The Wachusett Tradition

I have given it some thought and have looked at quite a large number of rock pile sites and it has crystallized into an idea that one kind of rock pile site is related specifically to Mount Wachusett. Several years ago I heard Curtis Hoffman say something like that all ceremonialism in eastern Massachusetts was directed towards that mountain. At the time this seemed an oversimplification and, now, I think it only covers a part of the variety of rock pile phenomena.

But I saw a site last weekend that really exemplified one common combination of things:

• a view of Mt Wachusett
  
• a rectangular pile 10-20 feet long by more than 8 feet wide
  
• built up, occasionally more than four feet high
• singly or doubly chambered (with a hollow)
• mostly in westernmost suburbs of Boston
  

I'll show pictures in a moment.

But seeing these features together, as I say, crystallized the idea that this combination represents a particular ceremony or ceremonies from a particular culture which I want to call the Wachusett Tradition. I don't know what ceremony but it looks like burial. I don't know what culture but sense that these piles are pre-colonial. I see them in Berlin, I see them in Framingham, in Harvard, and as far east as Lincoln. I see them mostly in the western suburbs.

But I have to fudge with the ideas. For example, the pile in Lincoln [first pile here] is low, and has no view of anything; it is simply a pile that fits the physical description. Or the piles in Berlin [here] have a good view and fit the physical description but the view does not actually face Wachusett. Or the piles in Harvard [here] with a view not towards Wachusett and oval rather than rectangular. So let me take the site from last weekend as the classic example, this is on Apron Hill in Boylston MA, on conservation land. I approached the site along a nice looking stone wall:Approaching from the south, I stayed to the left following the wall as I got near the hilltop, wanting to see if there were any large piles with a view towards Wachusett. Here is a first glimpse. There is a large stone mound right of center and something smaller to the left over by the wall: Here is a closeup of the pile:It is rectangular but has a small pile appended to it.

Here is a closeup of what I am calling a hollow in the pile [with suburbia's intrepid encroachment in the background.]
Here is the Wachusett view, masked by trees, but you can make it out:And here is a smaller pile over closer to the wall, sized a bit like the appendage to the first pile.
Another view:
And here is the view back towards the first pile.Further back, in the direction away from Wachusett there was at least one more squarish pile, pretty damaged and unclear under the snow.

I was thinking about exactly this kind of site when I went looking at Apron Hill. Those small hills in northern Boylston looked perfect for viewing the mountain, so I was hoping to find more of the big piles I seem to keep coming across this winter. I was getting close to the idea a few weeks ago when I wrote about Rock Piles at Overlooks [here].

Having finally noticed these identifiable features of a particular kind of rock pile site, having made this identification as something somehow related to Wachusett, the question becomes whether any particular new or old site should be considered as part of this "Wachusett Tradition" or not. So for example, the site in Holliston on Miller Hill [here] might be part of the same tradition or not. I think those big sites in Leominster [eg here] are probably part of this tradition, or at least include this; and the same goes for those sites in Westminster around Muddy Pond [here]. So this is a unifying idea that I believe relates to one culture. It is far enough west of Boston that it seems to be "Central Massachusetts" the ancestral home of the Nipmuck.

Holliston Golf Course Stone Mound perspective

Joanne Hulbert, the Holliston Town Historian and Forest Committee manager writes:

Although the Mavor interpretation of the golf course pile is tantalizing, Many years ago I spoke to Mary Driscoll Murch who lived nearby when the piles were created on the Howe Brothers Farm in an attempt to clear the fields for pasture land. In order to get an idea of what they were up against, the Murch property next door has their rocks still in place and there's alot of them! Mary remembered watching the farm hands - Italian, Portugese and/or Irish, depending on who told the story (Jimmy Macchi said they were Portugese) and the workers were told to build a stonewall around the field "wide enough to drive a wagon upon it - not that they would, just a measurement - and they had so many rocks left over they built the famous pile on the north and started another south of the present golf course clubhouse - but the didn't finish it. Also there's other structures further out on the property. Some have recently been dismantled. My father was a close friend of the Murches and had been told of the rock clearing by them. The town has alot of other great sites, but I don't think we can attribute the golf course piles to anything other than a grand attempt to clear the fields.

Some interesting links

From Archeologica, several interesting links that are not specifically rock pile related:

Tree carving "arborglyph" convinces researchers the Chumash rock art included astronomy. [Click here]

And speaking of glyphs, here is something about the western Amazon and geoglyphs - large geometric patterns on the ground. [Click here]

Inuit trans-continental migration takes a couple of years not hundreds of years. [Click here]

A peculiar combination of rock piles

It seems that in the winter time, hunting rock piles by car makes as much sense as hunting them on foot. So last weekend I was cruising the back streets of Boylston MA, on my way to a hill and a walk, taking time to look side to side. Here was one rock pile, ~50 yards from the road, visible only at this time of year from the road. [On the west side of Rt 70, directly south of the Tahatawan High School.] So I parked and went down to take a look.

This is a tidy rectangular pile, but lying low to the ground and at the angle of repose.Aside from the rectangular outline, this is not a well built pile. And since the rocks have no lichen cover, I kind of assumed this was discarding of rocks - nothing too interesting. Of course there was a nice view westward towards Wachusett and there were a couple pieces of quartz in the pile, so it is a bit like a burial:Here is the view back towards the street - so I can brag about my spotting abilities.That was all well and good, except there was another pile nearby. The place is a spring with water forming up and becoming a brook and heading off downhill. Between the first pile and the brook was a flat pavement of rocks:Unlike the first pile, the rocks here are better covered with lichen. Easier to believe this is an older pile. But what can I make of it? Certainly not much in the snow.

Across the brook and uphill there was a third small rock pile, almost natural, hard to make anything of. Then a few feet downhill from the first pile, was a fourth, crescent shaped "eyebrow" of a pile:This just looks like a bulldozer swept through a rock pile, leaving one well-built section:andI did not know what to make of it.

I would dismiss any one of these piles if it was by itself. But collectively? Pick any scenario you like for the building of these rock piles. How would that scenario play out in explaining all four of them? That is the problem I had understanding this place. My best guess is that it is a badly damaged site, with some modern tweaking for unknown reasons.

In every swamp...

...and wetland, no matter how embedded in suburbia, there remain traces of Native American ceremonialism.

(side of the road, Boylston MA)

It is a compelling narrative for me that modern people live in a landscape that was largely modified earlier (perhaps prehistorically) but which is invisible to modern eyes.

Opacum Woods

Read Mike H. writes:

I took this photo this afternoon in Opacum Woods

http://www.opacumlt.org/opacum_woods.html


I was on the Northwest Corner of the Opacum pond, about where the O in Opacum pond is on the trail map This Structure of 3 built walls against the side of a large rock was interesting. It may have been a building, or a foundation? There was a spring in the ground nearby with built walls lining it in a circular patter and the top was covered by three or four rocks. I only had my cell phone with me, as I was CC Skiing on the pond. The satellite photos for this area just aren't as good as east of here yet.

Anyway, I am going to head back there next weekend with a real camera. There are other interesting rock things on the south west of this pond, near where the "rock shelter" as seen on the website is located.

Detailed report on the Oxford Stone Mound

Norman Muller sends this link to an article in the Anniston Star.

I am afraid it could not get any worse. A few crooks and ...that's it: no more archeology.

Robert Buchanan writes:

Last weekend I took a quick and very cold trip into the Moneyhole Mountain area of Fahnestock State Park. I goal was to explore a broken rectangular stone row array which was about 200m east of the spectacular wall I had found earlier in the winter.

The stone row rectangle was interesting in its position and isolation but not in its construction.

The highlight of the trip however was a discovery I made on the drive home. Instead of taking the usual road exit to the east of the area, I took the scenic route to the west and came across a nice perched boulder right beside the road.

Platform Mound at Miller Hill - Holliston, MA

On first approach from below, the platform looms to the left:
I made a video:

Saw some views of the platform:I like this thing:And of course this picture:Downhill to the northeast was another outcrop with a very damaged pile along it:
And the view from the mound towards the west:At least one of these was natural outcrop, the others were completely man made.Look at that wedge shape, that "ski jump" profile:It is like an early form of marker piles visible from a central platform. Is this not the very basic model of most of the sites around here? A viewing position (in this case a central platform) with slight geometrically placed 'marker' piles oriented in some way perpendicular to the line of sight from the platform? Frankly I cannot see how this would be for anything other than the shadows these piles would cast under various seasonally adjusted lightings, because the well defined faces of the piles are not even visible from the platform. Of course a simpler explanation would be that the whole theory is barren. Also it is possible these piles have been damaged beyond the point where there appearance is meaningful. Still, there is some sort of arrangement here.

At the top of the traprock (basalt) quarry - Miller Hill

A small 'U' ?

Center part 2

center part 2

Miller Hill - Holliston, MA (Preamble and Overview)

A couple of weeks ago I reported on a mega rock pile on a golf course in Holliston, which reminded me of something I read. James Gage pointed me to the article by James Mavor in the NEARA "Across Before Columbus?" entitled: Earth Stones and Sky: Universality and Continuity in American Cosmology. Re-reading, I found this reference to a nearby hilltop:

"...About a mile away there is a traprock quarry on a hilltop which fills with water in the spring. It overflows through a massive earthwork funnel to pour down the hillside and collect in a dammed up pond. It then seeps underground to emerge around the great mound on the golf course. All about the quarry there are stone platforms, mounds, and stone rows that seemed related to the quarry...." (from p64)

When I posted earlier, I commented that there were about 5 hilltops about a mile from this mega pile (the red dot on the map above shows the mega pile, the blue outline is a rock pile site). Then Bruce McAleer emailed me that I should consider Miller Hill (one of the 5) because he had seen rock piles up there. So I looked more carefully at the topo map. Mavor actually provides more than one clue and, significantly, implies that the mega pile and the quarry are in the same watershed. On the topo map you can see that three of the five nearby hilltops are actually separated from the golf course by a brook. So there were only two possibilities and Mill hill was the better of the two.

So, with Bruce's endorsement, I went to have a look last weekend. Not seeing much at first, I came across the quarry and then, poking around, came to a wonderful collection of large stone mounds, to either side of a very large platform mound which I showed yesterday (here) as an appetizer. But before finding the rock piles, I was starting to worry that Mavor was exaggerating. The whole area is massively damaged with earth moving and signs of more recent activity. I saw a number of piles of rock that seemed like discards rather than deliberate structure. Then later in the walk (after seeing the mounds) I found an old 'cellar hole' of a house foundation. In general, I saw every expected sign that this area was harshly, even industrially, used in an earlier time period. And yet, in the valley before seeing the mounds, I did see one obviously ceremonial rock pile right next to an old road, with lots of little rocks spilling off the sides of a boulder - what I think of as a donation pile.Later I found a second similar pile with small rocks spilling off the edge of a boulder. So I started thinking about this juxtaposition of recent harsh land use with a possible donation pile that maybe acknowledged something ceremonial in the vicinity. And I am trying to figure this out. Later after seeing the platform and nearby mounds, I was wondering why Mavor did not make more of a big deal about them and decided: maybe this ambiguity between the modern and the ancient put him off from a simple endorsement of the site.

Then, as I read a bit more in the Mavor article, I see that it was just this same topic that was puzzling him - at least with respect to the large pile at the golf course:

"...We came across some reasonable answers to the enigma posed by the mound rather quickly, to our surprise, that is, in a couple of years. We believe we now know how the mound was built, when it was built, and the names of some of the people involved. But most important of all, as it turned out, the investigation opened the door to 'invisible Indians', descendants of Native Americans, living among the general population, who prefer not to be recognized, but who carry on many of the old traditions...."

So being puzzled by this is natural. There are however, two things I want to postulate, that Mavor might have been more cautious about: first that large platform mound on Miller Hill looks old, and reminiscent of 'Mound Builder' structures. It is like mounds from the Oley Hills site (see here) and others with similar large well-surfaced mounds. Old, as I believe they are, these mounds on Miller Hill would have sat there throughout the time frame of the harsh land use of recent centuries. I would also postulate that the donation piles were in reference to the mounds. In other words - there were lots of people in and about there, and they have been and continue to be well aware of those mounds. They have always been regarded as ceremonial and worth revering. Another view of the platform:After this, I exchanged emails with Bruce, who pointed me to photos he had taken at Miller Hill. He found things I missed. Then re-reading the Mavor article, I noticed the phrase: "All about the quarry there are stone platforms, mounds, ..." and I start thinking I should have explored much more carefully around the quarry. In any case, it seems I missed quite a lot and that more exploration of the hill would be worthwhile. Of course there are still those other 5 summits nearby and it is easy to believe there is more material to be seen on those hilltops as well.

I'll post more details of the mounds later.

A visit to Dr. John Champlin Glacial Park, Westerly, RI

Reader Ted writes:

A visit to Dr. John Champlin Glacial Park, Westerly, RI

Sunday was a nice day to get out so we set off to a new (to us) spot. The Glacial Park had intrigued me for a year or two but somehow I had never gotten around to explore it. We had no expectations, going on intuition and the notion that at the very least there might be some nice glacial erratics to photograph. Lovely paths wind through a hilly landscape with kettle ponds and stone walls made from the round rocks that abound. Looked like field boundary walls to me. At the top of a hill was an opening into a boulder field that contained a split boulder with rocks tucked into the split.Wandering a little further along another trail flanking the southwestern side of a small hill. A small rock pile came into view, but being near a wall, maybe it was a building pile?
We decided to keep our eyes open for others. But further we only saw one more pile, looked kind of disturbed. Not sure what we were seeing. Returned on the same trail and approached the area where the first pile was, but now looking from the other direction, spotted a covered boulder!
Then another and another! Cool.

Lots of leaf litter, but we did not want to disturb anything. These were at the border of the park, just at the edge of a new development, an empty "active adult" community of super-sized houses and condos. Had to wonder if there were even more of these that were destroyed. We found 10 of these in various states in this small area. Great surprise!

Miller Hill Holliston, MA (preview)

I have a platform mound to show, more about it later.

At the Center of the Universe

A small detail from a big-picture - photo #07599 - may actually be the center of the universe.

Stone Platform Mounds - Brooklyn CT

Norman Muller writes:

I am attaching a half dozen images of three large platform mounds on private property in Brooklyn, CT, that I photographed on a hot April day in 2005. One (004 and 007) is beside a small stream. A hundred yards or so away is a huge platform mound (013), which measures more than forty feet along one side and is seven feet high (note the metric stick leaning against the well preserved side). Other shots of this mound (011, 012, 015) show that it has deteriorated significantly on the other sides. Perhaps stones were taken from it to construct nearby colonial walls. A third platform mound (022) is on the same stream as the first one (004), but it is pretty much gone except for the general outline.

View of Spencer Brook...

...over a stone wall with a dead Juniper bush:

Magnificent Platform Pile from Larry Harrop

Just browsing, I had forgotten this one he posted.

Intro to Hopkinton State Forest (last post)

Rock pile video:

(Sorry about some of that voice over.)

Goodbye to Hopkinton State Forest