Rebuilding Those Iconic "New England" Stone Walls (CT)

 Another One Bites the Dust

  To me, the biggest disaster of all this rebuilding of the Iconic New England Stone Walls is that the original “wall” or “fence” may be far older than is generally assumed. That seeming “pile of field clearing (garbage) stones” or “linear landfill” may actually be an Indigenous creation, a Native American construction. Those miles and miles of “New England Stone Walls” deserve a second look and some scientific investigation rather than to be casually dismissed as artifacts of Euro-American Agricultural Methods because once they are gone or rebuilt, they are lost forever.

 I know that the majority of the plethora of books and essays and video presentations about "New England Stone Walls" tells you that, with minor exceptions, there are no pre-contact era stoneworks here in the northeastern U.S.A. - but that is almost entirely speculation, a Colonialist point of view, to use Dr. Bruce Trigger's term. The Colonialist Folklore about "stone walls" is a bit of ethnic erasure, promoting the exceptionality of the early European settler colonists and their descendants with scant documentation of actual stonewall building. There is actually a dearth of actual scientific investigation into the actual age of these actual stacked stone cultural features and to suggest that Indigenous Stonework exists often results in ridicule...  

 I constantly drive by miles and miles of “stone walls” and every once in a while I see someone has cleared the brush and trash away from another one these misunderstood stacked stone cultural features and I smile, sometimes stop by with a camera when I get the chance, photograph the “snakes and turtles” – the Indigenous Iconography that is a step beyond “artwork” – that are distinguishing characteristics of Indigenous (Native American) Stonework.

Sometimes I find that the "stone wall" is being rebuilt,

without a thought to the origin of that 

unique stacked stone cultural feature:

 

  I understand that the man in the photo above who is doing the stonework is just a guy doing his job. As we passed by, my brother John and I wondered about where the man might be from, wondered if he spoke English and Spanish or perhaps Portuguese, as well as perhaps at least one Indigenous language, possibly several different dialects as well. 

  When my brother said, "That's a lost art," I thought about more than just European style stonework and just whose art becomes "lost" when the stone features are taken apart and then put back together.

 I'm sitting here this morning wondering if he might well be from somewhere where Indigenous Stonework is considered a National Treasure, perhaps worked doing Stonewall Conservation rather than transforming an older Qusukqaniyutôk, such as the one seen below, into an entirely different form of stacked stone cultural feature... 

Links to Colonialist:

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