This last site was a good ending for the day because we hadn't seen any of this type of pile yet: low ground piles each with one or two pieces of white quartz:
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 is one with two pieces of quartz and not much else:
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.In the end I took all the pictures available in my camera and we left. On the way home, looking out the car window to the other side of the road, I saw one more rock pile site, east of the road, downhill, just south of Freeman Rd which I think is also in New Salem. The 2006 fieldtrip was an unqualified success.
1 comment :
Well it is not much of a theory for blazed ground piles but for what look like effigy piles of a turtle, the presence of quartz somewhere on the turtle's back it common. Why would this be ?[and here speculation is building on top of supposition so you realists might want to stop reading] The answer lies in asking: what is supposed to be on the turtle's back? All of the other creatures of the world are on turtle's back.
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