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.
Went for a drive with my middle son, David, to southwestern RI and Canonchet. Having heard about Canonchet for many years, I thought it would be worth a visit. As it turned out, we barely scratched the surface. Among other things, I am pretty badly out of shape after 3 years of staying at home to avoid disease.
I put blue outlines where we saw rock piles but you might as well put a blue outline around the entire map. In any case, we had a successful short hike. Starting at the parking lot (lower right corner of map) we walked west until I got tired of walking in the flatlands and sensed a hill off to my right. Along that flat trail, I noticed one rock pile that looked like an effigy.
Later, my son said the underlying boulder looked like a frog.
As soon as we got over to the "hill" - a small outcrop - we started seeing rock piles. I liked the bit of stone wall we saw. Tim M. might call this is a "snake". I was struck by the pointed standing stones at each end (small in front, large in back). I was particularly struck by the third rock from the front - made of quartz. It reminds me of the pearl on Unktena's forehead.
[Parenthetically, I just Googled "Unktena" and it is all over the Internet that it is a "Cherokee Myth". But that is nonsense. The Cherokee were not in Massachusetts, naming the islands and brooks.]
Anyway, we continued uphill, through the site. This is David Waksman:
The piles got bigger and fresher looking, right up into someone's backyard.
Quite an intense place. I rarely see piles so close together. Also, since these are quite cleanly vertical sided, I suspect them of being a kind of marker pile.
It was around here I started noticing something that did not 'click' until I got home and thought about it. There are some things wrong with these piles. They are in perfect shape and they do not have any forest debris on top of them. In other words: they are new. Or, more likely, they have been restored in the not-too distant past. Given they are in someone's backyard, I guess this makes sense - especially if the people living there happen to be Narragansetts [the local tribe here].
There is a sense that the vertical sided piles were all lined up toward the same direction (note the angle of the tree shadows in these 3 pictures):
Then we got out to the Lawton Foster Rd. Here was another fine rock pile across the street in someone else's backyard:
We trudged uphill, admiring rock piles on either side of the road. Apparently the locals are OK with honoring these things. Here is someone's driveway.
Then we came to another collection of larger piles, on the north side of the road. Note how some of these are older, not reconstructed and covered with leaves, moss, and downed branches.
But this one? I think it might have been reconstructed:
In the middle of all these glorious marker piles, something different and less conspicuous:
Yep, that's a rectangle with a niche at the lower right. Let's go around to the other side and have a look:
(I got the name of the road wrong, it is not Richardson Rd but Lawton Foster). Another error, is that while filming, I did not notice there was another rectangle to the side - it is right at the end of the video. Also at around 0.14 minutes from the start.
If you watch the video, there is something wrong about the "hollow". I would say that it partakes of the same "newness" as do the reconstructed piles. Except, this looks more like recent destruction than recent construction.
I wanted to go on walking but we sort of got stuck on the road because of not knowing which way to go, and ending up circling back to the parking lot. Sorry I was in such a rush, I really have to slow down and learn how to study places rather than focusing on how to get there and back.
Update: I think Jim P photo'd the same piles long ago:
If
First Peoples did not leave behind monuments...
Published online by Cambridge University Press:01 December 2021
Bonnie L. Pitblado writes:
“Peopling researchers study the physical detritus of First
Peoples, who moved around a lot and created a record profoundly ravaged by the
forces of time. Based on even the most rudimentary understanding of mobile
populations and taphonomy, this means we are unlikely to encounter remnants of
a built environment (because highly mobile people usually do not expend energy
erecting permanent structures) and destined to encounter only the most
resistant stone and bone objects (because they are what preserves).
If the earliest material record consists so
disproportionately of stone tools, dense megafauna bones, and the occasional
ephemeral fire feature, would we not be downright irresponsible to try to
access human motivations beyond the subsistence and land-use activities that
these archaeological signatures most obviously represent? If First Peoples did
not leave behind monuments or other more “obvious” windows to their thoughts
and values, who are we to overreach the record? Again, are the sorts of
questions posed by those with postprocessual leanings not beyond the scope of
what we can responsibly address?”
The Pootatuck made
zigzag rows of stones are of the type most people attribute to a progression of
events that follows the construction of a Virginia or “Snake Rail” Fence. I
appreciate the work the Gages have done, but it’s something I respectfully
disagree with, just as I respectfully disagree with Eric Sloane who popularized
the idea in his books in the 1950s.
I’ve observed single course zigzag stone
rows and I’ve observed some that are perhaps four feet high (and a nagging
thought tugs on my sleeve about a small segment that’s taller than I am, up
above the Falls). Most around here, in that Pootatuck Territory tend to be in-between
those first two extremes, such as those in my first Rock Piles post: https://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2006/03/more-zig-zag-walls-from-tim-macsweeney.html
On my third day of the single year I was a
NEARA member, after that 1998 conference in Danbury CT where I first met Peter
and Norman in person, the three of us walked up an access road under the power
lines that cut across the Nonnewaug floodplain. I was going to show them some
surviving low to the ground stacked stone features – a few Káhtôquwukansh, in
Mohegan/Pequot/Narragansett.
A káhtôquwuk is a kind of stone pile, a kind of stone heap,
something that which is heaped high, ceremonially, religiously, by placing one
stone above another stone. As I understand it, Káhtôquwukmeans, allegorically, a 'Stone Prayer,' as in:
“Káhtôquwukansh is the plural of Stone Prayers, stacked stone features invested
with prayers for the balance of the universe.”
Those specific Káhtôquwukansh were inside an enclosure of
intentionally made zigzag rows of stones:
These zigzag rows
of stones, ten foot segments of stones laid in a fairly consistent lightning
bolt pattern lead outward from the “mound swamp,” linking outcrops and boulders,
lead to streams, bordered on both sides with zigzag rows of stone more often
than not, just as are the wetlands in the Nonnewaug uplands.
The Great Snake
imagery abounds in these carefully made constructions that remain intact, while
others now destroyed can only be seen with my sometimes rather lame images –
some with overlays of eyes and horns on them – can be found tickling the search
box with “powerlines (sic)” or “power lines.”
Low Bush or Wild
Blueberries, in “garden plots” separated by fuel break zigzag stone rows may
have once been thermally pruned, section by section in certain places, on
staggered four year intervals may be a rare survivor species on the former
Indigenous Cultural Landscape, a trait shared by cranberries in another remarkable
location.
Indeed, the saddest
part of the story is that a wide swath of land under those power lines has been,
blasted and bulldozed into a “blank slate” or “tabla rasa” by Eversource, the
power company, for new towers and transmission lines. I can only show you older
photos of the Ceremonial Stone Landscape features that were once located there.
If any sort of an
archaeological survey was done before this destruction, I’d be interested to
see it…
Given the discussion of zig-zag walls, here is one from Cahoonzie that seemed to be made from separate dumped piles of rock:
This is somewhere near Wilson Rd.
I guess you distinguish between the walls that zig-zag back and forth horizontally versus ones that zig-zag up and down, like this one. I have seen both kinds in southwestern CT but they are no so common in eastern MA.
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