Yurok, Karok, and Rocks

Mavor and Dix have a bunch of Yurok references in “Manitou,” mostly taken from a 1925 book on CA Indians. I recall highlighting “rock ref.’s” on a flight to San Diego, just before driving down to see my brother-in-law’s new house in Baja California. These are the people who put the idea of stone prayer seats into our collective heads.
The Karok People are also discussed in the “Handbook,” the up-river neighbor’s of the Yurok, both of whom spoke an isolated Algonquian dialect - and an oral tradition as coming from "the east." The two groups never saw white people until about 1850. There are no references to burning over the landscape, but other sources link their dependence on acorns as food to a management of oak groves by fire, and other plant resources as well.
There’s even some photos of the Rocks that have names…

New "Friends of the Falls" Post

New Post: http://friendsofthefalls.blogspot.com/2008/09/my-controlled-burn.html.

Observing the rising and setting of celestial bodies

Click on some of the pictures of text in Tim's post below and you can see one of them includes a discussion of the affect of dis-continuing the yearly burn offs:

"The tradition of observing ritually the rising and setting of celestial bodies on the horizon became increasingly difficuly to practice after contact...."

That seems like a pretty significant quote; especially for Mavor and Dix's readers.

Is That a Bear?

A composite photo: Peter's Sunday, September 07, 2008 post, "A small site at the start of a brook - Harvard, MA," and photos from mine from a year or so ago:
http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2007/06/old-friend.html .
They reminded me of each other and these were the closest to the same angles...

Waking Up (and Burning) Again Again

That "Burning Question" was on my mind again this morning when I woke up (on Turtle Island again).

Much of my own personal library is old textbooks from relatives and tag sales (Maybe yours is too), and that's very true of my Indian related stuff. So I looked at the oldest of relatives text books first, checking the index of each for "burning." Back around 1976, UCONN was using Trigger's 1969 "Huron: Farmers of the North" as a text my brother John paid $4.95 for. "Slash + Burn," he wrote in the margin. Compare that to the many entries in Cronon's "Changes in the Land," that my sister Joan was using a dozen years later at the same school, possibly the same or a similar course (I'd add the photo, but I failed to put the book back on the shelf and will soon surprise my self by finding it in a strange place - and where is "1491' where the number of entries is staggering?)

That's OK, because I know that you've seen Norman's comment and are probably planning on stopping by either the library or bookstore to get a copy.

Then I spied my copy of "Manitou" and found the entry in the index of that book.

They were onto the same idea, starting really on page 124, under the sub title "Ecology..."

A small site at the start of a brook - Harvard, MA

You step off the road in Harvard and more or less expect to find rock piles. There was a patch of woods I never explored, along Rt 111, so I stepped into the woods there last weekend and went downhill, past signs this was an old farm or orchard, down to the edge of a wetland. My feet found the first rock pile and, looking around to see if it was isolated, I saw a couple of others. Then I noticed an interesting configuration of wall, rock-on-rock, and rock pile - all in a line.

It was something like this:
This shows a portion of a stone wall at the top of the picture, a rock-on-rock, a rock pile, and the brook/wetland flowing off to the right. I left out some small boulders that are also in the line.

Here is a first pile, found by my feet: a rough oval, including a piece of quartz or quartzite:
Here is a closeup of the quartz:
There were a few other inconspicuous piles nearby, I might easily have missed them.

The main thing that caught my eye was a rock-on-rock next to the beginning of the brook.
I got the impression that the larger boulders in the brook were in a line with this rock-on-rock and, as I looked along the line, I could make out a break in the stone wall. Something prompted me to look behind me along the same line. There, hidden in the vines was a more substantial rock pile:Of interest, was the reddish burnt looking rock in the pile.
But what was most interesting was when I went to take a closer look at the rock-on-rock and found it was made of quartz.
This is quite rare and I can only think of two other places where I have seen quartz used in a rock-on-rock. One was at the end of a line of rock piles (not more than a mile from this current spot) the other was also associated with an alignment.

Following the same line over to the stone wall, there was a break in the stone wall and another piece of quartz:The next picture (sorry for the blurring) shows the whole line, with the stone wall in the foreground, the rock-on-rock behind it, then another boulder in the brook, and the larger rock pile is behind that in the same line:

Burning (and Waking Up) Again

It was William Cronon (who as Wikipedia says is, “A noted environmental historian, Cronon is probably best known as the author of Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983), a work based on his doctoral dissertation. Two insights in that book have reshaped the way historians think. The first insight was that the way cultures conceptualize property and ownership is a major factor in affecting economies and ecosystems. The second was that the Indians were active intervenors in and shapers of the ecosystems in which they lived.), writing in Changes in the Land, who gave me the idea of stone rows as fire breaks. He never mentions the possibility of the existence of Native American stone rows being built in order to manage the controlled ground fires he says were instrumental in the creation of the Cultural landscape of Southern New England, but it was the light bulb that flashed on in my thinking about the miles and miles of stonework around me.
I even emailed him once or twice to say to him that I found the stonework that fits so neatly into his management scheme, sort of “an insurance policy written in stone,” but he never got back to me.

I’ve quoted him often, as in this old post, where I wrote, “…to the colonists only the (Native American) women appeared to do legitimate work (in the agricultural field and gathering of wild foods); men idled away their time hunting, fishing, and wantonly burning the woods." Roger Williams may have seen this when he wrote: "(The Indians) hunted the Country over, and for the expedition of their hunting voyages, they burnt over the underwoods, once or twice a year." He was trying to defend Native sovereignty, suggesting that the Royal Grant of New England to the Plymouth Colony was illegal. In reply John Cotton, who considered native people savages and minions of the devil, wrote in reply that "We did not conceive that it is just title to so vast a Continent, to make no other improvement of millions of acres in it, but onely to burn it up for pastime…(http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2006/06/yes-there-is-great-bias-against-idea.html).”

I think that sometime in the future, I'd like to have a Rock Piles meet-up here in Woodbury, when the leaves fall, when the perspective opens up, to spend a day walking some of these rows.

What do you think???

My Burning Question Re: "walls"

This started as a comment to "Rock piles under the power lines...giving way to grander things under the trees," but as the lights on my cable modem began blink off and on and off again, the comment dissappeared.

So I thought, "Why not post my "Burning" question (again)?"

And the question is: "How might the stone rows relate to the well documented schedule of burning that created the Native American Landscape?"

At an post a couple of years ago, I sort of describe my involement in puzzling about atypical stone rows (http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2006/11/walls-and-me.html), and qoute Cronan's statement that "What most impressed English visitors was the Indians' burning of extensive sections of the surrounding forest once or twice a year. 'The Salvages,' wrote Thomas Morton, 'are accustomed to set fire of the Country in all places where they come, and to burne it twize a yeare, viz: at the Spring, and the fall of the leafe.'"

Another here: http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2007/09/some-ecological-aspects.html , and here too, with probably the best photo I ever took of a zigzag stone row remnant with possible survivor plants that I know continue to be burned on a four year cycle in Maine: http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2006/10/blueberries.html .

Here's one online article new to me (that I found the image above) at: http://www.nifc.gov/preved/comm_guide/wildfire/fire_8.html

Beat Poet Gary Snyder wrote this poem you can find at:

http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2006/10/more-gary-snyder-control-burn.html

and I encourage the people who read Rock Piles to think of how we are frustrated by the rock piles and remnants of stone rows that escaped destruction and pillage being covered by poison ivy, bittersweet and greenbriar, how we wait the for the leaves to fall to see things more clearly, and stretch our collective imaginations to envision that Cultural Landscape kept clear by controlled fires.

And think about this too, as you brush away the humus created by worms:

"America, Found and Lost"
Much of what we learned in grade school about the New World encountered by the colonists at Jamestown is wrong. Four hundred years later, historians are piecing together the real story.
By Charles C. Mann
Courtesy Trustees of the British Museum
"It is just possible that John Rolfe was responsible for the worms—specifically the common night crawler and the red marsh worm, creatures that did not exist in the Americas before Columbus. Rolfe was a colonist in Jamestown, Virginia, the first successful English colony in North America. Most people know him today, if they know him at all, as the man who married Pocahontas. A few history buffs understand that Rolfe was one of the primary forces behind Jamestown's eventual success. The worms hint at a third, still more important role: Rolfe inadvertently helped unleash a convulsive and permanent change in the American landscape..."
From Jamestown - National Geographic Magazine

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/05/jamestown/charles-mann-text.html

Rock piles under the power lines...giving way to grander things under the trees

This is a site in Leominster I have described before as a Wachusett facing site - don't want to again. But I went back to show it to FFC and the piles are as grand and moving as ever. Here are ones from under the power lines:A larger one in the woods:[Note a similarity with the pile at Whipple Hill in Lexington]

And this wonderful construction. What better argument for these being ceremonial could there be than the simple observation of the design and clear intent in this? A split rock with quartz and careful fill. The vistas: A Japanese garden moment: It is a big site and covers one side of a small hill.

Sharp-eyed as usual, FFC noticed several wall anomalies, including a "snakiness" near the earlier split rock with quartz. Here are views in opposite directions along it: FFC also noticed a sequence of round depressions in the middle of a rather wide stone wall: Things like this catch ones attention: The overwhelming impression for me, is that these piles had structure. Some straight lines and perpendicular angles are still visible in the tumbled rocks. The damage looks deliberate on most of the piles. I wonder what was the reward for breaking into them? (The light colored rock is not a piece of quartz, it is the light in the photo.) Also some of the piles looked added to with little hollow "nests" made of smaller stones and a piece of quartz at the edge of the hollow (I saw this more than once bit only got one pictures of this).Enough to keep you thinking.

Cedar island Trail at Hammonasset (CT) State Beach

If you aren't too weary of my newest tangent, take a look at:

http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2008/09/thing-about-waking-up-on-turtle-island.html

Dr. Rankin at Hammonasett

Dr. Rankin sent me this...

flikr foto

From "quillonphoto's" of Queens River Preserve, Exeter, RI.
“End of the line. I wasn't sure if this was the end of the trail, but someone seemed to have purposely placed a huge pile of boulders on the path. I looked to the sides of the pile to see if the path continued, but I couldn't find the path. I didn't have the right kind of hiking gear on to be able to amble over the top. Perhaps another time.” http://flickr.com/photos/quillon/265163044/in/photostream/

Rock piles under power lines - Groton, MA

Indian Profile rocks and hunting for Spanish gold in Colorodo

[Click here]
Our interests overlap with theirs.

Rockpile Ridge - a property with many boulders

A reader writes:

Hi,

I found your blog quite by chance and really enjoy the photographs you have there. I think it's amusing how fascinated you are by these rocks, and think perhaps you should check out my blog... rockpileridge.blogspot.com. It is not about rock piles, Rock Pile Ridge is what we named our property. But if you like rock piles I'm sure you will find mine interesting.

Bear in mind that some of it was created by myself, where the gardens and steps are concerned. However, the large boulders (some as large as 10' tall x 18' wide or more) are put there by nature, and the placement of the gardens and steps was inspired by the huge unmovable rocks. I also have an estimated 40' tall boulder that is the mother of all the rocks on our property... we simply call her The Rock. The first picture I have attached shows her clearly poking out from behind a wall of her children. The second picture I have attached shows a row of large boulders that march like soldiers through the woods.[Anyone see anything in this photo? - PWAX]

The most incredible thing about our property is that this landscape only exists there. The property to the north of ours has a cliff and the odd large rock, and the one to the south has nothing significant on it. This pile of ours is unique and massive, and everyone who sees it is captivated. It was incredibly hard to find a flat spot to pitch a tent because of all the rocks everywhere! Enjoy the pictures, and if you see something you like you have my permission to use it on your blog. I have a public album at Picasa with more photos as well.