INTRODUCTION

AN EXPRESSION OF THEIR WORLDVIEW

The subject matter of this book deals with the physical, material, and metaphysical or spiritual nature of the stone constructions and other unusual land features found in the backwoods of America’s Northeast. These structures represent the direct and indirect evidence left on the landscape by past cultures. About prehistoric times, which for most parts of the world are no more than a few centuries ago, it is from that scant material evidence and in many cases that evidence alone by which we must inform ourselves. To learn about the cultures that made these past structures, we work as best we can from those material remains that are available to us.

Among the most appealing and the most “direct” of those material traces, in the way they seem to speak to us, are the many historic and prehistoric stone constructions, carefully built stone mounds, foundations, walls, effigies, chambers, and standing stones, and their apparent and observed alignments. Some person or persons from the past or distant past expressed their vision of the world in that material object. When that expression miraculously survives into our own time, we can see that same stone construction, investigate it, and understand the message it contains and perhaps recover and share an ancient story or vision.

But it’s never easy. Under the best of circumstances, when the history is detailed and clear, we can hope to be sure about the history. Other circumstances and situations offer a message that is more elusive, and few are more elusive than an isolated, nondescript pile of rocks or row of stones. The essentials of geometry that make up alignments and human and animal shapes are simple enough, which is why people chance to “see” faces, animals, and geometric patterns in a cloud or cliff face or stain on the wall. Certainly, twentieth-century art has taught us that the variety of depictions of human and animal figures and geometric shapes is nearly infinite in the mind of the shaper. So how is one to know, when one perceives an alignment or a human or animal form in a prehistoric stone construction, whether one has understood the origin and purpose of the construction as directly intended by the long-dead minds that shaped the form?

A step beyond understanding the intended purpose of a construction is to grasp the vision, not just of what it means to us, but what it meant to its maker. A stone wall, yes, or an aligned boulder, but what did the wall mean to those who built it? Where did it point and why? What did it enclose or delineate? What did the boulder align with, and what lesson or story did it hold? What immortal thought or belief is framed in the ancient undertaking?

Interested though prehistorians are in these matters, most feel there is no reliable way to grasp these things. We may marvel at the simple elegance of an undulating stone wall leading to a boulder. We might nickname this a “serpent wall” because it reminds us of a snake or serpentine creature. But we struggle to come up with who the snake maker was. We would like to know if that person was considered a god or a mortal, young or old, an artist or a joker, but little in the material we study seems able to tell us.

The choice, then, is often between safe silence and a risky attempt to reach out and grasp at the unknowable. Where most are silent, a few prehistorians have followed the more dangerous, higher path. James W. Mavor Jr. and Byron E. Dix were two. Notable for the sober reliability of their fieldwork throughout all of their careers and for the vigor with which they brushed aside visions of the past that made no sense, they literally wrote the book on recognizing prehistoric stone constructions, forms, and alignments, and their meanings: Manitou: The Sacred Landscape of New England’s Native Civilization.

There are pitfalls: Are those forms and alignments, all of them, intended as the forms and functions assigned to them? Are these constructions, for all their variety and all their range in space and time, not just the cairns, effigies, or alignments of a particular people, or a particular person, but a pursuit of all people, everywhere? Was there a worldwide rock cult and a rock god? Could the deity have been the stone itself? If so, then the domain of this commanding deity ran for thousands of years and for thousands of miles, from every corner on Earth.

To most prehistorians, Mavor and Dix’s Manitou is a curiosity: the general ambition is unsafe, the particular course improbable. Most prehistorians today do not recognize, accept, or credit an ancient indigenous population in the northeastern United States with having built in stone or with creating stone constructions that align with and memorialize events in the sky. And this to me seems most improbable and why Manitou is still to be taken seriously and why new editions are published and welcome, to satiate the appetite for information on this subject. That high and dangerous path, for all its risks, is an important part of the way we try to grasp knowledge of prehistoric antiquity. And though they have both passed, it would warm the hearts of Mavor and Dix to know that researchers today, including many northeastern Native American tribal preservation officers, roam the woods with dog-eared copies of Manitou, searching for significant cultural resources to identify as sacred.

It appears that ancient cultures in parts of the northeastern United States, at one time, surveyed their territories extensively, identifying natural objects such as large boulders and erratics to exploit or use them as part of their belief system, if the objects fit or if they could make them fit. So the coincidences we’re seeing may have been noted by others as well, long ago, and used in some way as an expression of their worldview.