Potential Site in Albermarle County, VA

Reader Jackson Landers writes:

I've come across a site that I don't quite know what to make of and I would really appreciate your advice.

By way of background, I am a science journalist who wrote for Smithsonian Magazine for several years, a few years with Slate, some work for The Washington Post, etc.

This site is in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, about ten miles outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. It was first settled by Europeans around 1850. The Saponi occupied the area before being pushed out, and they were probably here since around 1200 CE, when they believe that they arrived and introduced agriculture to the people who were here before as hunter-gatherers.

There are at least 40 of these piles, spread out across a ribbon of area of approximately 12 acres.

Most of the stone piles in question here face west, over Ward's Creek, which typically runs year-round and probably contains eels, green sunfish, channel catfish in the spring and summer and perhaps shad 150 years ago before dams were built. The area faced on to is a broad flood plain, suitable for agriculture to the tune of about 200 acres with a small elevated tertiary bench area. There is room for a stockade typical of a Saponi village within the primary flood plain, but the elevated area would be a very tight fit for a stockade and village and more suitable for people passing through.

Around the site at high elevation are what I believe to be old pastures. Wire fence remains are in evidence, with stones littered across the the top of the knob and surrounding areas. There is no place within half a mile where a plow could be dragged due to the stones obvious on the surface. I've read the paper by Charity Moore and Victor Weiss which touches on the transformation of pastureland and the aggregations of stone that I find do not think to fit this model.

A few of the piles involve a base that is stacked in way that could not happen by chance, and I include photos to that effect. None of the stone piles include a visible quartz stone. I should mention that this area has some deposits of blue quartz that are not included visibly within the top layer of any of the piles. Nor are there any split stones in the area which could have involved a wedge.

I have searched the local stream beds for artifacts without result. Though I should say that I have never found a point in this area in spite of having lived, visited and camped here since I was 13 years old and never found a point. Perhaps they are here but I'm not quite programmed to see them. Getting the eyes for snakes, or deer, or mushrooms, or points seems to be an acquired skill. I can find deer or chantarelles, but perhaps points aren't in the algorithm here.

Any advice on how to proceed would be enormously appreciated.

Some rock art links

Reader Alicia writes:

…I'm sending, as I said that I would, some more articles on rock art when they were published

Past Preservers’ Expert of the Week - September 2017
http://pastpreservers.com/our-experts/

Just published:
Fumiko Ikawa-Smith: Her Kind of Woman
https://trowelblazers.com/fumiko-ikawa-smith/

Food Archaeology: Chocolate
https://www.wonkmagazine.co.uk/food-archaeology-chocolate#!

January 2019 An Instruction Manual Would Be Perfect!
Anthropos: International Review of Anthropology and Linguistics 114(1):37-56
DOI: 10.5771/0257-9774-2019-1-37
https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/10.5771/0257-9774-2019-1-37/an-instruction-manual-would-be-perfect-jahrgang-114-2019-heft-1

An old 'shovel' - from Boxborough

Reader Russ sends:
About 9 inches long with broken tip.  6 inches wide at the top.  If legit it seems like a shovel?

Upper Fall Brook - Westville, Taunton

Glebe Rd is an old road that crossed the lowlands around Fall Brook. If you follow the edge of the wetland north to the highest place you can get with water, there is a small site about where you would expect to find one.

Make what you like of this (found along the way):

 Here we are at the headwater:

Minor tributaries of Threemile River - Westville, Taunton

I thought it would be fun to go a bit further afield, to Taunton. My center of gravity is southern Rt 495 and it was only about 20 minutes from the highway. Instead of walking north from where I parked I saw an inviting "corridor" down into a wetland to south [see here], and I followed it.I followed it until I got to a funny little stretch of stone wall and started seeing rock piles after that, as I continued down the wetland [lowest blue outline].

These piles were not much to look at:

Perhaps the nicest one:

These piles are not of a style I recognize. I did not see any even spacing. I did see a few "gap" piles, like these:

Also this seemed to be a place with many short stretches of wall:

 And fainter:

I could have continued down the wetland because there seemed to be a continuation of the things I was seeing. Again, these are not a familiar style: they are not marker piles, they are not mounds. A few piles were small and circular, like fire rings without charring. There were piles right within the wetland and the "gap" piles suggest a place of movement and pathways. 

Instead of continuing downhill, I cut east and found some more traces on a high outcrop looking east. Here the ridge was modified:

Eventually, I turned north, crossed the dirt portion of Rocky Woods Street, and went down along the north side of the land, south of Fall Brook, heading back west. Eventually I came upon some really old mounds [upper blue outline]. I doubt very much whether anyone would see these, or agree that they are man made mounds. But they are.

 [Here is something very unusual: quartz used to wedge a split rock. My thought is that you would rarely want to amplify the spirit of a split rock.]

 Here is another of those invisible mounds.

and others:

The general observation is that these seem to have two or more large rocks at their periphery and, otherwise, are completely broken down - nth stage decrepit. All of which makes this place, at the very highest headwaters of Fall Brook, seem quite old.

Teeing up the next site

Kinda looks like you should walk down that path between the boulders - do you see it?

The brook continues below and does have piles along it.

North Cumberland RI - Ash Swamp Brook

I took a walk in a substantial, open, woods behind a high school. I found the inevitable rock piles; about where they were supposed to be. There were no obvious stylistic differences between these piles in Rhode Island and others a few miles to the north in places like Upton.

What can never be learned entirely is where to expect rock piles, given a map like the one above. Clearly in a swamp like that, surrounded by hills with feeder brooks, and with relatively undisturbed woods, rock piles are almost guaranteed. In fact I turned back after finding one site and I have no doubt there are other things in similar settings all around that swamp.

How do you find these things? You pin down the rock piles between the water and the hill, either by sweeping the hill or by sweeping the water. It is very typical to follow a stream uphill and it is pretty straightforward to come down a hill, stopping at every water source. So in this case, I swept the hill: crossing it with one eye downhill towards the swamp and with expectations of finding marker piles on the slope or something interesting along the brooks (which you can see entering the valley from the left). Strange, it has been a couple weeks since I found this site and I am already confusing the details with what I found yesterday - because the configuration of swamp and brooks (from the west/left) was the same, and the exploration technique was the same, and the site location, with respect to water, was pretty much the same. Let's look at some pictures and, at least, record the site.

This looks like a "gap" piles that create a space between a pile and a boulder or another pile. There were several:

It sure looks like there is a path between these two piles:

and

and

Also a number of lovely little things, in their snow covered 'aspect':

This site was at a flat place where a brook goes around a big bend.

A little further along (north) and down the hill was another two or three piles, enclosed by outcrops and little bits of wall.

On my way back to the car, I note that the first site is along an ATV trail and looks like this upon entering from below:

You can see a boulder in the background. Note the wedge:

This site is only about half way up the brook, so there is probably more to see.

RI Appetizer

Native American Social Dance - Greenfield MA

The Nolumbeka Project presents a Native American Social Dance and Stomp Dance, Saturday, February 1, (snow date 2/2), 1-4 p.m., Greenfield Community College, Cohn Dining Room, 1 College Drive, Greenfield, MA. All welcome.  A rare opportunity to learn and participate in Northeastern Woodlands Native social dances, led by Annawon Weeden, Mashpee Wampanoag, Congressional award honoree as culture-bearer for the Northeast and James Moreis, Aquinnah Wampanoag, father and culture bearer. Opening words by Chief Roger Longtoe Sheehan, Elnu Abenaki. All ages. The single file call and response dances will be taught and are fun and easy to learn. Bring rattles and shake out the cabin fever!  Snow date? www.nolumbekaproject.org Free, donations appreciated.

Acton's Trail Through Time: Information, dis-information, and missing information

I went back to Acton's Nashoba Brook Conservation Land. I did a lot of poking around there in the past, slowly forming an opinion. How many bad ideas did I have to try out and discard? Nashoba Brook was the great "teaching" experience. But that was 20 years ago. I expected to see new rock piles this time and was not disappointed. I found several new clusters but trying to compare them to locations on my topo maps, I can't tell whether I saw these places in the past. Here is a self portrait:

I could describe the sites but you have heard this before. I take away two things from this walk. One was the way I sub-consciously hunted down the rock piles. I cannot really describe this other than to say: I found the hilltop and headed west, downhill, knowing that I would have to cross several wetlands and knowing that I could pin down the rock piles between the hill and water.

The other thing I come away with is an emotional reaction to the "Trail Through Time" interpretive panels I encountered at the bottom of the hill when I got back to the trails. Frankly they are a bit lame, presumably because they are based on information from Indians who learned about these things from people who, themselves, had spent little time understanding the overall phenomena. It is sadly generic. In fact Mark Strohmeyer and the Mavor and Dix team had spent a lot of time at Nashoba Brook. I spent many days walking there and showing it to locals, and I spent several walks there showing the place to the Indians. Today's interpretive signs tell nothing of the history of the place, how those panels came to be. Nor do the signs contain anything that is accurate or specific to this place. I wrote down some reactions when I got home:

Revisiting Nashoba Brook and being gratified to see the interpretive panels and the little 3-dot indicators of rock piles that I recommended. But being disappointed at the incorrect information (saying marker piles in a row are “unusual”) the disinformation (the newly coined Algonquian representing non-existent categories). And saddened at the missing information: no real acknowledgement of the role of water and the key role of Nashoba Brook with many springs flowing out of the hill from the south.

I took a hike there recently heading uphill and left after the bridge, then swinging around more to the west until I got to the highest place on the hill, where I turned west and headed down past a series of valleys, each with a spring, two out of three with rock piles. This all happens between the green trail and the yellow trail, near the hilltop. These were new sites to me and not all are on the Acton trail map. After seeing three different sites with rows of evenly spaced “marker” piles, I came to an interpretive panel for the “Trail Through Time”, which informed me that piles in a row were “unusual”. Later on the trail, a cluster of three marker piles, forming a ‘L’ rather than in a row, was given a freshly minted Algonquian name and interpreted as something different. Well, I suppose I should not be picky. We have replaced the agrarian myth with an archeological myth. But what is most saddening is the missing information and the failure to explain how this site is connected to water “from head to toe” – meaning: water sources on that most porous of hills to the south, Spring Hill, drain down into Nashoba Brook and then down from the rocky hills of Acton into the rich alluvial flatlands of Concord, around the Assabet River. Most of the springs have sites and, of course, these woods are the first place suitable for rock piles , uphill from Assabet River. So this failure to connect the Nashoba Brook Conservation Land to the brook itself is a disappointment.

Let me end by saying that marker pile sites, which are thought to be calendrical, are the most common type of rock pile site (and represent ~90% of the piles at Nashoba Brook). The piles may be on the ground or up on a boulder - whichever is needed to locate the pile where it needs to function. The standard characteristic is even spacing of the piles. This arrangement tends to form a grid when the piles are clustered, or form a set of 'tic marks' when the piles are in a row. Almost invariably, marker piles are found in associated with a burial, which is usually represented by a larger and less conspicuous mound, to the side of the marker piles. 

Remember Phillips Hill, Hudson MA

I just came across this photo (here) and can't resist posting it.

A little "Valley of Kings" - new rock piles, where I already looked many times

I took a stroll through parts of Woods Hole to show rock piles to a friend, and ended up finding new piles in more than one place - just for the price of looking again and being a few yards away from where I had been previously. It just goes to show how easy it is to miss these things.

 Boy that's hard to see!

From the side, you can detect a familiar shape - a broad horseshoe with its back against the hill (to the right). Ten yards away, at the top of the slope, is a pavement and a small collection of marker piles.

That makes three different mounds in the same half acre valley. A miniature valley of the kings.

I suppose the pavement at the top is the same age as this new leaf-covered mound. It shows you how differences in topography can affect the appearance and weathering of a pile. As for the mounds being hard to see, I only saw the third one that one time. It is not worth braving the bull-briar to find it again.

To finish the story, the above site is behind the fire station, north of the main road a few steps. Driving through the parking lot behind the Woods Hole Oceanographic's Quissett Campus, here was another new pile. Again, for the price of driving through a different parking lot:

Best of 2019 from Joshua H in RI

Reader Joshua H. writes:

here is a photo of all the most important artifacts from my first year collecting in RI. The top left greenish yellow stones are made from serpentine rock

there is a resharpened smoky quartz hardaway side notch with fluting and terminal hinge fracture, a black argillite serrated point that's similar to atlantic phase, a green argillite guilford round base,

an ancient rhyolite biface blade that's serrated, a red rhyolite cobbs triangular round base, a broken red rhyolite spearpoint that may be Kirk stemmed or Wapanucket (I think) but also looks similar to a benton,

a marblehead rhyolite hell gap point with quartz phenocrysts, red rhyolite short kirk serrated I think, a small quartzite point that looks similar to a RI and CT clovis point types

and a green argillite koens-crispin point as well as a few other broken points including a peachy colored quartzite spearpoint that looks early archaic/late paleo.

I had an amazing first year collecting to say the least. All artifacts were collected from the beach or the edge of Point Judith pond.

[Update]
I misidentified this as a union side notch but it's a Dalton-greenbriar, greenbriar or Hardaway-Dalton I think

Best of 2019

Since I moved to Cape Cod I have done little exploring. There are still plenty of woods out there. My main finds of the year were: Quisset Wildlife Management area in Mendon

And my most recent finds at Sippewisset:

There was a bit of good writing and I found myself pre-occupied with worked fragments of quartz, found in strange settings in Woods Hole, like this Levallois Technology blade from deep in the glacial clay during construction:

Well, I will be up in Concord and may get some exploring in if there is no snow.

Have a good new year everyone.

The inlet at Flume Pond, Sippewisset, Falmouth, MA