Some fall photos of a series of (likely) prehistoric walls near the headwaters of a creek in Pine Log Mtn WMA, Bartow Co., GA. Tommy Hudson led me to this site several years ago. It is well off the beaten path and mostly undisturbed. I have a lot of other pictures of this site, but since the leaves have fallen, the light put things in a different perspective. The main wall includes an interesting right-angle bend I don’t often see in the surviving walls around Georgia. The main orientation is N-S, with some separate, perpendicular segments. There are also some cairns associated with this site, on both sides of the creek; I have been trying to broaden my search around this location, since there seem to be some additional features — maybe buried by time — that are difficult to categorize.
What nice looking woods! Wish I could walk around there.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like such sites are rare and hard to find in Georgia. Is that true? Up here in MA I would expect the next hill over to have walls and I would hope for rock piles near every undisturbed spring.
I would have entitled this one: "GA stonework (that looks like PA stonework that looks like MA stonework)"
ReplyDeleteHarry Holstein and Jannie Loubser would be two people I'd contact about this site, just to get their opinion. Harry, especially, since the stonework reminds me of photos he has taken of similar features in Alabama.
ReplyDeleteCompared to what you guys have in PA, MA, etc, GA sites are rare. I’ve recorded 161 petroform sites as of this date. About twenty of them have stone walls.
ReplyDeleteThe Bartow site, like so many others, is located near a gurgling or “talking” spring (see James Mooney’s ‘Cherokee River Cult’). These sites are also closely associated with petroglyphs. I’ve recorded some 150 petroglyph sites and a surprising number of them are near petroforms. The Bartow site is no exception. All the petroglyphs and petroforms at the Bartow site are similar to other sites in north Georgia, including an abundance of quartz stones or outcrops. Many of my Powerpoint presentations on petroglyphs, petroforms, pictographs, and what I call the Tri-Level Cosmos (Upperworld, Middleworld, Lowerworld) point this out. The similarity of site attributes is spooky at times, as if constructed or marked by the same person. Certainly a similar belief system is involved.
I’ve already been contacted by people asking me for the site location. Technically, the site is not associated with the Pine Log WMA and the landowner is adamant about maintaining his privacy, so you’ll have to understand that I’m abiding by his wishes. I’ve shown the site to a couple of people I consider to be serious researchers.
Here in Georgia, these sites are few and far between and we have an abundance of delusional people who want to destroy these site by digging for non existent gold treasure or burials. We also have a lot of self declared New Age people and Indian wanna-bees who have their own “special knowledge” and who want to “guide” a group of clueless followers to these sites and perform some sort of self styled ceremony. Many of these sites have been damaged by the above mentioned groups. Georgia has a long history of this, so that is why the handful of serious researchers in north Georgia keep the sites to themselves.
Harry Holstein’s sites are incredible and they have a somewhat different set of site attributes. Look up his site reports on line.
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ReplyDeleteNorman:
ReplyDeleteYes, I would be particularly intrigued by Harry Holstein's opinion on this site. He pointed out similar right-angled bends in the walls at Chocolacca, AL last January, and has interesting hypotheses about their meaning and occurrence. The topography at the Bartow site is different. It would be interesting to either develop a new synthesis incorporating both types of sites, or determine if they represent different belief systems.