A village of blowdowns

Here nature is coming very close to creating a rock pile site. All the trees got blown down here at the same time, leaving a little "village" mounds made of earth and stone.

Small rock "sitting on its hanches"

Also from behind Middlesex School.

A couple of rock piles behind the new tennis courts at Middlesex School

Lovers of Estabrook woods put up a brave fight to make Middlesex School stick to to its non-expansion promises. But to no avail, and they did end up bulldozing several acres and putting in a tennis court. FFC led me back there and we saw a couple of rock piles just at the edge of the bulldozed "zone". Maybe there were other piles there before.
It is kind of an interesting spot. You are pretty high up and you can see Wachusett from one angle - faint and purple in the distance.
You could definately have seen it from where these piles are, if there trees were not in the way. Here is a closeup of that last pile.Couldn't quite convince myself these piles were ancient, clearly there is some recent debris scattered around.But the view is nice and this would have been a good place for rock piles. Site destruction is sad but at least there are more where that came from east, inside the Estabrook woods.

Suspicious spalling of a roc

FFC thought this was an obviously artifact:From behind Middlesex School in Concord, MA.

Isolated rock pile

On my way back from the disappointments of Horse Hill in the snow, I wanted to poke around in a smidgen of conservation land I spotted on the map:I was not sure where the entrance was to the conservation land, so found myself driving to the end of each of several small residential roads to see if there was trail head and parking. I was about to give up and decided to check out one more little road and went to the end of it. At the last moment I noticed this a few feet beyond the end of the road, in somebodies backyard.
Determined to not pass up a sure thing, I actually went to knock on the door (usually I am too shy), found the people in a car in their driveway, watching me. So I asked if I could park and go into the conservation land and they more or less said: no. The lack of hospitality is more interesting than the rock pile. I parked somewhere else and snuck back to grab this photo but I could not get up close. And there was nothing else in the woods - just sand and white pines.

Horse Hill, Groton

I have a rule that I break at my own peril: don't waste time exploring Groton or Dunstable. I know there is supposed to be a stone chamber somewhere in Groton [if anyone knows where it is, please let me know] but all I find there is sand and granite quarries. It is as though these towns (and I can name others like them) had very harsh land use in the 18- and 19- hundreds and no Indians ever came back afterwards to restore the woods.

So I broke my rule because, once upon a time, I found material at Horse Hill in Groton and wanted to go out and explore the fringes of that location, thinking I might find other things. Instead I pretty much concluded that my original find was not ceremonial. But still, in the midst of things - a split wedged rock. So what to conclude?The wall to the right is on the western edge of the dirt road that goes up towards the hill from Martin Pond Rd.

Closer:
So somebody was fooling around there.

In this same area there were some very short stretches of wall and some loose rocks piled on boulders. But then the house foundations right nearby confuse me.

Franklin MA "Indian Fort" lost and found?

Chris Pittman writes:

I wanted to share these photos with you of a site in Franklin, MA. This is the Franklin "Indian Fort" described in "Manitou". Derek Gunn showed me this place last year and I have been visiting often, after many hours at this large site I still am not sure I have seen it all. There are probably miles of stone rows and the size and quantity of propped and pedestaled boulders and slabs is really extraordinary. Here are the photos: http://stoneruins.cellarwalls.com/#30.0 There are 50 photos, please look at all of them. The photos by no means show all of what is there, only highlights. There are rows on berms and what appear to possibly be other earthworks as well. In Manitou, the authors indicate that this place is known locally as an Indian Fort. I can tell you, this place is not mentioned in any of the histories of Franklin, the town Historical Society had never heard of it, and long-time residents in the area that I spoke with had never heard of it, including a woman who has lived less than a mile away for the past 90+ years. A couple of the stones in one part of the "Fort" have marks from steel drills, I did notice. Peter, the photos of the archaeological dig I sent you this week are from this site. I spoke with an archaeologist who told me that the flags I saw were from an archaeological survey, the type of survey routinely done when federally funded construction projects threaten to damage a site. The person I spoke with indicated that he believed that the notations on the flags indicate prehistoric artifacts or features were found. I fear that there may be some kind of construction planned for this area. Next week I am going to find out who owns this land, I have assumed it is town property but I am not sure. I am also going to try to learn more about the findings of the archaeological survey. I live in Franklin close to this site and would be happy to show anybody where it is. I would like to hear your impressions based on these photos. There are an incredible number of ticks at this site so it is best to avoid the place in the warmer months.

Norman Muller writes:
Larry Harrop went to this site in November or early December and photographed the stone rows. He was unimpressed, thinking that the boulders looked like they had been moved around with a bulldozer. As he was leaving, a local told him the rows were constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1930s for managing wetlands. Someone should get to the truth of the matter by contacting the local historical society. Or, if that doesn’t work, there must be some way of determining just what the Corps of Engineers or the CCC did in Franklin during the Depression.

I write:
I am about 85% sure this is ceremonial - primarily because of one photo (last picture of the 2nd group of 18 photos)of a boulder on a nest of smaller rocks, not connected to a wall. Otherwise it is hardto say - a lot of boulders pulled from one place and put on top of[older?] walls made from smaller rocks. Not too much debris buildup suggests recent times but, again, that is variable.
Also, if it is a ceremonial complex, there are other types of features I would expect to see; and I do not. Where are the piles, wedged rocks, pieces of quartz, etc? It is not that those things must be there but their absence raises the level of uncertainty.

Chris replies:
Thanks for the reply. Norman e-mailed me and said that Larry Harrop was there in November and felt the rocks had been moved around with bulldozers. As he was leaving a local told him the walls had been built by the CCC in the 1930s to manage wetlands. This is a possibility. However, nearby there are some big concrete structures (cisterns) and modern berms and walls that I do believe were built during the 1930s according to other local residents. And close to that there is another site with piles and rows of boulders that were definitely made with bulldozers, although this appeared more recent, to me. When I was first looking for this site with the map from Derek, I looked in this area first and for a time I believed that the "Indian Fort" had been destroyed. There are also a couple places where these big rows of boulders taper off and become regular stone walls. I am going to e-mail Larry with the link to the photos to see if he was looking at the same structures. The tantalizing thing is that Mavor and Dix alluded to historical records that called this an Indian Fort. I have searched but have been unable to identify any such references. There are some piles at the site but none of the small well-built piles you usually find. I didn't see any split or wedged rocks but it is possible that these features are there but escaped my noticed. There is some quartz but not a lot. For me the number of instances where large boulders are balanced on small stones is remarkable and this appears to me to be deliberate. The apparent prehistoric nature of what was found in the archaeological survey interests me as well. The survey was conducted near the biggest boulders in the complex, right at the edge of the swamp. Please feel free to post the text and links on your blog. I'm not making any claims as to the age or origin of this site but I do think it is interesting and deserves attention, at least until further research clears up the question of whether these walls were in fact built by the CCC or not. If you are ever down this way I think this place is worth a look.

Update: so the sense is there is modern material here. Perhaps it is sitting over some older ceremonial material and perhaps the archeologists are finding even more ancient material there under the soil.

Similar structures in old photos - NY

by theseventhgeneration

The recent post at Ceremonial Landscapes had me looking back at photos of rocks on their haunches. But then I noticed a similarity in rock piles with niches at the base and found two that are strikingly similar.

This first photo is a recent find, and I posted about it here. Note the boulder on boulder, with the top boulder turned to create a space under it where the niche is located. Also, the rock pile on top is off to one side, in other words, there is not a rock pile covering the entire top of the boulder.
The second photo is a rock pile from a site I previously posted here. These are smaller boulders. They are also turned so that a niche is created below the top boulder. In this case, the upright rock in front of the niche does not completely enclose it, but it still gives the sense of recognition of the space. I hadn't posted this photo before because the lens had a little blur, but it gives a decent view of the rock pile only on one side of the top boulder, similar to the first photo, although much smaller.I'm calling the top boulder "turned", but I'm not sure if that's natural or man-made. At any rate, the similarity overall in these structures enhances the notion that something more than "field clearing" is going on here.

Realtors show rock piles in there promo

Nice find at TwoHeadwaters. [Click Here]. Only $140K for five acres?

"Of Pipelines and rock pile excavations"

Here is a sad story from the Society for Georgia Archaeology. [Click here]. I say "sad" because the piles are equidistant from each other and the rock in the background of the picture. That is an unexplained structure. How did they miss it? Also, there is a bit of: if you don't understand something, make up a quick answer and dismiss it.

Alabama Digs

This blog, a local archeology blog, mentions a stone pile (scroll down a ways). They don't say much about it but it should look familiar to readers of this blog. There's a video!
Update: maybe I should just say it looks familiar; and I wonder what they mean by "cut stone". Aah! It is Civil War related.

Gentle light on the snow

Hard Time...Starvation Times

A rock pile in a wall corner.Little enough to show for a drive out to Stirling.

Concord Water Tower

Not (very) rock pile related: Went out walking in the snow in Concord west of Fairhaven Bay (off of Lawrence Dr.) and saw little. This water tower caught my eye:Woods in there have that harshly-used-in-the-nineteenth-century look.

Today it is cold out, but I am going back out in the snow. Maybe I'll get lucky.

Moundsville Stone Tower

Norman Muller writes:
Attached is an image of the Eastman watercolor, which I copied from the book Seth Eastman: A Portfolio of North American Indians, by Sarah Boehme, Christian Feest and Patricia Johnston (Afton, MN, 1995). The painting in question is illustrated on page 116.

The caption accompanying the painting reads in part: “In addition to seven mounds (‘Celtiberic tumuli,’ as he called them) and traces of ‘circumvallation,’ Schoolcraft located ‘on rising the hills to Parr’s Point … quite entire and undisturbed, the ruins of a tower or look-out, upon a commanding point of ground on the farm of Mr. Micheltree.’ It had been built over an excavation of several feet deep, walled with rough stones, and had supposedly once stood ‘many feet’ high. Similar remains were discovered by Schoolcraft on the other side of the Ohio River (Schoolcraft 1851-1857, 1: 123; see Squier and Davis 1848: 182).

“In Eastman’s view, which faces nearly due south, the conical Grave Creek Mound appears in the distance behind scattered farmhouses and close to a bend in the Ohio River.” The caption is on page 117.

The watercolor drawing measures 4-15/16” x 7-5/8”

Something like this was also mentioned here.

Mobile Phone use may stave off, reverse Alzheimers's

(Not rock pile related, but I couldn't resist) From the AFP:
Write your own caption.

Stone snake - New Salem NY

Polly Midgely (long time NEARA coordinator for NY state) writes:

This stone structure, which resembles a serpent, was found in June on private property in North Salem NY. I first noticed it from below. The serpent was looking out over a swamp from a higher position above me. It looked fierce.

The serpent faces west and runs E-W along a ridge top for 120 feet. It clears the north side of a house by about 12 feet and extends along the upland length of the property from its ravine edge to the town street. This serpent wall does not mark the property line. It is hard to know if this stone wall/ serpent body was shortened by the street but, to me, the tail does not seem finished.

It is located about 1/2 mile south of the Titicus River and runs parallel to it.

Rock pile against the sky - Harvard MA

Simple Rock Pile - Berlin MA

Rock-on-Rock near Harvard U Observatory

Rock Piles at Outlooks

Observations accumulate into patterns and ideas form slowly. I have been reporting examples of "chambered cairns" (see here for an example from Framingham) and two weekends ago, in Berlin, I walked up to a ridge with a fine southeastern view to find a chambered cairn and a site very obviously located in relation to the view outward (see here) . Thinking back to some of the other recent "chambered cairns", some were at nice outlooks and some were not. At the same time, some of these "cairns" are rectangular, others were elongated ovals. So these are not simple monolithic ideas; rather I am seeing some hints of commonality, some hints of themes that I hope will become more real and more valid over time. I previously only posted a video of the Framingham "chambered cairn" example. Here are a couple of other pictures of it. This is an isolated rock pile on a small piece of the Sudbury Valley Trustees land on Doeskin Hill. Note the view to the south:and the note the hollow in the center of the structure (from one side):(and from in 'front'):

* * *

But I don't actually want to write about chambered cairns so much as about large rectangular piles that top a ridge and look outward. (It is just that a lot of examples of such seem to be chambered.) The nice weather after Christmas gave me a chance to do some exploring. What with the find in Berlin, and the Framingham example (also an outlook), my interest was drawn back to Oak Hill [Oak Hill is the long ridge following the western edge of the valley of Beaver Brook (north to the Nashua) and Elizabeth Brook (south to the Assabet), a valley followed by Rt 495 as it loops around the northwestern edge of the Boston area. This is the area associated to the Boxborough Esker, as written about in Manitou. The geology of Oak Hill is layers of schist, standing on edge. This makes for steep ups and downs. With the easy commute via waterways and with its steep slopes ideal for watching the sky or a distant horizon, it is no wonder that this ridge contains the highest density of rock pile sites around here. It is the main reason I can go out weekend after weekend and continue to find new sites. ] Oak Hill is one long outlook - a ridge with excellent views to the east, running for miles through Littleton, Boxborough, Harvard, Bolton, and Berlin. As I looked over the topo maps I figured it might be worth exploring more directly around the Harvard University Observatory on Oak Hill. I found several small sites over the course of a couple of walks there. On one walk I started near "A", found a rock pile (shown under new snow a few posts previously), then continued into the woods, skirting the edges of an orchard (indicated by green dots on the map). There are lots of big sites in this area, so I was skirting the fringes looking for other smaller sites and I came to a small site at "B". This site consists of a long broken down rock pile on top of a low ridge, looking eastward a short distance to three separate rock-on-rocks. First I noticed the rock-on-rocks, then the smeared out remnants of a larger pile at the top of the small ridge there:

Here is a view uphill:And a view downhill:[A nice snow started falling and I was relieved to be on foot]

The size of the component rocks in this smeared-out pile are significant. They match the sizes used in the Framingham examples, and the Berlin examples. This same rock sizes appear in one of two examples from a subsequent walk. The main significance is how different it is from another pile discussed below.

Last weekend I managed to get FFC out of Carlisle for a short walk downhill from the Harvard U. Observatory. He knows people everywere and we ended up parking at the house of a friend-of-friend on Cleeves Hill Rd, and accessing the woods directly behind the house. Almost immediately we got up to the top of the ridge, and almost immediately located a large broken down rock pile (at "C") that was definately at an overlook, definately made from similar sized component rocks. To me, this feels a lot like these chambered cairns discussed earlier.
Note the view eastward:
Note the size of the component rocks - overall largish. So the attributes worth noting are:

• good view eastward
• rectangular and large ~25' sides
• large component rocks but not too large to carry
  

Another smaller pile was just over the curve of land 20 yards to the side:

Contrast that with what else we found up there on Oak Hill. At "D" we came across something that was quite different and just enough like field clearning to make me unsure. This was a big 20 yards long berm at the crest of a ridge made mostly of smaller component rocks.
Actually the pile was hooked around like a "J" with the long berm as the main stem of that letter.

At one end of the berm was loose dumped rocks, suggesting a practical agrarian reason for this pile. At the other end of the pile, a single white rock, suggesting a ceremonial reason for this pile. Note that the component rocks are small and that this is quite a different beast from the outlook piles shown earlier. Sometime contrast with some "other" helps clarify differences between types of rock piles. This large hooked berm is unlike the rest, but at the same time similar to other berms I have seen: some in Lexington and Waltham [reminds me a little of Whipple Hill], some in Littleton [reminds me of John Hanson Mitchell's "Serpent Mound" at Sarah Doublet] and one in Princeton overlooking Watchusett Reservoir. [Sorry there are no better pictures.] As we returned from that high point, there were several other beaten down structures made from similar small component rocks. Seems to me that the rock harvesting mechanism is a significant classifyer of a type of rock pile. Since these component rocks seem to have come from a similar mechanism, located near to it, it makes sense to group these with the large berm. Here was another berm-like structure forming the edge of the ridge.And here was a small rectangular pavement of cobbles in a bit of a hollow along the wall. So, some rather diverse structures up near "D" which cannot be completely disassociated from practical agrarian purposes, even though the large hooked berm is quite interesting and comparable to berms in other places. The sites at "B" and "C" may be candidates for a new site classification involving ridge crests and outlooks.


After that nice day, the weather got colder, I got in one more walk, then it started snowing again, which it is doing now.

Silver lining behind the "Oxford Mound"

Norman Muller writes:

I just heard from Harry Holstein, who was interviewed several times in the Anniston Star newspaper concerning the Oxford, AL, stone mound. He says the mound itself was all but destroyed, but most of the earthen hill it sat on survives. Trees that were growing out of the stone mound were toppled, and they pushed the stones in the mound apart and some fell down the hill. The area is now fenced off and no one can get to the top of the hill.

But some good came from all of this. The city of Anniston called Holstein to have him survey an Indian mound near their airport, and apparently a bill will be introduced to the Montgomery (AL) State Legislature to protect prehistoric sites by State law.

Starting to snow

A scene near Oak Hill Rd in Harvard, MA:

2009 Retrospective

2009 Retrospective

An Outlook in Berlin MA (2)

(I meant "southeast")

An outlook in Berlin MA

Went out hunting rock piles on December 27th, 2009.
I climbed a hill, back of the road, and came to a spot with what would have been a magnificent view to the southeast. Climbing the last few steps up to the top I was thinking: this has got to be a site, whether or not there are rock piles up here, just look how the rocks are scattered around - they must mean something. But there were rock piles. As I approached a boulder near the top, I could see some scattered rocks to its side:Then cresting the rise, a couple of larger rock piles through the ground fog:A closeup:Increasingly, I am noticing when a large rock pile like this also has some kind of hollow at the center. Increasingly, I believe this is an architectural feature of certain piles. Possibly it is what remains of an inner chamber. Other people have said they think hollows were built into the surface of a pile as a place to sit. Whatever the explanation, it is clearly a feature worth noticing. I am starting to get a sense of the distribution of this particular "chambered" feature - it is western Middlesex county and over west of the Nashua River at least into Leominster and Westminster. I think these large "chambered cairns" represent at least one distinct culture. Some of these mounds [eg examples in northern Harvard] are elongated ovals, about 5 feet high. Others, like these from Berlin, are more rectangular and not so tall. So it could be a couple of different cultures.

A closeup of a smaller pile:
[That big pile in the background is a pile of dirt tossed up by a bulldozer. They are that close to destroying this place.]

This gives a good sense of the layout of the piles and boulder along the edge of the outlook:
In this picture we are looking south, back towards the way I came up the hill, with the boulder at the far rear of the picture. The outlook is to the left. To the right are the standalone piles. Behind them is a flat area, pretty much torn to shreds by bulldozers. But there was one smaller pile still there in the flat area, built on a split rock:From there back to the ridge and view west:
In the background, the boulder is to the right.

Taking one last look at the view,I proceeded north along the edge. There was another tumbled structure:and I came to a short berm blocking the highest part of the gully:The road was built over it, so this might have been simply part of road building. But it also fits into a pattern of large rock piles.
The component cobbles are of like size between this pile and the ones earlier on the ridge.

Oxford Stone Mound "makes it to the big time"

This is the first time I remember seeing an official publication like Archeology Magazine noting a rock pile related story. The following is from their end-of-year list of most most endangered archaeological sites [click here for the complete list] (Recall also that the Indians in Alabama used the USET resolution as part of the basis for their argument to protect the mound.)

Signal Hill Mound
During construction of a Sam's Club Walmart megastore in Oxford, Alabama, contractors stripped earth from a nearby hill, destroying a stone mound that was built in the Late Woodland Period, around A.D. 1000. Archaeologists have only recently begun to realize the significance of stone-mound networks in the eastern United States so few have protected status. After public outcry over the site's destruction, Walmart halted the project.

Merry Christmas