Friday, October 31, 2014

Big Heap of Boulders

On my fourth little venture into a nearby by Preserve, I finally found something other than field clearing piles of stones dumped along a a row of stones - a large pile of large boulders, sort of oval shaped, maybe 35 by 15 feet maybe. 


Above looking SSW, below toward the NNW.

I haven't so far found anything resembling a mortar stone, but perhaps this is a grinding slick, the metate style with a mano still sitting there, but I didn't brush the leaves aside...


A lot of effort must have gone into stacking these boulders up (above) rather than just dumping them as seen here below a little to the north and west:


Back to that big Heap O'Boulders, there are smaller stones, cobble sized, along the western edge of the big boulders, so debris covered that my first (erroneous?) impression was that they were bulldozed up against it but there's really not a lot of soil in there, so probably not.





This is on the same preserve as this:
It's a place where the "stone walls" might be dismissed as typically post-contact constructions possibly have inclusions of possible effigies and possible cultural symbolism:
Possible Serpent Head end of a row - of which there are many:
Not to mention some rather interesting stones placed to recall the testudinate 
Again, the good, bad, and ugly set of photos at flickr:
(and I'll update this with the proper addy)
1934 (West at Top):
1965 (West at Top):
Last look to the West:
Bing Bird's Eye (West at Top) :

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Little Turtle with Wolf?



Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Little Turtle with Rhombiodals


Friday, October 24, 2014

Stonewall (rebuild) Workshop (Killingworth CT)


     It was another “Looking for Something Else and I Found This” Situation that brought me to someone’s photos about a 2 day stonewall workshop that involved rebuilding an old “stone wall.” It happened five years ago and I don’t want to embarrass the people who participated.
    They really didn't understand what that row of stones was, what it was actually composed of.
     They didn't know that it was an Indigenous made stone construction.
      Read just about any book about stone walls and you won’t find this type of “wall,” actually, properly and technically a “fence,” described in those books. At best you’ll find it described as a haphazard collection of stones tossed out of a field and possibly stacked in a double row in a rather random matter. But I quickly spotted a few details I've seen elsewhere that leads me to believe that there isn't isn’t anything random about it, excepting that some stones may have been actually added after people began plowing and clearing the field of stones.
     I hypothesize that Indigenous People in what is now known as New England built miles and miles of what are known as “stone walls.” I’ve been field observing “stone walls” for over twenty years, that Indigenous-made perspective in mind, looking for repeated patterns that suggest an Indigenous (Indian or Native American) origin.
    Just as some authorizes say about other rock art in this region, representations of the turtle and the serpent are probably the most common (Ed Lenik somewhere or other comes to mind) signatures of Indigenous constructions. Representations of turtles seem most numerous (and it’s a whole other story that there are many rows of stones that I interpret as actually being representations of serpents – petroforms really). I've never kept a count of exactly how many I've come across and it’s been a learning process as well as I continue to learn new forms, different patterns…
   
  It took just seconds to spot a beautiful stone turtle effigy or representation; sometimes I will enhance a photo to emphasize eyes or a mouth, legs or shell, but I don’t think I have to in this case:
(Carapace or shell above a headstone looking sideways toward the camera, a dark crystal of the reptile's right eye, a vien of dark minerals in the stone recall a mouth and two forelegs.)


Another obvious testudinate effigy included in this row of stones, triangular headstone at the nuchal notch of a carapace stone (and is that a rather rhomboidal xenolith just above the notch?):
A (red?) possibly quartzite turtle head stone with well defined eye peeking out from the far side: 
A view of the rebuilt wall with an older row of stones in the distance:
(Note the "wave" in the older construction, a wave not unlike the rims of some Indigenous Ceramic Pottery found in the NE that I and others have observed in many "stone walls.")
Another view of the finished stone fence:
(To the left of the finished fence, a stone with the suggestion of eyes, another with a "vee" to suggest a turtle beak, another pattern that occurs often in other stones observed over the years:)

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Lenik's Rhomboidal Turtle

from:

Making Pictures in Stone: American Indian Rock Art of the Northeast

 By Edward J. Lenik

(Curt suggested to me a while back that scutes have been represented as rhomboidals...)

Little Golden Turtle


    In the only pleasant dream I had last night, I went back up the hill to that outcrop with a beautiful  remnant row of stones perched on it, just to look at certain little turtle effigy with (as far as I can see) a golden-colored quartz left foreleg and head (I'm sure it was because I'd had to resort to my cellphone camera for the dramatic series of photos that follows here, moving in closer and closer).
    Don't see it? 
    Try now:
Closer:
(Google+ automatically backs up my cellphotos and adds effects - unasked:)
I guess I did notice the golden quartz in the "wall" about the time I took this photo, with my real camera before the battery died, while looking for those effigy patterns of stones with the suggestion of eyes, headstones and forelegs and all the rest:
And then the next frame, closer, two separate stones of the same material, representing a left foreleg and a head stone behind it:
The carapace stone would be the stone directly above the head and foreleg, that recalls high domed box turtle-like shell, probably...