More Woods Hole outings

With respect to:
Day 1 - Locust hole
Day 2 - Fringes of Webster woods
Day 3 - NE of Thomas Landers
Day 4 - west of Punch Bowl
Day 5 - Bourne Cons lands
Day 6 - WHOI Quisset

Day 2 - Fringes of Webster Woods
A little prayer seat:Found some more of the typical low degenerate ground piles. Also saw this curiousity:
I do not see any signs of fire use [like the "orb"?] so what is this? People camp in these woods, sometimes for extended periods - it being the Cape and all.

Day 3 - NE of Thomas Landers
Some nice colored mushrooms:A beautiful, simple, rock-on-rock:

Day 4 - west of Punch Bowl
A couple of rock piles in the trail,just past the end of Terhuen Dr.
These play well into the narrative of archeology hidden in suburbia. They must have been good sized piles originally.

Then uphill from there, a couple of very subtle structures. Like this mini gap-pile:
And other low degenerate piles:See the shiny bull-briar leaves? Walked through miles of the stuff this summer - getting used to lifting my feet and, later, to the sting of salt water on the many scratches.

[Saw nothing in Bourne]

Day 6 - WHOI Quisset
A couple of possibly recent structures in the woods by the drive into the Quisset Campus. Bad lighting:And nearby, a funny structure with a standing stone (or "backrest", or "headstone")
There was blue writing and a blue heart on the standing stone. So what is this? Also, right along one of the Quissett Campus trails, is the finest split-wedged rock example I have seen down on the Cape. Split-wedged rocks are rare down here, in general - I used to think they did not exist.

Ancient Stone Monument to Napi Discovered on Canadian Prairies

From Heritage Key [click here]

Also, see this.

A couple of classics from Falmouth, MA

Awww
...gotta love it

Miscellaneous outings around Woods Hole, MA- Day 1 scouting for rock piles

Looking at the trail maps available from the town of Falmouth (where I have already explored for several years) these seemed like reasonable prospects in the 'edge' areas.

Day 1 - Locust hole
Day 2 - Fringes of Webster woods
Day 3 - NE of Thomas Landers
Day 4 - west of Punch Bowl
Day 5 - Bourne Cons lands
Day 6 - WHOI Quisset

More detail about Day 1:
Taking the trail south from Brick Kiln for a while, over hill and dale, I got to a point where there is a wall to the left like this:At this place, I headed off in the obvious direction, downhill to the right where there was a developing gully and possibly a kettle hole. I explore all kettle holes because, especially in the Falmouth area, this is one good place to find rock piles.

I encountered a stone wall going down into the hole and, next to it, a first anomaly:You can see it is a little ring of stones next to the wall:Then, a few paces downhill, something I usually would not notice.
I suspect this is a deliberate structure since it was near the little circle and the 3 rocks forming a sketchy line parallel to the wall are too far from the wall to be random. I was very pleased, to find a relatively large (for Falmouth) rock pile across the gully from these wall anomalies. You have to be no more than a few feet from things to see them in there.
Closer:
Closest:
Although it seemed to be an isolated pile, it was only a few paces from the wall and its anomalies. So I felt this was a small but complete site. I did not see anything else and their was water a few more paces downhill.

Mavor wrote about and built a model of a similar ring of stones next to a stone wall over on the Oceanographic's Quisset property. For some time the model was displayed at the Woods Hole Historical Society. In his analysis, he assumed someone sitting in the ring. Now that I think about it, Mavor made the argument that sky-meeting-water defined a point on the horizon which was astronomically significant from the point of view of an observer sitting in the ring. If that is so, I wonder if the rock pile's edge might define a similar such horizon point, where it meets the ground - the pile was in the right sort of place to be observed on a near horizon, across the slope from the ring - visible if there was not so much brush in the way. That would make this a "marker pile".

Beech Trees

I cannot resist one more non-rock pile related photo, although to tell the truth there were some piles on the same slope a few yards to the left.

Resuming blogging slowly - Yellows

Someone remind me: is this is an edible mushroom?

Fire and Agroforestry

In describing and interpreting the results of her investigation of the Goldkrest Site near Albany, New York, archaeologist Lucianne Lavin (2004) referred to the radiocarbon dating of burned soil patches with associated charcoal as evidence of forest clearing through the use of fire...

Whole Article:
https://www.curtinarch.com/blog/2010/7/28/forest-burning-and-clearing-by-hudson-valley-indians-1000-years-ago

More on California rock walls

Reader Danny S. forwarded this link:
http://www.platosatlantis.com/The%20Rock%20Lines.htm

Greetings from mid-vacation

Saw a few piles down on the Cape and am back in Concord for the morning. I will try to visit somewhere new on the way back to the Cape later today. Maybe regular posting will resume next week.

Sedona Cairns

Norman Muller: "I took this shot in Sedona, AZ, five or so years ago. Call it cairn overload."[PWAX: I have been reserving the words "stacks" for these modern structures. Lucky they look so different from Native American rock piles.]

Excerpt from Charles Mann' s 1491

 The 1987 edition of American History: A Survey, a standard high school textbook by three well-known historians, summed up Indian history thusly: “For thousands of centuries—centuries in which human races were evolving, forming communities, and building the beginnings of national civilizations in Africa, Asia, and Europe—the continents we know as the Americas stood empty of mankind and itsworks.” The story of Europeans in the NewWorld, the book informed students, “is the story of the creation of a civilization where none existed.”

Meanwhile, new disciplines and new technologies were creating new ways to examine the past. Demography, climatology, epidemiology, economics, botany, and palynology (pollen analysis); molecular and evolutionary biology; carbon-14 dating, ice-core sampling, satellite photography, and soil assays; genetic microsatellite analysis and virtual 3-D fly-throughs—a torrent of novel perspectives and techniques cascaded into use. And when these were employed, the idea that the only human occupants of one-third of the earth’s surface had changed little for thousands of years began to seem implausible. To be sure, some researchers have vigorously attacked the new findings as wild exaggerations. (“We have simply replaced the old myth [of untouched wilderness] with a new one,” scoffed geographer Thomas Vale, “the myth of the humanized landscape.”) But after several decades of discovery and debate, a new picture of the Americas and their original inhabitants is emerging.

Advertisements still celebrate nomadic, ecologically pure Indians on horseback chasing bison in the Great Plains of North America, but at the time of Columbus the great majority of Native Americans could be found south of the Río Grande. They were not nomadic, but built up and lived in some of the world’s biggest and most opulent cities. Far from being dependent on big-game hunting, most Indians lived on farms. Others subsisted on fish and shellfish. As for the horses, they were from Europe; except for llamas in the Andes, the Western Hemisphere had no beasts of burden. In other words, the Americas were immeasurably busier, more diverse, and more populous than researchers had previously imagined.

And older, too.


Excerpt from Charles Mann' s 1491

Money Hole Mountain Stone Wall - NY

Rob Buchanan writes:

As I mentioned I had come across an interesting stone wall on Moneyhole Mountain. Below is a description of the wall and some other stone structures near it.

The stone wall is situated on the NW edge of a long ridge which runs in a south westerly direction from the top of the Moneyhole Mountain.

The wall itself is less than 1 m high and primarily constructed of rectangular slabs. The slabs are tilted and stacked to form many holes, gaps and niches.

The NE part of the wall runs through open forest for about a 100 m before entering thicker vegetation. The wall then turns uphill to the east.

All along the ridge and wall there are views to the W and NW of the Mount Beacon ridge and Storm King across the Hudson.

Where the wall's eastern arm ends there is a large turtle effigy mound and about 60 m to the S of that there is a propped boulder cluster.

The propped boulder cluster consists of three boulders leaning into each other. There is an opening which passes in a N - S direction under the boulders. There is also E - W opening between them.

On the ridge above the stone wall there are two large light colored boulders.

Flashback to Carlisle

Perhaps you have not heard some of this.

More on Serpentine Walls

Rob Buchanan writes:

Your post about the Dick's Rdge wall reminded me of the following site, Fort Mountain which is also in NW Georgia. Below is a link to an extensive web article describing it.

http://www.lostworlds.org/fort_mountain.html

Here's another study of a serpentine wall in the South. This site is in Alabama.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Preliminary+investigations+at+the+Skeleton+Mountain+site,+1CA157,+...-a0200132376

I have come across a similar structure on Moneyhole Mountain in Putnam County.

Dick's Ridge Serpentine Wall

Have we seen this?

Cabell cairns pique archaeologist's interest. By Rick Steelhammer, The Charleston Gazette

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Shortly after a surveyor marked off the boundaries of his newly purchased farm in southern Cabell County two years ago, the landowner hiked its perimeter. Halfway up a steep hillside behind his home, he noticed a series of rock piles on a bench of flat land and walked over to investigate. [Click here for entire article]

The people of the stone

Check it out.

Taa-Daa!

downhill from Ash Str. Hopkinton. Behind the Church School

Very light posting for a few weeks

Two reasons for not posting go beyond my usual laziness: I have had exceedingly poor luck finding new rock pile sites (maybe the heavy leaf coverage prevents spotting from the car or in the distance) and I am going on vacation for a couple of weeks starting next weekend. Last weekend I found a total of one split-wedged rock, which I will show (with fanfare) later.

Following along with the idea of "bringing home the bacon" or "bringing home the rock pile bacon" [like Michael Cole's "bringing home the epigraphic bacon"], I sometimes think about it as if we had to eat what I bring home. A larger stone mound...big game. A split-wedged rock...maybe a chipmunk. Sure, we'll eat. But not well.

Surveyors cairns, shepherd's cairns, Spanish Boundary Markers from Wyoming

Peter Anick of NEARA found this:
[Click here]