Colonialist Armchair Investigation

 

  I can’t remember the term for the term of a term which one has just suddenly invented at the moment, but here’s the phrase: Colonialist Armchair Investigation. My longtime associate Mr. Peter Waksman knows just what I mean I know because he has alluded to the phenomenon as well, all those times when he’s said that some of these “Indians never built in stone in New England” Denialists need to get out of their armchairs and “take to the woods” and take a look around.

  But neither Peter nor I were the first to say something like that.

 Here’s what Dr. Bruce G. Trigger had to say about something like that:

  The name of the region where Peter and I found ourselves wandering about in, looking for stacked stone features, is known as New England. If I say instead that we’ve been making observations of Indigenous Stonework at “The Eastern Gate of Turtle Island,” most people (from their armchairs) would not have a clue where we were talking about. Right away, one has to use the Colonialist term, the “New England,” to even begin a discussion of where we are investigating which.

 

 “Trigger (1984) started his paper with a discussion of nationalist archaeology, the primary function of which is to bolster the pride and morale of nations or ethnic groups aspiring to nationhood. Examples of nationalistic archaeological traditions cited by Trigger include those in Denmark, Israel, Egypt, Iran, Mexico, China, and Germany.

The second category, colonialist archaeology, refers to archaeology practiced by colonizers in a colonized country. Examples show that colonial archaeologists often emphasized the primitiveness or lack of accomplishments of the ancestors of colonized people to justify discriminatory behavior as well as colonization itself. The United States, New Zealand, and parts of sub-Saharan Africa are examples of countries and regions that experienced periods of colonialist archaeology.

Third, Trigger pointed out that states with worldwide political, economic, and cultural power have produced imperialist archaeological traditions. He included in this category the archaeological traditions of the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States after the advent of processual archaeology. Archaeologists working within an imperialist tradition take for granted the superiority and universal applicability of their theoretical and methodological approaches. They also exert a strong influence on research around the world through their writings, the international nature of their research projects, and the key role they play in training archaeologists from various parts of the world..."

https://anthropology.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/habu_multiple_narrtatives.pdf

: "Nationalist, Colonialist, and Imperialist Archaeologies that claim most of the credit for the majority of an incredible amount of stonework may well be the sort of “Alternative Archaeology” or Pseudoscience that cherry picks a small bit of documentation for a small amount of stonework, as if Denialism is science with no need for further investigation."

Nationalist, Colonialist, and Imperialist Archaeologies  are also “Alternative Archaeologies.”

 

It’s like, Indians of the Hemisphere were doing things with earth and shell and stone.

Everywhere else but not Here in my Town and all around New England,

Those Indians didn’t build anything except campfire hearths with stones until the Europeans came in and “learned them how.”

And except of course for and Gazillions Gazillions of Projectile Points.

And those hammerstones and net weights.

And all those fishweirs in the rivers, by the sea:

On dryland no Indian has a clue how to stack a stone on another,

But stick some Indians in some water 3000 years ago,

And there you go... 

One might ask: What is nationalist archaeology?

One might ask: What is ultranationalist archaeology?

"Nationalism and archaeology have been closely related since at least the nineteenth century. Archaeological interpretations and ancient history can be manipulated for nationalist purposes, such as cultivating national mythologies and national mysticism," writes Mr. Wikipedia.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalism_and_archaeology

WHY Indigenous?

 In the Era of Social Media

     Someone poses a question:

Someone #1 responds: “I've never seen documentation for any stone walls in North America in the 1400s. Never heard in any lectures about pre European history with stone walls in fields.”

And the “stone wall” conversation begins:

Someone I know says: “there are written accounts from settlers in New England, having found stone rows when they arrived in the region.”

#1 replies: “if you could show me the source and the text please, I would greatly appreciate it. I know all about controlled burning to assist in deer population management. That was used by New England native Americans. From my other understanding, they built few stone structures, as they were heavily nomadic.”

#1: “online University lecture gave details on it. Maybe the guy lied. I'm looking for details on stone structures we can say were produced by pre 1400 Eastern North American people. I've studied stelae monuments in South America...Pueblo also had a variety of stone monuments. Everything I've learned about tribes going towards the East Coast and New England have them fully utilizing wood for structures. I was asking for documentation on stone walls being erected around fields, the kind we all know European settlers made in droves, but made by pre Columbian folk. That's what the OP post is all about. Fwiw... I live on land in CT that was farmland from the 1600's with original stone walls and fallen stone bridges over river ways. All this was Native American tribal land... near the Housatonic River.”

 

Someone, apparently mimicking a TV commercial, says:

"Three main reasons:

1) clearing the fields

2) clearing the fields

3) clearing the fields

It was either plant crops on the fields, or grow more rocks in the fields. (Or both.)"

    Of course, the SHEEP show up quickly in the conversation, when several people suggest: "Look up Sheep Fever in New England. Merino sheep were smuggled into the US in the early 1800s and wool production boomed. A majority of the old stone walls were for keeping sheep.”

Someone posts this link of SHEEP – with a banner and several photos of Ireland for some sheepish reason: https://sugarriverregion.org/new-hampshires-hidden-sheep-farming-history/

https://ryanwcurleyphoto.com/ireland

I don't know where this photo was taken:

There is one photo from North America, a "stone wall" that doesn't much resemble the Sheep Fences of Ireland very much at all, claiming to be a low row of stones on Mount Monadnock - with a view of the mountain Mr. Wikipedia says the Abenaki called "menonadenak (the smooth mountain) or menadena (the isolated mountain).

  

 

   And there are some responses about aliens and lost civilizations, perhaps jokingly or perhaps seriously, it’s hard to tell sometimes on social media. It's a strange place where images such as this show up:

     So where to begin?

   First one might consider the affect (effect?) of what Bruce R. Trigger began calling a “Colonialist Archaeology, a type of “Alternative Archaeology” in 1984. Despite a similarity to Indigenous made stone structures of all sorts all over the western hemisphere that may have been used to “domesticate a landscape,” including stone wall-like structures, the New England area is a place where this colonialist archaeology has inhibited any serious scientific study of what are colloquially known as “(Yankee) stone walls:”

   “Trigger (1984) started his paper with a discussion of nationalist archaeology, the primary function of which is to bolster the pride and morale of nations or ethnic groups aspiring to nationhood. Examples of nationalistic archaeological traditions cited by Trigger include those in Denmark, Israel, Egypt, Iran, Mexico, China, and Germany.

The second category, colonialist archaeology, refers to archaeology practiced by colonizers in a colonized country. Examples show that colonial archaeologists often emphasized the primitiveness or lack of accomplishments of the ancestors of colonized people to justify discriminatory behavior as well as colonization itself. The United States, New Zealand, and parts of sub-Saharan Africa are examples of countries and regions that experienced periods of colonialist archaeology.

Third, Trigger pointed out that states with worldwide political, economic, and cultural power have produced imperialist archaeological traditions. He included in this category the archaeological traditions of the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States after the advent of processual archaeology. Archaeologists working within an imperialist tradition take for granted the superiority and universal applicability of their theoretical and methodological approaches. They also exert a strong influence on research around the world through their writings, the international nature of their research projects, and the key role they play in training archaeologists from various parts of the world.”

“Introduction: Evaluating Multiple Narratives: Beyond Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist Archaeologies” - Clare Fawcett, Junko Habu, and John M. Matsunaga (2008)

https://anthropology.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/habu_multiple_narrtatives.pdf

 

  That Colonialist Archeology is alive and well and very vocal still in New England, where some State Archaeologists refuse to entertain the thought that anyone other than European American farmers could have stacked stones for any other reason than clearing agricultural fields and keeping domestic animals contained in pastures and prevented from entering those agricultural fields. In Massachusetts, the Office of Archaeology will not accept site reports that suggest an Indigenous origin of any culturally stacked stone features by anthropologists, archaeologists, or independent researchers. Not much funding goes to any study that’s not related to “the superior culture” replacing the “primitive nomadic” Indigenous on a pristine wilderness, an empty void where nothing much happened until 1620.

 The late Connecticut State Archaeologist Dr. Brian Jones:

  Examples of this Colonialist Archaeology controlling a narrative that Yankee Stone Walls abound, claiming without any real evidence that most if not all stone wall-like structures are post contact constructions. Beginning with the apologistic writings from the settler colonial period about the righteousness of acquiring Indigenous land for settlement using Biblical Law, to modern writers, Colonialistic Archaeology is still alive and well in New England. From books, articles, lectures, and videos by (or about) Eric Sloane to Tom Wessels, Robert Thorson, and Susan Allport (to name just a few), to a manifesto-like, unscientific ad hominin attack by Timothy Ives called “Stones of Contention,” the Colonialistic points of view keep being repeated, and in Ives case appear to perhaps be embracing a new era of Nationalistic Archaeology. The former Principal Archaeologist of Rhode Island contends that since there are almost no “Real Indians” living in New England, there is no good reason why we should even bother to put any effort or money into studying or protecting suspected Indigenous culturally stacked stone features. He also accuses some professional archaeologists and anthropologists as “academic frauds,” as well as suggesting that people claiming Indigenous ancestry are more likely grifters who should get Real Jobs and become Real Americans.

  It "Trickles Down," as they say, this Nationalism:

  Personally, after 35 years of observations and independent research, combined with the first 35 years of my lifelong love of stone walls and the Connecticut landscape I have called home, I would probably say that an unknown percentage of the “stone walls” snaking across the landscape, the Indigenous Cultural Landscape, of this Eastern Gate of Turtle Island, may well be related to the use of fire by Native Americans to “domesticate the landscape.” Roger Williams early on questions the right of Europeans to claim Indigenous land, cites this cultural burning but never mentions stone wall-like “bounds” that may have been used to control these low intensity cultural burns. The Puritans did shortly afterward create Fence Laws that included a height requirement of somewhere around 4 to 5 feet tall that was easily attainable by using split rails to meet the requirement, fencing that was considered an “improvement” on supposedly vacant land, or recently vacated land, that had been allotted to private landowners.

 

Where I live, on the Nonnewaug Floodplain, this happened around 1740:

   The statement made in one of the many comments also reiterates the claim that “the natives present when the Europeans arrived may have been nomadic. But they are said to have told the Europeans that the stone walls were already present when they themselves arrived” is another bit of Colonialistic Myth, that Indians were recent arrivals in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut that may be more related to Puritan and other Christian beliefs of devil worship by the Indigenous Peoples that could result in death or slavery in Bermuda or elsewhere in the Caribbean Islands.

  "Toby, is that your devil worshipping snake effigy?"

   "No Reverand, it was here long before we got here..."

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

  

Mythinformation (Myth + Information)

 

  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 21^st 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.”

 If you have an odd wall you want interpreted, please feel free to send me some descriptions and images.  Perhaps I’ll start a separate section of the website for this.”

https://stonewall.uconn.edu/2024/12/30/bladed-lace-wall/

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

Fences, Walls and Snakes

"If Sloane were alive today"

If the "stone fence" begins with a Snake head,

 Then you may want to reconsider Eric Sloane...

Reconsider Robert Cushman's words as well:

"Robert Cushman (1577–1625) was an important leader and organiser of the Mayflower voyage in 1620, serving as chief agent in London for the Leiden Separatist contingent from 1617 to 1620 and later for Plymouth Colony until his death in 1625 in England. His historically famous booklet titled "Cry of a Stone" was written about 1619 and posthumously published in 1642. The work is an important pre-sailing Pilgrim account of the Leiden group's religious lives."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cushman

If Sloane were alive today,

 Would he be informed and aware of 

Indigenous Ceremonial Stone Landscapes,

or would he still endorse a Colonialist point of view?

He never really mentions a source for this idea:

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

Suddenly a Zigzag (MA/CT)

 

   Looking at an old post, I suddenly notice an “abandoned stonewall” might be a dreaded “zigzag stone wall.” With no further ground proofing, I decide to dive right into just another zigzag dissenter post:

  Well, yes it might be better defined (from a distance or a fuzzy enlarged photo) as appearing to be “serpentine,” but every popular stone wall book (or online lecture of a presentation on the YouTube) might say because it’s so very regular" and such “even” construction that it is probably most likely definitely without a doubt a “Yankee Farmer Wall.” The Colonialist Folk Tale states that zigzag stone walls are accidental creations, agricultural waste tossed against a wooden rail fence, sometime after 1620 in the howling pristine wilderness that became the "New England."

Above: Eric Sloane drawings.

 And yes, you might hear or read that the shape is used to distinguish a “farmer’s fence” from a “Native American Wall” by people who acknowledge the existence of Ceremonial Stone Landscape features, but here I am once again telling you: That carefully constructed zigzag is not the result of “field clearing stones thrown up against wooden rails that have long since rotted away."  

Nonnewaug Snake Effigy

A linear row that turns zigzag:

  These Big Stone Snakes may have functioned as fuel breaks on a fire-tended cultural landscape, a large scale garden – a rock garden, if you will – for a very long time. They are infused with, are alive with, the powers of the Great Serpents who have much to do with weather and water as well as lightning-set fires - or humanly set fires thermally pruning the landscape or protecting certain places from those fires, keeping the fires under control... 

  If this segment of stones was indeed shaped by Farmer William Nilly, then which side of the wooden fence was he tossing those stones?? Likely from the field above, right?? So, the uphill side, right?

And yes, I’m telling you again, “Look for the Snake Head.”

Old Post: https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2016/03/is-that-serpent-like-wall.html

View from the Watch House

 

Colonialist fence lawfare 

Beginning in 1620s:  Acquiring use of “abandoned” cornfields and village sites by treaties, early settler colonists began writing fence laws and making wooden rail fences. Common fields and crops at first, extending into uplands for pastures and firewood etc. later.

From 1673 and up to about 1740, the people living at the Nonnewaug Wigwams were planting in these "Indian cornfields" while south of there the early settler colonists were also planting:

A preexisting low stone “big snake effigy” fuel break of unknown age might enclose or border “something for something” (a road, a stream, places not to be burned, or multiple patches of blueberries to be burnt over on a staggered 4 year schedule etc.) but it’s not a legal 4 and a half foot high fence...

In 1740, when the Nonnewaug Wigwams were "abandoned" by the Pootatuck in the eyes of the colonists, the wooden rail fences appeared as the area became divided into "Home Lotts."

https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2020/10/protective-spirits-guardian-snakes.html

("Great Serpents can be Protective Spirits, Guardian Snakes having control over weather and water – and protection against both the fires caused by lightning shot from the eyes of the Thunder Beings (Thunderbirds) as well as the controlled burning Indigenous Peoples used to maintain Balance and create Abundance," writes Tim MacSweeney)

William Cothren, Woodbury Connecticut's favorite historian, mentions burning and cultural landscape management: “They encamped on Good Hill that night. The next day they proceeded to the valley to examine their possessions. Much of the intervals and plains on the river, throughout the whole extent of the first purchase, had been divested of trees and undergrowth, by the Indian custom of burning over the woods in the autumn, and the natives had for many years raised their slender crops of corn, beans and tobacco, in these pleasant valleys, before the whites set foot in Connecticut. By this method, the forests were cleared of underbrush, so that the hunters could better pursue their game, and could have some open spots for their rude husbandry."

Cothren’s footnotes the passage with a quote from "Hildreth:”

 “While the red men possessed the country, and every autumn set fire to the fallen leaves, the forests presented a most noble and enchanting appearance. The annual firings prevented the growth of shrubs and underbrush, and destroying the lower branches of the trees, the eye roved with delight from ridge to ridge, and from hill to hill; which like the divisions of an immense temple, were crowded with innumerable pillars, the branches of whose shafts interlocking, formed the arch-work of support to that leafy roof, which covered and crowned the whole. But since the white man took possession, the annual fires have been checked, and the woodlands are now filled with shrubs and young trees, obstructing the vision on every side, and converting these once beautiful forests into a rude and tasteless wilderness.”' - Hildreth

"Hildreth" in the footnote turns out to be:

"S.P. Hildreth, (an) early historian of Marietta, Ohio, writing in 1848, said: “The yearly autumnal fires of the Indians…had destroyed all the shrubs and undergrowth of woody plants….and in their place had sprung up the buffalo clover, and the wild pea vine, with various other indigenous plants and grapes, supplying the most luxuriant …pastures to the herds of deer and buffalo….” (Hildreth, 1848, pp.484-485).

I found Hildreth hiding in an article called: References on the American Indian Use of Fire in Ecosystems:

itcnet.org/file_download/5d76d377-8025-4780-8511-4dc8d0596e45

https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fsbdev3_000384.pdf

“Evidence for the purposeful use of fire by American Indians – also termed Native Americans, Indigenous People, and First Nations/People – in many ecosystems has been easy to document but difficult to substantiate,” Dr. Possum read aloud, attempting to read a pdf on the tiny screen of his phone.”

“And yet we are surrounded by these snake-like effigies in stone that may well simply be, in some places, fuel breaks for low ground fires set by these “Indians,” Sherlock Stones mused. “Quite the mystery, my dear Possum, quite the mystery.”

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

https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/search?q=protective+effigies

"Musical Row of Stones" is a term Norman Muller uses: 

https://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2015/03/musical-row-of-stones.html