Eric Sloane once wrote something to the effect that what people call "stone walls" are more properly called "stone fences." Walls are the things between the ceiling and the floor, while fences are the things that contain livestock or mark boundaries, as in property lines and agricultural fields etc.
(What about retaining walls, Eric? And what about that song that says, "One man's ceiling is another man's floor?")
I look at certain stone "walls" or "fences," and when they have the "Indian Look," think of them as possibly other things - like firebreaks around resource zones or ceremonial or (especially) Sacred Ground - like areas such as Burial Grounds or Tobacco Stones or the Mound Swamp I've written about.
Really I should say, "It's one kind of Indian Look. The type of stone, the individual or individuals building the individual row create other sorts of "Looks," also too."
So it's one of them, not the only one...
I can't help but notice the same "Look" to many of the stone rows I see near many Rock Pile pictures (like the previous post of Peter's, "Next to a swamp behind a school in Littleton, MA) and I always wonder if they surround the areas, thinking of that fire management scheme - small ground fires that kept the areas clear of brush, promoted the growth of certain plants, prevented the growth of others, that wouldn't spread out of control to other areas, burned over on a different schedule.
The Sacred and Cultural Landscape, the Garden created by a Native American Civilization that Turtle Island was before the epidemics and invasion of that "Virgin Wilderness" that "pagan savages" roamed about in...
And:
(Take a listen to this, a link from the Algonquian Confederacy of the Quinnipiac Tribal Council (ACQTC) website if you haven't already: Download Part 2 — Dr. Jack Dempsey (35 minutes, 35 seconds) - there's alot about stones - and the trading routes from Wisconsin to New England.)
So these are a few photos of that "Indian Look" that I took yesterday, by a roadside in Torrington CT near an old mill site...
The colonial stone wall argument is so strong around here that I've seen cairns in NY that are in rows and I've been told cairns in rows are colonial era fences. The 'proof' is in the piece of wood stuck in the cairn. So, a long line of them I found yesterday clearly have wood in them, but it's stuffed in the cairn right at ground level. Now I'm starting to think someone figured out that niches make a nice place to stuff a wood pole to make a "fence". That's just my opinion and I have no scientific basis to prove it. Any comments to correct me on this issue are appreciated!
ReplyDeleteI am waiting to understand this "Indian Look" you are writing about. I think I see it but I need help. It would be good to have a stone wall vocabulary.
ReplyDeleteI was going to comment that I've seen too many styles of walls at sites to completely agree, but then I realized that I've also looked at walls near roads as we drove somewhere and thought, "Well, that's definitely not an Indian wall!" And how could I do that if there weren't an Indian look?
ReplyDeleteI think it's probably more accurate to say that there's a difference in style between pre-contact, contact, and post-contact period wall and fence constructions. Because remember that Indians made up a large portion of the slaves who built stone fences in New England in the European style. The stone masonry tradition continues among New England's Indians to this very day.
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