Ancient Land - Quotes about the Berkshires

Bruce McAleer sent this:

Just playing around with google and came across these quotes. The link to the quote source is below.


How does this pertain to the Berkshires? We tend, Piasecki says, to forget that this land -- as with all land -- has an ancient history, and also a Native American history that predates European settlement. Some clues to the land’s cultural history are buried, like arrowheads that surface as farmers plow their fields. Other clues are in plain view. On a knoll near the center of Stockbridge stands a 20-foot spire of stone. A monument that English settlers erected to mark a Native American burial site, it recalls the town’s origin as a Mahican Indian settlement along the Housatonic River, made up of groups gathered by Reverend John Sergeant. Now the area is a golf course, its history erased, except for the stone spire.

And here's another paragraph.

In the forest, rather than simply cut a trail and mark it with blazes, Piasecki and his staff followed hunting trails and deer paths, finding vernal pools and old stone piles. (New England is dotted with these piles, he says, and no one is precisely sure of their origins.) To guide the family through their woods, Piasecki made sculptural markers, using materials found on the site. He restacked some stone piles, and created others: rocks piled within the hollow of a multi-trunked oak tree; a chunk of quartz wedged into the crook of a hornbeam; downed branches shaped into a rustic bridge between two trailside trees.

http://www.goldenbough.net/berkshireliving.html