Insomnia, site classification, and a wetland's edge in Carlilse

Can't sleep, I find myself thinking about the sites I looked at over the last several weekends. I am falling into the habit of making a longer drive to explore far from home on one of the weekend days but making a shorter drive to explore somewhere near to home on the other day. This has had me exploring far away in Sterling and also near to home in Carlisle for several weekends in a row. I am seeing different types of rock pile sites in both places but, by coincidence, there have been some interesting parallels between the sites in both places. So one weekend I am at a cellar hole in Carlisle and the next I am at a cellar hole in Sterling. One day I am looking at rock piles clustered along a wetland's edge in Sterling and the next day I am at the same kind of place in Carlisle. And this helps me notice similarities that I would probably miss otherwise - if the observations had not happed so closely together in time to make the connection.

So I just reported on a site in Sterling at the headwaters of Rocky Brook where I noticed a few things that might barely be noteworthy:

• small rock piles clustered along the edge of a wetland
• at the headwaters of a brook
• split rocks
• an elongated triangular shaped rock-on-rock

These features would not naturally jump out as particularly noteworthy or significant in their coincidence, except that I saw the same things together the next day in Carlisle. Having driven to Sterling the day before, now I was near home up at the north end of Two Rod Road [Two old dirt roads run north south through Estabrook Woods; one to the west called Estabrook Road and one to the East called Two Rod Road. Kibbe's place from two weekends ago was on Estabrook Rd.]; and exploring near the "Malcolm Meadow" conservation land, and I headed off in a new direction into the woods, to explore along the very northernmost fringes of the large wetland there. Maybe this is the northern fringe of Yellow Birch Swamp but I think it might, instead, be called the "Great Carlisle Swamp". Anyway, it was wet and soggy and I had the most abysmal brook crossing possible: taking a hard fall in the middle of the brook. This threw me off a bit but I was taking some nice pictures in the drizzle.

Here was a magnificent split wedged rock:Then after my fall I spotted a rock pile and...away we go. I photo'd this little combination:
Had I not just last night been blogging about "elongated triangles" I would not have noticed that the upper rock in the picture is the same triangular shape. Maybe I am just imaging that this is significant.

Here are two rock piles in the ferns, at the wetland's edge:The near pile had a very interesting and distinct feature (and not something I saw in Sterling). It had a vertical "fin".(Further away)I see these finned rock piles occasionally. I am remembering one I saw at the Conant Land in Carlisle a while ago, also at a wetland's edge.

What a beatiful spot with the piles in the ferns:Most of the piles, unlike these visible ones, were so low and covered with dead leaves that you had to step on them before you noticed them. I started a bit west of the northernmost edge of the wetland but worked my way around to the eastern side, and stopped seeing piles. But I continued southward on the eastern side of that swamp (hey how about a map fragment?)
After not seeing much I did see one quite different type of rock pile: a larger oval mound, completely buried, perhaps ten feet long:A trail and a couple of long boardwalks took me back across to the western side of the swamp, then north and back to my car where (not atypically) the police were waiting to snarl at me about where I parked.

But let's come back to that first cluster of piles on the northwestern extreme of the swamp and some characteristics:

• a wedged rock
• small piles clustered along a wetland's edge
• an elongated triangular shaped rock-on-rock (propped up at an angle)
• a finned pile

You'll have noticed that this is largely the same list of features I wrote down above for the Rocky Brook site in Sterling. This similarity in features is the basis for thinking these sites are examples of the same thing, the same type of rock piles site: A type of ceremonial site occurring at a wetland's edge. But more than just this nice little comparison one can see the outlines of a methodology that might be useful and might not rely on noticing similarities only because they are seen on adjacent days of a weekend. Namely: listing the observed features and keeping track of such lists. I am probably too lazy to do it but it makes sense to try. Because there are things that would not seem particularly noteworthy but if you wrote them down, made a collection of feature lists, and occasionally took the lists out to examine them for similarities, would help to see subtle similarities that you would miss otherwise. For me, I would not have thought those elongated triangular shapes would be significant; and perhaps they are not. But I am definitely going to keep track of that pattern and notice it, even look for it, in the future.

So I think we are making some progress towards recognizing certain basic site types. Let me list the ones I can think of and let me work on tidying up the ideas over time - eliminating them, modifying them, so to speak: savoring them. I don't know to what extent these classifications are real or generalizable outside of my Eastern Massachusetts/ Middlesex County sampling territory.

Wetland's Edge Sites - sites with small piles clustered along a water's edge, etc.

Monumental Pile Sites - big rock piles and short stretches of stone wall, mixed with smaller piles; all with a sense of overall site organization and layout.

Cellar Hole Sites - with piles on boulders around a cellar hole and pile-gap-pile features.

Marker Pile Sites - with piles evenly spaced and somewhat in lines. Some piles with vertical sides, etc.

"Burial Pile" Sites - sites with low circular ground piles not in any pattern, having one or two pieces of light rock (usually quartz), with a few piles built on boulders near the edges of the group.

I do not know where effigy rock piles fit into this, they might be mostly a feature of the wetland's edge sites and I failed to see that perspective last weekend. That big oval pile on the western side of the Carlisle swamp was something different again. I have seen things like that in a few other places but they are not part of a more comprehensive feature list; not that I can describe anyway. It seems to me there may be some merit to writing down these feature lists, or at least thinking about them collectively when looking at a site. It makes sense to include topography and other landscape features in the list. There may be some merit to writing down minor observations - since they may turn out to correlate with other sites, but you wouldn't notice, you wouldn't remember where you saw that before. All of which may, in the long run, help to get a sense of the different uses and different cultures that left these rock piles in the woods.