cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A Burial Ground? Getting my bearings on this stone thing. I found some piles of stones in the forest, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. About forty of them, on several slopes, mostly facing west, overlooking running water. Big piles, the largest about 15 feet by 50 feet and perhaps four feet tall on the down slope. The smallest about five by four. What are they and who made them? They are not field-clearings. The land around them is still littered with stones. It was never plowed or used for crops. There are wire fences that show that some areas around it were used for livestock from perhaps the 1870's onward. But there are still stones everywhere on the tops of the knobs. These were not 'cleared.' The piles are at many different levels on these steep slopes. Most of them are more than one or two cart-loads of stone. Some of them show clear stacking and wall-building on the down-slope sides. They aren't all random piles of dumped rocks. This area was only settled by European colonists in the 1850's. I think that I may have found a Saponi Indian cemetery. I've done a lot of research, read papers, and found references to similar sites elsewhere. If a farmer, even with slave labor, was disposing of unwanted stones from a pasture then he wouldn't have had them dumped on at least forty different sites. The slope for most of these sites would be dangerous to take a truck or a horse-drawn cart along to dump waste stones. Someone in that situation would pick a few places close to the gathering points and drop them all into a few big piles. They face west, towards the setting sun. It turns out that there are many, many sites like these around the US. A community of archaeologists and historians are studying them and documenting them. The ways of proving that they are pre-Columbian involve deconstructing them in order to test either the lowest stones or any artifacts or organic material below. Either carbon dating or a method that determines when a sample was last illuminated by light. I don't know for certain what I've found. 10:00 p.m. - 2020-01-29 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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