Thanks DC!

My friend dc often comments on my posts and sends me some very interesting images, tickling Google Earth to find many amazing images, sifting through time as you'll see by the end of the post. By some sort of mysterious circumstance, I just can't access Google Earth (it's either a quality of mine or my computer or possibly both) but Dave was kind enough to send me some images of Madison CT.

The Shore Greenway Trail section that is presently the "landscape of my imagination:"

Note the date, December 31, 2011. You get a winter view of the stone rows - and I think I can even spot the branches of the Grandfather Oak in the image. 

Dave goes on to search for some more interesting rows - and finds these farther north on Cow Pen Hill.

To me, this suggests a later use of Native American Stone Rows, as fuel breaks around the original "resource zones" that the Indians maintained by burning right up until Contact Time, but as convenient "Animal Containment Fences," and later still, property boundaries for these house lots. I can even spot a double row in there that I conjecture was probably an Indian Trail, also burned over, probably yearly or even twice yearly as widely reported in early Historical records:

I read a human laziness factor into this; it's easier to reuse a stone row than to take it apart. And it was easier to put up wooden rails over the sometimes low stone rows to satisfy the old fence laws when this "unoccupied" land was free for the taking. Dave spotted another "double row" and I'm thinking it's another trail. I think it's a kind of "chicken/egg" situation and a reversal of the conventional theory about which came first. There was a Native American Cultural Landscape that built the rows that were reused and "modified" rather than an empty wilderness that Colonial European Colonists (or their slaves/servants/cheap labor sources) built as they re-created the agrarian landscape (as described by Cronon in "Changes in the Land" in New England and later by Charles Mann in "1491," extending across the entire hemisphere) of Europe on Turtle Island (and beyond):

Here's a low water view of Lake Hammonassett:

I found some photos on a blog that coincide with the above photo:

http://nature-dayhikes.blogspot.com/2010/09/lake-hammonasset-and-stratford-point.html

(The blog also may promise to show some other interesting places with interesting stones.)

So thanks again, dc. One of these days, perhaps we'll hook up and walk along some of these beauties!