The Deer Path "StoneWall" (Weston CT) Part Two

 Stonework and Stonework on Google maps and Google Earth

   “I keep looking for a view of them on Google maps and Google Earth where street views are available but the foliage gets in the way and I can't show you a good view of that,” I mentioned in the previous post, here:  https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-deer-path-stone-wall-weston-ct-part.html

 

   So I kept looking (as if that were the only thing in the world I was thinking about):

Of course there's the modern stonework:

And older stonework near the modern stonework:

And segments of old rebuilt stonework

that meet up with

other segments of old rebuilt stonework:

And because I've seen this stonework of undetermined age

elsewhere in the Paugussett Homeland

(with an overlay of horns and eyes for the skeptical to ridicule)

at the first Puritan minister's house in a certain town,

I'm looking for something similar in the Street-view images:

And going back to the first image above,

I certainly did not find something like that,

Just to the right of that old tree:

I was hoping to find something like this:

And then, 

just a little farther along,

there is this flat topped triangular boulder

at the beginning of a segment of what almost everybody seems to call a "stone wall:"

And then there is this one:

A wee bit of LiDAR:

A different road, with another similar but not identicle "gateway:"

Another wee bit of LiDAR:

I'm just getting used to the "new" viewer:

And then there is a little conjecture about some "left-over boulders"

by newer stonework, since I've seen this, as I said earlier:

Odd that there seems to be an apparent eye on this boulder:

Also odd is that another boulder also has another apparent eye,

over by another segment of modern stonework:

The Deer Path “Stone Wall” (Weston CT) Part One:

A Culturally Stacked Row of Stones on a Modern Day Property Line 

   Six months and a couple days past the Valentine’s Day Achille’s Tendon Incident, I found myself traveling down some old turnpikes and trails to have dinner with someone in someplace I’d only been to once before. The town was one of those fancy Connecticut towns where former farmland turned to fancy suburban houses for the wealthy, and of course I was looking at all the various forms of “stone fencing” reflective of those time periods my critics believe I’m unaware of, but as I drive along the old roads, I see the Indigenous Stonework remnants still in place here and there, just like just about everywhere in Connecticut. I glimpse old trail border rows of stones and spot some Stone Prayers (hidden in plain sight as they say), up by some “broken” rough and rocky uplands, a couple Stone Serpents with big stone heads guarding them, up near "The Devil's Den" along the way. 

(I keep looking for a view of them on Google maps and Google Earth where street views are available but the foliage gets in the way and I can't show you a good view of that.)

  Just before we pull into the driveway at our destination, I note that there is a “stone wall property border fence” hugging one edge of the yard…

    The ground was fairly level along this row of stones and I finally got a chance to hobble along the first “stone fence” I’ve been able to "walk like an old man pretending he's not drunk and failing to do so" along in half a year. The next day, at home, I check the aerial photos for 1934 and see the cultural snapshot of farmland that’s mostly “cow and apples” related, with probably tobacco plots and woodlots as additional cash crops. I see that the rows of stacked stones sort of point to present day magnetic north and I know that is commonly assumed to be a sign that somebody used a compass to plot these lines (long lots?) in the post contact period, as they say…

     (But the declination changes over time and the artificial intelligence overview that pops up these days on a web search surprises me by saying that “In 1700, magnetic declination in Woodbury, CT, was approximately 7 to 8 degrees west of true north. This means a compass needle would point 7 to 8 degrees to the left of geographic north.” I don't know what to think about that...)

     Still, these initial observations on a single visit makes me really wonder if I am seeing pre-contact Indigenous Stonework of undetermined age in the Paugussett Homeland or later stonework created in the last 335 or so years after the Puritan/Pequot War when settler colonists were granted land to be turned into private properties and farms practicing European style methods of agriculture. 

Close to the Deer Path Road, there's a large "triangular" boulder in the row of stones that could be or "could have been seen as" an example of a boulder-type of snake head (like hundreds of others in many other places).

Another one, as I "walked the line:"

With an overlay of an eye and a deer horn:

I thought, "Interesting: looks like someone wanted to see if this stone would be a workable piece of stone - as if one were perhaps a flint knapper" as a cultural clue or something. I'm not a flint knapper or a geologist so I don't really know if it's "not good:"

Note the bowl-like stone on top of another stone by but not on or in the "fence:"

Nearby were these broken non-flinty stones!!

Of course when one fnds oneself on Turtle Island, 

One should of course be looking for possible turtles as a cultural clue:

Or a possible snake head with a possible "jewel" on its possible head as well:

An interesting feature: 

And then there is this:

A Segregated Segement trapped inside two "pool fences."

Take a peek at the Google Earth, the old aerial photos,

and the recent CT LiDAR images:

1934:

Something lifted from somewhere:

Take a look at this map from 1975:

The Horseshoes of Social Media 01

 Horseshoe-shaped or “Indian Horseshoe?”

  Every once in a while, one should take a good look at the language being used by people on social media (or other places) who are discussing certain subjects, such as those people looking at Culturally Stacked Stone features thought to be Indigenous made here in this corner of Turtle Island that became known as the “New England,” a subject close to my heart for three decades, a science long neglected.

   Not that I’ve been elected the Chief of Language Policemen by a vast majority of voters or something but just in an effort to “get on the same page” of our independent researchers’ notebooks, one could say. I’m just a guy with a blog, monitoring a couple other blogs, and a few Face Book groups, offering an opinion or two now and then...

 

SO:

 Are they Rock Piles or Cairns? Stone Prayers or Prayer Piles??

   Are they stone walls or stone fences?

    Are they Yankee Farmer Garbage Piles of field clearing stones or are they the “Religious Furniture” or sacred stacked stone features of the Indigenous Cultural Landscape??

     Is that Face Book photo of a naturally occurring Rock Formation or an intentional human made stone construction?? Is it one or the other or both??? It certainly can’t be “neither” I’m reasonably sure…

    Like Curtiss Hoffman suggests in “Stone Prayers,” we shouldn’t be confined to that same old intellectual vacuum that has held back the study for so long. These features occur elsewhere outside these “colonies” that became states.

Somewhere in Southern California:

    And as Curtiss also suggests, there are sometimes Indigenous names that are like little poems for these features, such as Káhtôquwuk that suggests those culturally stacked stones that have been stacked up as a form of prayer. Mavor and Dix in “Manitou” pointed toward the Yurok of Northern California to show an example of Indigenous People known to pray or perform ceremonial rituals by constructing sacred stone structures. One could cite Kroeber and other ethnologists talking about a single stone on a boulder as a Prayer or a larger U-shaped vision seat or Tsektsel, composed of many stones, possibly incorporating a boulder (or more boulders or even no boulders – each one is a unique construction) as a Ceremonial Stone Landscape feature.

   Really: take a look around out there and dive into all that has been written about these Prayer Seats and stone vision quest structures (and other similar such structures with a different purpose, such as Sleeping Circles and Eagle Traps etc.).

   

Above: Paugussett Homeland (CT)

Below: Karuk Homeland (CA)

      One hears the denialists say, “You can’t do that!” This or that sometimes credentialed Colonialistic/Nationalistic authority may shout, “Just because another culture elsewhere in the hemisphere did that doesn’t mean that the now extinct Real Indians of Rhode Island did the same thing here!”

     Well, one wonders, “Isn’t it really more like “everywhere” and not just an “elsewhere” or two?

        Well, one wonders, “Just who inhabits the intellectual vacuum or just who indeed is practicing a form of pseudoscience??”

           Well, one wonders, “Just who is committed to continuing to ethnically cleanse the indigenous from the landscape, and the long human history, of the “New England??”

 

Another stone structure in California:

Obvious Basque Stone Shepard Shelter

 (according to Proffesor Thorson)

(See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basques - because you can do that!)

https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2022/05/stone-shelters-in-sierras-and-new.html

  One may want to consider those Indigenous voices, the Indigenous writers, those Indigenous researchers who have begun to publicly speak about these culturally stacked stone features. One may want to consider the nuances of traditional practices of Mohegan, Narragansett, and other stone masons of Native American ancestry, federally recognized or not, that still show up modernly: the places for offerings to the spirits, including tribes of Little People, that still live on the landscape, those effigies, the stacking styles and the iconography, the “snakes and turtles” many pretend that they just can’t see.

  

   So, yes probably one may want to consider designating some U-shaped (Horseshoe-shaped) culturally stacked stone features on the stony broken landscape where spirits love to dwell, often a shared cultural space of different Indigenous homelands as a “Horseshoe” or even an “Indian Horseshoe.” It’s very likely a “Prayer Seat” in Connecticut, just as they are “out west” or on the continental divide, a semi-circular culturally stacked stone feature used by religious practitioners for a wide variety of uses, such as an isolated vision quest bed (a dreaming bed) or for other “contemplative or spiritual purposes.”   

 My great concern is that people will begin nailing these  alleged "horse shoes" to doors in order to boost there good luck, a widespread American tradition:

 

(Oh my: Or “stone throwns,” someone boldly states, out there online as I search for synonyms…)

 

    One who finds oneself walking about the first Colonial Connecticut town that wasn’t built on the site of an older Indigenous village may well consider that “Shwihwakuwi” means ‘it grows around,” świ, ‘three’ for “3-sided” in the Mohegan-Pequot and Narragansett languages, as well as “níswonki” in the Nipmuc language, also meaning an enclosure, which has "three bends" that “form open ellipses that the author considers roughly equivalent to the “nave” of a Christian church,” writes Nohham Rolf Cachat-Schilling writing in Quantitative Assessment of Stone Relics in a Western Massachusetts Town 2017, Bulletin of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society. {https://www.academia.edu/40876478/Quantitative_Assessment_of_Stone_Relics_in_a_Western_Massachusetts_Town}

 

From my notes (taken outside the intellectual vacuum):   

    Tsektsel or prayer seat (Yurok) “...tsekteya or tsekwel in Yurok (Kroeber 1976:381)...known in English as "stone seats" or "stone chairs." They are semicircular walls built of unmortared stones, piled about three or four feet high. These were made as places to cry and shout for help, especially for female Indian doctors seeking to obtain their power-enabling vision. There are photographs of a similar structure in Kroeber and Gifford (1949:143)."

  "The men go there and sit in the [prayer] seat there. Then after a while they clap their hands, and if the echo comes back clear they know they have what they’ve prayed for..."

  “Other men shout, listening for an echo."

Keeling, Richard in Cry for Luck: Sacred Song and Speech Among the Yurok, Hupa, and Karok Indians of Northwestern California. Berkeley:  University of California Press, c1992. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8g5008k8/

 

“Two small low walled stone enclosures on a ledge directly above the petroglyph panels at Site 26LN211 most closely resemble vision quest structures documented in the ethnographic record…”

 

Located on a narrow ledge directly above the panels of Site 26LN211, Stone Walled Enclosures 1 and 2 are small semi-circular walled structures, their walls not exceeding three courses in height and their interiors not exceeding two meters in width (see Figures 6-8). A miniature piled “wall” occurs on a tiny rock ledge behind and slightly above each of the big walled enclosures. Stone Walled Enclosure 1 is vertically above and behind Panel 1A while Stone Walled enclosure is vertically above and behind Panels 4 and 5. Stone Walled Enclosure 2 contains a long and narrow rock slab that could be a tiny monolith that once stood vertically. The bodily position to properly fit into any one of the two small enclosures is either crouching down onto one’s knees or lying flat in a curled-up fashion.

 

A virtual tour available on Stratum’s web site is based on 360° photographs taken at the site. This tour enables online visitors to walk up to and through the site to view its panels and the surrounding landscape from various distances and angles. Such a tour helps reduce the carbon footprint by reducing the number of motor vehicles driving to the site

 

 

The Rock Eagle effigy was long thought to be the only rock effigy in the Southeast. At least three sites have been confirmed to contain effigies in Georgia, Rock Eagle (Fig. 11.3, 14), Little Rock Eagle/Rock Hawk (Fig. 11.3, 13) and River Glen; while two have been confirmed in Alabama (Holstein 2007a; 2007b). Those from Alabama are undated and represent snakes but all Georgia rock effigies are recognized as birds. The effigies and piled mounds at River Glen are associated with miniature late Lamar Wolfskin phase bowls, dating to between 1540 and 1670 CE. A total of 56 rock features were recorded at River Glen and are classified according to 11 different shapes, including the effigies. It should be noted that shapes need not be recognizable to the European eye to make them culturally meaningful to their original creators, a fact supported by highly stylized and unidentifiable petroglyphs and pictographs in the Southeastern US and farther abroad.

 “It should be noted that shapes need not be recognizable to the European eye to make them culturally meaningful to their original creators, a fact supported by highly stylized and unidentifiable petroglyphs and pictographs in the Southeastern US and farther abroad…” – Jannie Loubser

 

 

http://www.stratumunlimited.com/uploads/4/8/1/5/4815662/management_planning_for_conservation.pdf

 One might consider taking a look at the “Prayer seats, mounds, walls and snake effigies” found in the article about THE WALLS OF CHOCCOLOCCOT in which we are told “Harry Holstein, Archeology Professor (emeritus) at Jacksonville State shows rock formations formed by Native Americans,” which may better be described as culturally stacked sacred stone features constructed by Native Americans/Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island: https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2015/09/prayer-seats-mounds-walls-and-snake.html

 

Above is another view of this one:

https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2012/05/classic-example-of-prayer-seat.html