I’m frequently asked if a stone pile is associated with Native American tradition, or an artifact of agricultural activity. Having been recently asked this by someone with the administrative responsibility of adjudicating this debate, I thought I’d put it in my SWI blog, and make it available to anyone interested.

First, the presence of Native horticulture turns this binary (Native vs. agricultural) into a tautology.   More simply, a pile can be Native AND agricultural at the same time. Cobble piles in Native farming sites should look like those of Euro-Americans.

Second, the binary of farming vs. Native American  is only one set of explanations that is logically equivalent to the set of other explanations we do know about, which is logically equivalent to the set of explanations wee do not know about. A decision about one pile must be made in the context of these three sets.

This begs the question: “What’s a stone pile?” First, it’s an unconsolidated (loose) concentration (many stones) of clast-supported (stones rest upon one another without being supported by matrix) eminence (positive topographic feature). To me, “pile” connotes a “dumped” degree of order, meaning the mass of stones are not deliberately stacked or arranged in any particular way. This leaves the possibility of surface alteration/decoration/shaping possible without disqualifying it as a pile. Depending on context, a stone pile may be no more than a few stones placed one upon the other. Or it might be a giant heap. I’m not going to define it here because you probably have a good working definition in mind. And that’s good enough for now.

The much easier question ignores these sets of possibilities and deals with one straightforward question: Is this an agricultural pile? If we turn this question into a statement that is relevant, ethical, original, and can which will yield a yes/no result is a hypothesis. By relevant I mean is it worth spending personal or societal effort on it. By ethical, I mean that it does not transcend our community standards of behavior toward one another. By original, I mean it hasn’t been done before: each new pile is an original question. By a yes/no result I mean it is one or the other. Anything fuzzier result disqualifies the statement as being a hypothesis.

Depending on circumstances, the question “Is it an agricultural pile” can be tested within certain limitations in the New England woodlands.

UTILITY AND EXPEDIENCE

 The most important and useful limitation is the assumption of “utility and expedience” in the context of making a living from the land with Euro-American agriculture practices involving mixed husbandry: pasture/ tillage/ sugar-bush/ woodlot etc. during what I call the “pioneering” and “established farm stage.” Humans have limited agro-ecological resources and do not do things like building piles either frivolously or “just for the heck of it,” which I call the idiosyncratic function.

Making the utility-expedience assumption requires that stones were piled to dispose of a local excess of stone, and that local excess was not needed to serve as a source of stone elsewhere. If this were the case, and if the stones were uniformly distributed, then so too should be the piles. Furthermore, the spacing and mass of the piles should correlate with the stoniness of the land.

Outcrops, slabs of rock, residual stumps, ravines, swamps, fence-lines, are sites where neither pasture grass nor crops can grow. Hence, they are preempted from productive activity. They will absorb waste stone if they are close enough to the source. In fact, sprawling stone piles on slabs of rock and outcrops are diagnostic of agricultural waste disposal, and will be used before piles are built on non-preempted land.

Utility-expedience requires that the stone in a pile is not carefully places. It can be placed to economize space, but will not carefully so.

Piles grow outward like talus cones. Along any ray, they are concentric. Any variation in the stone coming at the pile will manifest as “vertical” stratigraphy. A dumped load(s) is suggested by a more massive texture (with exceptions). Dumping, however, usually imparts an asymmetry in plan (like a fan) and cross-section (like a snow-drift with the steep side nearest the site of dumping).

COMPARING PILES

An independent test involves comparing the spatial pattern and morphology of known agricultural piles to those of unknowns. The simplest association here is that waste piles are usually plural, and seldom singular. Let’s not forget that waste piles were harvested to create stone walls. Hence, it’s hard to assume that the resulting pattern is the whole original pattern.

OCCAM’S RAZOR

When presented with two explanations for one phenomenon, the most likely to be correct (not the same as being correct) explanation is the simplest one. What this means is that a stone pile in the woodlands can be assumed to be an agricultural pile unless proven otherwise, because this is the simplest explanation.

Amazing. One minute and I was inside the lovely conference center in the Coach Barn on the Rockefeller Estate in Tarrytown, Westchester County NY. The next minute I was out the back door standing below a wall at least 30 feet high and built of massive boulders plucked from nearby fields.  With me was a group of architects, educators, artists, and staff of the Pocantico Center, which arranges tours of grounds of this property, now managed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.  The questions kept on coming.  Why so tall?  Where are the boulders from?  Why do they let the ferns grow through them?  And above all – How come it doesn’t fall down?

I made up the answers on the the fly just by looking at what I could see.  To the right was a “battered” wall of dimension stone, which means it was cut straight from the quarry to the proper dimensions. And yes, the  word battered is correct, for that’s the word for the angle away from vertical that the wall is laid for ideal support.  To the left was a massive arch, also built of dimension stone, through which the horses and carriages used to enter what had been the finest barn I’ve ever seen: an enormous structure built of quarried gneiss.  Between these two masses of quarried stone was inserted the wall you see.  Some of the boulders were a yard in diameter with nary a scratch mark on them.  Indeed they were “milled” within the shear zone at the bottom of the ice sheet that spread them over the land before melting down to a last gasp.  The placement was the ideal mix of random and deliberate, with no real “courses,” as with a brick wall, and no more than one “tier” meaning only one group of stones from bottom to top, at least in this view.

It’s such fun so share something so fun. With just a few words for stone size, shape, composition, and surface texture, the tour group began to sound like experts.  They were now empowered to go “Exploring Stone Walls,” the title of one of my books.

To answer the question of whether stone walls are landforms, I like to start with the word “landscape.”  According to Webster’s this 16^th century word derives from the Dutch landschap, meaning “land + ship.” Tracking back through the etymology of the Oxford English Dictionary, however, indicates that the concept clearly predates the 5^th century A.D.

Being empirical, ignoring the conventions of art history, and based on the way I hear the term used colloquially and professionally, a landscape is not a place, but an image (visual or mental) of a place that consists of physical entities and that can be seen and appreciated by the human eye from a single spot, often by a single glance.  Technically, its the cone of human vision at the familar scale of village, coast, or rural geography.  A human presence is always either present or suggested.

In contrast, a landform is easy to define because  no cultural connotation is required. Nor is there a required scale. To geologists like me, a landform is any natural discrete physical object composed of “land” (rock or earth) that can be observed in its entirety.  Because humans were visual primates long before they became stone-age men and women, the form of the landscape (landform) has held higher priority over the equally important elements of the material they consist of, the process creating them, and the time involved.

Typically, a landscape is younger and larger than the set of landforms within the scene.  The only exception to this commonality is when the natural scene contains little or no topographic or lithologic variety, for example a sand plain as smooth as a glassy sea such as the the Llano Estacado of west Texas.

So are New England stone walls landforms? It think yes, even though I included the term “natural” in my definition.  First, the vast majority of walls are no more complex than many natural forms, a star-dune for example, or the herringbone structure on a fine-sand beach.  To exclude them as landforms because they were built by humans is to suggest that humans are not natural.  I refuse to accept this false, and damaging dichotomy.

In political dialogue, the infinitive “to stonewall” means to delay or prevent something by putting up a serious barrier of some sort.  Not so for those of us who appreciate the fine art of building a stone wall from scratch, given a supply of stones.   Fortunately, there are a growing number of workshops that individuals can sign up for to learn the art, or practice, of dry stone masonry.

For most people, this is a ritual way of entering New England’s former stone age, generally spanning the 18th and 19th centuries.  For me, it’s like playing outdoor chess. Indeed, some pieces are more valuable than others, strategy is important, and pawns are often sacrificed en route to victory.  And all of this takes place aerobically outdoors.

Last week I was at the Eric Sloane Museum in Kent, Connecticut to spend a day in celebration of New England’s historic stone walls.  This event overlapped with one such stone wall workshop, hosted by the “friends” group of the museum taught by Carl Dill.  The previous week, I recall reading about one at Parmelee Farm in Killingworth, taught by Andrew Pighills and Dan Snow.   And this week I learned of one being offered in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, sponsored by the Wentworth Gardner and Tobias Lear Historic Houses.  With news of three such events reaching the Stone Wall Initiative in as many weeks, I decided to write a blog posting alerting readers about the phenomenon in general, and Portsmouth’s 2 day intensive hands-on masonry conservation class in particular.  It will run on June 13 & 14. The contact person is Sandie Dika, who can be reached at 603-426-9282.

Of course there are!  There have to be!  Hundreds of thousands of human beings have walked and worked the New England uplands for at least 11,000 years.  And many features have been confirmed as pre-Colonial by properly credentialed archaeologists.

But let us not conflate the few, the small, and the odd stone features in the woods with the latticework of abandoned stone walls gracing much of the New England countryside. This latticework of walls is the collective work of colonial and early American farmsteads built by Euro-settlers and their descendants since 1607.

Last night, while giving a talk to the Boxborough Conservation Trust in Massachusetts, I got the inevitable question about pre-colonial stone ruins.  This morning, I decided to post my answer in the form of a keynote speech I gave several  years ago to the New England Antiquities Research Association.

Follow this link.

Friday, February 20, 2015  was a bitterly cold night in New England.  At the University of Connecticut where the SWI is based, the overnight low was -15 F.   The following morning, stone wall enthusiast Kate Johnson sent me a video-clip taken by her parents, Claire and Steve Johnson, from Little Compton, RI.  It showed steam rising from a stone pile like smoke from a dying campfire.  Thinking other stone wall enthusiasts might be interested, I decided to post it on the SWI website.  Click on this link to see it.

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We are delighted to announce that Stone Wall Secrets (1998) has been republished under the same title in a new edition (2014) as a Tilbury House Nature Book as part of its Learning Center. Authored by  Kristine and Robert Thorson (illustrated by Gustav Moore), this book was reprinted in hardcover and paperback before being re-issued in 2014.

As part of this process, and beginning in March, 2015,  Professor Thorson will be heading back into elementary school classrooms to conduct hands-on programs, during which signed copies of the book will be made available to all students at the cost of printing and shipping.

For more information, see the Stone Wall Secrets landing page.

Walking down a trail somewhere on Block Island, I caught sight of a  light-colored dike (vein) that seems to be sharply bent.  This doesn’t make sense because there are no other fractures and no other indications of folding. What you’re looking at is optical illusion created by a pair of planar facets on the surface, each of which is one side of an old fracture.  These facets change your angle of view in such a way that they make the dike appear to be bent.   Proof that this is so is the next photo, taken parallel to the plane of the dike.  From this direction, the angle the facets don’t change the appearance.

This mini-mystery was only one of many delightful things I saw during a trip to Block Island in mid July to run a field trip, give a lecture to the community (sponsored by the Block Island Gardeners), and enjoy the cool fog.  Everyone who was on the trip with me looked at this optical illusion, and found it interesting.  Another was the standard or “archetype” block island wall, taken in the southwestern corner of the island, where the land is preserved from future development.

Note the uniformity of pink granite, the general blockiness of the stone shape, and the subequal mix of semi-rounded and angular fragments.  This indicates “bumper-car” style of boulder traffic in the basal shear zone of the ice sheet, which rounds stones until they break, only to be rounded again.

That’s me, standing in front of about seventy third graders in Guilford, CT at the Calvin Leete Elementary School on Friday the 13th of April.  In the air are the wiggly hands of nearly seventy third grade students.  Why?

Because I asked them: “How many of you have a stone wall in your backyard or in a nearby place?” The hands shot up.  The enthusiasm was palpable.  Every student, it seemed, wanted to tell me about their own favorite wall.

The four classroom teachers and their staff were quite proud of their student’s excitement about the subject, which had just been introduced as part of their earth-science curriculum. They will be linking this subject to other subjects required by the curriculum, namely language arts, science, history, art, and mathematics.  I was there to read and discuss the award-winning  illustrated children’s book, Stone Wall Secrets, for which we wrote a curriculum several years ago.

During my many years of visiting classrooms, I’ve found that elementary school kids like these are no less interested in stone walls than in dinosaurs, volcanoes, and glaciers.  All it takes is a teacher willing to embrace stone walls –New England’s signature landform–  as a launching pad for their earth science teaching, rather than the more national generic menu offered by the national publishers.   Did you know that dinosaur footprints, lava flows, and glacier-marks have all been found on the stones within the region’s walls?   Indeed, these three phenomena are but chapters in the grander story of New England’s  stone walls.

Two days later, I was standing in front of an altogether different group. All were over thirty and most were senior citizens.   This was the Middletown (RI) Historical Society, located in a town that occupies the bulk of Aquidneck Island in Narragansett Bay, and is responsible for its best beaches.  To the south and north are the more well known towns of Newport and Portsmouth, respectively.

This rural residential town is one of three in the state having an ordinance for the protection of stone walls.  Congratulations for their foresight.   This much-older group was equal to the third-grade children of Guildford in terms of their enthusiasm, and they were the ones asking the questions.  In fact, there were so many questions early on that my talk went overtime, forcing the reporter and photographer sent by the Newport Daily News to leave early.

The most iconic item in the historical society’s collection is a spectacular windmill reconstructed in Paradise Park,  adjacent to the society’s small museum, a one-room schoolhouse on the National Register of Historic Places.  When rigged with all eight sails, Boyd’s windmill, built in 1810, provided the power to rotate one grinding stone above another to convert historic Rhode Island’s grain into flour.

Its pair of cylindrical grinding stones –one intact, and one broken– provide a perfect example of what I call a “Notable Stone” in my taxonomy.   Though both were made of durable granite, the top one broke with what engineers call “stress fatigue,” the accumulated result of too many vibrations for too many years.

Though the grinding stones were fascinating, I thought that the local stone walls were even cooler than the millstones.  Though built recently, they capture not only the local style of the well-built historic walls, but also the relative abundance of the local stone in their proper proportions. The vast majority of rock on Aquidneck Island the gray to green-gray muddy sandstone and sandy mudstones known to geologists as the Narragansett Formation. The locals call it slate.   In the photo below is  a boulder of pudding stone (right) and a block of quartz from a vein. Both are common, but less abundant variations within the local rock.

These two recent SWI programs illustrate the range of interest in the phenomenon throughout New England.  If you’re interested, contact me (Robert M. Thorson), the coordinator through this website.