skip to main
|
skip to sidebar
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.
statcounter
(Part 2, Cont'd):
ReplyDeleteAnother point along these lines is to bring up the Great Horned Serpent. Represented sometimes in the Native American Ceremonial Stone Landscape as Serpent rows, serpent walls and enclosures, snake effigies, etc. Now this is a very great spirit or Manitou, of course. Some of the "head stones" of the serpents are also very deliberately worked-out to depict the great snake. From what I understand, related to these stone rows are also our more modern accounts of what you might call "lake monsters" or "sea serpents" such as Gloucester/ Cape Anne serpent, Lake Champlain, Mann Hill Beach/ Scituate Great Serpent (who wants sea serpent soup?), Various serpent sightings/ legends in New Hampshire/ Maine, Lake Memphrmagog in Quebec, and lake Oganaukin in BC. etc. Compare this to the "Loch Ness monster" in Scotland and we are dealing with the same Great Horned Serpent. Check out "Search at Loch Ness: The New York Times and the Academy of Applied Sciences Search at Loch Ness" by Dennis Meredith. They captured the serpent with sonar readings as well as strobe-light photos simultaneously. In it's facial profile we can see that it is indeed a Great Horned Serpent. Some of the Native legends around the creature say that (what sounds like the EMF pulses given off by the creature) the beast could stop even the greatest medicine people in their tracks, rendering them helpless before it. I believe that mytho-poetically, the Great Horned Serpent represents the duality of the universal elements- the positive (life giving) and destructive forces of nature's cycle- a thing to be highly revered.
So yeah, when you see a split-filled wedged boulder, a common feature of the CSL of the Eastern Seaboard here, except when we are finding the same kind of structures in friggin' Scandinavia, we can either A): ignore it or B): scratch our chins.
I should probably put the disclaimer here that chin scratchers are not taking anything away from anyone's heritage whatsoever, in fact, it may open up new doors to understanding it better. Chin scratcher's are however, if one does not choose to ignore them, admitting to ourselves in an intellectually honest manner, that we are surrounded by mysteries, and that we should at least be as smart as to realize that we don't know everything, we are far from a bunch of know-it-alls.
(Part 1) Hi Peter-
ReplyDeleteRight. Exactly. We MUST be intellectually honest with ourselves. Mavor and Dix in Manitou even bring up trans-polar cultural connections on different sides of the North Atlantic (the most remarkably similar structures in my opinion are certain propped boulders such as the examples shown on pgs. 110-112 of Manitou). We can't quite put our finger on the pulse of what exactly the full story may be, as this ceremonialism is the most ancient of ancients (which, being the case, is probably the most "tuned in" with the environment).
I would point out, however, if I remember hearing this correct, that the indigenous Saami people of Scandinavia (Saami-land) used to live on the coasts, etc., until they settled in the more arctic areas that they live in for the past 500+ years. I think the consensus is that geneticists say they are of some kind of Siberian "stock", just as they would be quick to say that Alonquian and other Native groups are also of Siberian "stock." Regardless of one's views on this (such as those who take a more traditional stance that was championed by say, Vine Deloria Jr. in his writings), it does show at the very least that Saami people could very well be related to some North American Native groups, and it would fit right in with the whole "trans polar north atlantic/ circum-polar navigating" thing.
And then, in lands such as Ireland, there are the "dark Irish", who are supposedly pre-celtic in their inhabitance of that land (probably in Scotland too) and I don't think anyone has satisfactorily addressed just who the "dark Irish" are. I see the Stone Chambers and dolmens of Ireland/Scotland as being Celtic in design (as they are very close in design to their Mediterranian counterparts, where the Celtic people sprang from), yet there may be more to the story, again, the most "ancient of ancients" that modern people haven't realized about yet in those lands as well. For instance, for all of the differences in the Standing Stones of the North American Eastern Sea Board and the European Western Seaboard, there are similarities as well, as well as in the legends surrounding these stones (i.e., "such and such a person turned into, or was turned into, stone.") Again, we must be intellectually honest. North-west Scotland also used to be a part of the North American landmass in pre-history, but split off. If some stones are able to withstand earthquakes, how about a land shift? Could it be that the crustal displacement of those lands happened at a later date than is currently understood? Or have people been the way we are for a much longer time than is currently understood or admitted by the academics? All reasonable questions. What was it like before the last Ice Age? What were the population dispertions like between different cultural groups before the last Ice Age? (pretty much zero data here,) Or take the Earthquakes and cataclysms of only 5,000 years ago when the water levels in the Atlantic rose making it more turbulent and less navigable (splitting Martha's Vineyard, Long Island, etc. off the main-land).. were people trans-polar navigating the North Atlantic even up until this point of 5,000 years ago? (I am inclined to say "yes".) What were the effects of people experiencing the Aurora Borealis in those days? (even in our time we experience the northern lights once in a blue moon here in New England.) Could, in fact, some of these stone structures in different lands, have germinated from something far more ancient (still involving the respective Native people of those different lands of course) that we do not understand today or have a clear picture of today in our times?
Let's plan an outing. Send an email.
ReplyDeleteHi Peter-
ReplyDeleteWill do. Looking forward to it!