Sunday, March 18, 2007

The Acton Rock Pile Grid - Fred Martin's Survey, FFC's "Stupid Sheet", and testing the radial line hypothesis for marker piles

I went out with FFC in the snow to look at the high point overlooking the rock piles at the Spring Hill Conservation land in Acton, MA. I wanted to see if all the piles were visible from this high point and whether they would line up with this as a viewing position. Although I could not really see much on the ground, something exciting happened when we got back to FFC's house and looked at the survey Fred Martin made from data we helped him collect at Spring Hill. This is where the use of alignment information together with careful surveying leads to an interaction between the work people are doing on alignments with what I have been noticing about marker pile sites and how they are organized around lines radiating from an elevated viewing location. [Click here for the discussion of marker pile site organization]. [Also click here for the Ashland sites that brought up the idea of radial organization.] So here is a video where the rock pile alignments are tested for being defined relative a high point and, at the same time, the alignments are tested for being astronomically significant:
I think this is best possible result. Marker pile sites are common and make up, I would say, the majority of rock pile sites, so having this confirmation of their being organized radially is an important step towards understanding them.

3 comments :

Tim MacSweeney said...

So what happens there tomorrow, the Equinox?
Also: the stone row - is that orientated along a magnetic compass reading (and modern) or a sight line (and ancient)?

pwax said...

Tomorrow we would have an east-west line. I can draw one like that through the dots but am not confident there would be a designated position for viewing the event. I am pursuing the idea of viewing location and based on the lines converging to the right and also (I notice) the the lower left, it looks like only 2 viewing positions might be present. I am told that the upper left stone wall is an "alignment" involving the Milky Way. The other wall is not in a direction that anyone has identified yet (as far as I know).

Tim MacSweeney said...

I posted up the Calandar drawings and photos that you've seen beforeat Waking Up; not clearly stated is that the stone that got moved, has lots of noticable red quartz in it; the grey stone actually is grey, the white one really light, especially that smaller stone east of the really large one. Could there be similar colors in some of stones in some of the mounds that might be a similar pattern?