A Handbook Of Stone Structures In Northeastern United States

This handbook is the first comprehensive field guide to both agricultural and Native American stone structures found throughout northeastern United States. These stone structures include stone cairns, chambers, standing stones, niches, enclosures, stone walls, foundations, wells, pedestal boulders, Manitou stones, and other structures. The handbook provides the means to identify, document, analyze, and interpret these structures.

From the time of the American Revolution to the end of the 19th century, Lawton Foster Road in Hopkinton, Rhode Island was home to a small rural community. A few families eked out a living on the rocky poor soils through growing corn, rye, potatoes, apples, small scale sheep farming, and timber harvesting. Today, the land has reforested and much of it has become wildlife conservation property. These lands harbor a big mystery. Over 1500 stone structures have been found including stone cairns, three stone chambers, several serpent effigies, enclosures, niches, triangle symbolism and other odd man-made features. These are in addition to the more recognizable historic structures like house and barn foundations, stone walls, and two saw mill sites. Who built these enigmatic stone cairns? When? And for what purpose? A dedicated team composed of stone structure researchers, field documentation team, local historians, and conservation people set out to unravel this mystery through documenting the structures, researching the genealogy of the families who lived there, deed research, and analysis of the structure themselves and their relationships to each other. The results of this multi-year effort were a major surprise. The findings challenge conventional historical and archaeological assumptions about these stone structure sites.

For most people, the term “root cellar” evokes an image of a brick or stone masonry subterranean structure tunneled into a hillside. These classic root cellars are only one of a number of different types of structures used to preserve root crops, vegetables and fruits over the past 400 years. The other structures include subfloor pits, cooling pits, house cellars, barn cellars, field root pits & trenches, and root houses. Root Cellars in America provides a history of all the structures, discusses their design principles, and details how they were constructed. The text is accompanied by period illustrations from the agricultural literature along with archaeological photographs. There has been a long standing debate whether the stone slab roof and corbelled beehive shaped subterranean structures in northeastern United States are root cellars or Native American ceremonial stone chambers. New research indicates some are root cellars and some are ceremonial chambers. The third edition has a new chapter exploring this topic. Detailed guidance is provided on how to distinguish the two from each other based on differences in their architectural traits.

Challenging traditional and long-standing understandings, this volume provides an important new lens for interpreting stone structures that had previously been attributed to settler colonialism. Instead, the contributors to this volume argue that these locations are sacred Indigenous sites. This volume introduces readers to eastern North America’s Indigenous ceremonial stone landscapes (CSLs)—sacred sites whose principal identifying characteristics are built stone structures that cluster within specific physical landscapes. Our Hidden Landscapes presents these often unrecognized sites as significant cultural landscapes in need of protection and preservation. In this book, Native American authors provide perspectives on the cultural meaning and significance of CSLs and their characteristics, while professional archaeologists and anthropologists provide a variety of approaches for better understanding, protecting, and preserving them. The chapters present overwhelming evidence in the form of oral tradition, historic documentation, ethnographies, and archaeological research that these important sites created and used by Indigenous peoples are deserving of protection. This work enables archaeologists, historians, conservationists, foresters, and members of the general public to recognize these important ritual sites. Contributors Nohham Rolf Cachat-Schilling Robert DeFosses James Gage Mary Gage Doug Harris Julia A. King Lucianne Lavin Johannes (Jannie) H. N. Loubser Frederick W. Martin Norman Muller Charity Moore Norton Paul A. Robinson Laurie W. Rush Scott M. Strickland Elaine Thomas Kathleen Patricia Thrane Matthew Victor Weiss

The main complex of the America’s Stonehenge site in New Hampshire is a collection of stone chambers, enclosures, niches, standing stones, carved drains & basins, and astronomical alignments. The archaeological community has largely dismissed this seemly eclectic collection of structures as the work of an eccentric farmer named Jonathan Pattee who built his house on top of the ruins in the 19th century. Other researchers have sought to compare the chambers and astronomical alignments to stone structures from around the world built by other ancient peoples. No one has thought to evaluate the site on its own merits, specifically evaluating its architecture. Architecture can tell you a lot about a culture. Using this approach the author unravels the mystery surrounding the site. This architectural study revealed the site was built in a series of distinct phases each with its own unique style while at the same time incorporating key concepts and ideas from previous phases. There is a clear evolution of building skills and cultural ideas that can be followed through the architectural build-out of the site. Because key features and ideas were carried forward from one phase to the next, we now know that the site was the work of a single culture over a several thousand year period. Stone tools and pottery recovered from archaeological excavations at the site confirm that the builders were Native Americans. The idea of Native Americans building stone structures for ceremonial and spiritual purposes has gained a lot of credibility over the past twenty-five years. There is mounting evidence that hundreds of ceremonial stone landscapes (CSL) with stone cairns, niches, enclosures, standings stones, chambers and astronomical alignments found throughout northeastern United States are part of a broad based Native American cultural tradition. The America’s Stonehenge site is one of the most sophisticated and culturally complex of these sacred ceremonial places. The second part of this book uses primary source materials like deeds, town records, court cases and genealogy to reconstruct the history of the Pattee family who owned the hill where the site is found from 1739 through 1863. The Pattees started out in the 1700s as a prosperous family with a house in North Salem village and a 248 acre farm. By the 1820s, the third generation was reduced to owning 15 acres of the original farm and living in a small house built on top of the ruins of the site. Despite his many financial misfortunes, Jonathan Pattee (third generation) managed to hold on to and protect the site.

This book is an offbeat field guide for sites in North America that reflect the rejection of the facts of prehistory and history. They are the physical equivalents of "fake news" about America's ancient past. Feder provides an entertaining summary forty sites along with the practical information you’ll need to visit these fun and fascinating sites.

A Guide to New England Stone Structures is a basic field guide to identifying the many different types of stone structures found while hiking through the forest and conservation lands in New England.

A ground-breaking study of ceremonial stone landscapes in Northeast America and their relationship to other sites around the world • Features a comprehensive field guide to hundreds of megalithic stone structures in northeastern America, including cairns, perched boulders, and effigies • Details the Wall of Manitou, the Hammonasset Line, landscape astronomy along the Hudson River, and a several-acre area in Woodstock, NY, with large, carefully constructed lithic formations • Analyzes the archaeoastronomy, archaeoacoustics, and symbolism of these sites to reveal their relationships to other ceremonial stone sites across America and the world Presenting a comprehensive field guide to hundreds of lost, forgotten, and misidentified megalithic stone structures in northeastern America, Glenn Kreisberg documents many enigmatic formations still standing across the Catskill Mountain and Hudson Valley region, complete with functioning solstice and equinox alignments. Kreisberg provides a first-person description of the “Wall of the Manitou,” which runs for 10 miles along the eastern slopes of the Catskill Mountains, as well as narratives about related sites that include animal effigies, reproductive organs, calendar stones, enigmatic inscriptions, and evidence of alignments. Using computer software, he plots the trajectory of the Hammonasset Line, which begins at a burial complex near the tip of Long Island and runs to Devil’s Tombstone in Greene County, New York. He shows how the line runs at the same angle that marks the summer solstice sunset from Montauk Point on Long Island, and, when extended, intersects the ancient copper mines of Isle Royal in Upper Michigan. He documents a several-acre area on Overlook Mountain in Woodstock, New York, with a grouping of very large, carefully constructed lithic formations that together create a serpent or snake figure, mirroring the constellation Draco. He demonstrates how this site is related to the Serpent Mount in Ohio and Ankor Wat in Cambodia and reveals how all of the vast, interlocking sites in the Northeast were part of an ancient spiritual landscape based on a sophisticated understanding of the cosmos, as practiced by ancient Native Americans. While modern historians consider these sites to be colonial era constructions, Kreisberg reveals how they were used to communicate with the spirit world and may be remnants of a long-vanished civilization.