Purpose of this Blog

                                                                Mission Statement:

Welcome to my blog.  Hopefully this site will come up on a search engine for those wishing to research and learn more about the NorthEastern United State's pre-historic (meaning, before European conquest), indigenous stone constructs.

There are many kinds of ancient stone features that can still be seen and experienced in our modern day, even with the advent of development and technology.  A lot of the sites apparently incorporated multi-functional features, such as Solar Observatories in stone (different stone features lining up in points, i.e. astronomy), Stone God effigies, sacred piles of stone in honor of important people, events, and deities, stone-wall terracing, Propped Boulders, Horizon Markers and Standing Stones to name some of the structures.  The sites had different purposes most obviously, and each site is unique.

For thousands of years the indigenous people of this land worked with what they had according to their environment- and for a rough landscape such as this area is, the People thrived and had a sophisticated culture and cosmology.  It is important to note that before European conquest and modern damming/ aqueducts, the water-ways of this area (such as the Charles River and it's smaller tributary streams) were much more accessible, open, and grand.

The People (as First Nation's people referred to themselves) knew how to use this landscape like no one else has since.  For instance, colonial era and 19th century people cursed this region for being so inhospitable.  Even today with modern conservation movements, people's concepts of how to maintain the environment is by-and-large dim compared to this earlier culture which once dominated this land, in greater population densities than most people have previously believed.

This blog will feature a lot of Native Stone features and ruins that remain dotted across the landscape of New England in the many of thousands; in fact- no one yet knows just how extensive these ruins are, they seem to turn up everywhere.

I will not give exact locations for these stone features on this blog (unless if it is an already well-known site such as the Upton Chamber), but I will give a generalized area, and sometimes maybe not, according to the sensitivity of the site.  This blogs' mission is to recognize, honor, share, and contemplate some of this Ceremonial Stone Landscape, which our modern culture seems to over-look.  Sometimes I will include photos from my hikes and explorations in the woods around different areas, and sometimes I will post articles from other people's research regarding this subject, and sometimes even post about some features in other regions of  North America/ the Americas.

Lastly I would like to thank Peter Waksman of Concord MA. for encouraging me to start my own blog.

                       I hope whoever finds this blog will enjoy it,

                                                                 -Matt.