Geophile writes:
Someone brought this to my attention and I thought I should pass it along. Kentucky serpent
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This is about rock piles and stone mound sites in New England. A balance is needed between keeping them secret and making them public. Also arrowheads, stone tools and other surface archaeology.
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Also, since I'm dropping in, thought I'd pass along this sentence from the January/February issue of Archaeology magazine, in a small piece about the Oxford, Alabama mound you've seen discussed. "Archaeologists have only recently begun to realize the significance of stone-mound networks in the eastern United States, so few have protected status."
ReplyDeleteA few years ago, seeing a statement like that in a major archaeological magazine would have brought tears to my eyes. Even now it lept out of the magazine to my eyes as if it had been lit from behind. Some of you may know what I mean. Times have changed! Hurray!
Unfortunately, most of the change seems to be occurring in the South.
ReplyDeleteIn time, hopefully, we'll see similar change here in the Northeast. Some of the change seems to have prompted by the USET resolution of two or three years ago, which identifies stone mounds as "prayers in stone," implying their sacred nature. Archaeologists who ignore this resolution do so at their peril.
You had a hand in the resolution, didn't you, Norman? Well done! if I haven't said it before. I included info on the USET resolution in the Wikipedia pages I made for Ceremonial stone landscapes and for the Oley Hills site. Both have been edited by others since, but they left in the parts about USET.
ReplyDeleteIf I had a hand in the resolution, it was only indirectly. I had given a talk on the Oley Hills site at a ESAF meeting and later the NEARA meeting, and Ted Timreck heard the talk and later filmed me and others at the Oley site. I think the attention he brought to the stone ruins of the Northeast, beginning with the Oley site, probably helped to move the idea of the USET resolution forward. Also, when Ted presented one of his videos at Killingworth, CT, in hope of helping to preserve some cairns in that town, Doug Harris was in attendance, and being a historical preservation officer of the Narragansett Tribe in RI, he may have been the real force behind the resolution.
ReplyDeleteI had a bit to do with the USET resolution - I provided the list of the 8 towns that were covered.
ReplyDeleteWell, all the work you two and others are doing is inching the issue along, and although there is far yet to go, it's already at a stage I hardly hoped to see when I first became involved. Back then there seemed to be no hope of it ever being taken seriously by the archaeological community. Well, you were at the conference, Norman. You know what it was like. I remember one archaeologist at a diner suggesting the sites were built by teenage goths or some kind of secret druids.
ReplyDeleteGoths that visited every single goddam swamp/hill combo in eastern Massachusetts.
ReplyDelete