Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Driving along the road - a site with pile-gap-piles

I was leaving the place just mentioned and had gone no more than a few hundred yards from where I had parked when I noticed some more rock piles right next to the road. A small site like this would be barely worth mentioning except that there were a couple of examples of probable "pile-gap-pile" arrangements. So I wanted to show these.

Here is one:and here, perhaps, is another:A problem is that once you start imagining that you are seeing these then every rock next to a rock pile becomes suspect.

There are only two other sites I know that have multiple examples of this kind of structure. One is called "Above the Falls" and the other was in Westford/Tyngsborough. These are all very water- related places. For lack of better phrase I call them "pile-gap-pile" and imagine them as gateways, where the piles define so-called "negative space". For other references see here. As I look over old examples, I am surprised that I saw them in so many different places, I thought they were more rare.

2 comments :

Velvet Ginger said...

I waws just blog hopping and your rock piles caught my eye! One thing to consider...whenever we hiked (in AZ or WY) my boys would pile rocks one on top of the other..."just because". Though I don't know if that's the case here, some of those smaller ones would have drifted from the top by snow or rain. Anyway...thanks for sharing the cool pictures!

pwax said...

Somtimes I wish that rock pile study was more larded with jargon and an appearance of a greater barrier to entry into the topic.