Some other pictures

Another BrewertonFound both pieces and glued them together.

Rock piles from Bolton:

Rock pile pictures from Israel

If you like looking at rock piles as much as I do, you might enjoy these even though they are from so far away.
[Click here]

http://www.cannonvalleytrail.com/culturalresources.htm

More about stone mounds in Redwing Minnesota [Click here]

Stone Mounds of Hampshire County, W. Va.

[Click here]

STONE MOUNDS ON THE WHITEWATER

About Indiana Stone Mounds

"The observations of the writer and what has been learned from others leads to the thought that this class of structures are among the most recent in origin of all aboriginal remains in this part of the country. In the Southern States the erection of stone mounds are directly traceable to the modern Indians, even down to the advent of Europeans, while in the North among the Hurons, and many kindred tribes, what was called the feast of the dead was celebrated every few years" [Click here]

101 Ranch Oldtimers

Rock piles in Oklahoma [Click here]

A website about the Nasca Lines

This is not particularly about rock piles or about New England but it is kind of interesting to me. Maybe it suggests some ideas that could apply around here. This is from a website called "Nascodex".

"a clearing contains rows of stone heaps seemingly to be random placement - postulated by some archaeologists to be a geoglyph in the course of elaboration" [Click here]

Hermes and rock piles

From the Jung Society of Atlanta:

"name Hermes is probably derived from the Greek word for 'stone-heap,' herma, and signifies 'he of the stone-heap"' [Click here]

Triangular structures - from Norman Muller

Norman writes:
"...mentioned a triangular structure in the cairn that Larry found, and that reminded me of a triangular fill of stones I saw in S. Newfane, VT, and how this is reflected in the triangular stone placed on top. See the attached. The triangle can also have female symbolism."

Freetown Structure From Larry Harrop

by JimP
The Freetown State Forest is located in Fall River, MA and it's 5,441 acres of forested land with more than 50 miles of unpaved roads and trails. Within the forest is the 227-acre Watuppa Reservation owned by the Wampanoag Nation -- a place where annual tribal meetings are held. Also found in the forest is Profile Rock, a 50-foot outcropping handed down by oral tradition as being Chief Massasoit.

Larry Harrop sent me the following photographs of one of the many structures in Freetown State Forest. The following photo shows the structure as Larry first found it.On a subsequent visit Larry removed some of the leaf litter and snow cover, revealing a possible Manitou stone below:Recently Larry returned to the structure and removed even more of the leaf litter. This time even more of the structure was revealed below:
The following photograph gives a closer look at the collection of interesting rocks in front of this niche. Most interesting to me is the use of triangle symbolism at the base of the structure:

Southeast facing rocky hillside

I had been hoping to go explore south of South Monoosnuc and had been hoping to climb that sucker. I drove in along Elm street from Leominster and could see I was getting up near to one of the prominent hills that you can see from Rt 2 going west before Mt. Wachusett. So it was nice to drive up to the foot of it, passing under the power lines and parking just west of where the brook crosses the road. There is a forest "fire road" entrance northward and I walked in along that.

Within a minute or two I saw a kind of wedged rock above and left of the trail and, climbing up to look at it, I spotted a rock-on-rock, which led up and into an area of other rock-on-rocks and effigy-like piles.Whatever happened here is tumbled down and spread out. But the site reminded me of the one in Westford along (is it?) Rt 40 which I called a "typical brookside site". Well this was not exactly near a brook but the topography is very similar to the place in Westford. So I think this is yet another example of a particular type of site. Not a marker pile site and not a large mound site.

There were a number of faint alignments, some of which incorporated a little "niche" type of structure. I saw this a couple of times:
Later in the walk, at a slightly different part of this slope, closer to the power lines, there were several more substantial piles. These are effigy-like to me:

Mountain Laurel on South Monoosnuc Hill in Leominster Mass.

...I pushed on uphill and across into the saddle between hills, then got a bit mixed around and turned east towards the major hill and finally came out to the open space under the power lines. It was not as easy to get across that "open space" as the words make it sound. When I got to the other side I wanted to just climb up South Monoosnuc Hill. This is what met my first advance:
Click on the picture and take a closer look. That is what meets the eye. You cannot walk through that stuff. I walked along looking for an opening and thought I found one. Went in about 2 yards and got completely pinned by the branches and twigs and had to turn around and head back out to the power lines. It was not a matter of being strong enough to continue - you just cannot get through without huge contorsions. Maybe you could crawl if you had to, since it looks a little clearer at ground level. Love that stuff! Then I got lucky and found a place where surveyors had carved a trench and I was able to get up higher on the hill where the mountain laurel gave way to oak and pine trees, rocks, and grass.

Up near the top of South Monoosnuc Hill there are surprisingly few stone features. I saw one little prayer seat,
and maybe a rock pile and a wedged rock or two:
How come this hill, which is larger and closer to Mt Wachusett has so many fewer structures than [see several articles here] I was exploring in the weeks before summer vacation? I wondered about this and concluded that the angle from here to Wachusett is just not right. This might provide a great opportunity to go out an measure angles and come to some kind of conclusion. I headed back south down the ridge of the hill, saw a few things along the way and then headed back out to the power lines and across to the slope of the hill I had explored earlier. ...

More From Bob Miner -- New Features!

By JimP
Some new photos from Bob Miner gives us a new look at a familiar rock pile, and also shows us some new piles not seen before. Above is the huge cairn that we talked about extensively before. It was such a lovely photo of this enormous pile and some of Bob's farm that I just had to share it with all of you.
Above is a rock pile we have not seen before on the blog. Sure looks like a turtle to me.
Above is another large cairn we've not seen before. It is also built at the corner of two stone walls. But there is something very special about this rock pile -- it holds a feature that I personally have never seen built into a cairn before.The above photo shows that special feature. Built into the middle of that large rock pile is this round well-like structure. What was it built for? Did a tree once grow there? Was it put there for offerings? Was there something special on the ground there? What are your theories?

Got Megabytes?

I cancelled my Verizon DSL and inadvertently lost the web page space where I was hosting the "Indian Rockpiles" book excerpts. Can any reader donate about 30 Mb to host it?

The Pond at the foot of Murray Lane. Harvard, MA

There is some Harvard Conservation Land there - the "Williams Land". On Sunday I walked up along the side of the pond, in a northerly direction uphill into the pine woods and outcrops. I thought I would find more in there than I did but in the end only spotted a couple of badly damaged big piles, a rock-on-rock, and a wedged rock. There were probably a few more split wedged rocks in there if I had felt like cleaning in the cracks the way FFC does. Then I circled around behind and along ... until I came to an outcrop with one beautiful "noble" pile. Maybe the broken down piles I found nearby used to look like this. In more detail:

Walking in along the east side of the pond on a trail, you immediately pass a broken down, large rock pile.
And then up near the highest point of the conservation land there is another:I see signs of internal structure in this, meaning the hint that it might have had an inner chamber.

At another low spot was this wedged rock:
Finally ....on top of an outcrop..., was this nice pile which is built against a boulder:I do not know if this nice pile is of the same style as the one across the pond was, before it was broken down but these are very different piles from what I was calling "marker piles" and reporting on yesterday.

Another structure near Sherry Rd

"Upper" Sherry Rd - a typical marker pile site

On my Saturday walk I ended up back at a site I found last year, called "Upper Sherry Rd" because there is another site called simply "Sherry Rd", lower down the ridge and closer to that road. All these sites are at the foot of Oak Hill which stretches from Littleton southward, through a corner of Boxborough, and into Harvard. Mavor and Dix wrote about Oak Hill as a unifying and important landform in Nashoba and, for sure, the foot of Oak Hill is a great place for rock pile sites. The "Sherry Rd" site is mentioned in Manitou on p.279. Anyway, the site I visited last Saturday is a typical marker pile site. Specifically what I mean by this is:

• Piles lined up three and four at a time
• Piles roughly evenly spaced along those lines
• Piles incorporating any of
• One vertical face
• A pointer rock sticking out above or to the side of the pile
• Piles with burnt rocks and quartz
• Site located on a slope or on level ground with a near horizon.

Let me illustrate these things from "Upper Sherry Rd".
Here we see three piles in a row leading from the foreground off to the upper right. You can also see these piles are about the same distance apart. Other piles in the background to the left suggest this pattern continuing.
Here are a number of examples of piles with a vertical face. What may be less clear is that these piles have only one vertical face. The back and sides of the pile are not vertical and, given this structure, there is the strong suggestion that the purpose of the pile is to provide that vertical face at that location - and what structure is there in the rest of the pile is not important. Another possibility is that the vertical face creates height for the pile and allows a stone on top of the pile to be located precisely.

In this picture, every pile you see, has one rock on top hanging over the side. These are what I am calling "pointer" rocks.
Finally, mixed in with these vertical faced piles and piles with pointer rocks are a number of low ground piles with quartz and burnt rock:
[The quartz is the white rock, the burnt rock is the one to the far right.]
Here is a picture that shows both a pile with quartz as well the kind of layout you see at a marker pile site.
I wish I could put it all together and say: "see this is what these sites were for...". But I cannot. I suspect that burial was involved but perhaps these are memorials rather than graves. I think the burnt rock came from a fire or fires which were made at this spot with the rocks used afterwards for rock piles. I think the lines of equally spaced piles have something to do with sky watching and, to be honest, I do not see how these fragmentary fantasies add up to a sensible activity. I do know that marker pile sites, as I have tried to define them, are by far the most common type of site in the Rt 495 corridor around Harvard, Boxborough, Stow. The more classic site mentioned in Manitou is another example, and up and down this valley of Beaver Brook, there is one after another of these sites - some in good shape, some all broken down; like what is left of 500 Cairn Hill, a mile or so down the valley. Also this example from Stow.

Near Sherry Rd Harvard, MA

Around Sherry Rd in Harvard, MA is one of the areas of highest concentration of rock pile sites. So for my Saturday walk I thought I would explore a piece of woods back in there which I had never been to. In the end I found what might have been a couple of prayer seats, and a couple of new rock piles, but I did not really start seeing things until I got back into a site I found previously. Here, then, are the few things I found before that.

I was walking north through the woods starting where Sherry Rd begins off Rt 111. Followed a ridge with the sounds of Rt 495 to my right. If the trees were not in the way, the views would be to the east. Built into the bedrock of the ridge were a couple of structures. Here is one: You see a couple of placed rocks (behind the hanging vine in the picture).

Here is another:
If you look carefully there are several placed rocks here and they create a sense of enclosure. But if we imagine someone sitting there, they would either be looking at nothing or else looking through the hole underneath the two placed rocks in the foreground.

After this, I continued northward along the same ridge, until it came to an end at a low place with a small brook winding past. There were a couple of very minor modifications to the ridge, like this:
And then along the curve of the brook were two small rock piles, broken down and falling into the brook but still with a little structure left visible.

I notice that each of these piles has one or two chunks of quartz in them. This is a pure and simple site: two rock piles next to a brook, each pile with chunks of quartz.

Near Murray Ln. Harvard, MA

In Harvard near Sherry Rd, in earshot of 495

We've seen places like this before.

Familiar Faces at the Mavor Memorial

Ted Ballard, a woman I do not know, Curt Hoffman, The Martins. Ted is/was the NEARA research committee chair. Curt is the well known New England Archeologist who is interested in Native American stonework. Ted and Fred Martin have done research with Mavor.

Fred Martin going up to speak about his relation to Jim.

Linda McElroy looking at the camera. Linda is\was the chairman of the Acton Land Stewards Committee.
Jim Mavor's son Jimmy, the tall man looking at the camera:
Tom Paul, NEARA's long-time treasurer.I was told that Cheryl Maltais from the Gayhead Wampunoag was going to be there but I do not know what she looks like. There were also many familiar faces from Woods Hole.

Here is a closeup of Curtis Hoffman: