Do Native American ceremonial stone landscapes exist in New England, or is all stonework in the region post-contact European handiwork? According to a Massachusetts Historical Commission brochure on historic stone landscape features excerpted below, the answer is that Native American ceremonial stone landscapes are a myth! This is the first in a series of posts that questions this viewpoint, and examines historical bias among New England archaeologists that precludes acknowledging the existence of Native American ceremonial stone landscapes—and the people who created them.
THE LAST WORD: DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF STONE WALLS, PILES AND CHAMBERS
The stone walls built by New England farmers helped define property lines, divide fields, woodlots and pastures, and shape animal pens. Coincidentally, the walls may match cardinal compass points or celestial phenomena – but for practical purposes rather than sacred. It was also common to construct cold cellars and pile surplus rocks within pastures for later use or sale.
Some have suggested a Native American origin for these features. There is no archaeological evidence to support this conclusion. . .
. . . Archaeologists also consider ethnographic and ethnohistorical information. For example, Native American oral traditions record that people did place small stones or twigs on a sacred spot as they passed by. Over time this might result in a small pile of pebbles, tiny cobbles, or sticks, but not large piles. Conversely there is a strong, documented ethnohistory of stone building traditions among the European settlers of Massachusetts. Together, archaeology and ethnohistory provide conclusive evidence that stone walls, piles and chambers are not the work of ancient cultures.
The Massachusetts Historical Commission is the guiding state agency for the protection of historic and prehistoric properties; if you have a question regarding the significance of a stone feature, please contact them . . . .
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As the self-proclaimed “guiding state agency for protection of historic and prehistoric properties”, the Massachusetts Historical Commission has assiduously ignored the beliefs of the United Southern and Eastern Tribes, an inter-tribal organization with 26 federally-recognized Tribal Nation members (including Federally recognized tribes of New England), who declared in a resolution written in 2002 that their people created ceremonial stone landscapes, and that these places do exist.
[F]or thousands of years before the immigration of Europeans, the medicine people of the United South and Eastern Tribal [USET] ancestors used [ceremonial stone] landscapes to sustain the people’s reliance on Mother Earth and the spirit energies of balance and harmony.
[D]uring and following the Colonial oppression of Southern and Eastern Tribes, many cultural and ceremonial practices, including ceremonial use of stones and stone landscapes, were suppressed. . . .
[W]hether these stone structures are massive or small structures, stacked, stone rows or effigies, these prayers in stone are often mistaken by archaeologists and State Historic Preservation Offices (SHPOs) as the efforts of farmers clearing stones for agricultural or wall building purposes.
[A]rchaeologists and SHPOs categorically thereafter, dismiss these structures as non-Indian and insignificant, permitting them to be the subjects of the sacrilege of archaeological dissection and later destruction during development projects. . . .
[C]laiming them as products of farm clearing, professional archaeologists and the SHPOs annually pass judgment on the significance and potential protection of these sacred ceremonial stone landscapes and their structures within USET ancestral territories.
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Could it be that consultation with indigenous people by New England archaeologists might involve a potentially wrenching change in the balance of power, the fear of which has caused some of them to avoid such consultations? And could it be that deeply engrained cultural bias on the part of Eurocentric archaeologists prevents them from recognizing Native American ceremonial stone landscapes in the northeast?
Consider this. For decades, the Massachusetts SHPO has refused to visit the site of a remarkable beehive-shaped stone chamber in Upton, MA that is acknowledged by four federally-recognized New England tribes as part of a highly significant ceremonial stone landscape. In absentia she has determined that it is a colonial root cellar—end of story. Yet recently-completed optically stimulated luminescence analysis of backfill behind a chamber wall yielded dates between 1350 A.D. and 1625 A.D.—predating European settlement in the area. Is it not time for the Massachusetts SHPO to reconsider the colonial attribution?
This brings to mind the words of Paul Bahn from Bluff Your Way in Archaeology:
If History is bunk, then Archaeology is junk. Never let the fact that nothing is really known about past events stand in your way; it is child’s play to give the false impression of being informed, and few will dare to challenge your facts or your hypotheses.
The time has come to challenge the “facts” and hypotheses of New England archaeologists who pontificate without benefit of the Native American voice (which many mistakenly believe has vanished), and to encourage them to open their minds to the truth that hides in plain sight all around them.