Rock Piles: The main rock pile site at Poplar Hill

Friday, July 24, 2009

The main rock pile site at Poplar Hill - Pelham, NH

With reference to the sites I began reporting here and continued with here, let me describe the largest site on Polar Hill, shown as the large blue outline on the map. As I think about it, most rock pile sites in northern and eastern Middlesex County (north and northwest of Boston) are located on the northern slopes of hills. [I can say this with some knowledge.] By contrast the sites in western Middlesex County (west of Boston) are most common on the western slopes of hills. I have thought that the western facing sites were chosen because of their view of Mt. Wachusett. If that is correct, then these northern facing sites should be facing some prominent mountain to the north or northwest. Maybe Manadnock?

I was heading back to the car, well pleased with the site I found earlier, when I passed a slope and told myself to just have a closer look in case there was something inconspicuous. Like this:

[There were Indian Pipes (shown in the foreground) all over the place last weekend.] As I looked around I saw rock piles scattered across the slope:

Some of them were roughly in line with each other and with boulders, and the spacing between piles looked to be slightly systematic. Where earlier I had found a common spacing of about 13 paces, here the spacings was more on the order of 8 and 16 paces. Here is a closeup of the pile in the foreground of the above photo. Note the vertical "fin" and the adjacent piece of quartz:

Note also the way the other rocks in the pile are carefully placed. This photo gives a good feel for the dappled light and the pile spacing:

Like the earlier site, some of these piles contained a single larger rock on their perimeter (perhaps shaped like a Manitou stone, I could not tell):

In my own theory about rock piles, the characteristics of even spacing and their placement along lines, rules out their being burials. I try to avoid reporting locations for burial sites and I do not think this is a burial site. Hence, in this theory, Manitou stones are not direct evidence of burials. They would have to be more general purpose indicators of something ceremonial.

Lots of low inconspicuous piles:

But as I proceeded down the slope, the piles got bigger...

...and bigger, till they were 4 feet high and perched upon boulders.

This change in height was pretty much a systematic change as I went further downhill. To me this suggests they are getting further and further from the viewer and needed to be larger to be seen. On the other hand, there were several distinct clusters of piles so these might just be different sites at different places on the hill. This pile shape is beginning to remind me of the "dumpling" shape of piles from southern Mass. and Rhode Island.