Bears Rocks, Pennsylvania

I thought I wouldn't be posting again for a while, but our son is home from a very flat area of Ohio and wanted to get to the mountains, so I found myself at Bears Rocks on the Kittatinny Ridge yesterday. To my surprise, the propped rock I referred to in a previous post had been rebuilt, see above. One can never know, but it probably wasn't done by traditional people, as some other curious constructions had also been created.

Above is one of the new stone constructions I spoke of, a swirl of piled stone with a seat visible at the center back. I suspect this was put together by partying visitors, and they may have reconstructed the propped rock, too. There's no way of knowing, but it's interesting to see that these things are happening.

Below, a gratuitous autumn shot. Those in the picture probably aren't very old, but some moss and lichen communities are aged, possibly in some cases thousands of years old. The forests present when Europeans arrived are all but gone, but these ancient communities of mosses and lichens, especially those tucked between stones on rocky ridge tops, have remained for the most part undisturbed and are representatives from that time we all wish we could visit or conjure in our minds.

Okay, now re-posting the photos that caused a little controversy. The first one below is of an indentation in the rock at the very highest place at this lookout, a natural stack of rock about 20-25 feet high, overlooking the propped rock. I've been coming here for about 40 years and always noticed this hollow, partly because of its placement and partly because of the relative smoothness of its sides and floor. It's probably 10 inches to a foot in diameter at its widest point. Earlier I suggested it might have been used as a mortar for healing herbs by indigenous people who wanted to permeate them with some of the power of this impressive place, that looks out over a broad valley to the north and a partially obscured but equally broad expanse to the south.

Doug Watts posted a comment below saying it is a xenolith, meaning that at one time there was another kind of stone embedded in this one and when it came loose it left this hollow. He seems to think that this eliminates all possibility of human use.

Paint and the darkening, which could be soot, are no doubt from the partying young people mentioned before.

The second picture is of another hollow in stone some distance away from the main part of the lookout. I took this on the same day for comparison with the one above. It and a few others I found were all much rougher looking than the first, and have much less of a worn look. The sides in particular are rougher and slope more gradually.
I re-post these because a couple of people asked me to. I am not saying that I know whether the rock bowl was ever used as a mortar. I sent these photos to Norman Muller at his request and he pretty much agrees with Mr. Watts. I have a great deal of respect for Norman's accumulated knowledge on these subjects, so I'm inclined to think he's right. However I leave a little door of possibility open, partly because at a lookout I was shown in Warren County, New Jersey I saw a similarly worn indentation in rocks, in the shape of an animal paw.

Return to the Mortar/Turtle (Part One)

This "Return" will take a few posts...
Up in the northwest corner of CT, fairly recently, a road was bulldozed into former farmland to create something called Technology Park. Remnants of stone fences from the farm are still visible here and there, but I have this idea that many of these fences were built over existing stone rows that had been there hundreds (thousands?) of years, firebreak devices of the Native Americans who once lived there, part of their ecosystem management scheme.
And I also came across another textbook from another family member – my daughter this time. Apparently (note the word parent contained in that word) my wife and I financed the purchase of “The American Indian; Prehistory into the Present” by Arrell Morgan Gibson – for $60.75 plus tax. My daughter was born in 1981; the book was published the year before. The book’s point of view could be sort of summed up as how the American Indian reacted to the waves of Empires that took over the Indians’ Homeland, sometimes called Turtle Island.

So I’ll return to that little section of land I started talking about and showed a photo of a quartzite mortar stone (Teaser Pix ), a little bit of that “vast estate” along the Greater Housatonic River System, where rows of stones were used in order control a burn in a relatively densely populated area, protected from the bulldozer in modern times still because it is inside the boundary of an inland wetland inside an industrial park.

I followed the wrong stone row trying to return to the place and drew a picture of that row that I posted at Rock Piles (Soon Come ). I’ll amend that here with a drawing of the “next row to the north” of that row. You’ll be looking west from inside the wetland area, and so the top drawing is south, the bottom to the west and if you'd like you could imagine them joined together to get a general feel for how this section would appear, sort of a stylistic representation, trees and brush and poison ivy left out for clarity…

I found the fields I entered following the the bulldozer path using MapQuest, pretty much the same view I got from Google Earth, north at the top. The fields in the upper right are part of the Dairy Farm…

A detail with landmarks added…