Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Cadwell Memorial Forest part 2

We left off the story with Peter holding a camera that still had some room in it for more pictures and Bruce wanting to explore one more of the places marked as having rock piles on the UMass map of the Forest. We got back into the car, drove a short ways, and could see the piles from the car. So we parked and got out to take a look.

This last site was a good ending for the day because we hadn't seen any of this type of pile yet: low ground piles each with one or two pieces of white quartz:
The piles varied a good deal in size and shape and they were not evenly spaced or in lines, but they did consistently have the quartz. I call these pile blazed piles and usually assume they are burials although I could easily be wrong.

Here is one with two pieces of quartz and not much else:
Here was one nicely built pile from in there:
Then this next one was one of several that seemed a bit like a turtle. What is up with that? It happens occasionally with blazed piles - I'll leave a comment below about a theory about that.
The final picture shows a sacred little spot with an accumulation of quartz into a small outline:
So there is more here and it is complicated. Obviously you are not going to have the same understanding of this site, which has small-scale details, as you do of the site we saw earlier at Moosehorn Rd, which has large monumental platform piles and good views.

In the end I took all the pictures available in my camera and we left. On the way home, looking out the car window to the other side of the road, I saw one more rock pile site, east of the road, downhill, just south of Freeman Rd which I think is also in New Salem. The 2006 fieldtrip was an unqualified success.

1 comment :

pwax said...

Well it is not much of a theory for blazed ground piles but for what look like effigy piles of a turtle, the presence of quartz somewhere on the turtle's back it common. Why would this be ?[and here speculation is building on top of supposition so you realists might want to stop reading] The answer lies in asking: what is supposed to be on the turtle's back? All of the other creatures of the world are on turtle's back.