Some Will Tell You

 

Milky quartz stone

Framed by other stones

In the camera’s frame

The professor’s quotation in the caption reads:

“This remnant of single wall construction in Lyme, New Hampshire, shows a variety of features: Shapes are blocks, slabs, and pillows; sizes are mainly two-handers, with one one-hander; order is stacked, rather than laid or tossed; structure is a single-tiered, un-coursed wall one-on-two-and-two-on-one, with one error; lithology is mainly granite and gneiss.”

 

Some will tell you

 These Stones are

A monument to Yankee Exceptionalism,

Overnight sensations that brought civilization

Into a pristine howling wilderness

Where savages roamed like foxes and beasts

 

Some will tell you

These Stones

Couldn’t have been the work of the Original Owners who belonged to the land,

Couldn’t have been an aspect of their religion and culture,

Both banned early on by those Yankees, those English,

Who forbid the speaking of the old languages and the practice of the old religion

Up to the days of the 1970s Proto-Disco Era legislation that finally legalized

The freedom to practice Native American religions

Just in time for the Bicentennial Celebration, one might add...

Maunumuet – “where someone gathers it” Stone prayer place, in the singular, in the plural, ceremonial stone landscape (maunumuetash).

 

 

Kodtonquag(kash), kodtuhquag, kahtoquwuk - Means ‘heaped up by placing on top’ or more properly “it is raised construction” and is arranged in courses around a semi-open center by those who invest them with prayer and then raise them up together. 

 

These are placed directly on the ground.  Made of the roundest available large cobbles or tabular stones.

 

Stone Prayer - “Invested with prayers for the balance of the universe”

 

https://www.ethicarch.org/post/understanding-stone-prayers-in-the-northeasterncultural