Rock Piles

Thursday, August 21, 2008

More enhanced outcrops at King Phillips Woods

This was an interesting structure:

Just a bit of outcrop with a wall like addition to its middle:

With a little cut-away at the far end:

Here is a view back towards where the first picture was taken:

A nice bit of fungus nearby:

The original cedar tree and rock-on-rock

On the other side of the Rt 27 uphill from the King Phillips Woods conservation land parking lot in Sudbury, there are a variety of rock piles going up the hillside and, on one level spot, this example of a cedar tree growing next to a rock-on-rock. In fact the cedar tree was old and, I think, dead. But it gave the strong impression that it was planted next to the rock pile, or vice versa the rock pile was made next to the cedar tree. I was trying to find this example and show it to FFC because I saw it before and thought it could be related to the battle between Indians and settlers in the King Phillips war that took place here in Sudbury.

I don't remember where I got this idea but I imagine a connection between cedar trees and memorials to the people killed in battle at these spots. And this Kind Phillips Woods with its battlefield is full of examples, like this one, which I showed the other day.

If it is true these tree and rock pile combinations represent a memorial to the fallen then they cannot have been made any more long ago than when those cedars were born. If they are no more than 100 years old that is consistent with accounts of Indians continuing to visit places well into the late 1800's or later - plenty of time to plant trees or put rocks on rocks. It appears they remember this battlefield also.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

King Philips Woods - Sudbury, MA

I originally posted about the place here, and went there again with FFC last Saturday. We saw numerous nice things, some new to me, and he called it a "big old medicine place". I'll continue posting a few pictures.

A new site from Larry Harrop and Bob Miner

JimP writes:

Have you seen Larry's latest blog entry? The highlight is the video. Check it out!

http://www.larryharrop.com/blog/

[I have never seen something so clearly Native American.]

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Enhanced outcrop - King Phillips Woods

Many of the outcrops there are like this, enhanced with rock piling.

Note the small secondary pile to the far right in the picture.

Another example:

Effigy-like rock piles in King Phillips Woods - Sudbury, MA

FFC calls this a "big old medicine place".

Note how these piles have a solitary larger "head" rock, and some degree of symmetry. That makes them suggestive of animal shapes.

Monday, August 18, 2008

In Callahan State Forest, Marlborough, MA

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Pictographs from Wisconsin

Norman Muller writes:

Not cairn related, but fascinating nonetheless: www.tcinternet.net/users/cbailey/GottTitle.htm.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Nova Scotia Rock Piles

An annonymous commentor wrote:

http://museum.gov.ns.ca/arch/sites/btown/pages/mounds/akdi31_4.html

http://museum.gov.ns.ca/arch/sites/btown/pages/mounds/akdi31_12.html

Yes there are rock piles in Nova Scotia.

(I think these links are from Birchtown Archeology):

Standing Stone - King Phillip's Woods, Sudbury MA

A ridge along a wetland and a view to the southwest. From left to right is a standing stone in the background, a rock pile in the center and FFC to the right next to another structure. The standing stone is very suggestive:

Cedar Tree and Rock Pile - King Philips Woods, Sudbury MA

As if the cedar tree was planted in the rock pile. It is emblematic of these woods, where warriors fell in battle.

Another view:

Wildfires threaten tribal sacred sites

Reader Lisa C. sent in this link to an article in the Silicon Valley "Mercury News" [Click here].

Excavating Stone Mounds in Birchtown - Nova Scotia

From an annonymous commentor [Click here].

One comment: those mounds are not in the least bit "unique".

Friday, August 15, 2008

Videos from the Quissett Woods

Goodbye to the Falmouth woods for now

A propped boulder "dolmen" in Quissett Woods

I was sure I had seen some writing by Mavor about this propped boulder in one of the upper valleys above the main kettle hole I wrote about here. I cannot find the reference.

Here it is in the distance, rockpile in the foreground:

A stone wall runs from here down into the kettle hole to the right. I again remember Mavor writing about the directions that the stone "rows" follow on their way down into the hole. Closer up:

There is a smaller wedge propping up the rock, to the upper right in this next picture:

But check out the overhead view down:

That's a blast hole - something drilled out in order to place a charge inside the rock. But usually the blast splits a rock in the direction of the hole. Which did not happen here. Meanwhile, there are clear signs of steel drill splitting along the edges of the actual split. It is fun trying to imagine a chronological sequence of events that led to this structure. A person I showed it to thought it looked like a whale.

One more word about the rock pile in the first picture. Here it is again. It has one white cobble on its periphery (not visible in the photo) and is a bit nestlike:

The pile is made from hundreds of small stones, quite different from all the other piles I saw in there.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Webster Woods - Woods Hole, MA

Down in Woods Hole MA for summer vacation, there were still two pieces of woods I had not explored - both had rock pile sites and there was a certain amount of similarity between the two sites. But the more I explore, the clearer it becomes that sites are essentially everywhere. That is not the picture you get from reading Mavor and Dix ("Manitou") and I feel there is still a residual if not dominant belief that sites are exceptional, unusual, etc. Like a newspaper article reporting someone finding an arrowhead. It would come as no surprise for an arrowhead hunter, knowing arrowheads are pretty common everywhere. So also with rock pile sites but it is always nice to find sites nearby just as it is always nice to find an arrowhead.

Of the two new sites I saw this summer, the first was a small site on the WHOI Quissett Campus, with piles in lines in a rather steep gully. I figured it for a "marker pile" site and, on re-visiting, confirmed that it was a somewhat unique location because the sides of the gully were so steep there but, perhaps more importantly, flat or even slightly concave - so the layout of piles was such that all were visible from one place. For example, from a large boulder at the top of the site. Here I try to give some sense of it, although I cannot make out exactly where most of the piles were, they are roughly in the layout I sketched on the photo, from across the valley:

Now the second site was more special to me because it is so close to home that I can get there on foot without a car. Also this woods contains a much larger complex of features, some of which I have seen before, stretching from Quissett Ave to the Woods Hole Rd behind the fire station. Because it is adjacent to the golf course this used to be called the "Caddy Camp Woods" but now, as it belonged to the Webster family (the "rose garden house") it is called the "Webster Woods". Apparently this woods now belongs to the town of Falmouth and, discussing it with friends who read the Falmouth "Enterprise", it was slated for affordable housing development. The latest on that is that the developer ran out of money and lost his option and made a deal with the town to develop a different property (the Nautilus Hotel and Dome restaurant), so perhaps these woods are safe for now. But I wanted to include all these details so that Internet searchers will be more likely to read this and learn that those Webster Woods contain perhaps the most extended and significant Native American ceremonial landscape I have seen on Cape Cod. In addition to that, there are vernal pools, unusual species (I saw a flowering Rattlesnake Orchid),

and such nice Beech trees, with minimal undergrowth, that walking around in there is pleasant even if you see nothing more than the ground and the trees. Mavor wrote about a little "dolmen" in one part of this woods and about the short stretches if stone wall leading down into the major kettle hole back in there (I cannot locate the reference). I thought I should go explore that woods more carefully. I have been there before, seen Mavor's dolmen, seen a rock pile or two, visited with FFC who noticed some open rectangle outlines made from cobbles placed on the ground. But I knew I had not explored it recently or carefully, so I went in there to look around. In one place I wanted to go down into the kettle hole but was following along a ridge and figuring I should just finish the job and keep going up to the head of a little valley before giving in to the downward pull of the kettle hole. And just as I was about to turn back I saw a rock pile. "Oh gee! at least one rock pile".

And looking around I saw a couple more at the head of this little valley.

And then looking around more I saw perhaps ten piles, most of them so deeply buried in leaves and dirt that only a faint bump was visible - and only if you were looking hard. I cleaned a few piles off

and tried to evaluate the type of site. These were not burial piles according to my theory (no water visible, no white rocks included) but what were they? So decrepit as to have almost no shape, still some of them seemed to have one vertical side - so there there is a reasonable chance these are "marker piles" like in the WHOI woods. That means the speculation is that they have an astronomical function. But these piles were not all visible from a single place - so if they are marker piles, they represent lines of sight from multiple locations: an ovelaying of different functional clusters. In the end I think there are maybe thirty piles in there in four or five clusters. The upper valley is to the right in this picture:

Mostly in the first little valley, they are also clustered in the other little hollows and on the slopes leading down to the major kettle hole. Is this all there was or did this site extend from Quisset harbor all the way across to Vineyard sound? ( See the map above.)

The WHOI Quissett Campus is just across the Woods Hole Rd from this other woods. Meanwhile there are also rock piles on the west side of Quissett Ave, so this an extensive collection of related sites. Here is the most beautiful little scene, a rock pile beneath a Beech tree:

closer:

closest:

Note the structure of this pile and the prominence of the outer ring of rocks. This pile is pretty typical. You see an area of cobbles about 4 feet across but if you look at it you can see the mounding of the pile extending perhaps 8 feet overall under the leaves and dirt.

From the first upper valley, I descended into a smaller kettle hole. I should mention a curiosity: this lesser kettle holes had a large 40 foot square hole dug into its bottom. Was it an old foundation? Was it a borrow pit for sand and gravel? I had a hard time coming up with a reasonable scenario for someone going off the road, past ridges and slopes with plenty of opportunity for collecting sand and gravel, and digging at the bottom of this hole. I think it is worth exploring or excavating. Someone might try a metal detector down in there. I am told these woods were never farmed. They were used for sheep pastures and wood lots.

Continuing on, I saw one u-shaped outline:

(This picture captures the Beech woods feel of the place.)

Then came to a shoulder looking northwest down a steep slope towards the major kettle hole. Here there were several lines of rocks ("stone rows") running downhill into the hole.

There were rock piles down at the bottom between lobes of the kettle hole,

and a few larger ones that might have been platforms, also just above the steep slope down into the hole (this looks vandalized to me):

Exploring those upper valleys, one had a single rock pile:

Another had a open rectangle outline and a rock pile nearby:

I cleaned off this last pile and noticed the structure: a curve of cobbles opening one way, containing another curved group of cobbles facing the other way - not exactly a campfire circle. This is a very similar shape to at least two other piles I saw in there, for example the one under the Beech tree shown above. Here is another outline or some such structured grouping of cobbles on the ground:

From there I went over to look at the "dolmen" and then out. I'll put those pictures in a separate post.

I showed this site to some friends and they showed it to their families. I tried to show it to another friend but we played phone tag instead. I hope I can show it to enough people that a general awareness of this place is born - so people will be more aware of what is at stake if the town decides to resume development plans for the area. There are plenty of boring flat woods off on the northeast side of this area that would be fine for a housing development, so maybe there is enough woods for everyone.

As for ceremonial structures, there is quite a lot of variety around this deep kettle hole.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Wawanaquassick

Another link from Tim MacSweeney:

Here's another, found by Googling "Indian Rock Piles."

Wawanaquassick - "land of many memorial stones."

http://www.geocities.com/megdagooch/BackWoodsCampWawanaquassickCairns.html

(with two familiar links).

Today's search terms

Here are some search terms that recent visitors used to find this place. You can see that on an average day a certain number of people go to the Internet to find out about rock piles. I only report search terms used by people who spent more than a minute here.

strange rock piles finds north eastern united states

hidden landscapes "ted timreck"

jack ricciardi

new england rock piles

old fulton postcards

american indian pictorgraphs

rocks piled in the woods

freetown

the rock pile, ma

historic indian villages and ma waterways

stealing stone

pennsylvania farmers rock piles

hybrid peacocks

glastonbury mountain