They were from a site with a number of other distinctive features, like small pile with a space and then a larger pile:
I'll say more about the site some other time.
Today we went down and around the west side and circled around to the north, down into a valley where one of the main brooks starts. There are always faint traces, like a wedged rock:
or a rock-on-rock:
Then we climbed the hill to a slight lower northeastern summit and saw rock piles integrated into a stone wall. Just dumps from a farmer preparing for a better wall? Or just the downhill side refuse that has been scraped off the more plowable land on the little summit? Most of the piles were in line with a trace of a stone wall. But one or two were not on the line. Are they something else? 
This one had one piece of quartz at one end, was a well-defined oval and was out of line with the trace of wall. If the wall was not there I would have taken this for a legitimate rock pile.
The one below isn't typical, but it's similar to the others, although it's also possible it once was part of something else. It's in Berks County, PA, not far from Oley Hills. The people in the picture are, in the foreground, Frank Maykuth, who grew up a NEARA kid and added that perspective, and the other is Don Repsher, reverend rascal and researcher extraordinaire.
The next one is from the Hackettstown, New Jersey site. Its form, like two of the others, is what you might call the 'Anne Elk' shape if you're a Monty Python fan--small at one end, larger in the middle, and then small again at the other end. It is however, less flat as it faces you.
The last is from the same site as the second, not far from Oley Hills in Berks County. Like the first one above, especially, it is backed up against a small hump of earth, is flat in front, and seems never to have been part of a larger structure of any kind. This one is especially nice to look at.
This cairn is in a somewhat swampy area, and there are colonial walls nearby. At the same site are two very attractive platform cairns beside a beautiful stream, and I am attaching a photo of one of them.
The piles varied a good deal in size and shape and they were not evenly spaced or in lines, but they did consistently have the quartz. I call these pile blazed piles and usually assume they are burials although I could easily be wrong.
Here was one nicely built pile from in there:
Then this next one was one of several that seemed a bit like a turtle. What is up with that? It happens occasionally with blazed piles - I'll leave a comment below about a theory about that.
The final picture shows a sacred little spot with an accumulation of quartz into a small outline:
So there is more here and it is complicated. Obviously you are not going to have the same understanding of this site, which has small-scale details, as you do of the site we saw earlier at Moosehorn Rd, which has large monumental platform piles and good views.
These three pictures are from a group of piles deep in the woods. They were all made of broken fragments of a nice smooth grey material like a gneiss. To get to them we parked off Parkerville Rd and walked north along a forest Rd. These were right on the trail and, in fact, this is a mountain laurel woodland and you cannot stray safely from the path so everything we saw was along the trail.
This is one more beauty from in there. I thought this pile was great. It was in a different cluster of piles. Bruce noticed that at each cluster was next to a gully of some sort. He said that everything was about gully's.
Here is Google Maps "hybrid" of satellite+road map images. This is a portion of Rt 202 just north of the power lines in New Salem. You can sort of see the gully developing and edging the main site and draining out towards the bottom of the picture.
And here is a topo of the site. We learn from this that the brook is actually called "Manning Brook" that the two hills involved are Andrews Hill and Harris Hill.
Am feeling a little despondent, as I thought I was going out looking for stone sites today and it turns out I'm not. So here's a picture of a lovely woodland scene. A fellow named Kyle Hildebrand took us to this area on the mountainside, which almost seemed to have been terraced. It's in the 'Eck' or corner, where the Kittatinny Ridge curves back on itself before continuing southwest. Without its trees, this spot provides a breathtaking view east across the great valley many miles to the Delaware River. As you can see, the stones were arranged in low walls and rows. Intriguing.
As we continued along south on Rt 202 I noticed a site on the east side of the road. It was on a steeper slope and I could see already from the car that the piles looked equal sized, evenly spaced, and (probably) placed in lines as with a standard "marker pile" site. In the above panorama photo the piles are disappointingly difficult to see in the dead leaves. There are probably about 15 piles in this photo. Maybe 30 overall at the site. Uphill we are facing south east but the only view would be high in the sky against a near horizon. Notice the small gully running down the center of the photo. Bruce said that everything was about gullys on this trip. It is true, everything we saw was next to a brook cutting into the landscape.
We have seen sites like this before and in better repair. Is this the same culture as made the piles near Moosehorn Rd?
We found several small piles in the woods before coming up to the one I had spotted.
But soon I was not giving the "agrarian" hypothesis any more thought.
The nice thing, though, was that the big piles were intersperced with smaller piles which seemed just as important to the design of the site. In this next picture the pile has a large white feldspar stone in the foreground, seeming to align this pile with another further back which Bruce is looking at. We are on a nearly level terrace above a gully which is curving around behind where Bruce is standing.
But even as we saw these smaller piles, bigger piles were looming in the background. What a wonderful experience that is when you start to suspect greater wonders still. And there they were: monster piles.
You can see these are very large piles, almost the largest I have seen and definately the only ones this size that are nicely made from smaller cobbles. Rectangular and obviously very old and broken down. To me this site had the feel of a mound-builder complex.
Here is one more platform and a detail of the white quartz at the top of the pile.
This site was on a terrace overlooking a gully and facing east and southeast across and down the valley. Bruce pointed out a prominent hill blocking the view to the north east. This hill divided the eastern sky. I was very impressed by several things about this site. It seemed undisturbed and still in its original form. There were about 6 large rectangular platform piles. There were low stone walls integrated into the site (although I payed them no attention). There large platforms were intermixed with smaller piles, and the location would have had a spectacular view to the east and southeast if there were not trees in the way. To me this site was reminiscent of the monumental sites seen in Pennsylvania and Vermont - just a bit like Oley Hills. I have seen broken down rectangles almost as large as these - in Weston and Carlisle, and smaller ones all over, for example in Boxborough. But here was an entire undisturbed example of - may I say- a particular rock pile building culture. Almost pristine. Still monumental. I think Bruce and I were proud to find this site. We know someone will come back and study it someday. Also it is within the boundaries of the Quabbin Reservation, so it is reasonably protected.
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