Another Look at a Photo from 2019

 "Serpent Stacking"

If the courses are laid in a manner to suggest "entwined" snakes (or Horned Serpents), then there's a great degree of probability that this is an Indigenous construction (rather than an "imported" style of "stone fence.).

The rhomboidal stone in the center of this photo of a little segment of stacked stones caught my attention back in 2019. It was just a little detail in a bigger "picture" of a row of stones that connected to a big boulder or piece of outcrop at a local land trust that I first visited as a child, before it became a land trust preserve. My grandmother and her brother were looking to buy some sheep and back then it was still a working farm:

I just happened to look at the photo again yesterday - and said "Hokey Smoakes, Bullwinkle! That's a jewel on the head of a snake effigy." 

See: the stacking of the stones, the courses laid down, are similar to the way the Snakes on this Mississippian Bowl are depicted on the ceramic pottery piece:

An overlay of an eye, an Eastern Timber Rattlesnake eye to be specific:

Sometimes as one effigy comes into focus, others almost magically appear:

Sometimes the more closely one looks, the more small details become more apparent,

and one can see why that stone was chosen: 

So other photos from that same walk along the "stone walls" that are supposed Sheep Fences (that fail the test of an effective sheep fence according to almost everyone)

become just as suspect and then,

as one is looking for Stone Snakes,

The Stone Turtles start becoming evident:

"There's that Rostral Scale again, but represented by a stone "instead:"

And one suddenly sees the "Eye" of that particular Snake Row of Stones:

A long row of stones,

a triangular flat topped boulder conspicuous,

 catches my attention as I peruse the folder of photos...

And an overlay kind of brings it to life,

once you get over that old denialism that clouds the study

of these Rows of Stones as Indigenous Stone Constructions:

It's an interesting place,

And sometimes Striking Snake effigies literally can be found,

If you are asking, "What's around it?"

https://www.flickr.com/photos/34580529@N04/albums/72157710520892856/with/48610872128/

"Pareidolia Is"

With thanks to Eric Triffin

𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐢𝐝𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐚: (n.) the instinct to seek familiar forms in disordered images like clouds or constellations; the perception of random stimulus as significant.

Pareidolia is a type of apophenia, seeing patterns in random data...

   “Once in possession of the pattern, the data, then one must bring the tools of science to bear on the data: testing, experimentation, and mathematical analysis!" Sherlock Stones exclaimed. "As Ceremonial Stone Landscape investigators, this is what we must do; we must apply the scientific method to our observations. If, as an expert witness goes into court with only the observation of a pattern, their testimony “I see a pattern” can be refuted by an adverse expert who simply says, "I do not see a pattern”. Our clients deserve and require more than just seeing supposed “shapes in the clouds” – or in this case, "the shapes of the selected and positioned stones.”

“May I suggest, an additional distinguishing feature, sometimes present behind the triangular flat topped boulders, another data point, so to speak?” Dr. Possum replied. “Note the rhomboidal shaped stone that perhaps suggests the vulnerable 7^th Scale of the Great Serpent, sometimes present.”

“There’s hope for you yet,” said Sherlock to his compatriot, lighting his pipe…

https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/search?q=7th+seventh+scale

Apologies to: https://www.edtengineers.com/blog-post/keep-your-head-out-clouds

“Fluid intelligence is the ability to see patterns and solve reasoning problems,”  writes someone from the famous Yale Community College in a fairly recent article here:

https://earthsky.org/human-world/brain-activity-pattern-as-unique-as-fingerprint/

Mr Wikipedia writes, insisting that:  "The concepts of fluid intelligence (g_f) and crystallized intelligence (g_c) were introduced in 1963 by the psychologist Raymond Cattell.^[1][2] According to Cattell's psychometrically-based theory, general intelligence (g) is subdivided into g_f and g_c. Fluid intelligence is the ability to solve novel reasoning problems and is correlated with a number of important skills such as comprehension, problem-solving, and learning.^[3] Crystallized intelligence, on the other hand, involves the ability to deduce secondary relational abstractions by applying previously learned primary relational abstractions.^[4]"

      I just don't know what to think about Mr. Wikipedia sometimes...

 

Orenaug Striking Serpents

       -and Sachem Pomperaug’s Castle

Both sides of a raised or Striking Serpent Effigy Row of Stacked Stones or Qusukqaniyutôk

   Sometimes, but not all the time to say the least, one may find an old painting that includes some Indigenous Ceremonial Landscape features. Here’s one:

   With some informed imagination as well as familiarity of the landscape, sometimes one can detect many details and slap some labels on these old paintings:

    Seen from a distance, of course you can't see the details of those features but ground checking some of those “stone walls/fences,” one sometimes finds the Indigenous Iconography is present, “snakes and turtles mostly” but other effigies as well, effigies one won’t find if one isn’t looking for them, because of that old myth that these rows of stacked are all settler colonist constructions made after (in this town) 1673 rather than older Indigenous constructions that may in fact far older than that, built by Indigenous Peoples sometime in the past…

    At the time I took some of these Orenaug photos, I wasn’t “seeing” the large boulders (and tors?) below the cliff side of Bethel Rock as Raised Head or Striking Serpents, my term for these sorts of snake head variations, apparently after voting at the Senior Center in 2014: 

There's even a Serpent with raised head built up on a rocky talus slope: 

https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2014/11/exit-poll.html

  I had to ponder some smaller examples and finally puzzle out this one, over on a local land trust property before I ever figured out that this is a (sometimes) repeated Snake Head variation:

https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2018/06/striking-serpents-woodbury-ct.html

   

Pootatuck Stone Effigy and a Pictograph in Alabama, two Uktena-like Serpents, head to head:

There's all sorts of interesting stone features up there, Hidden in Plain Sight, that practically no one has any interest in in my town, just above the center of town: 

https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2016/09/a-boulder-split-into-four-quarters.html

   In the mid-1800’s, Woodbury CT historian William Cothren wrote: “Orenaug is the name of the beautiful trap-rock cliffs, which bound the village on the east. The front cliff has been recently purchased and improved by the writer, as a mountain park. Oak, maple, hickory, chestnut, and cedar trees are scattered over the mountain-top, and in the beautiful ravine beyond, while the crest is covered by a beautiful grove of pine trees, in the midst of which a tower, thirty feet in height, has been erected, from which views of six surrounding towns may be obtained. It has been named the Orenaug Park. Here one can always catch a delightful breeze, and enjoy a beautiful panoramic view of the village, valley and meandering river below, while the whispering pines above his head sooth the perturbed, wearied and overworked mind. The beautiful evergreens suggest thoughts of peace, and the beatitude of the eternal rest on high:

   "As the softened land-breeze marches,

    Through the pine's cathedral arches."

     A few moments walk to the south-east, through a pleasant grove, over the second cliff, brings the visitor to the celebrated 'Bethel Rock," in the bosom of these cliffs, of which more will be said hereafter. A more lovely and romantic spot, even without its sacred associations, cannot easily be found.”

     (The "sacred" Cothren is talking about is best explained here: https://youtu.be/-DY-V7T0KSI)

 

    Back in 1673, Capt. John Minor and a group of people walked from present day Stratford CT to present day Woodbury, ending up at some abandoned Indian fields and village site, near the grave of the Sachem Pomperaug, according to local Historian William Cothren. There’s a big rock formation called Pomperaug’s Castle, reportedly an Indian Fort, but having climbed up there, I’m not entirely certain that’s true. I’m more inclined to believe that there was a palisaded wooden structure on a rise above that floodplain called the Hollow where John Minor had a timber framed house built making use of the old abandoned Indian Fort. It was the easiest thing to do after all, just as planting in those already cleared fields was… 

Related Posts:

https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2018/09/an-unlikely-place-for-ceremonial-stone.html

and a few "Newer Posts" after that one.

 https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/search?q=orenaug

Half a Lifetime

   Could that possibly be correct? I’ve been questioning that “New England Stone Wall Myth” since the spring of 1990, when I found that illustrated copy of William Cothren’s History of Ancient Woodbury Connecticut in the local library and figuratively woke up on Turtle Island. Prior to then, I was familiar with the myth that, as others still put it, that Indians around here learned the techniques of stone building from Europeans and every stone fence or stack of stones had something to do with property lines and field clearing, cows and sheep, and a howling wilderness transformed with metal axes and plows into a “New England” in a “New World.”

   It was quite different when I started all those years ago, when I was half the age I am now. Back then I didn’t have a little computer device in my pocket that was a phone and a camera. I couldn’t “look stuff up” unless I went to the library, or the school, or the museum, couldn’t instantly be in touch with the few people at the time who considered the idea of pre-contact Indigenous Stonework in the Northeast as a legitimate possibility. Used to be that I had to buy film for my camera and pay for developing and printing, waiting to see if those photos were actually conveying what I wanted to convey about my observations. I was scribbling down notes in sketchbooks, those old photos rubber cemented onto the pages, next to drawings of what I thought I was observing, carrying the sketchbook to lectures, museums, and Pow Wows, and putting up with a great deal of skepticism from a great number of people, as well as the occasional person who seemed genuinely interested in what I was suggesting.

   Back then, for the first 6 years, I was also blissfully ignorant, for the most part, about the “Lost Civilizations” that, like those first European explorers and colonists, supposedly taught Indigenous People how to shape stone or stack one stone on top of another, hyper-diffusing all sorts of superior knowledge to this half of the planet. The book “Manitou” by Mavor and Dix, recommended to me by Trudie Lamb Richmond as a work that suggested that Native Americans did in fact build with stone in this corner of the world, actually exposed me to these pseudoscientific beliefs, still promoted strongly by many individuals. I still don’t fully understand how anyone can take seriously all those people who still claim that Celtic Monks (sometimes spelled as “Keltic”) or a “race” of red-haired giants or angels are really responsible for any sort of “advanced ideas” these fictitious people brought to the “savages” – before vanishing without a trace. Other than some “Dolmens” and astronomically aligned structures made with liquid stone that could be poured like concrete that honor Greek Gods in “Megalithic Montana” or “Ancient Vermont.”

   It’s very different now, sort of. I can livestream a report on a “site,” or access a video of a presentation I missed. I can hear leaves and snow crunch under the footsteps of someone making a video of some explorations up the side of a mountain hundreds of miles away. I look at 3-D models of Stone Prayers and Serpent Effigies that work on one electronic device but not on another, even if I don’t understand why.

   And yes, I can photograph an interesting phenomenon of light that illuminates the eye of a Serpent Effigy that’s part of a zigzag row of stones on my way back home from the store and moments after my arrival home, I can post up the image and some thoughts about it on the World Wide Internet and hear within minutes:

   “It’s just a rock,” or “That’s Ogham writing,” or “That’s a stockpile of stones a Yankee farmer left there when he was plowing,” or “That’s Fred Flintstone’s house.”

   Thankfully, these days I’ll find that someone somewhere says: “This is something similar that I’ve found,” with a spectacular photographic image of some incredibly beautiful stonework…

 

Friday, March 24, 2023  

Qusukqaniyutôk/Snake Effigy (CT)

And some SHEEP...

 

Tossing Stones

Just a coincidence...

 

Indigenous Stonework (PA)

With thanks to Jim Wilson 

   Sometimes you might read something like this:

  “First Farmer William Nilly plowed those first fields and tossed those first stones, one of those first people to throw those first stones up against those first wooden fences first in that empty howling wilderness.  Mostly interested in the disposal of stone, William Nilly – who clearly wasn’t interested in making a stone fence – piled these stones “loosely” and quite unlike a “proper fence” at all...”

    Sometimes I look at stonework and think:

That’s not Willy Nilly Stonework…

With John Martin and Frank Maykuth 

https://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2021/06/some-images-from-jim-wilsons-zoom.html

"Learn what history, science and Native Americans have to say about ambiguous stoneworks found throughout the Northeast Woodlands—including here in the Lehigh Valley—and how public and private organizations are coming together to document, preserve and protect them..."

https://fb.watch/6fxQG6CmSB/

https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=2834092913546251