Wednesday, November 30, 2022
Suspected Indigenous Causeway (Nonnewaug CT Cluster #3)
Sunday, November 27, 2022
Snake Effigy and Riders/Rails (CT)
Stephanie Ashman photo
Stephanie Ashman's photo above seemed so familiar to me and it didn't take long to recall the photos below, as well as a drawing Norman Muller had made of it, suggesting that this might be a snake effigy, a certain stone used for the snake's eye:
Norman's Drawing from the
NEARA Journal, vol. 41, no. 2, Winter 2007
https://neara.org/pages/Montville%20Souterrain%20Reconsidered.html
There's also a rhomboidal stone behind the eye, perhaps suggesting the vulnerable seventh scale location of the snake's heart, a feature that repeats sometimes but not all the time on Snake Effigies:
Norman writes: "The Stone Row - A clue to the original function of the souterrain may lie
with a curious and very well made stone row, 147 feet long, situated several
hundred feet west. During the colonial period, walls were generally
constructed of stones dislodged in fields by plowing, and were carried by stone
boat to the edges of the field, where they were piled into the rustic walls
that define the New England landscape. Many of them form networks with other
walls. However, the one on Beaver Dam Hill is different, in that it is an
isolated segment with no indication that it was ever connected to a wooden rail
fence. A trace of low stones beyond where the present wall begins and ends
would provide a clue that a rail fence continued at either end, but nothing of
the sort is to be found. Instead, the wall or row in question is finished at
both ends, implying a function quite distinct from the usual colonial usage.
Some of the boulders comprising it are huge: one is six feet long, a foot thick
and two feet wide, and weighs close to a ton. I believe the row bears a direct
relationship to the souterrain...As
viewed head on at the top, the row has a curious, repetitive post-and-lintel
construction (Fig. 8), consisting of one or two smaller rocks supporting a
larger, flat slab. However, when viewed from the side, (Fig. 9), the pattern of
stones seems to merge into the shape and detail of a serpent's head, with an
unusual square stone representing the eye, and the arrangement of long
rectangular stones below, the mouth (Fig. 10). Some may say I am reading too
much into the stone arrangement, but Indian stone constructions representing
snakes or turtles are often very subtle, with only a few accents providing a
clue as to what they represented."
Ms. Stephanie Ashman also captured a "head on" image of the probable Snake Effigy:
Every good student of "New England Stone Walls" knows that easily and quickly made wooden fences preceded the alleged "Golden Age of Stone Wall Building" in Colonial Mythology and seeing those four socket like openings in the otherwise fairly realistic and intact Snake Effigy reminded me of an Eric Sloane illustration about the Cross and Rail Fence:
Peter Waksman, Barbara Waksman, and I were also looking at a similar such thing in CT. This "Stone Wall," which could be said to have a snake-like appearance (A huge round eye?);
And if one walks along the bedrock outcrop this "stone wall" is built on, one will find an interesting snake-head-like feature below (shown with the person who suggested it to be a Great Snake's head):
The original row of stones might have extended farther than this "wall end" that's just out of sight to the extreme left in the above photo (both Peter and Curtiss thought as much as well), perhaps modified within the last 2 or 3 hundred years:
And those three "sockets," one with a stone inserted for some reason, at some unknown time, reminded me of a different illustration of the same sort of wooden fence, labelled the Stake and Rider Fence:
Back to Montville, thinking about Mohegan fence builders building fences that comply to 'early' fence laws in that Mohegan homeland, I'm thinking the effigy stayed intact for a Mohegan reason:
Wednesday, November 16, 2022
Harvard Stone Walls Mysteries Solved
While ignoring at least 13,000 years (97% or more) of the Human history of "New England"
Un-credited photo used in presentation
I don’t know how I
missed this one from last year, a Zoom presentation by the man who “thinks
about stone walls more than anyone else:”
Harvard Stone Walls Mysteries Solved
“The Harvard Conservation Trust presents Dr.
Robert Thorson, as he decodes mysteries from the thousands of stones that make
up stone walls laid by colonists, Native Americans & enslaved people.
Thorson writes “[Stone walls are] a visceral connection to the past. They are
just as surely a remnant of a former civilization as a ruin in the Amazon rain
forest.” Professor Thorson reveals why New England is uniquely situated to be
the quintessential landscape for stone walls and the work that communities are
doing to preserve them.”
About 46 minutes and 47 seconds into the presentation, we find that someone has sent in a photo of most of a "Stone Prayer," a Káhtôquwuk in the Mohegan/Narragansett/Pequot languages, a Kodtuhquag in Massachusett, as well as many other variants. These "stone heaps" have been documented by numerous early European visitors in the region who suggest a religious aspect to them that Indigenous People were reluctant to talk about. Thorson has chosen to rather facetiously label the photo as a
"Manitou Animal Effigy of a Turtle:"
"What is the meaning of facetiously?"
Thorson and Ives rail against "a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method" when it comes to the subject of "New England Stone Walls" and these "manitou animal effigy turtles" constructions while relying on folklore of, as Thorson puts it, a "Yankee Cowboy" transforming a howling wilderness, stone by stone, to farms and fields surrounded by "garbage piles of stones." Both write and lecture about the "dearth of scientific data" about "New England Stone Walls" while promoting the idea that the Indigenous Peoples of this corner of Turtle Island had to wait around for a superior advanced ocean going civilization from Europe to show up and teach them the art of stonework. I find that not much different that those beliefs promoted by Graham Hancock or Sir Wolter Scott that one can easily find on cable TV or a streaming service like NetFlix...
Both ignore (or openly ridicule) actual scientific investigation into similar stone structures and constructions such as those in Turners' Falls in MA, the Manitou Hussanash Preserve in RI, or the Oley Hills in PA, among other places. (Some examples: https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/search?q=osl ) One of them, without embarrassment, even states on video that he has no desire to learn how to pronounce Indigenous Place Names. There's something about stones to be learned when one "decodes" what those words mean. Sometimes there's a stone - or a bunch of stones - in them.
So here's an Indigenous word for you that, as I said above, might explain the questionable "Manitou Animal Effigy of a Turtle" featured in the presentation:
káhtôquwuk NI a pile, a heap, that which is heaped high, by placing one above another
káhtôquwukansh heaps
káhtôquwukanuk in the pile
https://www.moheganlanguage.org/2017/05/01/hvo20856/
Nohham
Rolf Cachat-Schilling (Mohawk-Nipmuc), writing in 2016 for the Massachusetts Archaeological Society, notes that “There
are several types of kodtonquagkash (kodtuhquag in Massachusett), including
effigies. Most kodtonquagkash are not
more than 2 m (6.56 feet) wide and less than 1.8 m. (5.9 feet) tall. They are usually made in an organized manner,
in several courses of stones, often turret-like in form atop a base
boulder. There are kodtonquagkash types
that are built directly on the forest floor, on shallow bedrock or even no rock
at all…At a site in Shutesbury MA, “94% of intact concentric circle káhtôquwuk
are formed from four to six rings, the center most often being a stone of unusual
type (jasper with contrasting line, pegmatite, quartz crystal or quartz
inclusion, leucic granite, or similar mineral). Center stone is usually quite
round or else pyramidal...88% of intact boulder-based cairn káhtôquwuk consist
of 38-50 flattish stones, usually all of the same type in a given feature,
where basal stones are somewhat larger than the succeeding courses of stone,
which are quite uniform in size. Courses of stone number five to seven in
intact specimens of this type…”
And, for goodness sakes, while there's no such thing as a "Manitou Animal Effigy of a Turtle," there do exist religiously, ceremonially stacked Turtle Effigies built on boulders (or about to be built on the bedrock of Bannock Point and other places by Indigenous People alive today), most likely Indigenous artwork that actually resembles actual Turtles here on Turtle Island, as it was called for thousands and thousands of years. Here's a rather famous one both are certainly aware of in Killingworth CT:
Quote from "Stone Prayers" by Dr. Curtiss Hoffman,
the photo from wherever I lifted it...
"The ages of the samples from Pratt Hill near Upton, Massachusetts, at a site that was recently desecrated by (stones) being scraped off the boulder foundation it was originally built on, are 1475-1375 C.E. (595 ± 50 years) for the top sample and 1315-1835 B.C.E (3,595 ± 260 years) for the bottom sample. These samples were obtained from dust or loess that had blown into the structure and collected in the scooped out hollow of the boulder foundation..."
Tuesday, November 01, 2022
Peter Waksman at the Acton Memorial Library (MA)
THE HISTORY OF THE CEREMONIAL STONE LANDSCAPE MOVEMENT
– A LOCAL PERSPECTIVE
by Peter Waksman
Thursday, Nov. 3, at 7 PM
To meet Peter Waksman in person, join us at the Acton Memorial Library, 486 Main St in Acton, MA
To join us remotely, use this link
https://actonma.zoom.us/j/82281640480
This program is made possible by generous support from Freedom Way’s National Heritage Area
and the Acton Memorial Library.
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