316 (Plus or Minus)

     “Well, you know,” I was saying to Curt, “All we have to do to prove that this (above) or any of the others is a sculpted (zoomorphic and species specific) snake-like image but all weathered and lichen covered, is to make a couple ourselves and promise we’ll meet up and check in on them every couple hundred years and see how long it takes for the weathering to catch up.”

       Well, I was joking around when I said that.

       In the meantime, I started to realize that what I thought was Euro-American stonework around our home might more likely be the work of the Indigenous People who lived nearby, rendering a date of around 1700 – with 316 years’ worth of weathering and lichen growth.

       Suspecting Native American Iconography in the foundation as I began restoration of the east face of the house, I exposed a long buried and unexposed segment of stone at the southeast corner. Those are stones lying on the ground are some of the surviving drip stones that pitched rain away from the house...

       I think I can show Curt what to expect when we meet up 316 years from today, when looking at this at noontime (looking toward the north). But thinking about it, I think I may have an unweathered sample to run by him. There's a tough layer of modern Portland mortar above that reacted with the older lime mortar, the weathered outside wall below, but there below the drip stone is a stone that hasn't seen daylight in about 300 years, with obvious metal tool marks:

Just might be a Rattlesnake...

In the morning light, it looks like this:

In the afternoon, splashed with water to bring out the color:

Compare some details:

Last image of Eastern Massasauga is from: http://www.massasauga.ca/

Update to this (4/18/2016):

(I don't see it exactly as Curtiss says. The house was probably constructed by the "Nonnewaug band of the Pootatuck," for the English plantation of Pomperaug that became Woodbury CT, five miles south along the Great Connecticut Path. The house may be as old as the Treaties, was most likely nominally "owned" by the military leader, John Minor, a "Watch House" with a view of the Indian Fields and Fish Weir, just as in nearby Weantinock, present day New Milford  CT.)