Late afternoon Saturday, skies overcast, spring in the damp, cool air and in the granular corn snow underfoot, puddles alongside the road, slush, mud and puddle ponds in the meadows, water flowing freely through icy, stony brook crevices working their way down to the Connecticut River. Clipboard, notebook and a few photos of a site I believe has deep-history significance as a hunting, berry-harvesting ceremonial complex in hand, I’m headed to a fundraiser organized to help defray the costs of an honorable, ongoing battle to stop a Bay State, natural-gas pipeline.
The drawing card for me is a Doug Harris PowerPoint presentation. The lean, braided-ponytailed Harris, 75, is the Narragansett deputy tribal historic preservation officer. His talk will focus on indigenous ceremonial stone landscapes — a hot topic among local deep-history buffs for many years. Also on hand to speak is Anne Marie Garti, an activist attorney who’s fighting the good fight to halt construction of an intrusive, destructive pipeline that’s determined to make its presence felt in bits and pieces of pristine western Massachusetts forest.
West Northfield hosts Jenny Tufts and Gary Rucker have opened their cozy, contemporary, exposed post-and-beam, open floor plan home on Bennett Brook Road to a crowd of maybe 30, two tasteful, cut-stone steps welcoming guests to a porch and front door.
Inside, I find a festive, casual and congenial crowd, hor d’oeuvres circling the dining-room table, beer and wine in a tidy, granite-counter-topped cubby along the functional island kitchen’s north wall. It’s a warm social gathering of cerebral folks ranging in age from their 30s to 70s, including organizer Lisa McLaughlin of Northfield. I recognize fewer folks than expected, and some of those I recognize were not expected. No problem. I enjoy meeting new people and reconnecting with old sources who share my interests.
The subject of Harris’ presentation happened to be apropos for me, personally; however, not surprisingly, his information was not new to me. I have attended other talks of his and been in the same room with the man many times. Plus, I have immersed myself in reading about stone structures, petroglyphs, pictographs, Native American dwellings, ceremonial complexes, Native American literature (oral history), spirituality and worldview … all of it fascinating. I try to keep an open mind, but can’t say I agree with everything I have been exposed to over the years. Isn’t that the attraction? The unknown: always most enticing to curious minds? American history is finite. Not so for prehistory. There, the possibilities are limitless, the meandering hypotheses intriguing.
Which brings us back to last week’s subject, that is photos and drawings of a pictograph discovered by a Greenfield man on three interior walls of a stone structure buried under a layer of earth in Franklin County’s eastern uplands. There seems to be a lot of these structures out there, places like the Monk’s Caves in Wendell and similar turf-covered stone structures and/or beehives on nearby landscapes in Shutesbury, Leverett, Pelham and Leyden. Plus, there are many similarly constructed structures of the like in Vermont and New Hampshire, many of them not all that far from us. Although many scholars and amateur archaeologists have addressed these structures and thrown in their two cents’ worth, the conclusion is that in fact we have not pinned down exactly who built these structures or why. And, really, does the simple fact that historic materials are often found near or inside such structures mean that they were built after Columbus sailed the ocean blue? Could not pioneer homesteaders have discovered such existing structures on land grants or purchases and, puzzled, eventually found a use for them? It’s a beguiling mystery.
The red pictographs drawn on three interior walls of the stone structure brought to my attention by the man who discovered them, and put together an unpublished book he loaned me during a personal visit to my home last week, depict: 1.) two concentric circles that could represent the sun, the moon or even the circle of life or the circle Native Americans sat in for diplomacy, discussion or winter storytelling over a warm, glowing fire; 2.) an antlered animal head that appears to be a deer or caribou; or 3.) what may be a turtle shell intersected perpendicularly by what paleontologist R. Michael Gramly calls an underwater serpent that’s an ubiquitous rock-art image across the continent. Some of these serpents have horns, some don’t, but the base image is always the same, with a large, colored, circular head and a squiggly body tapering down to a pointed tail. This spiritual image is often found around waterfalls and stone crevices, which ancient indigenous people identified as portals to the underworld.
After touring with the late Montague stone-structure aficionado Lionel Girard in the 1970s, and respectfully rejecting Harvard author Barry Fell’s hypotheses about pre-Columbian Celts and Phoenicians touring the New World before Christ — on which Girard based his own amateur hypotheses — our unnamed set his roots around San Francisco. There, he continued to study Indian cultures and stone structures and today is a believer in Fell and Girard’s theory that Old-World explorers were here before Christ. He also believes that seafaring fur-traders taught Northeastern indigenous people to build earthen stone structures with European corbelling for the purpose of storing furs between visits from ships. He says there is no trace of corbelled arches in ancient North or South American stone construction.
I’m not going to pass judgment on my new source’s hypothesis. Who am I to judge? I’ll just file it away in my gray matter and continue to explore other angles, all of them intriguing and creative. I will, however, share with you the pictographic images as drawn by our source, a trained artist and photographer of the Ansel Adams school. Take a look for yourself and allow your mind to wander as far back as the hunter-gatherer Paleoindian era. These images could be that old, say 10,000 or 12,000 years. Then again, maybe they’re 8,000 or 800 or 80 years old, drawn by some mischievous farm boy in the late 1930’s.
It’s part of the great unknown that has attracted curious minds for centuries and will continue to do so until the end of time. The most important prerequisite is to listen to all interpretations with an open mind and free spirit.
Recorder sports editor Gary Sanderson is a senior-active member of the outdoor-writers associations of America and New England. Blog: www.tavernfare.com. Email: gsand53@outlook.com.