Posted on January 23, 2012 by admin
“I’m just wrapping up a report on some field stone piles,
and thought it might be worth a brief post.
Field stone piles are, of course ubiquitous in cultivated
fields. Sometimes they are obviously of
recent origin, sometimes it is hard to tell.
The problem out here on the Plains is that Native American peoples have
built and used cairns for a variety of reasons (including burials). When we do an archaeological survey, we want
to be carefully not to write a cairn off as a field stone pile. Aggravating this issue has been the mixed
rigor and accuracy of field stone pile identification in standard
archaeological surveys. Universities don’t teach seminars on field stone piles,
and in fieldwork (by necessity) we record them pretty quickly. I have seen
cases where piles that were obviously made with a bulldozer are identified as
prehistoric cairns, and I’ve seen cairns written off as field stone piles.
The North Dakota Department of Transportation is now
requiring a survey of field stone piles that have been sold for use as road
fill [this happens fairly frequently]. A
few times in the recent past, construction equipment has revealed that what
everyone assumed was a field stone pile was a cairn (and a burial). Much of this re-evaluation is being driven
by Tribal Historic Preservation Offices (especially at the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate)..."
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