Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Return to the Mortar/Turtle (Part One)

This "Return" will take a few posts...
Up in the northwest corner of CT, fairly recently, a road was bulldozed into former farmland to create something called Technology Park. Remnants of stone fences from the farm are still visible here and there, but I have this idea that many of these fences were built over existing stone rows that had been there hundreds (thousands?) of years, firebreak devices of the Native Americans who once lived there, part of their ecosystem management scheme.
And I also came across another textbook from another family member – my daughter this time. Apparently (note the word parent contained in that word) my wife and I financed the purchase of “The American Indian; Prehistory into the Present” by Arrell Morgan Gibson – for $60.75 plus tax. My daughter was born in 1981; the book was published the year before. The book’s point of view could be sort of summed up as how the American Indian reacted to the waves of Empires that took over the Indians’ Homeland, sometimes called Turtle Island.


So I’ll return to that little section of land I started talking about and showed a photo of a quartzite mortar stone (Teaser Pix ), a little bit of that “vast estate” along the Greater Housatonic River System, where rows of stones were used in order control a burn in a relatively densely populated area, protected from the bulldozer in modern times still because it is inside the boundary of an inland wetland inside an industrial park.





I followed the wrong stone row trying to return to the place and drew a picture of that row that I posted at Rock Piles (Soon Come ). I’ll amend that here with a drawing of the “next row to the north” of that row. You’ll be looking west from inside the wetland area, and so the top drawing is south, the bottom to the west and if you'd like you could imagine them joined together to get a general feel for how this section would appear, sort of a stylistic representation, trees and brush and poison ivy left out for clarity…
I found the fields I entered following the the bulldozer path using MapQuest, pretty much the same view I got from Google Earth, north at the top. The fields in the upper right are part of the Dairy Farm…

A detail with landmarks added…

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