Let the Landscape Speak (on 4/2/2025)

There used to a National Parks Service Training Video I could point you to, but now:

I can still send you here:

https://dharriscsl713.blogspot.com/p/let-landscape-speak-click-on-for-sample.html

 

“One of the World’s Largest Rock Gardens" (New England)

 

Illustration from "1493"

 “The New World was not a wilderness at the time of European contact, but an environment which Indigenous peoples had been altering for thousands of years for their benefit, mostly with fire… Mann discusses the growing evidence that shows Native Americans did indeed transform their lands. Most Native Americans shaped their environment with fire, using slash-and-burn techniques to clear forests and create grasslands for cultivation and to encourage the abundance of game animals. Native Americans domesticated fewer animals and cultivated plant life differently from their European counterparts, but did so quite intensively nonetheless…”

  I would have to disagree with Mr. Wikipedia because, as Mann points out in the book if I recall correctly, that it isn’t really “slash-and-burn techniques” being used but more like a particular cultural landscape maintained by “thermal pruning,” a kind of culturally controlled burning, understudied in the Northeast and New England in particular, where assumed post contact “stone fences” colloquially known as “Yankee Stone Walls” may actually be Indigenous made fuel breaks surrounding enclosures connected to other enclosures which were in turn connected by stone bordered roadways as well as stone retaining walls supporting causeways over water features which in turn may also show evidence of being bordered by stone wall-like stacked stone features that divert water and prevent erosion.

     Mr. Wikipedia: “Mann argues that in the ecological sense Native Americans were in fact a keystone species, one that "affects the survival and abundance of many other species". By the time Europeans arrived in numbers to supplant the indigenous populations in the Americas, the previous dominant cultures had already been nearly eliminated, mostly by disease. There was extensive disruption of societies and loss of environmental control as a result. Decreased environmental influence and resource competition would have led to population explosions in species such as the American bison and the passenger pigeon. Because fire clearing had ceased, forests would have expanded and become denser. The world discovered by Christopher Columbus began to change immediately after his arrival, such that Columbus "was also one of the last to see it in pure form".

Illustration from "1493"

    Mann concludes that we must look to the past to write the future. "Native Americans ran the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the same. If they want to return as much of the landscape as possible to its state in 1491, they will have to create the world's largest gardens."

    Here in what has come to be known as New England, I suggest that the “state of the landscape in 1491” may qualify as “one of the world’s largest rock gardens…”

Illustration from "1493"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus

Some other links:

1491- New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - PDFDrive.com

Watch 1491 Channel Online | Vimeo On Demand on Vimeo

And there's also: 

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Wikipedia

How Does That Stone Wall Begin?

How does that stone wall begin?

That’s what I’m interested in,

I’m always drawn toward those gaps in those stone walls,

Looking for something like the Uktena that knows your intentions,

Big Stone Snakes perhaps with a stone horn, a stone “crystal”

A pair of protective Spirit Beings that guard a spring,

A single serpent on a hillside, facing the direction of sunset

Or sunrise or water or something sometime or maybe all the time...

 

And the sun behind rain clouds rises on the first day of spring

And you aren’t supposed to talk about the Great Serpent until winter returns

And that makes it hard to say what I have to say about

    Stone Walls that begin with what looks like a Snake Head…

 

Thursday, March 20, 2025

The Hilltop Farmer 2

That Exceptional Yankee, the Hilltop Farmer William Nilly,

        plowed both sides of the same field they say,

Just because he could, just because he was so frugal,

          just because of all those stones…

He had a million sheeps and twice or half as many pigs and cows 

          and his plow was the finest in the land.

Singlehandedly and willy nilly, he tossed them stones 

     (that some silly people think are “Serpent Walls”)

           while holdin’ the plow with the other hand…

Sometimes he had some help of course

 And sometimes he helped someone else of course:

How Things Were

 

“One day I'll be an old gray grandpa

All the pretty girls will call me "sir, "

Now, where they're asking me how things are

Soon they'll ask me how things were…”

 - Jesse Winchester

  I guess that is what I have been trying to tell you about, “how things were,” here in Nonnewaug, a little section of a town in western CT. Much has disappeared from the landscape, much has changed – from the stones along the roadways to the stones in the Nonnewaug River and anything along the powerlines – you know, I felt the rumble of those big machines sometimes before I ever saw what they were doing just like I felt an earthquake one morning not all that long ago.

 

   “How things were” isn’t just the changes on the landscape since 1650, but it’s the changes in the landscape since 1970 when I first visited Nonnewaug Falls as well as those changes in the landscape since 1990 when I read William Cothren’s History of Ancient Woodbury and realized that there was a village right here on the floodplain when the English settler colonists arrived in 1673, a permanent Indigenous settlement that continued to be occupied up to around 1740.

 “How things were” has been affected by floods and frost, stone structures along the little brooks and streams, as well as the diagonal stone fish weir on the Nonnewaug River that may be the source of the place name that still survives here, a “fishing place” like Cothren suggests, over by the cornfields of the Nonnewaug Wigwams. 

    “How things were” has also been greatly changed, like I said, by those big machines in an archeologically sensitive area, without any investigation I’m aware of, no thought given to these culturally stacked stones that may well predate colonization and Euro-American settlers in the Paugussett Homeland.

    There’s a bright spot in this ‘how things were” business. That old “History of Indians in Connecticut” by John Deforest can be retired as the “go to history.” Dr. Lucianne Lavin’s “Indigenous Peoples of Connecticut” is a remarkable book that replaces older 1850s misinformation and misconceptions with reliable information and reinterpretations of those misconceptions.

   And then of course there are other bright spots, other recent publications such as Curtiss Hoffman’s “Stone Prayers” and “Our Hidden Landscapes” edited by Dr. Lavin and Elaine Thompson, two more books I highly recommend.

  In the meantime, I’ll keep trying to tell you, like an old grey grandpa, about “How Things Were.”

Images from my notes in a folder called “Picture of Nonnewaug Wigwams 2025”

Pattern vs Pareidolia on Social Media

 

I take a look on that social media page and see:

Yet another fine example of

    An obvious Indigenous stone effigy

Yet another snake, I say

“Serpent Stacked” or “Serpent Laid”

In courses like entwined snakes

“Yet another turtle right there, in or on that alleged farmer wall,” I say

AND THEN:

Yet another someone says “Euro-American Stone Wall!”

Yet another someone says “Pareidolia!” and sends yet another definition

Which both Mr. Merriman and Webster claim is ‘the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.”

Random, ambiguous, you know, “not really a pattern.”

 

Here’s a basic pattern for you:

1. A Stone Snake-like head

 2. A Stone Snake-like body

  Sometimes a “diamond” on the head (or at the 7^th scale heart),

    Maybe below the head or behind it

Maybe a Stone horn or feather, pointing backward or maybe forward

Maybe undulating up and down or side to side

     Maybe hugging the road or a water feature

Maybe on both sides of that road or water feature

Emerging from a rock face or a split stone

 Connecting to “something” somewhere or maybe everywhere

   Separating “something” from something or maybe everything

    And maybe probably both separating and connecting

At the same time and in every time and always and forever….

 

So yeah, of course, I overlay the image with the imagery of informed imagination

 So that even the most skeptical of skeptics can plainly see

    And for every someone who says, “That really makes it “come alive,” so to speak,”

 Another one or two says, “I really really hate it so much much much when you do that!”

 

Me, I’m just wondering how many more examples I forgot to add…