Monday, April 02, 2018

Debunking stone wall myths....the videos

This is a long series of videos with  a person speaking and little visual change. You may not want to sit through it and, in any case, it is hard to locate the whole series - they seem to be scattered around YouTube. Here is one:

Anyway there were several things I enjoyed about these videos: The Bronx accent reminds me of childhood friends. Also I love the gratuitous insults tossed in the direction of academic stone wall "experts". Academic theories on stone walls are described as "infantile". Which is true.

The speaker spends a lot of time discussing a 1930's USGS estimate of 24,000 miles of stone walls, taking 15,000 men 247 years to build. The speaker points out that there were not enough people living outside the cities for this to be possible - by several orders of magnitude. He takes quite a while to discuss this.

Finally, this guy makes a very good point about landowners sub-dividing their land into multiple lots: they would have used (and often did use) simple and regular rectangular plots. Instead we see examples where the subdivisions are random irregular shapes:
Bounded by walls, these lots make no sense if the subdivisions are being created for the first time. They only make sense if the walls were already there.
The speaker adds a key bit of information: there are other walls inside these ones selected (in white) as property boundaries.
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8 comments :

  1. Tim MacSweeney10:04 AM

    budcat7! I've seen his work before!

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  2. pwax10:18 AM

    To hear him call Thorson "ding dong" is a joy.

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  3. Andrew Pighills10:20 AM

    Me too.
    It makes absolutely no sense to use 21 century reasoning to explain 18th/19th lifestyle and work ethic.

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  4. Tim MacSweeney11:00 AM

    budcat7 can't seem to shake that "anyone but Indians" mind-set. I'd urge both him and Thorson to learn a little something about the Indigenous Peoples of the Northeast and elsewhere in the hemisphere creating Cultural Landscape just like other People did in other parts of the world...

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  5. pwax3:28 PM

    I thought he proposed it took thousands of years to build all the walls, so then...Indians did it.

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  6. Tim MacSweeney9:31 AM

    I can only listen to him for short periods of time - and I recall turning it off when he mentioned some sources that he considered reliable: the usual suspects that drag in Lost Civilizations, Giants and even UFOs. It seems like a sort of a home-made version of America Unearthed...

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  7. Tim MacSweeney10:58 AM

    Take a look at his buddy's video: https://youtu.be/Ni7_BJUQU-c

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  8. budcat71:44 AM

    Listen people! I do not say that the "Indians" didn't build the stone walls. An ancestor of the Native peoples did is what I say but not an ancestor that is recognized. I've said that these ancient peoples we don't know anything about, including not much by mainstream, aren't clearly identified. What their language was, what their pigment was, what their hair color was. There are many anomalous things to consider about the past and I'm sure it was far different than we can even imagine. People have a tendency to ignore what I say based on the confirmation bias whether it be mainstream or alternative. Watch more of my videos and you'll find out what I ACTUALLY say and not what other interpret my meanings to be.

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