Where Rye Hill Was

     I finally stumbled upon an archaeological paper from the town I live in, in an online reproduction of THE SUSQUEHANNA HORIZON AS SEEN FROM THE SUMMIT OF RYE HILL (6LFlOO), WOODBURY CONNECTICUT by DAVID H. THOMPSON (of the) GREATER NEW HAVEN ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOCIETY (1989) from the "TOC's" of the CT Archaeological Society. I found a bunch of downloadable articles from past bulletins that I thought I might read on my tablet if we lost power at Happiness Farm during Hurricane Sandy.

     I found 'em here: http://www.connarchaeology.org/html/tocs.html and the Rye Hill document here: http://www.connarchaeology.org/ASC52.pdf#pagemode=bookmarks&view=fit&page=17

      So of course I start wondering "Where is Rye Hill?"
      And then the author let's me know in the first paragraph:

  "Today, thanks to the rumbling of the bulldozer, it is impossible to see anything from the summit of Rye Hill in the literal sense. This small, glacially deposited hill upon which the site was located has been entirely leveled in the quest for top soil and gravel. Ruth and Edmund Sinnott salvaged what they could in 1965 over several weekends, while the area was being obliterated during the week by the bulldozer. If it were not for their efforts, nothing would be known of the site."

     So it's just another bulldozer story, where money 'talks' - or "quests" after topsoil and gravel - and a thousand year or two year old nonrenewable cultural resource 'walks' off into oblivion.

      So of course I start wondering, "Where, at least, was Rye Hill?"

       And then the author shows me Figure One:

So I find my USGS topological map of the Woodbury quadrangle and look for the old Indian Trail that's now known as main Street as well as CT Rte. 6 (but marked U.S. 6 on the map above), the Pomperaug River and something called South Brook, the one ingredient I'm not familiar with.

(1955 - updated 1984)

      "Hokey Smokes!" I exclaim (in a G-Rated version of the story) when I find the location. I've been by there a million times, parked my car there by the back door of the Natural Food store a few hundred times, and even walked down across the levelled ground to the river, picking up a stone or two along the way, wondering if they just might be perhaps an abrader or nutting stone - just like the ones found in figure 9, on page 36.

(Google Earth 2012 - and I've made the circle too small, I think)

I can take you back to 1934, thanks to the CT State Library, and show you how Rye Hill used to look back then, an actual hill perhaps at one time planted in rye:

The same State Library magic allows me to show you a photo from 1965, bulldozer included:

When I imagine sitting up on top of Rye Hill in the distant past, by a stone lined pit that might be a cremation burial site or an acorn leaching pit - or both, although not at the same time, of course - I think about the Cultural Landscape of a thousand or two or more years ago, and find so does the author of the paper: “The black fine grained soil that formed the fill of the pit also contained many small carbonized (partially burned) nuts. Upon excavation the Sinnotts did not immediately notice them. There was rain during the night, and the next day the nuts were found washed out of the pile of fill from the pit. These did not entirely fill a pint-sized peanut butter jar...the majority of the cotyledons not only belonged to the white oak group, but were from the dwarf Chinquapin Oak Quercus prinoides...Chinquapin Oak is a low wide-spreading shrub which grows in thickets. These spread radiating underground stems which send up new shoots. As do other members of the White Oak group, the abundant acorns mature in the first autumn. It is sometimes called the Scrub Chestnut Oak because the leaves resemble the leaves of the Chestnut. The dwarf Chinquapin Oak has minimum of tannin and a sweet kernel which contributes to its food value. Upon maturation Collins believes that the acorns are quickly consumed by birds, mice, squirrels, and deer. However the low size of the shrub might make collecting the collecting of the nuts easier for hunters and gatherers who would otherwise have to wait for the nuts to fall to the ground from the large species... Some speculative questions ought to be raised concerning the frequency and distribution of this species under aboriginal ecological conditions when the forests were periodically burned either by lighting, or deliberately by the natives in order to reshape and manipulate the ecosystem (Cronon 1983:47- 51)...(t)he burning minimized the understory plants, in order to produce and open park-like forest with widely spaced trees, few shrubs, and much grass and herbage. The larger oaks, particularly the white, since they are more fire resistant than the black oaks according to Collins, would have been an important component of these forests. A thinner forest canopy would have permitted a sunnier, warmer, and dryer forest floor which might have been conducive to the propogation of Chinquapin Oak as it was for a variety of different kinds of berries. The fact that this oak may be propagated by shoots growing up from undergound stems, may have been a significant survival factor when the forest was burned. Consequently Chinquapin Oak may have been more prolific in the past than it is today, and consequently of greater aboriginal economic significance than has previously been recognized…”

Turns out these Scrub Oak Shrublands are “fire dependant,” are found on ridge tops like they say, but also in and around “frost pockets,” ice in glacial Kettle Holes that are all over the place in that part of town, scrubbed more deeply by glacial action than anywhere else in CT except the CT River Valley. Pollen studies show evidence of intentional burning by native Americans, going way back and this pdf tells you a whole bunch about it:

https://www.mass.gov/doc/scrub-oak-shrubland-0/download

And it turns out the word “chaparral” comes from the Spanish "chapa" or scrub oak...

First Zigzag

The first zigzag stone row I ever came across, sometime in the 1960's, that got me wondering, "Why a zigzag?" was in a wooded area of my neighbor's farm.

This 1955 map shows my parents house as a barn, which it was then, later to be converted to a house by my grandmother's brother.

I used to follow the brook that runs through the property and then take that old dirt road that led to what looks like a house but by the mid-sixties was just a chimney and an old out house in the woods. Other roads led to more places to cut firewood, a bunch of fields, and what my family called "Lost Lake."

Today it looks like this, a soon to be developed parcel of land, to the east of the Hamburger and Car Lot Edge of Town:

The swamp that became Lost Lake must've been dammed when I was a baby, maybe - this recent map above shows it as a body of water.

This is not the actual row below, but there are many up there that look just like this pattern.

Eric Sloane in Our Disappearing Landscape offered this explaination, echoed by many other writers:

I've really wondered about that explaination in the last 15 years, following these sorts of stone rows that seem carefully made, that seem to be something else entirely, rows that may have already been there long before 1700.

By the way, this row travels across an outcrop:

It continues on the other side; here I'mlooking back at it:

In another place, at a right angle and to the west of a very long zigzag row, an immense linear wall meets up with another zigzag row, blocked sort of by the big fallen tree:

I would have stitched these three together, but somehow that panorama function has dissappered from the program it used to be in...

I'll meet you by the old chimney - it's there still, but the outhouse is gone....

The Walls and Me

So here’s me, looking at more stone wall information from acceptable scientific sources, the “lunatic fringe” that includes (me and) many friends of mine, and the actual stonework I see on the ground around me. The first group says “There’s little bits of Native American made stone work,” the second group says there is a lot, and the last group is slowly disappearing.
My resume includes years of wandering in the woods, the place I’m most comfortable in this world, as well as living in this old house of ours where I’m even more comfortable.
The occupation I had for the longest time was a Restorer of Antique Furniture - I “peeled back the years” of history to get to the original state of pieces of furniture. I’m applying the same techniques to this home of ours to do the same, keeping in mind that my limited budget allows me to keep intact some historic changes that are part of the house’s history.
This is a long story – I may have to return as a ghost to ever finish the project- and I don’t want to get distracted by going into it too much.
It’s all a part of an ability to see things as they were, a natural talent to which self education eventually added up to some sort of notoriety to be able to be considered quite good.

My wanderings sometimes led to puzzling bits of stonework and I relied a lot on the works of Eric Sloane to explain some puzzles to me. He even had a great explanation for Zigzag stonewalls. It’s the one almost everybody uses as they write about them.
Before I started this blog, I posted that explanation at my friend’s fine blog:
http://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2006/03/sloane-et-al-tell-you-this-is-how.html
But I found another scan from an old floppy disc:

I accepted that explanation for the longest time until I read about Indian Fences here and there, including the first two before coming up with my own idea based on other rows nowhere near vast areas of floodplains where I live, much of it still cornfields and hayfields etc.
http://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2006/03/3-hunting-fences-from-tm.html
I developed a hunger for information and read local and not so local histories and journals and books and eventually found my sister Joan had a book she’d used as a student at UCONN.
http://www.ecobooks.com/books/changes.htm
(Cronon writes):
"What most impressed English visitors was the Indians' burning of extensive sections of the surrounding forest once or twice a year. 'The Salvages,' wrote Thomas Morton, 'are accustomed to set fire of the Country in all places where they come, and to burne it twize a yeare, viz: at the Spring, and the fall of the leafe.'
"Here was the reason that the southern forests were so open and parklike; not because the trees naturally grew thus, but because the Indians preferred them so. As William Wood observed, the fire 'consumes all the underwood and rubbish which otherwise would overgrow the country, making it unpassable, and spoil their much affected hunting.' The result was a forest of large, widely spaced trees, few shrubs, and much grass and herbage. 'In these places where the Indians inhabit,' said Wood, 'there is scarce a bush or bramble or any cumbersome underwood to be seen in the more champion ground.'
"By removing underwood and fallen trees, the Indians reduced the total accumulated fuel at ground level. With only small nonwoody plants to consume, the annual fires moved quickly, burned with relatively low temperatures and soon extinguished themselves. They were more ground fires than forest fires, not usually involving larger trees, and so they rarely grew out of control. Fires of this kind could be used to drive game for hunting, to clear fields for planting, and, on at least one occasion, to fend off European invaders."
Elsewhere in the book, Cronon writes that this is a generalization and that such things are best studied at the local level. “Soon extinguished themselves” was an idea that seemed a little haphazard, and looking at distinct areas never cultivated around where I lived (and those Native People as well) led me to think about control of these fires. You wouldn't want to recklessly burn up everything around you:
http://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2006/03/this-stone-firebreak-wont-burn-tm.html

Some more Cronan:
Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
by William CrononPaperback - 241 pages 1st Ed. edition (June 1984) Hill & Wang Pub; ISBN: 0809001586


http://www.ecobooks.com/books/changes.htm
http://www.rsiss.net/ecology/changesinland.html
http://rvannoy.asp.radford.edu/rvn/680/digests/meller1.htm

From what looks like some sort of homework assignment I found “Things To think About…” where I like the last question best since I’d reply “Look at some stonework that might be ancient.”

http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/History/21H-421Spring2004/448FF6EE-38BE-4BA2-A242-BEE1553FD2A2/0/cronon_chs_ques.pdf

http://www.nescb.org/epublications/winter2001/salett.html
(and a link to
http://www.massaudubon.org/Nature_Connection/Sanctuaries/Broadmoor/index.php )

http://history.wisc.edu/cronon/Writing.htm

Blueberries

I was just looking at the photos from the other day and, thinking back, I recall not only how many stone rows have dissappered, but also how the blueberry population has declined, up under those power lines.



Because I once worked in the Blueberrie Barrens of Washington County in Maine one summer many years ago, I knew the Indian custom of burning over fields on a four year cycle still continues up there (or Down East as they say).

Maintainance of the power lines and the access roads in recent years involves chains saws and herbicides that kill the bluberries that grow in the sandy soil and need a nematode that lives in its roots (see links for more detail).
In my imagination, in the years before 1700, going back who knows how far, maybe this was an area of low bush blueberries, maintained by burning over sections every four years, those sections selected and controlled by those zigzag rows of stone...
"Low bush species are fire-tolerant and blueberry production often increases following a forest fire as the plants regenerate rapidly and benefit from removal of competing vegetation. (from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueberry )

The row leads into what is now forest...





















Blueberry Links:
http://www.wildblueberries.net/bluehistory.html
http://wildblueberries.maine.edu/TableofContents.htm
http://www.nsac.ns.ca/wildblue/facts/pruning.htm (most often "fire pruning")
http://www.downeastsoilwater.org/blueberry.htm

"What Most Impressed...Indian Burning

(modified from the original cover)

   Yes there is a great bias against the idea that Native Americans built stone constructions, especially in what’s now called New England. This sort of bigotry against Indians goes back along way, and has much to do with land acquisition.
   Ownership of property, marked by fenced fields seemed to be a requirement of civilization in European eyes. And Native people seemed not to do that. For instance, we have John Winthrop's word that "they enclose noe land," as he lists the many reasons the Indians had no more than a "natural right" to the land that he personally wanted to appropriate as a manorial landlord as he and his ancestors had done in England. Further "proofs" of the times pointed to are typical of this excerpt from "Reasons and Considerations Touching the Lawfullness of Removing Out of England and into the Parts of America" by Robert Cushman written in 1621: (The Indians) "...were not industrious, neither have art, science, skill, or faculty to use either the land or commodities of it; but all spoils, rots, and is marred for want of manuring, gathering, ordering etc…(The Indians) do but run over the grass as do the foxes and wild beasts (Cronon 56) ." The dominant group, as they invaded a country to appropriate its land and resources, was quick to determine that Indians were sub-human.
   

"What most impressed English visitors was the Indians' burning of extensive sections of the forest once or twice a year,” William Cronon wrote in Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983). He quotes several primary sources of the 1600's, to explain as to why the Southern New England forest was so "park-like" and "open." In 1605, James Rosier, author of the “Voyages of George Waymouth,” felt that “It did all resemble a Stately Parke.” William Wood in 1643 put it this way: "In those places where the Indians inhabit there is scarce a bush or bramble or any cumbersome underwood to be seen in the more champion ground.”
   "In short," Cronon goes on to say, "the Indians who hunted game were not just taking the 'unplanted bounties of nature;' in an important sense, they were harvesting a foodstuff which they had consciously been instrumental in creating. Few English observers saw this. To the colonists only the (Native American) women appeared to do legitimate work (in the agricultural field and gathering of wild foods); men idled away their time hunting, fishing, and wantonly burning the woods." Roger Williams may have seen this when he wrote: "(The Indians) hunted the Country over, and for the expedition of their hunting voyages, they burnt over the underwoods, once or twice a year." He was trying to defend Native sovereignty, suggesting that the Royal Grant of New England to the Plymouth Colony was illegal. In reply John Cotton, who considered native people savages and minions of the devil, wrote in reply that "We did not conceive that it is just title to so vast a Continent, to make no other improvement of millions of acres in it, but onely to burn it up for pastime."

  Just this morning I came across four interesting articles.

   The first is "Restoring the Cultural Landscape" by Germaine White, of the The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation in Pablo, Montana.

She writes:

   "But North America was not a virgin wilderness before European settlers arrived. It was an inhabited and known land. Native peoples were not passive residents of the land. They were responsible managers who affected their environment in profound ways, and their primary and most powerful tool was fire. They burned to increase many plant food and medicines. They burned to increase game animals, because fire improved forage.

  They used fire to hunt with, building drivelines and game surrounds. They kept the trails groomed with fire. They employed fire in warfare, both offensively and defensively. They cooked and warmed themselves with fire. For thousands of years Indian people more than doubled the frequency of natural fires, so much so that the plant and animal communities we have inherited today are in large measure the legacy of Indian burning.

  And that is one of the pieces missing from the national conversation about fire. It is as if Indian people’s presence on the land for thousands of years has been invisible. What we need to be talking about now is the restoration of a cultural landscape."

  The next is an "Essay on Native American Environmental Issues"
by David R. Lewis, taken from Native America in the Twentieth Century: An Encyclopedia, edited by Mary B. Davis and published in 1994.

He writes:

   "Traditionally Native Americans have had an immediate and reciprocal relationship with their natural environments. At contact, they lived in relatively small groups close to the earth. They defined themselves by the land and sacred places, and recognized a unity in their physical and spiritual universe. Their cosmologies connected them with all animate and inanimate beings. Indians moved in a sentient world, managing its bounty and diversity carefully lest they upset the spirit "bosses," who balanced and endowed that world. They acknowledged the power of Mother Earth and the mutual obligation between hunter and hunted as coequals. Indians celebrated the earth's annual rebirth and offered thanks for her first fruits. They ritually addressed and prepared the animals they killed, the agricultural fields they tended, and the vegetal and mineral materials they processed. They used song and ritual speech to modify their world, while physically transforming that landscape with fire and water, brawn and brain. They did not passively adapt, but responded in diverse ways to adjust environments to meet their cultural as well as material desires. The pace of change in Indian environments increased dramatically with Euroamerican contact. Old World pathogens and epidemic diseases, domesticated plants and livestock, the disappearance of native flora and fauna, and changing resource use patterns altered the physical and cultural landscape of the New World..."

  Of O'odham, Crow, and Chicano descent Dennis Martinez, an ecosystem restorationist, contract seed collector, and vegetation surveyor, as well as the founder of the Indigenous Peoples' Restoration Network, writes, "The latest Indian burning in Northern California and Southern Oregon was in the 1940’s. When Henry Lewis did his 1973 study of the patterns of Indian burning in California, there were people living who remembered why they burned. Now their children, who are in their 60’s and 70’s, remember burning, but they don’t remember the control techniques or the objectives. So we may have lost that knowledge.

   At Three Fires Walpole Island Reserve (Ojibway, Potawattomi, Ottawa), they never stopped burning.  Ontario’s 70 endangered species are found in quantity in 2,200 hectares on Walpole Island. This is amazing to botanists, who come there from all over the world to see what a “pristine” landscape can be like. But the people are part of that “pristine” quality. They’re still performing their role in the ecosystem, so the biodiversity is incredibly high.It’s the only place in Ontario where you can find biodiversity that high..."

   Dr. Gerald W. Williams appears to have been a Historical Analyst for the USDA Forest Service, at least in July 15, 2003, when he wrote an introduction for something (I'll figure it out) in which he wrote:

"Henry T. Lewis, who has authored more books and articles on this subject than anyone else, concluded that there were at least 70 different reasons for the Indians firing the vegetation (Lewis 1973). Other writers have listed fewer number of reasons, using different categories (Kay 1994; Russell 1983). In summary, there are eleven major reasons for American Indian ecosystem burning, which are derived from well over 300 studies:

Hunting - The burning of large areas was useful to divert big game (deer, elk, bison) into small unburned areas for easier hunting and provide open prairies/meadows (rather than brush and tall trees) where animals (including ducks and geese) like to dine on fresh, new grass sprouts. Fire was also used to drive game into impoundments, narrow chutes, into rivers or lakes, or over cliffs where the animals could be killed easily. Some tribes used a surround fire to drive rabbits into small areas. The Seminoles even practiced hunting alligators with fire. Torches were used to spot deer and attract or see fish at night. Smoke used to drive/dislodge raccoons and bears from hiding.
 Crop management - Burning was used to harvest crops, especially tarweed, yucca, greens, and grass seed collection. In addition, fire was used to prevent abandoned fields from growing over and to clear areas for planting corn and tobacco. Clearing ground of grass and brush to facilitate the gathering of acorns. Fire used to roast mescal and obtain salt from grasses.
 Improve growth and yields - Fire was often used to improve grass for big game grazing (deer, elk, antelope, bison), horse pasturage, camas reproduction, seed plants, berry plants (especially raspberries, strawberries, and huckleberries), and tobacco. Fire was also used to promote or improve plants (such as willow, beargrass, deergrass, and hazelnut), as many were used for important storage/carrying baskets, clothing, and shelter.
 Fireproof areas - Some indications that fire was used to protect certain medicine plants by clearing an area around the plants, as well as to fireproof areas, especially around settlements, from destructive wildfires. Fire was also used to keep prairies open from encroaching shrubs and trees. Insect collection - Some tribes used a "fire surround" to collect & roast crickets, grasshoppers, pandora moths in pine forests, and collect honey from bees.
 Pest management - Burning was sometimes used to reduce insects (black flies, ticks, fleas & mosquitos) and rodents, as well as kill mistletoe that invaded mesquite and oak trees and kill the tree moss favored by deer (thus forcing them to the valleys where hunting was easier). Some tribes also used fire to kill poisonous snakes.
 Warfare & signaling - Use of fire to deprive the enemy of hiding places in tall grasses and underbrush in the woods for defense, as well as using fire for offensive reasons or to escape from their enemies. Smoke signals used to alert tribes about possible enemies or in gathering forces to combat enemies. Large fires also set to signal a gathering of tribes. During the Lewis & Clark expedition, a tree was set on fire by Indians in order to “bring fair weather” for their journey. At least one tribe in the Northwest used fires set at the mouth of rivers to “call” the salmon to return from the ocean. There is one report of fire being used to bring rain (overcome drought).
 Economic extortion - Some tribes also used fire for a "scorched-earth" policy to deprive settlers and fur traders from easy access to big game and thus benefitting from being "middlemen" in supplying pemmican and jerky.
 Clearing areas for travel - Fires were sometimes started to clear trails for travel through areas, especially along ridges, that were overgrown with grass or brush/chaparral. Burned areas helped with providing better visibility through forests and brush lands for hunting, safety from predators (wolves, bears, and cougars) and enemies. Felling trees - Fire was reportedly used to fell trees by boring two intersecting holes into the trunk, then drop burning charcoal in one hole, allowing the smoke to exit from the other. This method was also used by early settlers. Another way to kill trees was to surround the base with fire, allowing the bark and/or the trunk to burn causing the tree to die (much like girdling) and eventually topple over. Fire also used to kill trees so that the wood could later be used for dry kindling (willows) and firewood (aspen).
 Clearing riparian areas - Fire was commonly used to clear brush from riparian areas and marshes for new grasses, plant growth, and tree sprouts (to benefit beaver, muskrats, moose, and waterfowl). Species affected included cottonwoods, willows, tules/bulrushes, cattails, mesquite, as well as various sedges and grasses."

 Drawing from personal experience, the author once actually worked for four days on another site that has also been continually maintained by burning since prehistoric times. Known collectively as the Blueberry Barrens of Washington County, Maine, these huge fields of “wild” native low bush blueberries (as opposed to the “cultivated” high bush type) have always been burned over on a staggered schedule every four years to keep them at peak production. Dirt road firebreaks, enabling the maintainers to selectively control which is burned and which is not, surround individual fields. The foreman, Mr. Williams, claimed it was the same manner in which Native Americans had eliminated weeds as well as fertilized the blueberries since before colonization (Personal communication August 1975).
 The myth of an empty but bountiful, beautiful, and biodiverse continent, ready for settlement may fade away eventually. More will be written about the Native American’s past -and present- management of the landscape as time goes by. The original inhabitants may one day receive credit for their understanding of how to live in harmony with nature to such a degree of perfection that early Europeans mistook it for pristine, untouched Nature. Which may truly be the higher civilization: the one that scars the planet or the one that blends into and enhances the environment? Perhaps ideas will be formulated for the future, using some of this ancient wisdom.

  And if you are wondering what has this to do with stones, you'll just have to wait awhile for future installments that I hope will illustrate some of the functions of some very fireproof (and waterproof) stones may have once had...

Links:

http://www.firewise.org/resources/files/Newsletter%20May%202005.pdf

http://ncseonline.org/NAE/docs/intro.html

www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/gtr63/gtrwo63g.pdf

http://www.fs.fed.us/fire/fmt/Bibliography/Introduction.doc