"Medicine Bowlder"

I made a few posts in 2008 at Rock Piles about the "Turtle Shaped" boulder mortar pictured above. Take a look here: http://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2008/09/teaser-pix.html for the old posts, with more at: http://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2008/09/return-to-mortarturtle-part-one.html
In among all those "bowlder” pics I took back then were these two photos:

See: I had no cover to sneak into the place where I was originally trespassing into in the Industrial Park to get to the boulder, so I was following the stream and its zigzag stone riparian zone borders, back in 2008 to get there "under cover." I don’t know why I took these photos at the time; I would have for a reason if I had walked there today.

See: Out in Northern California, my friend Alyssa Alexandria tells me she finds these Offering Basins or Offering Baskets quite often. I had spotted a few in photos from Ron Smith’s website and had been wondering about them, looking into documentation about them.

See: http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2010/09/somewhere-along-klamath.html

(Which is really: "Off Pass Road in the Sutter Buttes. ~ Ron Smith)

http://www.relicsoftheancients.com/sb_pass_road_Rock%20Lines.htm

(Now a dead link...)

7/8/2022: Chile Verde photos 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/47276842@N04/albums/72157642008730755

Below pondered at: http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-is-it.html

There were more:

Each of these is probably a "luck basin/rock bowl/rock basket."

I had found reference to them here first as below: 

"This medicine was to be used at a special "luck basin" that Shoemaker knew about. This term refers to a basinlike depression in a rock formation, and the Hupa word for it is translated into English as "rock bowl" or "rock basket" (Golla, in press [MS p. 214]). The use of a luck basin for success in gambling is described as follows: When you find such a place you must "smoke" it with incense root and speak to it. You smoke it for ten days and talk to it about the people you're going to gamble with, and how many points you want to make in a stretch, and so on. Then you clap your hands to it, and leave some incense root in it. When you are ready to gamble, you go up to it and rub your hands with the incense root. (Golla, in press [MS p. 213])" http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft8g5008k8&chunk.id=d0e1239&toc.id=d0e310&brand=eschol

Keeling, Richard. Cry for Luck: Sacred Song and Speech Among the Yurok, Hupa, and Karok Indians of Northwestern California. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992 1992. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8g5008k8/

I found more recently that they are also called “Spirit Baskets” (and even a different sort of “Pain Basket” that isn't mortar-like) by the Maidu:

“The statement is made, moreover, by the Indians, that finished, widely and deeply excavated globular mortars were found by them in certain localities in considerable numbers. These localities were gravel-banks along the edges of streams, the stream-beds themselves, or the surface of the ground in certain stony places. They claim that in a few spots large numbers of mortars were to be found; and some declare that the shamans know where these spots are, and go there at times to secure mortars, which, as will be seen later in speaking of religious ceremonials, were used for various mysterious and sacred purposes. Everywhere throughout the Northern Maidu area these mortars are regarded with considerable awe and veneration, and are feared quite keenly in many instances. Apart from their ceremonial uses, every family is anxious to own a mortar; but it is never kept in the house or near it, being generally buried some distance away, and occasionally dug up and examined.

Mortars were used by the shamans as receptacles in which to keep their most powerful and precious charms, especially the "pains" which they shot at people to cause disease or death. Such "pains" were kept in a mortar, with another mortar inverted over the first, the whole carefully secreted in a hollow log or under a large stone at a considerable distance from all habitations or trails. In the initiation ceremonies of the Secret Society the sacred meal used for sprinkling the novices must similarly be kept in a mortar. Lastly, the mortars are generally known by the name of ku'kinim to'nior i'tum to'ni ("spirit or pain baskets"), and are often supposed to be themselves the abiding-places of powerful spirits; although the belief in the mortars' animation, and their ability to move of their own accord from place to place, is not held here, as it is among the Shasta. By some the mortars are said to have been made by the Creator, or the Coyote, at the time of the creation, and scattered over the world for the use of mankind. By others they are supposed to have been people originally, during the bSte'ito, or time of the "first people," who were turned into stone in this form at the coming of the Indian people, when the other "first people" became animals.”

Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, Volume 17
By Joel Asaph Allen, American Museum of Natural History
http://books.google.com/books?output=text&id=hYNCAAAAYAAJ&dq=shaman+mortar&jtp=136

Alyssa Alexandria’s photos of some of these boulders close up:

Here are three possible similar such “Medicine Bowlders” - a combination of words I just came up with - in Woodbury CT:

And a fourth, incorporated into a zigzag stone row about 60 feet from my back door:

So I'm on the look out for these, and if you happen across one, please take a photo and send one in...

The Rock Pile IS THE ARTIFACT!

See Rock Piles for this one in full: http://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2012/04/rock-pile-is-artifact.html

Waterbury CT Stone Turtle

Bad cell phone photo of 

a large Turtle Petroform

at an apartment complex

in Waterbury CT 

Red Eyed Turtle (And)

Shastina Stone Mound

Another Alyssa Alexandria photo from Northern California.

Cloud Catcher

"Black Butte during storms-- perhaps the reason The Pyramid Site is pointed to it, rather than Mount Shasta. This happens in every storm-- there's something about the magnetics of the place which draws the water molecules down to it." - Alyssa Alexandria

She continues: "The pyramid stone is enclosed in a triangular wall on a conical tipped hill. It "sights" directly to Black Butte, a volcanic cinder cone. I leave the interpretation up to you."

The Differences (West/East)

I woke up thinking about the differences between Shastina and Nonnewaug, after two or three weeks of thinking about the similarities (Shastina – little Shasta? Like my Grandmother Rose, whose real name it turned out was Rosina, little Rose in Italian on her birth certificate. What is the real name of Shastina?).


I just called the place I’ve been thinking about, so much I feel like I’ve been there, “Shastina” as in Lake Shastina, not even a lake until the 1930s. It is a name that isn’t even an Indian name. It is Indian based, Shasta an anglicized version of one of many Indian names for Mount Shasta, but Nonnewaug is different, the old Native American place-name for a ‘fishing place,’ possibly “in the middle” of, and this is just a guess, the floodplain fields.

Shastina (the area, I mean, having no other name to call it right now) is a place with Mountains All Around it – or at least dominated by views of one of the most beautiful mountains on Turtle Island, Mount Shasta. Nonnewaug is a floodplain valley surrounded by hills. There is no Big Mountain.

Alyssa Alexandria photo of Mount Shasta

http://www.relicsoftheancients.com/images/Shasta%20Valley/Lake%20Shastina%20Area/Alyssa%20Alexandria/Lake%20Shastina/055.jpg

There may be camps up in Shastina, places where people stayed while making use of the places there, oak groves, patches of prairie, and all that was lost when beavers were trapped and trees were cut down, when the burning was stopped and the cows and sheep came in, changing the ancient places, places with names. Nonnewaug was a village site, the Nonnewaug Wigwams at the end, but it was probably well known and well used, revisited, the waterfall making it a special place. It may have ended up a village site because the Falls was a special place of Spiritual Power, the music of the water, perhaps the Great Manitou’s Tears in that time of epidemics and the Pequot Massacre. Some say just a tenth of the population survived and perhaps the power of the Falls drew the survivors here.

And there’s the evidence on the landscape of glacial lake shores. What was the ancient name of that lake, still a fishing place but what other descriptive pieces were there to that word?

The stone rows here are a smaller web, defining and connecting smaller sections of land, many more springs and streams. The trees have grown back in here, a wounded forest where there once were groves of ancient trees, like on the hill above me to the west. The same devastation by the trapping and the tree cutting, trampled as well by sheep and dairy cattle browsing for food. That happened here much longer ago, the second half of the 1600’s, the early part of the 1700’s, Shastina in the 1850’s.

https://thetrustees.org/content/monument-mountain-history/

      There are special high places here along the Housatonic River, some close by and not-so-high, some at a greater distance - but what’s a great distance when the Great Spirit moves you? If I followed the Great River into where the Berkshire Mountains begin, I could and would (and have) stopped at Monument Mountain, the Giant’s Stone Pile below it on the east side, massive boulders covering a Giant whose name I don’t know, a story my Grandmother Rosina told me about when I was seven, as we stopped and walked around a little, on our way to Montreal. Somewhere on the west side is a stone pile I’ve never visited, but that I’ve heard and read has been visited in the past by a group of Native people who live in (Brotherton?) Wisconsin now and back track their own trail of tears to visit a monument to the ancestors left behind when these Christianized People slowly migrated along a route marked by Moravian Missionaries, towns named Bethlehem and Brotherton in what became states as the western frontier pushed farther and farther westward.
 

Norman Muller photo from: http://indianrockpiles.weetu.com/articles/RockPileTypes.html  (by P. Waksman)

The wounded and untended forest grew back here as the little farms began to vanish and the manufacturing migrated elsewhere. The beavers, decimated in Connecticut they say by 1500, once gone are returning, getting back to their jobs of creating ponds and, I like to think, restoring the richness of the landscape, packing mud into the fallen trees they make their dams with, just like that beaver in the Creation Story plopped down some mud on the back of the Great Turtle – when all the world was water – and created the soil of Turtle Island, the tree, perhaps a Great Oak – civilization around the world was tied to the presence of acorns as food – sprouting from it, giving birth to the first man and woman of the Turtle Clan, sprouting from root and branch tip of that tree…

Below: one of the first photos of what I call Turtle One, taken on 35mm film in June of 1997. This box turtle petroform was the first of all the other turtles and turtle forms I have found since. I respectfully disagree with the professionals who have looked at it and determined it was not enhanced by human hands or placed  as I believe it had been originally had when it was created. I don’t know the name of the person who created the petroform, but I know the name of this turtle is “Grandfather Turtle.” I heard about it from Trudie Richmond first, at a Pow wow where and when she told it from the circle of her heart  by the stone circle where the fire burned in the center of that circle inside the larger circle of tents, surrounded by the circle of the sky in the circle of the solar system inside the circle of the universe.

Take a walk around it:

I'll "doodle" a Turtle Vision for you:



"Doodled" Dog Tag Turtle Mound

(Above: "Doodled" Mound; below: Original Mound with nearby Dog Tag and Collar)



Two Aerial Photos of ‘The Leap Day’ Area

PW, King O’ The Rock Piles, spots some probable “field clearing stones,” and some old photos confirm it (I think).

The last couple “mounds” (  http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2012/02/beyond-big-stone-leap-year-day-rock.html ) don’t appear on the 1934 shot, but do in 1965. Click on the photo below to enlarge and you will see the places the photos from the post from Leap Day 2012; the rectangle at the bottom of the photo is the Big Stone that called me here and I followed a counter clockwise circle along the zigzag row from there. The larger circle is about where the Ceremonial native-made Mounds are located. The sharp edged smaller rectangle is that big pile of stones and the smaller circle is the pile with the one boulder sitting on it:

Damn, he’s good!

What else can be read into these photos, I wonder??

Beyond the Big Stone; Leap Year Day Rock Piles

I always said I’d go back to this site, a big stone on a jumble of stone rows, - which time has been unkind to, it turns out:

Looking East

It’s on the far side (of the road that runs along) the next floodplain to the south of where I live, on a west facing terrace above the river and floodplain. I couldn’t cross the river so instead I went back to the same place I’d been the day before, opposite bank from the Old Mill. I’ve seen the old zigzag stone rows that touched the river disappear over the last three or four decades I’ve been wandering around the River and its uplands, never photographing them because I just didn’t know what I think I know now. I believed in the old Colonial Myth and film was expensive, as was developing. A big 100 year flood wiped out a tremendous amount of them – just before I’d visited this big stone for the first time.

There still remain these linear sorts of rows on both sides of the river below the Old Mill. Are they Indian or Colonial? I don’t know…

I walked maybe a quarter mile downstream, cut east a little and finally got to this stone row (after crossing a couple of other East/West linear Rows).

I scrambled thru some nasty brush of the invasive kind, taking some souvenir thorns with me and finally made it to the Big Stone. Face-like from the distance, it wasn't so much when I got right up to it.

Some animal forms perhaps? More than one?

Left facing Bear? Right facing Turtle ?

(Above: South facing Turtle close up; Below: Looking West)

What I remembered as a triple row of stones just didn't seem to be more than impression, but looking south:

(Above: East west row in background, foreground is a zigzag row, perched boulder at junction)

Single Stone turtle again

Looking uphill, I spot some mounds:

Mound and circular ring

Short row that leads to long linear N/S row:

Another larger mound with a tree sprouting out of it (above)

Back to the East/west row (below)

6th Mound:

7th:

8th in distance as snow begins to fall:

I got more scratches getting in here: