In New England, upwards of 250,000 miles of stone walls were assumed to have been built by Colonists over a time period of, oh call it 200-300 years on land continuously populated by Indigenous Cultures for 12,000 years or so...
Who had the more "dire need" for all those fire-proof rows of stones on a Landscape that was fire-tended and most likely pretty densely populated by 1492?
Who in the long run would have saved labor (travelling less for a more dependable and abundant resource outcome, not burning up your firewood or all the managed resource "gardens," pruning and maintaining just one of your blueberry fields or cranberry bogs, instead of all of them at once)?
Who indeed was more inclined to make petroforms or geoglyphs - Stone Effigies - that resemble Great Serpents on a Sacred Cultural Landscape?"
Great piece and begs the right questions. We know who built the walls....Native peoples and much much more!! Pyramids, chambers, effigies, cairns besides building canals, sluices, and other projects involved in water management and on a level much higher than the walls demonstrate at first glance. But then there is the walls themselves which are more complex than they appear to be and all appear to be the serpent and I think the serpent represented is the "horned serpent". There is clear evidence of this in Algonquin folklore. Thanks Tim!!
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