Shrine-Chamber Around Echo Lake

Shrine-Chamber Noted Around Echo Lake Area

   Echo Lake is a very important area where I am living (and I tend to explore everywhere around where I live, if you haven't yet guessed.)  To do this you have to throw away modern town names and strive to understand how the landscape works, and how it was used.     

   Echo Lake is the highest point in the region, and is the headwaters of the Charles River, the Blackstone River, and the Sudbury River (thus also the Concord and Assabet rivers which split off from the Sudbury.)  Well, the SuAsCo (Sudbury, Assabet, Concord) river watershed dumps into the Merrimack River which goes up into New Hampshire (past the site of Mystery Hill, aka "America's Stonehenge) and dumps into the Atlantic Ocean.  

    Some further thoughts is that what we can see here is the same pre-colonial, indigenous culture of people building ceremonial stone structures of sophisticated function and cosmology, all throughout the Northeastern Sea Board and inland along the waterways.  If you research Mystery Hill on Mary and James Gage's website (www.stonestructures.org) you will notice that one of the chambers has a petro-glyph on the wall (i.e. marking in the stone) which has been interpreted as a representation of the Merrimack River as seen in Haverhill, Ma.  I believe the builders/culture of Mystery Hill (ancestors of indigenous First Nation's people) must also have known about the Echo Lake area and it's significance.  The beehive shrine I also found (2nd post on blog, early Sept. 2014) in Medway is in the general area of Echo Lake also.  All of these places seem possibly to be connected.  And remember that the people the first European colonists encountered in this area in 1620 was already a remnant population (diseases by other European fishermen who never settled introduced in the 1500's, the Little Ice Age of the middle-ages, etc.)  Another area of research to be explored by people is the impact that the Red Paint People had, aka the "Maritime Archaic" culture, who were probably seafaring around the latitude lines of the Atlantic ocean thousands of years ago, possibly into Europe and back (New England into Labrador, into Iceland, into Europe).  In this way I do not totally discount concepts of diffusion-ism, but we have to give these structures the proper credit as being built by the Native American culture, especially when things like indigenous arrowheads and stone tools are found on-site at Mystery Hill.

    So with all that said here are some pics of the Native Shrine around the Echo Lake, Ma. area:

                                                   The entrance to the structure:

A view of the back of the structure:

A close-up of the front roof slab and some of the slabs behind it, stacked up to center the weight:

A view of the roof slabs from inside the structure:

A view of the roof slabs from on top of the structure:

A ceremonial stone circle directly outside the structure:

A close-up view of the back of the structure (nice slabs and pre-colonial quarried stone!):

An image of the back wall inside of the structure:

Another pic of the entrance:

More pics around Echo Lake to come....