“Most of us today have had no experiences to challenge that view.”
Here’s another article I somehow missed
until just this morning, from somewhere in Massachusetts, where I think I may
have seen one or two photos of suspected Indigenous Stonework, if I recall
correctly:
“What's Wrong with Our Stone Walls?” - Acton
Historical Society – (11/16/2019)
https://www.actonhistoricalsociety.org/blog/whats-wrong-with-our-stone-walls
Of course this article tells that “One of
New England’s familiar sights is a stone wall in a forest, a remnant of land
use in days gone by.”
Of course this article tells us: “Based on
what we can see, many of us assume that farmers would have removed the many
rocks from their fields and stacked them in two- to three-foot-high walls to
delineate their property from their neighbors’ or to serve as a barrier to
animals. The former landscape that we envision
would have been open fields and gardens surrounded, if not by wooden fencing,
by relatively low stone walls.”
Of course this article tells us: “Most of us
today have had no experiences to challenge that view.”
Of course I am going to disagree with that
statement, thirty plus years into experiences that have caused me to think very
critically about challenging the idea that “stone walls” arrived sometime after
1492 or 1620 or perhaps the time when Indigenous
Homelands turned into Plantations in the New England town you might perhaps
live in, have visited or plan to visit.
The
Acton Historical Society tells us: “Visitors to our recently refurbished
landscape are surprised to discover that above our stone walls at the Hosmer
House are crossed, wooden poles. Why
would we ruin the look of “iconic” stone walls?”
I’ll partially
credit the Historical Society for telling us: “As it turns out, while our
imagined Massachusetts farm landscape is not entirely fictitious, farmers often
supplemented their rock walls with wood to make enclosures higher and less
likely to let animals escape.”
Of course I am going to disagree when they
repeat this same old story: “According to Robert Thorson’s Stone by Stone, a
hybrid fence of stone on the bottom and wood on the top was very common. The stone walls, in many cases, were “linear
landfills” to give farmers somewhere to put the rocks cluttering their fields,
and the wood raised the height of the fences to the 3.5-5 feet considered
necessary to block the movement of animals.”
In my experience, in my neighborhood, where an English Plantation collided with a Late Woodland/Contact-era Indigenous Village known as the Nonnewaug Wigwams in 1672 (or 1673), the oldest of the “stone walls” may have already been there, separating yet connecting sections of land. One could say that here in Nonnewaug (and beyond), “Stone walls parse the land into finer pieces, creating diverse microclimates and ecosystems and opportunities for creatures of all types,” as Robert M. Thorson is quoted as saying in “Stone Walls are a Habitat All Their Own” by Joe Rankin (Mar 16, 2018), found here:
The Acton Historical Society closes their
article by telling us that “(The) new walls are a reminder that we need to keep
our minds open to learn more about the lives of Acton’s former residents. Even commonly-held ideas of how things were
in earlier days may simply reflect the fact that our frame of reference is very
different from theirs.”
Of course I am going to tell you that yes we
do need to keep our minds open about the lives of the former residents of what
has been called New England (and beyond)for just a few hundred years.
Of course I am going to invite you to
consider that some “stone walls” and other “stone structures” are beginning to
reveal construction dates that go back hundred and even thousands of years, as
more sites are investigated, especially when optically stimulated luminescence
(OSL) is being used to test soil samples:
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Acton: https://rockpiles.blogspot.com/search?q=Acton
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