Stone-Works, Corn and

 Calendars

This is David Wagner's conception of a Middle Archaic Native village-site

     The science of archaeology itself is scarcely more than 100 years old. The Northeast and New England (like the ancient Aegean) have only begun to reveal a record of activity and achievement.

     We face a challenge---to explore, discuss, understand, and integrate the fruits of new sciences with tradition, in order to arrive at the best (most seasoned and accurate, but never "final") conception of the past. Consider: Each time The West discovered a "new" planet in our solar system, it expanded its model of where we are. The new model expanded us. We did not deny Uranus and Pluto because some were "uncomfortable" with their colors. For too long, that is just what The West has done with its histories. All sides deserve and must have better.

     Discoveries await You. All you need is curiosity and knowledge of signs to look for---and RESPECT! See that what you find remains undisturbed until you can bring qualified Native and other expert help. This will test your patience and persistence. Learn and create ways to document your find. Only this creates your right to join the ranks of pioneers. Otherwise, it's plunder of everybody's chance to learn. As in the Aegean, "amateurs" and "people of the land" can and do lead the way. For example, Click the image below to enjoy a brief illustrated report from Fox Running (Mr. Gordon Brainerd) of Connecticutt, on a careful dig he performed with others on a site close to his home. His finds ranged from the Archaic to Late Woodland...

     Here are more recent finds from east-central and northeastern Connecticut: examples of what The Earth yet holds from Chile to Canada. Dating-tests so far suggest long periods of activity where they were used and buried, from 3200 to 930 years ago. These "Early America" pages owe a great debt to David Ostrowski and David Wagner of Connecticut for sharing their research into the early indigenous cultures of Northeast New England.

     The serpent you see in relief above is etched into a gorget---It hung about the neck of some very learned Native New England person(s) and, like gorgets in general, spoke in its symbols of that person's relationships with the land, powers and people(s) of the time. Also found: dozens of tobacco-pipes of the same workmanship you see below have come from these places---tiny frogs, sea-bass, other turtles with 13 plates across their backs, foxes, fish. The spear-throwing weights or crescent-shaped atlatls you see below could scarcely be manufactured today by machine. Contrary, though, to the Bering Strait Theory's concepts, North America's oldest atlatls come from the East: a device that increased your spear's throwing-force many times over. And not least, let's begin to wonder what "cultural influences" created the ceramic statue of the woman just below---What other American cultures do you see in the styling of her head and features? What world cultures do you see in this very choice of subject?

       Native New Englanders spoke (and speak) of Kytan or Cautantowwit as "the Greatest Manitou," or Great Spirit dwelling to the southwest: the source of benign powers, of the ancestors and culture and the haven of spirits in the afterlife. (Many burials faced that way in the "foetal crouch.")

      To the northeast is Chepi or Abbomacho, who sent winter's cold blasts and darkness, and the malignant powers of wandering souls. But also from Chepi, usually a great Serpent, come the deep mysteries born of things under The Earth, visions and shamanic powers too. Chepi as Serpent is the guardian-spirit of the "bridge" that people cross to join their Ancestors---the living stars that fill the universe like the waters and peoples here on Earth. (See for examples works cited here by Quinnipiac historian Iron Thunderhorse.)

       We know too that, between their own unique ways and outside contact-influences from other American regions, Native New England was/is full of reverence for women and "feminine-spiritual" concepts. (Keep in mind that these are very much ongoing cultures.) Their traditions of history and art express this in countless ways from these figures and pipes to the very story of Turtle Island, the American continent itself. It rose from the primeval waters "as" a Turtle, with the aim of helping The Woman Who Fell From The Sky---the mother of all peoples, including New England's benevolent Glooskap/Maushop and his pesky brother Lox.

     The spear-point you see is a Clovis---perhaps 11-12,000 years old and once-believed the earliest American type. How did it get here, how old an "heirloom" was it when buried? (This is not exactly exceptional: another fresh dig at the seaside "Maushop Site" at Caddy Park in Quincy, Mass., found then-ancient implements in the midst of far more recent ones.)

      These owl-effigy pipes are one of many carefully dug by David Wagner, David Ostrowski and their expert associates from "mound fields" themselves arranged in spiral form---several of the mounds all white quartz-stones, and every burial topped with at least one large quartz-stone, plus generous layers of red ochre.

       Does this atlatl-weight with the image of a Raven or Crow on it show the creature eating an ear of corn? Accepting a thank-offering of a tobacco-leaf? Or is the leaf a feather? (By tradition corn first arrived in New England in a crow's ear, and they were known to guide hunters.)

      David Ostrowski and David Wagner have noticed in their extensive field research that some groups of small stone mounds, when viewed from above, reveal patterns such as lines and spiral formations. Many of the stone mounds will have marker stones of white quartz also, with patterns of stones on them forming effigies like turtles, ducks, snakes, and humans. There are many mound-fields in New England and other parts of the Northeast that are currently discounted by most archaeologists as field clearings---which hardly goes to explain their socially meaningful significance. David Ostrowski relates: "These owl-effigy pipes show strong connections to Mother Nature, the impressive owl's stealth as a hunter and its tantalizing sounds of communication. It stirred these ancient individuals to the point where they learned to avail themselves of an owl's wisdom as a guide. The things they learned were not superstitions but made practical and qualitative differences in their real lives."

     What creature do you see in the "whale" effigy below? Is it a whale, which was such an ancient and important food-source in New England? Is it a killer-whale, whose images decorate ancient New England art as early as the Maritime Archaic? A porpoise? The object with the bird-headed handle is a "monolithic axe" (one made from a single piece of stone)---and below this, take a look at two of the most mysterious kind of object that we know and yet don't know: they are often called "boatstones." What is their purpose? Why are they so beautifully made and yet so hard to understand? What's the purpose of the holes we always find drilled into them?

     University of Texas laboratories confirm that those are "Native copper" earrings and rolled beads. When these experts publish more of their finds, you will see things even more exquisite. A stone pipe 18 inches long (unheard of even in South America) whose stem is two twined serpents and whose bowl is a Native man's head, flanked by the serpents' heads. Decorated gorgets, ritual "talking stones," more effigy-pipes like a plump Sea-Bass, birds, frogs, foxes. Hundreds of copper discs incised with three concentric circles, perforated at center as if made for musical instruments or to hang from a priceless garment. And not least, spatial/geographical correspondences among these spiral-form sites and others. Again you see the vast horizons opening before us.

      Can we begin to speculate why such treasures---the objects of a rich daily life---lie packed together to this degree? Indeed, from the gorgets to the spear-throwing weights, each may represent both important group-rituals and their individual owners, either literally or symbolically buried here among their clans and families. We don't know---but you're looking at the cutting edge. And there are worlds more to discover.

     Over hundreds of generations and thousands of years, Native Northeasterners communed with their spiritual world and memorialized their observations in larger "fixed" stone-works---from the "singing walls" of Martha's Vineyard to the region's many sites with carved glacial boulders and formations of standing-stones that appear to have astronomical contexts and/or calendar functions. (One of the best recent surveys of these is Mavor and Dix's Manitou; and don't miss the works of NEARA, the New England Antiquities Research Association, link below).

     Native Northeast stone-works were either dismissed or destroyed by later colonists as "the Devil's works"; and then came increasingly secular phases of American history that did the same by other ideological means. By the time 19th-century historians (most schooled in New England) began to notice the huge earth-mounds and major Native sites of the Midwest, their commitment to "Manifest Destiny" drove them to claim that they'd been built by almost anybody but American "savages." They sooner suggested "The Lost Tribes of Israel"; or (as William Cullen Bryant's poem "The Prairie" put it) that the imposing remains providentially signaled Native America's "inevitable fate" as The United States conquered a continent full of peoples. The first anthologist of "American Literature" Moses Coit Tyler (a Congregational minister turned lecturer) deemed them "fierce dull bipeds standing in our way." As Nina Baym's research shows, Tyler was followed for generations reaching our own "because he himself was a follower."The profoundly rich sites we find today owe their survival to more than just contemptuous ignorance. Native people themselves, approached at times by relatively sympathetic "maverick" historians, brought a sly circumspect caution to their services as guides. Records say that these Native guides, leading investigators to a site of some significance, would take them there by routes that conspicuously avoided other areas. Why? "Local-savage superstition," the historian would write---never suspecting that his guide endured this in order to protect the most significant places from intrusion. Plenty of evidence today points to quietly-ongoing relationships between Native New Englanders and these "new" major sites.

     As we know from studies of ancient Europe too, those Powers include spiritual and natural forces, and aspects of human experience---from sexuality to issues of power ("aggression" being one kind of power). If we find all these concerns among the facts that describe these new-found objects and places, we may surmise that these were not just "powerful places to be." They were sites of collective ritual-address to those Powers and human quandaries, sites for honoring and celebrating them, and places where new understandings could be achieved: places for teaching the young.

     For archaeologists as seasoned and respected as Dean R. Snow, for historians like Great Moose too, one of "the most striking characteristics" of these stone-works and petroglyphs is their "heavy sexual content" (Snow "Solon"; Gardner "Anthropomorphic"). New England's many small "effigy pestles" are anatomically-perfect stone penises (one from Nantucket is over 6,000 years old). Once they were written off as "grinding tools"(the pun not then intended), for a time when Native people did not grow crops. Today, many suggest symbolic functions for them; not least that (according to Gardner) they were "symbolic of female ascendancy" as the center of the community and household. Men were known to "wield" them but did so against tradition, as Great Moose relates from no less than historian Gladys Tantaquidgeon.It's no great leap to wonder how we might unpack certain meanings in those facts. The thing-itself becomes symbolic because women recognize men's literal body-based "power to dominate," and the sexual part they play in the miracle of childbirth. At the same time, it is woman who "dominates" (exercises decisive guiding-power) because the men cannot help but look to her and the children in everything they do. A woman in their language is okasu: "the living producer, giver of life on earth," born of the Kehchissquaog, the female elders. The phallus, a real-life thing, becomes a symbolic object that expresses relationships---and its power is found to belong in woman's hands. (This Native wit is intended.) This means that more than "brute natural force" and other determinisms guide individual and community relations. Observation, reflection, choice, experimentation, discovery, and flexible cooperation seem more likely decisive factors.

      Native people(s) originally using this site became aware that certain alignments among the boulders, local hills, and the annual course of the sun could mark and bring them knowledge both useful and profound. (Note that because some of these readings are about 2 degrees off center over the sighting-boulders, the site may be very old; for the sun itself drifts slightly toward the south each year and this variance grows more notable with each thousand year-period.)

      How does this place work? Its obvious uses don't necessarily relate to agriculture, for "hunter/gatherers" too mark astronomical events and natural rhythms that govern their surroundings. So did New England Native people as they looked south from Boulder A over Boulder C at the Winter Solstice, or from Boulder B over C at the Spring Equinox. Sighting along these lines in the opposite direction, they used a nearby hill as an intervening or "false horizon" (rather than the actual one in view), and the boulders gave them a perfect planting calendar for this region.The word solstice means "stationary sun." If you observe the sun's position against this "false horizon" hill each day at sunrise, you see that for several days at a time it appears to rise at the same point (hence "stationary"), and that at other times its rising-point "moves" or changes. For example, by sighting the sun from Boulder C over Boulder P (the "planting stone"), you know the time (April 30-May 1) best for planting corn-crops in New England. Then, as the sun moves day by day toward alignment with Boulders C and A, you mark the Summer Solstice (June 11-July 1); and within about 6 weeks (via Boulders C and P again), the sun's alignments mark the "Green Corn" time when the first ears should be ripe (August 12-13). By the time sunrise aligns with Boulders C and B, Harvest-time has arrived (September 5-6), a date that avoids both early- and late-autumn frosts that can harm crops. This is a total of 120 days---precisely the "window" of time for growing corn in New England.

     For down below one side of this hill where meets a dry stream bed, we find a whole collection of large stones of unmistakably uniform shape (and not one mark of a tool on any of them), haphazardly dumped off the hill and half-buried. These remarkable and unique triangular stones would stand 4-5 feet tall, and may well be the site's original main features---pushed entirely off the hill in less tolerant colonial times and the site (for all we know) ignored until more recently. Not least in import is the stone at right in the first picture, at bottom in the second: what can only be described as a turtle-shell, for along its rectangular 4-foot back its surface is sharply "crowned" like that of a Snapping Turtle, and it even includes the familiar recess or "slot" at one end where a real turtle's head emerges from the shell. No other New England species has quite this distinct crowned shape to its shell. The Snapping Turtle spends most of its life in watery depths, and makes a fierce response to any who disturb it.Was this "turtle," a Native symbol known across the Americas, the central icon of a site we begin to grasp through the great labor needed to build it? We don't know, and as usual, answers wait on funded and formal archaeology. Clearly, this place belongs to a family of important sites. We realize how much we have to rescue and learn right under the nose of "civilization." How little our colonial ancestors bothered to understand about peoples and places they readily demonized dubbed "savage children," and tried to destroy for their own purposes.

     Concentric circles of natural and human experience---cycles within cycles---inform the Native New England view of existence, from The Earth to The Ancestors to the Living and Those To Come.

      What was this place about? With dating-tests so far we have a somewhat unwieldy range on when it was in use: from 3200 to 900 (and, we know, beyond that). Putting the simplest elements together, we surmise that these pecked-in images, stained in their outlines with ochre, relate to rituals documented among "hunter-gatherer" peoples worldwide: rites of communion with and gratitude for these life-sustaining creatures and powers.

     Concentric circles of natural and human experience---cycles within cycles---inform the Native New England view of existence, from The Earth to The Ancestors to the Living and Those To Come.

 Indications are that many stone work sites represent three- (and more) dimensional ideas of The Powers that drive the world. "Man has ever sought intercession and communion with those forces above and beyond his understanding and control," wrote late Wampanoag Tribal Historian Great Moose/Russell H. Gardner ("Genesis"), "and our native Indian ancestors were no different in this respect."

      "They lived very comfortably, happily, and did not destroy The Earth," points out Wampanoag historian Linda Coombs (a professional of Plimoth Plantation, Mass., qtd. in the Dempsey documentary NANI).

     These symbols and places together are multi-dimensional living and teaching-tools. They bond together groups and generations with the practical and deep value of their "answers" to perpetual human questions; and center them in a Multiverse that is alive, full of wisdom, and speaks.A patient person discovers that this is neither utopian, unscientific, nor lost.

     Many sites marked by stone-works are known as "dancing places," like Dancing Field at Indian Hill (Tisbury, Martha's Vineyard), Dancing Hill in Pembroke, and Tuspaquin's Hill in Middleboro (these and more in Gardner's "Anthropomorphic"). Dance would be one part of large intertribal events recorded in the earliest writings. Many a "major stone" also bears the image of one or more of the animals most important to Native New Englanders: the White Tail Deer and the Black Bear. Along with The Great Serpent, this is what we find at this site today in the Plainfield/Sterling region of eastern Connecticut. (NOTE: What you see has been cross-analyzed by experts from Native historians to the U.S. Geological Survey; but much as we encourage direct experience of these things, for obvious reasons we cannot widely reveal more exact site-locations.)

      First at left you see the largest of (at least) three boulders that make up the teaching wonders of this place. These stones sit (whether naturally or arranged) on the gentle western slope of the highest hill in their region. They're granite, a hard stone that has to be pecked (vs. carved, as with softer sandstones). There's a small symphony of signs and images among these three main boulders.

      The second boulder above---with its ovals distinctly like a snake's eyes---seems to make The Great Serpent a part of this place. (The "third" boulder of this site, not shown, is smaller and covered with many pecked-in ovals.) A relevant land-feature is that this site stands close to plentiful fresh water, namely the "Great Cold Spring" that feeds dairy-cattle today. Once it was so powerful that its waters pouring from the ground may have approached the level of a geyser---a wonder to people then as well as now

      The creature at left---whose teeth are made up of Milky or Smoky Quartz---best compares in appearance with the local ecology's Black Bear. At the bottom-left of this boulder (upper photo) there appears to be a creature with long bull-like horns: it could be a big-antlered Moose "face on" to us, or perhaps a tribal shaman in familiar horned headdress. Above it, the neck and head of a female Deer (or perhaps Moose-cow, its ears back) stretches out in the space above the lower creature's horns. At center are an oval and a circle- dot-figure (the oval we also find on the other two stones of this site). Notably below these, we see what may most seem to be some kind of scrotal or phallic image.

      What was this place about? With dating-tests so far we have a somewhat unwieldy range on when it was in use: from 3200 to 900 (and, we know, beyond that). Putting the simplest elements together, we surmise that these pecked-in images, stained in their outlines with ochre, relate to rituals documented among "hunter-gatherer" peoples worldwide: rites of communion with and gratitude for these life-sustaining creatures and powers.

     These known periods of use for the site also cross the ages when agriculture and corn farming developed in the Northeast. The site's structure---whether original or modified---reflects what may have been new significances for the Native Americans who used it down the generations. The positions of these boulders show us the landscape itself a teacher.

      So, while indications are that this site was in use before the arrival of corn agriculture, the facts also suggest an evolving and expanding body of knowledge that Native Americans built into it over time. Few if any New England sites so clearly and efficiently bring together the worlds and rhythms of animals, plants and people into harmoniously life-sustaining relation. Were these "solar stations" discovered locally, or taught to New Englanders by perhaps the same peoples who brought corn agriculture to the region? Were the boulder-alignments noticed or created? Whatever the answer, only years and generations of careful observation made it possible. The result was (and is) a "way" that centers people within the living rhythms of the world.

      This is one of many sites becoming visible across the Northeast.

       Here is one other site under study, close to the city of Boston and not far inland from the seacoast. Weymouth Historical Society President Phil Smith and others---first helped by "amateurs"---are examining its remarkable characteristics.

      To reach this place you walk more than a mile through today's dense woods along scarcely-visible paths. As you approach it, crossing dry stream-beds and climbing gently toward higher ground, you notice more and more lengths of stone "walls" no more than three feet high and made up of boulders of fairly uniform size (from 2 to 4 feet around): these formations run for hundreds of feet into the surrounding woods in almost every direction relative to the "main" site, and leave no doubt that building them was hard labor. While they may turn out to be later farmers' property-lines etc., none yet found intersect at right angles (as property-lines do). Straight as they mostly are, in fact they have almost no familiar-looking symmetries at all, but may belong instead to the documented stone-work traditions detailed in Mavor/Dix's Manitou, in which such "walls" serve no purpose we yet understand. Some formations on Capawac/Martha's Vineyard are called "singing walls" for the sounds made by winds whistling through them: perhaps these in Weymouth comprise a "sacred topographical architecture," lines that signify the special character of the "main" site nearby.

      This hilltop-site is also surrounded by smaller ones that feature the "face" seen just above along one of the trail-approaches, as well as larger flat, triangular and other boulders whose arrangements clearly suggest human arrangements and/or use.

      This hilltop suddenly presents us with a circle (about 50 feet wide) of standing stones---30 of them, a number of almost-certain calendarical significance. However, close inspection of these stones reveals the marks of modern stone-tools. These and other signs suggest that persons-unknown "reconstructed" this circle relatively recently (perhaps during the last 100 years). At the same time, further evidence shows that this was, originally, a place of Native American significance.

      Can we begin to speculate why such treasures---the objects of a rich daily life---lie packed together to this degree? Indeed, from the gorgets to the spear-throwing weights, each may represent both important group-rituals and their individual owners, either literally or symbolically buried here among their clans and families. We don't know---but you're looking at the cutting edge. And there are worlds more to discover.

     Over hundreds of generations and thousands of years, Native Northeasterners communed with their spiritual world and memorialized their observations in larger "fixed" stone-works---from the "singing walls" of Martha's Vineyard to the region's many sites with carved glacial boulders and formations of standing-stones that appear to have astronomical contexts and/or calendar functions. (One of the best recent surveys of these is Mavor and Dix's Manitou; and don't miss the works of NEARA, the New England Antiquities Research Association, link below).

     Native Northeast stone-works were either dismissed or destroyed by later colonists as "the Devil's works"; and then came increasingly secular phases of American history that did the same by other ideological means. By the time 19th-century historians (most schooled in New England) began to notice the huge earth-mounds and major Native sites of the Midwest, their commitment to "Manifest Destiny" drove them to claim that they'd been built by almost anybody but American "savages." They sooner suggested "The Lost Tribes of Israel"; or (as William Cullen Bryant's poem "The Prairie" put it) that the imposing remains providentially signaled Native America's "inevitable fate" as The United States conquered a continent full of peoples. The first anthologist of "American Literature" Moses Coit Tyler (a Congregational minister turned lecturer) deemed them "fierce dull bipeds standing in our way." As Nina Baym's research shows, Tyler was followed for generations reaching our own "because he himself was a follower."The profoundly rich sites we find today owe their survival to more than just contemptuous ignorance. Native people themselves, approached at times by relatively sympathetic "maverick" historians, brought a sly circumspect caution to their services as guides. Records say that these Native guides, leading investigators to a site of some significance, would take them there by routes that conspicuously avoided other areas. Why? "Local-savage superstition," the historian would write---never suspecting that his guide endured this in order to protect the most significant places from intrusion. Plenty of evidence today points to quietly-ongoing relationships between Native New Englanders and these "new" major sites.

     As we know from studies of ancient Europe too, those Powers include spiritual and natural forces, and aspects of human experience---from sexuality to issues of power ("aggression" being one kind of power). If we find all these concerns among the facts that describe these new-found objects and places, we may surmise that these were not just "powerful places to be." They were sites of collective ritual-address to those Powers and human quandaries, sites for honoring and celebrating them, and places where new understandings could be achieved: places for teaching the young.

     For archaeologists as seasoned and respected as Dean R. Snow, for historians like Great Moose too, one of "the most striking characteristics" of these stone-works and petroglyphs is their "heavy sexual content" (Snow "Solon"; Gardner "Anthropomorphic"). New England's many small "effigy pestles" are anatomically-perfect stone penises (one from Nantucket is over 6,000 years old). Once they were written off as "grinding tools"(the pun not then intended), for a time when Native people did not grow crops. Today, many suggest symbolic functions for them; not least that (according to Gardner) they were "symbolic of female ascendancy" as the center of the community and household. Men were known to "wield" them but did so against tradition, as Great Moose relates from no less than historian Gladys Tantaquidgeon.It's no great leap to wonder how we might unpack certain meanings in those facts. The thing-itself becomes symbolic because women recognize men's literal body-based "power to dominate," and the sexual part they play in the miracle of childbirth. At the same time, it is woman who "dominates" (exercises decisive guiding-power) because the men cannot help but look to her and the children in everything they do. A woman in their language is okasu: "the living producer, giver of life on earth," born of the Kehchissquaog, the female elders. The phallus, a real-life thing, becomes a symbolic object that expresses relationships---and its power is found to belong in woman's hands. (This Native wit is intended.) This means that more than "brute natural force" and other determinisms guide individual and community relations. Observation, reflection, choice, experimentation, discovery, and flexible cooperation seem more likely decisive factors.

      Native people(s) originally using this site became aware that certain alignments among the boulders, local hills, and the annual course of the sun could mark and bring them knowledge both useful and profound. (Note that because some of these readings are about 2 degrees off center over the sighting-boulders, the site may be very old; for the sun itself drifts slightly toward the south each year and this variance grows more notable with each thousand year-period.)

      How does this place work? Its obvious uses don't necessarily relate to agriculture, for "hunter/gatherers" too mark astronomical events and natural rhythms that govern their surroundings. So did New England Native people as they looked south from Boulder A over Boulder C at the Winter Solstice, or from Boulder B over C at the Spring Equinox. Sighting along these lines in the opposite direction, they used a nearby hill as an intervening or "false horizon" (rather than the actual one in view), and the boulders gave them a perfect planting calendar for this region.The word solstice means "stationary sun." If you observe the sun's position against this "false horizon" hill each day at sunrise, you see that for several days at a time it appears to rise at the same point (hence "stationary"), and that at other times its rising-point "moves" or changes. For example, by sighting the sun from Boulder C over Boulder P (the "planting stone"), you know the time (April 30-May 1) best for planting corn-crops in New England. Then, as the sun moves day by day toward alignment with Boulders C and A, you mark the Summer Solstice (June 11-July 1); and within about 6 weeks (via Boulders C and P again), the sun's alignments mark the "Green Corn" time when the first ears should be ripe (August 12-13). By the time sunrise aligns with Boulders C and B, Harvest-time has arrived (September 5-6), a date that avoids both early- and late-autumn frosts that can harm crops. This is a total of 120 days---precisely the "window" of time for growing corn in New EnglandFor down below one side of this hill where meets a dry stream bed, we find a whole collection of large stones of unmistakably uniform shape (and not one mark of a tool on any of them), haphazardly dumped off the hill and half-buried. These remarkable and unique triangular stones would stand 4-5 feet tall, and may well be the site's original main features---pushed entirely off the hill in less tolerant colonial times and the site (for all we know) ignored until more recently. Not least in import is the stone at right in the first picture, at bottom in the second: what can only be described as a turtle-shell, for along its rectangular 4-foot back its surface is sharply "crowned" like that of a Snapping Turtle, and it even includes the familiar recess or "slot" at one end where a real turtle's head emerges from the shell. No other New England species has quite this distinct crowned shape to its shell. The Snapping Turtle spends most of its life in watery depths, and makes a fierce response to any who disturb it.Was this "turtle," a Native symbol known across the Americas, the central icon of a site we begin to grasp through the great labor needed to build it? We don't know, and as usual, answers wait on funded and formal archaeology. Clearly, this place belongs to a family of important sites. We realize how much we have to rescue and learn right under the nose of "civilization." How little our colonial ancestors bothered to understand about peoples and places they readily demonized, dubbed "savage children," and tried to destroy for their own purposes.

This "glacial erratic" or boulder left behind by a glacier stands close by the above ancient site. It's "Weymouth Granite"---so-called for its reddish iron-oxide coloring. Do you see the points on this possible "Serpent's Head" (nose, eye and ear) with this red tint? Are they alone worn down and discolored like the other boulders you've seen because of ritual activity? More investigations will tell...