As you all know, I've been working for the past 2 years on compiling an inventory of stone constructions on the eastern seaboard, from Georgia to Nova Scotia. I have now closed the inventory at 4,209 sites and sent it on to my research assistant, Cory Fournier, to begin the analysis of these sites. More will certainly be forthcoming which I will post to this blog, but for now I thought you might like to see the final distribution map by 100 km blocks across the region. I asked Peter to post an earlier version of this, I think about a year ago. This is a schematic, at a very large scale, so it's not too obvious where landforms are, but the southernmost site is in Savannah GA while the northernmost is interior New Brunswick, Canada. The numbers on the top and left edges are the UTM coordinates. It is color-coded so you can easily see where the highest concentrations are.
It should be obvious that the highest concentration is in eastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and southern New Hampshire - which should come as no surprise! Sites are generally absent from the coastal plain south of the glacial margin, which is not surprising since there are few rocks there! There is also a clear separation between the cluster in the Southeast and that in the Northeast, which to me suggests that we are dealing with different cultures in each region. What I think is more surprising is the general absence of sites from the Adirondacks and White Mountains, while they are not uncommon in the Catskills and Green Mountains.
More to come!
7 comments :
I would like to have a look in the woods at those places like the Adirondacks. Maybe no one is looking hard in those places.
I agree with Peter: few people have bothered to look for stone constructions in the mountainous regions of the Northeast, which accounts for the lack of sites reported.
Why, then, are there so many sites noted in the Green Mountains and the Catskills? Or, for that matter, in the mountains of Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina? In Iroquois folklore the Adirondacks were considered the abode of Tawiskaron, the dark god, and were avoided. Perhaps this is the reason?
It does bring up an interesting question of "who and when." And "Where else?" Only the Curious Have Something to Find, my grandfather always used to say...
Another possibility is that those areas are much more aggressively farmed than in New England - which reflects a real difference in the places' histories.
In the case of the Adirondacks, the histories will show that they were much LESS aggressively farmed than most nice level stone-free areas! But so was Putnam County, and it is absolutely chock full of stone constructions. A mystery!
I gotta say, reading this in 2017, that we should have continued this conversation. Because I think we actually have enough info in our heads to figure out if some places are or are not relatively concentrated with sites and were or were not more "aggressively" farmed.
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