Here is another (2 views)
Here is a third from in there.
Nice colors.
To the left is a knoll facing west. There are a few rock piles on it. Here is one.
Note the quartz, in this detail shot:
Here are two views of another.
This is the first substantial pile I have found in several weeks. You can see these are both supported piles, at the top of the knoll and facing west over the brook as it curves around the base of the knoll.
This last one looks like it was vandalized very recently. There were a couple of others like it and I thought there were traces of someone having driven over them deliberately with some kind of ATV.
I noticed a few other odds and ends: what looked like a "gateway" pile, a ground pile here, a false outcrop there.
And also this old friend, a nice example of a split-wedged rock:
No doubt this whole area was once filled with ceremonial structures. A few are still left in there.
FFC gave me a map he found at the Carlisle landfill - a 1923 topo map of the area around Fort Devens (mayb ~10 miles on either side) that shows all the stone walls. Dan Boudillion first mentioned this map to me and Bruce McAleer had given me some xerox copies but it was nice to get the full map in its original form. It is a fascinating document. For the most part the stone walls form parallelograms or other rectalinear shapes which sub-divide the landscape.
But there are other places on the map where the walls go crazy. Places with pentagonal outlines, diamonds, triangles, little short stretches of wall, bits that follow the natural contours of the hills and wetlands. It is very interesting to note that one place on the map with the most rock piles (as far as I know) is also one of the places where the walls are very irregular. As another example, I was looking over the map and spotted an area of irregularity and though...hmmm...before I realized that that was the place I found a nice site on Dec. 26.
So this observation of a correlation between rock pile sites and irregular stone walls leads naturally to the strategy of searching out on the ground places where the walls seem weird on the map. I practised this strategy last weekend and found a rock pile site - but I probably would have found one anyway in that big a patch of Boxborough woods. I post about that later.
Another thing of iterest on the map is where the stone walls are not. Because those are places where it is too sandy for there to be wall making material. There will not be rock piles there either in most cases. Lately I have been having to drive further away from home to go exploring in new woods and there are two things that can spoil the day: sandy soil and new housing developments. There is nothing more disapointing then driving for 3/4 hours only to end up in a spot with sand and no rocks for walls or rock piles. After that long a drive the day is shot. So now I have a way of screening those places out, t least near Fort Devens: I make sure there are stone walls in the vicininty.
Finally, I think there are other pieces of interesting information hidden in the tangle of lines on this map. I see a number of east-west directed walls. But very few true north-south walls and I am not sure how many magnetic north-south ones. I wonder how many of these walls might line up with a solstice?
This is a chamber that has been mentioned before. I do not know if M&D knew about it, it is near a more famous other one directly along the road. As far as my experience goes about this, it was first spotted by Derek Gunn as we drove by on the way to the other chamber. More on this later.
A person could easily be sheltered in the cavity. The less well known feature is a stone row with what looks like a snake head at the end. The nose of the "snake" points to the cavity as shown in the following two pictures:
The body of the "snake" goes about 300 feet and projects into a spring fed pond. The path of the of the body is shown in the aerial photograph below. Part of the body looks like a conventional wall but other parts definitely do not.
As noted the "tail" projects into a pond about 10-15 feet. This section is shown in the following photo.
There are a number of other interesting features in this area. I hope to survey them more thoroughly in the future.
This is a fine example of a field clearing pile for comparison with other piles which are similar but which, I claim may be ceremonial. This one is not. Notice the following features:
It struck me that this is a pretty classic vertical faced pile. But other signs of a "marker pile site" were lacking.
Before examing it, I photo'ed a nearby rock-on-rock group and also an uneven ridge of larger rocks and boulders.
This is not a stone wall but a somewhat wiggly line leading from the road (in the background of the picture) down to the large pile. I imagined this line as a tail connecting to the head of the larger pile.
Here is another view of this larger pile. It is a classic "wall bulge" but without the wall. The pile itself has a well-built retaining wall. This is essentially identical to the piles at ZZZ Pond in Carlisle. You can see the pile contains rocks of all sizes but which have been carefully graded. The basic principles of field clearing are visible.
Also one observes that the water starts at the big pile and then flows eastward a short ways into HHH Brook. Things like a stack in the water or this rather large rock-on-rock are not compatible with simple farming.
This seems like a reasonably good example of where the basic height of the wall is uniform and [as described in the previous post] one portion sticks noticeably above that height - a little symmetry with a window. It also looks like an example where the horizon is visible through the see-through hole.
From Concord, MA. The official name of this material is Cambridge blue argillite. It is one of the commonest materials used, mostly, by the maritime archaic cultures of this area.
In this example, the "see-through" structure is a good three courses higher than the rest of the wall. It is hard to not see that as deliberate.
