It’s called a hedgerow, sometimes settlers in the past pick up rocks to make farming land to grow food. All the rocks were made into fencing to keep the cows in. I don’t think they would have messed with the big rocks though.
Even Broadway (broad way) in Manhattan was originally a native road. The plagues and diseases spread through the natives so fast and with such a horrific death rate, because they had no antibodies or immunity against the diseases that were carried by the Europeans. The death rate was much higher than can ever be calculated.
First European settlers used mainly tree stumps and wood fences as borders. The first settlers only built stone walls after erosion in their fields from agriculture and deforestation started producing rocky soil from glacial rubble. That began in the early 1800s. Settlers likely used some of the stone walls of indigenous peoples that already existed as well.
I was a young lad when I lived in western Mass back in the 70's. We would find rock walls everywhere. We did not realize the antiquity of the walls or their significance.
Those look like fortifications from the french and Indian war. Common tactic was to ambush on a road and fall back into wetlands so brits would be forced out of formation and off the horses. Green Mountain Boys did the same thing in the revolution, maybe check your location against known battles?
It certainly wouldn't hurt to go over the wall line with a metal detector. What you're looking at there certainly has some age to it. I'm in N.E. NM, and we have rock walls/pens from the late 1800's, typically built by shepherds after the natives were isolated on reservations in about 1870. We still have teepee rings in some locations, and a friend found a pre-Apache exposed grave that was exhumed, recorded and re-interred by state archaeologists. There is a lot more history under our noses than is apparent.
I had no idea native Americans built stone walls; I always associated them with colonist farmers plowing fields and needing somewhere to put the rocks they dig up. Thank you for expanding my horizons! I wonder what the purpose of the walls was. It's easy to say something is "ceremonial" and not look deeper. Speculating, perhaps the walls were there to demarcate a sensitive part of the watershed from that spring. I can imagine you wouldn't want your neighbor "copping a squat" right near your source of clean water. A stone wall could be a good way to signpost that.
I have seen a lot of of rock piles and have always been under the impression that they were just where a farmer cleared a field of rocks at least in southwest Virginia
A lot of these features have been misidentified. This is a great presentation that shows that this kind of stonework is widespread, ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-NkZIwe3LV3Y.htmlsi=VBzKR_aJmZJWekIZ
It would be interesting to look on Google Earth and see if the layout is visible. Maybe the split rocks and pointing tree would make sense in a plan of the site in it's geographical context.
I live in Massachusetts. My son and I found a strange boulder in the woods across from our home. There are carvings of native Americans and what clearly looks like a bear. If you're interested, I can lead you to it. It's about a mile and a half walk into the woods. Pretty amazing stuff.
Manitou is the spiritual and fundamental life force among Algonquian groups in the Native American theology. These stones are placed to represent that spirit. This is in Vermont.
