Revisiting "Indian Cave" Part 2

The upper red dot is my entry point from Dec. 5, 2011 and the lower is the approximate location of the cave, where the river cuts a zigzag into the bedrock. This link to Bing Maps shows a "Bird's Eye" south-facing view of the contour lines just to the left of the 750 mark: http://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=qy3ww18x08j6&lvl=17.994347843867192&dir=182.50308350405655&sty=b&form=LMLTCC

This rough drawing is probably not very accurate but shows the feel of the place; these photos are from that middle section where the rows intersect:

I already posted two rock piles, a mound and the two stones with a bucket. There was another similar to the first:

And another that I'm not sure of; is it an elongated pile or a row?

I can answer that very quickly: I don't know.

But a little south and west of that, I found a low Zig-zag row that I began following:

There was a little gap in the row, perhaps for a "wood road" or a cart path or perhaps intentional, but it sort of straightened out to define the base of an out crop high spot (that I didn't check out - yet):

It continued and so did I:

A detail of the row, the sort of stacking I think of as the "Indian Look" present, a more artistic placing of stones (rather than the no-nonsense European stonework), the inclusion of quartz, the effigy like shapes etc:

A linear row led off to the right (north), but I stayed with the zigzag:

Rather than an accidental haphazard bunch of stones, many seemed chosen for their shapes,

the row itself intentionally zigzag, particularlly the quartz stones...

The zigzag row continued and another linear stone row appeared, again to the north toward the river,

so for no reason really, I turned and followed that. More interesting stones on that row:

Below: An Owlish Face?

Above: Turtle? Bird? Turtle Bird?

As I approached the change in the gentle almost flat area the rows are in, I saw another east/west row at the other end of the linear row, defining that steep change of slope leading back down to the stream.

And there perhaps was a "manitou stone (looking North):"

The manitou is just to the right of the small sapling below:

Above: looking south, back along the linear row & toward the zizag row;

below: Looking west, the steeper decline toward the stream at right:

"Mysteries In Stone"

Have you guys poked around this web site much?

I'll hold off on making a permanent link. It seems, as with the Hamonasset Line, to be generalizing from about 1% of the evidence.

Water Ceremonies - near Half Moon Swamp Groton

I went for a walk in southernmost Groton and saw a few rock piles. This is the woods between Indian Hill Rd and Half Moon Swamp Conservation land. This was in the same area but a bit west from Nutting Road, which I wrote about here.

When I got home and was giving my son a ride he asked: did you find anything good? My first thought was: not particularly, just some minor piles and split rocks next to vernal ponds. Then I realized that these were actually examples of the same thing: a view over a small pond, a split rock, a rock pile. In retrospect I think this is a somewhat formulaic set of structures that also is seen outside of Groton. Here are some pictures.

First I saw a couple of messy piles in the woods:The latter was almost like part of a stone wall: elongated, extended into other "piles" (later I followed this direction). But then I noticed a rock pile across the way and, when I got over there, I saw it was next to a split rock. Here is a view back across to the first piles. The split rock is to the left, and the water is out of sight, still further to the left at the bottom of the dip:It took a moment to get the layout clear and the relation to the water:
Here we are look from the water back towards the nice rock pile, lined up through the splits in the split rock.

I explored around a bit in one direction and did not see anything. Then I applied a "wisdom" that says: always look thoroughly in all directions near where you first find something, before moving off in a new direction. In this case, I found nothing in one direction and, rather than continuing in that direction, I went back to look at the first piles and explore more in the direction of the elongation of the second pile. After a few feet I found another pile, pretty much along the same line:
Since that direction seemed to be working, I continued and found one more pile. This one would be easy to miss: And I continued, out across and under a power line:
Not sure why the rock piles showed up in this longer term sequence, following pretty much along the same line. It is a small scale "alignment" - the kind of thing my colleagues often talk about but which I rarely see examples of.

(Parenthetically, while I am skipping from topic to topic, let me mention that Mavor was a strong proponent of alignments that last for a mile or so - structures that appear along a line. I do not know his opinion of the long cross-country alignments such as the Tom Paul's "Hamonasset Line" that go for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of miles. I am not a fan of that sort of theory and the one clean experiment that has been done shows there are no such long term alignments around here. The experiment is to plot all the sites and look for some clustering along a line. I want to say that even the short term alignment theory of Mavor's was misleading. I explored a site this summer that had maybe twenty rock piles. Five of the rock piles happen to fall on a line (it was a marker pile site) and were the only ones Mavor noticed and mapped when he explored the site. His preoccupation with the alignment stopped him from taking a good look around at all the rock piles that were not on the line he was following. Anyway...)

Continuing after the power lines, I got onto a forest road, followed it a while, until I found another small collection of rock piles, next to a split rock, next to a bit of water. Here we are looking from a small pile to a larger pile to a split rock. The water is to the right.Closeup of the larger pile:Let's look at the other side of this pile:Ooh baby! How about a closeup:
The water would be that low spot to the right, mostly dry but still a bit of a puddle.
Let's take a closer look at the split rock:Closer, you can see a wedge:
Back towards the pile with quartz:
If you look up hill from this spot, to the east away from the water, there is sort of ridge line outcrop forming the horizon. I noticed a couple of rocks hanging out over the edge of the outcrop. Let's have a look at these and their relation to the water.

The outcrop with hanging rocks:
A couple of rock-on-rocks that were part of this cluster:Looking down the line that joins these two rock-on-rocks, you do get a sense that attention is being directed to the water.The Half Moon Swamp is beyond and below this, in the background of the picture.

These seem to me to be structures that are related to the water. In the cases of the rock pile + split rock + water, these structures look to the southwest over the water.

To answer my son: Yes, I think I did find something good.

Revisiting "Indian Cave"

From a Remnant Stone Row by the stream...

...to a Rock on Rock (with a bucket to boot).

Rock Piles under Power Lines - aerial views

Tim MacSweeney draws my attention to Bing and aerial viewing of something I was just writing about: rock piles under the power lines near Westminster Hill Rd in Fitchburg. I know one place where the rock piles should be visible in the aerial and sure enough:This is in Leominster, MA where Mt Elam Rt becomes Granite St and turns under the power lines. Sadly this is about the best I can get out of these satellite images. The best I could get out of the view over by Westminster Hill Rd was an indistinct grayish patch.

Taking Mental Snapshots - Parker Hill Revisited

First described here.

Went back to do some more exploring around Parker Hill in West Fitchburg. I was well on the way in my car before realizing I'd forgotten my camera. Usually I figure hunting without your "gun" makes no sense but, this time, I was not expecting to see too much anyway and I could always come back again with a camera, if anything really great showed up.

I followed the power lines in from Westminster Hill Rd and went over a knoll and looked across a dip to the next slope and I could see two large smeared out rock piles on the next slope, under the power lines. Going over to take a look, I saw one more large smeared pile to my left in the woods. There was also at least one more large pile under the power lines, so low and covered with weeds that I had to step on it to know it was there. This site is in a gully that corresponds to the lowest blue outline on the above map fragment. I took a first mental snapshot of the scene looking across the gully at the smeared piles under the power lines. I guess I took another snapshot of the pile in the weeds, seeing rocks down under the raspberry stems.

My plan was to follow the gully north, staying to the left until I could get onto what looked like a sort of plateau and, perhaps, to go even further north to the a brook confluence that invites an in-person examination. The walk over to the plateau was uninteresting but when I got over to there, at a place where 4 paths meet (to the north of the gravel pits) I saw what seemed to be a solitary large smeared pile on a little knoll. Believe it or not these large smeared piles are exactly what I was hoping to find - remnants of my "Wachusett Tradition" burial mounds. I believe that there are actually five or more of these mounds over in that area, approximately where the upper blue outline is, on the map fragment. I took another mental snapshot of this smeared pile on a knoll, and I guess there are some additional ones in a moment.

What I found on this walk is of no particular interest, except to me in my fanatic pursuit of traces of the Wachusett Tradition. This type of rock pile site is, pretty much, all you can find north of Fitchburg. I just wanted to extend my knowledge of that area around Parker Hill - a pretty big piece of woods. But the rock piles I found over there, in the area of the upper blue outline, were so far gone that I think I would have a hard time convincing even a rock pile enthusiast that there was anything there at all. I have another couple mental snapshots. One is of a 30 foot long rectangular scoop taken out of a sandbank, with an arrangement of rocks following the back wall and sides. Another is of a 5x5 rectangular hole along with the thought "no this was not the remnants of a small sweat lodge, but a hole outlined by rocks...all that is left of a mound with hollow". Just as a rock pile enthusiast would have trouble showing a rock pile to someone who had never seen one and knew nothing about this subject; so, in the same way, I would have trouble explaining these remnants, even to a rock pile enthusiast. The piles were so far gone, I had trouble making them out. But they were there.

I truly wonder if anyone will ever get back over there, will clean up the piles a bit to make them more visible, or even excavate them a bit - after all if they are not there then what would be the harm in digging?

Update: I mean, it is too bad we cannot get a team of students out from Fitchburg State really looking into these sites in a way that, at least, cleaned up the site.

Update II: The lowest left blue outline on the map is deprecated.

Sinagua Arrowheads from Northern AZ

A Concord Rock Pile Under the Moss

I like the two white rocks where the moss did not attach.

Parker Hill - Fitchburg, MA

I picked this hill in western Fitchburg for my Sunday walk. Drove up the road next to it until the pavement gave way to dirt, parked, and continued on foot up the road. Lots of dumped rubbish consisting - curiously - of lots of chairs and old TVs. It was like graveyard for couch potato accessories.

One dirt road goes up and crosses the hill east-west just below the summit - a stone wall actually crosses the summit. From there I took another smaller dirt road down the north side of the hill. I wanted to get into the flatter valley in that direction (hoping to find some traces of the "Wachusett Tradition") and wanted to get away from the dumped rubbish. This turned out to be a good move. Half way down the north side of the hill, the road passes through a gap in a stone wall and passes what looked like a donation boulder (because of the sense of random rocks falling off the sides):
I was worried, though, that it was an isolated pile and was only slightly re-assured when I saw something else on the other side (downhill) of the wall. But I was not too sure of this:
Let me parse this view. We are looking at a low, curved mound of cobbles, mostly of the size that you could carry in one hand. On the left, at each end of the curve, are two larger cobbles/boulders and you can see some symmetry of the curved mound between these larger endpoints. Looking carefully there is also a piece of quartz at the center of the curve, just to the right of the center of the photo. There is a second piece of quartz to the right of that. Here is a view towards the center of the pile, taken in a line perpendicular to the above photo:I was still a little worried that this was not a "real" site. The worry started to fade when I came to a "real" rock pile - real because it is carefully built up.
This manifests the ideal of "rock piles poking up out of the laurel". My worries that this was not a site evaporated as I entered a boulder field, with lots of rocks and small rock pile clusters.
So I combed the area, traversing the hill at the same level until I ran out of rock piles, then traversing back, a few feet lower down on the hill. Lots of examples of piles with two larger rocks in a pair:Some pretty old piles - love it when they are moss covered and hiding in the bushes this way:
Now, that first pile with quartz would make a decent example of an older Wachusett mound. But everything else I was seeing felt more like marker piles - evenly spaced, and the kinds of things I expect to see as outliers around Wachusett mounds. Or perhaps each cluster represents an individual little ceremony.The question was: are there any other of the larger mounds in here? I think I found a couple but they were too far gone to photograph well. You see, here the laurel is growing around the edges of the rock pile:Is this cool or what? I'll just show you some more pictures, hoping to convey the atmosphere of the place:Note in the distance is a pile built into the corner of a stone wall. I wonder if this came later or if the walls and piles are from the same date as the rest of this site?

It was a pretty, but somewhat forlorn, place. This is the first decent new site I have found in a while, so I was glad for that also. The location corresponds with the larger blue outline on the map fragment above.

After spending a while at this first site, I continued into the flatter area beyond north and west of the hill. There was a brook, and a large pile of rocks badly re-arranged and driven over by multiple ATV. My guess is that this is just what it looks like: a multiple chambered mound right next to the water. But who can tell? There was a little quartz in the right place:
Not that this pile is of any interest by itself. Perhaps another dot on the site map? But overall another site in Fitchburg, much like the others I have found here.

Update: I want to mention two other sites this site reminds me of: the northern slope of North Manoosnoc and downhill from Fenton Rd - both places a few miles south of here in Leominster. From my point of view this site is pretty typical of what I would expect to find in these hills. The sites are pretty common if you go looking and cover enough territory. That requires curiosity and a car. But how likely would it be for someone to spot a pattern when they only see one site? How inclined would someone be to hitch up the horse and wagon and go looking for something similar, further afield? Not very. I think getting a real sense of rock pile sites is only possible because of the having a car and having reasonably affordable gasoline.