Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Sawyer Hill/Gates Pond. Site (D) Big old piles near an orchard

With reference to the map [here], I went back down one hill and up another to the back side of some of the orchard buildings and found other big rock piles.Certainly some of them had that impractical/ceremonial look:In particular, the component rocks in this pile do not look rounded enough to be glacial cobbles removed from a field. But this big old mess of a pile could have been anything.Note the rusting blue enamel pot. Note the larger rocks scattered around the edges. Note a small segment of carefully built retaining wall (center of picture). All of which suggests this might have been a ceremonial pile that got turned into a place to dump stuff. Here is a closeup of the well-built segment:There is even structure underneath this bit of well-built segment. And also outlying piles like the first pictures above, or this one:All of which re-enforces the idea of older piles incorporated into modern dumping. Here is a final look at the main pile, from above:After puzzling over this briefly [after all, this was the 3rd site I found that day] I headed downhill thinking: "Well if those were mounds with hollows, there might be a few others down along the sides of the brook" [A brook starts about here on the hill.] So I walked in that direction.

Came across this:And then this:This last pile was genuinely puzzling. The right sort of size and shape to be a mound with a hollow, but built on a rock and I am not sure these rocks have been weathered and exposed enough to be old enough. Seen from the other side:
and up close:See where the lichen is on these rocks? Unless the pile was recently cleaned, those component rocks have been moved around lately. So the whole collection of piles from the orchard on down to here is corrupted and I could not figure it out. Also, I was sated from all the earlier finds.

I could have kept walking, I could have gone farther downhill, or along the other side of the brook but I was tired and turned back at this point.

1 comment :

Tim MacSweeney said...

"older piles incorporated into modern dumping:" 100 feet from where I sit are several mounds like this, my old chickn yard that I've posted many a photo of. Some were covered in metal and other types of trash, and possibly many were robbed of their stones for modern projects, as have been the stone rows along side of them...