Friday, February 05, 2016

Norman Muller writes:
A friend sent me the links below.  The third one is new (to me, anyway),  Still, Thorson continues to deny any Indian connection to the walls he studies.  I think he was brainwashed by Bellantoni.
 
http://robertthorson.uconn.edu/writing/books/stone-by-stone/

http://robertthorson.uconn.edu/

http://www.earthmagazine.org/article/history-science-and-poetry-new-englands-stone-walls

http://www.yankeemagazine.com/article/features/stonewalls-robert-thorson#_

10 comments :

pwax said...

I think he is just not a scientist.

Tim MacSweeney said...

He's a geologist, but when it comes to understanding the stonework most likely related to the Indian or Indigenous Cultural Landscape, he's an unimaginative and mediocre "historian" merely repeating a scientifically unproven myth about a golden age of stone wall building that is a form of Ethnic "Erasure" (aka Ethnic Cleansing) that violates the Law of Parsimony. I'm surprised how much I've written that was in response to many things he's written, including all those links above: https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/search?q=thorson

Tim MacSweeney said...

Ever read “Thorson’s Keynote Speech to NERA (sic)” that has transformed, uncorrected grammatically, into a web page on the Stone Wall Initiative entitled “Pre-European Contact” {http://stonewall.uconn.edu/investigation/pre-european-contact/}?
My take on that masterpiece here: https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2015/04/ways-of-knowing.html

pwax said...

If you look carefully at stone walls (generally, I haven't) you see things that need some explanation - for example if the wall height varies a lot, or if a single course of stones becomes wider for a few feet and then goes back to a single course, or when some kind of enclosure is included in the wall, or there is a bulge with a hollow in the middle of it. I wonder if Thorson has even seen such things?
And I am sure that is only the beginning of what you could look for in a wall.

Curtiss Hoffman said...

I think many of our Native friends would not agree with Thorson that rocks are "inanimate"!

Tim MacSweeney said...

In Stone by Stone, he minimizes Indian controlled fires that "domesticated" huge pieces of the landscape to "burning a few patches of dry forest." Yet he remarks that "stonewalls become firebreaks," as if it were an accidental function. Denser and denser Indian populations in Southern New England since Archaic times, "walls" often so low cows could step over them, the many references to burning - who had more time and more "dire" a need to build a quarter million miles of stonewalls??
https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2014/07/stone-by-stone-segment-one.html

Tim MacSweeney said...

And then there's those snake-headed walls...

Curtiss Hoffman said...

At least in southern New England, populations were NOT denser after Archaic times - there seems to be a major decline in population from the Late/Transitional Archaic peak, and high levels were not again seen until the Late Woodland. Just FYI!

Anonymous said...

We have some rows here in DE that have that "look" as Tim says. They are made from the famous blue granite that underlies this area. They are tremendously dense and very heavy, even a small one needs several people to move it, and many of the walls have large stones that would have required many men to quarry, move to the site, and place in the row. The amount of work to build one of these walls had to have been huge, and then to think there are a quarter million miles of them... tells me that it took billions of man hours and a fiercely dedicated work force to accomplish. No way white settlers had the time, manpower or money to do this. dc.

pwax said...

Until we have good explanations for why anyone (Indian or white) put in the effort, the same argument applies to whoever made the wall.