Creative History

  On February 13, 1961 three small business owners: Wallace Lane, Virginia Maxey and Mike Mikesell--artisans by trade who specialize in the crafting of handmade jewelry and sell their creations at a local boutique--are out in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains near the Nevada border in western California scouring the arid countryside looking for interesting mineral specimens known as ‘geodes’. A ‘geode’ in geologic terms is defined as a: Geological secondary formation within sedimentary or volcanic rocks.  In layman's terms a geode is typically a hollowed out rock usually in the shape of a sphere, or cylinder, with some sort of mineral deposit at the center.  Usually these mineral deposits are quite colorful, and often they are very beautiful which is why geodes are something that three small business owners specializing in handmade jewelry would be out scouring a California hillside in search of in the first place. As it was, on that fateful day of February 13,...

Palace at Knossos         "Now in the island of Atlantis there existed a confederation of Kings of great and marvelous power which held sway over all the island and many other islands."                                 -Plato from Timaeus the year 360 BCE           For two years the team of Italian archaeologists has been laboring in the hot sun on the island of Crete in the middle of the Aegean Sea.  Though the waters surrounding the island are a deep and lovely blue the heat is oppressive, the work is tedious and the local inhabitants are suspicious at best and openly hostile at their worst. It is July 1908 and the team has been excavating palace sites across the island, trying to piece together information and artifacts about a little known, but apparently much advanced civilization--the Minoans. The Min...