Yesterday I visited a site in Equinunk, PA, which is along the west side of the Delaware River. A few images of the site had been posted on Peter's web/blog, and they were enticing enough to convince me to hurry there before the leaves came out. It is a curious, rather strange and complicated site, not easily given to one interpretation or another. Its main focus are three huge terrace walls that dominate the site.
On top of the highest terrace are the remains of an 18th or 19th century house, which consists now of one large chimney and the remains of another (images 70, 91).
To the right of these terraces are about a dozen or more (maybe two dozen) well constructed cairns on existing flat boulders (images 58, 59, 63, 65), .
These cairns and everything else are bordered by a stone wall, not that well built in spots and not continuous; the section to the left is intermittent and linked to large boulders -- a strange configuration that reminded me of other sites I have seen, one being the Oley Hills. The terrace walls and the field of cairns to the right also reminded me of the Scot Run site in PA, which may no longer exist. This was the first lithic site Fred Werkheiser took me too about eight or nine years ago, and it consisted of a half dozen or so small terrace walls at the base of a very steep slope, two stone walls about 20' apart that led to a vertical wall/fill, perpendicular to the two walls, that faced east. To the right of all this was an area of cairns, perhaps a half dozen or so. You can see what I'm driving at. It was this similarity that was in the back of my mind when I saw the Equinunk site, and its terraces and cairns. Since I could see no cairns immediately beyond the walls, I wondered seriously whether the cairns could be linked to the construction of the terrace walls and the house, since the quality of stone masonry for the terraces, cairns and even the chimney was very high, and somewhat similar. But the three massive terrace walls (they were 7' high in places) seemed out of scale for what remained of the house, and they had collapsed in places and slumped. Could it be that the walls and the cairns were constructed at the same time, and that the house came later (obviously the top terrace was leveled by the time the house was constructed)? The cairns were of a type I had seen at Hallstead, PA, which may be twenty or thirty miles directly to the west, and I had concluded that they were Indian. This idea that the cairns might be colonial was dispelled when I looked at them carefully and saw that they were in various stages of disrepair; one was in ruinous condition on top of a large boulder.
They looked very old. Then, as I was leaving the site and driving on the dirt road to the north, I saw two other cairns on boulders about a quarter mile away and on a different piece of land. And on the other side of the Delaware River, driving south, I saw a group of similar cairns on a steep hillside.
These additional sites convinced me that I was looking at a regional cairn phenomenon. All the photos I took yesterday were compromised by not adjusting the aperture of my camera correctly, and so I had to delete some and "Photo Shop" the remainder; they are a bit grainy and out of focus. On the way back, and before reaching Port Jervis, I stopped by an overlook and saw what appeared to be an Indian fish weir in the river. Two photos of that are attached, along with one of the Delaware itself. It is a beautiful river, and no wonder the Indians built such impressive cairns along its banks.
A group of photos I took yesterday are attached. The ones of the terrace walls are self explanatory, as are those of the cairns. The cairns on the NY side of the Delaware are shown in the image above. The V-shaped possible weir is shown in the next images.
I suppose others know of this weir. I am also attaching a shot of the cairns at the Hallstead site.
As I was roaming on the hillside among the cairns, and was leaving for my car, I heard a dog barking in the distance, and then I saw an elderly man approaching. When I first arrived at the site, I saw No Trespassing signs posted on some trees, but since I had seen no house nearby, nor any signs of life, I decided I could wander quietly and perhaps cause no attention, even though I was not trespassing (I'm reminded of the book Trespassing by John Hanson Mitchell). The elderly man turned out to be the owner of the property, and although he warned me that I was trespassing, I said I meant no harm and was only taking photos. As we talked, he became less concerned, and in the end let me roam his property at will. I'm mentioning this because you should not visit the site without first obtaining permission from the landowner, whose name and phone number I have. If you do not do this, you will probably spoil it for everyone else. Just a warning.
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