Above: Snake-like stacked row of stones
separating the riparian zone of a stream and a hilltop enclosure.
Sometimes you catch a glimpse of the
Indigenous Cultural Landscape, widowed and culturally appropriated abruptly
here in the Northeast sometime after waves of European diseases, virgin soil
epidemics, travelled to the Western Hemisphere, the “New World,” in 1492. When
the leaves fall, a curtain opens, and the “stone walls” are more easily seen,
stretching into the distance, down by the streams and up to the hilltops:
Closer to the Gateway.
It’s a view of a Landscape that became an
early 20th century nature sanctuary and was possibly pasture for a brief period of time, but
it’s also a glimpse of Indigenous made stone row enclosures on some uplands,
above a stream that empties into a huge cranberry “swamp,” Great Serpent
Effigies guarding and protecting those “meadows,” burned on some sort of
schedule, just as was the “cranberry bog,” also surrounded by a Stone Serpent
border intended to allow burning on either side, at the proper time {see: http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2016/02/fire-and-cranberries.html}, of the
stone row or “Qusukqaniyutôk , a ‘stone row, enclosure’ as Harris and Robinson
call them in Ancient Ceremonial Landscape and King Philip’s War (2015:140), ‘a fence that crosses back’ that
is made of qussuk, translated as ‘stone.’
{Accessed from: http://oso-ah.org/custom.html}
What was in those enclosures in the
photos above I don’t know, but there’s plenty of choices to consider when it
comes to plants and animals that were encouraged to thrive as well as those
that were discouraged by those “seasonal fires” so often mentioned by all those
local histories of early New England towns: “For their part, Native Americans
set seasonal fires that were intended to preserve meadows against the
encroachment of forests and to maintain open park-like woodlands for hunting.
As a side-effect of these landscape management efforts, fire promoted the
growth of certain species of trees at the expense of others. Many of the
fast-growing tree species best able to take advantage of the seasonal recycling
of nutrients into the soil through burning
– like aspen and birch – also
happened to be those species of trees most favored by beaver as both food and
construction material. In the long-term, Indian burning practices created
habitat more favorable to beaver colonization at the same time that beavers
engineered a landscape that favored human hunting, foraging, and agriculture.
This mutually beneficial relationship between human and beaver land use
practices stretches back perhaps as far as 12,000 years, when both species
followed the retreating Laurentian glacier into New England and, respectively,
began setting fires and building dams to alter the natural landscape that they
encountered...”
Changes
in the Land and Water Beaver Ecology and the Fur Trade of Early New England by
Strother E. Roberts
In particular, those “gateways” always attract
my attention, noting well any resemblance to a timber rattlesnake. These days,
at these gateways, I look for several diagnostics of this Ceremonial Stone
Landscape feature, at the beginning of/at a “breachway” in a possible “snake row of stones:”
1. A Large Triangular Shaped
Boulder
2. A Stack of smaller Triangular Boulders
3. The Squamation Variation:
cobblestones stacked to resemble the scales of a Timber Rattlesnake.
4. And, of course, an unmistakable
eye or other physical feature such as a nostril or “pit.”
5. A collar-like stone that may
perhaps have helped anchor horns, possibly actual horns, possibly branches that
resembled horns.
6. A Rhomboidal “Healing Diamond
(Mohegan)” about “seven scales” behind the head of the Great Serpent Effigy petroform.
7. Multiple Images from different
perspectives, in different light and weather conditions, “shape-shifting” as
the Great Serpent often does in Indigenous stories.
8. A “Bowlder” for a tobacco offering
– a stone with a depression in it, perhaps intended for a shell of a smoking
mixture offering to appease the Great Serpent protectors.
9. All the other things I can't remember right now, which obviously includes a thick rattlesnake-like body in stones undulating behind the head, how it might also be smaller snakes and other Effigies such as Turtles.
Closer:
In
among those invasive plants, I often wonder, are there indigenous survivors?
Looking east from just above the
gateway
Back over to the trail, looking
north toward Cranberry Swamp:
To another gap or “Gateway:”
The
Squamation Variation: cobblestones stacked to resemble the scales around the
eye of a Timber Rattlesnake.
And
the “Body” part fits to, undulating in height:
(Below: See the Rhomboidal partially hidden by the small tree?)
Where I was in 2012 Lidar:
East from the second gateway
leads to where Three Stone Rows meet:
The test of Three: one is accidental, two is a coincidence, but three is a conspiracy.
There are three Serpent Gateways I know of along the top of the LiDar image above that make use of a four or five foot long triangular white quartz boulder, possibly humanly enhanced at some time over the last 12,000 years:
The Cranberry Edge doesn't show well on the LiDar, but it's visible as you follow along it, more gateways leading into it, a couple more single triangular white quartz boulders as Snake head-stones:
"There is no need to question the land, the place where one finds oneself. The answers are all freely available - Creation is always speaking and being. Rather, always question oneself. Am I listening? Can I see? Am I present? Who else is here? Am I fulfilling my responsibilities as a part of the Great Mystery or have I (again) separated myself?” ~ R. Holschuh
https://www.flickr.com/photos/34580529@N04/albums/72157682024013886
Some other "bumps and lines" also in here (there's a Flickr App for your phone):
https://www.flickr.com/photos/34580529@N04/albums/72157655621548668/page1/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/34580529@N04/albums/72157653543571419
https://www.flickr.com/photos/34580529@N04/albums/72157648611640309/page1/
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