Friday, February 28, 2020

An Emerging Serpent (RI)


Skuguisu káhtqwk (káhtôquwuk)


    "The explanation of Moore and Weiss' Figure 3 (2016:51), which shows a ring of carefully stacked cobbles outlining part of a boulder and trailing behind it, forming an emerging serpent form, reports a claim by Ives that it "allows for a large quantity of stones to be stored within a small footprint."  Objectively assessed, the form claimed by Ives to be an efficiency device is not at all efficient; it holds very few stones for its area on actual count. Ives' cited conjecture fails upon real-life testing and practical farm economics, and fails to explain the "stone corral" shown, being built partly on and partly off an immovable boulder, and being empty of actual "stored stones." No explanation is offered as to why stone "corrals" are usually empty at sites across the Northeast, or why stones on immovable boulders, which do not move on their own, need to be "corralled." 

     Evaluations of máunumúetash*  by parties who do not test their hypotheses against Northeast Algonquian cosmology and rituals are doing, at best, only half an investigation..."

Nohham Rolf Cachat-Shilling
Bulletin of Society for Connecticut Archaeology (2018)


*Máunumúet(ash) - place(s) of ceremonial gathering (ehenda mawewink, Lënapeuw, mawighunk, Mahhekanneuw). Themes of connectedness, reciprocity, prayerfulness and continuity are expressed through máunumúetash.

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