Drip Stone Turtles

 Could it really be “Turtles All the Way Down?”
   
        Our next target of restoration at home is the front door and all that surrounds it. I was removing the cement/cinder block/cobblestone front steps of 1969, exposing the damaged sill, hidden by the cement for all that time, and what appear to be what are sometimes called “colonial drip stones” incorporated into the field stone foundation, protruding outward from the foundation. It looked like this back in ‎November ‎2015:

    There is a cloudy early history of our house and I don’t know the year of construction. A possibility exists that the house was built for the Pomperauge Plantation cooperatively with the Nonnewaug band of the Pootatuck supplying labor, sharing the use of the land described in the 1700 Nonnewaug Treaty:

I had already been noticing some of the things I call diagnostic of Indigenous stonework in the retaining walls around the house and now some of those same features seem to be showing up in the foundation:

Possible Effigies and Rhomboidal Stone:

Moving south along the front of the house, more of the same “turtle components” – shapes that suggest forelegs and shells as well as a few that seem to be possible head stones, of a size and shape unusual in a typical colonial foundation, usually composed of flat slabs or quarried stone.

    But above that quartz headstone and the triangular stone with what I term “the beak,” is a rather snake-like course of stone slabs placed thickest to thinnest, behind a possibly modified stone of the same kind.

    The retaining wall, like many stone walls in other places, appears to be in places courses of stones placed to resemble heads and bodies of snakes. The head stone bears much resemblance to one in the retaining wall a short distance away:

Stones on the retaining wall - could they be moved drip stones?

A testudinate possibility: