“Fences,
Possum, not ‘walls.’ The English, one could say, “denoted property
boundaries” with fences of wooden rails. The first rails went up around
their acquired communal planting fields, allegedly removing stones from soil
previously worked by generations of Indigenous women and tossing those stones
at or under those rail fences. The purpose of those wooden barriers went up
around garden plots to prohibit those imported domesticated animals from
destroying corn or wheat or peas, but it was not too much later that settler
colonists began the practice of enclosing their “bounds” as a matter of a property
law, drawn up by the settler colonists, a tangible and visual sign of an
improvement of said property, about four or five feet in height, ‘Horse High
and Oxen Strong and Pig Tight’ and all that, as the romantic language of
Colonial History puts it. But still, it’s a perfectly good question,” replied
Sherlock Stones. “But first we must consider the language of the times. In the early 1600s in English eyes, to
English ears, “stone walls” more likely meant the defensive stone walls of a
castle or a fortress rather than what most people today think of as “stone
walls.” I’m not quite sure at what point in the curious history of the modern American
English language when the expression “stone wall” replaced “stone fence,” any
more than do I know the cultural origin of those cross and rail fences or those
zigzag rail Snake or Worm Fences one sees show up in the beginning of virtually
every stone wall book ever written. The Wattle and Daub fence one sees in the
gardens of re-created Colonial English Plantations (or in the plans of Fort
Pohham) is clearly a European creation in use both here and in Europe, and
only occasionally does one see a writer imply that these early colonial wooden
constructions enclosing corn or wheat fields may have a had a “Native American
Hunting Fence” origin, such as Champlain wrote about and had illustrated in
several forms. One version shows what greatly resembles a picket fence, just to
ensure that the European audience interprets it as a fence, despite the
inaccuracy of the engraving.”
Dr. Possum opened up
a well-worn dog-eared print copy of William’s Key and read aloud:
“The
Natives are very exact and punctuall in the bounds of their Lands,
belonging to this or that Prince or People, (even to a River, Brooke) &c.
And I have knowne them make bargaine and sale amongst themselves for a small
piece, or quantity of Ground: notwithstanding a sinfull opinion amongst many
that Christians have right to {Heathens} Lands: but of the delusion of that
phrase, I have spoke in a discourse concerning the {Indians} Conversion.
When a field is to be broken up, they have a
very loving sociable speedy way to dispatch it: All the neighbours men and
Women forty, fifty, a hundred &c, joyne, and come in to help freely.
With friendly joyning they breake up their
fields, build their Forts, hunt the Woods, stop and kill fish in the Rivers, it
being true with them as in all the World in the Affaires of Earth or Heaven: By
concord little things grow great, by discord the greatest come to nothing…”
“Ah - The Bounds,” Sherlock sighed, “An expression that gives us, modernly, the term “boundaries,” more
or less in the same way that the word “fence” itself is derived from
“defense” or “defensive barriers,” one could say. Williams seems to be writing
about the bounds of small parcels of land, filled with the flora and fauna he meticulously lists, that
fed the Indigenous Peoples, the resource zones of the
seasonal round the serious student hears so much about, the gathering part of
hunting and gathering that some anthropologists say supplied so much food (for
humans and the animals hunted) that the introduction of maize into the region
was almost a “non-event.”
Dr. Possum
frowned at the text and said, “Well here’s this reference to “stop and kill
fish in the Rivers.” By “stop” does Williams mean to pause beside a river
and catch fish or is he implying that the Native Americans could and would
build and maintain the dam-like fish traps known as weirs??” He pointed to
Sherlock Stone’s huge map of place names he had painted on one of the walls of
the room they were in. “There’s quite a few ‘fishing places’ to be found, some
with a fragment of the words for stone in them.”
“Peculiar how a
stone wall-like structure in a river or stream seems to be feat Indians were
very capable of designing, building, using, and maintaining for century after
century, often recorded as gathering places in which to celebrate the return of
a certain migrating fish, species such the Salmon or Shad or Eels in yearly
festival-like celebrations but once one reaches dry land, the concept of
Indians building permanent masonry structures here flies out the window,
despite examples of Indigenous stonework structures to be found in the arid
American Southwest or in the rain forests of Amazonia.”
“It’s as if,”
Possum mused, “the area now known as Southern New England was the only place in
the world where people so generously supplied with both ordinary and exotic
stones, transported and dropped room service style by glaciers, never stacked
one stone on top of the other."
“One might attempt
to build a case that any Indigenous person who could not stack one stone on a
top of another was exiled to the Connecticut or Rhode Island Shoreline, walked
the ancient trade route highways to the area, to happily live with others like
them, perhaps patiently or perhaps anxiously waiting for the Europeans to sail
in a teach them how to stack stones,” Sherlock said.
(Is the above map is actually of present-day Biddeford ME?)
Possum turned his
gaze toward another wall where Sherlock Stones had painted reproductions of
several of the old drawing like maps that had been made after the earliest of
European voyages, based observations by Giovanni Verrazzano, John Smith, and
Samuel de Champlain, peppered with quotes from the explores about villages
packed “check to jowl’ on the landscape, cornfields “fathoms” in extent, a
place too crowded with Indigenous Peoples to provide suitable space for English
colonial settlements. The Doctor noted the places where his compatriot had
painted in low rows of stones with snake heads at their beginnings, quite
resembling the LiDar images other researchers attributed to settler colonist
farmsteads, enclosures sometimes regular and rectangular but sometimes quite irregular
like shapes on a crazy quilt.
Sherlock Stones
struck a match and as he lit his pipe said, “Now there is also that Burning
Question to consider: all those references about the thermal pruning of the
landscape, the often-mentioned fires set by Indians that to this day remains
very much understudied and very much poorly understood.” Stones picked up one
of his tablets and stabbed at it with his forefinger. He read aloud, “When I
argued with them about their Fire-God [Yotáanit]: can it, say they, be but this
fire must be a God, or Divine power, that out of a stone will arise in a
Sparke, and when a poore naked Indian is ready to starve with cold in the
House, and especially in the Woods, often saves his life, doth dresse all our
Food for us, and if he be angry will burne the House about us, yea if a spark
fall into the drie wood, burnes up the Country ? (though this burning of the
Wood to them they count a Benefit, both for destroying of vermin, and keeping
down the Weeds and thickets)”. (A Key, p. 125)” He touched the screen again
and read, “Sôtay yo kisk, nupito yoht cukánuk,” which seems to translate to:
‘Sunday today. I put fire in the pasture.’”
“So,” said Possum,
“A field of some sort of grass, in a thickly populated place, was “burned over”
for some purpose, no mention of how the fire was prevented from spreading, just
as the burning over of hunting lands is tossed out by Williams in the argument
about Indigenous ownership of the lands with powerful Puritan leaders of the
time, their bounds, beyond the agricultural gardens Indian people used and
maintained, without mention of a "too low to be a barrier to domesticated
animals imported from Europe" row of culturally stacked stones as a hearth-like
fuel break such as the notorious Timothy “Eyes and Antlers” McSweeney claims to
observe in Woodbury Connecticut, by a village site where the Indigenous “stone
wall-like structures” resemble the Big Snake Spirit that controlled weather,
guarded “Indian Gardens” of many kinds, and importantly, put out the fires set
by the lightning from Thunder Birds/Beings eyes as the two battled, creating
the sounds of thunder and the flashing of lightning.”
“It’s Tim, not
Timothy – and Mac, not Mc,” Sherlock responded, “And I am not sure why this
contact era village is not of more interest to either professional or
avocational “true believers” and skeptics of Ceremonial Stone Landscapes alike.
That pervading cloud of Colonialistic or Nationalistic attitude that ‘nothing much happened here
before 1620,’ obscures and often ridicules observations of Indigenous stonework
that continues to disappear more every day, buried by leaves or carelessly
destroyed by machinery, washed away with flooding and often rebuilt in a style
foreign to the disappearing Nonnewaug Cultural Landscape.”
“It is a unique
place, indeed,” Watson mused. “Most CSL researchers are looking at "remote" upland
hunting grounds that may also be considered Sacred and Ceremonial Grounds while
here is a village site which isn’t as completely buried beneath the modern cities
of Providence RI or Plymouth MA, or the Village of Mattatuck that became
Waterbury CT, or the village where Sachem Pomperaug had once lived, just five
miles south on the Indian Path, that became present day Woodbury CT.”
I compee agreetly,”
said Sherlock with a wink of his eye. “All these places, connected by roadways
bordered with remnants of zigzag rows of culturally stacked stones as well as
linear rows of stones that undulate like a giant snake on the landscape, the
occasional Algonquian dialect place name still in use need a second and third
look at without remaining under the shadows of a Colonialistic or Nationalistic
Archaeology.”
"Do you know why
most investigators fail? They refuse to extend their basic knowledge beyond the
bounds of basic investigative procedure. It is the mark of the mediocre
investigator who fails to use the informed imagination part of science that has
in the past led to the greatest of discoveries."
~ Sherlock Stones
