Wednesday, March 28, 2007

AK EK' or Stars, Turtles and Pigs



This Week's Sky at a Glance
by Alan M. MacRobert
Friday, March 30 2007
· Early spring is when Orion tilts and marches down in the southwest during evening. A sure sign of the season is that Orion's Belt is nearly horizontal after dark (as seen from mid-northern latitudes). At the beginning of winter when Orion is striding upward, his Belt is nearly vertical.

http://skytonight.com/observing/ataglance


(Create a custom naked-eye map of the whole sky for any place on Earth, at any time of day or night, on any date from 1600 to 2400. Our Interactive Sky Chart works in most Java-enabled Web browsers.)



Some Orion stuff from “less than reliable websites:”
“In the Mayan Myth of Creation, the paddler gods transported the Maize gods in a huge canoe that corresponded to the Milky Way until they arrived at the place of creation that we know as the belt of the constellation Orion. The Maya saw Orion's belt as a huge cosmic turtle. The god Chak cracked open the back of the cosmic turtle with a lightning stone. Watered and nurtured by the Hero Twins, the Maize Gods grew from the crack in the back of the turtle, which is now represented by the Ballcourt all across the Yucatan.
This structure is a representation and hommage to the great cosmic turtle.”
http://www.ancientworlds.net/aw/Post/261970
In addition, the Maya used three stars in the constellation Orion: The great blue giant, Rigel, Kappa Orionis, the star Saiph and the belt star, Alnitak. These three stars form an equilateral triangle called, “The Three Stones of the Hearth”. They represent the Maya hearth, made of three stones placed in a triangular pattern.
http://www.astras-stargate.com/orion.htm
But here’s something from “Creation, Cosmos, and the Imagery of Palenque and Copan,” by Linda Schele and Khristaan D. Villela from the University of Texas:

“…At the 1992 Workshop on Maya Hieroglyphic Writing, Barbara Tedlock further added that the K’iche’ call Orion Je Chi Q’aq’, ‘dispersed fire’. The three hearth stars are called the Oxib’ Xk’ub’, ‘three hearthstones’ and Nebula M42 is Q’aq’, ‘fire’. Schele (1992, Freidel et al. 1993) believes this association to be a very ancient one that identifies the First-Three-Stone-Place as these three stars in Orion (fig. 3c).
The cosmic hearth was not the only image generated by creation according to the ancient texts. Another inscription (fig. 3a) published in Mayer (1991) says that “on 4 Ahaw 8 Kumk’u, was seen the first image of the turtle, the great divine lord” (Chan Ahaw Waxak Kumk’u ilahi yax k’oh Ak Chak Ch’u Ahaw). This turtle is the double-headed turtle that cracks open for the rebirth of the Maize God (fig. 3b), and like the cosmic hearth can be found in the sky. Lounsbury (inMiller 1986) identified the turtle in Room 2 of the Bonampak murals as Gemini or Orion (fig. 3d). Because the three stars on the turtle’s back match the belt of Orion, Schele (1992) believes the turtle to be located there.
2
She also associates the copulating peccaries in the opposite cartouche with Gemini, because, as Lounsbury pointed out, ak is the word for turtle, peccary, and dwarf. An ak ek’ can be a ‘turtle star’, a ‘peccary star’, or a ‘dwarf star’, and we have good evidence that images of peccaries and turtles substituted for each other in several contexts, including images of these constellations…”

http://www.mesoweb.com/pari/publications/RT10/Creation.pdf

Monday, March 26, 2007

Some more Weir stuff






"In Nova Scotia, Meadowood sites and materials are known almost exclusively from the southwestern part of the province. Meadowood style projectile points have been identified on Lake Kejimkujik and the short section of the Mersey River conecting this lake and Lake Rossignol (Ferguson 1986). The Eel Weir complex is a group of sites associated with a series of triangular-shaped, stone fish weir bases along the Mersey River. These weirs are believed to have been used to capture eels in the fall and gaspereau in the spring. At Eel Weir Site 6, five Meadowood style points were recovered. Similar points have been recovered at the Merrymakedge site, which is a multicomponet site at the north end of Lake Kejimkujik."
http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~mdeal/Anth3291/notes6.htm

"This sign on the main street of Concord marks where the original Bulkeley dam and mill were located. Before settlement by white men this was the location of an Indian fishing weir. "

http://www.newenglandancestors.org/education/articles/research/special_guests/member_staff/indian_fishing_weir_659_51705.asp

"...Rufus gave us an old map hand-drawn on disintegrating paper which showed the location of the Indian weir at the foot of our hill, and also a village and burial ground on the Sudbury side near what is now called Pantry Brook . Old Oxbow Road and our present driveway was labeled "Weir Meadow Path" and connected to the old Indian path that followed the esker ridge and is now called Castle Hill Road, a favorite bridle path for our daughters. It was the main north-south road before Concord Road (route 126) was built. A contemporary map in the Concord Antiquarian Society museum shows a long-house near what is now the Macone’s gravel operation. Shirley Blonke, an archeology student at BU did some spot digging and found many charred fireplace stones and stake holes. We also found many artifacts. Quartz bird points for arrows, larger flint and slate deer points for arrows and lances, mortar-and-pestle stones for grinding acorns into flour, a stone for sharpening arrow points, and many charred fireplace stones. Whatever pottery shards we found were clearly white man’s. Local Indians must have cooked in baskets, using hot stones..."
http://www.henrykolm.com/Weir_meadow.htm


The Roanoke Island Fishing Weir

http://www.georgehoward.net/midgette.htm




Riverbed reveals ancient Mi'kmaq campsites
By JOHN SOOSAAR
- Halifax Herald, February 13, 2005
"Archeologists estimate this fish weir on the Mersey River could be 4,000 years old. The weirs were constructed by piling stones up in a V shape so that fish would be speared or trapped in the apex..."

http://www.danielnpaul.com/Mi


“Abenaki in Vermont learned from childhood that the Creator, Tabaldac, had set aside the rivers and mountains of their homeland for their eternal use. Each landmark had a story: An enormous boulder in Lake Champlain, for instance, contained the spirit of the giant Odzihozo, who in his birth pangs had gouged out the basin that held the lake's waters. These stories, told by firelight during long winter evenings, reminded people of why things were the way there, and of their own place in the world around them.”


"According to Blackfeet storytellers, their forefathers successfully goaded buffalo to their deaths by "buffalo jumps" only when a gifted shaman oversaw the proceedings. At the start, hunt leaders would position women and children behind piles of stones arranged in a V-shape that narrowed to a point at the edge of a sheer cliff. The buffalo were enticed to enter the wedge by a slow-hobbling man disguised in a fur robe. Other people brought up the rear, yelling and flapping robes and waving the scented smoke of burning cedar in the air. This gave the impression of a terrifying forest fire, causing the great beasts to stampede over the edge of the cliff. Down below, a makeshift enclosure prevented wounded animals from escaping, while arrows and spears rained down from all sides until the lifeless carcasses could be approached by the butchering parties..."
http://www.geocities.com/willow1d/factab.html

"Peace Monuments
There is good reason to believe that it was the custom of Indians in the colonial days to erect a conical pile of stones near their settlements to indicate that they were at peace with their neighbors. There also is evidence that they have been known to bury a stone ax in the center of these unique peace monuments, which they inevitably tore down whenever they started on the war path.

The Tide Mill Site
Willard Emery remembers, as a boy, seeing banks of clam shells, peculiar mounds, piles of stones and finding Indian sweet potatoes in the area close to the site of the old Tide Mill and south of Tide Mill Road. This is in the locality where Frank Glynn would like to dig a few archeological test pits and it may well have been the site of the original Indian settlement of Winnacunnet…"


From: The Indians of Winnacunnet
"Our Town" by James W. Tucker
The Hampton Union -- Thursday, September 10, 1959



http://www.hampton.lib.nh.us/hampton/HISTORY/ourtown/indians.htm

Friday, March 23, 2007

NJ Calendar Stones

Indiana Would Be Jealous
by Jake Farley
"The woods tell many stories if you know how to look."
Published December 07, 2004 in "Gig It" magazine.

"On the way to the High Point Monument, three curious boulders sit across the road from glacial Lake Marcia. They face the lake and the Kittatinny Ridge beyond and, on the equinoxes and summer and winter solstices, they face the rising sun as it beams through a U-shaped notch where two hills meet – all in perfect alignment. They are calendar stones..."

http://www.dig-itmag.com/features/wildgardens_story/183_0_8_0_M/

More Equinox

The Tilted Earth at Its ‘Equal Night of Spring’
By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: March 20, 2007
“For many cultures throughout history, people got ready to start tilling the fields. Ancient peoples may not have understood orbital mechanics, but they were tireless observers of the Sun, stars and planets and noted with enviable precision how the position of the sunrise shifted on the horizon throughout the year. By tracking solar motions, they kept track of time and could estimate with some security when the last frost had passed and it was safe to plant crops.
“It seems wonderfully appropriate that you would anchor the timing of your planting season directly to the source of it,” said Dr. Paul Doherty, a physicist and senior staff scientist at the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco.
Archaeological evidence abounds that astronomy is among the oldest of professions, and that people attended with particular zeal to the equinoxes and the solstices. The Great Sphinx of Egypt, for example, built some 4,500 years ago, is positioned to face toward the rising sun on the vernal equinox.
In the 1,500-year-old Mayan city of Chichén Itzá, in Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, the magnificent Kukulcán Pyramid practically slithers to life each spring equinox evening, as the waning sun casts a shadow along its steps of seven perfectly symmetrical isosceles triangles, a pattern suggesting the diamondback skin of a snake.
“The snake’s head points north, to the sacred part of the site, and the snake’s body represents a kind of umbilicus between sky and earth,” said Dr. Isabel Hawkins, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, who has traveled to the site to witness the alignment, as do about 60,000 people from around the world every March.
“It’s a truly international celebration of the equinox,” she said. “It gives you goose bumps to be part of it, and to share with a bunch of strangers an intimate, primal sense of your connection to the bigger universe.””
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/science/20angi.html?_r=2&ref=science&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Spiral






Googling “Pleiades + petroglyph”

I got the images I posted the day before yesterday from:
The Celestial Desert: Viewzone
"The line ends at the spiral of the Pleiades, whereas the ecliptic itself passes within only four degrees or so of the constellation. On the petroglyph panel ..."



www.viewzone.com/carving2.html

It’s a spiral sort of thing.
Somewhere on the hillside above where I’m sitting, there’s a low spiral stone row.
When I first read Manitou, I was camping at Burlingame in RI and remember a spiral stone row right in the campground between two areas of campsites.
Of course I don’t have any photos…now I'm wondering if anyone else has ever seen more spiral rows anywhere...

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Speck and Pleiades

Or: "Think like the Ancients"
  By chance I read an article, “Where Would I Go? - Exploring a lost civilization and the lessons it holds for our own” while at the Emissions Testing Station the other day.
And here it is online:

http://magazine.audubon.org/journal/journal0701.html

This is the part that was most relevant to me:
““Think like the ancients” has been our trip mantra. We tell the kids to imagine where they would put a dwelling if they had to live here, where the sun will strike in the morning but where shade will rest on summer afternoons.
We’ve gotten good at spotting sites. They tend to be located on a specific orientation, or in a particularly amenable layer of undercut strata. The kids are also remarkably good at climbing like the ancients, scrambling up to some pretty inaccessible redoubts, sometimes finding weathered, chipped-out handholds on the way…”

So I'll try to “Think like the Ancients,” with a youthful open mind while looking at those stones…

So promising to tell the story of the Pleiades from Speck, I located my copy of the Big House and found I had forgotten a bit of it – sort of – very much related to “kids.”
Specks first reference to the Pleiades talks about ancient shamans.
“The Delawares believe that some of the stars are living beings. For example the seven stars, known as asiskewtayasak, “bunched-up,” bear the identity of clean or holy men, prophets. They are known only to shamans or those who possess supernatural power. The legend says that at one time seven meteors fell from the sky partly burying themselves in the ground. Some Shamans soon discovered them and they disappeared.
The Shamans found them again in the form of seven pine trees. They used to consult with these pine trees. Finally they became transformed into the seven stars,” Frank G. Speck writes on page 48 of “The Delaware Big House Ceremony (1931)

Speck footnotes this, asking the reader to “See Appendix, Note II,” called “ The Myth of Red Cedar and the Seven Stars (Pleiades).” In this version the discovers are described as “young pure youths.”

Speck’s native informant, Witapanoxwe (Walking in Daylight) tells the story – after he relates some uses of red cedar as a medicine for swollen feet and purification of a home after a death has occurred. He then mentions that “cedar is always used for purifying the Big House.

Walking in Daylight, also called War Eagle, then tells this story, in a dialect of Delaware that had come to be spoken in the “Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory (Oklahoma), which Speck then translates to:
“A very long time ago in the life of the Delawares we have heard our deceased ancestors how they said, in ancient times when there were living men of great spiritual power; seven of them it was said, all at once were not seen anymore. They had gone, those prophets, men departed. But young pure youths blessed with a vision of something all at once while walking about along the ridge among rocky cliffs – all at once a thing upright there, seven stones almost alike. And then it was said that all at once the youth was thence spoken to by one of these stones. Then they came to be known[1]. And more and more widely persons constantly went there because those prophet men were there. All of a sudden when several had gone there to the place where they were, no person was seen there. But again after a very long time someone found them. Here were these seven beautiful appearing pine trees. And some of the individuals appeared as cedars in outward appearance. This very thing there shows evidence that they are closely related, the cedar and the pine, although in a very different way gifted with the power of spiritual force when created by the Creator. However, they were placed together as one since both are conjurors.
And there is more than one way otherwise to use the cedar, for the purpose of coloring.
Again they notice that those prophet-men had become trees. Again they went away and it was a very long time afterward before they found them again. As soon as they were known here these had formed in a group up above in the middle of the sky as seven stars[2] and they are called, when they are seen, as though they were great persons, from which reason from then until now they never stay in one place during the year. That is what was said by our ancestors from whom it was known that the cedar was of medicinal purpose.”

So I’m thinking about Speck saying “seven meteors,” which doesn’t get mentioned in W’s story.

And I’m thinking about “seven stones almost alike.”
Could they be “seven mounds of stones almost alike?”

And knowing that Indian settlements moved from place to place as resources were depleted, could some shamans be recreating the stone mounds in the places that people moved their cornfields to?

And I in my imagination I can see trees growing up in some of those mounds of stone, like the transformation above of stones to pines or cedars, “in outward appearance.”

Also: Peter commented to me about a certain stone wall above an amazing mound site being aligned with (or perhaps representing) the Milky Way. On pages 22 & 23 (and elsewhere) in Big House, Speck writes of “the most engrossing allegory of all (that) stands forth in the concept of the White Path, the symbol of the transit of life,” which might be the Milky Way, the “Ghost or Spirit Way,” or even possibly “across smoky way.” A nagging memory in the back of my mind tells me that there are some places somewhere (or a lot of places everywhere) where stones (or stone mounds?) are representations on the ground of stars in the sky.













(I read somewhere that Orion was called "The Great Turtle by the Aztecs. The "belt" was the crack in the Turtles back from which the world was recreated each spring.)




And would you have to put the transparent star map upside down on top of the mound graph to tell?


















Speck's footnotes:
[1] Indicating that these prophets to escape the importunities of people seeking help from them had concealed their identity by transforming themselves into rock among the mountains.
[2] The Pleiades.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Equinox













I’ll be working at sunset tomorrow, March 20, so I won’t be standing by the stones I call the Calendar, just above the remnants of a burial ground, on the first terrace above the floodplain where there once were Indian cornfields when my town was first “settled.”
But I know that if I stand along a row of low stones (that are covered with snow and ice right now), right behind the original location of a boulder that Jamie the banjo player knocked out of the path, mowing for a fox hunt club many years ago, I’d see the sunset directly above another boulder about 95 feet away.
And maybe, just before sunrise, looking at something called the "Stupid Sheet" I linked to from Rock Piles, I’d see the Pleiades set over the same stone that shows the Summer Solstice Sunset. I say maybe because I’ve never tried it and just noticed it said that at: http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1180/2122/1600/the_real_stupid_sheet.0.jpg . (Our numbers don't match up I know, but that magnetic North drifts about...)
More about Pleiades (Subaru in Japanese by the way, and hence the emblem on the front of the cars) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades_(star_cluster).
(Did I say Hence? I’m not sure I’ve ever said that before, other than quoting someone.)
And when I find “The Delaware Big House Ceremony” by Frank Speck, I’ll re-read it and tell you if I am remembering correctly about these “seven special stars” that were first talking stones, then trees, and finally the stars…

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Have You Seen the Little Piggies?

Pigs naturally like to live in forests,
especially where there are oak trees that make acorns,
because pigs like to eat acorns.
Kidipedia http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/economy/pigs.htm

Left: Hunting pigs, The General History of the Vast Continent and Islands of America, 1725-26, From The Library at The Mariners’ Museum, E141.H59.1725 rare.
http://www.mariner.org/exploration/index.php?type=webpage&id=46



Just yesterday I was driving with the radio on and heard yet another “feral pig” story, this time about farmers building fences to keep “pigs gone wild” out of agricultural fields. It seems that the prime suspect in the “Ecoli in the Spinach Crop Outbreak” a few months ago is the feral pig. It must be true; I heard it on NPR.
The other recent story I’d just heard was about feral pigs destroying the Koa forests on Maui on the National Geographic channel. Again fences had been built to keep the pigs out of the forest; the pig-side of the fence more resembled the moon rather than Hawaii.
And I then remembered kind of joking recently about short-legged cows in a post called “The Occasional Chestnut Rail” and realized I was forgetting about pigs. I’d had some ideas about pigs before, intruding into the Native American Landscape, and so this morning I was drinking my coffee and humming the tune of “Piggies” by George Harrison.
So, as is often my first step, I checked the index of “Changes in the Land” by William Cronon and under “livestock” found several pig references. Hogs were let loose in the Mast Forest to forage for themselves; they had a great ability to defend themselves against bears and wolves, reproduce rapidly, and live almost as wild animals until fall when they were hunted and slaughtered. Cronan calls Swine the “weed creatures of New England, breeding so quickly that a sow might farrow twice a year, with each litter containing four to twelve piglets…Colonists were glad to have swine reproducing and fattening in forested areas distant from English settlements – where only Indians would have to deal with their depredations.” Cronon recalls that by 1634 William Wood defined the wealth of the Massachusetts Bay Colony “referring to its livestock” “where (Wood writes) for four thousand souls there are fifteen hundred head of cattle, besides four thousand goats and swine innumerable,” which seems to mean a lot of pigs.
In the late 1630’s, Roger Williams wrote that “Of all the English Cattell, the Swine are most hateful to all Natives, and they call them filthy cut throats.” Williams describes the pigs watching and waiting for low tide (“as the Indian women do”) and digging up and rooting in oyster and clam beds. Both Indian and English corn fields were targets for the pigs. By 1653 the town of New Haven CT made a promise to spend sixty days helping Indians fence their fields. Other towns soon followed suite.
So am I suggesting that Indians only learned to build fences, either of wood or of stone, only after the English taught them to?
Not really. I keep in mind that epidemics decimated the Indian population. Estimates range up to 90% of the population died, and wave after wave of disease continued to do so. By 1653, around New Haven, who was left alive, what land had been taken?
Maybe the land near me, to which the first English arrived in 1659, lands claimed by right of conquest after the Pequots were massacred at the mouth of the Great River, was managed by firebreaks of stone. But maybe those rails were added to keep out pig colonists, running wild, way ahead of the human colonists. Maybe those sacred mounds were protected from swine by those stone rows…


Some pig stuff from the net:

“The pig is one of the first domesticated animals: its remains in some archeological excavations have been found to date earlier than the bones of cattle…Pork was a popular food in early dynasties of Egypt. The ancient Greeks ate pigs. The Romans were masters of smoking and salting pork. From the time of medieval Europe through colonial North America, pigs were allowed to forage for acorns, nuts, and other foods in the forest in a semi-wild state. In the fall, they would be rounded up, slaughtered, butchered, and preserved by smoking, salting, and curing. In the United States, the pig was the most popular source of meat through the nineteenth century. The westward migration of American settlers into what would become the Corn Belt in America's midwestern states was the perfect marriage of an Old World livestock with the grain of Native Americans. The diet of swine shifted ever more from woodland forage and scraps to corn.
Prolific and Efficient Meat Producers
The Spanish, too, brought hogs with them to the New World. The explorer, Hernando de Soto landed in what is now Tampa Bay, Florida, in 1539 with thirteen hogs. Three years later, the swine herd had grown to seven hundred.
This ability to multiply rapidly is a quality that endears the pig to some of the poorest farmers on earth as well as the most modern swine production complexes. A sow produces almost three litters of pigs a year, although 2.25 litters per year is more realistic on smaller, traditional farms. From each litter eight or more pigs usually survive. Sows on large commercial farms can produce nearly twenty-six pigs per year…
Not only are pigs prolific, they grow fast on modest amounts of feed. A pig easily gains a pound for every three to five pounds of feed it eats, reaching more than two hundred pounds in six months…”
A female pig can become pregnant at around 8-18 months of age. She will then go into heat every 21 days. Male pigs become sexually active at 8-10 months of age [1]. A litter of piglets typically contains between 6 and 12 piglets.

Feral pigs like other introduced mammals are major drivers of extinction and ecosystem change. They have been introduced into many parts of the world, and will damage crops and home gardens as well as potentially spreading disease. They uproot large areas of land, eliminating native vegetation and spreading weeds. This results in habitat alteration, a change in plant succession and composition and a decrease in native fauna dependent on the original habitat.”

http://www.answers.com/topic/pig
Wild Gardens: How Native Americans Shaped Local Landscapes
(an article on California Indian land management practices)
“Local tribal peoples had an intimate connection to the land, living with it rather than on it. They consciously and conscientiously reshaped it through the use of such horticultural techniques as burning, pruning, and digging, enhancing many species while suppressing others. These methods resulted in a world well suited to plants and animals upon which people relied for food and objects that blended utility and beauty. The uplands of Ohlone Regional Wilderness have the most extensive and the east side of Briones Regional Park the most diverse oak woodlands in the Park District. Recent studies have shown that most of the state's oak stands date to a mere 50 to 150 years ago, with few seedlings ever reaching maturity. Reasons for this decline include some combination of fire suppression, poorly managed cattle grazing, land clearing, moisture depletion by nonnative annual grasses, and predation by insects, rodents, deer, and pigs.”


http://www.baynature.com/2006janmarch/wildgardens.html

Pigs: The Perfect Colonists (Old World)

The Boar or pig, A New Complete, and Universal Body, or system of Natural History, 1785, From The Library at The Mariners’ Museum, QH15.M6 oversize rare.



"Pigs were first brought to Espanola and the Antilles in 1493, when Christopher Columbus made his second voyage. They were the perfect colonists. Why? They weren’t picky and did not need to be fed a special diet. They could eat vegetables of any kind including cassava, as well as shellfish, and even small animals. With a healthy diet, and no natural predators, pigs reproduced quickly in the dense forests. And while pigs quickly adapted to their new environment, the environment did not quickly adapt to pigs; they had a dramatic impact on the native ecosystems, rooting in the forests, killing vegetation, and causing erosion.
Pigs adapted well to North America in the English and French colonies, but it was the Antilles that were hit the hardest with wild pig populations.
If you look at a map of the North American East Coast, a number of places are named “Hog Island.” Ever wonder why? The Spanish dropped pairs of pigs on uninhabitable islands as a future food source. Pigs were also a staple food not only for English farmers, but for the Native people who discovered the pigs roaming wild in the woods. Since most Native American cultures felt that animals did not have human owners, they did not hesitate to take advantage of this new food source. This became a sore spot between the colonists, who felt they owned the pigs, and their Indian neighbors. In Virginia, the Powhatans’ killing of pigs and cattle became a rallying point for Bacon’s Rebellion. Which seems so appropriate, since bacon comes from pigs…"

http://www.mariner.org/exploration/index.php?type=webpage&id=46



And this is my family's coat of arms.


Suibne (Shivna) has been anglicised into MacSweeney and even McSwiney.


Apparently my Irish ancestor's hunted not only wild pigs but an occasional dragon...

Friday, March 09, 2007

Other Weirs


Norman mentioned Al Lutins and a fishweir thesis over at Rock Piles. It is indeed very good, especially when he writes “Weirs themselves suffer from a lack of research in eastern North America. Both historic and prehistoric weirs dot the landscape, yet they seem to have escaped the attention of historians and archaeologists alike.”
I’ll add “much like rock piles and stone rows etc.”

One of Lutin’s Footnotes mentions “Toronto:”

In another area, Johnston and Cassavoy claim that the stakes are "oriented on the diagonal northwest-southeast and would serve to obstruct fish swimming upstream toward Lake Simcoe". Radiocarbon dates on a number of the stakes demonstrate that the weir was constructed during the Late Archaic (Johnston and Cassavoy 1978:704)
These are the (presumably uncorrected) radiocarbon dates listed in Table 1 on page 704: · 4560 ± 115 B.P. (2610 B.C.)· 4430 ± 95 B.P. (2480 B.C.)· 4500 ± 95 B.P. (2550 B.C.)· 4375 ± 95 B.P. (2425 B.C.)


http://www.lutins.org/thesis.html#4.1

I did a little google search and found this:



Origin of the Name Toronto
In 1670 the name Toronto made its first appearance in history as 'lac de Taranteau' on a map of southern Ontario drawn by the French priest Father Rene de Brenhant de Galinee.
By the 1720s, Toronto was accepted as referring to a trading post on Lake Ontario at the mouth of the Humber River, where present-day Toronto is located.
The meaning of the word has been a subject to much discussion. The most popular interpretation originated with the nineteenth-century historian Henry Scadding, who claimed that it derived from a Huron word meaning 'to be plenty,' so that Toronto means 'plenty of people' or, as Scadding put it, 'meeting place.'
This interpretation is not accepted by many historians today, who are better versed in native languages. Current interpretations suggest the origin of the word Toronto in a Mohawk term for fish trap or weir, which were a noticeable feature of life around Lake Simcoe.
http://schools.tdsb.on.ca/jarvisci/toronto/tor_word.htm
I’ve gone back many a time to search more names and got stuff like this:

“We call ourselves Mitchikanibikok Inik, or in English, Algonquins of Barriere Lake. Our First Nation is one of ten Algonquin First Nations inhabiting the Ottawa River watershed along the border between the provinces of Quebec and Ontario approximately 3 hours drive north of Ottawa.
We take our name-" Mitchikanibikok Inik", meaning "the people of the stone fence or stone fish weir"-from our former rendezvous place of Barriere Lake at the headwaters of the Ottawa River.”
http://www.snowwowl.com/peoplealgonquin.html
More that have photos and pictures:
http://www.csasi.org/2004_october_journal/the_iowa_river_fish_trap_a_mystery_and_a_challenge.htm
http://www.igsb.uiowa.edu/Browse/precult/precult.htm
http://www.fromsitetostory.org/nhr/21ic0046thirdriverbridge/images/fig19u575.asp

http://www.victorianvilla.com/sims-mitchell/local/whispersofthe1700s.htm