Friday, June 19, 2009

Hopkinton Field Trips with Bruce McAleer (2) - gaps, gateways, and more gaps

Another site Bruce took me to is at the edge of a vast rock pile area in Hopkinton/Holliston. At first glance this was your typical southern New England site, with rock piles like little dumplings, evenly spaced over a flat area:
Here is a closer look and some of them:These are just great. There are not too many sites like this north of the Mass Pike but compare to the Acton Grid or the Stow Grid. But aside from these piles, I started noticing pile-gap-pile structures, and there were lots of them. Some with larger gaps:Some with smaller gaps:
This one is more like a funnel:
There were also some lovely individual piles. This one looked symmetric to either side of a little beakey head:
(Don't even say it Tim! There is no carapace.)

A lovely place, with lovely dappled sunlight and shade:If we had gone further we would have just seen more rock piles. This was a few hundred yards south of College Rock.

Commenting about pile-gap-pile structures: this is the third site I know with a predominance of these structures. They also occur one or two at a time in other places. The other sites with many such structures are in Westford and in Bolton - widely scattered across the countryside. Although I do not like to argue against the "field clearing" hypothesis for rock piles - (because it only keeps that absurd idea alive), still one of the strongest arguments against it is the appearance of deliberate identifiable structures like pile-gap-piles across the landscape in widely different places. That implies a common culture was producing these structures and since there are no such cultrual concepts from Europe, it must be some other culture that was all across our landscape. It must be that Indians made these - by a process of elimination. Somebody had to do it and it sure wasn't Europeans.

1 comment :

Tim MacSweeney said...

The site reminds me very much of the Enderslie Preserve west of Rock Hill Road in Woodbridge!