This is near-raw Field Footage from today’s re-visit. Not truly edited, just what was shot today strung together, without narration. Join me in the field!
How can there be a Potential Serpent Effigy Form in Vermont?
The Indigenous Peoples — Native Americans — of the Northeastern United States enhanced the land they lived upon, constructing Ceremonial Stone Landscapes, leaving behind stone assemblages which resembled cairns and low stone walls. These were later assumed to be the forgotten work of early colonizers or settlers, and were later still attributed to a short-lived Merino Sheep “craze” of the early 19th century by myth-making archaeologists and ecologists explaining away 12,000 years of Indigenous impact on the land.
Resolutions of The United South and Eastern Tribes (USET) set out to correct the record by identifying these stone constructions as Ceremonial Stone Landscapes constructed by their Ancestral Peoples. Archaeologists such as Curtiss Hoffman, author of Stone Prayers (2018), now build upon the ground-breaking early work of amateur antiquarians like scientists James Mavor and Byron Dix, authors of MANITOU (1989), the book which first proposed that New England’s stonework could be of Indigenous origin.
Authors and researchers like myself — today’s amateur antiquarians — continue to reassess the stonework of New England and the surrounding area. And it’s clear from my own work that these ideas are still really only just reaching the mainstream. Most people haven’t yet heard of these Ceremonial Stone Landscapes constructed by Indigenous folks in the Northeast.
What most people have heard are a lot of fabrications and what might kindly be called “mistaken assumptions”. For example? Up until recently, many of us were taught that “Indians” in the Northeast didn’t work with stone, that they didn’t live in what’s now the state of Vermont, that there were so few Indigenous people the entire continent was sparsely inhabited and left mostly a Pristine Wilderness until Europeans arrived… None of which was true.
It’s not surprising, then, that the “stone walls” of Indian Brook Reservoir Park in Essex, Vermont, are assumed by most to be of settler manufacture. There is said to be no archaeological evidence of Indigenous habitation in the area that’s now covered by the park. Yet, this park is in a known Indigenous travel corridor. And there are sites not far from here, many discovered as they prepped a Circumferential Highway, which show evidence of continuous Indigenous use and habitation of this area all the way back to the end of the Ice Age!
If we allow that the Indigenous peoples of this area worked with stone, then I believe we see possible Indigenous stone constructs all around this park. Some were incorporated into later settlers’ work, some were left intact.
This Potential Serpent Effigy Form remains a work of high interest. Well, to me, anyway. I reported this Potential Serpent Effigy form to the Vermont State Archaeologist after discovering it and offered to show him to it if he wanted to see it, but he did not respond. This video walk-around now gives you a quasi-virtual chance to join me in the field and see it for yourself. Thank you for watching.
Did you know my new book is out? Ancient Stone Mysteries of New England is available in paperback, on sale on line wherever paperbacks are sold. Details and links to buy the book can be found at AncientStoneMysteries.com.
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