Mike Luoma, at either his social media page or mine, once came up with the
term “Mythinformation” during an online conversation. We were talking about how
here in “The New England” (as the area has been called for a few hundred years)
where we both have lived in for most of our lives, there are many myths that
still stand and pass for bona fide information when it comes to the Indigenous Peoples
of the Eastern Gate of Turtle Island (as the area is sometimes still referred to by
descendants of the Indigenous Peoples who have been here for thousands and
thousands of years, particularly those whose names translate to “Easterners” or
“People of the Dawn” et cetera). I believe that I responded that I wish I had
come up with that word ‘Mythinformation.”
Those old colonialist myths persist into the 21st century and
most of the present day population remains influenced by this Yankee Folklore
that still puts forth these ideas that the Indigenous Peoples, the Native
Americans, were “uncivilized savages” who left no lasting “foot print” on the
landscape, “nomadic” peoples living in a “pristine wilderness,” wandering about
on “paths” to hunt and gather from Nature’s Bounty.
Robert Thorson, self-identified and often
introduced as “the man who thinks about New England’s iconic stone walls more
than anyone else,” has published several books and lectures about these stacked
stone cultural features, influenced more by the Yankee Folklore rather than by
advances of modern Anthropology and Archeology that are at odds about those old
ideas that are based on what Bruce R. Trigger termed a “Colonialist Archaeology”
that ignores and often fails to investigate the Indigenous as a real
civilization, the only Indigenous Peoples on the planet incapable of stacking
one stone on top of another as was often said, while promoting the idea that
the vast majority of “stone walls” as creations of the generations of Exceptional Yankee Colonists who showed up in
the early settler colonist era that began around 1620, bringing “real
civilization” to the area for the first time.
You know,
that whole “shining city on a hill”
thing, a “New England” where there was once only a Howling Wilderness,
transformed by settler colonists into an orderly landscape of churches, farms
and fields, pastures and woodlots, towns and village settlements connected by
roads blazed into the dismal forests – or what was left of them after
extraction colonists began exporting timber products to Europe, unmanaged
second growth forests where once stood Forest Garden groves of Oaks and
Chestnut, Hickory, Walnut, and Butternut, thermally pruned by controlled fires.
By coincidence Professor Thorson, a geologist,
got interested in “stone walls” about the same time I really began questioning
the old Yankee Myths about “stone walls” around 1990 or so, based on
observations here by the site of the Nonnewaug Wigwams, an Indian Village at
floodplain fields by a diagonal stone fish weir (descried usually as a “camp”) at
the time settler colonists moved into the area in 1673 which persisted up to
about 1740. Thirty something years later, much of this colonialist ideology is
being challenged by Indigenous writers and researchers as well as by professional
archaeologists and anthropologists, not to mention independent researchers such
as Norman Muller whose curiosity, research, and observations of suspected
Indigenous Stonework began long before that 1990 date, if I recall correctly.
I have to admit that I was quite surprised to
see a change in Thorson’s Stone Wall Initiative section on “Pre-European
Contact.” He now includes:
“I
begin by sharing a variant of UConn’s statement of land acknowledgment. The “the land on which” the Stone Wall
Initiative does its work “is the territory of the Eastern Pequot, Golden Hill
Paugussett, Lenape, Mashantucket Pequot, Mohegan, Nipmuc and Schaghticoke
Peoples who have stewarded this land throughout the generations.”
There is no question that indigenous
stonework exists. It was well documented at several sites during the contact
phase by early explorers, and some sites have been radiocarbon dated. However, the degree to which Indigenous
stonework of “ceremonial stone landscapes” is significant in New England
remains unsettled. For contrasting reviews consult.
Lucianne Lavin
and Elaine Thomas, ed., Our Hidden Landscapes: Indigenous Stone Ceremonial
Sites in Eastern North America (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press,
2023).
Timothy H.
Ives, Stones of Contention (Nashville, TN: New English Review Press,
2021).
My opinion is
that each site must be investigated case by case…”
(And I
recognize the last included sentence (statement) above as one often made by
Jannie Loubser, a Rock Art specialist, regarding both sites and “stone walls,” a
thought which I readily agree with.)
See:
https://stonewall.uconn.edu/investigation/pre-european-contact/
So maybe there is some hope of deprogramming
the Colonialistic misinformation or Mythinformation out of the present-day Archaeology/Anthropology/History
of this corner of Turtle Island, subtracting the Yankee Folklore out of the
real science of stone walls here in the “New England.” Hopefully Thorson’s
readers will take a look at (or actually read) both those books mentioned,
recognize which may indicate the “real science” of informed investigation and
which is an angry manifesto against a “woke” bunch of scientific and “Pretendian”
(a pejorative colloquialism describing a person who has falsely claimed
Indigenous identity) frauds, presented in a sort of frightening non-scientific
(pseudoscientific) Nationalistic point of view.
Well, “maybe.” Snoozing on Turtle Island, I also noticed a few new
entries to the colonialist writings found at The Stone Wall Initiative I hadn’t
seen before:
Unusual stone wall in Tyringham, MA.
Credit: Bess Dilman.
“INTERPRETATION: Colloquially, this is known as a lace wall, though it’s
a very unusual one because this shape stacks so easily to minimize pore space.
Most lace walls are made of rounded ball-shaped stones which require high
porosity and stones not bearing weight are very unstable. Now, having described it with a nomenclature
and classified with with a taxonomy, we can
speculate on why. This wall makes
no sense as a “linear landfill” for field clearing. It might have been a fence,
but seem too low. It could have been a
border to a field or farm. So, let’s
call it an unexplained anomaly, perhaps an idiosyncratic, “what the hell,” folk
art expression of some sort, likely built from locally quarried stone on
bedrock. A reconnaissance of the terrain
would provide other clues. But for now,
let’s just call it a “Bladed Lace Wall.”
https://stonewall.uconn.edu/2024/12/30/bladed-lace-wall/
.jpeg)
Make Way for Drylands!
(Which is just a little bit humorous
to someone who has spent many years observing stonework that has a high degree
of probability of being Indigenous in origin of undetermined age at a place
that retains its Indian Name “Nonnewaug,” sometimes interpreted as “Dry Land.”)
https://stonewall.uconn.edu/2024/12/30/make-way-for-drylands/
Let me think about these “stone
walls” mentioned in those two new entries for a while before I get back to you…
I was originally thinking about these excerpts from Thorson’s Stone by Stone used
here:
https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2014/07/stone-by-stone-segment-one.html
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