Turtle Visions

Turtle Visions & More Turtle Visions

Uktena turns out to be a constellation

See here

Yoni and Lingam

I am surprised this is still online, since when I first posted it it caused a ruckus amongst some of the more conservative NEARA board members and I agreed to removed it from the NEARA webpage. But anyway, Tim MacSweeney asked if I had photos of funny stuff built into stone walls. And example is here.
Update: Today I think the writing is a bit foolish but it provides another interpretation of splits in rocks.

NEARA meeting starts today

Inside the Riparian Zone

Inside the Riparian Zone

Squiggles

Squiggly Lines on an Old Photo

Another Squiggly Line

More Squiggles

Coming up...

...another cluster of rock piles by (but not on) Barrett's Hill, Bolton:

Split boulder from Montville CT

Norman Muller writes:

Beaver Dam Hill in Montville, CT, where the “souterrain” is located, is also chock full of cairns. Ted Hendrickson, a photographer by profession, was looking for the souterrain with his wife, and came across this marvelous split-wedged boulder with some donation stones on top. I look upon these wedged boulders as a Native American signature. I also see the stones on top as later than the stone wedged in the split: in other words, in response to the wedge.

Like the shadows in the stream

Like the shadows in the stream
Like the evanescent gleam
Of the twilight's failing blaze
Like the fleeting years and days.

From Thomas L. Doughton's

"Like the shadows in the stream"
Local Historians, The Discourse of Disappearance and
Nipmuc Indians of Central Massachusetts

[click here]

[Brought to my attention via a reader's search terms and a JimP post from back when]

Bright November Morning in Leominser State Forest

A few photos from a walk. It was clear and blue with plenty of light, off a side road north of Parmenter.

Ice crystals:
A spring, just off the path:A typical view, what about that split rock up there?Closer:

Closest:Here is a particularly nice example of a split wedged rock:
These examples obviously required single minded physical effort and I think they demand some better explanation than that they represent offerings to the spirit of the rock. Especially casual passers bye could not make such things. I want to hear a more explicit scenario.

Beech trees:
Fresh moose hoof prints:(They had a faint smell of large animal)

Underwater leaves:Another look at that nice wedged rock, if you watch closely you'll see very briefly another rock is shown at my feet and in line with the wedge in the rock. Sorry I did not pay more attention to it when I could.

Moose Video - Leominster State Forest

With the degradation that happens when I upload video, this already pretty grainy sequence will probably be worthless. Look for the dark thing a little left of center. But anyway, I came across a moose eating buds in the morning on a bit of trail in the Leominster woods. Got the camera going and took some kind of video. I was upwind and the moose spotted me a moment or so after I spotted it; so I was trying not to move and watch with my eyes while also filming. I did not dare activate the zoom (now I wish I had) fearing the mechanical sound would scare it off.

Later back at my car, I ran into a water department official, told him about the moose, and learned there were three bears in the area, as well.

Another snippet from Maine

Backtracking a visitor to their search terms leads to stuff I never saw. Here is yet another rock pile explanation:

"The first “lighthouses” in Maine probably were Native American bonfires with rock piles on two or three sides to protect the flames. Early Colonists use..."
- A Signature Flash on the Maine Coast from VisitMaine.com

St. Aspinquid Rock Pile moved atop Mount A in York

From SeacoastOnline [here]

The other evening Doug Harris of the Narragansetts told the audience at the Acton Library that a stone was put on a rock pile as a prayer and that removing the stone breaks the prayer.

More background [here]. Among other things this shows the practice of placing rocks on a memorial/donation pile continues in the present today.

South of Camp Virginia...

...in Bolton, there is a wetland and an undisturbed woods. Some of it is conservation land and a lot of it has occasional rock piles. I went to explore part of it last weekend and I can see that there is still plenty I have not explored down there, e.g. Barrett's Hill. Anyway, I walked in from the west having parked on the road that more or less bisects the map vertically - Rt 85, Hudson Rd. Found a couple of small rock pile clusters and then came back out. Here is one site, almost smothered in blueberries. and smothered in pine saplings:Also there was a nice boulder with rocks stacked on it. This is not that common. Look at the other side. Any theories as to what this is?

There was also a low wall there, too indistinct to photo, and a bit of structure too hard to make out:
This is along the blue dot trail. You ought to be able to find it.

Another Familiar Place Post (or two)

Another Familiar Place and Something "New"
Toes and Claws

Portraits

This is me, Peter Waksman
Other people get pictured occasionally so I hope it is not too vain to show myself once in a while too. If you are willing to send in a photo, please do, and I'll post it.

Cisco Ad with Stone Tools

I don't think they'll mind my infringing on the photographer's copyright. Those rocks are Silicon Valley cobbles. See that chipped rock in the foreground? I wrote about such things here and here.

Wisconsin Boulder Mound Site

Norman Muller writes:

A large boulder mound site in north central Wisconsin was recently investigated by Jack Steinbring, an archaeologist and international rock art expert. The site measures about 10 acres, and consists of about 50 stone mounds spread over a glacial kame, surrounded on both sides by marshes. The boulders comprising the mounds are round glacial erratics, of a size one or two men could carry. As Jack said, he wonders where these boulders came from, since the area is part of a national forest, and not covered with loose stones. One of the mounds has a red rhyolite porphery stone on it (#3).

These red stones are commonly found for petroforms in other parts of the state. Another of the mounds (#5)seemed to have a geometric shape, similar to what we find here in the Northeast. But because the boulders are round and not angular or flat, they do not make for convenient building material, and hence the mounds frequently subside. Jack also said that this is trapping area and not farm land.

Jack says he has just heard of another stone mound site nearby in the general vicinity of the first, and hopes to explore it before the weather deteriorates. They get snow pretty early in Wisconsin.

Stow Grid

Nice to visit a familiar site occasionally:Not too badly vandalized.

NEARA Fall Meeting in Boxborough MA - Nov 13-15, 2009

Let's keep this front and center for the next week or two.
Even if you have to drive half a day, getting to the Holliston field trip will be well worth your while.

I am please and a bit surprised to see that NEARA used one of my pictures of the Potato Cave, with my son Joe in the entrance.

Two Walls and a Spring

Norman Muller writes:

The effigy site [see here ] in western Massachusetts, which also has a curved wall with a spring in between, made me think of a similar site in Vermont.

Six or seven years ago, Ernie Clifford showed me a small but spectacular site in Rochester, VT, that he wrote about for the NEARA Journal. Located at the top of a steep mountain slope are two distinct walls with a spring in the gap between them. Each wall section measures 40 or so feet long, and I have no doubt they were constructed this way and were not at one time connected. Three of the attached photos above show the two walls from various directions.
6a shows a split boulder below the wall to the right with a metric rod leaning against it. This boulder appears as "Fig. 13" with a phallus-like stone between the split halves. A cairn has been built against one half of the split.

There is more to the site than these walls and split boulder. A very large cairn on a boulder is one of the highlights, along with two round platform cairns and other stone features.

"A walk in the woods" - by James Gage

An excellent summary [here], James crystallizes the concept of sites being accumulated over time.

A niche built into a wall with other anomalies

From the Great Elms Conservation Land in Harvard, MA:
Update: Norman Muller writes:

I just looked at your blog and saw that fascinating photo of a niche or small chamber built into a wall. It reminded me of one I saw more than ten years ago in Scot Run, PA, also part of a wall (see attached).
The stonework to the right of the niche in the photo you posted looks interesting. What else is there?

To answer the question: there is a hole in the wall, roofed over with a flat rock, and a few other flat rocks propped against the wall there.

More street signs

I guess when these signs were new, many of the rock piles would have been visible out in the open pastures.

Ohio Wesleyan art professor uncovers celestial connection in desert Southwest

From the Columbus Dispatch [click here]

Desert Southwest Archeology has always been the most popular field for American academic archeologists. Given the state of understanding of archeo-astronomy amongst those folks, when do you think they will get around to New England? Not too soon, I guess.

Barbour Brook, NY revisited

by theseventhgeneration
I first posted about this site here. Had I hiked just a bit further earlier this year, I would have found the real "rock field", but it made a nice find last week. A map of the area:In comparison to the map from the first post, this is just a little farther southeast of the features I reported back on May 20th. The map shows a stream near the road. However, between the "rock piles a through q" and the "rock pile near figure 8" there is a creek branch that was flowing heavily this week, following a lot of rain.

There are at least 20 rock piles of various sizes at this site, in what I would describe as a compact grid. I marked some of the rock piles with the GPS, with the track log on, so just looking at these waypoints and remembering what I can about the site, I believe this is a fairly accurate representation of how the piles are arranged:A couple of photos of the rock piles. This first one is very hollow. That yellow spot in the center is not a leaf, it's a hole. And how about that one perpendicular rock, in the center, to the right of the hole? It's not an uncommon feature around here, but how is it efficient to stack rocks that way if the purpose is agrarian?:This one has a different shape. A second pile is in the background:
Going slightly downhill from the rock piles, but before reaching the creek branch, is this:
Next, this ground structure is just below the rocks in the photo above (they are within sight distance of each other), and is even closer to the creek.
Then, this is the "rock pile near figure 8" on the map. It is on the opposite (western) side of the creek branch. There are at least 2 additional, very small rock piles on the western side of the creek, but this is the only large rock pile on this side:
This is the strange, figure 8 structure. The implement (plow blade?) leaning up against the tree has me baffled. As with the previous ground structure, it is built in a very wet zone. The creek is just visible in the background here. This is looking upstream, so the rock pile site is to my right or roughly northeast. You might have to click on this photo to see the top half of the "8".