Saturday, October 29, 2022

Roadside Segment of Stones (Watertown CT)

Indigenous Stonework, a Qusukqaniyutôk, in the Paugussett Homeland

   Driving the four wheel drive shortcut to my sister's house, I glanced to the right just before the stop sign at the junction of a road named for an "Artists' Colony" long ago in my hometown and another, the one I was on, called "No Winter Maintenance." I had to reverse the vehicle and get out to capture the autumn image of that "Indian Look" of the stones stacked not like bricks or blocks but in an artistic manner that recalls Indigenous Iconography, particularly Snakes and Turtles as well as stones with certain shapes, unusual colors, stones with inclusions of crystals of other types of rock, et cetera.
 
I'd seen this "stone wall" before, having driven past this I don't know how many times in my life,
 but I just hadn't observed the stones as probably Indigenous made before...


Probably Turtle Effigies









I suspect this one was chosen because of a resemblance to perhaps possibly a turtle or maybe a flat topped rattlesnake head:


An apparent eye for the effigy head:

A "marking," reminiscent of the "crystal" or the "carbuncle" found on the forehead of a Spirit Being from many Indigenous cultures sometimes called a "Great Serpent" or "Big Snake" in English language terms, Misi-Ginebig (Anishinabe) or "Gitaskog (Abenaki),
the Ulstitli Mooney describes on the head of an Uktena (Cherokee)

(Lifted from: http://www.native-languages.org/horned-serpent.htm )

(Please pardon me for using those terms before the winter solstice.) 


Looking East:






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