Monday, March 19, 2018

Great Stone Serpents on the 12,000 Year Old Landscape


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.’ 
      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:

 Lifted Photo of an Eastern Diamondback (couldn’t find a Timber Rattlesnake posed properly).





(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 



Also, along that top edge, is some massive stonework that hints at Indian Causeways and control of the water level in Cranberry Swamp (although I prefer to say "Cranberry Garden) of undetermined age and obvious WPA repairs done to some circa 1940 as well as the more modern repairs and "improvements."
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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