RI Appetizer

Native American Social Dance - Greenfield MA

The Nolumbeka Project presents a Native American Social Dance and Stomp Dance, Saturday, February 1, (snow date 2/2), 1-4 p.m., Greenfield Community College, Cohn Dining Room, 1 College Drive, Greenfield, MA. All welcome.  A rare opportunity to learn and participate in Northeastern Woodlands Native social dances, led by Annawon Weeden, Mashpee Wampanoag, Congressional award honoree as culture-bearer for the Northeast and James Moreis, Aquinnah Wampanoag, father and culture bearer. Opening words by Chief Roger Longtoe Sheehan, Elnu Abenaki. All ages. The single file call and response dances will be taught and are fun and easy to learn. Bring rattles and shake out the cabin fever!  Snow date? www.nolumbekaproject.org Free, donations appreciated.

Acton's Trail Through Time: Information, dis-information, and missing information

I went back to Acton's Nashoba Brook Conservation Land. I did a lot of poking around there in the past, slowly forming an opinion. How many bad ideas did I have to try out and discard? Nashoba Brook was the great "teaching" experience. But that was 20 years ago. I expected to see new rock piles this time and was not disappointed. I found several new clusters but trying to compare them to locations on my topo maps, I can't tell whether I saw these places in the past. Here is a self portrait:

I could describe the sites but you have heard this before. I take away two things from this walk. One was the way I sub-consciously hunted down the rock piles. I cannot really describe this other than to say: I found the hilltop and headed west, downhill, knowing that I would have to cross several wetlands and knowing that I could pin down the rock piles between the hill and water.

The other thing I come away with is an emotional reaction to the "Trail Through Time" interpretive panels I encountered at the bottom of the hill when I got back to the trails. Frankly they are a bit lame, presumably because they are based on information from Indians who learned about these things from people who, themselves, had spent little time understanding the overall phenomena. It is sadly generic. In fact Mark Strohmeyer and the Mavor and Dix team had spent a lot of time at Nashoba Brook. I spent many days walking there and showing it to locals, and I spent several walks there showing the place to the Indians. Today's interpretive signs tell nothing of the history of the place, how those panels came to be. Nor do the signs contain anything that is accurate or specific to this place. I wrote down some reactions when I got home:

Revisiting Nashoba Brook and being gratified to see the interpretive panels and the little 3-dot indicators of rock piles that I recommended. But being disappointed at the incorrect information (saying marker piles in a row are “unusual”) the disinformation (the newly coined Algonquian representing non-existent categories). And saddened at the missing information: no real acknowledgement of the role of water and the key role of Nashoba Brook with many springs flowing out of the hill from the south.

I took a hike there recently heading uphill and left after the bridge, then swinging around more to the west until I got to the highest place on the hill, where I turned west and headed down past a series of valleys, each with a spring, two out of three with rock piles. This all happens between the green trail and the yellow trail, near the hilltop. These were new sites to me and not all are on the Acton trail map. After seeing three different sites with rows of evenly spaced “marker” piles, I came to an interpretive panel for the “Trail Through Time”, which informed me that piles in a row were “unusual”. Later on the trail, a cluster of three marker piles, forming a ‘L’ rather than in a row, was given a freshly minted Algonquian name and interpreted as something different. Well, I suppose I should not be picky. We have replaced the agrarian myth with an archeological myth. But what is most saddening is the missing information and the failure to explain how this site is connected to water “from head to toe” – meaning: water sources on that most porous of hills to the south, Spring Hill, drain down into Nashoba Brook and then down from the rocky hills of Acton into the rich alluvial flatlands of Concord, around the Assabet River. Most of the springs have sites and, of course, these woods are the first place suitable for rock piles , uphill from Assabet River. So this failure to connect the Nashoba Brook Conservation Land to the brook itself is a disappointment.

Let me end by saying that marker pile sites, which are thought to be calendrical, are the most common type of rock pile site (and represent ~90% of the piles at Nashoba Brook). The piles may be on the ground or up on a boulder - whichever is needed to locate the pile where it needs to function. The standard characteristic is even spacing of the piles. This arrangement tends to form a grid when the piles are clustered, or form a set of 'tic marks' when the piles are in a row. Almost invariably, marker piles are found in associated with a burial, which is usually represented by a larger and less conspicuous mound, to the side of the marker piles. 

Remember Phillips Hill, Hudson MA

I just came across this photo (here) and can't resist posting it.

A little "Valley of Kings" - new rock piles, where I already looked many times

I took a stroll through parts of Woods Hole to show rock piles to a friend, and ended up finding new piles in more than one place - just for the price of looking again and being a few yards away from where I had been previously. It just goes to show how easy it is to miss these things.

 Boy that's hard to see!

From the side, you can detect a familiar shape - a broad horseshoe with its back against the hill (to the right). Ten yards away, at the top of the slope, is a pavement and a small collection of marker piles.

That makes three different mounds in the same half acre valley. A miniature valley of the kings.

I suppose the pavement at the top is the same age as this new leaf-covered mound. It shows you how differences in topography can affect the appearance and weathering of a pile. As for the mounds being hard to see, I only saw the third one that one time. It is not worth braving the bull-briar to find it again.

To finish the story, the above site is behind the fire station, north of the main road a few steps. Driving through the parking lot behind the Woods Hole Oceanographic's Quissett Campus, here was another new pile. Again, for the price of driving through a different parking lot:

Best of 2019 from Joshua H in RI

Reader Joshua H. writes:

here is a photo of all the most important artifacts from my first year collecting in RI. The top left greenish yellow stones are made from serpentine rock

there is a resharpened smoky quartz hardaway side notch with fluting and terminal hinge fracture, a black argillite serrated point that's similar to atlantic phase, a green argillite guilford round base,

an ancient rhyolite biface blade that's serrated, a red rhyolite cobbs triangular round base, a broken red rhyolite spearpoint that may be Kirk stemmed or Wapanucket (I think) but also looks similar to a benton,

a marblehead rhyolite hell gap point with quartz phenocrysts, red rhyolite short kirk serrated I think, a small quartzite point that looks similar to a RI and CT clovis point types

and a green argillite koens-crispin point as well as a few other broken points including a peachy colored quartzite spearpoint that looks early archaic/late paleo.

I had an amazing first year collecting to say the least. All artifacts were collected from the beach or the edge of Point Judith pond.

[Update]
I misidentified this as a union side notch but it's a Dalton-greenbriar, greenbriar or Hardaway-Dalton I think

Best of 2019

Since I moved to Cape Cod I have done little exploring. There are still plenty of woods out there. My main finds of the year were: Quisset Wildlife Management area in Mendon

And my most recent finds at Sippewisset:

There was a bit of good writing and I found myself pre-occupied with worked fragments of quartz, found in strange settings in Woods Hole, like this Levallois Technology blade from deep in the glacial clay during construction:

Well, I will be up in Concord and may get some exploring in if there is no snow.

Have a good new year everyone.

The inlet at Flume Pond, Sippewisset, Falmouth, MA

Flume Pond - Sippewisset, Falmouth MA

Been a while since we had a standard report:

Flume Pond is a Falmouth "300 Hundred Committee" conservation land. Several stone walls (in light blue) cross a ridge of higher ground next to a pond, that was probably connected to the ocean at one time. Along the north side of a ridge are a couple of "grids" (upper dark blue outlines) and on the south side, where another wall comes down to the very tip of an inlet, there were several features: a large boulder connected to the wall, a couple of small rock piles (lower dark blue outline) and a linear earthen "berm" (orange line) that parallels the wall and the water. I would have called it a ditch except it is above and parallel to the water. This spot, by the inlet, is a place where brackish water is coming up directly under the oak trees.

You walk along the ridge following a stone wall. Right at the beginning is a vernal pond and a small bit of wall wraps the pond. Next to the vernal pond, a fine example of a split wedged rock:

You keep going along the trail for a minute and see a rock pile off to the right. An older trail leads down to the water on the right (north side) to a place where a boat would be easy to launch. As the trail goes down to the water a small collection of rock piles appear. Upon investigation there are several different clusters of piles out along the ridge, and all the way to the tip of the higher ground sticking into the pond.

I poked around more carefully and would say there are 20 or so piles in the whole area. Yesterday I spent a while looking closely at the first collection of piles on the northern side of the ridge and going down to the water. I started to notice the piles were a bit evenly arranged along lines and started looking for missing piles where the "grid" had me expecting them - ending with my brushing leaves off of several piles I did not see at first. Then I tried to memorize the layout and, getting it at least viusalized, was able to record the layout with bits of dead leaf on a rock:

(Click in to see it better.)

I also explored more extensively in a bulbriar patch that covers the southern side of the ridge. Where the inlet cuts into the land and meets another stone wall, there were a couple of little rock-on-rocks right down at the edge:

 Looking south over the final inlet:

Just to the side of this, as shown in the map fragment, was an unusual earthen feature. Like a stone wall, parallel with a stone wall (shown in previous picture) but made of earth:

Otherwise this is a site with several different typical "grids". In my experience these are usually found near larger mounds, often lower and less conspicuous than the piles of the grid. I did find a larger "bump" with a few rocks poking out that might meet that description.

The Swanzey Fish Dam

A Large, Precontact Native American Stone Structure in SW New Hampshire 

by Robert G. Goodby, Sarah Tremblay, Edward Bouras (2014)

"The Swanzey Fish Dam is a large V-shaped stone structure in the Ashuelot River of southwestern New Hampshire. One of the few substantial stone sites in New England with clear archaeological evidence for a Native American origin, it is assumed to have been used for the harvesting of anadromous and/or catadromous fish. Archaeological data demonstrate that the dam became a focus of Native American activity by the Terminal Archaic Period and continued in use into the Contact Period. While one of the first such dams to be documented in New England, the Swanzey Dam is shown to be part of a larger pattern of stone dam construction across eastern North America.

The Swanzey Fish Dam was known to the earliest Euroamerican settlers of Swanzey. The most detailed description comes from an 1888 account by Keene resident and respected naturalist George Wheelock (cited in Griffin 1904:140): “The low water in the Ashuelot, occasioned by the repairs at the Swanzey mill, has exposed the old traditional Indian dam two miles above. Indians were lazy, and this work of theirs is the more surprising on this account...the river at this point is now almost a rapid and strewn with boulders for thirty rods or so. It is less than a hundred feet wide, but the dam being in the shape of a harrow pointing downstream is more than that distance. By skillful stepping it is possible to pass the point of the harrow, the apex of the dam, and somewhat farther. It is made of stones such as a man could lift, picked up in the stream above. It varies from six to twelve feet in thickness, according to the depth of the water. It looks like a tumble down wall mixed with gravel, but it must have caused weeks of labor....Below the dam is a flat boulder reached by stepping-stones....Near by the old dam lives Jonas L. Moore. Here lived his father and grandfather before him. For one hundred and thirty years this has been called the Indian dam...The elder Moore dug up a half peck of arrow and spearheads, all in one pocket....Some twenty Indian fire-places have been ploughed up here. These were simply circles in the middle of the wigwam, paved with stones from the river.”

Racist stereotyping aside, this account is significant in a number of respects, most notably in dating the recognition of the dam as a Native American creation to the earliest Euroamerican settlement of Swanzey in the mid-18th century...

Only a handful of wooden fish weirs have been documented in New England, and prior to this study, no stone dam has been conclusively shown to be Native American in origin…

… Research at the Swanzey Fish Dam site has resulted in a detailed description of the dam feature, has shown that the dam was a focus of Native American activity, and has definitively dated this activity to the Late/Terminal Archaic and Contact periods. This research has also ruled out a Euroamerican origin for the dam, and has shown that, as in much of the eastern United States, substantial stone structures were constructed by Native Americans in New England."

http://environment.yale.edu/forests/files/Swanzey%20Fish%20Dam%20Article.pdf

Appetizer - Sippewisset Piles

Archaeoastronomy facebook group

https://www.facebook.com/groups/730976450733866/

Canadian Shield rock art as Gesamtkunstwerk : Aesthetics of place and landscape

by Dagmara Zawadzka (2010)

Global Rock Art. Annals of the XIV World Congress of the International Federation of Rock Art Organizations, Piauí, Brazil 

(Excerpts:)

   “…Substances, such as red stone, quartz, copper, crystal, shell, and certain woods, such as birch, were spiritually important and their aesthetic properties of colour and texture were exploited. The use of exotic stones, which were traded at a long distance, stems back to the Paleo-Indian period (10,000-,000 BC)…
The exploitation of the natural shapes and colours of stones is also evinced from the Shin-ga-ba-was-sins, “curiously wrought boulders of rock” that resembles human or animal forms. These stones, which were believed to be imbued with spiritual powers, had sometimes features such as eyes painted in order to accentuate their organic shapes. Certain stones were imbued with special significance. For example, the Mistassini quartzite was called by the Eastern Cree of Québec “Stones that look like fat,” fat being an esteemed substance. Evidence of its exploitation for tools could go back to 4,000 years ago and the quarry itself was regarded as a sacred place...

More: https://www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg/place-lieu.aspx?id=12977&pid=0

    The Jesuit Pierre Laure has left the following account of the Antre de Marbre cave in the quartzite outcrop of la Colline Blanche:   “The most remarkable of all the curiosities to be seen in these woods, in the direction of Nemiskou, is a cave of white marble, which looks as if a workman had carved and polished it. The aperture is easy of access, and lights up the interior. The vault corresponds, by its brilliancy, to its supports. In one corner is a slab of the same substance, but somewhat rough, which projects, forming a kind of table as if to serve as an altar. Consequently the savages think that it is a house of prayer and council, wherein the Spirits assemble. Therefore all do not take the liberty of entering it; but the jugglers who are, as it were, their Priests, go there in passing to consult their oracles…”

    According to the archaeologist George Hamell (1983), among North-eastern Woodland Indigenous peoples, substances such as copper and crystal, which can be characterized as shiny, translucent and light-coloured, are metaphors for Light, Life and Knowledge. HAMELL (1983: 5) claims that: When consecreated [sic] to ritual use, shell, crystal, and native copper, and artifacts made from these substances are traditional material culture expressions of “metaphysics of light” shared by the Northeastern Woodland Siouans, Algonquians and Iroquoians. Within this metaphysics “Light” is a metaphorical conceptualization for semantic domains of highest cultural value or significance: “Life,” “Mind,” “Knowledge,” and “Great Being”. As light, bright, and white things, shell, crystal, and native copper, are “good to think (with)…”

    These substances, appreciated for their whiteness, transparency, reflectiveness and lustre, were obtained from underwater manitous such as the mythical Snake whose body “looked like brass” and “eyes and horns shone like a mirror.”

White shiny objects were endowed with special powers. Kohl  (1985[1860]: 414-415) recounted a story relating to the sacredness of white: An Ojibbeway, of whom I inquired why a white colour was so specially esteemed by the Indians, told me that the cause was as follows:

    “When the first man on earth fell sick, and saw death before his eyes, he began to lament and complain to the Great Spirit about the shortness and suffering of this life. [To help the Great Spirit sent messengers bringing the Midewiwin ]. These messengers brought down at the same time a white hare-skin, the feathers of a white-headed eagle, and a medicine-sack of white otter-skin. These contained all the Indian medicines and benefactions of the Great Spirit to mankind. And from this time forth white became a sacred colour among the Indians…"

https://www.academia.edu/38232214/Canadian_Shield_rock_art_as_Gesamtkunstwerk_Aesthetics_of_place_and_landscape?email_work_card=title

“A Gesamtkunstwerk (German: [gəˈzamtˌkʊnstvɛʁk], translated as "total work of art", "ideal work of art", "universal artwork", "synthesis of the arts", "comprehensive artwork", "all-embracing art form" or "total artwork") is a work of art that makes use of all or many art forms or strives to do so.” 

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Gesamtkunstwerk

Western Canada, view of stone construction

https://merlemassie.wordpress.com/2015/09/17/rockpiles/

More 'arrowheads' from North Kingston, RI

Reader Joshua H. writes:
I recently found what I believe to be an argillite guilford round base, quartzite point, three unusual argillite points with two that are very similar to the points described in the thread on arrowheads.com, "narragansett bay argillite spear point tips" and the other is tri-faced and most likely untyped...also a rhyolite adena blade, quartzite blade and (please don't laugh) a crowfield point made out of slate!!  I know it sounds crazy but it has all the characteristics of the shape.  I hope to get all my finds authenticated in the future.

Here is a photo of the "crowfield":

By a vernal pond in Sippewisset, Falmouth MA

For readers unfamiliar with the supposed 'grammar' of split-wedged rocks, a vernal pond is a small water source, a place full of spirits. Here, a spirit in the split rock has been blocked from coming out. This spirit - or perhaps the blocking of it - is connected loosely, through a few widely placed rocks, to the stone wall in the background. This wall makes a 'V' with another wall [not shown] just to the right of the picture, on the other side of the low place of the vernal pond.

Makiawisug

(The Little People) of Mohegan Hill, Uncasville

May, 2017 by Ray Bendici - Filed Under: Legends, Odd Things, Weird Places

"Described by some as knee-high tall, the Makiawisug wear moccasin flowers for shoes... They are believed to have the power of invisibility, and have been reported to carve symbols into stone. In addition, they supposedly create stone piles, which are used to help protect the Mohegan. In 2012, a development in the area was interrupted by tribal members wanting to preserve such piles, described as "being made of the bones of Mother Earth" and containing messages that "guide generation after generation of Mohegan people."  

https://www.damnedct.com/makiawisug-little-people-mohegan-hill 

http://newenglandfolklore.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-little-people-who-live-under-hill.html

Makiawisug: The Gift of the Little People Hardcover – December 1, 1997

by Melissa Jayne Fawcett (Author), Joseph Bruchac (Author), David Wagner (Illustrator)  

 "Suddenly, the storm seemed to stop as they began to descend into the ground. They were in the realm of the Little People. Weegun led her to a beehive shaped chamber of rocks..."

https://www.mohegan.nsn.us/explore/heritage/our-stories/makiawisug

Small clovis-like point from Concord

I never showed this one:

Found at the wastewater facility cornfield - it was snowy and only a narrow strip of mud was melted out along the top of each corn row. I bent down to investigate what turned out to be a goose poopy, and while my head was close to ground I spotted this little point. I should not have found it otherwise.

The ghosts of the past seen on the pathways in a dust of snow or...

Maybe someday this technology can be applied to rock pile sites.
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-ghost-footprints-pleistocene-era-revealed.html

I wrote a post somewhere about seeing the ghosts of people walking on the old paths, visible only when there is a dust of snow. Cannot find the post.

A real stone pyramid from Quebec

Impressive:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JLM6yEKC-k