[williamcotton]

I’ve always interpreted it as post holes as they fence in and close the Wild West.

He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there

A post hole digger has two handles. When you’re using it in rocky ground you hit rocks and make sparks.

Picture:

https://images.homedepot-static.com/productImages/ed49f7f1-a...

[OfSanguineFire]

Yeah, the interpretation of that scene as an elegy of the end of the “wild West” through fencing, feels obvious if the reader has read what McCarthy wrote next after Blood Meridian: the Border Trilogy, where some 20th-century Texas romantics are already dealing with that fencing-off.

[bamfly]

I'm quite sure he means a post-hole digger. I can practically smell the odor of digging in rocky soil with those, coming off the page, almost feel the cracked dust-sweat-caked knuckles of setting posts on a hot, dry day.

[EDIT] As for the rest, putting aside metaphorical readings, the clockwork-like progression and repeated crossing of the line of holes calls to mind the stop-and-start movement of running barbed wire and working a ratcheting tensioner tool behind the one digging the holes, and in the right country, the curious among those workers may pause to reflect on the remains of long-dead things (fossils, "bones"—fish, horse, bison, mammoth, spine-like crinoid stems, shells and coral from an eons-dead sea, even dinosaurs—the ranches and farms of the West largely sit atop the shallow graves of life's history on Earth) sitting flat in the dirt or exposed by the digging, while others may pay them no mind. There's definitely a defensible reading of this as on the surface a plain, if oblique, description of a work crew running a fence line—not just the one digging the holes, but the whole set of folks described. I'd wager that's what's intended (though not the only thing intended), in fact.

[robbintt]

It is also related to the judge's quest to name all things. The relationship is measurement, a fundamentally human activity... or perhaps fundamental to the way our civilization is doing human.