Stone wall dissent continues...
(Mostly dissenting inside the parentheses, along with an occasional cross out.)
“The town of
Shutesbury is without a doubt full of human-created stone structures. Stone walls border many roads…
The Town's land area was dissected by well-used Indigenous paths (that should be known as Indigenous roads and Indigenous highways)
running east and west, as noted above (see Appendix E “Turners Falls Sacred Ceremonial Hill
Determination of Eligibility”). Some existing roads are built atop these paths (that should be known as Indigenous roads and Indigenous highways).
Roadside stone walls,
(assumed to be) built along the (Colonial) roads that replaced these paths (that
should be known as Indigenous roads and
Indigenous highways), are probably the most visible evidence of
Shutesbury’s stonework (and need to be carefully observed to detect Indigenous
Iconography – and perhaps tested to determine the age of the roadside “walls”).
Stone walls are ubiquitous across New
England. Robert Thorson, a geologist at the University of Connecticut, is a
leading expert (best-selling
author) on (the popular myths about) New England stone walls. He (repeats) estimates that
there are more than 240,000 miles of stone walls in New England (according to an 1871 survey), amounting to
40 million “man-days” of labor. 61 (The pdf article claims the geologist claims) Colonial stone wall building occurred primarily during the early Federal Period (1775-1825), (which is 100 years after the Colonial Period and to his credit he does mention the use of wooden fencing during the Colonial Period).
Based on a
detailed review of the written record of colonial agriculture in New England, (Young
James) Gage (2013, p. 27) notes that field clearing occurred primarily in
plowed fields: livestock pastures and orchards, such as are found in
Shutesbury, were rarely cleared. Footnote 62
In the first comprehensive study of stonework
in New England, researchers Mavor and Dix (Manitou
1989, p. 84) note that many stone walls in New England have celestial
alignments, occur far from Euro American homesteads, and do not appear to serve
as boundary markers (which is not true where I live). 63
Many stone features in New England show human handiwork, including
petroglyphs, carving/chipping, and splitting. Some include the inexplicable
placement of huge boulders atop a bed of smaller stones or the equally
mysterious placement of piles of small stones atop boulders.
Mavor and Dix report:
“Rather than use the
functionally limiting terms fence and
wall, we prefer to call the linear
stone structures by the name of stone row. We are then not confined to a
utilitarian image but can visualize them as landscape architecture following
land contours, connecting tops of hills with valleys and ponds, connecting
large boulders and rock outcrops, defining the shapes of the wetlands and
highlighting distant horizons.” (pp. 84-85)
Stone structure
researchers Gage and Gage (2016) have also conducted extensive research on New
England stonework and note that many stone structures and rows appear in areas
not subject to settler activities. They demonstrate that many stone structures,
presumably Indigenous in origin, can be found on various terrains within many
surviving on former woodlots. 64
This discussion
suggests we should not assume that all stone
“walls” and other structures in our community are the product of settler
activities. As Mavor and Dix (1989, p. 304) point out, “The ancient tradition
of large-scale stone construction among Algonquian-speakers, the historic
accounts of this native stone construction, the nature and quantity of
stonework on the New England landscape, and the deliberately low social
visibility of Indians since the time of the Second Puritan War lend support to
the hypothesis that Native Americans constructed the majority of New England’s
stone rows and other stone structures.” 65
Pages 24 & 25
"During the 19th and 20th centuries, European-American archaeologists failed to understand these structures and created a picture of pre-colonial Indigenous society as being too decentralized and nomadic to create large construction projects. This narrative was compounded by the conclusion, unsupported by any scientific methodology, that all stone structures in New England were the result of early Euro-American field clearing. Hoffman (2018) notes that the traditional “it’s just stones from field clearing” theory has become more implausible and unsustainable with the accumulating empirical evidence that Indigenous CSLs are widespread across the Northeast.
Stone structures of possible Indigenous origin throughout
New England have been documented by field researchers. Footnotes 78 79
78 http://ceremonial-stone-landscapes.com/index.php/ - no longer works
&
can be found in part here:
https://neara.org/gallery/LarryHarrop/
79 http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/
The original Document:
That Survey as a Poem
https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2019/12/ct-statistics-of-fences-in-united.html
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