewis, the Callanish stones rise in quiet grandeur. Here, too, the arrangement is far more than decorative. The stones track the rare and subtle event known as the lunar standstill, a moment in the moon’s complex dance across the sky that takes nearly nineteen years to complete. To chart this, you must observe. Not once, not twice, but over the course of a lifetime. You must notice how the moon rises just a little further each night, how it dips and climbs in ways only visible if you have the patience to stay with it. This is mathematics in motion—geometry felt through repetition, mapped through memory.
And in Orkney, at the Ness of Brodgar, the ground yields stone temples, painted walls, ritual objects—all part of a ceremonial complex older than writing. These are not the traces of a people living in ignorance. They are the fingerprints of a culture that placed intelligence in relationship, not in domination. A people who did not separate the sacred from the scientific, the spiritual from the practical. They studied the world not to master it, but to remain in harmony with it.
These were not superstitions carved in stone. They were calculations. Observations. Agreements made with the sky and kept through generations. What we often mistake for myth was, for them, a way of life—a science not named as such, but embodied. They measured not to impose order, but to recognise it. They built with intention, with precision, with care.
And they did this not as individuals seeking renown, but as communities in rhythm with their world. There is no evidence of centralised power. No kings, no written decrees. Just people who understood that knowledge—real knowledge—requires continuity. It requires slowness. It requires trust.
This, too, is mathematics. Not the mathematics of conquest, but the mathematics of belonging. A way of knowing that is held collectively, practiced patiently, and shaped by place. The stone-borne people did not build monuments for show. They built instruments for remembering. And through them, we are invited to remember, too.
A Relational Mathematics
The Stones were not simply structures of stone. They were structures of story, of sky, of season. They held within them not just weight and form, but memory—carefully observed, patiently passed down, shaped by the rhythms of the world they stood within. They were not monuments to power, but invitations to relationship—each alignment, each placement, a conversation with light, with time, with the turning of the earth.
The mathematics of the Stone-Borne People was not the kind written in ink or chiselled into tablets for display. It was not made to be hoarded or exported. It was relational—emerging from the land, shaped by the sky, and held in the bodies and memories of those who lived closest to both. It was not extractive. It was participatory. A way of knowing that required not only intellect, but presence.
Their measurements did not seek to control time, but to keep pace with it. They did not isolate numbers from nature—they counted the full moon’s rise against the hills, the changing angle of light through a passageway, the return of birds to a particular inlet in spring. Their geometry was not separate from the fields they tended or the rituals they kept. It was woven into them. And so it required more than knowledge. It required care.
Learning, in such a culture, was not hurried. It could not be. To track a lunar cycle that takes nearly two decades to complete, you must think beyond yourself. You must plant the observation in someone else—your child, your apprentice, your neighbour. You must return to it together, again and again, refining the understanding not through written equations but through repetition, conversation, attention. This is mathematics as inheritance, not possession. It does not belong to the individual but to the community, and to the place in which that community is rooted.
There are no textbooks from this era. But there are patterns—etched into stone, aligned with the turning of the earth, calibrated to celestial rhythms. Patterns that speak not of conquest or cleverness, but of continuity. This is a different kind of pedagogy: one that values patience over speed, closeness over abstraction, and depth over display.
In contrast, the models of learning that followed—particularly under colonial and industrial systems—were built on very different assumptions. Knowledge became something to be taken, extracted from its context and repackaged for sale or status. It was no longer something you grew into through years of watching, helping, listening. It became something you passed or failed at, something to be tested rather than transmitted. Time was no longer measured in solstices or cycles, but in bells and deadlines. Mathematics became dislocated from place, cut off from story, and pressed into the service of production.
And in that transformation, something vital was lost.
The Stone-Borne People remind us that mathematics does not have to be separate from the world. It can be embedded in it. It can emerge from it. It can bind us to one another, rather than ranking us apart. Their monuments are not just evidence of ancient calculation—they are invitations. To return to a kind of learning that is slower. More rooted. More whole.
To remember that even now, the stars are still moving. The sun still returns to its place in the chamber. The moon still walks her long arc across the sky. And we are still capable of learning in ways that honour that movement—not by owning knowledge, but by becoming part of it.
My Process: Reassembling the Story
I went looking for algebra, and found the moon. I went looking for logic, and found lineage.
This is not just a book. It’s a process—of writing, yes, but also of returning. A gathering of threads long scattered. A listening back through time to what was always there, waiting for someone to stop, and ask, What are we really teaching? And to whom?
When I began The Story of Math, I thought I was writing a textbook. A practical thing. A much-needed resource for students in Learning Centres—students with IEPs, students acquiring English, students who have been told, implicitly or explicitly, that mathematics is not for them. But very quickly, I found myself drawn far outside the expected scope of standards and pacing guides. I kept returning to the beginning—not the neat, linear beginning of modern curricula, but a deeper beginning. Before textbooks. Before symbolic algebra. Before the clean slicing of mathematics into disciplines. I found myself among stones and stars, with people who counted by light and shadow, who knew geometry not as abstraction, but as ritual, as remembering, as responsibility.
And I realised that this process was not about innovating, but about reassembling. Not about reform, but about recall.
There is a reason the Latin quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—was structured as it was. Each branch a way of understanding number: numbers in themselves, numbers in space, numbers in time, and numbers in space-time. Even within that framework—so often invoked in classical education—we find only echoes of something older. Fainter, more fragmented. But echoes nonetheless. And if you trace the sound backwards, carefully, respectfully, you begin to reach something that is not just curriculum—it’s ceremony.
For me, this act of tracing has become central not only to the book’s content, but to its ethic. I want to tell the story of mathematics without overwriting the stories that may still be living in my students’ bones. I want to offer an entry point that does not assume absence or deficiency. I want to create a structure that welcomes ancestral memory—not just mine, but theirs. The migrant child who remembers rhythms passed down in cooking or weaving. The student whose grandmother tracked planting seasons by moonlight. The autistic student who processes through sound and symmetry. The teenager who can’t explain their logic but always arrives at the right answer, as though by intuition.
I want to centre belonging.
Because the dominant model of mathematics education does the opposite. It centres performance. It centres abstraction. It centres speed and legibility to systems that were never built with our students in mind. And for those of us who teach at the margins, we spend every day trying to bridge the gap between what is expected and what is possible—often with little more than instinct and faith.
But the truth is, mathematics was never meant to be the thing that kept people out. It was meant to be a way in. A way of seeing, of noticing, of naming the patterns that hold the world together. When I write math in full sentences, when I ask “What’s the story here?” before solving, I’m not doing something radical. I’m doing something ancient. I am not simplifying. I am remembering. I am offering back what was once common knowledge: that meaning comes before mastery, and that learning begins in relationship.
This is the ethos that underpins every unit of The Story of Math. Not just history for context, but story as method. Arithmetic as sharing. Geometry as movement. Algebra as restoration. Music as number in rhythm. Astronomy as number in wonder. Every unit begins with narrative not as decoration, but as grounding. Every lesson is an invitation, not a threshold. And every student is assumed to have knowledge worth building on.
This process has changed me. It’s pulled me not just into the pedagogical past, but into my own past—into the ways I have always needed story to make sense of systems, the way my GLP brain refuses to separate content from context. It’s made me softer with my students. More reverent toward their confusion. More curious about what they already know that our standards cannot measure.
Because maybe, when a student says, “I don’t get it,” they’re not failing. Maybe they’re asking for the story first. And maybe, if we give them that, they will remember what they were never taught—because it was taken, silenced, or simply never named.
The Story of Math is how I begin to name it again.
They Remember Us Still
There are moments in teaching—and in writing—that feel less like constructing something new and more like uncovering something old. As if, beneath the debris of curriculum and compliance, beneath centuries of conquest and categorisation, something intact is still waiting. Not whole, perhaps. But intact in its intention. In its rhythm.
This next section is not analysis. It’s not lesson content. It’s a lament. A recollection. A reckoning. It speaks not in prose but in presence. In tone. In the hush that comes when you realise you are not the first to look to the sky and try to make sense of what moves.
This section’s title, They Remember Us Still, is both a claim and a hope. It gestures toward a kind of intergenerational memory that exceeds the written record—carried in stones, in soil, in stories that pulse beneath silence. It is inspired by an invocation from the film The 13th Warrior—“Lo, there do I see my father…”—a Hollywood line that, surprisingly, touches something true.
The title of the poem borrows its cadence from The 13th Warrior, a 1999 American historical fiction film based on Michael Crichton’s novel Eaters of the Dead—itself a loose adaptation of the Beowulf epic, woven together with the real-life travel account of Ahmad ibn Fadlan, a 10th-century Arab envoy who encountered the Volga Vikings. Though the film is fictionalised, it gestures toward a truth that archaeology is only now beginning to fully affirm: there was frequent, sophisticated contact between the Norse world and the Islamic world. Not just passing encounters, but trade, shared language, medical knowledge, geometric instruments. We have found Arabic calligraphy woven into burial shrouds in Scandinavia. Islamic astrolabes—tools for measuring the heavens—made their way from Cordoba to Copenhagen, from Baghdad to the Baltic.
These connections are rarely taught. They disrupt the neat division of “East” and “West.” They remind us that the pursuit of knowledge has always been borderless, and that the people of the North were not isolated, but deeply entangled in the global exchange of ideas.
What else have we been taught to ignore?
How many connections—between the peoples of the North and the East, between mathematics and ritual, between care and calculation—have been silenced not because they were untrue, but because they were inconvenient to empire?
This poem doesn’t answer that question. It simply holds it.
And so, with reverence for those whose names were not written down, and whose knowledge was not preserved in books but in breath, I offer this:
Lament for the Stone-Borne People
Lo, do I see the ones who came before...
Not kings, not warriors—but boatwrights and bone-setters,
stone lifters, song keepers,
those who spoke the sea like a second mother.
I see them on the tide—
from Cantabria’s rugged edge
to the high cliffs of Islay,
their voices braided with salt and starlight,
carving memory into rock.
Their cairns were not graves but anchors.
Their circles not temples but mirrors.
They read the sky to speak with time,
lit fires where land ends,
and called it home.
They did not conquer.
They did not name the world to own it.
They placed their hands upon the earth
and listened.
And when the Gaels came,
and after them the priests,
and after them the crowns,
all built upon the bones they did not understand.
Still—
on moor and machair,
on lonely ridges where sheep now graze,
their silence hums like distant pipes.
Calling.
Waiting.
Remembering.
I’m not writing, exactly. Not in the way we’re taught to think of writing—as production, as authorship, as invention. What I’m doing feels closer to listening. To connecting. To following something that rose not from research or outline, but from inside—a feeling, a memory, a rhythm that didn’t begin with me but passed through me. This lament, this invocation, is not fiction and not quite history either. It’s something older. Something we carry in the marrow. And I suspect I’m not alone.
Because what I found, in tracing these stones and cycles and silences, wasn’t just a forgotten past. It was a living presence. A knowing still embedded in us—in our questions, in our patterns, in our longing to make sense of things in ways that feel whole. The Stone-Borne People are not gone. Their memory is not behind us. It is within us, humming just beneath the noise of modernity, waiting for a moment quiet enough to be heard.
And so, this story I am trying to tell—of maths, of meaning, of belonging—is not mine alone. It is something we are all invited into. A pattern we already know, if we let ourselves remember.
Final thoughts …
We are not beginning from nothing. We are beginning from what endures.
There’s a question I keep returning to—not as a researcher, but as a teacher who sits with students every day and watches their shoulders tense the moment they hear the word maths. The question is this: Why do so many children in the West believe they can’t do it? Why do they carry this deep, quiet shame? Why does the subject that once emerged from counting stars and sharing bread now make so many feel small, excluded, or afraid?
I don’t think it’s because the content is too hard. I think it’s because the connection has been lost.
For generations, we’ve been teaching maths as if it were a ladder—something you climb alone, rung by rung, with each step measured against the others. But that shape was never universal. In much older traditions—in the megaliths of the Atlantic coasts, in the rhetorical algebra of the Islamic Golden Age, in the rhythmic calendars of Indigenous communities—maths was never a contest of speed or abstraction. It was a way of being in right relationship with the world. With land. With time. With each other.
When children say, I’m not a maths person, they’re often naming a wound. Something once intuitive has been made alien. Something once shared has been turned into a test. And in that loss, we’ve created generations of learners who confuse being excluded with being incapable.
The Story of Math is my attempt to solve that—not through a new method, but through an old remembering. It is not a curriculum in the traditional sense. It is a restoration. A return to maths as something deeply human: born of need, shaped by culture, carried through story. It is built for students who have been told they don’t belong, and for the educators who know that isn’t true.
What I’m offering isn’t a ladder. It’s a circle. A place to stand beside one another. A geometry that holds room for different languages, different processing styles, different ways of knowing. It begins not with performance, but with presence. With the understanding that maths was never meant to live only in symbols and silence—it was meant to live in rhythm, in relationship, in story.
And so we return. To the stones. To the stars. To the spoken sentence and the spiral of the moon. We return to where the connection was never broken—only forgotten.
Because the real question isn’t whether our students can learn maths. It’s whether we can teach it in a way that lets them remember they already knew how.
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