Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Agricultural use versus rock pile site counts
From Curt Hoffman:
I now have got soils data on most of the sites in my inventory.
Looking at this, it seems that sites with high agricultural
productivity, low productivity, and no productivity (rock outcrops and
swamps) are in about equal numbers at 30% of the total each, with sites
used for pasturage and with moderate productivity constituting the
balance. However, sites with only rock piles and no other types
(constituting about 1/3 of the total) are almost twice as likely to be
found in agricultural lands, and this is statistically significant at
the 100% confidence interval. This is especially the case in Georgia
and South Carolina. By contrast, they are much more likely to be found
on infertile lands in Vermont and Maine. The attached graph, color
coded by sextile %s, illustrates this.
This is somewhat contrary to my finding, where I count rock pile regions per town:
ReplyDeleteSudbury 4
Lincoln 4
Concord 7
Boxborough 11
Stow 16
Acton 21
Carlisle 24
Sudbury and Concord are the most agricultural towns.
How are you defining the terms "agricultural use," "high productivity" etc? I'm guessing that it means according to that imported European style of agriculture, since "pasture" is included, swamps considered "infertile" - the Cultural Landscape after 1620 you might say.
ReplyDeleteIn answer to Peter -
ReplyDeleteYes, but as you yourself have demonstrated, most of the rock pile sites are not located in the floodplains of the Sudbury, Assabet, and Concord Rivers in those towns - that is where the agriculturally productive lands are. How are you defining a "rock pile region"? By a coherent cluster of sites?
In answer to Tim -
I use the information sheets for each soil type provided in the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) online database - down the bottom of each form is a category, "Use" which lists the primary uses of soils of that type. And it is absolutely the cultural landscape after 1620 I'm interested in exploring, because I'm trying to show that these sites are outside of that landscape - and not the result of colonial field clearance or wall building activities.
Curt: I get ya! But I'd still like to take you for a little walkabout around the old Nonnewaug Wigwams where what's left of the "stone walls" exist by already cleared floodplain fields. And where you can still find some of the pieces of old chestnut rails of the first legal fences can be found here and there, as well as interesting stone features linking the old trail border to the "gateway" to my house and yard.
ReplyDeleteI used "rock pile region" to gloss over the details of the way I count 1x1 K squares, on the topo map.
ReplyDeleteTaking it from a different direction: I have seen plenty of fields with stone walls and occasionally (quite rarely) there are crummy rock piles scattered around the field's edge. It is not for lack of rock but because, around here, farmers were mostly pretty tidy. Sometimes, rocks are dumped off the lower edge of a field. It is not common and it is easy to recognize. Around Concord there are very few rock piles at all but many stone walls.
Maybe I misunderstand your data but I do not believe site are correlated with rocky wet land. Too much agriculture would have erased the sites.
"This is especially the case in Georgia and South Carolina" Not hardly. First of all, I would doubt Mr. Hoffman has visited more than a few of his claimed 440 stone piles in Georgia to verify their in-situ context, without which, it would be difficult to determine their relationship to say, "agriculture." In my line of work, where I associate with mathamatical and statistical modeling and projections on a regular basis, primary subsets would have to be a little more "fact based" to be of use. That said, I would personally consider the colorful chart accompanying the verbiage little more than a "wild ass guess", particularly in the case of Georgia.
ReplyDeleteSorry, but I couldn't let this one go by me, should someone see that chart, and think it had any semblance of accuracy. After all, we're still trying to stamp out the "Mayan" fire down here.
Easy Tommy, Curt's on our side, just trying to get this info into the record around here is a tough battle! Two well known facts often neglected to take into perspective are the Pre-Contact Indigenous use of fire to produce an abundance of resources in a densely populated area with an increasing sedentism/territorialism would have to have an increasingly better means of controlling those fires that stone fuel breaks built over thousands of years and the Post Contact business of defining a legal fence in order to claim ownership of land usually involved easily made wooden rail fences. That's one long sentence, but I think more attention needs to be paid to the manner of construction of those "stone walls" that are too casually dismissed as "agrarian" - in the post contact sense - especially if those "stone walls" end in (or include) a serpent's head.
ReplyDeleteCorrection: I meant I DO believe rock piles are correlated to wet rocky land.
ReplyDeleteClarification of the meaning of the table would be helpful.
Tommy, almost all of the data I have from Georgia comes from Mark Williams' extensive inventory of sites. I have not visited any of them. But it isn't SWAG: the site locations he provided are quite precise, and we correlated these using GIS with soil types and then - as I said to Tim - correlated the soil types with NRCS data. Soil which has high agricultural potential is not necessarily the same as soil currently used for agricultural purposes today! But I do think that there is a significant (probably cultural) difference between what I see in the Southeast and what we have up here in the Northeast. There is much less diversity of stone structure types in your area, for one thing. There is also a major geographical gap between the two regions; most of North Carolina and eastern Virginia have few reported sites. Things pick up again in the Shenandoah and upper Potomac drainages to the north, and the PeeDee in the south. So i do think that the structures may be used differently in the two regions.
ReplyDeleteTim mentions "stone fuel breaks" built over thousands of years to control fire. Where could I read more information on this? How was the function of the walls determined?
ReplyDeleteNorman: It's more of my own personal theory (or hypothesis?), based on observation (and maybe logic) here (mostly) around the Nonnewaug Floodplain, rather than anything I've ever found in any work I've ever come across anywhere ever since reading Changes in the Land. I've attempted to talk to Cronon, but he's never responded to my emails. I think that the rows of stone on Burnt Hill are examples of it, used to burn over certain sections of blueberry field on a staggered schedule so some remain in production while others are burnt every four years.
ReplyDeleteBird' Eye Bing Burnt Hill: http://binged.it/1JWRp7l
ReplyDeleteThis might be relevant to the conversation - " “Early accounts of the pre-settlement landscape are consistent in their descriptions of fertile soils, abundant wildlife, and healthy human populations. Although reliable information is lacking on the number of people that presettlement agro-ecosystems were capable of supporting, it seems likely that numbers were much higher than generally supposed, especially in the upland areas [42, 71]. The Indians were apparently able to produce high quality food and fuel on lands that now generally produce fuel and fiber of only indifferent quality [23]. The following sections of this paper will show that the Indians' agro-ecosystems were in fact elegantly simple, yet highly productive agroforestry systems which were ideally suited to the ecology of the Northeast…
ReplyDelete…The term "controlled burning" is used advisedly here, considering the lack of specific information in the early accounts about how the Indians actually managed the fires they set..." - http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2014/09/two-on-burning-as-in-burnt-hill.html
In the table, ignoring the low sample states: every New England state has significantly higher site percentage in NON- agricultural land. Same for NY. Then PA is about equally split. SC and GA have significantly higher percent sites on agricultural land.
ReplyDeleteThe progressive shift in the balance, going north to south is interesting and needs more confirmation. NJ, for example, needs more sampling.
A question for Tommy: is it your impression that more sites are in poor agricultural land or in good agricultural land?
Peter, Since I have the same site info from Mark Williams at UGA that Curt has, and quite a bit more of my own, I still could not posit a credible answer to your question. What would be considered agricuLtural land in Georgia has changed since most of the stone piles were constructed..the Woodland people of 2000 years ago used the land differently from the Mississippian people who followd them. Upland gardening of berries, beans, and squash was as important as moderately scaled corn farming agriculture of later times, not to mention the periodic burning of forests to replenish seed and berry crops. The first pioneer farmers worked the most marginal and rocky upland soils on the sides of ridges and mountains, and some people still do. Thousands of acres of swamps were drained and steep hiils were terraced by the first mechanized farmers, and still later, these practices were abandoned. Agricultural lands of yesterday are not the agricultural lands of today. Taking a "snapshot" of agricultural practices at any point in time or space, in order to provide a benchmark that will relate to stone piles constructed 2000 years ago, is iffy at best. The data subsets would have to be better defined, and thats not to say it can't be done, it just needs far more work. Also, when you see phrases such as " 100% confidence interval" it should be noted that the desired level of confidence is set by the researcher, not the data. I have no ill will against Curt, I just think his info is not usable at this time.
ReplyDeleteWhere I am there is a great abundance of zigzag "stone walls" - all supposedly a result of field clearing stones thrown against a wooden rail fence. But I find almost all are carefully constructed, the exceptions looking as if they have been taken apart, plundered for reuse. The only places I've found that suggest random, haphazard field clearing are piles of stones in between the zigzags, filling in the open angle.
ReplyDeleteForest Burning and Clearing by Hudson Valley Indians 1000 Years Ago - http://curtinarchaeology.com/blog/2010/07/28/forest-burning-and-clearing-by-hudson-valley-indians-1000-years-ago/
ReplyDelete